Baptisms Baptisms everywhere

Last week (and this week too) I managed to preach on 1 Peter 3 and avoid the whole Noah business (even in question time). I did fit baptism in though (for one service, it got cut in the other four because of length).

But the blogosphere is full of baptismal goodies, and , having been looked at suspiciously for my acceptance of the paedo today, thought I'd better record these gems for posterity.

Andrew Errington- ten thoughts on infant baptism

And Byron's Baptism by the book

Fear and loathing in Las Diocese

I read Keith Mascord's 2006 open letter to the Sydney Anglican Diocese tonight. It was interesting. One of the things he was really worried about was the theological questionarre that third year ordination candidates have to fill out and be interviewed on. He was worried about a culture of fear being created by MT&D.

Now, Keiths concerns aren't entirely unjustified given some of the rants I've sat through at conferences, but the questionaire was ok.
As I ticked (or didn't tick) the boxes last year, there was a little trepidation on what I would be grilled on.
But the interview was surprisingly pleasant, and late last year I picked up my letter from the Archbishop. It wasn't a nice, frameable certificate with a big red 'not a heretic' stamp on it, but it did invite me to continue my ordination candidacy.
Fear is a funny thing, if you just don't care it has very little power.
So if you have this coming up next year, don't worry about it. The diocese is broader than most people assume, and if God wants you serving somewhere else, well, theres worse ways he could get you there.

That said, I would love ALL the college lecturers to give a session on their thoughts on women in ministry. This whole 'we cant talk about it because it might be hurtful to women' moratorium is rubbish. If your views are hurtful whenyou have plenty of time to prepare and think, how much more hurtful will they be in the parish. As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced by either side of the non-debate, (although to some that makes me a closet liberal already), but I'd like to at least hear the theologically qualified, thoughtful teachers at my college be able to present what they think. My hope is that the students would be godly and mature enoughl to not demonise anyone

Barth on anthropology

self understanding...can only be the understanding of the man who hears and believes the Word of God... And by this Word and judgment of God we do not mean a revealed theory of supernatural origin and content about man, but the address and and claim of God concretely attested to him, the viva vox evangelii which comes to him, the Gospel of the Lord who in his place became a servant, who humbled himself for him. The one who hears the viva vox of the gospel is the only man who sees and understands this matter. He is the one who is instructed concerning himself
Barth 'church dogamatics 4.1 pp479.

What I love about this from Barth is that there is no working out of the nature of humanity and it's sinfulness prior to the narrative of gods redemption in christ. Understanding the truth of our condition is not some abstract theory, but living in response to what God has done. We simply cant expect people to grasp truly the idea of sin until they are grasped by God who has redeemed them from it.

Thanks Nietzche!

Nietzche has bequeathed Christian thought a most beautiful gift....this first eruption of the post-modern, which arrived appropriately as a rediscovery of pagan ontology and aesthetics, reminds theology that against the God declared in Christ, Dionysus and Apollo stand as allies, guarding an enclosed world of chaos and order against the anarchic prodigality of his love... And so theology is reminded that it has another tale. One in which the being of the creation is an essential peace, hospitable to all true difference, refecting the infinite peace of God's triune life in its beauty and diversity

DB Hart. Beauty of the infinite 127

Hart argues that both traditional metaphysics and rejections of metaphysics assume an essentialy chaotic and violent cosmos. One attempts to control the chaos through totalising schemes, eliminating difference. The other advises us to embrace the chaos and fragmentation. But christian theology simply doesn't assume this fundamental violence

The feast of the mediocre supper

let us celebrate the feast of the mediocre supper.
We haven't fasted, we stand at the end of history, our home pantries are chocked full, why wait?
We wont feast. But we've banned alcohol in our churches, and together we will partake of the mystical milk arrowroot and common international roast,
then home for our private eschatologies

Who I Am In Christ

'Who I Am In Christ: a devotional' Neil T Anderson

One of the things I forget as a Christian is how much the Bible has shaped my identity.This book of devotions reflects on 39 short Bible passages and theit importance for our identity in Christ. Anderson really wants people to be free and joyful about their new identity in Christ. Thankfully there is only one on satan, Andersons speciality. Occasionally the book is a little too American, a little too gnostic evangelical, but that is ok. I would give this book to a newish christian, in fact, i might even work through it myself.

Nietzsche, Hart and killjoy christians

no one familiar with late antiquity and the world in which the gospel was first preached can be unaware that a prevailing spirit of other worldliness had long been moving inexorably through the empire... One may agree with Nietzsche that this atmosphere of acosmic and incorporeal religiosity defames the world, and one may acknowledge that it infected every institution and spiritual aspiration of it's age, including those of the church, but one should recognise it as first and foremost a pagan phenomenon: a growing awareness...that the pagan cosmos was aregion of strife, in response to which one could adopt only the grammars of empire or spiritual retreat.. Christianity suffered from the contagion in some considerable measure, but was also able to resist it as paganism could not, because it had at it's disposal means for renarrating the cosmos from the ground up...it was also in this crepuscular world of trancendental longings, of a pagan order grown weary of the burden of itself, that the Christian faith came as an evangel promising newness of life, and that in all abundance, preaching creation, divine incarnation, resurrection of the flesh, and the ultimate restoration of heavens and earth. A faith, moreover, whose symbols were not occult sigils, or bulls blood, or the brackish water and coarse fare of the ascetic sage, but the cardinal signs of fellowship, feasting and joy. Bread and wine...a rejoicing in the order of creation as a gift and blessing, an inability to grow too weary of the flesh, an abiding sense of the weightiness-kabod-of God's glory and the goodness of all that is, but it is a subversion that Nietsche does not grasp from the perspective of his rather adolescent adoration of pagan harshness..

DB Hart 'The Beauty of the Infinite' eerdmans 2003 pp106

Knowing Jesus

'Knowing Jesus' James Alison SPCK 1998. 116pp

What does it mean to be people who follow the risen crucified Jesus? What does it mean for Jesus to be present to us by his Spirit? How does grasping the kingdom and grace of God change us as humans and as the church? What happened to the apostles, and how did we get from them to us?
These are the kind of questions addressed by Alison. The core of his answer is a non-violent, welcoming and gracious Christ, who blew open jewish ethnocentricity to unify all humanity under the universal victim. Knowing Jesus is being part of that new humanity, neither excluding others, nor imagining ourselves as the victim.

This short book is like a Catholic 'Exclusion and Embrace', that explores the vision of humanity opened up by Christ's death and resurrection. Alison places knowing Jesus firmly in discipleship and following His articulation of the gospel and it's importance is exciting and enriching. Some may be put off by his Roman Catholic faith, but there isn't too much eucharist, and what is there is reasonably helpful.

Preaching with Purpose

'Preaching with Purpose: the urgent task of homiletics' Jay E Adams Zondervan 1982. 162pp


Jack Starmans, the Assistant Minister at Wentworth Falls, now with Mission to the Seafarers gave me this book way back.
Like alot of Jacks advice, I wish I'd listened to this book more, and it's one I come back to often. Adams drives home the point that preaching is not just information, but has a purpose, the transformation of the listeners. Anything that doesn't serve that purpose must be cut. Like most Jay Adams, he sometimes overstates his case, but it's good stuff anyway. Well worth the short amount of time to read it.

Great blog

spally's blogThe other night I rediscoverd spally's blog. Alison works at Anglicare doing policy and mapping/demographic stuff. The blog is well written, thoughtful and funny funny funny, you should check it out

Books Clubbed

As a new batch of 1st years pour into Moore College, my best piece of advice to them is 'get in a book club'. Book club is definitely where i have learnt and been stretched the most. (thanks guys !)

I'm trying to remember which books we've done each year, so this list isn't exactly in order

'Evangelical Theology' K Barth
'Exclusion and Embrace' M Volf
'The one, the three and the many' C Gunton
'The Trinitarian Faith' TF Torrance

'The Crucified God' J Moltmann
'Holy Scripture' J Webster
'nein and....(i don't remeber the title) Barth and Brunner

then timing starts to get a bit blurry
'God Crucified' R Bauckham
'Church Dogmatics IV.1 59' K Barth
'Holiness' J Webster
'Resurrection and Moral Order' O O'Donovan
'The Hauerwas Reader' S Hauerwas
'Ways of Judgement' O O'Donovan

Have I missed any?

All of these were fantastic, though 'Exclusion and Embrace' still tops the list for me, an incredible book.

Interview with Richard Hays

HEsed we'emet has an interesting interview with Richard Hays , the most important 'Old testament-in-New-testament' scholar to not get a book in the Baker Commentary on The New Testament Use of the Old Testament (I mean really, what were the editors thinking? Five books for Don Carson? And Mark Seifrid for Romans?)
If you haven't read his 'echoes of scripture' your life is not yet complete.

schweitzer on ethics and mysticism

'the ethic of self-perfecting is in inmost connection with mysticism. It's ow destiny is decided in that of mysticism. t
Thinking out the ethic of self-perfecting means nothing else than seeking to found ethics on mysticism. Mysticism, on it's side, is a valuable world-and-life-view on in proportion as it is ethical'

albert scweitzer 'civilization and ethics' trans by C T Campion London: Adam and Charles Black, 1949 3rd ed

For all his talk of mysticism, schweitzer rejects all forms of current mysticism as world and individual negating. Attempting unity with the absolute or essence of being is a futile activity that distracts us from the reality in front of us. Yet scweitzer urges us to have a transcendent or mystical view of the mundane reality as it is.

things i'd like to do in a project

In Romans 12:1, Paul says 'present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-this is your act of spiritual worship''. Paul expands this in terms of renewed understanding and various ethical injuntions.
How may we read this text?
I'd like to explore this interaction of worship, hermeneutics and ethics

firstly, Paul uses the metaphor of sacrifice to open a new understanding of life. For the first readers this was one imaginitive move, but for modern readers, unaccustomed to any sacrifice, let alone jewish temple sacrifice, this involves two imaginative moves. First we must imagine living in a sacrificial world, and then we must map that to life. Two unhelpful paths are often trod. The first is to equate later christian liturgy with the cultic pratices of Israel and either interpet ethics in light of modern liturgy or to sideline the ethical injunctions altogether. This approach grasps the idea that human action should be refigured by worship, but fails to see the shape of that refiguring.
The second false path is more common amongst evangelicals. This approach reacts to the first position by emphasising that ethics 'is' worship. The point on this reading is the replacement of the cult with 'whole of life'(as though the cult didn't already govern the 'whole of life' While at first this grasps the point of the metaphor, by equating the two it eventually loses it's referrent. Rather than new horizons being opened on the ethical life of the
beleiver, we simply disparage liturgy.

Then a short section on how general hermeneutical theories might help us, probably focussing on Ricouer

Common to both approaches is the idea that 'worship' is basically a universal idea that everyone understands.
Tied to this is the idea that sacrifice is also a universally understood concept.
Yet sacrifices vary from religion to religion. In the christianised west, the idea of sacrifice is dominated by the concept of 'cost'. To sacrifice is primarily to give up something of value.
Is this what paul was talking about? Where shall we find what he was referring to? Here a short discussion of the 'renewing of the mind' and the relationship of jew and gentile in rom 9-11(i come down on gentiles as ingraftesd branches and pauls sacrifice as OT)


While the idea of cost is certainly there in the bible, I don't think it the only or even main meaning of sacrifice. So part two of the project would be examining OT sacrifice what it meant, especially around the ideas of presentation and representation. How did the sacrifical system imagine the world and form the self of those participating in it?The sacrifices placed God, humans and the rest of the world in particular relationships and imagined the entire world in a particular way.

Part three would be taking this renewed imagination of sacrifice back to the ethical injunctions, what might it mean to imagine ethics as 'presentation to god'. Here i would like to engage with Ricouer with his ethics of self-sacrifice, which requires two actors, and with biblical self-sacrifice which conceives of those actions and actors as presented to god.

Part four then explores how we might be 'biblically sacrificing' interpeters and how the biblical ethic contributes to the renewing of the mind that makes this passage comprehensible after all.
(which is a tricksy way of saying the evangelicals are best off in the end, living in the worship the text commends, we are more likely to be enriched in our understanding. )

so theres some thoughts. I'd probably like to include more hermeneutics stuff than I've written here

Preaching and poetry 3: an elegy on the death of John Donne

Tis a sad truth. The pulpit may her plain
And sober Christian precepts still retain;
Grave homilies and lectures; but the flame
of thy brave soul, that shot such heat and light
As burnt our earth and made our darkness bright,
Committed holy rapes upon our will,
did through the eye the melting heart distill,
And the deep knowledge of dark truths so teach
As sense might judge what fancy could not reach,
Must be desired forever

Thomas Carew 'An elegy upon the death of the dean of St Paul's, Dr John Donne' 11-21

John Clare: I Am

You may have noticed I've been a bit down lately. Thanks for you lovin! A friend gave me a big fat book of poems today, fantastic!

I'll start with a depressed one from John Clare. He captures the tired emptiness of introverted depression


I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self consumer of my woes-
they rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes-
And yet I am, and live- like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love best,
Are strange- nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes, where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept-
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below- above the vaulted sky.

Performance and Preaching

I've found an interesting article fromRichard Ward on the intersection between performance studies and preaching. Using performance studies theory, he explores what it means for a preacher to be one spoken to and speaking the biblical texts, how preaching is more than the conveying of information, or even persuasion, but is part of the worship of the church.

Herb Sennett uses the performance theories of Schechner and Turner, who go beyond 'aesthetic drama' to analyse the performative elements of life, to understand the performance of preaching. He also dabbles in a bit of Bahktin, ("We act confidently only when we do so not as ourselves, but as those possessed by the immanent necessity of the meaning of some domain of culture." The African American preacher finds his significance in the community of faith and in the community in which he lives. Within these structures, he knows who he is and why he is. With that confidence, he acts as he ought and as he is guided by the word of God.) to explain how the black preacher in America functions within the community.

In the same journal Eli Rozik tears apart the argument that theatre developed out of religious ritual, either in Greece or in Medieval Christendom. The twentieth centuries penchant for constructed ritual in theatre is due to it's rampant individualism, not some innate connection between the two. Rozik really isn't impressed by quasi-religious symbolism in theatre,quoting Schechner,
"a contradiction undermines these efforts. [...] When artists, or their audiences, recognize that these staged "rituals" are mostly symbolic activities masquerading as effective acts, a feeling of helplessness overcomes them. So-called "real events" are revealed as metaphors."
but is a lot happier with the religious use of theatre.


Jana Childer offers some areas where the practice of theatre and preaching may over lap.
1.Skills
"Skills that build the use of concentration, imagination and observation (a la Stanislavsky, Boleslavsky, Viola Spolin, etc.) are of equal use to the preacher as the actor - both for the moments in the pulpit where the preacher operates as an actor (assuming a personae) and for the moments in the study where the preacher operates as playwright."

2. Attitudes
"Attitudes of respect for space, audience, body, and the text’s author which are common in the theatre, and especially important in the experimental theatre, may contain some answers for modern preaching’s problems."

3. Habits of the heart
Habits of the heart which are often cultivated by preachers, [page 7] including faith (i.e., confidence in the Creative Power) and openness (i.e., toward reciprocity and the mutual transformation it implies) may be of interest to some actors.

Theological lectures

Daniel over at 'text community and mission' has put together an online index of theological lectures....excellent.