Maleficent, and the rape scene that isn't

SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT

I'm not a huge fan of "the real story of" fairytale hatchet jobs, with the notable exception of Hoodwinked which is possibly the greatest CGI film ever. But my wife and daughter wanted to see Maleficient and, far more importantly, I needed to obtain closure on a Facebook argument.

In a Huffington Post blog entry by Hayley Krischer entitled The Maleficent Rape Scene That We Need to Talk About, we learn that

Rape has so permeated our culture that it ended up in a Disney movie

Krischer describes the rape scene (or maybe the rape metaphor scene) as follows:

Imagine you're drugged by someone you thought you trusted. You wake up in the morning with your face down in the dirt. You're aching. Your appearance has changed and you can feel that you're different as you try to stand through the pain. Beyond the physicality of it, your power was stolen from you. Your flight response. Your dignity.

I would say that this description of the scene is a little subjective, but more of that later. As for the interpretation:

My 5-year-old digested the scene as an act of betrayal. She flat-lined the reasoning for Maleficent's rage: "He cut off her wings." Maleficent was wounded. But she survived. More, she recovered -- physically and psychologically. [...] Grown women know better. I know better. I'm too familiar with the headlines about the boys who feel entitled to take from women and girls.

Disney doing rape scenes for children would indeed be a new departure, from the people who famously air-brushed Aladdin's nipples. So, armed with my wife and two teenage children as guinea pigs, we headed for the cinema. Please note that we saw the French dubbed version, so Your Names And Quotes May Vary.

The film exceeded my low expectations. Angelina Jolie plays her role brilliantly, to such an extent that the other actors look 2D by comparison. Actually, that may not be entirely Jolie's fault. My daughter said that she wanted to punch half the characters for being so annoyingly cheerful. My son said that the plot made some sort of sense until about halfway through, then went into a steep dive, and after it hit the ground it started to dig. My daughter and I started giggling uncontrollably around the time things were supposed to get really serious. My wife said she loves a happy ending. Not a great film, but better than most Disney offerings. (The most traumatic part of the trip was sitting through trailers for Planes 2 and Cute Dragons 17, or something.)

As we were leaving the cinema, I asked what they had made of the rape scene. My children both looked blank and said "What rape scene?" My wife knew she was looking for a rape scene and still failed to find it. I invited them to suggest some rape-like scenes. They mentioned Maleficent watching the young Aurore for every second of her sixteen years. They mentioned creepy "tucking comatose people into bed" scenes. They thought that the prince had been objectified. I thought that the scene where the anti-hero is trapped under a metal net, surrounded by men who poke her with swords while others beat out a rhythm on the floor, was quite dark. There's a moment when the two lead females almost end up mud wrestling... Eventually I told them that it was the wing-ablation scene, and they said "Oh, yeah, err, no, that's stupid."

"You wake up in the morning with your face down in the dirt." I hesitate to start with the detail, but there is no dirt. None at all. Not a single speck. The whole before, during and after scene is a Disney wonderland set piece. People sit and lay on earth by a river for hours on end, and when they get up they are cleaner than a prepped surgeon's hands. The amputation happens without a single drop of blood. And without even affecting the perfect hang of the victim's clothes. The loss of wings itself is horrible, but everything else is absurdly sanitised.

But the underlying metaphor could still be rape. Well, maybe, if it wasn't for the plot which, at this point, still retains some structural integrity. The prince sets out to kill Maleficent. He drugs her, picks up his dagger, which glints in the moonlight, he tries to bring it down on his prey, but he can't do it. He searches for another solution, and decides to cripple her instead. There's no pleasure or sexuality in this act. It's plan B for a wannabe assassin. And Maleficient confirms this later when she exclaims "He cut off my wings in order to become king!"

But the underlying metaphor could still be rape, because it's all about... "The wings. The wings give her the freedom to escape. To fly away. It's about her ability to retreat. And if you can't fly. If you can't run. If you're drugged and trapped."

Except that the whole point of the film is that Maleficient is not into running away. There is never ever the merest hint of a "flight response". When she stumbles to her feet after losing her wings, the very first thing she does is to start walking towards the castle where her attacker lives. (The film would have been shorter if she hadn't taken sixteen years to work out that she could conjure up a horse, but I digress.) The king wanted her killed, not because of some gender issue, but because she was the head of the army of a nation against which the king was at war, because she was the most fearsome warrior he had ever faced. She is a strong character with agency from start to finish. For once, this is a Hollywood production where the men engage with a female lead as an equal. And the wing-cutting scene is an example of that. The baddies take away the hero's superpowers, just like in every superhero film since the invention of kryptonite.

But the underlying metaphor could still be rape, because she is drugged. Well, I suppose a drugged drink might make some people think of date rape. But, when interpreting a fairy story, I think it's a good plan to start with the fairy story genre, and people get drugged and otherwise robbed of their free will all the time in fairy stories. Maleficient spends her time turning a male raven into a man and occasionally a wolf so often that I began to wonder if they needed to burn some unspent CGI budget. She sends Aurore to sleep at least twice. She sends the prince to sleep and then proceeds to drag him behind her in the air like a Mickey Mouse helium balloon in the Paris subway. Magic potions and spells are part of what make a fairy tale a fairy tale, and they predate date rape drugs by centuries.

But the underlying... No, just no! If I hadn't got to the film via this article about rape, I might be blogging now about how I'm getting bored with films about matriarchy. The wing-cutting scene, after about ten minutes, is the high point of male involvement in the plot. The lead character is female. The main supporting character is female. The comic relief fairy godmothers are female. The "kiss of sincere love" comes from a female. And the story arc concludes with the evil king being replaced by a queen of two nations, under the watchful eye of the former queen, with the Prince Not Quite Charming Enough and Raven-Man as their male fashion accessories. Oh, and then there are the soldiers who get to do a bit of violence before being tossed around in the air for a woman's amusement, exactly as she played with her dolls in the opening scene.

If this film is a parable of anything, it's a parable of how contemporary society struggles to find any role to which men are suited, other than as thugs. Or maybe it's about how really really sweet princesses can cause tooth decay. Or maybe, just maybe, it's just about Disney wanting to collect money from the public in return for ninety-seven minutes of vacuous entertainment, and we should save our sociological analysis for the real world.

Review of "Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth", by Reza Aslan

Aslan's book became a bestseller after a particularly incompetent Fox News interview went viral. As Aslan points out in that interview, whatever else the book is about, it isn't a traditional Moslem gloss on the gospels. Aslan holds a PhD in the Sociology of Religions and has written extensively about several world religions. The first sentence of the book states, "When I was fifteen years old, I found Jesus." Aslan describes a personal journey from nominal Islam through Christian enthusiasm to a more detached, academic understanding of the historical figure whose life and death gave birth to the world's largest religion.

The main body of the book contains 216 pages of intelligent and engaging prose. Aslan tackles many themes addressed in theological texts, but he introduces his material gradually, and I would expect his argument to be easily accessible to non-technical readers. I found some of the storytelling sections a little contrived, but overall it was an enjoyable book to read.

Aslan's central argument is that the historical Jesus was a radically different figure to the one recreated by the church. Given that this argument has been advanced by literally thousands of biblical scholars who have been unable to agree on anything about this alternative Jesus except that he was radically different, my expectations were not high, and I was pleasantly surprised to find much which was useful and challenging:

1. Aslan paints a vivid picture of First Century Palestine. He points out that when Jesus began his preaching by announcing the Kingdom of God, no-one at the time imagined some other-wordly set of abstract values. Israel had been fighting for political liberation for centuries, in the expectation that, one day soon, YHWH would send Messiah to show the world the one true God living with his one true people. He points out that Galilee was a poor rural district that was despised even within Israel, and that by the First Century it was suffering from an aggressive urbanisation programme driven by the Romans. He also dwells upon the many different factions within Judaism, who often hated each other more they hated the Romans. Other writers have covered this ground, but Aslan's rendition is compelling.
2. Aslan points out that the message of Jesus is often far more concrete and far more aggressive than the Jesus presented in Sunday School. Jesus speaks of dramatic upheaval in society; he worries about the fate of pregnant mothers when "the End" comes; he says that he has come to bring not peace but a sword. In my view, Aslan is on the right track here. Too often, the church has turned Jesus' ministry into a series of spiritual aphorisms, and thus missed the clear social challenge behind his words.
3. Perhaps surprisingly, in a book that rejects much of the face-value teaching of the gospels, Aslan recognises that claims of resurrection cannot easily be discarded, simply because something clearly happened to mobilise the movement that became the church. Aspiring messiahs were crucified all the time, yet no other crucified messiah maintained his following after his death. Aslan maintains that the historicity of the resurrection is not a question that historians can easily deal with, but he considers the disciples' subsequent behaviour to be "a nagging fact". "It was precisely the fervour with which the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection that transformed this tiny Jewish sect into the largest religion in the world." (p175)
4. Aslan correctly perceives evolving understandings of Jesus within the New Testament, as well as the tension that often exists between different "voices". At Pentecost, the disciples see themselves as a messianic Jewish sect, and there is at best muted enthusiasm for world mission within the first assembly in Jerusalem. Paul - the bicultural, bilingual convert who eventually wrote half the New Testament - refers rarely to the life and words of Jesus, and introduces new ways of understanding Jesus' mission. Tensions between the Jerusalem of Peter and James and Paul's Antioch are explicit in Scripture, and Aslan is right to suggest that euphemisms such as "after much discussion" in Acts 15 suggest that there was outright conflict at times. The church described in Acts is clearly making theology on the hoof.

Nonetheless, despite some excellent analysis and attention to scriptural detail, I ultimately found Aslan's overall argument unconvincing, not so much because of what he says but because of what he ignores. Although Aslan is clearly aware of work by New Testament historians and theologians, I could not shake the impression that at many points he was struggling to reinvent concepts that have been taken for granted by many in those disciplines for many years.

1. I think that Aslan draws a false dichotomy between earthly and heavenly understandings of the Kingdom. While it is easy to find churches whose sole interest is getting disembodied souls to heaven, the long history of Christian philanthropy and social reform and more recent movements such as Latin American Liberation Theology show that this has never been the whole story. The Lord's Prayer anticipates the Kingdom "on Earth as it is in Heaven". In many cases, mainstream theological thinking would say that statements by Jesus have both an immediate earthly and an eschatological heaven meaning, and that God's plan is to bring Heaven and Earth together rather than abandoning one in favour of the other. In the famous words of Ladd, the Kingdom is both now and not yet.
2. I think that Aslan draws a false dichotomy between Jewish and Hellenic thinking. At points he suggests that Hellenic Jews living outside of Jerusalem would be basically clueless about the Jewish Scriptures and about Jewish tradition. That cluelessness undoubtedly came to characterise many in the increasingly Greek-dominated church in later centuries. But the whole point of synagogues in the diaspora was to preserve Jewish teaching and culture, and a synagogue is literally defined by the presence of the Torah. And thus, for example, I would be inclined to see Stephen's account of Jewish history in Acts 7 as deliberately subversive rather than inaccurate because of ignorance. (One problem I always have with such claims is that the church had several centuries to fix this kind of apparently glaring error. So maybe, if they didn't fix it, they didn't consider it to be an error, and it is our analytical framework that should be reconsidered.)
3. I think that Aslan makes some strange calls about the historicity or otherwise of specific claims about Jesus. To be fair, this is the fundamental paradox encountered by all attempts to discover "the historical Jesus" from the New Testament, while at the same time insisting that the same New Testament hides and distorts the truth about that historical Jesus. It seems to me that once Aslan has convinced himself that the historical Jesus as he sees him "has been almost completely lost to history" at the end of the book (p216), he really ought to abandon the manuscript and write a book about some other topic on which the historian's toolset can work, especially as "outside of the New Testament there is almost no trace of the man" (p xxiv). But, like many other scholars who have started down this path, he ends up trying to reconstruct what has been lost on the basis of a series of more or less tendentious assumptions about the detailed workings of society 2000 years ago. Space forbids, but one example is Aslan's take on the conflict between Paul and James around p191. It seems to me that the un-reconstructed account of the conflict in Acts makes as much sense as Aslan's reconstruction, once we accept Tom Wright's argument that Paul is reforming Jewish thinking from within, in the best traditions of the Old Testament prophets. From that perspective, the conflict becomes a quintessentially Jewish scene of debate and eventual compromise between rabbis, rather than a DaVincian fight between two completely different world views. The problem with trying to reconstruct detail that has allegedly been removed is that you may sometimes end up constructing something that was never there in the first place.
4. Finally, I could not work out what would drive the flip-flop doctrinal progression that Aslan describes in the concluding chapters of the book. For example, Aslan has Paul the non-Jewish outsider being resoundingly defeated by James and his follower, with Peter beating him to Rome... and then the church in Rome promptly abandons all the disciples' teaching to accept all of Paul's teaching almost as soon as Paul is dead. Such things sometimes happen, but in this case it seems to me that the more linear account of mainstream theology fits both the text and human nature a lot better - the church realised from the start that Jesus was more than a man, struggled with ways to express this, especially as the church found itself needing to explain itself in Greek culture, and eventually settled on forms of words that most Christians at the time could live with. (I recognise that, by the time of the Nicean Council, the church was subject to major political influence. But that wasn't the case in the First Century, when there really wasn't a single entity that could impose a doctrinal sea change even if anyone had wanted to do so.)

Overall, I enjoyed "Zealot". I learned some things, and I was challenged to think about my own beliefs at several points. But, if I had to choose one book on this topic, I would opt for Wright's "Jesus and the victory of God", which in my opinion puts most of Aslan's concerns into an equally scholarly but broader and less contentious framework.

In response to Colwell

Online sacraments are filling my Twitter feed for the second time this week, and responding intelligently in that format is quite hard. So here's my most sustained attempt to critique the status quo and propose an alternative perspective, in the form of a review of John Colwell's "Promise and presence". Bonne lecture!

Review and response to "Promise and presence : an exploration of sacramental theology", by John Colwell

By Mark Howe, 17^th April 2011

In this book, by a baptist theologian, which pursues an agenda not traditionally associated with baptists, Colwell pleads for a rediscovery of the mediated nature of God's presence through which "the instrumentality of Christian ministry can be re-asserted." (p13).

Ch 1: Sacramentality and the doctrine of God

As might be expected from a self-confessed disciple of Colin Gunton, Colwell starts with the doctrine of the Trinity, which is a theological response to the revelation of the gospel (p22, see also Moltmann on p37). The Trinity enables God to express love without creation, which is necessary for God's love to be authenticallly loving (p23). Continuing with the theme of God's freedom, he quotes Barth saying "God is always free; is subject not object" (p25). God's freedom is not arbitrary because he acts in accordance with this character (p28). This is relavent to the sacraments because "... God cannot be manipulated; he is never at our disposal; he is not capricious, but neither is he subject to necessity; a sacrament may be a means of grace but is never his prison" (p29).

BUT how prescriptive is character? It it easy to see how character traits proscribe certain categories of behaviour, but harder to see how they can decide, for example, which Iraquian nomad to choose as the starting point for his people. Indeed, if character was alone sufficient to explain God's acts, a list of his character traits would effectively be prescriptive, like a rule-based computer program. So, while we must surely affirm that God acts in a principled way, we must surely also avoid suggesting that his principles totally constrain his behaviour.

Ch 2: Sacramentality and the doctrine of creation

Iraneus argues that creation has a goal - man in the image of the Son (p45). Ex nihilo creation is vital if God is not to need creation (p48). "God in everything" panentheism decays to monism, while deism descends into dualism. "To contrast nature and grace is to imply an 'ungraced' nature." (p48)

Berkeley and Edwards sees perception as crucial. Edwards contends that the Spirit grants perception to man, so all knowledge is mediated (p54). BUT in that case, man as creation is pretty much a puppet of the Spirit, who not only can but must create perception ex nihilo and will presumably only do so in accordance with the divine will. To control perception is ultimately to control decision.

"Even a cursory reading of Scripture identifies God's apparent predilection, not just for bushes, but for physical, material means of mediating his presence and action." (p56). Nevertheless, "pansacramentalism emasculates sacramentality" (p55). SO, Colwell seems to want God's presence, freely given, to be mediated through creation, but for this to happen in ways that are, if not contractual, at least extremely formulaic. There is surely a false dichotomy here between "God in everything" and "God uniquely in between two and seven sacraments".

Ch 3: Sacramentality of Church

Talk of gathered church tends to ignore that church is "gathered to" more than "gathered from" (p70). Church is defined by baptism (p73) and church membership courses are "simply a departure from Christ" (ibid). The universality and catholicity of the church are defined by the Lord's Supper (p75), and also penance (p76) and ordination (p77). There is an eschatological focus to the church and its sacraments (p86).

BUT, the Church is the Body of Christ, not in the sense that it is Christ on Earth, but that the church as a whole experiences and expresses something unique about Christ. The sacrament here is surely "Where two or three..." (Matt 18:20) rather than any centralized notion of church defined in terms of specific rites. (Colwell appears to dismiss this verse as irrelevant on p79.) Viewed sacramentally, "Where two or three" is the basis for seeing local "gathering from" as a sign pointing towards eschatological "gathering to". There is no formula that guarantees the sign will always function this way, but then this is true of all sacraments, according to Colwell.

Ch 4: Sacramentality of the Word

Colwell suggests that Scripture should also be seen as a sacrament (p88 ff). The assumption that the Bible is "at our disposal", shared by the historical-critical tradition and fundamentalism, fails to take account of our distance from the biblical text, and indeed from texts in general (p91). "Speech act" theory provides a way to "shift the focus from meaning to performance" (p94) but does not solve the underlying problem: "Post-structualism has pronounced the death of the author, and merely to refer to the author as a speaker does not constitute a resurrection" (p94). Here Colwell again turns to Berkeley and Edwards for help. The scriptural text can communicate to us directly because, uniquely for any text, the Spirit is both the author and the mediator (p96).

BUT in this case the distance between God and his creation collapses, which makes the wide range of interpretations of Scripture all the more perplexing, unless we resort to "Anyone who disagrees with me does not have the Mind of Christ" reasoning. Furthermore, since, for Edwards, all perception of texts and everything else is mediated by the Spirit, it is not clear in what sense Scripture is special - it would seem that the Spirit mediates perception of the Daily Mail too, and presumably does so in a way that is faithful to the intentions of the original journalists.

Colwell is on surer ground when he identifies the close relationship between Scripture, which is given to the church, and church, which is the community within which Scripture is heard and performed (p104).

Ch 5 and 6: Baptism and confirmation

Colwell's chapter on baptism begins with Peter's injunction to the Pentecost crowd to 'repent and be baptised' with its adjacent promise of the Spirit (p109). This shows that receiving the Spirit is linked to baptism (p111). While acknowledging episodes such as the "re-baptism" of Samaritans and Ephesians in Acts 10 and 19 (p135), Colwell insists that on this link between baptism and Spirit (p111) and laments both paedobaptist dilution of the promise by the practice of confirmation (citing Calvin on p138) and the frequent demotion by baptists of baptism to mere witness to a previous, felt conversion (p145). In both cases Colwell sees a risk that we "restrict the the perceptibility of [reception of the Spirit] to the vaguaries of felt religious experience" (p120). It is through baptism we are "in Christ" (p120).

In view of all this, Colwell concludes "What disingenuity beguiles us to abandon [God's ordained means of grace] and invent our own (as if such were possible)? (p125). YET he also argues, when speaking of the Samaritan baptism that "The New Testament is not a blueprint for ecclesial practice" (p136), and that salvation is effected by God alone, with or without the sacraments (p144). He suggests that the Baptist practice of infant presentation should be viewed as "truly sacramental" (p144), argues that confirmation could be salvaged as "truly sacramental" (p152) and insists that "God is not ultimately hampered by our sacramental indiscipline." (p153). Paedobaptism cannot be considered "entirely unsound" because all sacraments depend on God (p152) - and, I would add, because Colwell's working definition of baptism seems to be "Something done by a group calling itself a church that involves some water" - otherwise it is very hard to see how infant baptism is an appropriate way to receive the Spirit following repentance as Peter describes while, say, the Pentecostal "Second Blessing" is not.

Colwell's conclusion that baptist churches could offer confirmation to those baptised as infants as a way to avoid re-baptism and thus become more orthodox (p152) seems to me to bring together all the problems with his approach in general. It combines dogged insistance upon the non-negotiable primacy of the sacraments with boundless flexibility in terms of how those sacraments are defined operationally, to the point where catholicity depends on a conjuring trick with words. He also completely ignores issues over which committed, evangelical paedobaptists struggle, such as the relevance or otherwise of the faith commitment of the parents to the validity of paedobaptism.

Ch 7: The Lord's Supper

On the subject of the Lord's Supper, Colwell argues strongly for some form or real presence in the elements. For him, passages such as 1 Corinthians 10 establish a parallel between the Christian shared meal and pagan sacrificial meals (p155). The passover meal was more than memorial - it also involved participation in earlier oppression and liberation (p157). Thomas, Luther and Calvin, while differing on philosophical details and terminology, share more common ground than is often recognised, and all reject mere memorialism (pp163-172).

Sacerdocalism (where the priest becomes an agent of grace), is an unfortunate but peripheral distraction (p172ff). As with baptism, the Lord's Supper creates rather than expresses Christian unity, and all too frequent schism over the details of the shared meal is "the greatest irony, the greatest tragedy and perhaps the greatest apostasy of the Church" (p176).

HOWEVER, Colwell's argument seems to assume from the outset an established scriptural model that can surely only be sustained at the conclusion of such an argument. The shocking absence of any explicit mention of the Lord's Supper in John's pascal scene is dismissed because of the 'obvious' sacramentality of John 6 and the preaching account of the feeding of the 5000 (p162). The notorious difficulties in agreeing how to reconcile the chronologies of the gospel accounts and the their relationship to the Passover are dismissed as irrelevant (p156). Colwell asks how 1 Corinthians 10 can speak of participation in the body and blood of Christ unless there is some form of real presence (p156), but fails to mention that two chapters later Paul speaks of the body of Christ as the united people of God (I Co 12:12ff). He sees sacraments as a means of "indwelling the gospel story" (p158), but fails to explain what 'physical indwelling of a story' or even 'real indwelling of a story' could possibly mean.

Ch 8-11: Other sacraments

In these chapters Colwell considers the "Catholic" sacraments. It is hard to resist the impression that the driving force at this point is ecumenical dialogue more than canonical exegesis. "There is no difficulty in affirming absolution as a sacrament" (p194), despite no explicit scriptural justification for this conclusion. Decision-card conversions that claim to confer eternal security are dismissed as belittling "the seriousness of sin and the graciousness of grace" (p185), but it is not clear why the same criticism would not apply if the card was replaced with a jug of water and a trinitarian pronouncement by a third party.

Colwell appears to see Christian ministry as the third essential sacramental expression of the sacrament of the church. He argues - convincingly in my view - for the "given-ness" of ministry as the basis of Ephesians 4:7-13 (p211ff). "The essence of Christian ministry [...] simply cannot be acquired - it is a matter of calling and of promise" (p219). However, his attempts to apply a sacramental understanding of ministry result in a quixotic call for free church ministers to retro-fit apostolicity to their ministry by being re-ordained by the Pope (p230). At points Colwell seems to be saying, rather like Lloyd-Webber's Joseph, that any symbol of unity will do, the Pope being the most pragmatic starting point, while at others he argues, for example, that protestant protestations about papal application of "upon this rock" "... have the ring of special pleading" (p230). (Of course Roman Catholic theologians such as Küng also adopt such special pleading, on the basis that there is no evidence of any Christian in the first few centuries of the church interpreting this verse as a support of the primacy of Peter.)

Here, more than anywhere else, it seems to me that the two fundamental problems with Colwell's sacramental agenda become apparent. On the one hand, he needs the specifics of each sacrament to be given, in order to avoid pansacramentalism. On the other hand, the definition of those given sacraments must be extremely flexible in order to fit the widely divergent ways in which each sacrament has been practised across time and denomination. Ultimately, his demonstration of widespread conformity to the "given" promises without requiring any adherence to any ritual specifics is only sustainable by intellectual gymnastics that, whatever their merit in logical terms, simply do not work at a deeper level. Colwell appears to concede this point partially in his concluding remarks, where he recognises that post-denominationalism has achieved more on the ground in terms of practical Christian unity than a generation of formal ecumenical dialogue (p256).

Response

In my view, Colwell's thesis begins well by recognising that God is distinct from but not separated from his creation. Throughout Scripture, YHWH acts within and interacts with the world. Starting with Genesis 12, he does this in a special way with respect to a chosen people who are to bless the nations. In other words, the call of Abram can be seen as a call to sacramental nationhood.

Subsequent events show that YHWH is not imprisoned by his specific commitment to a chosen people - in Colwell's terms, Israel is not his prison. Yet, notwithstanding the Naamans, Ruths and Rahabs, YHWH's choice of Israel for service continues into the New Testament, where the unexpected (though prophesied) nature of the Messiah and the unexpected gift of the Spirit to culturally-gentile gentiles redefines Israel around the incarnate Son. Thus sacramentality - to use that loaded vocabulary - therefore finds its origins not in temple sacrifice, nor in circumcision, but God's calling of a people since pre-history.

Whichever understanding of causality we opt for (causality being a topic that Colwell returns to frequently in relation to the sacraments), it is very hard to conceive of a coherent system with multiple levels of causality, each of which is "given". For example, what does it mean to say that the church is formed through baptism, and united through the Lord's Supper? Does baptism without communion give us one disunited church, while communion without baptism promises several united church (sic)? Colwell attempts to sidestep this problem by reminding us that God's grace is bigger than the sacraments. But, in that case, the sacraments are neither necessary not sufficient, and there is every reason to expect to find God with or without those sacraments. I simply cannot see how, on a logical basis, Colwell can have it both ways.

An alternative understanding would affirm the sacramentality of church, and see all specific sacraments as culturally-shaped expressions of that underlying church sacramentality. This does not equate to pansacramentality because church has form. In particular, church is always community-shaped, which is the antedote to the primacy of unmediated, "felt" immediacy of God that Colwell is so keen to avoid. God gives his people to each other and to the world. He gives his Word to that community. That community lives out the gospel, and God is present as the community does this.

The origin of both baptism and the Lord's Supper are at least partially cultural. The gospels show that baptism existed before Jesus began his ministry, and the way the gospels use the term without explanation, along with the reaction of Jews to the call of John to be baptised, surely suggest that the rite itself was not novel. It has been suggested, for example, that there is a natural link with Jewish ritual washing, and the healing of Naaman is one OT example of a baptism-like rite in Jewish culture. John gives that pre-existant rite new meaning, and the church extends that meaning further in due course. Thus baptism becomes central to Christian praxis as an expression of the "given" gospel, but the rite itself has a large cultural component.

The Lord's Supper is clearly derived from paschal practices and, more generally, from the practice of Jesus who was criticised for spending too much time at table with the wrong sort of people. Table fellowship was one of the key issues in the First Century, where those invited shared an intimacy from which others were excluded. It is therefore unsurprising that Jesus tells the first disciples to share a meal with him at the centre, that this meal contains elements of a typical mediterranean menu, and that this meal had connections to Jewish culture's ultimate salvation narrative. The shared meal of the first Christians had history, but it was also instantly comprehensible to their contemporaries.

Jesus says "Do this in remembrance of me!" to his first disciples. The meaning of "this" is as important and contested, while the assumption is generally that Jesus is announcing a specific rite for all future generations. But the very ambiguity and lack of detail in the gospel accounts is surely problematic. Old Testament rites are described in great detail - does "do this" really cover the same ground? As Colwell says, the New Testament is not a blueprint for the church. What if Christ's command is addressed to his first disciples, in the expectation that successive generations will seek expressions of the sacrament of church that are evocative in their culture?

Would a re-evaluation of sacraments along these lines require the rejection of the sacraments that have served the church during twenty centuries? Maybe not, because the very act of perpetuating the dominical sacraments has made them part of the people of God's shared cultural. Viewed this way, the cultural case for maintaining baptism and communion largely replaces the conventional sacramental case.

However, if the church is the sacrament that God has given to the world, we need not be surprised if God's presence is found within our own intentional cultural practices that reflect God's relationship with his people. It is not a question of expecting God to jump through hoops of our making. God travels before his people when his people are nomadic. He indwells their temples when they settle in cities. The incarnate Son learns Aramaic and begins his ministry with a statement about the Kingdom of God that engages directly with Jewish aspirations over the preceding 400 years. God meets us through the sacrament of his gathered people. He does so in an enculturated way, because it is oxymoronic to speak of an acultural people. Such a perspective allows us to embrace the historical culture of God's people, while freeing us to create new ways in which God's presence can be experienced - including ways that are appropriate to the culture of virtuality.