Commentary Spring 2020 edition

commentary

ministry for the real world

Marks of true faith Johnny Juckes and Dan Strange introduce this edition of Commentary, which has themes of practising biblical hospitality, the life and witness of the church, and how the gospel helps us meet the challenges of our times For believers down the centuries, and around the world, the most significant moment of worship we offer involves breaking bread and sharing the cup together, ‘remembering the Lord’s death until he comes’. Whether we call it ‘holy communion’, ‘the Lord’s supper’, ‘the eucharist’, or simply, ‘the breaking of bread’, the remarkable thing is that we share a simple meal, enjoying fellowship and hospitality with each other.

The giving of generous hospitality as one of the marks of true faith is perhaps the most forgotten element of the gospel in the Western church.

David Baldwin, Director of Global Missions at Oak Hill, reflected on this important theme in the last edition of Commentary, and he concludes his article on ‘Hospitality and the gospel’ (page 11) in this edition. Drawing on 2 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

the rich tradition of hospitality in biblical cultures and in many places around the world, he shows how the truly converted person is necessarily truly hospitable, and how this is also true for Christians in the community of God’s people.

Matthew Weston (on page 22) is similarly inspired by learning from Christians from outside our own time and culture. He explores how the voices of Christians from other times and places can give us a bigger vision of God’s plan of salvation.

One of the themes in this edition of Commentary is the life and witness of the church. At a time when many American pastors consider themselves the CEOs of their churches, Ray Porter (on page 4) looks at the expected biblical character of pastoral leadership.

Andrew Nicholls (on page 26) asks how churches can keep holiness on the agenda in the current climate, where traditional norms are all, apparently, up for grabs. Robin Ham (on page 7) has a practical take on how we live as Christians, looking at four evangelical authors who have written on cultivating ways of life which put us in everyday touch with God. Meanwhile, Fred Sanders (page 42) argues that evangelism can only be enriched and empowered when we see it in light of the trinity. Lee Gatiss shows how the Anglican doctrine of the church can nourish the reforming activity of Evangelicals in the Church of England.

Another theme we consider in this edition concerns what is happening in our culture, and how the gospel helps us meet the challenges of our times. Dan Strange (on page 16) looks at recent research which shows that the decline of faith has produced not outright atheism, but a proliferation of superstitious practices. He unpacks a commonly held belief that ‘You must never say “the phones are quiet” in the office.

commentary Spring 2020 Power and control or servant leadership?

Ray Porter Method in the madness?

Robin Ham Meanwhile, Kristi Mair (page 19) explores the growing phenomenon of religious fictionalism, where ‘believers’ follow a faith as a useful fiction. It’s a faith position she describes as ‘like trying to nail jelly to the wall’.

In our books section, Chris Green (page 44) reviews Dominion, Tom Holland’s account of how Christianity has shaped Western culture in ways that have been forgotten today; plus a new biography of Otto von Bismarck, who unified the German nation, but chillingly cast it in the mould of the Roman empire, ‘replete with eagles and death, blood and iron’.

Finally, Eric Ortlund (page 29) takes a fresh look at the opening chapter of the Book of Job, tracing God’s purpose in inexplicable human suffering. Kirsty Birkett (page 32) asks whether good manners are simply stylised behaviour, or whether they have more deeply ethical content. And Michael Hayden (page 36) reviews one of the few books to have been published on transgender theology.

Johnny Juckes is President of Oak Hill, and Dan Strange is College Director of Oak Hill

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Hospitality and the gospel David Baldwin The Q-thing Dan Strange

4

11

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Believers who don’t believe Kristi Mair

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Treasures of the global church Matthew Weston The priority of holiness Andrew Nicholls Job’s story, our story Eric Ortlund

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26

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Ps, Qs and other good manners Kirsty Birkett

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Asking questions of trans theology Michael Hayden A congregation of the faithful Lee Gatiss Evangelism is trinity-shaped Fred Sanders

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39

42

Books 44 Chris Green oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 3

Power & control, or servant leadership?

Many American pastors consider themselves the CEOs of their churches, while pastors in Britain are more likely to see themselves as military commanders. Ray Porter looks at the expected biblical character of pastoral leadership Lord Acton’s famous maxim that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ was written in a letter to an Anglican Archbishop who had been defending popes who had used their power to persecute others. Acton (a Roman Catholic) argued that popes and kings needed to be judged by the same moral standards as anyone else and that their office does not permit different behaviour.

Papal power is a long way away from the power of a Christian minister in the modern church, but abuses of power still take place. Press reports follow if a church leader uses their position to sexually abuse someone committed to their pastoral care. The organisation thirtyone:eight has promoted the term ‘spiritual abuse’ for cases where coercive control takes place in a religious context. The term has been challenged, but the experience is real. The desire to control others in a church 4 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

situation, while it may not extend to abuse, is a significant contradiction to the pattern of leadership enjoined by Jesus himself.

Let me give a few examples of what I am talking about.

I had no hesitation of recommending a man I had known as an excellent curate for his first incumbency. At the induction I was thanked for the introduction, but when I visited to preach a few months later, it was a very different story. The leaders during the pastoral vacancy had been deposed so that the new minister could appoint his own people. After six years of curacies, he had power and was going to use it.

During a pastoral vacancy we had worked hard to establish a united vision for the future of a Baptist church.

A minister was voted into office knowing the plans in hand. But soon after he arrived it became clear that he

had his own agenda. He spoke about the need for people to accept his authority. A gentle reminder that in a Baptist church the locus of authority is the word of God and the decisions of the church meeting failed to divert him from this quest for personal authority. He did not survive long.

The rector of a charismatic church had a new vision of where he thought the church should be going. He had appointed lay elders to share in the leadership of the congregation, but one of them could not accept this new direction. There was no room for consideration together or a prayerful searching for a compromise. The elder must resign and the rector’s will enforced. The Spirit apparently only spoke to rectors!

These are just three of the examples I have known of ministers believing that their personal authority should shape the direction of the flock of disciples they had been called to pastor. They were not situations where there was a gospel issue that required a servant of God to set his will against that of the congregation. There was rather the belief that by virtue of their appointment, these men had to establish their personal authority over the congregation.

What is the nature of ministerial authority and why do we have these examples of good men wanting to lord it over their congregations?

It is not a new issue. Peter had to remind elders not to act as lords to the congregations that they served (1 Peter 5:3) and Paul declared that he did not do it (2 Corinthians 1:24). Jesus himself notes one reason

why such abuses of power might take place. He says that his disciples are not to base their leadership patterns on that of secular rulers (Matthew 20:25, Mark 10:42, Luke 22:25) and he gives an example of what servant leadership should be like in John 13:13ff. We should not adopt the cultural patterns of society, but rather look to Christ.

It is suggested that the British model of leadership is that of a military commander. There are those who both within their own church and wider afield see themselves in an embattled situation. There are enemies within and without the church. Sometimes ministers see themselves as in a battle where the congregation needs to be brought to submission to the pastor’s views oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 5

It is very easy to follow cultural patterns within the life of the church. In many African churches, the pastor takes on the status and role of a village chief. He is the big man. No wonder that many African indigenous churches have seen episcopacy as the appropriate form of church government.

In many East Asian churches the underlying Confucian concepts influence the role of the pastor’s authority.

Chinese churches have often struggled to have two equal pastors in leadership because culturally they expect one person at the top.

Sometimes cultural blindness can look amusing to outsiders. The constitution of an independent church established in Essex in the last century stipulated that only ‘gentlemen farmers’ could be elders. Farm labourers could not have ecclesiastical authority over their employers. The orders of society must be preserved.

Sam Allberry in an article for The Gospel Coalition in February 2019, argued that cultural patterns in America and England were different. He thought that American pastors considered themselves as the CEOs of the church organisation. This is not limited to the United States.

Many people today advise pastors of growing churches that they must look upon themselves as the leaders of an organisation rather than as a pastor of the flock. That task should be devolved to others. Lessons from business are imported into church structures as the only way of developing efficient leadership.

Some may move in this direction because that is the background they have had themselves before entering the ministry, or it may be conducive to them because they have been brought up as part of the British class system where some are expecting to lead others. It is what their class does so well. They are often unaware that they manifest a sense of superiority and entitlement. Their ministry, like that of the ‘gentlemen farmers’, is directed towards their social inferiors. How hard it is for some to identify patterns of leadership that will incorporate those who don’t share their cultural background.

Allberry suggested that the British model of leadership is that of a military commander. There are those who both within their own church and wider afield see themselves in an embattled situation. There are enemies within and without the church. British culture certainly lends itself to seeing oneself in perpetual opposition to other groups.

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Where does authority lie for pastors?

The basis of authority is the word of God and the Spirit’s work within the believer.

The aim of minsters is not to take authority away from the congregation, but to equip them Which other parliament has itself ranged on benches that are two sword lengths apart?

Sometimes ministers see themselves as in a battle where the congregation needs to be brought to submission to the pastor’s views. In others the military concept sees the congregation as foot soldiers in a battle against outside forces. This is certainly a new form of the church militant and such congregations can easily become known more for what they oppose than what they proclaim.

But you may be thumbing your Bibles and producing Hebrews 13:17 to argue that leaders should expect congregations to submit to them. The same Spirit that tells leaders not to lord it over a congregation, tells the congregation to submit to the leaders. This is a common pattern of the New Testament that gives us reciprocal responsibilities. The submission of Hebrews needs to be understood in the light of the ‘not lording’ of Peter.

It brings us to the basic question about where authority lies for pastors. It is not personal authority, but derived. (A fact which should have a role in any discussion of women’s ministry!) The authority derives from the ministry that is given. The basis of authority is the word of God and the Spirit’s work within the believer. The aim of minsters is not to take authority away from the congregation, but to equip them in the pattern of Ephesians 4:12ff. They do not want to divide but to reconcile. Consensus is sought. They want to see all come to maturity in Christ Jesus.

The watchword of ministers when they think about their pattern of ministry should follow that of John the Baptist: He must increase and I must decrease. Any pattern of leadership that exalts the minister has not learned it from Jesus Christ.

Ray Porter lectures in World Mission Studies at Oak Hill

METHOD IN THE MADNESS? How do we bring order to the messiness of everyday life? Robin Ham looks at four evangelical authors who have written on cultivating ways of life which put us in touch with the God who is intimately at work in our lives

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Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, Marie Kondo’s Spark Joy tidying craze, not to mention endless dieting options: keto, vegan, blood sugar. You can see why it’s been said that the question of our age is not so much, ‘what is the meaning of life?’, but rather ‘what is the method of life?’

How we ‘do life’ seems to be what counts. Are we failing at life, or winning at life? No doubt our heightened awareness of everyone else’s lives – or at least the curated version on our social media feeds – is a significant factor. Coupled with this hyper-aware, hyper-connectedness, most of us find ourselves incessantly busy and overwhelmed, with an unsurprising desperation to find a technique or method to control our chaos.

But it seems this isn’t just a trend among non-Christians. My sense is there has been a recent increase in evangelical Christian literature with a decidedly practical focus. I’m going to consider four recent contributions, reflecting briefly on their insights as we seek to engage with a generation hungry for method in the madness.

lifestyle: ‘I had said one thing: that God loves me no matter what I do – but my habits said another: that I better keep striving in order to stay loved.’ This subsequent ‘crash’ led him to consider how he might restructure his life – and what followed was ‘the common rule’, a series of eight habits that make up a 21st century rule of life.

Converted lives

I had said one thing: that God loves me no matter what I do – but my habits said another: that I better keep striving in order to stay loved

Christian lawyer Justin Whitmel Earley begins The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction (2019) with a powerful story of his own conversion. Yet this isn’t a conversion to Christianity, but rather about when his body finally became ‘converted’ to the anxiety and busyness that had become his default setting.

Though a Christian, functionally he worshipped the idols of his career and 8 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

all have habits, even if most of these haven’t been questioned. Consider what you do when you first wake up, or when you get home from work, or how you spend your weekends. These routines, rhythms and norms are all habits.

But secondly, these habits shape us much more than we know. Here Earley is indebted to the work of James KA Smith, who frames such habits as ‘cultural liturgies’, silently schooling us in how to live and make sense of the world. Whether or not we’d be predisposed to the ancient religious notion of a rule of life, Earley’s point is that each of us already has one.

The key question is whether we’re awake to the ways in which these life patterns are forming us.

Signposts to another world

Earley’s argument has two particularly persuasive steps. Firstly, humans are creatures of habit. We

The rule of life Earley advocates is effectively what a previous generation would have labelled as ‘spiritual disciplines’, which is also the subject of Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World (2017), written

by Mike Cosper. Some may consider it a strange incongruity to find wonder and spiritual disciplines in the same breath; as theologian Michael Horton has observed, among evangelicals historically the language of disciplines has often been surrounded by an air of legalism. But if anything the pendulum has now swung the other way, with practices such as family devotions, private prayer, solitude and sabbath falling off the radar.

That may be more to our detriment now than ever before, according

to Cosper. Building on the work of philosopher Charles Taylor, he argues that we live in a disenchanted world that conditions us for doubt. As such,

Cosper’s primary concern is the faithfulness of Christians, but there is a missional edge to this too. A tangible or ‘thick’ spirituality, where Christ’s followers evidently live with a deep sense of God’s involvement in their lives, embodies the gospel and brings us not far from Newbigin’s famous mantra: ‘The church is the plausibility structure of the gospel’.

But if our daily lives are no different to our secular neighbours’, bar a few hours on a Sunday and midweek, then surely we short-change a world still ‘haunted by transcendence’?

Union and communion

Spiritual disciplines can act as ‘rhythms, signposts and practices that orient us to another world’.

They disturb our culture’s default setting and help us to see beyond its shallow horizons spiritual disciplines can act as ‘rhythms, signposts and practices that orient us to another world’. They disturb our culture’s default setting and help us to see beyond its shallow horizons.

Undoubtedly all this talk of rules and disciplines could seem burdensome, if not framed by the sovereign grace of the gospel. Tim Chester is one of the UK’s most prolific evangelical authors, and yet it’s one of his most recent books, Enjoying God (2018), that is being hailed as his most significant.

In it he seeks to help Christians have a strong sense of living in relationship with God in the everyday stuff of life.

Evangelicals often speak of being in a right relationship with God, but we sometimes might wonder how it’s meant to cash out day to day.

In responding to this tension, Chester takes readers back to the 17th century. He draws on the great divine John Owen, who distinguished between our union with God through Christ and our communion with God. The former is something we’ve been ‘given and cannot ruin’, whereas the latter is the two-way relationship into which we’ve been saved. Chester’s point is that we can emphasise the

former to the extent that we never expect much of the latter. And yet, ‘what we do really does make a difference to our experience of God’.

And so, unsurprisingly, Enjoying God is theologically rich but unashamedly practical. Whereas the standard

He distinguished between our union with God through Christ and our communion with God. The former is something we’ve been ‘given and cannot ruin’, whereas the latter is the two-way relationship into which we’ve been saved

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practice in many Christian books (and sermons!) has been to end a chapter with discussion questions, Chester instead uses practical action points. It may seem a small difference, but after

We can’t make the water flow, but we can open a tap; God’s sovereign grace is not dependent upon us, but God has given us ‘pipes to open expectantly’ trialling it in his hugely popular You Can Change, Chester believes it’s an important emphasis: ‘What I want to show people is that the triune God is intimately at work in our lives in many different ways all the time.’

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Habits flowing from means Finally, David Mathis (of Desiring God) wrote Habits of Grace back in 2016.

The title is his way of describing ‘the countless practical rhythms of life we can develop... for accessing the timeless “means of grace” that God has given’.

Mathis’ brilliance lies in his simplicity, highlighting the three means of grace (Bible, prayer, fellowship), but giving a wide-angle view of how we can creatively cultivate all sorts of personal rhythms and patterns that position ourselves to keep on receiving through those means. We can’t make the water flow, but we can open a tap; God’s sovereign grace is not dependent upon us, but God has given us ‘pipes to open expectantly’.

In using the language of ‘means of grace’ over ‘spiritual disciplines’, Mathis is seeking to place the emphasis firmly on God’s role as supplier and provider, rather than on our initiative and effort. Along the way, Mathis also sensitively notes the danger of feeling we need to ‘wear Saul’s armour’, i.e. the tendency to compare our practices with those of others. This brings us full circle to Earley’s common rule, and the pastoral tension of helping people imagine what their lives could look like, without binding them to a specific form of practice.

A gospel net to catch our days The American writer Annie Dillard wrote that ‘how we spend our days is how we spend our lives’. To put it in more familiar terms, ‘we become

what we worship’. I’m grateful for the calling of these four Christian authors to consider the formational influences at work in our lives and the degree to which we live with intentionality.

Personally, I’ve been led to consider how my daily rhythms might include gospel hooks that snag at my life and re-orientate me to Jesus and his grace. Conformity to a set of practices can never be the sum of Christian maturity, but I am convinced that as we push the gospel into the nooks and crannies of our lives, God loves to grow our imaginative vision for Christlikeness.

Living a life worthy of the gospel can only be done by living ordinary days that are worthy of the gospel. In a similar vein to Titus, I pray it also stirs those whose lives are entwined with ours to ponder the goodness of this good life.

This certainly isn’t a process that happens on auto-pilot, a 21st century ex opere operato, but it’s also more than telling myself truths. Ultimately, rather than pitting the mind and behaviour against each other, it’s my heart that I want to keep warm in the sunshine of the gospel, all day long, world without end.

Robin Ham is a pioneer minister at Grace Church Barrow, in Barrow-inFurness, and writes on gospel, culture and church planting on the blog, That Happy Certainty

Hospitality and the gospel In part 2 of his article on hospitality, David Baldwin says the truly converted person is necessarily truly hospitable, and that this is true not only of individuals, but also of Christians in community

Priya Basil, a British novelist, wrote recently to extol the virtues of open hospitality, describing the communal kitchens that had blown her mind, where anyone is welcome to enjoy a free meal. The hospitality she describes sounds properly Christian, doesn’t it? But Basil isn’t a Christian, tracing her origins back to Indian Sikhism. The communal kitchens where ‘anyone can come and share’ weren’t in church halls, but in Sikh temples, or gurdwaras.

Her article (in the Guardian, ‘Make yourselves at home: the meaning of hospitality in a divided world’) is a reminder that if you’re ever down on your luck and in need of a square meal, while you can try your local church, you might fare better at your local gurdwara!

Rahil Patel, a former Hindu priest who is now a follower of Christ, compares his life before and after becoming a Christian. Eating alone, he says, ‘was something that very seldom happened before I became a follower of Jesus.’

He’s conflicted: On the one hand, knowing God personally through Jesus is unlike anything he ever knew before as a Hindu, but on the other hand, ‘eating together regularly is

a gaping hole that I see missing in general Western culture and the Western church.’

What are we to make of that? Are we backing the wrong religion? Or is the problem not our faith in Christ at all, but rather our culturally distorted understanding of it?

Hospitality as litmus test When I was a science teacher in the 80s and 90s, I loved teaching children the universal indicator and litmus paper tests. There was no messing about, and there were instant colour changes to see, which the kids appreciated. Is the liquid acidic or not? Dip in your paper and there’s your answer.

In part 1 of this article (in the last edition of Commentary), I argued that the biblical text presents hospitality as a distinguishing mark of true faith. Far from being an optional extra, or a spiritual gift for those so blessed, hospitality is the ‘ground zero of the Christian life’, to quote Rosaria Butterfield, author of The Gospel oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 11

Comes with a House Key. Modelled extensively in the Old Testament and explicitly commanded numerous times in the New, there is clearly something about hospitality that many of us are missing.

Amy Ogden, author of And You Welcomed Me, helpfully links hospitality to repentance and describes it as a ‘moral category’. Before knowing Christ, we were self-centred, idolatrous self-worshippers. Hospitality demonstrates an internal change. The ‘de-centering and reframing that accompanies hospitality is the very movement the New Testament calls metanoia, or turning...’

What Ogden is saying is that the truly converted person will necessarily be truly hospitable. This is true of individuals, yes, but also of Christians in community. Still not convinced? Let me take you to two modest locations, to meet the people there.

From Gibeah to Malta In part 1 we noted the juxtaposition of Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality with the wicked and inhospitable people of Sodom (in Genesis chapters 18 and 19). The writer expected the reader to see that hospitality is indicative of internal states.

I love and hate reading the book of Judges, all at the same time. Chapter 19 of the book is the absolute pits, isn’t it? There’s no king in the land, everyone is doing their own thing, an unnamed Levite has a concubine, whom he treats like dirt, until she’s unfaithful and runs away home. He follows her and enjoys hospitality in her father’s house for three days and nights, which quickly becomes four, then five and counting. They make a late start for home and only get as far as Gibeah, where they sit in the town square awaiting the expected Israelite hospitality. Pointedly, we twice hear that ‘no one took them in’. Finally, an old man does invite them home, and treats them as honoured guests.

And then... ‘Behold!’ blurts out the shocked narrator. The wicked men of Gibeah bang on the door asking for sex with the guests, have their wicked way with the concubine, and leave her for dead on the doorstep. The stunned Levite chops up her corpse and sends the 12 pieces to the 12 tribes of Israel for reflection: ‘Consider it, take counsel, and speak.’ (Judges 19:30). Civil war breaks out and tens of 12 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

Our Ethiopian friends always used to walk home with us after having us in their homes. I initially wondered if it was to make sure we didn’t overstay our welcome, but quickly grew to receive it as a very gracious and loving action, a humbling and hospitable kind of love

thousands are slaughtered. Israel is rocked to the core.

What was the main sin here? Family conflict? Lack of care? Unfaithfulness? Sexual rapaciousness? Sexual deviancy? Maybe. But just as in Sodom all those years before, the chief marker of internal corruption seems to be a lack of hospitality. In fact, Gibeah demonstrates the opposite of hospitality. Instead of outward movement towards the stranger, giving and filling, we find a selfish sucking dry. ‘Consider it, take counsel, and speak.’

Now jump forward with me 2,000 years. When my wife Maura and I were living in Ethiopia, our Ethiopian friends always used to goad me by asking, ‘How many times does England appear in the Bible?’ It was an unfair contest, a rugby world cup score in reverse: Ethiopia 60, England 0.

I’ve never had a similar argument with any Maltese, but the margin of victory would be much narrower. Malta gets just one mention – but what a mention!

Luke tucks away his Maltese narrative in Paul’s journey to Rome and his shipwreck saga, near the end of Acts. Unlike the wicked people of Gibeah, the Maltese only get 10 verses. Before looking at Luke’s description of them, let’s hear from Homer to get a feel for ancient expectation of encounters with new lands and peoples: ‘Alas, to the land of what mortals have I now come? Are they insolent, wild and unjust? Or are they hospitable to strangers and fear the gods in their thoughts?’ (Odyssey 6:119-121).

Not holding out much hope of a warm welcome for wandering Odysseus there, then! Putting up with inhospitable treatment was the expected norm for

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travellers. The missionary John Allen Chau’s reception on the Andaman Sea island of North Sentinel, in November 2018, when he was killed by tribespeople, was a possible outcome.

Joshua Jipp, author of Saved by Faith and Hospitality, thinks Luke is making a deliberate point about the Maltese in their give and take with Paul. Perhaps ironically, he initially (twice) calls them barbaroi – natives, primitive islanders, barbarians, Philistines... translators, take your pick! Homer’s warning seems appropriate. Expectations are low. But against all the odds, Luke reports that the Maltese are really, really hospitable. He stresses this repeatedly and in different ways by...

J highlighting the ‘unusual kindness’ of the islanders as

they ‘welcomed us’ J stressing that the chief man, Publius ‘entertained us

hospitably for three days’ J lingering on the detail of how Paul’s party are ‘honoured

greatly’ and finally sent on their way with ‘whatever we needed’ In part 1, we saw how Andrew Artebury, in his book, Entertaining Angels, highlighted five keys to good hospitality in the ancient world. One of them was to give visitors a really good send off, escorting the guest on their onward journey and providing for their needs on the road.

Our Ethiopian friends always used to walk home with us after having us in their homes. I initially wondered if it was to make sure we didn’t overstay our welcome, but quickly grew to receive it as a very gracious and loving action, a humbling and hospitable kind of love. It reminds me of John’s instructions to receive itinerate gospel preachers hospitably and ‘send them on their way in a manner worthy of God’ (3 John 6).

As host, you are merely a space creator, making a little room in your life and your home for somebody else to come in and play host to you, waiting for the Spirit to work.

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Luke is telling us in no uncertain terms that the Maltese hosts of Paul are truly transformed. And just in case we missed it, Luke includes a healing scene which is similar to his account of Jesus healing first Peter’s mother-in-law, and then many more, as God’s kingdom arrives among them. What’s Luke’s point, without him needing to make it explicit? It’s this: Hospitality is evidence of gospel transformation.

Hospitality in freeze frame So what’s the big deal? What’s so special about a bit of shared food and all the other bells and whistles? We’ve just covered 2,000 years of history in a few short minutes, so to finish let’s slow the camera right down and see what’s going on – or what should be.

I don’t know who said it first – probably Henri Nouwen, and maybe even Jacques Derrida – but some pretty strange things happen in a hospitable encounter, and one of the strangest is role reversal. The host becomes the guest and the guest becomes the host.

English doesn’t help us here, with a clear distinction between host and guest. The host is the provider, the one with the power to dispense largesse. The guest is the humble, powerless recipient. But other languages shed a little light on the weakness of this distinction. They retain a delightful ambiguity. Hospes (Proto-Italic), hostis/ghostis (Proto-Indo-European), xenos (Greek), hôte (French) and ospite (Italian) are far less clear about who is host and who is guest or stranger. Who cares?!

As a host sincerely opens up their home and their life to the guest, the guest starts to assume the prominent position ceded by the host. ‘My house is your home’, and, ‘You are family here’, articulate something of the transaction as the host freely relinquishes proprietorial rights and lays all at the feet of the guest. The guest, in turn, begins to play host, as their stories are drawn out of them and life is shared.

As Nouwen puts it: ‘When hostility is converted into hospitality then fearful strangers can become guests revealing to their hosts the promise they are carrying with them. Then, in fact, the distinction between host and guest proves to be artificial and evaporates in the recognition of the new-found unity.’

Harvey Kwiyani, whose book, Sent Forth: African Missionary Work in the West, draws on Malawian concepts of umunthu, describes how ‘both the host and the stranger need each other, if not for anything else, then just for the sake of their personhood... Hospitality becomes a constant negotiation between two strangers playing host and guest to each other simultaneously.’

Once the guest is completely comfortable, Kwiyani continues, only then can he or she be ‘liberated to be himself or herself among the hosts – to be comfortable enough to unpack the gifts that he or she has brought.’

This ‘radically shifts the power dynamics to a point where both the host and the guest are equally powerful – or powerless, leaving room for God to be the powerful one in their midst.’

Actually, this is especially good news for those of us who find being hospitable difficult, and shrink towards the introverted end of the scale. As host, there is absolutely no need to be a great entertainer, which is probably even counterproductive. You are merely a space creator, making a little room in your life and your home for somebody else to come in and play host to you, waiting for the Spirit to work.

Off the map hospitality Coming back to Priya Basil’s Guardian article, what she says chimes with Kwiyani’s understanding of hospitality.

‘Stories enact a form of mutual hospitality,’ she says. ‘You are invited in, but right away you must reciprocate and host the story back, through concentration – you need to listen to really understand. Granting complete attention is like giving a silent ovation. Story and listener open, unfold into and harbour each other.’

Longingly she glimpses and reaches for a hospitality that is, unlike human hospitality, completely unconditional.

‘Hospitality, were I to draw it, would be a series of potentially endless concentric circles extending outwards from each of us... Yet, however far those circles spread, unconditional hospitality remains outside their furthest perimeter. It lies, for the most part, in unknown territory, off the map.’

What lies off the map for Priya has been made known to us through the hospitality of the Father, in the Son,

READ ON Is there room on your bookshelf to welcome the most widely read books on hospitality and the gospel? Here are details of some of the books which informed this article.

Simply Eat: Everyday Stories of friendship, food and faith, by Manoj Raithatha, et al (Watford, Instant Apostle, 2018) The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practising Radically Ordinary Hospitality in our Post-Christian World, by Rosaria Butterfield (Wheaton, Crossway, 2018) And You Welcomed Me: A Sourcebook on Hospitality in Early Christianity, by Amy G. Ogden (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 2001) Saved by Faith and Hospitality, by Joshua W Jipp (Grand Rapids, Eerdmanns, 2017) Entertaining Angels: Early Christian Hospitality in its Mediterranean Setting, by Andrew Artebury (Sheffield, Sheffield Phoenix Press, New Testament Monographs, 8: 2005) Reaching Out, by Henri JM Nouwen (London, Fount, 1976) Sent Forth: African Missionary Work in the West,

by Harvey C Kwiyani (New York, Orbis, 2014)

through the power of the Holy Spirit. Now there’s something that needs to be shared, over food if possible.

David Baldwin is the Director of Global Missions at Oak Hill. He and Maura Baldwin direct a Serving in Mission UK ministry, two:nineteen, that helps local churches engage with people from the nations living in their communities oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 15

THE Q-THING GK Chesterton famously observed that when we choose not to believe in God, it’s not that we believe in nothing, but we become capable of believing in anything. Dan Strange proves the truth of this by looking at ‘the Q-thing’

This year has seen the publication of the interim findings of a research programme, Understanding Unbelief: Across Disciplines and Across Cultures. Led by a number of scholars in British universities, the programme has interviewed thousands of people identifying as atheists and agnostics in six countries: Britain, the United States, Brazil, China, Denmark and Japan. Two of the key findings are relevant to the proliferation of superstitious practices:

our countries appear to be thoroughgoing naturalists.’

‘Unbelief in God doesn’t necessarily entail unbelief in other supernatural phenomena. Atheists and (less so) agnostics exhibit lower levels of supernatural belief than do the wider populations. However, only minorities of atheists or agnostics in each of

Such findings seem to bolster the analysis of scholars such as Rodney Stark in his book, The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is more Religious than Ever. Stark takes as the ‘empirical backbone’ of his research the Gallup World Poll, which has

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‘Another common supposition – that of the purposeless unbeliever, lacking anything to ascribe ultimate meaning to the universe – also does not bear scrutiny. While atheists and agnostics are disproportionately likely to affirm that the universe is ‘ultimately meaningless’ in five of our countries, it still remains a minority view among unbelievers in all six countries.’

conducted over 1 million interviews in over 160 countries. He argues that ‘a massive religious awakening is taking place around the world.’

Importantly, Stark’s definition of religion includes churched and unchurched religions and supernaturalisms. For Stark, and on this definition, it seems that not only the triumph of secularisation but any theory of secularisation should be receiving short shrift.

While philosophers such as Charles Taylor have argued that Europeans, Canadians and Americans ‘are immune to deep, religious experiences, being only in tune with “naturalistic materialism”, which is the scientific understanding of reality’, Stark responds by quoting the 2007 Baylor National Survey of Religion, conducted by Gallup, which showed that 55 per cent of the American public believed they had been protected from harm by a guardian angel. Stark continues:

‘Nor has Europe become disenchanted… Multitudes of Europeans believe in ghosts, lucky charms, occult healers, wizards, fortune tellers, huldufolk, and a huge array of other aspects of that enchanted world that Taylor believes has long since vanished.

What Taylor really demonstrates is that from nowhere is one’s vision of modern times so distorted as from the confines of the faculty lounge’ (Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Faith).

Ouch. While I think that Stark dismisses Taylor far too easily (those who have attempted to grasp

Taylor’s delineation of the secular will know that he is dealing not simply with what is believed, but what is believable), everyday examples of enchantment abound. One of these, given to me by a current Oak Hill student, has captured my imagination: ‘You must never say “the phones are quiet” in the office. When I first started, I thought this was a bit of a joke, but it is considered deadly serious. You Do Not Say That. I’ve been interested in trying to talk it out with some colleagues, because they are clear that they have no belief in any sort of higher power,

‘Although humans know themselves to be active players in the world, there is a nagging feeling that they are also passive participants in somebody else’s world. Life courses between action and fate, like actors on a stage, aware that though they act out their part, they are working from someone else’s script’ oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 17

and are “perfectly rational” people.

At the same time, saying “the phones are quiet” will result in (something/ someone?) making said phones busy and unbearable. We simultaneously have no control over how our phone shifts are going to go – “you’ll just have a day like that” – and are responsible for our own/others’ bad shifts, “because you said it was quiet and that made it busy”. There is a level of discomfort around breaking this rule that goes beyond amusement or social discomfort, and especially since only one or two people are working on the phones at any time, does result in real tension when someone “curses” another person’s shift. One of the interesting things about this power behind phone calls is that it is clearly malevolent. There’s no good power responsible for quiet shifts or pleasant customers, just bad ones.’

Even a cursory search has unearthed what can only be called a ‘Quiet’ conspiracy, the Q-thing, with versions of the superstition popping up all over the place and in the most unlikely of places. For more details, see my recent article in Themelios, ‘Never Say “the Phones Are Quiet”’.

How are we to interpret phenomena like the proliferation of determined non-utterances of ‘Quiet’? Is there a way of solving the mystery of the Q-thing? A robust biblical doctrine of humanity can help us here: We are creatures made in the imago Dei, made for transcendence. Although we suppress the truth of our existence by arguing that ‘life under the sun’ is all that there is, we can never eradicate our sense of the divine; it always has 18 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

and always will pop up in all that we fashion.

No matter what we tell ourselves, the self has been shaped before it attempts to shape itself. It’s never been easy to be a materialist or nihilist, but conversely, it’s never been good to be a superstitious pagan, however supernaturalist. Although humans know themselves to be active players in the world, there is a nagging feeling that they are also passive participants in somebody else’s world. This creates an existential tension between human freedom and boundedness. Life courses between action and fate, like actors on a stage, aware that though they act out their part, they are working from someone else’s script. There is a providential power at work behind all things, but what or who is it?

Superstition is the fruit of this root.

The silence of not uttering ‘Quiet’ is a cry for help, of a need for control and meaning in what is believed to be a chaotic and meaningless world.

Pastorally, while recognising this phenomenon, we must not become falsely or overly enchanted, with the result that we become fearful.

Fear of created things, natural or supernatural, is ultimately idolatrous, given the only one we should fear is God himself. This is true wisdom. As Calvin writes (in Institutes 1.XVI.3): ‘We are superstitiously timid, I say, if whenever creatures threaten us or forcibly terrorize us we become as fearful as if they had some intrinsic power to harm us, or might wound us inadvertently and accidently, or there were not enough help in God against their harmful acts.’

In her essay, ‘Early English Reformers and Magical Healing’, Kirsten Birkett notes: ‘The Reformers’ God was a loving father who looked after his children. Someone who believed that would have the confidence to put aside fear of suffering of death or of evil spirits, and look boldly at the world that his God had made.’

As Stevie Wonder sings in ‘Superstition’, there do seem to be things in this world, and experiences people have, that are mysterious and that we don’t understand. However,

by God’s Spirit, scriptural revelation gives us enough understanding and direction to help us see what both godly and ungodly engagement with such phenomena look like.

The apostle Peter exhorts us: ‘Do not fear what they fear; do not be frightened. But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord’ (1 Peter 3:14-15).

Contrary to not saying ‘Quiet’ – yes, I’ve said it! – our Christian witness must be loud as we live with a bold freedom, and not in fear. We don’t resign ourselves to blind fate or have to ward off powerful malevolent forces. As Stevie Wonder sings, ‘Superstition ain’t the way.’

This article is an edited version of Dan Strange’s article in Themelios, ‘Never Say “the Phones Are Quiet”’ (Volume 44, issue 2).

Dan Strange is the Director of Oak Hill, and the author of Plugged In: Connecting your faith with what you watch, read, and play (Good Book Company 2019)

Believers who don’t believe Can you practise a faith without believing it? Kristi Mair responded to this and other questions recently when she took part in a radio discussion with a religious fictionalist

If you read the title above and thought ‘What?’ – then you are not alone. I had a similar thought. I thought we had done away with the ‘useful fiction’ narrative surrounding Christianity, but it turns out that theologian John Hick’s ‘the Real’ lives on long after him, and so too does that not so small discussion over whether or not religions are just many paths up the same mountain. It is making a nuanced return in the form of religious fictionalism. Only now, the mountain has been replaced with community, and the Real with the transcendent.

As you may or may not know, I wrote a small book on truth, MORE>Truth, not so long ago. Apologies for all the book spam if you follow me on social media. The kind folk at IVP sent a review copy to Justin Brierley, host of apologetics show Unbelievable? on Premier oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 19

Kristi Mair and Philip Goff at their debate on the Unbelievable? show on Premier Christian Radio.

Christian Radio, and I was invited to sit down in front of a microphone and next to someone who held different views to those I had expressed through the themes of my book.

That someone happened to be Philip Goff, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. No pressure!

Off air, we celebrated our Birmingham University links (Goff lectured while I was an undergraduate), our love of Hungary (he was formerly on the faculty of Central European University, Budapest, and I a former national resident), and our enjoyment of dairy alternatives (mine, alas, flows from necessity). On air, pictured above, we discussed this curious position of believers without belief, religious fictionalism, for three hours.

Religious fictionalism doesn’t easily roll off the tongue; it is, however, gaining traction in a number of philosophical circles. Far from being the irrelevant reflections of a few, this position, I believe, will only grow in its spiritual sociopolitical appeal. Indeed, it is already doing so.

Defining the position of the religious fictionalist is a little bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Religious fictionalism is a slippery and elusive mass of meaning. As the structure of its collective identity emerges over the next few years, 20 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

the basis of its appeal rests in its apparent lack of objective content. As a result, the religious fictionalist finds herself recalibrating her position from moment to moment based on existential, felt needs; or at least, so it seems.

It is, however, possible to put forward a few tenets of fictionalism. Essentially, a religious fictionalist delights in the behavioural and social benefits of religious belief, yet would stop short of believing in the objective reality of the God it flows from and points to. Robin Le Poidevin in his book, Religious Fictionalism (a primer on the topic released by Cambridge University Press), writes that ‘language about God (and related religious language) is best understood as concerning a fictional world, and that engaging in such language involves engaging in makebelieve.’ Each religion then employs its own fictional language in order to articulate its own fairy tale. They do not bear upon reality, but upon ourselves.

Jordan Peterson recently declared something to the effect of: ‘I live as though I believe’. While this statement threw no small number of us into a theological tailspin as to whether or not Peterson does believe, these few words most accurately and adroitly sum up the position

of religious fictionalism, of which Peterson may be a card-carrying member. I should add that not all religious fictionalists are of a Christian flavour. For Goff, however, it is the Christian God in particular in whom he expresses no belief. Instead, he readily aligns himself with the Christian community due to Western tradition and cultural affiliation.

(Tom Holland, author of Dominion, may have a word or two to share with Goff on this.)

The religious fictionalist lives as though she believes.

But believes in what, exactly? As Le Poidevin asserts: ‘Neither the fictionalist’s utterances, not the attitudes they convey, are truth-normed.’ It is mere make-believe. To make this point, throughout our conversation on Premier Christian Radio, Goff made frequent reference to the work of historian of religion Karen Armstrong and philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder. Citing Armstrong, Goff says that the Greek word for ‘faith’ (pistis) has been insufficiently translated into English as ‘believe’. The former conveys ‘engagement and commitment’, while the meaning and connotations of the latter has been corrupted by the Enlightenment. No more is belief associated with commitment, but with ‘cold-blooded intellectual assent to a hypothetical proposition’.

Goff outlines this argument in an article in The Times Literary Supplement. The obvious conclusion he draws is that Jesus has been misunderstood. In line with Snyder, Goff holds that Jesus spoke of faith contexts. He was ‘concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality.’ Jesus, Goff argues, is calling us to the 16th century understanding of ‘belief’, not the 21st.

It only takes a few minutes with a good Greek dictionary in order to understand that Armstrong is no philologist; she relies heavily on a selective reading of historical data, and so too does the religious fictionalist. If the statement, ‘Jesus rose from the dead’ is false, what pragmatic value can possibly be derived from it? If something is not real, can it really help – especially when it comes to the person and work of Jesus?

Here, Goff makes his salient point that in a time of tribalism and political fissure, uniting ourselves with others around common structures of meaning and a shared moral purpose is needful. The problems are apparent: Why these structures and not others? What is a good, shared

moral purpose? How do we ground moral values? What’s wrong with fragmentation? Why God? Why not the tooth fairy or a particularly empathetic book group? I don’t say these things sarcastically; I am genuinely intrigued. It’s reminiscent of Steve Turner’s memorable poem, ‘Creed’: We believe that all religions are basically the same, at least the one that we read was.

They all believe in love and goodness.

They only differ on matters of creation sin heaven hell God and salvation.

There is one specific point in our interview which haunts me still. It is when Goff inclusively begins one of his sentences with the words: ‘For us as Christians...”

Considering the fact that he had just denounced the work of Christ, demeaned the cross to the level of ‘useful fiction’ rather than historical fact, and raised questions over the resurrection, I struggled to make sense of this. What is a Christian, if not the person who has been redeemed through the risen reality of Jesus Christ in space-time history, and filled with the Spirit of adoption through whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’? Goff quoted the lyrics of a Nick Cave song: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’ – and yet Goff does hold to the idea of the transcendent.

This creates some very fertile ground for engagement.

For me, our radio conversation wasn’t about demonstrating the incoherence of Goff’s account. Instead, it was about exploring the points of contact we share by virtue of living in the Father’s world as image bearers.

Fictionalism seems to be a convenient way of holding the reality of God at arm’s length. I can’t help but wonder what prompted it, and where, precisely, the hope of healing for the religious fictionalist can be found.

The potency of religious fictionalism rests in its ability to capture the human imagination by latching onto our desires for unity, love, shared values and community. But what an anaemic imagination it fosters; it truly is a world of make-believe. Why settle for less? Have they not heard?

The fairy tale is indeed true. The Myth became Fact.

Kristi Mair is the Pastoral Support and Research Fellow at Oak Hill, and the author of MORE>Truth: Searching for Certainty in an Uncertain World, published by IVP (2019) oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 21

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TREASURES OF THE GLOBAL CHURCH Matthew Weston explores how listening to the voices of Christians from different times and places can give us a bigger vision of God’s plan of salvation and the work of Christ

It was an Egyptian bishop who first helped me read outside my culture.

An author I was more familiar with had written an introduction to one of the bishop’s books, so over Christmas one year I picked it up. It was like nothing I’d read before.

The book was On the Incarnation, by Athanasius. It was thought-provoking, full of insight, occasionally frustrating, but remarkably relevant. In CS Lewis’s famous introduction to a translation of the book, he writes persuasively of the need to ‘keep the clean sea breeze Left: Tanzanian Christians meeting for worship.

of the centuries blowing through our minds’, to counter the biases and blind spots of our own age. All of us live within a particular time and culture, which shapes our perspective on every aspect of life and thought.

Because we breathe in the cultural air of the early 21st century West, we need voices from outside to show us what we’re missing.

Our national culture, our Christian subculture, and our own selfcentredness can blind us to truths about God, truths from scripture, that our ancestors in the faith could see clearly. Lewis coined the phrase ‘chronological snobbery’ to oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 23

describe writing off people of the past as unintelligent or unworthy of study. Rather, our contemporary understanding of scripture is built on the work of Christians through the ages, and needs the counterpoint of those Christians to counter our biases.

Global theology The body of Christ also spans seven continents. The same benefits of listening to the voice of the centuries apply to listening to the voice of the global church. If we compare the truth of God to a diamond, then we need different perspectives on scripture to fully see all the different facets.

Listening to the past is one way of seeing through different eyes; I’m suggesting that listening to Christians round the world is another, vital way of doing this.

Problems with this approach might quickly spring to mind. The very words ‘global theology’ can ring warning bells. We might associate African theology with the prosperity gospel, or South America with liberation theology. The emphasis in less developed parts of the world might seem too focused on a social gospel. And with the riches of our Western, Reformed tradition at hand – frankly, why bother engaging at all?

Geographical snobbery?

Not only do such attitudes ignore much of the good theological reflection going on in other parts of God’s world, it betrays a sense of geographical snobbery – that I, as a Western Christian, am the arbiter of

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what is classed as ‘sound’, or indeed safe. I may be willing to listen to voices from across the globe, but only to the extent that they agree with me on the things that matter – the things that matter being decided by me.

Could it be that the Black American church’s perspective on racial reconciliation, that I place in the category of ‘not gospel’, is in fact at the heart of Paul’s gospel message in Ephesians? Could it be that an African or Asian perspective, uninfluenced by the Western dichotomy between souls and bodies, has a more biblical approach to caring for people’s physical needs as part of our Christian witness? I’m not arguing here for the correctness or otherwise of these perspectives – but how will we know if they are correct if we never listen in the first place?

If we neglect to listen to faithful brothers and sisters around the world, we are doing ourselves and them a grave disservice, for a number of reasons.

Missing out on insight As creatures seeking to understand our Creator, our insight is necessarily limited. Calvin talks of the need for God to ‘lisp’ to communicate with us, like a parent talking simply with a child. God reveals himself to us in human words and language, but to paraphrase Solomon, ‘The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less can these words we use fully describe you!’

(1 Kings 8:27).

Our speech about God – our theology – can be true, but can never

be complete. We will never see the whole diamond.

As with looking at a diamond from a variety of angles, different languages describe God from slightly different perspectives. One culture will notice things another culture does not. Varying perspectives don’t necessarily contradict each other, as we know from having four different accounts of Jesus’ life. Rather, they can complement each other, giving us a greater insight into the whole.

When we ignore the voices of the global church, we deny ourselves their insights into the riches of the knowledge of God.

The myth of neutrality At some level, all of us think of ourselves and our culture as the norm against which we measure difference.

In reality, we each have our individual ways of seeing things, and our wider culture does too. Not being aware of our biases is not a sign of our neutrality; it’s a sign of our need for others.

One simple example of this is the individualism common to many Western cultures. Our attitude towards our church family, our corporate identity as believers, are influenced by the norms of our society. We might be aware of this.

We might want to do something about it. But we will never see how deeply this individualism is ingrained in our interpretation of Scripture if we’re not challenged by a more communitarian perspective.

Our culture – even our Western Reformed theological culture – is not

neutral or objective. We need others to help us see past our biases.

Biblical diversity From the beginning of Acts, the place of the nations in the church is an important thread. Jesus sends his disciples ‘to the ends of the earth’; Jews from every nation hear the gospel at Pentecost; and in the multicultural congregation of Antioch believers are first called Christians – presumably because Christ was the only thing they had in common!

The first reported church theological debate (in Acts 15) is brought about by Jews and Gentile believers interacting; it helps the church clarify the gospel and grow more united.

The expectation of the apostles seems to be churches that are mixed culturally (see Ephesians 2:11ff), and the believers worshipping before the throne of heaven are of ‘every tribe, tongue, people and nation’ (Revelation 7:9).

In order to reflect the universal church, local churches are called to diversity; we will all benefit from the different insights different cultures in our congregations can bring.

Multicultural Britain It used to be that only missionaries going overseas would be sharing the gospel cross-culturally. Now it is something every church needs to think about. It could be economic migrants from Eastern Europe, asylum seekers from the Middle East, or international students from east Asia. Almost without exception, our

churches will have such people on our doorstep.

How do we share the gospel with them? How can we understand the defeater beliefs of an Iranian Muslim?

How can we help a new Christian navigate family expectations around marriage, or concerning ancestor worship, when they return to Thailand? How do we learn to preach the gospel in a context of religious pluralism? Of racial tension? Of extreme poverty? The global church has been dealing with these things for centuries.

The shifting centre In 1900, the geographical centre of the church was around Madrid. The geographical centre being defined (by Timothy Tennant, in his book, Theology in the Context of World Christianity) as ‘that point on the globe with an equal number of Christians living north, south, east and west of that point.’

By 1970, the centre had moved south-west to the Western Sahara.

Today it is near Timbuktu and is moving south-east, as the church expands in Africa and Asia.

Western Christians are the minority.

Missionaries are coming to the UK, some working on their own, some alongside local churches.

We are used to assuming a position of leadership in the world, as a country and a church, but this has not been the case for a long time. Facing up to this reality may be humbling – and hard! – for us, but the sooner we recognise our need of help and give those outside the UK an equal place

at the theological and missional table, the better for gospel progress.

Learning from the global church How might we repent of our geographical snobbery and start to learn from other global voices? Here are three practical responses.

Read broadly – There are many great books and articles from all over the world accessible in English. The Langham Global Library is a great place to start, with authors such as Lammin Sanneh or Jackson Wu showing the fruit of engaging in an Islamic and East Asian context.

Be charitable – We’re not going to agree with everything we read or hear, but even in the things we disagree with, there will be much to stimulate and challenge.

Make friends – Many of our cities have churches built around different nationalities. Some are characterised by theological differences, such as the black-majority Pentecostal churches; some are non-English-speaking. But often the reason they exist is that non-British brothers or sisters haven’t felt welcome in British churches.

So let’s build relationships, talk to the leaders, invite them to our fraternals, and maybe even have a joint prayer meeting or Sunday service. Let’s take the initiative to break down barriers, and see what we might learn and where it might take us.

Matthew Weston is studying for a BA (Hons) at Oak Hill.

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THE PRIORITY OF HOLINESS As a pastor, I find I forget most of my own sermons. I think I can remember roughly three from the first 15 years.

One stands out among these – and actually, it’s not that I remember the sermon, but I remember the text, because it was a blow-me-away moment to discover it buried in the passage set for the week.

It’s in Hebrews 12, in the section where we learn about discipline as a feature of God’s fatherly love for his children. Verse 11 tells us about the good he is working in us: ‘God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness’ (NIVA, 2011).

Sharing his holiness That God’s discipline is for our good is not surprising to anyone who has begun to experience God’s grace towards us, although we need to hold it alongside statements such as those in Ephesians 1. There, God works for our good for the same reason he does everything – as a display of his grace, that he might be praised. We are not the end, he is.

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How can churches keep holiness on the agenda in the current climate, where traditional norms are all, apparently, up for grabs?

Andrew Nicholls, a pastor of 15 years until moving to Oak Hill last year, thinks through the issues But the good he is giving us, described in Hebrews 12, is almost totally unbelievable: ‘that we may share in his holiness’.

The holiness of God is that quality by which God is utterly unapproachable, in the presence of which Isaiah feels instantly ashamed and condemned.

It is the call to Israel to ‘be holy as I am holy’, which gathers up all the law in Leviticus into one surpassing ambition. Peter repeats it (in 1 Peter 1:16) for the new Israel, calling us to reflect now the grace we will be given at the return of Christ in likeness to God. Even here, it has the character of a constant call to a goal not yet achieved, but one we make our own,

and strive towards, if we understand the gospel. We hear that command at every stage of the Christian life as calling us lovingly upwards, to a standard we now aspire to even while we continue, in our flesh, to rebel.

Hebrews 12 is about what God is giving us. Whatever the success of our own efforts could be, the end of God’s loving work to discipline us is that we will share in his holiness.

Our attempts must surely fail, but his cannot. He is actually getting us holier, a work he will one day be able to say he has finished, in keeping with Paul’s confident assertion that ‘he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6).

This has many implications for the way I process unwelcome experiences, as Hebrews makes plain. No one likes them, but I treasure exceedingly the result of this loving discipline.

But it also establishes something to hold on to as I ponder my response to contemporary challenges to, for example, traditional views of gender and sex. Wherever the debate is going, holiness is still a flat-out priority. God still cares about it and is active to achieve it, so that we will achieve the ultimate human ambition, and share his holiness. I can’t afford to let all my energy be sapped by processing the arguments. I must save my best efforts to pursue the holiness God defines for me.

Can we just be friends?

As culture demands fresh answers to questions of transgender and intersex, we want to pursue a nuanced, subtle understanding, embracing new

science, and exploring new dimensions of grace. We must try to learn from past mistakes to grow pastoral sensitivity in well-tempered language.

But sin and holiness remain enemies!

Lust remains lust, whether it begins with L, G, B, T, Q, I or any other letter.

And this boundary is drawn by God out of his great love for us. Sexual arousal, except with a marriage partner (of the opposite sex), is not the good it appears to be when viewed through the distorting lenses of sin, selfishness and godless materialism.

I may feel uncertain how to respond when someone is convinced their body is not made in their true gender; and I could lose confidence in calling people to holiness, because I can see someone facing difficult and painful questions that leaves them feeling justified in experimenting outside oneman, one-woman marriage. But love for God and neighbour calls me not to stop talking about sexual holiness to them, or to the church at large.

How can sexual holiness stay on the agenda at church?

An old pastor of mine made it his practice, in a large student church, to make sure he had a mini-series of sermons on sex every February, ‘when the sap is rising’, as he put it. There were at other times a series of short interviews to remind us that God is for sex, sex is for marriage, and marriage is for keeps. And I still remember them as loving reminders of the goodness of God by which to shape our lives.

With this in mind, here are ways I might think about leading a church, if that was still my calling: J Corinthians – I might choose to preach through 1 Corinthians in a couple of terms, or 1 Corinthians chapters 5 to 7 in a term, or just chapter 7 over three weeks. It would be exciting to develop Paul’s rich treatment of sin’s effects in the body, how church discipline loves people, why singleness and marriage are both God’s gift, and how to think of both when the return of Jesus is actually filling the horizon. John Richardson’s God, Sex and Marriage remains an outstanding, highly relevant and straightforward handling of 1 Corinthians 7, including very clear thinking in its tricky corners.

J Marriage – In any sermon in any week on any text, I could consider how the text informs our thinking about the challenges which will be faced in the congregation this week, including sexual purity and marriage.

Without saying the same things every week, I should probably address the

oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 27

issue more often than when marriage specifically comes up in the text, in so many words. The character of God, the beauty of the gospel, the glory of faithfulness, the reality of covenant, the need for longsuffering, the freedom of forgiveness, and the appeal of true humility are all highly pertinent to marriage and sexuality.

I could try to paint a picture of any virtue, any communicable attribute of God, from any passage, in the colours of marriage.

J Singleness – In exactly the same way, in any sermon in any week, I can consider how the text under consideration informs our thinking about sexual purity and singleness.

Again, the goal is biblical freshness, not dullness. Singleness is rarely front and centre in the Bible’s cultures, but the qualities of godly singleness are illuminated on every page.

How can I pastor the single people in the acute loneliness they sometimes feel? Importantly, by showing them the God who is their refuge in just that experience. For example, the deafening emptiness of a flat is an opportunity to cry out to him and know his presence which, though it takes an effort to appropriate, rather easily trumps the false companionship offered on the internet. What would it look like to experiment instead with the sweetest possible communion?

J Small groups – What about the small groups in my church? What are they like on holiness? How can I ask questions that connect some aspect of King Jesus seen in our passage to the struggles of the day to live out his

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rule? King Jesus showed daily courage of greater-than-Joshua proportions.

How does the continuing gracious presence of his Spirit open new possibilities after a weak week in the battlefields with world, flesh and devil?

King Jesus is the eternal king and will be the one to welcome us into the new creation. How does that encourage the same-sex tempted to keep wanting celibacy? How can I help small group leaders to get here? I’ll probably need to help them shift gears, to become convinced that if our discussion includes these sorts of questions being honestly debated, in expectation that these are the sorts of struggles we (leaders included) are actually in, it will grow holiness in all of us.

J Leaders – Leaders in the church need help themselves. I may need help to work out how I can be known, like everyone else, as a repenting believer, without needing all the details to be shared. Doubtless some would be too interested in the more sordid corners of my soul. From time to time, I may need help to rediscover grace daily, so I have a rising well of refreshment to share rather than ordering people away to find their own.

Few things kill a congregation’s grasp on grace more quickly than if I as pastor hide myself with sham obedience under the law. Are there a couple of elders I trust to share my real life battles, to help me walk in grace? How could I grow them on to do that well?

What about our unholiness?

My own need truly to walk in grace for my failures, has important implications

for everyone in the church. It’s not grace for me and law for everyone else. Holiness is, now, for the saved, the redeemed, the forgiven children of God we all are. That forgiveness was and is and ever shall be for all my sin, past, present and future.

This is why holiness is no longer a doomed exercise. I am clean forever (positionally sanctified) which secures the possibility of being progressively sanctified – that is, of being cleansed

by Christ all the way along the road of failing-but-growing holiness.

A teenager professes faith but struggles with pornography, masturbation, gender confusion, same sex temptation, envy, pride, self harm, prayerlessness, and everything else under the sun. How perfectly they belong with the rest of us in the church, which is a hospital and not a courtroom! For us Jesus came.

She or he may believe, as Satan would have them, that they fail once and fail eternally, or if they fail hard enough they fail irredeemably. A willingness to raise the question of holiness for Christ must be allowed to drive us again and again to cling to Christ.

If we ignore Jesus as Lord, including in matters of holiness, it won’t be long before we ignore Jesus as Saviour. If we ignore Jesus as Saviour, it won’t be long before we can no longer bear the idea that he is our holy Lord. Christ both cleanses and calls us, and he is equally, gloriously serious about both.

Andrew Nicholls is Director of Pastoral Care at Oak Hill

Job’s story, our story Eric Ortlund opens up the Book of Job, and takes a fresh look at the opening chapter, tracing God’s purpose in inexplicable human suffering

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any flaw in Job’s walk with God, he turns Job’s integrity Why is the book of Job in the canon? It can be easy to itself into a problem; and untrue, because we are already assume that God gave us this lengthy and difficult book assured of Job’s love for God in the first verse of chapter only as a resource on the rare occasions when our lives 1. God sees this as clearly as the narrator, repeating Job’s aren’t going very well. Having taught and preached the spiritual qualities, and even adding, ‘there is no one like him book in a variety of contexts, however, it seems to me in all the earth’. Since this is a phrase only rarely used for more likely that God gave us this book because Job’s human beings and more often applied to God, this is high experience is so common. praise indeed!

You don’t have to talk to very many people in church And yet, baseless as it might be, the Accuser’s question before you see the outlines of Job’s ordeal in another lingers: ‘Does Job fear God for nothing?’ The implied Christian’s story: God allows a terrible loss, which cannot answer is obviously no. Job only says he loves you (so the be explained in relation to some sin in that Christian’s life, Accuser implies), but what he really loves are the secondary or God’s work of sanctifying them as a Christian. And with blessings you give. Take those away and you’ll see how he tears in their eyes, you are faced with the terrible question: really feels about you. Job is, in other words, a gold digger, why did God allow this? Why is it that God allows some mouthing empty pieties people, who live out their just to hold on to his faith most beautifully, to picture-perfect life. suffer so nightmarishly?

We are only nine verses Job’s nightmare unfolds into this long and complex in the early chapters of book, but already we the book with deceptive are near its heart. The simplicity. Almost the first issue here is whether thing we learn about him is Naked I came from my mother’s womb, a human can have a his extraordinary piety: the and naked I will depart. relationship with God three phrases describing The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; for God’s sake, with any him in the book’s very first may the name of the Lord be praised. other secondary benefit verse are an Old Testament remaining secondary and way of describing Job’s Job 1:21 dispensable. Will we enter complete integrity with into a relationship with God God: ‘This man was where all we gain from it is blameless and upright; God? Or are we too selfish? Is all our piety just for show? he feared God and shunned evil.’ This does not mean Job This question makes me very uncomfortable. I don’t never sinned, but only that he consistently confessed and benefit from my relationship with God in ways identical to repented of his sins. As a result, Job has what is, in an Old a member of the old covenant, but I do benefit from being Testament framework, a picture-perfect existence. As far a Christian in ways secondary to the forgiveness of my back in the Old Testament as Deuteronomy, God insists sins and eternal life. I never could have married and started that obedience to him will not go unrewarded; Job is the a family unless God’s grace had been at work in me for ultimate example of this. decades prior to meeting my wife.

Unbeknownst to Job, however, he is the subject of an But if God allowed the loss of one of my children, what unfortunate conversation in God’s throne room. As God’s would be revealed about the quality of my love for God? various divine servants give reports to their sovereign, the When I next went to church, without suppressing my Accuser also reports back to the Lord, at first evasively, grief (as Job does in chapter 1 and verse 20), would I and then viciously attacking God’s favourite servant as an still worship God for his own sake, and because he still utter hypocrite. This accusation is, of course, both unfair promises himself to me in deepest intimacy? Or would it and untrue: Unfair because, when the Accuser cannot find

THE LORD HAS TAKEN AWAY

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be revealed that my Christianity was just for show, that I ‘receives the outcome of his faith’ (1 Peter 1:9) and sees was treating God like a business partner, a means to some God as God in a whole new way. He is able to receive God in all of God’s fullness in a way he couldn’t before. Almost other end? Thomas Merton put it in this way: ‘If we love the last thing Job says, in chapter 42, is, ‘Now my eyes God for something less than himself, we cherish a desire have seen you’. He is caught up with the all-surpassing that can fail us. We run the risk of hating Him if we do not worth of knowing God (Philippians 3:8), and receives the get what we hope for.’ object of his confession, God and more of God, in that God could, of course, simply rebuke these accusations state where ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all (as he does in Zechariah chapter 3). Instead, he allows a manner of thing shall be well’ (Julian of Norwich). terrible ordeal in which Job loses every secondary blessing And so the question of ‘why?’ which Job asked so and has every earthly reason to give up on God. I think plaintively, which has echoed in the mouths of so many we begin to see why: There is a sense in which God has to Christians who have read their own story in Job’s, receives allow these temporary experiences of extreme, inexplicable the terrible and blessed answer: God is actually about suffering, because it is the only way to prove the reality of the saving our souls and giving himself to us. Job’s suffering relationship. After all, a relationship with God in which every has nothing to do with secondary blessing remains some hidden sin or with secondary is the only kind growing him as a believer, of relationship which will for Job is already a mature save you. Otherwise, we’ll believer. It has only to do be bored in heaven, when with God communicating all earthly blessings have himself to Job in a way passed away. God allows almost too profound for extreme and inexplicable My ears had heard of you words. suffering in order to but now my eyes have seen you.

The wordplay between push us into the kind Therefore I despise myself ‘bless’ and ‘curse’ in Job of relationship with him and repent in dust and ashes chapter 1 was hinted that will actually save our at above: although the souls. Some affirmations Job 42:5-6 Accuser predicts Job (‘I love you best of all, will curse, Job does the Lord!’) simply cannot opposite. A poignant and remain theoretical forever. precious truth is discernible here. Sometimes God allows Even more, when Job makes his tear-stained, beautiful terrible evil to touch our lives, and the Devil’s intention confession (see the panel on the opposite page), blessing is to destroy our relationship with God so that we’ll God’s name just as sincerely when God takes away as (terrifyingly) belong to him. when he gives, he does more than just prove his love for But in God’s grace, this evil produces exactly the God. He seals himself in it. Job’s confession is similar in opposite of what it intends – it drives Job deeper into God significance to wedding vows, which do more than express instead of away from him. And as God enables us to echo inner emotion, for most lovers affirm the equivalent of Job’s costly confession, we too receive the outcome of our ‘in sickness and in health’ to each other many times faith, just as Job did, and our eyes see what our mouths before saying so during their marriage ceremony. Rather, can hardly find words to express. ‘I had heard of you by the wedding vows seal and objectively externalize the the hearing of the ear...’ relationship in a way which no other private declaration of love can.

Eric Ortlund lectures in Old Testament and Biblical Hebrew Job’s confession does the same. When he blesses God’s name in the midst of terrible loss instead of cursing, he at Oak Hill

MY EYES HAVE SEEN YOU

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Ps, Qs and other good manners Are good manners simply stylised behaviour, or do they have more deeply ethical content? Kirsty Birkett explores the rise and fall of good manners and argues for their revival today

I would like to stand up for good manners. Maybe I’m just a latent Victorian, but hear me out. I think good manners, in a formal sense, are worth bringing back.

Why? Because, as our Williams stated (see their quotes on the left), manners make – well let us call it humanity, which was, of course, what the original proverb was referring to. It conveyed the sense that manners are what separate us from animals; they are part of what is essential to being human. These days, however, it seems that good manners are a relic of the quaint but slightly regrettable past; suitable for Downton Abbey, perhaps, to be enjoyed in a slightly nostalgic way, but hardly relevant to a progressive, liberal society.

Rooted in ethics Nonetheless, for a long time the concept of good manners was deeply rooted in ethics, not just stylised behaviour. A person’s ‘manners’ were his or her habitual moral behaviour. Chaucer describes the duchess who 32 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

‘did good gladly’; those were her manners. Coverdale’s Bible translated 1 Corinthians 14:33 as ‘Evil speaking corrupts good manners’ (‘good character’ in the NIV).

Having good manners meant being a virtuous person, and not just conforming to what might be acceptable in society, although in a largely Christianised culture the two usages might not be easily distinguishable. Francis Bacon, for instance, wrote of ‘the state of Religion, or manners’ as if the two were the same thing.

Other words that are used to describe ‘good manners’ have similar roots. Civility, for instance, has a moral as well

In an act of epic gallantry and good manners, Sir Walter Raleigh lays his cloak on a muddy puddle for Queen Elizabeth I to walk on, as pictured in a 19th century illustration.

as a neutral meaning. It comes from what is appropriate for a civilization, that which happens between citizens.

Civil order, for instance, is opposed to a state of anarchy.

It can be used in a purely technical sense, with no particular value claim; such as a civil court, a civil war, civil disobedience or being a civilian, as opposed to a soldier, all of which may or may not involve good manners. (Contrary oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 33

to the Horrible Histories joke, the English Civil War was not so named because soldiers would ask, ‘May I kill you, please?’)

Sixteenth century usages, however, show a move to a meaning with more ethical content: ‘civil’ being used to describe not just anything concerned with citizens, but in particular that which benefits citizens. Justice, lack of hatred, and other moral values, were considered ‘civil’.

It also came to suggest the kind of society which was advanced, or highly-developed; its content would include clothing or behaviour which reflected biblical values, such as women not concerning themselves with showy vanity but rather modest demeanour.

It also covered obliging or thoughtful behaviour. In turn, it was used as a standard to do with external forms. The ‘civil thing’ was the polite thing, the publically acceptable thing, although what that thing was generally reflected the kind of behaviour that makes it easy for people to live with each other, being tolerant, kind and considerate, and benevolent.

Courtesy was what was appropriate for court, implying a certain formality. But with its overtones of the chivalric tradition, it also had a moral sense. It was typical of those who valued humility and consideration for others, generosity and love. A Wycliffite sermon of about 1380 describes Christ as having ‘courtesy’.

The word ‘polite’ is slightly different, having a root meaning of something smooth, or polished, and so used of people figuratively. It transferred to a sense of things that are refined, elegant, or scholarly; there is an implicit class or value judgement. Only the well-educated would be in a position to have this quality; it has an overtone of good taste as well as knowledge of the arts or scholarship.

However, precisely because what characterised social interaction in Western society was a Christianised ethic, ‘polite’ behaviour was considered to be that which is respectful or considerate of other people. To do something politely was to do it in a refined or educated manner, but was also to do it with consideration of the feelings of others.

Codified v considerate behaviour Just what are good manners, then? We can think of them in at least two distinct ways. One is the external pattern

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of behaviour that is considered acceptable in society, that may even be a means of class distinction; good manners being those which the upper class display, which marks them off from the more rustic, less refined and lookeddown-upon manners of a lower class. If that is the case, they can reasonably be considered artificial and something that a truly advanced society should do away with; a matter of codified behaviour that separates people.

In this sense, what is civil behaviour has even been contrasted with what is truly Christian. ‘He which reaches but to civil honesty comes far short of being in Christ’, R Bolton wrote in 1611. CS Lewis wrote of what is called Christian behaviour, but is really just the externally polite form; it is not actually Christian or what makes a Christian.

Anyone with any biblical knowledge knows the truth of this. We do not preach mere morality or, even worse, mere good manners. A Christian is someone saved through faith in Christ, having gone through a transforming rebirth entirely through God’s grace.

However, having been reborn, the essence of the new person is to be living for others rather than oneself; and doing so means acting in a way that was always at the root of what came to be considered good manners in Western society. This is far more than a means of social stratification which reflects a sad truth about the way fallen humans judge each other. It is, rather, a codified form of behaviour that is meant to provide ways of considering others. The essence of good manners is to make the other person feel at ease and welcomed.

Why do we not see this more in evidence? After all, valuing others is a quality that is still applauded in our society. It is considered good to be welcoming to others, making them feel safe and affirmed. However, this quality is ironically at odds with another value that is becoming almost totally dominant; the value of expressing oneself, being true to oneself, standing up for one’s rights and following one’s own path.

Somehow, the two are meant to go together, but that is not what happens in practice, and it is hardly surprising, since considering others and putting oneself first are logically incompatible. Which one will win? We are sinful people, and in a culture that increasingly rejects Christian values, we naturally revert to selfishness; putting oneself first is always a temptation, and when this is not only

allowed but overtly taught and applauded in society, the ideal of making sure it is others who flourish most, is likely to lose.

So we see a decline in good manners in the real, internal sense; the attitude of seeing the other as more important than oneself. We also, not surprisingly, see a decline of good manners in the external sense.

Should we, then, make an effort to bring back good manners, with its formality and overt external gestures?

You might expect me to answer: ‘No, instead we should concentrate on the central problem, the sinfulness at the heart of people, and preach the gospel rather than worry about external forms.’

Of course I want the gospel preached and people converted. However, I also think we should make an effort to bring back the external forms. They are good, and good for us. They are ways of acting and speaking that have been worked out over centuries to enable people to live together well; they work because they are based on Christian values, and Christian values are good for us as a society. They will not save people, so we need real gospel preaching at the same time; but as an act of service to society, as well as way of enacting our Christian convictions ourselves, let us be polite.

The problem with good manners All very well, you might say, but good manners, the mode of behaviour considered refined, polite, or civilised, has all sorts of associated problems.

It is actually lowering to girls, as Eustace was quick to inform Edmund and Caspian when they gave the best cabin to Lucy (rather than to Eustace). But does he have a point? Are not traditional good manners demeaning, suggesting that women are not capable of opening doors, carrying large parcels, standing up? In fact, is not the idea of a man deferring to a lady in any sense simply reinforcing the idea that men and women are different types of being, not equals deserving of the same treatment?

Ah, landmines abound here. However, without repeating an entire volume of what I think of feminism and its social philosophy, I would at least say: Sometimes I am not capable of opening heavy doors or carrying large parcels, or at least to do so causes me far more discomfort than

it would a man. Some of these traditional good manners just recognise ordinary reality; and I always appreciate the effort.

Yet it is fairly rare these days for these simple courtesies to be offered. Often, I suspect that a man would like to offer to help me but is afraid to; afraid of seeming to be condescending, or perhaps having suffered an angry rebuke when he has offered in the past. That is a real shame. The only way we can treat people with equal consideration is to recognise their different needs.

What of the contexts in which formal manners do not make others comfortable? When an insistence on, for instance, table manners, makes otherwise educated people feel uncomfortable and excluded?

I maintain my stance. In my experience, it is those who are best educated in formal manners who are best able to relax them in an entirely appropriate and comfortable way.

It is the person who knows the rules really well who can break them seamlessly, especially when they understand what manners are truly for.

What about other cultures? Some cultures consider it polite to finish everything on one’s plate, while others think exactly the same behaviour is impolite. Surely we need to be sensitive to this?

Well, of course. If we are genuinely concerned for others, we will make an effort to learn how another culture works, and be slow to take offence. This is not an argument for abandoning what I think is essentially a good thing; rather, I think it an argument for training ourselves in good manners all the more.

So, at the risk of sounding like an ancient curmudgeon, please mind your manners. Be polite. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Listen courteously, stand as a remark of respect for elders, let others be served first, be on time, don’t speak over others and apologise if you do. Think about how to be overtly considerate. It’s not a matter of class or culture, and it is a flexible code that allows for appropriate variation. In other words, in humility, consider others better than yourself. It’s entirely Christian.

Now, just wait until I get started on correct grammar...

Kirsty Birkett lectured at Oak Hill for 14 years. She is now Associate Minister at St Paul’s, Hadley Wood, and a Latimer Research Fellow

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ASKING QUESTIONS OF TRANS THEOLOGY

In the last edition of Commentary, Michael Hayden considered the accusation that transgenderism is a replay of Gnosticism, where the ‘real me’ is trapped in the wrong body. He continues here with a review of a book on trans theology Is transgenderism simply the ancient heresy of Gnosticism rehashed and reheated? That was the subject of recent debate between Peter Lynas, of the Evangelical Alliance, and Professor Mike Higton, of the University of Durham, which I looked at in the previous edition of Commentary. I argued that those who equate transgenderism with Gnosticism lack sufficient historical nuance in their presentation of Gnosticism, and contemporary nuance in their presentation of transgenderism.

However, those who say there are no parallels between the two are also mistaken.

Although there has been only a trickle of books and articles on trans theology in the past 10 years, one work worthy of attention is This is My Body: Hearing the Theology of Transgender Christians (published in 2016), edited by Christina Beardsley and Michelle O’Brien.

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The book is significant because the editors and contributors are actually transgender themselves.

Given the prevalence of Gnostic charges aimed at transgender theologians, Christina Beardsley and Michelle O’Brien try to counter those charges head-on at scattered points throughout the book. But the success of their efforts, as they answer the important questions of theology, anthropology and epistemology, is questionable.

A disappointing lack of theology For a book subtitled, Hearing the Theology of Transgender Christians, there is a disappointing lack of

theology in This is My Body. There is much talk of faith, spirituality and being a Christian throughout the book, but God is often absent, sometimes from entire chapters.

If the authors wish to convince us that theirs is not a Gnostic theology, they needed to show us what their conception of God actually is.

Many of the most egregious errors of historical Gnosticism were found in the realm of theology proper, and anyone seeking to avoid the errors of Gnosticism needs to pay careful attention to this area. In This is My Body, however, one gets the impression that the authors might be scared of doing this, because the issue of transgenderism raises serious

questions about the nature of God. What kind of God could make such a mistake to give me the wrong body? What does the Creatorcreature distinction look like if I have to recreate myself? The sole foray into these waters comes in a chapter

by O’Brien, when she simply states, ‘I don’t believe that God makes mistakes’, and then moves swiftly on.

Issues of anthropology As might be expected, much of the heat in the debate comes in the area of anthropology. The classic charge on the part of many evangelical writers is best summarised by Nancy Pearcey in her book, Love Thy Body: oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 37

We need to hear the critique that the vast majority of trans people have thought much more deeply and extensively about what it means to live as embodied creatures than many evangelicals have. And if we want to charge trans theologians with improperly giving the mind ontological priority over the body, we need to make sure we’re not guilty of the same crime

Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Transgenderism, she says, in splitting the mind from the body, and giving the mind ontological priority as the ‘real me’, offers ‘a devastatingly reductive view of the body. Young people are absorbing the idea that the physical body is not part of the authentic self... This is ancient Gnosticism in a new garb.’

This charge draws much scorn from Christina Beardsley. She argues that ‘the transition journey, in which the subject’s body is subtly, or dramatically, changed by hormones and surgery, is not a Gnostic rejection of the body or denial of its importance, but a quest for fuller embodiment.’

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In a debate so heated, such an important point as this requires a high degree of nuance. We must certainly not fall into the trap of arguing that trans people do not care about their bodies at all. Such a facile comparison to ancient Gnosticism is easily rebuffed by trans people for whom it simply does not match their lived experience.

We need to hear Beardsley’s critique, that the vast majority of trans people have thought much more deeply and extensively about what it means to live as embodied creatures than many evangelicals have. And if we want to charge trans theologians with improperly giving the mind ontological priority over the body, we need to make sure we’re not guilty of the same crime.

This does not mean, however, that we shouldn’t point out that trans theologians have a deficient anthropology; they do. That trans people are concerned with their bodies in a way that ancient Gnostics simply weren’t does not mean that they aren’t guilty of related (if not identical) mind-body dualism.

Epistemology and scripture If anthropology provides some of the closest parallels between trans theology and Gnosticism, epistemology is hardly far behind.

Questions of epistemology and revelation were central to ancient Gnosticism, but they do not appear to have been well thought through, if at all, by trans theologians. This problem is best seen in the approach to scripture, which does not feature

much in the pages of This is My Body.

The authors are often content to ignore what scripture might have to say, at one point even admitting, ‘The Bible is an even worse resource for trans theology than it is for feminist theology’!

Where scripture is referenced, it is of a cursory and superficial nature.

Careful attention to the words of scripture are not given anywhere in the book, but instead the ultimate authority is the lived experience of trans Christians. As is typical of a revisionist project, experience trumps all.

The need for serious work I believe we need a nuanced approach to the question of whether there are parallels between Gnosticism and transgenderism. We need a response that takes into account the historical reality of Gnosticism, and the contemporary reality of transgenderism; that refuses to make connections where they don’t exist, but also refuses not to make connections where they do exist.

In This is My Body, the authors wished to rebut the charge of Gnosticism, but failed adequately to do so. If trans theologians wish their opponents to stop making such charges, they had better do some serious work in the areas of theology proper, anthropology, and epistemology. Until such work is forthcoming, it is hard for us not to see these parallels.

Michael Hayden is an ordinand, studying for an MA at Oak Hill

A congregation of the faithful

Lee Gatiss examines the Anglican doctrine of the church, and shows how it can nourish the reforming and renewing activity of Evangelicals in the Church of England In recent days, there has been some confusion about Anglican polity among Evangelicals. Some have made the claim that if we wish (quite rightly) to distance ourselves from false teachers within our diocese or national church, we can easily do so, because in Anglicanism the visible church is really only the local congregation.

It is true, that the Church of England has never seen local parishes as merely ‘lesser groupings of the faithful’, subordinate to the bishop and diocese, the ‘real’ church.

That is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, which teaches that ‘the bishop is to be considered as the high oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 39

priest of his flock, from whom the life in Christ of his faithful is in some way derived and dependent. Therefore all should hold in great esteem the liturgical life of the diocese centered around the bishop, especially in his cathedral church’ (Sacrosanctum Consilium, promulgated

by Pope Paul VI in 1963).

The parish is truly the heart of the Church of England.

However, that should not mean that for Anglican Evangelicals the parish, or local congregation, is all. Neither does it mean that the bishop and diocese is nothing. Nevertheless, the claim some have made is that Article 19 of the Thirtynine Articles supports the idea that Anglican polity is Congregationalist, to the extent that nothing outside the local gathering is really ‘church’. The Article says: ‘The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men.’

In the historical context, however, the word ‘congregation’ was not used exclusively of a small local gathering of Christians (as a modern reader may imagine).

Theologians of that period routinely used the word to refer to the entire church militant and/or triumphant.

There are many examples from English and Continental Reformers speaking about the universal visible church as a congregation (and lots of Latin synonyms), even a congregation that can never actually meet together physically because it is spread over the whole world.

The term ‘congregation’ was much employed by our English Reformers to translate the biblical Greek word ekklesia. Yet they did this not to restrict the word to a local setting, but actually to widen its meaning. Their point was that the church is not just the Roman clergy under the Pope, as some claimed. This is why the Oxford English Dictionary specifically gives the use of the word in Article 19 as an example under its definition of congregation, ‘in the sense of the whole body of the faithful, the Church of Christ’, as distinct from the contemporary clericalist connotations, or the narrower, parochial sense.

with the ancient church, unity, holiness, efficacy of doctrine to convert people, holy leaders, glorious miracles, the light of prophecy, the confession of adversaries, the unhappy end of those who oppose the church, and the temporal happiness of those who defend it.

Bellarmine also gives a snappier definition, aimed more at brevity than comprehensiveness. The Catholic teaching is that there are three essential marks which make a church: ‘The profession of the true faith, the communion of the Sacraments, and subjection to the legitimate pastor, the Roman Pontiff.’

By deliberate contrast, our Article 19 says: ‘The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.’

According to the Thirty-nine Articles, a true church is a group of people, with lives marked by an intention to be faithful and loyal to the holy God in their lives, who listen to his word and celebrate his sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper in a disciplined and orderly way under the properly constituted and accountable leadership of bishops, presbyters and deacons. This is the kind of healthy congregation that Anglicans today ought to be pioneering, establishing and securing, the goal of all the reforming and renewing activity of Evangelicals within the Church of England.

Challenges of the doctrine This Reformed Anglican ecclesiology is a particular challenge for people holding the following views: 1. Those who think there is no Anglican doctrine of the church and we can just make it up as we go along.

Anglican ecclesiology is biblically based, historically rooted, and carefully defined.

The marks of the church Cardinal Bellarmine (1542-1621) lists no less than 15 marks of the true church in his treatise on the subject, De Controversiis Christianae Fidei (1588). They are: catholicity, antiquity, long duration, the multitude of believers, apostolic succession of bishops, agreement in doctrine 40 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

2. Those who think Anglicanism is basically Roman Catholicism with a few twists. It is, rather, clearly a form of confessional Protestantism, with a Reformed flavour.

3. Those who think Anglicanism is essentially Congregationalism. A misreading of the word ‘congregation’

5. Those who do not celebrate the Lord’s Supper in accordance with Christ’s institution. As the Articles say: ‘The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them’ (Article 25); and ‘The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped (Article 28). This is what it means to duly minister the sacraments as Anglicans.

Cardinal Robert Bellarmine.

in Article 19 might give this impression on an ahistorical and superficial reading. Yet the Article is not saying the church is just the local meeting. Moreover, there are clear confessional and institutional accountability structures over the minister which are built into authentic Anglican polity.

It is precisely because Anglicans are not actually Congregationalists (who give significant powers to the congregational meeting), that it is dangerous to ignore and sideline these wider accountability structures, since ministerial accountability can thereby be seemingly removed altogether. Otherwise, what we could end up with is a strange, pseudo-Congregationalism focused on monarchical presbyters, who can potentially become tyrannical mini-popes, free from any restraint either from above or below.

4. Those who think that church is defined purely institutionally. The Anglican view is that the church is marked by pure doctrine and proper administration of the sacraments. The Articles deliberately reject a view which sees communion with a particular bishop as an essential mark of a true church. Popes of all kinds are to be resisted.

6. Those who do not believe in infant baptism. To ‘duly minister’ the sacraments ‘according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same’ must surely include the baptising of infants of believers, which is ‘most agreeable with the institution of Christ’ (Article 27). To deny this is to deny a key part of the definition of Anglican polity. There may be a minority report on this doctrine within the context of Christianity as a whole, and among Evangelicals; but it cannot pretend to be Anglican, according to the Articles.

7. Those Anglicans who think bishops and dioceses are not important, or that ordination is nothing – a position characterised as ‘a prayer meeting which recognises Bible teachers’ by Nigel Atkinson in a talk in 2015. This is not a classically Protestant, never mind an Anglican, view if Anglicanism is defined confessionally. There can be a church without duly ordained ministers (as in Acts chapters 13 and 14), but duly ordained ministers are necessary for the church’s wellbeing (see Acts 14:23 and Titus 1:5). Episcopacy is not the only way to organise a true church; it is not an intrinsic part of the essential definition of the visible church in Article 19. Yet clearly it is part of the Anglican doctrine of church polity as defined by the Thirty-nine Articles and Prayer Book as a whole.

No doubt the Anglican doctrine of the church is challenging in many other ways. But this is just to sketch out some initial implications for today, for those trying to recover a genuinely Anglican ecclesiology, or for Evangelicals (of any denomination) who are interested in what such a thing might look like.

Revd Dr Lee Gatiss is the Director of Church Society and author of Light After Darkness: How the Reformers Regained, Retold, and Relied on the Gospel of Grace oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 41

EVANGELISM IS TRINITY-SHAPED Fred Sanders explores how evangelism can be enriched and empowered when we see it in the light of the spiritual reality of the trinity

Most people think that the trinity will complicate evangelism. We assume that sharing the gospel is easy but explaining the trinity is hard.

But if you consider the nature of evangelism for a moment, it turns out that it is already a nested set of mysteries in itself. How does a person become a Christian? How can a few sentences in a human conversation bring about salvation, and launch a person on an endless journey into the life of God? It is precisely here that the trinity helps. All of these mysteries lead toward, are sorted out by, and culminate in, the mystery of the trinity. In other words, evangelism is a mystery solved by the trinity, because evangelism is inescapably trinitarian.

One mystery that may loom especially large for any evangelist is the surprising contrast between the 42 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

brief message and the big result. Or (to put the contrast another way) how few words we say when sharing the gospel, versus how vast the reality of salvation is. This mystery is a kind of discrepancy of scale. How can a handful of words bring somebody into contact with the personal reality of God’s salvation?

Already in the New Testament we see striking examples of this contrast.

When Matthew tells us that Jesus preached, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,’ that very brief message is probably a shorthand summary for Jesus’ full message, as expanded in the Sermon on the Mount. Still, it is a strikingly short formula: a nine-word command for response to God’s decisive action.

When the jailer in Philippi asks, ‘What must I do to be saved?’, Paul responds with a handful of words: ‘Believe in

the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved – you and your household.’ Again, these 14 words reported in Acts are a condensed, introductory summary of the whole message. We are told immediately that Paul and Silas went on and ‘spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house.’

Perhaps the most striking New Testament example of a short message producing an outsized evangelistic result is Peter’s speech in the house of Cornelius. ‘You know the message God sent to the people of Israel,’ Peter tells these Gentiles.

He goes on for a couple of hundred words (about 10 verses), explaining clearly how God was ‘announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ,’ describing the key points in the life and work of Jesus.

His story falls very much into the pattern of the second article of the

news is set forth, the words spoken still amount to a mere handful.

The response, when a listener experiences salvation, simply seems out of all proportion. The reason, of course, is that counting words is not the right way to measure spiritual communication. While God consents for his message to be carried along on faithful words (the pattern of which he himself provides by inspiration), that message is not ultimately about the words, but about a spiritual reality.

Evangelism is a verbal expression of a more-than-verbal reality, testifying to the presence of something, or rather of someone, who is truly there. The knowledge communicated through evangelism is knowledge by acquaintance rather than knowledge by description. That is why it doesn’t have to be an account that is proportionate to the result.

Evangelistic words are pointers that indicate or pick out the Son by the power of the Spirit.

Apostles’ Creed. He concludes that ‘everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.’

But perhaps ‘concludes’ is not the right word, because Luke tells us that ‘while Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message.’ Surely this is among the greatest interrupted sermons of all time. Something massive broke out there in the house of Cornelius, triggered by Peter’s clear account of the saving life of Christ.

We can anticipate the trinitarian aspect of this evangelistic event by

saying that when Peter testified about the Son of God, the Spirit of God bore witness to the truth and reality of what he said. The Spirit bore witness to Christ, and salvation came to the house of Cornelius. The persons of the Trinity were in that room. The Spirit made Christ present; though the Son was exalted to the right hand of the Father, he was present in power where salvation was offered in his name.

Anybody who has proclaimed the gospel and seen people respond to it will recognise this pattern. No matter how competently the good

Fred Sanders is a systematic theologian who specialises in the doctrine of the trinity. He teaches at Biola University in the Torrey Honors Institute. He is the author of The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010), The Triune God (Zondervan, 2016), and several other books.

Note: An editorial error led to this article being wrongly attributed to David Shaw in the print edition of Commentary. With apologies to Fred Sanders, the online edition is now attributed correctly. oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 43

BOOKS Chris Green reads Dominion, Tom Holland’s account of how Christianity has shaped Western culture, plus a new biography of Bismarck, which shows what happens to societies when the moral landscape changes

Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind Tom Holland London: Little, Brown, 2019

44 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

Tom Holland is a phenomenon. His output covers ancient Greece and Rome, Anglo-Saxon England, and a wonderful, gossipy translation of Herodotus. More importantly (arguably, even more important than Dominion), he has cast his historian’s eye over the history of Islam. The Shadow of the Sword is, simply, an imperative read.

Dominion, though, is a different kind of history book again. Holland is clear: this is not a history of Christianity – it’s narrower and more selective – nor is it a history of Christian thought or theology. It’s an account of the impact Christianity has had in shaping the assumptions of Western culture, an impact so deep that those who reject the doctrine are unaware that both their rejection and their alternatives are actually based on Christian ideas.

Growing up, Holland was fascinated

by Greece and Rome, but came to realise that while he loved the stories,

he was repulsed by their moral strangeness. Violence, power and sexual abuse were inherent. Somehow, something seems to have violently disrupted that narrative with an alternative that produced meekness, self control, and love of stranger, in turn producing hospitals, universities, democracy and universal human rights. That violent disruptor was the gospel.

For readers of Rodney Stark or Os Guinness, this might be familiar, except for Holland’s breadth and depth. He is an outstanding longform historian, and his account of the counter narrative, of the sweep of the message from Abraham through to today is, I would have thought, hard to disagree with. Dawkins take note: the narrative ‘Christianity is evil’, is dead.

The pattern of each chapter is the same. Holland picks one illuminating event from a period, and uses it to cast light both on its immediate

context, and today. That way he takes us from ancient Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, through to President Trump. He does a masterly job of distilling the Old and New Testaments for the ordinary reader. I’d quibble with some of his critical choices on dating and authorship, and most importantly I think he downplays the significance of Jesus’ resurrection, but all in all, this is an astonishingly fair summary from someone who – still – wouldn’t quite call himself a Christian.

Of course he has to leave things out; what’s remarkable is what he’s managed to keep in.

This is an ideal book to give to a reading non-Christian.

You travel on. This is not the kind of history book where nothing happens between the Council of Nicea and Geneva; no, that long millennium is rich in shaping our culture, stone by stone, story by story. And treasures abound. Who knew that the abolition of slavery was actually argued from the canons of the church in Bologna, centuries before Wilberforce? Calvin, when he comes, is given a remarkably kind ride, with Geneva as the centre of care for refugees. The Puritans, when they come, are shown to have a love for marriage and family and its pleasures.

I will say – and perhaps this is inevitable – that I find this utterly plausible. Human rights have their origin in creation and covenant; and Live Aid only worked because of an appeal to common humanity based on centuries of believing we were one in Christ. And when Holland opens the dark alternative, of our culture based not on Christian values, but

on some Nietzschian power struggle, he finds it utterly appalling in its knowingly anti-Christian consistency.

As well he should. The dominance of the strongest has always been an appalling creed.

So his thesis is that Christianity is woven so deeply into the West, that we cannot think outside it. Both John Lennon’s advocacy of free love and the #MeToo movement have Christian origins; Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling are very Protestant atheists; the French state’s famous secularity depends on a Christian distinction; and most painfully, as Holland recounts visiting the sites of the atrocities committed by ISIS, even our concepts of ‘wicked’ and ‘wrong’ show how Christian our values are.

That chapter should be printed off and given to the Foreign Office, as a briefing paper.

Yet I wonder. Because it seems to me that there is a missing chapter, a chapter of rebellion and resistance.

The Renaissance is missing. Now, I know that the title ‘renaissance’, ‘rebirth’, was a piece of clever self-publicity, designed to put Christendom into the ‘Dark Ages’ without the light of classical thought; into the ‘Middle Ages’, between the time Rome was dominant, and the time it was rediscovered. But nevertheless, there has been a selfconscious attempt, from the 1400s on, to build thought, law and culture on the human-as-centre, rather than human-as-creature, or humanas-covenanted. It may not have succeeded, it may not have been consistent (how could it?), but the attempt was there, repeatedly, and

I do wonder whether the grand and true major narrative Holland recounts has blinded him to the smaller alternatives. He is too persuaded of his thesis, which means that the final chapters become overstretched, and to my mind, implausible.

Theologically, I want to argue his case more globally: All human cultural rebellion is based on the rejection of God, and therefore presupposes him.

That’s the case Augustine can make in The City of God, and how he explains the fall of Rome. But Holland’s argument is historically based, and narrower, and I think is open to the charge that there are traditions even in the West which are not based on Christianity or its knowing rejection.

His thesis is that Christianity is woven so deeply into the West, that we cannot think outside it.

Both John Lennon’s advocacy of free love and the #MeToo movement have Christian origins; Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling are very Protestant atheists; and even our concepts of ‘wicked’ and ‘wrong’ show how Christian our values are oakhill.ac.uk/commentary 45

Bismarck, A Life

Jonathan Steinberg Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011

Bismarck created the persona of the Caesar, Kaiser or Fuhrer. While Bismarck was alive, he controlled his masterpuppet from behind the throne; but with him dead, only the space for a demon remained. He was not recreating the Holy Roman Empire; he was recreating the Roman empire, replete with eagles and death, blood and iron 46 oakhill.ac.uk/commentary

He would reply, I think, that they have fooled themselves: The humanists did not base themselves on Rome or Greece at all (whose values, had they acknowledged them, they would have found repellant), but on a Christianised ideal, without the doctrine. Again, I think that’s mostly true, but if you look at the rise of modern Stoicism and the sudden popularity of Marcus Aurelius, you can see that there is another story to be told. Today’s humanists are trying to account for ‘good’, without Christianity, and finding in Marcus a non-Christian source. Theologically, we can account for that, in common grace, but I’m not sure Holland can.

Consider exhibit B, Jonathan Steinberg’s brilliant biography of Otto von Bismarck, the German statesman who created the German empire out of myriads of statelets, and gave it a military will and force that – make no mistake – paved the way for both World Wars. Bismarck created the persona of the Caesar, Kaiser or Fuhrer. While Bismarck was alive, he controlled his master-puppet from behind the throne; but with him dead, only the space for a demon remained.

He was not recreating the Holy Roman Empire; he was recreating the Roman empire, replete with eagles and death, blood and iron.

I use ’demon’ deliberately, because it is a description that Steinberg repeatedly uses of this extraordinary, hate-filled man. How Steinberg kept working on Bismarck while simultaneously finding him revolting is beyond me, and from what I can tell, this is the fullest and roundest

biography of the man in English.

There is no case for the defence; the unification of Germany could have been achieved in many other, wiser, kinder ways. This is a brilliant biography of a repellent man.

Holland, of course, would rightly point to that word ‘demon’ as a biblical one, and he is correct; that is the root of Steinberg’s moral stance.

But – and I say this carefully – it’s a stance entirely absent from Bismarck.

At one point he seems to have shared an evangelical viewpoint, probably for political ends, but he defiantly, repeatedly, acted out of a quite other moral landscape, where power was everything, and any means justified ends. It’s possible he was grasping for a quasi-classical alternative to Christianity, but I’m not sure he was that philosophical. He was inconsistent, other than in his greed.

Now, put the two together. Bismarck dominated. Dominion, by contrast, shows that Christianity has changed the world by weakness, love, and the story of a crucified saviour. It also shows how it is when we have loved power, class and status, and when we have valued self-expression over selfcontrol, superiority over service, that we have been least true to our gospel, and closest to the spirit of our age.

Chris Green is the Vicar of St James, Muswell Hill, and the author of several books, most recently, The Message of the Church

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IMAGE BEARERS

OAK HILL SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY 2020 How do we exercise power in ways that honour the image of God in others? How should the church uphold the most vulnerable in our society? What should we make of attempts to upgrade humanity with new technologies?

The School of Theology on Tuesday 14 July 2020 returns to the theme of the image of God. In previous years we laid the biblical and theological foundations, and now we think through the ethical implications.

The annual Oak Hill School of Theology helps pastors and teachers strengthen their biblical, theological and exegetical grasp of key doctrines, and apply them practically to ministry in the real world.

LANGUAGE REFRESHERS Following the School of Theology are two-day Language Refreshers for ministry on Wednesday 15 and Thursday 16 July 2020, with a choice of Greek or Hebrew. The focus of these days is on revitalising language use for sermon and talk preparation.