Full disclosure: I’m taking a few ideas for a walk here, combining a meander, a wander and a ramble. You’ve got some Life of Brian, Saul, Samuel and Peter Hitchens look forward to.
Have you ever had the feeling of realising much later what you should have said? It’s usually in the context of an argument. I had that feeling in the context of a sermon the other day.
I was preaching Revelation 2:1-7 at my church in Yeovil in Somerset. It was a joy, not least because it’s one of the easiest bits of the Book of Revelation. There are some puzzling parts, about the ‘angel of the church’ in Ephesus (2:1) and there’s a mention of the Tree of Life (2:7) at the end. But the sense of the passage is clear.
Revelation is the Marmite book of the Bible, sending scholars and Bible teachers in radically different directions. The book opens itself up to a huge range of interpretations of the powerful visual imagery that is alien to us. There isn’t even agreement over whether the events in the book are to come, are happening now, or have already happened. This is a path to discussions about preterism, postmilliennialism and dispensationalism, which get very confusing very quickly.
Who Said Jehovah?
It’s easy to make jokes about theological debates. I’m a comedy writer, so I find it very easy indeed. And I’ve got plenty coming up in June in my book, The Gospel According To A Sitcom Writer. But theology matters. We read that in Revelation 2:1-7, in which Jesus praised the Church in Ephesus for its good theology.
“I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false.”
So while we can make jokes about medieval scholastics discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, we need to be careful that we don’t essentially say that theology doesn’t really matter. It really does. The consequences of bad theology are dire.
This Is An Ex-Church
Since lockdown began nearly a year ago, I’ve not been to the gym. Call me paranoid, but being in close proximity to people huffing and puffing during a global pandemic doesn’t strike me as a wise thing to do. So I’ve been out in the countryside and villages of Somerset and Dorset, appreciating my local area. In fact, I don’t think I’m going back to the gym again. Give me trees and fields any day. I’m coming round to Tolkien’s way of thinking about trees in that they’re a bit magic. (One for another newsletter about the Tree of Life.)
Quite often I come across villages and small towns where chapels and little churches have been built and then turned into houses, flats or offices. The architecture may be beautiful, or at least striking, but to me, it’s a thoroughly depressing sight.
Think about what it took to build that church.
A poor rural community pooled meagre resources to build a chapel in which to worship faithfully, presumably because the vicar down the road wasn’t delivering the goods. There may have been a parting of the ways over theology.
But what happened next? Within a few generations, the chapel was abandoned or sold off. Why? In some cases, depopulation might play a part, but here’s the main cause: bad theology. AKA false teaching.
The gospel wasn’t fully explained, parts were omitted because they were contentious, or simply assumed, and then later denied. Some left the church because of the false teaching. Others left because they were hearing a gospel that was in the image of the preacher who then died. Or the preaching was indistinct from the spirit of the age. Before the church members knew it, God had removed his lampstand.
The Chilling Words to Saul
Lampstand removal is the threat in Revelation 2:5. The idea of God departing from your church should be truly chilling. It puts me in mind of Saul’s rejection as King of Israel for not doing everything God commanded, and then setting up a monument in his own honour (bad sign). And then he tried to put a positive spin on it later to Samuel. Eventually he admits:
“I have sinned. I violated the Lord’s command and your instructions. I was afraid of the men and so I gave in to them. Now I beg you, forgive my sin and come back with me, so that I may worship the Lord.” But Samuel said to him, “I will not go back with you. You have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel.” (1 Samuel 15:24-26)
That a strong powerful king like Saul, clearly appointed by the LORD himself, ‘should be afraid of men’ is telling, and little pathetic. And now we see him grovelling for forgiveness. You can sense the panic. It’s too late. The Lord has rejected him.
No Way Back
The message of rejection comes back again and again throughout the book of 1 Samuel, even to the point where Saul resorts to summoning Samuel from the dead using the Witch of Endor. (Another bad sign) Samuel appears, rather surprisingly, and tells Saul the same message:
“Why then do you ask me, since the Lord has turned from you and become your enemy? 17 The Lord has done to you as he spoke by me, for the Lord has torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to your neighbour, David. 18 Because you did not obey the voice of the Lord and did not carry out his fierce wrath against Amalek, therefore the Lord has done this thing to you this day. 19 Moreover, the Lord will give Israel also with you into the hand of the Philistines, and tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me.” 1 Samuel 28:16-19
Translation: You’re still in the dog house. And see you and your kids in the underworld after the battle tomorrow!
It’s like a punchline to a sick, running joke.
The removal of the lampstand (Rev 2:5), which refers to God’s presence in the travelling Tabernacle and then Solomon’s Temple, should be of concern to us, lest our church is flattened. Or turned into flats.
Forgetfulness
The warning to the Ephesians in Revelation, however, is not issued about wobbly theology, although that is implicit. It is about forgetting your first love. The church in Ephesus had plenty of theologians – and also those who worked hard to do good works, and kept doing them (Rev 2:2).
But it’s possible to work and work for the Lord, and contend for sound doctrine, and lose your first love, which is Jesus Christ himself. That is the thrust of the sermon I preached, and if you’re interested to see that, you can watch it online here.
Having preached the sermon, however, another thought struck me which I shall attempt to unfurl here. Let’s go back to the beginning. Bear with.
The Atom Bomb
I’ve been going through Genesis first thing in the morning, and reading how Adam was put into the Garden of Eden. In fact, God planted the garden in front of Adam as a special dwelling place. Adam’s job? To tend it and defend it. But before he even had a chance to tend it, he failed to defend it. He should have driven out the serpent, but he didn’t.
We probably gravitate towards either tending or defending ministry. We’re in the business of caring about people or ideas. The nature of this newsletter would suggest I’m a defender rather than a tender. What about you?
We love personality tests. We love to look inside ourselves. And we consider the individual to be the basic unit of society, which in a sense it is. But we neglect the realms God has created at our peril: the family, the church and the magistrate.
In our society we have become utterly fragmented. Blown apart. Atomised. Broadly speaking, it’s just you and the state. This has been intentional, as Peter Hitchens has tirelessly pointed out for years. I don’t like to quote the Mail on Sunday too often, but on May 2014, Hitchens wrote:
The very sharp and influential Sir James Munby, senior judge in the English family courts, has said that couples should be able to end a marriage simply by signing a form at a register office, with no need for lawyers or judges.
And, being smart, he has also urged the next obvious step – that cohabiting couples should be treated as if they are officially married once they have stayed together for a couple of years.
After all, why not? There’s no important difference any more. Official forms long ago stopped referring to ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, and those who cling to these archaic terms are frequently told by bureaucrats that they are now in fact ‘partners’.
I think Sir James will get his wish. And everyone will be happy, happy, happy – except the growing multitude of children who have never known domestic security and now never will, and the lonely, confused old men and women with nowhere to turn but the doubtful comforts of the care home, where their lives can dribble away in a medicated haze, perhaps punctuated by slaps and insults.
Marriage is highly soluble. Spouses owe nothing to spouses, parents to young children and children to ageing parents.
Perhaps this pandemic has driven us back into families and households, which would be a plus, but in the 21st Century West, we relate to the world, the church and the Bible in a highly individualistic way. Ironically, it comes from a seed sown five hundred years ago during the Reformation.
We Are All Individuals
Until the 1520s, there was one Church. (There’s a song about that in A Monk’s Tale) And we were all part of it. All of us. The Church was at the heart of society, binding together family and state. Births, marriages, deaths, coronations and feast days. As it happens, in their Twelve Conclusions that I mentioned last week, the Lollards said the Church should be separate from the state and senior clergy should not be ministers of state.
The idea of a schism with The Church of Rome went from being unthinkable to essential. And once you’ve done it, there’s nothing to stop you from doing it again, and again. And again. Therefore we have hundreds of Protestant denominations, and very few Catholic ones.
In that fragmented context, we are more individualistic than ever before. Therefore, we might approach the ‘tenders’ vs ‘defenders’ idea as one we need to resolve within ourselves. It feels like we must be both. We can’t specialise. I have to be the complete, all-round package.
But that’s not how Churches – or families – work. The Head of the household defends, and the Mother tends. In a church, we have those teach, preach and drive away error, and we have deacons who serve, give alms and administrate. God has given us each other in his Church. And both tenders and defenders must remember their first love, Jesus Christ, or our church turns into a soup kitchen or a debating society. We are all one in Him.
Creeds
How, then, can we preserve good theology to avoid the removal of the lampstand? In our individualistic age, it feels like each of us needs to build our own theological system from the ground up, selecting from the buffet of theological dishes, or downloading apps and plug-ins for our theological operating system. We may be critical of those who say ‘I like to think of God as…’ but we do the very same thing with our own theology, just on a deeper level.
This is why churches and denominations have creeds and articles of faith. If you are a member of that church, the creed or doctrinal basis tells you what that church teaches and what you, therefore, should believe.
We instinctively find that a very troubling concept. Nobody tells us what to think. We are all individuals. That’s the message of Brian in the Life of Brian.
BRIAN: Look. You've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves. You're all individuals!
FOLLOWERS: Yes, we're all individuals!
BRIAN: You're all different!
FOLLOWERS: Yes, we are all different!
DENNIS: I'm not.
FOLLOWERS: Shh. Shhhh. Shhh.
BRIAN: You've all got to work it out for yourselves!
FOLLOWERS: Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!
BRIAN: Exactly!
FOLLOWERS: Tell us more!
BRIAN: No! That's the point! Don't let anyone tell you what to do! Otherwise-- Ow! No!
MANDY: Come on, Brian. That's enough. That's enough.
Brian says it’s all up to us. It’s all on us. And that message had, and has, huge resonance.
The fact that we struggle with creeds – any creed – demonstrates we have a long way to go in understanding what it means to live the Christian life. It is to be lived in communion and fellowship with other Christians, gifted in different ways, in service of the Church, as we build the Kingdom together under God until Christ returns.
Barry Cooper and I discussed the importance of creeds on our podcast a while back, so have a listen to that if you’d like more. And that’s what occurred to me after having preached the sermon. I’m sure my congregation were more than happy that I stopped talking when I did.
But creeds are important. And isn’t it ironic that we will happily click boxes and assent to all kinds of things when it comes to approving software on our phones or small print on insurance policies? But offer us a lengthy credal Confession, over which learned godly men have agonised for years, and we get cold feet and begin to cherry-pick or back off saying ‘I’m not really into theology’ – rather than ‘Amen’.
Thank you for reading to the end. Or at least getting to the end. I’ll try and be a little more focussed next time!
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Hello James
I got your name from a neighbour who invited me to a talk by you at the STAG church tomorrow in Cambridge where I treated myself to one of their religious courses some years ago, so I thought I would see what you were about!
Having said that, it would be nice sometimes if an article such as this one would explain what it was going to discuss at the beginning rather than just diving in and writing apparently whaffley assertions about supernatural issues.
I fear such writing will not stem the flow of people away from the church, whereas some discussion of why intelligent people believe in a concept such as god, and some do not might get a wider audience.
As an atheist I have been to a lot of talks in Cambridge to try and look into this and very rarely do I find it possible to have a more in depth discussion about belief. It is usually just one question and one answer and so it is usually a waste of time! Therefore I thought why not put my current understanding on this subject to you which is that whether someone believes is down to how the brain works. This comes from scientific studies with people with damages frontal brain lobes which shows such damage leads to heightened religious experiences. I think this is something Prof Alasdair Coles has done work on (I've looked at his Test of Faith website) but I have not had the opportunity to go to any of his church talks where I could raise this. Just wondering what your views are?
Another fantastic read. I agree with you on quite a lot of theology James, it reassures me that I'm not stark and raving after all.
Here's another view on the aversion to Creeds. What happens when the Pulpit has absolute disregard for the Creed, what becomes of the Pew? When the Clergy do not hold to the sound theological and doctrinal basis of the Christian faith, what then is to be the fate of the Laity? The Shepherd ought to lead well or the Sheep are roast! All around us we continue to see that faithful Christians are having to suffer the leadership of Donkeys instead of Godly Shepherds and therein lies a devastating problem. If the Donkeys were even of Balaam's kind, it would be semi-bearable.
Lamp-stands will continue to be removed, the sifting of wheat from chaff will persist even as the Lord continues to preserve His remnant and purify His Church.