Peter Edman
Bishop N. T. Wright’s sermon at the end of the Anglican Consultative Council meeting deserves a wider hearing than just Anglicans.
Wright, an eminent New Testament historian and Bishop of Durham who has moderated Trinity Forum sessions in Europe, spoke on 28 June 2005. Particularly if you haven’t been aware of his thinking before, take the time to read this through very carefully.
“Shipwreck and Kingdom: Acts and the Anglican Communion” (one source text is here) includes an ironic discussion of the politics of left and right, but is particularly thought-provoking on the concept of “tolerance” and the truth-claims that underlie the Christian faith—and all other faiths, for that matter. Faith is not a matter of personal opinion, and those who say otherwise have their own not-so-hidden agendas.
But when you are in Caesar’s world, where truth comes out of the barrel of a gun, or in his day the sheath of a sword, tolerance can simply be a fancy name for cowardice. The claim that ‘Jesus is Lord’ was never, in the first century, what we would call a religious claim pure and simple. There was no such thing as religion pure and simple. It was a claim about an ultimate reality which included politics, culture, commerce, family life and everything else you could think of. . . .
And if you stop saying ‘Jesus is Lord’ out of deference to the private opinions of your friends and neighbours, Caesar smiles his grim smile and extends his empire by one more street. After all, the great eighteenth-century virtue of tolerance was developed not least by those who were keen on extending their geographical or industrial empires, and who didn’t want God breathing down their necks to stop them. Keep religion in the private sphere and we’ll run the public square. And to that idea Luke says a clear No; and so must we.
More on tolerance and its implications:
It is becoming increasingly clear in our society—you only have to look at France to see the point—that under the superficial smile of tolerance is the hard fist of secular power. And the task of the church in this day, as in Luke’s day, is to find the appropriate ways of declaring that Jesus is Lord, openly and unhindered, recognizing that this is a statement about the real, public world as well as the world of private religious experience—indeed that it is only truly the latter, about me and my religion, because it is truly the former, about God and his created world. . . .
The point about Jesus going to heaven is not that we’ll go there to be with him one day, away from this wicked old world at last. The point is that from heaven he is ruling the world, ruling it through the faithful lives, the suffering, and the witness of his Spirit-driven apostolic followers, calling it to account, demonstrating that there is a new way of living, a way which upstages all Caesar’s pretensions to have saved the world, or united it, or brought it genuine justice, freedom, and peace. (All those claims, by the way, are the standard things that all empires have claimed, whether in the first century or the twenty-first.)
. . . [I]s it surprising that, if every doctrine from the Trinity to the divinity of Jesus to his saving death and bodily resurrection and ascension has been dismissed as outdated, disproved, or irrelevant, the church should then have no means of protesting against massive economic injustice, against the erosion and inversion of sexual morality, against rampant militarism—in other words, against Caesar and all his weapons?
His move to “shipwreck” nearer the end as a metaphor for the life of the believer in the world is also must-read as a corrective to our natural inclinations.
Sightings, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Society, Thu 30 Jun 2005
The question is not whether the end justifies the means. The question is whether the means are worthy of the end.
Greg Slade
China’s Olympics: The Earthquake Dividend
The Renaissance and Religious Toleration
Zimbabwe, the Scandal of Africa
Russert and the Crystal Ball Media
Dear Kid: Die Now. Thanks, The Planet
A Spiritual Pilgrimage by Malcolm Muggeridge, Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald.
A life in perspective, offering questions to consider and a path worth exploring.
The Long Road to Forgiveness: “On June 8, 1972, I ran out from Cao Dai temple in my village, Trang Bang, South Vietnam; I saw an airplane getting lower and then four bombs falling down. I saw fire everywhere around me. Then I saw the fire over my body, especially on my left arm. My clothes had been burned off by fire. I was 9 years old but I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way.” (Kim Phuc, NPR , 2008 07 01)
The Little Robot That Could: “Stanton: No, it always works backward. It’s more like, Wow, look what this sort of feels like. So you run with those things, because they’re very primal. In my mind they’re very much in the core of our storytelling. So much of the Old Testament is sort of built into our DNA. I’ve read other stories where you’ve talked about your Christian faith a bit. Can you tell me how your faith informs your creativity and your work? Stanton: They tell you that as a storyteller, it’s vital to just stick with and be honest with your values system. The last thing I want to do is go to a movie and feel like I’m being preached to or being told how to be, and I think it’s more honest—and you’re going to have more effect—to be truthful with the values of your characters, working off of your own values. That was the case with WALL•E. The greatest commandment is to love one another, and to me, that’s the ultimate purpose of living. So that was the perfect goal for the loneliest robot on earth, to learn the greatest commandment, to learn to love.” (Mark Moring interviewing Andrew Stanton, director of Pixar’s WALL-E, for Christianity Today , 2008 07 01)
Never Mind Machiavelli: ‘Of course, there was plenty of ambition. But with Washington, it was always tempered by a sense of honor. Where many of his more sophisticated contemporaries sought Machiavellian political guidance from “The Prince,” Washington looked to the Roman philosopher Seneca—not to find shortcuts to success but “to know how he should behave, and how other men had behaved in positions of power and times of stress.” (Aram Bakshian, Jr. on George Washington on Leadership by Richard Brookhiser in The Wall Street Journal , 2008 06 30)
A Stirring Defense of the Conversation: “The humanities are supposed to “give young people the opportunity and encouragement to put themselves—their values and commitments—into a critical perspective,” yet if the notion that class, race, and gender are absolutely determinative becomes an article of faith, then the very possibility of transcending one’s prejudices is ruled out.” (James Seaton, reviewing Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman, in The University Bookman , 2008 06 30)
• Let My People Go, AIDS Profiteers (2008 06 30)
• Between Obedience and Obedience (2008 06 26)
• Why Me? The case against the sovereign self (2008 06 25)
• Cities for Living (2008 06 25)
• Theophobia (2008 06 20)
When No One Sees: The Importance of Character in an Age of Image by Edited by Os Guinness with Virginia Mooney.
