tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83342158958129964602023-11-16T05:40:10.948-08:00Theoblog DurhamGuerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-68129045205965284152011-10-03T13:20:00.000-07:002011-10-03T13:20:24.173-07:00All good things...Another break in transmission - and we're back. A very long break, let's be honest. <br />
<br />
In brief - life got crazy, and not the thesis side of things which is ticking over very nicely thank-you. No, I had one of my immediate family get diagnosed with cancer and close friends lost their nine day old baby to a heart problem.<br />
<br />
Crap city. <br />
<br />
Family member doing nicely now - operation to remove the tumour went swimmingly. Our friend's knew this was coming - the whole chapter was sad beyond words. <br />
<br />
Wise words from Job - The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.<br />
<br />
So yes, my mind has not been on blogging. <br />
<br />
I did write a poem for our friend's to mark the all-too-brief of their beautiful girl Phoebe.<br />
<br />
<em>Monday came too soon<br />
Brought forth<br />
When better off inside.<br />
A fight you could not win.<br />
Fully loved,<br />
But only half a heart.<br />
<br />
Better some touch<br />
Some seeing you<br />
Than not<br />
But never enough.<br />
Oh Bright sad day,<br />
Monday came too soon.</em><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiNa0JGY0EaawE83aBBDIr7et75fTlYgEBGRe1OCVWi3yKrfMZs6zO1oK68t4oqW9RfY1tj250hDmvd2maM9d1ThKLQncHsT6O33Sz8NFCD9N45REGoYi6G8mut1aqvrQNrK57vleAd0g/s1600/durham-castle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiNa0JGY0EaawE83aBBDIr7et75fTlYgEBGRe1OCVWi3yKrfMZs6zO1oK68t4oqW9RfY1tj250hDmvd2maM9d1ThKLQncHsT6O33Sz8NFCD9N45REGoYi6G8mut1aqvrQNrK57vleAd0g/s320/durham-castle.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br />
<br />
In a couple of days we leave our life in Durham and move home to Australia. Two years ahead of plan. I'm still working on the doctorate but will be full-time in Australia with remote supervision. I've submitted my literature review and thesis proposal - once they've been marked and externally examined I'll put them up here for your reading pleasure (or incase you're having trouble sleeping).<br />
<br />
G.Guerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-40522728906953731502011-01-28T03:54:00.000-08:002011-01-28T03:54:20.962-08:00Who are you and what have you done with the real Guerin?<img height="187" id="il_fi" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLmW0qsd646p7VWSUkGpYqsrM3Ggrw_EJ8qhUctafilpwD-baC-Vvq_xFRnHuD6uilB8VtTQ2pUSUybElTjir2SCU-iv2EBILHbO1MONV_g2OLZmAfkldzzUJGtRHDJupJYYaI0SgD9jA/s320/pod1.jpg" style="padding-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="291" /><br />
<br />
No I haven't been replaced by a pod person - well may you ask what I'm talking about, and where have I been? Ok - if you haven't been following my FB updates, we were meant to spend three weeks in Italy but caught up in all the snow related 'fun' at Heathrow. Holiday got canned. Luggage lost for three weeks - various unrepeatable comments about Bristish Airways. I've been trying to push through various books for my thesis, and have neglected posting here.<br />
<br />
That still doesn't explain the above title. <br />
<br />
Let's talk TV. Or rather, the lack of a TV.<br />
<br />
I don't think its any great secret that I'm a TV addict - my preaching and writing is usually liberally scattered with various pop culture references from TV. But since moving into our current abode in England - no TV. This has been deliberate - you have to pay £145 pounds for a TV licence EVERY YEAR!!! That's on top of the cost of the TV itself. <br />
<br />
But more than that, we made the decision not to get a TV because of our daughter Aly. Because we don't have a TV in the house, it's really interesting if I take her to the Keenan House Common room - if other kids have the TV on there she just sits and gets this vacant look on her face - kids don't evaluate what they watch, it just soaks in.<br />
<br />
<img class="rg_hi" data-height="242" data-width="208" height="242" id="rg_hi" src="http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTUIniWBLXITFrrmKXUAHFKOVMb0S6KUGMK9vuDXz9F53Jpes_8" style="height: 242px; width: 208px;" width="208" /><br />
<br />
Apart from killing imaginative play, the real danger here is in branding. Go and watch a movie or commercial TV show - and play the game 'Spot the product placement'. No joke - count how often Coke, Starbucks, or whatever makes an appearance. Companies wouldn't do this if it didn't work. Aly sits and reads, or plays with her toys. She makes her own games (including a disturbing sequence in which she cooked the holy family from our nativity scene and fed them to her Teddy Bear...). The adults talk. You get used to having silence in the house and not needing background noise. We get to make good head way with our hobbies - Em's turned into a knitting MACHINE, and I've been painting a large number of models for Warhammer 40K (at present I've done up a unit of 30 Choppa Boys, 20 Shoota Boys, 20 Choppa Boys, 1 Deff Dread, and 3 Killa Kans). <br />
<br />
Which leads me to a thought hither to unimagined... No TV when we get back home to Australia. <br />
<br />
<img class="rg_hi" data-height="160" data-width="200" height="160" id="rg_hi" src="http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRn2aLwEK5IPUxA02V_cLW2Ervox45mUmkl_imJ31pA-cjsIVt7Mg" style="height: 160px; width: 200px;" width="200" /><br />
<br />
No.<br />
<br />
Really.<br />
<br />
I'm not joking.<br />
<br />
I may even trim back my DVD collection.<br />
<br />
Any way - back to the thesis.<br />
<br />
Cheers - GuerinGuerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-54973000751992254782010-11-30T13:01:00.000-08:002010-11-30T13:01:57.898-08:00A review of Bound to Sin by Alistair McFadyen.<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Synopsis:</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i> McFadyen seeks to test the explanatory power of the doctrine of original sin in the cases of child sexual abuse and the Holocaust so as to demonstrate the necessity of God and sin in public discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following the modern theological rejection of sin as being biologically transmitted, McFadyen posits that sin is instead transmitted through social means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Humans are bound to sin not through the negation of our freewill but through sin colonising our will, warping the field in which the will is exercised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By demonstrating how the will is not negated but subverted McFadyen is able to show sin’s ability to describe human pathology in ways distinct from secular disciplines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following Augustine, McFadyen posits the heart of sin as misdirected worship – what the Bible calls idolatry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>God orientated worship is therefore a means of re-educating us away from sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, he overstates the case for what worship does at the expense of the Cross, and also fails to take into account the Biblical account of sin and how his theory impinges on the doctrine of the atonement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" /></span></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;">_______________________________________________</span></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You have not yet considered the exceeding gravity of sin.</span></span></i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></b></span></span></span></i></span></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></i></div><div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">(Anselm of Canterbury)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why bother with the language of sin?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recently I have passed a shop which has used the term ‘sinful’ to describe one of their sale items.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is a word that for the most part in our culture is ignored, moralised, or in this window front, subverted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Inherent in this subversion is the idea that Christianity equates sexuality with sin – but modern people know sex is pleasurable, and having rejected the relevance of God, the language of sin is now only useful as a playful reference to sexual hedonism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is absent from the language of morality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is seen as irrelevant to public discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only quaint Vicars in antiquated robes need employ the term – and even they rush past it into the next hymn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the larger part, sin is a dead word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But sin still matters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The great error has been the decoupling of sin from the person of God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is sinful, because it speaks of broken relation between the Creator and the creation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is not about being bad:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sin is the language of relational pathology; of the root to all the evil in our world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i> Alistair McFadyen seeks to test the usefulness of the language of sin in dealing with actual examples of pathology in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He employs the term pathology because of its biological and medical associations – here is sickness; here something is wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in the role of doctor, he reaches for sin as the overlooked means of diagnosing the nature of the pathology.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Although ostensibly about whether the concept of sin adds anything in describing human pathology beyond that which is capable through secular language, at its core this book is about God<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- can we talk meaningfully about God?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The validity of sin-talk is therefore critical to the validity of God talk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If sin-talk adds nothing to the understandings provided through psychology, psychiatry, sociology, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">etc.</i>, then it is a category of speech that is superfluous.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So too God:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if reality can be adequately described without reference to God, then God’s existence is not necessary.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McFadyen relates this position to our current cultural milieu: while there are most definitely vocal detractors of the divine, our society is one of practical atheism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, we (even believing Christians) make no reference to God in the public sphere; all things are described and understood without reference to God.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>God is therefore redundant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if people are reluctant to talk about God, then they actively flee sin-talk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, if sin-talk is able to demonstrate a capacity to describe human pathology in a way that no secular category is able to, then not only may sin-talk be retained, but so also may God-talk, as the concept of sin is not so much moral but relational – the pathology resides in its orientation against God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If God is real then nothing that is can have its being without some referent to him and failure to do so marks a discipline as a failure.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></b></span></span></i></span></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This is practical theology in both senses of the word – it seeks to uniquely describe human pathology, and also claims that theology is of itself practical: sin-talk and God-talk relate to the real world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To this end McFadyen considers two examples of what should be universally considered pathological, child sexual abuse and the Jewish Holocaust conducted by the German Nazi state, and sees whether the doctrine of original sin, as historically understood, is able to describe them in a way that exceeds or differs from secular methodologies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McFadyen posits that if this is so, then the situation we are confronted with is this:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>secular means of describing pathology are by themselves not wrong, but inadequate.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> It is this issue of adequacy/inadequacy that drives McFadyen’s rigorous logic: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if God exists and if sin has reality beyond mere morality, then it must be an observable and describable feature of the world we know, inhabit, and observe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Correlation between the observable and theological language is a necessity if theology is to have any validity in the public domain.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McFadyen’s assumption in this is of course that sin is somehow quantifiable; his methodology rests on bringing theology into conversation with secular disciplines to highlight their inability and theology’s ability to account for reality.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">McFadyen chooses the doctrine of original sin not simply because it is the theological connection with human pathology, but because the doctrine itself has been seen to be problematic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He outlines sin as something that is not core to our human nature, even though it is universal; something that is continuous rather than episodic; something that we pass on to others as it was passed to us; and something that that is universal – though not core to the human ontology and yet present in all of us.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus original sin posits two things that together are anathema to contemporary (modernist) thinking: liberty to choose and being held in thrall by some power external to ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Put briefly, the problem is this:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if we are bound to sin by it being ontologically part of our nature inherited from Adam, then how can we be held accountable for it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If something occurs not through my own personal exercising of my will, but through an inherited state then how am I to be held responsible for it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I am captive, or have not willed something, why should God, (how dare God!) seek to punish me?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freedom of choice is one of the cornerstones of our society:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>oppression (limiting or removing choice) is immoral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For freedom to truly be free it must be absolute, and untethered by any strictures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For freedom to exist, the self must be unfettered and able to choose the good or the bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is a sinner only in so far as one chooses to sin, and not by means of sin entangling our nature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The doctrine of original sin, indeed the Bible’s own testimony, is therefore dismissed not for a lack of explanatory power to understand reality, but because it is seen to infringe the prior commitment to freedom, possibly before any consideration is given to the ethics of judging someone for an action they could not have willed otherwise:</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Modernity’s core premise concerning human nature clashes immediately, then, with the traditional doctrine of original sin, which holds that sin (at least since the Fall) is not in any simple way a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">phenomenon</b> of, but is prior to individual freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> pre-conditions</b> freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a structural co-determinate of human being and action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin lies <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">behind</b> action, in the most basic intentionality of the agent (indeed, in the biological and social processes which lie behind that), and not only in the acts themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But how then may, not merely moral acts, but the human condition itself, be said to be characterised by freedom?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In its traditional form, the doctrine of original sin appears to modern sensibilities to propose a metaphysics of sin (to ontologise sin in the form of bondage and non-personal attribution of guilt) which runs directly counter to the metaphysics of freedom characteristic of modernity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In so doing, the traditional doctrine appears to the modern (just as much as it frequently did to the pre-modern) mind to undermine the possibilities of deploying sin as a moral language; to undermine the very conditions for making moral judgments.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></b></span></span></span></a></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But is this actually so?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do we possess freedom in this way?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In answering this question McFadyen works up two thick descriptions of child sexual abuse (primarily from the victim’s perspective) and the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Problem’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McFadyen makes a crucial point for his readers:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>these two concrete examples of human pathology were selected not to demonstrate sin, but to see if the doctrine of sin is able to offer something in describing this pathology beyond, but in partnership with, secular disciplines.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His primary insight in this is to take into consideration not simply the individual will, but the environment in which the will is exercised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is crucial to McFadyen’s thesis:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he wishes to test whether human will is bound to sin not through biological inheritance from primordial ancestors but through culture, through institutions, through our experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In so doing, he is simultaneously affirming the necessity of freedom to will in order to sin with the observation that we do not experience or possess freedom in the titanic sense it is often portrayed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freedom is reliant upon context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freedom is informed and known only through our environs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My willed action does not disappear into the ether after I have performed it, rather it changes the nature of the field of future actions by myself, but also for others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is true for the individual, for families, for institutions and states.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each person exists in reference to a multivalent field of influences that inform (or distort) our preconceived ideas of the good so that while we may well be ‘free’ to choose our actions, the reality is that our choice is inherently distorted by prior acts of willing and action – this is how we are bound to sin and yet retain freedom:</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Here there is a thoroughgoing substitution of social categories for the ontological and metaphysical language through which the doctrine of original sin is traditionally expressed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we inherit are the consequences of a past history of freedom as they distort the conditions of communication and relation (and thereby of meaning-, value-, and identity-formation) in which we are situated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We inherit this, furthermore, not merely as the external situation upon which we act, but in the internal pre-conditioning of our free agency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is then propagated through forms of sociality distorted through a history of sinning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The social processes, structures, and institutions through which we are called into full personhood, the very processes through which we receive the conditions for autonomous and therefore responsible action, are pathologically distorted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are alienated and alienating from God</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span></span></span></a></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thus it is that willing becomes McFadyen’s Archimedean point upon which to move the world; but it could also prove his Achilles’ heel:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in claiming that exercising of the will is not coterminous with moral accountability</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> he has made willing the point by which his thesis stands or falls.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In turning to McFadyen’s enquiry into child abuse and the holocaust, insofar as he presents his accounts of both, similar patterns of enculturated sin emerge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least in these two cases McFadyen showed that the pathology was not simply one of cause and effect, but of an altering of the relational and motivating dynamics in both the victims of abuse and the breadth of the German state under the Nazis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In both cases reality and identity are recreated so as to further enmesh the pathological orientation inherent in their worldview, values and decision making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is not passed on via procreation, but via relationality and the reshaping of the field within which one wills.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is located precisely where we want to proclaim our freedom – in the exercising of will.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once introduced to the human ecology it does not exist as a discrete feature but enters all facets of life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The will is changed internally in the case of abused children, and for both the perpetrators and the victims of the Holocaust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This brings us to a related doctrine – Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In saying we are totally depraved, Calvin did not mean that we are all totally monsters, but rather that sin has entered every part of our existence, there is no part of our nature that is exempt.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This perspective will be of assistance when we contrast Augustine and Pelagius on the relationship between sin and the will.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">McFadyen finds a supportive dialogue partner in feminist theology, where he finds an analog for sin: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the feminist understanding of the nature of patriarchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea of patriarchy does not simply reside in simple actions in which women are limited in choice and worth, rather it exists as a field of force with a culture:</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">… ‘patriarchy’ is not an external object of choice in relation to which will is neutral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is already present within the internal dynamics of self-orientation and life-intentionality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than presenting itself as one object of possible choice among others, ‘patriarchy’ functions as the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">basis and foundation</b> of all choosing and acting, as the rules by which one makes choices, which are not themselves open to scrutiny or direct choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>… its core ideological function is to shape and influence us, not only through external constraints, but through the internal shaping of cognition, desire and (therefore) will .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Patriarchy’ need not then be chosen explicitly or directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is ‘chosen’ implicitly in and with every choice that operationally assumes its base assumptions and meanings</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span></span></span></a></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So too sin – it colours our values, perception and orientation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin binds us, not by removing our freedom of will, but by subtly warping the field in which freedom is exercised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a loathsome thing, because our every free choice simply serves to bind us evermore to sin, by further warping our will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is insidious and virulent, as indeed has been testified to in the test cases of sexual abuse and the Holocaust – like patriarchy, sin operates not as an external power but as something internal to us, which limits the field of possible willing.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">McFadyen now turns to Augustine as the representative figure for the doctrine of original sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The heart of the matter is the necessity of the exercising of will in order to transgress and incur guilt:</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The bottom line is that freedom is a prerequisite for there to be a moral accounting of behaviour, at least in the sense that it would have been possible to have willed or done otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Determination and moral evaluation are usually considered antithetical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that sense at least moral behaviour involved free willing and intentionality, coupled with freedom in action sufficient to enact the will.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></b></span></span></span></a></span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Pelagius championed the view that freedom is absolute, that the will was not enslaved to sin, indeed it remained free even after willing a sinful (immoral) act.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[19]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any talk of being bound was seen to deny this foundational premise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What this fails to take into consideration is the situatedness of human existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what is seen in McFadyen’s test cases – all things are not equal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Context -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>previous acts of willing, even those taken by others - reshapes the situation in which one wills, so that even when will and action appear free, they are so bound in the continuum of events that the perception of reality and the concept of the good have been changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In McFadyen’s account, sin exerts a field of force so that the will, while free to choose, has had its field of reference so altered that it is enmeshed in a sinful pattern and cannot will apart from it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pelagius would see the will as the Phoenix:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>rising anew from the ashes of each act of will, unfettered and bound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What McFadyen has shown, following Augustine, is that the will is more like Marley’s ghost – weighed down with chains wrought through each and every act of will – free, but loaded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this illustration breaks down on the Augustinian side, because it might be an inadequate portrayal of the location of the chains – they are internal, not external to the self.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Augustine’s view sin does not force us as an external force, but rather as an internal compulsion.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[20]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are bound, not in chains, but through a radical re-orientating of our worldview, our values, and what we think will make for felicity.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This introduces the real death blow to the Pelagian view of sin, and what sets Augustine’s view in relationship to the Gospel: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the nature of the good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his zeal to safeguard human will, Pelagius had the will as independent of all external forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What this meant however was that the will was to understand and construe the good, without any external influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Augustine wrote that this meant separation even from God <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>– in trying to preserve the will, Pelagius had brought us back to Eden, to the desire to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be like God, to be the arbiters of what is good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Augustine countered this by saying that the good is good only in relationship to, and by the regal decree of, God himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Having been separated from God and the good, the will is unable to return to them by its own efforts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any attempts at rediscovery or union by ourselves only further entrench the separation created by sin:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘In acting on the illusory assumption that sin has no real, conditioning power over us in reality, that we remain free in relation to it, we lend sin ever more power and embed it all the more deeply.’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[21]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is needed is for God to act as saviour – to reconcile humanity to himself, and therefore to know the good once more in relationship to him.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[22]</span></span></span></span></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">McFadyen posits that Christian community and communal life, that is, life rebuilt and relearned in communion with God, is an essential part of God’s panacea for sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the church is of course itself sinful, the church plays an educative role in unbinding human life from sin – not educative in the sense of merely imparting information, but as a counter-culture wherein relationships, values and identity are reworked offering an alternative to the existing sinful paradigms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following Augustine, McFadyen rejects the popular understanding of sin as pride, or sloth, or immorality, instead positing that the heart of sin is idolatry:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sin is misplaced worship:</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[23]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The idol exerts a comprehensive and compelling field of force, which sequesters all other dynamics and forces (including God) into its own service.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The worth of all else becomes a matter of its functional utility in relation to that which is worshipped, which functions as the criterion of truth and righteousness as well as of value (goodness).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not only does the idol override all other claims, it bends the whole of life into its exclusive service</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[24]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">True, loving, joyful worship restores the focus upon God to whom it rightly belongs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joy is found in the good as revealed and known in God, who <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i></b> the good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Identity is formed not by the independent exercising of the will, but through relation with God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worship is thus not a mere activity but the natural, God ordained nature of being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worship is more than just song and prayer – it is the description of a God-re-orientated life in communion with God and his people.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Has McFadyen succeeded in retaining the doctrine of original sin?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through rigorous logic he has demonstrated that the language of sin is better placed to describe human pathology in the cases he examines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has shown that sin is more than mere morality by showing that the complexity of willing in the situations considered is beyond our normal patterns of culpability.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[25]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin so changes the field in which will is exercised as to bind it, while still allowing for an active willing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McFadyen concludes:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Sin now appears as energised resistance to the dynamics of God and, thereby, as constriction in the fullness of being-in-communion and joy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is thus construed primarily in dynamic terms, as highly energised, comprehensive disorientation in, through and of all relationships.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such energised disorientation is also communicable and, whilst the claim of biological transmission has not been amenable to testing in relation to these pathologies, it is clear that this disorientation is transmittable through the dynamics of social relationships.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That includes those through which we construct our personhood, identity, life-intentionality (including desire) and sense of what is good, right and true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin therefore is not an object of possible choice, external to my will, but a dynamic disorientation already internalised in my will and redoubled with the addition of personal energy I provide through my own willing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All this suggests a working out of the doctrine of original sin in terms of communication, rather than causality</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[26]</span></span></span></span></a> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin-talk would seem to offer something by way of descriptive and explanatory power beyond that which the secular disciplinary languages allow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This in turn, demonstrates that God-talk should not be precluded from the public sphere.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There are two pragmatic issues arising from McFadyen’s thesis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first is to establish the place and necessity for sin-talk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least in so far as his two test cases will allow, his theory stands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin as a life orientation that internally warps the field of willing that is communicable has been shown to be a viable description.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The language of sin is a valuable asset that assists us in making sense of the human pathology we encounter in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second pragmatic issue is one of remedy. But is worship really the answer to sin?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin may be idolatry, but can we so simply assume that the worshipful life of the church is the answer?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many victims of childhood sexual abuse of the church would disagree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The German Reich church had its worship subverted through its allegiance to the Nazi party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where are we to find a church that is not in some way compromised by its culture location?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The church, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, may have an educative role to play in the common life of believers, but McFadyen seems to have overstated the case for what worship does.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worship is important in the sphere of soteriology, but it is not our worship that frees us from sin:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it is Christ, who in the ultimate act of worship was himself both great High Priest and perfect sacrifice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is his act of worship that is the panacea for sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worship now is only ever a foretaste of the true, joyful and sinless worship that will exist in the fully realised Kingdom of God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McFadyen’s formulation of worship is therefore a form of over-realised eschatology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">McFadyen’s theory has other problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has overlooked two areas and how they impact on his reworking on the doctrine of original sin:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the Biblical language of Sin and the nature of the Atonement.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Much of McFadyen’s work is taken up with the issue of willing (that is, our active participation in sin); what remains untouched is sin’s own willing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Human culpability and participation in sin do not exhaust the issue of willing – sometimes in Scripture sin itself is spoken of as willing, or desiring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In warning Cain God speaks of sin actively desiring him (Genesis 4:7).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Apostle Paul writes of sin actively seizing opportunities to turn him away from God’s good law (Romans 7:8, 11).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is telling that while Berkouwer refused to define sin as the work of the demonic, yet he still wrote of sin as an alien other : <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘a very vicious and mortal enemy, an irascible and persistent power’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[27]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is beyond mere anthropomorphism, rather it reminds us that the issue of evil is one that is larger than simply a human problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin and evil are somehow the true primordial enemies of God; sin may have entered human ontology in the events of Genesis 3, but whether the text is read literally or metaphorically, evil/sin is prior to the fall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin is an un-thing:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it is not part of the created order and yet it exists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McFadyen’s description may be a true analysis of sin, but it does not exhaust the reality of sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not to invalidate his work, but a call to walk humbly – there is a precipice at the edge of what is humanly discernable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sin, like God himself, retains something that transcends our ability to comprehend without revelation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The issue of revelation is pertinent in at least one critique of McFadyen’s approach:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>his thesis grants primacy to the Augustinian formulation of the doctrine, without a detailed biblical account of sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Augustine may have been dealing with the Bible in his theological work, but Augustine himself is not Scripture.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">While I agree with McFadyen’s point that Christians are implicated in the practical atheism of our culture that precludes God from any discourse about the nature of reality, why is the present cultural setting considered so problematic?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paul writes of how human beings suppress the knowledge of God from creation (Romans 1:18ff) – this has always been the case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is in itself symptomatic of what McFadyen himself identifies as sin – not the breaking of moral norms but the break in relationship with God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Somewhat contentiously, let me suggest that our society’s indelicate rejection of God-talk, of exclusion of God, is just as illustrative biblically of sin as is paedophilia or the holocaust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not to minimize the singular horror or either, but to point to the simple truth that McFadyen himself reminds us:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sin is more than moral failure, it has to do with a broken relationship with God.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We also need to ask, what does McFadyen’s formulation of sin do to the atonement?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What sense can we make of Christ being made sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The definitive nature of the cross is lost in favour of an educative and participatory salvation through participation in worship</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[28]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> or through God’s re-creative work in the resurrection</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn29" name="_ftnref29" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[29]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This seems to align with the emphasis on incorporation into the life of the triune God; but while Scripture does talk of the disciples’ life with God (for example John 14), it is not the primary Biblical paradigm, which is instead Christological.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McFadyen fails to attend to one of the New Testament’s most cherished topics – what did the cross achieve?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is one thing to talk about ‘Joy worthy of God has already gone through the cross’</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn30" name="_ftnref30" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[30]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> without explaining how the death of the one is related to the sin of the many.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And herein resides a key Biblical concept that aids us in understanding the atonement and the nature of sin:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that is representative headship:</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 1cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">According to Scripture the kind of solidarity with Adam which explains the participation of all in Adam’s sin is the kind of solidarity which Christ sustains to those united to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The parallel in Rom. 5:12-19; 1 Cor. 15:22, 45-49 between Adam and Christ indicates the same type of relationship in both cases, and we have no need to posit anything more ultimate in the case of Adam and the race than we find in the case of Christ and his people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the latter it is representative headship, and this is all that is necessary to ground the solidarity of all in the sin of Adam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To say that the sin of Adam is imputed to all is but to say that all were involved in his sin by reason of his representative headship.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftn31" name="_ftnref31" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[31]</span></b></span></span></span></a></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The concept that sin is transmitted biologically is incorrect – we all share Adam’s sin, because he is the original human being who is representative of the whole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is the human ambassador who speaks and acts for the whole of humanity:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it is not biological descent from him that binds humanity to sin, but his position as appointed by God as the head of humanity:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘as in Adam all die’ (1 Corinthians 15:22) is not about biology but ontology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is Jesus’ role as the new Adam (new head/ambassador) that permits his self-sacrifice for sin on the cross, and is why his resurrected life is good news for those ‘in Christ’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This concern, taken with my previous comment regarding the Bible’s talk of sin as an entity, does not unpick McFadyen’s primary thesis regarding the relevance of any form of God-talk to reality over and above secular description, but rather reveals an oversight into what sin is, and therefore how we are to formulate our doctrinal understanding of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as McFadyen described secular means of describing human pathology not as wrong, but as inadequate without sin-talk, so too, McFadyen’s own presentation on sin is not wrong but inadequate:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sin is more than the social structures, pressures and personal inheritance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To talk about sin is to talk about the nature of evil itself – the dark primordial thing that is the enemy of God, the thing defeated in the Cross, and whose end is the lake of burning fire (Revelation 20:14).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What McFadyen has done is describe how sin operates in some capacity – he has demonstrated that the language of sin is useful in describing concrete situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it would be a mistake to assume that we now know the true and full nature of sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anselm was right:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sin far exceeds what we can test for or imagine.</span></span></div><div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><br clear="all" /><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /></span><div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Anselm of Canterbury <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cur Deus Homo</i> (Edinburgh:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Grant, 1909), 50</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">McFadyen, Alistair<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin</i> (Cambridge:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cambridge University Press, 2000),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>7.</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 5-7</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 9</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 54</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 53</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 54 </span></span></div></div><div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 16-17</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 28-29</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 48</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 36</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 113</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn13" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 78-79, 104</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn14" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 110</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn15" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Calvin, Jean<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Institutes of the Christian Religion Vol.1. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(London:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>James Clarke, 1962), 248-255</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn16" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 148-149</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn17" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 149</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn18" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 21</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn19" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[19]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 171</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn20" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[20]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 182-183</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn21" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[21]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 174</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn22" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[22]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 184-185</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn23" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[23]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 125</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn24" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[24]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 225</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn25" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[25]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 128-130</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn26" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref26" name="_ftn26" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[26]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 246-247</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn27" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref27" name="_ftn27" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[27]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Berkouwer, Gerrit C., <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sin</i> (Grand Rapids MI:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>William B. Eerdmans, 1971), 235</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref28" name="_ftn28" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[28]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 215ff</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn29" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref29" name="_ftn29" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[29]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin</i>, 210-211</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn30" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref30" name="_ftn30" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[30]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bound to Sin,</i> 211</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn31" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8334215895812996460#_ftnref31" name="_ftn31" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Calibri", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[31]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> ‘Sin’ in Douglas, James D., (Ed.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Bible Dictionary</i> (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1962), 1107</span></span></div></div></div>Guerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-35357411075194248392010-11-29T09:03:00.000-08:002010-11-29T09:18:38.991-08:00Journal of Dangerous Ideas - part the first.Any idiot can criticise - it takes a certain sort of idiot to make a contribution... a dangerous idiot. Herein lies an attempt at dangerous idiocy.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOcgoyWWl8MEGueiQwbqtzCVzuhTLAFbw94n-zpM-SyFWdbI4Wl9JPYMjdui-5ThzYpuGdxobGBNt1sSMmcpq25NjG60tSLOsoxctVUwRFIUbBwVBsIdgq44A04nWTPctU-fiyik-zyEc/s1600/imagesCABO5UK2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" ox="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOcgoyWWl8MEGueiQwbqtzCVzuhTLAFbw94n-zpM-SyFWdbI4Wl9JPYMjdui-5ThzYpuGdxobGBNt1sSMmcpq25NjG60tSLOsoxctVUwRFIUbBwVBsIdgq44A04nWTPctU-fiyik-zyEc/s1600/imagesCABO5UK2.jpg" /></a></div><div align="center" class="separator" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaLV0G9XHM2IehF12kOVa1q6p0ddeY9A8d8Y7FCBq-0z2LQnesVAeH1UPURAjMC9aYsAUHXhwDa4q97tHgjcEUxLWx9LuOcLubFLTTbmou72ToaQO6j0j290UjGuO0Plk57TNxGUOxDQE/s1600/imagesCABO5UK2.jpg"><span style="text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" stroked="f"><stroke joinstyle="miter"></stroke><formulas><f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></f><f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></f><f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></f><f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></f><f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></f><f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></f><f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></f><f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></f><f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></f><f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></f><f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></f><f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></f></formulas><path gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect" o:extrusionok="f"></path><lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"></lock></shapetype><shape alt="" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaLV0G9XHM2IehF12kOVa1q6p0ddeY9A8d8Y7FCBq-0z2LQnesVAeH1UPURAjMC9aYsAUHXhwDa4q97tHgjcEUxLWx9LuOcLubFLTTbmou72ToaQO6j0j290UjGuO0Plk57TNxGUOxDQE/s1600/imagesCABO5UK2.jpg" id="_x0000_i1025" o:button="t" style="height: 24pt; width: 24pt;" type="#_x0000_t75"></shape></span></a></div><br />
What dangerous ideas are we talking about here? I've commented previously on issues about places like Lindisfarne which have a facade of Christianity but are now distanced from the actual Christian faith (Holy Island Cream Liqueur anyone?). <br />
<br />
How about we actually use our church buildings in communicating the Christian faith? I'm wearing my art history hat here (which I majored in for my original degree at Monash University) - during the medieval period the churches painted Bible stories on the church walls for the peons to look at during the Mass - given that the service and the Bible reading were in Latin. This idea of the 'gospel for the illiterate' assumed that people would learn the Bible's metanarrative and individual stories through these pictures.<br />
<br />
What I'm suggesting is this - person X rocks up at a Cathedral/picturesque stone church for a look around. Instead of trying to flog novelty tea-towels and histories of the parish, maybe we could use the previous opportunity to explain the person the stain glass windows are depicting; how things like the pulpit, the baptism font, or the communion table relate to what we actually believe. Jesus. <br />
<br />
If we have a bookshop, maybe we could stop selling Jesus-junk and actually have Bibles, and good books on the Christian faith. Dare I say it - like St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral, Sydney? Yes - a Melbourne boy is saying something nice about Sydney... They have free CD's with a simple gospel message; run Bible studies for people throughout the week. They don't talk much about how the physical contents of the Church relate to the gospel message, but you can't have everything. <br />
<br />
The basic question is how do we make our buildings work for us (well, for the gospel) rather than against it, but sucking up all our time/resources/emotions? Doing this isn't a universal panacea for the Church's ills, but it would be a positive step towards making the church's buildings more missional rather than the goal themselves. <br />
<br />
Stay dangerous.<br />
<br />
G.Guerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-45341312869900230702010-11-26T12:41:00.000-08:002010-11-26T12:41:43.809-08:00There's SNOW business like SNOW business, there's SNOW business I know...Please forgive the long break between drinks - I have two excuses: a) a note from my mother (who is staying with us), and b) I have actually been working (waits for cries of 'I can't believe it').<br />
<br />
The weather has turned markedly towards winter, and by winter, I mean it snowed. A lot. 10 + cms. For a family used to Australian summers, thats a lot of snow! It granted Durham a rather otherworldly look, which has given way to grumbling, swearing and staggering as people try to get off the now icy paths onto the few that the County Council is actually putting salt/grit onto.<br />
<br />
Aly has had her first experience of snow - still undecided about the whole caper though. She'll hopefully grow to enjoy it (given we've still got winter to go - technically we're still in Autumn). Em has taken up baking her own bread which has been a great (tasty) success. Spelt flour has proved a little tricker to master, but in the end, the moral of the story is: Emma always wins.<br />
<br />
My studies are progressing - I've had my first formative essay back with very positive comments, and have just finished a first draft for the summative piece on the book I mentioned in an earlier post - 'Bound to Sin', by Alistair McFadyen. As soon as its finished I'll post it here for your interest.<br />
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I've also met with my supervisor for the first time - David Wilkinson (principal of St John's College). He's been really supportive, and had some good suggestions, and good questions too! My favourite is what's your writing style? Up to 3am the night before, or slow steady progression? It used to the the former, but now I can do either - Aly's birth during my Master of Ministry work may have had a hand in this.<br />
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We're continuing to attend St Nic's in the Market Place, which has been really welcoming. The Vicar has invited me to preach in the new year, which is a very welcome opportunity to keep my skills up - and I always find I learn more about God when I'm having to read the Bible, and thinking and pray about the passage too. <br />
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We're missing family and friends back in Australia - its hard to believe its been over three months since we left! There have been some hard things happen for our extended family which makes being here harder than it was already knowing that we could be away for so long - but while its no absolute panacea, Skype does have its benefits! How long we're actually here for is hard to say - but the department is happy to allow people in the later years of the program to have supervision remotely, as long as you make a reasonable appearance in Durham every year. <br />
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Back again soon with a theological paper for your consideration.<br />
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G.Guerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-34707663940369082252010-10-27T11:40:00.000-07:002010-10-27T11:44:28.869-07:00DisappointmentYou taste the apple but its chalky.<br />
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You buy the car but its a lemon.<br />
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You take the holiday but rains all the time.<br />
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Disappointed.<br />
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We went to Lindisfarne today. Visually it was beautiful, haunting; ancient history before your very eyes.<br />
<img class="rg_hi" data-height="196" data-width="257" height="196" id="rg_hi" src="http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRY6p-Bg4ucezucbVzIKjm-6v9FwoEhSPNw4xgtn5RWC63uFpc&t=1&usg=__Wf193vgxrwzH9ob-u62-0WsNwuA=" style="height: 196px; width: 257px;" width="257" /><br />
But I went home disappointed. Why? Because what I saw today present Christianity as a museum piece; it talked about the Gospel, but presented nothing of its content. In the Lindisfarne Centre there was a lot about the history of the island in the face of Viking invasion; a lot on the history of how the Lindisfarne Gospels were written and illustrated; a lot about life on the island in that early era; a lot about Cuthbert. Not a lot - if anything - about Jesus.<br />
<img class="rg_hi" data-height="264" data-width="191" height="264" id="rg_hi" src="http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSRGKlQDme0WTZQ0y3vuXXkR4ZQcb0tZhEI_a25CCPByXdPaGE&t=1&usg=___j1yBzQV3REnEXBmRsNSu2RDTH0=" style="height: 264px; width: 191px;" width="191" /><br />
Where was the content of the four Gospels? Who was it that the early missionaries spoke about? Why was it the monks lavished so much effort on their books? <br />
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Where was God? Where was Jesus?<br />
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Nowhere in what we saw today - with one exception, the Catholic shopkeeper who had various devotional items in the general store. How come I could buy any number of books on the history of the Lindisfarne Gospels, but couldn't buy a copy of the Bible on the island (let along a copy of Matthew, or Mark, or Luke, or John)? <br />
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A lot of the 'Christian history of England' seems to be about the buildings, the institutions, the kings, and not about Christ himself.<br />
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A lesson for home - in one hundred or a thousand years time people of talking about the Anglican Christians of Canberra and Goulburn Diocese (or whatever your home region or demonination is) will they be talking about your faith in terms of its outward signs (buildings and documents) or about the Lord Jesus Christ? <br />
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Does our use of money and energy represent our investment in proclaiming Jesus or proclaiming our institution?<br />
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G.Guerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-59255329812291597252010-10-22T09:37:00.000-07:002010-10-22T09:39:02.461-07:00The promise of good things.Well now, THIS looks interesting... Looking forward to reading something by these two Anglican scholars.<br />
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<div class="span-24"><h1 class="navtop">Barton Books — Published Titles </h1></div><div class="column span-4"><img alt="Barton Books logo" class="imgwrapper-L" height="218" src="http://www.bartonbooks.com.au/images/bartonbooks3.jpg" width="150" /> <br />
<div class="navleft"></div></div><div class="span-16"><div class="span-4"><img alt="Called To Minister" height="240" src="http://www.bartonbooks.com.au/images/definingconvictions-150.jpg" width="150" /> <br />
<h2 class="booktitle">Defining Convictions and Decisive Commitments: The Thirty-Nine Articles in Contemporary Anglicanism </h2><span class="bookauthor">by<br />
Michael Jensen and Tom Frame</span><br />
RRP: tba<br />
Published: November 2010</div><div class="column span-12 last">"We firmly believe that the Articles have a continuing place in the life of the Anglican Church of Australia because they deserve such a place. In our view the Articles are a treasury of wholesome doctrine and ought to serve as the basis for assessing new thinking and novel customs. We are convinced that the Articles point to a distinctly Anglican approach to theology and ecclesiology, and are worthy of close attention and sustained study. Rather than have the Articles overlooked in the hope that they might quietly fade from view, we argue that Anglicans ought to pay closer attention to the Articles. In relation to disagreements about their meaning, Anglicans ought to engage in discussion about where and how they might be amended. Ultimately we might achieve a new consensus or see new articles added in relation to matters that presently divide Christians – and even Anglicans. Pretending the Articles do not exist is not a long-term solution or an attractive option in any sense. The longer the task of reviewing and revising the Articles is delayed, the more imposing will be the scope and substance of matters requiring clarification and codification.<br />
This small book is part of our effort to revive interest in the Articles. It reflects our commitment to an expression of Anglican mission and ministry that honours the past, engages with the present and anticipates the future, for the sake of Jesus Christ and the coming Kingdom of God."<br />
Michael Jensen<br />
Moore Theological College, Sydney<br />
Tom Frame<br />
St Mark's National Theological Centre, Canberra</div></div>Guerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-36195079912441873902010-10-21T14:29:00.000-07:002010-10-21T14:31:42.187-07:00Monkey alert!<div style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr4hu7vgJ2NGZsGPg22RyIrzBgroimaz1iHvbA3dxajjWhKHPHVwDPEVTuZLJRcatNOc8NiR5zdv_EAQPxzTVbPbQ3f4vaxwFbhoAOfdjemhVLazCt2efMJBKaDpC4St-Pkh-bNOo9ywU/s1600/blogging.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="272" nx="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr4hu7vgJ2NGZsGPg22RyIrzBgroimaz1iHvbA3dxajjWhKHPHVwDPEVTuZLJRcatNOc8NiR5zdv_EAQPxzTVbPbQ3f4vaxwFbhoAOfdjemhVLazCt2efMJBKaDpC4St-Pkh-bNOo9ywU/s320/blogging.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Had the first session of a MA class I'm auditing on Anglican Theological Identity today; it was a good start but highlighted a serious flaw. (Apologies to any English Anglicans reading...) The Church of England actually finds it hard to speak of Anglicanism; the colonials present (Australian, American, New Zealand) seem to have much sharper sense of a distinctive Anglican identity, even if we don't agree on the features of that identity. What does it mean to be an Anglican Christian?<br />
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The problem is like the above picture - too many monkeys!!! (No offence to anyone at the seminar today.) In practice its very hard to talk about Anglican <em>theological</em> identity - often whats discussed isn't theological but historical or experiential. Yes, I'm aware that church history is sometimes regarded as as the history of doctrines; what I mean is how to define Anglicanism by its distinctive theology not merely by its history? Lots of people want to talk about my subjective experience of being Anglican rather than talking about its theological distinctives.<br />
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<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSFY54M9fKWWvnbn4fW3v8QAhJliic49tgHOmUKRRciUid0EJY&t=1&usg=__DSjgrioEXvjd4QKWWL-wlnu64hA=" imageanchor="1" style="cssfloat: undefined;"><img border="0" class="rg_hi" data-height="183" data-width="275" height="183" id="rg_hi" src="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSFY54M9fKWWvnbn4fW3v8QAhJliic49tgHOmUKRRciUid0EJY&t=1&usg=__DSjgrioEXvjd4QKWWL-wlnu64hA=" style="height: 183px; width: 275px;" width="275" /></a></div>This is a horse I've been laying into for some time and see no reason to stop now; why is it we're so reticent to accept the theology of the 39 Articles, the Prayer Book, and the Ordinal? If you're ordained (as I am) you're asked by your Bishop to subscribe to these things. For many this seems to be wink-wink, nudge-nudge... Oh yes, I subscribe to the 39 Articles - but I don't believe in them. Many pew perching Anglicans may not even know that we have a doctrinal statement (or have never been sufficently bored by a sermon to surf the Prayer Book). But they are there. They are official. And they don't seem to be going away. They may not have the size of the Westminster Confession, but they are as J.I. Packer says of a confessioinal nature. Yes, they go beyond theology into the polity of the era they were composed it, but they are still for the greater part theological in nature.<br />
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Some have pointed out that Anglican theology isn't so much confessional as it is liturgical. In some cases this is little more than an attempt to obfiscate the formularies (the 39 Articles, etc...). But there is a sense in which this is also true - we enact our theology of the atonement when we join in the words of the Great Thanksgiving which draws our attention to Jesus' death as 'full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the world'. Anglican liturgy is mean to be didactic - it teaches us about the 'faith delivered once for all to the saints' (Jude v3). We learn to live as justified sinners called to new life in Jesus in the weekly communal call to repentance and assurance of God's forgiveness. We learn to come under God's rule through hearing the Bible read and proclaimed. At its best Anglican liturgy is gospel shaped. There is of course much more to being a Christian than a weekly meeting, but what we do in that meeting should further our discipleship of Jesus Christ. We enact reconcilation and unity in the passing of the peace (or at least we should be. Its meant to be about applying Paul's call for a recognition of the church and all its members as parts of the body of Christ rather than the aneamic handshake its become in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34).<br />
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Why be Anglican? What does it mean to attend an Anglican church? <br />
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Clergy - how seriously do you take the oaths and declarations you've made?<br />
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Laity - think beyond custom and musical preference; think about what it is that the Anglican church stands for theologically. Borrow a prayer book and think about whether the shape of the service has a gospel ring to it. Think about what it is our ordained ministers are called to in the ordinal. Think about what the 39 articles put forward as the basis of Anglican theological identity.<br />
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But please keep reading the Bible too! There is a perverse trend in which we can be so smug about being Anglican that we think of being Anglican ahead of being Christian. Some Anglicans know their Prayer Book better than they know the Bible. That's tragic - our traditions should help us not distract us from our core identity - Christian.<br />
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Anglican, Baptist, Prebyterian, Methodist, and all the rest... they're secondary things. Not the main game.<br />
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On other fronts, Emma is suffering the twin burdens of cake and supermarket rage. She'd made two cakes for Aly's birthday. The first one rose but was stuck to the pan. The second collapsed but came cleanly out of the tin. I blame the local climate as Emma is normally quite a good cake maker and chef (except for the time she tried to cook and artichoke but make some sort of blue porridge). And apparently supermarkets are a lousy place to try to resettle a child whose woken up. Who knew? Aly is turning one. I can't believe it. Where's the year gone?<br />
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How best to teach your child about God? How do you introduce them to Jesus? It starts with parents not Sunday School. More on this as Aly gets older. At the moment its making church part of her life with us, reading her Kid's Bible (when it arrives from Australia), praying with her and singing hymns to her - Amazing Grace helps her settle.<br />
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More rants to come. G.Guerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8334215895812996460.post-43001229496324430552010-10-18T14:44:00.000-07:002010-10-19T00:05:21.688-07:00Take one, scene one, action!Ok, um, first post. Better make this profound... Ahhhhhhh... Well... Can I start again? <br />
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Take two.<br />
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Hi all, welcome to Theoblog! This blog is devoted to chronicling my work and life as a doctoral student at the University of Durham, a husband and father, and whatever thoughts my feverish mind deems preserving. I'm an ordained minister in the Anglican Church of Australia (a priest/presbyter depending on how reformed you are - I prefer the latter). I trained at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia; started a Master of Ministry at Ridley but finished it at St Mark's National Theological Centre in Canberra, Australia. I'd moved from Melbourne to Canberra so finishing it at Ridley was going to be a stretch. I also wanted to be able to identify with Canberra and Goulburn Diocese - fly the local flag as it were. For my Master's research project I created a feedback form for Anglican preaching (for use in parishes and theology colleges) and examined the general culture around reviewing preaching in the Anglican Chuch of Australia. <br />
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I've been a Rector in Canberra before my Bishop nominated me for a scholarship to study in the UK; my research area is: "The theology and use of the Bible in the Fresh Expressions of Church movement". I'm hoping to finish in 2013 and then return to Canberra with knowledge that will be helpful in the Australian church and a degree that might let me teach at a theological college.<br />
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I'm an evangelical Anglican Christian with an egalitarian view of gender and ministry.. I think Jesus is the most important person who ever lived (and still does). I try to take following him seriously; if you're a Christian too I hope you find my writing stimulating. If you're not a Christian I hope you find my writing a pointer to investigating who Jesus is, and why he matters. Can I start by suggesting that you read Mark's Gospel - its short, pithy, and a great way of getting to know the man.<br />
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My wife is awesome and gracious. She's left her family and job back in Australia while I do this (how long for is hard to say - she's a medico type but the NHS doesn't recognise her qualifications). My daughter is beautiful, delightful and very busy. <br />
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I'm also a nerd.<br />
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I play D&D and other roleplaying games.<br />
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I'm a Games Workshop fanboy - while in England I'm trying to limit myself to Ultramarines, Orks, Skaven, High Elves, and Orcs and Goblins.<br />
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And I have a large Transformers collection back in Australia - I have too much stuff. If anyone wants a pile of TFs (some rare) please contact me on my return to Australia.<br />
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Still reading? Trying to figure out how this all fits together? You're not the first.<br />
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I'm just about to start some reading for the prelimary work for the degree - reading and reviewing the practical theology of Alistair McFadyen's "Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin" (Cambridge University Press, 2000). I'll post my reflects for your interest and edification.Guerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12182817397584965721noreply@blogger.com6