The Lord's Supper in Human Hands

I recently obtained a commentary edited by Peter Bolt, Mark Thompson and +Robert Tong all from the Anglican Diocese of Sydney reflecting on recent opinions of the Anglican Church of Australia's Appellate Tribunal that there are no Canons of the Anglican Church of Australia under which a Diocese could authorise the deaconate or laity to celebrate or preside at the Lord's Supper.

It is a bit of a deadly dull read, and I must admit that I find myself a bit ambivalent about the issues given my long association with Churches of Christ where it is almost the case that only the laity preside at the Lord's Supper.

In some respects I am a pragmatic Anglican rather than one by conviction, but I think that to belong to a particular tradition you must allow for things to be done in ways that are consistent with the particular orders and ecclesiology that marks out that church among the many.

As a result, I have no difficulty pointing to the issue of Orders in the Anglican Communion as a basis for maintaining that Presidency is not an issue that can easily be extended to the Diaconate or Laity if one wishes to remain Anglican.

This has to do with the essence of the relationship between the Bishop and Deacons and Priests. In the catholic tradition the Bishop is the primary minister of the church, and in the history of the development of the three orders of ministry in the church, it was the Deacons who were first appointed, supporting those who were to become the episcopal leaders of the church. So it was that the Deacons took their place at the right hand of the Bishop when he was presiding - their table ministry was assisting the bishop.

Next in the developing orders of ministry were the priests, and the nature of their relationship to Bishops was vicarious - they stood in the place of the Bishop within the plurality of congregations that by then meant that a Bishop could not be present for all for whom he was responsible. So the table ministry of the Priest was the same as the Table Ministry of the Bishop - to preside and the Deacon's place at table is beside the priest. It is interesting to note that in parishes where both a priest and deacon are present, it is the Deacon, not the Priest, who assists the Bishop at table when he or she visits.

The ecclesiology of the Anglican Communion also has bearing on this matter, and it somewhat overlays the issue of Orders. The Anglican Church is Diocesan not Congregational. The Churches of Christ of my earlier Christian life were Congregational and all instruments and authority necessary to constitute the Church were seen to be present in the congregation. The basic unit of church in the Anglican Communion is the Diocese and the primary minister of the Diocese is the Bishop. It is the Bishop and only those who stand vicariously in the Bishop's place that are authorised in the Anglican Communion to preside at the Lord's Supper.

For me, these are sufficient grounds to say that the issue being pressed for by the Anglican Diocese of Sydney is indeed eccentric, despite the protestations. They have argued that their contention for lay presidency is wide-spread and long-standing but they offer evidence of this controversy spanning a mere forty years of debate in Australia and and glimpses of it elsewhere in provinces in Africa, India as well as England over a period of a few more than a hundred years. These are hardly significant in time and scope given the 2000 year history of a global church.

An observer on Facebook recently commented that the Diocese of Sydney has systematically rejected all aspects of "Popishness," for want of a term, from their expression of the Church - no chasuble for priests, affirmation of the 39 Articles as foundational expressions of Anglican Doctrine (including the repudiation of Roman Catholicism) and much more - and that the move towards lay presidency would be the final step.

I would regard it is indeed the final step for once taken this Diocese would no longer be Anglican but rather a new Protestant Church in the Reformed Tradition. I sometimes jokingly refer to such evangelicals a "wannabe Baptists" for if they had their way they would elevate the Ministry of the Word so far about the Ministry of the Sacrament that they would only rarely celebrate the Lord's Supper.

Any thoughts?

Freedom of Religion or Freedom from Religion

The Australian Human Rights Commission has just published a report that has been about 4 years in the making. Entitled "Freedom of religion and belief in 21st century Australia", this report seeks to respond to the aims of a National Action Plan to "build social cohesion with a particular focus on fostering connections and understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims."

There is a lot of interesting material in the report and its findings were not all positive. Religious life in Australia has become complex as new, non-Christian religious communities have grown in number and size. But perhaps the most interesting shift for me is the place of the non-religious and their claims about the nature of Australia as a secular nation.

In discussing the nature of the secular, the researchers received submissions from people who

claimed the right to unbelief and the right to be free from religion. They argued that the term "freedom of religion and belief" excludes the rights of persons who hold beliefs that are not religious, or who believe there is a right to non-belief.

I was intrigued by the distinction that was trying to be made here. To say we have "freedom of religion" is to say we can have any religion we like, but it is also to imply or assume that we all have a religion. They thus argue that we should speak about Freedom From Religion.

I can see the linguistic sense of this argument, but having spent a recent weekend debating matters of faith with members of the Atheists Federation of Australian Forums they seem to me to want to assert the right to take God and religion completely out of public spaces, consigning God and religion to an entirely private sphere.

From a Human Rights perspective, while they might claim that the presence of the religious in any form in the public arena is an infringement of their right to live in complete freedom from religion, the corollary of this position is that to grant the position would be to deny the rights of the religious to live in a public arena that recognises the place of religion. So, whose rights will win the day?

The report chose to avoid dealing with this issue, but it is one that lies at the heart of the current debate about the place of Christian Chaplain in public schools.

Having listened to the stories on the Atheists Federation forums about the intrusion of the religious factor in their schools in the persons of rather evangelical Christian chaplains, I have some significant sympathy for them. Where I work, the emphasis is on service, compassion and respect rather than evangelism in the delivery of school chaplaincy services in public schools and the kinds of embarrassing situations described concerning Chaplains in Queensland are much less likely to occur in this state.

However, I find the demand to make all public institutions "religion-free" is more an attempt to marginalise the religious than to make a valid claim for a human right.

Another little issue the Atheists raised, which again I have some sympathy for, was the wording of the religious question in the Census. Rather than having atheism, agnosticism or no-religion as options among a long list of religions, they suggest that the section should begin with the simple question "Do you have a religion?" If you answered YES, you would then be invited to respond to the next question about what sort of religion you adhere to. If you answered NO you would be invited to skip the next question. It would be interesting to trial both approaches to see if the Census reports of religiosity would be affected by such a change.

Finally, it is my view that social cohesion is best promoted by an understanding of the idea of "freedom of religion" that embraces the freedom to have no religion as an option. Those of us who are religious have just as much responsibility, perhaps more, to be respectful and tolerant of those who choose a non-religious life-style, as we would expect avowed atheists to be respectful of our choice to be religious. This also requires a willingness to allow each other to enter the public discourse in ways that are shaped by our faith or non-faith.

What do you think?

Evolutionary Christianity - the Pod-cast Marathon is complete

I have spent the last few weeks listening to 39 pod-casts of telephone conversations between Michael Dowd, a self-described "Evolutionary Evangelist", and people he refers to as thought-leaders who are drawn from many and various Christian traditions as well as academic disciplines and fields of science.

There were some well-known Christian thinkers among them - Bishop John Spong, former Dominican Priest Matthew Fox and Fr Diarmuid O'Murchu - as well as two Nobel Prize-winners, Charles Townes and William Phillips, and two Templeton Prize winners, Ian Barbour and John Polkinghorne. I listened to Anglicans, Catholics, Southern Baptists, pentecostals of various kinds, process theologians and those from what is called the emergent or emerging church. I listened to physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, biologists as well as various professors of Science & Religion, a position prolific among the many Christian Colleges that American young people go to after school.

Along the way, in this marathon, I travelled through some amazing worlds of ideas, and I have to say that the people whose stories and ideas most excited me were mostly Catholic Religious women, particularly Joan Chittister. It seemed as if their contemplative life had given a great deal of time for good theological reflection such that their ideas were well thought out, really coherent for me.

Five Signposts became evident as I travelled along the way, and I thought I would have a got at describing them briefly here.

1. Evidence - since scientists seek truth, scientific evidence becomes an accumulation of truth about life as we know it, therefore evidence can be regarded as a kind of Divine Revelation. The claims by some that faith is theistic and science is atheistic is thus demolished, because all truth is an expression of God, even scientific truth.

2. A Single-story Universe - there are some cosmologies that see God, the Divine, as utterly separate from the reality of the physical world. This idea is largely derived from ancient Greek Philosophy, but it is based on the idea that the physical and the spiritual are like oil and water, and are perpetually separated. It is the basis of the idea that God is out there and has to be called into our present reality by our prayers so that God can intervene in the natural order and do a miracle or something, according to our wishes. There is thus a two-story universe in many people's mind.

Rather than being "out there" it is understood that God is intrinsically connected to every bit of the cosmos, as hinted at in Acts 17 where Paul, when he describes God as the creator of the world and everything in it and that God is so intimately present in this creation that he concludes "In him we live and move and have our being". This idea collapses the two-story world view. God is here, in everything. Instead of a theistic, dualistic world view, we see in Scripture evidence of a pan-entheistic world view - God is in everything. This is not pantheism where there are gods everywhere, but one God in everything.

3. A Deep Time Reality - the work of astronomers and astro-physicists has expanded our understanding of how old the universe is, estimated these days to be about 16.8 billion years. Along with this, we have an understanding about the stability of matter that means that matter is constantly circulating through the system of the universe. Atoms are used over and over again - one speaker described us as being formed from stardust, and this was not meant to be a romantic notion, but one based on scientific evidence.

This deep-time notion gives us a sense of being part of something that is indeed very ancient,even though humans have inhabited this planet for just a few million years, and life-forms for just a few billion years.

4. Death is Natural - One thing that is a natural consequence of this scientific world view is that death is something that is intimately connected to life - from dust we are made and to dust we return. This challenges the biblical notion that death was a consequence of sin; but one only has to think a little about the consequences for the universe if those first human beings had got it right and so all creation lived forever. All the resources of the earth be consumed in constantly creating new life.

Just as our gardens obtain life from the composting of dead plant matter so in a way the life of the next generation is secured by the death of a previous generation. There are many Biblical metaphors that catch a hold of this - a grain of wheat must die before it can produce a harvest - but we have so locked ourselves into this idea that death is a consequence of sin rather than simply part of the natural order that many find this one hard to grasp. But it is necessary to find new ways of understanding the Biblical material. For me, the Genesis accounts simply provide us with the best available explanation of why people so feared death.

5. Human Nature - The final thing that people spoke about, particularly Michael Dowd, was that the human sciences have helped us understand a great deal about human nature - psychology, anthropology, social science etc - and many of the things that were described in our Scriptures as being connected with the spiritual dimension such as evil spirits we would see now as having naturalistic explanations. They would also suggest that even the notion of sin is often related to things that are simply our head/body trying to cope with mismatched instincts. For example, in evolutionary terms our instinct towards violence against others is an instinctive response that derives from our much more primitive life and context millennia ago. In other words, the instinct is no longer appropriate and we have developed all sorts of social mores that help people change their behaviour.

These signposts are just that for me. They have marked the territory, and they have shaped the things that need to be considered as this new Evolutionary paradigm emerges. I resonate positively with a great deal of what I have heard and I am sure I will continue to ponder them for a long time.

How about you?

Revelation and revelation

I was recently reminded of the words that open Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
One day tells it to another
and the night to night communicates knowledge.
There is no speech or language
no are their voices heard;
Yet their sound has gone through all the world
and their words to the end of the earth.

A Prayer Book for Australia

Thinking about this I was prompted to think of the ways in which God's so-called Revelation is mediated to us. How does God speak to us? How do we know what we know about God?

Traditionally we have used a capital letter to distinguish two different ways. Capital "R" Revelation generally refers to the stories of our faith, once transmitted orally but now written, and contained in a compendium we now call the Bible. This definitive Canon of Scripture, of texts written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is for many the definitive Revelation of God. The only Revelation mediated in a higher form is Jesus the Christ, whom the Apostle John described as the Word or Logos of God - "the Word was with God and the Word was God."

The Person Jesus and these written Sacred texts have come to hold a primacy in the Revelation Stakes - Jesus because we see him as the human face of God, and the written texts because we regard them as "inspired" or "God breathed".

What then of the Revelation of God that is proclaimed by the Psalmist in those few lines I began with? Through the history of the Church there has always been an understanding that here, too, is Revelation, and there has even been an argument based on verses like this that since God is glorified and revealed in every element of the Cosmos, then we ought not to think of God as separate from us, as distant from our lived experience and therefore needing to be invoked into the present by our prayers and intercessions. (But that is an issue for another day.)

In respect of the written Revelation why do we find comfort in the proposition the Holy Spirit inspired those authors to write these definitive texts between 1900 and 3200 years ago but since then has refrained from similarly inspiring others to write texts that could be regarded as Capital "R" Revelation. By what authority has the Church declared, through those 4th Century Councils that determined what texts would make up the New Testament, that since that time there has been no further Revelation of this kind or authority?

All this is leading to a question, which I am sure has been asked by others elsewhere:

If a Council of the Church was called today with the express task of determining what texts, written since the 4th Century, could be regarded as expressing something of God that could only be regarded as inspired of the Holy Spirit and worthy of being included as Revelation, what texts would like them to at least consider including?

Would you want to include the writings of early Christian saints Benedict, Francis, Thomas Aquinas, and mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart and others? Would you want include Bunyan's "Pilgrims Progress" or John Milton's classic poem "Paradise Lost" or the poetry of the metaphysicals like George Herbert and Robert Frost?

In our multi-media world, what about some of the musical and visual extravaganzas that have so enriched the experience of our lives and have, in themselves, proclaimed the glory of the Lord?

I feel that we need to be open to this idea, and indeed many of us are given the way we buy sacred books other than the Bible. I am convinced that the Holy Spirit did not cease inspiring men and women to record their visions of God in words, music or visually, 1900 years ago. If this inspirational work has continued to this day where can we see the evidence of it?

I have posed the questions. What do you think?

Communing with God

I have been doing a lot of theologising lately - thinking about God, and how I might begin to express what God means for me. I was listening to John Spong recently and he made the comment that it is impossible to describe God - words and the images we use them to create are so finite, and yet God can be nothing if not infinite. But, he said we can all describe our experience of God.



It is in this context that I have just read a small book by Paula D'Arcy called "Gift of the Red Bird". It is an easy read, in journal form although I think written retrospectively, perhaps relying on actual journal material in many places.

It begins with her experience of the immediate aftermath of the death of her husband and daughter in a road accident just three months before her second child was born. She chronicles her experience of God through those dark times as well as her frenzied experience as a circuit speaker, telling her story over and again, to a point of physical collapse.

She thinks she is recovering when she is struck down with an illness that was completely unresponsive to treatment. For eight months she struggles and eventually recognises that her illness is not a physical thing, but an inner spiritual thing, and when she begins to put these things right, her recovery becomes evident.

She gets back onto the speaking circuit but under much better terms and after a time plans a wilderness retreat - that involves three days of fasting as well as solitude. She spent a great deal of time preparing with others for this experience and the plan was that she should keep a journal of this quest. Towards the end she writes:

"In reading through these pages I have noticed many things: the length of the grief process; the way God must continue to be followed and pursued; and the fact that yesterday's understandings of the Divine are already old. It is only the immediate day and moment right before me that matter."

What struck me as I read her experience is something I think we all find and experience quite naturally: that God is in all things that surround us, and that some of our most profound experiences of God occur in natural settings. There are hints of this experience in our sacred texts - the Psalms and the writings of Paul in their various ways affirm this idea that God is not separated from the creation, but is in a sense incarnated in it.

Paula D'Arcy's experience is not unique, nor is it uniquely Christian. It could be said to be common to the human experience that we gain a sense of acquaintance with the Divine or God or whatever you may choose to call this sense of "the Other" when we place ourselves in our natural environment and pay attention.

The question that then arises for me as I make this observation is: How is it that so many Christians live by a world view in which God is out there, to whom we pray, seeking a visitation from "heaven" into our earthly experience in order to intervene and make things right? I know that there are also hints of this dualism in the sacred texts, but I find that view much harder to fit into a modern world view of a cosmos that is driven by a whole set of laws of nature in which God is already present.

What do you think?

Evolutionary Christianity

Throughout Advent and the Christmas Season a natural scientist and devout Christian, Michael Dowd, conducted 38 telephone interviews on this topic with a wide range of scientists and theologians from diverse Christian traditions, including evangelicals, all discussing various aspects of their views about Christianity & Evolution. There were three Nobel Science Prize winners among the speakers and four Templeton Prize winners for their contribution to religion. Some were academics. Some were pastors. It is an incredibly diverse group and all these conversations can be downloaded as MP3 files.

They seem to me to have three basic themes, but each guest speaker takes their own particular slant on them.

Firstly, they want to claim a middle ground between Ken Ham's young earth Creationism and Richard Dawkins' scientific atheism. For them there is no conflict between science and the Bible and in fact the whole realm of scientific evidence, as a revelation of truth, is in some sense a revelation of God. Therefore, the scientific evidence for a process of evolution does not undermine faith in Biblical Revelation, it simply changes what we understand the text to be saying and how it got to be that way.

Secondly, they want to propose that the idea of evolution, of gradual and incremental change is intrinsic to all aspects of creation. If this is so, and there is a great deal of evidence for it, they want to suggest that our faith must also be seen in evolutionary terms - not just at a personal level, but also for the whole of the church. Most of us can see the sense of our own faith journey as one in which we have had a gradually unfolding, ever deepening relationship with God. I like, but find quite challenging, the idea that the faith of God's people and the church must also be constantly evolving into new things.

Finally, they talk about time as Deep Time and by it simply mean that there is to much evidence (revelation from God) that the world is approximately 18 billion years old for anyone to convincingly argue that God made it all 6,500 years ago.

It seems to me, and others, that there are basically four ways that Christians deal with this Science-faith debate.

1. The two world views are mutually exclusive - you can't have an evolutionary scientific world view and be a Christian.

2. The two world views must be kept in separate compartments of our lives - like oil and water, they don't mix, but they are both there.

3. The two world views can learn from each other, but they are still essentially separate.

4. The two world views can and must be integrated into a single world view.

I can see all versions of this among the people I know in the church, but I have found this series of conversations have helped give me a vocabulary to express that I have intuitively believed - that science and faith can and must live together within a single world view. What do you think?

They Followed a Star

Two things have converged for me to raise an interesting question.



A few days before Christmas, Andrew McGowan, in his blog A New Parson's Handbook discusses the origin of the date 25th December as the date we remember the birth of Jesus. He canvasses various suggested sources ranging from astrology, paganism, the Roman Emperor Cult and even an example of very interesting early Christian logic - based on an assumption that the death of Jesus was coincident with the date of his conception in Mary's womb, and given that his death can be carefully dated in relation to the date of Passover in the relevant year (dates ranging from April 25 - May 6) then his birth mist have occured on a date nine months before those dates (hence the existence of two dates for Christmas).

Regardless of which story may actually be the explanation of the source of the date, two things are clear, the nominated date of December 25th is most certainly only that, a nominated date, and the earliest attribution of that date for the birth of Jesus seems to be about the 3rd Century. In other words, we have no way of actually knowing the date of Christmas.



Then yesterday, in the ABC Broadcast of Songs of Praise produced by the BBC the presenter, in between the various songs about the Wise Men following a star, we were introduced to a range of astronomers, some no less influential than those residing in the Vatican, who have deduced that the year of our Lord's birth must have been 6BCE because in that year there was a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Mars (I think) within the constellation of Aries, an event that would have been of some significance to middle eastern astrologers. This convergence was not apparent on 25 December in the year 0 so the explanation must relate to some error in the assignment of the date of the start of the Christian Era, and Jesus was born BCE.

Two things immediately came to my mind that made this amusing. First was the aspect mentioned above by which December 25 is in most likelihood completely arbitrary as the date of Jesus' birth. Second is my basic understanding of the history of our calendar. The Julian Calendar started in 45BCE and was basically a solar calendar of 365 days with a leap year each 4th year adding an extra day. But over time that extra day added too much time because a solar year was 11 minutes short of 365 1/4 days. So, in the 16th Century Pope Gregory XIII modified the Julian calendar into what we observe today, a calendar not universally accepted in Western Europe and when some Eastern European countries eventually relented in the 20th Century they had to wipe out 13 days - not to be celebrated that year. Even though Gregory and his mathematicians did some amazing calculations to work this all out, I live with a niggling doubt that we can actually tie down the year we nominated as 0 to a documented moment in history.

In other words, I found it rather preposterous that here we are in 2010 trying to fit scientific facts to a view of time and history that is so rubbery and slippery that any conclusions we might arrive at would inevitably be flawed.

I am happy to live with a nominated date for Jesus' birth. I am happy to live with birth narratives that are highly figurative and symbolic rather than historical. The fact of Jesus is indisputable. The thrust of his teaching, although subject to some debate, is generally agreed upon. The establishment of a movement that became the Church as a result of his life and story is beyond doubt. It is the details that ground all this in a very particular historical moment that is much harder for us to pin down.

What do you think?