Anvil

Please pardon the blatant self-promotion, but - what is a blog for if not that?

In the latest issue of Anvil, I have an article on Chris Wright's The Mission of God - much of which was trialed here on this blog. Chris also adds his response to the four reviews that appear, and there admits to having read the debate as it developed here!

In the same issue, I have smaller reviews of Mark Thompson's A Clear and Present Word , Bernd Wannenwetsch's Political Worship, and Sam Well's God's Companions.

I also note that Wannenwetsch has edited a collection of essays, Who Am I? Bonhoeffer's Theology Through His Poetry. Alas, T&T Clark are offering it at the mighty price of £55!! That's 140 AUD!! (or 110 USD). Ouch - looks like a trip to the library to read that one...

Some holiday reading

Sacha gazes out over Prague.

Prague Castle with St Vitus' Cathedral from the Charles Bridge.

OK - we are are back. Czech Republic was great. Sadly, the churches seems to be emptied out shells, and I could see no evidence of Protestantism at all. The land of Jan Hus is no longer a place of the kind of preaching he was known for, even though his statue is in the Old Town Square.

I read while I was away:

Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost. I went through an Ondaatje phase back in the mid 90s - I read all his poetry and novels. Loved his poetic style and his depictions of love and pain. He is a writer who really knows about the human body. Then I never got around to this novel which he sets in his native Sri Lanka. It is brilliantly written - three or four terrific, wounded characters. And more suffering of an appalling kind mixed in with illicit and licit love. The narrative has a kind of CSI flavour which is becoming a bit tired now after all those TV shows (the main character is a forensic anthropologist).

Franz Kafka - The Trial. OK, I tried here and failed again. I have tried several times to enjoy this book and where better then in Kafka's home town? But frankly, it is a dull book. Perhaps it is badly translated...

Will Self - The Book of Dave. I enjoyed this immensely. I am a self-confessed Self fan (??). He is a real surrealist. This is a kind of dystopian fantasy of what England would like if the mad, racist and misogynist ranting of a London cabbie of today were written on metal plates and found in a post-apocalyptic future and then treated as a divine revelation. It is a non-too-subtle satire of revealed religion and its capacity to wreak havoc. But Self also endears us to Dave, who by the end of the novel has been redeemed sufficiently to have written a second, more humane book... Wonderful passages written entirely in Cockney.

Sam Wells - God's Companions. I have to review this book - as I said before, I think it is frustratingly cheesy. I won't put it like that in my review...the best thing is that Wells has discovered the local church as the site of theo-praxis. Evangelicals I think have know that the local church is where the action is for years. The emphasis on symbolic practices is curious to me: Wells wants us to practice foot-washing, for example. It is funny that ritualists read scripture literally at this point, and non-ritualists read it metaphorically...

Charles Taylor - Modern Social Imagineries. Interesting take on the way in which revolutions come about and why or why not they are successful. There needs to be a vision of what a society could be under a new regime - merely opposing the current ruler will produce chaos unless there is a deeply felt sense of an alternative national/social/political identity. Why did the Velvet revolution succeed in 1989 without bloodshed? Because it was obvious to the Czechs that there was another and better way of being Czech, without communism. Maybe Taylor is only saying what is obvious in different words... also, he clearly feels he has earned the right to make sweeping historical statements without footnotes or evidence. It is hard to challenge him when he is writing like this.

Roger Scruton - Modern Culture. Scruton is a fabulous English conservative. The real thing. And thoroughly Kantian. His thesis in this book is that without religion 'high' culture will die. He mounts a sterling defence of high culture against the dominance of 'cultural' 'studies' in our schools and universities. I have to say he has my sympathies: good writing just is good writing I am afraid. You can't make pop culture better by clever criticism of it I am afraid. One of his best points is that the canon of Western culture is already a tolerant and diverse and self-critical canon - and is so because of Christianity. To present as a single monolithic ideology is simply false. Scruton is an unabashed Kantian, and I feel this is his great weakness - because he presents Kant's view of religion rather than the really Christian one. Christianity for Scruton seeps out of the English soil and is the natural accompaniment to Englishness. Only an Anglican of a certain blinkered and rural kind could think that.

Reviewing: Brock, Wells, Thompson

I have taken three books to review for Anvil (a UK-based evangelical journal). Just some brief notes on my first impressions.

The first of these is Mark D Thompson's A Clear and Present Word. This is a no bull polemical call to return to and recapture the Reformation doctrine of the clarity of scripture. I have to say I heard the lecture version of these and it looks as if they have really been given a full revision for publication. Mark has a real gift for summarising other points of view - surveying the terrain quickly AND thoroughly, so that an immense amount of ground is covered in no time at all. Mark tries to clear away the philosophical and theoretical tangle and ask what Scripture's own attestation to itself is. Of course, like many Reformation doctrines, this one suffers from bad press based on a great deal of misinformation and caricature, so necessarily the book does a job of clarifying clarity. In a nutshell, Thommo is convinced that God is very good at saying what he wants to say. (Exiled Preacher, I think you would enjoy this book!)

Secondly, I have been reading Aberdeen ethics lecture Brian Brock's new work Singing the Ethos of God - On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture. I haven't got far, but as my own supervisor says of it: 'Beyond Hermeneutics would have been an apt subtitle for this groundbreaking study'. Essentially, Brock enlists the help of Luther and Augustine to engage in a reading of the Psalms as texts to pray and sing. Too often, ethics has come to the Scripture with its own agendas and theories rather than starting with the ancient practice of praying and praising with the text. As Brock writes:

Praise takes us inside God's works. It reveals God's daily care in providing the food that sustains living creatures, and the time, space, and emodiment in which all creation exists. He makes human sociality possible by providing, reneing and reclaiming language. He sustains this social space by setting up political authorities and maintaining peace. At the heart of human political life is the church, a community that learns from Scripture how to praise, with all creation, the divine inexhaustibility. In the church, the twisted sociality that expresses the ethos of self-interest, fear, and tribalism is remade into a political order whose telos is the discovery of the divine ethos of diversity in mutuality [is this really the divine ethos? MJ]. It is a renewal sustained by the divine gift of Scripture, thourgh which God invites and facilitates human praise. In praise the communion of saints continually rediscovers that God uses our faltering collaboration to bring humanity in tune with himself. p. 363.

Thirdly, I have God's Companions by Sam Wells, co-editor with Hauerwas of the gratingly cheesy Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (every chapter opens with a tear-jearking anecdote about 'what happens in my church', in an attempt to ground the thing in the practices of church life). From my first impressions (and I hope to be corrected), this book shares the Companion's laudable emphasis on the local church, but also its 'we do it this way and it is so beautiful' anecdotalism and sentimentality. Hmm...