Not taking Catholic Communion

There was a Catholic mass held today in the college chapel in place of the usual weekly Anglican eucharist. It was a fun service; some good singing, a nice sermon by the university's Catholic chaplain, and it was good to be re-familiarised with some of the niceties of Catholic worship which you don't get in the Anglican church. I couldn't help but try to end the Lord's Prayer with 'For thine is the kingdom...' but had to stop myself going any further because the Catholic version breaks after 'deliver us from evil'. For the record, it's worth stating as a quick word of explanation that I'm a baptised Catholic who received his first holy communion in the church before defecting in the direction of the Anglican communion while still young. And I've remained, when I've worshipped, primarily a worshipper in Anglican settings ever since.

What surprised and to some extent disappointed me today was the refusal of the bread and wine on the part of a good many members of the (Anglican) congregation at the Catholic mass. The priest could easily have stated that he was only happy to administer to Catholics. But he didn't do this, although he did state that anyone who preferred to have a blessing than receive communion was welcome to. I tried for a large part of the rest of the service to think about why the actions of the people who'd refused communion might be defensible. But I couldn't - at the end of it all - come up with anything. The same Jesus, the same Lord, the same creeds: granted that history separates Catholics and Anglicans in various ways. But history likewise separated tax collectors and sinners from the priestly castes in a number of ways, just as it has always separated those who wantonly refuse to be reconciled on the basis of past or present misgivings. The point of the eucharist is to emphasise that sitting down to eat and drink is what comes first, before we allow the awkward wrinkles of our human history to have their say in attempting to thwart our attempts to be together in unity. Jews have always known this and it's not a little sad that the central institution of the Christian religion - deriving, as it does, from Jewish origins - can fail so manifestly fully to unify God's people around God's gifts.

It's surely right to remember the past and to regret what has transpired. But the past is dead and gone and the present is the home of the living spirit in us. God's work of unity and reconciliation should not be blocked by pious attempts on our part to place awkward boundaries - grounded in our ideological takes on our often bloody and tragic human histories - in its way. The spirit - and God's love in it - are more unbridled than that.

Biblical Hermeneutics: A brief comment

This brief post is written in response to a request from a friend for an outline of the basics of my position on biblical hermeneutics - which is to say, the interpretative strategy/ies I adopt when I engage with the Bible. My sole intention here is to sketch out a few fundamentals which I regard to be pretty basic to my view of Biblical interpretation. It's not an attempt to be 'systematic' or 'scientific', nor is it an attempt to be uncontroversial. But it addresses what, for many people in the contemporary church, has seemed a particularly important set of issues - and, I suppose, here, if I am honest I am no exception.

The most basic thing I can say is that I do not adopt any kind of position which insists upon the use of the words 'inerrant', 'infallible', and 'without error' in relation to the Biblical text. To me, the use of these words in respect of the Bible is both naive and unhelpful. The Biblical text is not God and it is not appropriate to use these words in respect of it. (The same, by the way, goes for the church and the pope...more on that, perhaps, in another post). But if the text is not these things, it is still held (at least by me) in high regard, for a number of reasons.

a. As historical evidence/testimony, both of physical events and of theological outlooks.

b. As evidence of multivalence and variety in Jewish and Christian tradition, when it comes to talking about, thinking about and experiencing God...a variety which demands humility from modern day interpreters.

c. As evidence of unity in a number of essentials, such as the focus on the Mosaic covenant, the foundation stories of Israel and the important position of the Temple.

d. As a vital source of inspiration for the devotional lives of subsequent people, both in private and public contexts.

e. As an adaptable vessel through which life in God can be communicated, in conjunction with the activity of the spirit through the church.

The Biblical text admits of different interpretations by different believers. That this is so is well demonstrated by the differences which have characterised outlooks on passages and themes within it down the centuries. Certainly, there is a need to recognise that certain outlooks and passages in the Bible stand in marked opposition to ways of thinking we hold dear today. But does the Bible demand that we align ourselves more directly with all its ideological outlooks, rather than those it seems to us to have right at the heart of its tradition - a tradition which continues in the form of the church today? No one, surely, would argue this. We are all pickers and choosers when we come to the Bible and its interpretation, whether we are fundamentalists or not. And this is the odd thing about the Richard Dawkins criticism that 'fundamentalists' are being 'truer' to the Bible than non-fundamentalists.

The 'rules' of interpretation, insofar as these can be formulated, are in actual fact indecipherable from 'rules' about the integrity of a Christian life, lived as a whole - in dialogue with the Bible, certainly, but also in dialogue with subsequent written tradition and church life, and with fellow believers and non-believers and in prayer. All of these serve to shape the religious life - and Biblical interpretation has to take on a valid form in reference to each. This may mean that we interpret differently in different contexts. But why not aim for a more catholicising style of interpretation, which attempts to draw all people into the question of the textual interpretation of the Bible, and the question of living with integrity. This, as I see it, is the function of the truly lived and truly loving human life - rather than the narrowly sectarian one which refuses to shift beyond the realms of its own self encoded comfort zone.

Biblical interpretation is not a 'science', at least not in any popularly understood sense of the word which has been left untouched by the recent assaults of the philosophers of science of the late twentieth century: the biblical interpreter has no recourse to a reliable empirical vacuum in which he can conduct his research. His is rather a contextual task, which admits of different appropriations of the same truth in different circumstances: as the community, in totum, moves forward through time, it is certainly to be hoped that agreement will be more fully felt about how to read the Bible and about what the Bible is, both within and without the church. But the attempt to present the Biblical texts as self evidently revelatory of higher truths, in particular and already established ways to people, is to miss profoundly the point that the text only attests to the life of God insofar as it possesses the power to illuminate and lead in NEW ways we had not previously thought to be possible precisely through those people. And it is through service to people that the text can become alive to us in new ways too.

The Church of Violence

As I was sitting today in the local church in London, talking with a friend, I heard a shout and a bang from outside the church door, where a man and a woman had been sitting, arguing. Clearly, someone had been hit. The woman - she was about 40 - rushed in to the church, crying. No one followed. My friend and I wondered what to do. We walked over and she said she had been hit and that she was afraid. I asked if she wanted help: did she want me to check if he had gone, or if he was still outside. Did he have a weapon? No, apparently. I went out to look, and as I did, the man came in. The couple began arguing with one another. It was a desperate, pitiful scene. She accused him of hitting her and of being prone to violence. He was accusing her of abusing his children. She was saying she didnt want to be with him any more. He was saying that she had to stay with him. The conversation was heated.

With the threat of more violence in mind, my friend called the police. It seemed the right thing to do. I went over to the couple and offered them two chairs at the back of the church to sit down in. This was partly a strategy to stop him from getting her against the wall, and talking right into her face. It half-worked. Soon enough, the police arrived. They asked us what had happened and we told them. If we hadn't seen the violence, nothing could be done, we were told. We hadn't seen it, but we'd heard it. But that wasn't enough.

From what I could tell, the police did an admirable job of calming things down. They parted the man and the woman from one another, and sent each went away from the church in separate directions after about 10 minutes of discussion. What more could the police do? The officer who talked to us impressed me. He was courteous and understanding and somewhere in conversation he slipped in the sage remark that 'we all have our domestic issues'. True enough. But it's still sad that physical violence so easily appeals to us as a useful means of communication: it helps us get our stubborn point across, when all else fails. And I can't think that it really does the job we want it to. Not really.

Of course, 'violence' - loosely conceived - is a fact of all human relationships. We do violence to each other's wills and inclinations when we come into contact with one another and attempt to do anything other than gratify. We strive to bend and shape others around our own agendas and presuppositions. Forms of 'violence' are enacted on humans around us in the world, all of the time, with our complicity. Some are pernicious; some are not. Most of us don't stick out our own necks out to stop what is pernicious. We are inclined not to. Such neglect of the needs of others is perhaps the grossest, and most tragic, example of what might be called 'indirect' violence. Everyone is complicit in it - some more than others.

Reflecting on some of these things a little later, I reminded myself that the Christian church was an appropriate setting for the events I witnessed: acts of human violence are never out of place in churches. Violence in the church has a strange and perhaps awkward double aspect. On the one hand, it has tended to be condemned - although perhaps not to the extent and frequency that we would like. Christians campaign for peace, mercy, love and forgiveness. Can these things truly be pursued through the use of violence, in any sense of the word? (Contextual factors have tended to decide the matter). On the other hand, it is well remembered that acts of violence give life - they are truly vital - both to the church and its congregations. The taking of the apple; the crucifixion, spearing and abandonment of Jesus; the acts of the martyrs. And, according to some theologies, the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. We can look out more broadly too: what kind of beauty, what kind of joy, what kind of pleasure would there be without violence? Theologies of the Cross, however morbid and offensive some of them are, also make this point clear.

The most fundamental truth about Christian conceptions of violence, of course, is its recognition of the bare necessity of taking violence onto oneself for the sake of others. Only then can we respond adequately to violence: in the most difficult way. Maximilian Kolbe understood this. Jesus knew it too. As did Mahatma Gandhi. be the proponents of penal substitutionary models of the atonement seem to know it: but the challenge to them is to make good on their insights, rather than simply to (try to) enshrine them in crypto-Pauline dogmas about divine wrath and - bizarrely - in foundationalist epistemic principles.

What needs to be recognised above all is that for Jesus, the overriding concern was to plug a hole in the system of violence we all inhabit. He stood in the eye of the storm and took the consequences of worldly violence onto himself. He refused to shy away from it, and refused to respond to it in kind. He refused to avenge it. He tried instead to overcome it - by serving as a revolutionary exponent of a different kind of 'violence'. This violence would be restorative and constructive. It would be concerned with building up and seeking out, not breaking down and hiding away.

The tragedy is that only Jesus and a few other humans have ever shown themselves capable of such acts of constructive, restorative violence. The decision truly to suffer in place of others, for their sake and out of the desire to address the destructive violence the world wreaks on them, is a rare decision indeed. But it is the hallmark of true, full love to engage in constructive violence. Constructive violence in self sacrifice for others is the Christian calling. And its perpetrator is the holy spirit, whose divine fruit is forgiveness and the power truly to forgive. For those of us who have only a tiny taste of the fruit of this spirit - for those of us, that is, who can't think to give of ourselves enough to taste more - we can be comforted in our measure by the saving knowledge that our Lord knows and pities our weakness and has worked and is working - both in himself and in us - to address it.