Simon Says ...

There's been a fair amount attention to the work of Professor Simon Blackburn on lust . He suggests that it should be a virtue, not a vice. Clearly provocative books sell more copies, and I haven't read it so I don't want to be too rude about it. I think that it's important that lust should be seen as a sin. Most of the interest has been in sexual lust (no surprise there, really), but there is also lust for power, money, status and lust for material goods. We need to destinguish between lust and desire. Desires are good and natural. We desire to be intimate with people, we desire to be cherished and valued. We desire to be comfortable, secure and safe. Lust is not just a strong desire, it is a perverted desire. So the desire for intimacy becomes a lust to possess a person. The desire to be cherished becomes a lust to be more important than another. And so on. Desire can and must be very strong, but they must also be disciplined. One can desire God -...

I've been looking at a booklet about Domain Field by Anthony Gormley . This was something between a piece of installation art or sculpture and a piece of performance art. The making of it, using local volunteers who had plaster casts made of their bodies. These casts were then used as spaces within which steel rods were welded together. The finished product looks like a sort of exploded mess that fits within the space of a human body. They are recognisably human shapes, even while they are not straightforward sculptures of human beings. The essay in the booklet I've been reading talks about the relationships that make up a body, and I think that there is something here of this. There is just enough in the apparently randon bits of steel to tell us that this is a human body that is modelled here. I'm a fan of Gormley's works, but this seems a little disappointing. A bit too sterile. Maybe the combination of the steel and the white gallery space, but he seems ...

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the Bible and how we read it. The current mess in the Anglican Communion is, in part, due to disputes over how to read the Bible. We are starting a sermon series at one of the churches I serve on the Bible, and I have to preach the first sermon (on the authority of the Bible). So there's some self interest in all of this. Over Christmas I read a large book by RPC Hanson on The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God . Essentially this is about the Arian controversy of the fourth century. There's a lot in this about reading Scripture, and indeed the Arians can be seen as the conservatives defending the traditional reading of Scripture. Arius saw Christ, the Son of God, as a creature (albeit a particularly important one) and rejected attempts to describe him as God. (This is an exceedingly sketchy account. If you want more on Arius read the book!) But the reading of Scripture was very interesting. Both sides engaged in all...

The Feast of the Epiphany A combination of the day and a church council meeting that I was at last night have got me thinking about mission. Epiphany is about the manifestation of God in Christ, especially to the Gentiles. This, it seems to me, is a perfectly decent account of mission. The manifestation of God can happen in a number of ways and is bound to surprise us (think of the Magi we remember today, surprised not to find the new King in Jerusalem). We cannot make God manifest - only God can do this. Our task as disciples of Jesus is to point to the way that Jesus makes God manifest to us. Sometimes this will mean standing up for the weak and the powerless, sometimes it will be simply enjoying the gifts that God has given to us. The three Bible stories that have been associated with the Epiphany since ancient times are those of the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of Christ, and the wedding of Cana. Here we see the surprising manifestations of God - to a bunch of pag...