January 27, 2012 at 2:03 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: essays, lst, postmodern, theology, wisdom
Christian Wisdom and Transformation is the long title for the core module, which we all called Wisdom. The task over two terms was to explore Christian Wisdom, how it draws on the Old Testament and its potential for transforming Christians today. The first semester started by talking about what we might mean by ‘wisdom’ and where it’s found in the Old Testament, primarily the books that are called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
My title was:
Is wisdom only contained in restricted sections of the Old Testament or is it possible to argue that there is a sense in which wisdom permeates the whole of it? How does this affect the transformative potential of Old Testament Wisdom?
Phew! Quite a mouthful! In the essay, I sought to show that limiting the influence of Wisdom to those three books alone is not the best way of reading the Old Testament. I looked at various sections of scripture: Pentateuch, Psalms, Prophets and narratives in Genesis and Esther; looking to see if Wisdom was a them or a shaping force in their writing. My conclusion is that Wisdom did indeed shape the Old Testament, perhaps through redaction from a wisdom school, perhaps though those schools as a force in ancient society.
I also had to spend some time looking at how this would influence Christians today. I suggested that finding wisdom throughout the Old Testament was a very powerful way of reading the Bible as many of the values associated with Wisdom resonate so much with postmoderns. I concluded the essay in this way:
In seeking the wisdom of Scripture, we have found practical advice on living, centred around God. It
appears throughout the Old Testament, in all the sections we have examined. It includes the worship of God
and study of Scripture, but recognises the limits in understanding and experience and is comfortable with
the issues of God’s apparent absence and the abundance of suffering. Wisdom seeks answers, but finds
paradoxes. Wisdom has much to speak into the culture of today when we recognise that simple, dismissive
answers characterise the fool, and the honest hard work of seeking through an enigma suits the wise woman
or man.
Wisdom Essay 1 - download a .pdf file of the full essay.
This essay by Jon Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.jonrogers.co.uk.
January 26, 2012 at 2:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: essays, lst, personal, study, theology
As many who read my blog (or know me AFK) are aware, the academic year 2010-2011 was spent studying for an MA at London School of Theology. It was awarded to my early in December, with Merit (yes, I am a little bit proud of that). All this meant submitting a little under 50,000 words in essays, including a 20,000 word dissertation. Over the next three weeks, I want to make each of the essays that I wrote available on the site for people to read, with a short summary of each so you can see if it would be interesting to you. I don’t expect anyone to endure reading all of them, but some of you might find something of interest in there, even if it’s just a big long bibliography to help add sources to your own essay!
Semester 1 was a fun time for me: getting stuck into not only a new course, but a new discipline, with new class mates and teachers, each with their own way of doing things. Each semester had three modules, including the core Wisdom module running through both. In the first semester I took a module on Exegesis of Mark’s Gospel and one on Transforming Contemporary Apologetics.
One of the difficulties we had to learn to navigate with the course in this first semester was that the assessment (the one essay) did not match up to the majority of the learning (the seminars, along with the preparation and reading for each of them). Simply put, the essay titles each covered approximately the content of one single seminar in much greater depth, so in some senses, the hours of reading required to be intelligent and on the ball in most of those seminars was ‘wasted’, or at least unassessed. As the term drew to an end, as the deadlines started to get big in our minds, it’s no surprise that the quantity and quality of reading for the seminars decreased. I don’t know the solution to this problem, perhaps it just calls out a bit more maturity in us as students to know that our learning and our assessment are not the same thing and to do both anyway.
The essays for semester 1 were due on 7 February – four days after our baby was due to be born. I knew that babies can come early as well as late (though Nathaniel was not born until the 10th), so all the essays had to be written with plenty of time to spare – I did not want to be driving to hospital panicking that I still needed to writ another thousand words! This was a tough but important discipline for me – I’ve always been a bit last-minute, using the pressure of deadlines to focus me on work. Still, most of the writing got done during the Christmas break, leaving January quite relaxed.
I will write a separate post for each of the essays, aiming to get through two semesters and the dissertation within three weeks. I’ll also aim to write some other things too – trying to make sure you don’t get too fed up of academic writing! As I write the posts, I will link to them from here.
January 18, 2012 at 7:25 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: change, feel, God, immutable, impassive, process theology, theology
I’ve been thinking about what God is like to day as I’ve been reading about Process Theology. It’s something I have come into contact with a few times over the past year or so, especially when looking at some of the ideas of the emerging church. It’s not something I’ve really had much call to study, so I’ve had little more than a basic understanding of what it means. But prompted by blog posts and conversations I decided to have a bit more of a look at what it’s really about and try to look into some of the questions it raises. If you want to know more about what I’m talking about before engaging with the questions below, have a look at this or that.
The first thing that Process Theology requires you to question is ‘what is God like‘? In Process Theology, everything is to be understood relationally and God must be understood as interdependent with creation. Now that is a difficult pill for many who have been raised with more traditional theologies to swallow. But exploring that one suggestion raises more questions for me.
Firstly, if we’re to think of God as relational, we must first think about God as an emotional person. The ancient Greek idea of God, going back to Aristotle was that of ‘apatheia‘, unfeeling, unmoved, impassible. A quick scan of the Old Testament shows us that that was not the experience of the Jews – their God was compassionate, loving, merciful, patient. And if we see Jesus as the very embodiment, the incarnation of what God is like, then we can see that the gospels depict him as a passionate man – recognising the pain of the people he met with, experiencing it himself, literally moved – to tears, to respond.
Some have sought to reconcile this by suggesting that although we experience God as compassionate, or having one another of these ‘anthropomorphic’ emotions, in his real being he is not moved, that he is still dispassionate. This is deeply dissatisfying to me, especially as I think of John’s epistle saying that ‘God is love’. The ‘god of the philosophers’ does not seem to match the revealed God that we follow.
If God does feel and if we see this most clearly in Jesus, then we have to think of God’s suffering. This is something I’ve written about before, thinking about how God suffers with us based on Romans 8. Here and elsewhere in Paul’s writings, suffering is seen through the lens of Jesus’ crucifixion – the suffering, dying God. Christians, like Paul, are called to have their lives moulded by their suffering with Christ into a ‘cruciform shape’. On this topic, I’ve started to read Moltmann’s The Crucified God to explore his perspective on this.
But this thought of a suffering God brings up the idea of change – one that sits uncomfortably with traditional understandings of God. If we are shaped and transformed by suffering with Jesus, does this mean that he was changed by his suffering? If Yes, that implies that God can be changed in a very fundamental way; if No, did he really suffer in a meaningful way. Suffering, perhaps more than any other feeling, must change us, often in the most profound ways. The depth of faith of martyrs, holocaust survivors and so on is unquestionable, and that it was developed as a direct result of the suffering they endured seems obvious. If God really suffered and continues to suffer with us, does that mean that very experience changes him?
Wayne Grudem (who I would think to be a standard go-to for a conservative evangelical take on this) rejects the idea of God being impassive. He also suggests that God is unchangeable in four ways: his being, his perfections, his purposes and his promises. By his definitions, it seems what I’m talking about above are God’s ‘perfections’ – the attributes that he has that are perfect, full, complete – his love and compassion being examples. But Process Theology would also challenge Gruden’s conception of the unchangeable being of God. For Grudem, people – and all creatures – are constantly ‘becoming’, while God as pure ‘being’, with no potentiality or changability is where they can find rest.
So my first reflection on Process Theology has circled around whether God can change. I wonder how we can reconcile the feeling, suffering God with the idea that really feeling something is transformative while keeping the belief that God cannot change or be changed. On the other hand, what does it mean for God to be ‘the Rock’, ‘the same yesterday, today and forever’ if the every part of the universe in their relationships with him change him?
What do you think? Have I misunderstood the nature of feeling, experience and how it transforms? Or are there better ways of thinking about the unchangeability of God that I have not explored? Please add your comment below!
January 12, 2012 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: news, personal
Not many posts on my blog are personal, mostly they are about an idea or a viewpoint on a topic that I’ve been thinking about. But I thought that, given the break I’ve taken from that kind of post, it was time to fill you in on what’s been happening and some plans and ideas.
December’s blogging output mostly went on the Provoketive website. I wrote an Advent series, trying to see what we might learn from taking the beginnings of each of the four Gospels in the New Testament on their own, at face value. It was a valuable exercise for me, I hope one that others could learn from too. You can go back and read it even now – it’s in four parts: Mark, John, Matthew and Luke.
December was the date set for the exam board at LST, the meeting that approves the marks given for my MA. They have awarded me an MA with merit – a very good result for a student switching disciplines as I have. I am thinking about how best to make my work available to read – especially the dissertation on Rob Bell’s book Love Wins, as I think it may be interesting to some. Watch this space, as they say!
My job search goes on, as does the fantastic time I get to spend with my little boy. It seems unbelievable that he’s almost a year old, but I suppose a lot has happened in that time.
I have plenty of ideas for writing and 2012 is full of wide open spaces to fill with imagination!
December 12, 2011 at 12:35 pm · Filed under Food · Tags: christmas, food, mince pie, recipe
You’ll need some mincemeat for this – I’m sure shop-bought would work fine, though. The pastry is the important bit here - this is Ainsley Harriott’s recipe from the BBC, though with some adjustments! The result is very popular – with all ages! Read the rest of this entry »
December 7, 2011 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Food · Tags: christmas, food, mince pie, mincemeat, recipe
This recipe for mincemeat comes from an old book that my Mum uses every year. It’s a cooked mincemeat, which means (according to both my Mum and the recipe book) that it will keep for not just weeks but even years! You can, of course, try adding some other things to it – Mum adds ground almonds, I think, while I added some dried cranberries. 2011 is the year of the homemade mince pie!
Read the rest of this entry »
December 7, 2011 at 1:37 pm · Filed under Food · Tags: cake, christmas, christmas cake, food, recipe
This is a recipe that I tried last year (2010) and found that even my Christmas cake hating wife enjoyed! It only needs to be made a week before Christmas, though I suppose earlier would be fine and it keeps well – if you can stop people eating it! Shamelessly lifted from cottagesmallholder.com and minimally edited.
November 30, 2011 at 2:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: economics, education, opinion
Today is November 30th, strike day across the UK. Universities across the country are being occupied in protest against the ‘reforms’ that are planned to come in next year, public workers are protesting against the changes to pensions that will see them paying more for longer in return for a smaller payout in many cases. As an NUT member, I joined a rally in Coventry, where I live, but the other thing I can do is blog about why this government’s actions are so regressive.
The reasons why the pensions are so important to teachers and other public sector workers have been very publicly and cogently discussed, so I want to write about education specifically, from the earliest years to university. The plans of the government do in fact make sense if you are comfortable with the ongoing comoditisation of education. If it makes you at all uncomfortable, now is the time to speak out and call for a cultural change at all levels of society.
Comoditisation is the process of industrialising education – in the way farming is industrialised, think chicken farm. All that matters in highly comoditised education is the results, the outcomes and grades that are achieved at the end. What matters in secondary education at least is the overall results that the school achieve, it is those grades that to a very large extent determine what assessment the school inspectors, OFSTED, give the school. There is an incentive for schools, in particular the leadership, to not focus on teachers or individual students, except as means to achieving their overall targets.
You might think that the commercialisation of education would bring benefits to students as they gain power as the ‘customer’ in the game. I think that’s a wrong view of things – the customer in this game is not the one you might expect.
You can see this effect at play at Facebook. You might imagine that as a user with a profile at Facebook that you are a customer. Wrong. the advertisers are the real customers who actually are sold a product: you. When Facebook makes changes the site that make life more difficult for you, or change your privacy settings to make more things public than you wanted, you have to ask why. Why are they doing things that upset users, that make it more difficult to do the things that they want? For one, very few of the users are actually going to leave the service, but secondly, the changes are made to benefit the real customers.
It’s the same in education: the real customers are not the students, it’s the big companies that sponsor universities, it’s the government targets and funding that keep schools open. The students are a means to an end, factory-farmed animals that are fed and watered, kept alive and in reasonable health because to do otherwise would undermine their production value. Teachers and lecturers have gone from skilled small-holders to farm-hands to replaceable production line workers in the minds of the DFE, despite struggling to replace the increasing turnover. They seem to believe that the business plan, the curriculum is what will change the results that they demand, they seem to think that the contribution of teachers is minimal – why else would they cut investment. If the students were seen as individuals, as actual people, if teaching staff were the key resource in transforming the lives of those human beings, why would they be cutting them?
Setting a target at the national level seems fine, even appropriate, until they filter down levels to the micro scale. Students are not numbers or points to be banked. They need to be seen as individuals, cared for and cultivated into the successful people they can be by skilled educators given the resources and support that they need. Students are not merely the future of this nation, they are present now, with needs and dreams now.
Taking on massive debt is sold as an ‘investment’ in the future to students, which underscores the production mentality of twenty-first century education. Nothing is done for the now, for the benefit of the student and the enrichment of her life. It is all so that in the future they might be productive. We are creating a generation of students for whom learning is either a luxury or a chore to be endured until they can do something actually important. Teaching is set up as different to doing, inferior and passive – a production line task. Life long learning is rhetoric, unreal and undesirable in the culture that is being created.
The US is often used as an example of the success of high-cost, ‘high-value’ education, with the Ivy League colleges regularly topping the lists of best universities in the world. Yet the high cost of education is one of the key reasons that despite the ‘American dream’, social mobility is lower in the US than in Europe – high cost education means the rich keep on being rich and it is harder for the poor to become rich.
Education is not the only public service to go down this road in the UK, many others are seeing the same process – the health service is another good example. Commoditisation is a dehumanising process, one that we must oppose and suggest practical alternatives to. The strikes and the Occupy movement are a chance to say ‘no’, but we must go on to start exploring constructive ways to change the system.
November 29, 2011 at 9:45 am · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: opinion, philosophy, provoketive, writing
I’ve written a post for Provokotive Magazine touching on Michel Foucault and the shift in power that the use of mobile phones and other highly portable video recorders has made in the protests this year. The all-seeing ‘panopticon’ has been inverted and state surveillance has almost been overtaken by the people providing their own view of events and the actions of the police.
It’s really exciting to have my writing published by another site, bringing my thinking to a new, mainly US based audience. I hope that it will also demonstrate my attitude and passion as I’m applying for new jobs in the next few months. I’ll have more posts published there very soon – including an advent series that will be starting today! I’ll keep linking to what I’ve written there from this blog and I’d love to see your comments on what I’ve done on either site.
November 17, 2011 at 12:34 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: gospel, scot mcknight, theology
Reading ‘The King Jesus Gospel‘ by Scot McKnight had moments of that bizarre experience of someone thinking your thoughts after you, then having the analytic insight to go deeper and find answers that are intuitively right but you hadn’t reached.
Though I posted a quote on the subject of ‘what is the gospel‘ just a few months ago, it was years ago (the start of 2008 to be precise) that I started an email conversation with a leader at our church on the exact question of ‘what is the gospel’ – asking (among other things) if Jesus preached the gospel. I think we concluded at the end that Luke wanted us to see the continuity between what Jesus did in the early chapters and what happened in Acts, right up to the last verse of the last chapter. But the relationship between what Jesus taught and what we find (for example) in the epistles and in Acts remained nebulous.
McKnight has thoroughly gone through each aspect of the ‘gospeling’ (yes, it is a verb, especially for Luke) of Paul, the four gospels, Jesus and Peter to make, as he puts it, a ‘four-legged chair’. He starts in 1 Corinthians 15, probably the earliest recorded gospel statement (as when 1 Corinthians was written Paul was only halfway through the missionary journeys that the second half of Acts describes and each of the gospels were written probably at least a decade later). McKnight draws out four themes that he then goes highlights in the rest of the gospeling of the New Testament. I summarised them like this for the housegroups at church:
The gospel message that the apostles preach is the story of Jesus – that’s why the early church called the first four books of the New Testament “the Gospel”. It’s the story of his life, death and resurrection, and it’s all wrapped up in the story of Israel, the Old Testament. We can’t understand the gospel without trying to understand what God had been doing since the start of human history through to the Kingdom of Israel and on towards the time that Jesus was born.
When that gospel is preached it requires a response, faith and repentance, aligning ourselves with what God is doing. Responding to the gospel means sharing in its benefits and effects – the saving and redeeming that God is doing in this world.
Now this sort of ‘narrative’ reading of the gospel works well for me, especially with some of the things that I have been reading and writing over the past year. If the gospel is Jesus as the pinnacle of God ‘s saving mission through Israel and now the Church, our response is not just to ‘accept Jesus into my heart’ (as if the gospel is all about me and that all God’s efforts from eternity have been about me!) but to start to put ourselves into the story.
We might choose to extend the story metaphor in two directions – we might be all journalistic, our response could be to report the story to others. I don’t think that goes far enough. As I’ve written before, as actors, we become part of the story, acting it out as a dramatic improvisation - and acting has to come with both words and ‘actions’. This in turn leads to the understanding that gospeling goes beyond seeking conversions, it is about making disciples and fills every part of a Christian’s life.
Trying to get this kind of idea across to church on Sunday I experimented with a different, more interactive, style of teaching. It seemed to go down well, with some very positive feedback from a wide cross-section of the church (including some who I wouldn’t have expected it from!) I’ll probably blog about the experience, but one thing to note now is that I at least have an idea where people missed the point of what I said! Anyway, the sermon audio and presentation on Prezi are available from the Canley website and you can also download the notes I wrote for the church housegroups – ‘Jesus is the good news!‘
This also adds to the post earlier in the week on discipling and mission.
