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Struans made some most interesting comments on one of my recent posts on Purgatory. As so often with his comments, there is a wider application which merits further discussion.
He says:
As someone who rather likes the historical critical approach, I sense that the tone of C451s comments that I quote below seems to betray an erroneous preconception of this:
“We now have scholars who claim that the whole of Christianity is a man-made myth, and can provide evidence which satisfied them and many.”
“Those who preach moral relativism did not start off by finding the existing status quo good and then changed their minds under the evidence; they started off with a dissatisfaction with it and then found evidence which backed up their views.”
Which is a fair representation of what I wrote. He goes on:
So what if the scholars are right ? I think that they probably are, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no Christian truth in the myth. Myth is a mode of communication.
Christianity can still be true, as I believe it is. I sense that C451 thinks otherwise.
Myth is certainly a means of communication, but we should not fall into the not uncommon academic trap of using a word with a commonly-understood meaning. I am not sure what meaning Struans attaches to it. His friend, and the author of that splendid book Martyred Church, David Wilmshurst, has a view which accords with the common understanding of the word myth (note, I am not saying this is Sruans’ view):
I just don’t happen to believe that the Christian faith is true. I believe that the disciples falsely claimed that Jesus had risen from the dead, just as the chief priests and Pharisees said that they would (Matthew 27:64). This verse seems to me to be a crucial contemporary testimony that the disciples were prepared to found the Christian faith on a lie. We might think it strange that they were prepared to court martyrdom in the service of a lie, but their contemporaries believed that they would do just that. As a historian, I find it easier to believe that Christianity was invented by Peter and the other disciples than to believe that a dead man came back to life.
As another historian, I read that verse in precisely the opposite sense. The Evangelist reported the rumour because it was there, not because it was true. St Paul goes to great pains to emphasise the number of witnesses to the Risen Christ; this was clearly a matter of some importance to him. We cannot have it both ways. Either lots of people agreed with the Pharisees and all the evidence has vanished, except from the NT, or Paul was doing what any contemporary would do, telling people to go talk to the witnesses, confident in their testimony; as St John labours the same point, for me the evidence points in that direction. Men do not commonly martyr themseves for what they know to be a lie.
That the Apostles come off as pretty bone-headed, and that Peter hardly emerges from the pre Resurrection narratives as a hero, are also, to my historian’s sense, significant. I cannot call to mind any founding document of a faith which does this, If you are crafting a lie, why go to the trouble of making your heroes look like a bunch of bumpkins, cowards and even traitors? That would be an odd thing to do. If you know you are making it up, the least you would do would be to go on at some length about the heroism and courage of your founders. After all, who would willingly follow a bunch of cads like the Apostles?
I am with St Paul: ‘And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.’
All Along the Watchtower 
“Men do not commonly martyr themseves for what they know to be a lie.” – I totally agree. It would be remarkable, indeed, that you could spread the faith as fast it spread in the midst of a culture that might require your life if you assented to that faith. It just doesn’t pass the smell test.
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With you all the way.
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I also have an issue that uses historical critical methods to the exclusion of other methods for examining the faith. There are areas where it is helpful and there are areas where they have blinders on that their method will not let them remove. They cannot accept the supernatural within the natural world though they are speaking of a religions that professes a God – and a most remarkable intrusion into human history by that God. How can we profess to be Christians and dismiss the supernatural. Christ was not simply a man or we are left with nothing. If that were the case, it seems to me that atheism would be the only truthful reality that one could arrive at by human logic and should be adhered to by everyone of intelligence.
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Very good points. If we automatically exclude the possibility that Christianity is true, we shall end by thinking it so.
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Great post Chalcedon 451.
Historical Critical methods in my view are totally wrong. The Jesus Seminar so called is barking up the wrong tree. Its a misquided quest for a false Jesus.
History is a limited mode of human knowing. It’s analysis can yield knowledge about earliest Christianity and the figure of Jesus. BUT there are intractible limits to this knowledge.
When inquiry seeks to surmount those limits , evidence is distorted and history is discredited. Obviously the New Testament documents yield some historical information, but that is not what they do best.
When the compositions are fragmented, chopped into small pieces and arranged in arbitary sequences they do not work at all.
The literary compositions of the New Testament are analysed best when their literary integrity is respected and appreciated. Approached in this fashion they can be appreciated as witnesses and interpretations of religious experiences and convictions, of which the supernatural and miraculous are key components.
Inspite of the obvious diversity in genre, perspective and theme in the New Testament compositions, the coherence of their generative experiences and convictions can be glimpsed from their remarkable consistency concerning the image of Jesus and of discipleship.
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Good points Malcolm. HIstorical method can, and in my view does, support the Gospel story, but it is only one mode of apprehension.
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History is a good servant, but a bad master.
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An excellent point. We are too often in thrall to our own intellects – as though we were infallible.
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Just a short note, C451, to say thank you for taking my comment on Matthew 27:64 seriously. I would like to respond at length to your rebuttal, as our interpretation of this verse goes right to the heart of the Christian faith, and I hope you will allow me some time to work out a considered response. The question, basically, is: how far can we trust the witness left us by the disciples?
For the moment, I will just say that I am not convinced by the argument that men ‘do not commonly martyr themselves for what they know to be a lie.’ I agree that to us, living in the twenty-first century, it seems difficult to believe that the apostles could have done so. But the beauty of my argument from Matthew 27:64 is that it depends on contemporary testimony, not on our own a priori assumptions of how men reasoned in the first century AD. We are told by the Christians themselves that Jesus’s enemies believed that the disciples were prepared to steal the body of their master and proclaim that he had risen from the dead, even though they knew this to be a lie. I don’t think it is necessary for agnostics like myself to try to reconstruct the psychology of the disciples. It is enough to point out that their contemporaries believed that they were indeed capable of ‘martyring themselves for what they knew to be a lie.’
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David, if you would like some space, Jessica says she’s more than happy either to send you an invitation to contribute, or to put an email from you in the form of a guest post – as you wish.
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That’s very kind of you both. Somehow or other I have managed to maneouvre myself into the position of the loathsome Un-man of C. S. Lewis’s ‘Perelandra’, my personal favourite among his many splendid books. I am not quite sure what I am doing making myself unpopular on a blog which was established primarily for Christians to share their views with other Christians; but I would certainly enjoy the opportunity to discuss the historicity of the Gospels with somebody like yourself who values the claims of historical truth and approaches evidence as a good historian should. I will contact Jessica once I have put something together worth posting.
All the same, I fear that I will be seriously outnumbered in the coming debate. I also seem to hear Jessica in the background cheering you on, like the Green Lady in Lewis’s novel: ‘Oh, brave Piebald, this is the best you have said yet!’ I will try not to be as disagreeable as Weston.
(Incidentally, it is a tribute to Lewis’s artistry that every reader of ‘Perelandra’, whatever their religious convictions, wants Ransom to win the debate.)
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I do not think anyone here finds you at all disagreeable, David. Your presence, and your views are most welcome. It would be a shame if we became an on-line version of the quivering brethren.
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You are more than welcome, David. 🙂 xx
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I have bookmarked about twenty posts from this blog from the past year – posts I wanted to reply to, but didn’t have the time. Much has moved on with this blog since then, but I now find myself with some time to address these. So let me do so:
Again, C has directed this post to some of my former comments – so I would be being rude if I didn’t reply. Months later though – please forgive me, but I wanted to focus on saying what I wanted to say first. As it turned out, I had to reach for someone else’s words, but nevertheless, it’s important to have a grip on what theology whilst debate takes place. Well, that’s my view. So, to comment:
Fist of all, I see that David Wilmshurst is mentioned, and quoted. He will be pleased. Let me make him aware of this at once. I am with C on this one. I know David relatively well, and he takes a somewhat literal view of the Scriptures. I think my view is admirably summed up by my favourite theologian Keith Ward in this lecture: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-beginnings-a-jewish-messianic-sect
S.
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Oh, the beauty of that ‘somewhat’ in ‘a somewhat literal view of the Scriptures’! As you are only too well aware, my excellent Struans, I take a completely literal view of the Scriptures, true to my training as a classicist and an ecclesiastical historian, and sensitive (I hope) to the cultural assumptions that lie behind the way its various authors wrote. My hero is Robin Lane Fox, whose book ‘The Unauthorised Version’ is, quite simply, the best book on truth and fiction in the Bible I have yet read. ‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and stayed not for an answer …
If you have a faith that is grounded in a historical claim (namely that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures), then you can hardly complain that people are going to want to test that claim. I would love to develop my argument from Matthew 27: 64, as I do think that it is a crucial verse. C451, whose acuteness in deploying historical arguments I respect greatly, has raised some very interesting questions about the psychology of the disciples in the wake of their master’s crucifixion. I particularly liked his point that Matthew did not suppress the inconvenient fact that a lot of people were expecting the disciples to announce that Jesus had risen from the dead. That is indeed a telling point, though not, I think, an insuperable objection to my thesis.
I would like to engage further on this issue when I have time, and I promise that eventually I will get round to producing a full-length post on the subject. Alas, my book ‘The Church of Severus’ (a history of the Syrian Orthodox Church, designed to complement ‘The Martyred Church’) is currently taking up a lot of my time, hence my infrequent contributions to this blog during the past few months. But I shall try to drag myself away from the delights of Michael the Syrian and Bar Hebraeus for an evening or two, and try to craft a coherent statement of my views.
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To save further head-banging, having been over this ground before on many an alcohol lubricated Saturday evening Sunday School:
The Nicean Creed does not expound a historical claim that “Jesus Christ was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day he rose again”, rather:
(i) the subject of that particular part of the creed is “one Lord, Jesus Christ” which is the one that the creed asks is professed as the one that people “believe in”, that is to say, trust in – or, to have as the sole guiding principle in ones life – the Risen Lord, Jesus the Christ, the Messiah.
(ii) as regards this subject, the creed then states: “he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures”. So the Risen Lord, which later at Chalcedon (which, as a scholar of Nestorius will know, was about Christology in Platonic substance theory terms) was crucified, suffered death and was buried. The Risen Lord was indeed crucified, as being co-terminus with Jesus of Nazareth, and did indeed suffer in that Jesus of Nazareth died, and was indeed ‘buried’, howsoever one wishes to interpret that – and one is invited to metaphorically, given the scriptural non-reference to burial in relation to the Passion events.
No doubt C can pitch in with his own views – I’m sure that the Romanists don’t hold to the precise outline above, which I have described in terms that I happen to like.
I ought to cry out now “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”
S.
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That would be extremely welcome, David, but as somebody’s are looming forward to your book, we must not distract you overmuch. Is hall look forward to whatever you are able to spare the time to say.
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Thanks very much, C451. The Jacobites promise to be just as much fun as the Nestorians, as this typical passage from the ‘Chronicon Ecclesiasticum’ of Bar Hebraeus demonstrates. He is talking of the sixth-century Coptic patriarch Damian of Alexandria. The translation is my own, but I swear that I have not misrepresented Bar Hebraeus:
‘Then Damian came in person to Syria to see his brother, the prefect of Edessa, and decided to appoint a patriarch for Antioch, even though Paul was still alive. Several bishops agreed with him; but when they had chosen one man, then a second, and then a third, none of whom wished to become a bishop in violation of the canons, they finally found a man who was a little soft in the head, named Severus, and Damian and two other bishops took him with them to Antioch, to the church of Cassian, and gave its watchman 18 darics to let them into the church at night, and consecrated him there. When the patriarch of the Chalcedonians discovered this fraud, he sent some men to arrest them, and they captured three monks from their party. Then Damian, the bishops and the man they had just elected patriarch went down into the basement of the building. In their terror, they crawled along the sewer or drain that lay below the church and escaped through a small grating above the conduit. They emerged in great embarrassment, not so much because their plot had failed but because they were all covered in excrement.’
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Not being a theologian, I am not sure how we are supposed to take torture, death and burial metaphorically. Either Jesus died and rose again from the dead, as the vast majority of Christians have always believed, or he did not, You seem to be veering terribly close to the detestable heresy of the aphthartodocetists. 🙂
I am not sure what you mean when you say there are no scriptural references to the burial of Jesus. Was not the stone rolled away from the tomb? Did not the women find the tomb empty when they came to anoint the body of Jesus? Read the gospel passages again.
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a) Alas, perhaps a further reading of the ecumenical creeds might be relevant – particularly so as to give an insight into dear Nestorius. I encourage you once again to spend an hour of your excellency’s most important time to watch this video:
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-formation-of-christian-doctrine
b) ‘Burial’ in the sense of to inter in the ground I was referring to. To store a body for a few days when Passover is coming up, with a view to later burial – such is the context that the Passion narrative is often held to have – is not, a ‘burial’ in my understanding.
How the Jesus brigade, or whatever it was that you were involved with in your youth, still seems to be setting the rails along which your theology travels. Break free, my friend, break free. 🙂
S.
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I am not sure that your reading of the Nestorian dispute is quite accurate! as I am not sure that either Cyril or Nestorius were as familiR with Plato as you imply. I base what I say on two of the more recent books on the subject, Wessels and McGurkin.
Paul was quite clear on this, either Christ was raised from the dead, or our faith is vain. St Gregory Nazianzus was right, what was. It assumed could not be redeemed. Yes, it is possible, and always has been, to construct a different narrative based on comparative mythologies, but this was not what turned a bunch if frightened men into fearless missionaries.
I find it difficult to understand why there is even a need to parse what the early Christians believed. The Messiah, the Word, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin, became man, dwelt among us, was crucified, buried in a borrowed tomb (as a preparation to being buried in one of his own) and when they came to do that, found He had been raised. This was the faith of the early Christians, and is still the faith of most. It may be that there are parts of the Anglican Church which are a bit embarrassed or have some other reason for not being happy with it, but it is there, folly to the Greeks and shame to the Jews.
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I wasn’t attempting to outline the Nestorian dispute, but rather to note that that particular council came up with a Christology in the Platonic terms that I have outlined – meaning that it was possible to say that whilst Christ in the divine nature didn’t die (so that particular Christology went on), only in his human nature.
The need to parse is / was for David’s benefit as he insists on reading the Bible as little more than historical source material – a point made in my course notes on Scripture.
As for your again presuming an Anglican loony tunes explanation for my post: again wrong – this was the Christology.
The video lecture I linked to outlines it all quite well.
S.
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As a matter of fact, you would have liked the Jesus People of Bugbrooke Chapel, with whom I spent a few months while I was an impressionable sixth-former. Leaving to one side the exhilarating speaking and singing in tongues which was routine at their evening assemblies, the most enjoyable aspect of my stay with them was the singularity of their sermons. Their leader, the Reverend Noel Stanton, had a taste for theology of the most recondite kind. I remember he once preached for a whole evening on the significance of the Shekinah, that grace of God that covers one like a tent (Greek: skene). On another occasion he parsed the scriptural passage in Genesis about the Spirit of God brooding upon the face of the waters, pointing out that the AV translation ‘brood’ was wrong. Actually, the Spirit was flapping like a dove, not brooding like a hen. Many years later, when I was learning Syriac, I was delighted to discover that the Syriac text of Genesis bore him out. True, there was quite a lot of demonstrative Christianity at Bugbrooke that goes against the Anglican grain – exorcism of demoniacs, miracles of healing, baptism by total immersion, extravagant prophecies of the advent of Antichrist – but on the whole I thought that Bugbrooke offered a pretty fair imitation of what 1st-century Christianity must have been like.
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Pingback: I believe? | All Along the Watchtower
Well said, C451. As you so rightly say, the early Christians believed that Jesus rose from the dead; or to put it more bluntly, that a dead man came back to life. Whenever I see attempts to wave that uncomfortable and embarrassing fact away (‘there is a difference between resuccitation and resurrection’), I cringe at the lengths to which some modern theologians will go to blur or deny the central tenet of the Christian faith.
Seeing the Gospel narratives in metaphorical terms may work for some modern Christians (it seems to work for Struans), but we should be aware that this is a very novel way of interpreting the Christian faith. It is certainly not the faith that Christians have believed in for most of the history of the Christian Church, and it is not the faith (again, as C451 has rightly observed) that so many Christians have died for down the centuries.
Reading some modern interpretations of Christianity, I wonder why the Fathers bothered to hold the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon at all. The massively sensible interpretations of the faith that were made at these ecumenical councils have been jettisoned in the twentieth century by the ‘happy clappy’ brigade, who have spread the pernicious message that so long as you think nice thoughts and avoid at all costs being judgemental, you can call yourself a Christian. What a milksop view of Christianity! In a sterner, more reflective age, such fatuity would have been anathematised.
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My dear friend David….
I cannot resist jumping in here to your conversation with C. I suspect of course that you have laid the bait and wait for the prey to leap into the trap.
I cannot resist, so here goes:-
I think you very well know that the idea of dying and rising gods has been around for a long time. The history of Christology is long too. Of course there have been and are very many people who take very literal views of these matters – that is why myth, stories, particularly when mixed with historical truth, are so good at communicating truth.
What you are doing is pointing to one part of Christianity, saying that that is the foundation, claiming that people who were part of the original founding group were deluded, and so it’s all bunkum – such is how I understand your narrative.
The foundation of Christianity might be more accurately to be said to be evidenced in the Jewish faith found in the Hebrew Bible, and the expectation of a particular group of people for a messiah.
So far from being easy to pick off “the root was false, so all that has grown is false”, you have chosen a mere rootlet. The vine is strong, my friend!
Another point is that you are conducting religious studies – because you are outside of the faith. Theology – and theological understanding – can only be done by those of faith (or, at least, good theology). That’s not to say that one cannot move from being a believer to an unbeliever and vice versa. However, the point is that one can only take a view of understanding good or bad on theology if one has that precondition that is part and parcel of theology. Which moves me onto my final point.
Gods. Everyone, except nihilists, has god(s). Those things that we think are of importance, purpose, or somehow ultimate principles around which we organise our lives. Whether explicitly stated (if often failed to live up to – as with most Christians – we’re all sinners after all) or just evidenced by observing a personal lifestyle and conversations. Whether those gods be power, booze, or even a denial that gods exist (as Dawkins does) even though he then makes a god of reason. Christians like to claim, in their simplistic moments, that God is love. Is love something physical that lurks around the back of some planet in outer space? No. So why on earth to people keep banging on about God not existing because there’s no such physical god – Christians are near as atheistic on this point as all of these new age atheists.
C451 – take my friend David in hand please, as a fellow historian, and make anything of him: papist, orthodox, anglican, muslim, new ager, mormon, or what you will – anything but rolling out critical lines to which the answers go in one ear and out of the other without any semblance of comprehension.
Dave – the next curry is on me.
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I couldn’t agree more David – well said!
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How interesting! : ) Rather than engage in Christology, for a lost sheep who enquires, C would rather endorse dubious views. Is there no potential return of the Prodigal Son? It is not so much that a dead man comes back to life, a holy mystery to which all Christians subscribe, but rather that we have an enquirer assuming reasons involving the delirium of magic believers present. Do we endorse such views rather than to try to seek understanding through a little Christological discourse? : ) S.
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For me, the dubious views are those derived from Fraser and comparative mythologies. None of those, of course, were subscribed to by those Jews you mention, and it was not part of their tradition. Neither was there a story of a God who remained God and yet was incarnate. That all of these, and the Trinity, found their way into that Jewish context suggest not a transfer of myth, but something which happened.
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Well, thank you for venting. Of course, as you will know from my comments (including Geoffrey and my recent exchange re the full divinity and full humanity of Christ, to which I subscribe) I am not sure if there is a target of your vigour.
S.
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Perhaps I have been reading too much Hemingway recently, but whenever I take up my pen to respond to one of your posts, my dear Struans, I am reminded of a matador deftly planting banderillas in the rump of a large, lumbering, preternaturally obtuse bull.
On myth and metaphor, please read C. S. Lewis’s book ‘Mere Christianity’ and try to grasp his distinction between false and true myth. On the beliefs of Christians down the ages, there are plenty of sources. I will mention just two at this point. If you want to know what Christians in the Church of England used to believe until fairly recently, renew your acquaintance with the Thirty-Nine Articles. If you want to know what the Church of Rome believed until fairly recently, read the acts of the Council of Trent and the First Vatican Council.
I think the next curry is now on me. 🙂
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Well, I’ll take the curry offer, but not offence. You seem to fail to understand that Christianity is not static. As I mentioned to C the other day: the evidence is there in Scripture: Jesus wanted Torah kept, yet the infant church said otherwise.
Drop your Hemingway and take up the Cross ! 🙂
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The conversion of James (the Lord’s brother) is a fact to consider. Prior to the crucifixion the Lord’s brothers did not believe in Him. Paul in 1st Corinthian one of the earliest NT texts indicates that the change in James was due to Christ’s post resurrection appearance to him.
In opposition to the ‘lie theory’ we also have to consider other facts that it would involve:
a) The apostles would have to have maintained this lie while teaching a high moral standard that was totally opposed to such behavior.
b) They would have to have maintained it not only at the risk of their own lives which the theory states they were prepared to do but also to have risked the lives of those who followed their deception.
c) They would have to be able to assure that no other credible witness to the real events broke rank from their deception of which there were many others.
The ‘lie theory’ seems to me to be unable to offer a credible explanation of the circumstances.
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I agree entirely Rob. Very good arguments. Glad to see you back with us.
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My friend Roger Forster has a quaint way of putting it – “The bones on the plate, evidence for the resurrection”. I do not know about you but If I were present at Christ’s post resurrection appearance I think I would have been like Thomas and needed to assure myself further of the reality of what I saw. Thomas wanted the sense of touch as well as sight. For the others there were the bones left of the fish Jesus ate with them and perhaps the women rejoiced at the event while doing the washing up!
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NOTES ABOUT THE JESUS FELLOWSHIP/ARMY: is a neocharismatic evangelicalChristian movement based in the UK, that is part of the British New Church Movement. It was founded in 1969, when Noel Stanton (1926–2009), at that time the lay pastor of Bugbrooke Baptist Chapel was inspired by a charismatic experience. The church grew and became charismatic, many of the original congregation left, there now a few thousand members in congregations in various cities in the UK. The Jesus Fellowship operates much like the UK house church movements of that time and originally associated with a number of the early leaders within the British New Church Movement. The branch of the British New Church Movement with which I first associated began somewhat earlier in 1965.
CRITICISM: The Jesus Army (JA) has aroused controversy, critics claimed that the movement tended to break up the natural family unit, but the JA maintains that many relationships with parents have been strengthened and that the Fellowship encourages community members to visit relatives. The original Bugbrooke Jesus Fellowship had been part of the Baptist Union. However expansion in members made the JA a nationwide movement. This took it out of the ambit of the Baptist Union, which places authority within a specific congregation. The JA was also accused of “isolationism,” epitomised by the JA practice of sometimes rebaptising new members who had already been baptised by other Baptist churches, implying that Christian baptism elsewhere may have been invalid. Consequently, in 1986 the JA was expelled from the Baptist Union.
In 1982, the Fellowship had joined the Evangelical Alliance, membership required that the church remain in close fellowship with other local evangelical churches. Earlier in 1986, the Evangelical Alliance had launched an inquiry into the beliefs and practices of the JA and found that it no longer qualified for membership, citing much the same problems as did the Baptist Union. There were also allegations that the JA had too authoritarian a style of leadership.
I personally encountered many former members of a couple of branches of the UK house church movement whose faith suffered with emotionally damage at that time from such authoritarian leadership. The JA probably went further in this manner than any others although it could be argued that to a degree this was necessary given their clientele. However there were allegations that members were under pressure to commit to lifelong celibacy, and that community members were required to hand over their material possessions, left them vulnerable to accusations of cultic practices. Their intense style and all-engulfing requirement of commitment led to allegations of abuse from disillusioned former members. During the late 1980s and 90s, the Fellowship improved its relationships with other churches, broadened its membership so that community residents became a minority of the church, re-examined its practices and loosened its style. It reapplied for membership of the Evangelical Alliance in 1999 it received endorsements from both local and national church leaders and was accepted into membership. The church still attracted a range of views and anti-cult groups like the Cult Information Centre, and Reachout Trust[61] still included the Jesus Army on their lists.
EVANGELISM: The JA was launched in 1987 as the campaigning identity of the Fellowship. Following the example of the early Salvation Army, and with a stated intention to “go where others will not go” and engages in street evangelism among the marginalized sections of society” working among homeless street people, those involved in drug or alcohol abuse, and prisoners and ex-prisoners.
JESUS CENTRES: It operates ‘Jesus Centres’ in various UK cities Drop-In Centres which provides subsidised breakfasts, free clothing, showers, hot drinks, social support, job training, medical help to vulnerable people and assistance in finding rented accommodation for the homeless, though a major emphasis of these activities is evangelistic. The JA has a comparatively high proportion of young members.
COMMUNAL LIFE: In the early years of the Fellowship, ‘New Creation Christian Community’ was founded in Bugbrooke for its growing membership and it became the first centre of a community lifestyle. Today there are around 60 community houses in the UK and about 25 per cent of the total membership of the Fellowship is living in them. The movement is one of the largest intentional Christian communities in Europe, charismatic or otherwise. For community members all their income, wealth and possessions are shared and there is little by way of private property. Community members aim to “eschew worldly belongings and seek what is perceived as a simple and more ethical form of economic life”. Wealth deposited in the common purse includes members’ incomes and salaries. The economic structure of the Fellowship might be said to be “socialist” in orientation and is most readily seen in the property-less community and the philosophy of “each according to their need.” New community members have to live in a community for a probationary period for two years and must be over 21, before being allowed to commit themselves to full community membership. Although community members donate all their money to the Community Trust fund, if they later decide to leave the community, their capital is paid back, sometimes with interest.
CHURCHES: There are a variety of levels of commitment in the Fellowship with corresponding types of membership. Those in the loosest forms of membership may merely attach to a Fellowship weeknight “cell group” or attend only on Sundays. The church household is the basic unit of the, usually comprising both members who live in community and a majority who do not. Several church households will usually come together to form congregations for public worship along with members of the public who wish to attend.
CHURCH BUSSINESES: The movement has founded a series of Christian businesses. Profits from the businesses help fund the wider work of the Fellowship.
CELIBACY: The Fellowship is the only new church stream that advocates and practices celibacy, claiming it leads to a full life for single people. Within the Fellowship there are couples and there are male and female celibates. The Fellowship claims both as high callings. The main justification used for advocating celibacy is that “it frees a member for ministry, particularly in the unsocial hours that Jesus Army campaigning requires.” Some critics have maintained that celibacy is taught as a better or higher way, and that single members have felt pressured into making the vow. Noel Stanton, the original leader, was himself a celibate The senior leadership of the church is made up of roughly 50 per cent celibates and 50 per cent who are married.
BELIEFS: The Jesus Fellowship describes itself as reformed, evangelical and charismatic. It upholds the historic creeds of the Christian faith. It believes in baptism in water and the Holy Spirit, in the Bible as the Word of God, and in acceptance of charismatic gifts. It proclaims free grace, justification by faith in Christ and the sealing and sanctifying baptism in the Holy Spirit.
While having knowledge of JA these notes have been adapted from Wikipedia for ease and may be relevant to the opinions and attitudes of former JA associates towards the Christian faith.
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An interesting resume of the Jesus People. I was aware of the negative publicity about Noel Stanton’s movement when I briefly joined it in 1975, as the strange goings-on in Bugbrooke Chapel were the staple of pub gossip throughout Northamptonshire. My next-door-neighours in the nearby village of Harpole divorced after the wife and her two teenage daughters moved in with the Jesus People, leaving the husband to fend for himself. When I started going to services at Bugbrooke Chapel, at the age of 19, I had just finished secondary school and was about to start university. I was put under intense pressure not to go to Oxford but to move in with the Jesus People instead. I seem to remember the verse about giving up the world for Jesus’s sake being mentioned. They were nothing if not persuasive, and for a week or two I seriously considered making that ‘leap of faith’. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your premises), I went my worldly way. Looking back now, I think it was the right decision, but I will always wonder what would have happened to my life if I had decided otherwise. No doubt everyone who hears the imperious call ‘Follow me!’ has a similar story to tell.
It does not surprise me that the movement eventually blotted its copybook, as its system for administering donations was, to say the least, devoid of oversight; but I can only report what I saw for myself. Noel Stanton impressed me greatly as a charismatic figure. He was one of those people who exudes energy. He was also a very able preacher. But I also got the sense that he was not the sort of man you would want to get on the wrong side of. When I started going to the evening services, the congregation numbered around 100 people, mostly in their teens and twenties. Some of them had been dropouts or petty criminals before they joined the movement, and they seemed to me to have been genuinely transformed by their experience. Many others were perfectly respectable middle-class professionals.
The services were conventionally pentecostal. The hymns and choruses were mostly Methodist. John Wesley’s hymns were favourites. The movement did not recognise any Christian festival except Easter, but as a sop to Christmas they allowed ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ to be sung in December, including the sadly neglected fourth verse (‘Adam’s image, Lord, efface/Stamp thine image in its place). Singing and speaking in tongues was an invariable feature of every service. If prophecies were made in an unknown tongue, Noel Stanton very correctly followed the advice of the Apostle Paul, and insisted that an interpretation be given in English. There was normally at least one miracle of healing at each service. To the best of my recollection, the Bible was read in the Authorised Version.
The choruses were incantatory, and I am sure that much of the group hypnosis that Noel Stanton was so adept at generating came from the repetition, twenty or thirty times over, of a single verse from the Bible. I still remember the swelling sense of wonder that came with the repeated chanting of the verse ‘He leads me up to his banqueting table and his banner over me is love.’
I cannot explain the purported miracles of healing that I saw at Bugbrooke, nor the astonishing demonstrations of speaking and singing in tongues. I am inclined now, at the age of 57, to be duly sceptical. At the age of 19, I was profoundly impressed. The movement fizzed with vitality, confidence and, above all, love. Yes, love, strange though that sounds. The Bugbrooke People behaved towards one another as though they loved each other. Maybe it was just an act, but it certainly didn’t seem so to me at the time. As I said in an earlier post, the experience gave me a sense of what early Christianity might have looked like. ‘See how these Christians love one another’, as bewildered pagans are reported to have said. I am grateful for having seen this extraordinary phenomenon for myself.
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David thanks for your personal history, a brief resume of what I have been up to since the same age of 19 might be of interest.
I was a fairly knowledgeable young member of a non charismatic evangelical church having had a definite conversion experience at the age of 11. At the age of 19 in 1965 I was similarly inspired by a charismatic experience and began speaking in tongues. I taught Sunday school and ran a youth club in a mission of the church I was a member of but was forbidden to speak about my charismatic experience by church elders. However following my experience the class I taught made commitments to Christ as it seemed there was an added power to my words.
Now that these young people had declared themselves Christians I was in a dilemma about how I should teach them. I was now also attending a ‘house church’ where we operated spiritual gifts similar to Bugbrooke. I came to the decision that I could not live under the restrictions of the evangelicalchurch I was formerly a member of and explained this to the group of converts I was teaching. I resigned from the evangelical church and continued in the ‘house church’. The young converts wanted to know what it was all about and continued to meet together in another home. They also experienced the Spirit in a new way and began speaking in tongues and a young lady was healed at that time.
I continued in that movement which developed numerically and met in a variety of homes and collectively in a school for 20 years; unfortunately it also became increasingly authoritarian and at one point the pressure not to attend university also began to be applied. This type of authoritarian problem developed in several streams of UK ‘house churches’ during part of their history. From my point of view I would say you had a fortunate escape from Bugbrooke but that is not say that they have accomplished nothing that is good as the is also true of the group I belonged to. As I suggested perhaps Bugbrooke’s leadership style was in part necessary given many of the client types.
My wife and I withdrew from the group we were associating with and started a business in 1983 that has now grown nationally. We did not know what to do about church and were disillusioned but not with Christ or His gospel (over time relationship with our old friends has healed and they have learned somewhat from their previous errors). Soon many of our staff were converted and healings took place. We gathered together my wife and I taught them the basic of the Christian and advised them to find a church in our city to join, they said we thought this was it (meaning ourselves a a group of believers) and we concluded they were right. They passed their faith on and in 18 months there was a group of 100 composed of almost entirely previously un-churched friends gathering in homes and a local community centre. Their faith was vibrant speaking in tongues, interpretation and prophecy was common and several healings took place.
I have seen more in the way of healing during my missions to South Africa than in the UK. One outstanding instance in South Africa was the immediate recovery of an elderly lady’s hearing upon a simple quiet command for her to “hear in the name of Jesus”.
I am now 67 and working in Barbados assisting the development house churches and association with church leaders in more traditional settings. We hope to help them avoid the authoritarian and pressurizing pitfalls we have seen and encourage the unique gifts and abilities of each individual.
Over the last 30 years we have spent a large proportion of our time in evangelism and discipleship of converts. To enable this we have placed managers in our businesses and provide strategic leadership. We have never accepted any money for any of our Christian service and have told the ‘house churches’ we establish to select others to supervise a church bank account and encouraged them to use the funds they collect for evangelism and support of the poor amongst them. We derive all our personal finances and finance for our expenses for service to the church from our businesses. I this way we provide an example of giving without seeking any financial return. Our reward in the joy of our service if something far greater.
I am as convinced as ever about the truth of Christ’s Gospel and His resurrection from scripture, history and personal experience.
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Interesting, and it exemplifies the classic tension between charismatic personal leadership and good administration. There are many examples, not confined to Christianity or particular Christian Churches, where you get a movement launched by a charismatic figure which fragments or peters out in the second generation. The movement fizzes along for 20 or 30 years and then runs out of steam, basically because it has been for too long dependent on the leadership of an autocratic figure who doesn’t take kindly to seeing his power constrained. One thinks of the chaos into which so many African governments have descended after becoming independent. Their first presidents often had wide popular support, but over the years they turned into tyrants. From what you said in your earlier post, it seems to me that the Baptist leadership was absolutely right to excommunicate Noel Stanton. You can’t allow cowboys to run Churches with the aim of turning them into highly-profitable businesses.
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Or universities, indeed?
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A Good point David but unfortunately in a couple of branches of the British house churches groupings, where one man dominated, it became rather more than ‘poor administration’ it became abuse in various forms. The original group I was in has cleaned up its act but remains generally rather separatist and it’s satellite churches either closed up shop and the membership dispersed, joining various denominations or relocated their association to branches of ‘British New Churches’.
What is now called ‘The ‘British New Church Movement’ arose out of the earlier house church groups and generally have a plural leadership, better administration and lack the abuse of some of the one man bands that existed earlier. I would assess that most of these churches will continue into future generations. Over the last 30 years we have been associated with the ‘British New Church Movement’. A good history of the movement is ‘Restoring The Kingdom’ by Andrew Walker an Orthodox Priest.
The question are whether these churches can maintain their passion for Christ and the gospel exhibited at their origin and remain open to fresh impulses of renewal. Each generation of the church universal has to meet this challenge in whatever form it organizes itself and reaction to decline will always results in various reforms which may be viewed as simply the work of a few innovative leaders or a genuine renewal of the church by the Spirit of God. I rather like Catherine Booth’s phrase “God has no grandchildren”, implying that each generation must find it own relationship with God.
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Just so, my dear Struans; though ‘charismatic’ is not normally a word I would associate with the rarefied world of academia in which I am privileged to live, work and have my being. I suppose Doctor Arnold of Rugby might reasonably have been described as charismatic, but I can’t think of that many academics since who would rate such a description. Would one describe C. S. Lewis, in his shapeless, dung-coloured raincoat, as charismatic? Perhaps, but I recall that he was sensible enough to turn down all attempts by the college fellows to lumber him with administrative duties, and he was the first to admit that he would have been a hopeless administrator; unlike his brother Warnie, who would have made an excellent college bursar.
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There has been some charisma known at one of the two great universities in our realm. I recall the line “Roast swan stuffed with widgeon is rather an acquired taste.”
S.
P.S. No doubt at Hull too.
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