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

Anna Lo, and the Myth that Northern Ireland Politics is about the Border

by

Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole…

I very much doubt Anna Lo’s Irish News interview was in the Alliance Party’s 2014 elections gameplan. While almost all members of the party will remain loyal to her in public, I have equally little doubt that a number are privately fuming. Even some of them will have little problem with what she said, rather with its timing two months before local elections and little over a year before Naomi Long has to defend East Belfast. Others will regard it as a genuinely positive step, creating space for Alliance to expand beyond Belfast suburbia.

All political parties have internal ideological faultlines. Nearly twenty years ago, Nicholas Whyte identified Alliance’s primary faultline as being between the Liberal Unionists and the Liberal Liberals. I think that was spot on back then, although there were always a few Liberal Nationalists in Alliance – remember that one of Alliance’s first Stormont representatives was the Tyrone Nationalist MP Tom Gormley.

Read more

Some Thoughts on Tony Benn

by

TonyBennTony Benn was a lovely guy. I once got chatting to him on the Circle Line going home from work: I got on at St. James’ Park and said “Hey, you’re Tony Benn!”, and we chatted until he got off at Notting Hill Gate. He was just like that. Great company, totally unspun, absolutely principled. And, even better, he wore tweed jackets and smoked a pipe.

Unfortunately, he was a bloody awful cabinet minister, and the government he last served ultimately tested beyond destruction the post-war consensus, paving the way for Thatcher and all that came with her. He was one of the prime reasons for that. In the mid 1970s Britain was a more economically equal country than it has been before or since; there was never a better time for a young adult from a poor background to come of age. It was rapidly on the way to becoming a more inclusive society of minorities as well. EEC membership was helping British industry discover new markets, and Britain was finally catching up with the rest of Western Europe on living standards after a lost generation.

Read more

Categories UK

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

Address at the Memorial Service for the Revd Mervyn Kingston

by

This was one of three adresses celebrating the life of the Reverend George Mervyn Kingston at a memorial service held at St George’s Church, Belfast on 8 February 2014. Mervyn was a wonderful priest, a loyal friend and an unlikely prophet, whose prophetic ministry was particularly concerned with reconciliation between Northern Ireland’s churches and communities. He co-founded Changing Attitude Ireland with his husband and partner, Dr Richard O’Leary.

I hadn’t been long back in Belfast in 2007 when I chanced across the website of Changing Attitude Ireland. Mervyn and Richard had set the organisation up a few months before, and it had yet to catch a fair wind. I sent them an e-mail and a cheque, a sign of my good wishes and a salve for a conscience that felt it could do little more. CAI was still very small – I think I was member number 6.

Read more

A Farewell Discourse: The Hard Truths That Set Us Free

by

Within a few days, I shall be subsumed the Church of England’s system as a loyal and obedient functionary. Having spent the last three years deeply engaged with the struggle for LGBT acceptance on the other side of the Irish Sea, including the struggle for marriage equality, this is probably my last chance for some time to say in public what I actually think about the state of the Church of England.

Following the House of Lords vote on same-sex marriage, the anger and bitterness that already existed among LGBT churchpeople and those who support their full inclusion in the life of the Church has deepened. Online, people are shouting, not always terribly coherently. Privately, they are saying much worse things to one another. I have never seen this depth of anger among churchpeople before; some of it, from deeply loyal churchgoing Anglicans, tips over into outright hatred of the Church leadership, in a way that it never has in my lifetime. The reaction of Church of England bishops, and conservatives more generally, to this has been defensive and bewildered.

Shouting does none of us any good, and neither does chippy defensiveness. Nonetheless, I think there are messages my conservative my conservative brothers and sisters in the Church, especially my Evangelical brothers and sisters, need to hear. Some of them might not make terribly comfortable reading. But please take the time to read them – conservatives have set the agenda on sexuality issues in the Church of England for a generation. The view who feel betrayed and marginalised as a result  must also be heard.

Read more

Bobbie and Dessie: Does a 1980s Photo Tell Us Anything About Anglicanism’s Future

by

BobbieAndDessiePictured: the Bobbie and Dessie show, I would guess around 1985. 28 years is more-or-less a generation, and the ’80s, the first decade I can remember in any meaningful way, are now starting to be a long time ago. The ’80s, in hindsight, marked the apogee of Liberal Catholic power in both the Church of England and Anglicanism more generally. It would have been hard to see the rapid rise of Evangelical power from that vantage.

And it is hard from here to see what might come next, other than to note that a generation is a long time, and that all proud empires pass away, including Anglicanism’s mini-empires of the mind that we call “churchmanship”. The Anglican pendulum moves in at least two dimensions and swings constantly.

Read more

For they were afraid. A reflection for Easter Day.

by

For churchgoers, Easter Day is a time of joy and celebration, usually with a thronged church, an immaculately conducted service, the fruit of weeks of preparation, and the chance to catch up with friends we haven’t seen for a while. In my Church, we are even lucky enough to have a slice or two of Fr. William’s home-made simnel cake. After the austerity of Lent and trials of Holy Week, Jesus jumps out of the papier maché Easter egg and shouts, “surprise!” It didn’t all end on Good Friday – he is risen indeed. Alleluia!

The reality of that first Easter was very different. It was a time of fear, with Jesus’ followers in hiding, hoping the crowds only slowly departing from Jerusalem after the religious festival would help them stay below the radar. The capital was the stronghold of those Christ had spent his ministry criticising. His supporters’ hopes that he was the promised Messiah had been crucified along with Christ himself. Dare they presume that the whole episode was unimportant enough that they could keep their heads low for a while, before retreating back to the Galilee when the coast cleared? Or would the apparatus of the state stumble upon them, and decide that a few more needed to die for the sake of the whole people?

Read more

Hitting rock bottom. A reflection for Easter Eve.

by

In English, the Apostle’s Creed teaches that Jesus descended “to the dead” or “into hell” depending on which version we use. However, the Greek version states that “κατελθοντα εις τα κατωτατα”, “he went down to the lowest”. At least since the second Century, many Christians have believed that Christ descended literally into the underworld, and preached to the dead.

The ‘Harrowing of Hell’, as it is often called, is particularly important in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where the great Easter sermon of St. John Chrysostom, dating from around the year 400, is preached every year at Easter Eve.

For Chrysostom, this is the moment where Christ literally enters Hell and takes it prisoner, binding the Devil and death in chains. “He descended into Hades and took Hades captive!” Easter Eve is where the eternal life-giving force of God meets the power that death and evil have in time, and destroys them. This is the great mystery of the Christian faith – by dying Christ destroyed our death. By embracing, of His own free will, the power of evil to wound and destroy, Christ annihilated that power.

Read more

Why abandon me, God? A reflection for Good Friday?

by

At times, life consists of one painful episode after another. Troubles multiply, sometimes emotional, sometimes financial, sometimes with our health, and as they do, friends seem vanish like frost off the road on a sunny morning. At first we try to keep our chin up, to meet problems one by one, and ask for assistance in prayer. But things just get worse, and the most difficult thing of all seems to be that we often suffer not because we have been selfish or greedy, but because we are trying to do the right thing.

We have been told that God hears the prayers of those who ask in faith, and when those prayers seem to go unanswered, we quite naturally feel abandoned by God. Sometimes we get very angry at God. Afflicted by one painful illness after another, St. Teresa of Ávila shouted at God, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so many enemies.”

Read more