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.
“When one is writing a poem, one may not be thinking about one’s moral duties. One just has something inside that one wants to get out, and the only way to get it out and at the same time find out what it is one wants to get out, is to find the words for it. If you are a poet you will come to know when you have found the words, and when you haven’t.” T.S. Eliot
Source: Collected Prose Vol 4, quoted in TLS January 24 2025 p.5
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.
“Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis, and the current one here in the US is also a language crisis.” Rebecca Solnit
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.
I’m mainlining poetry at the moment, inspired by re-reading Clive James’s Poetry Notebook. These lines from Yeats sum up the present climate so well:
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love;
From The Stare’s Nest By My Window
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.