Confessing Evangelical

I could spend the rest of my life just playing with this new toy... Here's a shot showing the London Eye (top right), complete with shadow cast on the Thames. Big Ben is at bottom left, just below the road that goes over Westminster Bridge.

Update: And here's the entrance to the Channel Tunnel...

Just one more jump, Roo, dear, and then we really must be going: Pyramids and Sphinx (the Sphinx is due east of the middle of the three big pyramids) (do make sure you zoom right in on this one).

Couple of interesting Google satellite images (see previous post).

First, this view of Israel. Note that the border between Israel and Egypt can be clearly seen, thanks to the effects of irrigation on the Israeli side. Ditto between Israel "proper" and the occupied West Bank, though the effect is a little more subtle here.

Second, the border between North Korea and South Korea. Note the extensive cultivation on the South Korean side of the border (right/bottom) as compared with North Korea (left/top).

(Don't forget to use the drag and zoom features to get a good look at the effects I'm describing.)

I'm not entirely sure what conclusions can be drawn from these images - in the case of Israel and the West Bank, you'll probably draw the conclusions you brought to the image in the first place, one way or another - but they certainly provide a vivid contrast between the different countries and territories depicted. It makes me wonder what political impact this new ability to roam the earth's surface will come to have, the effect it will have on our perceptions of the world.

Can anyone find any similarly revealing images of other parts of the world?

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. (Click the link and then start dragging the image with your mouse to get the full-on "Wow" effect. And try zooming in and out, too.)

HT: Peter Ould, for the download version.

From our correspondent slamming in the moshpit at the Queen Elizabeth Hall:

Me and t'wife went to see Suzanne Vega playing live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank last night, in a concert billed as an "intimate acoustic evening of new material and classic hits": just Vega herself on acoustic guitar, with her bassist Mike Visceglia. Oh, and her 10-year old daughter Ruby Froom, who came on stage to play finger cymbals for "Solitaire".

I first became a fan of Suzanne Vega when we studied some of her lyrics in English classes, and I'd like to say I'd been a loyal fan ever since. However, in the early 90s I had some kind of mental seizure and sold my Vega CDs, only to have to repurchase them a few years later. But anyway, with that one interruption which needn't detain us now, I've been a fan of hers since around 1987, so it was great finally to have the opportunity to see her live.

(Incidentally, being an English teacher must be great, mustn't it? You buy the new Suzanne Vega album, and just as you're sat at home thinking "Bother. I won't be able to listen to this in the staff room tomorrow, as I've got to take 4DM's GCSE English class", a light-bulb comes on above your head and you turn the album into the theme of the lesson. And at least one of your charges doesn't even notice what you were up to until 18 years later.)

Anyway, it was a very enjoyable evening - the music (including a couple of very promising new songs) was wonderful, and Vega herself came across very well (it's always a fear when going to something like this that an artist you enjoy will turn out to be a bit obnoxious in the flesh). But then I am a bit of a sucker for intelligent, thoughtful, articulate, incisive English graduates - I did marry one, after all.

The concert also provides me with an excuse to post the following, as a service to the public:

Ten Great Suzanne Vega Songs That Aren't "Marlene on the Wall", "Luka" or "Tom's Diner"

1. The Queen and the Soldier
   


2. Gypsy
   


3. World Before Columbus
   


4. Left of Center
   


5. (I'll Never Be) Your Maggie May
   


6. In Liverpool
   


7. Soap and Water
   


8. Freeze Tag
   


9. No Cheap Thrill
   


10. Caramel
    

Honourable mention for St Clare , which would have made the top ten except that it's a cover version. The other near-misses are commented out in the source-code for this post, in case I change my mind about any of them.

The title for this post is taken from this frankly rather alarming article which forensically examines "Tom's Diner" to work out exactly what day in history Vega spent "sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner". Gasp, shock, horror, it turns out that, contrary to the lyrics of the song, it didn't in fact rain on the day on which the New York Post carried "a story of an actor who had died while he was drinking (it was no-one I had heard of)". The song appears to conflate at least two separate mornings. Suzanne Vega in Artistic Licence Shock.

Thanks to this site, I can now finally listen to this (13MB WMV) (streaming version here) using this. Great stuff!

Somehow, this book failed to make the cut on either of my book lists: that "Memorable History of England", 1066 And All That, by WC Sellar & RJ Yeatman.

One of my favourite sections deals with the Wave of Justifiable Wars fought in the 19th century in an attempt to amuse Queen "We are not amused" Victoria. Living as we do in another age of Justifiable Wars, some of this makes for quite topical reading. My own personal favourites are Burma, and the two phases of the war with Abyssinia:

1. War with China. Fought on moral grounds, because the Chinese government were disposed to impede the importation of Empire Opium into China. The British thus became indispensable to the Chinese and, after several bloody engagements, Hong Kong, the best port of China, was ceded to the British Throne.
   


2. War with Afghanistan. Owing to the size, direction, etc., of Russia, it was imperative that the King of Afghanistan, whose name was Just Mohammed, should sit on his throne in a friendly attitude. The King, however, (Just) declined to do this and the British Army was cut to pieces in the Pippa Passes to such an extent that Dr Brydle rode half alive (or, according to some historians, half dead) into Jahallaballad. After this, however, several bloody battles were fought, and the Kings of Afghanistan were compelled to sit in a more friendly attitude.
   


3. 2nd Burmese War. Cause: there had only been one Burmese War. Burmese cut to pieces. Burma ceded to the Crown. Peace with Burma.
   


4. War against Abyssinia. Object: to release the Europeans in Abyssinia, all of whom had been incarcerated by the King Theodore, who was a Christian and would not see their point of view. The war was divided into two parts. (1) Sir Robert Rapier demands release of prisoners. Prisoners released. (2) War declared against Abyssinia. King Theodore blown up with Magnesia, the capital of Abyssinia. Theodore commits suicide. Sir Robert becomes Lord Rapier of Magnesia. Peace with Abyssinia.
   


5. War against Zulus. Cause: the Zulus. Zulus exterminated. Peace with Zulus.

However, these wars failed to achieve their end of amusing the Crown, so something new was called for:

All these attempts having failed, news was brought to the Queen that the Fiji Islands were annexed to the British "by the desire of the inhabitants". At this point, according to some (seditious) historians, Her Majesty's lip was observed to tremble.

Prompted by my second book tag post, I've started re-reading Henri Blocher's book on Genesis 1-3, In the Beginning. I described this as "very French ... in a good way", and this recollection was confirmed when I turned to the opening sentences of the book (p.15).

Is it just me, or is there something very ... French ... about this opening? Mind you, I love the two opening sentences (highlighted):

Curiosity about our beginnings continues to haunt the human race. It will not call off the quest for its origins. One might have thought that "future shock" would divert it and that, by adopting a "prospective" attitude, modern man would no longer be interested in anything but the future.

Far from it. Mircea Eliade has seen clearly that the enormous historiographical task that has been going on since the last century is another form of the old search. "There is a veritable recuperation of the past, even of our primeval past," he writes, by which man "protects himself against the pressure of contemporary History", and he is doing an anamnesis comparable to a return by psychoanalysis to the events of early childhood.¹

Futurology is mirrored by archaeology, whose popularity remains unabated. And what is the most up-to-date way of explaining what happens to things? You consider their beginning, whereas Aristotle considered their end!

¹ Mircea Eliade, Aspects du mythe (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), pp.167ff.

There's more to life than books, you know -
But not much more.

  -  The Smiths, "Handsome Devil"

I said this already in the comments, but just for the record: while this book tag thing has been great fun, and reminded me of various books that have meant a lot to me in the past, and various books that I either want to re-read, or to read for the first time - and while I am looking forward to the lists from those yet to respond (you know who you are) - it has also, let's be honest, represented something of an outbreak of collective insanity in the Lutheran Blogosphere™.

Indeed, perhaps someone should have nominated this as one of their books (though in fact it gets quoted quite extensively by Francis Wheen, so perhaps it's included in my list "by reference").

So this is just to say that if any other "tag! you're it!" memes crop up, then I will be ignoring any attempts to tag me. That even includes - tempted though I may be to join in with this one - the twist introduced by "J Random Hermeneut" of extending the exercise to music. ("[The composer] J.G. Walther was the greatest Walther ever to grace the Lutheran church. All others are mere imposters." Bad pastor! No biscuit!)

I'm starting to develop a persecution complex. First Thomas tags me with one book list meme, now Bunnie traps me in a pincer movement with this hospital pass:

Imagine that a local philanthropist is hosting an event for local high school students and has asked you to pick out five to ten books to hand out as door prizes. At least one book should be funny and at least one book should provide some history of Western Civilization and at least one book should have some regional connection. The philanthropist doesn’t like foul language (but will allow some four-letter words in context, such as expressed during battle by soldiers). Otherwise things are pretty wide open. What do you pick?

Hah! Like banning foul language will keep me from my stated aim of corrupting these impressionable high-school students! Bwa-ha-haaa!

The other conditions (I'm not sure whether these are original, or added by Bunnie): (1) one book must be something you're a bit embarrassed to admit is on your favorites list, (2) all books would be suitable for adults and (3) one book changed the way you look at the world.

Western Civilization

1. The Communist Manifesto (online text here), by Karl Marx: Here's a book that changed my view of the world. I subsequently changed it back (like the Bob Roberts song, "Times are Changin' Back"), but let's not split hairs here. And there are some great lines in it: "Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat."
   
   And (in the spirit of Rick Ritchie's question 4 1/2) I'd make sure the copies handed out were the Penguin edition, including AJP Taylor's waspish and debunking introduction: "Marx seemed to his contemporaries a subversive writer, challenging accepted habits of thought. In retrospect he appears as a respectable Victorian gentleman of scholarly disposition, much given, as many Victorians were, to knowing what was good for his intellectual inferiors."
   


2. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions, by Francis Wheen: Wheen shows Michael Moore how polemic should be done. He provides a brief history of the growth of irrationality both in the west and elsewhere, in particular since 1979. Much of the book consists of an amusing, if slightly autopilot, canter through Thatcherism, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the New Age movement, televangelism, the death of Princess Diana and so on.
   
   The last couple of chapters are something else, and are clearly what Wheen really wanted to say, his excuse for writing the rest of the book, as he lays into global capitalism on the one (right) hand, and on the other (left) hand, the irrational response to 9/11 which has seen the western Left being driven to side with Islamists out of their knee-jerk opposition to the USA.
   
   Wheen fails to realise that his preferred option of Enlightenment rationalism is a busted flush, and just as you find yourself cheering him on he comes out with something absolutely enraging, but that's what he's set out to achieve, and it is certainly a fun and thought-provoking read.
   


3. An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth: like all Seth's books (such as A Suitable Boy and The Golden Gate), this is beautifully written. It gets in here because of the insight it provides into western classical music, particularly the experience of being a member of a string quartet, and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose Art of Fugue is central to the plot. (As it happens, I have no idea what it's like to be in a string quartet, but Seth makes you feel like you do, which is precisely my point.)
   


4. Scanning the Century, edited by Peter Forbes: This anthology, subtitled "The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry", aims to tell the story of the twentieth century through the eyes of its poets: including topics such as the Great War, Communism, Jazz, Fascism & Nazism, the Cold War, pop music and the media. Beautiful book, great idea and some top poetry.
   


5. Pure Sex, by Sydney Anglican stalwarts Tony Payne & Phillip Jensen: one thing our high school students will be treated to over the years is what CS Lewis described as a diet of "good solid lies about sex". This book aims to counteract this, by looking at the personal agendas, dubious science and bogus statistics of those who helped engineer the sexual revolution in the west. Phillip Jensen admits that one of the aims of the book was to "play the man, not the ball", and in particular the Bloomsbury Set and Alfred Kinsey do not come out of this book well.
   
   But it also shows a better way, by defending the Christian way to enjoy truly "pure sex", and also including a brief summary of the gospel to balance what could otherwise by a good solid diet of law about sex. And with a title like that, there's a fighting chance that at least some of our high school students might even read it, which is more than can be said for many of the books we're all suggesting in this exercise...

Funny

1. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson: apart from being very funny, and featuring great artwork, reading Calvin & Hobbes is also great training for parenthood. Long before we started a family, reading Calvin cartoons did wonders for reconciling my wife to the idea of having boys (which is just as well).

Regional

My excuse for including four books relating to human origins and Darwinism under "Regional" is that I live about ten minutes' drive from Down House, Charles Darwin's home in north-west Kent.

One of the aims of my list is to select books that will encourage our recipients to think, and so I thought it worth having several books looking at one area from various perspectives. Plus this is an area on which my own thinking is far from 100% resolved, so hopefully this will make it less of a descending-from-Mt-Sinai affair than it might have been if I'd selected another topic:

1. Climbing Mount Improbable, by Richard Dawkins: Let's be honest. Darwinian evolution is widely accepted both inside and outside the church. It tells a story that people find compelling, and has some highly articulate and convincing advocates, not least the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.
   
   This is one of Prof Dawkins' most compelling, not to mention exhilirating, books. He is an excellent writer, and this book includes some of his most illuminating metaphors (such as the "Mount Improbable" of the title), as well as such tours de force as his demonstration of how even the human eye could have developed through natural selection and a long, slow climb up Mount Improbable.
   


2. Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, by Phillip E. Johnson: A great little introduction to the shocking idea that (however persuasive Prof Dawkins & co may be) evolutionary thinking may not actually have tied up every loose end. Encourages you to question some of the underlying assumptions behind the evolutionary consensus, introduces the idea of intelligent design, and provides some useful mental and logical tools for examining not only evolutionism, but any other "metanarrative" that might otherwise be accepted unquestioningly (hey! watch where you're pointing that thing!).
   
   This book played a key role in shifting my own views on human origins from "theistic evolution" to, um, whatever they are now, um, seven days, framework, 24 hours, um, can I get back to you on that one? Compiling this list also reminds me that I must get round to reading this some time.
   


3. Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe: Having finished Prof Dawkins' book, and sat back amazed at the convincing account of how evolution can explain everything from the symbiotic relationship between fruit wasps and fig trees, to that creationist shibboleth the human eye, you can then turn to Michael Behe's book, where he proceeds to provide an equally compelling counterargument based on the concept of "irreducible complexity".
   
   Behe argues that, like a mousetrap, whose operation requires several interdependent components to be present and configured correctly, various biological systems (such as eyes, or the blood-clotting cascade) are "irreducibly complex": take away one aspect and they do not merely function "less well", but they fail to function at all. Thus they could not have developed by gradual evolutionary development, but required an "intelligent designer" to put the various pieces together.
   
   As with Dawkins, even if you are not convinced by his conclusions, the description of the science itself - the biochemical mechanisms at work within cells and organisms - is fascinating.
   


4. In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis, by Henri Blocher: the first book I ever bought on Amazon, this is one of the classic expositions of the so-called "literary-framework interpretation" of Genesis 1 to 3. Some of its particular strengths include Blocher's arguments for the unity of Genesis 1 & 2, based on numerological considerations (the number of occurrences in those chapters of "the LORD", "God", "the LORD God", and so on) and of the different literary structures of those two chapters (the two "tablets", as Blocher describes them).
   
   Then there is his demolition of the idea that taking Genesis 3 as a myth means we can get away from the idea of descent from Adam, original sin and so on, and read it as being about a fall from innocence in each human life (the "Adam as Everyman" approach). On the contrary, argues Blocher, if Genesis 3 is a myth, then it is a myth whose message is precisely that the entire human race descended from a single couple who rebelled against God.
   
   Again - and you'll see there's a pattern emerging here - even if you end up disagreeing with Blocher's conclusions, this is a stimulating book that will make you think. It is also very French, and I mean that in a good way.

Right then, I tag DS Ketelby (who can choose between today's and yesterday's tagging depending on which tickles his fancy; or both, if he's a total obsessive like me), Chris Atwood, and - just to send this meme (word coined by Richard Dawkins, of course) spiralling into the southern hemisphere - Greg and Craig.

[Note: I now realise I misinterpreted the rules (great lawyer, eh? sheesh). Turns out you don't have to fit all the books into the above categories. Doing so made it a more interesting exercise, for me if for no-one else, but my taggees need not feel constrained in the same way.]

So I got tagged by Thomas with this one. Like I don't have enough to do with my time. ;-)

1. How many books do you own?

Haven't the foggiest idea. Probably 1,500 to 2,000 between me and my wife.

2. What was the last book you bought?

Matthew for Everyone, Part 1 by NT Wright, on Monday. I also received my copy of the Brotherhood Prayer Book in the post on Monday, but the actual "buying decision" for that was back at the beginning of May (good ol' surface shipping...).

Other recent purchases: the pocket version of Celebrating Common Prayer, a pocket edition of the New Revised Standard Version and a secondhand copy of Byzantium: The Early Centuries by John Julius Norwich.

3. What was the last book you read?

"Actually, I'm re-reading TekWar, by William Shatner" - Father Ted.

Erm, in fact the last book I finished (always an important distinction with me) was Paul for Everyone volume by Tom Wright (hmm, bit of a pattern emerging here?), covering the letters to the Galatians and Thessalonians.

Books currently on the go include The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan and The New Testament and the People of God by (no groaning at the back, there) NT Wright.

Looking over the list of books recently purchased and read, I realise that I need to lighten up a bit, so I'll probably read some fiction next.

4. What are some books that have meant a lot to you?

[Adopts pious tone:] "You mean, apart from the Bible?"

I'll try to keep this a little shorter than Thomas managed. :-)

Some of the books that have had the biggest effect on me (perhaps that's not the same thing, perhaps it is), in roughly chronological order, include:

• Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick: the book that made me switch from wanting to study physics at university to studying mathematics, without which the next two items on the list might never have happened.
  


• Mere Christianity by CS Lewis: the book that played a pretty major part in my return to faith in 1994.
  


• The Passion by Jeanette Winterson: the subject of one of my first serious conversations with the woman who had lent it to me, who I proceeded to marry.
  


• The Last Word on Guidance (now republished as Guidance and the Voice of God) by Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen: a book I read very early in my Christian life, and for which I'm profoundly grateful for protecting me from the nonsense about "finding (or missing) God's perfect will for your life", "laying out fleeces" and so on that could otherwise have caused me the same anguish that this issue causes many other Christians.
  


• The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, edited by Tom Paulin: recommended to me by my friend Nick (an occasional lurker round here - hi, Nick!). While I had enjoyed poetry before, it was normally as a delivery vehicle for ideas. This book helped me start enjoying poetry for the language itself.
  


• The God Who is There by Francis Schaeffer: God is there; He is not silent. The importance of antithesis ("A is A, and A is not not-A"). The line of despair (and the existential leap into the upper storey). These are just a few of the ideas from Schaeffer's books that spring to mind now, and that continue to have a strong influence on me, hopefully for good.
  


• Gospel Trilogy by Graeme Goldsworthy: a.k.a. Gospel and Kingdom, Gospel and Wisdom and The Gospel in Revelation. All now out of print, sadly. Introduced me to "biblical theology", of reading the whole of Scripture as relating to, and fulfilled in, Christ. One of these days I will try to get round to blogging some of this stuff. If you're in an Anglican conservative evangelical church and you hear the words "God's people under God's rule in God's place" - and you will, sooner or later - then that's Goldsworthy's influence at work.
  


• Luther's Small Catechism and The Spirituality of the Cross by Gene Veith: to paraphrase Wren's memorial in St Paul's Cathedral, "if you seek their monument, look around you".

5. Tag! You're it: DS Ketelby, Pr Joel Humann, Bunnie (as revenge for having saddled me with the next of these lists I have to put together), Devona and Rick.

And am I the only person to have had "Freeze Tag" by Suzanne Vega going round my head for the whole time I've been doing this?

Update: Peter Ould, consider yourself tagged.

Hmm. Lots of excitement being generated by the likely rejection by the United Church of Christ of a resolution affirming that Jesus is Lord. I don't know much about the UCC, and what I do know I don't like, but I don't think we should be getting too giddy with excitement about this.

It's not like the resolution only says, "This synod affirms that Jesus is Lord". That affirmation is only one part of what is (whether you agree with it or not) a highly political resolution (PDF).

Putting the best construction on why people might vote no, here's what people who vote against the resolution could be regarding themselves as voting against:

"The greatest issue facing our denomination is whether or not to acknowledge the Lordship and divinity of Jesus".

• Response: "but we don't think that is, in fact, at issue"

"the UCC is often referred to as 'Unitarians Considering Christ'".

• Response: "I'm not going to vote for a resolution that endorses such an uncharitable and ignorant view of our church".
  
  (It's a bit like the time the chairwoman of the Conservative Party in the UK delighted its political opponents by saying that people saw the Conservatives as "the nasty party". To which the general response was, "Oh, of course! That's the word we were looking for! Hadn't quite been able to put our finger on it before, but now you've nailed it for us. Thanks!")

"It is highly detrimental to the health and growth of UCC churches and extremely embarrassing for UCC pastors and members to be viewed as non-Christians".

• Response: "I don't believe that's happening. And in any case, why should we pander to the ignorance of others?"

"...providing us the opportunity to boldly declare and celebrate that we are indeed a Christian denomination requiring that all of our pastors and churches adhere to the most essential, indispensable Christian doctrine of all, namely that Jesus is Lord."

• Response: "But that isn't in issue. What this is about is giving a political victory to one conservative group within our church".

I'm not saying I agree with these responses. Just that there are reasons why a "moderate liberal" could vote against the resolution in good faith, without that being a rejection of the affirmation that Jesus is Lord.

I'm not altogether sure I'd want to vote for a resolution like that, just because I do not believe that the earliest Christian creed, a precious affirmation that should be life and health to us, should be used as part of a political powerplay. This is, of course, one of the inherent dangers of denominational politics, and one from which "conservative" Christians, not least within the Lutheran Church, are far from immune.

Rowan Williams' address to the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Nottingham is well worth reading, even if - as Chris Johnson points out in his summary of the address - it will almost certainly come to be seen as Dr Williams' eulogy for the Anglican Communion.

What particularly impressed me was the seriousness with which Dr Williams tackles the issue of sacramental communion between Christians. Very often, this issue is swept aside by advocates of open communion - "We all love Jesus so we should all share in the Lord's Supper together. Anyone who says otherwise is a sectarian bigot" - but the Archbishop of Canterbury here recognises that things cannot be as simple as all that; and also that we are not faced with an either/or question of full communion versus sectarian hostility towards one another:

We can’t guarantee anything at this point. We can’t ignore the seriousness of what divides us. But if there is no easy solution, and there is not, we can at least think about this simple suggestion. If it is difficult for us to stand together at the Lord’s Table as we might wish, can we continue to be friends?

It sounds so weak, doesn’t? But, I actually think it is of great significance. It is a way of saying that we do not know how to go on being visibly full brothers and sisters, that we can find no clear visible way of expressing any sense of being together in the Body of Christ. But this is the case already with a number of other Christian bodies, and several other Christian bodies view us in this way, notably the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. And yet we maintain respect and often something more than respect. Friendship in Christ, it seems, is possible even when sacramental communion isn’t.

Dr Williams goes on to ask "what we are prepared to do to nourish this sort of friendship?", and continues:

Friendship in Christ is a willingness to share prayer, to listen without rancour to each another, to respect and even enjoy difference, to be patient with each other, not expecting quick healing of divisions but not walking away every time difference raises its head.

Friendship in Christ is best and most creative when it is linked with sacramental fellowship; but if that fellowship is hard or controversial, we need to remember from our ecumenical experience that this need not and should not mean a spirit of bitter contempt towards each other. It has taken the great churches of the world centuries to make this sort of friendship a routine matter, but, thank God, it is so now for the most part.

Dr Williams continues by imploring his listeners not to let "the language we use about each other ... slip from proper and honest disagreement towards contempt and mutual exclusion". Because, while we may not be able to kneel together at the altar:

Yet as baptised believers, we still have something to offer each other; and the friendship of the baptised should remain, whatever else divides.

The issue of "open vs close(d) communion" can lead to some pretty heated discussions, and I'm not trying to reopen that particular argument now. Suffice it to say that I agree wholeheartedly with the following words from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, para 1398:

The more painful the experience of the divisions in the Church which break the common participation in the table of the Lord, the more urgent are our prayers to the Lord that the time of complete unity among all who believe in him may return.

In other words, "common participation in the table of the Lord" should be our goal, what we are aspiring to and yearning for, rather than something we simply take for granted as if it lay within our power to achieve. And equally, we should not simply take our divisions at the Lord's Table for granted: they should be a source of anguish to us, and spur us on to pray and work for these divisions to be overcome, for the church to return to a "time of complete unity" in which God's people share a common confession of a common gospel, a common faith in Jesus Christ.

And, in the meantime, this inability to enjoy the blessing of "common participation in the table of the Lord" makes it even more important for the "friendship of the baptised" truly to be seen in our relationships with one another and with other Christians.

I'm thinking of changing the name of my blog to ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZConfessing Evangelical.

NT Wright, in the section on 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17 in one of his "Paul for Everyone" volumes, comments on St Paul's exhortation to "stand firm, and hold on tight to the traditions which you were taught":

There are troubled times on the way, and like a small boat crossing a turbulent waterway the little ship of the church is going to be tossed to and fro. When that's happening, they need to know how to stand upright and what to hold on to.

Here Paul is quite clear: the safety-rope consists of "the traditions you were taught", that is, the foundational Christian teachings which he gave them when he was with them, and then by letter.

We know from his various writings what these were. He frequently refers back to them, as for instance in 1 Corinthians chapters 11 (about the eucharist) and 15 (the basic gospel message itself). Often he says, "you will remember" or "you know, don't you", reminding his hearers of teachings they have already received (eg Romans 6:3).

These teachings are about three things in particular: the basic facts of the gospel; the central actions of the worshipping church, such as baptism and the eucharist; and the fundamental principles of Christian behaviour, particularly the mutual support he calls agape, "love".

Hold on tight to these, he says, and you won't go far wrong. This is as true today as it was in the first century.

The gospel, the sacraments and a life of love for others: anyone wanting to find a good summary of this "threefold cord" of Christian basics could do a lot worse than click here (or here for a PDF copy).

Paul's approach as described by Wright should also encourage us that it is neither necessary nor right for us drop one or other of those strands in order to make Christianity more palatable to outsiders. They represent the irreducible core of Christian belief and living. (They also represent the flow of the argument in Articles IV, V and VI of the Augsburg Confession, as it happens.)

Drop any of them - and it may be a useful exercise to consider each of these in turn, and to ask ourselves what the effect is on the church where that emphasis is missing, and which of the three we are most tempted to downplay ourselves as individual Christians - and you have something that St Paul, at least, would no longer have recognised as true Christianity.

Entertaining story about HM the Queen buying a mini iPod (6GB, £170 - she was ripped! For another 20 quid she could have had this!). But what I especially liked was the note at the end of the story giving the following insight into how these tabloid "royal exclusives" work in practice:

When the Sun uses the term a "royal insider" it means a footman or gardener who the hack met in the Rose and Crown in Windsor the night before. The footman gets about £100 and a pint for the tip. There is a good chance that the Queen has never noticed the leaking staff member before and the reporter is inclined to help him or her develop his information. I know this, because like Dave "Lord Bostoon" Evans, I used to work for the Sun.

I think "develop his information" means "totally make up 90% of the story"...

But, when it comes to British journalistic ethics (one to file with "military intelligence" in the "oxymoron" file), I'm with Mark Steyn, who commented as follows on the departure this week of the last news organisation from Fleet Street:

Fleet Street was a great place, because the whole culture of British journalism was these kind of hard-drinking, scurrilous, unrespectable hacks. And compared to the kind of pompous, ascetic, clean-living blowhards of today's mainstream media in the United States, I'd rather have all those grubby Fleet Street guys.

I must admit to feeling a bit sorry for this guy - the most costly four quid he'll ever ask for.

The email in question has been doing the rounds of the legal profession for the past couple of weeks. Quite gratifying to get it (just) before it hit the news - it arrived in my inbox yesterday evening.

Courtesy of the wonder that is Google, here's the context of "that" GK Chesterton quote:

Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption. You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs.

On the assumption that a man has two ears, it is good logic that three men have six ears, but on the assumption that a man has four ears, it is equally good logic that three men have twelve. And the power of seeing how many ears the average man, as a fact, possesses, the power of counting a gentleman's ears accurately and without mathematical confusion, is not a logical thing but a primary and direct experience, like a physical sense, like a religious vision. The power of counting ears may be limited by a blow on the head; it may be disturbed and even augmented by two bottles of champagne; but it cannot be affected by argument.

Logic has again and again been expended, and expended most brilliantly and effectively, on things that do not exist at all. There is far more logic, more sustained consistency of the mind, in the science of heraldry than in the science of biology. There is more logic in Alice in Wonderland than in the Statute Book or the Blue Books.

The relations of logic to truth depend, then, not upon its perfection as logic, but upon certain pre-logical faculties and certain pre-logical discoveries, upon the possession of those faculties, upon the power of making those discoveries. If a man starts with certain assumptions, he may be a good logician and a good citizen, a wise man, a successful figure. If he starts with certain other assumptions, he may be an equally good logician and a bankrupt, a criminal, a raving lunatic.

Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding truth; on the contrary, truth is necessarily an instrument for using logic - for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth and for the profit of humanity. Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

From Chesterton's column in the Daily News, Feb 25, 1905 (and found here).

So I got bored with "Here I Blog", which was only ever meant as a stopgap after the original strapline for this blog, "Knock, knock,knockin' on Wittenberg's door" got, erm, overtaken by events.

The new line is from our old friend GK Chesterton - appropriate credit to appear on the sidebar sometime soon - and featured as the strapline on the Boars Head Tavern for around, oh, eight hours at least it must have been. I love it, not only because it captures a very Lutheran tension between mistrust of reason and the glad use of it as a good gift from God, but because it perfectly matches my own experience.

Before returning to the faith in 1994, I was a very logical atheist. I'd constructed an imaginary god whom I was able to demolish with consummate logic and reason. While logical argument - for example, this guy - played a part in bringing me back to faith in Christ, for the most part it was only after I'd become a Christian, for reasons and by means that were not simply the outplaying of logic, that I could see how the Christian faith hangs together in terms of "reason".

While we're on that subject, here are three biblical texts that played a very large part in bringing me to faith:

Pilate asked him, "What is truth?" (John 18:18)

Jesus said to her, "Mary!" (John 20:16)

Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new. (Acts 17:21)

Why did those verses make an impact? Simply because, as I read them (not by any means for the first time) in early 1994, it hit me for the first time that what they were describing had actually happened. Simple as that.

In the case of Paul in Athens, there was the additional aspect of ancient Greece being a world in whose existence and truth I had no problem believing (not least through my lifelong interest in astronomy and mathematics). Suddenly, across this landscape walks someone from a world whose existence and truth I had spent almost a decade of my life denying. There's no logical reason why that should have made such an impact on me, but it did.

Anyway, that's enough about me: let's talk about me. :-)

Actually, no, let's talk about the Holy Spirit. Because the experience I'm describing above does illustrate the truth of Article V of the Augsburg Confession when it states that:

...through the Word and the sacraments as through instruments the Holy Spirit is given, who effects faith where and when it pleases God in those who hear the gospel...

Logic and reason don't come into it: one day you read the Bible and the whole thing is, as John Bunyan put it, "as a dry stick". The next, "where and when it pleases God", the Holy Spirit effects faith in you, and (to paraphrase Bunyan), you can see more in a line of the Bible than you can well tell how to stand under.

(Feedback on the new strapline, or appeals to restore the old one, or suggestions as to yet another alternative, etc, are invited. The context of the quote can be found in this post.)

I loved this point made by NT Wright in his essay, "One God, One Lord, One People", where he discusses what a verse that he describes as "one of Paul's most remarkable Christological formulations", 1 Corinthians 8:6:

...yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

Wright points out the parallel between this verse and the Jewish Shema, which "was already, at this stage of Judaism, in widespread use as the Jewish daily prayer".

The Shema reads:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One

Paul's formulation is then (using Wright's translation, but altering the indenting slightly to make the parallel clearer):

But for us:

One God

the father,


from whom are all things and we to him

and one Lord

Jesus the Messiah,


through whom are all things and through whom are we.

In other words, as Wright puts it:

In what is surely one of the most striking Christological formulations ever written in any century, Paul takes an argument which is about monotheism, and takes the Jewish formula which is the most basic expression of Jewish monotheism, and places Jesus at the heart of it.

Paul ... has glossed "God" with "the Father," and "Lord" with "Jesus Christ," adding in each case an explanatory phrase: "God" is the Father, "from whom are all things and we to him," and the "Lord" is Jesus the Messiah, "through whom are all things and we through him."

This is significant because it means that "Paul has placed Jesus within an explicit statement, drawn from the Old Testament's best known monotheistic text, of the doctrine that Israel's God is the one and only God, the creator of the world".

In other words, Paul manages to accomplish two purposes simultaneously: first, he explains Jesus in terms of Jewish monotheism: Jesus is God; He is that God of whom Israel had confessed that "the Lord our God, the Lord is one". And second, he redefines Jewish monotheism in terms of Jesus, so that Israel's God is shown to be the God who has come in the Person of Jesus Christ: so that we can say, with Luther, "I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ".

...but I can't honestly say that my heart was "strangely warmed" by this result:

You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan. You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God's grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your salvation, and he also enables you to live the life of obedience to which God has called us. You are influenced heavily by John Wesley and the Methodists.

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan		96%
Neo orthodox		75%
Roman Catholic		64%
Reformed Evangelical		50%
Fundamentalist		46%
Emergent/Postmodern		39%
Classical Liberal		25%
Charismatic/Pentecostal		21%
Modern Liberal		7%

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

As it happens, I have a lot of time for John Wesley. Despite everything. :-)

And I don't have any real problem with the detailed description, or for that matter with the order in which the other worldviews appear. I was surprised to see Reformed Evangelical so far down the list, though.

Thanks - I think ;-) - to Larry. Chris Atwood, feel free to repost your own results in the comments to this post!

We sang one of my favourite hymns at church on Sunday, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.

This hymn was written by the 19th century Quaker poet (and noted abolitionist), John Greenleaf Whittier. The context of the words is very interesting: they come at the end of his poem, The Brewing of Soma, which Whittier wrote as an attack the sensual worship he had witnessed in revivalist meetings.

Whittier compares the frenzy of revivalistic worship with pagan rites involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs to achieve religious ecstasy ("Soma" being a plant found in India, which was used to induce a frenzy as part of Hindu religious rituals from the second century BC):

As in the child-world's early year,
Each after age has striven
By music, incense, vigils drear,
And trance, to bring the skies more near,
Or lift men up to heaven!

[...]

And yet the past comes round again,
And new doth old fulfil;
In sensual transports wild as vain
We brew in many a Christian fane
The heathen Soma still!

It is in contrast to these "foolish ways" of revivalistic (or, might we say, proto-charismatic?) frenzy that Whittier then goes on to pray:

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives Thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.

From my own experience of charismatic worship, I think Whittier has a point. In retrospect, a lot of what I was doing in my more charismatic days - I was once "slain in the Spirit" in the south aisle of York Minster, and there's not many people can say that ;-) - looks an awful lot like an attempt to "brew ... the heathen Soma still". Both in public worship and private prayer (not least in "speaking in tongues"), I was striving to enter into an altered state of consciousness, what I now look back on as a form of self-hypnosis, which I could then interpret as evidence of God's blessing (otherwise known as "having a warm fuzzy").

I'm not saying this is true for all charismatic Christians; but it is a danger that is insufficiently guarded against. In charismatic circles, one of the main purposes of "worship" (i.e. the singing of choruses) is seeking an ecstatic, unmediated encounter with "the naked God": what another recovering charismatic, Tony Payne, describes as "an experience of communion with God, where God's presence is especially encountered" (see also my post on the sacrament of praise and worship from last year).

Anyway, to return to the topic, Whittier never intended this poem to become a hymn, so perhaps its fitting that the wonderful tune with which it has become associated, Repton, was never intended to be a hymn tune. It is taken from CHH Parry's 1888 oratorio, Judith, and only became known as a hymn tune when it was published in the hymnal of the English public school Repton, in 1924.

One of the roads near our house is called Repton Road, and whenever I see the road sign the hymn starts going round my head (as happened on the way home last night, when I was very grateful to have it drive out the irritating children's ditty that had been on a 15-second tape loop for the previous ten minutes). It's like when we went on holiday a few years ago to Gloucestershire: we were staying near the village of Down Ampney, and so I had "Come Down, O Love Divine" going round my head for the whole week. Bliss.

Update: For the record, the reference to Repton only being published as a hymn tune in 1924 is clearly wrong. I happened to be looking in my copy of The English Hymnal last night for an unrelated reason, and saw that "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" is in there, to the tune Repton.

The English Hymnal was published in 1906, and while a slightly revised edition came out in 1933, the preface makes clear that no tunes or words were changed in the revision. If anyone happens to know when Repton did make its debut as a hymn tune, please mention it in the comments.

Institutionally diversitarian British policing descends into self-parody as an Oxford undergraduate is fined £80 for calling a police-horse "gay".

Mark Steyn has great fun at the expense of Thames Valley Police over this ("Even now, the horse may be on one month's stress leave at home on full pay, with his feet up listening to Judy Garland on his iPod. Whoops, sorry ... there goes another 80 quid") before delivering the following truncheon-blow to the back of the head:

In these touchy times, are Thames Valley Police really the people you want enforcing the more nebulous sections of an already poorly drawn "Incitement to Religious Hatred" Act?

Peter ... is nothing but a man confessing his faith.
  -  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords

...It is not on Peter that God promises that he will build his church, but on Peter the believer in Jesus Christ. It is not our greatness that will further the kingdom of God, but our daring to believe the claims of Jesus and to take them seriously for the way we live.

Charles Ringma, Seize the Day with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from the entry for 10th June.

We spent last weekend in Cambridge, and on Sunday morning we visited Resurrection Lutheran Church for Divine Service. One of many highlights in a very enjoyable service (including an excellent sermon by one of the current students at Westfield House) was getting to sing the introit psalm from Lutheran Worship.

I love singing the psalms, whether that's the Scottish metrical psalter, the Genevan Psalter, or the simple tones used in LW - though none of those can begin to match Anglican chant. So I couldn't resist when I saw this page being recommended as a good read for "chant geeks".

It's a review of a book called Saint Dunstan's Plainchant Psalter, and as well as some observations about pointing that certainly are pretty hardcore chant-geekery - though while we're on the subject of pointing, let me just mention here that the pointing of the Te Deum in Lutheran Worship and the new Lutheran Service Book is the worst I have ever come across - the review also makes some useful comments on the singing of psalms generally. The review begins:

A said Psalm is an oxymoron. Imagine a congregation, at the Offertory, rising to say "Let all mortal flesh keep silence", and you have it in a nutshell. Early poetry, and especially epic poetry, was sung - and accompanied - the psalms being no exception. The caesurae in Beowulf, for example, are remarkably similar to those in the psalms; both surely were not silences, but were punctuated by an instrument of some sort.

So to really get the point of the psalms, we need to sing them:

Even those who say the Office alone should try singing the psalms: the deep meditative and spiritual value of this will soon become apparent. One who sticks to it for a month or so will never go back to saying psalms.

Another excellent article on the benefits of singing the psalms, from the opposite end of the ecclesiastical spectrum from the Anglo-Catholic reviewer of Saint Dunstan's Plainchant Psalter, is PCA pastor Terry Johnson's piece, "Why Sing Psalms?". Johnson writes:

[A] distinctive piety develops as a result of Psalm-singing, a strong, militant, and bold spirituality ... Nearly every Psalm refers to the conflict between the righteous and the wicked (148 of 150 by one count), a theme which is almost nonexistent in modern hymns. One author has said, "When iron was in men’s souls, and they needed it in their blood, they sang Psalms." The Psalms will stiffen a church accustomed to accommodation and compromise with the world.

In particular, the psalms are "the songs of the suffering church", the songs that Christians have turned to in "persecution, death, physical illness, depression, or spiritual 'desertions'". In short:

[T]he Psalms are unrivalled as a complete guide of spiritual life - precisely what they were meant to be. In them we find the whole range of human emotions and experiences. The Psalms are authentic. The joy of praise, the pain of persecution, the comfort of sonship, the sorrow of death, the hope of heaven, and the cry for justice all find full expression, often with vivid realism.

This is to say that the Psalms are human in a way that few hymns dare to be. The whole body of Christian doctrine and experience is to be found in the Psalms. They are virtually a "little Bible" as Luther called them.

The psalms are also gospel-centred and Christ-centred:

Showing the profound insight that we regularly expect from him, Luther says the Book of Psalms "should be precious and dear to us if only because it most clearly promises the death and resurrection of Christ, and describes His kingdom, and the nature and standing of all Christian people"

In the light of all this, it's a shame to see the singing of psalms so often being neglected in today's church. As Douglas Wilson points out, while the Reformed world is racked by debates over "exclusive psalmody":

...I am aware of no one who wants to maintain that Scripture bans the singing of psalms. And yet, despite this theoretical agreement, why, on a practical level, are the psalms virtually banned from the worship of the modern Church?

Though Wilson is wise enough to point out the "vast difference" between "those who would create a controversy about the psalms - as opposed to those who would create a love for the psalms themselves". "The need of the hour," he continues, "is for saints who will promote the psalms, not a certain position about the psalms".

And as was pointed out above, one of the most important features of the psalms is the breadth of human experience and divine truth that they cover. Wilson warns his readers to "be prepared":

[Y]ou may have been a Christian for thirty years, and if you start singing psalms you will find yourself singing things that have never occurred to you before.

Certainly you will find yourself singing things that you have never sung before.

Excellent piece on Touchstone Magazine's Mere Comments blog, on Preaching, Good and Bad. A must read. Short, too - so now you've no excuse not to go and read it. :-)

On the subject of good and bad preaching, I've spent the last ten years trying (and failing miserably) to live by the counsel of George Herbert in his poem, Folly and the Preacher (from The Temple). I expect I'll crack it at about the same time as I succeed in my equally long and fruitless struggle to live out Psalm 131:

Judge not the preacher; for he is thy Judge:
If thou mislike him, thou conceiv'st him not.
God calleth preaching folly. Do not grudge
To pick out treasures from an earthen pot.
    The worst speak something good: if all want sense,
    God takes a text, and preacheth patience.

Mark Steyn's review of Revenge of the Sith has now appeared on his website. Very entertaining. Steyn's not impressed, and he nails the real problem with all three prequels:

Lucas is truly one of the all-time worst directors of actors, and I include the teacher who put together the school production of Fiddler on the Roof I saw last week and got a more touching love scene out of a couple of 11-year-olds as the middle-aged Tevye and Golde than anything Christensen and Portman manage here.

Presumably actors say yes to Lucas because they figure Star Wars will do for them what it did for Harrison Ford. Instead, Lucas turns everyone he touches into Mark Hamill.

He illustrates this with the hilarious scene when Padme tells Anakin that she is pregnant, and Anakin:

...reacts with an eerie glassy-eyed expression as if he’s hypnotised himself trying to remember the next line. Eventually, Lucas prompts him and he utters the words, ‘I’ll have the club sandwich.’ No, wait. That’s just what it sounds like. He actually says: ‘You’re so... beautiful.’

‘It’s only because I’m so in love,’ says Padmé tonelessly, like a spy giving the reply password.

‘No,’ says Anakin. ‘I’m so in love. With you,’ he adds helpfully, just in case Padmé figures it’s the hot-looking Wookie strolling by in the background.

The real let-down of ROTS is its total failure to convince us that Anakin Skywalker could possibly turn into Darth Vader. Darth Vader is a truly great character, and without this film we might have imagined he had emerged from equally great and titanic forces, rather than from a lame teen romance in which the two lovers "have all the sexual chemistry of their Burger King merchandising tie-in action figures".

As Steyn points out, Lucas seems to have forgotten where Darth Vader was supposed to have come from:

In 1977, the original movie said only that Darth Vader had been "seduced by the Dark Side of the Force". There's no seduction here: he's played for a sap and suckered by Sidious. He's Dork Vader, all-time fall guy for the machinations of another. Even for a paint-by-numbers space opera, that doesn’t pass muster.

For me, one other way in which ROTS undermines the later films is the loss of timescale. In the original film, the sense is of new hope emerging from a period of darkness so prolonged that all memory of the Jedi has all-but vanished. When we first encounter Yoda, he seems like a figure from a lost and forgotten antiquity.

In fact, by the time Luke Skywalker comes along, the Empire is - what, eighteen? nineteen? years old. Yoda and Obi-Wan have been in exile for about the same time as the last Conservative government was in power (interesting I should make that comparison... guess it's all the Billy Bragg I've been listening to recently... sending me back to the Left Side...). The Empire ends up being, not a great darkness that could overshadow an entire galaxy for countless ages, but "eighteen wasted years". (Which in turn means that Luke Skywalker is in fact Tony Blair. No, let's not go there.)

The sad thing is that a large part of the appeal of the original series was the mysterious shadow cast by the backstory (as with Lord of the Rings). It now turns out the backstory wasn't worth a hill of beans. That can only undermine the original trilogy.

You are Pope John Paul II.
You are a force to be reckoned with.

Which twentieth century pope are you?

While pressing my nose to the window of the Boars Head Tavern the other day, I came across a link to an essay called Why smart people defend bad ideas, by Scott Berkun. Berkun argues that:

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong.

This manifests itself in a number of ways. First, smart people are often very good at basic debating and logic skills that can prove successful at defending ideas (however bad) against less-skilled proponents of rival ideas (however good):

If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you’re arguing with aren’t as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren’t as arrogant as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.

Secondly, smart people tend to group together in a self-selecting way that encourages "death by homogeny". Peer pressure works on our psychology rather than our intellect, which means it applies to smart people as much as it does to everyone else:

Just because everyone in the room is smart doesn’t mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas.

Finally, smart people may simply be thinking about the wrong things: finding brilliant ways to solve problems no-one actually cares about, or analysing the short-term in detail without considering the longer-term impact.

All this probably goes some way to explaining the Church of England's absurd proposal that priests may enter into same-sex "civil partnerships", provided they give their diocesan bishop an assurance that they will abstain from sexual activity with their "partner".

The problem is that Rowan Williams is a very smart person: indeed, he is an exceptionally intelligent and thoughtful man, but like many exceptionally intelligent and thoughtful men he can display a certain naivety that makes it possible for less sensitive, more politically minded souls to run rings round him.

You can see how ++Cantuar and his fellow bishops could have persuaded themselves that this proposal makes sense, looking at it in a total vacuum. There is nothing sinful about two men (or two women) living under the same roof. And as far as I know, the new law on civil partnerships, while only available to two people of the same sex, does not require evidence of sexual activity, or of the intention to engage in sexual activity. So in principle, two persons of the same sex are free to enter into a civil partnership (and enjoy the attendant tax and inheritance benefits) in a way that involves neither sexual immorality nor deception.

The Church of England's bishops are also a very homogenous group, who pride themselves on the number of decisions they make unanimously (seeing it as evidence of their "collegiality"). They perhaps lacked someone who could take a step back and say, "Y'know, while this sort of makes sense on one level, on another more basic level this is completely ludicrous. We all know that the only people who will actually enter into these partnerships are people in active homosexual relationships". (Perhaps this is the best argument yet for women bishops...)

In other words, to return to Berkun's essay, they may have been smart, but they lacked wisdom. As Berkun puts it:

[N]o amount of intelligence can help an individual who is diligently working at the wrong level of the problem. Someone with wisdom has to tap them on the shoulder and say, "Um, hey. The hole you’re digging is very nice, and it is the right size. But you’re in the wrong yard."

And that's a very good analogy for the Church of England, because if ever any group of supposedly smart people needed to take to heart the basic dictum, "When you're in a hole, stop digging", it's the House of Bishops.