New Wine Theology

I was just prayed for.

No really.

I thought that being 'shushed' at a Moody Blues concert was bad enough.

In front of a room full of about forty people, the reverend Dr Bob prayed that the voice of the serpent be silenced.

I can't believe it. I was ....lost for words, speechless, gobsmacked. Silenced.

That voice, the serpent's voice, was my voice.

Dr Bob was expounding on the story, obviously from a literalist perspective, of Cain and Abel. You remember how they both offered sacrifices to God, and God favoured Abel's gift over Cains, or was it the other way round?

He invited us to say what this story tells us about the nature of God. I said that, as a father, I would never be displeased with a gift from any of my children, nor favour a gift from one child over another.

I'll tell you all about it tomorrow. I'm fuming.

***

I had turned up to a 'taster day' this morning for a theological course. It was sold as intellectually challenging and to a BA level with points to go on to an MA it you wanted to. I'm looking for an intellectual challenge and I thought this might fit the bill, being challenging and academic, I thought, would allow me to ask some difficult questions, and increase my understanding of the various theological questions that are out there.

The session began with worship. Straight forward enough and not too much raising of hands an extempore utterances. Tolerable certainly. Then we were introduced to Dr Bob. An American who works as a prison chaplin and does lecture tours. He started off pretty well really. I thought 'I can work with this guy'. Apparently, he'd worked in South America for many years with the poor and disenfranchised. He went there after graduating with a history degree to teach the natives how to cultivate the land, he explained, recognising the naive and patronising nature of his ambition, but saying he wanted to do something to balance what the Americans were doing in Central and South America. 'Good guy' I thought. He was reacting against the foreign policies of Reagan and Bush senior. Yeah, well done fella. There were pictures of the house he and his wife lived in, and of the local peasants doing bible class. He didn't say if he had children, I'm guessing not. The showed the water projects he'd been involved in, and the full crop yields he, though God, had managed to grow. He said how he'd been influenced by 'Liberation Theology' which was current at the time, and how it was for Westerners to be changed by their work with the disadvantaged as much as the other way round. So I was warming to the guy and thinking about committing the time to this course.

Then he started with the Genesis passages, and what the verses said, and dissecting each sentence to draw out every fragment of meaning. It went well to start with. About how bountiful God is in creation and how much He loves us etc.

I thought his treatment of Eve was rather harsh but put it down to a transatlantic thing. You know, how terrible Eve was and how she was destined to need to search for a husband and have the Pain of childbirth for every more. I was thinking that anytime he was going to say how this story is an allegory to explain how human kind has got to where it is, but no, not yet. Then he moved on to what it must feel like to be out of favour, to be an outcast, an underclass. He talked of his current work as a prison chaplain, and how the gangsters and villains in his prison had empathised with the message that God was there for them, and how they had changed. No really, not just to get themselves earlier parole.

So that's how we got on to Cain and Abel. And that's how the voice of the serpent, previously banished by God, had slithered into the room and had voiced, through my voice, a question that Dr Bob didn't like. So he banished the serpent, in the name of God. And I walked out.