The Unchooseable Choice?

But we need to pause here and retrace our steps somewhat, because there’s a complication to the story – a complication I call the ‘unchooseable choice’ condition. It is true that people today speak of belief in God as something that one chooses for oneself. But there’s a contradiction here, too. People also characteristically speak of being religious or not as something about themselves that they can’t change and that just ‘is’ – like their eye-colour or race. They will say ‘I am not a religious person’. Philosopher Alain de Botton recently spoke of his unbelief as if it was inescapable fact about him that was not at all open to revision or question regardless of any choice he might make. Religious beliefs, or the lack of them, are something deeply ingrained in us from childhood to the degree that we can close off a conversation about religious matters by simply referring to this state of affairs. So, we have a choice that, ironically, many people feel they can’t choose. 

This condition is part of a deeper paradox at the heart of the culture of the west. It’s a paradox which reverberates right through western politics, science, economics and education, and which has no obvious philosophical solution. It’s this: one the one hand, we exalt the notion of human autonomous free will. It’s a fine idea, alright: liberty is an aspiration which lends the human individual dignity and enables us to talk about the rights and duties we owe each other regardless of skin colour or gender. The freedom to pursue happiness is the basis of our consumer economy, and of our system of justice, in which we hold individuals largely responsible for their actions as far as we can. We expect it from each other. And yet at the same time, various branches of human knowledge are offering powerful descriptions of the human condition as entirely and comprehensively determined by factors outside of our control – whether that be genes, natural selection, brain chemistry, our parents or whatever else. So, the whole idea of free choice may turn out to be a grand illusion. (see Sam Harris)

There’s a false dilemma here. True, the idea of picking through the various religious options, testing each as if you were evaluating the ripeness of an avocado in the supermarket, is an appealing myth, but nothing more. We’d love to think of ourselves as standing independently over all the possible choices and selecting one (or none) with a dispassionate logic and complete freedom.

But the reality is of course that we don’t do anything of the kind. We are a bundle of predispositions and preferences, marked by our experiences and relationships and shaped by our genetic makeup. When we choose, we make a decision in media res, in the middle of things, with time ticking away and with events swirling all around us. And yet, even if we can’t give a clear philosophical account of why the things we choose to do are real choices, we still have the felt experience of evaluating options and making decisions. It’s a felt experience of decision-making for which we feel (mostly) responsible – except in extreme circumstances, when someone’s drug addiction or abusive relationship with their father has distorted the choosing. In these cases it is up to the individual to explain how their experience of decision was inhibited or distorted. 

Which means: human beings are capable of evaluating their own decision-making processes – of engaging in self-reflection to the degree that people can give an account for their preferences and biases, and perhaps revising them. While our imagined ability to survey all our options from a neutral standpoint is false, to us is given the ability to reflect on ourselves as choosers and knowers. The gift of human self-consciousness bestows on us this perspective at least; and to that we should add that, as social and historical beings, we have the benefit of others to help us.

Of course, the decision for a particular faith or against it is felt by 21^st century people to be a highly personal one – as personal as one’s sexual preferences or taste in music. That is also a by-product of the Reformation period – the after-effect of a change in theological outlook. That’s not to say that the choice is simply a matter of personal preference, but that it is felt by many people to be a very private and internal matter. The old cliché about not mentioning religion, sex and politics as the three taboo subjects is very much in force – especially regarding religion. Even sex is talked about in public with less reticence. Public preachers and door knockers are the height of bad taste. It is also very much the case that the spectre of violent religious disagreement hangs over our culture. If we are to live at peace with one another, then it might be better if religion were held to be a purely private matter and not for public discussion. 

But I think  that we are greatly impoverished by this secretive and private attitude to matters of faith. While it protects us to a degree, it renders us inarticulate about some of the most profound experiences that are given to human beings. We are not challenged in the biggest questions of our lives to think more deeply because we prefer not to discuss them from fear of disagreement. We are crippled by this social convention. Personal need not mean entirely private.   

Difficulty breathing

Once upon a time, it was not so difficult to believe. 

Believing in God was like breathing – a second sense of which people were hardly aware. Even with a man as rational as the great English philosopher John Locke in the seventeenth century, lack of religious belief was an extraordinary and aberrant thing that wasn’t worth tolerating because it must surely lead to social chaos and even treasonable behaviour. Philosophers like the great medieval writers St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas offered their famous arguments for the existence of God not because they imagined that they would convince an non-believer but because they saw them as confirming what believers (that is, everybody) knew to be already true. 

Not only was the world self-evidently the handiwork of the Creator, but it was also the case that it was shot through with his divinity. Divinity oozed from physicality. Reality was connected in a great chain of being which participated in the highest being – namely, God. Human beings were a part of this great connected whole in which they could actively participate through prayers and other religious acts, mediated through the agency of the Church. The ‘divine’ and the ‘natural’ were not separate explanations for the workings of the world. 

Today we like to think of believing - as we like to think of many things – as primarily a choice. We think of our religious views as a preference – not a trivial one, it should be granted, but a preference nonetheless. What’s more, believing in God has become a highly contested choice, vehemently challenged by some of the most prominent intellectuals of our times. 

How has this come about? It would be too easy to say that the rise of the scientific world-view is the culprit. That is a common way of telling the story: as science and technology have enabled us to grasp the world more successfully and efficiently, the less mysterious the world has seemed. Take medicine, for example: once we could talk about bacteria and viruses and their effects, we could start addressing illnesses without supposing that a priest is going to have a great deal to contribute. It is true that science has provided alternative explanations of the workings of the world which at many points make appeal to a divine power apparently unnecessary. But that would be to miss the story of the how the scientific world-view come to prominence in the first place; and how it depended for its emergence on certain changes in the way faith and belief were thought of in Western Europe. The scientific world-view did not cause the change in the nature of believing, since it arose at the same time as the changes themselves took place. 

That change had to do with the extraordinary movement within the Western church: the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation, bound up as it was with the intellectual movement sometimes called ‘humanism’, introduced the notion of ‘faith’ not merely as ‘believing certain propositions to be true and others to be false’ but as a giving of the whole of one’s self in deep trust to the promises of God. The big thing that connected you to the divine world was now an inward and individual matter, whereas before this the external work of baptism was held to be the ground of your religious life. And this believing, this faith, was part of your life’s story: it was possible to tell a story of not believing and then believing, of coming to know what trust in the promises of God was as the Spirit of God did its work on you and you changed. Though the Reformers were adamant that faith itself was a work of God in the human person, it was still the case that the human person’s will, reason and affections were involved in the getting of faith. Even if one ought retrospectively to speak of the illumination of God’s Holy Spirit working in your heart to bring faith to flame, the experience of coming to faith felt certainly as if it involved one’s hearing, understanding and a moment of decision. At this point, faith became an act of the will – a reality decided upon. Mine to choose, mine to reject. 

At the same time, Protestantism concentrated the sphere of divine action in the Word of God. Instead of seeing God’s presence rippling through nature, Protestantism warned of the danger of confusing the created things with the Creator himself. There were many possibly idolatrous distractions from the decisive place in which God was at work – in Christ revealed in Scripture. And it would not do to forgot the sheer transcendent otherness of God. If anything, the gospel of the cross of Jesus Christ revealed to humankind the radical alienation of humankind from the divine being. The significance of this separation of God from his creation was that the world’s natural processes became available for study on their own terms, without the confusion of a metaphysical explanation. This was the beginning of the scientific revolution, and a revolution in the way people in the West thought about faith.

But we need to pause here and retrace our steps somewhat, because there’s a complication to the story – a complication I call the ‘unchosen choice’ condition. It is true that people today speak of belief in God as something that one choses for oneself. But there’s a contradiction here, too. People also characteristically speak of being religious or not as something about themselves that they can’t change and that just ‘is’ – like their eye colour or race. They will say ‘I am not a religious person’. Philosopher Alain de Botton recently spoke of his unbelief as if it was inescapable fact about him that was not at all open to revision or question regardless of any choice he might make. Religious beliefs, or the lack of them, are something deeply ingrained in us from childhood to the degree that we can close off a conversation about religious matters by simply referring to this state of affairs. So, we have a choice that, ironically, many people feel they can’t choose. 

There is a kind of wistfulness expressed at this state of affairs, too. With the rise of an absolutist New Atheism, it would be easy to overlook the fact that a kind of longing for the ‘ability’ to believe is widespread. There is a wistful look over the back fence of religion. People frequently express admiration for aspects of the religious world view, and for the beneficial effects that religious belief brings to those who are so fortunate. Those who have moved on from a religious past will express feelings of grief and loss – even when the circumstances of their leaving are quite bitter.

Sydney and Brawling: Sattler, Baldwin, and Murder Most Ordinary

Read it here

A Sinner's Lament - On Catherine Parr

Catherine Parr, the survivor among Henry VIII’s six queens married him in July 1543. She was an accomplished writer, and at some point between her marriage and Henry’s death in 1547 she wrote a spiritual autobiography called The lamentation of a sinner.

At one level, Queen Catherine maintains a dignified privacy even as she confesses her sins. There is no airing of her dirty laundry, or wallowing in her misdeeds. Nothing here would provoke a tabloid frenzy. But the Queen earnestly laments the state of her soul before she understood the true nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Her diagnosis of her spiritual condition prior to her conversion is most grave. It is not merely that she was a sinner: in one sense, she is able to confess that she is ‘not like other men’, and not an ‘adulterer, nor fornicator, and so forth’.

But for Catherine it was her spiritual pride which is at the dark heart of her former life. In this attitude of high-handedness she was guilty of ‘most presumptuously thinking nothing of Christ crucified’ and ‘went about to set forth mine own righteousness’. What’s more, ‘the blood of Christ was not reputed by me sufficient for to wash me from the filth of my sins…but I sought for such riffraff as the bishop of Rome hath planted in his tyranny and kingdom, trusting with great confidence by the virtue and holiness of them, to receive full remission of my sins’.

But the solution to this pride was not to display a greater humility – as if to find a virtue to outweigh it. For one thing, Catherine remembers herself as blind to her spiritual state: ‘If any man had said I had been without Christ, I would have stiffly withstood the same; and yet I never knew Christ nor wherefore He came’.

Rather it was an encounter with the cross of Jesus Christ that led to her change of heart. The cross at once revealed to her the love of God and her own sinfulness. It produced in her a new kind of faith: not any longer a ‘history faith’ but now a ‘lively faith’. What did Catherine mean by the distinction? She writes of ‘a dead human, historical faith, gotten by human industry, but a supernal lively faith, which worketh by charity’. One kind of faith might rightly be called a kind of virtue in that it is attained by human effort. But the faith that enlivens and justifies the sinner is ‘supernal’: it comes from a supernatural source. It is God’s own gift by the Spirit and not in itself a work earning merit before God. As she writes:

Yet we may not impute to the worthiness of faith or works, our justification before God: but ascribe and give the worthiness of it, wholly to the merits of Christ’s passion, and refer and attribute the knowledge and perceiving thereof only to faith: whose very true only property, is to take, apprehend and hold fast they promises of God’s mercy, the which maketh us righteous: and to cause me continually to hope for the same mercy and in love to work all manner of ways allowed in the Scripture that I may be thankful for the same.

What we have in this remarkable document written by arguably the most powerful woman in the kingdom at the time is a confident and joyful testimony to the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone. It reveals not only the doctrine, but the spirituality of faith alone. It is a solafidean spirituality that shines through in the way that the Queen speaks of the intractability of her pre-conversion state; and the way in which she describes the nature of the faith she has now found as emanating from God himself. But above all, it is Catherine’s call to a constant meditation on the cross of Christ as the ‘cunningest lesson in divinity’ which reveals just how deeply embedded this newly found spirituality had become.

This was one woman’s testimony and not an official church document or a formulary of some kind. However, it is evidence that the Reformation teaching on justification was not a piece of arcane theology, or the pretext for a manifestly political break with the Church of Rome. This was a deeply-held conviction: a transforming truth which had the power to captivate people and to give them a new self-understanding.

Sydney and Mates

http://sydneyanglicans.net/life/culture/7-sins-of-sydney-3-loyalty-to-mates


I feel I should put in an explanatory note about how I am working on these 'Sins of Sydney'.
Some people feel I have been too critical of 'our' side.
It would be too easy for the series to degenerate into a series of swipes from a height at the culture we inhabit. But that seems to be cheap to me. In each piece I have tried to include a reference to the way in which churches and/or Christians are themselves part of the 'sin' that we are describing and analysing.

The importance of this is theological and rhetorical and historical.

It's historical because (I hope) it is simply the truth that we have shared in the sins of our city to some extent and there is no point denying it!

It's rhetorical because in our times to admit one's faults is a very important thing to do in order to get a hearing (if indeed they are faults). In addition, we will find it very hard to accurately and precisely speak to society about its sins if we don't understand our own complicity in the social pathologies we discover.

It's theological because the one thing that constitutes the church is that it is a repentent church that has received mercy. There's no need for us to be defensive: we can be genuinely repentant in the expectation that there is no condemnation for those in Christ.

Quite simply: we, of all people, have nothing to hide!

A question for historical theologians

Historical theologians (and you know, some of my best friends are historical theologians...) are a curious bunch. They are dedicated to reach into the obscure pockets of the theological works of the past and telling us what someone REALLY thought. It is onerous and exacting work, and anyone who tries to do constructive theology owes them a debt.

Now, constructive theologians often making grand sweeping statements about the history of theology in order to bolster their case. Two examples:
1) the Barth-sponsored reading of Calvin and the Calvinists, which alleges that there is a marked difference between the two.
2) the Rogers-McKim reading of the Princetonian school (Warfield etc) which alleges that inerrancy was pretty much their invention and borne out of their commitment to Scottish Common Sense Realism.

In both instances, careful historical theology has shown where polemics have stood in the way of understanding what actually occured, and have given us a more nuanced view of the past and more options for discussing significant matters of controversy in the present. The historical theologian can always play the trump card of 'I have really read all of this work in its context and in its original language and in the unpublished manuscript and I can tell you that the true picture is more like X than Y'. It really is hard to get around that kind of breadth of knowledge.

However - there is a point up to which this becomes perfectly useless in tracing the history of ideas. What do I mean? I mean that what we need to deal with is not Augustine as he actually was (for example) but 'Augustine' as the tradition received him. Now, 'Augustine' is somewhat similar to Augustine, but not the same. Sure, find me an unread and untranslated sermon that shows that he didn't really think xyz, but in the final analysis, who cares? What matters is rather what successive generations of theologians have meant when they wrote about 'Augustine'.

An example came up in discussion recently about John Owen. Now, John Owen is probably best known - though certainly not exclusively - for his work on the atonement The Death of Death. A historical theologian friend of mine said recently though that, since this was an early work, it was not fair to judge Owen on this work. Granted. But Owen is not 'Owen'. And ultimately, 'Owen' is more interesting in the history of theological thought than Owen. So is 'Arius', as opposed to Arius.

This is not to say we should embrace unfair readings or short cuts or that more work on these great figures won't yield impressive fruit. But historical theologians need to engage more in tracing how ideas have been passed on, don't they - justly or not. In fact, this raises the point: can we ever really sum up the thought of an individual thinker as a consistent whole in any case? Thinkers are organisms. They change their minds, contradict themselves, forget things and get emotional about stuff. They respond to controversies and battles... are we not better served by asking what their legacy was? Don't we need a reception theory for theological thinkers?

Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology

I am starting to get into Kevin Vanhoozer's Remythologizing Theology. I enjoyed this comment:

The Bible both describes and participates in the economy of triune communicative action. The Bible is noth a unified (one mythos) and many-voicced discourse whose form is theologically significant. As opposed to monologic epics - comprehenisive stories told by an omniscient narrator with a single set of concepts and categories - the Bible communicates its theodramatic story dialogically. To speak of mythos is to remember both that there is a unifying plot and that no one voice, perspective or set of categories alone articulates it. Rather the divine playwright employs a plurality of human voices to communicate what he was doing in Christ to reconcile the world to himself. p. 26

This meshes with the idea I have had for a project on theological anthropology which would engage with the great literary genres as alterative or overlapping mythoi in comparison and contrast to the Biblical mythos. (You have to read Vanhoozer to see what he means by 'mythos' btw).

Sydney and the Pursuit of Luck

Read it here

Faith and Doubt Table-Talk

Details here

Creation 3: The search for order

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

(Colossians 1:15-20)

Perhaps we could understand human life best as the struggle to bring order out of chaos. Something deep in us predisposes us to like pattern, regularity, measure and coherence. We classify and designate as a way of holding back the encroaching and baffling complexity of the world. It makes the limitless universe of things containable in our limited minds. It makes it possible to ‘Get Things Done’. We are like trains needing tracks to run on.

The television show ‘Hoarders’ has been one of those great things that having extra channels has brought to Australian TV. In that show, the cameras visit a person suffering from the complete inability to deal with stuff in their life – someone whose house in filled to the brim with junk. Magazines, old tins of food, newspapers, unworn clothes, sentimental items, long dead pets and even used adult diapers fill the house to shoulder level. People haven’t slept on their beds for years because of the junk that is there. The fascination of this appalling show is that the mental illness in these people has led to a complete loss of the ability to order their domestic lives to the point at which it becomes completely overwhelming. I do somewhat suspect that my wife believes this is what I would become if I were to live on my own.

In this quest for order, we are like the God and Father of Jesus Christ. God is a God who not only brings something from nothing: he brings order from chaos. This is quite the opposite of the polytheistic worldview, in which the world around us is the result of the struggle between competing deities for supremacy. If you read Homer’s fabulous Iliad, that tale of human savagery and conflict, you cannot but fail to notice that the uncontrolled rage of the human beings at one other is mirrored by the heavenly wrestle of the Gods with one another. For Homer, human chaos and divine chaos are profoundly linked to one another.

The Bible’s version of things couldn’t be more different. Psalm 74, for example, which is a prayer from the ruins and devastating of fallen Jerusalem, presumes to remind God of his ordering activity in the creation of the world – it was he who ‘set all the boundaries of the earth’.

And of course, you can’t read the Genesis 1 account of creation and fail to be impressed by the way in which the creative activity of God is a movement from chaos to order. As a piece of writing, the opening chapter of the Bible exhibits an extraordinary order which is intended to mirror the ordering of God in the work of creation. The six days of creation are beautifully balanced, with the first three days providing the arena which is then successively filled in the next three days. God orders by acts of separation – light from darkness, water above from water below, land from sea. At the same time, the narrative builds so that the empty stage is increasingly filled with an abundance of life, leading up to the climax – the creation of the man and woman as creatures in God’s image.

The creatures are then created to order, ‘according to their kind’ – a strange phrase that must mean that the creatures that God makes are placed in the right place for them and together with others of their own kindred. There is we might say a generic order to the creatures of the earth. There is an affinity of the animals for each other – a likeness to each other and an individuality, in that a giraffe is not much like a lion. A giraffe is like a giraffe is like a giraffe.

The only creatures not so made are the human beings. They are not made ‘according to their kind’ but according to God’s kind – in his image and likeness, that is to say. Human beings resemble not only each other, but the divine being – and are given capacities to complete God’s task of bringing order to the creation, by tilling and filling, and naming and claiming. And so, unlike the animals, they share in God’s ordering of the world not just by organising it, but by bringing out its divinely-given purpose.

This is us at our best, isn’t it: with our minds, human beings can, through study and observation, find the order hidden in even chaotic things. We can study the apparent randomness of splash patterns. We can predict the movements of the stars. We can describe the mathematics of neutrinos, those mysterious sub-sub atomic particles.

This is the essence of wisdom, isn’t it? We see Solomon, the Bible’s byword for wisdom, as a collector and classifier of the things of the natural world in 1 Kings 4:29ff – ‘He described plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also taught about animals and birds, reptiles and fish’ (vs 33). Interestingly, this was God-given wisdom and insight: yet it was learnt through observation and study.

Recently I have been reading about the man who was arguably the greatest experimental scientist of the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday. A committed if slightly unusual Protestant Christian, it was Faraday who once said ‘the book of nature which we have to read is written by the finger of God.’

Faraday’s practice as a scientist was founded on his firm convictions as to the physical world created by God. He was convinced that the divine author had ordered the world according to certain laws that it was subsequently given to human beings to discover and of which they had a duty to make use.

Furthermore, the various powers which God had placed in the universe were part of a connected whole. Proceeding on this presupposition, Faraday was able to discover the remarkable connection between electricity and magnetism.

In a private lecture to Prince Albert in 1849, Faraday described how the whole universe seems to be shot through with the force of magnetism. He then said ‘What its great purpose is, seems to be looming in the distance before us… and I cannot doubt that a glorious discovery in natural knowledge, and of the wisdom and power of God in the creation, is awaiting our age.’ Here we see how Faraday thought of his science as an activity of faith. Each new discovery did not roll back or reduce the power of God, but rather expanded the realm of his glory and praise. As one of his biographers has said: ‘he conceived science to be closely akin to true Christianity, since order and peace were to be found in both.’

In our age of relentless ‘science vs religion’ debates, we have forgotten Faraday’s extraordinary, Solomon-like example. It is especially difficult for Christians who work in science and science-related professions to see how their work and their faith are intimately connected.

But sometimes our ordering cuts against the grain of the created order rather than running with it. Over-ordering can produce its own chaos, as we know when we try to turn animals into machines. Projecting a mechanical view of order onto an organism is a failure to reckon with the fact that there a different types of order, according to the things that need ordering. Order is not simply good in and of itself. We too readily superimpose the order that we find in one system on top of the order in another – or, we simplify, when complexity is needed.

One of the silliest things I have ever heard is that because God is a God of order this must mean that human babies ought to be fed on a four-hour routine. Routine feeding of babies may or may not be wise and practical, but it is an application of our modern, technological, human-perspective order to divine order, rather than the other way around. It claims to know too much about God’s ordering of the universe – more than is revealed to us. It is a confusion of types of order – the order of the clock with the order of the baby. Babies are not born with wrist-watches, strange to say; and yet (though they bring chaos to a household!) they are very much part of and a reflection of the divine ordering of things.

But there is another kind of ‘order’ that God brings to the world. It is more than simply ‘organisation’. As we discover in the New Testament, God has created the world with a purpose in mind. He has arranged it, but he has also purposed it.

We see this in the confession of the Colossian hymn (Col 1:15-20). It is a little statement filled to overflowing with rich theological meaning, isn’t it? The hymn doesn’t distinguish between the pre-incarnate Eternal Son who God loves and the incarnate Christ who dies on the cross – it unselfconsciously encompasses both. The beloved Son fulfills the destiny of humanity in that he is the ‘firstborn’ over all creation in that he is the heir of all things – the creation naturally falls to his possession and rule. It is he who is the true image of the invisible God, after all. And he is the agent of the creation of all things – they are created ‘by him’- and he is the sustaining power of all things: ‘in him all things hold together’. And things were created ‘for him’. He will encompass all things, and have the supremacy in all things.

And, such is Christ’s central role in accomplishing God’s purposes, that it is he who is the means of God reconciling all things to himself by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. The death of Christ ensures that creation fulfills its intended purpose.

We shouldn’t be surprised to see the themes of creation and redemption being interwoven in this passage. In fact, the Old Testament characteristically develops its theology of creation out of the experience of redemption in history (see Isaiah 40-55 for just one example). And this is a theological habit we should learn: the best view we have of the divine ordering of the universe is the view from 2Golgotha and the empty tomb – where we see the fulfillment of all God’s promises to Abraham and to Israel. This Christ is the logos, the wisdom by who the world was created and for who it was intended. It runs to his time.

And that is why we need to tell not only of the orderedness and coherence of the universe as a physical system to the glory of God but of his bring it to another kind of order by setting under the feet of his beloved Son, Jesus Christ. The human work of ordering the world is not only in sensing the inner order of things according to their kinds. It is also the work of bringing things to order under the rule of the creator and redeemer.

This may indeed lead us to a proper theology of church rosters. Church rosters of course are not commanded anywhere that I can see in Scripture (other than the widow’s list in 1 Timothy perhaps?). They are simply part of the ordering and patterning of community life according to the created givens of time, space, material resources and the human body. And yet, because these rosters hopefully serve in the building up of the people of God, they are playing a part in ordering all things according to their purpose.

Far-fetched? Not at all: it seems that Paul is making exactly this move when he reminds the Corinthians to clean up their liturgy in 1 Corinthians 14:33 on the basis that ‘God is not a God of disorder but of peace’. I am struck by the contrast here: disorder is matched not with order but with the deliberate choice of the word ‘peace’ – a word suggesting not merely pattern but purpose. The church’s life is to reflect the character of the God it serves not only by being organized, but by being marked by relationships of love for one another. Things are to be done in a fitting and orderly way in church not just because church is a place for people with obsessive compulsive disorder but because we are in the middle of God’s plan to bring his peaceful, redemptive order to the world.