http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRmbwczTC6E&list=PL92F9FC91BBE2210D&index=1

While listening to a sermon in which the priest listed a selection of sins, I realised with dismay that they reflected behavioural indicators of my childhood abuse. I had learned about emotional abuse while training to become a child abuse investigator. In horror I realised that the first abuse I should investigate was my own.

Since the Middle Ages and the rise of conservative-revisionism within the Catholic Church the traditional answer to this question has always been that Jesus died for our sins to make atonement for them. However, in recent years liberal scholarship has rightly pointed out that this is just a spurious conservative gloss not found in the texts for the very good reason that, however you understand the idea of atonement (and any number of ways have been tried) it invariably reduces the texts themselves to nonsense. This is all very well but it still leaves us with the question as to what Paul meant in I Corinthians 15.3:

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures ...

Like the last, this article is inspired by the Idolatry of God retreat in Belfast in April, which focussed on the work of Peter Rollins.

Slavoj Žižek is one of a number of contemporary philosophers who find in Saint Paul a rich resource for their own projects, particularly in relation to political theory and ideology critique.

One of the key problems that Paul wrestles with is the relationship between sin and the law. In Romans 7, he writes that sin seizes its chance in the commandment, and his awareness of the intermingling of the law and the desire to transgress the law prefigures the psychoanalytic insight that the law operates not only at the level of the letter of the law but also according to its ‘obscene superego supplement’. This is the law’s inherent injunction. It’s a level of implicit rather than explicit discourse that is obscene in its contradiction or transgression of the public text of the law, supplementary because it is this injunction that is what binds the subject to the law, and superegotistical because it takes the form of an injunction to enjoy.

One of the gifts of a spiritually-led life is that we can reflect on what unites us as well as what divides us from other people.

I struggle with attending church- but then often think, ‘Hang on - I agree with all of Christianity apart from the church dogma’.

This is a creed I can sign up to - and I think almost all Christians, non-Christians and people of other faiths can sign up to as well. Can you?

​Hymn writing is not normally a communal endeavour, but in her session on the use of hymns Ali Morley set retreatants the challenge of first choosing key words and then putting them together into a short hymn. Each group came up with between two and four lines and somehow we shuffled them into three verses, later reduced to two in an effort to eliminate repetition. Although we wrote the words for the tune of Amazing Grace, we found later that they went better to Dundee, the tune associated with ‘I to the hills will lift mine eyes’

Embracing love, accepting all

This blog was written after Katharine returned from a retreat in Belfast which explored the work of Peter Rollins. The title of the retreat was taken from Rollins’ fifth book, The Idolatry of God: Breaking our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction. As Katharine explains, Rollins is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis and the work of philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

Seventeen years ago, I wrote a book called In Defence of Doubt: an Invitation to Adventure. It was written in ‘‘white heat,’’ the summer we moved from Australia to the United States. Such moves are always dislocating because you leave behind old friends and rituals, but they are also ‘’ first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life’’ moments where you have a chance for self examination.

Last week, the

General Assembly of The Church of Scotland debated whether the church would be accepting of those in ministry, and those called to ministry, who are gay,

Gretta Vosper, a Minister in the United Church of Canada, and Chair of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity, is a fresh voice in modern theology. She is blowing a blast of fresh air through hallowed portals. This is the essence of her view expressed in her first book: “With or Without God – why the way we live is more important than what we believe.”

Out of the multitude of understandings of religion, spirituality and faith; out of the varying views of the origins, nature and purpose of life; out of the countless individual experiences of what might be called divine; out of it all may be distilled a core that, very simply put, is love.

The Bible is all over the place when it comes to the justification, or otherwise, of military might. This makes it easy for preachers to ‘find’ that it supports their personal views (whatever these are) if they carefully select their texts and employ ingenious hermeneutics. The net result is that those who still have the vestiges of an ‘open mind’ are left with the feeling that the whole thing’s an impossible mess. Is there any hope of rectifying this lamentable state of affairs by approaching the biblical texts somehow differently?

In the course of the ecstatic vision, at the limit of death on the cross and of the blindly lived lamma sabachthani, the object is finally unveiled as catastrophe in a chaos of light and shadow [...]. - Georges Bataille

Once upon a time, God was Good, and Good was born in each of us. Good took on human form to move across the face of the earth. As we let Good direct us, it taught us its wisdom; we realized its inspiration, treasured its compassion and deployed its power.

The impact of Jesus’ life on his followers was so intense it simply did not fade after his death. They kept awaking to new dimensions of what he meant. No act of human cruelty could destroy his life, no barriers could withstand his love. Jesus embraced the outcasts, whether lepers, Samaritans, Gentiles or the woman caught in adultery. His life could not be contained within the boundaries of religion He allowed the touch of the woman with the chronic menstrual ftow; he proclaimed that all religious rules had no value, unless they enhanced human life. His followers found in him a life that reflected the Source of Life, a love that reflected the Source of love and the being that reflected the Ground of Being and so they said “all that we mean by the word ‘God’ we have experienced in him.”

Just before I was due to go to theological college I worked as a temporary call centre worker for an international insurance company. This organisations as far as I could see had the morality of a monkey nut and a staffing policy which was less about ‘caring for our staff at every level’ and more about wanting stones worth of flesh for every pound. The longer I worked there the more irritated and critical I became.

As I read the archived letter, I was struck by the timing of its first appearance. It was written in January 1963, just two months before Bishop John Robinson published Honest to God. The writer was a teacher from the Midlands:

“I have charge of 54 sixth-formers in a co-educational grammar school. I would have expected only a minority of these young men and women to have had definite Christian convictions and a majority to have had agnostic views although mellowed with some Christian sympathies. Alas this is not so.

​Ask almost anyone around about Christian beginnings around Christmastide and they will almost certainly point you towards the nativity – those parabolic overtures (to borrow a phrase from Borg and Crossan’s The First Christmas) that Matthew and Luke provide as a means of ‘leaking’ Jesus’ significance prior to the onset of his ministry. Interestingly, the popular re-telling of Jesus’ birth is an amalgam of both versions, with contemporary appropriations. Be that as it may, what is important to recognise is that these narratives relating Jesus’ miraculous birth with angelic annunciation and divine conception, dreams, portents and programmatic infanticide were not intended by the evangelists to communicate historical fact but theological meaning. They bear witness to Christian beginnings, but not to the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth; instead, to the community of faith his ministry conceived. Or, expressed in another way, they are evidence of Jesus’ enormous impact upon those whom he encountered and, more remarkably, upon those who never met him and yet recognised his authority upon their lives.

Editor’s intro: Steve Chalke, (pictured), the well known author and pastor of the Oasis church in London, has caused an upset in evangelical circles by declaring his support for monogamous same-sex relationships. In an article entitled A Matter of Integrity, he argues for a progressive approach to Biblical understanding:

“The process of understanding the character and will of Yahweh as revealed through Jesus - is an ongoing task for every generation. Here is my question. Shouldn’t we take the same principle that we readily apply to the role of women, slavery, and numerous other issues, and apply it our understanding of permanent, faithful, homosexual relationships?”

Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christianity, is another evangelical who supports committed same-sex relationships. In this blog he gives his reaction to Steve Chalke’s stance and explains what it could mean for evangelical identity. He ends with a challenge to those who call themselves progressive Christians.

​In his column in the Church Times (21/28 December), Giles Fraser says because “all religion is intrinsically messy … it won’t tell me that my absurd hopes and dreams are absurd”, for the “best parts of the Bible are the weirdest”. He then says “A baby as God: it’s ridiculous”, presumably upholding both the idea and it being ‘ridiculous’.

This is a book that makes a major contribution in the continuing struggle against the literalism that bedevils the Christian Church. It is not an easy book, but Dominic Crossan is reader friendly: he takes the reader carefully through each stage of his argument and provides summaries at the beginning and end of each chapter.