Jesus is the question to all our answers

Moore College students have been hard at it this week, coming out of their classrooms and into the community to talk to people about the Lord Jesus Christ.

You might have noticed the mission-related posts from the student bloggers on my blogroll...such as this one, this funny one, this one, this one (from the team I am with), and this one. Oh, and this one.

Actually it was at Dan's blog that I heard the story of the student who accidentally said to a classroom of teenagers 'Jesus the problem to all our solutions!'

The more I think about it, the more I think this is a piece of accidental genius. It is a far better and I reckon far more biblical way to preach the gospel I think! Jesus is the question to all our answers! What do you think?

To my alarm

To my alarm, it has come to my attention more than once that some readers think that in this post from last month, 'Missiological Assumptions', I was urging clergy everywhere to don their collars and dress up in their flowing white robes!

I was not.

I think a straight reading of the post will reveal that my intentions were quite otherwise: I was merely questioning some of the discourse that I have heard used to justify changes in church practices over the years, and also asking whether we really are as flexible as we think we are. It was somewhat of a thought experiment - and a useful one I feel.

Furthermore, in the discussion that followed a variety of views were expressed. Some people made my point more intensely than I had, I think, or pushed it further than I had done. The discussion was vigorous, but polite and thoughtful too.

A few points:

1) a blog post is not a definitive declaration of one's deepest convictions.
2) the owner of the blog ought not to be judged by the opinions of the commenters.
3) good missiology helps us to revisit our assumptions, doesn't it?

Missiological assumptions?

Born in 1970, I am a post prayer-book Anglican. That is, I grew up in the era when formal liturgies and distinctive clergy dress were become a sign of the moribund and alien past. The outsider (so the argument ran) was alienated by such things, which were at best mysterious and at worst signs of a theology we wanted to repudiate. Formality in and of itself was part of everything that was wrong with the church of the 1960s which so many people had decided to...well, not attend.

When I was a Chaplain at the Cathedral school, following this logic, and with 90% of the kids unchurched, I moved school chapel services out of the Cathedral building itself and into the hall next door. I very rarely wore my collar. The services were informal, the music contemporary and the prayers spontaneous. The Christian students were especially supportive of this, because it was like the churches they went to. Surely the non-Christians would love it too...

But one day, one of the unchurched kids came to me and said 'look, why are you trying so hard to be like our culture? Surely the best thing you have going for you is your difference. The old thing is the thing you do best - that makes sense to me. And I can't stand your contemporary Christian songs'. (well that was the gist of it...)

Here's the thesis I am running, anyhow: The reason we eschewed formality in church services was because that was what WE on the inside wanted (or some of us, anyway) - the missiological reason was in fact only a justification for it.

There were some mistaken, or at least challengeable, assumptions here -

1 - that the outsiders prefered us to look like TV shows, and not like 'church' as they knew it
2 - that familiarity is always good, dissimilarity is always bad
3 - that formality equals insincerity and pomposity (it certainly can do, but not always)
4 - that formality equals impersonal, bumbling and ineffectual
5 - that church meetings/services should be attractional (as opposed to church communities)
6 - that a prayerbook service with a robed clergyman will be understood by an outsider as a sign of Tridentine catholic theology of the priesthood and sacraments

So - what's the evidence?

Mission and Theology

I posted this back in 2006 - but I think it is relevant to the Driscoll discussion, so I'll give it another run:

In his (in other ways very annoying) book Recovering the Scandal of the Cross Joel Green asks what I think is very good question: what would happen if theology took the mission of the church seriously?

It’s a good question because it inverts our expectations. We ordinarily imagine that mission ought to take theology seriously: if only we get our thinking about mission right, we say, then we will mission more effectively. We believe I guess in a priority of theory over praxis. The problem with this view is ineffectiveness: revivals are not usually begun in the academy, you may have noticed. There is a tendency for theory to be closed to the questions people are actually asking; to be abstract and unrelated. There is a resulting insensitivity to the different cultural contexts in which mission takes place.

On the other hand, I guess there are some of you who can already sense the artificiality of this: you have already been out there presenting the gospel and living it, and seeing lives changed and people won for Christ. Having to come and sit and think about it seems quite futile: it’s already going on! The problem with this view, I suggest respectfully, is pragmatism. Pragmatism means that we become like advertisers hawking products: we will do anything for a sale, including distort the message out of shape, perhaps casting aside or hiding uncomfortable parts of the scriptural teaching in order to fit in with the culture of context. Perhaps, rather than be insensitive, we may even accommodate our culture so that we lose our Christian distinctiveness.
This is why Green’s question is a good one: because theology needs to realize the urgency of mission! Theology must not be indulgent or merely speculative. It bears the responsibility of explaining a gospel which is for everyone to everyone. And on the hand, those engaged in mission have the weighty responsibility of speaking and acting in and with truth. Mission needs to heed the voice of theology!

And so, from both perspectives, there needs to be a turn back to the sources of theology in the scriptures. Mission must remain faithful to its source in scripture or it will be unable to address cultures - it will only reflect them. If theology takes the mission seriously, not only could theology be forced to rediscover its own deep scriptural resources, so also mission could be reinvigorated by the work done in the thinking about it. We need to trust our Bibles perhaps more than we do: there is more in them of more universal relevance than perhaps we realize. We need to trust perhaps less our ability to read cultures: remember this is a notoriously difficult art. Paul’s method in Corinth is perhaps instructive: he determined not give the Jews the miraculous signs they claimed, not the Greeks the sophistry they demanded: but determined to know nothing among them but Christ crucified no matter how culturally insensitive this may have seemed.

Driscoll skewers Sydney

Reports have filtered back to me about Mark Driscoll's session with Sydney ministers at St Andrew's Cathedral. Sounds like potent stuff. Mike Jolly reports here on the 18 points of critique Driscoll levelled at us. Hearing criticism is a great opportunity of course, and it will be interesting to see how the debate goes from here. I don't buy the whole Driscoll schtick, but, boy, he has courage.

From my point of view, the most interesting and telling of the critiques was no. 13: "There us a lack of missiologists. Your theologians are poor missiologists. You need more missiologists that evaluate culture and be missiologically aware."

Ouch. But, yes: I think that it is imperative that theology and missiology relate themselves better. Not of course so that missiology completely overwhelms theology, but so that theology is actually true to its own evangelical nature. There's work to do...

Volf on 'soft difference'

Miroslav Volf's article entitled 'Soft Difference' from Ex Auditu in 1994 is one of those ones I come back to again and again. In it he tries to describe from 1 Peter the way in which the Christians are supposed to differ from their surrounding culture. It is, he says, a 'soft difference'...

It might be appropriate to call the missionary distance that 1 Peter stresses soft difference. I do not mean a weak difference, for in 1 Peter the difference is anything but weak. It is strong, but it is not hard. Fear for oneself and one's identity creates hardness. The difference that joins itself with hardness always presents the other with a choice: either submit or be rejected, either "become like me or get away from me." In the mission to the world, hard difference operates with open or hidden pressures, manipulation, and threats. A decision for a soft difference, on the other hand, presupposes a fearlessness which 1 Peter repeatedly encourages his readers to assume (3:14; 3:6). People who are secure in themselves—more accurately, who are secure in their God—are able to live the soft difference without fear. They have no need either to subordinate or damn others, but can allow others space to be themselves. For people who live the soft difference, mission fundamentally takes the form of witness and invitation. They seek to win others without pressure or manipulation, sometimes even "without a word" (3:1).

The Mission of God X

In his zeal to show the continuity between the testaments, Wright has not (to my mind) sufficiently accounted for the difference between them. Marcionitism was attractive precisely because it has a point: in Christ, something new comes to pass. Or at least, the themes and concerns of the Old Testament are presented in a surprising new way. This is true of Wright’s particular emphasis on mission. It is precisely because of the revelation of Christ that it becomes possible to read the Old Testament in the light of mission. That this is an emphasis of the Old Testament becomes apparent on a re-reading of this text after the fact of the encounter with the New Testament. If reading the New Testament must be a canonical business, then so also must reading of the Old.[1] It simply will not do to read off a concept or theme found in the Old Testament, and apply it to the church without careful theological qualification. The church is not Israel. Wright is of course well aware of the danger of this kind of application. He insists: ‘[W]e are not Old Testament Israelites living within a theocratic covenant bound by Old Testament law’ (see p. 304-5). He rightly complains about the tendency of liberation theologians to do this with the exodus. But I am not convinced that he himself has completely evaded it. Especially, this comes into play in his discussion of the jubilee, one of his favourite biblical themes (p. 290ff). Wright says: ‘Mission belongs to God - the biblical God. The message of mission is to be drawn from the whole of God's biblical revelation. So we cannot simply relegate the powerful message of events such as the exodus or institutions like the jubilee to a bygone era. They are an integral part of the biblical definition of God's idea of redemption and of God's requirement on his redeemed people’. (p. 306) Certainly, Wright is right: relegation is not an option for a full-orbed biblical theology. But how are we to handle the transition between the social legislation directed to Israel and the era of the Church? Wright’s response to that question would be that the New Testament explicitly declares some Old Testament material to have been provisional – the food laws, for example, and the sacrificial system. There is an explicit rationale for our nonobservance of these ‘matters’ (p. 305). In other words, for Wright, ritual requirements are made particular to Israel’s own identity in time and space; whereas, the ethical principles gleaned from the Old Testament are universalised. But can this distinction be so easily sustained from reading the Old Testament itself? Wright seems to overlook the fact that the Jubilee itself was not merely an ethical teaching or principle, but precisely a ritual practice with an ethical and theological meaning that Israel was to engage in on regular occassions. Which is to say: the line between ceremonial and ethical command is not so easily drawn as Wright imagines. The critique of the latter prophets was not against ritual practice per se but against ritual practice set against a context of injustice and idolatry. Isn’t the charge that is frequently made against Calvin’s division of the law into moral, ceremonial and civil law – that it is an arbitrary division not found in the text, which for its part simply speaks of the whole as torah – also a charge that can be made to Wright’s proposed reading of the Old Testament ethical material? Certainly, many theologians in the history of the church have made proposals for criterion by which the Old Testament material ought to be received by Christians A further query I have along these lines is as to what Wright makes of holy war in the Old Testament. The relationship of Israel to the other nations surrounding her was frequently marked by armed struggle at the command of Yhwh. If there was an international perspective on view it was that that the defeat of the nations and their submission to the Lord’s anointed one was to be the way in which Israel would carry her mission to the nations. There was then a definite negative side to Israel’s mission: she was not merely the bearer of divine blessing to the nations, but also the bringer of divine curses. This too had been promised in the Abrahamic covenant of course. How is this negative aspect of the mission translated into the era of the church?

Kostenberger and O'Brien on Mission

I found this comment from Kostenberger and O'Brien to be a helpful clarification (Wright's book suffers from conceptual confusions):

The mission of the exalted Jesus is accomplished through the witness of the apostles in the power of the Holy Spirit. The one who is himself sent by God sends his representatives to bear testimony to his salvation, to announce the forgiveness of sins and to make disciples of all nations. In other words, his witnesses continue the mission of Jesus by declaring to men and women everywhere the glorious gospel of the grace of God. As the Father has sent him, so Jesus sends them. Moreover, this testimony to Jesus and his saving work involves a wide-ranging series of activities that result in believers being built up in Christ and formed into Christian congregations. It is not limited to primary evangelism and its immediate results...

And so: good works of all kinds, that flow from the impact of Christ in the power of the Spirit, are rightly ordered to mission (and to ecclesiology, too).

K and O'B do a much better job at a 'Biblical Theology of Mission' I find, partly because they don't overplay the OT to the extent that Wright does.

The Mission of God IX

How big is our gospel? Chris Wright asks, in his chapter on God's model of redemption. (I am curious about this language of 'models'... I think there is a problem here, not sure what yet).

He goes on:

The scope of our mission must reflect the scope of God's mission, [Granted] which is turn will match the scale of God's redemptive work. [well i think I get what he is trying to say...] Where do we turn in the Bible for our understanding of redemption? Already it will be clear enough that in my view it will simply not do to turn first to the New Testament. ...

What!??

The Mission of God VIII

An important issue to settle for me is 'what IS mission'? That is: does mission include any good work that Christians may do? Is fighting for 'social justice' (whatever that means!) found theologically speaking under the heading of 'mission', and if so, why? What about taking care of the environment?

There are two ways of arguing. One (my preference) is to say that we participate in the mission of God as we call people from darkness into his marvellous light, making disciples of all nations. Paul's mission to the Gentiles, for example, did not seem to have a lot to do directly with 'social justice' - though it certainly had the effect of changing society remarkably in lots of ways as people heard the gospel and responded to it. Neighbour love is, then, an imperative outworking of mission, but it isn't mission in and of itself. Having said this, it is true that the loving actions of Christians may indeed result in others giving glory to God, and that the NT has a lot to say about the coupling of actions to words in mission. Fair enough: but mission refers to the work of God in reconciling the world to himself in Christ. We do 'mission' insofar as we work to this end. Commending the gospel in word and deed is our mission. Question is I guess: does me secretly reducing my carbon footprint (for example) contribute to the mission of God? Has a Christian agency whose aim is alleviating poverty without any other evangelistic consideration have the right to call itself a 'mission' agency? (Note: I am not for a second questioning the importance of such agencies; merely wondering whether 'mission' is the right theological heading for them. Nor am I saying that one ought to preach the gospel without alleviating suffering where it is found. On the contrary).

The alternative position is that almost anything given to Christians to do can be called 'mission' if it seen to be fitting in the purposes of God . So, yes, caring for animals: mission. Alms-giving: mission. Lobbying for fairer laws: mission. Campaigning for fair-trade: mission. In fact almost anything we do having been sent out at 11:00am Sunday until we meet at 10:am the next send can be labelled mission, if it is doing what God wants done.

The Mission of God VII

Chris Wright says:

How then can it be suggested that evangelistic proclamation is the only essential mission of the church? It seems impossible to eme to justify such reductionism if we intend to sustain any claim to be taking the whole Bible seriously as our authority for mission and as that which defines the content and scope of our mission. Mission belongs to God - the biblical God. The message of mission is to be drawn from the whole of God's biblical revelation. So we cannot simply relegate the powerful message of events such as the exodus or institutions like the jubilee to a bygone era. They are an integral part of the biblical definition of God's idea of redemption and of God's requirement on his redeemed people... p. 306

This is typical Wright, and it is problematic in a typical way. I would never dispute that we need the whole Bible for our understanding of mission. This is what Wright has got so wonderfully right. However, Wright does not sufficiently account for the difference between the Old and New Testaments. He has over-reacted to a contemporary Marcionitism by going to the opposite extreme, it seems to me. We cannot relegate the exodus and the jubilee to a bygone era, sure: but also we cannot simply take them on board in an undifferentiated way. We are not Israel. We are the church. This basic observation cannot be overstated! Things are different: even the most ardent advocate of a third use of the law knows this. Wright gives (as far as I can see) an insufficient account of the difference.

Wright is of course highly selective in his reading of what aspects of the OT are still operative, though he keeps banging the 'holistic' drum. His version does not highlight the moral law, as forms of Calvinism do; rather, he pulls out some aspects of social justice and concerns of a vaguely left-wing nature. But it is just as arbitrary. This particularly obvious with the year of Jubilee, which is given a quite questionable amount of emphasis in this book considering its lack of prominence in the Scriptures. And I keep searching for an enunciated principle of differentiation that would account for his selectivity.

Evangelistic mission, I would argue, is deserving of particular emphasis and priority, also. But more of that later.

The Mission of God VI - 'Frameworks'

At Stowe Gardens. Simon pretends to be a tree. No-one else takes any notice.

Wright has a couple of guiding metaphors. He offers his reading of the Bible as the 'key to unlock' the Bible's narrative (is the Bible a safe that needs cracking? a door that needs opening? is it somehow closed without the key?). This sounds uncomfortably reminiscent of George Eliot's scholar Casuabon and his never-ending project to find the 'key to all mythologies'. He also repeatedly speaks of the theme of God's mission as a 'framework', or an 'overarching framework'. (Goldsworthy uses the same vocabulary). Though it isn't a framework, really (which is a structural metaphor), but, in the way Wright uses it, an organising motif. But: why do we need a 'framework'? Why do we need such intensive exploration to uncover the 'framework'? Why are there competing 'frameworks' of equal plausibility? Are we saying that without the framework, the Bible's unity and coherence is in question somehow? (Interestingly, Wright does not discuss at any length other suggestions for an organising principle, though there are many). Isn't Jesus the Christ the organising principle (at least for Christians) and all the framework that is needed? Part of the problem here is the Wright wants to make more of the OT ethically speaking than a properly Christological reading of the OT will let him.

Interestingly, Wright starts by offering his theme 'the mission of God' as one possible hermeneutical key among many. By the end, it has become THE right and correct way to make sense of the Bible. So, he is saying more than: this theme is a neglected theme and look how much of the Bible is related to it. Now he is saying 'this is what the Bible is about, and it isn't about something else'. It becomes less a book about mission, and more a book about how to read the Bible.

The Mission of God IV

[Caveat: I am responding to the book as I go rather than producing a well-thought response. Things may annoy me now that won't when I see the whole vision of the book.]

Mission that claims the high spiritual ground of preaching only [sic!] a gospel of personal forgiveness and salvation without the radical challenge of the full biblical demands of God's justices and compassion, without a hunger and thirst for justice, may well expose those who respond to its partial truths to the same dangerous verdict....if faith without works is dead, mission without social compassion and justice is biblically deficient. p. 288

Yes, yes, yes: but it is the conceptual looseness that confuses me here. Is social action part of 'mission'? (Actually, I have a problem with the term 'social action' anyway). Or is social action the result of mission? Or is social action mission? The false dichotomies and straw men don't help. He is attacking nameless opponents: do they exist? Who knows? As he says:

There may be an element of caricature in the way I have sketched this view, but it is not unrepresentative of a certain brand of popular mission rhetoric. p. 280

This is frankly annoying. We are in the middle of what purports to be a scholarly work and what we get is hearsay and gossip! Come on, Chris! I am not interested in whether you can show up a 'certain brand of popular etc.' Who cares? Find a serious thinker who would oppose you and show where THEY are wrong and that your argument is stronger.

In this section, where Wright starts to use the OT to draw ethical implications for Christians today, I start to scratch my head, as I did with his OT Ethics book. It just seems so arbitrarily done, or done with so little reference to the distinctive character of the Church qua Church and Israel qua Israel. Unless you are quite ruthlessly and unbiblically supercessionist, you can't just say that the Church adopts the habits and marks of Israel except in a carefully qualified way. I remain to be convinced as to whether the qualifications have been made here. But I have a long way to read!
Is the Jubilee such a prominent theme that it warrants a whole chapter? Also: I will be very interested to see what he does with the wars of conquest. Mission in OT perspective was carried out by means of the sword! (no index entries under 'Conquest' or 'War' I note)...

The Mission of God III

Wright asks:

‘I would ask that the missional framework I propose in this volume be exaluated for its heuristic fruitfulness. Does it in fact do justice to the overall thrust of the biblical canon? Does it illuminate and clarify? Does it offer a way of articulating the coherence of the Bible’s overarching message?'

Help me here: isn't this last sentence a tautology? I mean isn't he saying 'does it offer a way of articularting the coherence of the Bible's coherence?'?

Is it the coherence that needs articulating? Or is it the message itself?

The Mission of God II

The Mission of God opens with the bold claim that 'Mission is what the Bible is all about'. He wants to ask 'can we take mission as a hermeneutical matrix for our understanding of the Bible as a whole?' p. 32

But mission is a rather rubbery word. Has Wright succeeded in taming it? A little further on we read:

Down through the centuries it would probably be fair to say that Christians have been good at their messianic reading of the OT but inadequate ... at their missional reading of it. We read the OT messianically or christologically in the light of Jesus; that is, we find in it a whole messianic theology and eschatology that we see as fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. In foing so we follow his own example, of course, and that of his first followers and the authors of the Gospels. But what we have so often faikled to do is to go beyond the mere satisfaction of ticking off so-called messianic predcitions that have 'been fulfilled'. And we have failed to go further because we have not grasped the missional significance of the Messiah. p. 30

It seems by 'mission' Wright means something like 'purpose'... so, the missional perspective is always asking 'what is God doing here' 'what is his purpose or his plan?'

The Mission of God I

I have been asked to write a review article for Anvil on Christopher Wright's magisterial new book The Mission of God. So as always, a few notes here first.

The scope of this book is truly impressive, as is its aim: to give an account of all of the Bible ordered to the concept of God's mission. In one sense it feels like old hat, because this is the kind of thing that Moore College has been serving up for years via Dumbrell, Robinson and Goldsworthy.

I notice, however, from looking at the index and the bibliography that hardly any of the authors cited are theologians. They are almost entirely contemporary biblical scholars of one kind or another. He reference precisely no patristic sources; no Augustine; no medieval writers; no Reformation greats (oh, I think Calvin gets a mention); no evangelical revival era or Protestant scholastic thinkers; no Puritans; no Karl Barth (no Karl Barth!). No Moltmann, no Guttierez, no Gunton, no Webster, no John Frame. Vanhoozer gets a couple of passing references.

And so far, no mention of martyrdom!

Brueggemann, Wright, N.T., Bauckham, etc: they are all there. Lots of contemporary missiologists, of course.

Is this another example of the mutual deafness between the disciplines?

Experts, Climate Change, and Religious Knowledge

Oxford is basically as I write floating away. It always has been one of the dampest places on earth but today it resembles Kevin Costner's Waterworld - and we know what a success that was.

Anyhow, as usual, climate change is being blamed. And I have to say any mention of this kind of environmental science leaves me head-scratching. Why? Because it is so inherently dependent on experts for information. We are utterly reliant on them one way or another. And if you want to oppose climate change thinking you have to produce your own expert. This is because the reasoning involved is way beyond the ordinary person, even the educated ones. I am not a climate change sceptic: but I am an expert sceptic (as in, I am sceptical of experts). I hate being so reliant on people whose knowledge I can't test, and yet I guess it is a fact of modern life (see Anthony Giddens on this). What alternative have I? But I can't help noticing the way climate change talk feeds into our primeval apocalyptic fears so well (and into the general English pessimism too!). It is what we want to hear, strangely enough. And it is coated in the priestly/sacred language of science, with all its totemic power.

This feeling of bewliderment and disempowerment is however something that many people feel towards theological and religious questions. They can see that there is a lot of disagreement; they know that there is an industry devoted to specialised knowledge that they could never hope to master; and they haven't time to go further. I remember teaching a bright class of 17 year olds - one boy threw up his hands in exasperation and said 'how can I know what is true when there is so much to know and there are so many different answers!' I guess having people like me studying away at university becoming experts doesn't help matters either...

The gospel however is not a piece of expert information. It isn't shrouded in the darkness of arcane knowledge that it takes years to acquire. Christians and their theologians have a call to present it not as a piece of expert knowledge but as something else...

Nominalism: no, not a post about medieval philosophy

I have been a fan of St George Rugby League Club in Sydney since 1980 (they were champions then, and have failed to win since). However, I own only one piece of club paraphenalia (a beanie I sleep in sometimes), and I have been to perhaps three games in the last 27 seasons. I am not aware of their current form, nor of the names of their current players. Their coach is Nathan Brown (or was last time I looked). I don't watch their games on TV (even when I am in Australia). However, I do want them to win, and if they are in a major game it is them that I barrack for (that means 'support' in Australian). St George RLC is certainly not aware that I exist - but I think that they could make a better effort to flush me out.

Am I a St George fan?

Well, I think I am. But a diehard, every game attending fan will most likely despise me for my lack of commitment. But how dare they!

It strikes me that this is how many, many people think about their membership of the Anglican church, at least in Sydney. Apparently, there are fewer of them than five years ago (see here), but it is still a whopping 20+% of the population - more by far and further than support St George, even more than support Rugby League!

Evangelicals have in the last thirty years seen such people as a bit of a nuisance, because they asked for baptisms and funerals which took a lot of time but in many cases didn't really believe what they are doing - it's a horrible feeling performing a sacred ceremony when you know people are basically perjuring themselves before God, believe me. Or, perhaps they lingered on as Christmas and Easter attenders who complained when anything changed, but didn't really care about what happened the rest of the time.

But: some 700,000 people in our city already think if themselves as members of our club, which I would think means that they have some vaguely positive feelings towards us. So: what are we doing about it? This is a huge potential missionfield.... What is the statistical information that we have on this vast population of people? Why are they still connected, but absent?

Samuel Marsden - The Flogging Parson

I have long desired to explain to my non-Australian readers the derivation of the name 'The Blogging Parson'. Byron Smith suggested it to me first in an off-hand comment, and I just couldn't resist it as a blog-name.

It recalls the Rev Samuel Marsden, the second Chaplain to the colony of New South Wales, who has gone down in history as 'The Flogging Parson'. He acted as magistrate as well as Chaplain: and, according to the Irish (and Catholic) convicts, he inflicted more severe punishments on the misbehaving convicts than even other magistrates in the colony. He was not a popular figure - regarded as intolerant and argumentative even by his peers. The mythology of Marsden the monster was given further impetus by Australia's most famous (and now notorious) historian, Manning Clark, a child of the manse himself and an atheist. Clark's personal resentment of Christianity fairly oozes from his pages...

Of course, the truth is more complicated: in amongst this undoubted severity was also a great love for humankind and desire to see the gospel of grace preached. His life was in fact marked by many remarkable good works as well as the flaws. A Yorkshireman by birth, Marsden arrived in the colony in 1794 with his wife Elisabeth and their newborn daughter. He had had an early association with William Wilberforce, the anti-slave reformer. He was an extremely able - and eventually wealthy - man, and succeeded in shipping wool from Australia to England, and was reputedly the first to introduce sheep to NZ. But more importantly, he was also the first to bring the gospel to NZ, largely at his own expense. He was particularly fond of the Maori people. Interestingly he is remembered far more fondly in NZ than in Australia, where his name is used for schools and streets. You would never see that in Australia.

Let's not excuse the flaws: though I would have to say that it should be remembered that the colony of NSW was a prison camp in an alien environment, and that fear of convict mutiny must have been a daily companion, especially when the Irish rebels - ideological prisoners and not just petty thieves like the others - were sent in large numbers. But his determination to witness for Christ to the end of the earth - literally! - ought to be remembered and honoured, too.

Bruce D Marshall - Martyrdom and Truth

A number of authors I have encountered - namely Cavanaugh, Vanhoozer and DB Hart - stress the importance of martyrdom as the form of Christian truth-telling. Martyrdom is of missiological and apologetic importance - of course. It is a witness of a particular kind. In the postmodern as in the premodern world it is the ultimate proof that anyone can offer.

Bruce D Marshall in his book Trinity and Truth joins the ranks of the above. Is focus here is a epistemology. Here is fascinating excerpt in which he compares and contrasts two methods of establishing truth - scientific experiment and Christian practice:

The parallel between Christian practice and scientific experiment is, to be sure, inexact. As the martyr’s willingness to die for her faith in Christ most vividly shows, undertaking the life of obedience for which the gospel calls goes hand in hand with being convinced that the gospel is true, while scientists undertake experiments precisely in order to become convinced (or dissuaded) that an otherwise hypothetical set of beliefs is true. Failure of predicted results, moreover, tends to disconfimr the theory which underwrote the predictions, while Christians think they may and should believe the gospel precisely in the face of their own abject failures to live in a way congruent with it.

But the partial disanalogy apparently fails to bear on the relevant similarity of Christian beliefs to scientific hypotheses: the successful practice of the Christian community and its members might be explained otherwise than by the truth of the beliefs held by those who engage in the practice. An objector to the pragmatic thesis might agree to a significant extent with the Christian community's description of a practice...and might agree that the practice is good and right, but might propose a different, indeed incompatible, account of why the practice goes on and succeeds... (p. 186ff)

So, martyrdom is testimony, and as persuasive testimony perhaps as such there is: but it is not proof unless you already inhabit the world-view and practices of the martyr.

Marshall concludes:

Christians will inevitably encounter a kind of epistemic affliction, because they not only hold true, but insist on treating as epistemically primary across the board, beliefs which will be rationally contestable until the end of time…The affliction which goes with holding these beliefs may go beyond having to avoid giving them up. For the martyr’s willingness to die for her faith in Christ, a perseverance no less arduous for being whilly the Spirit’s gift, is rightly reserved the highest praise. p. 216

To summarise: the truth hurts. (Actually, is this a good title for my dissertation? Martyrdom - the Truth Hurts)