The empty CV (or resume in the USA)

I was taking my turn as a volunteer teacher at the computer class. The computers were in a refurbished church vestry in Shettleston, in the East end of Glasgow. For those who don't know Glasgow, it is one of the areas of the city that always got left behind in the good times and now is suffering disproportionately in the downturn.

The students were men and women who had been sent along by the job centre with a letter containing the warning that failure to attend may result in a loss of benefits. The course was designed by a retired teacher from the church to cover basic computer skills useful for jobseekers including searching for jobs online, applying for vacancies and preparing a cv. With almost all vacancies appearing online those without the skills to access to the internet are even more disadvantaged. The church had received a grant for the computers and saw this class as a way of trying to help the local community.

The regulars at the class knew only too well that the lists of jobs that appeared from the search engines weren't real. Many were still listed after the closing date had expired. The same jobs appeared on the websites of many agencies. A driving job may require you to have and use your own van; an impossible investment for many of these people. They also knew from bitter experience that working for an agency was often a way of making sure they stayed as a “casual” on the minimum wage. And we couldn't find any jobs that did not require some basic qualifications or experience or both.

Dennis had worked in care homes but the long shifts and unsocial hours had taken a toll on his health. As a non-driver he was reliant on buses to get to work and this added over two hours to his already long working day. The few agency care home jobs on-line were all vacancies he had seen before.

Jim was the last guy I worked with. He had been sent along and told to prepare a CV. I sat down beside him and he looked blankly at the keyboard. He had never used a computer. He admitted his spelling wasn't too good and finding the letters on the keyboard was painfully slow. We started at the top of the page with his name and address and date of birth. He was thirty five and had left school at 15. He had no qualifications from school and had not achieved any qualifications since. So there was the first blank: education and qualifications. How can you put a positive gloss on such a blank?

Next we started on employment history.

Most cv's progress in a logical sequence but his cv followed a predictably depressing path from YTS (Youth Training Scheme) for a year to a temporary warehouse job and then some some labouring jobs through agencies. And that was it. He had tried. He had done stuff. But despite the efforts he had made, he had never managed to climb above the very bottom rung of the ladder. He had spent all his working life struggling up onto that rung and then slipping off again. He had not sat and watched daytime TV 24/7 as some Daily Mail type commentators insinuate about those at the bottom of the pile. But however we re-arranged the words for employment history on the page they would only fill three lines. His dead pan, stoical acceptance of his lot didn't help me to make any more of it.

So we had almost half a page of A4 by using a big typeface.

Leisure interests usually fill a few lines at the end of a cv. I asked if he had any hobbies. "I keep pigeons" came the reply. We discussed his love of birds and for the first time in the afternoon his eyes lit up and he began to show some enthusiasm. When we came to write this down it added a single line "Hobbies - keeps and breeds show pigeons".

I showed Jim how to print and we played for a short while with the formatting of the document.

At the end of the class Jim went home with three printed cvs in his pocket. But I couldn't help feel I had failed to help him as the cv was the “thinnest” I had ever seen. He had been failed by the system since he left school and before. I wish I could be optimistic and say that he was going to use this opportunity to lift himself out of his situation. I fear though that the gulf between where he is and where the world has moved on to is so wide that this task may be beyond him.

Getting home from the computer club, the first thing I read on my computer screen was the facebook status of a friend: “People were created to be loved and things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.”

Dispensationalism—a dangerous and influential fantasy?

John Darby, a nineteenth century Anglican priest from Plymouth, has a  lot to answer for in the politics of the middle east and especially in the foreign policy of the United States. He became well known after he left the Church of England and was a founder of the Plymouth Brethren.

Darby devised a system of interpreting the bible that showed the actions of God to be understandable through current events. It was a  scheme in which he explained God’s hidden plans for the world. He also offered specific guidance as to how those plans would be fulfilled in the future.

He focussed particularly on the Second Coming and offered guidance to Christians to discern the signs of the times. Before the Kingdom of God  can be realised Darby taught that the following must occur:
1. The nation of Israel must be re-established.
2. The Jews must return to the holy land and become the occupiers of the land.
3.The Jewish temple on mount Zion must be rebuilt and  temple sacrifices re-established.

Once these had happened Darby then predicted that Jesus would return and hover over the earth. Born again Christians would fly up and meet him in the air. (He called this the rapture).

The doctrine of a secret rapture was first conceived by Darby in 1827.  Darby invented the doctrine claiming there were not one, but two "second  comings." This teaching was immediately challenged as unbiblical by other members of the Plymouth Brethren. Samuel P. Tregelles, a noted biblical scholar, rejected Darby's new interpretation as the "height of speculative nonsense". So tenuous was Darby's rapture theory that he had lingering doubts about it as late as 1843. However, this theory has survived and flourished.

As a result of the rapture all nonbelievers, liberal Christians and Catholics will be left behind. 144,000 Jews converted to Christianity will oppose the evil hosts of the anti-Christ. The 144,000 will also evangelise those left behind. There will be a climactic battle of Armageddon and at the end of the seven years of the tribulation Jesus  will return and establish his kingdom in the millennium! (His 2nd Second  Coming!)

There is more — but this summary gives a flavour of Darby’s dispensationalist fantasy. I spent three years studying theology at postgraduate University level and never heard of these crackpot ideas. The worrying thing is that Darby’s ideas are taken seriously as the rationale behind Christian Zionism.

Darby’s predictions of the end times excited dispensationalists in 1948 when  the state of Israel was founded! One writer, Hal Lindsey, predicted the Second Coming would be within 40 years but revised his theory after  1998!

These beliefs cannot just be rejected out of hand because they form a very popular and influential stream of thought in American Evangelical  Christianity. The influence comes through Darby’s own “Schofield Reference Bible” and the “Left Behind” series of books of popular Christian fiction. The “Schofield” bible aims to explain the bible to the lay reader in simple terms but the underlying philosophy is dispensationalism. The “Left Behind” books have sold more than 60 million copies in the US and more than 700 million world-wide. This fiction brainwashes readers in the theology of Darby’s dispensationalism by the Christian Right. In an entertaining manner readers are led to believe that what they are reading is in line with the bible and particularly the Book of Revelation.

President Reagan’s secretary of the interior James Watt was a dispensationist. He allowed drilling for oil in national parks and overturned environmental protection policies because he believed the days of the earth were numbered. Reagan took the advice from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson seriously and built up the US military for the coming battle of Armageddon.

George W. Bush has these same men as his spiritual advisors and his  reference to an “Axis of Evil” makes one wonder if he too is thinking of a coming Armageddon.

The “Left Behind” books portray the United Nations as an instrument of  the antichrist who is trying to frustrate the will of God. If the war in Iraq was seen as the beginning of the struggle leading up to the rapture and Armageddon then it is easy to see why the concerns of the UN were so lightly brushed off.

The US policy towards Israel and Palestine has been moulded dangerously by dispensationalists. Christian Zionists in Washington have pressurised politicians to minimise the rights of Palestinians and accept  Sharon’s expansionist policies. They believe the Jews alone should possess the land. The end times cannot happen until this takes place. Jews are rightly suspicious of Christian Zionists as they only see the state of Israel as a means to creating the rapture. In aiming for the target of 144,000 converted Jews they have made Jews targets for proselytising. Jews who do not convert will be destroyed in the Second Coming.

The theology of the followers of John Darby will set Jews against Arabs, generate a war with Islam (which is now what they predict Armageddon will be about) and lead to the destruction of Israel. Dispensationalists believe in a bloody world in which few are saved. Mainstream evangelicals on this side of the Atlantic believe in a God who loves Palestinians as much as Jews and who wants Justice for all. Christian Zionist followers of Darby are a dangerous obstacle in the road map to peace that most people of good will want for the Middle East. It seems to me that we must be aware of the influences of dispensationalism and other heresies permeating our churches from American evangelical sources and be ready to challenge them.


(this article was originally published in the December 2005 edition of the Fellowship of the Kingdom Bulletin)

Review of Warren Bardsley “Against the Tide: The Story of Adomnan of Iona”

Book Review:    Warren Bardsley “Against the Tide: The Story of Adomnan of Iona”   Wild Goose Publications Glasgow ISBN : 9781905010240 Price : £8.99

Warren Bardsley, a retired Methodist minister from Lichfield and a member of the Iona community, has written a work of faction about Adomnan (pronounced Adovnaun), the ninth abbot of Iona. Faction is the merger of facts and fiction that is appropriate here as the reliable historical facts from the second half of the seventh century are scarce. This process has been carried out with sensitivity and imagination so the result is both accessible and believable.

As a historical biography it is interesting reconstruction but the the book also has a deeper contemporary angle. The author sees Adomnan's major work, The Law of Innocents, as particularly relevant for today. This law can be seen as a very early form of the Geneva convention and was widely influential in its time. The law was to protect non-combatants in warfare, originally just women but it expanded during the process of drafting to include children and clerics.

Legend has it that the foundation for this law was a traumatic experience in his early life that made Adomnan give a solemn promise to his mother that he would work to protect women during times of conflict.

As well as being Abbot of Iona and a scholar and writer he was also a persuasive politician and diplomat shown through his persuasion of clan chiefs and kings in Ireland and northern Britain to accept and implement his law.

This was the time, after the Synod of Whitby, when the Celtic church was under pressure to conform to the authority of Rome specifically in regard to the issues of the tonsure and the date of Easter. Bardsley's book also considers the diplomatic skills that Adomnan possessed as he worked with the tension of these strongly held convictions in his community and church.

But this book is not just a historical reconstruction of a time when the monasteries were major players in the political world. Throughout the author reflects on the contemporary parallels in the church and world of our time. As with all Iona Community based spirituality the principles of these ancient Celtic texts are linked to the contemporary political agenda. The book contains a liturgy used at Faslane Trident missile base citing Adomnan's law to condemn weapons of mass destruction.

Each chapter contains a reconstruction of Adomnan's life and a reflection relating the issues raised to the present. Some of the chapters also contained a short imaginary dialogue between contemporaries about Adomnan. These were less convincing and I thought added little to the book.

I recommend this book as an easy to read introduction to the complexities of life of the distant past with deep resonances for our contemporary age. The royalties from this book are going to the Iona communities “Growing Hope Appeal”.

(This review first appeared in the Spectrum journal in 2007)

The changing nature of belief

I Believe....   How words change meaning with time

The two words "I believe" start the creeds.

Those who are antagonistic to the Christian faith may wonder if, when we utter them, we are crossing our fingers behind our backs before going through a list of all the impossible things to which we give intellectual assent.

But the word "believe" we now use has changed in meaning over the centuries. "Believe" has its roots in the German "Ich liebe" - I love, or more precisely "Ich belieben" - I like or I am attached to. The word we translate as "believe" was "credo" in Latin and before that it was "pisteuo" in Greek. The ancient creeds were written in Greek.

In Latin, Credo comes from cor do - I give my heart. It's not simply about making mental affirmations but about making a commitment. It can also be translated as “to have confidence in or to trust”  Likewise the Greek word pisteuo translates best as "I place confidence in" or "I engage myself with".  Creeds are not intellectual propositions requiring agreement but something we give our heartfelt commitment to live out in the muddles of daily life.

This can be seen in the way the words were used at the baptismal ceremony for welcoming new members into the ancient church. From the writings of Cyril (Bishop of Jerusalem c.315 -386) baptism took place in the early hours of Easter Sunday. All through lent the converts had been prepared by fasting, vigils, prayer and being instructed about the faith. But they did not have to believe anything. In the baptism ceremony the convert would be immersed in the water three times and were asked in turn do you have pistis in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and each time as they came up out of the water they would shout Pisteuo (I give my heart, my loyalty my commitment!) In the Latin church the cry became Credo. It was like saying "I will" at a wedding.

After the baptism they would be instructed in the deeper truths of Christianity because these dogmas would only make sense after the transformative experience of the ritual.

In those days faith was a matter of active commitment and had little to do with philosophical thought. Until the fourth century the emphasis was on orthopraxis (right practice) rather than orthodoxy(right belief) but it didn't stay that way.

I can see the advantage of taking a similar approach with new church members today. There is a limit to how much can you tell converts in a course for membership. Faith grows and develops as it is lived out daily and saying the creed is just a way of expressing commitment to a way of life.

Looking east to understand salvation

Why I look east when we talk about atonement…

I was at a meeting in Glasgow where the first song we sang in the opening worship had a line referring to being washed in the blood of the lamb. I don’t like this language and it is not because I am a vegetarian. This little phrase conveys a whole raft of meaning that goes back a long way. It comes from a particular understanding of the atonement.

On the train home I was reading Karen Armstrong’s book “The case for God” and I was reminded of a more positive understanding of atonement.  Our western ideas of atonement are based too much on the ideas of Anselm and not enough on the fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church such as Maximus the Confessor.  I had mostly forgotten the patristic lectures we had from Ben Drury in my first year B.D. course a long time ago. Reading those paragraphs by Armstrong encouraged me to look up “theosis” (also known as deification, divinisation or growing into the likeness of God) and the way it influences atonement.  As a Methodist, theosis appeals to me. Protestants are generally less aware of theosis, but Methodists, following John Wesley, have always placed strong emphasis on sanctification or perfection which equates in general terms. 

So what did Anselm of Canterbury say that was so influential? He expressed an idea that has influenced all western theology: that God became man in Jesus to expiate the sin of Adam. The reason for incarnation was judicial, to right a wrong. The idea has become so influential that many fail to attribute this insight to Anselm.

Alternatively the idea of salvation as theosis may be summed up in the phrase, "God became human so that humans might become God." This does not mean that humans can be another god or equal to God, but rather that they can hope to participate in the divine nature. This is based on the perspective that when Christ was incarnate in the man Jesus, he did take on just one human nature, but all of human nature. He thus made it possible for the reverse to occur – for humans to participate in the divine nature.

The orthodox churches of the east start their understanding of atonement and salvation from a different place.  Their tradition has different doctrines regarding man’s created state, the fall, and the Old Testament sacrificial system, which result in an understanding of the atonement as participatory rather than substitutionary, ontological rather than juridical, and cosmic rather than individual.  Maximus the Confessor said that the word would have been made flesh in Jesus even without the sin of Adam. The Word’s plan, even from before the creation of the world, was to “mingle” with human nature in a hypostatic union, becoming a man in order to deify man’s nature within Himself.  Jesus was the first human to be deified (entirely possessed and permeated by the divine) and we can also be like him in this life. The word had become incarnate in order that the whole human being could become God, deified by the grace of God become human, soul and body by nature, and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace. This divine initiative has made God and humanity inseparable. Jesus the man gives the human race its only hint as to what God is like and has shown that humans can become part of god in some way. When we think human we now have to think God and vice versa. 

In Maximus’ own words : “By his gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man and by exchanging his condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of his love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominization.”

Maximus, like Athanasius, saw God as absolutely transcendent and thus unknowable. And because God was not an immense being (as the Arian heresy suggested) but being itself, it was possible for Jesus to be both human and divine at the same time.  It is only because God is unknown and unknowable that humans are able to become like him.

So when I look for the reason that God became incarnate in Jesus I look back to the earliest theologians of the church and am inspired by the insights of Maximus the Confessor.

Incidentally, this view of salvation is not only found in Maximus; salvation as theosis occurs in the works of many of the early church fathers as the following quotations show.

We are not made gods from the beginning; first we are mere humans, then we become gods. --St. Irenaeus, Adv Haer III IV:38:4

Let us become the image of the one whole God, bearing nothing earthly in ourselves, so that we may consort with God and become gods, receiving from God our existence as gods --St. Maximus the Confessor On Theology, 7.73

For the Son of God became man, that we might become God. --St. Athanasius, De inc.

He has called men gods that are deified of His Grace, not born of His Substance.--St. Augustine

The Word became flesh and the Son of God became the Son of Man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God --St. Irenaeus, Adv Haer III

Let us applaud and give thanks that we have become not only Christians but Christ himself. Do you understand, my brothers, the grace that God our head has given us? Be filled with wonder and joy--we have become veritable Christs! --St. Augustine of Hippo

The Only-begotten Son of God, wanting us to be partakers of his divinity, assumed our human nature so that, having become man, he might make men gods. --St. Thomas Aquinas

The highest of all things desired is to become God. --St Basil the Great

And for Methodists, the closing lines from the hymn ‘Love divine all loves excelling’ - “Changed from Glory in to Glory, ‘til in heaven we take our place, ‘til we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder love and praise.”

Book Review of “Celtic Quest” by Rosemary Power

Rosemary Power, “Celtic Quest; A Contemporary Spirituality”, The Columba Press 2010, £12.99

My bookshelf contains a selection of books of “Celtic spirituality” by authors such as Esther de Waal, Ray Simpson and David Adam but I only had a vague idea of how this strand of Christian writing emerged from the misty bogs of the far north and west in the latter half of the twentieth century. The term Celtic spirituality would not have meant much before 1970. Now there is a live Celtic Christian tradition in each of the Celtic nations and also in England which may require a stretch of the imagination to be considered Celtic.

Contemporary writers claim to have found in the Celtic traditions new insights that are helpful for Christians today. Looking at the popularity of their devotional material they seem to have struck a chord with many Christians who find a freshness in this way of looking at the world. Specifically the Celtic authors emphasise the trinity, and the rhythm of life in which all is sacred. It venerates the natural world and has many stories about the faith of the saints. They give prominence to sacred and holy places and also to the pilgrimages needed to visit these. It values community and hospitality. It comes from the edge of the European civilised world and as such appeals to people living on the edge today. This list reveals many resonances that these Celtic writers have found especially for Christians living on the edge of the traditional church. Some of the modern Celtic writers have had an explicit evangelical aim of reaching people on the fringes through this re-presentation of the Christian message in a new yet traditional form.

Now having read Rosemary Power's book,“Celtic Quest”, I know how the tradition evolved. She shows how the earliest Celtic texts in ancient languages were translated and popularised and then used to fill gaps in the spiritual diet of mainstream Christianity. In the process she notes that the translators were highly selective of their sources and chose texts that said what they wanted to express. Most of the current translations date from the late nineteenth century. These edited and hand-picked texts became a canon which most contemporary Celtic writers treat as a primary source but are nothing of the sort. The translations are sometimes used in ways far from the meaning intended by the original writers (where this is known) or as an inspiration for modern writers producing creative prayers and poems in a similar form. There is nothing wrong with either except the lack of honesty if the jumps from the original to what is now presented as Celtic is not acknowledged. The Victorian translators saw the texts sometimes with a highly romantic lens and at other times with a lens of nationalistic polemic. The nineteenth century Celtic revival in Ireland is sometimes seen as part of the cultural preparation for the Easter uprising of 1916.

Contemporary Celtic spirituality writing has come from both protestant and catholic authors, both of whom see it as a way into a past golden age: for one a past unsullied by the excesses of Rome and the other a purer form of Catholicism. Such myths surrounding Celtic spirituality are scythed through by Rosemary Power in this scholarly and readable book.

As a member of the Iona Community Power uses this as a case study of a contemporary religious community based upon one of the most iconic of Celtic Christian buildings Iona Abbey. She describes how the Community are continually struggling with the ambiguity of what Celtic Christianity means in the contemporary world. Their founder, George Macleod, used the phrase Celtic to give authority to his pronouncements when it suited his autocratic style of leadership. Power shows that some of the ancient Celtic traditions revived by Macleod are his own inventions.

She concludes that Celtic spirituality with its emphasis on community, liminality (being on the edge) ecology and immanence has much to offer the contemporary church but it still needs further theological development because it is often superficial.

Power shows her scholarship, knowledge of the historical background and of the subject and the wide range of contemporary expressions of Celtic spirituality found today. I highly recommend this book.

How about not having Advent next year!

In my first years of church ministry I tried to follow the revised common lectionary and remember Advent. I did it because I felt I had to. I didn't want to go straight from the ordinary time of autumn to their special time of Christmas without something in between. But I do not find that the present lectionary suggestions really help. They are way off what most parishes and congregations are doing socially in December. If you are in a supermarket in the second week of December you will be surrounded by Christmas food, wrapping paper, cards and present ideas as the carols and secular Christmas music play on the loudspeakers. And then you go into a traditional church and find that they refuse to sing carols until Christmas eve and the preaching will relate to stories of the apocalyptic second coming and John the Baptist. It misses the zeitgeist of people cranking slowly up into party mood.
These traditionalists tell us we can sing carols for the twelve days of Christmas but once you get beyond the 26th December who wants to hear another version of "Away in a Manger". (actually who wants to hear this carol EVER but that's another rant!) We have Epiphany when we should properly think of the wise men and their gifts but their story has been squeezed already in the popular imagination into the conflated Christmas story itself. Again the church has lost the zeitgeist.
But what if we designated a certain number of days after Christmas and new year as penitential days for serious fasting and abstinence. We could use the weird apocalyptic readings on these days and add to them many penitential readings that always make people feel bad about themselves. We could then resonate perfectly with the feeling that many have as a result of ten days of overindulgence. I wonder would this work?

Facebook aurevoire

Facebook friends please note - I may not be around so much....
I think I have an addiction - do I need help? Every time I switch on my computer one of the first things I do is check Facebook. Then during the time I am working at my desk I will often have Facebook running in the background. I justified this as I am working from home and spend many hours alone so this gives me online colleagues to interact with. When I heard someone say "I love my computer as all my friends live there" I understood exactly what they meant. But I want to be more disciplined this year and check Facebook just a couple of times a week. So my new year’s resolution is to take a step back from online social networking.
This move was prompted by an online article that I read last week by D L Mayfield who described why she was quitting Facebook. (REVEVANT magazine “A new year without Facebook")  I can resonate with much of what she says.  The next paragraphs summerise the three points she makes.
Facebook detracts from authentic community. The more time you spend on Facebook, updating your profile or snooping on acquaintances, the less honest conversations you can have in real life. Many people assume they know everything that is going on with you based on status updates. Do we nowadays ask our friends searching questions or do we accept their status update at face value. There will always be more going on than what we choose to publish for the world to see. Even more alarming, I can see how I have often shaped my life to fit into a clever little status update, often used to elicit jealousy (“drinking champagne, listening to jazz, and reading Kierkegaard!”) or sympathy (“baby sick, only got 3 hours of sleep last night. Blerg!”). This is manipulation, done for the benefit of friends and acquaintances. Are we in danger of creating a persona for the benefit of people we are not really in community with? Wouldn't it be much better to cultivate relationships with those around us in a real community?
Secondly, Facebook can be a huge waste of time. I cannot resist reading all the status updates in my news feed; no matter how inane they might be (do you really care about what your friends are eating?). One quick log-in turns into thirty minutes of vacuous screen time.
Finally, there are real questions with Facebook in the areas of privacy and confidentiality. Facebook is a public space - we should only share there what we share in any other public space. It is a billion-dollar business driven by highly personalised advertising that targets each one of us in accordance with the content we have posted.
I am not leaving Facebook completely as I see some positives too. In its favour Facebook provides community and opportunity for interaction with other people for those whose disability or infirmity prevents them getting out without assistance. Social networking on a computer can be an opportunity to take the initiative and do what you want to do in the virtual world where this is impossible for you in the real world. It does provide a feeling of community and so long it is not replacing physical community, the more community there is, the better. Also for people like clergy who work from home with no regular colleagues it is a way of having some friendly banter with others in the same position. Working from home can sound idyllic but you have to like your own company and for many it can be very lonely.
So Facebook, I will be posting less often in 2012 and reading my wall only intermittently.