Lecture - Humour, theology & preaching

Humour in theology & preaching

I read a book about anti-gravity. I just couldn't put it down

The use of humour in general and irony in particular has been a feature of Modernity for most of the last century. The two best known works from the beginning of the 20th century are probably Freud’s 1905 work Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Penguin, 1991) and the Frenchman Henri Bergson’s Laughter written in 1911 (Macmillan, 1912). But of course it was Germany, the chuckle factory of Europe, which produced the best theological work on ‘Laughter’ this century. Karl-Josef Kuschel’s Laughter, (SCM, 1994) is a remarkably interesting and stimulating read.

Most of the more recent books I have on my shelves concerning humour and preaching are lightweight and American, apart from my own slim volume (with Stephen Gaukroger, Double Cream, Monarch, with some serviceable sermon jokes), which is just lightweight. Arthur Asa Berger’s An Anatomy of Humor (Transaction, 1998) is a full and amusing analysis, but is most concerned with technique and classification. And Peter Berger’s 1997 Redeeming Laughter (1999) is a tour de force full of humour...) There’s also a very good chapter in Mark Oakley’s 2001 book The Collage of God.

But Kuschel’s work, which draws on a wide European literature, has both depth and an appreciation of the postmodern condition that makes it a good framework for this essay.
You are unique, just like everyone else.

After an analysis of the Ancients (Homer, Plato, Aristotle), Kuschel uses as a contemporary source Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which he sees as a postmodern metalinguistic irony demonstrating the limits of knowledge and truth. Eco himself sees the mediaeval monastic whodunnit as a construct for exploring the masquerade of late 20th century epistemology. For Eco, when all is said and done there is only a stark choice left: laughter (William of Baskerville’s favourite) or silence (his pupil Adso’s conclusion in his dotage).

Kuschel then surveys the biblical material, concluding that the OT portrays human laughter of two kinds
1) the sceptical laughter of the faithful, who although they may deem God’s promises as unlikely, eventually (ideally) join the liberating laughter of God. So Sarah declares to Abraham, “God made me laugh, everyone who hears of it will laugh with me.” (Gen 21.6) But more significantly, Abraham laughs on being told to expect the patter of tiny feet (Gen 17.17). Despite Paul’s over optimistic interpretation (Romans 4.19f) Walter Gross (quoted by Kuschel) is possibly right when he states: “The Abraham prostrate in worship before God and yet laughing at the same time is one of the most inscrutable images in Holy Scripture.”
Jewishness has always been rooted in humour. (“beautiful Thursday joke”.
2) the mocking laughter of the fool in the face of the wise, which will lead to destruction, often expounded in the Psalms and Wisdom literature.

My Karma just ran over my Dogma

Kuschel also looks at Divine laughter in the OT and sees here three possible aspects of God
1) The God of joy and freedom who laughs with the sceptical believers at the unlikeliness of the faith enterprise
2) The “how odd of God to choose the Jews” God who mocks the wicked and laughs at the non-Israeli powers who presume world supremacy
3) The inscrutable God who appears to laugh at the innocent and act in an arbitrary fashion, which is Job’s experience (ch9 esp vv.21-23), although Kuschel argues that the redactors have obviously tried to ameliorate this view of God in the concluding chapters (eg. 37.23)

Veni Vidi Velcro; I came, I saw, I stuck around

Ironically it is in the Gnostic writings (eg the Apocalypse of Peter) that Christ is portrayed as demonstrating the very human characteristic of laughter, although they use it to support a form of docetism in which Christ laughs at the foolishness of mortals as they pin the human Jesus to the cross.

The NT knows nothing of Jesus’s laughter (or of Paul’s for that matter) which is why the monastic movement supported by Chrysostom, Augustine and a host of others were for the most part against any merriment that led to laughter. (Although Francis knew the power of mocking the temptations of lust - his body, Brother Ass.)
Yet Kuschel, following Moltmann in Theology and Joy (London, 1973), argues that the NT is suffused with laughter that stems from joy and paradox.
1) There is the joy of a God who sides with the marginalised and sympathises with the doubters, who rejoices with the sinners who see their need and mocks the smug righteous; he exults in physical and spiritual creation, and laughs at death in the resurrection of Christ.
2) The followers of Christ will know the laughter of others who mock them for their faith and for their Sermon on the Mount ethics. And in reverse, Christians will be those who do not join the wicked laughter of those who seek to put down with malice and superiority, the weak and the social outcasts.

Lottery: a tax on people who are poor at mathematics

I’m not going into the whatizitness of postmodernity here - I’ve written about it elsewhere. But humour is a key ingredient of postmodernity and especially blank irony: supposedly an irony without arrogance or self-importance. Moderns are still contemptuous enough to use irony as a tool for mocking that which they have ‘ridden above’, in the same way that theology students and clerics use cynicism to destroy their opponents while hoisting themselves on their own petards – for cynicism is deeply destructive.

The modernist ironist assumes privileged access to an objective point of view. He lives in the Big Picture. But the blank ironist has no such luxury. She lives in an incoherent and pluralist world.

So there is in art and literature (and the adverts) constant self-mockery: what various writers have called playfulness, pastiche, jokeyness, stylistic promiscuity, eclecticism, self-parody. You can see it in the Simpsons, The Family Guy, Green Wing, Eddie Izzard, Damian Hirst or Gilbert & George. There are strong connections in postmodern humour between death, violence, religion and sex, amply illustrated in films like Pulp Fiction, For many postmoderns, in apologetic discourse, you cannot be saying anything serious unless you say it with a smile. To be serious at being serious is to coerce. So humour must be employed.

The so-called ‘Waning of Affect’ is one reason why humour has become so dominant. The ability to feel deep emotion is spasmodic and brief for postmoderns. This is partly due to information overload and partly due to the fragmentation of consciousness. We have to cope with so many emotions in so short a space of time each day.

The TV culture and sound-bite sensations have coarsened the human spirit. There has been a loss of depth and more than that, in postmodernity there is a denial of depth. Jameson describes the loss of an ‘inner self’ that is able to feel, claiming that postmoderns’ “feelings (Lyotard “intensities”) are now free-floating and impersonal and dominated by euphoria.” Edward Munch’s famous painting The Scream is a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation. In postmodernity there can be no cathartic, wordless scream. There is only humour and another day.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

So how (if at all) do we use humour in preaching? There are those, and I guess they have already stopped reading this essay, who would agree with John Chrysostom: “This world is not the theatre for laughter; neither did we come together for this intent, that we may give way to immoderate mirth, but that we may groan, and by this groaning inherit a kingdom.” Or they might echo the words of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, from a different churchmanship and era: “It is an abomination for a man to go into the pulpit to be deliberately humorous.” Then others of us would agree with Malcolm Muggeridge that “Next to mystical enlightenment [laughter] is the most precious gift and blessing that comes to us on earth.”

Whether we are addressing modernists (the vast majority of our congregations), or postmodernists (the growing mind-set of western society), we remove a vital cultural element from our services and sermons if we remove humour. Evangelicals have made very good use of this, primarily in the modernist arena. The humour is very realist; it is the anecdote; it lacks surrealism. [Grocer to little boy by apple barrel: “Are you trying to steal one of those apples son?” “No sir. I’m trying not to.”] It is evangelicals who introduced the RCL collect for Sermon-block Sunday: ‘O Lord, who didst hallow laughter through thy gift of vestments; grant that we who have heard a fantastic joke recently, may find a Biblical text to accompany it...’ [You can find postevangelical humour all over the web. Eg, http://ship-of-fools.com] Perhaps Anglo-Catholics should re-introduce the risus paschalis of the middle ages, when at the Easter Mass the priest would use all manner of ribaldry and sexual humour to elicit peels of laughter from the congregation. Modernist Christian humour is still ‘western’, cataphatic, left-brain activity, full of the immanent. [Evangelist & pastor go bear hunting…] Postmodernist humour is more ‘eastern’, apophatic, reflecting mood and transcendent ineffability. It works better with agnostics who believe, rather than dogmatists who want reinforcement. [“I tried atheism, but in the end I found it too hard to believe.”]

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

Humour is an essential part of being human, and seems to reflect something within the Trinity. The joke, slapstick, physical laughter – these are but the visible outcrops of something that is very profoundly embedded in our psychology. Which is why you don’t necessarily have to be an outwardly funny or jokey person in order to have a deep sense of humour. If we go back to the Trinity, then perhaps humour is part of our psyche involved with our sense of self-worth and inner equilibrium – a part of the checks and balances on our self-reflection.

If the sense is either absent or ‘overbalances’ then it seems to exacerbate depression. (Antony Hancock or Kenneth Williams) But as a God given part of what it is to be human and seems to be a very effective survival mechanism. (The Life of Brian – always look on the bright side of things – a profound comment on how to live in this vale of tears.)

[If you don’t have a sense of humour, or at least are unable to use it publicly, then it is usually better not to try. Failed humour is a poor communicator and humour is only part of the communication process - hopefully you have other strengths. And of course good liturgy can help to restore a postmodern’s confidence in non-coercive seriousness. But if you can use humour, but have felt it inappropriate, maybe in some contexts you should reconsider. Then again, if you have a developed gift for humour, you should be aware of its manipulative potential and of the distinctive Christian theology which should undergird it. You could start in no better place than Kuschel’s Laughter.]

Coda: my vicar has a beautiful illuminated manuscript of this piece by Paul Bunday

In the beginning… God laughed
And the earth was glad.
The sound of laughter
Was like the swaying and swinging of thunder in mirth;
Like the rush of the north on a drowsy and dozing land;
It was cold. It was clear.
The lion leapt down
At the bleating feet of the frightened lamb and smiled;
And the viper was tamed by the thrill of the earth,
At the holy laughter.
We laughed, for the Lord was laughing with us in the evening;
For the laughter of love went pealing into the night;
And it was good.

Article - An autobiographical sketch

Living Intimately with Strangers
- a Postevangelical Pilgrimage?
(Published in The Postevangelical Debate, SPCK, 1997)

Northwest Spain was a revelation to me. As the plane circled round to land in Santiago de Compostela, I could see rolling green hills below and a landscape more reminiscent of my native Sussex than the arid desert regions of Spain, where I had stayed before in Zaragoza. The Cathedral, built over the bones of St James (‘Santiago’) the Apostle dominates the old city. It has been a great place of Christian pilgrimage for a thousand years and there were many travellers there when I visited the shrine a few days later. Most of the pilgrims had walked for many miles over many days to reach their destination. They simmered on that hot August day with all the joys and weariness that a long pilgrimage brings; savouring the new friendships and shared stories; the heightened faith and sense of belonging to the Church both militant and triumphant; at best, a greater devotion to Christ for whom they had undertaken the discipline of the walk. Pilgrimage has a long and noble tradition within the church, much neglected by Protestants because often abused by Catholics.

Some of the visitors, like me, had only flown in a few days before. They came from that part of the Christian family that does not understand pilgrimage. To them all this smacked of mumbo jumbo and salvation by works. They decided to sing some choruses in the nave and to pray ‘out’ the spirit of superstition that obviously pervaded a place where people genuflected, lit candles and kissed relics. An usher approached them and politely asked that they should stop singing and causing a disturbance. Vergers in Westminster Abbey would probably have done the same. Later that evening, back at the campsite, I heard some of these singers asking us to pray for the godless and misguided pilgrims. What further proof was needed of their unregenerate state, they said, than that the authorities had forbidden chorus singing in the cathedral.

Incidents like this have provoked in me an indefinable mental discomfort and pause for thought since I was a small, precocious boy in the Christian church. In recent years I have come to understand more about myself and the Christians who have nurtured me. I have reflected on the obvious sincerity and zeal of people who seem certain that they not only have the truth, but that their way of doing the truth is superior to all others. And these people have been my friends who loved me and cared for me. Yet somehow there was often a disjunction between what we were doing and the ordinary life of my unchurched family and wider circle of friends.

I sat on the hillside overlooking Compostela, at the foot of a huge cross, and remembered some of my early attempts at evangelism as a boy of 10 or 11. On Sunday afternoons in the summer, my church held open air services down on Shoreham beach. We would wade through the pebbles on what we judged to be the most densely populated part of the beach - always better at high tide when the masses could not spread themselves out so much - and set up a little peddle harmonium, a couple of outdoor PA speakers, and an old valve amplifier powered by a car battery that one of the stronger men lugged from the road. Then we would sing songs from ‘100 Favourite Hymns’, read from the Authorized Version, share testimonies and invite the oiled and bikinied multitudes to church that evening. My task was to go round, sweltering in my Sunday Best collar and tie, offering people hymn sheets in the vain hope that they might like to join in. I tried to ‘act natural’ when I came across a cluster of my school friends or neighbours. But it wasn’t natural. It was a cultural oddity, justified on theological grounds as ‘preaching the Gospel’.

Ten years later at university in the early 70s, Monty Python’s Flying Bible Study had at least been an ‘encultured’ attempt to share the Gospel, although I realised looking back that it still worked on an Us-versus-Them model of evangelism. But it was better than the prevailing method of thrusting Chic tracts up people’s noses, because, apparently, once a man had been converted by having a Chic tract nasally applied, and he had gone on to be a famous evangelist.

Another ten years later in the 80s, I was a Baptist minister, sitting in a boat moored off Torquay seafront on a Saturday evening. There was the familiar PA system, now transistorized, but with the same old car battery - this one with a dodgy connection which gave a surreal effect to the voice as it ebbed and flowed on the prevailing winds: “Welcome to the Boat Open… on these Satur… then do take one… … joy it!” There was an accordion, a choir, testimonies and solos, and two surly boatmen who sat like Gog and Magog at bow and stern with mugs of tea and fags hanging out of their mouths. One Saturday I remember the elderly speaker started off by shouting up to the promenade: “You may wonder what we are doing here?” I exchanged knowing smiles with many of the youngsters sitting around me. What were we doing there?

In 1996, as an Anglo-Catholic priest, I led a pilgrimage from my parish to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. I helped sprinkle at the well, anointed with oil at the Healing Mass, and sang all 37 verses of the hymn telling the Walsingham story as we processed round the garden behind the statue of Our Lady. It was a strange experience and I don’t think I will ever get into the Mary thing in a big way. I had been at Spring Harvest a few weeks earlier and there were marked cultural similarities although major theological differences; and of course a lot more gin and lace in evidence - at Walsingham, that is.

These and many more are the gallimaufry of religious experiences which have shaped my life and ministry over the last 40 years and I count myself lucky to have so many Christian friends who have shared with me the strengths and the weaknesses of their own traditions. I have never minded the walls of denominationalism, but I have always objected to broken glass on top of the walls. And I am but one of a growing number of Christians who have not only looked over the garden walls of very different denominations, but have walked through the gate. In a postmodern society where choice is of the essence of life, the church is in a strong position, with 57 varieties to suit most tastes and temperaments, all with one central, Christological and Trinitarian message. If only we could celebrate that diversity and love one another.

For me and many of my contemporaries, a dominant theme during these recent decades of social fragmentation and religious uncertainty has been integration - my life, my personality, my faith, my theology, my career, my spiritual life… And even integration of the wider church, allowing for individual choice with conviction, yet resisting the temptation to rubbish all other positions in order to make me feel more secure in my own. This has been the growing problem of the sect-like nature of some evangelicalism and some Anglo-Catholicism. We have seen others go along a road called Faithful to the Tradition and realised that for us it has become a cul-de-sac called The Myth of Certainty. There are no more certainties; only reasonable grounds for confidence. This must give us a degree of humility in our walk with others of differing theological positions, and in our dealings with those struggling with faith and practice.

Good friends often see the changes we are undergoing before we notice them ourselves. I can remember the day when walking through a little Oxfordshire village in the late 80s, a former colleague, David Coffey, asked me if I thought I would become an Anglican, or even a Roman Catholic. I was taken aback by the seriousness of the enquiry. It had never really occurred to me to change denominations, but David obviously thought I might. Later, he explained my denominational move to others who were perplexed by what appeared so rapid a change of allegiance, in a way that helped to clarify matters for myself. He said that my theological, spiritual and career paths had converged. Let me retrace my steps along those three paths, albeit rather sketchily and sadly leaving out a number of significant people and events.

The Emotional Blackmail of a Sound Theology

As soon as I could walk, I joined my neighbours’ kids at the local Baptist Sunday School. I had three, then four, then five, then six brothers and sisters and so Sunday School got you out of a crowded 3-bedroomed house, both morning and afternoon in the 50s. I liked Sunday School: lots of friends; a colour-in book with beautiful gummed pictures to stick in each week; Sunday School anniversaries with presentation books for good attendance over the year. And many godly older men and women who loved me and gave time to me. As I grew older I joined the choir and the youth group and the Christian Endeavour and the Boys’ Brigade and went to church pretty well all day on Sunday. I began to learn theology and to hear tales of liberals who dwelt beyond the Bible Belt which was the Sussex coast. Then there were the great Missionary Conventions at Holland Road, Hove, and charts of Dispensations and End Times, together with detailed models of the Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple. By my teens I was reading Scripture Union notes, and IVP books and at 14 I started lay-preaching around the Tin Tabernacles of Sussex villages.

Church had given me the impetus to pass my 11-plus and go with my friends to High School in Worthing. It was there that I grew to love mathematics, physics and self-conscious evangelicalism under the aegis of charismatic mentors, mostly from the Brethren. Jim Gravett taught us Latin by speaking nothing but Latin when we were in class. He threw blackboard rubbers at us, kept chickens and ferrets outside his classroom and led Bible studies in the lunch hour. Taffy Evans was the headmaster who was at once fearsome and playful and who taught us Religious Instruction and muscular Christianity. Beaky Martin was a polymath who inspired me to learn about everything and who somehow taught more philosophy and theology in a Maths lesson on differential calculus than I had heard in many a sermon.

The Joy of Science was only matched by the Joy of Sound Theology. (There was no Joy of Sex of course…) I was introduced to the Banner of Truth, to Reformation Today and to the writings of Francis Schaeffer. I bought Berkhof’s Systematic Theology and formed sound opinions on everything from women in ministry (OK as long as they weren’t presiding elders) to the Established Church (some evangelicals were alright - I had been to the bastions of Broadwater, Worthing and Bishop Hannington, Hove). Once I had got the theology of the charismatic movement sorted - admittedly a trickier problem in the 60s - I was ready for CICCU: the Cambridge Inter Collegiate Christian Union.

Cambridge was to be the finishing school of my conservative evangelical credentials, although I hung around a lot with charismatics and sang in the Selwyn Chapel choir, and this lost me serious brownie points. To be really ‘sound’ you sided with John Stott rather than Martyn Lloyd-Jones; and you prayed in your college CU prayer meeting for Chapel and those who went there. You didn’t attend yourself. You went to the Round Church, or to one of the Brethren halls, or joined me at Eden Strict Baptist Chapel. While studying science and the history and philosophy of science I also became a Young Earth Creationist, a position I held and championed for over ten years.

Being convinced of sound theology meant that you treated all others who claimed to be Christians but who held loose to evangelicalism as slightly suspect. Students who left CICCU to join more liberal churches and chapels were backsliders. Those who couldn’t hold to the strict moral codes of evangelicalism were beyond the pale and you prayed for them with tears in your eyes. This was genuine compassion, but it was fuelled by a sectarian theology that saw all other theologies as deficient discipleship. Like all sectarian thinking, it held a powerful emotional hold on you. The intimacy of fellowship would be broken if you forsook the evangelical way. You would wander off into the relativity of liberalism if you departed in any matter from ‘biblical’ Christianity.

This is a hard mind set to break free of. Although I can no longer call myself a conservative evangelical, I still feel an inner pain every time I move a marker post. In 1984 I became the Laing Scholar at London Bible College (now the London School of Theology) and spent two years full time, studying Genesis Chapter One. At the end of that exercise I had all but forsaken Young Earth Creationism. Eventually I realised it was only an emotional attachment and a fear of disappointing my creationist friends that made me in my dissertation allow for the creationist position as a possible reading of Scripture. In the course of my research I had in fact become angry at the way that Creationists (like me) manipulated the Bible and church history to make their case. It is hardly surprising that some people find it less painful to ‘give up’ on Christianity altogether (although they usually haven’t) rather than move away from evangelicalism to… postevangelicalism? In my church in Torquay we had a number of families who had been badly hurt by the Exclusive Brethren. They rarely came into church membership, because it had so many unhappy connotations, and some had a constant niggling feeling that they were bound for hell, and had forsaken the true path; the narrow way that so few enter. I understand their feelings now in a way that I could not at the time.

It is hard for exclusive theologies, and conservative evangelicalism was such in the 60s and 70s, to allow for a mind really open to other possibilities and points of view. Departing from the prescribed truth is too costly both in terms of inner turmoil and uneasy relationships. I know when I visit them, that some of my friends are praying that I will return to the truth and become an ‘effective’ evangelical again. How else could they pray?

A Subversive Spirituality

I was born at 2am one snowy Sunday, on Christmas Day, 1949. I was almost called Noel, but my parents plumped for the good Bishop of Myra, Nicholas instead. (One of my congregation in Torquay was born exactly 50 years before me and was called Yule, which made me grateful that I had not been called Holly, or even Turkey.) In a strange way, being a Christmas baby always made me feel special, and close to Jesus, the boy who shared my birthday. I never remember a time when he was not a part of my inner reality. I always spoke to Jesus and resisted any attempts to get me to ‘make a decision for Christ’ or to ‘let Jesus into my heart’ in adolescence. I was never converted. My metaphor of faith from infancy appears to have been that of evolution rather than sudden change; gradualism rather than catastrophism. Evangelicalism has been very prone to benchmark faith - conversion, baptism, backsliding, repentance, renewal, baptism in the Spirit, rededication… For some people this works well when set against a backcloth of progressive growth in grace. But for some who are ‘forced’ into this model of spiritual growth it begins to wear thin, and disillusion can set in, usually against a backcloth of increasing guilt.

There were three key elements in my early spiritual development. I grew up between the South Downs and the Channel on the banks of the river Adur. The 1950s were full of fun on beaches and in chalk pits; messing about in boats on the river; exploring among the tank blocks and the old air-raid shelters over at the airport. Shoreham-by-Sea was a wonderful playground. Secondly, my father is a radio ham, so the house was always full of electrical components, tools and mechanical wonders for managing masts. I could solder soon after I could walk and blame the recent degeneration of my brain on the many electrical shocks I received in my boyhood. A third element was the beauty of music. I had a strong singing voice and very early learnt the pleasure of making music with others in choirs and orchestras. My treble voice turned tenor by the time I was 12. By 18 I realised that male alto carried more kudos and was more marketable than an indifferent tenor. This was a decision that, somewhat surprisingly, altered the course of my life more than I could have imagined at the time.

These worlds of nature, science and music developed in me a strong sense of the power and mystery of God. Natural theology informed and gave stability to my spiritual growth, and from my 20s onwards began subtly to confuse my Christian life. My evangelical faith looked fine on paper and in the cut and thrust of student debate, but it didn’t ‘feel’ right, or make sense of the culture in which I lived. Now I knew, of course, that I must not follow my ‘feelings’, those unreliable doorways to sin. I must follow my mind, that ennobled arbiter of Christian living. But even then, my reformed training reminded me of my ‘total depravity’ and that my reasoning too was faulty. This began to throw me back on God in a way I did not really understand at the time. I felt like John Donne:

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you,’and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,’untie, or break that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. (Sonnet xiv)

It was all this poetry and music and liturgy and art so closely woven into Christianity that began to produce in me a sort of spiritual dualism. The focus of the culture which was confusing me at this time was Selwyn College Chapel. I had auditioned for the choir and joined the other three male altos, who were all much better than me, but the organ scholar desperately needed a fourth to balance the all male choir of about 20 voices. This introduced me to a régime of daily Eucharists and evensongs which was at once both utterly foreign to me and utterly compelling. Furthermore, although I knew that none of the clerics who still littered Selwyn in the 70s, were evangelicals, I realised two important things about them: they were not lacking in the brain department and could give good reasons for their ‘middle of the road’ (a pejorative term from my background) theological positions; and they were godly, and displayed a gentleness of spirit and devotion to God which did not fit the stereotypical picture that countless ‘sound’ sermons had painted of liberals. Even Bishop John Robinson, of the infamous Honest to God debates of the 60s, when I met him over dinner at Selwyn was a bubbling and charming Christian man - in favour of believers’ baptism as I recall!

My chaplain, Bob Hardy (now Bishop of Lincoln) lived next door to me on D staircase and there we had many group discussions with the older chaplain, John Sweet, a prayerful, caring academic with a dry sense of humour; and with the Master of Selwyn, Owen Chadwick. He was a powerful personality and a silent mentor for me. I would often serve for him at the early morning Eucharist where he murmured the prayers by the light of the altar candles and often thrust the Gospel book towards me if the reader had not turned up - his eyesight was not up to the candlelight. I read the lesson for him at Great St Mary’s, the University Church, when he was installed as Vice-Chancellor, and he took a kindly interest in my ‘free church’ progress after I left Selwyn.

After a difficult first term in 1969, feeling I was compromising my faith by being so involved with Chapel, I received a helpful letter from my old Worthing High School guru, Charles (Beaky) Martin. I had written to him of my concerns and he had wisely urged me to identify with ‘the household of faith’ in the college, even if I had some theological reservations. For the next four years, I worshipped daily in College Chapel and pedalled off after the Sung Eucharist on Sunday morning to get to Eden Strict Baptist Chapel for 45 minutes of David Smith’s great Bible exposition. Then after a very formal Sunday Evensong in Selwyn, I joined the 500 plus from CICCU at the Evangelistic Sermon in Holy Trinity. I was becoming a closet Anglo-Catholic.

My tutor at Selwyn, an engineer with a quiet devotion to Christ, always in Chapel (and now Master of Selwyn, Sir David Harrison), arranged for me to go and do my teaching practice during my fourth year at Lancing College, up the hill from my home in Shoreham. He was a governor at the school and knew that the head of physics was coming to be Schoolmaster Fellow for Easter term. It was a fantastic term, and as the Baptist Ministerial Recognition Committee for Kent and Sussex had just turned me down for training as a Baptist minister, I stayed on for two more years at Lancing. The school chapel is bigger than many cathedrals and was built as the central minster of the Woodward Foundation, an Anglo-Catholic educational trust. I was back in the choir again, deeply involved in chapel life, as well as attending my home church, Shoreham Baptist, down the hill. The ‘dualism’ continued and I thrived on the mystery and awe of a Sung Solemn Mass and on the intimacy and immediacy of happy clappy Bappy services.

During the late 60s and early 70s, I had also been deeply affected by the charismatic movement. I was at school with Stuart McAlpine and Michael Clark, and their fathers, Campbell and Dennis, and the wider circle of their friends which included Arthur Wallis, Cecil Cousen and Gean Darnall, had all made a deep impression on me. Despite the loony fringes of the movement, there was an authenticity and transparency about these men and women which again pointed me beyond the formulaic doctrines of conservative evangelicalism to the mystery of the interaction between the divine and the human - the working of the Holy Spirit. Capel Prayer and Bible weeks and the Intercessors for Britain weeks at Ashburnham Place gave me insights into prayer which I was not to come across again until I started reading some of the Fathers & Mothers of the church: Chrysostom, Francis, Hildegaard, John of the Cross, Julian, Merton…

I began to admit to myself, and others by my 30s, that I was theologically a Baptist, but aesthetically an Anglo-Catholic. This subversive spirituality eventually had an effect on my theology. The focus of my faith was subtly moving from ‘head’ to ‘heart’. When I was 20, I was very secure in what I knew, but very insecure in who I was. By 40 I was very secure in who I was, but quite insecure in what I knew. There were many fuzzy edges in my faith, and the old certainties seemed naive and unworkable. I remember standing around with half a dozen lecturers at London Bible College one afternoon discussing some particularly fundamentalist student. We had all been at Cambridge together in the 70s. I remember commenting: “You know, we’ve all become those woolly forty year olds that we despised when we were twenty!”

It was a great relief to me when I first realised that trying to get back to the fervent faith of my teens was an enormous guilt-inducing mistake. Pilgrimage requires change and if we cannot change our minds, then we cannot really change anything. I was struck by Carl Jung writing on preparing people for retirement:

“We take this step with the false presupposition that our truth and ideals will serve us henceforth. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning - for what was great in the morning will be little at evening… I have given psychological treatment to too many people of advancing years, and have looked too often into the secret chambers of their souls not to be moved by this fundamental truth.” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)

At the same time as all this change was going on in my spirituality/theology, my ecclesiology was also consequently undergoing a transformation. During my 11 years at LBC I realised that interpreting the Bible was a much more slippery enterprise than I had hitherto thought. And I saw that the church played a much more determinative role in biblical hermeneutics than I had supposed. I only had to look at the way that evangelicalism had viewed the issues of divorce and the role of women, during my lifetime, to see this demonstrated. The creeds were important, for they mapped the interpretive debates of the church. The Roman Catholic and Reformed Catholic (as some would call Anglo-Catholicism) church had maintained credal Christianity for nearly two millennia.

I led a pilgrimage to Assisi in the late 70s and was fascinated by all I learned of Francis. I had already met Anglican Franciscans at Lancing and at Cambridge. Then I began to read Brother Ramon’s books and eventually started meeting with him. He had been a Welsh Baptist, a charismatic, and now he was a Franciscan priest - presently a solitary up at the Prayer House in Glasshampton. While still a Baptist minister I became a Third Order Franciscan. This helped to discipline my spiritual life, gave greater focus to my pilgrimage and fuelled the Spirituality courses I was teaching at LBC.

Calling or Career?

Mathematics and the Baptist Ministry were the competing vocations of my teens. By the time I was 17 and in the Science Sixth Form I had decided to pursue both. My teachers suggested I applied for Selwyn because it was full of ordinands and clerics who would understand someone reading Mechanical Sciences in preparation for the ministry. Cambridge has a long tradition of science and mathematics as a limbering up exercise for the Queen of Sciences, Theology. I have never regretted the decision, although I must admit that I did a bare minimum of detailed Science while being involved in music and sport, the Christian Union and Chapel, politics and lectures by interesting people in other disciplines. These were the days of the Garden House riots, the English Faculty sit-ins, the formation of the Cambridge Students’ Union (as opposed to The Union - the expensive debating society), the first mixed colleges (women were not admitted to Selwyn till 1976), charismatic splits and decimal coinage.

After 2 years of teaching at Lancing, I entered Spurgeon’s College in 1975 to train for the ministry - an appeal had persuaded the Ministerial Recognition Committee to (reluctantly) change it’s mind about my suitability. Supply teaching in Steyning Grammar School (a 2,300 pupil comprehensive school) helped me to survive financially during my 4 formative years at Spurgeon’s. Ray Brown was the Principal. He was a church historian who also taught spirituality, both by his life and in class. He helped me to begin the integrative process between my baptist theology and my catholic spirituality and also made me realise that although I wanted to be a pastor, I also wanted to be a teacher and trainer.

I left to be Assistant Minister at Upton Vale Baptist Church in Torquay, where Ray had been the minister and here I experienced ‘high church’, pietistic, baptist worship. We had a robed choir and worked hard to give our services liturgical coherence. There was a strong brethren influence and a significant charismatic group in the church, which both served to undermine, in different ways, liturgical development - although they added much else in other areas. I had a basically Lutheran view of communion (the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the elements) but was aware that my congregation were essentially Zwinglians who saw the Eucharist as a memorial only (caricatured as the ‘real absence’).

Peter Barber was my boss for my first year. He was a protestant Scot whom I remember saying to me as we stared at a glorious triptych behind the high altar in some cathedral, “Doesn’t it make your protestant blood boil?” Well no it didn’t. I had been used to gentle Cambridge Catholics and Peter’s experience of Catholicism had been in Glasgow. I began to realise that temperament and formative experiences shaped your theology as much as the Bible. I could not imagine anyone who would be as good a mentor and teacher as Peter, but when he left to become General Secretary of the Scottish Baptist Union, he was followed by David Coffey who proved to be his equal as a gracious teacher and, like Peter, a man who gave me space to develop my own spirituality.

I wanted to work with students and after nearly five years at Upton Vale left to pursue research at LBC, which I knew to be a necessary preliminary for theological teaching. I began to examine my ‘calling’ and to sift the comments that I used to get in Torquay: “You’ll soon want your own church I suppose…” I didn’t. I enjoyed having fingers in many pies, being a gatekeeper in so many evangelical networks, having the freedom to travel, write, teach. Furthermore, I began to understand myself as a political animal, always wanting to influence the decision makers, always scared that I might manipulate committees rather than let decisions emerge.

When the time came for me to move on from LBC and to think about the next twenty years of my working life, I was at a loss to know what to do. I wanted to be a chaplain in an academic environment, but as a Baptist minister, such opportunities were few and far between. If only I were an Anglican, I thought… And then everything came together in my mind and I felt sure that this unthinkable step was indeed the next one. It was a sudden decision which I knew I must test carefully. Ramon sent me a long letter in which he showed, like David Coffey, that he knew my direction better than I did. “It was really not ‘whether’ but ‘when’ you would make the change” he wrote, and speaking of his own denominational change he said, “I also recall that although there was a long period of inward thought and debate within my own mind and heart, yet there was a ‘moment’ which seemed to turn the tide.”

But I was afraid that this change might be seen as a ‘career move’, and indeed I questioned deeply my own motivation. Was it primarily my career? Or aesthetics? Or theology? Or life style? However, my two close friends David Coffey and Steve Gaukroger both encouraged me to make the move and reassured me, and my Bishop, Graham Dow, gave wise advice and direction that facilitated a smooth transition.

For many, change is often seen as weakness - Major and Blair viewed by Thatcherism and Old Labour. But “change is the angel of a changeless God” (Archbishop Temple) The change has been a change in emphasis akin to moving from one focus of an ellipse to the other. I am more at home with the transcendent than the imminent; with mystery than explanation; with priests as the focus of the priesthood of all believers, and as a channel for transcendence, rather than ministers who equip; with paradox and uncertainty rather than closure and assurance. My earlier theology stressed beginnings - conversion; and action - busyness and behaviour, achievement and fervour. My new position embraces endings - heaven; and process - life and being, openness and reflection.

As ever, Jack Clemo puts it well

Broad Autumn
True faith matures without discarding:
All I unearthed, each sky-sign crudely mapped
On the white rasped hills of youth,
Warms me still by rowan-tapped crags
Far up the autumnal mountain,
Incredibly remote in climate, texture, weathering
Of bare stones, from my first insights:
I left no wreckage on those low rasped cones.

There is no snarl of tools
Where broad wisdom calls across the cordial heather,
But the hacked glints my young heart stored
Still tone the subtle comforts and the sharp
Fearful shifts of shade as the blood cools
To admit, and clarify, the expanding mental range.

No pestilence of proud ripeness,
Urbane, agnostic, cankers the wide braes
Which my spirit, eagle-keen now, calls native
In the pale sun’s gloss. The spikes of raw praise,
Sparse once on the white hills,
Glow ruddier here against the thinned
Thieving of the schooled foreign crows.

I have not changed my country;
I have grown and explored
In my faith’s undivided world.
I discard no primal certainty, no rasped
Sky-sign of the Cross;
But now in broad autumn, feeling a new peace
And the old poise of defence,
I accept the pure trysting lochs,
The full antlers in the glens.

I have a long way to travel but I have good travelling companions. Relationships have been my lifeblood along the way, even when sometimes those I have intimately lived and worked with have been strangers to many areas of my interior life, as I have been to theirs. The Church is undergoing a transition that may well turn out to be a paradigm shift. Working out how we can remain faithful to the tradition and each other, while genuinely open to the Spirit’s working through the Church and the Culture, takes a lifetime - and then some.

Harrow, Holy Week 97

Article - I was a Housegroup Junkie

I Was A Housegroup Junkie

It’s midnight and I’ve just got back from Richard and Dawn’s. It was a fantastic housegroup. As usual, I’m hyper at the moment and need to unwind before I can begin to think about sleeping. So pull up an armchair - I’ve got one of those special housegroup armchairs which look and feel so comfortable for the first 5 minutes and then begin to twist your spine as you sink into the crevice at the back. And if you try to make yourself more comfortable, one of the castors falls off (and I say “Oh, don’t worry, it’s always doing that…”) and then you try and mend it and completely distract everybody and then you sit down and it makes a mildly rude noise which will make anyone under 18 spend the next hour suppressing giggles. Of course, I’ve sprinkled milk chocolate crumbs all over the seat and these will gradually melt during the evening and work their way deeply into the fabric of your trousers. But you will be too busy trying to keep away from the traces of jam you have just discovered on the left arm to notice the chocolate. And only if you are very inquisitive will you find the unspeakable things wedged down between the seat cushion and the sides of the armchair.

So hands up if you would like a coffee. Or rather, hands up if you don’t want one, or if you’d prefer tea… or orange. So how many coffees is that? It’s special housegroup coffee, by the way. They collect all the powdery bits left in the bottom of the container ships which bring the coffee beans over from Finland (where they are used as ballast on the return trips from delivering live elks to the Highlands) and then they freeze-dry it, although you can still taste the North Sea oil a little, and certainly smell the elks, until you add the dried milk, that is. Actually it’s not just any old dried milk, it’s Coffeypal. That’s healthier than dried milk and congeals into soft little white balls which give a whirlpool effect as you stir in the few granules of sugar which haven’t stuck to the sugar spoon. It looks a little like a slightly blocked shower plug-hole.

Do help yourself to a housegroup digestive. They all have the hairline cracks which will cause them to break into a hundred pieces between the packet and your plate. It’s surprising really, because biscuits that old are usually a bit softer. The silica gel I keep in the biscuit tin must help.

So shall we wait a little longer for anyone else to come, or shall we start? Let’s split into small buzz groups and discuss that for just a minute or two. OK. So who would like to Open with a word of prayer? Now we’ll move into a time of open sharing. I’ll begin.

It all started when I was about 15, that very vulnerable age when you can fall into so many traps. I was bored with church. Sermons were beginning to lose their excitement. I couldn’t ask questions and I began to realise that our minister only had two basic sermons anyway: the evangelistic ‘let Jesus into your heart’ sermon, and the discipleship ‘pray-more, read-your-bible-more, give-more, witness-more’ sermon. On top of that, the liturgy had lost its allure and I seemed to spend most of the time working out why there were semi-colons in places where I expected commas; or adding up the hymn numbers on the board to see if they ever came to 666. Even the choruses I used to love seemed to have become devoid of intellectual challenge and kept reminding me of Barry Manilow.

Then one evening, some of my friends asked me to go to a Housegroup in another church. That evening changed my life.

I knew I shouldn’t really have gone. We still had a mid-week prayer meeting then, and the Prayer Warriors (Mabel & Elsie - we were very short of male Warriors - in fact we were very short of anybody) had often warned us young people, “Just say no!” But when you’re young, spiritually bored, and a born leader, and you see others going to housegroups, and it doesn’t seem to make them start thinking for themselves… well, what harm can it do, to go just once, I thought.

But I didn’t realise then how addictive housegroups were. So I had been to one meeting, and I hadn’t become charismatic (another thing the Prayer Warriors had warned against) - although I did get a bit of a buzz for the next day or two. Anyway, by the Sunday, I couldn’t wait for Wednesday and the next meeting. It was just ‘soft’ housegroups at first. You know, a few choruses, a lot of ‘sharing’, occasionally opening the Bible and seeing how quickly we could get off the subject. “Pooling Ignorance” was what the Prayer Warriors had called it. It was great, and I couldn’t get over the sense of freedom and excitement that I experienced in those heady, early days. There was Dotty Daphne, who was seriously into ‘pictures’, and Derek who had an uncanny knack of interpreting the most obscure ‘visions’. I thought he’d be stumped by Daphne’s picture of a man dressed all in black taking a white rabbit out of a top hat. But not Derek. Strangely though, we never heard back from Paul Daniel’s when we invited him to come and ‘preach with a view’.

Of course we had to be discerning, and I well remember the theological discussion we had about the omniscience of God after Gordon gave a ‘word’ one week, that started “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I love you my children, and have nothing against you, as far as I know…’” We decided he was prophesying ‘in the flesh’ and he stuck to his more usual ‘word’ after that incident: “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I love you my children and I am going to do a New Thing among you…’”

If those bits of Lego in the cushion are beginning to bother you, by the way, do take them out through the little tear in the cushion cover and pop them into Charles’s sock which you’ll find down the side of the chair there. He left it a month ago after we had laid hands on his athlete’s foot at the monthly healing meeting. It didn’t get any better, although Daphne’s cat never had any more bowel problems after that particular prayer time.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and eventually the ‘buzz’ of these ‘soft’ housegroups began to wear off. Then I met a friend one Saturday morning in the Springs of Living Joy Christian Bookshop and Coffee House, and he told me about the Housegroup run by the Strictly Particulars on Sabbath Eve at 7pm - it had been started to try and attract young people who might otherwise be led astray by the world, the flesh and the Devil on a Saturday night. (There was a jazz band playing in the Town Hall every other week.) Well, some of my friends warned me about getting into the ‘hard’ stuff, but before I knew where I was I had been to a meeting on Infralapsarianism and Vatican II and couldn't wait till the next Saturday when we were going to share informally on Pseudepigrapha in the Intertestamental Period. It was all downhill from there. Soon I was on Premillenarianism and the Middle East, The Significance of the Tabernacle Tent Pegs for Today, and I even led a housegroup on Predestination. I think it was ‘meant’.

But after a while, just as the ‘soft’ had led to the ‘hard’ housegroups, so my search for that ever elusive Housegroup High led me to the exotic and bizarre. I am talking the Katmandu of ‘Caring & Sharing’ groups. I am talking ecumenical housegroups during Lent.

Churches Together in Neasden (CTN) had never been very strong, mainly because it was only the Quakers, the Methodists and the 8am 1662 Congregation from St Etheldredd’s that attended. In fact, it was I and some friends who the following year set up CAN (Churches Apart in Neasden) and inaugurated the Truly Reformed Allcomers Summer Housegroups (TRASH) which started in March and went on till October. I was so addicted by then that even TRASHCAN failed to flash a warning light to me. The CTN groups were just week-fillers really. We used to discuss books written by Catholic Abbots with sets of initials like OBJ or CSSM after their names. There were lots of long pauses and we lit candles and decided that it didn’t really matter what you believed, as long as you believed it sincerely; and of course you had to be nice. I knew there was something deeply wrong with these housegroups because we didn’t have coffee, we had sherry. And some of them smoked. So anyway, one week, when John, who was between churches at the time, said that all religions were basically the same, and said, “just name any two religions you like… they’re all the same really…” I said “Christian Science and Melanesian Frog Worship.” The rest of the group thought I was very narrow-minded and Zöe pointed out that Mary Baker Eddy had kept pet frogs as a child. They didn’t like the way I kept dragging the Bible into things either.

When they introduced a ‘new’ chorus one week - “kum bi ya, my Lord” - I abandoned CTN as a lost cause. But it was a springboard for TRASH and soon I and a group of like-minded individuals from different churches were meeting in housegroups almost every evening. I didn’t realise it then, but in reality I was getting TRASHED every night.

If you want to use my housegroup ‘bathroom’ by the way, it’s at the top of the stairs. You can’t miss it, and if you do, you will stumble into a room with resentful looking teenagers in it, with earphones on, who will give you a ‘just you dare try and have an I’m-really-interested-in-young-people conversation, and we’ll smoke our pot in front of you and see if you tell our parents’ sneer. The light switch for the bathroom is in the airing cupboard. The obvious switch outside the bathroom door will turn the living room lights out, so we know when to laugh and shout up to you where the switch is. And I think you’ll find that the key in the bathroom door doesn’t quite turn. But it does make a lot of noise, and if you should manage to turn it, you will only be able to unlock it by putting your shoulder under the door handle and forcing the whole door up on its hinges. Someone will probably have to shout those instructions through the bathroom door to you while we’re saying the grace together. There’s a knack to flushing the loo. If you don’t catch it with another twist of the handle just a second after the initial turn, then you have to wait for the cistern to fill again. It’s a very slow filler, so probably I’ll send someone up to shout through the door “Are you alright?”.

As you can imagine, trying to support a habit like TRASH was very expensive and demanding. In the end, I even sold my guitar to pay for coffee and digestives. I knew I was out of control when I sent out a prayer letter to friends ‘looking to the Lord for support for my Neasden-wide ministry…’ But it wasn’t just the financial burden, it was the demands on my imagination and the group’s own giftings that led to my ultimate demise. Here’s a typical evening.

Arrive at 7pm for 8.30pm.
Coffee & digestives.
Move into a time of open notices.
Welcome latecomers.
Discuss who should open in prayer.
Welcome latecomers.
Sing choruses. (Tricky without the guitar, but fortunately Donna had a real gift for the gazoo, and she was only 16. Later we were to discover the freedom of Kendrick Karaoke tapes.)
Alan leads the next in his 15 week series on “Skin Diseases in Leviticus”. (We all assure him that his face is looking a lot better now and that 17 is a difficult age.)
Joyce arrives and apologises for her lateness (she does this every week). (She had a divine appointment with a man on the 39 bus whose dog had just died and who had been wondering about re-incarnation. She was able to share with him everything that Donald had told us the week before about Ecclesiastes and Tibetan Tantric practice. He had been very interested and said he would give Buddhism serious consideration. Doesn’t God work in mysterious ways?)
Alan says he has to go home because he has no lights on his bike. (Although I notice that Neasden Wanderers are on Match of the Day.)
Move into a time of open prayer. (We focus on Alan’s face and the man on the 39 bus. Jeanette isn’t here tonight so we skip praying for her aunt’s bunions just this one week.)
Discuss who should close in prayer.
Coffee & digestives. (Chocolate digestives if it was someone’s birthday, and it usually was.)
Continue fellowshipping informally with a Summer Ripeness Worship Cassette in the background.

Of course, not every evening was as exciting as this. But I think this gives you a tantalising flavour of what housegroups can be like. I’ve not gone into too much salacious detail as you might end up being drawn into my spiral of housegroup degradation. (Although I can’t help mentioning the inverted catering pyramid. Each week, the host and hostess try to present a more lavish and yet ‘casual’ spread of refreshments than the people who catered the previous week. So you start with the traditional coffee and digestives and three months later you’re snacking on venison vol-au-vents, crème brûlée tarts and non-alcoholic piña colada.)

I only understood the true extent of my dependency when one memorable evening the meeting was at my place, and nobody turned up. (I was so out of touch and had ‘lost it’ to such a degree that I had not even realised that Neasden Wanderers were in a Cup replay at home.) I found myself saying to Trevor McDonald at the end of News At Ten “thank you for sharing that.” I was shaking and in a cold sweat. When I asked the continuity announcer to close in prayer after the National Anthem, she didn’t, and I knew I had become that Housegroup Junkie I had always despised. I desperately needed help.

The Prayer Warriors, Elsie and Mabel, unknown to me, had been praying for me all this time. They had a friend, Arthur Pasty, who founded Capernaum Re-Roofing Ministries (remember that disastrous housegroup in Mark 2?) He ran a self-help meeting for housegroup junkies at Gadarene Grange. It was very informal and really just a time for open sharing with other addicts. But there was one big difference. We had to completely ignore one another. You’d sit there and say things like “I’d just like to share how I’m feeling…” and no one would look at you. Or Arthur would say, “And what do you think of that, Linda?” and Linda would have to keep polishing her nails. There was no coffee or digestives and Arthur would deliberately not close in prayer. We had Pastor Pasty’s telephone number and could ring him at any time of the evening if we felt a housegroup coming on.

Of course, they say you’re never really cured. I still kept using “really” and “just” and I had to keep out of any groups in homes involving 6 people or more, otherwise I started sharing uncontrollably. I used to miss the closeness and warmth that the housegroup gave, but I discovered that rush-hour on the Northern Line seemed to meet those needs. Last month my nephew had a gazoo for his birthday, and I found myself involuntarily closing my eyes and lifting up my head with a beatific smile, hands aloft, as he played ‘Old McDonald had a Farm’.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering why I was at Richard & Dawn’s housegroup tonight. Well, we had an itinerant evangelist in town last week leading a Neasden-wide Name It And Claim It Celebration. When he said there was a man in the tent with a secret sin that involved other people, I just really knew he was speaking to me. I went forward, had a spirit of Small Congregations cast out of me by one of the ministry team (Daphne, actually) and I’ve never looked back since . (That’s because I hurt my neck as I fell over.) I was spectacularly healed of my addiction.

Would anyone like to close in prayer?

A chapter in Housegroups, Crossway, 1996

Article - Notes on Joel

INTRODUCING JOEL

There will be a long line of Bible students waiting to question Joel in heaven. (And another group trying to avoid him as they never got around to reading his prophecy!) We know very little about this enigmatic prophet who is mentioned nowhere else in the Old Testament. Scholars have tried for centuries to pin him down to a particular period in history. Some think he lived around 800BC and on into the time of Jeroboam II and Amos; others place him just before the nation of Judah was carried off into exile in Babylon around 600BC; but we will place his ministry around 520BC, just after some of the exiles returned to rebuild Jerusalem. This is the period of the prophets Haggai and Zachariah and the Persian Empire; the time of Buddha and the emergence of the Greek city states as an empire.
Ultimately the dating is a very secondary issues. Calvin has commented wisely: 'the import of his doctrine is evident, though his time be obscure and uncertain.' So what is the 'import of his doctrine'? It is that God can speak to us through national disasters and human distress. He can lead us to repentance and bring about restoration by way of unexpected calamity. He can awaken us from self-delusion by personal suffering, which is God's 'megaphone to rouse a deaf world' (CS Lewis). Joel had that prophetic gift of seeing God's hand in current affairs and of calling people to turn to the Lord of history who would in the terrible 'day of the Lord' bring all human history to a just and rightful conclusion. And he had that confident prophetic hope that those who sow in tears shall reap in joy.

FRIDAY AUGUST 11
Joel 1:1-2:17
God's Locusts

In an age of deep freezes and worldwide trade it is impossible for most of us to imagine what a locust invasion was like for an agricultural community. The huge black cloud (2:2) containing millions of locusts hovered like a war-time doodlebug above the darkened landscape. With bated breath the villagers watched to see whether it would settle or fly on to destroy another community. Even this century such swarms have been carried into Palestine by the desert winds from Arabia. With a noise like burning straw (1:19), the locusts utterly wipe out all vegetation. They are voracious consumers at every stage in their development (1:4).
Joel does not hesitate to pronounce the famine and drought in the wake of the locust army as God's judgement, and a forerunner of even harsher chastisement (2:11). So he calls for the priests to organise a time of national repentance and mourning. But this must not be a skin deep show of remorse. In 2:12,13 Joel returns to a common prophetic theme: repentance is not a cosmetic one-day wonder, but a genuine change of heart. Repentance is not shown by what we say or do to show how sorry we are, but by a change in our lives and a turning from whatever displeases God.1
Joel had a realistic grasp of the 'state of the nation' and realised the seriousness of what was happening. Reflect on this concerning your nation, your church, your own life.

1 Daniel 9, Ezra 9, Nehemiah 9

SATURDAY AUGUST 12
Joel 2:18-32
Blessings Abound

A common pattern in Old Testament laments is seen here, and the warnings and judgments of God are followed by promise of blessings now and in the future.1 There would be prosperity and fruitfulness throughout the land (18-24) and the marvellous principle of restoration assures Judah (and us) that God "will restore the years the locusts have eaten" (25). If they would but repent, then God could bring good from the calamity and the latter blessings on Israel would be even greater than the former.
Malcolm Muggeridge was well on in life before he came to faith and the autobiography of his youth is sub-titled 'Chronicles of Wasted Time'. But in his latter years God was to restore the years the locusts had eaten. I can think of a man in my congregation who had refused a clear missionary call in his early twenties. He had live for twenty years believing that God could never really use him because of that act of disobedience. But hearing this text preached he realised that, having repented of that earlier hardness of heart, God longed to use him in even more fruitful ways in his present work.
We all have regrets. We can look back on missed opportunities and wrong decisions. But do not be fatalistically resigned to living a second-best life for God. He will restore the years the locusts have eaten and longs to bless you and make you a blessing.
"Praise my soul the king of heaven, to his feet thy tribute bring. Ransomed, healed, restored forgiven…"

1 II Chron 20

MONDAY AUGUST 14
Joel 3
The Blessing of Judgment

Peter cites Joel 2:28-32 on the day of Pentecost.1 seeing the outpouring of the Spirit as its fulfilment. But the early Christians did not realise that Joel's 'all people' would eventually include the gentiles as well. However, Paul realised this and took up the theme of 2:32 recognising that in the blessings of God's grace there is no distinction between Jew and Greek.2
It is a mark of God's concern for all nations that he therefore judges them and this is the two-edged burden of this last chapter. Included in the additional blessings on God's people will be safety from their enemies(17) and freedom to enjoy the good things of the land(18). In a reversal of Isaiah's3 and Micah's4 prophecy, Joel(10) warns the nations to prepare for God's dreadful judgment upon them. There will be retribution for those who have abused God's chosen people.
But Joel also holds out the promise of God's grace and tender mercy, which before the final, terrible day, will be held out to all nations through Christ. He who roars from Zion will be a refuge for his people.(16) This is why "we dedicate our lives to rescuing men from the righteous judgment of God and likewise we long to share with them the beauty of God's mercies." (Martin Goldsmith, Habakkuk & Joel, Marshalls, 1982)
Joel's prophecy ends on this confident note, that whatever happens to the people of God, "the Lord dwells in Zion", a stronghold for his people. In present difficulties, remind yourself where you will be a hundred years from now!

1 Acts 2:16-21 2 Romans 10:13 and 10:12 3 Isaiah 2:4 4 Micah 4:3

Article - Notes on Philippians

INTRODUCTION TO PAUL’S LETTER TO THE PHILIPPIANS

FREE TO BE!

I always do a preliminary sort through my morning mail before my secretary gets to it. I want to pull out any letters that don’t look ‘official’. These hopefully represent pleasure and not more work! I suppose that most of us love receiving personal letters full of news from distant friends; full of shared memories; reminders of joys and sorrows we have perhaps been through together. Paul writes this ‘Epistle of Joy’ from prison in Rome probably near the end of his life around 63AD. He is keeping in touch with his good friends at Philippi, whom he has visited on three occasions.

The first occasion was pretty spectacular. It had started with the vision of the ‘Man from Macedonia’ who urged him to ‘come over and help us’. So he arrived at the port of Philippi (Neapolis) around 52AD on his rather disheartening second missionary journey. Acts 16 will tell you all about the conversion of Lydia and the jailer and his family and the founding of the first European church.

Now as a general rule, Paul wouldn’t accept money from the churches he founded, but Philippi was an exception. He had often received gifts from them over the last ten years, and they had just recently sent him more money with one of the congregation, Epaphroditus. He was also to serve Paul as an assistant. Imagine this poor man’s embarrassment when he became seriously ill with the Roman Fever and was then worried and homesick - no one likes being ill when they are away from home. So Paul decided to send him back to Philippi with a letter of explanation, just in case they thought Epaphroditus had chickened out of staying with a condemned man in big bad Rome. And the letter this man carried back, full of encouragement to stick together and enjoy the freedom that Christ gives us in his service, is the letter we will be opening over the next few days.

CHAINS THAT FREE
DAY 1

Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people: the moaners and the make-the-most-of-its. Are they born that way or is it something that is cultivated over the years? In Britain, grumbling is almost a national pastime, a part of our cultural heritage. So how do we take steps to counter this tendency? As a pastor, I would sometimes give a ‘prescription’ to moaners in my church: “To be taken three times a day after meals - think of 5 things for which you are grateful to God!” Paul was certainly not a moaner. Could you have written such a cheery, encouraging greeting from a first century prison?

Philippians 1:1-11

And not only does Paul pray for his friends ‘with joy’ (4) but he sees his present unpleasant circumstances as an opportunity to preach the Gospel. He was under house arrest in his own private lodgings where he received a constant flow of visitors. But night and day he was chained to a succession of Roman soldiers - his guards. (Acts 28:20) Many of them became Christians and then enjoyed one-to-one discipleship classes on the end of a short chain to the great apostle of Christ.

Philippians 1:12-26

Why not write a letter to some Christian friends this week telling them what you are praying for them (9)? It will help you to focus your prayers rather than just praying ‘God will bless them…’ You might also tell them how you are making the most of the difficult things happening in your life at present.

FREEDOM FROM SELF
DAY 2

I, me, mine, myself… We have become the self-centred generation. Subtly, Socrates' dictum, "Know Yourself" has become "Be Yourself" and even Christians seem bent on pursuing self-fulfilment at any price. "This church doesn't worship the way I want… this fellowship doesn't use my gifts… this house group doesn't meet my needs… I've got this 'thorn in the flesh' and you owe it to me to deal with it NOW, Lord…" Christ warned his disciples that if they tried to save their own lives, they would lose them. (Matt 16:25)

Paul also knew that self-fulfilment, and that Christian robustness of character which is able to stand up to anything, can only be found in Christ and by following Christ’s example.

Philippians 1:27-2:4

United we stand (1:27; 2:2), divided we fall. And we don't 'fall' just as church fellowships through our divisions. Individually our lives are diminished and disintegrate when we live selfishly, looking constantly to our own interests.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that before ever there was a universe, or people, or a Bible, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were in an eternal loving, self-giving relationship with one another.

Fix this thought in your mind over the next few days: "Look not only to your own interests". Tie a knot in your hanky, move a ring to a different finger, write it on a little card - but see how it transforms your attitudes to other people, and so to Christ.

THEOLOGY THAT FREES
DAY 3

"I want to play the piano really well, but I don't want to learn music or practise or be taught by other pianists. I just want to be free to do my own thing on the piano." It's nonsense isn't it? We know from so many areas of life, whether music, or driving, or sports, that the better we have mastered the techniques, the freer we are to express ourselves. Paul was never interested in theology just as an intellectual exercise. He knew that "You are not what you think you are; but what you think - you are!" Do you have trouble living a Christlike life? Then get a better understanding of Christ and all he did in your brain. This is why all of Paul’s letters, full of practical instructions, always start with a great wad of theology!

Philippians 2:5-11

"In many ways this passage is one of the greatest reaches of theological thought in the New Testament, but its aim was to persuade the Philippians to live a life in which disunity, discord and personal ambition had no place."
William Barclay (DSB Philippians p.38)

Read through the passage again asking yourself in what ways Christ humbled himself and gave up his own desires. When you begin to grasp this 'Love so amazing, so divine' displayed in God made Man, your thinking will change, and so your actions will change. You will begin to have the mind of Christ and so live the selfless life of Christ. Stop and pray about things at home or work where you are tempted to try and get your own way, at any price. How do you think Jesus might have handled this situation?

FREE TO BE ME
DAY 4

I’m always telling my students in preaching classes to use more illustrations from everyday life and ordinary Christians. A human story often helps us to work out what it is that God is saying to us. Paul is anxious that his friends in Philippi will be able to work out what their responsibility is at the same time as they realise that it is God at work in them: act as if everything depended on you; pray as if everything depended on God! But he doesn’t just tell them this, he gives them three examples.

Philippians 2:12-30

Timothy is the patron saint of those who are quite content with second place so long as they can serve! We know he was really close to Paul and that the apostle had great hopes for his ministry. But he never pushed himself forward. In fact, quite the opposite: he was always looking to the interests of others - of Paul and of the Philippians and of Christ. (20,21)

Epaphroditus was a brave man, for the Roman authorities could have turned on him as Paul’s accomplice. He had given up his career in Philippi to go and be a dogsbody in Rome and he had almost died in the process. But you can almost see him there, lying on his bed, coming out of the fever saying, “I’m sorry Paul, to cause you all this trouble. And I came here to look after you!”

Paul was facing the death sentence, but not caring about his own life, he wanted to make things easier for Epaphroditus’s return to Philippi. Think of the most selfless person you know. How can you be more like them, and so like Christ? The more you give yourself to others, the more you become more fully ‘you’.

FREE TO BE ANGRY!
DAY 5

What makes you angry? People who squeeze the toothpaste from the wrong end? People who lie to you? Your own failings? I get angry when I’m sitting in badly run committee meetings. Try to remember the last time you were angry. How did you handle it?

James obviously expects us to get angry but hopes we will be ‘slow’ to do so. (James 1:19f). Paul warns us that our anger may turn to sin, so we should deal with it quickly and not brood for days. (Eph 4:26) And Jesus certainly became angry with the Temple tradespeople. (John 2:12-25) A fiery temperament is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s how we handle our anger when it flares up, and what we get angry about which matters.

Paul became angry whenever he found people perverting the Gospel of Christ. Especially when they tried to change its essence from the ‘outrage of grace’ to the ‘burden of works’; from accepting the free gift of God, to trying to impress God with how good they are; from believing that they are saved through Christ to believing that some ritual (like circumcision) can save them.

Philippians 3:1-11

What are some of the things you think you should get angry about - in the church, in your nation, in your own life?

“There is indeed a holy anger without which joy in the Lord is something short of what he intends it to be.”
Alec Motyer (BST Philippians p.154)

FREE STANDING
DAY 6

One of the things I admire in my Christian teachers is their maturity and reliability. Whatever the latest spiritual fad is, they are not knocked off course or shaken in their faith. They don’t go off like sqibs with a new enthusiasm. They have deep roots (Psalm 1) and have been weathered by the storms and trials of life. They can look back on the past, hold firm for the present, and press on to the future. Paul was like this and longed for his friends at Philippi to know this same stability of Christian character.

Philippians 3:12-4:1

“Stand firm!” commands Paul. But how do we do this? So many of us are custard Christians - we are upset over trifles! Or we are blown about by every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:14). Or we feel intimidated and insecure when other Christians have ‘spiritual experiences’ that they think we should have. Or we get depressed and down and feel useless and failures as disciples of Christ. One of my friends when things got on top of him used to say to me: “Well, I know where I am going to be a hundred years from now!” Paul’s eyes were fixed on Christ; on his ability to work his purposes out through Paul’s life and coming death; on his power enabling Paul and the Philippians not to follow their natural earthly desires but live as citizens of heaven.

Get a heavenly perspective on your own life. Try writing your own obituary! When you are finally home with Christ, what would you like to be remembered for. When you can regularly see things from the standpoint of eternity, you will be well on the way to standing firm, mature in Christ.

FREEDOM FROM FRICTION
DAY 7

Philippians 4:2-9

“You remember George. He was the one who still insisted on coming to church at 11am when we changed the time to 10.30am.” This is the way one of my fellow church members is always remembered. (He is now worshipping God regularly in heaven, but I suspect only at 11am and 6.30pm…) What a pity if you are only remembered for bad things! Two thousand years on, these two women with the unpronounceable names (unkindly etched in my memory as Odious and Touchy) are usually only remembered because they had fallen out with each other over some issue. Although they were good women, who contended at Paul’s side for the cause of the Gospel, they had lost their peace and joy and direction over some petty squabble.

“To dwell above with those we love, oh that will be glory.
But to live below with those we know is quite a different story”

Paul is anxious for the church to be united in its task and united in its witness to the pagan world round about. This was Christ’s test: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35) So Paul is pleading with the Philippians again to get their thinking right so that right actions will follow. It’s not that they all had to agree on every matter. It was being able to disagree in love, rubbing the rough edges off one another like pebbles on a beach. (“Grind us together Lord” as I once heard someone misquote the chorus!) Who has irritated you in your fellowship recently? Don’t let malicious thoughts get the better of you and become a “root of bitterness” destroying your peace with God and with one another. (Heb 12:15)

FREE FROM WANT
DAY 8

“Do you want a beautiful body? Do you want a magnificent car? Do you want your children to be happy, your clothes to be clean, bouncy and fresh smelling. Do you want more money to improve your home and business.” And we all know that the answer has to be “YES!” The advertising industry is carefully geared to increase our ‘wants’. It is much less concerned about needs, and even less worried about our contentment. Paul would have been a hopeless target for the advertising industry!

Philippians 4:10-23

Paul could be excused for being anxious and worried about the future, just as John the Baptist had been while awaiting death in prison. (Matt 11:2-6) But he was amazingly contented and at peace and we can see three things behind this: his friends, his own self-discipline and his Lord.

It wasn’t the money or even the sending of Epaphroditus which was a tonic to Paul. It was knowing that there were people who loved him enough to pray and do something practical. Who can you help to be contented in this way?

Paul stressed that he had ‘learned’ to be content (12f) - it didn’t come naturally. All the ‘changing scenes of life’ had been used by Paul to shape his attitude to that of Christ, with no envy or jealousy of what others had.

But most of all, Paul simply trusted Christ. Come plenty, come need; come death, come life; come what may, Paul knew that the glorious riches of Christ were his forever! Whatever you are facing, always trust in Christ. He is utterly trustworthy.

Article - Postmodernity & Rationality

Postmodernity & Rationality

The Final Credits or just a Commercial Break?[1]
[From Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995)]

Introduction
Postmodernity is a delightfully slippery word; a lexicographer’s nightmare. Rather like the sub-atomic particle dutifully obeying Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, it refuses to be pinned down. The literature is so littered with “probably” that it rivals the lager adverts. As far back as 1987 The Independent was advising hip culture vultures that “This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.”[2] Postmodernity is already passé within its own terms, for the concept becomes outmoded as soon as it is articulated. Postmodernity - a word to be preferred to postmodernism[3], which is a self-contradiction, for there are no more “isms” - is a condition[4] and not a philosophy. It is an all-pervasive mood and not a rational structure; a shift in sensibility;[5] a Weltstimmung and not a Weltanschauung. Postmodernity passes the death sentence on the Cartesian project of self-authentication through self-knowledge and it marks the final abandonment of the Enlightenment’s promise of self-determination. It describes a world full of contradictions and fuzziness in whose very paradoxes and pluralities personhood is affirmed.

Protestant Christianity has long been the bastion of Enlightenment rationality and in so doing has always been in danger of dethroning the suprarational God of the Bible. Despite the warnings of the Wisdom literature and some of the hard sayings of Christ, there has always been the irresistible temptation to sytematize and so tame and control the Lion of Judah. In it’s championing of the rational mind mastering God’s rational world[6], it has unwittingly fashioned and honed weapons for its enemies. They have built the secular city and banished an objective and transcendent God to the realm of personal preference and inner reality; the god who is within; the god-whatever-you-conceive-him/her-to-be. Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group have openly acknowledged this and sought to build a Brave New Christianity on this premise.[7]

But postmodernity sweeps all this away and in this respect, it is the most profoundly Judaeo-Christian epistemology since the Garden, because it implicitly acknowledges that we cannot work anything out for ourselves. It confesses that, if indeed we are limited “to our poor reach of mind” then the fragmentation and meaninglessness portrayed in Ecclesiastes is all we can expect.

Definitions
The first use of the word can be traced back to Frederico de Onis in the 1930s although its contemporary employment dates only from the 1980s.[8] There are different usages at different times over the past forty years in music, architecture, literature, theatre, the sciences… Charles Jencks notes with wry humour the beginning of the postmodern era in architecture at 3.32pm on 15th July 1972 when the Pruett-Igoe housing development in St Louis, the prize construction of high modernism, was blown up on account of its being uninhabitable.[9]

In the 1940s the noted historian Sir Arnold Toynbee undertook a massive overview of the history of civilisation. He used the word in the early 1950s, but in the sense of the decadent, anarchic and irrational. Nonetheless, there are striking similarities with present descriptions of the postmodern condition and it is worth mention. Patricia Waugh summarizes Toynbee’s prophetic characterization of what would follow the post-war decade during which he wrote.

“For Toynbee, the postmodern age would be the fourth and final phase of Western history and one dominated by anxiety, irrationalism and helplessness. In such a world, consciousness is adrift, unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason on which the ideals of modernity had been founded in the past. Consciousness itself is thus “decentered”: no longer agent of action in the world, but a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect. Art becomes not so much an expression of human spirit, but another commodity. Like knowledge, therefore, it can no longer be critical but only functional. Moreover, we are in the postmodern condition and, implicated in a culture where all knowledge is produced through discourse, we can no longer seek transcendence. There is no position outside of culture from which to view culture. There is no Kantian ‘view from nowhere’, no conceptual space not already implicated in that which it seeks to contest. There can only be disruption from within: micropolitics, language games, parodic skirmishes, irony, fragmentation.”[10]

It is dangerous to set up any sort of polarities between modern and postmodern, but so long as it is recognised that the present mood is something of a tension between the two poles; a synthesis, an acknowledgement of one in the light of the other - then the exercise is of some value. Hassan’s schema is one such attempt to voice equivocal dichotomies.[11]

Modernism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Postmodernism
romanticism/Symbolismc - - - - - - - - - - - paraphysics/Dadaism
form (conjunctive, closed) - - - - - - - - - - - antiform (disjunctive, open)
purpose - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - play
design - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - chance
hierarchy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -anarchy
mastery/logos - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - exhaustion/silence
art object/finished work - - - - - - - - - - - - process/performance/happening
distance - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -participation
creation/totalization/synthesis - - - - - - - decreation/deconstruction/antithesis
presence - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - absence
centring - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -dispersal
genre/boundary - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - text/intertext
semantics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -rhetoric
paradigm - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -syntagm
hypotaxis - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -parataxis
metaphor - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -metonymy
selection - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - combination
root/depth - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -rhizome/surface
interpretation/reading against - - - - - - - -interpretation/misreading
signified - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -signifier
lisible (readerly) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -scriptible (writerly)
narrative/grande histoire - - - - - - - - - - - anti-narrative/petite histoire
master code - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - idiolect
symptom - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - desire
type - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -mutant
genital/phallic - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - polymorphous/androgynous
paranoia - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - schizophrenia
origin/cause - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -difference-difference/trace
God the Father - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -The Holy Ghost
metaphysics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -irony
determinacy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -indeterminacy
transcendence - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - immanence
cataphatic - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - apophatic
Apollonian - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dionysian
Roman - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Celtic
Martha - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mary

The Postmodern Mood
One of the drawbacks of trying to convey the feel of postmodernity is the limitation of words. So in this next section, in the manner of the ‘stream of consciousness’, beloved of late modernity, I want to try and affront you with The Post. Ideally, you should be listening to floaty, ambient music like The Orb or Enigma, Leftfield or Enya, or the theme music of Twin Peaks. John Tavener would do at a push, or Officium… Alternatively, put the radio and the TV on at the same time.

The degree to which you are disturbed by this section is a measure of how much you have been influenced by postmodern culture. If you find it disorientating and confusing then you are very much a Modern. You probably don’t like those TV programmes where several things are happening at the same time as text is appearing on the screen (like Def II) and you don’t like ‘alternative worship’. (I went to a service where the Latin Tridentine Mass was being said against a heavy House rhythm while slides of icons were displayed on a high nave screen and several abstract videos were running on banks of TV screens.) You have probably never read novels by William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis or Don DeLillo and you have never watched Trainspotting (that’s a film). Most over 50s are firmly entrenched in modernism, and almost all who have grown up in the church of whatever age.

But first some terms which both set the scene and help to create the mood of ‘pessimistic wishful thinking’ or ‘nihilism with a smile’[12]....

The Post - Postmodernity, Pomo, or high modernism, or late modernism or Pre-postmodernism, or post-Fordism, or Late Capitalism, or Modernism-Not. The present intellectual and artistic climate in Britain, arguably, as discussed above. It is the quasi-philosophical and cultural accompaniment to the New Age, experienced in one way or another by most who live in the silicon cities of the West and the US. It is only discussed by intellectuals dispossessed[13] of a role in the ‘new’ techno-rational society: “the implosion of intellectual vision” as Bauman puts it.

Cyberpunk- a genre of science fiction (SF) which became self-conscious during the 80s, first characterized as Radical Hard SF or Neuromantics[14] or the Mirrorshades group.[15] At its best, it describes with all the linguistic style of the modern novel, a hi-tech future which is sometimes a drug-induced nightmare, sometimes a surrealistic New Age, always beyond the cutting-edge of physics and metaphysics. The Frank Herbert Dune series (also a film) is a very accessible way into the mind-set. The discourse of cyberculture is certainly impacting our academic institutions as well as street life.[16]

Cyberspace - the ‘place’ where we can live in virtual reality. “There is no ‘there’ there.” I was ‘sitting’ in a cyberspace restaurant (actually I was sitting at my computer console) talking with an academic from the West Coast of the US who was bored at 3am their time and decided to look around one of the cyber-cities you can visit by way of internet[17]. One of our other lecturers ended up doing some bereavement counselling with someone he met in cyberspace from - who knows where they are from. In virtual reality anyone is from anywhere…

Generation X - post-boomers, twenty somethings, baby busters, the 38 million Americans born between 1963 and 1977 made famous by Douglas Coupland’s book[18].

MTV - A Music Television Channel (also on VH1), which shows contemporary music videos 24 hours a day worldwide. There are some regional variations, but in general, this is the lifeblood of youth culture around the world.

Zine - a magazine or fanzine. Glossy and expensive like Mondo, Wired, or cheap FAXed and Xeroxed. The guys in my house produce Heartbreak Hotel every term. Look along the magazine racks in the ‘pop’ or ‘techno’ or ‘culture’ section of Tower Records, or a big HMV or Our Price. In the right shops there are zines to cater for every taste, whether Knitting Patterns, Latex Sex, Black Poetry or Chicken World.

Metanarrative - Some overall story or set of ideas which binds all cultural activities together in a project or system which proposes to make sense. Christianity is such a metanarrative - postmodernity denies the possibility of such Grand Narratives, or Macronarratives.

Structuralism focuses our attention on the text itself, and the understanding of a text in its cotext and context.

Deconstructionism is the daughter of Structuralism and concentrates on the reader-response to a text. All ‘meaning’ or authorial intention breaks down.[19]

So drift through this…
See Appendix 1

Some Aspects of the Postmodern Condition
Lists always get too close to ‘defining’, and we have seen that there can be none of that in the pursuit of postmodernity. Sampson put it well concerning his own essay:

“The classification which follows is… open to the objection that it snatches at a shadow, but it does have the virtue of mapping the ground on which the shadow lies.”[20]

Frederic Jameson paints a Small Picture:

“If the great negative emotions of the modernist moment were anxiety, terror, the being-unto-death, and Kurtz’s “horror”, what characterizes the newer “intensities” of the postmodern, which have also been characterized in terms of the “bad trip” and of schizophrenic submersion, can just as well be formulated in terms of the messiness of a dispersed existence, existential messiness, the perpetual temporal distraction of post-sixties life. Larger virtual nightmare, the sixties gone toxic, a whole historical and countercultural “bad trip” in which psychic fragmentation is raised to a qualitatively new power, the structural distraction of the decentred subject now promoted to the very motor and existential logic of late capitalism itself.”[21]

1. Non-rationality
It is not that postmodernity denies rationality, for to do so would be the death of discussion. Rather it holds loose to connected rational systems, to Grand Narratives, to any notion of the Big Picture. “Reason is displaced by reasons, each within its own discourse and for its own public. None is privileged.”[22] It is in this sense post-structuralist and post-deconstructionist.[23] This is an area where Christians need to do some more hard thinking. We rightly want to defend rationality and the power of verbal communication, and yet we sometimes seem to be saying that the cosmos is rationally coherent. And, as we experience it, it is not.

2. Blank Irony
The use of humour in general and irony in particular has been a feature of Modernity for most of this century[24]. But blank irony[25] is irony without arrogance. It is irony without self-importance. Moderns are still contemptuous enough to use irony as a tool for mocking that which they have ‘ridden above’. The ironist assumes privileged access to an objective point of view. He lives in the Big Picture. But the blank ironist has no such luxury. She lives in an incoherent and pluralist world. You can see this in films like Blazing Saddles or Airplane, in series like Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Red Dwarf, or more recently, Wayne’s World or Beavis and Butthead. “So let me get this straight. Young people go into stores, and buy heavy metal videos, and take them home and play them. And then they kill their friends… So what’s the problem?”[26] This is part of postmodernity’s discomfort with any representation that appears to be ‘saying’ anything or taking a moral stance. So there is in art and literature (and the adverts) constant self-mockery: what various writers have called playfulness, pastiche, jokeyness, stylistic promiscuity, eclecticism, self-parody.

3. Consumerism
Why do we need 83 different breakfast serials to choose from? Why must I be wearing this season’s fashions? Why do so many millions in the West worship in the mirrored Temples of Shopping Malls every Saturday and Sunday? Because it is in choosing and in buying that I find identity and acceptance. “Goods are valued for what they mean as much as for their use, and people find meaning in the very act of consumption. Advertising and product image become goods consumed for their own sake, rather than as representative of real products.”[27] This is the illusion of freedom which late capitalism offers us. It builds on the premise that “the love of money” is the only dynamism by which the world economy can function. So if I cannot choose and buy, because I am ‘under-privileged’ then I must look for identity and acceptance elsewhere, or else despair. The ‘elsewhere’ can be religion, or drugs, sex and rock‘n roll, or violence, or any mixture of these.

4. The Return of the Repressed[28]
Violence has itself become an exploratory tool of postmodernity and an icon of the modern film. Tarrantino’s films: Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction all exemplify a society fascinated by the fragility and ultimate worthlessness of life, while outraged at the institutionalised violence and brutality demonstrated by regimes throughout the world. Other examples of this can be seen in Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier Vietnam film Apocalypse Now and in Oliver Stone’s more recent Natural Born Killers. This is an artistic preoccupation with blood, the boundaries of sanity, and the limits of law, which offers an opportunity for voyeurism to a society that has carefully sanitized itself of death, insanity and criminality: these have been institutionalised so that most citizens need rarely, if ever, brush with them. Each year I ask students (of average age 29) how many of them have seen or touched a dead body. Apart from the medics, the affirmative answer represents only about 2%.

Violence is sometimes seen as a way to liberate the oppressed and empower the marginalised in postmodern constructed morals. (I.e. morals constructed by society for some reason or another.) Veith explains “power reductionism”, a sort of postmodern reworking of a discredited[29] Freud, in these terms: “All institutions, all human relationships, all moral values, and all human creations - from works of art to religious ideologies - are all expressions and masks of the primal will to power.”[30] The rage of the oppressed and the assertion of being through power seems to give special euphoria to some (especially within academia) postmoderns. This is of particular relevance to postmodern politics, but there is no time to develop this here.[31]

5. Plurality of Beliefs
Postmodernity has seen the commodification of belief structures. I buy into a belief and use it to feel good. If it doesn’t make me feel good, then why bother to buy into it? Because of the death of the Macronarrative, I can permute some acceptable combination of Micronarratives which give me a gentle euphoria. No matter that there is a rational conflict between any of these Micronarratives. Non-rationality takes care of that. In this way people build up sets of ‘free-standing’ self-referential beliefs. Cotterell has often pointed out the illogicality of trying to say that, for instance, Islam and Christianity are both ‘true’. “If we take this issue more generally, when Christianity claims that Jesus died on the Cross, and Islam… insists that Jesus was not crucified… must we make a choice between the alternatives?”[32] For postmoderns, the answer would be “no!” Within the self-referential system of Islam, you can believe what you choose. Within the self-referential system of Christianity, you can believe what you choose. And you can swap minute by minute between the two (or more) without worrying your head about the clash of logical truth claims. It is only transcendent truths which would bring conflict. But as there is no Objective Other, no transcendence, then everything is possible.

6. The Media
This is the central nervous system of the postmodern body. It communicates culture. The inescapable air waves shape our thinking from cradle to grave. “Media is man-made weather,” says one of the characters in Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers. And there is always weather. Satellite TV has arguably been a major factor in the crumbling of communist superstates and the fascist dictatorships. The capitalism portrayed in the glossy adverts, in Dallas, Dynasty and Bay Watch, in MTV and the Hollywood Blockbusters, doesn’t look nearly as bad as the totalitarian regimes paint it. There is of course a close connection between advertising and the media, which is financed in most parts of the world by advertising - and no doubt soon will be in Britain. This leads to the conclusion that Capitalism is the engine of culture. It is pure profit that drives the cultural machine. This has led Camille Paglia to comment that “Capitalism is the mysticism and glamour of things which take on a personality of their own… the West objectifies persons and personalises objects.”[33] Postmodernity is also therefore, the death of High Art and the death of the Dignity of Life. It is only those who have an Other World objectivity, a worldview based on transcendence, who can exercise high art within their own sphere of expression.

7. Technology
I was ‘ink monitor’ at my primary school, mixing up the ink from the blue powder and topping up the ink-wells on each child’s desk. The ‘nibs’ we stuck on to our wooden ‘pens’ cost one old penny each. Now, 35 years on, I am sitting in a MacDonald’s (again!) in Washington DC, with my lap-top on the table, having just checked the correspondence which I downloaded from Postmodern Christian, an internet subscriber group which I accessed via the phone line in my friend’s house last night. Our capitalism/media driven culture is only possible because of technology. The printing press was one revolution, the cheap microchip has been another. And machines humble us, because they never make mistakes and they remember everything. Indeed, in the world of artificial intelligence, the capacity for error is now a measure of humanity. It is observable generally that, the more there is for humans to remember, the less they remember. I used to learn telephone numbers. Now all my phones ‘know’ the numbers of my friends. The ironically named “virtual reality” is becoming more convincingly real by the day and cheap technology is opening many new doors into cyberspace.

8. The Significance of Insignificance
The Enlightenment Project and history as the history of success has failed. The history of failure is what matters. Humanity has dethroned itself from the high ground of cosmic significance. Museums are often reluctant now to set out their displays as the history of ‘progress’ for that suggests success and ‘right direction’. It implies an objective viewpoint. Rather the past is observed as a non-judgmental collage of what was.[34] From a Christian perspective, this ‘history of failure’ is a profoundly Biblical view of the world and of Heilsgeschichte - God’s saving acts in the light of humanity’s constant failure.

9. Different Relationship to Space and Time
The Copernican Revolution marked the opening up of Space and Time to the mind-boggling proportions that post-Einstein cosmology has now given us.[35] Postmodernity has recognised the fact that for most people the idea of “150 years ago” and the idea of “15 thousand million years ago” are equally impossible to grasp; Saturn, a few million miles away, might just as well be at the edge of Hubble’s known universe a trillion, trillion, trillion… miles away. Then there is also a paradox that the faster things happen, the longer waiting takes. When it took a week to go from London to New York, an hour’s delay in departure hardly mattered. Now an extra hour in the departure lounge warrants a letter to the airline. This is the apparent compression of space and time. There is now a lack of any chronological perspective as we have moved from the diachronic to the synchronic. So postmodernity espouses a new consciousness of time and space, a new way of relating to how things were and of the spaces in which we live and interact. Everything is in effect viewed through the timeless ‘here and now’. There is no history and no future. This is not the existentialist ’now’ of self-authentication through decision. This is an acknowledgement that all history is a history of the present.[36] Nostalgia can be another good trip. You can see this experimenting with time in the work of writers like Martin Amis, Vonnegut or Foucault, and in films like Sally Potter’s Orlando or in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series.

10. The Waning of Affect
The ability to feel deep emotion is spasmodic and brief. This is partly due to information overload and partly due to the fragmentation of consciousness. We have to cope with so many emotions in so short a space of time each day. The TV culture and sound-bite sensations have coarsened the human spirit. There has been a loss of depth and more than that, in postmodernity there is a denial of depth. Jameson describes the loss of an ‘inner self’ that is able to feel, claiming that postmoderns’ “feelings (Lyotard “intensities”) are now free-floating and impersonal and dominated by euphoria.”[37] Edward Munch’s famous painting The Scream is a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation.[38] In postmodernity there can be no cathartic, wordless scream. There is only humour and another day.

11. Image as Identity
In the loss of any objective ‘other’ and of any sense of progress, there is a fragmenting of the personality; a controlled schizophrenia in which “the unity of the “I” is more like the unity of a story than the unity of a thing.”[39] This is a persistent theme through all postmodern theatre, literature and film. Madonna is the iconographic example of this in contemporary culture. She is all surfaces and image; performances and pastiche; sexual machine, controlling superfemme, vulnerable Monroe, exploitative capitalist. There is no identity ‘behind’ the image. She is the sum of them and the collective consciousness of all her roles.

12. Cultural Cohorts
We used to talk of the generation gap (young and old ), and then of generation gaps (from 14 upwards at roughly 7 year intervals). But a more accurate picture of our presently fragmenting society recognises cultural tribalism or postmodernisms. “Society is splintering into hundreds of sub-cultures and designer cults, each with its own language, code and life style.”[40] Many people participate in various microcults each week: the cult of the work place, the modern management cult, the Club cult, the pub cult… Some of these commonly overlap, for instance the work cult and the pub cult. Others rarely do. So there are few from the world of banking amongst the neo-punks - although there are some - I have met them! Advertising recognises the need to aim for target audiences. Satellite TV and the Fanzine scene has made this task easier. But for the church at worship and play, this presents a considerable problem. When I am asked to speak at a ‘Youth Service’, I wonder “which youth?” For there is a host of subcultures in the 15 to 25 age group.

Postevangelicalism for Postmodernity?
As I have already hinted, I think that the postmodern world can be a very fertile soil for the Gospel if the church will but grasp the opportunities and venture through the open doors. We should not mourn the loss of arrogant modernism. But what will come in its place? As Toynbee recognised, the symptoms are those of decline and fall. Although the threat of nuclear apocalypse has receded with the unexpected thaw in the Cold War, computer technology has made the threat of economic collapse in the West an ever present danger. Will there be a resurgence of the Right and fascism, of the Left and ideological authoritarianism, of militant religious fundamentalism, or of servant Christianity? If we are in what Northrop Frye describes as a low mimetic period of history, then there can follow (says Frye) either chaos or a return to high myth. Although it is much more, Christianity is certainly high myth, and the stage could be set for a new revival. Evangelicalism in its present dying form will be unable to play a dominant role on its own. Postevangelicalism[41] which will be able to integrate more readily with broader traditions of historic Christianity, could play a major role in shaping the world which will emerge, God willing, from postmodernity.

These are early days yet, but perhaps we can see some characteristics of postevangelicalism emerging which will help us with the Dominical Gospel mandate.

1. Making Sense of Things
Postmodernity is a way of coping with life. It does not make sense of it. There is none. Christianity is a way of coping and making sense of life. Not complete sense, for now we see through a glass darkly. It is a metanarrative, but it is not exhaustive and Christians should beware of claiming too much. “Part of the responsibility for the modern fragmentation of culture, and especially for its loss of a coherent sense of meaning and truth, is to be laid at the door of Christian theology’s traditional tendency to a monolithic conception of God and of truth.”[42] Biblical faith forces humility and a degree of agnosticism on us, lest we presume again to eat of the tree of knowledge. Traditional, rational apologetics was fine for modernism, although even then it tended to share modernism’s arrogance, but it will become increasingly irrelevant to western postmodernity. We need to let God grasp people’s hearts and imaginations before we can restore their minds.

2. Story & Hope[43]
Postmodernity sees that personal identity, in as much as there is any, is experienced in the story of life, unfolding moment by moment, crossing the lives of others, with shifting images and shifting beliefs. (Short Cuts is a good cinematic example of this). The people of God have glorious beliefs and a magnificent story to tell. But we must learn how to relate to those round about us at the level of our common humanity, and not, at first, at the level of schematized dogma. Douglas Coupland concludes his latest book, Life After God, with these poignant words of challenge:

“My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”[44]

So why, like many of my friends and family, is he not looking to the church to find God? Largely because we have become implausible and such an introverted sub-culture that we cannot communicate with our contemporaries. We must learn to give a reason for the hope within us in a way our friends (if we have any unchurched friends) can understand.

3. Community
God, the Holy Trinity, is community, and in that community of love we find our identity in the postmodern sea of shifting images and personal fragmentation. Jesus’ command has never been more relevant: “Love one another as I have loved you… by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” If we cannot demonstrably love one another, then we might as well pack up. Colin Gunton and others are right in stressing the importance of Trinity as foundational to our faith, practice and mission.[45]

4. Transcendence
Many postmoderns, like Coupland, realise the need “To break the holds of power and institute research into a new collective subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick, so sick of ourselves.”[46] But where can they look but to themselves if there is no “Other”? We must present clearly the intimations of transcendence which God has planted throughout his universe. Beauty and love, order and satisfaction, suffering and meaninglessness - all point to an Utterly Other, to a gently compelling mysterium tremendum et fascinans. (Otto) Theologically, Gunton has argued for ‘open transcendentals’ and ‘trinitarian transcendentals’ which maintain the dynamism in our God-given faith and guard us from another round of reformation-stultification.[47] But once a postmodern has encountered Christ and believed the incarnation, she can never be ‘properly’ postmodern again. For if we are not alone, then there is a fulcrum for meaning, rationality, progress and morality.

Worship is an important part of this witness to the transcendent God. A vibrant corporate spiritual life, whether charismatic, Toronto-blessed, Anglo-catholic or Alternative worship, points to human creatureliness and the otherness of God which postmodernity denies but which our image-of-Godness yearns after. “You have set eternity in their hearts…” says Koheleth[48]. Furthermore, liturgy and the liturgical year, tradition and sacramental re-enactments, all help us to regain our place in space and time. This has always been a function of cultic worship.[49]

5. Radical Holiness
The evidence of God in our own lives is one of the clearest signposts to transcendence. It is not by setting up a dull and irrelevant Christian counter-culture, but by affronting society with ‘godly’ living, that we challenge people to consider the immanence of the transcendent Christ. ‘Holiness’ must not be confused with ‘niceness’. To counter postmodernity’s anti-hero we need Christian heroes: men and women who will be Rough Knights for the High King.

6. A Theology of Pleasure and Desire
The Old Testament perhaps extols pleasure more than the New, but the New does not deny it in giving it a firmer basis in joy. We should receive with thanksgiving all the exciting things and experiences that postmodernity brings to many of us, while demonstrating that we are citizens of heaven with a greater hope. Postevangelical Christianity must be more life affirming than denying. Although with CS Lewis we should remember that “All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status, always reminds, beckons, awakens desires. Our best havings are wantings.”[50] Our desire for God, the giver of all good things, can never be satisfied this side of death. It is the Love of perpetual longing. Mark Seem is indulging in wishful thinking when he suggests that desire alone in some way can replace the transcendent.

“A politics of desire would see loneliness and depression as the first things to go… the anti-oedipal strategy: if man is connected to the machines of the universe, if he is “anchored”, he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behaviour of his fellow-men, about right or wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit … The life that’s in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless, eternal process. The process is everything.”[51]

7. A Transformed Western Church
We have tried all manner of techniques and reforms in the church in the past fifty years and seen a steady decline in the West. Perhaps the new thing that God is forcing upon us through postmodernity will better equip us to work with Christ in discipling a generation who are ‘open’ but do not know where to turn.

“Generation X has come into young adult maturity in a cultural and moral ‘whirlwind of barbarism’… We believe that the characteristics for which generation X has received such bad press are the very qualities that will render them most effective as pioneers of a revitalised Christian faith. Their pragmatism and skepticism, their sharp-eyed assessments of life and above all, their search for community and personal relationships are exactly what the emerging era requires.”[52]

If postmodernity is just a commercial break then we should work and pray for a Kingdom programme to follow… until the Final Credits.

(Origin, 6/94 Last Revisions, 3/07)

Endnotes

[1] This article by Nick Mercer (without the bibliography and slightly modified), is published in Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995), chapter 18. The title is from an idea by my research assistant Mark Carter.
[2] The Independent, 24th December 1987 quoted in Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Sage Publications, 1991), p.1.
[3] Philip Sampson offers a slightly different explanation for preferring ‘postmodernity’ in ‘The Rise of Postmodernity’, Philip Sampson, Vinay Samuel & Chris Sugden eds., Faith & Modernity (Oxford: Regnum Lynx Books, 1994), n.1,p.50.
[4] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984).
[5] A Huyssen, After the Great Divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism (Indiana University Press, 1986) p.181.
[6] From another point of view, a belief in a rational God who created a rational universe has underpinned much of the post-reformation expansion in scientific knowledge. See R Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972).
[7] E.g. David A Hart, Faith in Doubt: non-realism and christian belief (London: Mowbray, 1993).
[8] See Featherstone op.cit. p.7ff and Antoine Compagnon , The 5 Paradoxes of Modernity (New York: Columbia University,1994), p.114ff. Although I noted Virginia Woolf in 1928 in Orlando (Penguin, p.19) compairing the black and whitness of the Elizabethan age to our age: “The withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown to them.”
[9] Harvey op.cit. p.39.
[10] Patricia Waugh, Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p.5 quoted in Gene Edward Veith, Guide to Contemporary Culture (Leicester: Crossway Books, 1994) p.45. I suspect that Waugh brings some of her own postmodern mind-set and language to this summary which tends to postmodernise Toynbee.
[11] I Hassan, ‘The culture of postmodernism’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.2(3)(1985),123f. Some of the terms in this chart will be unfamiliar to some readers. A helpful, fun, but well informed and illustrated commentary on all these terms can be found in Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (Cambridge: Icon, 1995).
[12] Gardner and Rietkerk quoted in Sampson op.cit. p.30.
[13] This is part of Zygmunt Bauman’s argument in Intimations of Postmodernity (London:Routledge, 1992).
[14] After William Gibson’s classic Neuromancer, (London: Harper Collins, 1984, 1993).
[15] Bruce Sterling edited a cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades (London: Ace Books, 1986, 1988), which contains a good editorial Preface outlining the history of cyberpunk.
[16] See the illustrated Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994)
[17] There are always articles and TV programmes about the global information superhighways, ‘surfing the net’ and so on. E.g. Timothy C Morgan, ‘Cyber Shock: Can the church keep pace with the new information culture?’ Christianity Today Vol.39,No.4(3 April 1995),pp.78-86 and Peter Farrington, ‘Inklings of God on the Internet’ Alpha (May 1995),pp.38-40.
[18] Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture (London: Abacus, 1992). And see William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994).
[19] That great ironist Lewis Carroll illustrated the point well:“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty scornfully, “it means what I want it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“My dear old thing,” said the March Hare, “there’s no more to it than that. When you say or write something, you’ve got to reckon that you can’t keep tabs on it. Other people might take what you say quite differently from how you meant it. It’s like setting a bird free. Once it’s gone , it flies where it wants.”
See Michael Ovey, ‘Deconstruction: Gagging the Speaking God?’ Cambridge Papers 2/4(1993) and for a fuller discussion and bibliography on structuralism and deconstructionism see Veith op.cit. ch.3.
[20] Sampson, op.cit. p.36.
[21] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p.117.
[22] Sampson op.cit. p.40.
[23] Partly, this is what Valentine Cunningham discusses in In the Reading Gaol (OUP, 1994).
[24] See Karl-Josef Kuschel Laughter: A Theological Reflection (London: SCM, 1994).
[25] A term that Frederic Jameson uses in op.cit..
[26] A line from a Denis Leary comedy routine. Woody Allen is also full of blank irony.
[27] Sampson, op.cit. p.31.
[28] A phrase used by Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity (London: Polity, 1991).
[29] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, (London: Athlone, 1984). This is an extremely dense book, but perhaps marks the way ahead for postmodern philosophy?
[30] Veith op.cit. p.158.
[31] But see Veith op.cit. ch.9.
[32] Peter Cotterell, Mission and Meaninglessness (London: SPCK, 1990), p.33.
[33] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (London: Penguin, 1991 ), p.37.
[34] See Sampson op.cit. p.51,n.18.
[35] Stephen Toulmin & June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London: Pelican, 1967) and The Architecture of Matter (London: Pelican, 1965) are still very readable accounts of this.
[36] See Harvey op.cit. Part III.
[37]Jameson op.cit. p.15.
[38] Ibid. p.11.
[39] Harre quoted in Sampson op.cit. p.45.
[40] Philip Elmer-Dewitt, ‘Cyberpunk!’ Time (8 Feb 1993),p.62.
[41] There will be a spate of books on this subject in the coming few years, of which Dave Tomlinson’s, The Post-Evangelical (Triangle, 1995) is one of the first. Jim Packer’s exhortations to “co-belligerence” in North America and the widespread move in British evangelicalism towards a radical self-appraisal of essentials is already paving the way.
[42] Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (CUP, 1993), p.129.
[43] See also Andrew Walker, Telling the Story (SPCK, 1996)
[44] Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p.359.
[45] Gunton op.cit.
[46] Mark Seem in the introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, op.cit., p.xxi.
[47] Gunton op.cit. ch.5.
[48] Eccles.3.11.
[49] See for example Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959).
[50] WH Lewis, Letters of CS Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966), p.289. Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths dated 5/11/59.
[51] Mark Seem in the introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, op.cit., p.xxiii.
[52] William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi, A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994)

Select Bibliography

* Represents a good starting place • Worth serious study

Ronald J Allen et al, Theology for Preaching: Authority, Truth and the Knowledge of God in a Postmodern Ethos (Abingdon, 1997).
* Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (Cambridge: Icon, 1995). An amusing, secular, well-illustrated diversion.
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
• Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992). A definitive and very much respected sociological study.
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Deceiving The Twentieth Century’ The New Statesman (1 Apr 1994),p.24.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1998). A fascinating analysis of spirituality and church.
Antony Billington, Tony Lane & Max Turner, eds., Mission & Meaning: Essays Presented to Peter Cotterell (Paternoster, 1995).
Harry Blamires, The Post-Christian Mind (London: SPCK, 2001).
John Bowker, Is God a Virus? (London: SPCK, 1995).
Andrew Boyd, Life’s Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip (Penguin, 1999). Lots of repeatable one liners!
• Antoine Compagnon, The 5 Paradoxes of Modernity (NY: Columbia, 1994). An elegant argument describing the fragmentations of postmodernity as consequences of paradoxes in modernity. It concentrates mainly on visual art and architecture.
Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Oxford:Blackwell 1992).
Robert Cook, ‘Postmodernism, Pluralism and John Hick’ Themelios Vol.19,No .1,(Oct 1993).
* Douglas Coupland, Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture (London: Abacus, 1992). This novel will give you the flavour of postmodern life.
Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994). And his more recent novels.
Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Mark Dery ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994).

* Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Penguin, 1984). DeLillo is increasingly recognised as the best analyst in fiction of contemporary culture.

Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Penguin, 1992).
Terry Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993).
David S Dockery, The Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1995).
Terry Eagleton The Idea of Culture (Blackwell, 2000).
Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1992).
Mike Featherstone ed., Theory, Culture and Society Vol.5,Nos.2-3(June 1989).
Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).
William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Harper Collins, 1984).
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
Stanley Grenz, Primer on Postmodernism (Eerdmans, 2000)
Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (CUP, 1993).
Jürgen Habermas ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’ in New German Critique No.22(1981).
*• David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). A thorough analysis.
Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light (London: Routledge Comedia, 1988).
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992)
J Ingleby, ‘Postmodernism: A Laid-Back Pluralism’ Third Way 15/4(1992),p.25.
• Frederic Jameson, Postmodernity: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). Definitive book for postmodern literary theory from a neo-Marxist perspective. Quite difficult. First chapter is the important one. Deeply right at times although, overall, deeply wrong.
* Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith (London: SPCK, 2002). A revealing qualitative piece of research on why people leave church.
Paul Lakeland, Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age (Fortress, 1997).
Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990).
David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland (Polity Press, 2000). Heavyweight and sociologically chewy with some nice bits about Christianity's role as a cultural resource.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth 1993).
William Mahedy & Janet Bernardi, A Generation Alone: Xers Making a Place in the World (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 1994).
* J Richard Middleton & Brian J Walsh, truth is stranger than it used to be (London: SPCK, 1995).
Leslie Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society (London: SPCK, 1989).
Christopher Noah, World Postmodern Fiction (London: Longmann, 1993).
* Kevin O’Donnell, Postmodernism (Oxford, Lion, 2003)
Michael Ovey, ‘Deconstruction: Gagging the Speaking God?’ Cambridge Papers 2/4(1993).
Gérard Raulet, ‘From Modernity as One-Way Street to Postmodernity as Dead End’ New German Critique No.33(Fall 1984).
J Reader, ‘Theology, Culture and Postmodernity: Response to Graham, Walter & Newbigin’ Modern Churchman 34/5 (1993),p.58.
Mike Riddell, Mark Pierson, Kathy Kirkpatrick, The Prodigal Project (London: SPCK, 2000). This has an intereactive CD-ROM, and explores new patterns of church.
* Philip Sampson, Vinay Samuel & Chris Sugden eds., Faith & Modernity (Oxford: Regnum Lynx Books, 1994). A good collection of essays coming out of a Lausanne Committee of World Evangelization conference held in Uppsala, Sweden in 1993. Sampson’s essay is very helpful.
Philip Sampson, ‘Why Stick to the Script?’, Third Way 19/4(May, 1996), p.21
B Smart, Modern Conditions Postmodern Controversies (London: Routledge, 1992).
• George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989). A profound and ultimately theological overview of Western cultural history putting this century in context.
Dave Tomlinson, The Post-Evangelical (Triangle, 1995).
Kevin Vanhoozer, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (CUP, 2003)
Gene Edward Veith, Guide to Contemporary Culture (Leicester: Crossway Books, 1994). This is an excellent Christian analysis from someone who knows the literature well.
Andrew Walker, Telling The Story (SPCK, 1996).
* Pete Ward, Liquid Church (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2002). A very provocative book about changing patterns of church.
Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh, T& T Clark, 2000).
World Evangelisation Vol.18,No.65, (December 1993).
Transformation Vol.10.No.4, (October/December 1993).
The Way Vol.36.No.3, (July 1996).
* Third Way Vol 19.No.3, (April 1996).
Magazines: Mondo, Wired, Viz & other fanzines.
Films: American Beauty; Blazing Saddles; The Player; Barton Fink; Short Cuts; Reservoir Dogs; Jacob’s Ladder; Something Wild; Mad Max; The Matrix; Orlando; Twelve Monkeys; Trainspotting. Most recent films directed by David Lynch, Peter Greenaway or Robert Altman
See also on a TV near you: MTV, The Simpsons, Friends, Sex in the City, Family Guy, Malcolm in the Middle, Little Britain, Ugly Betty

Appendix 1

Stream & Databites

I have been to MacDonalds in Berlin, London, NY, SFO, Manila, Hong Kong, Paris, Stockholm, Worthing, Johannesburg, Athens, Madrid, Brugge, Toronto… They are PSZs (Personal Security Zones - Toffler) in our turbulent Global Village. There was a time when churches were PSZs. Now they are menacingly unpredictable, even in the Home Counties.

I am a compulsive consumer - you are a consumer - of this lecture - of worship services and articles and sermons and Goods.

Productivity has collapsed into the black hole of consumption.
Tesco, ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am.

I am a compulsive producer. We are trapped in the cash-nexus and bind of consumerism: every time you spend money, you’re propping up systems you loathe; the structural sin that so tightly binds.

I am a target market. Somebody wants to sell me something, somebody who knows my needs, desires and anxieties, and will use this knowledge as a crow bar to alter my behaviour and therefore open my wallet… or am I paranoid?… or cynical… or grateful?

Of all the ‘somethings’ I am supposed to buy, I am to keep buying more of them. So they are obsolete or out of fashion almost as soon as I buy them.

The Global Village - Universal Culture. Driftwood shanty towns, with TVs and satellite dishes. Two billion people can view Baywatch.

The Post is cultural white noise - makes no sense, but it is on TV.

Democracy increasingly makes false promises.
Politicians are more concerned with image than integrity.
So the media, the Image Makers, control the political machine, while claiming they are serving the democratic process.

You must be bored again.

The Post is a Soup of floating cultural fragments - Scientific Revolution 17th Century… Enlightenment 18th Century… Romanticism 19th Century… Modernism 20th Century… Postmodernism 21st Century… Relativity (Einstein) Uncertainty (Heisenberg) Incompleteness (Gödel) Chaos (Mandelbrot). And a backcloth of General Synod reports.

“Fake it ‘till you make it.” We all have to look the part, to consume our images.

Stop Waiting for Godot.

Images are the most ephemeral of commodities, shifting fashions keep us purchasing in an accelerated culture.

Shopping Malls are the temples of creativity and diversity. Tescos that look like churches with clocks on Towers and soaring columns pointing to the Great Retailer in the Sky.
They give meaning. But no comfort.

“People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night knowing there is something they have forgotten to do.” Don DeLillo.

Integrate globally. Disintegrate locally.

The Space/Time compression of the last 20 years. Breakfast in London; lunch in New York. (Luggage in Munich.)

Take irony for granted.

Practise one-liners.

This week 70s funk, next retro-punk. And we eat in shiny new 1940s restaurants decorated with expensive memorabilia we threw away in the 1950s.

Premature Nostalgia - do you remember the 90s?

Fragmentation and surfaces, shifting personal identities - these are the essence. Relationships - not depth or permanence - unless you want them…

Participate without belonging

Clubbing, Techno, Garage - Coke, “E” - Drugs are simply states of mind - Coenaesthesis (Emotional Anaesthesia). Altered States of Consciousness. It’s the only way To Be. Or Not To Be. Good Choruses will do the trick. Or a soothing Mass. Or laughing in the Spirit or being Torontoed. Or anything that can unbind our future-shocked and stressed emotions.

“When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, then nothing is out of place.” Don DeLillo.

Vote anyway.

Virtual Reality merges with reality. “The world looks suspiciously like a 20-channel satellite TV with a madman holding the remote control; before you have time to make sense of the story, the screen beams other images, to be replaced with yet other images, before you begin to know what they are images of; and all comes from nowhere and melts into nowhere again.” Zygmunt Bauman

Control the remote.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” WB Yeats

Humour is serious. Irony rules - Humour is the White Man’s burden.

If you can’t say something serious while laughing at yourself, then you cannot be serious.
The Failure of the Enlightenment Project. Cogito ergo sum, cogito.
The Enlightenment Project was to illumine everything.
It has turned everything into the material and realised that nothing is knowable.
Come in Humanism, your time is up.

“This statement is unprovable” Kurt Gödel

The Xerox Revolution - The Zine Scene - proliferation of small circulation/highly specific publications.

Death of the Importance of the Individual - Ochlocracy - Crowd Rule.
The crowd wear Levis and are thin and are for abortion and against the government.

It’s hard to belong to anything now, unless it’s against something.

The Breakdown of Cultural Coherence - social fragmentation and lack of metanarrative.

Be profoundly superficial.

The church is the plausibility structure of faith.

God is Community.

Everything you know is wrong.

“It’s like this dad. You can either have a house or have a life. I’m having a life.”

Why have the stress and responsibility of a proper job?
I’d rather have time and a McJob.

Deconstructionism is logical positivism ad absurdum.

The good thing about The Post is it takes apart ideologies - communism and churchianity. The bad thing is The Post denies transcendence…

“In the twilight of the gods, men came forth like giants.
In the twilight of the men, all the gods came back again.
But is it dawn or dusk, or just a smoggy day?” Rob Draper

Belief in history is a step of faith, which having taken it, proves reasonable.
Belief in rationality is a step of faith, which having taken it, proves rational.
Faith is risk.
The Holy Spirit is the witness to transcendence and the inspirer of risk.

“When there is the ‘death of God’ in a culture, it becomes increasingly hollowed out, ‘weightless’” Nietzsche.

Truth is relative. That may be true for you, but it is not for me.

Jesus is either mad, bad or who he said he was - so what?

“At least five times the faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of the five cases it was the dog that died.” GK Chesterton

Databites

Dip into Nihilism
Manoeuvre between Pastiche & Mishmash
In panicked Defence of the Sacred - Embrace Fundamentalism
Need What Didn’t Exist
Pretend to be Real
Implicate Yourself in Every Interpretation
Write More about Less
Worship in a Building that Quotes Other Buildings
Take Irony for Granted
Participate without Belonging
Practise One-Liners
Purchase Genuine Imitations
Have Beliefs but don’t Believe
Be as Different from the Joneses as you can Afford to be
Debt-Finance Immediate Gratification
Give me ambiguity… or give me something else…
Cats know how we feel. They don’t give a damn, but they know.
Postmodernity is nascent, or infantile, or convalescent modernism. (Baudrillard)
Lottery - a tax on people who are poor at mathematics
The modern Western culture in which most people over 45 in the UK grew up saw everything as decided by reason
All change is perceived as loss
The future isn’t what it used to be
No persecutor or foe in two thousand years has wreaked such havoc on the church as has modernity
All generalisations are false
Ontology has collapsed into epistemology
Dead at 30; buried at 70 (Bart Simpson)
The media is modern society’s central nervous system
My karma just ran over my dogma
Postmodernists generally regard reason’s ability to organise and systematise as coercive and repressive
The answer to everything is a sort of blurry thing
For most evangelicals God was functionally irrelevant
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy
Capitalism, the state and the knowledge industry have deeply affected the way the church in the west has expressed the Gospel
If you don’t watch the violence, how will you get desensitized?
We have tried to use the forces of modernization to serve us, but unwittingly we ourselves have been shaped by them
Veni, vidi, velcro. I came, I saw, I stuck around
The Post is the death of the individual and the birth of neo-tribalism
Postmodernity makes evangelism easier yet makes discipleship harder
Postmoderns are rightly suspicious of postmodernity
Ozmosis: the inability of one’s job to live up to one’s self-image
Time is an illusion. Lunch-time doubly so
Look closer see less
The Post is the awareness of how much faith you need to believe that anything is real
We are born naked, wet and hungry. Things go downhill from there
Postmodernity is nothing to be proud of. It is a cultural virus, like AIDS. You catch it by watching TV.
A bird in the hand is safer than one in an aircraft engine
Data in, rules out. The future is looking increasingly fuzzy
Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot
A bishop never more resembles Jesus Christ than when his mouth is closed
(St Ignatius of Antioch, AD 37-107)
Things and meanings have imploded. All boundaries and distinctions have become blurred
A curved line is the loveliest distance between two points
(Mae West)
You are unique, just like everyone else
Very funny Scotty, now beam down my clothes
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana
Things go right gradually; they go wrong all at once
Jesus! Protect me from your followers
The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with postmodernity is the church’s engagement with God
Modernity’s replacement of ‘top down’ God-centred living with ‘bottom up’ human-centred living
Dogs come when called; cats take a message and get back to you later
Christianity survived for many people by retreating to the inward
How much uncertainty can a person take?
The Post hurts