I was struck by Jaroslav Pelikan’s decision in his Whose Bible is it? that:

In these pages … instead of “Old Testament”, or the various recent attempts at politically correct euphemis such as “First Testament” or “Hebrew Scripture”, it is usually called what it is called within Judaism, Tanakh, … Only as a reference to its place within the Christian Bible is it called here “Old Testament”. (p5)

The very odd thing about that decision, as Pelikan knows better than most, is that for the majority of the world’s Christians, the Old Testament contains more books than does Tanakh.

Interestingly, in a slightly different way, Pelikan’s academic home, Yale, very typically among many universities is quite happy referring, for example, to its PhD program in the subject area of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. That equation, however, despite its apparent dual faith neutral descriptiveness, masks a Protestant confessional stance. Only for Protestants are the books of the Hebrew Bible the same as the books of the Old Testament.

It seems to me that that’s a rather bigger problem for finding a common term for the books that both Christians and Jews lay canonical claim to than nit-picking over the fact that a bit of the Hebrew Bible isn’t written in Hebrew but Aramaic.

“Old Testament” is, as Pelikan notes, a Christian theological term, but whether taken in terms of its most common usage through most of Christian history (in various languages) or the collection of books the greatest numbers of Christians worldwide intend to refer to by it, it does not refer to the same books that “Tanakh” refers to.

It is also the case, that even for Protestants, the terms Tanakh and Old Testament do not simply designate a collection of books, but a way of organising them and ordering them. Different books are assigned different theological genres, and combined (or, rather, separated) differently. There is a sense in which both terms, the Jewish and the Christian, carry different theological freight, and are not simply purely denotative terms.

That last point might be a difference people could or should live with if the same term otherwise worked. I’m not sure that the ways in which the terms refer to different collections, however, should be obscured and ignored by the apparent Protestant bias of Western university departments. Old Testament and Hebrew Bible / Tanakh are simply not the same books for rather too many Christians that we should treat them as mutual substitutes of different inter-religious acceptability.

But what do others think, and has anyone ever come across any real alternative? Or do we simply accept that all our options have their own different problems?

I noted yesterday, as did other early commenters like Mouse, my views that the “Stephen Hawking says gravity renders God obsolete” story was a complete non-story. Clearly the media pack disagrees, and I was quite astonished to see it on the front-page of the dead-tree Times this morning.

One of the few intelligent pieces of coverage was on C4 news last night – atheist physicist Jon Butterworth and scientifically trained theologian Alister McGrath largely agreed with each other that Hawking’s views weren’t new, and weren’t science.

So why is this a story? I’m trying to puzzle it out, and wonder which if any of the following possibilities may have something to do with it.

• The summer silly season for news is still going on. The bizarre story of William Hague’s baseball cap, hotel room and special adviser illustrates how febrile journalism currently is.
• Virtually no journalist understands either science or religion, and therefore levels both down to the level of “celebrity” utterances being newsworthy in and of themselves. Hawking’s combination of scientific achievement and physical disability make him that rare thing: a scientific celebrity. That “god of the gaps” approaches have been subjected to withering theological critique, that string theory is contentious, and that many physicists reject the “multiverse” as a scientific explanation of anything are all lost in the simple clarity that a celebrity we’ve heard of has said something we can understand.
• Journalism is anyway now biased against understanding. The sensationalism that is believed to sell product and advertising space depends in large part for its effect on a superficial acquaintance with the issues. the more people understand, they less they will be fooled.
• On the whole – and I accept this is a gross generalisation and almost impossible to prove intuition – it seems to me that in the not too distant past people generally used to feel vaguely comforted that some discovery, or eminent person, made belief in God seem reasonable, acceptable, or even proved. By contrast, I think that currently many people are generally vaguely relieved when some discovery or eminent person reinforces the view that there is no God, that not believing in God testifies to our modern grown-up rationality and we can get on with our lives pretty much how we choose. Whether then or now, we like stories that reinforce our cultural disposition.

I thought the silly season for news stories ended when term started. But apparently not. On the other hand I may be unusual in thinking this is a complete non-story: Stephen Hawking apparently thinks scientific theory renders God redundant.

The journalist reporting this seems to take Hawking’s earlier reference to “the mind of God” – possibly the only words in A Brief History of Time that any popular writer has ever quoted – as a statement of theistic belief rather than a poetic metaphor. I was always under the impression that Hawking was at least agnostic verging on atheist, and expected that sooner or later a Theory of Everything would be worked out.

I am incapable of judging the quality of his science in this book, and not only because it isn’t published, but because I’m simply not that bright. However, I can’t see that any statement about how the non-universe was before [ed - after reading a comment I need to point out this is a non-temporal "before" – whatever one of those is!] the initial conditions of the Big Bang is any less speculative than any other. He’s quoted as saying:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

At one level, of course, this indicates the way in which God is sometimes treated as the filler for the ultimate gap in a way continuous with older God-of-the-gaps theories. It has never been the best of arguments to use God as an explanation for things we can’t yet explain.

At another level, it would seem to me that Hawking’s view is as much a statement of faith in gravity as some kind of Platonic idea as it is anything truly scientific. Gravity is a necessary property of the universe. It’s not clear that it can be held to be a spontaneous cause of it. I’m tempted to wonder whether string theory isn’t appropriately so named because its answers are always as long as a piece of string.

At a deeper level, of course, the way in which some Christians, myself included, take the nature of the universe to point to a purposeful God rather than a random fluctuation is its intelligibility as the sort of universe it is, not its simple existence. Our human reasoning about reality is not an empty activity of imposing rational patterns on a fundamentally random and pointless cosmos, but a discerning of pattern and meaning which offers a true (but limited) testimony to a pattern-maker and meaning-giver.

But that a famous scientist thinks science renders God redundant as an explanation is a bit of non-story. It’s nor science, it’s not theology and it’s not exactly new.

I’ve been trying to clarify some ideas for a sabbatical proposal in my own head. I’m all too aware that what I’m proposing deals with some controversial areas, and that by concentrating on one particular perspective I run the risk of being accused of bias. A sabbatical, however, is relatively short, and I think it needs to be focussed. This is, therefore, a first draft of what I hope to accomplish, limited though it be.

I would be quite interested in hearing constructive feedback here on the blog about what people think about how I might refine the proposal, or whether it is too narrow. I would also be grateful (in the comments or by private email) for any suggestions for contacts, places to stay or sources of grants. I either need good grants, or to do this on a shoestring.

Before commenting, remember, I know this is limited and partial. Here, however, is the broad detail:

The programme has an overarching aim, to explore and deepen my understanding of Judaism and Jewish identity in today’s world. Within that overall aim there are some key elements I wish to focus on:

• the complexity of Jewish identity between religious belief, ethnicity and geo-political realities
• the ways in which Jewish people both within Israel and in the UK perceive how that identity is represented in the international (but especially British) media
• the relationship between those identities and their media representations, and the Jewish experience of anti-Semitism.

I foresee several means of working In accomplishing those aims. I expect (funding and practicalities permitting) to carry out the following work:

• To spend between four and six weeks in Israel, ideally staying mainly in Jewish contexts and meeting a range of local Jewish people, religious and secular.
• In that same time to also listen to the voices of Christian (local Israeli Arab and Palestinian, rather than pilgrim) voices.
• To travel as widely as possible within Israel, but also into at least the West Bank (how do you describe something when all geographical terminology is politicised?)
• To meet staff working in the Israeli media
• To spend between four and six weeks in the UK, visiting different Jewish communities and meeting with representatives of them.
• To meet with people working in the media in the UK, especially Jewish journalists in the secular media and on the staff of, for example, the Jewish Chronicle.
• To meet with people working on inter-faith initiatives between Christians and Jews, especially those focussed around the reading of the Scriptures (Tanak and Christian Bible).

I shall be interested in hearing your views.

I have begun raising this with various people, but it seems to me that the current mainstream funeral provision in the UK is misconceived.

There are, I think, a significant number of people who have some fairly inchoate beliefs, and a larger number who are well aware that within their family grouping there are religious views ranging from atheism to fundamentalism. In the absence of a clear or committed viewpoint expressed by the person who has died, or often by their closest family, many people feel quite uncomfortable with either a fully explicit Christian rite, or a fully atheist one of the sort led by many humanists.

One of our local humanist funeral celebrants is quite happy to respond to family requests for a prayer by saying “I personally can’t say or lead one, but if a family member wishes to do so then that’s quite all right.” Another, I know, responds to the same request by saying “well, if that’s what you want get a vicar.” The latter seem more common in their proselytising atheism than the former among humanist celebrants.

Many – I think most – clergy, on the other hand, are often trying to squeeze as much personal tailored remembrance in celebration of a person’s life as they can, without downplaying or doing violence to the liturgy with its charitable presumption of faith. This also involves finding as many ways as possible of making the quite strange and almost incomprehensible seem relevant, helpful, and appropriate. There is often quite a tussle in balancing the God-shaped integrity of the liturgy’s faith and hope and the life-shaped integrity of the family’s grief and gratitude.

Church of England clergy do far more of these complex and incoherent funerals than others do – roughly 40% of English funerals are taken according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England. I would say, based on my experience and anecdotal evidence, that a fairly high proportion of those are having a C of E funeral by default. While such services are genuinely far more highly appreciated in practice than the popular perception of impersonality might suggest, I think they are increasingly distant from the family’s needs, and less and less able either to articulate their thoughts and feelings, or to give appropriate expression to the love of God.

There is a market, I think, for the humanly and spiritually sensitive life celebrant, who can be open about their own stance, inclusive of a range of (a)theologies among the family and mourners, and honest about the beliefs and character of the deceased.

I would like to see some well trained and regulated Christian life celebrants stepping up to fill that market, able to share their faith as appropriate, willing to lead prayer as needed, but fundamentally focussed in the funeral care in responding to the family’s needs and celebrating the life of the person who has died. I would assume that those would be lay people, fulfilling a Christian calling, but not working with a Christian liturgy, language or explicit framework.

I have said before that I think Christian humanism offers far more to the celebration of human life, love, meaning and value than does an atheist humanism. I suggest that this may be a way to show it. Christian life celebrants could, I think, be far more flexible and responsive to the particularity of human lives made in the richness of God’s image, than many others, and to their infinite value in the light of eternity.

Despite Rob Kashow’s comment, it’s not so much that I find addressing the question of pets in heaven to be a “waste of time” as that a) I find it difficult to deal with the level of evangelical seriousness with which the original poster dealt with it and b) I am increasingly impatient with the ways in which people think they can say much specific about heaven that won’t be in some substantial way wrong. Hence my facetious treatment of the question.

At one level we can and should assert as a fundamental tenet of Christian faith that God is working on the redemption and restoration of all that he has made. The “all things in heaven and earth – visible and invisible” which are made in or by Christ in the opening half of the Colossian Christ hymn (Col 1:16) find a mutually interpretative parallel in the reconciliation of “all things, whether on earth or in heaven” through the cross of the hymn’s climax (Col 1:20). In that sense I have no problem with a fairly generic level of pet redemption.

However, I get exercised by – for example – the fairly odd ways in which Tom Wright among others insists we should use the this-worldly nature of early Jewish and Christian cosmological metaphor to insist we must maintain some kind of corporeal tangibility about what is to come, and give some real physicality to it as – it seems – merely a better version of what we’ve got now.

I get even more exercised by what one might call the popular sense of heaven, where we all live with our current nuclear families, with blissful marriages and well-behaved children, in rows of ideal houses populated by people like us, where the dogs and cats get on, and the world is all suburb and never inner city.

The biblical apophaticism which says so little about the world to come, except that there will be no pain or mourning, but healing, and no darkness but the light of God is strangely absent from modern Christian discourse. The beatific vision, the sense of being lost in wonder, love and praise, the idea of sharing the divine life that have characterised so much Christian rhetoric about the destiny of all things are even further removed from this vision of unambitious niceness and bourgeois familiarity.

A seriously pondered question about the eternal destiny of pets seems to me so redolent with that ghastly picture of a spiritual suburbia masquerading as eternal bliss as to need – at the very least – that gentle mockery in which my previous post indulged.

I was reading this post of James McGrath’s when it struck me: the more “sceptical” (I rather doubt the universal applicability of the adjective in the case of much atheist posting on religion) a person’s view is, the less they feel the need to offer a reasoned evidence-based case for it.

For rather too many atheists, being able to shout “woo”, “pixie-dust” or “flying spaghetti monster” renders the need for rational argument redundant – or so, from the evident lack of reasoning in many of their posts on religion, it would seem. Hence I offer this maxim.

The rationality of a sceptic’s argument is inversely proportional to the strength of their attack on faith.

There’s a lot of “only true church”-ism about, and here in Droitwich we’ve just gained another example. A new “independent fundamental Baptist Church” (which seems to consist of a pastor from some 60 miles away advertising services) has set up shop in a hall two doors away from the long standing Baptist Church. This is the second only true church in town. The other, which equally has nothing to do with any other Christian grouping in the town, describes itself as an “independent, evangelical, reformed, Baptist church”. It least it has some 85 years history behind having nothing to do with any other church in the town.

The intriguing thing is that the newcomers, despite sharing what look to me like fairly identical beliefs on KJV only, (so-called) believer’s baptism, and male headship, are so attached to being the only true church that they can’t even share fellowship with the very like minded. They are very worried about other Baptist churches – never mind the rest – (one site they mention points people to this link):

Today the name Baptist is used by many churches that are not following the teachings of the New Testament. Thus the words “Independent” and “Fundamental” have been added by many Baptist churches to further identify themselves as true Bible believing churches and to show a distinction between themselves and Baptist churches that were not following God’s word. … The true Independent Fundamental Baptists have no association or fellowship with these churches because they teach or practice things contrary to the New Testament.
…
Independent Fundamental Baptist churches … will not participate, as a church, in any outside function with churches which do not also strictly base their faith and practice on the New Testament. They will not engage in joint meetings, or evangelistic endeavors, with Protestants, Catholics, or other doctrinally unsound church groups .

They’ve been busy trying to get people to accept their version of the gospel by pushing tracts through doors. Apparently the only possible starting place is to accept that you’re going to hell.

That figures. L’enfer, c’est les autres églises.

Fundamental Independent Baptists churches will remain separate from unsound churches, as well as other Baptists groups who join in with the unscriptural churches. They practice the biblical teachings of separation as taught in Ephesians 5:11, which state, “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”

Because Jesus never ever did anything so unbiblical as mix with sinners, now, did he?

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)

It feels good to be getting along to the end of this series on the articles, now that I arrive at the thirty-fifth. Again, this article demonstrates something of the huge change in culture between the Church of the Reformation era, and today’s.

XXXV. Of the Homilies
The second Book of Homilies, the several titles whereof we have joined under this Article, doth contain a godly and wholesome Doctrine, and necessary for these tunes times, as doth the former Book of Homilies, which were set forth in the time of Edward the Sixth; and therefore we judge them to be read in Churches by the Ministers, diligently and distinctly, that they may be understanded of the people.
(A listing of the Second Book of Homilies follows)

The homilies not only provided what were then thought of as model sermons. they served to provide sermons for those priests (and there were initially many) who were not licensed to preach, because they were regarded as insufficiently learned – especially in the new expressions of doctrine pushed by the Reformers. The emphasis on a learned clergy, and efforts to create them, slowly obviated the need for the homilies, as the licence to preach eventually became universally part of the priest’s licence. I guess, though, that the Reformers’ judgement on those parishes who allow lay people untrained in theology, and without a bishop’s licence, to preach on a fairly regular basis, would nonetheless still be unprintable.

It is also worth noting that these homilies, taken as patterns, reveal some significant differences with much contemporary preaching, not least in the complete detachment from the Scriptures set for the day. This set up a model which has overall had a negative effect, especially when combined with the relative limitations of the Sunday lectionary in the BCP. In evangelical parishes there was an increasing abandonment of the lectionary in order to preach sermon series from themed selections or whole books of scripture (the latter a good patristic practice!). In the rest of the church there was an increasing detachment from specific scriptural passages, which made the relevance of scripture seem less obvious than it might have done in the hands of a skilled interpreter. The newer lectionaries have been helping restore the link between preaching and the scriptures that have just been corporately read. Such a practice should better inform the individual scripture reading people might engage in in the week.

Stressing the need for a learned clergy was not an unmixed blessing. On the positive side, it produced not only a thoughtful theological approach to scripture and ministry, but also encouraged a general fascination with learning. Anglican parish clergy were noticeable in every field of knowledge, not least the natural sciences, until increasing professionalisation and specialisation took over in the nineteenth century. Of course, there was for a long time an effective Anglican monopoly on learning in both universities: college fellows normally had to be ordained, and one had to be Anglican to gain a degree until the middle of that same nineteenth century that saw the disappearance of Renaissance man as an educational ideal.

On the negative side, this was one of the features that set the typical priest on the side of the gentry and apart from the normal run of people in the parishes. It was class division by twinning education with religious affiliation and money. Both the disenfranchised non-conformists deprived of Oxbridge by their dissent, and the extremely unlearned clergy that came over with the “bog-Irish” were by contrast pretty much on the same level as their people. Clerical learning, initially intended to serve the gospel, became part of the social pattern that estranged the clergy from the emergent working class.

The church regularly exhibits the desire to fight yesterday’s battles, and having digested the divorce from ordinary people that accompanied this stress on learning, has looked for a broader base from which to call its clergy, and far greater diversity in the methods and modes of training offered. Ironically, of course, this has happened at the same time that more and more people enter higher education, a higher education whose often unspoken tenet and cultural milieu is one that assumes real learning and religion are fundamentally incompatible. The church has, responding to past criticisms, so much turned its back on elitism, that it has allowed the elite to assume that Christianity has nothing for them, and propagate that view in the universities and the media.

Preaching and theology need to escape from this false dichotomy that has paralysed too much of their history. Deep learning and good communication need to go together. It is usually the person who has understood something most deeply who can express it most simply. The obfuscating terminology that has affected so many arts and humanities subjects in the post-modern world (so that they can compete with the technical language of science) should have no place in theological discourse, far less spill over into preaching. (Radical Orthodoxy, please note.) At the same time, we must resist all those who would treat “theology” as a dirty word, and try to reduce Christian doctrine to cosy nostrums and self-help manuals, and cast a sprinkling of angel dust over secular moralities. The challenges of truly proclaiming the gospel in simple terms to a complex world demand nothing less the greatest learning we can aspire to.

The proliferation of “statements of faith”, together with their content, never fails to amaze me. Today I came across two more with their own idiosyncratic take on things. I was following a commenter on this post to find out who this defender of bad street preaching was.

In this post I only note her statement of faith, oddly addressed as a “contact” page with no contacts listed. I may come back to the other one later. Hers finished with this flourish:

We believe it is the mandate of the whole Church to go into the whole world and to preach the Gospel to every living creature.

For this mandate she quotes Mark 16:15. Principally, of course, this demonstrates a blind attachment to the KJV. As most readers with recent translations are aware, there’s very little basis for seeing the longer ending of Mark as part of the original gospel. The selection of this citation (Mark’s longer ending is also cited to “prove” the ascension) points to just how much of a hidden problem there is in appeals to “the Bible” tout court as the only basis for saying anything about the faith. The commenter ends up quoting a verse that isn’t in this “infallible” Bible.

The second oddity of the use of the KJV is the bizarre paraphrase she produces ” to preach the Gospel to every living creature”. (The KJV of Mark 16:15 actually reads “preach the gospel to every creature”) I assume this is not a kind of ultra-Franciscanism that moves from preaching to birds to evangelising fleas, but that addition of the word “living” does make me wonder whether she has misunderstood it and is as likely to be found casting her pearls before swine as people.

Perhaps, given this usage of the KJV, its not surprising that she defends the idea that presentation doesn’t matter, all you need is the right content.