Confessing Evangelical

Great essay from Michael Spencer on The Final Deposition: Pilate and the Cynicism of Contemporary Truth Seeking.

The encounter between Jesus and Pilate in John's gospel, and in particular Pilate's question, "What is truth?", was one of the key texts in bringing me back to faith in 1994. Not just because it is such a contemporary question - the Sunday Telegraph that Easter had a great editorial picturing Pilate as a retired British colonial administrator, reminiscing at his club about that rum business with the Jewish teacher back in Palestine - but because it leapt out of the page at me as something that actually happened. (Two other verses that had a similar impact at the time - the sudden conviction that this happened - are John 20:16a and Acts 17:16.)

Michael Spencer picks up on this theme of Pilate as a "recognizable voice to those of us in the contemporary world", as "the voice of one confronted with Jesus, one asking questions about Jesus", but one who never "considers a surrender to Jesus as Lord and God":

Pilate is not presented to us in the Gospels as one who was on the way to faith in another King, Jesus ... No, Pilate is the voice of the faux Jesus scholars, the t-shirts,the television specials and magazine covers asking curious questions about Jesus; questions meant, in the final analysis, to bring Jesus down to our level, not to reveal truth we will embrace. These are questions, investigations, fascinations and presentations not meant to bring anyone into submission to the crucified one and his eternal empire of the Son, but meant to bring him down to a level where we can understand, manage and categorize Jesus in our own world.

Pilate is the voice of the person intelligent enough to know that Jesus must be considered, but not spiritually hungry and thirsty for the bread and water this world cannot give; the bread that comes from heaven. Pilate is the one who will not drive the nails, but who is willing for the nails to be driven as long as he can return to the imagined sovereignty of his own existence.

But as Michael goes on to point out, the meeting described by John is not the last meeting that Pilate and Jesus will have:

One can only imagine what the final deposition will be like. Not the deposition of Jesus by Pilate, but the opposite: the moment when Pilate stands before Jesus, as we all must. Here is the proud, the curious, the one who laughed at truth and presumed that Jesus needed to know a few things about how the world really works. Now he stands in the light of that one whose wounds and humiliation are still recognizable.

What is truth now, Pilate? Where are the kingdoms of this world? Where is the power to crucify or to pardon? Where does judgment finally lie?

Isn't this picture wonderful? These pictures of a baby elephant in utero have been posted in a number of places over the past couple of weeks (I can't believe I'm about to link the Daily [hawk, spit] Mail website, but here's another great shot).

But Mere Comments is the first site I've come across to mention the Great Unmentionable Point that sprang to mind immediately upon seeing this picture: if that's a baby elephant in there, then why is this only a "foetus"?

Click here.

Lots of fun and games this week on the subject of "absolute" vs "relative" poverty, following comments by the Tory MP for Tunbridge Wells, Greg Clark, and now the leader of the Conservative Party himself, David "Dave" Cameron, on the need to move away from Winston Churchill's approach to poverty - namely, a basic safety net to keep people from literally starving, but little more than that - to one closer to the philosophy of that Guardianista-of-Guardianistas, Polly Toynbee.

Polly Toynbee managed to avoid crowing too much in an excellent column in yesterday's Guardian. Instead, she reminds us of why "relative" poverty is an important concept - contrary to those who take the view that, provided people are better off than those in the worst squalor of Victorian England, there is no problem with poverty today ("They all have colour TVs, don't they?"):

Poverty is measured internationally in relative terms, because that is how people feel it. To be poor is to fall too far behind what most ordinary people have in your own society.

Toynbee uses a powerful image from one of her books, cited by Greg Clark in his own comments, to show why relative poverty matters:

Clark cites an analogy from my book, Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain, in which I described society as a caravan moving across a desert. All may move forward, but how far behind do the poor at the back have to fall before they cease to be part of the same caravan at all? Political parties will differ on how far that stretch can be - but at least now they agree all must travel at the same speed to stay within the same society.

Toynbee goes on to examine the difficulties of communicating the concept of relative poverty. Research by the Fabian Society indicates that many people take the view that poverty today is "the fault of the poor themselves - feckless addicts or scroungers". But when people are presented with the facts of what modern poverty looks like, they change their minds. And the examples cited by Toynbee certainly made me wake up and take notice:

When they considered the quarter of children who never go on a summer holiday and have no money to go swimming, have a birthday party or a sleepover or take school trips, let alone own a computer or a mobile phone, they thought it unjust.

They thought it wrong that children avoid teachers' questions about what they did in the holidays, avoid collections of money, avoid PE for lack of the right kit. They understood the pain of being at the bottom of the pecking order from day one at school. Relative poverty is a dry phrase - but make it real and people feel for children born with their noses pressed against society's window.

There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, of course, and the Tories certainly have to do a lot of repenting on this issue: when Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979, 14% of children lived below the poverty line. By 1996, the last full year of the Tory government, that number had risen to 33%.

Labour has presided over its own further rise in inequality, but much good has been achieved:

By stealth Labour has lifted 700,000 children above the poverty line, with most estates and schools much improved, generous tax credits and programmes such as Sure Start transforming lives.

The problem is that "Labour has done little to change voters' attitudes" - note those words, "by stealth" - and in particular has shied away from words such as "inequality", with their perceived "socialist" overtones. But the Tories' shift of position on this issue now gives Labour the opportunity to be bolder:

Here is the opportunity for Labour to stop appeasing old Tory sentiments and say outright that gross inequality is a key reason for so much social dysfunction.

As for the Tories, the test now is whether "Cameron really [is] ready to face down his own CBI, with the Mail and Telegraph shrieking 'Tax burdens!' every day". As Toynbee concludes:

So let's see if this pig flies.

Craig draws our attention to a post by Justin Taylor entitled When People Are Big and God Is Small, which summarises a book of the same name by Ed Welch which seeks to encourage Christians to fear God rather than human beings.

Now of course, as a good Lutheran I'm all in favour of people being encouraged to "fear and love God...". Whether yet another evangelical n-step programme (with n=7 in this case) is the way to go about it is a different matter. But the point I really wanted to pick up was this question of people's God being too "small".

Asserting that God (as conceived by many Christians) is "too small" has been a common theme ever since JB Phillips published Your God Is Too Small in 1952. Many people assert that the remedy to Christianity's contemporary ills - our triviality, our lack of holiness of living, our worldliness - is a recognition that our God is "bigger" than we give him credit for.

There is something in that - which is why reading the psalms regularly is such a healthy practice - but what this brought to my mind was a post by Revd Joel Brondos on his blog a couple of years ago, where he took the contrary view and claimed that the problem is rather that Your God is too Big (the original post has now disappeared; the link is to the Internet Archive cache). Revd Brondos writes:

Our comfort is not that God is big. Our comfort (and even greater awe) is that the big God became small. He became small like us, taking on flesh and blood for our sakes. And He got even smaller than that. Humiliation can make us feel so small that we could sit on the edge of a dime and swing our legs, but His humiliation was even smaller in the eyes of the world which rejected Him.

And as it was in Bethelehem and at Calvary, so it is for us here, today:

He who became small for our sakes now comes to us in small ways (in the eyes of the world). A little water and a few words. A little bread, a little cup; His body and His blood. We are too small for Him to come to us in His bigness. It is gospel where He comes to us in the small ways of Word and Sacrament.

We should resist the temptation to make God bigger by our own efforts:

God did not become small with the intent that we should make Him bigger by our rituals. Our greatest delight is in the small things which are so small that heaven and earth cannot contain them. That is to say: a smallness that is greater than greatness, a foolishness that is wiser than wisdom, and a weakness that is stronger than strength so that where people are looking for God in greatness, wisdom and strength, they will miss Him altogether. Not in the wind. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire. These were too big for Elijah. But in the still, small whisper...

In conclusion, Revd Brondos asks us to choose whether we wish to confront the big God in all his awesome holiness, or the small God in his gracious tenderness:

If you wish to make God big, you are free to do so. If you wish to confront the Lord God in His awesome splendor and majesty, you are welcome to it. (Compare each instance in the Bible where the Lord revealed Himself in His glory and you will find people on their faces in the dirt.)

But as for me and my house, we will just congregate where two or three gather in His Name, where [we find] Christ the Lord who came in the flesh to finite creatures by becoming graciously small in a little town of Bethlehem, and who defends us by felling the old evil foe with one little word.

As Martin Luther put it, "I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ": a God small enough to fit in a manger, on a cross, in a tomb, and in bread and wine.

The latest update of the Amarok music player - Linux's answer to iTunes or Windows Media Player - includes an integrated Magnatune music store.

Magnatune is a record label that has taken a radically different approach to copyright licensing and digital restrictions, compared with its more mainstream, Defective By Design competitors. Its features (as summarised on their "What you get when you buy" page) include:

• DRM-free downloads


• CD-quality (lossless) downloads available, not just lossy MP3s


• CD artwork supplied as a PDF, rather than just a single thumbnail image


• Full-length sample tracks, not just 30-second snippets


• Choose your own price for the download, with whatever you pay being split 50/50 between the label and the artist.


• Most imaginatively of all, the label actively encourages sharing of music: you are permitted, and indeed actively encouraged, to pass the download details on to three friends.

Now it has to be said that, so far at least, much of the music on the site is, how can I put this, not really to my taste, and I was very unimpressed by a sample CD attached to a Linux magazine a few months ago. (It would be ungenerous to characterise much of it, as I did in a previous draft of this post, as "frankly bloody awful stuff by people you've never heard of". Ungenerous, but not inaccurate.)

However, it's a thoroughly praiseworthy venture, and the Amarok interface makes it much simpler to browse through Magnatune's wares and identify items worth exploring further. As a result, I found a good album of Russian Orthodox church music which promptly became my first download from the site. Well worth a listen.

Today's sermon from our church is now available on the audio downloads page.

Our pastor tackles the gospel reading from Mark 13:24-31, and in particular one major question that this notoriously difficult passage poses, namely: "What event is Jesus referring to?":

• His death and resurrection (when "the sun [was] darkened", and the earth was "shaken")?


• The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem ("When you see the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not to be", verse 14)?


• Or his second coming at the end of time (When "they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory")?

The answer our pastor gives, by the way, is: "Yes".

Heard an entertaining little factoid yesterday evening: according to the 2001 UK census results, on the day the census was taken, more people called Lee were in prison than out of it.

Today's "vox pops" in The Onion address the question of the latest critical security patch released by Microsoft. One of the respondents hits the nail on the head:

"I would like to think that this will be completely effective, but I know from personal experience that the patch tends to work only 99 percent of the time. The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence."

Amen, sister. Preach it, preach it!

I think what I was trying to say in this post a couple of weeks ago is summed up more succinctly in this short verse quoted by Joel Hunter on the BHT:

More about Jesus would we know,
More of His grace to others show;
More of His saving fullness true,
More of His love Who died for you.

Yes. That's it.

(PS: Does anyone know the source for this? Google comes up blank.)

One of my favourite anthems is an obscure little gem by the former organist of Manchester Cathedral, Stuart Beer, called "The cup of blessing which we bless". A sample can be heard here.

A few years ago, this anthem played a significant role in shaking my impeccably Anglican evangelical views on the Lord's Supper, in particular my rejection of "the real presence". It achieved this by a combination of factors: by bringing me face to face with 1 Corinthians 10:16 (which I'd previously not really paid much attention to, and which the anthem uses as its refrain), by skilfully juxtaposing this with Psalm 116, and by doing so with music of sufficient beauty to overwhelm my theological defences. My heart probably believed in the real presence from the first time I listened to this anthem; my head took a few years to catch up.

Here is the text of the anthem: if you've listened to the sample, the rest of the anthem follows a similar pattern:

The cup of blessing which we bless,
is it not a share of the blood of Christ?

How shall I repay the Lord
for all his benefits to me?
I will take up the cup of salvation
and call upon the name of the Lord.

The cup of blessing which we bless,
is it not a share of the blood of Christ?

I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people.
Precious in the sight of the Lord
is the death of his faithful ones.

The cup of blessing which we bless,
is it not a share of the blood of Christ?

O Lord I am your servant,
     your servant and the son of your handmaiden:
You have unloosed my bonds.
I will lift up to you a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and call upon the name of the Lord.

The cup of blessing which we bless,
is it not a share of the blood of Christ?

I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people.
In the courts of the house of the Lord,
even in the midst of Jerusalem, praise the Lord

The cup of blessing which we bless,
is it not a share of the blood of Christ?

This comes from a CD called "Sing Praises", a collection of twentieth-century English cathedral music sung by Manchester Cathedral Choir.

Full disclosure: this CD was recorded and published on Foxglove Audio, a small classical record label owned by one of my uncles. However, reverse-nepotism aside, it's still a cracking collection, including pieces by Herbert Howells, Bernard Rose, John Tavener (with his crowd-pleasing William Blake adaptation, "The Lamb") and William Mathias. A full listing can be found here. Stuart Beer's "Cup of blessing" is probably the stand-out track, though, not least because it is unlikely to be available anywhere else.

Foxglove Audio don't have a website (I'll have to have words with my uncle about that at Christmas), but they can be contacted by email at foxgloveaudio [at] gmail.com. Be sure to say who sent you. ;-)

An entertaining parliamentary sketch from Simon Hoggart, who reports on the prorogation of parliament yesterday - that is, the end of the parliamentary year, before the next session commences with the state opening next week.

Hoggart has fun with some of the more Ruritanian aspects of the occasion, such as the reason given by the lord chancellor - this year as every year - to explain the queen's non-appearance:

"It not being convenient for Her Majesty to be here today."

As Hoggart points out, that makes it sound like a diary mix-up rather than a parliamentary custom whose origins are, one assumes, lost in the usual mists of time.

Then there is the procession of various parliamentary eminences, "magnificent in full robes of scarlet and ermine, and hats, superb comedy pointed hats", including:

...on the end Tom Strathclyde, the Tory leader, whose name was read out in full: "Thomas Galloway Dunlop Roy du Blicquy Galbraith Strathclyde", which isn't so much a name as a platform announcement for the stopping train.

But even amongst all the pomp and "flummery" of the occasion, some serious constitutional business was done: the formal passing into law of the various acts from this session, by the royal assent:

[O]ne of two clerks read out all the acts that had been passed. They had dull workmanlike, New Labour titles: the Violent Crime Reduction Act, the Education and Inspections Act, the Safeguarding Of Vulnerable Groups Act, and so forth. After each title was read out, another clerk spun round, a little like Carol Vorderman picking out a letter, and announced to the MPs, who had assembled at the bar of the house to join in the fun, "La Reine le veult", or "the Queen wishes it".

Now, to some, the implication that parliament's actions require the Queen's permission in this way may appear to be a throwback to medieval times, a denial of democracy. But Simon Hoggart draws a different conclusion:

At this point it struck me that, while it might be the silliest flummery and pantomime nonsense, the ritual was moving, evocative and even resonant. For that one phrase, a piece of Norman French from nearly a thousand years ago, pronounced in the traditional fashion - "la wren le vurlt" - carried with it the unspoken addition, "whether she likes it or not", and so encompassed the history of our ancient freedoms, wrenched from the monarch by our ancestors over the centuries.

(That last bit's why you get the picture of Cromwell, in case you were wondering.)

There were a great many plots and Parliaments in James I's reign ... One plot, however, was by far the best plot in History, and the day and the month (though not, of course, the year) are well known to be utterly and even maddeningly MEMORABLE.

- 1066 and All That, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.

- Traditional

As the last of the fireworks die away, I couldn't let this Fifth of November go by without recommending the "Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving, to be used yearly upon the Fifth Day of November for the happy Deliverance of the King, and the Three Estates of the Realm, from the most Traiterous and Bloudy intended Massacre by Gun-Powder" which has, sadly, been dropped from the Book of Common Prayer in recent centuries. (The 1662 version is here; the version used in the 18th century is here.)

The first collect for use at morning prayer gets right off the fence and tells us what it thinks:

ALMIGHTY God, who hast in all ages shewed thy power and mercy in the miraculous and gracious deliverance of thy Church, and in the protection of righteous and religious Kings and States, professing thy holy and eternal truth, from the wicked conspiracies and malicious practices of all the enemies thereof;

We yield thee our unfeigned thanks and praise for the wonderful and mighty deliverance of our late gracious Sovereign King James, the Queen, the Prince, and all the Royal Branches, with the Nobility, Clergy, and Commons of England, then assembled in Parliament, by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter, in a most barbarous, and savage manner, beyond the examples of former ages.

From this unnatural conspiracy, not our merit, but thy mercy; not our foresight, but thy providence, delivered us: And therefore, not unto us, O Lord, not unto us; but unto thy Name be ascribed all honour and glory in all Churches of the saints, from generation to generation, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Another prayer gives thanks that God "[did] prevent the malice and imaginations of our enemies, by discovering and confounding their horrible and wicked enterprize, plotted, and intended this day to have been executed against the King, and whole State of this Realm, for the subversion of the Government, and Religion established among us".

Now it's easy to mock all this. And indeed I could probably leave it there: it is easy to mock this, and by and large it deserves it. But here are a couple of quick thoughts anyway:

1. The emphasis on it being "not our merit, but [God's] mercy" that foiled the plot (setting aside, for these purposes, the various theories about it being a put-up job) is heartening - but undermined by the suspicion that the language of divine grace is being usurped for what is really a triumphalist celebration of the Protestant (but not too Protestant thanks-all-the-same) post-Restoration status quo.


2. This only goes to reinforce one's admiration for the genius of Thomas Cranmer, whose contributions to the bulk of the Book of Common Prayer have aged considerably better than these later prayers. "We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep; we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts" taps into universal human experience in a way that these prayers - the liturgical equivalent of a "Church and King" riot - singularly fail to achieve.

Went to the Velasquez exhibition at the National Gallery last night. If you're in London before 21 January next year, do visit this: it is absolutely superb. Many of the portraits are astonishing: you are half-expecting them to walk off the wall, or to start to speak to you. Pope "Innocent" X is as terrifying as ever, even if we only get a head-and-shoulders version of the more famous portrait. And you have to admire (ahem) the (*cough*) brushwork on the Rokeby Venus. The only disappointment is the absence of Las Meninas.

But the painting that stopped me in my tracks - and left me struggling to retain my composure - was this painting (right) of Prince Felipe Prospero (for a detail of the face, see here; for a larger image of the whole painting, see here).

King Philip IV's previous heir had died suddenly at the age of 17, and the new crown prince's "fervently awaited" birth in 1657 "brought great joy to the court". However, this joy was to be short-lived, as the painting makes heartbreakingly clear in some of the details highlighted by the notes in the exhibition guide:

Velasquez captures [the prince's] lovely innocence, but also hints at the frailty of the child who lived only four years. He wears an amulet against the evil eye, an amber apple to ward off infections, and a bell to indicate his whereabouts.

Almost unbearably poignant - perhaps partly, in my case, because of a resemblance between the young prince and our younger son, another two-year old with blond hair and big, dark, "headlamp eyes".

...could someone please explain to me why All Souls' Day - oops, sorry, I mean the "Commemoration of the Faithful Departed" - is OK, but a Day of Thanksgiving for the Institution of the Sacrament of the Altar (or "Corpus Christi", for short) is utterly beyond the Lutheran pale? It just seems a little, y'know... arbitrary.

Update: Actually, fuggeddaboudit. We did this one last year, it turns out, and it appears the new Lutheran Service Book drops what I referred to in a comment as the "commemoration of the departed who were faithful but still somehow - in an interesting twist on Lutheran theology - don't count as saints".

But I think the NT Wright quote from last year bears repeating on an annual basis, as he describes the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other manner in which the Church of England marks All Souls:

"The sort of hymn you are likely to find sung at All Souls' commemorations these days is probably a piece of woolly Victoriana, hinting at purgatory without really coming out and saying it - which is what the entire commemoration, in its current Anglican mode, does at every point."

"Back of the net!", as Alan Partridge would say.