No…… although the insinuations about what he might have or might not have been doing during the years of Argentina’s military junta should come as no surprise to avid readers of Latin and Central American writers…

In Vargas Llosa’s “Feast of the Goat” for instance the Catholic Church colludes with the dictatorship Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Redpublic until the arrival of JFK..

and to those of us whoose teenage faith was saved by the reading of the works of Latin American Liberation theologians like Gutierrez, Boff and Bonino, the late seventies and early eighties were the years in which attempts were made to quash them by the appointment of ultra conservative bishops and cardinals. Many of these appointments were made by a certain John Paul II! Lest we forget Boff advocated the ordination of women in “Ecclesiogenesis” way back in the mid seventies.

But lets not talk about that, lets talk instead about the greatest soul duo of all time… the dynamic duo, Sam and Dave and also the band who backed them who happened to be one of the first mixed race groups….. Booker T and the MGs!

It may be in black and white and performed to a rather restrained looking and predominatnly white European audience, but their rendition of “Hold on I’m coming” on the Stax Tour is truly astounding(I’ve got it on the Otis Redding Respect Live 1967 DVD)! If only I could shake like that! And the faces that Donald “Duck” Dunn pulls whilst playing the bass are a picture! A bit like all those French arrivals at the enemy up the road in Newcastle, you have to say the Stax tour probably did a whole lot more for transforming race relations than the church did in many parts of the world. Proof for me that God uses anyone irrespective of their beliefs to bring in the kingdom, becasue if he relied only on Popes we would still be in the dark ages and as far away from the kingdom as ever!

I hope that writing this blog whilst listening to that old classic “Modern Life is Rubbish” on the headphones will produce something more cogent than the last offering which on reading back looks awful. I could say the same when I look back at some of the sermons that I preached back in the day as a curate in Birstall some twenty years ago!

I suspect, however, that the urge to break out into some kind of middle aged dancing might get the better of me and there will be no noticeable improvement….but not to worry as no one has been duped into reading any of this yet so it is all still purely thereaputic……which is all well and good….. Air cushioned soles…she don’t mind..I want to stay this way for ever…blue jeans….Good to see DMs making yet another comeback, I have worn them for years….best boots money can buy, but I digress…..

As I was trying to say, very badly, the last time there is a tendency in some recent Christian thinking to paint such a black picture of the world that we fail to see when God is using “the world” to call the church to repent and re-discover what Gospel values actually are. I often think that in the future church historians will heavily criticize the Christians of today and of the past one hundred years. It will be seen as a new dark age in Christian history. One of the few bright spots in this dark age will be Archbishop William Temple who bucked the trend along with a few others in helping to set up the Welfare State. But whether it be votes for women, ecology, animal welfare, equal rights for all, future historians will consistantley tell of a Church that was always on the wrong side, in fact not just the wrong side, but an evil side. One of the reasons that they will identify for this will be the elevation of the Bible into a place way above its station. For as John’s Gospel reminds us it is Jesus who is the Word of God and not the Bible which is a library of books that should be read through his glasses….after all isn’t this what the early church eventually did when they decided that the Gospel was for the Gentiles as well? Isn’t this what the disciples on the way to Emmaus were doing when they walked with the risen Jesus? Had they just been reading it literally as so many are inclined to do, they would never have recognised Jesus at all.

I had hoped that the Church of England’s obession with the exile in Babylon and the Gospel being “counter-cultural” would have been an obsession that would have been cearly de-bunked by now. Simply put this obsession leads to slip-shod theology and becomes a justification for running away from the mess of the world as we find it in the early 21st century. It also allows Christians to disengage their brains and feel superior to the rest of the human race. And I am sorry, but the Gospel has nothing to do with feeling privalaged or better than anybody else.

The Gospel is the Gospel, end of story….just because something or other is counter-cultural does not make it the Gospel…..just becasue something or other isn’t counter-cultural does not mean it is not the Gospel. Sometimes society will mirror the values of the Gospel far better than the “Church”. Conseqently it will be Christian culture and thinking that has to be re-shaped back into the Gospel and not the other way round. The wisdom is discerning which is which and waht is what….and there lies the difficulty…and that is why we run away into an exiles in Babylon kind of drunken stupor even though any connections between the exile and now are tenuous at best. In fact there are parts of the Old Testament that were clearly influenced by Babylonian thinking, it wasn’t all ignored or condemned out of hand; the experience of exile was far more complex than that!

So when I watched the opening and closing ceremony of the Olympic Games I rejoiced at all the creativity that was being displayed and the prophetic impact of both the suffragettes and the NHS on the rest of the world….and lest we forget the Church of England completely opposed “votes for women” on the grounds that it was against the will of God….women could not possibly be given the right to vote….such a move would symbolise a society losiing its Gospel values!!!!!

So lets debunk Babylon once and for all……