'After You Believe', new Tom Wright book

Tom/NT Wright has a new book due out in March, called 'After You Believe'. The book tackles the problem that many churches see their job as warehousing people for heaven: counting the souls in through the door, and then keeping them safe but otherwise unchanged until the next life.

The book is about Christian character, and how it's formed. Interesting to note that 'character' is a current issue in various places - witness Mondays' Demos event with David Cameron at the start of their enquiry into character and it's place in the good society. Here's an extract from an interview with Wright:

N.T. Wright: The point about the word “virtue” – if we can recapture it in its strong sense – is that it refers, not so much to “doing the right things”, but to the forming of habits and hence of moral character.

I remember Rowan Williams describing the difference between a soldier who has a stiff drink and charges off into battle waving a sword and shouting a battle-cry, and the soldier who calmly makes 1000 small decisions to place someone else’s safety ahead of his or her own and then, on the 1001st time, when it really is a life-or-death situation, “instinctively” making the right decision. That, rather than the first, is the virtue of “courage”.

In the book I use, as a “secular” example, the lifetime forming of habits exemplified by Chesley Sullenberger III, the pilot who, last January, brought the US Airbus down safely in the Hudson River after a flock of geese got into the engines after take-off from La Guardia. All his instincts had been trained so that when the moment came he didn’t have to stop to think what to do; it just “came naturally”.

Forming character by deliberate choices goes against the grain of just doing what we feel like, and expressing ourselves - another extract from the same interview on Prodigal Kiwis makes this point. The goal of character formation is that holiness becomes 'what we feel like' and 'what comes naturally', rather than just a random splurge of what we happen to be thinking or feeling.

I'll be interested to see what Wright sees as the path to character formation. My suspicion is that a lot of it will be about getting a correct understanding of life, God, the future and the present. We're currently talking about character and change on our Growing Leaders course with a group of lay leaders, and exploring what helps this process, including spiritual disciplines, accountability, reflection, suffering, overcoming at the points where we're tempted to quit etc.

Making disciples is the great challenge for the modern church, so if Tom Wright is applying his mind to this then so much the better. What I'd really like to see though is not a book, but a curriculum.

Tom Wright: Christmas sermon extract

The NT Wright page (maintained by a fan, I think) has served up some great background reading for Christmas sermons. In amongst it all, is this searing passage, preached 2 years ago:

Because it really is dark out there, and alas sometimes in here too. The great revolution of thought which happened in Europe over three centuries ago, associated with Descartes in particular, was the attempt to grasp truth as it were from scratch: by doubting everything, we would see what we could be sure of and build out from there.

We would know the facts, and the facts would set us free – free from God, free from any responsibility except to our own self-interest. There’s a straight line from Descartes to Dawkins: we can doubt God, but we can’t doubt the facts, the empirical evidence.

And the results of that arrogant attempt to possess truth are all around us, etched in the horrors of the twentieth century and now already the multiple follies of the twenty-first, as we in the West blunder blindly on, believing firmly that because we know the facts and have the technology we can do what we like with other people’s countries, other people’s stem cells, other people’s crops, other people’s money, other people’s lives.

And meanwhile the worm in the apple has hollowed it out more or less completely: the ‘truth’ which we thought we knew has been eaten away not just in theology and philosophy but in its heartland of physics, by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and in its deeper heartland of the human being, where Descartes began.

We have become a society paranoid about truth: so we make each other fill in more and more forms, and set up more cameras to spy on each other, to check up on one another because we want the truth, we want an audit trail, we want more and more Enquiries and Judicial Reviews and Investigations, but we can’t get at truth because Descartes’ experiment has itself made it impossible, has generated a world of suspicion and smear and spin.

and it's not just society...

But if the world has tried to have truth without grace, the church has often been tempted towards grace without truth – as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, ‘cheap grace’.

God has become a benevolent old softie, ready to tolerate everything, to include everyone, to throw away all those unpleasant old moral standards and say it’s all right, do your own thing, if it feels good it must be OK.

And once again the results are all around – both in the anti-moralism of the arch-liberals and the anti-authoritarianism of today’s new conservatives, who don’t realise that they are simply producing an ecclesiological parody of the do-it-yourself morality they so detest.

Tom Wright on Heaven

A mark of a good theologian is whether they can put their ideas across on a chat show. Thanks to Ruth Gledhill for posting this link. Also, the good thing about a video clip is that you can pause Tom Wright when he talks too fast, which is quite a lot of the time!

Tom Wright joins Doctor Who writing team

Just watched 'Forest of the Dead', the latest Dr. Who, on Iplayer. Several thousand people are 'saved' from a giant Library by a computer storing them on its hard-drive whilst some flesh-eating shadows are dealt with. When it's safe, they are then restored and given their lives back again.

I'm pretty sure I heard theologian Tom Wright give the same illustration about the resurrection several years ago, that when we our hardware gives out and we die God (this is an illustration, remember), stores all our files in his memory, so that when the day of resurrection comes our 'files' - i.e. us, - are uploaded to a new system which will never get viruses, crash, or shut down.

When the final character is saved, they appear dressed in white in a kind of paradise world. Hmm, wonder what they were trying to suggest there?

and it was a fantastic episode too.

New Statesman: 'Belief is Back'

'Belief is Back' declares the front of the latest New Statesman, which has:

- a lengthy interview with Tom Wright summarised as a declaration of war on 'militant atheists and liberals'. Thanks for letting us read it with an open mind. Wright also restates his much-cited take on the resurrection: "We are talking about a good physical world which is to be remade, not a bad physical world which is going to be trashed in favour of a purely spiritual sphere."

- an article by Stephen Bates on the rise of the Bogeyman, sorry, evangelical Christians - These range from the charismatics (the happy-clappies) to the open movement, placed pretty well in the centre of Church life, to the conservatives, whose more militant fringes are now consciously mirroring some of the highly politicised techniques of the religious right in the US (they get some funding from there, too). The conservatives' tactics are also quite similar to those of the old Militant Tendency in the 1980s Labour Party.

You think I'm joking? Here is one article in the magazine of the conservative Church Society about how to take over a parish: "The rural Church is likely to be dominated by the 'old guard' who are suspicious of innovation . . . do they actually understand about the issues or even care about them sufficiently to make in telligent dialogue worthwhile?" The answer, he says, is to recruit small groups of the like-minded to infiltrate congregations "to help others see the need to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus". The conservative evangelicals are the ones who do not hesitate to tell that nice, Guardian-reading, self-designated hairy lefty, Rowan Wil liams, Archbishop of Canterbury, that he's a false teacher and a heretic. They noisily assert that they wouldn't allow him in their churches to preach because he would only confuse their congregations with wrong doctrine.

I'm sure there's an informal rota amongst journalists, so that roughly every 6 months since 1975 someone publishes a 'conservative Christians are coming to get you' article. Some of the categorising is pretty sloppy - I speak as one of his 'happy clappy' types - but the conclusion is spot on: the ultimate irony is that the more urgently they profess the need to win the nation for Christ, the more they repel those they say they most wish to save.

Finally Mary Warnock argues that God shouldn't be a trump card in law-making, arguing that an MP's religion should have no influence over how they vote. This is nonsense. If you have a religion, it is bound to affect how you vote, otherwise you are a hypocrite. Everyone votes and thinks on the basis of a value system, so to rule out theistic value systems discriminates against Christians, Muslims and other believers. You can't pretend this is even-handed, even though Warnock makes it sound ever so reasonable. Her litmus test question "Will society benefit from it in the empirical world?" is hardly a neutral one - your notion of society and what benefits it depends on your value system.

Plenty to chew on for a spring Saturday. Plenty to spit out too!

Tom Wright on Church and State

I was mulling on a post about church and state and how 'Establishment' works in a secular postmodern society, but Bishop Tom Wright has, thankfully, beaten me to it. Ruth Gledhill links to his lecture this week on 'God in Public?'. Full text of the lecture here. Here's an interesting excerpt:

‘Establishment’ is a way of recognising that we are still essentially a
Christian country, both in the sense that our history and culture have been
decisively shaped by the Christian faith and life and in the sense that at the
last census over 70% called themselves ‘Christian’. As the Archbishop said last
Monday, this means that the ‘established’ church has a special responsibility to
take thought for, and speak up for, the small minorities, and to ensure that
they are not squashed between an unthinking church and an uncaring secular
state. Hence his perfectly proper concern for the particular sensitivities of
Muslims, as indeed of Jews and others. And most Church of England leaders would
insist today that if some way could be found to share our ‘Established’ status
with our great sister churches, we would be delighted. But let’s not fool
ourselves. To give up ‘Establishment’ now would be to collude with that
secularism which postmodernity has cheerfully and rightly deconstructed. Rather,
the challenge ought to be to make it work for the benefit of the whole society.
To aim at that would be to work with the grain both of the Christian gospel
itself and of the deep roots of our own society and traditions.

Emphasis mine - this is a key challenge. Establishment, and the role of the church, is no longer a given in a secular society. In all sorts of ways the church is being asked to demonstrate competence, to compete for its place, and to demonstrate 'added value' (excuse me whilst I wash my keyboard out). In the education system, chaplaincies (NHS, prison, supermarkets), etc. the church is one provider among many, and the historical legacy of a privileged status is nearly spent up.

Another important factor is this: the New Testament is a document for people living out their faith in a society where other people hold the levers of power. Islam from the outset was a faith to run a country by (e.g. monotheism - gets rid of competing deities in a pagan society for the sake of national unity). In Judaism, the commandments and laws are an attempt to give some shape to the new Exodus community and turn them into a functioning society. Christianity has the ambivalent situation of inheriting the Old Testament (with a system of law, the Ten Commandments etc.), but being founded as an outsider group on the fringes of society. Where NT writings address church/state issues, it's normally to explore how Chrisitans should behave under persecution. The idea that they might one day hold the levers of power just doesn't seem to be entertained.

So on one level the church doesn't want to lose power and influence, because we hope to use that power and influence for good. But on another level we know that the church doesn't belong on the throne, and that our primary calling is not to run countries but to love God, love one another, and share Jesus. For some Christians and Christian organisations, that calling may express itself in politics, but for the church as a whole the relationship is more ambivalent.

A Word of Wisdom from Tom Wright

A very big thankyou (the bloggers in-phrase is 'hat tip' I think...) to Malcolm Chamberlain, newly discovered blog (via Steve Tilleys comments on what sort of evangelical is the right one) for this fantastic bit of wisdom from Tom Wright:

"In Christian theology, such phrases [as "the authority of Scripture"] regularly act as “portable stories”—that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the Church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us. Shorthands enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point in doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in the new location. Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron." (emphasis mine)

this is an extract from an interview with the excellent Wittenberg Door, the original Christian satire magazine.