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.

The Singer and the Song

Maggi Dawn, looking for debaters on the subject of scripture and translation, asked some questions on Twitter this morning which got me thinking.

@maggidawn: The Message: do you love it or hate it? I'm looking for debaters on the subject of translation

@maggidawn: The King James Version: beautiful or incomprehensible? I'm looking for debaters on the subject of scripture and translation

@maggidawn: who have you read/listened to that has most influenced you on translation and interpretation of the Bible, tweeps?

I have very little familiarity with "The Message" as a paraphrase or translation, and my familiarity with the King James Version is by no means complete. But I am also acutely aware that my Hebrew is very poor and I don't understand Greek at all. When I read the King James Version I think I understand the language fairly well, but I know that isn't true for everyone. If we are going to have scripture available to everyone that means we will need to renew our translations and interpretations as our use of language changes. So I find a certain irony in the existence of groups which believe the King James Version is the only valid scripture, given the Reformation value of accessibility of the text -- despite the situation surrounding the actual translation, which I understand was made with certain goals regarding the status quo in church and politics.

A few years ago I read various books by Karen Armstrong, and was struck by her repeated assertion that in many faiths there has at some point been a tradition of compassionate exegesis. That is, the "rules" are that any interpretation of scripture which is harmful, violent or cruel, is necessarily incorrect. That helped me a lot in coming to terms with a collection of texts which is often contradictory. Indeed, learning to see the Bible as an anthology rather than as one coherent book was also helpful.

As far as interpretation is concerned, there's a great post by the Three Minute Theologian which illustrates the difficulty of scriptural literalism. A musical score contains a certain amount of information about which notes are to be played when, and if you're lucky you get instructions about volume and articulation, too. But all of that must be interpreted in the context of the performance expectations of the time: in some periods there is a great deal that nobody bothered to write down because it was just the done thing, for example repeated phrases having some variation in dynamic. Debussy and Brahms are both composers who wrote a huge amount of what they wanted on the page, so that it is possible to follow their instructions exactly and get a half-decent musical result, but both still require a sense of line and direction, and the knowledge to interpret things like the time signature, which doesn't only tell the performer how many beats there are in a bar but how they should be stressed in relation to one another. Bach left much more to the discretion of the performer. As I commented there, an historically accurate interpretation of music requires study of contemporary performance practice, but an informed contrast to that tradition of interpretation also requires some understanding of how the music would have been performed. Performers always end up interpreting, too.

What is important in the interpretation of music, in the end, is not how correctly one interprets the dots and squiggles, but the impact of doing so on the listener. A very historically authentic performance and one that departs drastically from traditional performance practice can both be moving and inspiring; it is likely that neither will consist only of what is written on the page. The creative interpretation of the performer or performers is an intrinsic part of the music, whether the performance consists of singing, blowing air through tubes, drawing a bow across stretched strings or even putting together instructions for robots to play the music (I refer to various forms of digital music, most of which are so far outside my own area of training as to be incomprehensible to me in their performance techniques).

I'm not a theologian, but I'll go out on a limb here: I believe that how people present scripture in the way they live their lives is a more important interpretation issue than which translation or tradition of interpretation they might use to read it. That doesn't apply only to Christianity, either. Actions speak louder than words and actions are more important than which words you read.

What do we say in our daily actions?

(edited slightly for clarity)