Oaths - Article 39/39

XXXIX. OF A CHRISTIAN MAN'S OATH

AS we confess that vain and rash Swearing is forbidden Christian men by our Lord Jesus Christ, and James his Apostle, so we judge, that Christian Religion doth not prohibit, but that a man may swear when the Magistrate requireth, in a cause of faith and charity, so it be done according to the Prophet's teaching, in justice, judgement, and truth.

Christians have had a difficult relationship with oaths down the ages. In trying to be people of the truth, people of no-lying lips, people who let their no be no and their yes be yes we find it hard to swear on the Bible as if that raises the standard somehow.

But an oath in court is a matter of record and judgement. So whilst not wanting lies to pass our lips on any occasion we are allowed, by this final Article, to agree to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in a court of law and be legally bound by it in a way we are not in everyday life.

We may want to ask questions about the court process, which uses a method of examination and cross-examination which can hinder the arrival of the whole truth rather than help it along. But the Reformers were happy for the Christian individual (they said 'man') to take part in legal process and not be exempted.

But swearing in court is not contrary to Scripture for the Reformers.

Workers in the Vineyard

During my sabbatical break I intend to visit a few other churches. Last Sunday I found myself at Nailsea Methodist Church where minister Deborah handled Matthew 20:1-16.

A straightforward and clear message invited us all to avoid being grumpy when others were doing well if it was not at our expense. It also encouraged us not to begrudge those who came to faith late in life, especially as they might have done so because of our labouring long hours for the same reward. We can all only be who we are and do what we can do, so do that, would be my summary.

But, as ever when pondering a well-known passage, my thoughts drifted to context. Where did Matthew put this tale? What can we deduce from where he put it? It's a story unique to Matthew, which puts us on our guard, knowing that he had an axe to grind and sometimes used his Jesus stories to sharpen it.

We have had teaching on forgiveness, divorce and riches in the immediately preceding material. The last line of chapter 19 has been that the first will be last and the last will be first. So does this expand on that? Yes, to some extent.

First thing to remember is Matthew's axe. His Gospel is all about the status of the law of Moses in the light of Jesus and in the light of the fall of Jerusalem. Any material unique to Matthew is likely to illustrate this point. So, says this story, if you want rules you've got them. A generous contract of employment for a day's work, signed at the start of the day and honoured at the end. The rules are kept.

Second thing, which you maybe do not know, is that this parable is based on a story from Jewish folklore, in which an employer rewards a hard-working employee for achieving more in two hours than other labourers managed in the whole day. His audience may well have been familiar with that.

But what might Matthew's readers have missed about the rules? Because the vineyard owner has to be God in the story. Israel is always the vineyard. And God (who likes to seek and save the lost - Matthew 18:10-14) comes a-seeking for employees.

The Gospel of grace is a new thing. It is a gospel where people who have been waiting all day for work don't get sent home with insufficient money to buy supper on the way. You can play by the rules if you want to; if you do you'll be treated fairly. But if you accept the wonderful free good news of the grace of God delivered in Jesus Christ you will get a better deal than the lawmakers and lawkeepers could ever have imagined.

If you are a follower of Jesus and have committed your life to that for a long time, good on you. But make sure you have ditched the idea that you are in a meritocracy. For the people who come to faith late after a lifetime of sin will know, better than you, that they did nothing to deserve it. Nothing. Thing is, neither, my friend, did you.

And forgive me getting all messianic on you but whenever Jesus calls people 'friend' in the gospels he is about to prick their bubble. So the story ends with Matthew's little coda, again. Lastly beats firstly in the topsy-turvy world of Jesus.

Trust

The way American lawyers go at a corporate negligence case is a wonder to behold. A wolf-pack cornering a wounded prey is not a strong enough image.

And in some cases this is good. In the manner of a John Grisham thriller (only a good lawyer can fix anything) American attorneys have moved the world on. Only American lawyers seem to have managed to corner FIFA into admitting that perhaps all was not well with an organisation most of Europe thinks is corrupt but no-one in Europe has been able to lay a glove on. That is excellent.

But there seems, from my distant view across the pond, to be no difference in their approach to such an adversary and a company such as VW. Now I love VW. I have owned five in my life and have also had two Audi A3s, which are just VWs in better clothes.

This crisis over emissions-test fixing (not qualitatively different from painting the walls before the Queen visits or preparing a better lesson for Ofsted) is a slur on a company with an otherwise excellent reputation. My mind understands why all such cases should be treated the same; my heart wants to allow the investigation to be done gently because reputation counts for something and when the chief of VW says this was done by a couple of rogue engineers I tend to believe him. Because of reputation.

To put it another way. I am almost always punctual. When I am not I find people tend to ask if everything is OK rather than telling me off. In this environment I find it easier to tell the truth if I have erred. I am usually forgiven. And it makes me determined to keep my reputation for the future.

Hard questions can, I put it to you, be phrased in a gentle manner without losing their power.

Judgement Day

I may have read too much Grisham or watched too much Good Wife, but today I caught a few minutes on Sky News of the live proceedings from the Pistorius trial in South Africa. And my one thought was how desperately slow it all was.

This was not born out of a desire to cut to the chase, nor to read the last few pages of the novel first. It was a sympathy for the defendant. Pistorius knows what he has done. He alone does. For when two people walk into a room and only one walks out there is an inevitable bias in the record of what occurred. But he has been found, at the time I write, guilty of culpable homicide and not guilty of murder.

And now he waits while legal arguments are made about the bail possibilities pending sentencing. During this period his current address was broadcast to the world. Again that seems odd to a Brit.

How can one sit calmly for so long awaiting sentence? An attribute of civilised society is that we are not cruel to offenders. We aim to punish them without undue cruelty. We take away liberty not fingernails.

In the absence of a jury, which is how this case has worked, the judge hears arguments then heads off to ponder and research. But presumably she already has a good idea of what sentence to impose. Yet Pistorius must wait. Until mid-October. It takes forever. And that seems harsh.

Spot the Allegory

The courts of our land have struggled coming to terms with the modern world. The big question has always been whether they need to change or whether the modern world needs to be educated.

Take the question of robes. Do they get in the way of the work of the courts or are they a sign of an office to be respected?

Now some people make their living in and around courts - the legal professions and court clerks and assistants. They know the language and the necessary style and deference. The lawed.

Some people don't go to court very often, but they have been enough (witness, plaintiff, defendant, juror) to have grasped what to do. Or they watch a lot of legal dramas on TV. The delawed.

But it appears there is a new class of people. We shall call them the unlawed. They have no idea what to do and ask questions. Lots of questions. They have never been to court or seen one on TV.

And eventually there was bound to be a jury that came along where the twelve randomly chosen members were all unlawed.

It is good that they came at all. Maybe they had no choice. But they are very confused. They need a simple explanation of what is going on at every stage.

So even though the words 'reasonable' and 'doubt' are well known words they have never heard the expression 'reasonable doubt' before and don't know if it means what it says or if it has some hidden, special meaning. They ask and are told by the judge, in effect, that they are being stupid. 'A reasonable doubt is a doubt which is reasonable' he says. 'I'm not allowed to help you any more.'

There have been loads of other questions and this has frustrated the judge who is used to being understood.

Just when you thought the Huhne/Price cases couldn't get more entertaining. More next week I gather. Fantastic.

Innocence

The hard cases are what make good law. You take a guiding principle and test it at the edges. Is it murder if I only meant to hurt him? This is imaginary right? Enter manslaughter.

On Fighting Talk, (Radio 5 Live Saturday mornings at 11.00 a.m. - the best show for sports loving blokes ever) they have an item called 'Defend the Indefensible'. To test their debating skills panellists are asked to argue that, for instance, Usain Bolt is over-rated or Manchester United would be better off changing their manager more regularly.

I am about to do that so please understand.

One of the hard fought for principles of the legal system in this country is that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Another is more obvious - you can't put a dead person on trial. Now I realise that there is so much smoke around the Savile corpse that you would be pretty daft to deny the presence of flames. Fair enough. But to make the leap from allegation to guilt without a trial. We don't do that round here. We're civilised.

We do not like to think of ourselves in the same breath as those who threw rocks at the van taking Venables and Thompson to court for the Bulger trial. We do not sit comfortably with those who drive paediatricians out of town because they sound like paedophiles. So we should not, unless we change the law, talk of Savile's crimes, however tempting that might be. We speak about the serious allegations made against him. No more.

Theippaper, which is normally very good, fell into this trap over four pages last Saturday. Shame on it.

This piece is not intended to trivialise sexual, or any other sort of, abuse in any way

Rules

Pint for the gentleman; white wine or fruit-based drink for the lady. Those are the rules, and if we didn't have any rules where would we be? France. If we had too many rules where would we be? Germany.

So says comedian Al Murray in his Pub Landlord persona, often adding a third line, such as:

...and if we had a rule that every child under ten had to stitch three footballs before breakfast where would we be? China.

Funny man. But we all live our lives by various rules. As I drive home along Trendlewood Way a large, flashing sign illuminates should my speed dare creep up to 31mph. It's the rules. Then there are disciplines - self-imposed rules such as not leaving dirty washing on the floor or studying the Bible before the racing form.

What rules are we subject to? The law of the land. Local by-laws. Employment contracts we have agreed to; I do this and you pay that.

Some rules remain on the statute books but have passed into obscurity and are only dragged out to be laughed at. Apparently:

It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.

It is legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls of York, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow.

In the UK a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman's helmet.

So there.

In the New Testament already we see people being defensive about rules. Jesus upset the scribes and pharisees by an apparent lack of respect for laws. Matthew writes his gospel from the perspective of one defending the law (of Moses). Paul writes in Romans 13 of the need to submit to the authorities who he describes as God-given.

Much has been made recently of the centuries old dilemma of distinguishing between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. Philip Pullman's new novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ has sparked it off, helpfully.

But is the church, as Pullman might put it, an organisation running totally contrary to the spirit of its accidental founder, designed to control people?

It can be. Those of us with leadership responsibilities have to take seriously the need to empower, not disenfranchise, the people we lead.

Looking through the Canons of the Church of England recently (I obviously have too much time on my hands) I found many rules that I habitually break to do with my mode of dress, the content of the church services I lead and my pattern of daily prayer. I break them willingly, deliberately and with a view that not breaking them would be detrimental to the growth of the church which the spirit of the canons is designed to promote not hinder.

If you architects want to know where to put the footpaths on a new housing estate, do not build any until people have lived there for six months. Then look at where they have trodden the grass down and put the paths there.Rules, in many circumstances, should not restrict behaviour but describe it. So let's build some new paths.

Easier said than done. Last time a motion was put before General Synod to relax the rule about the wearing of robes by clergy it was thrown out. Democracy has arranged that the small number of churches which are growing, by and large the robeless ones, are not able to carry a majority on synod and so the status quo is voted for by the majority of synod people who like their clergy robed. Likewise the relaxing of the formality of what are known as eucharistic prayers in church.

So I don't robe at Trendlewood Church, often don't even wear a dog collar, and have invented a form of eucharistic prayer that the children can use. Lock me up.

And if Gordon Brown should visit York this election campaign, someone hand him an ornamental bow and arrow as a gift from the city.

Legal Changes

'Ministers faced demands last night for legal changes to protect public officials who leak material embarrassing to the government as the secrets case against Damian Green, the Tory shadow immigration spokesman, was thrown out by prosecutors.'

Thus spoke the first paragraph of the lead story in today's Guardian. And I have a question.

You see, after due legal consideration by prosecutors, the case against Christopher Galley, the leaking home office official (what is the collective noun for home office officials? A leak?) has been thrown out. So, what changes are being demanded? Surely an investigation that finds there is no case to answer is about as protective as protection gets. Why change anything? And who is doing the demanding? Only stupid people I should imagine. And probably only stupid Tories at that. Ah, I see what the Guardian did there. Clever.

Driving Licences

A circulated email told me this. Worth checking.

Unwitting motorists face £1,000 fines as thousands of photocard driving licences expire.

Thousands of motorists are at risk of being fined up to £1,000 because they are unwittingly driving without a valid licence.

They risk prosecution after failing to spot the extremely small print on their photocard licence which says it automatically expires after 10 years and has to be renewed - even though drivers are licensed to drive until the age of 70.

The fiasco has come to light a decade after the first batch of photo licences was issued in July 1998, just as they start to expire.

Motoring organisations blamed the Government for the fiasco and said 'most' drivers believed their licences were for life.

A mock-up driving licence from 1998 when the photocards were launched shows the imminent expiry date as item '4b.'

They said officials had failed to publicise sufficiently the fact that new-style licences - unlike the old paper ones - expire after a set period and have to be renewed.

To rub salt into wounds, drivers will have to a pay £17.50 to renew their card - a charge which critics have condemned as a 'stealth tax' and which will earn the Treasury an estimated £437 million over 25 years.

Official DVLA figures reveal that while 16,136 expired this summer, so far only 11,566 drivers have renewed, leaving 4,570 outstanding.

With another 300,000 photocard licences due to expire over the coming year, experts fear the number of invalid licences will soar, putting thousands more drivers in breach of the law and at risk of a fine.

At the heart of the confusion is the small print on the tiny credit-card-size photo licence, which is used in conjunction with the paper version.

Just below the driver name on the front of the photocard licence is a series of dates and details - each one numbered.

Number 4b features a date in tiny writing, but no explicit explanation as to what it means.

The date's significance is only explained if the driver turns over the card and reads the key on the back which states that '4b' means 'licence valid to'.

Even more confusingly, an adjacent table on the rear of the card sets out how long the driver is registered to hold a licence - that is until his or her 70th birthday.

A total of 25million new-style licences have been issued but - motoring experts say - drivers were never sufficiently warned they would expire after 10 years.

Motorists who fail to renew their licences in time are allowed to continue driving. But the DVLA says they could be charged with 'failing to surrender their licence', an offence carrying a £1,000 fine.

AA president, Edmund King said: 'It is not generally known that photocard licences expire: there appears to be a lack of information that people will have to renew these licences.'

Archbishops and Sharia

In a question and answer session with the ladies (and a few guest men) of the Holy Trinity Mothers' Union yesterday, the question of the Archbishop's remarks came up once again. I have written a piece for Urban Saints (formerly Crusaders) leaders on this but it will only be available to those who subscribe to their Energize web-site. So here is an edited and, as far as I am able, simplified, version.

Last Thursday, in an interview on Radio 4’s The World at One, Archbishop Rowan Williams appeared to suggest that there was a certain inevitability about the adoption of some aspects of Sharia Law in the United Kingdom. The interview was in advance of a lecture to be given that evening. Although it was a reasonably long interview, and he was guarded and cautious, the opposition generated was astounding.

‘Sharia law is the body of Islamic religious law. The term means ‘way’ or ‘path to the water source’; it is the legal framework within which the public and some private aspects of life are regulated for those living in a legal system based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence and for Muslims living outside the domain. Sharia deals with many aspects of day-to-day life, including politics, economics, banking, business, contracts, family, sexuality, hygiene, and social issues.’[i]

Sharia is not a fixed system. Within it some actions which we consider abuses of human rights are enshrined. But the Archbishop said, ‘...while certain elements of the sharia are specified fairly exactly in the Qur'an... there is no single code that can be identified as 'the' sharia.’[ii] So although he distanced himself from being thought to advocate the adoption of sharia in its entirety, many journalists and commentators picked up on the Archbishop’s use of one word, ‘unavoidable.’

There followed a scramble of comments on the relationship between the law of the land and sharia, most of them based on things the Archbishop did not say. For many the idea of sharia conjures up images of stonings and amputations. But we should be very wary of judging a whole movement by its extreme positions – that would be like assuming all Christians are Mormon polygamists. In his opening address to General Synod last weekend the Archbishop quoted Ronald Knox saying, 'The prevailing attitude ... was one of heavy disagreement with a number of things which the [speaker] had not said.'

The text of the interview and lecture are both available. You can also listen to the lecture, courtesy of the BBC, here. The lecture is academic and includes many precise and technical words. Only the finest minds could listen to it and make immediate sense of it without access to the text later. The interview, whilst still complex, attempts to simplify for a non-technical audience, the nature of the discussion. It is probably within this process that the confusion arose. It is not easy to popularise a complex lecture for a non-specialist audience before you have delivered it to the specialists.

Many laws and rules govern our behaviour. We put ourselves under some of them voluntarily. The two places I have been questioned about this both have their own sets of rules:

Pubs - drinking hours, management right to refuse
Mothers' Union - subscriptions

In sports and games we stick to the rules or we will find ourselves in trouble, or become a founder of rugby football. If we belong to a club we agree to abide by its regulations. In each case access to a higher authority is possible – a person badly fouled in a game of football can sue in the civil court for damages. So where do we agree to have our disputes resolved? Arbitration is often agreed between parties without resorting to using the courts, but appeal to a higher court or authority is always available.

There already exist some concessions to faith communities in matters of family law within the law of our land. The Church of England enjoys the privilege of having control over its own buildings (through the ‘faculty’ system) without recourse to the law of the land. Church consistory courts hear cases on matters of parish discipline.

The Archbishop appears to argue that there should be a certain tolerance of faith groups in the order of a state justice system. Some will say no to that in a secular society; others might affirm individual group’s rights to self-policing as long as the law of the land is still the ultimate authority.

We live in a culture of opposition. Truth is established by setting out alternative propositions. Sometimes the desire to find the alternative pushes aside the desire to understand what is being said. We're an argumentative lot. We have all experienced being contradicted or even shouted down before we have finished our point. We are not good at hearing people out. The newspapers represent this. The Sun's headline was, 'What a burka!' Hardly tolerant.

There is a strong theme in the Old Testament prophets of the need for leaders to counter injustice and speak out on behalf of the unrepresented – see Amos 2:6-7 in particular. Has the Archbishop done any more than that? Christians believe that Jesus removed our obligations towards the ceremonial law (ritual washing, food laws etc) but the ethical law still stands, although needing interpretation in the light of today's culture.

In Romans 13:1-7 Paul writes about the law of the land and our attitude to authority. His basic premise is that the authorities are good. They are established by God and we should obey them.

‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’[iii] Let us be more entertaining of views we don't immediately find attractive. We may grow to love them, and that has to be a good theme for Valentine's Day.

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia
[ii] http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1575
[iii] attributed to Aristotle