We’re back this week after a little break and we catch up on how things are going with our themes. There’s a great email about ways to respond to fear. And I talk a little bit more about my year of ‘Less is More’. I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve started to put more systems in place in order to simplify things. And there are a couple of elements which I talk about in this week’s episode.
With Joe away in Mexico we have an interview with Bekah Legg. She talks about the work of Restored with the victims of domestic abuse, and shares a little of her own story of loss and grief. The statistics are sobering: in the UK, 1 in 4 women will be subjected to domestic abuse. And, shockingly, that stat is exactly the same within the church. And we need to reflects within the church, on how our theology actually reinforces this behaviour.
This is our annual themes episode, in which we set out themes for the year. Not an original idea, I think I got it from a podcast I used to wisent to, but for the past few years we had set themes which we will seek to explore. (We used to do this around January, but then changed to March, because as everyone knows, the real new years day is 25 March.
In this week’s episode we talk about how culture shapes art, and especially, how the culture of the time affects the Bible. This is always a tangled thread, not least because many people like to assume that God dictated the Bible. And, since God is outside all time and therefore culture, the Bible must be free of that. Of course, God didn’t dictate it. At least not in that sense. Paul says that scripture is God-breathed, not God-spoken.
In this episode we discuss some follow up from last episode’s interview with Danielle Strickland which addressed issues of patriarchy within church and society. A lot of our discussion this week was on the difficulty of addressing the deep, ingrained stuff, the stuff we grew up with and which has shaped us. We are all products of, what one correspondent calls our ‘silly teenage dramas’. It’s life-long work dismantling this kind of stuff.
This is a great and really important interview. Author Danielle Strickland talks with Joe about patriarchy – ‘the male-centring and male-ordering of the world’. This is something we’re always keen to discuss, but being two blokes of a certain age, it feels like it could so easily tip over into mansplaining. So it was great to have Danielle talk about the challenges of calling it out, the heretical concept of the male-ness of God, and the way in which it affects our world and, of course, our church.
More discussion of metaphors this week. We talk more about the idea of Jesus as ‘Lord’, and discuss how changes in culture, society or even technology might change our understanding of long-standing human metaphors. As culture and society changes metaphors can get left behind. This is the issue with the idea of Jesus as ‘Lord’; it’s really whether that, as an honorific, still works in our society. It’s not that it’s not true, it’s whether the word has lost its impact.
Happy Candlemas to one and all. In this episode we talk a lot about baptism: what is it, where did it come from and does it still matter? And did I really write a book on it without realising? Spoilers, but turns out we both think it’s still significant and important. My feeling is that, as something which Jesus told us to go and do, it seems that we ought not to dismiss it lightly.
We had lots of interesting feedback this week, including a question about whether the statement ‘Jesus is Lord’ still works for us in our democratic, post-feudal society. I was reminded of a piece I wrote in a book called God’s Dangerous Book, which talked about the first translation of the Bible out of Greek and into the Gothic language by a cleric called Wulfila. Here’s an excerpt: There were three immediate problems.
There’s a lot about metaphor in this week’s show triggered, partially, by my latest irritation with a worship song, but also by a heartfelt email about the patriarchy in religion. Metaphors are, of course, vital. Apart from mystical moments of direct revelation, they are the only way we have to talk about God. As I say on the show, God exists in translation. Without metaphor we are up the creek without a paddle.