Who do you say that I am?

Who is considered "Christian"? Why do any of us care?

Edward Green wrote an interesting post about the UCCF's Doctrinal Basis, a sort of pseudo-creed which it seems is sometimes used as a litmus test of who is "in" and who is not at university Christian Unions.

Revd Green rightly points out that even the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a broader remit than that, stating that “All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.” I would agree that this is true, but I shy away from relying on the sacrament of baptism as a way of defining who is Christian, or rather, who is not.

The Salvation Army is one example of a non-sacramental movement that I would find difficult to classify as "not Christian". There are also Christian Quakers, and Christian Unitarians, and all sorts of people from all walks of life who consider themselves Christian in the sense of trying to follow the way of Jesus of Nazareth regardless of not sharing creedal beliefs. There are Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses; I've lived with the former and been friends with the latter and I am not willing to call either group "not Christian" because of their divergences from the creed I give my heart to. Quite frankly, if someone believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster but also self-identifies as Christian I am willing to consider them Christian.

There are a few reasons I have this attitude. One is that I believe God is ultimately ineffable and limitless. This puts everyone in a bit of a pickle as it's difficult to say anything meaningful about the nature of God without putting limits on God. If God is pink then God cannot be blue, but if God is limitless then God is both pink and blue. So while I am concerned with right belief, I try to sit lightly to it, if you will, remembering that we are all heretics.

Another reason is that the example Jesus set for us, if I am to believe scripture, points toward accepting others and treating them with respect and loving kindness regardless of their religious background. What is the point of my knowing what sort of Christian someone is? So often, this seems to be a case of trying not to associate with the "wrong" sort of people.

Sometimes this is out of a concern for sacramental purity: only baptised, confirmed Christians who have jumped through this hoop and that hoop are welcome at the Lord's table, says the Church. We mustn't "adulterate" the sacrament by allowing anyone who might have the wrong idea to try it for themselves, or by allowing anyone we aren't quite sure about -- sinners, gays, women -- to preside at the Eucharist. I think this is incredibly sad; we are all heretics, remember? and I would say we are also all sinners! But Jesus ate with society's outcasts and died as an outcast himself. He asked people to believe in him, but didn't demand they believed before feeding them. I have better things to do than try to follow obscure rules about who I may or may not eat with.

Sometimes the purity concerns seem to be more along the lines of worry that someone will come along and infect us with wrong belief. I can understand this a little better. If you have a nice comforting belief and someone comes along and questions the premises, then of course it's going to be unnerving. But scary and evil aren't the same thing, and building isolating walls around our faith does two things: it puts the community at risk of stagnation and idiosyncracy, and it gives people leverage over us. Now, I do think that people in community should give one another power; we are accountable to each other, we live together on this interconnected planet where there is only one flesh we can wound. But I don't think that power should extend as far as someone saying "Well, you aren't really Christian if you believe that. You don't belong here."

At Greenbelt, I went to a talk by Mark Vernon on fundamentalisms and boundaries. He described the difference between bounded sets and centred sets by talking about ways of keeping herds of cattle together in Australia. There are basically two strategies: you can build a fence, or you can sink a well. Then in the rest of his talk he went on to talk about how some people seem to need boundaries, how without boundaries we can't define what the church is or isn't and cross those boundaries to reach -- who? Other churches? the "unchurched"? I don't quite remember, to be honest, because for the rest of the talk I was thinking "OK, but what happens if we just sink a well?"

Boundaries make us feel safe, right enough, whether that's to do with purity of thought or purity of sacrament. It's natural enough to want to associate with the "right" kind of people. But dividing the sheep and the goats by doctrinal fences isn't, in the end, for us to do. The wheat and tares are not for us to sort out.

Instead we are told "by their fruits ye shall know them" and "love your neighbour as yourself". I hope that if people classify me as Christian it is not because I go to church to pray, or because I regularly receive Communion, or because I happen to agree with them on matters of doctrine or liturgy. When someone tells me that they are Christian, I consider it a statement of intent, not a statement of adherence to some orthodoxy or another. I am not a theologian and some would say I lack the education to make such assumptions. Nevertheless, I hope that if people classify me as Christian, it is because of my attempts, however frail or flawed the results might be, to live in the world as an example of God's love for the world.

Life as usual

This morning I drifted in and out of groggy sleep... you know the sort, when you've set the alarm with the best of intentions but don't actually have to get up right away and a few more minutes sleep seem the better option. I heard someone on the radio speaking of a death, of rejoicing in the streets, and thought, "Oh, that'll be Osama bin Laden, then" before rolling over, too somnolent to have any strong opinion. So it was no real surprise to me later to find Twitter all a-tweet with the news.

It may be just the peer selectiion effect, of course, but the overwhelming impression I got was of righteous dismay at reactions to the news. Choice verses from Proverbs were being quoted, as well as one 9/11 survivor who was just saddened to see yet another person killed. Then, of course, there were the worthy objections to someone, even a terrorist, being killed without a trial -- though others rightly questioned whether a fair trial would have been possible. And of course there were the pragmatic voices, pointing out that the result of vengeance, of making a martyr of a charismatic leader, can only be further bloodshed as the cycle of violence continues.

All of these are entirely correct, of course.

Participation in tit-for-tat wars is almost never a good idea. Osama bin Laden may well have been an extremist who doesn't represent the views of the vast majority of Muslims, but there will still be extremists who are upset and angered by his death. I can't say that makes me feel any safer, in London.

A fair trial may well have been difficult to ensure, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been attempted. Justice and vengeance are not the same thing. Was it truly impossible to capture this man? One argument I saw said that if he had been captured and detained, there would have been countless hostages taken in order to demand his release. But keeping in mind the pragmatists, aren't we all now hostage to those who would retaliate?

Prooftexting is rarely helpful, but the point so many people tried to make today -- that Osama bin Laden was a human being and it is wrong to rejoice in his violent death -- is one I agree with. I don't really mind whether you couch this in theological terms, stating that every creature is a beloved child of God, made in God's image and therefore worthy of love and respect, or whether less theist principles about the dignity and worth of human beings or the senselessness of violence are more agreeable to you. If you were saddened, disgusted, frustrated or dismayed at the triumphant celebrations of killing, rest assured that you were not alone. I was unsurprised, but certainly disappointed. Humanity should be able to do better than this.

It is seductively easy to talk online with my peers and sigh and tut about people's reactions, though. "What is the world coming to?" we ask, as if we have never cheered at another's loss or our own gain. It takes little effort to disapprove of the lack of any attempt at a trial, fair or not. It is not difficult to chime in with my own doubts about whether the lack of this one person really makes the world a safer place.

None of that is enough, though. Peace will not be achieved by spending a day or a week criticising the sorts of decisions most of us hope or pray we never have to make. Justice will not be served by focusing on the end result of a systemic culture of competition where might is taken as right. Those people whose raucous glee so upsets us will not become more compassionate as a result of our condemnation, however righteous we might feel about it.

It is not enough to sigh and shake our heads and go back to life as usual. "Life as usual" is part of the problem. "Life as usual" got us where we are. Life as usual means nothing will change, for us or for those we eagerly criticise or all too readily fear.

People hurt one another because they feel threatened. People are vulnerable to extremist ideologies because they feel threatened. Wherever people do not have enough to eat or drink, wherever people are denied access to medical care, wherever people struggle to have even their basic needs met, there will be strife, warfare, and suffering. And all that need happen for suffering and evil to exist is for good people to do nothing. We are all interconnected and our daily actions affect six billion other people (and counting). These problems are systemic and we are part of the system, like it or not. It's up to us to change it.

Instead of continuing with life as usual, we need to take positive steps toward creating a better world. A culture of peace will take root where there is trust and cooperation. A culture of justice will grow when we honestly examine our own actions and choose fairness over giving ourselves some advantage. A culture of compassion will thrive when we treat one another with loving kindness despite the risks, despite the costs.

Let's make "life as usual" something that we can all live with.

Music for St Michael and All Angels

Today I've been to St Paul's Cathedral for Evensong, to hear the winning entry in the recent New Music Competition. There were 58 entrants, out of which one was chosen for the £1000 prize.

Andrew Cusworth chose the same text as I did for the competition, one previously used by Richard Dering in this gem (YouTube link). It was interesting to hear the difference in our approaches to it. I like to think that there are some similarities, and of course I can't make a fair comparison having heard his piece once and knowing mine rather better than that, but I think his is the better composition, both in terms of technical polish and in terms of suitability for that cathedral. So congratulations to Andrew Cusworth!

I struggled over my submission, trying to be faithful to the idea of angels as strange and terrifying beings, but also to stay within strict limits -- SATB + organ, under 4 minutes -- and keep the piece suitable for use in a liturgical setting. In the end I knew I hadn't quite managed the latter; what I wrote was too exciting, too dramatic, and too ragged round the edges to fit into a stately Evensong. I did start over several times with several versions of the text in English and Latin, and each time it seemed to demand such a treatment. Eventually I gave up, tidied up what I had and submitted that.

It doesn't look like Andrew's version is online. So, here is my version: Factum est silentium [PDF] [MIDI]. Of course, the midi version sounds like robots rather than angels, but that's always the way of these machines! As always this is released under a CC-BY-SA license. Perhaps in a different building with a different choir it will work better, or perhaps someone else can take my ideas and develop them.

It was while I was researching the Revelation-based text of Richard Dering's "Factum est silentium" that I happened across a blog which eventually led me to Dust, a blog I've been trying to keep up with and very much enjoying the last few days as its author has been to a very shiny conference. (He quotes Christopher Smart in his subtitle, too.) My own research into psalmody has mostly consisted of reading a lot and doing some singing, and is much less advanced; I expect that much of the Oxford Psalms Conference would have been beyond my grasp. Nevertheless, I'm really glad to have found this rather random connection, which I might not have otherwise stumbled upon.