Religious Education in Secular settings

The current debate is about a couple of things, I think, and Christians need to engage in the debate with the utmost honesty about their arguments.

On the one hand it is argued that there is no place for the religious domain in a public school setting; that secular means free from religion; and that the presence of Christian religious people in public schools, in particular, is evidence of a continuation of the cosy relationship between church and government that was supposed to be dismantled by our Constitution. That discourse is the dominant view of the readers and contributors to this GetUp! page.

I am just as uncomfortable as many readers with the cosy relationship between church and state and the not unreasonable perception that the proposal of the NSCP was entirely motivated by a desire to secure political support from a particular constituency as well as creating a pathway into the funding of public schooling in the states, thus influencing policy outside of the national jurisdiction. That is a political discourse which I do not wish to participate in.

I do believe, however, that there are well grounded arguments that create an alternative discourse by which the religious can legitimately occupy a place in our public school system.

Firstly, the presence of the religious in our public school settings is only a threat to the secular nature of those schools when there is coercion involved, when one religious view has structural precedence over others, where the purpose of the presence of the religious is to persuade students to subscribe to a particular religious world-view.

Contributors to these pages have provided sufficient examples to demonstrate that there are situations in which the presence of some Christian religious people and programs is such a threat to the secular nature of our schools. It is not universally the case and it need not be so. My Christian friends need to get used to finding ways to be there that do not pose such a threat.

The Principal of the Separation of Church and State that we believe is somewhat enshrined in out Constitution can be understood or interpreted in several ways. It is clear that for the Americans this means no prayers in school, and that the only way Christians can get close to teaching their "crazy views of creation" in public schools, for example, is to invent something they call "intelligent design", leave any reference to God out of it, as if the God factor is self-evident, and call it science. If you look back at the historical, social and political context in which the American constitution was established, and that the Free World was a place where many marginalised religious groups sought freedom from the religious oppression of the Church-States of Europe, it is no wonder they banned any presence of the religious from schools.

The Australian Constitution was written in a different era, guided by different objectives. The practical outworking of the Constitution on this matter has been to allow the religious to be present without requiring adherence or observance. Even in Victoria and elsewhere, where SRE is compulsory if offered by the church, there is a personal prerogative of withdrawal for parents. I actually believe that public schools should not be bound as they are in Victoria. They are not in WA, and my organisation has much healthier relationships with schools as a result.

As to the legitimate place of the religious/spiritual domain within the syllabus of a public school, it is worth noting that successive Declarations on Education, the latest being the Melbourne Declaration of 2008, all make reference to the need of any comprehensive Curriculum to teach kids, not just about religious diversity and pluralism, as a General Religious Education program would do, but to give them skills to look after their own spiritual welfare. Each state has a Curriculum Framework, and the Commonwealth is trying to overlay a National one at the moment. All these documents make reference in various ways to these matters, providing a way in for schools to address the spiritual and religious world-view. It is interesting to note that in none of the state jurisdictions is a General Religious Education Program delivered by classroom teachers, and at least in WA where the Curriculum Council has created two courses about religion for teaching as a high-school subject - "Beliefs and Values" and "Religion and Life" - these two courses have only ever been taught in faith-based schools. No a single state school has offered them to students.

The absence of the religious domain in the curriculum of public schools makes these schools less than comprehensive schools as there is a major gap in what they offer to students.

If the schools won't offer this dimension, and there is legislative provision for religious groups to do so though volunteer visitors to schools, I see that as an opportunity that should be taken. However, when visiting religious volunteers go into schools, they must remember that they are not in Sunday School. They are in a secular context in which a pluralist approach to world views is prevalent, and that they are there to make a contribution to that in the name of their faith - not to convert students to their particular religion. This is about giving kids information about the religious world-view and some life skills that they may make use of later on in life.

There will be challenges to this discourse, I am sure, but s Christians we need to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the debate. I hope that I am able to do that.

Are Atheists a Persecuted Minority?

In recent days I have been engaging in some of the public forums debating the validity of the Federally funded National School Chaplaincy Program. This has mainly been in relation to a discussion on the Atheist Federation of Australia's forum about School Chaplaincy, and a discussion page on the Get Up web-site.

As a general rule, both of these forums were dominated by opponents of School Chaplaincy and the few supporters who ventured to make a contribution to the discussion were ridiculed, derided and insulted to such an extent that few were willing to contribute for more than a few days - myself included. I concluded that they simply wished to hear from others who reinforced their views of reality rather than inviting them to consider the possibility that there are multiple realities that need to be considered.

I don't like to generalise, because there seemed to be a generalised view that all Christians were on a God-given mission to convert the whole world to Christianity, and even if examples were offered demonstrating this not to be the case, they were dismissed as being fundamentally deceptive - "they really want to, even if they say they don't".

I wondered why these self-appointed advocates of a religion-free public space should feel the need to respond to Christians with such derision. This response is similar to the response of oppressed or marginalised groups in society - they resent the power/influence of the dominant group and the only resort left is insult and an attempt to respond to exclusion with exclusion. We see this on a multi-cultural level, and in the areas of gender and sexuality.

Secular atheists have a world view. In this world view the scientific method relegates religion to the realm of fairy tails because the religious cannot be validated scientifically. It also challenges the divine as no self-evident logically, so therefore it is non-existent. Logic and the scientific method are the only two realms in which truth and reality can be found.

While this world-view may not be a religion, many who hold it do so with a zeal and fundamentalism that is akin to those associated with various religious traditions. In a sense it is true that for the religious and secular atheists "right" and "truth" are held in their hands alone and all others are living in some form of error or delusion.

The fundamentalists of both the secular and religious domains need to realise that modern society requires them both to have an authentic regard for each other that allows us each to have an equal place in society, not a marginalised one. I know this is hard for the dominant group - the religious - but there is already such plurality within the religious domain that making a place for the irreligious is not conceding much ground.

In the world of ideas there must always be room for alternatives as well as willingness to engage in debate about those ideas without feeling coerced to abandon your own views.

What do you think?

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?