Martyr Stephen and the beauty of baby Moses

Why did matter that Moses was such a beautiful baby? In Acts 7:20 we read:

"At this time Moses was born; and he was beautiful in God's sight." (the wooden-ultra-conservative ESV)

or

"At that time Moses was born, and he was no ordinary child." (the taking-liberties-fluffy NIV)

or

"At this time Moses was born, and he was beautiful before God." (done-by-pack-of-liberal feminists NRSV)

The Greek word can mean 'handsome' or 'well-bred'. He is probably picking up Ex 2:2 which mentions that Moses was a 'fine child'.

But: an odd thing to pass on?

The Lord's Prayer

The disciple of Jesus has to refrain from worry, and pursue as a priority the kingdom of God. In other words, as Bonhoeffer puts it:

The Christian lives from the times of God, and not from his own idea of life.

This was the lesson of Abraham too. And it is the same attitude that Jesus himself taught his disciples, in the Lord’s Prayer. The prayer itself is an articulation of a subjectivity experienced in media res but also in the hope of eschatological deliverance. It is distinguished from the verbose Gentile prayers who try to demand divine notice by sheer volume of words (6:7). This prayer is a very different kind of speech-act. First, it addresses the one in heaven (6:9); which is to say, it addresses the ruler of all things as he sits on his throne. This is a prayer from one who has a limited view of things to a being who has a superior vantage point indeed. It is a prayer to a known rather than to an unknown divinity, it should be noted: this prayer proceeds on the basis of the prior revelation of God’s identity, on the basis of promises he has already spoken. He is can be addressed by his name because he is known. Second, the primary request of the prayer is that the Father would hallow his own name, and carry out his will ‘as in heaven also on earth’ ( 6:10). Clearly the (earthly) perspective of the prayer is one which observes that the divine will is not yet fulfilled, and the divine name not yet hallowed. The experience of the pray-er is that of not being able to see that God’s rule is everywhere enforced; but yet, there is a drilling down into the character of God as he has revealed himself that can only be named ‘faith’.

Rowan Williams on the early martyrs

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

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

Ricoeur recurrs

We had quite a deal of fun chewing over a Paul Ricoeur quote about history and fiction.

In his article he argues that the history and fiction intersect in the way they refer to the 'real' world.

Our ultimate interest when we do history is to enlarge our sphere of communication: that is, to encounter that which is different to us. But this requires an imaginative act, which is, to suspend your own conditions and desires and assumptions, in order to be communicated to.

'My contention...is that it is in this exchange between history and fiction and between their opposite referential claims that our historicity is brough to language.'

Abraham's Test and the Providence of Yhwh

Genesis 22:1-19 tells the story to which Israel looked back for the revelation of Yhwh Yireh - ‘Yhwh the provider’. It was the story of Yhwh’s trial (nissah) of Abraham, too. At the outset, a word comes from God that makes Abraham’s experience of God to this point baffling (22:1). He cannot see the pattern of the divine plan. He cannot make sense of this command according to some rational scheme; or according to some morality to which he imagines that God is subject like everyone else; or, by dint of some hermeneutic strategy lately learned, hear something other than what he has heard. He does not even begin to doubt his own sanity. There is the semblance of cruelty in the request, even: God reminds him that he, Abraham, loves his son (22:2).

With what attitude does Abraham set out on his journey? In the other pieces we have of his story, we have presented to us a fearful doubter. In Egypt he presents his wife as his sister; in the disastrous begetting of Ishmael, he is seen (with Sarai) as attempting to foreshorten the gap between the divine promise and its realization in his life. In those tests he stumbled; here now, he silently presses on towards the mountain. He cannot see what is ahead, but rather only possesses the promises of the God who called him. As he says to Isaac, ‘God himself will provide the sacrifice’. That is the perspective that to which he clings.

At the climax of the story, the angel stays Abraham’s hand; and the ram – a superior sacrifice? – is found caught in the thicket. This provision of God of course is not merely a result of his action as a supreme being – if it were, then this whole episode would certainly be an exercise in divine sadism of the hapless human subject. However: this is not the God that Abraham encounters here; he proceeds on the basis of the God who has previously revealed himself to him, and meets at his journey’s end the Yhwh Yireh. Abraham receives the provision of a ram as a demonstration of God’s determination to be the Lord of the covenant with his people in its concrete history.

The Temptations of Allberry...

Sam Allberry, maker of Oxford's finest Thai curries, considers temptation in James here and here.

Jesus on providence

Jesus’s own teaching on providence in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 6:25-34) is not a statement about the order of things as they are, but a bold declaration about coming of the kingdom of God.

He urges his hearers against anxiety about material provisions, but to be comforted. He asks them not worry about their ‘lives’. The birds are well-fed; the lilies are finely dressed. In both cases this happens without the labour of those who benefit. Yet: ‘[A]re you not much more valuable than they?’ (6:26) Jesus here highlights what has traditionally been called God’s ‘general’ providence in upholding even the smallest parts of the natural world. The fact of this provision for the natural world should prompt a reassurance of the ‘special’ providence of God for his people, and an end to running like the pagans after material securities.

And yet, the Sermon itself begins with recognition of the fraught conditions of lived experience for the people of God: mourning, persecution, being slandered and insulted, and so on (5:11-12). Whatever the providence of God means here it is not merely that his people will be well fed and beautifully clothed. There is no promise that consists in an earthly prosperity or security, which would be temporary in any case (Mt 6:19-21). The promise in which this faith in providence rests is a promise that the kingdom of God will bring vindication – that is the implication of the blesseds (Mt 5:1-12).

There is an inescapable future-sense in this view of providence. He recognizes that the experience of life as it is – and especially for the people of God – is not of itself reassuring without reference to the future fulfillment of the divine promises. The disciple of Jesus has to refrain from worry, and pursue as a priority the kingdom of God. In other words, as Bonhoeffer puts it:
The Christian lives from the times of God, and not from his own idea of life

The Beauty of the Infinite: and Christian rhetoric

I received my copy of David Bentley Hart's dazzling The Beauty of the Infinite yesterday... It begins by setting the question:

'Is the beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism inevitably appeals, and upon which it depends, theologically defensible?'

That is a great question, and it coincides with some of my interest in describing and defending the power of scripture . It's a good question especially given the eschewal of power rhetorics by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1-3.

Hart closes his book with a chapter entitled 'The Gift of Martyrs', and has this to say:

'...theology has no choice but to cling to its own peculiar practice of persuasion, in order to resist the temptations of power (and in a history governed by sin, these temptations inhabit every moment); Christianity can only return to its understanding of peace, its unique style of rhetoirc, as the sole source of accord; it must always obey the form of Christ, its persuasion must always assume the shape of the gift he is, it must practice its rhetoric under the only aspect it may wear if it is indeed Christian at all: martyrdom'. (p. 441)

This is salutary for evangelists and apologists, isn't it?

Calvin and God's anger

Calvin in the Institutes:-

...whenever we hear that God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion in him, but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our own human experience; because God, whenever he is exercising judgment, exhibits the appearance of one kindled and angered. (I.xvii.13)

Huge hermeneutical implications here... I know what he is trying to protect, but does he make Scripture almost deceitful? Of course, when we speak of God we need to qualify the application of human language to him... but is this accomodation gone too far?

Foucault and pastoral power

A friend and I were having one of those late night discussions - this was about the use of power by pastors in a manipulative way to have control over people. We weren't talking about a context of any actual abuse or sexual seduction - though these things happen too. Rather, for some of us pastors, just the thrill of having the keys to someone's life is extremely hard to let go of. Noticeably, people without strong father figures are extremely vulnerable to this kind of relationship - they tend to hand over control of themselves to a strong male figure, and a pastor often fits the bill..


It struck me that, of all people, Michel Foucault had been most insightful at this point. Foucault invented the term “pastoral power” to describe what he saw as an extremely influential view of government which it inherited from Christianity. This very special form of power is a concern for the salvation of the individual, and seeks to care for the individual; it is not merely a form of power that commands, but is also prepared to sacrifice itself (as opposed to, say, royal power); and it demands that people reveal their innermost secrets and so is therefore is linked with the production of truth – the truth of the individual.[1] In its transferral to use outside ecclesiastical institutions, the concern for salvation has become this worldly and therefore taken up in terms of (to list some examples) health, well-being, security, wealth and sanity. The function of truth-production led to the proliferation of the human sciences, whether as a population or as an individual.

Why do we demand that people confess to us? Or, press them to tell us the details of their inner lives? Is it not because it is exhilarating to have that kind of power over someone? At least, that was my temptation in pastoral ministry...

Reflections anyone?


[1] Foucault, “The Subject and Power.” p.333-4

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

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

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

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

Ricoeur

"Could we not say that by opening us to the different, history opens us to the possible, while fiction, by opening us to the unreal, brings us back to the essential?"

What could he mean?

Narrative Logic: sequence vs pattern

Temptation is part of the ‘narrative logic’ of martyrdom.

What do I mean by 'narrative logic'? ‘Narrative logic’ indicates the ‘patterns of order which are proper to story rather than to discursive reasoning’ Richard B. Hays, "The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11" (Thesis (Ph. D.), Scholars Press, Emory University, 1981., 1983), p. 223

Stories are composed of actions and events order to one another by reference to time. To view the story as a unity, each subsequent event must be intelligible in relation to what preceded it. It can be surprising; or the intelligibility may not be obvious immediately; but the events must show some kind of fitness. Ricoeur’s way of putting this is to say that narrative conclusions must be, rather than deducible, acceptable. The follow a ‘particular directedness’ that propels them forward to a conclusion – though of course we need to follow it to the conclusion because it is only from that point of view that we can ultimately judge the acceptability of the sequence. Paul Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," Semeia no 13 1978 (1978): p. 182

That is not to say that there isn’t a ‘logic’ to the way stories proceed, of course. Rather, it is almost a truism to say that successful narratives do possess an explanatory power that resonates – profoundly so – with the human experience of events.

Ricoeur goes on to develop his analysis of the logic of narratives by claiming that all narratives combine two aspects, one of which is chronological and one of which is non-chronological. The first he calls the ‘episodic dimension’, by which he means to indicate the way in which narratives throw up the question of ‘and then’? – that is, ‘what happened next’? Simultaneously, however, telling a story is also about construing ‘significant wholes out of scattered events’, attempting to grasp the series of events as a unity – its ‘configurational dimension’, as Ricoeur labels it. Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," p. 183-4 Ricoeur observes then that narratives combine both sequence and pattern – though, it must be said that these two elements exist somewhat in tension with one another:

‘this structure is so paradoxical that every narrative may be seen as a competition between its episodic and its configurational dimensions, between its sequence and its pattern.’

The Joy of Providence

'Belief in God's providence is the practical recognition that things are as we have said. [Barth has just been describing providence as God's caring co-existence with his creatures] It is the joy of the confidence and the willingness of the obedience grounded in this reality and its perception. In the belief in providence the creature understands the Creator as the One who has associated Himself with it in faithfulness and constancy as this sovereign and living Lord, to precede, accompany and follow it, preserving, co-operating and overruling, in all that it does and all that happens to it. And in the belief in providence the creature understands itself as what it is in relation to its Creator, namely, as upheld, determined and govened in its whole existence in the world by the fact that Creator precedes it every step of the way in living sovereignty, so that it has only to follow...' Church Dogmatics, III.3.14

But what of the uncertainty of our experience? Our feeling of God-forsakeness (check the Psalms sometime!). Ultimately, as Barth will argue, the Christian belief in providence is belief in Christ. That makes all the difference...

Sermon online

Listen to my sermon on Jesus and the devil here

The Book of YOU

Over and my other blog, my 'book' has been bubbling away. It has been a very interesting journey - I feel torn a little between letting the segments sit for a while and accumulate comments, or keeping the posts coming (which keeps it fresh)... Happy for your feedback of course. I'd love to know what other topics might be worth posting on. I have just started posting on GENDER, and I am planning one on talking and one on friendship. I also wondered about time. And I should finish with an essay about Jesus's humanity.

Here is a list of the chapters entered here so far. Please feel free to go back and reopen some discussions: I don't consider them closed.

dreams
possessions
death
life
parents
evil
touch
body
where to?

The possibility of not submitting

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

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

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

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

The Execution - a poem

The Execution

"It's always trickier
in execution"

said

Saddam -

past tense -

past limp:

just...

passed.

With thanks (or, blame?) to Tim Pfennigwerth...

Key Posts from the Past

Here is I hope a useful selection of past posts. I have chosen according to those that most sparked discussion, rather than those I think that most reflect my interests or emphases in this blog.


imitating christ
sacraments
enhypostasis/anhypostasis
the Bible, and Theology
Stanley Hauerwas
Bernd Wannenwetsch on sex and the trinity
mission and theology
rethinking the term 'propositional'
doctrine - a rationale
the great evangelical bible swindle
kataangelism
if christian schools were really christian...?
von balthasar and impassability
at the crossroads
the famous smacking discussion!
was bonhoeffer a martyr?
gurus and growing up
violence: what is it?
straining at gnats
david hicks: does this bother you?
power of scripture

Oliver O'Donovan on 'Good News for Gay Christians'

Here is Oliver O'Donovan's last in his series on contemporary issues.

It asks a great question: in what sense is the gospel good news for gay christians?

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...