A whinge?

[leonato]

This may turn into a long Anglican whinge so bear with me..

I've been thinking a bit lately about attitudes in the Church. It all started on Saturday when I was singing in the parish choirs service in King's chapel. A number of local church choirs get together to sing in a kind of festival of church music. It was a shame the choice of music was so poor. A bad piece by Archer, an appalling hymn whose idea of harmony was having eight bars of middle C for the basses etc. Of the few decent pieces the conductor murdered If Ye Love Me. [ or If ye love me ( gasping breath!) keep my comman-DUH-munts as he would have it].

Then I realised that for most of the choir this was the height of church music, many had been practising for weeks, which made me feel guilty about turning up 2 hours before the service to sight-read my way through it. This was also fairly high church (cassock and surplice all round). So of course the great church music of the cathedral / chapel tradition which I am used to is very much the exception and not the rule. It seem a great shame that one of the great cornerstones and achievements of the Anglican church is being almost willfully ignored by most of its members, and perhaps are ignoring what the church was is (and should be?).

In a similar vein I discovered the website of Cambridge City church here. This is a super-charismatic evangelical church here in Cambridge. Among the gems on their site:

"Brickfields [the name of their building] is situated on the right hand side, between the Mazda garage and the shed factory."

Their "prophetic picture" of their church is an image of King's chapel, clearly they secretly long to be Gothic high Anglicans...

and their justification for the absolute truth of the bible:

We know that because it says so in the Bible. Now you may say, 'hang on, isn't that a circular argument?' But in fact, any argument for an absolute authority on truth will always be circular - for example, we might say: 'I use logic to work out what is true, because any other method would be illogical'.

[A circular argument is still a circular argument, we don't use logic to find what is true, only what is true given certain assumptions are accepted. The statement on logic is actually illogical, and a tautology, in itself.]

When will evangelicals realise that their acceptance of the absolute truth of the bible is a belief, and not a necessary part of Christian faith, and certainly not a certainty.

I may have fun poking fun at evangelicals, but then I read a sermon on Genesis 1 on the Stag website here. Yes its the old God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve argument. Sometimes I think the sooner the church schisms over the gay bishop debate the better...

Comments

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

A better argument for the absolute truth of the Bible might run as follows:

Given that God is omnipotent, and He has decided to communicate His truth partly in written form, and given that even Geoffrey Archer sues for libel when someone prints accurate defamatory statements about him, it is highly probable that such an omnipotent God will not allow His truth to be so dramatically perverted from its main aim as to be actually untrue.

Of course, since people preach sermons on it every day and many of these are mutually contradictory, God is quite clearly happy for us to figure stuff out for ourselves without recourse to smiting or even shifting quantum events to prevent untruths being spread.  Possibly this is the optimal method of spreading truth, which would be consistent with God being cool.

Hey, we'll figure it out eventually.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

Oh, you probably know this, by the way, but any logical system which asserts, by proof, its own consistency must be inconsistent.  This does not include systems where consistency is merely assumed.

I myself am logically demonstrably logically inconsistent, for I believe the following sentence to be true, because of inductive arguments similar to those used by Socrates to demonstrate his own mortality:

I cannot consistently believe that this sentence is true.

[leonato.livejournal.com]

Of course I dont mean to say that the bible isn't true (absolutely or otherwise), merely that to think so is an act of faith.
Since Christ cannot have said "You must beleive absolutely in what will be written about me after my death" then it can't be necessary to belive in the absolute truth of the bible.

That said I'm sure people's incorrect intepretation of scripture causes far more problems than any problems in the text ever will.

City Church quote 2 Timothy 3 to assert the truth of the bible:

"Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful one way or another.."

which strikes me as saying that although we need not follow Jewish scripture strictly, it is Godly and can still be useful, hardly a ringing endorsement for absolute truth, which just shows what interpretation can do.

[vectorious.livejournal.com]

A lot of people (both religious and not) seem to need certainty.

Not having an absolute seems to eat at a lot of people - Plato even invented the absolute forms to get away from it. Some religious types need absoluteness as they cannot cope with "mainly right", as in words that were inspired by God but filtered through humans, and hence may not be word for word accurate. It is either absolute or nothing - there can be no in between.

Of course science does not sit well with absolutes (which does not stop scientists trying to apply them anyway) as everything in science is at best true until further notice, and often only approximately true in certain circumstances. The papers often mis-report science as the reporters don't seem to be able to cope with degrees of certainty.

I (any maybe most people) almost certainly have many things that I believe absolutely without really questioning them, but I tend not to see them as they are so much part of my world view. I wonder what they are?

[(Anonymous)]

This City-Church-going evangelical does "realise" that belief in absolute truth is a belief (and I'm far from alone). It is one I happen to hold, and base a number of my faith positions on. But it's certainly not one I would claim all Christians have to hold - and I don't believe City claim that either. We're happy to work together with other churches with alternative views.

As for describing the location of Brickfields, perhaps someone'd care to explain the joke? It seems an accurate description, if somewhat uninspiring; but Brickfields is the church's newish big building, that we can serve the community from. A number of us would like a more "traditional" church building, but if God's given us this place, surely it's best to use it as best we can?

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

I'm slightly confused at the statement about high church music. Obviously LSM don't sing many canticles, but my recollection is that there was a considerable overlap in the anthems chosen at LSM and at Peterhouse, and indeed I hear a similar repertoire when I visit cathedrals. Obviously church choirs will not be of the same standard as cathedral choirs, and this, together with the different setting, may render some pieces unsuitable, but I hardly see that we are wilfully ignoring our choral tradition as you suggest. Now, the Church of Rome, on the other hand...