Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 90

Vampire community?

In a recent blog post John Morehead wrote: Morehead's Musings: Media Stereotypes of Vampires and Other Alternative Subcultures Continue with Alleged Abduction of Teen: "One article I read recently even went so far as to offer commentary on just how dangerous such groups are. The problem is, no such groups exist, and this media narrative was shaped by the residual effects of anti-cult stereotypes, misrepresentations of the vampire community, and the legacy of satanic panics."

Now I've deliberately quoted out of context, because I take issue with two terms, or concepts — "vampire community" and describing vampires as a "subculture".

Perhaps my interest is primarily as a language pedant. Can one really have a "community" composed of fictional creatures, largely invented by Bram Stoker in the late 19th century? Can one really describe such creatures as a sub-culture?

Some years ago Irving Hexham wrote in the New Religious Movements (Nurel) forum of some people who believed that the Necronomicon written about by H.P. Lovecraft actually existed in the actual archives of an actual Miskatonic University.

But even assuming that there really are such creatures as Bram Stoker wrote about, and that they actually behave in the way described in his book, then saying that a community composed of such creatures is not violent is really stretching it — like saying that a community of terrorists, or a community of torturers and interrogators is not violent.

What next?

Are there media sterotypes of hobbits, and unfair misrepresentations of the "hobbit community"?

I suppose one could put a similar spin on this obituary by heading it "Death catches up with man who slandered the fairy community": Geoffrey Crawley, 83, Photographic Scientist – NYTimes.com:

Were there really fairies at the bottom of the garden, or was it merely a childhood prank gone strangely and lastingly awry?That, for six decades, was the central question behind the Cottingley fairies mystery, the story of two English schoolgirls who claimed to have taken five pictures of fairy folk in the 1910s and afterward.

The Cottingley Fairies

Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths borrowed Elsie's parents' camera and went out into the woods. They came back claiming that they had taken pictures of fairies. It went beyond a joke when Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, began promoting them as genuine pictures of actual fairies. Real-life authors, it seems, are not as astute as the fictional detectives they create. But whatever one makes of this story, could one really speak of a fairy community, or complain about media stereotypes of fairies? Can fictional creatures be described as a sub-culture, whether their characteristics are pleasant or unpleasant?

Will someone be castigating J.K. Rowling for publishing unfair stereotypes of the blast-ended screwt "community"?

Cease and desist

What is it about Americans with their "cease and desist" letters?

Two years ago it was a J. Mark Brewer demanding that cartoon blogger Dave Walker "cease and desist" from commenting on Brewer's destruction of the SPCK chain of Christian bookshops.

And now The Inspiration Network, a big US company which was bought by TV evangelist Morris Cerullo from another TV evangelist, Jim Bakker, is sending "cease and desist" letters to a Methodist youth group in the UK because they had inadvertently chosen the same name, Steelroots, as one of The Inspiration Network's subsidiaries. As blogger Bene Diction Blogs On says

The Cerullo's network people could have written Sheffield without legal heavy-handedness, offered to help with transition costs, re-launch etc. But they didn't.

Right. Consumer confusion. We silly Christian couch potatoes are going to get all mixed up as religious media consumers. Sheffield UK. Indian Land SC. (I mix up my continents and countries up all the time, don't you?). Different efforts; an 80 million dollar a year network and music videos, versus a couple of church trusts. Kids sponsoring other kids in Tanzania, versus boy bands. We can't be trusted to tell the difference between .com and .org., a website and a television network. Entertainment versus service. Too tough for me. It's about the bottom line, can't have a donation going to the wrong place now can we? There is a City of Light to build and a world-wide media dream to pursue.

Why does American Religion Inc. so often come across as a bunch of heavy-handed bullies?

Perhaps Christians around the world could send letters to The Inspiration Network suggesting that they cease and desist from bullying, and rather display a little Christian love.

The media and religion

That the media don't "get religion" is a commonplace. There is even a web site devoted to the phenomenon. Now Church of England bishop Nick Baines has come up with some interesting examples, commenting on the media coverage of the conversion of Lauren Booth (Tony Blair's sister-in-law) to Islam (On becoming a Muslim | Nick Baines's Blog).

In today's Mail on Sunday Lauren Booth gives her side of the story. Credit to the Mail for giving her the space, but it is set amidst the usual xenophobic content we have come to expect. The headline speaks volumes: 'Why I love Islam: Lauren Booth defiantly explains why she is becoming a Muslim'. I defy you to read what Booth actually writes and call it 'defiant'. 'Defiant' suggests stubbornness, arrogance or deliberate contrariness; yet, she writes calmly, clearly and honestly to explain why she has converted. She doesn't pretend to know more than she does and she doesn't overstate her case.

She describes how she found Muslims and Islamic society very different from the way they are portrayed in the Western media, and Bishop Nick goes on to say

You'll have to read the article to see the experience of generous hospitality that impressed her. And it is this that provides the most interesting element of the story.

The factors in her conversion were: (a) unexpected generosity from a stranger; (b) experience of hospitality and community; (c) an intense spiritual experience. Interestingly, she is only now learning to read the Qur'an and understand the faith that has grasped her. Didn't someone once speak of 'faith seeking understanding'? And someone else of 'believing before belonging'? The message is meaningless without a community in which to see it lived.

An interesting sidelight on this emerges from the current one-day cricket series between South Africa and Pakistan, being played in the United Arab Emirates. In the second match of the series (which Pakistan won in a nail-biting finish), played in Abu Dhabi in a largely empty stadium, among the spectators was a group of males who were carrying dolls and teddy bears and a variety of other stuffed toys. In other matches at other venues, when specators realise that the camera is on them, they tend to jump up and down, or wave their arms wildly, or both. In Abu Dhabi, however, the (male) spectators held up their dolls and stuffed toys to display them to the camera. In Western culture such toys are usually confined to small girls, and so it seemed strange to see the way that grown men were relating to them. Some of the men also had real children, and quite young ones.

The cricket commentators remarked on this phenomenon, but no explanation was forthcoming. I was reminded of the use of dolls and stuffed toys in Albania — where they are nailed to half-completed buildings to ward off the evil eye. People from other cultures find these crucified dolls quite scary and disturbing (they are called dordolets) and you can find information about them on the web if you Google for it. But the dolls and stuffed toys in Abu Dhabi seem quite different, and searching the Web produced no information about it. Abu Dhabi is an Islamic culture, but this aspect of it is missing from the Western media.

And the distortions in the media are not confined to Islam. Christianity also suffers, as Bishop Nick goes on to point out:

Just as Islam is fragmented and contains a spectrum of 'believers' – from the mad to the wonderfully wonderful – so is Christianity. Just as I want Christianity to be judged by the best examples of Christian expression and community, so I want the same for Muslims. I wonder if the Mail plans to give any thought to, consideration of or coverage of good Christian stories that speak for themselves – or are Christians only useful if they are pitted against 'the others'. Certainly, to depict Christians as white, Anglo-Saxon victims of persecution in the UK is ridiculous… but it sells well.

So when it comes to religion (as with many other things), the media act as trolls (let's you and him fight). I suppose dolls and teddy bears are not enough of a casus belli for the Western press.

Gendered Christianity?

From time to time I've read articles by Western feminist theologians on the need for Christianity, or theology, or something to be "gendered", and it's always made me feel a bit uncomfortable because I've never been quite sure what it meant. Then I came across this, and had the same uncomfortable feeling. Why Orthodox Men Love Church : Journey To Orthodoxy:

In a time when churches of every description are faced with Vanishing Male Syndrome, men are showing up at Eastern Orthodox churches in numbers that, if not numerically impressive, are proportionately intriguing. This may be the only church which attracts and holds men in numbers equal to women.

It's an interesting article, though I'm not quite sure whether it's "gendered" or not. It goes on to speak of the "feminization" of Christianity, which does sound gendered, but the article seems to be saying that Orthodoxy neutralises this "feminization" and, unlike other varieties of Christianity, attracts both sexes equally. But I still have this strange feeling that the "feminization" that the article speaks of is not quite what the feminist theologians have in mind when they say "gendered".

The article says why Orthodoxy appeals to males, but it seems that it appeals to females for the very same reasons

"In Orthodoxy, the theme of spiritual warfare is ubiquitous; saints, including female saints, are warriors. Warfare requires courage, fortitude, and heroism. We are called to be 'strugglers' against sin, to be 'athletes' as St. Paul says. And the prize is given to the victor. The fact that you must 'struggle' during worship by standing up throughout long services is itself a challenge men are willing to take up."

In those long services, however, it is the babushkas who put the males in their place — upbraiding teenage boys who saunter up to communion with their hands in their pockets, and who, in the Bolskevik era in Russia, could always tell the KGB men by the way they stood in church, and would make remarks about the way they couldn't stand still, "Perhaps the devil put nuts under your feet."

I'm not sure which varieties of Christianity are feminized, though.

If  you look at the "Christian" shelves in secular book shops most ofn the books on offer are written by megapastors of megachurches out to make megabucks, and nearly all of them are male. The few books written by women seem to be written specifically for women, and their vision of femininity seems to resemble nothing so much as The Stepford wives. It would be inaccurate to say thay they resemble androids; gynoids is probably closer to the mark. But I also supect that some feminist writers really do think the world is like that.

It wasn't so in the old days. I think Aimee Semple McPherson would have given any of today's megapastors a run for their money. And then there was Ma Nku, the founder of the St John Apostolic Faith Mission.

The very word "gender" seems to be confusing nowadays, and often seems to be used as a longer and more pretentious substitute for "sex". In the past it was simple: the sexes were male and female, and the genders were masculine, feminine and neuter. Sociologists began to use "gender" for the social construction of sex, meaning that sex was biological, whereas gender was more cultural. And that's were it gets rather complicated. If gender is cultural, then it varies from one culture to another, and that is precisely the point at which I mistrust Americans writing about the "feminization" of Christianity.

Some years ago some British online friends went to work for a Christian NGO in Colorado in the USA, and they went to a local Protestant church in Colorado Springs. They were hit by culture shock when the minister of the church preached a sermon on the need for macho males. He said that parents should discourage their sons from playing "girls' games" like soccer, and rather encourage them to play more macho games, like basketball. But in other cultures the gender of the games is quite different. Soccer is seen as a primarily male game, while netball (the equivalent of basketball), is seen as a "girly game", as Arnold Schwarzenegger might say. Gender certainly differs from culture to culture, so what do you fill in on those forms that ask for your "gender"? Think about how you feel about soccer today, and think about whether you are in the USA or in the rest of the world?

The article I quoted goes on to say Why Orthodox Men Love Church : Journey To Orthodoxy:

In "The Church Impotent," cited above (and recommended by several of these men), Leon Podles offers a theory about how Western Christian piety became feminized. In the 12th-13th centuries a particularly tender, even erotic, strain of devotion arose, one which invited the individual believer to picture himself or herself (rather than the Church as a whole) as the Bride of Christ. "Bridal Mysticism" was enthusiastically adopted by devout women, and left an enduring stamp on Western Christianity. It understandably had less appeal for guys. For centuries in the West, men who chose the ministry have been stereotyped as effeminate.

And worship can have its own cultural assumptions. An Orthodox woman I know was quite shocked when seeing Pentecostal worship on TV, "all those people with closed eyes and bared teeth."

I read the article, and think yes, most of what is says about Orthodoxy is true, but there is such a thing as being too self-consciously gendered. Perhaps it's American gender angst. The point about Orthodoxy isn't that it's macho, it's rather that it's true.

15 authors (meme)

15 Authors (meme)

Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag at least fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose.

This comes from A mule in the chapter house, who asks to be included among the tagged ones, to see what others say. I wasn't tagged, but thought it might be interesting to join in.

So here's my list:

Alexander Schmemann
C.S. Lewis
G.K. Chesterton
Charles Williams
Jack Kerouac
Roland Allen
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
J.R.R. Tolkien
G.B. Caird
Gustav Aulén
Alan Garner
Nicolas Berdyaev
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Samuel Beckett
Jonathan Swift

I didn't choose them because I liked them the most or that I've read most of their work, or that I own all their books, but simply because their writing has influenced me and shaped my thinking at various times.

1. Alexander Schmemann

I put him first because his writing probably made the biggest change to my life. It was reading his For the life of the world (or rather the shorter version, The world as sacrament)) that crystallised my dissatisfaction with Western theology, and made me seriously consider Orthodoxy as an alternative.

2. C.S. Lewis

It was Lewis's fiction, initially the space trilogy, and later the Narnia stories, that influenced me most, and enabled me to experience what Berdyaev (q.v.) meant when he said that "myth is a reality immeasurably greater than concept". It also prepared me to understand what G.B. Caird (q.v.) wrote about.

3. G.K. Chesterton

His Orthodoxy also influeced me a great deal in seeing the value of myths and fairy tales in communicating truth.

4.Charles Williams

I began reading his books at about the same time as I read Lewis's space trilogy, and though I didn't then know that they knew each other I liked them for the same reasons. His The place of the lion showed the influence of spiritual power in everyday life.

5. Jack Kerouac

I've only really liked one book of his, The Dharma bums. I've reread that many times, but haven't really been tempted to reread most of the others. The idea of a "rucksack revolution" appealed to me. I was turned on to Kerouac and Charles Williams by Brother Roger, of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection, who was a kind of guru to me in my late teens, and whose paper Pilgrims of the Absolute probably influenced me as much as any of the authors listed here, and he wasn't included in the list only because it wasn't a full-length book.

6. Roland Allen

Roland Allen's Missionary methods: St Paul's or ours helped me to clarify my understanding of the role of the ordained ministry in the church. Roland Allen, an Anglican, wrote about a century ago, when many Anglicans still believed that there were three orders of ministry in the church — bishops, priests and deacons, and Allen explained what their role should be within the Christian community. Nowadays, however, most Anglicans have abandoned that notion, and seem to believe that the three orders of ministry are bishops, vicars and curates. and clericalism is as rife as it was in Allen's day.

7. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

His Cost of discipleship still scares me, and his Life together remains a good guide for Christian intentional communities (sometimes referred to as the "new monasticism").

8. J.R.R. Tolkien

In 1966 I went to Oxford to be interviewed by a group of trustees about a bursary I had applied for. Another interviewee was a friend from the University of Natal, John Henderson, who told me about Tolkien's books, and also told me that Tolkien was a friend of C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams and that they gathered regularly in that very city to read their works to each other. That was sufficient recommendation — any friend of Williams and Lewis had to be worth reading, and when I got back to my digs in Streatham, I began reading The hobbit. I bought the first two volumes of Lord of the Rings and finished the second late at night, so I borrowed a friend's copy to continue reading, and didn't buy the third volume for several years. But I've read it several times since then.

9. G.B. Caird

In a New Testament class at university our lecturer, Vic Bredenkamp, was talking about "principalities and powers", and I didn't understand what he was saying. I thought of "principalities" in terms of places like Monaco and Liechtenstein, and "powers" in terms of the USA and USSR. Vic recommended that I read Caird's eponymous book, and suddenly everything fell into place. The Oyarsa of Malacandra; the Lion, the Serpent and the Butterflies of Williams's The place of the Lion, and what lay behind the peculiar and mundane battles between the Liberal Party and the Special Branch. Our struggle was not so much against Van Rensburg and Dreyer, or even against Vorster and Verwoerd, as against the principalities, the powers, against spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies. In rural hamlets in Natal, like Hambrook and Stepmore, a conflict was being enacted whose roots reached the depths where angels and demons were locked in mortal conflict. Caird opened my eyes to that. At one time I wanted to write a book about it, but then Walter Wink published first. I haven't included Wink here, because his writing didn't really influence me, but he said a lot of the things that I wanted to say about it, based on Caird, Lewis and Williams.

10. Gustav Aulén

Following on from Caird, Gustav Aulén's Christus Victor helped me to understand the atonement in Christian theology, and also helped to predispose me towards Orthodoxy. Aulén wasn't Orthodox, he was Lutheran, and his explanation was not complete, but it was more coherent than most of the others.

11. Alan Garner

I loved Alan Garner's first three books — The weirdstone of Brisingamen, The moon of Gomrath and Elidor. They were Charles Williams for children. Someone described Charles Williams's books as "supernatural thrillers". Garner's first three were supernatural thrillers on steroids.

12. Nicolas Berdyaev

I've already mentioned Nicolas Berdaev in connection with what he said about myth. He wrote a lot of stuff, most of it interesting, though not all of it I would agree with, but what he said about myth bears repeating:

Myth is a reality immeasurably greater than concept. It is high time that we stopped identifying myth with invention, with the illusions of primitive mentality, and with anything, in fact, which is essentially opposed to reality… The creation of myths among peoples denotes a real spiritual life, more real indeed than that of abstract concepts and rational thought. Myth is always concrete and expresses life better than abstract thought can do; its nature is bound up with that of symbol. Myth is the concrete recital of events and original phenomena of the spiritual life symbolized in the natural world, which has engraved itself on the language memory and creative energy of the people… it brings two worlds together symbolically.

13. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's novels have taught me a great deal about compassion, forgiveness and repentance.

14. Samuel Beckett

It was Brother Roger, CR (see above) who turned me on to Samuel Beckett, and lent me most of his books and plays. I suppose that unlike many of the other books I have mentioned, which seem to emphasise premodern themes like angels and demons, Beckett was modern, and his books deal with modernity, but especially the bleakness of modernity, which is the complement of some of the others.

15. Jonathan Swift

When I was at school, and encountered bullies, I would become quite misanthropic, and then I would read Swift's Gulliver's travels, because it suited my mood. The more I saw of some people, the more I liked my horse. But Dostoevsky's compassion trumps Swift's misanthropy, so I don't read Swift so much nowadays. I did read a biography of him, though.

And now I have to think of fifteen people to tag.

1. Bishop Seraphim Sigrist

2. Macrina Walker

3. John Morehead

4. Jim Forest

5. Matushka Donna

6. Malcolm Guite

7. Matt Stone

8. Reggie Nel

9. Tinyiko Maluleke

10. Cobus van Wyngaard

11. Arthur Stewart

12. Jenny Hillebrand

13. Terry Cowan

14. Sue Fairhead

15. The mule in the chapter house

 

Underrepresented at Cape Town 2010

Andy Crouch writes: Underrepresented at Cape Town 2010 | Liveblog | Christianity Today:

I'm in Cape Town for the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. Four thousand delegates are here in what is being described as the most representative gathering of Christian leaders in history. But one group is notably underrepresented: prominent figures associated with evangelical Christianity in the United States, especially pastors of large churches. Rather than name names, let me put it this way: pick a celebrated American evangelical church leader, especially one who founded his current congregation, and I will give you 5-1 odds that he (and most of the missing are "he"s) is not here, at least not as part of the official US delegation.

For better and for worse, these absences tell us a lot about power, influence, innovation, and the future of global movements like evangelical Christianity. Here are a few lessons from the ecclesial Realpolitik of the no-shows (in rough order from brutally honest to genuinely hopeful) . . . .

For megapastors, platform time is the price of participation
Learning happens in the hallways, not the hall
Innovation happens today in small distributed networks, not in large centralized meetings
The globalization that made "Lausanne 1974" so powerful, and made "Lausanne 2010" possible, may well make "Lausanne 2046" unnecessary
The absence of major American figures really doesn't matter and probably actually helps

And Andy Crouch concludes, "Very likely, when we look back from 2046, we will discover that the most significant outcomes of Cape Town 2010, unforeseen and unforeseeable today, came from those relationships—and from the very spaces created by the missing megapastors. And in 2046, without a doubt, those leaders will be the ones having to make the tough decisions about what to do with their power and their all-too-limited time—just like the no-shows of 2010."

I can think of several other groups that were underrepresented at Cape Town 2010. There didn't seem to be many Orthodox participants, for one thing, though whether that was because they weren't invited or didn't bother to attend, I'm not sure.

But it seems that there were not many African megapastors there either, which is more significant for a congress held in Africa than the absence of American megapastors.

It appears that some African pastors who preach a prosperity gospel are also conducting and promoting witch hunts, and especially of child "witches", and this is being publicised outside Africa, creating considerable resistance to the Gospel in Europe and elsewhere. Though one of the topics at Cape Town 2010 was "prosperity gospel", this aspect of it was barely touched on, and yet the competition between the new megachurches and the old African Independent Churches is one of the raw nerves of African Christianity today. Perhaps it was the elephant in the room that nobody wanted to talk about. Or perhaps no one at Cape Town 2010 was aware of it, precisely because those for whom it is most important were absent.

Visiting bishop and mission team

Last week was a busy one with a mission team from the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC) in the USA running a teaching seminar at Atteridgeville, and Bishop Grigorije of Herzegovina visiting St Thomas's Church in Sunninghill for their patronal festival.

Father Michael Miklos of Florida teaching at Atteridgeville

The OCMC were teaching for three days, and I took one of the young people from Mamelodi to join them.

Ed Bearse, a retired judge from Minnesota teaching at Atteridgeville

On Friday Bishop Grigorije arrived for the patronal feast of St Thomas's in Sunninghill, and on Saturday night there was Vespers and refreshments afterwards.

Coptic Bishop Antonius Markos and Bishop Grigorije of Herzegovina at St Thomas's patronal feast

Deacon Zoran from Serbia with Sophie Aphane and friend

New Monasticism and Orthodoxy

Quite a lot has been written in Protestant circles recently about the "New Monasticism", which refers to semi-monastic Christian intentional communities or communes. I was therefore especially interested to read about a current Orthodox example in Notes from a Common-place Book: Buy Mary Alice's Book:

I have just ordered my copy of Community of Grace, the story of the Orthodox community associated with St. John's Orthodox Cathedral in Eagle River, Alaska. The author, Mary Alice Cook, is a native East Texan who has lived in that state since 1976. Raised Southern Baptist, she and her family became Orthodox Christians in 1992.

It sounds like an interesting book, and one I'll be adding to my "to read" list.

Multiculturalism is dead

One of the things I find difficult to understand is Christians who rail against multiculturalism and religious pluralism as if these were self-evidently evil phenomena.

The Western Confucian: I Read the News Today, Oh Boy recently juxtaposed two items that illustrate the difficulty

Sandro Magister on an unenviable position — Christians in the Middle East. Crushed between Islam and Israel.
"Somebody eventually had to say it — and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud," says Thomas Sowell; "Multiculturalism has 'utterly failed'" — The Multicultural Cult.

It is a commonplace that multiculturalism has failed in the Near and Middle East. The Wars of the Yugoslav Succession 20 years ago made that pretty clear, and introduced us to the phrase that describes the opposite of multiculturalism, namely "ethnic cleansing". If, as many people seem to believe, multiculturalism is a Bad Thing, then the way to undo it is by ethnic cleansing, and as the other article referenced by The Western Confucian points out, it has been going on for most of the 20th century: Christians in the Middle East. Crushed between Islam and Israel:

The exodus of Christians from those lands is an important part of this movement. But it is not a new phenomenon. During the first half of the twentieth century, the extermination and expulsion from Turkey of the Armenians, and then the Greeks, were of colossal proportions. Today the exodus continues from several places, and in different degrees. The fact is that in comparison with the twelve million faithful of the ancient Eastern Churches who today live between Egypt and Iran, there are now about seven million living elsewhere.

And that, of course, is where multiculturalism meets religious pluralism, because the process involves religious cleansing as well, and the erection of barriers between ethnic and religious groups to try to make sure that they never meet or mingle.

One of the things that has puzzled me over the last 20 years or so is that just at the point where we in South Africa had finally realised that apartheid had failed, many people in Europe and the Near and Middle East were eagerly embracing it and declaring that multiculturalism has failed.

In South Africa people began to talk about "the rainbow nation" and "many cultures, one nation", whereas in other places they were erecting new apartheid walls to revive the Verwoerdian dream of separate development, where the development is a "nice to have" optional extra, the sugar coating on the pill, but the separation is not negotiable.

And Angela Merkel was not the first German chancellor to come to the conclusion that multiculturalism had failed. One of her predecessors, Adolf Hitler, came to the same conclusion. Austria was a multinational and multicultural empire, and the German nationalist element saw their task as a struggle to maintain their national language and traditions, contradicting what was said by non-German teachers, and wearing emblems and colours of the German Reich.

…at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with Heil! and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own Deutchland ueber alles, despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own nationality except the language (Hitler 1939:24).

I suppose that part of the difference is cultural, and has to do with the kind of society one grew up in.

I grew up in South Africa, which has been a multicultural society since human history began, and yet the government was determined to undo this, and separate the cultures through the implementation of the policy of apartheid. This involved ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, with some 3-4 million people being uprooted from their homes and made to move somewhere else so that each part of the country could be ethnically pure and monocultural. Of course much of the history of South Africa is made up of the story of clashes of different cultures. The Nationalist government claimed that the only way to avoid the clashes was to separate the cultures. Not only was it impossible for people to learn to get along with others who were different, it was regarded as positively evil that they should try to do so. And this, it seems to me, was in direct contradiction to the Christian faith. As Fr Thomas Hopko puts it (yes, I've quoted this before in this blog, and will probably quote it again, because I believe it is true)

Tolerance is always in order when it means that we coexist peacefully with people whose ideas and manners differ from our own, even when to do so is to risk the impression that truth is relative and all customs and mores are equally acceptable (as happens in North America).Tolerance is never in order when it means that we remain idle before wickedness which harms human beings and destroys God's creation.

To be tolerant is to be neither indifferent nor relativistic. Neither is it to sanction injustice or to be permissive of evil. Injustice is intolerable and evil has no rights. But the only weapons which Christians may use against injustice and evil are personal persuasion and political legislation, both of which are to be enacted in an atmosphere of respect. While Christians are permitted under certain conditions to participate in police and military actions to enforce civil laws and to oppose criminality, we may not obey evil laws nor resort to evil actions in defence of the good. This means that Christians are inevitably called to suffer in this age, and perhaps even to die. This is our gospel, our witness and our defence.

Father Tom puts his finger on precisely what it was that motivated Christians in South Africa to struggle against apartheid, and to see it as a struggle against evil.

But apartheid was not just a war against multiculturalism, it was a war against religious pluralism. There were three favoured religious groups, the Dutch Reformed Churches — the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK), the Nederuitsch Hervormde Kerk (NHK) and the Gereformeerde Kerk (Doppers). They had their differences, theological, political and cultural, but generally the government could count on them to support its apartheid policies and to expel dissenters from their midst. The NGK was given free rein in the Kaokoveld are of Namibia, and their mission at Orumana flourished. Anglicans, however, were persecuted and obstructed by government officials at every turn. One Anglican evangelist living there, Thomas Ruhozu, once made the 500 mile journey to Windhoek to ask the Anglican synod, meeting in Windhoek, for help for the small but growing Anglican flock in the Kaokoveld. But the government refused permits for outsiders (other than NGK missionaries and government officials) even to visit the place, and controlled access on all the main roads.

In the Near and Middle East the situation of Christians is even worse. The book to read is:

From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A travellers tale giving an idea of the condition of Christianity in the Near and Middle East at the end of the 6th century and the end of the 20th century. It's a good introduction for those who know little about the topic, though of course the situation has worsened considerably since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

I can only suppose that people in monocultural countries see things very differently, though I doubt that there is such a thing as a genuinely monocultural country. To be monocultural a country would have to be small and fairly isolated. Iceland, perhaps. The Faroe Islands, the Falkland Islands, perhaps Lesotho and Swaziland.

I try to imagine what might happen if the idea that multiculturalism and religious pluralism were evil actually caught on. Past experience of the apartheid era makes it not too difficult to imagine. It would require a new Hitler to declare that one culture was dominant, and that all others must either assimilate, get out, or perish. If that were to happen, one of the first things to be banned would probably be Orthodox Christianity. And what would happen thereafter would depend on which culture became dominant. If Xhosa culture became dominant, perhaps things like male circumcision would become compulsory; if Zulu culture became dominant, then perhaps the practice would be forbidden. No, I really don't want to go there. And I find it very difficult to understand people who do.

Book review: Charismatic renewal

Charismatic Renewal by Thomas A. Smail

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three British authors who were all involved in the charismatic renewal movement examine it theologically over a period of thirty years. They come from different theological backgrounds, and so contribute from different perspectives. Tom Smail was originally Presbyterian when he became involved in the renewal, and later became Anglican. Andrew Walker was raised as a classical Pentecostal, and later became Orthodox, while Nigel Wright is a Baptist.

The book is in four parts. The first is the testimonies of the authors, describing their own involvement in the charismatic renewal, and how it affected their own spiritual growth.

In the second part the authors each give a theological interpretation of the charismatic renewal. In some ways this is the most important part of the book. When the charismatic renewal began in the non-Pentecostal churches in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a tendency for charismatics to adopt Pentecostal pneumatology, often quite uncritically. In some cases this proved quite divisive. Pentecostal pneumatology sometimes was incompatible with the existing pneumatology of a church, and so some argued that new wine needed new wineskins, and several broke away to form new denominations, hence the rise of Neopentcostal churches.

Smail, Walker and Wright, however, try to interpret their charismatic experiences in terms of the theology of their own traditions, and thus try to have a more balanced theology, not separating pneumatology from the rest.

The third section is devoted to certain aspects of the charismatic renewal that have proved controversial or have caused problems in other ways.

Tom Smail deals with worship, and notes the disjunction between charismatic worship and the rest of Christian worship. Nigel Wright deals with prophecy, and those who isolated prophecy and claimed it as a special spiritual gift. He deals with the so-called Kansas City prophets, who also influenced the Vineyard movement. Andrew Walker discusses miracles, and especially the temptation to use alleged miracles as crowd-pullers, and a form of showmanship, whereas they should rather lead us to see and desire the holiness of God.

The last two chapters, written jointly by the three authors, deal with the so-called prosperity gospel and the "Toronto blessing". They critcise the theology of the "prosperity gospel", which they consider verges on heresy. The discussion of the "Toronto blessing", in which people laugh uncontrollably and sometimes make animal noises, takes the form of a panel discussion or conversation between the three authors. While they do not oppose it, they seem to think that it has "jumped the shark", as they say in show business – gone over the top.

While it concentrates on the British scene, the charismatic renewal was sufficiently widespread to make this book useful for anyone seeking to understand the movement.

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