An anthropology of temptation?

A couple of posts ago I buried in a piece of verbosity a suggestion that I thought might interest some people: namely, that temptation is part of being human in a very fundamental way. Jesus needed to undergo temptation in order to identify with us, to be like us in every regard. Which sends back to thinking about the garden...

There is but one restriction: the notorious tree. The restriction stands as a reminder to the creature of his creatureliness – for man of all creatures was most likely to forget this about himself and to believe in his own independence from God and his Word. And yet, as Bonhoeffer writes ‘innocence means clinging to the Word of God with pure undivided hearts’.[1] That is why the Tempter, when he comes, comes armed with the Word of God; and concealing his true nature.[2] The beauty of the lie he told the woman and the man was that it was not completely a lie. In fact, it was close to the truth. ‘Did God really say’ he whispered, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’? (Gen 3:1)

There had been a command, true, and it had been about trees and eating. But the woman is able to put aside this first suggestion: God in fact had said ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die’ (Gen 2:16-17); only one tree was off limits. Far greater was their freedom than their restriction. But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’ (Gen 3:4-5). God really doesn't have your best interests at heart, but is only protecting himself; God doesn't want you to have a power that you deserve but that only he has; God has lied about what will happen if you disobey him; without God you can be your own moral arbiter: these were profoundly attractive – indeed, tempting – lies. They are an attack on the Word of God itself: on the very God-ness of God. Adam’s ingratitude at the extraordinary liberty in the task offered to him and his failure to imagine his task as sufficient for his needs are part of his deafness to the voice of God, his lack of response to his call.

The temptation has three aspects: first, one that relates to the flesh and its lusts – the allure of the fruit is matched by the hunger of the man and woman. Then, secondly, there is their sheer disbelief – their lack of faith in the Word of God about himself and about them. There is also, thirdly, a challenge to the power and authority of God involved: that his rule is not as absolute as it appears: the scent of revolution is in the air. Adam is tempted in his flesh, his faith and his allegiance to God.[3]

[1] Bonhoeffer, Temptation, p. 15
[2] ‘The voice of the tempter does not come out of an abyss only recognized as ‘Hell’. It completely conceals its origin. It is suddenly near me and speaks to me…Indeed there is no sign of the origin of the tempter in fire and brimstone. The denial of the origin belongs to the essence of the seducer.’ Ibid.
[3] Bonhoeffer applies this triad to Jesus, but doesn’t read it back into Adam’s (and Israel’s) temptation as I have here. Ibid., p. 18-21

God is beauty

"God is beauty; to be God is to be enjoyable... God's beauty is the actual living exchange between Father, Son and Spirit as this exchange is perfect simply as exchange, as it sings." Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology I.235

Jonathan Edwards privileged beauty in his doctrine of God: God is truth and goodness because he is beauty, 'beauty of the sort music has'. This is his glory.

In a discussion of feminine beauty elsewhere, people were quick to raise the passage in 1 Peter about the prominence of character as the truly beautiful adornment of a woman's life (as opposed to bling bling...). Edwards would agree, pointing out that beauty and virtue are in close connection. But it is still an aesthetic quality, regardless. To talk of God's beauty is to talk of how God is sensed, for example.

The temptation of man

The author of Hebrews describes in a very elaborate way the process by which Jesus became qualified to the sacrifice of purification. The mere process of incarnation was not sufficient to demonstrate or achieve his perfection: he had to undergo the trials and sufferings of human life and overcome them with obedient submission to the Father.

The word 'peirasmos' can mean either 'trial' or 'temptation'. A trial is an external and public thing; a temptation is more internal and personal. The word retains its ambiguity in the Hebrews letter somewhat, such that it is hard to see which part of the narrative of Jesus' life the author is referring to. See, for example, Hebrews 2:17-18

17 Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. 18 For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Linking suffering to temptation/testing here is probably evidence that he is talking about the 'test' of Gethsemane and the Passion, the suffering that comes from an external source or threat. But, interestingly, it is this suffering test that Jesus needed to endure to complete the incarnation, to complete his identification with his brethren - 'in every respect' - in order that he could function properly as the high priest. The effectiveness of his priestliness is dependent on his complete identification with the people he represents in making the sacrifice - the peirasmos is, while not the whole of this identification, the significant last part of it.

From here the author moves on to a typological discussion of the wilderness period and the temptation at Massah, using the unforgettable Psalm 95 as his verbal map. The recipients of his letter are warned not to give in to the temptation of unbelief (3:19) and deafness to God's voice. Of course, the one being tested at Massah was Yhwh himself: the people's testing of him was evidence of their hard-heartedness and resulted in their inability to enter the Rest of God.

The recipients of Hebrews however have a significant advantage in their resistance against hardness of heart: they have not merely Moses, but a high priest who is the Son of God but who is also one who has 'in every respect' been tempted as we are - so he is able to sympathize (literally, 'suffer along with') with us. So Hebrews 4:14-15:

14 Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Peirasmos, it seems, is so closely bound up with human experience, is so universally a feature of what we undergo in this life, that we are not truly represented by a saviour who has not undergone them. Who is Adam after all if he is not the one who was tempted, even before he fell?

What exactly is the reason that temptation/testing is such a feature of the human story? It has to do with the nature and reality of human creature-freedom: the presence of the peirasmos, which offers or prompts an alternative to the obedient response that the Word of God demands, shows that the obedient response is a free submission of the creature. It is therefore a real, genuine and not fraudulent submission to that Word in real personal relationship with it.

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.

The authority of scripture (or, of God IN scripture)

The Lord to whom the Bible testifies is described as wielding words of mighty power; but he is also of such righteous character that his power is not compromised or tainted. The authority of the God of the Bible rests on three supports: his capacity to act, his knowledge, and his utter trustworthiness.

First, Scripture testifies from its opening sentences to a Lord who says and it is. His word corresponds exactly to reality: in fact, it is what reality is: “And it was so”. The absolute sovereignty of this deity is not met by any challenge. He is not tapping into some primal force or casting a spell, but exercising his free creative power and his absolute mastery of things. These words were the kind of speaking that wizards attempt to emulate: except that here, of course, the being that is speaking is of an entirely different order. And his act of creative will establishes his worthiness to receive the adulation of all creatures (Rev 4:11).

Second, God speaks true words because of his knowledge of all things. He has the “view from nowhere”, although it is better rebadged as the “view from heaven”; and so may properly speak powerful words. It is not that he is objective; rather he is authoritatively subjective. This difference in knowledge is what Yhwh wields against Job in Job 38-41: it is Job’s ignorance, rather than his strength, that contrasts with Yhwh’s knowledge of the origin of things. It is a war of words, not an arm-wrestle.

Third, the character of the God of Scripture is not dissembling or unreliable but utterly trustworthy. Words that he speaks do not distort or pervert reality. In speaking, this God speaks truly of the world but also speaks truly of himself. He does not construct an identity for himself like a participant in an Internet chat room. (This is always the problem with Calvin's doctrine of accomodation...)

So: if the God who is mighty, knowledgeable and reliable speaks, ought we not expect powerfully authoritative words? Does he not have a moral right as well as the capacity to utter words of power? Once again, Job 38-41 is instructive: after all, what right do human beings have to dispute with God? And yet, from the whirlwind the Lord deigns to converse playfully and beautifully with Job in such a way that it restores him to his original dignity.

(for my Barthian readers - yes, you can cast all this in a christological mode of course!)

A tension in evangelicalism...

A moment of clarity for me:

In evangelicalism, is the authority of the Bible absolute? Or is it the authority of the evangelical theological system?

In debates about the New Perspective and other issues, the notion of a 'classic evangelical' position is bandied about as a bit of a trump card: if not the joker in the pack, than certainly an ace up the sleeve. But at the same time, the authority of the Word in operation should theoretically at least mean that (within orthodoxy) for true evangelicals doctrine is revisable... which is to say, the theological system is revisable as the Bible is read more skilfully and more carefully.

In Sydney, Knox and Robinson were great models of the kind of true evangelical priority of the Bible. That is, they produced an ecclesiology which was in many respects a readjustment and reinterpretation of previous ones, because of their commitment to the authority of the Bible above all else. It left them exposed to the charge of an 'un-Anglican' ecclesiology. Today we do this with lay presidency: the argument is, sacerdoctal presidency isn't biblical. We don't care whether it is traditional or not.

Knox was quite an original thinker, and he was free to be, because he didn't hold to a rigid set of handed-down doctrines. That is why Moore sets a little at odds to our fellow evangelicals in other parts of the world: because we don't in general hold to a system of theology (like 5-point Calvinism) just because it might be logical or traditional: limited atonement isn't biblical (and you know, it just isn't!), so we ditch it. Our best current preachers and thinkers do this too: Peter Bolt and John Woodhouse are great examples of guys who have followed in the Knox-Robinson footsteps (if I may take their names in vain).

Noticeably, however, we are happy to play fast and loose with Anglican traditions, but not with evangelical ones. Perhaps this is because the former tend to be liturgical matters as opposed to doctrinal ones...

An eschatological sense of scripture?

In 2004, I wrote these words:

In the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead – the most dramatic revelation of God’s power since creation (see Rom 4:17) – we receive public notification that, in the work of Jesus, God himself was at work. He was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). How much more can the believer expect salvation from the wrath to come! As Paul describes it in 1 Cor 15, we are shown in the risen Christ the trajectory of what is to come. The death and resurrection of Christ “according to the Scriptures” are a powerful affirmation of those Scriptures from within the present age ahead of the final “yes” of God, which is yet to come.

Recognition of the place in salvation history from which we receive and read the Scriptures means that we can strongly affirm the meaningfulness of those writings without claiming that we have complete mastery over that meaning here and now. We also know that we read those Scriptures with the responsibility to answer to their divine author for how we read and respond. Rowan Williams makes a fruitful suggestion along these lines when he speaks of reading for an “eschatological sense” of Scripture:[1] by which he means that, as we read the Scriptures, we read as seriously as we can to discern the meaning of those writings, not shirking the discomfort of disagreement or avoiding the painful truth in them, but neither claiming an ultimacy for our reading that it is not ours to claim. Reading with this eschatological sense we may avoid merely co-opting Scripture in the service of our own power and instead become its servants: not using the text, but being used by it.

[1] R. Williams, "The Discipline of Scripture," On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) p. 59.

I still think the major thrust is ok here, but I can see that Williams is uncomfortable with almost any assertion at all. For him it is the tension between the readings that is itself somehow the point. I want to be able to say what he says but also to be able to say 'that is false teaching' when I see it, something he seems to find difficulty doing at the moment. I am trying to express a kind of critical realism/epistemic humility about our reading of scripture without capitulating to relativistic woolliness... any suggestions?

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.

Hell article

Ben very kindly mentions my article on 'The Genesis of Hell' published in the latest version of the Reformed Theological Review. It's a bit of history cum exegesis cum theology cum literary review. Evidence that I don't know quite what kind of theologian I am!

This is how I finished the piece:

“Christians have since very early days appealed to Hell and depicted Hell in ways quite unknown in the witness of their own Scriptures, and have at times drawn a perverse comfort from the imagined spectacle of the suffering of others” (p. 148).



Also, Michael links to my scripture post: thanks everyone for the extra traffic!

Eight Theses on Martyrdom's Hermeneutical Prospects

Not mine (alas!) but Craig A Slane's. In may ways, here is encapsulated my project (oh dear!) ... I have bold-ed the theses I would like to think about some more...

1. The totality of a human life and its identity is graspable only whe death is entertained as a consititutive feature of that identity.

2. Subjectively or existentially, in the midtemporal experience of one's own death by anticipation the posttemporal whole of a life may be grasped in advance and become a significant catalyst for life.

3.Objectively, the postmortem vantage point, though excluding the subject of death by definition, is one in which the totality of a life appears to others as an object for consideration and reconsideration.

4. The quality of that totality of life which now appears as an object for consideration and reconsideratio is fixed neither by the end point of its death nor by its continuity as such, but by its evident comportment toward death, and hence, by the kind of end and the kind of continuity achieved.

5. A Christian death is one that consummates a life into which Christ's death has been assimilated.

6. The process of assimilating Christ's death into one's life begins at baptism.

7. Martyrdom is the quintessential form of that assimilation of Christ's death begun at baptism, whose possibility is contained embryonically within it.

8. The quintessential Christian death called martyrdom may serve, then, as a powerful lens for observing various aspects of the life it encapsulates.

The power of scripture?

Scripture is composed of human words that retain the frailty that belongs to all human language in a fallen world. That is not to say that we are condemned to wander the no-man’s land of relativism at all; only that we should not be surprised that the Scriptures are contested territory. This side of the eschaton, absolute certainty is not possible; though confidence is.
In fact, I would want to say that the human weakness of Scripture is entirely in keeping with the character of the God whose word Scripture claims to be. Protestant attempts to defend the Bible from its own scandalous humanity by appeals to (real or alleged) “original autographs”, and the like are not only futile: they are unnecessary. While often this theology appeal to the character of God, by supernaturalising Scripture it actually conceals something of God’s true nature. These appeals are an expression of an over-realised eschatology of Scripture, an emphasis of the “now” at the expense of the “not-yet.”

Scripture is, according to its human nature, revealed to be powerful along the continuum of salvation-history. That power has yet to be revealed in full; it as yet remains a power that is partly concealed, and contentious. It is rejected as much as accepted; denied as much as affirmed. It is a great, unfinished symphony! The themes have been stated and re-stated, but the resolving cadence has yet to be played.

However, we must also assert that the judgement of God has been inserted into human history, at the cross of Christ. For all the gentleness and forbearance of God’s word to us in Scripture, it has at its central motif God’s fearful verdict on humanity. The publication of this judgement in the pages of Scripture stands as a terrible warning to men and women of what the final judgement holds for them. It is God’s promise that he will vindicate his own righteousness at the last.

The Temptation to do good

'Sin grows with doing good', Eliot has his martyr say.

Alongside invitations to do quite marvellous works of piety and love, lies the temptation to somehow seek pride in them, or to use them manipulatively, or to love God less because of them.

The devil tempted Jesus to make bread and to share in rule and to save himself, all in themselves not bad things. The goodness of creation itself and serving its needs, which are real and authentic goods, can be extremely diverting from the ultimate purpose of human life, its worship of God.

The story of Mary and Martha - which I always found to be a great rejoinder to people obsessed with housework! - perhaps is suggestive of this. Martha is busy in doing good, doubtless. But her good spills over into her fury with her sister; and earns her a famous rebuke. Was Cain's sin likewise not the ungood of his offering, but his envy of his brother (see I John 3)?

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.

Liturgy? Who me?

I'd love to begin a discussion of what happens currently in Sydney (and other evangelical Anglican) church services/meetings. At present, the standard format (liturgy?) seems to be: Song X 2
Welcome (often forgetting to pray)
Confession (perhaps)
Song
Break
Notices
Bible reading (on which the sermon is based)
Sermon
Song
Prayers (extempore, usually about local interests)
Song
Close
Coffee

THis pattern is indicative of churches I have had a hand in running, so I am as much to blame as anyone. But it seems to be the general pattern.

BUT: I have seven gripes with this:
1. Bible Readings - there is often no OT lesson, and the readings are entirely dictated by the sermon, which means we limit the way in which scripture may speak to us. We have no scripture unless it is explained - do we think our congregations are idiots?
2. Lord's Supper - if it is done at all, it is done in a kind of embarassed way, as quickly and as roughly as possible, and with as little prayer book as possible.
3. Creeds - what creeds? are we a creedal church or not? What do we believe? How would we know? Do we have any continuity with history at all?
4. Prayers - Confession is often missed out. On the one hand, we have abandoned the rich prayer book prayers, but we haven't got a tradition of magnificent extempore prayer like the baptists and pressies do. And we keep praying prayers that sound like announcements: "we pray for the outreach meeting on Saturday, which costs $10 a head. We pray that you would move those hear to do as I tell them and bring their friends..." Do we pray for our governments?
5. General sloppiness/messiness - church buildings are hugely and chronically untidy places. Would a lick of paint really hurt? Do we have to hand out large amounts of paper all the time? Musos leave sheets of paper everywhere! Service leaders dress badly and are underprepared, don't smile and don't introduce themselves. And they say too much, as if they were cricket commentators: 'now Jo is gonna read the Bible for us.' Power point is mucked up, or in the wrong order, or - well, something always goes wrong with it.
6. Sound systems - I can't believe that churches are so stingy about sound systems, and don't seek help for balancing sound or where the speakers ought to be placed.
7. Lack of creativity - it seems to me 'being creative' means 'having an interview'.

Perhaps I am becoming an old fogey (OK, I am). BUT: it seems to me that these services do not feed the churches well. They tend to the dull, and they are undernourishing. We have jettisoned the old forms and perhaps rightly so: but, we have also I think lost a good deal of the substance of the old Anglican way. I guess for me the shocking realisation was, that when I visited a liberal Anglo-Catholic church, they were getting more scripture than my evangelical church and it was better read. The mistaken assumption it seems to me is that a more free-form service is more 'seeker sensitive': but I would say 1 - no it isn't and 2 who is a church meeting FOR anyway? Seriously - as a pew-sitter, sometimes you do feel treated like a complete twit. Anyone? Could pastors comment as to why they do what they do in their church meetings? Could lay people say whether it is working or not?

[At Moore, we generally have a more prayer-booky service with lots of great bible stuff in it. It works really well, in my opinion: I find that it is a feast of scripture, and works on so many levels - the word of Christ dwelling among us richly indeed. The singing is great, too. And yet, when we turn the services over to the students to organise, we get the boring old sermon sandwich I describe above!]

The Children of God and the Children of the Devil

If, then, we are children of God by means of the love of God, we ought to live as the children of God and not as the children of the devil. If we have been set free from the works of the devil, we need not live our lives conditioned by them any longer. As the children of God it is no surprise that we are called to

1 - speak the truth, and especially the truth about God: to add our witness to voices that proclaim the greatness of God the Father and his son, Jesus Christ as the way to the Father.

2 - to love our brothers and sisters and not to not participate in the sin of Cain that has so marked human history from the beginning.

3 - to not fear death: though we will still die, death will not have the same menace that it did. As a forgiven person, death becomes not a judgment on my sins and something I dread, but a pathway to holiness and righteousness and life with God.

3. Life - Jesus in his death made a sacrifice for sin that broke the devil's power over death

We have spoken of where Jesus was true, exposing the devil's lies; we have spoken about Jesus life and death of love, counteracting the devil's murderousness; but in one way we have thought about it backwards. It was by his death that Jesus struck the decisive blow against the devil, and so unravelled all his works.

As Paul once said, the sting of death is sin. What makes death so appalling, what gives the devil his power, is sin and its consequences. That is death's real horror. But on the cross the Son of God made of himself a sacrifice for the sins of the world; he made atonement for sin so that the devil had nothing left with which to accuse us. By his death, Jesus disarmed death, so that for the children of God death is a bomb that explodes with no charge.

The cross was the scene of Jesus' great triumph: for finally there a human person did what Adam failed to. Finally there, a human being - in his flesh and blood, with all the difficulty that would have meant - in obedience to God, met the devil with all the worst that he could do, and overcame him. It would be easy for us to see the cross as a defeat, and the resurrection as the overturning of that defeat; but that would be to miss the way the NT talks about the cross as itself a victory - as Paul does in Colossians 2, and as the author to the Hebrews does in the second chapter:

Hebrews 2:14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death-- that is, the devil-- 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

That Jesus rose from the dead confirmed that he had in his death destroyed the devil and his works.

2. Love - instead of answering hate with hate, Jesus loved even his enemies by dying for them

Adam's fall resulted in the murderous violence of Cain, who belonged to the evil one.

The fruit of Jesus' resistance of temptation was not murder, but love. Instead of vengeance, he sought the good of enemies. He did not resist them, though he did challenge them; he did not call down curses upon them, but prayed for their forgiveness, even as they killed him.

His death was the great example of the Father's love: God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8). It is a love that costs.

Jesus showed in his life and his death that devil's work in sowing discord and disharmony had been short-circuited. And more than that: that his death as a sacrifice for sin has brought us into a new way of being human, not one like Adam and Cain, but now like Jesus himself.

No wonder John in his letter can say How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!

1. Truth - instead of believing the devil's lies, Jesus believed and told the truth.

Jesus, like Adam & Eve, was tempted by the devil. You remember the scene: before he started his public ministry he spent forty days and nights in the wilderness being tested.

And true to his nature, the devil presented him with not quite truths about the Father: that somehow, his provision and his authority weren't as absolute as all that. And each time, Jesus falls back on God's word to respond; instead of accepting the lie, he recalls the truth: Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God's mouth; You shall not put the Lord you God to the test; Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.

At this point, Jesus' story took a different fork in the road from that of Adam. Here now we have a human person who hasn't fallen for the devil's trap. Here is one of us who can actually say I am innocent. Here is one who hasn't meekly accepted the mastery of the devil, but who has rather offered him resistance.

How did the Son of God destroy the devil's works?

Adam & Eve's story of temptation, fall and death, corresponding to the three works of the devil is of course tragic. It is a story of unreached potential, of two beings who are in every way a shadow of their former selves. It is a story we are all enmeshed in.

But it is a story that has a sequel. Our text, remember says that the Son of God appeared to destroy the works of the devil.

How did this happen? What did Jesus Christ do to destroy the works of the devil? His story in many ways is a parallel to the story of Adam: only with a very different outcome.

There are three works that Jesus Christ did, as he retraced the steps of Adam, that directly confronted the devil's work.

1. Truth - instead of believing the devil's lies, Jesus believed and told the truth.
2. Love - instead of answering hate with hate, Jesus loved even his enemies; and began a group of people who would known by their love of each other.
3. Life - Jesus in his death made a sacrifice for sin that broke the devil's power over death

The three works of the devil. 3 - Death

The third work of the devil is death.

In Hebrews 2:14 we hear that the devil is the one who has the power of death. That is to say, not death merely in its physical aspect, but the death whose hidden sting is sin. This is what death must mean for those under God's judgement. And so the passage from Hebrews goes on to talk about those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.

So, the devil's work is, by the terrible sign of death, to obliterate human hope. The power of death is the dread it produces in us. Our contemporaries imagine that death can be a peaceful, natural affair. They kid themselves that non-being might be not so bad after all; and that, with our technology, we can somehow manage death: fit it into our busy schedules somehow. But that is somehow a mask for the reality of it; it is one way of coping with the fear that all human societies and in fact all human individuals have to face. Another coping mechanism is the frenetic activity of our lives which gives us thankfully not one second to contemplate anything beyond the instant.

The serpent in the garden was I guess partly right: on that terrible day Adam and Eve did not surely die. There was a stay of execution. But Adam's curse was that after his life of toil on the earth he would become gardening mulch: you shall return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return (Gen 3:19). As Paul explains it in Romans 5, in Adam began the rule of death which spread from the one man to us all.

The three works of the devil. 2 - Murder

The second of the devil's works is murder. In John 8 Jesus calls him 'a murderer from the beginning'. Whatever he can do to promote the shedding of blood, he will. He loves violence, and he loves that we love violence. He stirs up hatred and strife even between people who have the best of intentions to do good.

In this work he is again successful: the fraternal struggles that are a feature of our recent history bear witness to his activity. Certainly greater enlightenment and civilisation has not brought greater peacefulness: but rather has meant the discovery of new means to kill. We have invented a technology of murder and a bureaucracy of killing upon which we in the suburban west depend for our security. Our fear of the murderous fanaticism of Islam is entirely disproportionate to the much more effective killing machine that is provided by the secular state.

This was the insight of that movie ‘A Few Good Men’. When Jack Nicholson's character the marine colonel sat in the dock and shouted 'you can't handle the truth' the truth he was speaking of was that the peace and comfort and clean hands of the west depends on the murderous dirty work of a few good men patrolling the frontiers away from our gaze. We would be appalled if we knew, so we look the other way. Unless they are prepared to accept guilt, the rest of us cannot imagine we are innocent.

In 1 John 3:12 we are directed again back to the earliest episodes of the human story. John says:

we must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous...

Cain, the first born son of humankind, was also the first murderer. From the beginning, he did the devil's work and shed his brother's innocent blood. The human story, in other words, is steeped in blood, the fruit of the rising tide of envy and hatred.

The three works of the devil: 1- Lies

There are indeed three works of the devil: lies, murder, death.

1. Lies.
In John 8:44 Jesus calls the devil 'a liar and the father of lies'. Not only is the devil himself a liar, but he perpetrates falsehoods: he deals in untruths. He is the master of deceptions. He is the proprieter of the lie.

His success lies not only in the inability we have of giving a straight account of ourselves, or to match reality to our words. He is able most of all to decieve us about God: to make us unable to
hear the truth about God when we encounter it; and to fill the world with false gods and false images of God. We exchange the truth of god for a lie; and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.

The beauty of the lie he told Eve and Adam was that it was not completely a lie. In fact, it was close to the truth. 'Did God really say' he whispered, 'You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?

There had been a command, true, and it had been about trees and eating. But Eve is able to put aside this suggestion: God in fact had said 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die'; only one tree was off limits. Far greater was their freedom than their restriction.

But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

God really doesn't have your best interests at heart, but is only protecting himself; God doesn't want you to have a power that you deserve but that only he has; God has lied about what will happen if you disobey him: these are profoundly attractive lies.

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.

Quiz on christology

Which of the following statements would you assent to? (you can choose more than one).

Jesus the Son of God:

1. is subordinate to the Father only in the economy of salvation
2. is subordinate to the Father both in the economy of salvation and in eternity
3. is partly human, partly divine
4. remains fully human in glory.

In your answer, give some scriptural justification...

(ps, this is not a question of my devising)

Little Gidding

Today we went on a journey to Little Gidding, the place that inspired TS Eliot's poem. In the early 17th century there was a religious community there, founded by the Farrar family.
It is a remote and out of the way place. We visited the tiny church, and then went next door to the tea room for refreshments. I hadn't brought any cash with me, but being a tourist site of a kind I expected that I could pay for tea by debit card.

We were welcomed at the door like lost relatives by the couple who are now wardens of the property, Rev Tony and Judith Hodgson. I asked if they took cards: they wouldn't hear of it, and gave us all tea and cakes and juice. We were treated to a slide show detailing the history of Little Gidding and the communities who have lived and prayed there.

Eliot only went there once, on a May afternoon in 1936:

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.

These words come now to life... I can see the rough road, and the pig-sty, the dull facade of the little church building, and the Farrar tombstone in front of it. Charles 1, the 'broken king' on the run from the Roundheads, sought solace Little Gidding in 1646 after coming here in more peaceful times.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Somehow, for once, tourism became pilgrimage.


http://www.littlegiddingchurch.org.uk/

Burn your boats!

The disciple simply burns his boats and goes ahead. He is called out, and has to forsake his old life in order that he may ‘exist’ in the strictest sense of the word. The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered. The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity (that is, in truth, into the absolute security and safety of the fellowship of Jesus), from a life that is observable and calculable (it is, in fact, quite incalculable) into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous (that is, into one which is necessary and calculable), out of the realm of the finite (which is in truth the infinite) into the realm of infinite possibilities (which is the one liberating reality).

A life of absolute insecurity: it is amazing how much we do to avoid this. Who wants to be a refugee?

Samson: a tricky case study

Then Samson called to the LORD and said, "O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged upon the Philistines for one of my two eyes." And Samson grasped the two middle pillars upon which the house rested, and he leaned his weight upon them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other. And Samson said, "Let me die with the Philistines." Then he bowed with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were in it. So the dead whom he slew at his death were more than those whom he had slain during his life.


A suicide bomber of a kind? Or a glorious martyr?

Augustine for his part writes that it was an exception ordered by God:
When God orders, and shows without ambiguity that he orders. no one will bring an accusation against obedience. Who will lay a charge against a loyal compliance?

A convenient case of the 'teleological suspension of the ethical', a la Abraham and Isaac?

Lacey Baldwin Smith gets it wrong...

In his book "Fools, Martyrs, Traitors - The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World", Lacey Baldwin Smith writes

Jesus the martyr, the man who elected to suffer and die, not the risen Christ, became the inspirational source for the philosophy of martyrdom that emerged during the next three centuries. p. 87

This strikes me as almost entirely misguided. It was in fact the resurrection - and ascension - that propelled martyrdom; or, at least, the resurrection as the vindication of the suffering and death. The martyrs did not merely die out of some imitation of Jesus' heroism, but out of a hope borne from his rising to life. They did not die merely out of admiration for him. They did not display courage only, but courage along with hope.

Perhaps the error here is: Jesus is not a martyr but a model for martyrs. Martyrs are not imititating Christ in his martyrdom, but rather becoming martyrs out of imitation of Christ.

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.

More Badiou

Differences, like instrumental tones, provide us with the recognizable univocity that makes up the melody of the True. p. 106

Badiou shows that Paul presents us with a schema of discourses. In Paul's thought world, both 'Jew' and 'Greek' operate as subjective dispositions or regimes of discourse: ways of thinking and speaking in others words. Jewish discourse is the discourse of the sign, the demand for miracles. On the other hand, the Greek discourse is the discourse of the logos, the demand for wisdom/rhetoric. The Jewish discourse is about election and exception; the Greek one is based on cosmic order and nature.

Paul's profound idea is that Jewish discourse and Greek discourse are the two aspects of the same figure of mastery. For the miraculous exception of the sign is only the 'minus-one', the point of incohernece which the cosmic totality requires in order to sustain itself...the Jew is in exception to the Greek. Neither of the two discourses can be universal, because each supposes the persistence of the other, ...and secondly, that the two discourses share the presupposition that the key to salvation is given to us within the universe, whether it be through the direct mastery of totality (Gk wisdom) or through mastery of the literal tradition and the deciphering of signs (JEwish ritualism and prophetism).

Humanity is riven in two, inevitably, on either conception.

The announcement of the gospel, that word about an event, is made without wisdom or depedence on sign (thought it is not the absolute destruction of either). The event of Christ's resurrection subverts both of these two discourses by not being dependent on either. It is the language of 'naked event', not of proof. Paul does not prove his gospel: he preaches it.

Paul sets up Christian discourse only by distinguising it further from a fourth possibility: the mystical 'discourse of non-discourse'. It is interesting to me that Badiou shows Paul repudiating this apophatic way, given its recent resurgence in those theologians interested in Derrida in particular.

Badiou on Paul

Alain Badiou's book 'Saint Paul - The Foundations of Universalism' is, like Zizek's work, a cheeky attempt to recover the genius of Paul for the 21st century.

In brief, his thesis is that Paul was able to combine the notion of truth with the subjectivity of the inward experience in a remarkable way:

...Paul himself teaches us that it is not the signs of power that count, nor exemplary lives, but what a conviction is capable of, here, now, and forever. p. 30

Badiou reads Paul's lettes as 'interventions' - that is, they are radically situational, militant documents, more Lenin than Marx, more Wittgenstein than Russell (more Luther than Calvin, I would add.) Paul is an 'antiphilosopher', propounding a 'speech of rupture, and writing ensues when necessary.' p. 31 His is the thought of event and conviction rather than Law or Logos.

Paul operates out of an inward, subjective but nonetheless actual truth, the truth of his conversion. This kind of truth has little time for outward customs, which a merely limp enactments incapable of really mirroring or capturing or expressing the inner conviction.

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).

William Cavanaugh: Torture and Eucharist

Cavanaugh's book is a lucid and fascinating application of theology to recent history. He successfully keeps the lines open between the experience of those in Chile under Pinochet's regime and his conceptual/theological discussion. One of the interesting things here is that he recognises that martyrdom, which relies so much on the public nature of the suffering and the memorialisation of the martyr in stone and ritual, is thwarted somewhat by the modern regime's ability to operate in secret; and even its ability to not NOT kill but only torture its victims. The old pattern of martyrdom is not allowed a staging by contemporary states.

A couple of quotes on the way:

The imitation of Christ is not reducible to some principle such as “love”, but is rather a highly skilled performance learned in a disciplined community of virtue by careful attention to the concrete contours of the Christian life and death as borne out by Jesus and the saints p. 62

What is needed instead is rather a more eschatological and more ecclesial notion of what is meant by dying for one’s faith…one which does not make sharp distinctions between the ‘religious’ dimension of confessing Jesus as Lord and the “political “ implications of such a confession… The ancient church understood the martyrs’ deaths as an inevitable consequence of imitating Jesus, who was put to death for inaugurating a new reign which stood in contrast to the powers and principalities of the world. p. 62

He futher writes:

A martyr is one who lives imaginatively as if death does not exist.

and:

The eschatological imagination sees that, although they presume to kill us, Christ has vanquished the powers of death once and for all. The eschatological imagination of martyrdom is not a vertical ascension to another place and time, a distant heaven; the movement instead brings a foretaste of heavenly space-time to earth. p. 65

Marilyn McCord Adams on redemptive suffering...

An interesting comment from Regius Prof Marilyn McCord Adams:

Christians can be martyrs and fill up the sufferings of Christ (Col 1:24) only to the extent that he cleanses them first. That is why continual repentance is not only necessary for the Christian's own reconciliation with Christ but also the best contribution he can make toward solving the problem of evil.

So, then, the work for Christians to do in the face of evil - in the first place - is to deal our own personal evils such that we may become effective witnesses to the judgment and redemption of God.

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?

Pacificism?

We have been reading Stanley Hauerwas and so inevitably we came upon the issue of pacificism, which he advocates strongly. In one of his toughest articles, Hauerwas argues that Just War theories are a failure of the Christian imagination, or of faith: that we fail to believe that God could bring about communities - and even countries - of peace on the earth, assuming that war is inevitable this side of Jesus' return. Assuming the inevitability of war dooms you to always pursue it and justify it.

The exegetical force of Hauerwas' argument (which he gets from Yoder of course) is that this is what Jesus himelf would have taught, and certainly what he would have enacted (notwithstanding that he doesn't call on soldiers in his audiences to leave the army but rather to be just soldiers...).

I am impressed but not convinced. I cannot see but that the kind of eschatological peace that Hauerwas hopes for is not given to nations in this way in this age, at least certainly not permanently. I cannot but see that we are left to make tragic calculations about the justice of the wars that might be pursued and that it is often our right calling to do so. We may so define just war so that it could never be pursued. But still we might retain the possibility that force may be needed to protect the innocent and pursue justice...

A evening with John Milbank

Speaking off the cuff, John Milbank gave a very interesting and compelling account of his own theological programme, or agenda. It was polemical and aggressive in tone, to say the least!

The great insight of Radical Orthodoxy is the claim that there is no such thing as the secular. Milbank pointed to the fading away of sociology as a discipline as vindication of his own book in particular. He mentioned Benedict XVI's Regendsberg address as evidence of his own influence! Which is to say, the claim that the Pope made that faith and reason integrated is the best, nay only defence against the arrogance of reason unfettered and the lunacy of pure fideism. What both he and the pope agree on is that there is the need for a 'mediating metaphysics'.

1. Achievements. Milbank claimed that RO is one of the most influential and significant movements in theology today. It claims to revision philosophy as well as theology and to bring theology back to the centre of thought as in the medieval university. He claimed that the movement had global reach.

2. Themes 1. RO is a critique of the secular. The secular is an illusion! This is to me is the great attraction of RO. It has real apologetic teeth at this point. There is no neutrality when it comes to metaphysics. It is all metaphysics - just good or bad metaphysics. In analytical philosophy we see not argument but a buried theological decision. Theology saves common sense!!
2. Postmodernism. RO is very positive about the destruction of modernism and wishes to 'embrace the postmodern flux'. The flux is however not a cause for despair AT ALL but a sign of divine plenitude. Once again, I find this a very attractive feature of RO.
3. RO rests on a peculiar and contested genealogy. This to me is the least interesting feature of the movement. Duns Scotus is cited as the point of departure - where subsequent Christianity went wrong. As a post-Reformation theologian, this leaves me a little sidelined!
He went on a little here to speak about the mode of theological writing. The point is, that if you stick to pure rational discourse, you will go wrong, says Milbank. He has a bit of a point here: Christian theology when it attempts a pure rationality fails to capture the richness of its own scriptures. I would cite 17th C. scholastic protestantism as guilty of this. Narrative and metaphor in fact SAVE the grand tradition, says JM. To strip them away is a fatal move.
4. Theological ontology... RO talks a great deal of participation in the divine being. This it has learnt from thinkers like Maximus, and this participation is expressed liturgically and especially eucharistically. This is unashamedly platonistic - Milbank says that Christianity is inherently Platonist.

3. Criticism. Milbank said there were no serious criticisms. Sure, he said, you get politically correct US rant and you get a British version which is nitpicking about his reading of various thinkers, but these are not serious.

4. Future directions. JM spoke here of a number of themes that he was interested in exploring: geopolitical theology, the idea of gift exchange and so on. He was quite unabashed about being a supercessionist! He also spoke of an educational programme: theologians should be soaked in the classics and in philosophy and literature. And he has an interest in parish life and so on. He claims an ecumenical reach beyond Anglicanism.

A vigorous question time followed.

John Milbank on Radical Orthodoxy After Seven Years

This was a lecture/debate I attended here in Oxford last night.

Milbank began by eschewing 'false humility'! And went from there making sweeping and hubristic claims for his own project! It was a tantalising performance.

A summary and reflection to come.

Martyr of the Month - Charles Godden

I cite the following from a Moore Theological College newsletter.
Recently, the Sydney Synod (rather gracelessly in my view) refused an opportunity to recognise Godden as a martyr on the grounds that he was not called upon to give up his faith!


OUR FORGOTTEN MARTYR
Remembering the death of Charles Christopher Godden
BY JOHN HARRIS
On 16th October, 1906, on a lonely jungle track high on the slopes of the brooding
volcano that is the island of Ambae, Charles Godden met his violent death, Moore
College’s first and only Martyr.

An orphaned country boy, Charles was converted at confirmation classes in Euroa,
Victoria. He immediately offered for the ministry. At 19, he entered Perry Hall,
Nathaniel Jones’s little college in Bendigo. In 1897, when Jones was appointed
Principal of Moore College, he brought Charles with him. He was ordained by the
Archbishop of Sydney in 1899 and appointed to St Michael’s Surry Hills.

A year later, the Bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson, spoke at St Michael’s of islanders
‘crying out for someone to teach them the gospel’. Charles instantly offered for
missionary service. He wrote prophetically, ‘There have already been six martyrs … I
shall therefore have the opportunity of glorifying God by my devotedness to the lost
sheep whom the Good Shepherd is seeking.’

After training on Norfolk Island, he was appointed to Ambae, part of the New
Hebrides but now the independent nation of Vanuatu. He reached the isolated little
Lolowai mission on the coast in April 1901 during the last days of ‘blackbirding’, the
infamous Queensland labour trade. Just 24 years old, he was the only missionary,
visiting coastal people by boat and venturing inland to jungle villages. He gained a
reputation for his enthusiasm for teaching the Bible, his medical skill, his efforts to
begin schooling for children and his devotion to the discipling of new converts.
In December 1905, Charles returned to marry Eva Dearin at St Michael’s Surry Hills.
His best man was David Knox, Broughton Knox’s father. Charles spent some of his
leave drafting an Ambae translation of Mark’s Gospel. In April 1906, the couple
arrived at Lolowai mission amidst a crowd of islanders with welcoming flowers.
In October a Christian family from a jungle village asked him to come to baptise new
converts. Lolowai people warned him not to go. Alameamea, a ‘blackbirded’ labourer
returned after being jailed and tortured in Queensland, had threatened to kill the first
white man to tread on his land. Charles, however, considered it his duty. He left
Lolowai on Monday 15th October, travelling down the coast by boat and walking up
steep jungle tracks.

After the baptisms, while walking back down, Alameamea shot him with a musket.
His companions fled. He fell to the ground and his assailant rushed out, striking him
in the neck with an axe. His friends returned, tearing up clothes to bind his wounds.
Carrying him down the mountain, they rowed him home along the coast. Just as
they reached Lolowai, Charles died of his wounds. His final words were: ‘Let there
be no fighting because of me. Let there be peace.’

His grave is at Lolowai. A stone cross in the jungle marks the place of his
martyrdom. A simple monument at a little church high up the volcano contains the
stones on which his blood fell. He has two memorials in Australia, one in St John’s
Euroa and another in the Moore College Chapel.

He was the first Australian missionary to die in Melanesia and one of the first
evangelicals to be martyred as a missionary anywhere in the world.

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.

Straining at gnats?

In the debate about sexuality a comment often heard from the more liberal side is that sexual matters ('sleeping arrangements') are a matter of very small importance compared to the really large issues of injustice and poverty.

The accusation from liberal quarters of the church is that conservatives are obsessed with sex, and that relative to bigger issues sex is unimportant. This is usually accompanied by something about how Jesus doesn't mention sex that much and is more concerned with greed and war etc etc.

But: sex IS important. It is such a crucial and personal feature of human life and identity; and it is such a yardstick for difference between the Christian community and the world around us, and always has been since the earliest days, not true? Sex is not merely a private matter (a Hauerwasian observation): any feminist knows this. (And actually, Christians knew it first).

And, concern for war and greed and sexual behaviour need not be mutually exclusive, surely? And, why is it the conservative side that is 'obsessed' and the liberal side not? Who keeps pushing the issue forward? Who makes an idol of sexual identity such that it trumps unity and biblical teaching?

I am interested not so much in the mud-slinging, as in the 'this is more important than this' argument. Granted, I think there is a critique to be made of an evangelical spirituality that is more concerned with swear-words and tax returns than about global poverty and mega death. This issue is perhaps: where does the ethics of individual personal everyday actions fit in with the so-called 'bigger' issues? And, does the practice of not-swearing, or at least, of keeping language holy (and the practice of chastity for the matter) actually form part of a larger whole?

How to talk right?

In our Hauerwas seminar today we spent a good deal of time reflecting on the Hauerwasian mode of discourse: polemical, violent (even), subversive, angular. Of course, to be studying this writer in the home of good manners (ie Oxford) amongst a people skilled in the art of not saying the truth is an interesting juxtaposition! Hauerwas's speech is justified in that he brings to light through dissonance the deeply embedded pagan assumptions of much Christian discourse in the West. The truth ought to be offered so that one may respond to it, if it is indeed the truth; and, the truth often comes through unpicking the assumptions that clump around its opposite.

The thing that saves Hauerwas from being just a naughty boy is that he has done his homework. Behind every verbal missile is a depth of thinking and reading, and a coherent and complex framework. It is thrilling that Christian speech can be so dynamic, and also alarmed that it can be so rude! The truth ought to be so divisive.

Where it goes wrong is that imitators of the Hauerwasian style (or imitators of other similarly aggressive and polemical Christian thinkers) imitate it as a style. There is the provocation of the prophet and then there is plain bad manners. The two are not the same; and just because something is done with no taste and complete bad manners does not make it true, or right; and certainly, the person who is merely rude can not call themselves persecuted when they are attacked.

Does this bother you? David Hicks in Guantanamo

David Hicks is an Australian suspected of involvement with the Taliban in Afganistan. He has been detained without trial or charge since 2002.

I have no doubt that he has some objectionable views and may have got up to some reprehensible activity: but the way in which this whole procedure has been carried out without the bounds of ordinary systems of justice bothers me a great deal.

Why has justice been so slow in coming? What is going on? Am I right to be concerned?

Some stirring words from Stan about preaching

" When was the last time you preached or heard a sermon on war? Furthermore, when was the last time you preached or heard a sermon on abortion? When was the last time you preached or heard a sermon on the kind of crae we ought to give to the ill? When was the last time you preached or heard a sermon on the political responsibilities of Christians? The problem is that we feel at a loss about how to make these kinds of matters part of the whole church. So, in effect, preaching betrays the church. I do not mean to put all the blame on preaching, but ministers do have opportunities to address moral issues that almost no one else in this society has - except for television. It is not much, but it is something. At least preachers can enliven a discourse that is not alive anywhere esle, and people are hungering to be led by people of courage." (Hauerwas Reader, p, 622)

I generally can't stand 'issue' sermons, because they are so much opinion and so little word of God. They are so prone to all the worst vices of preaching. But if we preach the scriptures, won't these matters arise ALL the time? Oh, for courageous inhabitants of the pulpit!

'Order' in Genesis 2 - 3

I am teaching a class in Moore's Introduction to the Bible.

This week we are looking at one of my favourite sections: Genesis 1-11.

But there is a strange comment in the notes about the order of creation and its reversal in the fall. That is, in Genesis 2 you have a hierarchy of man, woman, creature; in the fall the problem is the woman listens to the creature and the man listens to the woman; and then in judgment, the right order is restored as God addresses man, woman, creature. I have heard this preached in sermons, read it in books and heard it bandied about as evidence of the order and the sin which is at root the upsetting of this order.

Only: in Genesis 2 we don't EVER see order established in this way! In fact, the creatures are made it seems before them both... It is a curious logic indeed.