The Modern Leper

Important people watch their watches;

Important people dress to impress;

Important people are serious but not sad.

So I’ll look important,

While I smoke,

In the rain.

Was William Wilberforce bad for the churches?

I am am fed up with dear old WW.  It has been impossible to avoid him and I am sure many a church member is tired of the “topical” references to his 200 year old Act by lazy preachers.  Nearly half of all references mistakenly credit WW with abolishing slavery when all he did was to make the trade illegal.

He may have been (marginally) good for some oppressed people but I think he did the churches considerable harm.  They began to see their mission in terms of civilising the British through publicity campaigns and social engineering.  The moral crusading of the 19th and 20th centuries continually hyped and lauded the achievements of the Clapham sect (while generally ignoring the work of quakers and rationalists) as it rushed down the blind alley of social meddling in the name of Jesus.

Everything was cast in terms of abolishing the next “slavery” (child labour, votes for women, even banning alcohol in the name of setting free the slaves of drink).  The current application of the slavery model is things like forced prostitution and chinese manufacturing.

Am I in favour of these bad things?  No, but we already have a criminal code which should be able to deal with wrongs done in our jurisdiction and I doubt whether we can do much about China.

And I do not remember Jesus  calling his disciples to do all this stuff.

The liberation of Black Americans came when THEY began to insist on taking their freedom.  Most liberties have to be taken rather than given.

Why no time?

All my friends in ministry seem so busy. They rush from place to place, bolt their meals and often have no time for conversation. It is understandable for those who are not paid but this is just as true for those who have the privilege of being paid ministers.

There must be many reasons but one is, I think, because they feel guilty just reading, meditating, praying (and chatting). It seems so passive and lazy. So unproductive.

Everyone else in the congregation seems busy. Sometimes busyness seems to be the only commonly recognised virtue in London. All else is relative. And our role as the Pastor/Teachers of churches is easy to despise when secularism rules. If only people realised how busy we are we would feel justified and so we become busy. We dress and act as busy professionals. “See my diary”, “Hear my phone ring”, “Sorry, have to dash!”

So who will do the work of hearing God speak in scripture? thinking through its implications in a world going mad and churches going adrift? working out what lives we should live in consequence of the faith delivered once for all by the Apostles and Prophets of Christ?

Who will put the Gospel of God in the language of the City of Men? Who will stand before the Lord?

I’d like to think about these things when I am less busy.

The Weapons of our Warfare?

3 For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh.
4 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.
5 We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
6 being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.

Is this quote [ESV] from 2 Cor 10 true of modern believers?

We are often socially engaged and campaign on issues of rights and justice. Indeed, you will commonly find campaigners on both sides of modern controversies each of whom sees him/herself as obeying God with their efforts.

And there are so many parachurch organisations who want to stir us to action. Write to your MP about debt relief, religious persecution, homosexual “marriage” etc.. Send more money to our organisation which is doing God’s work but strangely never seems to be properly funded by Him.

They all assume the power and the glory belong to the governing institutions – Parliament, UN, EU, etc. or to the Media and (that strange monster) Public Opinion.

The weapons of our warfare are no longer the weapons of the cantakerous Jewish convert who wrote Second Corinthians. Neither are they mighty.

The New Legalism

Christians know that law can not create virtue and that law keeping can not lead to righteousness.

Nevertheless, in practice, so many of us are legalists.

We are legalists in our thinking about society. We hear of some abuse and immediately say, “There should be a law against it”. We consider abortion wrong so we want it banned on pain of punishment. We want to see the law tightened up and strictly applied in all sorts of ways.

But the best set of laws ever given – the law of Moses – was a complete failure. It did not create in Israel a standard of communal life or personal goodness which was praiseworthy or sustainable.

So many of us love Authoritarianism. The bullying Blair was backed by so many Christian believers in the poll booth and in public. We are like the Israelites with their rebellious lust for a strong king.

But God prefered the age of the judges to the age of kings. Indeed the main lesson of the Davidic dynasty is that even the best of men is not fit to be a monarch. And one of the lessons of the Old Testament is that something better than a good set of laws is needed to create a just society.

The law of the Spirit written on the heart is the only law worth anything and the monarchy of Jesus is the only authority we can trust.

In the meantime, let every man do what is right in his own eyes.