Honey, I shrunk the Kingdom!

Perhaps by assuming that the Kingdom is only to do with the salvation of souls, or that the Kingdom will fail in history.

Christian Pubs?

On Thursday we went for our last supper at the Cock and Dragon in Cockfosters, which was very good, but it’s a shame to have to walk past a Buddha (statue of!) to get a pint.

Mrs Lloyd suggested Christian pubs: a cross on the wall, a good Christian name (St George and the Dragon, perhaps), a few Bibles and good books handy, music that doesn’t tell all and sundry to F*** Off!, that sort of thing. No doubt you could do silly things with Bishop’s Finger Ale, Rambling Rector wine, all sorts of Spirits and so on, but those gimmicks are not really the point. And it needn’t be primarily evangelistic, any more than much else in life is. It would just be showing the Christian virtues of hospitality, welcome, friendship, rest, feasting etc.

In the end we realised that what we wanted was not just a Christian pub but a Christian culture and nation.

A word-based culture?

I live and "work" at Oak Hill. It is undoubtedly a very word based culture. There is little public art or music, for example, but lots of talk and books.

And I've been trying to think about the Word and the Supper. The Supper is of course "things" more obviously than the Word is a "thing", though of course the word is mediated to us by the physical and there are lots of books and ink and pages about.

Anyway, some of that stuff flooded into my mind when I read this interesting snippet on Pastor Douglas Wilson's blog:

The Reformers not only revered their biblical heritage, but recovered its energies, its acids, its spices, its 'red wine and cheese', the sting and zing of the Magnificat. We should therefore be chary of assuming that a more verbal spirituality, which Protestantism undoubtedly was, was necessarily more bookish or intellectual. It commuted between the lofty discourse of the classics and the rude simplicities of the venacular. The living Word which Luther talking about, emerged from a filthy stable and ended on a foul cross. Theology was worked out in the study, certainly, but above all in living, dying, being damned" Theologia crucis"

(Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation, p. 127).

And this (via the same source) was wonderful:

I wish we did not have to fritter away on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting coloured tinsel upon them

(G.K. Chesterton as quoted in Thomas Peters, The Christian Imagination, p. 10).

Evangelicals undoubtedly have much more thinking to do about words and things, culture and creation. I'm going to start with Revd Dr David P Field 'Not The Least Lash Lost' (linked to from his blog, linked to on the right) about how nothing we ever do is lost and all creation is transformed into the New Creation, hence the added importance of daily acts of service (the dishes) and culture building (writing symphonies and painting portraits).