The Dancers

Themes: Moore College, The Trinity

The Anglican Church in Springwood last night hosted a Middle East Feast for women of the Church and any friends they might care to invite. Obviously, I didn’t get to go, so this is a second hand report, but everyone I’ve heard says the evening was fantastic. There were well over 150 people at the event with half of those not regular attendees at Springwood Church.
One of the ladies at the Church is from a Middle-Eastern background and teaches folk belly-dancing as a hobby. She (with her pixies) cooked the entire meal, and then came and taught the women some belly-dancing moves. At the end of the night, 150 women were gyrating around the middle of the room like something from Arabian Nights.

Some of the blokes from the team had arranged to come back to the Church building to help the ladies pack up and they arrived early enough to catch the end of the dancing. The sudden presence of men at what had previously been an entirely female event apparently created little ripples of disturbance. The guys reported hearing the women whispering, ‘men’ when they were noticed.
It’s interesting isn’t it?
It’s entirely understandable as well, dancing makes you feel strangely vulnerable. I used to have these weird late-night dance parties with my housemates and we certainly wouldn’t have felt quite so free to try out our wicked stylings if there had been women around. (did I just overshare?)

The awkwardness which suddenly came over some of those women last night is a reminder that we are beings who find our identity in relationships. We mark out physical and temporal regions, we are bodies, we find ourselves in what surrounds. That’s why femininity is experienced differently by a room entirely full of women and by a room not-quite-entirely full of women. Often we only notice this when there is a sudden transition.
Christians understand that this conception of human identity is rooted in something true about the God who made us. The God we worship is One and Three. Completely whole and sufficient in himself, but also within himself perpetually in fellowship and love. Christian theologians in the early period of the Church conceived of this One and Threeness using the focal image of a group of dancers. The Cappadocian Fathers (Basil, Gregory, and Gregory) sought to give an account of how God could be ‘One God’ and yet equally, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. Cappadocia is a remote part of central Turkey, if you wander into enough Turkish Kebab shops you’ll eventually find a poster depicting Cappadocia on a wall somewhere. It’s famous for odd-looking rock formations and salt pans, and Christian theologians. I think the Turkish tourism agency must have been targeting Kebab shops in Australia at some stage.

The Cappadocian Fathers obviously didn’t mind a little Middle Eastern Feasting, and could probably jiggle it with the best. They noticed that as a dancer moves around a circle, following the patterns of the dance and the rhythms of the music, she continually pours herself into the space just vacated by another dancer. The dancers are continually giving and receiving each other into their positions, and her identity as a dancer is found through the relations, the dance, which she shares with all the others. It is not a fixed identity, it is movement and action. But neither is it random, a dance celebrates the individuality of each dancer through co-ordinated and ordered movement, through a particular form of being with others. This is our God, they are infinitely more than that, but he is One and Three, giving and loving forever.
We also are ‘ones’ and ‘many’ and we find ourselves in giving and loving.
We are a room full of women dancing.
And God is a dancer.

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image by agsaran

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I bet all I have on Jesus

Themes: Moore College

I’ve just been listening to a song called “Real Hope” by Colin Buchanan. We’re thinking about using it for our Men’s Breakfast at the Golf Club on Saturday (now looking for someone who can play and sing).

Ed Frost is speaking about being “Real Men” under three headings: Blood, Sweat, and Tears. The idea is to take us through Jesus’ tears (weeping over Jerusalem’s sin and rejection); then Jesus’ sweat (the image of anguish and suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane); and Jesus’ shed blood on the Cross.
Jesus’ real humanity was expressed in these concrete, dirty, gut-wrenching experiences. That’s what it means to be a Real Man.

I was really struck by the chorus of Colin Buchanan’s song. It goes:

I bet all I have on Jesus,
I throw myself on him.
The one who died a real death, for real sin.
I bet all I have on Jesus,
And throughout eternity,
I’ll marvel at the real hope,
My Saviour won for me.

Isn’t it interesting that he’s used the language of gambling to describe what Christians have traditionally meant by ‘faith’?
It’s a potentially risky move, but he’s given us guidance to what he means by “bet all I have on Jesus” in the next line, “I throw myself on him”. The payoff is that “to bet the lot” is a concept which really works in our culture, where the concept “to have faith” really doesn’t. “Faith” basically always carries a religious, and increasingly, oppressive, set of connotations, it is often used in contexts where people are discouraged from doing due diligence before making a decision. In contrast, no one (sensible) “bets the lot” without making sure you’ve got really strong odds, without checking the sources and thinking about the consequences. The betting metaphor also has a great sense of all-in commitment. Once you’ve ‘put the house’ on something, you’ve got a serious interest in what happens next: you’re committed to actions that promote the outcome in which you’ve invested.
I think this is what lies behind Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
“Invest all your investments in heaven” (Matt 6:19)
He’s having a go at those who claim to be waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven but have all their assets invested in the status quo. Anyone like that has a deep-seated conflict of interest, “double-vision” (Matt 6:22-23) when it comes to prayer, to discipleship, to genuinely following Jesus. “You cannot be slaves of both God and money.” (Matt 6:24) Or as Colin (who, incidentally, is probably one of the most influential Bible teachers of our age) would put it:
“bet all you have on Jesus.”

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Jesus is the Problem to our Solution

Themes: Moore College

“Jesus is the problem to our solution!” That’s what a guy on our mission team announced to a class full of kids this morning. He meant it the other way around, but there was so much conviction and authority in his voice that apparently he got away with the mistake.
It’s an oddly profound mistake though…

Last night we hosted a debate between a representative of the Australian Sceptics Association and a Christian minister from Sydney. It was an disappointing experience in many ways (honestly, most religious debates are).
When the Atheist Case is coherently, passionately, and sensitively argued it is a beautiful and compelling testimony. The best example I know is in the words of Ivan Karamazov from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (I’ve been reading it for the past few weeks). It is an atheism of despair and wounding, that wishes above all to hold God accountable for his non-existence. It is an atheism of inconsolable grief. And rightly so, for if God is dead then that which is most beautiful and wise has perished from the Universe and we are terribly alone. The Atheist who can suffer that wound and still love is worthy of my respect, even admiration. In the light of Jesus’ Resurrection, such a view is folly, an unimaginable tragedy, but it is nevertheless remarkable, and in its own strange way, a testimony to the Creator who set his image on humanity.
That’s the atheism of Camus’ The Plague.
Sadly, we heard nothing like that last night.
If fact, we didn’t hear Atheism at all, just Fundamentalist Scientism.
Idols always have to be constructed from materials that are good in themselves – gold, silver, wood.
And Idols need to represent ideals that are good in themselves – fertility, wealth, beauty.
It is precisely the same with Science. The lower-case ‘science’ is something profoundly good – a useful, powerful tool. But when ‘science’ becomes ‘Science’ – when an idol is constructed from these valuable materials – the result invariably has the same binary poles, the same classic traits, as all the various forms of primitive idolatry.
It is at once both pathetic and terrifying.
Fundamentalist Scientism cannot recognise the limits of science, and so, it either ungratefully borrows huge portions of its proclamation from other religions (particularly in the realm of ethics) and so becomes a pathetic parody of religion, or it utterly denies the existence of anything beyond those limits, and so is led inexorably towards Totalitarianism.
(In the hands of particularly silly Atheists, i.e. last night, it does both at once…
…Total Muppet)

Scientism is a false religion, a foolish idol, a human, all too human solution.
And Jesus came to be The Problem to our Solutions.

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To change a life

Themes: Moore College

This week I’m away on mission in Springwood. The best thing about Mission is getting to see and hear brothers and sisters from College as they get their hands dirty with preaching, teaching, encouraging, and organising ministry – as they plant and water the gospel seed.

Last night my good friend Anthony preached a cracker sermon from Mark 9:14-32. He put his heart and soul into the words and as his love for Jesus shone through it was impossible not to be swept up along with him.

I preached at the 8am Service at Christ Church, Springwood – an old sandstone building on the Great Western Highway. Here’s part of my introduction:

Many great and terrible powers there are in the world today, but nothing is great like the power to change a man’s heart.
When bombs went off over the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima the terrible power of burning suns was unleashed upon people’s upturned faces, but in that power was proof that a greater power is needed to change men’s hearts.
When a man stood on the moon, or when he could first put a computer in his pocket, or when an African-American first stepped up to the podium as the President of the United States, we heard the rhetoric of change, we saw a power, maybe we thought we the power of change -
But time and again, though the powers change, though the dress of power changes, we see that what is in the hearts of men and women remain fundamentally the same. The same choices, the same fears, hopes, anxieties, loves, the same vices, the same track, the same parallel lines of life stretching away to the horizon…
What does it take to grasp those lines, to wrench them from their course?
What does it take to change the direction of a persons life?

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Learning Voodoo

Themes: Moore College

We’ve just had a full day intensive on Educational Theory as part of our Congregational Ministry subject.
The final part of the session involved talking about learning styles and doing a couple of  Questionnaires to work out how you operate.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably done this plenty of times in work, Church, or uni contexts…
If you’re really like me, you probably hate them with all the passion of a mis-spent post-modern youth.
Woe to you, Essentialists.
Just stop trying to label me,
c’mon man.
<puts down bucket of irony>

Strangely though, whenever I am put in a room where Personality Testing is taking place I find that it tends to provoke a period of fruitful philosophical reflection (It’s probably a strategy to avoid answering the questions).

My juicy cogitation has led me to think that what we are really doing in ‘Personality Testing’, and all this theorising about learning styles, is a simplified Phenomenology – an attempt to describe how we structure our experiences.

‘We are the only beings for whom ‘Being’ is a question’ … and all too often Contemporary Beings express that questioning through Questionnaires. It’s a terrible cop-out, rather than genuine engagement with The Question: ‘what am I?’, we surrender to the comfort of being told, labelled, categorised.

The methodology of Personality Testing Questionnaires makes them virtually useless for genuine existential (the structure of consciousness) description. The major weakness is that they cannot quantify the context specific nature of decisions and relational strategies. However, I’m also faintly suspicious that their explanatory power has as much to do with suggestion and over-generalisation as genuine personality traits. Have you ever heard the instructor read out the list of types…
“You are the Concrete Random mindstyle. You like Imagination, Creativity, Fluffy animals, and Long Walks in the Rain.”
It works the same way as a Horoscope – you read yourself into it. You’ve been told that you have to be one of four types so you sift your set of experiences to fit into the structure.  You could get the same thing from Athena Starwoman or any side-show psychic.

I’ll try to be a little bit fair, PTQ’s probably do have some good points. They certainly can provoke existentiell (first-person questioning of the meaning of life, etc) reflection.
At least, they do in my case,
particularly after a few hours of it.

Further, our lecturer made the very useful point that in the Questionnaire you will tend not to select options that reflect what you don’t like or don’t want to be like. As a result, the personality types that you score least upon are likely to be a useful indication of the types of people that you will find frustrating or look down upon. I’m willing to accept this conclusion because, as much as I’m sure typecasting doesn’t work for me, it’s probably a reliable guide to everyone else.
In seriousness, I think that the negative results are slightly more methodologically sound, and could be quite useful in working with other people.
In case you’re wondering, I really don’t always play well with Concrete Sequential and Abstract Random type people (from Mindstyles). Sorry, I still love you guys.

I did find the VARK website quite handy. I think that their underlying approach is a bit more sensible. It has an online Learning Styles Questionnaire but the really useful stuff is in the Helpsheets – guides for how to study according to your learning style.

On a different point, check out this great little critical introduction to Heidegger called, aptly, Heidegger: a (very) critical introduction. It’s a product of the Centre for Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham so it’s attempting an integrated Philosophical/Theological engagement with Heidegger’s thought. It’s making me think of Heidegger as primarily a Lutheran theologian.

Tags: EducationTheory, Heidegger, Phenomenology, Personality Questionnaire

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Moore Confession

Themes: Moore College, Sin

We are always and endlessly fascinated with knowing the truth about ourselves.
I’ve been attending the Moore College Annual Lectures over the past couple of day, there are 2 to go next week. This year’s speaker is Mike Ovey, the principal of Oak Hill Theological College in London. His topic is ‘Repentance’.
His particular angle is the extent and role of repentance in our preaching of the gospel. Have we proclaimed the gospel when we set forth the truth that ‘Jesus is Lord’, all the rest is implication and consequence, or is the call to repent an intrinsic element of the proclamation, so that, unless you have called on your hearers to ‘repent’ you have not proclaimed the gospel.
It’s a great question.
Today’s lecture included the claim that repentance, and particularly confession, is a form of self-understanding, specifically the revelation of yourself in and through the word of God addressed to you. Perhaps I’ve tarted it up a little, but that was the gist.
Ovey suggested that confession, understood in this way, is alien and hostile to the mind of a (post)modern committed to personal autonomy.
But is it?
There certainly appear to be aspects of our culture that revolve around ‘confessing’. Seemingly trivial examples might include the appeal of TV shows like Oprah, Denton’s ‘Enough Rope, Jerry Springer, or Dr Phil.
But what about, the Doctor’s Surgery, the leather couch in a psychologists office, or more pointedly, the ‘coming out’ of someone gay.
I asked Dr Ovey to comment on these situations, and he made the excellent point that many of these examples are situations in which a confession is given in order to engage the hearers in some form of complicity, i.e. I’ll tell you who I am, and you’ll tell me, that’s all right. There is almost an implied contract that creates the space for the confession.
But that really doesn’t cover the whole field, there are distinct and given situations in which people engage in ‘secular’ confession in order to be told who they are, even if who they are is ‘bad’. Dr Phil or Jerry Springer are examples, sometimes so is the Psychologist, although ‘bad’ is ‘sick’ in line with our tendency to pathologise evil (I’m aware that it is more complicated that this bland statement). The ‘coming out’ of someone gay, is not conceived of as the search for validation of an identity so much as the confession of an identity you have and which has been pronounced over you.
The danger seems to me, that there is a deep temptation to this style of confession because it allows us to abdicate responsibility. Confession relieves us of guilt, but it can do so in different ways. Secular confession relieves us of guilt by relieving us of responsibility and freedom.
But what kind of confession are we calling for when we preach the gospel? And what kind do we get when hundreds of kids go streaming down the front to commit themselves to Christ?

I haven’t really set this out very well, or thought it through thoroughly because I don’t have time, but someone should.

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