Christianity

Praying for Ian Paisley’s Soul

by

Crossposted to Slugger O’Toole…

I have prayed for the happy repose of the soul of Ian Paisley. Initially almost to make him turn in his grave, but then with sincerity. The Book of Common Prayer says that Christ died as a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world”. Note the sins of the whole world – Christ’s death atoned for my sins, for your sins, for Ian Paisley’s sins.

Paisley’s sins? In my book, they were grievous.

Would The Troubles have happened without Paisley? Almost certainly, in some form or other. Would they have been as bad without him? It’s difficult not to believe that many people in their graves would still be alive today if he’d ended up the pastor an independent Baptist Church in North Wales.

As the Northern Ireland of Craigavon and Brookeborough became untenable in the late 1960s, that booming voice with its hypnotically rhythmic, staccato, delivery was everywhere. Denouncing O’Neill and his successors as ‘lundies’, or traitors; weaving grand conspiracy theories about Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics, and implying that any amelioration of the anti-Catholic bigotry of the old Stormont state would only empower the conspiracy; popping up in Nationalist strongholds to start riots around marches and flags. Later, as The Troubles got worse, so did he.

His main object was always to destroy the Ulster Unionist Party and its old establishment hierarchy, whatever the cost to his country and his own community, so he could become Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. He never had the slightest idea of what he would do if he achieved it. It was a suitably limited aim for a man made big only by the Fisher-Price scale of Northern Ireland.

Read more

Jesus Went to Birmingham. Did the People Let Him Die?

by

image

Every Eucharistic service, in whatever Christian tradition, is a recreation of the Last Supper. I’m at a work conference in Birmingham at the moment, staying in a hotel bang opposite the Cathedral, so I joined the 8 a.m. congregation there today for the service that I was taught, unfairly, to call Muddled Matins and Holy Confusion.

We were 12 congregants, like the apostles, gathered around the altar where the priest played the role of Christ. In Christ, we are always being made new: the priest was a woman. For two millennia it would have been a vanishingly rare event, although not as unheard of as the sceptics admit. Now, at least in the churches which emerged from the Reformation, it is commonplace. That should not deflect us from how wonderful and glorious and new it all is. The Holy Spirit continues to renew His Church.

How could we have been so blind, for so long, to the truth expressed so plainly in Scripture by St. Paul barely two decades after the Resurrection? There is no longer male nor female, for we are all one in Christ. To say that a woman cannot represent Christ at the altar is, to my mind, dangerously close to saying that God did not so much become man in Christ, but male.

And we 12 whom the priest fed with Christ’s body and blood were a reflection in miniature of the final heavenly banquet, where people from every tribe and nation will gather. We were young and old; men and women; black, white and Asian. Some were in good suits on the way to an office job that doubtless paid for a comfortable bourgeois life; some were obviously very poor to the point were they could have been sleeping rough. All of us equal in God’s eyes, all of us citizens of the family of holy screw ups we call the Church.

The sun streamed through that magnificent east window depicting the Ascension, Christ triumphant over death and going ahead of His people to prepare a place for them in Heaven. In the glorious silence between the words, the sounds of a vibrant city waking up to glorious September sunshine percolated through the walls.

Read more

Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square

by

I attended the national demonstration on the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square, London on Saturday 26 July. There was a large turnout of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern Christians, a healthy and welcome presence of Iraqi Muslims, a disappointingly small number of British Christians who looked like their ancestry was from these islands … Read more

Prisoners of Conscience on St John the Baptist’s Day

by

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gxMq7s0ELE

I always had a good appetite as a child, getting stuck into seconds and more whenever I had the chance. My mother, observing this, would often remark, “Son, you’d eat the head of John the Baptist.”

John the Baptist’s messy end is one of the best known of Bible stories. Like most Gospel stories, it is a short narrative and doesn’t go in for detailed descriptions of personalities and motives. As so often, much of the popular memory of the story doesn’t come from Scripture at all.

Oscar Wilde’s grotesquely brilliant play Salomé, later turned into the first true 20th Century opera by Richard Strauss and then into a Holywood epic by Columbia Pictures, has added much to the popular perception of John the Baptist’s death, even among those who have never seen any. Scripture does not record the nymphomaniac, borderline necrophiliac, Salomé of Wilde, Strauss, and Rita Heyworth, but instead a girl very much under the thumb of a ruthless mother with a personal grudge against John because of his uncompromising sexual moralism.

Read more

Why is Cathedral Evensong Growing and What Does It Mean?

by

This piece appeared in the May-June 2014 edition of Salisbury Cathedral News I’ve always preferred the intimate parish church community to a cathedral’s grandeur. I came to mature faith in Belfast’s city centre parish of St. George’s, walking past the door of the Cathedral to do so. Since arriving in Salisbury last summer, I’ve yet … Read more

The Good Samaritan Visits North Belfast

by

And, behold, a certain pastor stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down the Whitewell Road, from Bellevue to Greencastle, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

Read more

In response to Owen Jones: In Defence of the Establishment of the Church of England

by

Owen Jones’ appeal for the separation of church and state showed a deep respect for Christianity in general and the Church of England in particular. But he failed to explain how and why disestablishment would be an improvement. Throughout the article, I only read one serious criticism of the status quo: that it is an ‘anachronism’.

Perhaps so – the relationship between Church and state in Britain is certainly illogical. The monarch swears in the Coronation Oath to maintain the “Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”, but Britain doesn’t have an established Church. England has one, and Scotland has a different one, more thoroughgoingly Protestant than the curious part-Catholic hybrid south of the border. No kirk celebrated Holy Week like we did at St Martin’s in Salisbury, with prostrations before the Blessed Sacrament and kissing of the cross. Wales, like Northern Ireland, gets by without an established church.

Indeed Northern Ireland argues against disestablishment as a means of promoting good relations between faith communities. The Church of Ireland was disestablished fifty years before Northern Ireland’s creation, and was in any case the minority Protestant tradition in the new state. That didn’t prevent a horrendous history of state-sanctioned anti-Catholic discrimination, nor a descent into thirty years of ethno-religious violence.

Read more

So You Follow Jesus? Are You Sure?

by

A common line in blogs and sermons these days is to call on people to be followers of Jesus and not just admirers of Jesus. There’s nothing wrong with that on one level. I like to think I do that sometimes myself; but I know just how flaky I am when the going gets tough. Following Christ is hard. Sometimes even being an admirer of Christ is hard; often it’s hardest even to like Jesus when one really has tried to follow Jesus to the Cross and ended up being crucified.

Some of those blogs make out that if you don’t follow Jesus, 100% of the time, right to the end, then you aren’t a real Christian. If that’s the case, then there are no real Christians. I wonder what image they have of themselves if they think they’re the real Christ followers, with the authority to lecture the poor benighted masses who just want an easy ride.

In Holy Week, Palm Sunday was when everybody got to admire Jesus; the night of Maundy Thursday was when following Jesus got really hard and everybody, and I do mean everybody, abandoned Him.

We’re all good at liking Jesus on Palm Sunday. We all love Jesus when He rides into Jerusalem in triumph, fulfilling the prophecies, and doing nothing to contradict our understanding of what a Messiah looks like. The Kingdom of God is at hand! Safe as one of a crowd of thousands, we know Jesus will soon show His power. As we’re good Christians, we know that will be good for everyone, and especially for us.

Read more

No Simple Answers for Christians in Politics

by

I’ve enjoyed the series of posts hosted by Gillan on God and Politics UK, where guest bloggers associated with the three main GB political parties, as well as the Greens and UKIP, say they support their particular party from a Christian perspective. Two final articles are from someone saying he finds it hard to vote, and someone who says voting is a Christian duty.

I was a member of both the Liberal Democrats for many years and was heavily involved in the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for a long time. I’m not a member of any political party at the moment. Given the events of the past 16 months in Northern Ireland, I doubt I could vote for anyone other than Alliance just now, but I’m living in Wiltshire and I don’t know who to vote for in Great Britain. Not voting at all is certainly an option, although one I’d take only with great reluctance. I might return to how all that fits with being a Christian in a later blog post, but just for now I thought I’d ask a few questions of the philosophy behind the series.

It seems to have been taken as a given by all the posters except Frank Cranmer, who isn’t voting, that it is a good thing that Christians are involved in politics; and that the world would be a better place if more of them were. Indeed, Daniel Stafford argues very directly that Christians should get involved both in the party which most closely reflects their beliefs, and that party’s internal Christian grouping. This view is a common assumption in British Christianity, indeed an unusual case of an assumption that cuts right across Evangelicalism, Roman Catholicism and Liberal Christianity. How valid is it?

Read more

Banish the Square Brackets! The Case for Reading the Ugly Bits of Scripture.

by

I have never been in any doubt that God has a wickedly playful sense of humour, and that it is most often deployed when he encounters the Church at its most institutionalised. During this month’s Church of England General Synod, with another crucial vote on the path to the consecration of women as bishops on the agenda, the lectionary had us reading the First Letter to Timothy day by day at Morning Prayer. Those of us in the 8 a.m. weekday gang at St. Thomas’ in Salisbury were reading it along with the rest of the Church of England.

On the morning of the crucial vote, the reading included the following comment on women. “Their role is to learn, listening quietly and with due submission. I do not permit women to teach or dictate to the men; they should keep quiet.” It then goes on to justify this with reference to the fact that not only did Eve come after Adam, but she was responsible for his temptation. Women should therefore, the letter argues, be happy in bearing children modestly, instead of getting uppity ideas about teaching.

By all accounts, red faces abounded and an alternative reading was supplied. But, really, should it have been? Are we embarrassed to deal with the Scriptures that God has inspired for us? Do we think we do ourselves any favours but cutting out, little by little, the bits that offend our sensibilities?

Read more