Blasphemy in Australia?

Well, maybe just perhaps...

Freedom and the good

David Bentley Hart writes:

Democracy is not an intrinsic good, after all. Where the moral formation of a people is deficient, the general will malign, or historical circumstance unpropitious, it is quite unamiguously wicked in its results...The only sound premise for a people's self-governance is a culture of common virtue directed towards the one Good. And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progessively conclude that al things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as 'nature', that we are our own creatures. The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethcs, if it could be take to its logical end would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen... From 'In the Aftermath', p. 80

Hart puts his finger on something very real for Australian public discourse. The principles of political liberalism do not of themselves promote the good in the citizenry. Freedom is only beneficial when you have a culture of common virtue. Such a culture, if it ever existed (and actually, perhaps it certainly did), is but a distant memory... Moral outrage at pedophilia and Islamic terrorists are what we use to fill the blank space.

Hi everyone, I posted an episode to my podcast, The Common Room. Click this link to check it out: More on what theology is! - Michael

The Green Bible... yes, it's true

I have been receiving the brilliant magazine First Things. This month's edition has an absolutely brilliant piece by Wheaton scholar Alan Jacobs reviewing the freshly minted (sorry) Green Bible. Yes, it's true... contemporary piety has even come to the point of producing a Bible with creation passages printed in green. What a relief, says Jacobs, to discover that God is green, because we know that green must be good. Even the ubiquitous NT Wright has penned an essay for this tome.

But Jacobs makes some terrific theological observations, not the least of which involves the issue of continuity/discontinuity.

Some will argue that the Book of Revelation promises the complete destruction of this world and its replacement by 'a new heaven and a new earth'. I am not inclined to that view; I tend to agree with NT Wright that the vision points to a moment when the new creation is made 'not ex nihilo, but ex vetere, not out of nothing, but out of the old one, the existing one,' just as the resurrected body of Jesus is not a brand-new body but his old one glorified.

Even so, we must face the fact that God's interaction with his creation is not always constructive and restorative but is often shockingly destructive. It is true that the destruction always precedes some kind of renewal, but it is destruction all the same, and while we can come up with comforting scenarios in which we do the same kind of thing - controlled burns in forest management and farming, for instance - it would be best not to allegorize too readily. God loves his creation, but he deals with in ways that, to us, are sometimes indistinguishable from hatred. As he deals with us....

A great rejoinder to the environmental ideology which is coming pretty close to idolatrous... (I am no green-sceptic, by the way!)

Meanwhile, over at Same-same...

My Jerry Springer article gets a mention in the gay media.

It might have been better to keep my big mouth shut?

Ten or Eleven Propositions on Boredom

Over here.

David Bentley Hart on Theology as an academic discipline

This makes me feel so much better... David Bentley Hart points out that theologians should never have holidays, really:

...theology requires a far great scholarly range than does any other humane science. The properly trained Christian theologian, perfectly in command of his materials, should be a proficient linguist, with a mastery of several ancient and modern tongues, should have a complete formation in the subtleties of the whole Christian dogmatic tradition, should possess a considerable knowledge of the texts and arguments produced in every period of the Church, should be a good historian, should be thoroughly trained in philosophy, ancient, medieval and modern, should have a fairly broad grasp of liturgical practice in every culture and age of the Christian world, should (ideally) possess considerable knowedge of literature, music and the plastic arts, should have an intelligent interest in the effects of theological discourse in areas such as law or economics, and so on and so forth. This is not to say that one cannot practice theology without these attainments; but such an education remains the scholarly ideal of the guild...

He's right of course... theology is a meta-discipline in many ways. Very interesting to think about in the light of current debates about theological education.

Katay cranks up

Drum roll please...

This is a great moment! Moore graduate and rector of Ashfield Andrew Katay has begun a new blog called Gold, silver, precious stones... . His chief focus will be the building of churches... about which he has never had a dull thought. The guy has got GOLD to share, so go and make yourself at home over at his blog.

The Common Room episode 2

David Hohne and I have a gasbag about theology and what it is good for:

What is Theology?



We realised afterwards that we forgotted to say that theology is about God... oops.

Charles Taylor and the conditions of secularity

In the opening pages of The Secular Age Charles Taylor outlines something rather interesting about the contemporary shift to a culture of secularity - meaning specifically, an age in which religion has become very much an option.

It goes something like this:

Every society and every person lives with some conception of what human flourishing constitutes, or what a fulfilled life resembles. In religions, the best human living includes aiming at a final goal somewhat beyond ordinary human flourishing. In Christianity, loving and worshipping God is the ultimate end; though of course it is true that God wills human flourishing in Christianity. But, writes Taylor: the believer...is called upon to make a profound inner break with the goals of floursihing in their own case; they are called on, that is, to detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of..renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God...

This isn't just masochism (as it might be with the Stoics): for Christians, renunciation is only meaningful if the thing renounced (ie life itself) is worth having in the first place:

God wills ordinary human flourishing, and a great part of what is reported in the Gospels consists in Christ making this possible for the people whose afflictions he heals. The call to renounce doesn't negate the value of flourishing; it is rather a call to centre everything on God, even if it be at the cost of forgoing this unsubstitutable good...

So: flourishing is good, but not the ultimate goal of human life.

What Taylor is describing in his book is a humanism in which there are no final goals beyond human flourishing, 'nor allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing'. Never before in human history has this 'self-sufficing humanism' become a widely available option. 'A secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people'.

This is an entirely new context: there is now no naive acknowledgement of the transcendent, or of goals that go beyond ordinary human flourishing. 'Naivete' says Taylor 'is now unavailable to anyone, believer, or unbeliever alike.'

The implications of what Taylor is saying for Christian missions are enormous. We live in a completely new context of believing/unbelieving. Arguably, in Australia this has been a development only since the 1960s! The is no precedent (if Taylor is right) for missions to a society in which, en masse, people do not see belief in some transcedent other as a necessity. Believing is entirely contigent for Mr and Mrs Average living in their cul-de-sac in the suburbs. The temptation of course will be to cast Christianity entirely in terms of human flourishing - and there are left and right-wing versions of this...

A good place to doubt

Reading of AN Wilson's recent conversion back to Christianity, this thought strikes me: Christianity is a better place to doubt from than atheism.

Wilson described how little by little he began to doubt the certainties of atheism: could they really be so convinced that they were as right as they pretended? Is materialism - which keeps proclaiming its own superior intelligence with the volume turned up to 11 - really as intelligent as it thinks it is? Can it really provide a credible basis for believing in the dignity of human beings AND also being sceptical of their inherent disposition to goodness? Does it really provide the complete explanation of things, as it promises? Isn't there a problem of evil for the atheist too - that there is no reason to use the term 'evil' at all?

Orthodox Christian belief doesn't pretend to offer comprehensive knowledge - of the world or of God. It asks us to believe in things we haven't seen, and to hope against hope that suffering and evil do not have the final word. Its biggest claim is that we now 'see in part'. The Bible itself is frustratingly reticent on questions of freedom and destiny, evil and suffering - though not silent. Not all the tangles are straightened, not all the discords resolved. It offers us witness, but not proof in the final, scientific sense.

And its great characters are doubters. Abraham, whose belief in the promises of God was the merest thread at times; Moses, who argued and pleaded with God; David, who sank in his own sins, and who as the Psalmist wrestled with God's apparent absence; Peter, who sank beneath the waves and betrayed the Lord. Even Jesus in Gethesemane does not appear as a superman of faith- but rather as a man in the grip of real existential terror. The cry of dereliction - though not his only word from the cross - is a cry of 'believing doubt', or 'doubting belief'. Believing doubt: I am thinking too of the words of the man in Mark 9:24: 'Lord I believe! Help my unbelief!'

We misrepresent Christianity if we present it an answer to all questions, or a solution to all problems. I have said this before, of course. Fundamentalism tries to make of Christianity an alternative to materialist atheism: an answer for everything. But it has to read the Bible as badly as the atheists do to get there. Liberalism, for its part, pretends to a kind of believing unbelief, but is really just a failure of nerve. It sits somewhere in the middle, neither believing, or sufficiently doubting.

Rather, biblical and orthodox Christianity keeps nagging away at us, challenging our human pride and upsetting our self-made securities. It turns us always to the twin wonders of a crucified messiah and an empty tomb... It gives us confidence, just enough, to live in the turbulence of the world.

AN Wilson returns to Christianity

Famous atheist A.N. Wilson has decided to become a Christian once more. See here and here. Extraordinary. And he always was an annoyingly good writer...

Here's some highlights:

Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

See, that's one for the martyrs...

... the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.” And then Coleridge adds: “‘And man became a living soul.’ Materialism will never explain those last words.”

On Easter:

Easter does not answer such questions by clever-clever logic. Nor is it irrational. On the contrary, it meets our reason and our hearts together, for it addresses the whole person.
In the past, I have questioned its veracity and suggested that it should not be taken literally. But the more I read the Easter story, the better it seems to fit and apply to the human condition. That, too, is why I now believe in it.
Easter confronts us with a historical event set in time. We are faced with a story of an empty tomb, of a small group of men and women who were at one stage hiding for their lives and at the next were brave enough to face the full judicial persecution of the Roman Empire and proclaim their belief in a risen Christ.

Title for new e-journal?

Ok, you heard it here first... or maybe second. But anyways, I am in the process of setting up a quarterly e-journal for the purpose of 'showcasing' Moore College students excellent work in the fields of Theology, Church History and Ethics.

The idea would be that students submit for publication their revisions of their essay work (it has to have scored an HD level mark in the first instance). I/we would then select four pieces for uploading as PDFs each quarter. I wouldn't expect the revisions to make the work more palatable for a general readership, though the writing could be made more clear in the revision process. The purpose is to have some great academic work available on line. Other institutions like TEDS and Princeton and Regents do something similar.

ANYHOW: we need a name. I am leaning away from the Greek/Latin name idea, but I can be convinced.

Here are some suggestions:

Alignment/s (ie, Alignments, or Alignment)
Refinements
reSubmit
Mortar
Sentientes
Mindsets

got any others?

Test Podcast

Just a test.

The state of education... hmm...

Something has changed in our educational culture. When I say 'our', I suspect that this is true of most Western countries, but since what I am going to say is anecdotal and observational, I restrict myself to those systems with which I have some experience, namely, Australia and the UK. Some of these changes are undoubtedly for the better, or inevitable because of technological advances, so this is not a 'grumpy old man' list!

I am finding it hard to nail down, so this post is a necessarily inadequate attempt. I am hoping for responses which deepen this. So, here goes:

1. There seems to be a far greater expectation that educators are 'service-providers' and students (and, where relevant, their parents) are 'clients'. The economic paradigm is corrupting at almost every level - though it is understandable given the huge price of education.
2. Whereas in the past, students had to find their own articles and materials, and make their own way in attempting assignments, today there is an expectation that a task will be clearly spelt out with accompanying notes, and that specific articles will be provided direct to the student. Research in the library seems almost redundant.
3. Knowledge of 'learning styles' has led to great student/parent awareness of teachers not addressing the different learning styles. On occassion, students even refuse to learn if their 'learning style' is not catered to!
4. Teachers at secondary and tertiary level are weighed down with administration and reporting.
5. There has been a strong reaction against exams as a form of assessment. The advantage of exams is that they are the least labour-intensive form of assessment from the point of view of teachers - meaning they are free to care for students in other ways.
6. Vocational training has almost completely triumphed over the old, humanist-style (and Christian-endorsed) broad-based education in subjects which cannot be justified by appeal to 'relevance'. Like Latin, for example. Knowledge is almost never now seen as an end in itself. The complete victory of pragmatism?
7. The postmodern to turn to perspectival approaches to texts means that students no longer develop basic skills in interpretation and exegesis of texts in their own language. Year 12 students are taught how to give a Foucauldian reading of a website, but not how to read it. (And hey, I like some things about postmodernism!) They are equipped with suspicion, and not naivety: and I think the latter is essential for good reading. The former only gets in the way.
8. History is bunk, as far as contemporary education goes.
9. We don't put up with people who are bad teachers (on the face of it) but great thinkers. And yet some of the best educational experiences happen with such people.
10. The emphasis in high school on a final, standardised test/assessment has led to the dumbening down of educational standards, because of the need to compare apples with oranges. It also leads to very assessment-stressed students at tertiary level. Anxiety about assessment is palpable.
11. Memorisation of anything is now just not done.

Any more?

Stuff I have been up to...

I am sorry that there hasn't been much blogging of substance of late. No excuses, excuses are boring.

However, I haven't been idle.

I have been preaching some, at All Saints Petersham. I have been trying to do evangelistic sermons from the Sermon on the Mount.

Here's How to be really happy ;
and How to have a worry free life.
And How to get what you really need.

I have also been reading: David Malouf's new novel Ransom. I think Malouf is one of the best writers about the world of men that there is. This novel is pretty much the best thing I have read from him. His novels sometimes become rather twee: but not this one. Not for a second.
I have also been reading Steve Volz's A Fraction of the Whole. A sprawling comic epic of outlaws set in Australia. Marilynne Robinson's essays in The Death of Adam are amazing - including a stout defence of John Calvin from the usual Weberian cliches.

More to come: I am thinking about education, and more about Charles Taylor....

YOU on YOUTUBE!

YOU: An interview on the Radio

Listen here.

And go ahead and buy it here!

Jesus is the question to all our answers

Moore College students have been hard at it this week, coming out of their classrooms and into the community to talk to people about the Lord Jesus Christ.

You might have noticed the mission-related posts from the student bloggers on my blogroll...such as this one, this funny one, this one, this one (from the team I am with), and this one. Oh, and this one.

Actually it was at Dan's blog that I heard the story of the student who accidentally said to a classroom of teenagers 'Jesus the problem to all our solutions!'

The more I think about it, the more I think this is a piece of accidental genius. It is a far better and I reckon far more biblical way to preach the gospel I think! Jesus is the question to all our answers! What do you think?

Torture doesn't work

In a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner writes:

'The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed'.

And yet, it appears, the US and its allies have been engaged in what can only be described as a regime of torture against its enemies in the last few years. Now, I am not particularly sorry for the terrorists on whom it was practiced. But, as Danner says:

'by choosing to torture, we freely chose to become the caricature they made of us'...

Luther’s Moral Theology

The accusation was from the first pressed against Luther's theological system that it was antinomian. If the individual was to be justified by faith and not by the merits of works, then what motivation could there be for good behaviour? This accusation lead Luther to write extensively on the issue – most particularly in his Treatise on Good Works (1520). Luther was concerned to show how his ethical teaching was not an addition to his theological thought, but actually formed a unity with it.

How would Luther expound the Ten Commandments, for example? If Law and Gospel were opposed, did the Law have anything to offer the Christian believer? Luther did not want to read the Decalogue as a moral code, distinct from ceremonial or civil laws. As he pointed out, no such easy division is possible. God's law is one. All the commandments derive from the first commandment. As he said: 'the first commandment contains in itself all the other commandments. Whoever keeps it, keeps them all, and who does not keep it, neither keeps them, for his heart clings to something other than God alone.' That is: only faith can keep the fulfil the first command – and thus all the commands.

But, more crucially, Luther would insist that the law was unintelligible unless read christologically. There were two aspects to this christolological conception of the law. Firstly, the Sermon on the Mount shows that external acts are not enough to fulfil the law if inner motives are not themselves righteous. Second, there is an exposition of the law as positive commands rather than merely prohibitions.

Luther was to insist that there was no two-tier level of performance in the Christian life – works of supererogation were not taught by the gospel. The commandments come to every person as a whole – or no commandment comes at all.

Luther was not as dualistic as usually supposed. While in soteriology he did push the opposition of law and gospel, in his Genesis commentary we find him making a more subtle use of the law. Law is already present in the garden as a means of providing Adam with a way of giving concrete form to his love of God in responsive obedience. The Christian life means dying to the pride and desperation of the external code and rising again to the law in its original sense – 'the law of the spirit of life in Christ' (Rom 8:2).

Neither does Luther's moral theology rest on a dualist anthropology (as many of his interpreters and critics have supposed). In The Freedom of the Christian Luther distinguished between the 'outer and the 'inner' man. By this distinction Luther did not mean to split the individual man in two – and thus bolster make the works (or not) of the outer man an unimportant matter. Rather both concepts refer to the whole individual – the one facing God [coram deo] and the other facing the world [coram mundo]. It is not as if faith belongs to the inner and love to the outer man. Rather, love is in need of being shaped by faith. 'Faith is the 'genetrix', the fertile soil of good will and just action, in that it give a specific shape to love by transforming the affective existence of the beliver, from the 'impious affections' towards the affects of the Spirit' (Bernd Wannenwetsch).

Reviews of YOU: An Introduction

*NEW* Nathan Lee

Brett Hall in Southern Cross

John Hundscheid in The Gadfly (US)

Arthur Davis

Matt Moffitt

Julian Gamble

Mark Barry

David Miers

A couple of things from Mark Meynell

Tim Vasby-Burnie (UK)

Peter Sanlon (UK)

Sam Allberry (UK)

More to come!