How to select a cricket team

1. You can't select a team on a match by match basis. If we don't have the players for this match, it is because we didn't select the right players two years ago. Basically, if you can't cobble together a convincing team at the beginning of the series, the problem hasn't just emerged.


2. Don't scapegoat. Philip Hughes was blamed for the defeat at Lords in 2009, when it was really Mitchell Johnson's fault if anyone. Hughes' confidence has been shattered ever since. Now we need him and he is in dreadful form.

3. Don't throw away test caps on long shots - it cheapens the currency. The (almost) selection of Michael Beer is a disgrace and it introduces an element of arbitrariness into the process which unsettles everybody. Let's pray he never makes it onto the field.

4. Experience is priceless. Hauritz was growing as a dependable bowler and traded away for... who? Can't remember him. He was a debutante rushed in to bowl to a strong England batting line-up. It didn't work. No kidding.


5. Encourage experienced players to stay. Brad Hogg and Stuart MacGill should have been given more enticement to stay. Stuart Clark was a great bowler treated harshly after injury.

6. See the writing on the wall. Was anyone predicting that Marcus North was going to last the whole series? So why not act straight up and axe him?

7. The Sheffield Shield is in crisis, but we knew that already. For decades, players have come up through the Academy system, earmarked for selection from birth it seems. (Anyone who has ever played any youth rep cricket in Australia will know that there are those players who are tagged from the start and there's nothing much you can do if you are an outsider to get a tag). Warne and McGrath, for example, seemed to spend almost no time at the Shield level. So the real crisis is in the Academy and other youth programmes. What's going on there I'd like to know?

8. Does anyone really think that Michael Clarke is the right man to captain Australia next? Nice guy I am sure. But - score some runs please. Since when do we nominate the successor to the captain YEARS before?

John Frame's Perspectivalism

In his The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God John Frame attempts a kind of epistemology. He calls it 'perspectivalism'. Rightly, Frame shows that epistemology has a relation to ethics - 'knowing is not autonomous; it is subject to God's authority, as is all of human life. This procedure also reminds us that knowing, thinking, theorizing and so forth are indeed parts of human life as a whole.'

The three different objects of knowledge are God, the world and our selves. Knowledge of god is 'normative'. Knowledge of self is 'existential'. Knowledge of the world is 'situational'. These objects are so closely related to each other that that knowing them is all the same process but seen from different perspectives. So: knowing oneself better is at the same time a gain in knowledge of God and the world. In a counselling situation, says Frame, the Christian can seek to grasp 3 things: 1) what was the situation? 2) how are you responding to it? 3) what does Scripture say? These questions are mutually interdependent.

Frame complains that in non-Christian ethics, the three factors seem to get seperated or lost. 'Scripture, however, tells us that God is in control, is the authority, and is present; therefore the situation, law and person are part of an organic whole, together revealing God's Lordship.' (p. 74). Likewise in epistemology, the normative perspective focuses on God's authority as expressed through His law - a self-attesting and ultimate authority. The situational perspective focuses on the law as revaled in Scripture and in creation. The existential perspective focuses on the law as revealed in man as God's image. 'We get to know the law better as we come to know ourselves better.'

Perspectivalism is rich because it shows how epistemology has different modes. It allows for a total knowledge without granting it to fallen human beings to know it. It shows that all knowledge is in some sense knowledge of the divine - or it is interrelated with knowledge of God. In knowing anything (as Frame says) we know God.

But Frame's characterisation of the knowledge of God as 'law' is, in my view, theologically and biblically flawed - and gravely so. It fails to start from the gospel of Jesus Christ. It threatens to make the OT universal but can only do so in an arbitrary fashion by dividing the law into parts. I am happy with the idea of the 'normative' perspective if its chief characterisation is the grace of God in Christ. Knowing God in his control, authority and presence must surely be condition by the gospel - his control and authority and presence are ultimately and decisively revealed and thus known in Christ crucified and risen, yes?

William James and Religious Feelings

In the northern spring of 1901, the noted Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James packed his bags and sailed for Europe to deliver the esteemed Gifford Lectures. For several years prior to this, James had been furiously collecting, clipping and filing the data – usually personal testimonies - that would become the basis for his study. He had overcome bouts of severe ill-health which led to him writing a good deal of his text in bed and had postponed the delivery of the lectures for a year. The lectures were finally delivered in Edinburgh to great acclaim. When it was published, in 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience would both baffle and intrigue its reviewers as being ‘too biological for the religious, too religious for the biological’. Nevertheless, Varieties would run to some thirty-eight impressions by 1935.

James attempted, by means of an exhaustive empirical study, to peer behind the dogma and creedal aspects of religion and discern the real core of individual religious experience. His concern was what he called ‘personal religion’, namely
…the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.
James was keenly aware of the sceptism of his audience that his study could really be considered properly scientific. He argued that religion presented to the psychologist a set of distinct phenomena that were available to be analysed with due rigour. In James’ view, the experiences that he described could only be classified as ‘religious’. They certainly could not be explained away by reference to sickness or the displacement of the erotic.

It was the feeling generated by religious experience that enabled an analysis of religion that overcame the diversity of religious opinions. As he explained, ‘I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.’ The divergences between theological systems are irreconcilable. These differences only appear because ‘[F]eeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself.’ Theology and institutional forms of religion appear as expressions of this inner experience.

When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives.

The feelings that generate these systems of thought are marked by ‘an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, ‘dynamogenic’ order which like any tonic, freshens our vital powers.’ This remarkable zest, James concludes, results in the first instance from a profound sense that something is wrong with us in our natural condition; and that re-establishing one’s connection with the divine is an antidote to the wrongness.

James was not about to build a proof for the existence of God in the traditional sense on the basis of the filing cabinet full of testimony to religious experiences that he had collected and collated. He was confident to conclude that this wealth of data exposed something anthropological in the sense that ‘the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come’. That is to say, there is always more to the self than the self is aware of; and this subconscious self is evidence that there is more life in us than we even know ourselves. For James, these outer limits of the personality point to a ‘mystical’ or even ‘supernatural’ dimension in which the human being shares – a dimension which is no less real in being unseen, because it produces real effects. Why is it, theologically speaking, that human beings are so pervasively given to immortal longings? Why is that they speak so often of experiences that give a sense of resolution to those longings?


Whereas James deliberately eschewed the traditional discourses of theology and claimed that his achievement rested only on empirical data, it is my task to essay a theological anthropology of feelings. James attempted to sift through the soil of Christian doctrine to uncover the core realities he wanted to analyse. For the Christian theologian that is not a desirable or even possible strategy. Yet it seems that James’ foray into the philosophy of religion offers an account of human experience and feeling that a theological anthropology can scarcely avoid if it is to be persuasive. What

Nice to know!

http://www.masteroftheology.org/top-50-blogs-by-theology-professors.html


Coming in at no 47 ain't bad!

'Come over to Macedonia and help us'

Will you support me?


In Acts 16, the apostle Paul had a vision of a man from Macedonia pleading with him to ‘come over to Macedonia and help us’. Answering this call led to one of Paul’s most successful missionary journeys and to the planting of Christianity in the famous area to the north of Greece.

I too have received a call from a Macedonian man! I have received an invitation from my good friends Kosta and Nada Milkov to travel to the Balkans from April 27th – May 9th 2011 in support of evangelical ministry and witness in that country. The number of Evangelical Christians in Macedonia is very small in spite the fact that they have been present for the last century. The generic name for all churches of Evangelical belief is ‘Protestants’. In the vernacular though, the terms ‘Sect’ or the alternative ‘New Faiths’ is much more common.

I met Kosta and Nada while Kosta and I were both studying for our doctorates at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford University from 2005-08. We were neighbours and also shared a study room. Returning to Macedonia in 2009, Kosta has founded Metanoia, which is the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture. As he describes it: ‘It will be founded on its integrity and commitment to the Gospel and Christian witness as envisioned in the context of genuine encounter with the contemporary Balkan culture.’ Formerly, Kosta was the pioneer of Egzodus, the IFES-linked student movement in Macedonia, and maintains strong links with that group. Already Kosta has had a number of exciting opportunities to present the gospel of Christ in his work.

On my trip I have been invited to preach at a number of evangelical churches, to be involved in lecturing at the university, a public forum, a TV appearance and speaking to the students from Egzodus. I am praying that my trip will be of great encouragement to the local evangelical Christians – and that I may learn a great deal from their witness under trial. I am excited about the possibilities of future contact between Australian and Macedonian evangelical Christians – especially seeing as there are something like 83,000 Macedonian-born Australians, many of whom live in Sydney.

So as not to be a burden to my hosts, I need to raise funds for my air travel to Skopje and home again. Will you support me? The easiest way to do this is to go the page at:

http://www.everydayhero.com.au/michael_jensen

and follow the instructions.

The Anglican Church League 2

Once Archbishop Wright had made a strong stance against the introduction of such vestments in Sydney, the PCEU found that the wind was taken out of its sails somewhat. A new evangelical party, the Anglican Church League, emerged in 1909 as a party of broad evangelical consensus. The founder of the League, Canon Francis Bertie Boyce (1844-1931), was determined that evangelicals would not merely present a reactionary, defensive and increasingly isolated place in the Church. The League would rather pursue a constructive and reasonable evangelical policy, finding as it did so as much common ground between evangelicals as it could. It would fight strongly for the principles of the reformation but it intended to do so from a position of centrist strength and not from the fringe. In the words of Judd and Cable, ‘they were not about to be isolated as a lunatic fringe; they were determined to be a party of comprehension, not narrowly exclusive.’

From this broad base, the ACL was able to achieve considerable political success in the Sydney synod. It did this because its relatively small actual membership remained united and because it was brilliantly directed by an even smaller executive group. It also succeeded because it was led by clergyman who had the time and inclination to attend to Church affairs. In addition, the League sponsored lectures and events on Evangelical themes, and it further revived the Evangelical newspaper the Church Record.

In the view of historians Judd and Cable the secret to the ACL’s success was its pre-selection of candidates for diocesan elections – caucusing, in other words. This was not a novelty in church affairs – indeed caucusing is of ancient provenance. What was new was that Evangelicals were doing the caucusing. And it was astutely done. The League’s policy was to pre-select not only strong Evangelicals but also to elect a proportion of High Churchmen to various diocesan positions. This somewhat disarmed the High Church opposition, who were given a share of the power but only on the terms set for them by the League. By the mid-1920s, the ACL had achieved dominance in electoral terms. The proportional representation policy helped to quieten dissent and discontent.

By the mid-1930s, however, the broad evangelical consensus under which the League had first gathered its membership had broken. At the election of Howard Mowll to the see of Sydney in April 1933, the conservative evangelicals asserted themselves over against the liberal evangelicals led by the Dean, AE Talbot and the Principal of Moore College, DJ Davies. Talbot and Davies were also the President and a Vice President of the ACL at the time. These two men now resigned from the League and set up a new, more liberal, grouping, the Anglican Fellowship. This was a real challenge to the conservative evangelicals, who now felt that something of theological importance was at stake. The liberal evangelicals were more vague about the authority of Scripture and less definite that the atoning blood of Jesus Christ was central to the gospel. The business of the synod was not merely now a matter of keeping the diocese operating smoothly. With the increasingly emergence and influence of a more liberal evangelicalism, it was now a contest about the theological commitments that would mark the Church of England in Sydney.

For the first time, the ACL not only nominated its own candidates in synod elections, it issued a how-to-vote ticket. This was an immediately successful strategy; and continued to be so throughout the 1930s, such that Anglican Fellowship completely died away. Upon the death of Principal Davies in 1935, Archbishop Mowll appointed the singularly remarkable Irishman TC Hammond – arguably the greatest intellect in the conservative evangelical world - to the principalship of Moore College. Along with these two men, the League now pursued the goal of securing the specifically conservative evangelical character of the diocese. By the mid-1950s, it could be safely said that it was a strategy that had largely succeeded... (tbc)

The Anglican Church League

In his book The Chosen Ones – The Politics of Salvation in the Anglican Church journalist Chris McGillion paints a somewhat unflattering picture of the inner workings of the diocese of Sydney over the 1993-2001 period. Crafted chiefly from interviews with some of the protagonists, it is a story of manoeuvrings, tactics, parties and vote-counting. Some of those interviewed seemed, like old war heroes, to relish the chance to recount the cut-and-thrust of those days – oblivious to the interviewer’s distaste, which he assumes that his implied reader will share. McGillion’s thesis is that the Sydney Anglicans who came to power in those years had a belief that they were ‘the chosen ones’ – and that this justified to them the use of nakedly political means in the godly cause to which they had been called. From McGillion’s point of view, politics is an ugly business even when it pursues apparently holy ends. His subjects did not seem to share this embarrassment. It is this clash of perspectives that makes the book an intriguing read.

The subject of ecclesiastical politics is frequently associated with Sydney Anglicans, not because they invented it, but because they have been remarkably good at it. The refined disdain for the political aspect of church life is a luxury afforded those to whom power naturally tends to accrue. Like all human institutions, churches need a decision-making process. As a body politic, it has bodily-political functions that need attending to. It is not an unspiritual thing to seek to manage these as effectively as possible, however crass it might seem to those of more sophisticated palate. Sometimes it is a messy and complicated business – a process that presents unenviable choices and imperfect solutions.

That being said, success in the process has perhaps obscured the consideration of the possibility that the process itself might be deeply flawed and could be reformed. As has been frequently pointed out, synods as they are presently constituted have far too many members to be an efficient chamber of debate and discussion and are inevitably dominated by lawyers and those of a political disposition. Sydney Anglicans have twice as many representatives in their synod than the Australian people do in their parliament! Inevitably, with such an unwieldy process the distribution of power and the mutual accountability that a democratic process is meant to ensure becomes concentrated in the hands of smaller committees. And it almost requires the development of a group whose history is inextricably linked to the history of the Sydney diocese: the Anglican Church League.

The Australian form of Anglicanism has a long history of embracing synodical government. Without the deeply embedded alliance with the Crown and the Parliament to help it, as was the case in England, the Australian church had to find a way to order its own affairs. In fact, as Tom Frame writes ‘[T]he Australian Church led the Anglican Communion in its embrace of synodical government’. The word ‘synod’ emerges from a Greek word sunodos, which means ‘assembly’ or ‘meeting’. There being no prescribed method of decision-making for churches in the New Testament, synods have varied enormously in size, task and process over the two millennia of church history. In the Church of England, synods had a rather peripheral role given that the church was governed by Royal Supremacy via parliament and the convocation of bishops. The colonials, for their part, wanted an arrangement which ensured the more direct involvement of the laity in parallel with the secular parliaments. This meant that synods have largely adopted the parliamentary processes and legal mechanisms of the British parliament. From 1872 there was a national, ‘General’ Synod and corresponding diocesan synods. Given the great distances involved in most Australian diocese, the diocesan synod became in many places the most significant opportunity for clergy and laity to share fellowship.

Sydney’s synod was first convened in 1866 by Bishop Barker (dates). The sessions were lengthy, and demanded a high level of competence from its participants. Whereas before the bishop relied somewhat informally on carefully chosen lay and clerical advisors in order to make decisions, now this gathering of high-powered laity and clergy had its own decision making function. As the historians of the Sydney diocese, Judd and Cable write: ‘by the end of Barker’s episcopate, synod had emerged in an effective form as the focus of the diocese’.

In these early years the synod needed to set the affairs of the diocese in order. The parliamentarians, lawyers and landowners that held positions on synod ensured that proper standing orders were introduced, the financial arrangements of the diocese established and a standing committee appointed. For clergy, the rise of the synod meant that they were no longer vulnerable to the whims of their bishop. There was now a system of nominations and a degree of professional security. Theological and social issues did not arise and were not debated – there was not initially a sense that there were mutually incompatible theological visions that would need to assert themselves in this forum.

Up until the 1890s, it was still however the case that the synod tended to see itself as chiefly supportive of the bishop in his management of the diocese. In 1897, the Standing Committee was granted authority to act ‘without prior reference to the full synod’. The rate of legislation increased and indicated that the exclusive power of the bishop over his diocese was certainly at an end.

The emergence of party groupings in the synod can be dated to this period. Becoming a busier legislative chamber inevitably led to divisions just because of the adversarial nature of the process, with winners and losers. In 1886 the Church of England Association, a lay organisation, was formed. The Association’s stated aim was to prevent the advance of ritualism in the church; and it proved to be successful in achieving this end. Throughout the 1890s other political groupings emerged representing the Anglo-Catholics, High Churchmen and others. It was the Protestant Church of England Union, an evangelical alliance, which emerged as the strongest group in the diocese by the turn of the century. The Union was determined to stop Anglo-Catholic practices and pressured the Archbishop to act on their behalf against the introduction of Eucharistic vestments....

Perfectionism

http://ping.fm/0Tw6V