The most hated book in the Bible
Thursday 19th September 2013
| Author: Dave Coaker
While agreeing that the progressive religious community is right to dissent from passages in Leviticus, Rabbi Maurice Harris make the case that there's 'a lot of baby in that bathwater' - a great deal of insight that enriches a progressive, pluralistic, humane, and loving approach to religion.
Among progressive Jews and Christians, Leviticus is often treated like a dirty word. With its animal sacrifices and purity rituals, its skin diseases and genital discharges, Leviticus manages to alienate and even offend liberal Christians and Jews alike.
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Why I am thankful for feminist theology
Monday 16th September 2013
| Author: Val Webb
Australian theologian, Val Webb, recently completed a tour of the UK. The talks she gave can now be read, in an expanded version, in the Resources section of this website. In this excerpt she outlines the importance to her of feminist theology.
Feminist theology played an important part in my evolution. When I was first introduced to feminist theology at an academic level, it suddenly dawned on me that many of my childhood doubts about Christianity came from being a girl raised in the fifties and sixties.
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What is Nelson Mandela's heroic quality?
Monday 12th August 2013
| Author: Andy Vivian
Former PCN Trustee, Alison Morley, makes a link between Mandela, Tolstoy, Ghandi and other twentieth century heroes; their understanding that the world can be changed if we change ourselves
‘I sometimes believe that through me Creation intended to give the world the example of a mediocre man in the true sense of the term’ (Mandela: 'Conversations with Myself', page 7).
This is a mediocre man who proved that there can be the highest honour and integrity in the human being. A man who is embarrassed when caught in the act of braking prison rules (passing letters) in front of a young prison guard who he knows will turn a blind eye because of the respect that has grow up between them. Mandela is hurt and embarrassed because in some pure and fundamental way he has betrayed this young guards trust and put him in the position of having to fail in his job. He has diminished himself and created a barrier between them. (Conversations with Myself page 193). This is a subtlety of feeling and a development of conscience that few of us will ever attain but when we read it or see it we know that this is the truth of who we could be.
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The changing meaning of sin
Monday 29th July 2013
| Author: Richard Holdsworth
Richard Holdsworth looks at how the meaning of the word 'sin' changed when transferred from the Judaic tradition to Christianity.
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.
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What does it mean that Christ died for our sins?
Monday 24th June 2013
| Author: Andrew Parker
Andrew Parker argues that the metaphor of being 'saved from sins', used by St Paul and St John was taken too literally by the Medieval church and in the process the political reality of Jesus' message was lost.
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 ...
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Dying to the Law: The Church That Dies
Tuesday 18th June 2013
| Author: Katharine Sarah Moody
Katharine Sarah Moody on the idolatry of God. Having written earlier about the God who dies, Katharine here explores the fate of the church.
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.
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What unites us is central
Tuesday 18th June 2013
| Author: Julian Wood
Julian Wood thinks it is more important to celebrate what we share than to focus what divides us
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?
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Quick hymns at the PCN progressive liturgy weekend
Saturday 8th June 2013
| Author: Andy Vivian
Set the challenge of writing a hymn in twenty minutes, could we produce something both progressive and singable?
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
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The God Who Dies
Wednesday 5th June 2013
| Author: Katharine Sarah Moody
Katharine Sarah Moody writes about the fictitious projections in which we place our trust, including notions of God. She argues that Christianity has an insight which allows it to live with that.
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In Defence of Doubt
Tuesday 4th June 2013
| Author: Val Webb
Starting on 18th June, PCN Britain and the Open Christianity Network Ireland are sponsoring a tour of the United Kingdom by Dr. Val Webb, who will be speaking on the new edition of her book ‘In Defence of Doubt: an invitation to adventure’
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.
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Church of Scotland's historic step towards inclusion
Tuesday 28th May 2013
| Author: Andy Vivian
Blair Robertson, Convenor of Affirmation Scotland, gives his assessment of where gay and lesbian ministers in Civil Partnerships now stand in relation to appointments in the Church of Scotland.
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,
lesbian and who may or may not be in a relationship. Were our prayers answered?
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The theology of Gretta Vosper
Saturday 13th April 2013
| Author: Michael Wright
There is a common aim among progressive Christians to be followers of Jesus. But our understanding of divinity is a source of lively debate with a whole spectrum of beliefs and agnosticisms. Gretta Vosper has opened up a new strand in this debate. Michael Wright likes what she has to say.
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.
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Military Might
Tuesday 9th April 2013
| Author: Andrew Parker
Andrew Parker makes a case for the rejection of military might, taking his evidence from the Hebrew Bible.
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?
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What I will celebrate on Easter morning 3
Thursday 28th March 2013
| Author: George Elerick
George Elerick, cultural theorist, author and activist, goes in search of God's soul.
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
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What I will celebrate on Easter morning 2
Tuesday 26th March 2013
| Author: Richard Holdsworth
Richard Holdworth offers an allegorical approach to the meaning of Easter.
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.
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What I will celebrate on Easter morning 1
Monday 25th March 2013
| Author: Bishop Jack Spong
Through Holy week we will publish some thoughts on the celebration of Easter. We start with these words from Bishop Jack Spong, taken from his book, Examining the Meaning of the Resurrection.
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."
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What I Would Ask the New Chief Exec of Canterbury
Monday 25th March 2013
| Author: Sonya Brown
Justin Welby is the first Archbishop of Canterbury whose background includes being a chief executive in private industry. As one of his newly acquired junior employees, Sonya Brown, has prepared a few probing questions she would ask the boss, should she get invited to a 'team development day'.
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.
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Was Honest to God ever likely to convince teenage atheists?
Wednesday 6th March 2013
| Author: Frank Godfrey
While he was re-reading Honest to God, published 50 years ago, Frank Godfrey noticed that the Methodist Recorder had reprinted in its '50 Years Ago' column, a letter about teenage atheism. It got him thinking..
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.
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Christian Beginnings
Monday 4th February 2013
| Author: Ian Wallis
If we’re not persuaded by literal readings of the virgin birth, bodily resurrection and Pentecost, then we need to supply an alternative account for the extraordinary and enduring impact of Jesus upon humanity, writes Ian Wallace
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.
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