423 forum messages posted by
Mark Bennet
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| Defining Evangelicalism |
| 397 [3914] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Wednesday 20 June 2007 - 10:52pm |
| Darren - there is rather a problem with thinking or believing that an authority is clear when it is not. Take the example of infant baptism or not, or charismatic gifts, as matters on which evangelicals have disagreed strongly. Or the commandment 'thou shalt not covet' in relation to prosperity gospel teaching. In the Bible itself, scriptural authority is claimed in the temptation of Jesus. I was once at a meeting of an evangelical group where some people walked out because we had too much singing and it got in the way of the gospel address. All these positions CLAIM authority - how authority is actually discerned in the face of competing convictions is a rather more complex business. Some false routes to this are 'what I was first taught is right' - actually very very hard to deal with, or 'the people I hang out with all agree with me so we must be right', or '[XXXX - insert the name of your favourite biblical teacher or scholar] says it so it must be right'. |
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| Wycliffe Hall |
| 398 [3913] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Wednesday 20 June 2007 - 10:38pm |
| This is rather off the subject of this thread, but I have taken "Thinking Anglicans" not to mean "more thinking than other anglicans" but as an invitation as an Anglican to make thoughtful comments on the subjects which come up and to engage in purposeful dialogue - just as this is itself an open forum. Even strong convictions can be thoughtfully expressed - but this takes care and discipline, particularly the discipline of listening to others. If I am to proclaim the Gospel as I understand it in terms which others will be able to hear, I need to learn what in my way of communicating hinders the Gospel in its journey from my head to the other's heart. A question I often ask myself is whether I sometimes lose sight of the fact that the Good News is to be shared, even with those who call themselves Christians and with whom I disagree. Debating points which are cheap shots or are designed to provoke formulaic responses are as useless as cheap grace - but they are very easy to post on a forum. |
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| Defining Evangelicalism |
| 399 [3898] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Tuesday 19 June 2007 - 10:22pm |
| If the Biblical witness were as obvious and clear as is sometimes alleged on doctrines like Incarnation and Trinity there would have been less trouble in the early church and the Arian position would never have prevailed, as it did, for a while, or had so much support. We have the benefit of seeing how the arguments were rehearsed and resolved, but we should never do our predecessors the injustice of supposing that they were easy or obvious! In fact part of the task of the church in establishing 'Nicene Orthodoxy' was to translate the Biblical faith into terms consistent with the prevailing cultural understanding informed by the varieties of current Greek philosophy. This entailed BOTH articulating the faith in non-Biblical language (Tertullian being an early exponent, the concept being controversial to quite a late date, but affirmed by the worked-out doctrine of the Trinity - homoousios is not directly Biblical) AND making a distinction between terms which in previous generations had been regarded as having the same meaning. When I say that my task is to 'proclaim afresh' in this generation 'the faith once delivered to the saints' these subtleties seem to matter. The Church in its tradition (well understood) has given us clues how to do it. If we say the Nicene Creed we imply that "simply" going back to the Bible is a misleading way of describing what we do. Another way of saying much the same thing is to understand that the Biblical faith is transmitted to us through the use of language - Babel and Pentecost attest to the complexities of this. |
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| Wycliffe Hall |
| 400 [3850] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Thursday 14 June 2007 - 12:58pm |
| Trial by media? What has struck me from early on in this is how constrained is the position of those staff who are, or may be, unhappy about what is going on at Wycliffe - including some of the FULCRUM leadership. On the other hand Richard Turnbull is free to give an articulate and quite inspiring account of what he thinks the future of Wycliffe is - in some respects fair enough, that is what a Principal is for, at least in part. And then the concerns which do emerge are dismissed/condemned as leaks and rumours, and on grounds which do not deal with whether they have substance or not. There is a huge power imbalance here, and assumptions are being made, on very thin evidence, about who is leaking what and why. I would like to affirm my appreciation of the dignified silence of some people who will be under huge pressure to say something, and to say that my prayers - and I hope yours - are for all who are tangled up in this difficult situation. |
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| Wycliffe Hall |
| 401 [3761] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Monday 4 June 2007 - 05:42pm |
| Without wanting to assume that contexts are the same, here in this Local Ecumenical Partnership we are conscious both of what we have in common, and what is different. Also that Wesley's irregular ordinations were a key aspect of the split between the Methodists and the Church of England. |
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| Wycliffe Hall |
| 402 [3750] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Sunday 3 June 2007 - 05:20pm |
| User 1345 - various people made a fuss about the Co-mission ordinations including some evangelicals. This is because a substantial majority of those in the Church of England understand it to be an episcopally led church governed by Canon Law - that is our internal discipline and polity, and when it goes wrong there are internal structures to deal with it. This is not just 'catholic' ecclesiology, but Anglican ecclesiology for most of us. When the discipline fails, or is ignored, or is walked over without respect, it makes people angry and upset - and some of us wonder whether we are still part of the same church or not. For all the new 'mission-shaped' agenda, for many people the Parish System, with its geographical boundaries, is the essence of the practical ecclesiology of the Church of England, and even in the mission-shaped church experiments, respect for the parish system is part of 'the rules'. But some evangelicals (often labelled conservative) seem to have very little sense of this, or - as with your post - that there is anything wrong with such irregular acts. That is one of the reasons that Richard Turnbull's comments to Reform worry me, because without advancing an ecclesiology that the Church of England can share, which is approved by General Synod, he almost suggests that evangelicals can sit light to the current pattern. Sorry, for me at least, that won't do. And with recent appointments the question is at least validly raised, whether the tutors at theological colleges are equipped to teach ordinands to walk together with colleagues trained in different traditions, or at least to respect the structures within which they are to be ordained? Some of us see the irregular ordinations and the so-called Covenant for the Church of England (signed by Richard Turnbull and Simon Vibert amongst others) as looking far too much like part of a pattern of walking apart to feel comfortable. |
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| Wycliffe Hall |
| 403 [3730] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Thursday 31 May 2007 - 08:08pm |
| Phil and John
It just won't do to throw flak back. Oak Hill probably has a range of supporters, direct and indirect - most such bodies do these days. But I was once an investigating accountant, and it really was follow the money. If organisations have nothing to hide, they should hide nothing. Experience of sinful humanity tells those of us who have seen things go wrong that almost anyone may be tempted ...
So those posters who are giving examples of things which might go wrong are not so much speculating, as suggesting reasons why the question might be worth asking in the first place. If the money doesn't come from these sources, where does it come from? Or are we in the Rumpelstiltskin business of having to say "it might be that" "O no it isn't! Try again" - which is just childish and silly.
Of course it is not to you and me, necessarily, but to the House of Bishops to which the primary duty as a sponsoring organisation should be held. And it is not necessarily the posters on this site who would have the answers. So while the question is a good one, some of the discussion around it is rather pointless. I am sure that members of General Synod will be asking some well directed questions on this kind of topic in a public forum, in which people who ought to know might be put on the spot. |
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| Defining Evangelicalism |
| 404 [3694] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Monday 28 May 2007 - 08:49pm |
| I would like to see more comment on the Biblical material on both power and the giving of names - Chris Sugden and Richard Turnbull in their pieces reveal a weakness in many evangelical positions, replicated also on the Fulcrum site by some - the lack of a positively stated evangelical ecclesiology in my view gives some evangelical contributions to the internal organisation and structures of the church an uncomfortably pragmatic feel. Yet scripture says a lot about power and powerlessness.
Again the debate here about how we name ourselves and others and how others name us could usefully refer to occasions of naming and renaming in scripture. The essay 'How to kill people' in Denys Turner's book "Faith Seeking" (SCM 2002) contains the following stark comment on page 60:
"Let me tell you how to kill people efficiently; or rather, here's how to get yourself, and, if you are in the business of doing so, here's how to get others, to kill people. First, you have got to call your proposed victims names."
I have long called myself a liberal evangelical (not conservative, open or post) because my reading of scripture, which I love and care about a great deal, seems to be somewhat idiosyncratic. I seem to read different texts first, as it were, and when I mention my texts in the presence of others I very often get told that other texts, or more often general principles, are more important, though I very rarely get told why. My texts are supposed to be assimilated to others, though why it is that the others don't need to be assimilated is a mystery - they are all there in the Bible for everyone to read. Where is penal substitution in Paul's sermon at the Areopagus, I think to myself? Is it necessary to terrify people to proclaim that perfect love casts out all fear? What is my part in 'all have sinned and fall short of God's glory'? That's one part - and the other is that I take seriously books like Turner's book and notice what the authors are saying, because it seems somehow to be important.
But now that term has been hijacked to say 'not a serious Christian, can usefully be ignored'. |
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| The Cross and the Caricatures |
| 405 [3564] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Wednesday 9 May 2007 - 11:07pm |
| Dave W
"2. The Paul who wrote all of the epistles does not differ from Jesus in any respect -again that is what makes it so nonsensical to talk about Evangelicals choosing to follow Paul, rather than Jesus."
Maybe so, but this would perhaps be the same Paul who even the doubters on the Pastorals, Ephesians etc would generally accept wrote 1 Corinthians 1.10ff - on the reality of divisions between enthusiastic but misguided Christians (I belong to Paul, I belong to Christ etc) - the Paul who wrote this clearly had a firm grip on reality, and the message is no less relevant to the current controversy. You might say, with Paul, "This shouldn't be!" - but it is unreal to say "It isn't". |
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| The Cross and the Caricatures |
| 406 [3541] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Saturday 5 May 2007 - 08:44am |
| Dave
Glad you go for Ecclesiastes - great book.
On the slogan/sound bite thing - it isn't a question of what these things are, but of how they are used. Titles and names can be a window onto subtle and worked out doctrinal complexes attached to biblical roots. What seems to me to be happening just now is that the subtlety behind the titles is being substantially lost, and what seems to matter most is not whether you understand and engage with the complex issues, but whether you are heard to say the right words in the right order.
Those who challenge this tendency, and say 'let's not just say the words, let's think about what they mean, let's hold off saying them because they are getting in the way of real understanding' seem to me to have a point. The words have started to become symbolic of people taking sides rather than meaningful.
On another part of this debate, I have not seen a really good discussion of the extent to which 'doctrine' is a Biblical genre - compared, for example, with narrative, poetry, law code, lament. |
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| The Cross and the Caricatures |
| 407 [3535] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Friday 4 May 2007 - 06:34pm |
| Dave
On the other hand we might discover that narrative, like the relationship between God and humanity, cannot be reduced to punchlines (or soundbites - including Penal Substitutionary Atonement or Christus Victor, imperssive as these sound).
Just like people and relationships cannot be entirely encompassed in narrative, as indicated by the fact that the Bible is not 100% narrative. And even the narrative bits are not all the same kind of narrative.
I have long thought that where people are, people can go - even when stories cannot be told or heard. Which is why, for me, the incarnation is hugely important. The Gospels tell us amongst other things about the places where Jesus went as well as the words he said - and religious folk, formed by their understanding of the OT narratives, were scandalised by some of it. Paul went places too (Acts). |
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| The Cross and the Caricatures |
| 408 [3498] Posted by: Mark Bennet |
Thursday 26 April 2007 - 11:20pm |
| It's rather late, but to answer Steve's question from earlier.
The 39 Articles are not as Reformed as some would have liked, hence the Presbyterians who opted out of the Church of England. The CofE, it has been suggested, is in need of encompassing the full Reformation, and charactaristic heresies are often cited as Pelagianism and Esrastian tendencies (salvation by works and selling out to the state).
Nonetheless, as Steve notes, the drafting of the 39 Articles encompasses the symbolic code words and phrases of much Reformed doctrine.
"More Than Reformed" comes when you notice that in the interstices there is also symbolically coded support for a more Catholic interpretation. The two tendencied have not been good at noticing each others code.
This both/and for Reformed and Catholic gives us a church which exists in continuity with its tradition, yet embracing the Reformation. This for me is 'more than' but for others it may be less that (I gladly concede than).
There is a tendency just at the moment, to use 'party' language, to argue that "my party is the church". Evangelical, reformed catholic etc. It might be truer, but more difficult to acknowledge, that 'The Church of England is the parties" - it is the 39 Articles which give this second possibility its credibility and life. |
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