What is 'the self' anyway?

In his monumental work Oneself as Another Paul Ricoeur makes a distinction between the two major meanings of the word ‘identity’ in terms of the Latin words idem or ipse.[1] Idem-identity has the sense of ‘sameness’. Under this definition, a person’s identity can constituted from matrices or horizons that stem from comparison to others. So, I identify with those who are the same as me and over against those who are different. On the other hand, ipse-identity invites an understanding of identity in terms of ‘selfhood’. As an identity, the self ‘has to be reflexively made’.[2] Self-identity refers at the outset to the one I am speaking about when am able to speak self-consciously about myself. It is already an indication of self-awareness, a capacity for ‘seeing’ oneself. We might describe it as a mental gaze at one’s own reflection in a mirror. This self-awareness is not self-understanding as such, or an appreciation of the meaning of oneself; but it is a prompt to self-understanding. The very notion of oneself invites one on a quest to discover or make sense of who it is one is talking of when one refers to oneself.

If I am to make sense of myself, I need a point of reference or comparison. I must be able to trace in some way a coherence, a pattern in this entity I name ‘self’. Time offers that to me in two ways: firstly, by an act of remembering I can trace my own actions and experiences across time. I can begin to see patterns of cause and effect; to makes sense of motivations and intentions; to have feelings of nostalgia and regret; and so on. In other words, I begin to see my own narrative emerging, the story of my self. In turn, secondly, I can begin to exercise my other mental faculty relating to time, my imagination, and to project into the future the next stages in the emplotment of my life.

To persue this invitation to understand oneself, then, suggests that it is a narrative that is needs to be understood – in Ricoeur’s terms, the ‘hermeneutics of the self’. It is true to our experience of embodiment to think this way, too: that we are not selves known in abstract, as if we are static types, but rather that we are revealed, to others as well as to ourselves, as characters in a sequence of causally related events. We notice then of course that were are not, even in this moment of reflexivity, cut off from the phenomenal world – but rather, thoroughly situated within in it. In other words, this reflexive sense of identity finds its expression in the form of a narrative. That is what our memories do for us: they narrate the self into identity, interpreting the past for us and projecting out of that past a future, the open horizon to which our personal history is moving.[3] Story is a remarkable mnemonic device. In fact, personal identity takes this narrative form because of its inherently historical nature.

What we have in narrative is a binding together of word and event: the event is described and given coherence by the application of the shape and categories of narrative. Narrative applies a causal and teleological form to events as we experience them; though this is not altogether arbitrary. The sequentiality of events invites the search for causal links between them. This is something we recognize even in our own bodies: as they change over time, collecting scars and wrinkles, we experience in ourselves the results and effects of our experiences. This is not to say that our narrating of the events of our experience is the final truth about them; or, that every account that we give of events we have experienced is absolutely comprehensive. It is the tracing of a path through a forest as best we can: though we do no see every tree in the forest, and though at times the going is rough, and we lose our bearings, we still are able to make our way. Though there is difficulty, there is not incoherence, necessarily.

If ipse-identity requires narration, then it also draws the self into realm of the ethical. This is for two reasons. One the one hand, the realisation that we are actors and agents, who may participate and contribute to the chain of causality. As selves in time, we are immediately in the position of asking what it is we are going to act in a way that it is consistent and coherent with our conception of our self-identity. How are my actions going to make sense as coming from me, as being ‘mine’? Insanity is a way of describing someone whose actions do not emerge from some evident sense of self – a judgement even the insane person might make as they find themselves unable to answer the question ‘why did you do that?’

The second point is not unrelated: the notion of the self is also an invitation to pursue the ‘true’ or perhaps ‘authentic’ self. The corollory of this that individual must have, or develop, some conception of the good by which to judge the self that might emerge. Yet, with the turn of the self to the good does not come an automatic description of the good. So, if the chosen measure for self-realisation is ‘authenticity’, for example, then the concept must be given some relatively substantial account if the authentic self is to be recognised when it appears. Which is to say: the hermeneutics of the self orients the self to the pursuit of the good, without also giving thereby a definition of what the good is. That discovery remains to be made; or, that revelation remains to be given...

[1] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 2.
[2] Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity : Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1991), p. 3.
[3] George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology : Recovering the Gospel in the Church (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), p. 107.

Amor Sui: the problem of self-love

The sun is out in Oxford! Freya has a beer with a Macedonian theologian.

If I am to love my neighbour as myself -

how am I to love myself? What does self-love mean? How is self-love possible without narcissism, or when it lies so close to what the Bible says is sin's essence?

After all, Augustine says 'the primal destruction of man was self-love'.

Theology After Wittgenstein - Fergus Kerr

OK, this is one of those books that I should have read years ago, fair enough. Another one of 'em. It is enjoyably and unexpectedly quite chatty.

Kerr contends that modern theology is imbued with a thoroughgoing Cartesianism - an individualistic view of the self as a disembodied mind. This Cartesian turn, which is not as Augustinian as everyone says, was one of Wittgenstein's great targets: his great white whale you might say. Kerr is quick to show that, actually, Christian theology ought never have been so ready to swallow the Cartesian internalisation of the self.

He makes some fascinating applications of this shattering of Cartesianism:

There is nevertheless a central strain in modern Christian piety which puts all the emphasis on people's secrte thoughts and hidden sins. It gets to the point, in some traditions, that the worst sins of all become those that the individual performs entirely by himself. Wittgenstein recalls us... to the historical contingency of this belief. ... Why should our secret thoughts be more important than the thoughts that come out only too effectively in what we say and do? Are our most secret thoughts always so deep that only God could understand them? Are our most secret thoughts so much more interesting that the thoughts that we communicate? Are our hidden sins so much worse than the sins that we commit against, and with, other people, out in the open, for everybody to see? p. 173

Evangelicalism and Catholicism share this inward turn, it seems to me, though in different ways. Is it a fair cop?

Four lessons from Anthony Giddens for preachers

Giddens has a good deal to say about the late-modern soul, though he mightn't call it that. I reckon awareness of this analysis might really help magnify the existential impact of a few sermons...

He identifies four 'tribulations of the self':

1. Unification versus fragmentation By this he means that constructing our identity involes a myriad of contexts and experiences, though which a coherent course must be chartered.

2. Powerlessness versus appropriation We live in a culture surrounded by opportunities and options made available to us by modernity and its technologies. But this also has the effect of generating feelings of powerlessness, even amongst people who are wealthy and educated. It's the system...what can we do about it?

3. Authority versus uncertainty Giddens points out that late modern people experience a radical mistrust of all authorities such that none are final. As a self, therefore, we must steer a way between commitment (possibly without full trust) and uncertainty.

4. Personalised versus commodified experience You have to tell your own story or construct your own self-identity in the midst of circumstances in which the economy of consumption standardises everything. So, because of this one-size-fits-most experience we have in the marketplace, we must find other ways to individualise ourselves...

Six theses on Temptation and Providence

My task is here to draw together some of the themes of our discussion of temptation and providence, as they related to martyrdom as the pattern of the Christian life. We have proceeded by establishing that temptation – or more rightly, peirasmos, which includes temptation and also trial– is genuinely a part of the narrative logic of martyrdom. But what does this observation itself in turn reveal?

1. Peirasmos as temptation is a given of human existence: it is Adamic. It is a feature of the primal human story; and also part of the redeemer’s experience in identifying with hapless human beings. Human identity is not ever constructed aside from this inner battle with sarx and diaboloj. We do not know of a time when human subjects did not have to face these opponents.

2. Peirasmos is a test of the free human response and obedience to the divine call. As such, it tests our awareness of our own identity as his creatures – our recognition of our maker’s voice and our responsiveness to him. It describes not the moment of that call, but our memory of the call at the moment when it appears to be gainsaid in our experience: ‘did God really say…?’ The trial or temptation comes to us as a contradiction of the Word of God: it came as temptation in the garden, and in the post-lapsarian era has been intensified through the unyielding nature of the world itself.

3. The peirasmos threatens the individual with her own disintegration as a person. It leads to the captivity of the self to the world of sin, the flesh and the devil (to use New Testament language). The biblical history is a history of the human subject’s utter capriciousness; of the human individual’s unwilling inability to be truly herself, even to herself. That is to say, trial and temptation throw into question – a question not readily answered – what the ingredients of an authentic human life might be. For Gregersen, under the pressure of trial and temptation ‘both the objective arena of the world and the subjective arena of the self are seen as unreliable. Only God is reliable.’ We see something of this disintegrating human subjectivity under the power of sin famously expressed by Paul in Romans 7:7-24: ‘O wretched man that I am!...’

4. It was necessary for Jesus Christ to undergo peirasmos to demonstrate his total solidarity with humankind and to defeat the evil one. The trials and temptations of Jesus in the wilderness and in Gethsemane are shown so that it might be known that there was one who passed through the peirasmo,j known to us all and emerged victorious over Satan. These episodes reveal not only Satan’s impotence against the Son of god, but also the fittingness of Christ to become High Priest and sacrifice. The cross of Christ itself is the sign of his ultimate defeat. (This is a theme in Pauline theology: ‘He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.’ Col 2:15 )


5. In answer to the peirasmos of human experience, Christ re-invites trust in the providence of a covenanting God – whose providential care of the world is revealed most completely in him. We learn much from the manner of his victory: he reaches down into the Word of God and rests on it; he submits his will to God as he prays, for the good of others. Further, he himself carries out the divine providential action in his death and resurrection, by these actions enabling the world ‘to become itself by action within, and over against, its fallen structures’.This is inclusive of human beings; who rightly respond when they cry out to the Lord for deliverance.I have in mind in particular Romans 8:19ff, where the redemption-action of Christ has its effect in terms of the adoption of human beings into the family of God and also the future liberation of the creation itself, which elicits much groaning under the present conditions of trial. The Lord’s prayer – the prayer taught by the Son of God to his disciples – gives voice to this felt disparity in human experience.

6. Christ’s disciples are thrust anew into an experience of peirasmos: the weakness of the flesh, the hostility of the world, and the attacks of the Evil One. As they seek to imitate Christ, peirasmos naturally features as part of that mimetic action; as it was part of the narrative logic of his life, so it is now of theirs. Satan renews his efforts against those whose determination is to defy him; though it is not by their strength in this battle that he is defeated. The victory belongs already to God himself. The peirasmos may result in bloody martyrdom: as such it is entirely unsurprising, because it is the outworking of battle already fought.

Standing in the tradition of the Reformation?

I have raised in an earlier post the tension I see and personally experience between on the one hand seeking to give an account of the Scriptural revelation and the adherence as a Protestant and confessional theologian to the doctrines of that period.

In Barth's exposition of the doctrine of election, he has to tangle with the fact that as a Reformed theologian he is going to offer a serious departure from Calvin's teaching, and from the teaching of those that followed him: yet, he wants to stand in the Reformed tradition. He makes as a result several quite salutary points about his theological method.

First, the doctrine is not adequately grounded if it merely traditional to Calvinism:
...we shall be doing Calvin the most fitting honour if we go the way that he went and start where he started. And according to his most earnest protestations, he did not start with himself, nor with his system, but with Holy Scripture as interpreted in his system. (II.ii.36)

Second, it is not the pastoral usefulness of the doctrine that is its foundation or its basis. That predestination is a comfortable doctrine of assurance may be true, but it is not sufficient to assert it.

Third, neither is the datum of experience a worthy candidate. In this Barth is particularly critical of Calvin (fairly?) for introducing his observations of people in his ministry as they accept and reject the gospel in his description of the doctrine.

Fourth, the doctrine of election must not begin with the abstract God of the omnipotent Will, with God as a concept of philosophy, in other words. As he puts it:

If we allow God's self-revelation and the testimony of Scripture to prescribe our concept, then the Subject of election, the electing God, is not at all the absolute World-ruler as such and in general. (II.ii.49)

So: an authentic reception of the Reformation is to listen afresh and anew to the Scriptures, come what may...

Hart again

I added this paragraph to my 'power of scripture' essay (parts of which I have already posted here and here and here and here. Oh, and here ...)


"My argument in certain respects resembles that of David Bentley Hart in his monumental The Beauty of the Infinite. Hart mounts a defence of the ‘beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism appeals’ (p.1) against the same charge from contemporary philosophy that concerns us here: that this Christian rhetoric of peace is in fact inescapably violent. As Hart writes: ‘Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a great, as an episode in the endless epic of power’ (p. 3). This is our question too: though where Hart more generally speaks of the Christian evangel and the life of the church (which looms large for him as an Eastern Orthodox theologian) our focus is the Scriptures as the source and guarantor of Christian rhetoric. If the scriptures are merely an iron fist, even if placed in a velvet glove, then the Nietzchean/postmodern charge is sustained..."

[note please: self-quotation is definitely allowed within the rules!]

Rowan Williams on the early martyrs

'The martyr stories often try...to make this holy power somehow visible or tangible: swords are blunted, animals are cowed, executioners bungle their work, there is an effusion of blood that quenches the fire (as in Polycarp's case); the divine presence does not rescue the martyr but makes itself felt. Legendary as this may be, it simply underlines what is thought to be happening. The relating of the stories of the martrs in this early literature, up to the mid third century, is an essential part of the Church's self-identification, part of the definition of the vocabulary of being an ekklesia of aliens, the citizens' assembly of the non-citizens, a people whose political legitimacy and loyalty lay outside the imperial system.' Why Study the Past? p. 36

I was just caught by his use of identity here, and in the collective sense. For the early church, this identification was as he says essential... On p.111 he comments that martyrdom was the way in which testimony was given to the fact that our lives are not our own to submit to some tyranny.

O'Donovan on the gay issue: a daring hope?

Oliver O'Donovan has caused some huffiness amongst conservatives because of this paragraph:

The old-style liberalism that used to preside over the church’s dilemmas in a confident spirit of practical compromise began from the assumption that everyone was divided from everyone else by recalcitrant disagreements. The Lord, the liberals prophets announced, had sent a perpetual famine of his word. We should stop asking questions of one another and hoping for answers, and eat the dry bread of commonsense compromises. Those who remember Pentecost may reasonably doubt that this was ever the wisest counsel for the church. But at the very least we cannot know whether and how much of a famine of the word there is in any disagreement until we submit it to the disciplines of patient common enquiry. No disagreement refuses to be analysed, and its constituent elements sorted out according to size and shape. No disagreement does not lure us on with the hope, however distant, of a genuine resolution. Can we promise ourselves, then, that if the churches would only discuss homosexuality long and fully and widely enough, they would end up agreeing? Well, we are not entitled to rule out that possibility. But suppose it were not true; suppose that after careful exploration and a search for common ground, there was an agreement-resistant core at the centre of the issue – a problem about how modernity is viewed, for example, or about the ontological status of self-consciousness - it might still be possible to set the residual disagreement in what the ecumenists like to call “a new context”, and (who knows?) learn how to live with it. We have a parallel in the difference between indissolubilist and non-indissolubilist views of marriage, a traditional point of tension between Catholic and Protestant. That disagreement has not gone away; but if today it bulks less threateningly than it once did, that is because we are so much more clear about the extent of the agreed ground all around it – God’s intentions for marriage, the pastoral desiderata in dealing with broken marriage etc etc. It no longer evokes threatening resonances. It is a problem reduced to its true shape and size.

Is it possible to imagine this? I don't think that O'Donovan is himself making the gay issue a second-order issue as is claimed by the Anglican Mainstream commentator. O'Donovan is rather standing against the liberal belief in the famine of God's word, which means that true reconcilation is impossible...

The possibility of not submitting

As Eliot shows in his drama, the renunciation of temptation leading to martyrdom is the fruit of a particular response to divine providence. Temptation occurs within an apparently dualistic framework in which the tempters (and, what’s more, the Tempter) may be seen to have an unrestricted power to attack. The doctrine of providentia dei is a reminder of the overarching monotheistic structure of Christian belief: that nothing, not even the temptation, falls outside the sovereignty of God. But, to be distinctively Christian, belief in providence must be allowed to be articulated in Trinitarian terms. So, amidst the dualism of experience with all of its peirasmoi, the martyr rests on the singularity of the Father's providence, expressed in the supreme and effective example of the Son's renunciation of temptation and his strength under trial to the point of death, and in the comforting presence of the Spirit.

The providence of the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself is implemented in this act of reconciliation. The self-emptying of the Son was to the extent (and further) of subjecting himself to the trails and temptations of life in the world, under the auspices of the devil, in the likeness of sinful flesh. Thus, the testimony of the martyr is not merely to a remote understanding of the divine mastery of events from outside, but in fact to the loving providential action of God in Christ from within the sphere of the human. As Colin Gunton writes:

A Christological structuring of divine providential action understands it in the light of the one who became human, identifying with the world’s structures in order to reshape them to their eschatological destiny. Incarnationally conceived action – action understood through the focus provided by the true humanity and self-giving to death of Jesus – indicates contingency but not ‘pure’ chance as the heart of the matter.

The divine being whose sovereignty is unchallengeable lives for a while ‘a little lower than the angels’; he submits himself to the possibility of not submitting.

The Legitimate Power of Scripture, in promise

The Scriptures are promissory and prophetic in nature, as diverse critics have noted. They have at their core the great promises of God to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai and, later, to David: and signal God’s declaration of his commitment to his people. In Jesus of Nazareth all God’s promises coalesce; and yet in him there is a magnification, an intensification, as well as a fulfillment, of the ancient promises. The promise of his return and the recapitulation of all things in him is the abiding hope of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, whose work as inspirer, illuminator and counsellor so closely intertwines with the words of Scripture, is given to believers as an arrabon or guarantee of the return of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor 1:22).

The legitimate power of Scripture is rooted in the God who says and it is, as we have seen. But it is a power now played out gradually, over the sweep of human history, within and across human culture and language. The word of the creator God HAS the power of absolute force, but the Bible’s power is not like this. It is a power appropriate to human nature, too.

With that in mind, we may observe that scripture is primarily and not incidentally a narrative. The various parts of the Bible cohere around the story that is its central theme. This narrative shape is not merely the casing for a set of propositions or timeless truths. It is quite deliberately immanent, as humans are. The Scriptures chart a revelation that has taken time to come to its fullness. For men and women to see the righteousness and trustworthiness of God necessitates the passage of time: for it is only over time that promises are to be declared, believed, tested and fulfilled.

We might here adopt Calvin’s language of accommodation to describe what we here find in the nature of the Scriptures. In speaking to us in Scripture, “God is wont in a measure to “lisp” in speaking to us” as a nurse does with a baby:

Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.[1]

The drawing out of God’s speaking over time as portrayed in the Scriptures is a feature of his stooping to us – what we may call his gentleness. This gentle accommodation is not an act or a façade: rather, it is entirely true to the character of the God the Bible describes, a characteristic seen in its full flourishing in the obedience and humility of the Son.[2]

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols. (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975) I.XIII.1. Where Calvin’s analogy is problematic is that it could suggest that in revelation God comes to us as other than what he is.
[2] The Occamist distinction between potentia absoluta dei and potentia ordinata dei is suggestive here as well. God’s omnipotence and his absolute freedom are conditioned by his self-limitation, in the making of promises and even in the choice to use human texts in which to reveal himself.

Temptation: a sketch

By making the central part of his first act the scene of temptation, Eliot suggests that temptation - or rather, its renunciation - is a crucial matyrological theme. Of course, as an imitatio Christi martyrdoms will always find echoes of Christ's passion, including his temptation by Satan and his trial by the authorities, so it is perhaps unsurprising that temptation is a prominent theme here.

For temptation to be real requires the presence of a freedom to accept it or reject it. In fact, temptation is a moment of decision for the individual prior to the public testing before the court or in the circus, an inward crisis whose outward counterpart is the trial before the powers. This is crucial, because the martyr must be one who freely chooses not self-determining freedom but submission to the divine will.

The renunciation of temptation requires a particular understanding of divine providence. Temptation occurs within an apparently dualistic framework. The doctrine of providentia dei is a reminder of the overarching monistic/monotheistic structure of Christian belief. But it must not be allowed to be articulated in a non-Trinitarian way. So, amidst the dualism of experience, the martyr rests on the singularity of the Father's providence, expressed in the supreme and effective example of the Son's renunciation of temptation and his strength under trial, and the comforting presence of the Spirit.

The Lord's Prayer is an interesting example of both perspectives: the Father is in heaven and rules - that is the basis of the prayer; yet we pray that his kingdom may come and his will may be done.

We must note the biblical words massah and peirasmos both mean 'trial' and 'temptation'. The seperation of the two concepts linguistically is a feature of later Latin theology. The temptation idea is more closely linked to the work of Satan and is designed as a trap; the test comes from God and is designed to strengthen the believer. The tricky text is the prayer 'lead us not into temptation': can he or would he do this? Can we really get around the problem with the rendering 'trial'?

Strangely perhaps, the early martyr-acts do not depict temptation stories, though they do depict trials and tests of course.

Agaphour's Reading of "The Satanic Verses"

In Andrew Agaphour’s essay ‘Identity and Religion of the Status: The Rushdie Affair in the West’ he claims that, in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie outlines three types of ‘identity formation’: the ‘religious’, the ‘secular’ and the ‘postmodern’. The religious Agaphour defines in terms of traditional assignations of identity according to some transcendent ground; the secular is an identity that is utterly rational; and the postmodern (so-called) is seen in terms of ‘individual agency’. In Agaphour’s reading, then, Rushdie clearly favours the ‘postmodern’ over the other two. This a badly drafted typology, however: the ‘secular’ identity scarcely appears at all in the novel (as Agaphour defines it) and whether ‘postmodern’ is the most enlightening term for the identity Rushdie favours is extremely dubious. In fact, even Agaphour has to admit that Rushdie’s strident critique - in blatantly moral terms - of the religious identity is at odds with what may be termed a ‘postmodern’ critique. Rushdie’s analysis of identity and selfhood is contemporary (and in that sense perhaps ‘postmodern’) in that it is situated in the contemporary experiences of religious violence and of the massive movements of people-groups across the globe. However, it also solidly rooted in the Enlightenment and in the liberalism of the mid-twentieth century. There are echoes, too, of existentialism in Rushdie’s celebration of the individual forging his identity in the teeth of the circumstances, and especially death. Rushdie is perhaps a postmodern narrator, but he is no Foucauldian. The self in Rushdie is unsettled and unstable, but certainly not decentred.

The Son of God and the Works of the Devil - notes for an Advent sermon

My text is from 1 John 3:8:

The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.

Western culture, well most of it, is pretty good at laughing off the mythology of the devil as a superstition. The strategy is, make a cartoon character out of him (you know, horns, red suit, pitch fork), and then say, 'well of course he doesn't exist'. Well, fine: I don't believe in cartoon characters either... Which is why I need you now to make that little cartoon character that pops up in your head as soon as you hear the word 'devil' disappear. If you need to have an image, then the Bible portrays him in the form of a serpent, which, as a person who comes from the continent with 9 of the 10 most poisonous snakes in the world, will do admirably.

What we do believe in -what we trust in more than anything - is our that our rationalism has triumphed over this devil and his works. We believe that our technology and our ingenuity, our political skill and our social management, have banished the devil from the face of the earth and liberated humanity to be live unhindered. The devil was always previously a code for those evils in the world and in us that we can't understand or overcome: but as we progress, as we peel back the boundaries of knowledge, as we begin to understand human psychology better and better, such primitive explanations appear to have become redundant. Sheer knowledge - of our world and of ourselves - is surely enough to make the devil disappear.

We believe that we are part of a great exodus from captivity to ignorance into the glorious freedom that comes from knowing better. Since the 19th century education - especially secular education - has been seen as the great alternative to religion in helping people to be better people. Our faith in the capacity of education to make us better people and to produce a better society is virtually unchallenged. That's our response to any moral crisis, isn't it? We know people are basically well intentioned, and that they would make good choices given the right information. Knowing better is surely being better.

But that's where we are deeply ignorant. We Westerners have self-delusionary belief in our own capacity to overcome everything including our own natures. We prize our freedom above everything as the mark of our human-ness - our will to do and be what we desire; but we are dull to our own incapacity to do even that we would do - and our nagging tendency to do that we wouldn't do. The loss of temper, the moments of rage, the way we fail to tell the truth, the way we use words manipulatively or destrutively, our betrayals of our friends, the creeping envy, the impatience, the sudden surprise of lust just when you thought you had mastered it, the ingratitude, the way we rationalise greed, the wilfull blindness to the needs of the other: despite knowing the destructive consequences of these things, not least for ourselves, we find ourselves doing them anyway.

This twisting of our spiritual spines is why the Bible speaks us of us being enslaved by sin, or children of the devil. Despite ourselves, we do the works of our Father, the evil one.

And what are the devil's works? They are three, though they spawn many more:
1. Lies
2. Murder
3. Death

Theological Interpretation of Scripture

I have just taken receipt of the first title in a new series of commentaries, the SCM (or, in the US, Brazos) Theological Commentary on the Bible - Acts, by the late Jaroslav Pelikan. The exciting feature of the new series? No biblical studies specialists have been asked to take part! (Hooray!) The authors are theologians, self-consciously standing in the tradition of the great theologian-expositors of the history of the churches: Origen, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Barth.

The editor of the series, RR Reno, in his series preface, explains the need for such a thing. The suspicion since the 19th century has been that theology has in fact made reading the Bible harder rather than easier. As a result, biblical studies and theology have evolved as almost seperate disciplines entirely. These days it would be considered the greatest impertinence for a theologian to publish a biblical commentary.

Is doctrine, then, not a moldering scrim of antique prejudice obscuring the Bible, but instead a clarifying agent, an enduring tradition of theological judgments that amplifies the living voice of Scripture? ... This series of biblical commentaries was born out of the conviction that dogma clarifies rather than obscures.

In fact, it is biblical studies that have been responsible for the greater obscurity and the fog that has descended on the bible. The bible needs to be released from the dead hand of the philologists and given back to the churches!

As Reno continues:

We cannot speak for contemporary biblical scholars, but as theologians we know that we have long been trained to defend our fortresses of theological concepts and formulations. And we have forgotten the skilles of interpretation. Like stroke victims, we must rehabilitate our exegetical imaginations...

Amen to that.

Glorious...

As the Westminster Confession states it, the supreme goal of human beings is “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Human destiny – our noblest aspiration - lies Godwards: in the experience of heavenly bliss enfolded in his arms, glorifying him by loving him for his own sake.
The goal of glorifying God is not a means to some other end: it is its own end. As Moltmann puts it, “it is simply meaningful in itself.” As Augustine, in his On Christian Doctrine, explained: “sinners make use of God in order to use the world; but believers make use of the world in order to enjoy God.” Therefore, our relating to our world and even to ourselves is ordered to this glorious purpose.

And as Moltmann sees it (picking up an idea with strong roots in the Reformed tradition) the glorification of God is not primarily an ethical thing: it is aesthetic. This idea picks up from scripture the visually radiant scenes of God’s glory: Moses’ radiant face, the encounter of Isaiah with God in Isaiah 6, the glory of the light of God in John’s gospel, the woman’s hair in 1 Corinthians 11 and the sheer glow of the heavenly city in Revelation 21-22. The appropriate response to the vision of God’s glory is doxological; and so we are lead by the heavenly creatures and the beasts in Isaiah and Revelation: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, the whole earth is full of his glory.”

How does this relate to our question? The goal of glorifying God is goal in the sense of a telos; but it is also our true destiny, because God himself will bring it about. But how? Moltmann describes the glorification of God not merely in terms of the self-glorification of a narcissistic deity, or as the result (in Hegelian terms) of his self-realisation through the process of history, but more as the overspill [my term] of his divine life into the creation. The language of the pleroma, the fullness of God, in John 1:16, Eph 3:19 and elsewhere reflects this idea, as does the remarkable promise of God being all in all in 1 Corinthians 15:28. As Moltmann puts it, “The fulness of God is the rapturous fullness of the divine life; a life that communicates itself with inexhaustible creativity…The fulness of God is radiant light, light reflected in the thousand brilliant colours of created things.” Jesus himself of course continually compared this future for humanity with God as a joyful wedding feast. It is a moment of ecstatic consummation to which the first imagined human reaction is profound joy.

The human identity is thus ordered to this particular destiny. It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which took place by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 4:17) that is the type of our destiny, sown in dishonour and raised in glory. Having made reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, Jesus of Nazareth is the exact radiance of God’s being, the image of the invisible God: he fairly glows with God. Remarkably, the transformation was won from within the human sphere, by a man in the likeness of sinful flesh.

The promise of Christian eschatology is then something like this, from Philippians 3: “…our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” The new humanity will be glorious, but glorious because it is washed in the overspill of God’s own glory.

The Wreck of Human Culture

John Carroll, professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is not afraid of big ideas. His 2004 book The Wreck of Human Culture – a substantial reworking of a 1993 effort – ­is a passionate, daring and sustained attack on the bloodlines of what we call “the West.” He calls his book “a spiritual history of the West.” He writes with a refreshing polemical zeal and with none of the hedging and over-qualifying so characteristic of academic prose.

Carroll’s claim is that “humanism” – by which he means the intellectual and cultural movement originating in the Renaissance – has had its deficiencies exposed in the latter-day collapse of western culture. Most particularly, the humanist belief in the supremacy of the human free will as alternative to obedience to God has been revealed as self-defeating – not least by the devastating symbolism of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The strategy Carroll employs for demonstrating this thesis is a selectively genealogical one. In a deliberate snub of postmodern orthodoxy, he examines some of the finest works of high culture in the humanist half-millennium: Hamlet, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Rembrandt and Poussin, Mozart and Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzche, the novels of Henry James and the films of John Ford. It is an idiosyncratic choice and an unorthodox method, which Carroll justifies because these exceptional masterpieces have “tapped the deepest truths of their time” (p.9). His interaction with these works is stimulating and masterful and makes The Wreck of Human Culture a pleasure to read.
Crucial to the history Carroll traces is the famous sixteenth century debate over the freedom of the human will between the doyen of European humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the German reformer Martin Luther. Carroll bravely reads Luther as more anti-humanist than anti-Roman Catholic. The irenic Erasmus was a reasonable man. If there is no human free-will, he argues, why should the wicked reform? But Luther’s teaching of justification by faith alone meant a complete rejection of this reliance on human will and reason. For Luther, the human being is a slave to sin and sentenced to death; and must come, empty-handed, to the cross of the crucified Christ. Mere morality was a hopeless absurdity. The heart of the Protestant reformation, rooted in the writings of Paul, is an acknowledgement of the helplessness of the human as a result of sin and death and a need for absolute dependence on God. Humanism, with its alternative diagnosis of the basic goodness of human beings and their freedom to be moral, leads inevitably to the rejection of God. There are some mealy-mouthed versions of Christianity that espouse this kind of thinking, even today: but the calamities of history must be held up against them as evidence. Man has proved a very poor god; and ultimately, death still undoes him.

Luther’s insight is as crucial today as it ever was. What Protestant - in other words, Biblical - Christianity offers is a radically different diagnosis of the human condition. The humanist vision has been played out in full and now offers no comfort to the human soul. Carroll offers his work as a contribution to the funeral of humanism (p.268), with a warning for us not to give it another run.

But what does he offer as an alternative? Carroll enjoins the West to start again, to reach back into the past and recapture that right “enthusiasm for man and his works that the Renaissance attempted to enshrine” (p.266). He means by this a simple delight in place of the infatuation with the human that has bought us so badly undone. Carroll writes: “The culture of the West will not be renewed until the moment it kills Luther’s monster [ie death], and once again achieves a death of death” (p.267). For Carroll, it is in the art of Poussin that a particular alternative is indicated. Though the Frenchman Poussin was a Roman Catholic, Carroll claims that in his pictures he was able to represent Luther’s great ideas. He, too, sees that “darkness where the light of neither law nor reason shines” (p.70). He, too, sees the necessity for life and hope to come from outside sources and to be recognised as gifts. Yet he differs from Luther, writes Carroll, in that he appeals to a radically different divinity – “the sacred breath moving through the mythos” (p.71).

The shape of my project...

Well I am after your advice again!

I am at the point in my project when I really need to decide what it is about more specifically. Martyrdom as a theological theme provides the core, I know this already (that is, it is not a historical study of certain martyrs, but a conceptual/theological application/exploration of the concept of Christian martyrdom). I also know that I will be using TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral as the springboard for my discussion, and that methodologically I will use scriptural exposition and reference to a small bullpen of thinkers from the tradition. Here are the two alternatives I have before me at the moment:

1) Who are Christian martyrs?
When the martyr Secunda said to her interrogator 'I wish to be none other that I am ' who was it that she understood herself to be? How did those who remembered and celebrated her death understand her identity? What kind of self is the Christian martyr? This dissertation seeks to explore and expound Christian identity via the motif of martyrdom, which is the possibility latent in the Christian identity. Martyrdom thus analysed suggests itself as a great way to understand Christian identity in its own terms and in comparison to alternatives. So, how might a discourse of authentic selfhood (for example), one of our contemporary ways of thinking about selfhood, accomodate or interpret martyrdom and its self-denial?

Which is to say, the point of all this discussion of martyrdom is to outline a 'martyrological self' or a 'witnessing self'. The issue here is inteded to be the question of identity, or selfhood, though in fact I may decide that the Christian martyr refuses to BE a self as we understand it, and sees himself/herself in terms of another self.

2) What good do Christian martyrs do?
This study seeks to answer the question what good do Christian martyrs do? That is: following Dr Susan Parsons’ comment ‘the martyr sets ethics on edge’ we inquire as to how and why this is. Or, to put it another way, what kind of practical rationality can include Christian martyrdom as its highest expression, or at least as the external representation of its inner reality?

We pose this question in a context in which the very notion of religious martyrdom itself is viewed with considerable suspicion. It is a concept often critiqued as not good or as a lesser good: as denying the good of life; as promoting a victim complex, and thus the pursuit of violent retaliation by religious groups; as neglecting real opportunities for service and justice; as chasing shadows rather than concrete, this-worldly realities; as hypocritically and egotistically pursuing its own self-dramatisation and heavenly honour (martyrdom as a form of narcissism).

This is then, a more directly ethically oriented study, trying to understand what kind of act Christian martyrdom is in moral/theological terms. Is it an act at all, indeed?

God's word is not chained

It is an honour to give this sermon at St Giles Normanton in the memory of George Seamer, a man who stood firm on the Word of God.

My text today is these verses from 2 Timothy:
8 Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel, 9 for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God's word is not chained. 10 Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.
[2 Timothy 2:8-10]

On October 6th, 1536, in a prison yard in the castle of Vilvoorden just north-east of Brussels a 42-year-old Englishman named William Tyndale was strangled and then burnt at the stake for heresy and treason. Tricked and betrayed by an agent of King Henry VIII, he had endured 500 days of harsh imprisonment and a farcical trial prior to his execution. As he died, it is reported that he cried out ‘Lord open the King of England’s eyes!’

What was the nature of his crime? Why was he such a threat to the King and to the Church that he had to be silenced?

Apparently fluent in eight languages, the scholar Tyndale’s crime was to translate, print and distribute parts of the Bible into the English tongue, something that had been expressly made illegal in 1409. Tyndale’s life was committed to the power of words. He was convinced that God himself has spoken in words that ordinary people could understand.

The God of Jesus Christ is not a mysterious, distant and unknown deity who, if he speaks at all, speaks in a babble of Latin. By no means: the message of Jesus Christ and his victory over the devil and the grave is for all people everywhere, of every tribe and every tongue.

This message is not static, but dynamic: it is marvellously potent. It is the power of life itself! What Tyndale realized was that power of God himself lay not in the structures of the church, or with popes and bishops, or even with Kings, but in the word of God, living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.

Tyndale staked his life and safety on the power of God’s word. He knew that the word of God in the hand of the ploughboy was dynamite to kings and popes because it was the word about the rule of the Lord of lords. The irony of it was that not so long after Tyndale’s death King Henry himself authorized an English translation of the Bible which was substantially based on Tyndale’s work and which forms the basis for our English translations up to the present day.
God’s word is not chained!

Tyndale knew this because he knew what the apostle Paul knew.

These few words from 2 Timothy 2 are written by a man who also knew the deprivation and despair that comes with the loss of freedom. This was the man who had a calling from God to preach to the Gentiles, from one end of the earth to another. He had big plans: even to visit Spain with his good news, at the far edge of his known universe. But: he wasn’t going there while he was rotting away in chains. He wasn’t able to be with the churches that he had planted, or to be there in person to guide Timothy, timid Timothy, through his first stumbling steps in ministry. Was the mission going to fail? The question must surely have crossed Paul’s mind. What was the future to be? How could the gospel of Jesus possibly go forward with its chief apostle off the pitch and out of action? Would the Christian movement wither away and become a quirk of history, an artifact to be discovered and pondered over by antiquarians but of no ongoing significance?

If Paul knew first hand the impotence of his imprisonment, he knew also the shame of being chained up ‘like a criminal’, as if he was not the messenger of a mighty and glorious God but one of the numberless villains and vagabonds that frequented the Roman Empire. He was being treated as an enemy of good order and a threat to peace. This was not supposed to be the position of a respectable and cultivated Roman citizen; he was certainly not going to get access to the top end of town in his current position, nor influence the movers and shakers in society. What influence could he possibly have as a common criminal?

But the problem of the apostle’s imprisonment was deeper even than this: it was a real question mark over God himself. For, if his great apostle to the Gentiles is cooling his heels under house arrest somewhere in the empire, what is God doing? Is he really as powerful as he pretends? Is he really the master of events, or have events somehow conspired to master him? Is trust in the promises of this God somehow misplaced, if so little apparent progress can be charted?
It is a question we ourselves may feel like asking, even today. We experience from some quarters an open hostility to the gospel and a flagrant rejection of the word of God as if it were a polite suggestion.

That is more often a voice from within the church, sad to say.

From without, we experience rather the complete apathy of our friends and neighbours, the yawns and bored stares rather than the raised voices. Perhaps it is the apparent dagginess and the irrelevance of the gospel to most people that is more depressing than its explicit rejection by some. For every full church in the UK, there is at least one down the road that is virtually empty.

We may well ask: where today is the evidence of the power and authority of God?

But let us turn back to Paul at this point. What is his response?
He is not despairing: for, as he says: ‘God’s word is not chained!’

Why can he be so sure? Why can he be so confident when the evidence of the shackles jangling around his wrists would say otherwise?

What Paul says is that it is in the nature of his message. His gospel is what gives him confidence in his gospel.
And what is his gospel?
Have a look at verse 8. He asks his readers to ‘remember Jesus Christ’ – and two things about him in particular.

It has two parts:
First, Jesus Christ was ‘raised from the dead’.

That is to say, this man, the figure at the centre of Paul’s preaching, had been victorious over sin and death! The prison of the tomb could not keep him in. The chains of death and hell could not hold him: on the contrary, on the third day he had risen victorious. His grave is empty!

It is worth us pausing here to think: what kind of power is needed to raise the dead? Clearly this is not merely a human power: it is beyond the power of human beings to achieve. It is a power beyond our ordinary conception of what is powerful.

The word that Paul preaches is a message not only about life beyond death: it is a message of the defeat of death. It is a declaration that death has been reversed.

So: Paul’s gospel is about God’s power to reverse the effects of sin and death. It’s an announcement of the forgiveness of sins! And it’s a message from the same God who called light out of darkness and called things that are not as though they were.

What’s more: this power is also the power to transform lives. It’s a power that makes a difference for individuals. Paul could talk about this from his personal experience, of course: a man who once sought to murder the followers of Jesus but then miraculously became one of his leading followers. In Romans 8:10-11 he writes:

10 But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.

People here today know about this. People here have been changed by the power of God’s word, brought out of darkness into God’s wonderful light; they know the power of God’s word to liberate us from captivity to sin and death. People here live in full expectation that sin and death will not have the last word; and that they will have eternal life together with God. Like Paul, they have experienced it for themselves – they have heard this word of God and know how powerful it is.

The second part of Paul’s gospel: Jesus Christ was ‘descended from David’

This may at first seem like unremarkable thing to say. After all, lots of people could claim that they were descended from David: Joseph for example. But here it is far more significant that that: as the son of king David, Jesus was the heir to Israel’s throne and to all the promises of God that came to David. Back in 2 Samuel 7, God had made a covenant with King David that his kingdom would be without end. He had said to David:

12 When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

A son is promised; a direct descendent of David who will rule, and for ever. Though David will one day die, this Son of David, will live and live. In his gospel, Paul proclaims Jesus Christ as the one through whom God’s promises come to fruition.

God is powerfully true to himself. The true king who has ascended on high and NOW rules! The resurrection was not just the beginning of new life for Jesus: it was his enthronement as Israel’s mighty king: the king who was to rule not only Israel but the nations as well. All authority in heaven and earth is given to him. Jesus now rules: he is LORD. This was another way in which Paul summarized his gospel: Jesus is Lord.

And so, Paul’s gospel is powerful precisely because it is about power: it is a message about who is in charge, really. It is a word from and about a king who calls on people everywhere to recognize his authority and to submit to him as the son of David and the true heir to his throne. This word of God, about the rule of Jesus, has no regard for what human beings think is powerful: even though it be spoken by a man in rags or a by a poor woman it demands that kings, and princes and presidents and prime ministers and chief executives submit to his rule and the rest of us along with them.

So: Paul is able to say that God’s word is not chained because of what that word, his gospel: it is about: Jesus, raised from the dead, descended from David. And for Paul this means that he endures everything for the sake of others who believe it. He is able to withstand even his imprisonment, with all its deprivations and shames, because he knows that God’s word is powerful to accomplish his will. He is not despairing. He is not browbeaten. He is not bullied into silence, or embarrassed into defeat. Paul is all the more encouraged to continue on in hope, knowing that if even he should die with his mission unfulfilled that God’s word go to the grave with him. He endures everything (vs 10); he puts up with the trails and persecutions with an unbattered confidence in the power of the gospel. He knows that his own failings and weaknesses and sufferings are not an obstacle to God accomplishing his word.

So: for us there is I think a great comfort, but also a strong rebuke as well. We’ll start with the rebuke:

There is a sharp reminder for us that when we think that the word of God is chained to our programmes, our business, our effort, and way of doing things we are completely and arrogantly mistaken. It is a great temptation for evangelical churches in these days of thinking strategically about our church’s mission, and analyzing church growth, and signing up for programmes and courses and what have you. We do tend to think that the gospel could not possibly go forward without us and without our strenuous efforts. Our busy-ness which we offer to God to use does not make him dependent on us, though he certainly loves to make use of us. We must certainly resist this belief in our own indispensability: but I am afraid that in lots of evangelical churches resistance to this temptation has been rather minimal. We have started to believe in the power of the means that we use to do evangelism and run church services and not in the Word of God itself. We have fallen in love with our own technical excellence and forgotten that the only thing that advances the cause of the gospel is the gospel: that it is a powerful word about a risen king, a word that doesn’t need power-point to make it powerful. This morning I would like to invite us to re-consider our attitudes in this matter – not that programmes or thinking about the practicalities of our mission are wrong, but that we put them in the right place and recognize afresh our dependence on God’s word.

But also and more obviously here we have a great comfort: the word of God is not chained - so do not fear and do not despair at the attacks on the gospel or at the apathy of the wider community. Do not be afraid of standing on the word of God: where else can one stand? Do not be perplexed by the self-serving cleverness of those people who would tell us otherwise. Do not be surprised by resistance to the gospel – it is in its nature that it is a message as much rejected as accepted. Do not be surprised when the gospel is criticized for its irrelevance or its dowdiness – people need to find excuses to evade it, after all. But there is no need for us to be cowed or depressed either. Rather we can take great strength from the fact that God’s word does not return to him empty. This was after all the word that created the worlds, that caused the sun to shine and put the moon in its place; this is the word that rules the sea and the stars. God said, and it was so. And it is the word that brought Jesus out of the tomb; it is this word that rules: it is the authoritative word, the last word.

Let this church then be one that never ceases to rest wholly and only on the word of God, and nothing else. Let it be fearless in its declaration of the message of the gospel of Jesus, though it be foolishness or a stumbling block to others. Let it not trust in the brilliance of its ministry team or the magnificent planning, efficiency and wisdom of its PCC. For the word of God is not chained.

William Tyndale not only translated these magnificent words, he believed them too. And, he was not despairing even though his opponents in this work were popes and kings. He was not despairing even as he went to the stake with his work incomplete, and with the full realization of his dream – that the bible be freely available to all English men and women in their own tongue – was several decades away. His example is a great witness for us in our experience today of hostility and apathy to the word of God to endure everything.

Let’s finish with Paul’s words:
2 Timothy 2: 10 Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. 11 Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him; 12 if we endure, we will also reign with him. If we disown him, he will also disown us; 13 if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself.

Rushdie doesn't like martyrdom much...

In martyrdom we find victimhood and religious self-identity combined in a potentially lethal way: it is not an accident that Rushdie opens his novel with the act of a person claiming martyrdom for herself. He has elsewhere written: ‘[O]nly fanatics go looking for martyrdom’. It is for him an inauthentic and dangerous way to establish one’s identity. In the chapter entitled ‘Ayeesha’, Gibreel has a vision that he, as an angel carries ‘the Imam’ – a character strongly resembling the Ayatollah Khomeni – back to the capital city of Desh. Gibreel notices the streets swarming with people, converging in a regular pattern upon a grand avenue leading towards the palace of the Empress (who echoes the hated Shah of Iran, disposed by the Islamic revolution of 1978). The people march in their hundreds towards the gates of the palace:

Seventy at a time, they come into range; the guns babble, and they die, and then the next seventy climb over the bodies of the dead, the guns giggle once again, and the hill of the dead grows higher. Those behind it commence, in their turn, to climb. In the dark doorways of the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing their beloved sons in to the parade, go, be a martyr, do the needful, die. ‘You see how they love me,’ says the disembodied voice. ‘No tyranny on earth can withstand the power of this slow, walking love.’

This scene of ‘slow, walking love’ is viscerally awful, especially from the point of view of a secular individualist like Rushdie: the filmic quality of the narration adds to the revulsion that the reader must feel. That the mothers approve of the death march adds to its horror, that people could be so possessed of an irrational desire to self-destruct. For his part, Gibreel lamely suggests to the Imam that they are in fact driven not by love of him, but rather by hatred for the Empress: a revolutionary zeal in other words, rather than a religious devotion. The Imam replies:

They love me…because I am water. I am fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or a tock.

The religious emphasis on the transcendent, in other words, enables the appalling scene before us, because it holds out the promise of something even more substantial than one’s own life. It promises a substance more solid than the power of empires, which come and go along the ebb and tide of history. The cost of offering oneself to the Imam – life itself – is nothing compared to the reward that he promises.