1 Samuel 7

I've just read 1 Samuel 7. It's devastating - the radical social dream dies and the people want a king: to be like the other nations.

Paul Scanlon

Indictment of feeling safe in church. A congregation willing to leave their valuables on their seats - shows that they feel too safe. The church is the last place that is meant to feel safe.

The church as virtual reality - inside the church is not real! We kid ourselves that we're making a difference if we sing enough, pray enough or worship enough.

Integrity

Baroness Berridge, quoting John Stott said, on integrity, words to the effect of:

Integrity is not about honesty - it's about being integrated: not separating our personal, physical, spiritual, political lives.

Prayer discussion

We had an interesting debate at college about the way prayer works - is prayer a persuasive act in which which engage with God to influence and be influenced by him.

The ability or not to influence God began an interesting discussion about free will and predestination. A friend wanted to argue that God is outside of time and all that happens does so according to God's plan which incorporates our free choices. I wanted to debate with him that such a complete system is incompatible with personal freedom. Either God has predestined my choices (and I am only relatively free - it feels like I'm making free choices but I'm not actually because they are already decided) or I am genuinely free and God does not know in advance what I'm going to choose.

It is of course, possible to argue that God has fore-knowledge of the choices that I'm going to make due to his different relationship with time. However, foreknowledge is not the same as a preordained plan and anyway, I'm not sure that God is 'outside of time'.

In fact, inasmuch as I want to argue for the freedom of man (a freedom that enables genuine choices necessary for genuine love) I also want to argue for the freedom of God. This means that God would not actually be outside of time in order that he genuinely can respond to what's happening and be free to change his mind.

Where do the ideas of the immutability (un-changeability) of God and omniscience of God come from? Perhaps I'm ignorant of the bible verses. It strikes me that these ideas have more roots in Greek philosophy than in the scriptures.

Not political

Chatted with a guy yesterday who explained that he was going to work for some weeks at a house with Jews and Palestinians in east Jerusalem but it wasn't political.

Not political?!

It amazes me that people can feel that not engaging in political debate means that you are not being political. Really it means that you are being deliberately ignorant - not engaging is itself a political position. It strikes me that there is no (defensible) apolitical stance.

This position seems to be rooted in the myth of 'balance' in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea being that the best approach is to be even-handed (the easiest way to do this being saying nothing for either side). However, this approach neglects the present injustice and the drastic extent to which the situation is currently out of kilter.

A true balance would come through achieving an equality of rights. Whilst this 'see-saw' is currently so out of balance it is necessary to unashamedly speak up for those who don't have a voice of their own, whilst remembering that the aim is not to take a side but to achieve a just peace for all.

Ask me anything

A friend at church was wearing a t-shirt from a CU Freshers Fair campaign which had the slogan 'I'm a Christian, ask me anything' in bold capital white letters across the middle of the shirt. My question was "why are you so arrogant?"

These campaigns (like the 'I agree with Greg' OICCU one) seem to do more harm than good, making people of faith out to look thoughtless and arrogant.

Capitalism

I've been haunted by an image I saw on the BBC news yesterday. The report was on the drought and food shortages in northern Uganda. The cameras showed a mother feeding her children pieces of dried raw goat skin which they were chewing on because they were so hungry.

This is a f*$"ing disgrace.

How can we live in a such a divided, unequal world. My immediate reaction was that this kind of atrocity is the result of western capitalism. Certainly pure 'free market' capitalism is not serving the desperate needs of the bottom billion of this world. But are these anti-capitalist feelings justified?

Capitalism will be said to be the most effective way to lift people out of poverty through development from outside investment (although the bottom billion still struggle). I'm not sure about the socialist track record on international development?

What is a different vision? I don't know how to solve this (rarely mentioned) global crisis. However, I'm left feeling less inclined to sound neutral about Capitalism as the best of a bad bunch for the world (I still maintain that Christians motivated by love should be socialist). Capitalism may be the best of a bad bunch but that doesn't mean it's not negative. It's appalling that there is such inequality in the world. Unregulated Capitalism promotes this inequality (i.e. by the unlevel playing field of free market economics) and so it should be REGULATED for the negative system that it is.