Elucidations

  If there is a controversial figure in Christianity beyond Jesus himself it is his mother Mary. I have found people who love her more than Jesus, people hostile to her as a distraction to faith and people who cannot understand the fuss about her. Mary rides on controversies about authority in the church, the nature of prayer and the experience of the supernatural. Shedding light on her is about opening closed doors between Catholic and Protestant and windows to the breeze of the Spirit of truth linked to Mary. Sally came to see me because she could only pray to Mary. She knew as a Christian she should pray to Jesus but guilt about her son’s marriage breakdown prevented her. She felt Jesus was angry with her so it was better to go to Mary. In ministering to her I discovered something of a culture alien to me in which the saints rather than Jesus are go-betweens with God. Meeting Sally confirmed prejudice instilled in me about Catholics being on the wrong track about Mary as I was a...

  ‘If it were true it would be cosmic child abuse’ I’ve heard in and outside Christian circles in response to the understanding of God’s love shown in the Cross. The idea of God willing his Son to suffer and die to make things right in the world raises more questions for some people than living agnostic with the wrongs. That there is no official doctrine of atonement - how God and humanity are made one in Christ - makes for another complication. So does the simplification of thinking on the Cross to throw a line to Christian seekers not to mention poetic licence employed in hymns about the passion of Christ. Evangelical songwriter Stuart Townend weathered criticism for these lines in his hymn In Christ Alone: ‘on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’. At the other side of the Christian spectrum this phrase in a Roman Catholic prayer has detractors: ‘Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church and… the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcil...