Wave the white flag, consider the rest of us heathens that have no hope of ever being converted to your truth.
If that's what it takes to get you to talk about something else, I'd think a very large proportion of the rest of the people who use this website would sign up.
I might have time to discuss other issues on the Ship - that would be nice....
You have made interesting posts in Keryg that did not involve Constantinianism. Why don't you start doing that again?
I hope you'll understand that with a thread going which has attracted rather a lot of interest, given how many Shipmates supposedly aren't interested, and as it's uncomfortably like "Me vs The World" here (I'm very glad I know my ideas have quite wide support outside the rarefied world of the Ship) I'm probably not going to have a lot of time for a while. I am keeping a bit of any eye out for interesting possibilities.
Silent here because they aren't on the Ship. 'Majority' probably not, by a long way, but there are certainly a lot of people out there who are disenchanted with even the current attenuated form of establishment and are quite interested that there's a version of Christianity that doesn't teach that kind of thing and is traceable back to Jesus himself rather than just being modern Christians reluctantly changing because they realise they can't sustain the way things were until - well, around my youth.
The one thing I have never seen Steve do is admit when he's wrong. Ever. Not once. Never the fuck ever. Just now he was proven wrong about Orthodoxy and American separation-of-church-and-state, and has he apologized for his insult to me? Has he admitted his mistake? Fuck no.
Organized religion resists progress such that it has to be dragged, with much miserably flailing and gnashing, to even tolerate progress. And that's "god's plan" for leading people to be better.
I posted a "has God failed again?" thread on the old Ship on exactly this point. For all religion inspires people to make positive change it is also the brakes on the process. Who, for example, can claim exceptions to equality laws? Why, it's churches. Even the good old CofE is allowed to, and does, insist on male applicants for certain positions. According to the "God changing the world through changing individual people" model the Church should be in the vanguard of positive change, not resisting it until dragged kicking and screaming.
Agreeing with Steve on disestablishment is like agreeing with the person who thinks climate change is real because every time you burn a lump of coal, the fairies shake their wings harder, and this introduce more chaos into the global weather system.
He's right, and at the same time, so very very wrong. The kind of person you'd sprint a hundred yards and rugby tackle if you saw them about to speak to a reporter.
There is a final-package quality to Steve's thinking, IMO. Everything else is weighed against the edifice he has created.
So someone agreeing on something - however much they say that they disagree with other major structural parts of the argument or however minor - apparently indicates that they actually agree with it.
I guess he has accepted his own bullshit to such an extent that he can only see his own ideas as objective and indisputable truth and so everything else is measured by the extent that they agree with him - and therefore God.
Apart from anything else, it must be tiring to be Steve. Not only has he (by his own admission) created a theology that is not to be considered to be within a specific tradition, not only does he deny talking on behalf of or as a Mennonite, not only does he therefore ignore and decry any theological developments from within that tradition; he also sees himself as a lonely outpost of reason, forced to try to convert everyone else.
But like the delusional yet loveable Don Quixote, his only weapons are a broken sword and a bent spear - which only in his mind and nowhere else are formidable weapons.
It is quite sweet in a way. As well as being incredibly disturbing.
The one thing I have never seen Steve do is admit when he's wrong. Ever. Not once. Never the fuck ever. Just now he was proven wrong about Orthodoxy and American separation-of-church-and-state, and has he apologized for his insult to me? Has he admitted his mistake? Fuck no.
Response on that coming in a longish post on the Purg thread mainly about the 'tradition' issue.
Organized religion resists progress such that it has to be dragged, with much miserably flailing and gnashing, to even tolerate progress. And that's "god's plan" for leading people to be better.
I posted a "has God failed again?" thread on the old Ship on exactly this point. For all religion inspires people to make positive change it is also the brakes on the process. Who, for example, can claim exceptions to equality laws? Why, it's churches. Even the good old CofE is allowed to, and does, insist on male applicants for certain positions. According to the "God changing the world through changing individual people" model the Church should be in the vanguard of positive change, not resisting it until dragged kicking and screaming.
On the one hand, yes the Church should be in the vanguard of positive change; and the main reason it hasn't been has been the alliance with the surrounding world through the 'establishment' of various churches and the continued attempt to retain worldly privilege even where establishment as such is denied or has become extremely attenuated.
On the other hand, no the church won't always agree with the world - and providing it is a voluntary body not trying to impose its ideas on the rest of the world by legal force, why should it have to agree? That way lies not progress but totalitarian uniformity. and some of the 'equality law' stuff isn't quite as simple as the rhetoric makes out....
I'm looking forward to seeing you post about something else, Steve. I'm not sure what Kerygmanic topics Moo had in mind, but I don't doubt you are perfectly capable of posting such things.
What I don't see (yet), is any evidence that:
- You won't hijack said threads with your usual myopic rants about Co-Co-Constantine and non-Anabaptist forms of Christianity.
- You ever acknowledge or admit you're wrong. I'm not sure Mousethief needs or deserves an 'apology' as such, but an acknowledgement that you are completely clueless when it comes to understanding his particular Tradition might help.
I suppose it's rather too much to expect nuance from someone whose interesting bookshelves contain interesting titles such as:
- The Constantinian Catastrophe: How two Emperors, three Queens, an Empress with peculiar sexual peccadilloes and a One-Eyed Capuchin Monkey from Azerbaijan completely Fucked Up the Church
- Constantine: What a Cock: A definitive biography
- Henry VIII: Was he Fucked Up or What? How one English King buggered up the Anglican Establishment
- The Papacy: What a Bunch of Crooks. How the Vatican is responsible for that irritating pimple on your left bollock
Not only has he (by his own admission) created a theology that is not to be considered to be within a specific tradition, not only does he deny talking on behalf of or as a Mennonite, not only does he therefore ignore and decry any theological developments from within that tradition;
This is getting a bit bizarre. One minute I'm being accused of ignoring all 'tradition'; but when I show that I'm doing as goperryrevs says I should and using and considering other traditions, albeit, as I'd expect serious theologians to do, discriminatingly without automatically agreeing, that's a fault as well. Why don't you just stop going round in circles with this peripheral personal sneer stuff and free up this and the Purg thread to discuss the main issue?
And I don't "decry any theological developments from within that (Mennonite) tradition". More a case of via the closely associated Anabaptist Network in the UK, I'm in a small way part of the developments and the discussions around them.
Why don't you just stop going round in circles with this peripheral personal sneer stuff and free up this and the Purg thread to discuss the main issue?
This is Hell, and you're junior hosting. This thread is for sneering, jeering, poking fun and holes in your alleged logic, and anything else the peanut gallery may want to. You do not have to post here. You can ignore it completely. It's a safety valve for others to stop things boiling over in the Purg thread, a place for Shipmates to vent when they get exasperated at your cack-handed arguments and tone-deaf rhetoric.
In fact, I would much prefer it if the main issue was left in Purgatory. But you choose to come here too. So be it. But in that case, your kvetching rings as hollow as your exegesis.
It's not about sneering, I'm perfectly comfortable with people finding Mennonite ideas attractive and choosing to be associated with Mennonite groups.
But what is weird when you have the kind of pick-a-mix attitude to theology - taking a bit from Evangelicals, a bit from there, a bit from CS Lewis and a bit from Yoder - and then (a) refusing to accept that virtually no other stream of Mennonite thought and theology does this (b) refusing to frame discussions in any way that does apparently resemble Mennonite thought and (c) refusing to accept that the thing you've been presenting here is a mangled and cobbled together theology of your own creation.
Until you accept the latter, I doubt you are ever going to "succeed" in this argument because nobody is ever going to understand the elements of the argument in the way that you do.
But then I'm keenly aware that many things only make any sense in a particular context and with a particular perspective.
Truth claims based only on acclamation - which itself seems to be coming from a position that nobody else understands or accepts - seems entirely pointless.
Few people's theology is off-the-shelf; we all mix and match to some extent. The problem is when one claims one's mix-and-match theology is exactly equal to a plain, self-evident reading of scripture --- that any open-minded person approaching the scriptures should and will come up with exactly the same cornucopia of theological ideas as mine, because it's right there, man! In black and white! Just READ IT!
I should say few people on the Ship, or other people who sit and scratch their heads about this stuff. I'm sure there are millions out there whose only "theology" consists of the assertions and prejudices of their pastor or favorite TV evangelist.
I'm sure that's the case. We didn't have TV evangelists over here until satellite, cable and the 'God Channel'. Thank goodness. Even now, though, their influence over here is mercifully minimal. But I take your point.
On the issue of Steve's theology, it strikes me that it's simply bog-standard 1950s and '60s UK-issue .303 small r reformed flavouored conservative evangelicalism with a dollop of quasi-Mennonite on top like the cherry on the cake or on an old-fashioned Knickerbocker Glory ...
Nothing wrong with that, provided we have the self-awareness to recognise it as such.
Sadly, the terms 'Steve Langton' and 'self-awareness' don't generally appear in the same sentence.
I suppose it's rather too much to expect nuance from someone whose interesting bookshelves contain interesting titles such as:
- The Constantinian Catastrophe: How two Emperors, three Queens, an Empress with peculiar sexual peccadilloes and a One-Eyed Capuchin Monkey from Azerbaijan completely Fucked Up the Church
- Constantine: What a Cock: A definitive biography
- Henry VIII: Was he Fucked Up or What? How one English King buggered up the Anglican Establishment
- The Papacy: What a Bunch of Crooks. How the Vatican is responsible for that irritating pimple on your left bollock
[/quote]
I know I'm taking seriously something you intend sarcastically; but no, I don't have books like that on my shelves - apart from that one by Jenkins whose title you misquote there and which seems to be widely regarded as quite serious history. You - and mousethief - should read it.
I actually spend quite a lot of my time reading books which are decidedly not from people like me, because I know it's important to understand the opposition properly. And yeah, I'm so stupid I tend to think that in discussions of what Christianity is about, the words of Jesus and the apostles might be a pretty good touchstone for what is true, and I compare my conclusions, and other peoples', to that obviously major source. Precisely with the idea that what I say shouldn't just be my opinion....
Few people's theology is off-the-shelf; we all mix and match to some extent. The problem is when one claims one's mix-and-match theology is exactly equal to a plain, self-evident reading of scripture --- that any open-minded person approaching the scriptures should and will come up with exactly the same cornucopia of theological ideas as mine, because it's right there, man! In black and white! Just READ IT!
On the issue of Steve's theology, it strikes me that it's simply bog-standard 1950s and '60s UK-issue .303 small r reformed flavouored conservative evangelicalism with a dollop of quasi-Mennonite on top like the cherry on the cake or on an old-fashioned Knickerbocker Glory ...
I'm not sure this is quite fair. But I've talked to a fair number of people from that tradition and I've read a few things from different Mennonite perspectives.
In my opinion, also knowing something about some of the Evangelicals who look to at least some of the Westminster Confessions*, it would be very odd to hear a Mennonite talk about them. And the Evangelicals would probably regard any Mennonite who did with suspicion.
Mennonites are not Evangelicals and Evangelicals are not Mennonites. The overlap isn't actually that large because the schools of thought and theology developed in quite different ways.
*also acknowledging that different groups look to different Westminster confessions. And that there is a difference between Reformed as in Reformed Evangelical and Reformed as in Reformed Presbyterian. Which I'm still confused about - but either way, neither are particularly close to Mennonites and the Anabaptist tradition.
Agreeing with Steve on disestablishment is like agreeing with the person who thinks climate change is real because every time you burn a lump of coal, the fairies shake their wings harder, and this introduce more chaos into the global weather system.
He's right, and at the same time, so very very wrong. The kind of person you'd sprint a hundred yards and rugby tackle if you saw them about to speak to a reporter.
Forgive me if it's an Asperger's thing, Steve, but why are you taking seriously something I intended satirically?
I know I misquoted the title of the book by Jenkins you cited. That's what people do when they are being satirical.
As for whether Mousethief and I should read it, I can't speak for him but I'd be more than happy to do so. Given that the sub-title tells us what to expect I wouldn't imagine I'd be reading anything particularly objective.*
Hence my satirising of the title.
That's how satire works.
* Not that anything is objective, of course. If I read a book by an Orthodox author I know it's going to take that particular line. If I read a book by someone who believes that church-state links are the most evil thing imaginable, worse even than slavery, then I know what to expect there too ...
Doc Tor's rugby tackle thing made me laugh too. Only I'd extend the distance to three hundred yards rather than just a hundred ...
On the issue of Steve's theology, it strikes me that it's simply bog-standard 1950s and '60s UK-issue .303 small r reformed flavouored conservative evangelicalism with a dollop of quasi-Mennonite on top like the cherry on the cake or on an old-fashioned Knickerbocker Glory ...
I'm not sure this is quite fair. But I've talked to a fair number of people from that tradition and I've read a few things from different Mennonite perspectives.
In my opinion, also knowing something about some of the Evangelicals who look to at least some of the Westminster Confessions*, it would be very odd to hear a Mennonite talk about them. And the Evangelicals would probably regard any Mennonite who did with suspicion.
Mennonites are not Evangelicals and Evangelicals are not Mennonites. The overlap isn't actually that large because the schools of thought and theology developed in quite different ways.
*also acknowledging that different groups look to different Westminster confessions. And that there is a difference between Reformed as in Reformed Evangelical and Reformed as in Reformed Presbyterian. Which I'm still confused about - but either way, neither are particularly close to Mennonites and the Anabaptist tradition.
I agree with this and can't see how my description of Steve Langton's position is at variance with yours, mr cheesy.
Steve strikes me as someone who is closer to the Westminster Confession end of things than he is to the Mennonites. Which is why I've suggested that he's only got a smidgeon of Anabaptist/Mennonite views there, superficially superimposed on bog-standard reformed flavoured old-fashioned Banner of Truth style conservative evangelicalism.
We could drill it down and define things more clearly than that, of course.
As I've said, not Mennonite, UK Anabaptist Network. Which for most of us means we was dragged up in fairly conventional UK evangelicalism or thereabouts, and came to Anabaptism from outside as adults. So of course we have lots of things in our theological and church background which typical Mennonites don't have - like awareness of the Westminster Confession and its derivatives, for example, and CS Lewis, and Calvin, and.... This really shouldn't surprise you. Currently there is a good deal of - cross-fertilisation might describe it - between the UK and USA/Canadian groups.
In addition I guess I've always been a bit loose about church affiliation because, again, I was dragged up in inter-denominational groups in my youth, first the then Crusaders Union, then the Uni Christian Union. Evangelicals can do that kind of thing because we have so much in common. Not that I ignored churches, have been involved in various local churches over the years, but have worked much cross-denominationally in the 'common ground/mere Christianity' kind of area. I recall our mixed denomination Uni CU as far more ecumenical than the various other Christian groups; at least at our place they (apart from the RCs) were as liberals rather hazy on traditional Christianity and therefore looked more to their denominational distinctives, which kept them disunited.
So I found myself studying 'Confessions' back in the 60s-70s. And two things struck me; firstly, how much agreement there was between all the Protestant groups; and secondly, and it was particularly obvious when one looked at the Westminster 'family', that the differences were in a limited few areas. Basically, Church-and-State, Church Government, and paedo- v credo-baptism. and indeed the government and baptism stuff seemed also to be related to the Church-and-State position as well.
And somewhere in the middle Northern Ireland and that Paisley guy came along; not to me a pantomime villain but a certainly well-intended person who at least back then had simply not been able to shake off the problems and conflicts of Ulster. And concern over the mayhem in Ulster meant I had to think about that area which most other Evangelicals didn't think about because it wasn't 'common ground' - the state and church stuff. That in turn led me to an interest in the Anabaptists, for many years without access to much actual Anabaptist material; and in recent years going into that much more deeply.
Mennonites in some ways don't 'do' Confessions quite like others; but access to their Confessions confirms the notion of how much common ground there is. Even the RCs share considerable common ground with others.
Despite the efforts of Gamma Gamaliel and others to portray otherwise, I'm not concerned all that much with the petty purity seen among Amish, Exclusive Brethren, and a lot of the Evangelicalism of my youth. I'm more concerned with the idea of separation from worldly power; purity yes, but in a different sense.
Since the late 60s I've changed focus a bit from the Ulster problem to the problems presented by Islam. It's essentially the same problem, just on a more global scale....
You have nothing original to say. We want fewer words. We know your position. No one will be more convinced after your next screed than before. Shut up and go away.
Double posting to say that my immediately previous post is, in case Steve is in any doubt, what hell is for, and is meant entirely at face value. His verbiage is with merit, point or value.
Steve, not only does nobody have any fucks left to give about your particular special story, you are personally responsible for a global collapse of the sub-prime fuck-lending market.
And, really, that's the whole purpose of this thread: to point out to you what a monumentally annoying shitstain of a person you are to have a discussion with. Pointless verbal odysseys rummaging around your rectum are of no interest. To anybody. Ever.
Go gargle a garden weasel, you vapid little person of such intense pointlessness that Georges Seurat couldn't make a portrait of you.
I really don't know what you are doing nor setting out to achieve.
You're not the only one here who is familiar with the various 'tribes' and sub-groups within Protestant evangelicalism. Plenty of us have bags of experience of those.
You aren't the only person, either, with reservations about church-state issues.
I'm not trying to portray you as some kind of other-worldly Amish dude with an Abraham Lincoln beard and buggy.
If you're going to entertain highly-selective views about whatever your personal hobby-horses happen to be then fine. That's up to you. But you bang on and on and on about it incessantly and ignore anything anyone else says unless you set yourself up to correct it.
I've tried satire. That doesn't work. I've tried to point out inconsistencies and anomalies in your arguments. That doesn't work either.
More fool me of course. Pope Steve Langton has spoken.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to you that you are putting people off who would otherwise entertain very positive views of Anabaptist / Mennonite positions on some of these issues.
Some posters have told you that and you haven't taken a blind bit of notice.
Oh ffs, Christian Unions aren't ecumenical. They're bastions of rabid evangelical male-headship you're-only-Christian-if-you-were-baptised-by-immersion-as-an-adult-and-agree-to-our-doctrinal-basis fundamentalist nonsense. How you can claim to be ecumenical when excluding well over half of the world's Christians I don't know.
That's not quite fair - Evangelical Christian Unions in every British University I've ever heard of include people with a range of views on baptism. And I think the headship thing is much less of an issue than it was 25 years ago.
But your substantive point is correct, ecumenical it isn't.
"Ecumenical" in the sense of "cross-denominational" (Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal etc. ... so long as they're Evangelical) - though definitely not including RC or Orthodox, of course.
The charismatic Baptist minister David Pawson always used to say that he was, 'wider than evangelical, narrower than ecumenical.'
I've heard other Baptist ministers concur with this.
We all draw lines somewhere though.
But it's all relative. From the stand-point of some independent evangelical groups Steve's position would look dangerously ecumenical. To others his position looks narrowly parochial.
It all depends on where we stand.
I agree with mr cheesy that university Christian Unions tend to be broader than the caricature Arethosemyfeet presents. Heck, they were broader than that 35 years ago when I was involved with them ...
But again, it's all relative. There was even a Catholic lad who used to come to ours. I'm not sure he remained RC though.
But yes, it was a pan-evangelical form of ecumenism and didn't tend to spread any wider than that. But then, the same thing happens in the reverse direction too, of course.
They were precisely as I describe them when I ran rapidly in the other direction upon encountering them 15 years ago. I believe the one at my alma mater has since been forced to change its insistence on having only male visiting speakers and group leaders in order to remain affiliated to the student union.
I'm sure these groups do vary. There was no stipulation that speakers had to be male back in my day, though. That said, they did hand visiting speakers a very specific doctrinal statement of belief that they had to agree to first before they were allowed to spout.
Ultimately, they are just a bunch of kids, with all the pros and cons that involves.
I've not had that much contact with university CU's recently but a number of university chaplains - of all stripes - that I've known in recent years have all told me that the process of students going through an evangelical phase and emerging out the other side has accelerated.
It's not unusual these days, I'm told, for a student to sign up for Bethel Independent Free Church Baptist Pentecostal We're All Born Again Church on Gasworks Road in their first year, begin having misgivings about it in their second and by their Finals be liberals, post-evangelicals or nothing whatsoever ...
That process used to take around 15 or 20 years. Now it happens within 15 to 20 months.
I'm sure these groups do vary. There was no stipulation that speakers had to be male back in my day, though. That said, they did hand visiting speakers a very specific doctrinal statement of belief that they had to agree to first before they were allowed to spout.
Ultimately, they are just a bunch of kids, with all the pros and cons that involves.
A bunch of kids heavily supervised by the hand of UCCF paid staff.
Comments
Wave the white flag, consider the rest of us heathens that have no hope of ever being converted to your truth.
If that's what it takes to get you to talk about something else, I'd think a very large proportion of the rest of the people who use this website would sign up.
You have made interesting posts in Keryg that did not involve Constantinianism. Why don't you start doing that again?
I hope you'll understand that with a thread going which has attracted rather a lot of interest, given how many Shipmates supposedly aren't interested, and as it's uncomfortably like "Me vs The World" here (I'm very glad I know my ideas have quite wide support outside the rarefied world of the Ship) I'm probably not going to have a lot of time for a while. I am keeping a bit of any eye out for interesting possibilities.
Silent here because they aren't on the Ship. 'Majority' probably not, by a long way, but there are certainly a lot of people out there who are disenchanted with even the current attenuated form of establishment and are quite interested that there's a version of Christianity that doesn't teach that kind of thing and is traceable back to Jesus himself rather than just being modern Christians reluctantly changing because they realise they can't sustain the way things were until - well, around my youth.
*possibly not strictly a fallacy, but either way, it's unprovable and therefore inadmissible.
Nice for whom?
I posted a "has God failed again?" thread on the old Ship on exactly this point. For all religion inspires people to make positive change it is also the brakes on the process. Who, for example, can claim exceptions to equality laws? Why, it's churches. Even the good old CofE is allowed to, and does, insist on male applicants for certain positions. According to the "God changing the world through changing individual people" model the Church should be in the vanguard of positive change, not resisting it until dragged kicking and screaming.
Steve is the Messiah. All hail the mind-reading hero.
He's right, and at the same time, so very very wrong. The kind of person you'd sprint a hundred yards and rugby tackle if you saw them about to speak to a reporter.
So someone agreeing on something - however much they say that they disagree with other major structural parts of the argument or however minor - apparently indicates that they actually agree with it.
I guess he has accepted his own bullshit to such an extent that he can only see his own ideas as objective and indisputable truth and so everything else is measured by the extent that they agree with him - and therefore God.
Apart from anything else, it must be tiring to be Steve. Not only has he (by his own admission) created a theology that is not to be considered to be within a specific tradition, not only does he deny talking on behalf of or as a Mennonite, not only does he therefore ignore and decry any theological developments from within that tradition; he also sees himself as a lonely outpost of reason, forced to try to convert everyone else.
But like the delusional yet loveable Don Quixote, his only weapons are a broken sword and a bent spear - which only in his mind and nowhere else are formidable weapons.
It is quite sweet in a way. As well as being incredibly disturbing.
Response on that coming in a longish post on the Purg thread mainly about the 'tradition' issue.
On the one hand, yes the Church should be in the vanguard of positive change; and the main reason it hasn't been has been the alliance with the surrounding world through the 'establishment' of various churches and the continued attempt to retain worldly privilege even where establishment as such is denied or has become extremely attenuated.
On the other hand, no the church won't always agree with the world - and providing it is a voluntary body not trying to impose its ideas on the rest of the world by legal force, why should it have to agree? That way lies not progress but totalitarian uniformity. and some of the 'equality law' stuff isn't quite as simple as the rhetoric makes out....
What I don't see (yet), is any evidence that:
- You won't hijack said threads with your usual myopic rants about Co-Co-Constantine and non-Anabaptist forms of Christianity.
- You ever acknowledge or admit you're wrong. I'm not sure Mousethief needs or deserves an 'apology' as such, but an acknowledgement that you are completely clueless when it comes to understanding his particular Tradition might help.
I suppose it's rather too much to expect nuance from someone whose interesting bookshelves contain interesting titles such as:
- The Constantinian Catastrophe: How two Emperors, three Queens, an Empress with peculiar sexual peccadilloes and a One-Eyed Capuchin Monkey from Azerbaijan completely Fucked Up the Church
- Constantine: What a Cock: A definitive biography
- Henry VIII: Was he Fucked Up or What? How one English King buggered up the Anglican Establishment
- The Papacy: What a Bunch of Crooks. How the Vatican is responsible for that irritating pimple on your left bollock
This is getting a bit bizarre. One minute I'm being accused of ignoring all 'tradition'; but when I show that I'm doing as goperryrevs says I should and using and considering other traditions, albeit, as I'd expect serious theologians to do, discriminatingly without automatically agreeing, that's a fault as well. Why don't you just stop going round in circles with this peripheral personal sneer stuff and free up this and the Purg thread to discuss the main issue?
And I don't "decry any theological developments from within that (Mennonite) tradition". More a case of via the closely associated Anabaptist Network in the UK, I'm in a small way part of the developments and the discussions around them.
This is Hell, and you're junior hosting. This thread is for sneering, jeering, poking fun and holes in your alleged logic, and anything else the peanut gallery may want to. You do not have to post here. You can ignore it completely. It's a safety valve for others to stop things boiling over in the Purg thread, a place for Shipmates to vent when they get exasperated at your cack-handed arguments and tone-deaf rhetoric.
In fact, I would much prefer it if the main issue was left in Purgatory. But you choose to come here too. So be it. But in that case, your kvetching rings as hollow as your exegesis.
DT
HH
But what is weird when you have the kind of pick-a-mix attitude to theology - taking a bit from Evangelicals, a bit from there, a bit from CS Lewis and a bit from Yoder - and then (a) refusing to accept that virtually no other stream of Mennonite thought and theology does this (b) refusing to frame discussions in any way that does apparently resemble Mennonite thought and (c) refusing to accept that the thing you've been presenting here is a mangled and cobbled together theology of your own creation.
Until you accept the latter, I doubt you are ever going to "succeed" in this argument because nobody is ever going to understand the elements of the argument in the way that you do.
Truth claims based only on acclamation - which itself seems to be coming from a position that nobody else understands or accepts - seems entirely pointless.
On the issue of Steve's theology, it strikes me that it's simply bog-standard 1950s and '60s UK-issue .303 small r reformed flavouored conservative evangelicalism with a dollop of quasi-Mennonite on top like the cherry on the cake or on an old-fashioned Knickerbocker Glory ...
Nothing wrong with that, provided we have the self-awareness to recognise it as such.
Sadly, the terms 'Steve Langton' and 'self-awareness' don't generally appear in the same sentence.
Not without some form of "not" or "never".
I suppose it's rather too much to expect nuance from someone whose interesting bookshelves contain interesting titles such as:
- The Constantinian Catastrophe: How two Emperors, three Queens, an Empress with peculiar sexual peccadilloes and a One-Eyed Capuchin Monkey from Azerbaijan completely Fucked Up the Church
- Constantine: What a Cock: A definitive biography
- Henry VIII: Was he Fucked Up or What? How one English King buggered up the Anglican Establishment
- The Papacy: What a Bunch of Crooks. How the Vatican is responsible for that irritating pimple on your left bollock
[/quote]
I know I'm taking seriously something you intend sarcastically; but no, I don't have books like that on my shelves - apart from that one by Jenkins whose title you misquote there and which seems to be widely regarded as quite serious history. You - and mousethief - should read it.
I actually spend quite a lot of my time reading books which are decidedly not from people like me, because I know it's important to understand the opposition properly. And yeah, I'm so stupid I tend to think that in discussions of what Christianity is about, the words of Jesus and the apostles might be a pretty good touchstone for what is true, and I compare my conclusions, and other peoples', to that obviously major source. Precisely with the idea that what I say shouldn't just be my opinion....
Ok that's a fair corrective.
I'm not sure this is quite fair. But I've talked to a fair number of people from that tradition and I've read a few things from different Mennonite perspectives.
In my opinion, also knowing something about some of the Evangelicals who look to at least some of the Westminster Confessions*, it would be very odd to hear a Mennonite talk about them. And the Evangelicals would probably regard any Mennonite who did with suspicion.
Mennonites are not Evangelicals and Evangelicals are not Mennonites. The overlap isn't actually that large because the schools of thought and theology developed in quite different ways.
*also acknowledging that different groups look to different Westminster confessions. And that there is a difference between Reformed as in Reformed Evangelical and Reformed as in Reformed Presbyterian. Which I'm still confused about - but either way, neither are particularly close to Mennonites and the Anabaptist tradition.
Made me laugh.
I know I misquoted the title of the book by Jenkins you cited. That's what people do when they are being satirical.
As for whether Mousethief and I should read it, I can't speak for him but I'd be more than happy to do so. Given that the sub-title tells us what to expect I wouldn't imagine I'd be reading anything particularly objective.*
Hence my satirising of the title.
That's how satire works.
* Not that anything is objective, of course. If I read a book by an Orthodox author I know it's going to take that particular line. If I read a book by someone who believes that church-state links are the most evil thing imaginable, worse even than slavery, then I know what to expect there too ...
Doc Tor's rugby tackle thing made me laugh too. Only I'd extend the distance to three hundred yards rather than just a hundred ...
I agree with this and can't see how my description of Steve Langton's position is at variance with yours, mr cheesy.
Steve strikes me as someone who is closer to the Westminster Confession end of things than he is to the Mennonites. Which is why I've suggested that he's only got a smidgeon of Anabaptist/Mennonite views there, superficially superimposed on bog-standard reformed flavoured old-fashioned Banner of Truth style conservative evangelicalism.
We could drill it down and define things more clearly than that, of course.
In addition I guess I've always been a bit loose about church affiliation because, again, I was dragged up in inter-denominational groups in my youth, first the then Crusaders Union, then the Uni Christian Union. Evangelicals can do that kind of thing because we have so much in common. Not that I ignored churches, have been involved in various local churches over the years, but have worked much cross-denominationally in the 'common ground/mere Christianity' kind of area. I recall our mixed denomination Uni CU as far more ecumenical than the various other Christian groups; at least at our place they (apart from the RCs) were as liberals rather hazy on traditional Christianity and therefore looked more to their denominational distinctives, which kept them disunited.
So I found myself studying 'Confessions' back in the 60s-70s. And two things struck me; firstly, how much agreement there was between all the Protestant groups; and secondly, and it was particularly obvious when one looked at the Westminster 'family', that the differences were in a limited few areas. Basically, Church-and-State, Church Government, and paedo- v credo-baptism. and indeed the government and baptism stuff seemed also to be related to the Church-and-State position as well.
And somewhere in the middle Northern Ireland and that Paisley guy came along; not to me a pantomime villain but a certainly well-intended person who at least back then had simply not been able to shake off the problems and conflicts of Ulster. And concern over the mayhem in Ulster meant I had to think about that area which most other Evangelicals didn't think about because it wasn't 'common ground' - the state and church stuff. That in turn led me to an interest in the Anabaptists, for many years without access to much actual Anabaptist material; and in recent years going into that much more deeply.
Mennonites in some ways don't 'do' Confessions quite like others; but access to their Confessions confirms the notion of how much common ground there is. Even the RCs share considerable common ground with others.
Despite the efforts of Gamma Gamaliel and others to portray otherwise, I'm not concerned all that much with the petty purity seen among Amish, Exclusive Brethren, and a lot of the Evangelicalism of my youth. I'm more concerned with the idea of separation from worldly power; purity yes, but in a different sense.
Since the late 60s I've changed focus a bit from the Ulster problem to the problems presented by Islam. It's essentially the same problem, just on a more global scale....
....Not
Party on Wayne.
Correction: without merit, point or value.
And, really, that's the whole purpose of this thread: to point out to you what a monumentally annoying shitstain of a person you are to have a discussion with. Pointless verbal odysseys rummaging around your rectum are of no interest. To anybody. Ever.
Go gargle a garden weasel, you vapid little person of such intense pointlessness that Georges Seurat couldn't make a portrait of you.
I really don't know what you are doing nor setting out to achieve.
You're not the only one here who is familiar with the various 'tribes' and sub-groups within Protestant evangelicalism. Plenty of us have bags of experience of those.
You aren't the only person, either, with reservations about church-state issues.
I'm not trying to portray you as some kind of other-worldly Amish dude with an Abraham Lincoln beard and buggy.
If you're going to entertain highly-selective views about whatever your personal hobby-horses happen to be then fine. That's up to you. But you bang on and on and on about it incessantly and ignore anything anyone else says unless you set yourself up to correct it.
I've tried satire. That doesn't work. I've tried to point out inconsistencies and anomalies in your arguments. That doesn't work either.
More fool me of course. Pope Steve Langton has spoken.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to you that you are putting people off who would otherwise entertain very positive views of Anabaptist / Mennonite positions on some of these issues.
Some posters have told you that and you haven't taken a blind bit of notice.
But your substantive point is correct, ecumenical it isn't.
I've heard other Baptist ministers concur with this.
We all draw lines somewhere though.
But it's all relative. From the stand-point of some independent evangelical groups Steve's position would look dangerously ecumenical. To others his position looks narrowly parochial.
It all depends on where we stand.
I agree with mr cheesy that university Christian Unions tend to be broader than the caricature Arethosemyfeet presents. Heck, they were broader than that 35 years ago when I was involved with them ...
But again, it's all relative. There was even a Catholic lad who used to come to ours. I'm not sure he remained RC though.
But yes, it was a pan-evangelical form of ecumenism and didn't tend to spread any wider than that. But then, the same thing happens in the reverse direction too, of course.
Ultimately, they are just a bunch of kids, with all the pros and cons that involves.
I've not had that much contact with university CU's recently but a number of university chaplains - of all stripes - that I've known in recent years have all told me that the process of students going through an evangelical phase and emerging out the other side has accelerated.
It's not unusual these days, I'm told, for a student to sign up for Bethel Independent Free Church Baptist Pentecostal We're All Born Again Church on Gasworks Road in their first year, begin having misgivings about it in their second and by their Finals be liberals, post-evangelicals or nothing whatsoever ...
That process used to take around 15 or 20 years. Now it happens within 15 to 20 months.
A bunch of kids heavily supervised by the hand of UCCF paid staff.