eChurch Blog

With the Church of England currently embroiled in a media frenzy relating to the  non-appointment of Dr Jeffrey John to the Bishop of Southwark, Bishop Nick Baines offers us wise and timely council, urging circumspectness:

Bishop Nick Baines:

Life is a bit busy at the moment and there doesn’t seem to be much time for blogging. However, despite watching Germany play Spain in the company of German friends (who are not happy…) and reading about the reality of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ (66% cuts in Croydon’s voluntary services budget – of which more anon…), my real surprise is how easily people believe what they read in speculative (mischievous?) media reports.

Recently – in relation to World Cup prayers – Ruth Gledhill described me in the Times as ‘one of the favourites to succeed Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury’. By the time this reached the other side of the world, I was ‘the favourite to succeed…’. It doesn’t take long to be made an object of ridicule.

Now, apart from the obvious silliness of this suggestion (among other things: Rowan Williams isn’t leaving, I’m not a diocesan bishop, I lack the gifts, academic qualifications and experience … and would prefer to boil my head), the obvious question the reader should be asking is simply: favourite among whom?

Did the journalist do some research? Did she ask a few mates in the pub? Did she ask the House of Bishops or a scientific sample of clergy around the Church of England? No. It is baseless and meaningless. Fortunately. So, the reader should look at such stuff and dismiss it as baseless fabrication. It might add colour to a piece in the newspaper, but it should be dismissed by the reader as nonsense.

I have ignored this until now. But, reading the mischievous speculation last weekend about the nomination of the new Bishop of Southwark, I thought I’d have a fresh look at the language. (Linguistic analysis of texts isn’t just the preserve of under-occupied pedants; it can be useful in shining a light on reality – as we discovered when training in it at university.)

According to the Telegraph last Sunday, a particular person was ‘understood to be the favoured candidate’. What does that mean? I have served on one of these commissions and there is no such thing as a ‘favoured candidate’. There is a longlist which gets reduced to a shortlist and from that a series of votes comes up with the final name(s). To speak of a ‘favoured candidate’ is nonsense – the most that could be said is that a particular person favours a particular candidate.

Then the article goes on to say:

Members of the Crown Nominations Commission, the body responsible for selecting bishops, will vote this week on whether Dr John’s name should now be put forward to the Prime Minister for final approval.

Er… the CNC will vote on which of half a dozen names should be put forward to the PM. That’s different.

And if that isn’t enough, the piece goes on to state (as if fact) that ’the overwhelming majority of clergy in the diocese are believed to be very keen’ to have a particular candidate as their bishop. Really? How does he know? Has anyone asked ‘the majority of the clergy’, let alone the ‘overwhelming majority’? This is speculative nonsense dressed up as statistical fact. It should be dismissed as such by anyone who can read with their brain engaged.

And don’t get me started on the way in which disconnected observations are associated as if they were intimitely connected.

In today’s update (again, speculative) the language has shifted interestingly from Sunday’s edition. On Sunday the Crown Nominations Commission is a ‘confidential meeting’; now, apparently, it is a ‘secret meeting’ which took place at a ‘secret location’. How sinister. Confidentiality is something we respect (allegedly), but secrecy implies something to hide. Yet this is purely in the mind of the writer. Clergy are said to be ‘furious’ – really? Who? How many? And the candidate was ‘considered the frontrunner’? By whom? The journalist who was making the story?

The point of this ramble is to encourage a closer questioning of what we are being fed. The words matter. Journalists might want to tell a story and raise temperatures – that is fine, that is their job. But the readers should engage brains and not take seriously this sort of language without seriously questioning it first. This isn’t knocking journalists – I am more interested in how the readers read rather than how the writers write.

And if you are wondering why I am not commenting on the person at the heart of the speculation, the answer is simple. He could do without this stuff and I have no intention of commenting on what I don’t know about – the conversations or decisions of the CNC in which I wasn’t involved and about which I know nothing.

After all, it was confidential. Wasn’t it?

By Tom Rees of Epiphenom

Most research on religion is done in the US, a country which is something of an outlier among modernised nations because of the importance of religion in daily life. So, for example, the non-religious in the US tend to be ‘disagreeable’ (meaning that they are nonconformist and prefer to go their own way). But is this something general about the non-religious, or does it simply tell us something about what it takes to be openly non-religious in the USA?

So a recent analysis of the values of the religious and the non-religious in the UK is particularly interesting. The UK is moderately godless – few people go to Church, and a substantial minority (30-40%) don’t believe in God.

The researchers sent surveys to 2,000 people in two towns in the south east of England (Woking and Guildford, to be precise) and got 260 back. So it’s not exactly a random sample! They asked people about their values, using a standard scale (the Schwartz Value Scale) which splits values into nine broad categories.

You can see their main findings in the figure. Basically, the peaks relate to values that are endorsed more strongly by the religious. The troughs relate to values that are endorsed more strongly by the non-religious.

Click image to enlarge:

These are the values held dear by the non-religious in the UK:

Universalism: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature.

Achievement: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards.

Hedonism: Pleasure and sensual gratification for oneself.

Stimulation: Excitement, novelty and challenge in life.

Self-direction: Independent thought and action – choosing, creating, exploring.

By contrast, these values are held dear by the religious:

Benevolence: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact.

Conformity-tradition: Restraint of actions likely to upset or harm others or violate social norms. Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide.

And there are two values for which the relationship changes according to how religion is defined – higher for ‘religiousness’ and ‘attendance’ than for ‘spirituality’ or ‘identification’. These are:

Security: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, or relationships, and of self.

Power: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.

All in all, I don’t there are any major surprises. The religious are relatively more focused on their immediate friends, as well as respect for tradition and conformity. The non-religious, in contrast, tend to be those with the widest horizons and the most independent, confident spirits!

Pepper, M., Jackson, T., & Uzzell, D. (2010). A Study of Multidimensional Religion Constructs and Values in the United Kingdom Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49 (1), 127-146 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01496.x

Clayboy has just popped up a home-made aphorism, and I can’t help myself, I love it:

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

Kudos!

I shall now adopt this as my own, use it at every occasion, without due accreditation, and will accept plaudits with all humility and modesty.

I found the following by Michael Merrick to be a powerful and lucid observation on the topic of abortion, especially given the brevity.

Outside In

Oh my goodness, I’ve seen everything now.

There is an atheist web filter designed to protect you and your children from religious content, I kid ye not.

Here’s what they say about themselves:

What is it?

GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.

Why?

In the last century, the United States has seen a resurgence of fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalist Evangelicals, Mormons, Baptists, and Jews have held back progress in science, human rights, civil rights, and protecting our environment. How can we reverse this trend and join the rest of the world in the gradual secularization of society and government?

Most deeply religious people are born into their religion, but even children raised in a secular household are vulnerable to content on the web. That’s why we’ve produced GodBlock. GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions.

How extremist is this? They are as fundamentalist as the religious ilk they claim to be protecting their children from! I’ve never seen anything like this, I’m quite gob smacked.

Hat-tip Jim.

Cross-post by Dr Jim West of Zwinglius Redivivus:

From CyberBrethren:

Isaiah son of Amoz is considered to be the greatest of the writing prophets and is quoted in the New Testament more than any other Old Testament prophet. His name means “Yahweh [the Lord] saves.” Isaiah prophesied to the people of Jerusalem and Judah from about 740 B.C. to 700 B.C. and was a contemporary of the prophets Amos, Hosea, and Micah.

Isaiah was a fierce preacher of God’s Law, condemning the sin of idolatry. He was also a comforting proclaimer of the Gospel, repeatedly emphasizing the Lord’s grace and forgiveness. For this he is sometimes called the “Evangelist of the Old Testament.” No prophet more clearly prophesied about the coming Messiah and his saving kingdom. He foretold the Messiah’s miraculous birth (Isaiah 7:14; 9:6), his endless reign (2:1-5; 11:1-16), and his public ministry (61:1-3), but most notably his “Suffering Servant” role and atoning death (52:13-53:12).

The apostle John’s description of Isaiah, that Isaiah saw Jesus’ glory and spoke of Him (John 12:41), is an apt summary of Isaiah’s prophetic ministry.

Previous posts; here, here, here, here and here.

Another snippet from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book: A History of Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years.

Pages 261 – 262

In the Middle East and around the African shore of the Mediterranean most Christians would now have to live with a new reality; they had lost their position at the centre of society. The new situation was at its most extreme in Arabia itself, where Muslims put into practice what was said to have been one of Muhammad’s deathbed commands and set about eliminating Christianity from the peninsula. After a century or so, there were only a few Christian communities left. In a symbolic annexation which echoes similar architectural appropriations by Christians from predecessor sacred buildings, the eighth-century Great Mosque in Sana’a in the Yemen incorporates columns from the demolished cathedral built there two centuries before by the Miaphysite ruler Abraha. It may be the result of a policy of thorough Islamic destruction that no trace remains of a Bible in Arabic which can be dated to the era of flourishing Christianity before the coming of Islam; on the other hand, given the Syriac character of the Arabian Churches before, maybe it had never existed.

Elsewhere, there was no such extreme policy of suppression, and in fact in most of these societies newly dominated by Islam two or more centuries passed before there was anything like a Muslim majority. Although to begin with there was no effort to fill the cities with Muslim converts, wherever a church or cathedral was a prominent central building, it was likely to become the main mosque. It was natural that many Christians should assume that the Arab conquests signalled the end of the world, and there was much excited writing to that effect, but, as has so far proved the case in Christian history, apocalypse was postponed and everyday life took over. Someone would have to do practical deals with the conquerors. In default of action from the shattered secular authorities, a number of Christian bishops followed the example of Sophronios’s surrender to Caliph Umar I in Jerusalem and negotiated permanent settlements. regardless of the era in which they were actually concluded, conventionally these came to be known collectively as the Pact or Covenant (dhimma) of Umar; this referred to a second Caliph called Umar (reigned 717-20), though the attribution may have been retrospective. The Pact had its precedent already in the Sassanian Empire. Christians and Jews as People of the Book (and later, by extensions of dubious logic but practical utility, other significant religious minorities) were organised into separate communities or millets, defined by their common practice of the same religion, which was guaranteed as protected as long as it was primarily practiced in private. they were given a specified tax burden and their second-class status was defined as that of a dhimmi (a non-Muslim protected under dhimma).

[.....]

Whether Christians found themselves oppressed in the new situation depended on the personality and outlook of the Muslim authorities. At various times discrimination was deliberately burdensome; so under a number of governors and caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty, who were the first conquerors and who ruled from Damascus in the seventh and eighth centuries, Christians faced the destruction of churches and the strict enforcement of a host of petty humiliations and restrictions, while under the last great Abbasid Caliph Al-Mutawakkil (reigned 847-61) they were forced to wear distinctive clothing in yellow – an anticipation of a measure which, in later centuries, Christian societies would take against their Jewish minorities in Europe.

Some stuff I found interesting for one reason or another:

BioLogos – How Should BioLogos Respond to Dr. Albert Mohler’s Critique of The BioLogos Initiative?

Dr Calvin L Smith – Today’s Methodism: Distancing Itself Yet Further From Wesley?

Practical Shepherding – What is one of the best ways for a pastor to gain evangelist opportunities?

Ekklesia – Rise of European far right fuels ‘new racism’ of religious victimisation

New Leaven – Does Jesus Really Understand Human Suffering?

ClayBoy – This is the only true church (and you’re going to hell)

Parchment and Pen – What if God Read Your Posts? Christian Conduct on the Internet

CIFWatch – Press Release from Anglican Friends of Israel

Science and Theology – The Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outside of Conscious Awareness

scientia et sapientia – We need to be more materialistic

The Ugley Vicar – Be very careful before you object to Dr John

Why Evolution is True – BioLogos has lost it

Guardian – The Book of Job, Part 2, Theodicy on the street

Seismic Shock – US Methodist Writer on the UK Methodist Boycott

I’m humbled to let you know that I have written a piece featured on Harry’s Place today. Do hop over and comment:

Harry’s Place – UK Methodists: Justice for Palestine and Israel