Living

I’ve just read (in the transcript online – I’d got home long before this point) Andrew Brown’s conclusion to the programme:

But what can we change? What should our arrangements be? We can’t disentangle the problems of children from those of adults. The government, too, sends families mixed messages. They are to be, in Gordon Brown’s great phrase, “hard working families”. But do the hardest-working families have the happiest children? The evidence suggests that they don’t and that it’s the family which plays together that stays together. In fact it’s hard to resist a rather heretical conclusion. Most of what we have seen as the peculiar horrors of modern childhood seem to arise from a lack of authority: they can, in shorthand, be blamed on the Sixties. But that was a complicated decade, with good as well as bad; and one of the distinctive attitudes of the Sixties was a distrust of money, and a belief that material success should not be the measure of everything. We’re never going to get away from a society that cares about status. But one in which status is measured only by material success makes us, and our children, needlessly miserable.

Looks like David F is about to deliver a splendidly helpful talk.

Yes, the notes on his blog leave us with a lot of gap-filling to do. But better to have these notes to fill the gaps in that not even have those. Thanks, David.

Bailey’s article can be found here: http://www.theologymatters.com/TMIssues/JanFeb00.pdf. Significant because of the respect Bailey is increasingly commanding in Britain. Bailey has worked for 40 years in the Middle East, mainly in Syria. He has extensively studied contemporary Middle Eastern culture with a view to shedding light on the cultural background to the teaching of the New Testament.

Also N T Wright claims his own indebtedness to Bailey for the interpretation he adopts in his paper (see previous post).

If I'm right about 2 Corinthians 5-6, there are big implications.

A lot of people today make 3 moves. 1. Jesus is more important than Paul. I trust in Jesus. I'm saved. 2. Paul is misogynistic, 1st century, badly phrased, and slightly above his station. 3. But that is a secondary issue because of #1.

Instead, 2 Corinthians 5 says that a view such as #2 requires reconciliation to God. It is to turn your back on the offer of new creation, of sins not counted against oneself, of dying, of new life not to oneself but to Christ etc. To write off Paul's ministry in that fashion is not a secondary issue, but a central and gospel issue.

I suspect the end of Colossians 1 and the beginning of Colossians 2 makes the same point.