First published in the Baptist Times - OUTSIDE EDGE column - 1 October 2010
My husband and I have a joint chequebook, but separate cookbooks.
His Gary Rhodes is kept cleanly on the sitting room bookshelves. My Women’s Institutes are somewhere under the baking trays in the kitchen.
His is an instruction manual, followed faithfully in every detail. Mine is a basis for negotiation, with scribbled revisions to all the favourites.
If we’re missing a certain ingredient, my husband will go out and buy it. I’ll make the recipe with some random mystery substitute.
It’s a bit like people’s differing approaches to the bible. Some Christians point to the text (having previously rejected other chefs’ versions) and say: ‘Look, there - it’s in the bible! Just follow it!’ Others will, as with the Rorschach blot test, see the text from a different angle, choose another translation or focus on different ingredients.
Our church does occasional café style services. During one discussion about different versions of the meaning of biblical texts, two of the men were genuinely perplexed. ‘What do you mean - different versions? I don’t understand the question.’ The other agreed: ‘The bible is the bible!’
Someone explained that different people understand the same text differently, and the second man retorted, ‘Then you consult the experts!’- which begged the question of which expert he might consult - one he would agree with or one he wouldn’t?
A fascinating recent TV series introduced young people from the Amish community to UK youth culture, revealing the many customs and rules regulating every aspect of Amish daily life, such as wearing only clothes made at home. One of the stricter communities even had rules about how each seam should be sewn.
The young people emerging from this apparent moral straitjacket surprised their secular British counterparts by their liveliness and willingness to try new challenges, from surfing to street dancing, accompanied by infectious laughter at their own efforts.
One Amish girl, troubled by her community’s admonitions against dancing when her contemporaries invited her to join them, withdrew for a prolonged search of her bible and returned saying wonderingly, ‘But there’s quite a lot in it about dancing - even King David did it!’ She was not questioning her community’s recipe for life but beginning to see that her family had chosen to omit a particular ingredient.
Far from rejecting their heritage, at the end of the visit all the young people were voicing appreciation of the Amish tradition, but were also reviewing its prohibitions in the light of new experience and the freedom to express individual preferences.
It’s easy to be dismissive about someone else’s version of the recipe. An essential ingredient, in one person’s faith, is an ‘add-in if you happen to have it’ in another’s.
I met a young man who said only his group of ‘true Christians’ who ‘kept the true date of Christmas’ would go to heaven. I asked him if God would exclude from heaven brain-damaged children and old people too confused to know Sunday from Monday, and he said yes, and that was just tough on them.
A Baptist pastor in Texas emailed his view that all pastors had to be married, since Paul had clearly written that leaders should be ‘husband of but one wife.’ In his book - no wife, no pastoring, no buts. He was unmoved by Paul’s text about personally preferring celibacy but not wishing to prescribe it for everyone.
Some Christians believe that anything less than literal submersion in water is non-valid baptism; others believe the ‘one cup’ of communion should be literally one cup, not individually portioned. One Christian’s non-negotiable is another’s trifle.
In case you’re wondering, my personal non-negotiable is lemon drizzle cake: go for deep flavour (at least 3 lemons) in a shallow receptacle (wide open surface area to catch the essence).
The trifle? Generous sherry. No jelly. No exceptions.
And my husband might just agree with the Texan pastor about one ingredient: he’s not keen on celery either.
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