The end of an empire (Rome 2)

The best way to see Rome is clearly to get up early and get out before the Germans have woken up. (We learned our lesson the other day when a million of them got on the same bus as us…) We got the bus over to the Colisseum yesterday morning and were amazed by the sheer scale of the place. It is immense and puts into perspective any pride in modern engineering. This was built – probably by slave labour – 2000 years ago and was obviously intended to last for ever.

The exhibition is certainly worth seeing before actually going into the place itself, but it also left me with a feeling of some disquiet. Classicists are about to discover just how ignorant I am when I explain why.

Most of the exhibition is a eulogy to the Emperor Vespasian who had the place built. I could find no reference to the labour force that put stone on stone and brick on brick. The civil magnanimity and democratic generosity of Vespasian were lauded at every turn, but there was only a casual reference to (a) his brutal suppression of Judea, (b) the siege and slaughter of Masada, (c) the brutality of Roman suppression of local uprisings across the empire and (d) the cruelty that was at the heart of executions.

What did become clear was that the pagan empire had little respect for human life per se. What it did have respect for was rank, status and particular notions of human value according to role in the state.

It is sometimes trendy for people to dismiss the rise of Christianity as a form of cruel imperialism, but Christianity also cultivated the soil for great sacrifice, human value and great art – despite its terrible aberrations which can also be seen in the history of the Church in Rome. It is sometimes convenient to forget just how cheap life was in the pagan world.

The other thought that occurred to me was the fact that what are now called ‘back stories’ are always complicated. What I mean by this is simply that history is a mess of contradictions and inconvenient truths. Yesterday’s scandalous brutality becomes today’s intriguing curiosity. We read over centuries of oppression and cruelty as if it were somehow interesting but not quite real. We read of gladiators who fought and died in the service of entertainment; of people fed to animals in the service of entertainment; of people wiped out by disease and conflict; and we don’t relate to them as people with families and relationships. And we don’t stop long enough to ask where God was for them in the midst of their human lot.

When Rome declined, was the hubris of its imperial golden age seen as a bit of an embarrassment – the transience of hubristic power? Is our contemporary valuing of the ancient imperial power simply a reflection of our contemporary hankering after power and hubris?

I love what I am seeing of Rome, but it also pushes me to think beyond (or beneath?) the camera-clicking sights and try to perceive the human stuff that was going on – in ordinary people’s lives and deaths.

 

Easter. And God wants you wealthy?

I guess the irony is lost on the Guardian, but its feature today on the Kingsway International Christian Centre (in Walthamstow, London) puts into sharp relief the shocking surprise of Easter over against the shocking heresy of some contemporary Pentecostal teaching. (For a corrective, read Tom Wright in the Times.)

The article by Robert Booth highlights the fact that Kingsway ‘has filed company accounts which reveal it made a £4.9m profit over the last 18 months. It also has assets of £22.9m – more than three times the amount held by the foundation which maintains St Paul’s Cathedral. The church is led by a controversial Nigerian pastor, Matthew Ashimolowo, who earns a salary of £100,000 a year and preaches that God wants you rich.’ It goes on: ‘His church’s wealth stems largely from the donations it encourages from its 8,000-strong largely African and Caribbean congregation. They gave £9.5m in tithes and offerings in the 18 months to April 2008, dwarfing the £33,000 that the average Church of England congregation gave over the same period.’

All very well if you believe that God is on the side of the rich and has an overwhelming desire to make Christians healthy and wealthy (but, presumably, not very wise). In the annual accounts the church’s leader writes: “The last 18 months have been a period of incredible journey in the life of KICC…  It has been very exciting to see God move the ministry from one level to another as we witness the increased manifestation of His glory.”

It is difficult to know where to begin with this. So, let’s take several matters in turn:

1. The comparisons between the Church of England and Kingsway are both silly and misleading. Kingsway is a single church (with several offshoots) bringing together around 8,000 (mainly Nigerian?) people from all over London and Essex. In the same ‘catchment’ the Church of England has in the region of 1,500 parishes, maintaining a similar number of buildings (plus ancillary halls, etc. serving the community) and employing in the region of 1,500 professional clergy (and others). Aggregate the giving in all these parishes and then we have a reasonable comparison to make. You will find that people in Anglican parishes are giving to maintain Christian presence and service in all our communities, not just pulling them in eclectically to run a big show. Good on KICC for doing what it does, but if we are going to make comparisons, at least let us compare like with like. (The Diocese of Southwark – just one of the three or four referred to above – has an annual budget of around £22million, over 90% of which comes from people’s pockets to support 330 stipendiary clergy: and this before they even start paying for their local mission and running costs of buildings.)

2. Where is the biblical basis for allowing that being wealthy is to be equated with ‘blessing’ or ‘a manifestation of God’s glory’? I recently heard a Pentecostal preacher use the Bible in an indefensible way, citing (for example) Isaiah and telling the audience that this was talking about the church. It was a prime example of how to pick the bits of biblical text that say what you want to hear and fitting them into a hermeneutic that never has to be justified.

3. Abraham never saw God’s promises fulfilled. Moses was faithful, but never got into the Promised Land. Jeremiah went into exile despite (or because of?) his faithfulness. Jesus promised only self-denial and a cross to those who followed him. Pentecost led to execution and persecution for the apostles and their followers. The church is called to lay down its life that the world might see who God is (the suffering servant?) and what God is about (laying down his life for the sake of the world?). Wealth, numbers and ‘success’ might well be telling a different story from the one being preached and written about in the preface to the accounts of Kingsway.

Different churches emphasise different things and all are conditioned partly by their cultural assumptions. Every church has to be open to correction of its hermeneutical and cultural assumptions. I wonder if Kingsway is open to having its assumptions about God’s blessing questioned or challenged? (For the Church of England this seems to happen every day, not least through the media.)

This Easter I want to celebrate the amazing service and witness of ordinary Anglican (and other) churches in ordinary parishes and communities, faithfully serving those who do or do not belong to the church. This Easter we will be celebrating the God who raised Christ from death and thereby re-signifies ‘hope’ for a jaded world. In communities where life is a terrible struggle and there is no triumphalism and little spare cash, Christians will still join in committing themselves to walking the way of Christ and humbly serving their neighbours. A ‘manifestation of glory’?

I’m with them. I am not with the health and wealth merchants whose theology is, I believe, both manipulative and pernicious. This is not about culture – it is far more important than that. And honesty demands that the hermeneutical and theological differences should be recognised.

 

Hubris: the coming and going of empires

Schadenfreude is a terrible thing. But it is a little hard to resist when the mighty are brought low and the powerful lose their strength. Those of us who deplored the way Roman Abramovich was able to use his dodgy billions to buy Chelsea, price everyone else out of the market, win the Premiership and crow over the clubs lower down the table, have at least been able to watch the whole show begin to fall apart. Or, at least. to weaken.

Today saw the dismissal of Chelsea’s third manager in two years. It was ‘the Special One’, Jose Mourinho, who produced the champions who gloated about their money and strength and success. Avram Grant passed the time reasonably well. Then the Portuguese saviour arrived, Luiz Felipe Scolari. Seven months later and he’s gone. Chelsea are fourth and losing their gloss. Well, I am a Liverpool man and have had to endure a couple of decades of gloating from Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea fans after we graciously stood down from three decades of football dominance in England and Europe and let the little clubs have their chance.

I know I keep coming back to this, but it seems really important to have a proper perspective on ‘time’. As Mary’s Song, Magnificat, makes clear with uncompromising and worldly candour, the mighty will fall and what looks solid and permanent will one day collapse. Whether it be political and military empires, the global banking system or football clubs, the louder they shout and the harder it is to catch the sound of crumbling underneath the noise. Empires come and go, hubris leads to nemesis and the world can change in previously inconceivable ways.

Scolari might not be encouraged by this, but he is an actor in a play that provides a metaphor for the way the world is: the victim of people who have believed a myth and cannot bear to see the end of the fantasy they thought would be permanent. But life moves on and the mighty fall and the meek get raised up. The weak appear to be the strong ones and the fools turn out to be the wise ones.

I realise this is a bit of a leap, but this makes me reflect on the Church. It is always great to see ‘success’, but the edifice of ‘success’ (numbers, wealth, resources or noisiness) can seduce us into thinking that God must be on our side and approving/blessing all we think and believe and do. Yet history is littered with those who claim numbers and strength to validate their views over against those who differ – and, as time rolls on, are shown to have been wrong, unbiblical or to have found the right answer to the wrong question.

Surely the proper response to ‘success’ is that humility – rooted in the conviction that time will eat away at the powerful edifice – that knows its place and recognises that it might be wrong. One day I am going to write a book called ‘Towards a Confident Humility’ and work this one out in more detail. But, in the meantime, I’ll just wonder how many more managers Chelsea will go through in the next two or three years. And, of course, I’ll continue to hope that Liverpool doesn’t go the same way.

Incidentally, I know I should be writing something sensible about the opening of the General Synod this afternoon and the speech by the soon-to-retire Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, but I am not on the Synod, was busy in London and have only read George Pitcher’s intelligent and concise reading of the speech. So, I’m left with Chelsea. And my schadenfreude. And, of course, the guilt this induces in me.

 

Money money money…

When Abba proclaimed that ‘it’s a rich man’s world’, they were simply repeating what has been complained about for thousands of year. The prophets of the Old Testament had less of a bias to the poor and more of a bias to telling the rich to use their wealth and power for the common good and the protection of the weak. The Psalmists constantly complained about the injustice of a world in which ‘the wicked prosper’ and the ‘godly’ just keep getting a bum deal. So, there’s nothing new in moaning about rich people running the world.

But it seems to me that it isn’t good enough simply to moan about the current recession and the global financial crisis, scapegoating ‘greedy bankers’ – even if they deserve it. It is all too easy to be wise after the event and there are loads of smug people slinging the dirt around at the moment.

Andreas Whittam-Smith brings some wisdom to the situation in today’s Independent (
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/andreas-whittam-smith/andreas-whittam-smith-we-are-angry-so-tell-us-what-went-wrong-at-the-banks-1513373.html
). The natural search for revenge (usually dressed up in the language of ‘accountability’) will get us nowhere and will solve nothing. But, as charity trustees in the UK would demand an inquiry into where the system had gone wrong with their charity, so ought the British Government establish an independent inquiry into how the world’s economic and financial systems were able to go so awry.

People like me will be able to offer a limited perspective. I have three adult children and all of them have been through university – indeed, one is still there. They emerged with massive debts and begin their working (and married) life with an assumption that living in debt is the only option – the norm. For those of us who have spent our lives trying to live within our means, this has always looked wrong. It was not rocket science to realise that the endless offers of credit cards, loans and debt-consolidation schemes from banks were unsustainable. Lending money indiscriminately to people without any scrutiny of their future ability to repay – also the problem with sub-prime mortgages – was always bound to end in tears. But, when everything is going well and the general standard of living is high, we all-too-easily assume that the experts must know what they are doing. Now we know they didn’t. Or, if they did, they were criminally selfish.

The point about an inquiry is that it would re-tell the story in the cold light of day and expose where the system and decision-making went wrong. And I suspect it would make the fantasyland activities of the banking sector look embarrassingly stupid. But at least it would help us to learn and learn and learn.

I suspect that we would end up questioning the values that have underpinned the economic and banking system in the past thirty years. I would not be the first to suggest that money doesn’t actually exist – that it merely represents an arbitrary system of relative values that only pertain if everyone agrees to the same assumptions about where ‘value’ lies. That is surely why the system, founded on trust and confidence, collapsed so quickly when trust and confidence evaporated. The uncritical assumption that economic growth is eternally sustainable and can only generate winners now looks like the Emperor’s new clothes.

But this situation now provides us with a unique opportunity not only to try to get the economy going again, but also to re-think the values and assumptions that underlie it. It enables us to ask (without embarrassment) for whom the economy and the banks exist – and whether the system is there to serve the people whose money it uses or if the people are merely there to serve the system and those who run it.

Coincidentally, the Independent today also has an interview with Jerome Kerviel, the French banker who lost Societe Generale in the region of five billion Euros. He describes the unreality of the gambling he was involved in and the lack of scrutiny by his superiors as long as he was making vast profits. His (and their) negligent hubris led to disaster. He describes his joy at making huge profits out of events such as the 7/7 Tube bombings in London and the 9/11 attacks in the USA, exposing the hard fact that some people love crises because they are able to make huge amounts of money from them.

Although I think I understand why Gordon Brown is taking us further into almost inconceivable amounts of deeper debt (to get the credit flow going so that we can gradually resume the lending and borrowing that allows businesses to function as well as grow), I have a possibly simplistic suspicion that it might not be good to sort out a debt problem by going further into debt. We cannot and must not simply try to resume ‘business as usual’, if that means returning to the same old fantasies that have dominated the last couple of decades and not learning that a fundamental review and repositioning of values is essential to the future construction of a fair economy.

Abba’s cynicism will always be there, whatever system is shaped in the future. But whatever happens next, the world cannot re-dress the Emperor in the same old new clothes.

 

Deja vu

Like many other people, my mind is preoccupied with the horrors of Gaza and, despite the current lack of media attention, the appalling situation in Zimbabwe. Israel-Palestine is somewhere I have visited several times and will visit again next year. Zimbabwe is a country I have grown to love because of a strong link between the Diocese of Southwark and four of the Zimbabwean Anglican dioceses. The Croydon Episcopal Area is linked with the Diocese of Central Zimbabwe and we know Bishop Ishmael Mukuwanda and his people very well.

I have been to Zimbabwe several times and Ishmael and his wife have stayed with us several times during the last five years or so. It is in this relationship that we learn to see through different eyes and think through different frameworks. If my theology only ‘works’ in Wimbledon, but would be embarrassing if expressed in Harare or Gweru, then it is not a theology worth having. And to go to such places is to have your theology seriously tested.

And yet even in places of suffering and injustice there is a sense of deja vu – of seeing played out a situation that has been experienced many times before in the long history of humanity. Powerful people become paranoid and oppress others in order to compound their own security. Mugabe is trapped in his own weakness and paranoia – and they will lead to his undoing. As I observed in an earlier post, history teaches us that empires come and go and that power is a gift, not a right.

This might seem an odd diversion, but yesterday I was reading the speech by Franklin D Roosevelt on 4 March 1933 after being sworn in as President of the United States of America. I read it in the Guardian’s Great Speeches of the 20th Century. The introduction is written by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown who in retrospect must surely wish he hadn’t agreed to do it. Roosevelt, speaking of the dire economic straits of 1930s America, could have been writing today. Try this, for example:

‘…we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels: taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.

Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilisation. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy, the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men.

Recognition of that falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honour, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, and on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Delivered almost 76 years ago, his words resonate powerfully even now in a world of economic embarrassment and moral fickleness. Roosevelt was writing of America, yet while he was speaking on his side of the Atlantic Ocean Adolf Hitler was enjoying the first months of his rule of a Germany that had no idea what it was walking into.

America re-grew its economic, military and political power and ultimately became the ultimate superpower. But those days are passing even now – just as the thousand-year Reich collapsed after only a decade and a half of catastrophic hubris.

Empires come and go. The Bible tells us so. We’ve seen it all before. Time to learn the lessons. (But I doubt we will.)

 

Happy * Year!

I was going to launch into a ‘Happy New Year’ ramble when I got called away from my laptop (by my wife) and went into London to see the fantastic Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy. Now I have a problem – the usual result of thinking too much about history and time. As the writer of Ecclesiastes had clearly worked out, there is nothing new under the sun. History seems to have a habit of repeating itself and we never seem to learn the lessons or spot the repetitions. So, now I don’t know how to greet 2009: ‘new year’, ‘old year (again – sort of)’, ‘just another year’ or what.

There were two things that struck me afresh at the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Firstly, – and I was reminded of this while reading the introductory guide over a cup of coffee before going into the exhibition itself – empires come and go. According to the blurb (written by a ‘professor’), the reign of Justinian (527-65) ‘marked the end of an era of confidence and expansion… The rise of Islam in the seventh century changed the power profile of the Middle East, and Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria moved out of the sphere of Byzantine influence’. Within a couple of generations the power balance of the world shifted in ways that would have been considered unimaginable by those who believed that God was on their side and had proved himself (the evidence being the success of the enterprise) to be the guarantor of the natural order of the world. It seems to be a feature of collective human nature that we regard the present as the ultimate rather than a stage along the way – and, maybe, a bad stage at that.

Nothing new here, then. Read the Old Testament prophets and see how people cannot hear words of threat or warning when everything is going well and life seems to be – politically or economically, at least – secure. Yet the empires kept coming and going: Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, etc. Only after everything had fallen apart for Israel in the eighth and sixth centuries BC, leading to varying degrees of loss and exile, were people able to consider how they had got to where they were. Only then could the warnings of the prophets be heard: don’t take God, his favour, his allegiance or his generosity for granted – he might re-direct them in favour of the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalised and those who have been told with great confidence by the ‘people of God’ that they are of no account.

There is a contemporary resonance here with the response by politicians and media commentators to the comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops in England about the global economic problems and their origins in a form of idolatry. The truth is that bishops have been saying this for years. In fact, I came across sermons of my own while I was a Vicar in the Diocese of Leicester in which I questioned the arrogance of a culture which fails to question the moral basis of its economic success and fails to keep any short-term boom in a proper temporal perspective. I wasn’t being clever – I was just reading the Old Testament prophets and wondering why no one listened to them. I think people listen to the Archbishop now because the ‘security’ of confidence has evaporated and material success can be seen to be temporary, illusory and unsatisfactory when built on unjust or flimsy foundations.

So it is that every ‘empire’ is in danger of believing its own propaganda and drowning in its own hubris. Not only does the USA (in global historical terms like a toddler running round with a nuclear arsenal) need to read the prophets and heed their warnings, but the nascent empires should take heed, too. China and India might well feel that their time is coming. But they should read their history books and consider how even recent empires have collapsed in on themselves almost without warning: the Soviet Union, for example.

A Christian who reads the Bible will see pretty quickly that it is humility and not hubris that such a reading provokes.

The second thing to strike me at the Byzantium exhibition was the clarity with which religion is misunderstood by the secular cultural elite. This exhibition, wonderful though it is, is shot through with an assumption that what we are looking at is a mere historico-cultural phenomenon and not the stuff of people’s lives and worldviews. Again I quote from the guide: ‘… Easter, when the Crucifixion of Christ on Good Friday and his Resurrection on Easter Sunday were symbolically commemorated.’ ‘Symbolically commemorated’?!

Had it not occurred to the eminent professor who wrote this stuff that what was going on in these Byzantine churches was not a ‘symbolic commemoration’, bu the living worship by a living people of a God they believed to be alive and active in the real world? The point of the resurrection was that God had raised Christ from the dead – and so there is hope for everyone else. This was and is no ‘symbolic commemoration’ (such as Guy Fawkes Night), but a living and re-living act of worship by a people who live in the wake of the events (and God) being celebrated as world-changing. It is evident in just the two words quoted that the contemporary cultural elite view both history and religion through a particular lens – one that is, I would suggest, both ignorant and arrogant. It claims an objective neutrality that cannot be claimed with any ‘objective’ confidence. It is another form of hubris.

However, these observations should encourage people to visit the exhibition (with their brain engaged) and witness the product of generations of Christians in a changing world who sought to serve God within the imperfect and often dodgy parameters allowed by their particular time and place. They were writing the next Act of the play in the same way we do now.

This does all have a bearing on the conversation between me and Mark B in previous posts. And it still begs the question of what Israel thinks it can achieve in the long term by this short-term (and, in terms of Just War theory, disproportionate) violence. I leave it to others to engage Mark further.

Happy new year – may we learn not to repeat the errors of the old years, but to live with humility and not hubris.