Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise

John H Saturday 27th October, AD 2007

I’ve just been to an enjoyable concert at a church in Leeds, featuring a performance of Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang (”Hymn of Praise”).

The most famous section is the soprano duet and chorus, “I waited for the Lord”, which I sang with my school choir sang many moons ago.. According to the programme notes, Lobgesang was popular with 19th century choral societies, but has since lapsed into “near total neglect”, which the writer describes as “unjustified”.

I agree: it’s a splendid piece. Anyone looking for material for their choral society or choir’s next concert might want to check this out. It lasts about 50 minutes (if the opening “symphony” is omitted, as tonight), so it’s a good “second half”.

Measuring out my life with Bible versions

John H Saturday 20th October, AD 2007

Picture of NIV and NEB BiblesMichael Spencer has appealed for bloggers to “devote a post (and maybe a picture) to a Bible that has a special place in your spiritual journey”.

Rather than single out one particular Bible, I’m taking a different tack: namely, looking briefly at a number of different Bibles that have been part of my life over the past 26 years, since I first owned my own Bible at junior school. The Bible has been with me in one form or another without a break ever since that time, even during my years as an atheist, so this is something of an exercise in personal spiritual archaeology. Let’s start with that first, junior school Bible. (All dates refer to the period when a Bible was in regular use).

1. New English Bible (1981 to 1991)

I’ve just taken this one off the shelf to type this post, and it really is a wonderful edition of the Bible (deservedly still in print). It includes the best illustrations I’ve ever seen in a Bible edition: attractive line drawings, which are used to particularly good effect in books such as 2 Kings or Isaiah, where standard images for Israel or Judah are used within the text to indicate which kingdom is in view in a given passage.

Another innovative feature is the use of a reduced typeface for sections that are of more “technical” interest (such as genealogies or laws). You may or may not think that’s a good idea (on balance, I think not), but at least it’s an idea. The edition also includes a helpful “family tree” of Bible editions, in a frontispiece entitled “How our Bible came to us”.

This is such a splendid edition I may use it for the next few days, for old times’ sake.

2. Revised Standard Version (c.1989 to 1993)

When I bought this, I was in the middle of my period as an atheist (1986 to 1994). Throughout that time I retained a great love for the Bible (and for the Book of Common Prayer, and church architecture, and choral evensong. I tended to lurch between spittle-flecked Dawkins-esque zeal at one moment, and membership of what Woody Allen would call God’s “Loyal Opposition” the next).

My favourite biblical book during my teens was Revelation, and the RSV’s translation of Revelation 4:1 remains definitive for me:

After this I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door!
 

The RSV remains definitive for my other favourite biblical book at that time, the (ahem) Song of Songs. Look, I was a teenager, OK?

3. Authorised Version (c.1989 to 1994, and intermittently since)

I’ve used a number of copies of the Authorised Version over the years. My favourite - which I subsequently gave to a friend - was a paperback edition with a picture of the solar system on the front, which I bought a few weeks before my return to faith.

My most treasured copy is a fake-leather zip-up copy that I bought with vouchers given to me by the church where I played the organ during my teens. This was for the inaugural “Bert and Elsie Hill Memorial Prize”, given in memory of my maternal grandparents. (Some might think it was a bit of a fix that the first award went to the late donors’ grandson, but that is nonsense, nonsense, d’ya hear?!)

Oh, and I only call it the “King James Version” under duress, or when trying not to confuse Americans. ;-)

4. New International Version (1994 to 2001)

In 1994, the Lord brought me back to faith, which I’ve written about here before. In the period immediately before and after my conversion, I was reading the Authorised Version.

However, shortly after my return to faith, another Christian at my college persuaded me that I ought to be reading a modern translation such as the NIV. (At that time, the “Now Indispensable Version” swept all before it among evangelicals. For all the NIV’s flaws, it saddens me that the biblical landscape among evangelicals is now so fragmented and politicised.) So I wandered down to Blackwells and picked up the copy you see gracing the top of this post.

I’ve since moved on from the NIV, first to the ESV and now the NRSV. But the slightly lairy, blue-and-yellow “Popular Cross Reference Edition” of the NIV sitting on the desk beside me was formative for my development as a Christian, and is a fitting choice for the picture requested by Michael.

The Christian who first suggested I drop the Authorised Version in favour of the NIV also proved to be an enduring formative influence on my life as a Christian, and indeed one that outlasted the NIV: I married her.

Poking fun

John H Friday 19th October, AD 2007

I’m sorry to see that Alan Coren has died.

One of his best moments is one that won’t be cropping up in the online obituaries. Coren was a regular on the News Quiz, and back in 1997 the subject of Princess Diana’s campaign against land mines came up on the show. Coren commented:

“I don’t know anything about landmines or Princess Di, but I do know you’d be mad to poke either of them.”

As the-then presenter of the show, Simon Hoggart, put it:

There was a moment’s stunned silence, followed by a huge howl of delighted laughter.

That was recorded on the Thursday night. The show went out on Saturday lunchtime, and the joke - slightly to my surprise - stayed in. That night there was the fatal crash. The producer came specially in to Broadcasting House to lock the master tape in a safe so that it could never, ever be broadcast again.

Men who cry “miscommunication!”

John H Thursday 4th October, AD 2007

In the second extract from her book, The Myth of Mars and Venus (see previous post), Deborah Cameron takes on the widespread belief that men and women communicate in fundamentally different ways, leading to endemic miscommunication between them.

One example commonly given to demonstrate the problem of male-female miscommunication is the “female” tendency to use indirect requests (”The groceries are in the car”) in contrast to the “male” tendency to make direct requests (”Would you bring in the groceries?”). Prof. Cameron is unimpressed:

Gray seems to be suggesting that men hear utterances such as “Could you empty the trash?” as purely hypothetical questions about their ability to perform the action mentioned. But that is a patently ridiculous claim. No competent user of English would take “Could you empty the trash?” as “merely a question gathering information”, any more than they would take “Could you run a mile in four minutes?’ as a polite request to start running.

In reality, conflicts over questions such as “Could you empty the trash?” are not usually a matter of miscommunication so much as “who is entitled to expect what services from whom”. Many misunderstandings are therefore “tactical rather than real”: means of avoiding doing something you don’t want to do.

The myth of miscommunication can become a serious problem when extended beyond the domestic arena. Cameron describes an alarming incident at a Canadian university in the 1990s, when two women students brought accusations of sexual assault against the same male student. One of the complainants was taken to task by a (female) member of the tribunal panel for having failed to communicate sufficiently clearly that she wished the defendant to stop (”This is the whole thing about getting signals mixed up”).

As a linguist who later examined the tribunal proceedings pointed out, “the defendant is never challenged in the same way about his response to the complainants’ signals”:

At one point he is asked why he persisted in sexual activity with MB when she was either asleep or pretending to be asleep. He replies. “She said that she was tired, you know, she never said like ‘No’, ‘Stop’, ‘Don’t', you know, ‘Don’t do this’, uhm, ‘Get out of bed’.”

Nobody asks him why he did not consider the possibility that by saying she was tired and then apparently falling asleep, MB was communicating that she wanted him to stop. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that someone who feigns unconsciousness while in bed with you probably doesn’t want to have sex. But nobody criticises the defendant for being so obtuse.

In these proceedings, the assumption does seem to be that avoiding miscommunication is not a shared responsibility, but specifically a female one.

As a result, the defendant - though found guilty - was only given a light punishment and was allowed to remain enrolled at the university.

This then leads Prof. Cameron to look at the advice commonly given to women as to how to deal with similar situations: “just say no”. She cites research in which only a tiny minority of women said they would ever “just say no”. The majority took the view that this was “likely to make matters worse by giving men an additional reason to feel aggrieved”, and preferred time-honoured evasions such as “I’ve got a headache”, “I’m really tired” and “I’ve got my period”.

Is this just an example of women being too submissive and indirect in their use of language? On the contrary:

All the strategies the women reported using in this situation are also used, by both sexes, in every other situation where it is necessary to verbalise a refusal. Research on conversational patterns shows that in everyday contexts, refusing is never done by “just saying no”. Most refusals do not even contain the word “No”. Yet, in non-sexual situations, no one seems to have trouble understanding them.

Outright refusals are normally considered unnecessarily harsh. If a friend asks you, “Would you like to join the rest of us in the pub this evening?”, are you more likely to refuse by saying “No, I don’t want to”, or by saying something like “I’d love to, but I’m just too tired today”?

As Cameron continues, this evidence undermines the claim that men do not understand any refusal less direct than a firm ‘No’”:

If “ordinary”, non-sexual refusals do not generally take the form of saying “No”, but are performed using conventional strategies such as hesitating, hedging and offering excuses, then sexual refusals which use exactly the same strategies should not present any special problem. “For men to claim that they do not understand such refusals to be refusals,” Kitzinger and Frith say, “is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance.”

Cameron concludes with an example from the film Cool Hand Luke, in which a prison warden addresses the persistent rebel, Luke:

“What we have here,” says the warden, “is failure to communicate.” Both of them know that communication is not the issue. Luke understands the warden, but chooses to defy him. What the warden really means is “failure to do what I want you to do”.

Do women talk too much?

John H Wednesday 3rd October, AD 2007

The Guardian has been running a fascinating series of excerpts from a new book, The Myth of Mars and Venus, by Deborah Cameron.

This book aims to debunk the “myth” - made popular by books such as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” - that “men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate”. You know the sort of thing: women talk more than men, women are more verbally skilled than men, and that many problems in male/female relationships are the result of “miscommunication” arising from the different approaches of men and women to language.

As Prof. Cameron points out, men tend to come out rather badly from this mythologising:

The literature of Mars and Venus … is remarkably patronising towards men. They come off as bullies, petulant toddlers; or Neanderthals sulking in their caves. One (male) contributor to this catalogue of stereotypes goes so far as to call his book If Men Could Talk. A book called If Women Could Think would be instantly denounced; why do men put up with books that put them on a par with Lassie or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (”Hey, wait a minute - I think he’s trying to tell us something!”)?

Cameron cites some fascinating research showing that the differences between how men and women communicate are far smaller than is commonly supposed. One researcher estimates the overlap in verbal skills between the male and female population at around 99.75%. The differences among women and among men far outweigh the difference between men and women.

The most significant difference shown by the research is the clear indication (from over 60% of studies examined) that men talk more than women. Fewer than 4% of studies found that women talk more than men. Even then, however, this difference is not necessarily caused by inherent gender differences:

The reviewers are inclined to believe that this is a case of gender and amount of talk being linked indirectly rather than directly: the more direct link is with status, in combination with the formality of the setting (status tends to be more relevant in formal situations). The basic trend, especially in formal and public contexts, is for higher-status speakers to talk more than lower-status ones. The gender pattern is explained by the observation that in most contexts where status is relevant, men are more likely than women to occupy high-status positions; if all other things are equal, gender itself is a hierarchical system in which men are regarded as having higher status.

This theory is supported by studies in which the “men talk more” pattern is reversed (or at least reduced) “by instructing subjects to discuss a topic that both sexes consider a distinctively female area of expertise”. This leads to a temporary change in the relative status of those in the conversation, with the women participants’ status enhanced, and their contribution to the conversation increased accordingly.

As Cameron concludes:

That may be why some studies find that women talk more in domestic interactions with partners and family members: in the domestic sphere, women are often seen as being in charge. In other spheres, however, the default assumption is that men outrank women, and men are usually found to talk more. In informal contexts where status is not an issue, the commonest finding is not that women talk more than men, it is that the two sexes contribute about equally.

So why do people generally believe that women talk more than men, given that this is not reflected in reality? Cameron continues:

The feminist Dale Spender once suggested an explanation: she said that people overestimate how much women talk because they think that, ideally, women would not talk at all. While that may be rather sweeping, it is true that belief in female loquacity is generally combined with disapproval of it. The statement “women talk more than men” tends to imply the judgment “women talk too much”.

So the myth of Mars and Venus “provides a justification for an ingrained social prejudice”. The “evolutionary psychology” of writers such as Steven Pinker then “takes today’s social prejudices and projects them back into prehistory, thus elevating them to the status of timeless truths about the human condition.”

Who am I?

John H Friday 28th September, AD 2007

Peter Ould’s description of this video cannot be improved upon: “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow”.

It’s worth clicking here to see a full-screen version.

Departing the stage

John H Wednesday 26th September, AD 2007

As a follow-up to my posts on John Stott’s farewell sermon (1 | 2), my wife was talking to some friends of ours today whose pastor was at this year’s Keswick Convention, and who described how Stott ended his sermon.

At the conclusion of his sermon, Stott asked everyone to bow their heads for a few moments of silent prayer. Everyone did so, and when they lifted up their heads again and opened their eyes - the stage was empty.

No rousing send-off, no applause, no presentations of flowers - nothing, in short, to distract attention from the Christ whom Stott has proclaimed so effectively, and with such modesty and humility, for so long.

While we’re on this subject, a recording of Stott’s Keswick sermon can be downloaded as an MP3 for £3 here. Even better, the All Souls Langham Place website’s sermon archive contains hundreds of recordings of Stott’s sermons from the mid-60s onwards, available free-of-charge (though with free registration required).

Searching through the sermons is not for the faint-hearted - a better search facility wouldn’t hurt - but there’s a lifetime’s-worth of great preaching there. You could do worse than start with his 1971 series of sermons on Ephesians, which I’m currently working my way through.

(Note: you may find, as I have, that the All Souls MP3s don’t work very well. You’ll need to make sure you save them with a .mp3 extension (rather than “.kont”, whatever that is) and then use a program like Audacity to import them and re-export them as new MP3 files. Very frustrating, but worth the effort.)

Christlikeness in practice

John H Saturday 22nd September, AD 2007

In my previous post, we saw how John Stott’s final message to the church he has served for so long is: “Be Christlike!” In the final section of his sermon at this year’s Keswick Convention, Stott looks at “three practical consequences of Christlikeness”.

First, Christlikeness and the mystery of suffering. Stott observes that of all the ways in which Christians try to understand suffering, “one way stands out”:

…that suffering is part of God’s process of making us like Christ. Whether we suffer from a disappointment, a frustration or some other painful tragedy, we need to try to see this in the light of Romans 8:28-29. According to Romans 8:28, God is always working for the good of his people, and according to Romans 8:29, this good purpose is to make us like Christ.

Second, Christlikeness and the challenge of evangelism. Why do our evangelistic efforts so often seem to fail? Stott suggests that “one main reason is that we don’t look like the Christ we are proclaiming”:

There was a Hindu professor in India who once identified one of his students as a Christian and said to him: “If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, India would be at your feet tomorrow.” I think India would be at their feet today if we Christians lived like Christ.

From the Islamic world, the Reverend Iskandar Jadeed, a former Arab Muslim, has said “If all Christians were Christians – that is, Christlike – there would be no more Islam today.”

Finally, Christlikeness and the indwelling of the Spirit. It’s all very well saying we have to be Christlike, “but is it attainable?” As Stott goes on to remind us:

In our own strength it is clearly not attainable but God has given us his Holy Spirit to dwell within us, to change us from within.

And (having already quoted Michael Ramsay), Stott cites another former archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who used an analogy from Shakespeare:

“It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear and telling me to write a play like that. Shakespeare could do it – I can’t. And it is no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life like that. Jesus could do it – I can’t. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me, then I could write plays like this. And if the Spirit could come into me, then I could live a life like His.”

Stott then concludes his sermon with the following words, which could also function as a summary of what he has preached during his sixty years of ministry:

So I conclude, as a brief summary of what we have tried to say to one another: God’s purpose is to make us like Christ. God’s way to make us like Christ is to fill us with his Spirit. In other words, it is a Trinitarian conclusion, concerning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And all the people said: Amen!

The purpose of God for the people of God

John H Saturday 22nd September, AD 2007

I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth…

When a saint and servant of Christ like John Stott says something like that, you sit up and take notice, especially when the words come from his final sermon. Dr Stott finally retired, after sixty years of ordained ministry, at this year’s Keswick Convention, with a sermon entitled The model – becoming more like Christ. It’s a sermon that shows why Stott has been such a blessing to the church over the past six decades, and why he will be sorely missed.

Stott begins by considering a question which “perplexed” him as a younger Christian: “what is God’s purpose for His people?” He considers the answer given by the Westminster Shorter Catechism (”to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever”) and briefer statements such as “love God, love your neighbour”, but declares none of these to be “wholly satisfactory”. He continues:

So I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth and it is – God wants His people to become like Christ. Christlikeness is the will of God for the people of God.

Stott identifies three biblical texts which underline Christlikeness as God’s past, present and future will for his people: Romans 8:29 (God “predestined [us] to be conformed to the image of his Son”), 2 Corinthians 3:18 (we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another”) and 1 John 3:2 (”when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is”).

“[I]f we claim to be a Christian, we must be Christlike,” Stott concludes, citing 1 John 2:6, before going on to look at five ways in which we are to be like Christ:

  • First, we are to be like Christ in his incarnation, following the example of his “amazing self-humbling” (Philippians 2:5-8).
  • Second, we are to be like Christ in his service: “just as Jesus [in washing the disciples’ feet] performed what in His culture was the work of a slave, so we in our cultures must regard no task too menial or degrading to undertake for each other”.
  • Third, we are to be like Christ in his love. Stott bases this on Ephesians 5:2, and observes that:

    • Paul is urging us to be like the Christ of the Incarnation, to be like the Christ of the foot washing and to be like the Christ of the cross. These three events of the life of Christ indicate clearly what Christlikeness means in practice.

  • Fourth, we are to be like Christ in his patient endurance. 1 Peter, in particular, teaches us this truth:

    • Every chapter of the first letter of Peter contains an allusion to our suffering like Christ … This call to Christlikeness in suffering unjustly may well become increasingly relevant as persecution increases in many cultures in the world today.

  • Finally, we are to be like Christ in his mission. As the Father sent Jesus into the world, so Jesus sent his disciples into the world (John 20:21, John 17:18). This means that “as Christ had entered our world, so we are to enter other people’s worlds”, and Stott quotes Archbishop Michael Ramsay in support of this:

    “We state and commend the faith only in so far as we go out and put ourselves with loving sympathy inside the doubts of the doubters, the questions of the questioners and the loneliness of those who have lost the way.“

    Hence “All authentic mission is incarnational mission” (a statement that will raise hackles in some quarters, and I suspect Stott well knows it).

Stott concludes his sermon by looking at “three practical consequences of Christlikeness”, which I hope to look at in a separate post.

Copyright infringement is NOT stealing

John H Saturday 8th September, AD 2007

We interrupt this hiatus (again) for an important Public Information Message.

From the University of Sydney law revue: a parody of the “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy DVD annoyverts, with an educational message that is a lot more accurate than the original ads:

HT: Andres “Technollama” Guadamuz.

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