Knowledge, Status and Web sites

I have been doing a few little techy jobs recently. These arethe kind of things I slip into my spare time (which is usually very early in the morning).

• Experimenting with Knowledge Base Publisher. I was going to post all the little things I needed to remember in the “Techy” category of my blog, but I didn’t want to bore people subscribed by a feed reader. KBPublisher works quite well and has never yet fallen over. My copy is here: http://graham.doel.org/knowledge-base/
• Upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 which is excellent. The best yet. they have sorted all the little problems with printing. This time I plugged a printer in. Went to add printer and it was smoother than adding a printer in Windows. My sister in law needed a new computer so I bought a cheap one from Ebuyer and installed Ubuntu 7.10. It works great (after a few teething problems with their old monitor). Now they have a speedy computer and all for £150!
• Installing the “StatuPress” plugin for wordpress and using it on the home page of my blog. The home page now shows my facebook status in almost real time. If, for some bizzare reason, you wanted to add my status feed to your feed reader it is here.
• Designing a wordpress theme for the church web site. I am using the pages function in order to theme the site into four areas: Thinking of attending, Attended recently, Attend regularly and News. This is slow progress because it is not high on my priority list.

It’s Church Jim, but not as we know it.

We had our first “experiment” with a different way of bring church tonight, in a room behind the bar of a local hotel. I set the tables out so there were about 6 people around each table. I did 4 little A5 sheet with different discussion starters on. I chose a deliberately churchey theme:

• What do you think of Jesus.
• What do other people say about Jesus.
• Three stories about Jesus, “Jesus seems rude”, “Mary pours perfume over Jesus feet” and “A discussion with a Religious leader”. Each story had a left brain and right brain questions.

I pulled the whole thing together at the end with a short meditation. David played live tinkley music in the background.

These are my initial thoughts:

• I enjoyed it, particularly watching everyone get stuck in with discussion.
• It didn’t look like many people were uncomfortable.
• It was a bit cerebral, but perhaps that was necessary for a first go with mainly church people.
• It would need a bit of variety to survive every week.

I gave everyone a feedback questionnaire. I’m looking forward to the feedback both good and bad.

Circular letters written to the New Connexion.

Yesterday and today I am looking at the letters I copied from the archives. The language is a bit 19th century (not surprising since that is when they were written). So it takes a bit of wading through.  I have already posted a good example.

My method has been to identify the association letters that might contain something of interest to me and then read them and make a few notes about the argument the letter takes along with a few quotes that I think might be interesting.

The problem I’m having is that Mission, Evangelism and Church Planting is taken as a given. They do not seem to reflect on what they are doing, or how it relates to the world around them. There are one or two snippets of information that give a clue to how they were thinking, I hope to find more.

List of Association Letters Addressed to the New Connexion of General Baptists: Association Letter for the New Connexion

My very brief notes on the letters I have identified as relating to my subject: Notes on Association Letters

How to appologise in 1809

I came accross this as I was searching through some letters that had been published in the 1800’s:
It starts: “It is with deep regret we inform you, that the circular letter alluded to above, was, at the time it was read, by some means mislaid, and the most diligent search and enquiry after it has been in vein …”

Baptist Preaching Sinks to new lows….

You will never believe this:

http://trevinwax.com/2008/02/09/ baptist-preaching-sinks-to-new-low/

(Via TSK)

A step in the wrong direction?

At my last supervision two significant questions were raised:

1. Does the question you are asking reflect the contents of your proposal?
2. In the historical area of your study, will their be enough reflection by the church planters to give you enough to go on?

There were other questions, but these two are the ones that have set the direction for my Study leave. Richard and Stuart set me a deadline of March 13 to come up with some answers. If there is not enough primary material then I will have to refocus my proposal in time for my progress review with the university.

Stuart gave me most opportunity for reflection when he suggested that the question I am asking is “fundamentally uninteresting”. I must admit his words caught me off guard, because having spent nearly a year framing my question, I am very interested in it! Having re-visited my proposal, the question I have used to is:

How might revisiting the Church planting characteristics and techniques of the New Connexion of General Baptists (1770-1891) inform and challenge the reality of Church planting within the Baptist Union of Great Britain (1988-2008).

Unfortunately that question does not reflect what is in the proposal. I wrote the question and then wrote the proposal and didn’t go back and check that the two agreed with each other. It would be better to ask:

What were the philosophical, social, political and theological themes that influenced the Church planting characteristics and techniques of the New Connexion of General Baptists (1770-1891), and how might they inform and challenge the reality of Church planting within the Baptist Union of Great Britain (1988-2008).

That question better reflects what is in the proposal and provides a more interesting basis for discussion. Unfortunately I began to look at the history of the New Connexion of General Baptists with the question that headed my proposal in mind, not the substance of the proposal. Which means that the work that I have done so far needs totally re-working. But that’s not the end of the world!

The second question is a little more difficult to answer. The most significant histories on the New Connexion of General Baptists are ancient and not particularly analytical (with the exception of Frank Rinaldi’s thesis which is due for publication later this year). They tend to concentrate on description of the events and are interested only in where the New Connexion sit in the theological framework of their time. What I need to know s what the people who were starting the churches thought about how they were responding to the philosophical, political, social and theological themes of their day. The only way I am going to find that out is if they have written something about it. My trips to the archives should help me do that.

“The Enlightenment” by Outram, a summary

The Enlightenment

Author: Dorinda Outram
Publication: Cambridge University Press (1995)

Contents

1. What is Enlightenment?, p.1
2. Coffee houses and consumers: the social context of the Enlightenment, p.14
3. The rise of modern paganism: Religion and the Enlightenment, p.31
4. Science and the Enlightenment: God’s order and man’s understanding, p.47
5. Europe’s mirror? The Enlightenment and the exotic, p.63
6. Enlightenment thinking about gender, p.80
7. Enlightenment and government: new departure or business as usual?, p.96
8. The end of the Enlightenment: conspiracy and revolution? p.114

What is Enlightenment?

The Enlightenment should be seen as an intersection of debates, rather than one unified stream of thought. In this introduction Dorinda Outram presents the different ways the term “enlightenment” has been interpreted as it relates to this period of history. She starts with the way dominant Enlightenment thinker present their own understanding of the term in essays written for the Berlin newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift. She notes that the interpretation of Enlightenment as a value system based on rationality was predominant in the interpretation of the Enlightenment.

This Line of interpretation of the Enlightenment saw it as an intellectual movement by great thinkers in Western Europe and displayed little interest in its social or political context or in the impact of these ideas.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.3-4

She observes that the way Enlightenment has been interpreted by historians has changed significantly since the 1960’s. She points to Peter Gay’s works on the enlightenment published in the late 1960’s as significant in preparing the way for the impact of the social and political context of the Enlightenment to be considered in it’s interpretation. Authors Alderidge, Venturi and Darnton are sighted examples of the widening understanding of the political and social context in relation to the geographic spread of Enlightenment ideas far beyond the homogeneous white and male interpretations that had dominated its study.

Dorinda follows the changing interpretation of the Enlightenment through to the work of Habernmas and Foucault who saw the progression of ideas from the Enlightenment, through Modernity into their own emerging thinking.

She concludes her introduction by setting her understanding of her framework for interpretation:

… think of the Enlightenment, not as an expression which has failed to encompass a complex historical reality, but rather as a capsule containing sets of debates, stresses and concerns, which however differently formulated or responded to, do appear to be characteristic of the way in which ideas, opinions and social and political structures interacted and changed in the eighteenth century.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.12

Coffee houses and consumers: the social context of the Enlightenment

Economic expansion, increasing urbanisation, rising population and improving communications contributed to the rise of public lectures, coffee houses, lending libraries, art exhibitions operatic and theatrical performances. These led to an increase in social integration and the public debate of ideas. Observing that only 1% of borrowing in lending libraries was of a religious nature, she suggests that the novel was the main was in which the readers encountered new ideas and attitudes.

The Enlightenment was an era where dramatic shifts occurred in the production and accessibility of ideas and especially in the case of print media. New social institutions were constructed based on the interchange of idea, rather than to mark or display social and political rank.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.29

The Rise of modern paganism? Religion and the Enlightenment

A complex picture of religion in the eighteenth century is painted. While on the one hand the discovery of reason led to much question of accepted religious norms there was an increasing interest in religion from an alternative perspective. The enlightenment is seen as the natural continuation of the reformation (Hegel) and the debate about toleration of non standard religious practice as a debate about the place of monarchy. She suggests that there were many voices that tried to tackle the problem of religious belief with the growing Enlightenment reason:

One way out was Deism, with its total hostility to revelation. Another was to reject the attempt to make Christianity ‘reasonable’, and return to a view of religion which emphasised faith, trust in revelation, and personal witness to religious experience.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.43

Science and the Enlightenment: God’s order and man’s understanding

The development of “Natural Philosophy” which became known as “Science” after the term was coined in the 1830’s is significant in the Enlightenment. Initially it was treated with suspicion and attracted none of the central funding that it has attracted in the last 100 years. However its development in this period paved the way from the shift from religion to science as the dominant cultural force. Science began to offer people the opportunity to become independent in knowledge of the world form the traditional claims of religion. She also observes that Foucault’s view of the role of science in the Enlightenment was to change all the structures of knowledge.

Thus, for some historians science is the cultural category of the Enlightenment, rather than that of religion, which seems so central to Hegel.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.48

Europe’s mirror? The Enlightenment and the exotic

The existing knowledge of far lands and other cultures grew during the eighteenth century along with colonisation and colonial attitudes. The inequality between races that colonisation presented were contrary to the ideas dominating the Enlightenment. Rousseau challenged the idea of the European civilisation being the dominant cultural form to which other cultures were to conform to.

Enlightenment views of a single grand movement of progress lying behind human history could not grapple with the idea of each cultural identity being driven by its own cultural dynamic.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.79

She suggests with Herder that the central failure of the Enlightenment was the way it dealt with difference.

Enlightenment thinking about gender

The debate about gender was a dominant theme of Enlightenment thinking. There was a rise in female engagement in the exchange of ideas through the french “salon”. However the make dominated world was reluctant to accept the female intellectual capability. The result was a measure of confusion:

Enlightenment thinkers seemed to assert, on the one hand, that women, as human beings, could have rights; but also, on the other, that because of their alleged irrationality and lack of autonomy, they should not be allowed to take part in politics.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.95

Dorinda suggests that although during the Enlightenment period there was little change in the way women were treated, the argument of Enlightenment thinkers paved the way for those who were to bring about significant change in this realm.

Enlightenment and government: new departure or business as usual?

The change in dominant thought form that the Enlightenment heralded meant that it was impossible for kings to rule in the manner they once had. The people they ruled demanded rights. It is impossible to find a king who ruled without some form of restriction (in England it was Parliament). Towards the end of the eighteenth century most governments had engaged programs of reform involving education and welfare. There had the unintended result of increasing social mobility. They were aimed, however, to produce a population cable of giving rational ascent to the measures of the monarch.

In the end, Enlightenment was able to raise major problems for monarchies, as well as being of major importance in reform
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.112

The end of the Enlightenment: conspiracy and revolution?

Dorinda asks if the French Revolution was a consequence of Enlightenment and suggests that Enlightenment was a consequence of revolution:

One could even say that Enlightenment began with Revolution, that which occurred in England in 1688, which created the conditions for the emergence of the philosophy with which John Locke discussed new thinking about the relationship between ruler and ruled.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.120

what the Enlightenment contributed was not only a great number of new, non-traditional ways of defining and legitimating power, through ideas such as ‘natural law’, ‘reason’, and so on, it had also mobilised sections of society into ‘public opinion’, which Kant had earlier identified as requiring tight control if it were not to disrupt social and political order.
Outram (1995) The Enlightenment, C.U.P. p.127

Notes to Self

Interesting that the fairly recent writers look at the Enlightenment ans see some connections with the way they are thinking. Reading this book made me think of some of the similarities between the cultural shift that is happening in the Enlightenment and the cultural shift that is happening in the (so called) Post-Modern era.

Study Leave

Today sees the start of a fortnights study leave, most of which I will be at home for.   I use this blog  for storing my notes as I read stuff.  I know it might not be very interesting, but it is a good way of keeping my notes because I have a good backup regime.

However if you follow this by RSS feed rather than regular trip to the home page, their will be a deluge (I hope) of posts to the study category which you might find a little boring… sorry.