What Cory Bernardi and Tony Abbott Get So Wrong about the 'Judeo-Christian Tradition'

A sermon preached in the Chapel of Queen's College, Melbourne University, May 7th 2018.

Texts: Luke 4: 14-21; 1 Peter 2:4-13

“Australia is a secular nation but it is founded upon the Judeo-Christian tradition and values.”

So declared Senator Cory Bernardi in an interview he gave to the online magazine, The Conversation in 2011.

The claim at once invites some interrogation of what Bernardi means for a nation to be secular but founded around particular religious values.

Setting aside the question of its coherence or historical accuracy it is important to realise that Benardi’s invocation of the 'Judeo-Christian tradition' is part of  larger quest to defend not only so-called Australian values but the values of what he rather loosely calls ‘the West’. So, in his book, The Conservative Revolution, he makes these much more expansive claims:

The framework of our Western moral tradition can be found in the wisdom of the Ten Commandments, and the lessons of Christ and the lives of the Apostles.

All this can be affirmed, he rightly insists, regardless of whether the society at large regards itself as secular.  So he goes on:

Thus, secular or not, our society is based on the principles of religious faith, borne of the natural law that is engraved on our very heart, reflected in our customs and codified in our laws.

In this he has a close ally in his former party leader, or, I should say, the former leader of his former party, namely Tony Abbott.

In his 2015 Thatcher Lecture in London, the former Prime Minister made a quite specific appeal to Jesus’ instruction to “love your neighbour as you love yourself” – the so called Golden Rule. Abbott declared that this “imperative is at the heart of every western polity”. He continued: “It expresses itself in laws protecting workers, in strong social security safety nets, and in the readiness to take in refugees.”

Then last year in a much publicised speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, also in London, the former Prime Minister lamented how this particular religious heritage was being set aside by what he described as a new religion – namely the religion of Climate Change.

This is what he said:

Climate Change is by no means the sole or even the most significant symptom of the changing interests and values of the west. Still, only societies with high levels of cultural amnesia – that have forgotten the scriptures about man created “in the image and likeness of God” and charged with “subduing the earth and all its creatures” – could have made such a religion out of it.

What is going on here? It is partly nostalgia, or at least it trades on a certain kind of cultural nostalgia. It is partly a reflection of their own faith convictions. It is partly a perfectly reasonable reminder of positive influence of the Christian faith in shaping Western Culture. It is also partly, indeed, in very large part, a conservative political strategy.  

And this political dimension is Bernardi’s appeal to the 'Judeo-Christian' tradition is perfectly logical. We need, he writes, “traditionally minded governments” because only such  governments “can appreciate the importance and need of these principles.”

According to Bernardi, to honour this culture’s religious traditions and the culture on which is it founded is a political responsibility and the responsibility of politicians.

Again to quote from The Conservative Revolution:

I believe by stripping God and religious principles from our culture and our politics we have become a nation which does not know what port it is sailing to. Without the notion of the transcendent in our daily and public lives, we will undoubtedly lose a sense of the profound. Such a loss is like killing off the spirit of civilisation.

Perhaps he’s right. The values of the dignity of all people, a concern for the rights and welfare of the poor, and the orientation to heal rather than ignore or stigmatise the sick are not self-evident values. That they became common moral assumptions in the West was largely a consequence of Christian and Jewish ideas about these matters taking hold in Europe in the centuries following Christ, however imperfectly those commitments were enacted.

Yet, as a Christian, I’m very uneasy about what’s going on here.

I’m not uneasy because I want to deny the impact of Christianity on the formation of Western culture. Far from it. There is a forgetfulness, indeed often an ideologically driven denial, of  how Christianity has positively shaped the West.

But I am uneasy that the Christian heritage is presented in such idealised form. Christian faith demands honesty. And honestly, Christianity has been complicit in much that has been destructive. We must confront the ambiguity of the Christian heritage even whilst honouring and defending some aspects of the societies it has helped to generate.

I’m also uneasy because I think the political use of Christianity prevents any serious or wider engagement with the purpose of Christianity – at least as those purposes have some grounding in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Indeed, the use of the term 'Judeo-Christian' itself heavy with political intent. And this is not confined to Australian conservatives.

In October lastyear, Donald Trump declared: “We are stopping cold the attacks onJudeo-Christian values…We’re saying Merry Christmas again.” Seemingly unaware that Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, Trump was clumsily, but no doubt very effectively, playing to his conservative Christian base and its acute sense of loss of power and influence.

In 2014, an Australian scholar, Chole Patton, wrote that the very term, Judeo Christian tradition, first appears in Australian literature in 1974.  There is then a sudden peak after September 11, 2001. She writes: until 9/11, “it appears Australians didn’t give a fig about Judeo-Christian values”. A similar pattern is evident in America where the term first appears in the 1930s and again experiences a peak post- 9/11. Then it becomes a something of a rhetorical strategy of resistance to the influence of Islam.

And once again Christian honesty must be insisted upon here. For it is also the case that the Christian tradition has for long enough not only not cared about the Jewish roots of its own tradition, but maligned and persecuted the community out of which its own founder came.

This particular political appeal to the so-called 'Judeo-Christian tradition' also feeds into the persecution that many Australian Christians feel (wrongly in my view) as they find themselves challenged by the shift of the culture at large away from deference to the church and Christian values (broadly understood). This rhetoric about defending the 'Judeo-Christian tradition' too often becomes a tool for defending the rights of Christians. Yet to the extent that we can talk historically about the ‘Christian tradition’ and its involvement in politics, it has been more about Christians defending the rights of others and seeking the welfare of all rather Christians defending themselves.

So, ambiguity must attend any evaluation of the impact of the so-called 'Judeo-Christian tradition'. But this provides an opportunity to ask a deeper question: Just what is Christianity for?

Our gospel reading gives us some insight into at least how Jesus' followers remembered his own self-understanding of his mission.

Sometimes labelled the Nazareth Manifesto, the text from Luke records a highly-charged moment.

Famous local boy returns home. He attends the synagogue. He reads a heavily-freighted text, bristling with messianic, even revolutionary, rhetoric.

And then Jesus essentially rebuffs the good will shown to him by his own townsfolk. He tells them quite bluntly that they don’t have a clue who he is or what the text was about. So incensed is the synagogue congregation that they drag him to a nearby cliff intending to throw him off it and do him in.  It all went pear-shaped very quickly.

So what was the text he had read?  Let’s read that section again:

The scroll is handed to Jesus. He unrolls it to a passage from the prophet Isaiah (Chapter 61:1-2)   to be exact):

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.

Certainly we see here some of the themes that have come to be accepted as normative in the West. And, yes, it is from a Jewish prophet, or at least a tradition of prophecy associated with Isaiah of Jerusalem who lived in the 8th century before the Common Era. And it is read and endorsed by Jesus Christ. So, perhaps we do see here the foundation of 'Judeo-Christian' values.

Yet despite the fact that is labelled a manifesto – that is, as a charter for future action – Jesus turns all the attention to the present and, indeed, to himself. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”.

How, exactly, we might well ask?

You see, this text and this incident in Jesus’ ministry is not a manifesto for forming a new culture. It is actually about Jesus himself and his status. He is announcing that he will fulfill these hopes.

And it was the conviction of the first Christians that he had done so, but not through providing the template for the future culture of Europe, let alone 'the West.'

They believed he fulfilled these hopes in a way that was confusing, cryptic, and ambiguous. They found their hope not in the way he changed society – something he singularly failed to do in his lifetime - but through the whole drama of his life, death and resurrection. And rather than see that as transforming the wider culture, at least some of them they saw themselves as a counter culture.

We get a small insight into that perspective from the second of our readings. The document we know as 1 Peter was written to various small Christian communities scattered across Asia Minor around the end of the first century of the  Common Era.

Did you hear how the readers were addressed? “Aliens and strangers”. Their vocation was not to lay down the law for the surrounding world; it was instead “to lives honourably” amongst their neighbours that even the neighbours might glorify God.

And at the outset of the letter ( a section we didn’t read) they were addressed as "exiles". Their identity and their hope was grounded in “the resurrection of Jesus Christ”.

They are not instructed to take over the culture and politics of the day. There was no summons to a 'conservative revolution.' They were told to “honour everyone.” and even to “honour the emperor” of an empire that was by no means favourably disposed to this novel form of life called Christianity.

Now of course, this once exiled, persecuted, minority community scattered across Palestine, Asia Minor and the Mediterranean did become powerful. Over time it acquired and was given political power and cultural control.

But was this the founder’s intention?

That good flowed from this development, was perhaps providential. Perhaps it was an accident of history.

But  Christianity cannot claim that historical development as the mandate for preserving a 'Judeo-Christian' tradition or defending that tradition for for the sake of Christians having and retaining rights.

If we take the example of Jesus and the self-understanding of the first Christians as being in any way normative, the Christian posture towards the world should be characterised by a sense of modesty, a degree of humility, many acts of contrition, and constantly-nurtured orientation to serve the world.

Yes, it should also be characterised by a deeply-rooted confidence that the ways of life to which it is called are worthwhile, that they have something to contribute to the wider world, that they do point to the ways of  God and God’s purposes for the world.

So, can I encourage you, if you needed any encouragement, to treat with some skepticism the calls to defend the 'Judeo-Christian tradition' when it is made for political purposes.

Can I also encourage you to look at the history of Christianity and its formative impact on the West with your eyes wide open. You will have no difficulty seeing where that history has failed its own identity and calling.

But be willing also to recognize that the values of human dignity, care for the poor, attention to the ill, didn’t come to pass automatically. They are hard-won values and they are worth preserving.

And as a Christian disciple, as a teacher of Christian theology, can I also invite you to look behind the Christian tradition to the one from whom it takes its inspiration.  An ambiguous, cryptic, confusing Jewish rabbi, obsessed with what he called the 'kingdom of God,' and who through his life, death and resurrection brought something genuinely new to the world.

Looking at him, listening to his teaching, tracing the patterns of his behaviour, and wrestling with his unusual end, there could well be times when like the congregation at  Nazareth you might want to push him away – even off a cliff.

But there might also be times when engaging his teaching and tracing the patterns of his behaviour, and wrestling with his unusual and violent end, you find yourself drawn into the very depths of reality – your own and that of the cosmos. That has been the experience of Christian faith across diverse cultures, well beyond the 'Judeo-Christian' culture of the West which Cory Bernardi and Tony Abbott champion.

Christian faith is not about preserving a culture. It is about engaging Jesus Christ and serving and shaping many cultures. And that is what we are all invited to do in this place and every place.  Amen.

****

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Christianity and War - An ANZAC Day Reflection

I've penned a short article on the use of John 15:13 in Australia's acts of war remembrance and suggested that, if the wells of Christianity are to be tapped on such occasions, it would be more appropriate to cite the teaching about love of enemies and reconciliation.

The article is published in The Guardian Australia and is available here.

Sex, Gender and Christian Doctrine: Semester 1, 2018

Updated Feb 14th 2018 This unit is being taught by me and Monica Melancthon at Pilgrim Theological College in Semester 1, 2018. Part 1: March 2nd-4th  (Sessions 1-6) Part 2: April 27th-28th (Sessions 7-10) Below is the outline of the content for each session, including a summary of the respective aims of each of the two parts. Check out the full schedule here ****  Part 1 of this Intensive will survey the contemporary interface between Christianity and the discourses of sex and gender (and the contentions about them within Christianity) and develop the concepts, language, and questions required to develop informed, mutually critical but constructive conversations which occur at that interface. With both a biblical scholar and systematic theologian involved in the teaching, there will also be opportunity to explore the relationship between doctrine and scripture.   Overview A brief history of how sex and gender have become major points of disputation in the relationship between Christianity and Western cultures. Doctrinal discourse (and particular doctrines) will be introduced as a dynamic and constructive enterprise able to engage in lively, and not merely reactive, conversations with the discourses about sex and gender. Body in Christian Scripture and Early Christianity Christian theology is an embodied theology embedded in creation, incarnation, resurrection and sacrament, making the body both the site and the recipient of God's revelation. Even so, the body has been problematic for theologians and the church. What do the  Christian scriptures say about the body? How has the scriptural understanding of the body been received and understood by thinkers and theologians in the formative years of Christianity? How has these early understandings impacted our understandings of body and sexuality Sex and Gender: contemporary discussions Historical, philosophical, political and scientific developments have radically reshaped Western discourses about sex and gender. These include feminist exposure of patriarchy, Queer claims about gender fluidity, historical studies of the diverse meanings of ‘sex’, and biological explorations of gender diversity and intersex. The impact has been to place ideas about sex and gender very close to the centre of the West’s cultural identity. Sex, Gender, Creation and Anthropology Christian anthropology is the default doctrinal locus of sex and gender. The idea of the gendered human bearing the image of God has a complicated history within Christian doctrine. Now it is even more complicated. Is there anything about human being as imago dei that can be illuminated by contemporary ideas of sex and gender, and vice versa? Also relevant are recent developments in the broader doctrine of creation, notably evolutionary diversity and disputed questions of the order of creation. Sex, Gender, and Eschatology From Christianity’s origins, belief in the resurrection and its associated eschatology has given the body a pivotal  place in Christian thought. The resurrection at once affirms bodily existence but also points to a transformed body. The early equivocation towards, but never absolute denial of, marriage and sex was one manifestation of living in that tension. How does this perennial tension within Christian thought engage contemporary discussions of sex and gender.  Sex, Gender, Christology and Trinity Classical Christology is usually seen as a barrier to conversations between doctrine and contemporary discourses of sex and gender. On the other hand, classical Trinitarian theology is almost the first-chosen partner for such conversations. Christology will be explored for its fruitfulness for an understanding of what human ‘nature’ is. The Trinity will be explored (with more caution than has sometimes been the case) for the understandings of personhood which flow from it. A conversation around these issues has much potential. **** Part 2 will focus on using the framework developed in Part 1 to engage a variety of specific and recent proposals for linking particular Christian doctrines to particular areas of sex and gender. These will include desire, celibacy, orientation, intersex, and marriage. Each of these proposals gives particular weight to particular Christian doctrines. Each will be studied closely and critically evaluated. But the framework will also be challenged by considering the issues of sexuality and gender from a non-Western context, namely that of India. We will conclude by canvassing how the insights gained unfold in the life of the church, both locally and globally. Proposal A: Sarah Coakley’s God, Sex and the Self. In this book, British theologian, Sarah Coakley, explores the connections between the doctrine of the Trinity, desire for God and sexual desire. Drawing on patristic writers, Coakley develops a post-Freudian theology of desire. Proposal B: In his book Spiritual Friendship, American biblical scholar, Wesley Hill, argues for a classical doctrine of marriage according to which it is closed to gays and lesbians. He argues for celibate, covenanted spiritual friendship as the appropriate structure for same-sex attracted Christians. Proposal C: Robert Song’s Covenant and Calling also employs the notion of covenant for same-sex relationships, but in his case for relationships which involve sexual intimacy. Arguing from the doctrine of creation, he argues that openness to pro-creation is a definitive element of marriage.  But his notion of covenantal relationships embraces a connection between sexual intimacy and both faithfulness and permanence. Sexuality in India Discussion on sexuality in India is often limited to the Kamasutra or the many erotic temple sculptures or miniatures. The latter should be seen as 'irrigularities' or 'symbols' of artistic licence that are in fact lodged within an overarching narrative of repression.What is sexuality? How is it understood? Where is it embedded? What are the challenges that confront discussions on sexuality in India today? These are some of the questions that will be addressed.   Proposal D: In Sex Difference and Christian Theology Megan DeFranza argues, in part, from Christology for a concept of the imago dei which ‘decentres’ sex and gender from that image. She developed this argument with particular reference to the realities of the intersex community. Proposal E:  Roman Catholic theologian, Jean Porter, argues from a doctrine of nature and an understanding of natural law by which procreation is paradigmatic for the institution of marriage,but it is not essential to every marriage. Accordingly she extends marriage to same-sex relationships. Sex, Gender and Christian discipleship, Christian witness, and church unity. The issues explored in the previous sessions have implications individual Christians. They also have implications of the corporate life of the church. These include the understanding of baptism and the composition of the Christian community; the witness of the Christian church in a context where the church’s traditional teachings on these matters have become a form of ‘anti-witness' (Robert Song); and for the unity between churches of the West and those of other contexts where the issues of sex and gender have are framed differently than they are in the contemporary West. Against the background of the close nexus in the contemporary West between sex, gender and cultural identity, the place of sex and gender in Christian identity will also be explored.

Christianity's Big Ideas

This coming semester I'll be teaching 'Christianity's Big Ideas'. I'm hoping to subvert the negative baggage that attaches to 'doctrine' and 'systematic theology' by starting from the fact that Christian faith provoked new and controversial ideas. I also want to subvert the view that ideas are simply reducible to the material circumstances of their production and instead to foster a confidence in the continuing intellectual generativity of the Christian faith in a world full of competing and contested ideas. Theological ideas actually matter and are one means the church has as its disposal for truth-telling.

The unit will be running 2-5 pm on Thursday afternoons during semester. Check www.pilgrim.edu.au for semester dates and further details. First lecture is on Thursday March 1st.

Below is the twitter thread I recently tweeted about the course.

*Jesus: an unexpected messiah.* 1/2 The emergence the movement called Christianity rested on the proclamation of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth as Israel’s messiah. A crucified messiah was a pretty big idea. No such proclamation, no Christianity.

*Jesus: an unexpected messiah.* 2/2 This link of crucifixion with messiahship was unconventional and controversial, but it also generated other big ideas from within the Christian community, many of them sadly obscured in later Christianity.

*God is love.* Too easily taken to be a self-evident theological truth. Not so in the ancient world. Jews certainly believed that God showed constant love. And Christians developed this conviction on the basis of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. One of Christianity’s biggest ideas.

*Incarnation & Trinity: God is not aloof.*1/2  These doctrines aren’t simply Greek exaggerations of early claims about Jesus. Nor are they simply about Jesus’ status.

*Incarnation & Trinity: God is not aloof.*2/2  They are also statements of Xn understanding of God/World relationship. God becomes human without any loss of divinity. God relates to the world in this way because God is relation. These were very big ideas in the ancient world

*Salvation: cosmic in scope.* Much Christian discourse about salvation is trapped in piety and individualism – and in combinations thereof. Based on the resurrection of Jesus, some strands of the New Testament point to salvation as a cosmic restoration. It would be hard to get a bigger idea.

*Salvation: redemption not escape.* Early Christian thinking about salvation built on Jewish beliefs  about a renewal of this world, not an escape from it or a destruction of it. Belief in Jesus' resurrection fine-tuned this conviction for Christians.

*The Spirit: a materialist spirituality.* Biblical language of spirit, soul, body, flesh can all be confusing. The Spirit and matter not opposites. The Spirit’s work is to be seen in such concrete realities as the church, lives of service and communities of reconciliation, truth-telling, and justice-making.

*The church: God’s new politics.* 1/2 Early Christian communities were not spiritual enclaves for contemplation or satisfying 'spiritual' needs. They were unconventional communities working out discipleship in the context of tensions about money, food, sex and power.

*The church: God’s new politics.* 2/2 They were a particular form of social organisation. Mainline churches are still trying to get their heads around this big idea, so essential for the post-Christendom context.

*Scripture: 2-volume, uneven anthology.* 1/2 NT scholar Gerd Theissen warned re downplaying the radicalness and theological significance of adding Christian literature to the Hebrew canon. Accepting a two-volume scripture was itself a big idea.

*Scripture: 2-volume, uneven anthology.* 2/2 The odd collection thus produced invites deep theol reflection on what it is & why we read it, not just how to read it. Read the Bible as an anthology that deals with a big story rather than as a collection of ‘sacred’ ‘texts’.

*Sacraments: Initiating and sustaining mission.* Concept of ‘sacrament’ is fruitful if problematic. It sometimes obscured links b/w baptism, eucharist, discipleship & mission of the church. This big idea was easily lost in Christendom and needs to be renewed in post-Christendom.

*Hope.* Early Christians shifted from expectation of Jesus’ early return to a longer-term hope of God’s ultimate consummation of what was begun in Jesus. This itself was a pretty big shift in ideas. Accordingly, Christian hope is not waiting passively but actively living into God’s future.

*Theology: nurturing the Christian imagination* Weave these big ideas together and you get a Christian vision which, like a work of art, engages the imagination, intellect and heart. As such it serves the church and its worship, witness and service.

Scholarships for Under-35s at Pilgrim Theological College

If you're are aged under 35 years, and you are associated with the Uniting Church in Australia, you are eligible to apply for a scholarship at Pilgrim Theological College.

You can read the details here.

Pilgrim is the UCA's theological college in its Victoria/Tasmania Synod. It is located in Parkville, adjacent to the Melbourne University precinct, and close to public transport.  It is a member college of the University of Divinity, Australia's only specialist university and a national leader in theological education and research.

Check out the 2018 Pilgrim Handbook for details of the Units on offer next year, and for an even quicker overview take a look at the 2018 Timetable. There you'll see that there is a combination of face-to-face weekly units, on-line distance education, and intensives. Here's a summary list:

Semester 1:

• New Testament Greek
• Memory, History and the Historians
• Trinity, Society and Dialogue
• Greek Sources of Western  Thought
• Life, History and the People of God in the Hebrew Scriptures
• Biblical Theology of Mission
• Fullness of Life: Spirituality in the Christian Tradition
• Philosophy for Understanding Theology
• Christianity's Big Ideas
• Children and Families Ministry
• Sex, Gender and Christian Doctrine
• Living Leadership: Managing Organisational Change Faithfully
• Reading and Interpreting Isaiah

Semester 2

• Reason and Revival
• Belief After Philosophy
• Earliest Christianity
• Discernment and Authority in the Christian Tradition
• Theology of Pastoral Care
• Hermeneutics
• Jesus, Discipleship and Justice
• The Art of Belief
• Developing Mission Theology for Today
• The Living People of God: Local, Global and Mission
• A Changed Climate for Theology
• The World of Hildegard of Bingen
• Art and Practice of Oral Storytelling
• Watching for God: Theology, the Bible and Film
• Gender, Justice and Empire: Contextual Readings of the Old Testament
• Thematic Study of the Old Testament
• Doctrine, Truth and Pluralism
• Sex and the Bible
• Thinking Otherwise: Feminist Theologies
• Effective Christian Leadership and Ministry
• The Nurture and Spiritual Guidance of  Children
• Formation for Christian Leadership

 Click here for details of the scholarships. Applications close on February 1st, 2018.

The attractiveness of sinners.

Pilgrim Theological College Chapel

October 25^th 2017.

Texts: Matthew 20:1-16;  Romans 5:1-12.

This sermon was preached at the regular college chapel to a congregation of almost exclusively ordination candidates and college faculty.

*******

So here we are. Almost 500 years (less just six days) since the Reformation began

The day when, at least as legend has it, Martin Luther strode to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church and posted his 95 theses.

The ripples from that stone dropped in the pond of Western Christendom reach across to this very institution, to this community of people, to this moment.

But, of course, those ripples have not reached us through a smooth advance of gentle concentric waves travelling across those five centuries.

Between here and now and there and then, those ripples have travelled an ambiguous journey.

The impact of that initial protest in 1517 has included violence, division, death, mistrust and mayhem.

And none of those on a small scale.

And that's not even to mention the links that are drawn between the Reformation and secularism with its disenchantment, individualism with its weakening of community, or capitalism and its inequality.

Like all the Christian movements in history, the Reformation is marked by deep ambiguity. 

So, even allowing for these various reasons for ambiguity, what is it that we are celebrating?

Well, we could say we are celebrating a certain liberation from ecclesiastical tyranny.

We could say we are celebrating a liberation of the gospel from its disappearance beneath layers of tradition.

We could say we are celebrating the liberation of ministry from its centuries of institutionalism.

We could say we are celebrating the liberation of the biblical text from its dogmatic control.

But I’m going to invite you to celebrate the ‘alien righteousness of God’.

Let's face it, could there be anything more certain to induce a celebratory mood?

In his essay ‘Two kinds of righteousness,’ written in 1519, Luther referred to

“an alien righteousness of another, instilled from without. This is the righteousness of Christ by which he justifies through faith.”

At once we are into Reformation disputes about righteousness, faith, justification, works, and law.

And at once we are also into the disputes about Luther’s relationship to Pauline exegesis and the impact of the New Perspective on Paul on our reception of Luther as an interpreter of Paul.

Can I ask you to put those concerns on hold just for a moment?  

Regardless of how well he interpreted Paul, Luther can at least, I think, be recognised as putting his finger on something essential to Christianity and the gospel it proclaims.

Jesus, Paul and countless Christian thinkers, prophets and activists since, have unsettled prevailing conventions about the relationship between piety and morality.

Or between what we might term religion and ethics, or even between spirituality and justice.

At least some of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God seems to unsettle prevailing assumptions which suggested God’s favour was a reward for a virtuous or religious or spiritual life.

Many of Jesus’ parables seem to invert assumptions about what is deemed natural or conventional. The parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (to which we listened) inverts everything we might assume about natural justice. In the kingdom of heaven, a different economy of grace operates.

Paul’s teaching about faith and righteousness exploded the nexus between law and justification maintained by at least some of his contemporaries. And in the passage we heard from Romans 5, we hear the striking claim: ‘Christ died for the ungodly’. Christ did not die for the religious, or the virtuous, or the holy, or the spiritual.

Did you hear that? Christ died for the ungodly. And who’s that. By Paul’s logic in Romans: that’s all of us.

But I want to suggest that behind these challenges to prevailing assumptions about human faith and human behaviour, both Jesus and Paul were also saying something about the character of God.

Or at least, what they were saying about human faith and human behaviour inevitably unsettled some prevailing assumptions about the character of God.

And so was Luther.

In thesis 28 of the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, Luther contrasted the love of God with human love.

The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.

In other words, the love of God is not responsive as human love is; the love of God is creative and not determined by that which it loves. In terms of this contrast, human love is reactive; God’s love is just there.

In his ‘proof’ of this thesis, Luther says something else. Now the focus is on what it is that make sinful humans attractive to God.

“sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.”

Let me say that again:

“sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.”

In other words, we cannot attract God’s love by virtue of what we do. Rather: God is attracted to us because it is God’s character to be attracted to us.

Let me ask you: How much has this thought grasped you?

Yes, we might well be able to articulate the ‘priority of grace’.

We might well be able to affirm that ‘God is love’

But has this idea that God draws near to us regardless of our worthiness really grasped your theological imagination and your pastoral calling?

I ask the question because I think that many of the prevailing assumptions that Jesus, Paul and Luther unsettled continue to prevail.

I trust I’m not simply projecting my own assumptions on to everyone else, but I’ll venture to say that we find it quite easy to think that we can bargain with God. It comes almost naturally to us.

If I just do this, then perhaps God will…

It is a kind of quid pro quo understanding of our relationship with God.

Christianity has never been able fully to release itself from moralism; or from a certain impulse towards religious purity.

When 15 or so years ago, the researchers into American youth Christianity coined the phrase ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ they were not simply describing one cohort of Christians. They identified something that seems to run very close to surface of all Christianity and all Christians.

It has shown itself in the ease with which Christians have pronounced judgement on ‘the world’ in harsh tones that suggest deep down we really do think that we have somehow earned God’s favour in a way that ‘the world’ has yet to.

And I don’t mean ‘those other Christians’. I mean us. We can so easily default to the quid pro quo mindset. We think we can make ourselves attractive to God. And perhaps we even do it most pointedly when we think it is only a problem to be seen in those other Christians.

(And in this regard this there is a real challenge. Christians can and do distort the understanding of God. So, there is an issue of how we challenge ‘Christian views’ that we believe to be wrong without falling into the trap of thinking that those we think are wrong can’t challenge us back. And that would take another sermon or two to address adequately.)

There is no shortage of presentations of Christianity getting air time in the midst of the national debate about Same Sex Marriage which I believe are fundamentally wrong.

I can’t help but hear a certain and pervasive moralism underlying many of the Christian contributions to this discussion.

I can’t help but wonder what idea of God actually underwrites some of these views.

But perhaps we also have to ask about the ideas of God that underwrite even our strong convictions about the inclusivity of God’s love. Do we draw those convictions from the radicalness of the Christian gospel? Or do we draw them from what we as sophisticated modern liberal people think God should be like? A view that perhaps only thinly veils its own quid quo quo logic.

But let’s not focus just now on the self-critical introspection, even if that would be a very Luther-like thing to do.

Let’s think about  God.

Let’s think about God who, Paul tells us, “proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us”.

Let us think about God whose son “Christ died for the ungodly”.

Or think about the landowner in Jesus’ parable who declares to those who thought themselves more worthy: “Take what belongs to you and go: I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you”. God is not a God of the quid pro quo.

To come back to Luther: it is an alien righteousness by which we are justified – not our own. This focus on this alien righteousness that comes from outside ourselves means, as Luther saw,that we are not loved because we are attractive. We are attractive because we are loved – by  God.

Is that insight worth celebrating?

I think it is.

One of the most basic Christian convictions is that God is love. For all the ease with which we might cite and proclaim this, it is not a self-evident truth ready to be picked up from a few random observations of the world.

It is a hard won conviction. The early Christians we convinced of it not because they looked at the beauty of the world or the circumstances of their lives. Far from it. They were convinced of it because of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. After all, again to quote Paul, God had to prove or demonstrate his love for us.

At least according to Paul, God didn’t think it was self-evident.

Yet we as Christians and the church collectively can so easily live in forgetfulness of this conviction. As much as it is a hard-won conviction, it also an easily-lost conviction and an easily-domesticated conviction. 

Nevertheless, from time to time, so it seems, God, raises up people, sometimes the most awkward and irritating of people, to unearth that conviction from beneath the layers of piety, religion, spirituality, ecclesiasticism, and even theology, with which we cover it.

So, this is at least one reason why the Reformation should be celebrated, notwithstanding all the ambiguity that comes with it.

As a church that stands in the Reformed tradition, what might any of this say to us as ministers or future ministers in the Uniting Church in Australia?

As a church are we fully convinced of this truth?

How prevalent is the quid pro logic in our lives and that of the church’s wider membership?

My own view is that it is quite prevalent.

Twice recently, I’ve had UCA ministers tell me their sadness about members of their congregations declaring that ‘they are not good enough’. And these are members of 40 and 50 years standing.

Some of you have heard me tell the story of the parishioner of mine who would never participate in communion because in her words, ‘I am not worthy’.

These scenarios will have multiple reasons. But at the very least they are evidence of the resilience within the church of forms of piety and theology that have never been unsettled by the generosity or the radicalness of the gospel. 

How will you as minsters proclaim this gospel to those in the church so that they will know that they don’t have to be worthy?

Perhaps we could have a moratorium on discussion about the future of the church and spend a decade trying to unearth from beneath all the layers of Uniting Church-, Australian protestant- and Christendom-piety that hard won conviction that “God has proved his love for us that whilst we still sinners Christ died for us”.

And perhaps we might need some of the belligerence, pugnacity, and even existential angst of Martin Luther to do this.

We might ponder his idea of the ‘alien righteousness’.

And we might ponder his insight: “sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.”

And I suspect that not a few members of the Uniting Church might find that quite liberating.

But not just ‘those other members of the Uniting Church’ – perhaps it is also us who need to be constantly reminded of it and be liberated by it.

We are attractive to God just because God loves us. We are not loved by God because we are attractive. And that is gospel. And, however alien it is, it is worth celebrating. Amen.

Tony Abbott, the West, climate change, and the Bible.

The Guardian has published a short piece I wrote on Tony Abbott, climate change, and

his use of the Bible. What I originally submitted was pretty much exclusively focused on Abbott's speech to the  Global Warming Policy Foundation. Interestingly, a week had passed by the time I submitted the article to The Guardian, and got the response that since a week had passed it risked no longer being relevant. But rather than therefore knock it back, the editor invited me to expand the article to indicate the pattern of linking the Bible and the defence of Western culture in Abbott's writings. So, I did. Bravo to The Guardian for being willing to publish something that was theologically slightly technical. The article concludes thus:

Convinced that climate change is the new religion, Abbott argued in his London speech for “less theology”. Actually, Abbott himself needs more Christian theology if he’s going to quote the Bible. As a former seminary student, perhaps he could rekindle his own theological studies. He would discover that the Bible contains literature capable of calling every culture into question, not least “the west”. And he would be better informed for those occasions when he makes theological pronouncements from the various platforms he is given as a former PM.