Those of you who have followed the link (to the left) to the church where I am allowed more than three minutes, will have discovered that my parish incorporates the campus of the University of Kent at Canterbury. Something seems to be happening at UKC; all sorts of activity is going on, at a time of the year when we should be enjoying the peaceful absence of students.

Normally well-informed sources tell me that “the bishops are coming! the bishops are coming!” This can’t possibly be correct. Hundreds of bishops from all over the world descending upon a poor rector’s parish? This is boundary crossing of the most egregious kind! And nobody has asked my opinion on the matter, let alone my permission!

If the Anglican Communion has really descended into the worst kind of transgressions in this way, then I, for one, am prepared to document it. Stay tuned to 3 Minute Theologian over the coming three weeks and see if these episcopal rumours are true. Find out what cross-border incursions actually look like (when togged up to an impossible degree)!

In the meantime, this is what the calm before the storm looks like:

A circus tent has appeared in the car park of Rutherford College. Allegedly this is where the bishops are supposed to be meeting. In a circus tent? Surely not!

A labyrinth is being built overlooking the Cathedral– difficult bishops will be shown into the labyrinth, without the directions on how to get out.

The Senate House of the University, in which we find…

…the Conference “Prayer Space”.

(Not yet finished because a carpenter needs to come to install 800 bishops’ thrones).

Keep your eyes posted here for more “Signs of Life at Lambeth”™.

Richard Niebuhr’s book, Christ and Culture, the text which has determined the dialogue between Christianity and culture for fifty years, no longer seems to be able to function in the way in which we might want it or need it to. There is another place to look, one which has been cleverly rediscovered by Tim Gorringe: we need to go back to the future.

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The people of England encounter the Church of England in precious few ways, and one of the ways leads the Church into mortal and spiritual danger: colluding in the worship of an idol.

3MT : Love and Marriage [ 4:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (199)

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Well… quite!

(I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that if we don’t want them¹ as bishops, then we shouldn’t baptise them).

If I come across any blog comments worth reading, that don’t rehash the arguments of fifteen years ago, then I might link them here.

1. insert group of your choice here [↩]

After more than fifty years of citations and the status of “classic” accorded to the book in the theological faculties and seminaries of North America, and despite the frequent and increasing assertions of Niebuhr’s disciples of the timelessness of his work, it is probably true to say that the continuing usefulness of Christ and Culture (as opposed to its continuing status as a classic representative of its time and culture), has been fatally damaged in recent years. Niebuhr’s critics have pointed out at least five weaknesses in his work, one contextual and four structural.

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(Shamelessly stolen from Chris Brady’s Targuman blog– where he has a very amusing caption competition for the picture)

A (clergy) friend of mine went for a job interview not too long ago. He didn’t get the job, but, being a fearless sort of person and always wanting to improve himself, he asked for a debrief. “Why,” he asked the bishop, “did I not get the job?”. There was much humming and hawing, but eventually he was told by the bishop that the parish and its representatives had felt threatened by my friend’s doctorate. It was thought that he would be too intellectual for the parish¹. My friend was philosophical: “after all,” he said, “we wouldn’t want our parish clergy to be clever!”

This is, unhappily, not a new phenomenon in the church. What would you make of this:

The Church as it is today is tied to the two social strata of the middle-class bourgeoisie and the peasants, and this is true even of its dogmatics and ethics. I myself belong neither to the bourgeoisie nor to the country folk, but to the intellectual world, which does not go to church, and is undenominational out of necessity… I belong to a world different from my congregation’s, and different from what it can ever be; for the world to which and from which I speak does not go to church… For an intellectual minister the only alternative is either to renounce his former world or to leave the ministry, unless he can become a university professor.

Preaching is, after all, a dialogue. But a dialogue between an intellectual and a bourgeois or peasant is no longer possible. The two no longer understand each other. As an intellectual priest I am condemned to a tragic solitude.²

That was a letter from Richard Widman, a Lutheran pastor in rural Württemberg to his younger friend and colleague Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That was the situation in 1926!

Have things changed or improved subsequently? Are things better in the Church of England in the twenty-first century? No, not really. Not so long as the Archbishop of Canterbury is mocked for delivering theological lectures to audiences of theologians or jurisprudence lectures to audiences of lawyers. Not so long as the threshold for local ministry training schemes seems to be set at the lowest possible level, in order that no-one who offers themselves for ministry might be turned away for lack of intellectual aptitude. Not so long as the mark of authenticity is the status of victim and how strongly we feel about a subject.

Long ago Alasdair MacIntyre finished his pessimistic survey of the collapse of the western moral enterprise with this watchman’s exhortation:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us… We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another— doubtless very different— St Benedict.³

Looking at the way the place of the intellect and the intellectual is treated in today’s church, I wonder if we shouldn’t be waiting for another— doubtless very different— St Dominic.

(More of which, as they say, anon.)

1. and this, it must be said, was for a market town in the home counties. We’re not talking about a sink estate in the north where the average school leaving age is 12. [↩]
2. Letter from Richard Widmann to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 13 March 1926, quoted in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer theologian, Christian, contemporary, E. Robertson, ed., (London: Collins, 1970), pp. 65-66). [↩]
3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 263. [↩]

Niebuhr set out in his book, Christ and Culture, five types or solutions to what he called the “enduring problem” of the relationship of Christ and Culture.

The first type described is “Christ against Culture”, what Yoder later glossed as “radical tension”.  Here the apparent New Testament contrast between “the Church” and “the World” is emphasised, with true followers of Christ called to remove themselves from a corrupt and corrupting culture. The world is rejected and a new order is to be followed. Individual exemplars of this attitude are Tertullian and Tolstoy: group exemplars include early monasticism, Mennonites (to the later ire of John Howard Yoder) and, to a lesser extent, the Society of Friends.

The second type, “Christ of Culture,” describes the way in which Christ has been proclaimed as the embodiment of all that is noble and desirable in humanity and human culture: in this type Jesus is also the “Messiah of their society, the fulfiller of its hopes and aspirations, the perfecter of its true faith, the source of its holiest spirit.”¹ Historical exemplars of this attitude include the Christian Gnostics Basilides and Valentinus, Peter Abelard, and the eighteenth-century rationalists such as John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. The group exemplar is best represented by the “Cultural Protestantism” of nineteenth century Germany (and Niebuhr presents a defence of culture faith which was counter-cultural for his times). Continue Reading »

1. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 83. [↩]

It comes to something when the affairs of the Anglican Communion become the stuff of light satirical comedy; it is even stranger when the satirical comedy is pointedly favourable towards the Archbishop of Canterbury.

UK listeners might have heard “The Now Show” on BBC Radio 4 last weekend. If so, then you will have been delighted by Mitch Benn’s song in support of Dr Rowan Williams (“who knows which bits of the bible are no longer true”). If you haven’t discovered the “Listen Again” facility on the BBC’s website, then this is for you:

Mitch Benn and Dr Rowan Williams [ 1:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (292)

Lord knows there are many of us who wish the song were true!

For Niebuhr there are two parts to the question of finding meaning in Christ. First, belief in Christ means belief in God, “to be related to the One to whom he [Christ] undeviatingly points”. Second, and in the opposite direction, because Christ is the Son of God, so completely immersed in the perfect will of the Father, he becomes the “moral mediator of the Father’s will towards men.”¹ Thus there is a double moral movement, “with men toward God, with God toward men; from the world to the Other, from the Other to the world.” Christ is “mediatorial not median… He exists rather as the focusing point in the continuous alternation of movements from God to man and man to God.”²

Niebuhr then moves to a consideration of the other half of the problem: how does one define “culture” so as to be able to usefully and accurately measure it against the given definition of Christ?

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1. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 28. [↩]
2. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, pp. 28-29. [↩]