Where Everybody's Crazy

At last, 95 Theses against the right-wing church, ending in:

95. Christians are to be exhorted to speak out against the Religious Right, as it is a vile heretical movement, wholly outside the teachings of the Word of God.

I always wondered how the "religious right" was anything other than a massive experiment in cognitive dissonance - Christians follow this guy called Jesus, who was the most anti-establishment left-wing activist there was. I mean, remember that stuff he said about rich people? Or about self-satified legalistic religious do-gooders? Or loving your enemies, or not casting the first stone, or taking care of widows and orphans?

The religious right can only follow such a Jesus if they ignore pretty much every word that he said. Which, I suppose, is what these theses allege.

Warning - this is politics. Good evangelical missionaries don't talk about politics, so pretend this post doesn't exist.

Just when I decided to take a nice relaxing holiday, our prime minister resigns. And now he's in hospital. Nobody is quite sure why, and indeed why now, although I have to admit I did see it coming - I've been studying his leadership style as preparation for my seminar at the end of the month, and a week or so ago, the Asahi Shinbun had some quotes about his leadership being "invisible". He had already taken his hands off the wheel.

But why resign? Well, there are a number of factors at play. He's had consistently bad luck with cabinet ministers, from those who said that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were, on the whole, a good idea, to those who said that the best thing women could do is get on with their duty of having children. That was hardly his fault, though, but it did rather put his judgment into question.

Then there was the pensions thing. That was a bit sad. It just kept getting worse and worse - I was reading about the latest revelation on Tuesday in the Yomiuri Shinbun. The story so far is that the government has lost a load of pension records - not that it can actually pay them anyway. But this time around, it turns out that, for about half a million pension records, the government don't have the names, sexes or dates of birth of the policy holders. Which is, you would think, something they would take care to note down. The Department of Social Security have been unable to provide an explanation, and the best guess is that when the punched cards were transfered onto magnetic tape, they didn't transfer the indexes to the cards, just the card data itself. Yeah, right. Anyway, that's still not Abe's fault but also looks pretty bad.

Then they lost the upper house elections. That was mainly because of the pensions thing, but there were other things going on as well, including a big hard lurch to the right in terms of constitutional reform.

Because they lost the upper house elections, Abe needed to force through legislation using two votes in the lower house to get things done. One of the things he really wanted to get done was to provide an Enabling Act for the presence of the Japanese Navy (yeah, yeah, "Seaborne Self-Defence Force", I know.) in the Persian Gulf. They're there providing refuelling support to American combat operations, and unfortunately one of the lawmakers noticed that this was illegal. Busted! But since we're doing the whole Global War On Terror thing here as well, despite it having nothing to do with us, the government kind of needs to make it legal, and quickly. But the opposition parties - now in the majority in the upper house - won't play ball. The government could force it through the lower house twice but that would look like an extremely naughty way to legitimize something that's kind of illegal to begin with. And besides, the upper house said "you do that and we'll pass a censure motion."

So on Tuesday afternoon Abe's advisers asked him what he planned to do about all this, and he told them that he planned to resign. Now he's gone into hospital and everyone's saying it's health related. It might be health related. It might also be due to a complete loss of confidence in the government. You choose.

Anyway, the bad news is that the guy tipped to replace him, Taro Aso, is, if anything, going to be more of the same. If not worse.

In this way, two evangelical universities use the same quotes from the same Bible to make exactly opposite points of view about global warming. What could give a clearer insight into the opposing souls of America?

- Evangelicals split on global warming, BBC News

If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

- Jesus Christ

There are three types of umpires. The first type says: "I call balls and strikes as they are." The second says: "I call them as I see them." And the third says: "It ain't nothin' till I call it."

Hermeneutics - how we know what something means - is a subject that gave me a lot of frustration at Bible college, and continues to plague me. Hermeneutics classes generated far more heat than light; I came away at the end of the course not with answers but with a better class of questions. You go around and around in circles: How are we supposed to read the Bible, and who says? How do we determine the interpretation of a difficult verse, and who has the final say? Can interpretation of Scripture really be a matter of personal conscience - but equally can interpretation really be handed down by a monolithic and authoritarian church?

How do I interpret? Should I take the words literally? Should I take them figuratively? Should I do both, but how do I draw the line? Should I take the words at face value, or should I look for the original intent of the author, or should I take the Tradition, the sense of the reading community through the ages? Should I take the words to be speaking once and for all, or should I take the cultural context of the time into account? If so, how?

And who gets to decide the answer to all these question, anyway? Me? Why on earth should I trust me?

Catholics chide Protestants for "getting rid of the Pope and replacing him with a paper Pope", but my criticism of Protestantism is that actually it makes everyone into a Pope: I read the Bible, I interpret it, I do what I decide it says. If my reading of it says we can have women priests, say, or gay clergy, and yours doesn't, well, that's a shame, and we go our separate ways. We can all pull out our selective quotes, and the Bible is a big enough corpus, and theologians so skilled at sophistry, that you can build a theological position on just about anything you like and claim it as more biblical than anyone else's. Someone else may disagree, but what authority do they have over you if you're both claiming the authority of Scripture? And to make any such decision, you have to appeal to an authority other than Scripture, which exposes the whole "authority of Scripture" thing as a bit of a joke. Without a magisterium, the only authority I can appeal to is me, and I don't trust me. Some people think this means I don't respect Scripture. No. The problem is that I do respect Scripture, and so I want to know whether or not I'm reading it right!

My personal preferred understanding on hermeneutics is that interpretation is a job shared between the reader, the Bible and the community of the Church. This is, I think, quite close to the Orthodox position on the Bible. But we are back to my personal preferences again. No way to break out that cycle.

Anyway, I'm starting to see shades of this whole debate in another area, far away - although not too far - from Biblical hermeneutics: constitutional theory.

By the grace of God I was born in the United Kingdom, where the constitution is interpreted in a very Orthodox fashion. Yes, folks, we do actually have a constitution here, but it's not written in one single document; it's what they call an "uncodified" constitution. The British Constitution is the vast body of precedent, law, parliamentary convention and several significant documents which make up a collective and implicit sense of how the country works; what, in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, would be called Tradition. The advantage of not having a codified constitution is that we cannot have those endless language-lawyering disputes where you claim that your reading of "black" is "white", and so it must be; either "black" has the sense of Tradition, or "white" does.

Of course it's not as simple as that, and there are constitutional conundrums from time to time. But by and large, the tradition ensures that the British constitution is interpreted contextually and corporately, and so hermeneutic questions do not arise.

Where you have a codified constitution, however, you automatically have the question "What does it mean?", followed swiftly by "What does it mean to me?". And we are plunged once again into hermeneutics, only now it's called constitutional theory. Many of the questions that plague Protestant Biblical interpretation also come into play in constitutional theory - and for the same reasons.

For instance, there is the "textualist" position of interpretation. That is, it says what it says; all we have to go on is the text. What does it mean now? The Christian equivalent is called "biblicist". Then there is the "original meaning" position: what did it mean then? This one is common in Christian thought, and is called the historical-critical method. Another school of thought is "original intent": we have to go beyond the text to discover the original intent of the author. I don't know the technical name for that, but we've got that as well, and more besides.

There are many schools of thought, both in constitutional theory and in Protestant hermeneutics. But unlike in the Protestant tradition, in the case of constitutional law, we do have an authority to choose between them: whoever happens to be running the country at the time. There is something rather self-referential about this, because the constitution of a country generally gives rights to and places limits or obligations on the person running the country at the time. Generally there's some kind of "separation of powers" stuff in the constitution which stops this from getting too messy, but since the "separation of powers" stuff is in the constitution, it is open to interpretation by constitutional theory.

It sounds like what I'm saying is what's come to be called the unitary executive theory of the constitution: a written constitution has questions of interpretation, and so someone has to decide upon those questions. If they're in charge, then their interpretation wins. In simpler terms, might makes right. I don't espouse that worldview; I'm a Christian, after all, I'm on the side of the poor and the oppressed. (To put it another way, "Christian Right" is a contradiction in terms.) I think the might-is-right view of interpretation is wrong but hard to argue against, because there is no higher authority to take the argument to. It is the same problem as in Protestant hermeneutics: when the can of worms that is hermeneutics and interpretation gets opened, it is very, very hard to clean up in a sensible way. I may personally think that the unitary executive theory is bogus, and I personally do, but it's prima facie as valid as any other theory, and it currently happens to have all the guns behind it, which frankly is all that pragmatically matters.

The tyranny of interpretation. Thanks, Luther. I'm blaming this one on you.

The other day, a lawyer in the States said:

the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.

That lawyer was technically correct! You can't suspend the right - but that doesn't explicitly say that the right exists. Those who subscribe to a textualist position will be nodding their heads in agreement. Those who subscribe to an original intent position will point out that this is pure sophistry, and the mention of a right implies the existence of the right. The lawyer is correct in that the text doesn't literally say that, but it's certainly strongly implied. They might go on to argue that the original intent position is common sense. I think it's common sense, too. But that doesn't help; the lawyer in question is the Attorney General of the United States, and he rather thinks that a textualist position is common sense. And as AG he gets to decide. And he and his team still have all the guns.

Those subscribing to an alternate view of constitutional theory will be mourning the death of the most basic protection in law, but they won't be able to fault the logic that lies behind its demise. The little-publicised use of signing statements are the same: to execute the law, you've got to interpret the law. And just like Newman's genius Tract 90, which reconciled Anglicanism with Catholicism, it's possible for a highly-skilled sophist to present an interpretation of the law in a completely opposite sense to its intended meaning.

And the separation of powers? Well, someone has to interpret what the Constitution means when it talks about that, too. It's going to be the guy with the guns again.

So in short: The Constitution? It's what you make of it. For very select values of "you". You with the guns. And the really scary thing is, you're going to use them, aren't you?

Is there anything that can be done about this? As another great American constitutional hermeneutist put it, "that depends what the meaning of 'is' is."

Five years ago today, the first "detainees" arrived at Guantanamo Bay. Since then, hundreds have been shipped into legal limbo, often through kidnapping, to face torture, degradation, isolation and the loss of legal and human rights. They have not been convicted of any crime, and so must be considered innocent - although someone somewhere thinks they might be a terrorist. But no evidence has been presented, nor will it be; they are being held there, in an extra-legal situation, precisely to avoid bringing them to justice. Several have gone insane. This is a disgusting, sick affront.

And for five years we have allowed it to continue. I don't want to beat up on America too much, because even though it's an obvious reminder that everything America claims to stand for has no actual cash value, no other country has seriously done anything about it either. We all seem to believe this is acceptable behaviour. And as much as the stain of torture and injustice reflects badly on the world, the fact that I have allowed it to continue reflects badly on me.

I can't do much. I'm just one guy blogging. But this I can do: I can refuse to be lulled into accepting this as the status quo. I can remember that this is an outrage, and that it should not slip off the radar of my conscience. If it becomes accepted, then Guantanamo Bay will never close down, and will continue to kidnap, torture and break people for many more years to come. Don't accept it. Pray against it; it is wrong. Speak about it in your churches, if they'll let you. Get your organisations to support and endorse Witness Against Torture. You may have noticed that for the past couple of days I've been displaying their web button over there on the right. It's going to stay there until this abomination has been shut down - so that I do not fall into the trap of accepting it. I encourage you to do the same.

H asked this morning what my New Year's resolutions were. I said something about getting more fresh air - I was careful to word it that way instead of committing myself to "exercise"... - but I have another one that I didn't mention because I wasn't sure about it, and it's going to be difficult. But what's life without challenge and accountability: My New Year's resolution, aside from getting more fresh air, is to stop disparaging other Christians in blog posts.

I have to work out how this sits with a prophetic function of speaking out against abuses in church practices and theology, but after all, I am the one who keeps harping on about how the Church ought to be working together and not attacking itself all the time, and I'm aware that the "prophetic function" card can be overplayed and used as a justification for mouthing off about whatever one wanted to say anyway. I think how I'm going to do is is to think twice before posting anything inflammatory, and to ask you all to look out for me when I go over the edge.

Here's an example. I was about to write something depressing about how the American churches have been largely silent about the warmongering and denial of social justice that has been carried out in their name. But lo, I did my research, and there's good stuff out there. Jim Wallis as ever, fails to disappoint, and has drawn a community of bloggers around him. (And I believe that in 2007 more than ever before it will be the blog and not the pulpit that shapes how the Church's voice is heard.) Jim's books on social justice and the Americanisation of Christianity have been really inspirational, and I'm really glad he's picking up the ball on Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and many other areas. He may be a vocal minority, but social justice campaigners always were. Well done to him and the others at Gods' Politics.

See, that feels better, doesn't it?

The Vatican has made public its displeasure at the decision of a retired bishop to run in Paraguay's 2008 presidential elections... Canonic Law prohibits priests from participating in political parties or labour unions.

- Vatican warns Paraguay candidate

So it's not just our mob that are paranoid about involvement in politics, then; I didn't realise it was forbidden by Canon Law too. The problem, as I've mentioned before, is that withdrawing from political activity is itself a political act; it is declaring that the Church has nothing to say about the state of the world. Or worse, that it may have something to say about it, but it sure as hell doesn't want to get its hands dirty and do anything about it.

On other words, apathy or cowardice: take your pick.

The odd thing, if you look back into history a little, is that it was the evangelicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who really had a serious social conscience about the state of the poor, about prison reform, about slavery, about public health, and actively became involved in politics, even becoming MPs, to do something about it. I'm talking about the Wilberforces, the Venns, Edward Eliot, Thomas Clarkson... all, of course, nearly two hundred years ago now. Because evangelicalism could only fight against its arch-enemy of liberalism by pulling away from involvement in the world and concentrating on a very narrow interpretation of salvation, the future salvation of the soul. The "social gospel" terrified us so much that we forgot about society altogther. It's just that, well, balance really isn't something we're very good at.

It's not a very good excuse, but there it is. For the Catholic Church, as in this Paraguay case... well, to be honest, I don't know what their excuse is. Maybe, and I'm speculating, it's a reaction against the abuses of Caesaropapism, when the Catholic Church was the political establishment. That didn't go well, and I can understand if the injunction on involvement with politics came as a corrective to that. But it is an overcorrective. I guess balance really isn't something they're very good at either.

In current thought, half the battle is won. The question "Should politics be part of religion?" is more or less settled in the affirmative by Christian theologians these days, thanks in part to the stuff that's been coming out of Latin America for the past fifty years. Not entirely coincidental about our man Fernando Lugo, then. But the other question "Should religion be part of politics?" is still troublesome, and comes up an awful lot when we look at the US.

In my mind, however, it's a very silly question. It's silly because it starts from the curious Enlightenment-era assumption that certain unprovable preferences (economic theory, political philosophy, social philosophy, etc.) are perfectly OK to hold in the public sphere, and perfectly OK for you to act upon - so long as you're consistent - whereas other unprovable preferences (religion, morals, etc.) are not fit for the public sphere and must not be acted upon. It is something of an arbitrary dichotomy, and, as far as I'm concerned, a very dangerous one.

News commentators are asking serious questions about whether America is ready for a Mormon president, and how the religious views of the current adminstration shape their work. But far more serious, and, as I said, far more dangerous in my mind are other, equally unprovable, preferences.

I see "Keynsian versus monetarist", or "capitalist versus socialist", or "neoconservative versus progressive", or "expansionist versus multilaterist", to be far more pertinent questions about political conduct than "Christian versus Mormon". It is the "public" preferences, the "reasonable" preferences, the ones it's OK for us to bring up and act upon, and not the religious ones, that are responsible for much more of the danger, the oppression, and the war that we see around us today. Should religion be part of politics? As much as anything else should be.

(Free reading comprehension, and a copy of the previous post, to the first commentator who thinks I'm condoning politicians using religion to justify doing crazy stuff.)

The story of the Christian Embassy video showing generals in uniform proselitizing within the Pentagon was spotlighted today by CNN. I posted clips from the film on YouTube until the Campus Crusade For Christ managed to take it down for "Copyright" violations.

- CNN picks up the Christian Embassy video story, Shockwave at Daily Kos

So Campus Crusade have an evangelistic message that they don't want all the world to see?

Rule one of evangelism: If you're ashamed of it, don't do it.

So my previous post on this subject got me a lot of traffic and a lot of thoughtful comment. I want to return to the subject, and look a little bit more about the history behind American Christianity, how we got into this state. This journey will take us through questions of why Republicans don't care for the environment, a bit about the various shades of millenialism, the idea of "manifest destiny", and I also want to look at whether or not what I was suggesting there in my previous article was - as some people commented - a variant of the No true Scotsman fallacy. (I've been thinking about this for a while, so Haggard exploding today just shows he's an opportunist trying to cash in on my mojo.)

I'll start by admitting that I'm really not a historian. I'm a theologian. There's a bit of overlap between the disciplines, since to understand what the church did two thousand years ago and what the church is doing today requires a lot of understanding about what the church has been doing in the middle. And I've also got a big interest in the history of thought - theological, philosophical and scientific. But as far as American political history goes, I'm a student; I know what I've researched and what my theological training tells me. So if I get any of the details wrong, forgive me. The history of thought is ideal for me because ideas influence humanity gradually; events tend to happen more discretely. But if I get any of the details so wildly wrong that my conclusions are in doubt, please let me know.

Let's go back to the beginning, and as we do, I want us to hold on to the image of "clutching at straws" - a drowning man trying desperately to find something safe and solid to support him. We're around the 18th century. We've pretty much just had the Protestant reformation, and the Protestant churches are just beginning to sort themselves out. But here in Europe we're still bound by the structures of society instuted by the Catholic Church. The Protestants are basically doing the same again, but without the Pope this time.

The keyword of the time, philosophically, is "freedom". We want to throw off the shackles of authority, the vertical structures of society - God, king, lord, fief, perhaps; God, Pope, priest, individual. We're already experiencing God without the hierarchical church, and nothing's gone horribly wrong yet, so maybe we can make it on our own. And so there's a spirit of wanting to explore and innovate and stand up on our own two feet. The Enlightenment is born.

It's also an age of colonies, part of this desire for exploration and pushing the boundaries of the world. But there's a theological motive as well here for a certain group heading West from England. If we establish a New World, we can start society afresh, free - as in freedom - from the established society. We have a new God-given opportunity here: the opportunity to be the chosen people, the Kingdom of God on earth. This is the first metanarrative, the first straw that our drowning man clutches at: this is to be a Christian nation. More than a Christian nation: a theocracy. A new kind of society.

Now in the Israel story, the chosen people has to inherit the land by expelling and repelling its current inhabitants. Why would the New Israel story be any different? The Native Americans were the Canaanites, the Palestianians, who had to be destroyed to "make room for our Fathers" (see Beaver, Eschatology in American missions, Basileia 1961). Now I am not saying the theological motive was the only motive for the colonization. But it was a motive, and it provided an ethical justification. Colonization and, let's face it, genocide, could be given an overriding story based on the theological motifs of the Reformation. Scary, isn't it?

Let's pause for a second here and take stock. We have already found the genesis of a few of the ideas that became American Christianity. We have the "Christian nation" metanarrative which carries on even to this day. We have a sense of the importance of freedom, and whence it comes. We have an identification, even right at this stage, between America and Israel, which I really don't need to spell out. We can see where this train is headed. Over the next two hundred years these ideas, once explicit, will disappear deeper and deeper into the wiring of American Christian thought, until the underlying reasons for them disappear and only the latent sense of destiny remained.

Let's move on, because something ironic is about to happen. This great idea of freedom and emancipation from the structures of the Catholic Church gets widened and reapplied as the Enlightenment progresses. As we said earlier, we want to break down the hierarchical boxes of authority under which man is oppressed. The first hierarchy I mentioned was God, king, lord, fief. Why should a man have political status just because he was born into a particular family? Someone in France is just about to start asking these questions, and heads will roll.

The second hierarchy I mentioned was God, Pope, priest, individual. If we can live free from the Church without any apparent ill effect, why can't we live free from God? Can man truly stand on his own two feet? Of course, this is a transitional era, and these massive questions are addressed in small stages. We're not quite ready to give up God completely, and so the deists appear: they keep God as the supreme moral authority, but regulate him out of their lives. This pattern is going to progress through the Enlightenment as religion moves from being a public to being a private matter.

So following the example of France, a new metanarrative appears in the American colonies, a challenge to and a thorn in side of the "Christian nation" idea. The cry again is "liberty", and a declaration of independence is drawn up. The new metanarrative, set up by the deists, is the American dream: that in this new land, every man is free from the shackles of vertical society. Every man stands on his own two feet. You can see the moral ambiguity in the Declaration of Independence: "we hold these truths to be self-evident" - that is, they stand on their own authority, and on no higher authority - "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator" - that is, a higher authority. We are moving towards declaring full "independence" from God, but we are not there yet. We will try to do that in the structure of the Consitution.

At the same time, the Enlightenment forces a wide gulf between public and private life. The public sphere, politics and social structures, should be dominated by reason, not superstition; if you wish to carry on with peculiar beliefs, you may do so in the comfort of your own head. But never claim that they should be the basis of society - and with that, the theocratic ideal of the Pilgrim Fathers suffers a mortal blow.

So we have something of a crisis at the moment. There are two metanarratives vying for control of the country, and what do you know, the "secular" one has been the one which managed to set up government. When there are two big ideas in a quarrel they tend to polarize, and become caricatures. So the "American dream" metanarrative transforms from the deist "by their Creator" to the secularist "separation of Church and State", and the "Christian nation" metanarrative becomes "we need to make this a Christian nation, by force if necessary." It's sad, but you can just about see how we got there.

I always used to wonder why America was "one nation under God" and that "in God we trust" but the separation of Church and State was such a big part of American belief. Now I understand it. It is because there are actually two Americas. America A is the New Israel; America B is the New France. They are not going to get on together.

But let's skip a bit. We're doing this Enlightenment thing, and we're starting to see progress. Things are happening. We are going to countries that we have not been to before. We are begining to see that the world is not the same this year as it was last year, and that is a blow to us. People who live close to the land espouse an essentially cyclic view of time. There is planting, then rains, then harvest, the planting again. Progress, developmentalism, breaks the linear view of time. We're getting somewhere. We want to start thinking about where, theologically, we are getting.

But to think theologically in the liberated Protestant era requires a bit of prolegomena. After all, we used to have the Catholic church to tell us how to read the Bible. Now we don't have Tradition any more, and all we have left is the Bible. How do we interpret the Bible? Well, one schema is that we use the Bible to interpret itself. (Of course, that would mean that our faith was based not on the Bible, but ultimately, on choosing this particular schema.) But the Bible is a big corpus, and basically you can find something in there to justify something else in there, so that can't be right.

The other schema you can choose is a "flat" reading of the Bible, where it just means what you think it says. And this, terrifyingly, is what happened. The doctrine was first applied very narrowly, to say that "the Scriptures are so perspicuous in things pertaining to salvation that they can be understood by believers without any external help" (Francis Turretin). But as the need for more and more understanding of Scripture grew, the doctrine was stretched to areas not relating to salvation, and so the doctrine of the "inerrancy of Scripture" arose. This basically attests to "the truth to fact of every statement of Scripture". (Hodge and Warfield) If the Bible said that Eve was created from Adam's rib, then Eve was created from Adam's rib. It happened, because the Bible says so. And there will be no argument about this. Right?

Let's once again pause briefly to check what's going on here. For the first time, a full seventeen hundred years after the compilation of the Bible, it is being asked to stand as its own authority on matters of interpretation. We're entering into what's called "biblicism", where a flat reading of Scripture is expected to actually define reality. "Faith-based" versus "reality-based"? You heard it here, folks! And once again I need to point out that this is a theological innovation. Having divorced ourselves from any other guide to the meaning of the Scriptures, (the Ethiopian in Acts 8 said "How can I understand, unless someone teaches me?") we basically chose to follow our own brains. If you read it, and you understand it, then it's true.

The publication of the King James Version (or Authorised Version, AV) was a watershed in biblicism. I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea why. The King James is considered by many American Christians to be the benchmark of God's Word against which the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts and parchments we now have are tested. Please permit me an aside here.

I used to think that this sort of thing was satire. To this day, I am not sure whether or not the Jack Chick tracts are satirical. I don't discuss the wilder strains of dominionism in this article because again, I'm finding it hard to separate news from Onion. I honestly doubt that people could be that stupid. But people keep proving me wrong. Because then I met some American Christians who really do believe that the AV is the true and unadulterated Word of God. I knew this viewpoint as an example they gave us in Bible college to test how we would deal with people who differed from us. But I wasn't actually aware that it really existed. And in talking to these people, I found that they judged the manuscript evidence based on whether or not it fit their preconceptions. Wow.

And then I thought: Wait. That's what the rest of the world thinks about Christians.

That was humbling. OK, aside over.

At this point, the label "fundamentalist" appears on the scene. Actually, Christians are the only people before or since to apply the label "fundamentalist" to themselves. They have lost their grand metanarrative of a Christian nation, although it still lives in their subconscious. They have confusion within and without about the interpretation of the Scriptures. There will be a saviour, at the turn of the century, in the shape of the pamphlets called "The Fundamentals." These expressed the fundamentals of Christianity as:

• The verbal inerrancy of Scripture (implied: the Authorised Version)
• The divinity of Jesus (at least this one get settled in Nicea in 325AD)
• The virgin birth
• The substitutionary theory of atonement (itself a theological innovation)
• The physical return of Jesus

So, within that bit of America that is clutching at the "Christian nation" straw - which through fundamentalism will become a sturdy plank - we have an understanding that we are part of a bigger picture of history. The relationship between our current state and "the physical return of Jesus" is interesting, and provokes a new interest in eschatology - that is, the theology of the end times.

Now remember that for the past seventeen hundred years, interpretation of the Bible has been regulated - one might say - or controlled - another might say - by the established church. Now, at last, anyone and everyone is able to grab their Bible and let fly. And this they do. The book of Relevation, which was originally written as a comfort to persecuted churches, is taken up in the biblicist tradition, and forced to mean something to me, today, in my situation, now. What I am trying to say is that the degree to which the Bible was ransacked to determine precise schemas of what would happen at the end of the world is unprecedented in the previous seventeen hundred years.

But the Bible is ransacked, and schemas emerge. One of these is Calvin's schema, which prescribes three stages for the life of the church: the apostolic age, the era of the anti-Christ, and the time of the expansion of the church. Those Puritans living under the "Christian nation" metanarrative see themselves at the end of the second stage and the beginning of the third. "Slowly but surely the conviction grew that God's last and eminently successful attack on the forces of Antichrist would be launced from the shores of North America and that the Puritan saints would play a key role in this final drama of history." We can laugh now, but it was no laughing matter at the time.

We can laugh even more about the Scofield Reference Bible, which provided another, much more symbolic and interpretative understanding of the book of Relevation. In hindsight, most of it was based on massive over-interpretation. But at the time Scofield took the approach that, as we have seen above, Scripture is the arbiter of truth; that it tells us what we need to know; and that, therefore, it will tell us something about our situation today despite being written thousands of years ago.

Another aside. I once had a copy of the Scofield Bible. In fact, I had a very, very useful Greek interlinear Bible, with philological notes, but which had the Scofield notes. I took them seriously to start with; then I started to wonder where they were getting things from; then I looked at the notes on Revelation, and I started laughing. Because again, it looked like satire.

I don't remember very much about it, but the principle was that everything mention in Revelation had a truthful metaphorical meaning. Even though it was prophecy. The letters to the seven churches were not, actually, prophecies to seven particular contemporary churches, but descriptions of seven ages of world government before the end times would come, which coincidentally lead right up to where we were at the time. This, I'm afraid, is the hermeneutical problem when everyone gets to interpret Scriptures for themselves.

Anyway, this renewed interest in Revelation came to the fore with three particular interpretations of Relevation 20, in which it is stated that Christ will reign for a thousand years. If we're taking a flat and biblicist interpretation of Scripture, the obvious question arises: Has this thousand years began, and if not, when will it? The Puritans were sure, as mentioned above, that they were entering the final phase of the Church; so they of course began to seek the beginning of the millenium. The New Englanders saw the millenium as being, basically, when the rest of the world would experience the joys they already knew:

It would be a time of "the greatest temporal prosperity", when people would have "sufficient leisure to persue and acquire learning of every kind." Universal peace and happiness would reign, not least because there would be "great improvement in the mechanical arts" through which people would be enabled to produce utensils "with much less labor" than they used now. Because of people's "benevolence and fervent charity", all worldly things would be available to all.

- Bosch, Transforming Mission, quoting Hopkins Treatise on the Millenium

In this particular understanding of the millenium, there is essentially a continuity with the Enlightenment way of life; this is the culmination of everything that secular progress has been promising us all along. This is called postmillenialism and was particularly dominant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's a basically positive picture: Once everything naturally tends towards the best it could be, then Christ returns.

But soon after that the dominant theology became one of premillenialism; that is, that Christ would return to earth before the millenium started. This is still the dominant theology in American Christianity today. (The rest of us simply refuse to take Revelation so damned literally. The other positions available to the church are amillenialism - there won't be a thousand year reign - and my favoured panmillenialism - which states that it'll all pan out in the end.)

So in premillenialism there will be a rapture - again, I want to remind you that before the Scofield question, this was never actually taken literally - and Christians will essentially escape the mess that the world has got intself into. In contrast to postmillenialism this is a basically negative picture. The world will not get better and better until it is transformed into the kingdom of God, but will get worse and worse until it needs a radical rebuilding into the kingdom of God.

This decline of the world, in premillenialism, is faced with a sort of fatalism. After all, Jesus told us there would be wars and rumours of wars. And there are. The world is essentially a write-off, because we'll be receiving a new one soon. And so looking after the world is very low on the premillenialist agency. God gave us the world to "steward", and we're going to "steward" the hell out of it, because we're going to get another one soon. This should, I hope, explain some of the more confusing elements of recent environmental policy in the United States.

And that reminds me. Since basically the year dot, Christianity has been faced with an ugly choice: remain an outcast, terrorist organisation, or become part of the established state. Every single time it has chosen option (b), and every single time the integrity of its witness has suffered. And when the "Christian nation" metanarrative and the "American dream" metanarrative conflicted, someone basically said, so, how are we going to establish a Christian nation here, again? And the decision was made to use the trappings of power to establish the overall goal. And, as ever, the integrity of its witness has suffered.

So this, I hope, explains a lot so far. We've explained the "Christian nation" metanarrative, the support for Israel, the policy on the environment, the fundamentalist ideology, and so on. Just one last thing I want to add. Neoconservatism: Can it be explained in this schema? I think so.

There was an assumption - and dare I say it, there still is an assumption - within the missionary movement, that God has chosen the Western nations and culture to be superior to the others so that Westerners can be the conveyers of the Christian message throughout the world. This concept and assumption - the "manifest destiny" - was born with the Pilgrim Fathers but did not die with them. It fed on the nationalism of the time, and melded with the "chosen nation" metanarrative of the American colonies to produce a specifically American sense of uniqueness and privilege.

Allow me to quote Bosch at length on this score, as I believe it explains an amazing amount not just about what happened then but also about what is happening now:

After the American colonies had shaken off the British yoke in 1776, these ideas began to be ventilated much more generally and confidently, gradually hardening into the notion of "manifest destiny". Following, as it did, in the wake of the Revivals, it was only natural that it acquired very clear religious overtones and also that it would soon be wedded to the foreign missionary enterprise. The American Board, founded in 1810, attempted to enlise to the cause not only "Christians" but also those identified as "patriots" [Emphasis mine - SC]. In the early years of the nineteeth century a sense of "American exceptionalism" waxed strongly and even if the "bedrock reality" retained a demand laid upon the church rather than on Americans, it was evident to all that American Christians were better equipped for the task than were others... In 1800 Nathaniel Edmonds could muse that God was about "to transfer the empire of the world from Europe to America, where he has planted his peculiar people"; he added "This is probably the last peculiar people which God means to form before the kingdoms of this world are absorbed into the kingdom of Christ."

Finally, after all I have highlighted in the explanation of the American Christianity school of thought, do I lay myself open to the charge of "No true scotsman"ism? This is a fair comment. I have been essentially saying that American Christianity has sufficiently diverged from Christian belief - and I have not had time to go into the personal holiness understanding of contemporary Evangelicalism (I recommend Jim Wallis' "The Call To Conversion" for that) - that it can no longer be called Christian.

Now reminding me about the "No true Scotsman" argument is useful, because it reminds me that "God knows those who are His". It is not mine to judge. But at the same time, the "no true Scotsman" argument is based on a question of definition, and "Christian" has two definitions: one who believes and upholds the Christian faith, and one who belongs to the Christian church. Both, I accept, are rather self-referential. But the second is interesting to me.

The Christian church historically has determined its own membership. On both doctrinal and ethical grounds it has, through the ages, chosen to expel members, or to call them to discipline and into line. And these callings have generally been effected through a prophet - a prophet in the Bible is one who essentially calls the people of God to order and tells them they need to stop doing stupid stuff. Christianity has contained within itself many streams and patterns of thought, but when they conflict with the doctrinal and ethical standards of the body, then be they Arianism, Montanism, Sabellianism, or Mormonism, they are asked to come into line or cast out of the fellowship.

The privilege of the Church is to determine to what extent subgroups are acceptable to the others. The prophets may rail against them, and the prophets may or may not be heard; they will be given other chances to return to fellowship, and they may or may not do so; they may be accepted in the Church or they may be no longer considered part of the Church. But that's up to the Church. Religious definitions of faith and Christianity do not come into it. I do not believe I am putting forward a "no true Scotsman" argument. I believe I am part of the body which has the right and privilege to determine what a "Scotsman" or in this case, a Christian, actually is. That body may or may not listen to me. To be honest, it probably won't, and I'll respect that. But I work from definitions within, and not definitions outside.

I hope this gives a bit more insight. It certainly helped me to understand some things. I wish I could have written more about the moral reductionism of American Christians, or about the connection between Christianity and "patriotism" that I mentioned above. But I feel the can of worms has been opened now, and I hope there will be plenty of fun things for me to research for the next article!

The wonderful David Bosch says in "Transforming Mission" that we need to realise that different religions are "worlds unto themselves". What he means is that it is impossible to enter into dialogue with someone with a different religious commitment to you and assume that your viewpoints are going to be the same; different religions either come from or give rise to different worldviews, which are incommensurable. When a Christian talks about God incarnating himself amongst his creation, he's saying something good; but someone with a Buddhist background is hearing something bad, and someone with an Islamic background is hearing something impossible. I remember Dave Burnett taking apart John 3:16 and showing how it meant to a Buddhist listener the opposite of what it means to a Christian listener. God loving the world? What an unGodlike thing to do! Eternal life? That's what I'm trying to get away from!

I've noticed this a lot listening to young evangelists. Having already dismissed the worldviews of other religious positions, ("Why study about Islam? What can that teach us about the truth?") their apologetics takes place from a Christian perspective. Which is fantastic if you're trying to convince Christians about the truth of Christianity; but generally, you're not. Although sometimes, the net result of this sort of thing is that they end up sounding like they're trying to convince themselves of the coherence of their own position. And maybe they are.

It seems to be a trademark of younger evangelists, and particularly conservative evangelicals, who, on the whole, receive the Gospel as a coherent set of propositions about the nature of the world and are highly committed to the absolute truth value of these propositions. And I'm trying not to be judgmental here because there is absolutely nothing wrong with that; indeed, the fact that these guys are so committed to the accuracy and superiority of their position makes them the most fervent and active evangelists, certainly more so than us grouchy liberal guys. (I'm not really that liberal, but it's all relative.)

But as my tutor at college said, "to be a good evangelist, you need to be a good atheist." You need to start from where the other guy is. So you don't start, for instance, talking about "what the Bible says" just because you accept the primacy of the Bible; the other guy doesn't. I get honestly ashamed when I hear evangelists quoting chapter and verse to bolster their own position when it's clear that the person they're talking to doesn't operate from that starting point. I get ashamed because it shows they aren't taking the other person seriously; they are more interested in their own doctrinal correctness than in showing love, and you show love by understanding the other person and taking their commitment seriously. (If you think I'm being unbiblical at this point, look at how Paul in Athens dives right into the middle of people's religious commitments, accepts them as valid, and works out how to speak about his own commitment from within that system. It's beautiful, and we've all been way too scared of syncretism to do anything like it since.)

Another telltale sign is the jargon and the symbolics. Telling people that they need a saving sacrifice is meaningless outside of a Christian worldview. And yet I've heard people come out with it, cold. Or let's take, say, "sin" as an example. The seriousness of sin and the need for a remedy is pretty much the basis of the Christian worldview. I am not doubting that. But it is not the basis of the atheistic worldview, strangely enough.

And so I hear, on countless occasions, statements like "people can't appreciate the good news until they know how bad the bad news really is." Basically the implication is, convert them to the Christian worldview first, and from then on, Christianity is pretty much the logical conclusion of that worldview. This, again, is not exactly how Paul did it. The end result is that evangelism becomes a battle for the superior worldview - which is, I suspect, one reason why it's so damned unpleasant to be on the receiving end of. Or on either end of, to be honest. Worldviews are worlds unto themselves.

I'm beginning to realise that this principle has wider application.

Churches are worlds unto themselves. Jim Stamoolis has said that even though the Orthodox Church and the WCC have taken part in dialogue, they haven't really had any dialogue because they have used the same terms to mean different things.

Denominations are worlds unto themselves. I'm reminded of this every time I go to Henrietta's church (and maybe when she goes to mine) - I don't know the big names I'm supposed to know or the latest doctrinal or spiritual fad that the churches (all over the world!) are involved in. I only have a fuzzy concept of what Willow Creek is. (I keep confusing Willow Creek with the Willowbank Report, which is roughly what this whole blog post is about: "Many of us evangelical Christians have in the past been too negative towards culture.")

And now, switching topics somewhat, I'm realising that political viewpoints are worlds unto themselves. They're incommensurable. Hell, the American Senate just got rid of rights to representation (949b.c in sec 3), evidence admissibility rules, (949a.b in sec 3) Geneva Convention rights (sec 6b.1), and judicial review on all of the above (sec 5) for anyone that Rumsfeld or Bush decides has committed a "hostile act"; but try telling a Republican that all this Gleichschaltung is a bad thing if he doesn't want to hear you. The truth is that he can't hear you - and you can't hear him - as long as you're operating in different worlds. They will sound to you as though they're in denial of the truth; you will sound to them as though you're a paranoid raving lunatic. (Thankfully, the Enabling Act could never happen to us here in the UK. Nobody ever thinks it can happen to them.)

Real evangelism - religious or political - has to begin with taking the other person's commitment seriously, however insane or misguided we think it is, and pointing the way forward on their own terms, not on ours. Being content with being in the right is easy, comfortable, and saves you from the bother of engaging seriously with how the other person thinks. Working from within another's worldview is difficult, and puts you in a position of weakness - and people don't like to appear weak on positions of religious or political commitment. We much prefer working from a position of strength; but look at the Bible, and look how people like Paul operated - not with clever or persuasive arguments, but in the understanding that in the worldviews of his listeners, his message was foolishness and a stumbling block. He understood how he was being heard, and he knew that he was, in the minds of his hearers, backing a loser.

We're hypnotised by this idea of strength, of having the upper hand, of being in the right. We should be hypnotised by the ideas of self-denial, of understanding, of love. Of weakness. I've had other Christians pray sincerely and lovingly for me to get over my "doubts" simply because I've refused to deal with non-Christians on Christian terms. Thanks, but that wasn't doubt; it was love. Weakness - even ideological weakness - is not a dirty word. It is, after all, where God's power is made perfect.