Giddens on Risk

Anthony Giddens points out that trust is essential for 'an early sense of ontological security'...it is 'basic to a 'protective cocoon' which stands guard over the self in its dealings with everyday reality. Trouble is, we live in a 'risk culture'. Which is to say, the concept of risk has become fundamental to the way we organise the social world:

Under conditions of modernity, the future is continually drawn into the present by means of the reflexive organisation of knowledge environments (p. 4, Modernity and Self-Identity)

Not that life is now more risky than it was, but that the parameters of risk have changed: so that the modern world is beset by an apocalypticism unknown to the past. Modernity has produced security, and a better means of calculating risk, but it has also brought nuclear weapons and environmental degradation. What do we do with this sense of doom then? Well -

If most successfully bracket out such possibilities and get on with their day-to-day activities, this is no doubt because they assess the actual element of risk involved as very small. But it is also because the risks in question are given over to fate - one aspect of the return of fortuna in late modernity... (p. 183)

He continues:

There is a good deal of evidence to indicate that unconscious fears of an 'ending to everything' are prevalent among many sectors of the population, and appear with particular clarity in the fantasies and dreams of children.

Safety and the City

In the Scriptures, the promise of protection is necessary foil to the promise of provision. As soon as man steps outside the Garden, he is unsafe. Abel was not safe from the jealousy of his brother; Cain in his turn was not safe from the possibility of vengeance as a wanderer on the earth and needed protection. It is this wandering nomad, in fear for his life because of his own bloodguilt, who becomes the founder of the city of Enoch, named after his son (Gen 4:17). Though civilization shows the evidence of human flourishing – the beginnings of farming and tool-making and music – it is also begun out of fear of reprisal. The city is as much fortress as it is forum. Far from bringing anarchy, the turn of humankind away from God (and the revelation of their wickedness, 6:5) results in a collaboration amongst human beings that is ambivalent. The mission of mankind to fill the earth, renewed in 5:1, is hampered by the rather sullen insistence of people that they ought to collect together for fear of the murderous intentions of other beings.

Yet, it is too simplistic to read the Tower of Babel as merely a tale of pride gone wrong. The desire which drives the massive collective exercise of its construction (using bricks!) is not merely arrogance. The proposed city is to have a ‘tower with its top in the heavens’, granting a heavenly perspective on the earth; and it will be the occasion of the making of name for themselves (Gen 11:4). But there is also a note of fear in the motivation given: ‘otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’. What was so unappealing about being scattered in this way?

Byron starts on The Beauty of the Infinite: and Christian rhetoric

Byron has begun his reading of David B Hart's book!

Here is my comment on a similar passage:

The Beauty of the Infinite: and Christian rhetoric

Participating in Seminars: a guide

I sit in and participate in several academic seminars with an international and ecumenical membership, both formal and informal in nature. Sometimes they work really well as delightful mutual learning experiences; sometimes of course they don't. I notice that sometimes I say something (or someone else does) and it doesn't actually advance the discussion, it just confuses it, or sidetracks it, or diverts it. So, I have been thinking recently: what is the most 'helpful' way to contribute to one of these seminars? So, in the spirit of contemporary knowledge: a list. (An important note: I find myself breaking these all over the place!)

1. Do read the text under consideration before you come. Do have a couple of things you might raise as interesting points for discussion.

2. Be brief-ish: keep your comments to a sentence or two. Don't dominate. Advance the discussion rather than colonise it.

3. Be clear, or strive for clarity, rather than waffle till something intelligible arrives.

4. Be opinionated, please; but don't rant or preach. And try to say new things (for you) rather than return to the same criticism or the same author you trotted out last week - try to expand your range of comments.

5. Refer to the text in question as much as you can: this allows everyone a toe-hold in the discussion.

6. Try to understand before you criticise - it is a really big temptation to want to critique first.

7. Don't repeat yourself if people don't agree with you.

8. Ask others to clarify what they have just said, and do challenge it when necessary. Promote good communal listening practices.

9. Try to put emotions aside, and be ready to apologise for words out of turn.

10. Humour can increase the groups enjoyment of the subject: but use it sparingly.

11. Hang around after class and get to know people - increased trust increases the possibilities available to the class.

12. Bring snacks.

13. Change the subject if you feel it lagging, but not prematurely.

14. Anecdotes are almost always a waste of everyone's time. Think about it, then decide against. (I can't help myself...)


Any others?

PS - the seminars I am attending at the moment are very enjoyable, and I think it is partly because of observation of most if not all of these suggestions by the members!

Human Unity Otherwise Described...

As the NT talks about the people of God, it describes them as united in the basic quality of their existence: there is one Lord, one Faith, one baptism, one God and father of all (so Eph 4:2-5). There is not a need for the dissolving of cultural and personal differences – because there is a unity founded on something far deeper. Galatians 3:26 should not be over-read in this connection. As Bernd Wannenwetsch puts it:

The contrasting pairs Jew-Greek, man-woman, freeman-slave, listed in Galatians 3:26ff represented – and represent still – fundamental differences, ethnic and religious, sexual and economic…the intention was not to abolish these antinomies in general. They are to be set aside in a quite precise sense: the political one.[1]

However, the experience of transformed relationships and unity in the church’s life could not leave untouched what being Jew or Greek, man or woman, freeman or slave meant for life outside the church. Wannenwetsch continues:

God’s Spirit, which rules the ekklesia, relativises the ties with all the different political, economic, and ethnic systems which are determined by another spirit, the spirit of self-preservation.[2]

The point of Paul’s body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 is that human difference and distinction are not obliterated in Christ but brought together by the Spirit and found complementary. Conformity is to be found in imitation of Christ (1 Cor 11:1). The futility of Gentile living is to be abandoned (1 Cor 6:12ff): together the body finds a unity of purpose in living in a way which pleases God, keeping unity and peace with the other members of the body.

[1] Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens p.136-7.
[2] Ibid. p. 142

Review published in Studies in Christian Ethics

My review of -

Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). xvii + 335 pp. £26 (hb), ISBN 0–231–12986–6.

has been published in Studies of Christian Ethics 20.1 (2007) p. 125f.

More Globalisation

Globalisation may be interpreted as a secular western liberal adaptation of a Christian vision. The linchpin of globalisation is a liberal view of market economies, so that trade barriers are minimized if not removed (as they were between Australia and the USA in 2004-5). Free trade can have the positive effect in small economies of breaking down the wealth and power of oligarchies in favour of the majority; which has the apparent effect of advancing western liberal values.

This of course worked in Eastern Europe, where religious life had been by and large suppressed; but has had limited success in the Islamic world. It was relatively easy to dazzle the citizens of the gray cities of the communist bloc with consumer goods and so to turn them against their governments. As President George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration address revealed, the emancipatory master narrative of freedom is also being applied globally (and, ironically, by force if necessary). Globalisation means, in reality, the universal application of liberal values. Human fraternity – a secular catholicity – will be achieved in the end because Western culture is assumed to be the universal – or, at least, the universally desired – civilization. This is a soteriology without an eschatology: in other words, the ‘end of history’ is to be proclaimed from within history. In other words, what we may readily observe with secular western liberalism is a secular form of post-millennialism.

Calvin - from the Nursing Mothers' Association

John Calvin, commenting on Gen 2 writes:

". . .the Lord does not in vain prepare nutriment for children in their mothers' bosoms, before they are born. But those on whom he confers the honor of mothers, he, in this way, constitutes nurses; and they who deem it a hardship to nourish their own offspring, break, as far as they are able, the sacred bond of nature. If disease, or anything of that kind, is the hindrance, they have a just excuse; but for mothers voluntarily, and for their own pleasure, to avoid the trouble of nursing, and thus to make themselves only half-mothers, is a shameful corruption."

Interesting theological/ethical method here: he takes a feature of women's bodily nature and derives an ethical imperative from that alone... hmm. What other imperatives could you derive from the same method?

Globalisation - is God in it? How?

Described as the ‘emerging and homogenizing culture that tends to impact individuals and societies in all parts of the world,’[1] there is little dispute over that fact that globalisation is occurring – just as to whether it is desirable or not. ‘Globalisation’ describes, for example, the product of the felt ‘shrinking’ of the world as a result of developments in technology, the increased ability of multi-national corporations to reach every corner of the earth with their products, and the mass migration and intermingling of people groups in megacities. In the opinion of Max L. Stackhouse ‘the larger reality is that the whole world is becoming one place, an inclusive field of spaces, peoples and activities.’[2] Positive accounts of globalisation view it as producing a feeling that the world is becoming unified – it is available to be explored and experienced quickly and without much effort. The freeing of markets allows for consumers and sellers to transcend national boundaries. ‘God is in globalisation’, writes Stackhouse;[3] in fact, he suggests that it is a side effect of the missionary genius of Christianity. Could it be that the epoch of globalisation represents a gathering of the nations in unity on a scale about which the Bible only prophesies? Is this finally a genuine achievement of human fraternity and catholicity - a salvation of humanity, perhaps?


[1] Kurien, “Globalization: An Economist's Perspective,” p. 197.
[2] Max L. Stackhouse, “Public Theology and Political Economy in the Globalising Era,” in Public Theology for the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of Duncan B. Forrester, ed. Duncan B. Forrester, William Storrar, and Andrew Morton (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2004), p. 179.
[3] Ibid. I mean of course he is if you believe in providence: but, is it a blessing or a curse? A Babel or a Pentecost?

Prestige on Marcion

GL Prestige's great old book Fathers and Heretics (or 'Daddies and Baddies' as it used to be called by theological students) throws up much interesting material on the making of Christian doctrine in the crucible of heresy. On Marcion he writes:

...if the physical world, grounded in matter, were really the creation of a divine being, and not the self-subsistent organ of a mechanical fate, the pagan mind shrank from attritbutig so imperfect a structure to the creative hand of perfection; it must have been created either by some lower angel, far removed from the almighty Father, or else by the dialbolic enemy; the world was either a mistake or an affront. In contrast with all such speculations, the Christian Gospel offered a message of salvation from the one God and Father of mankind, who, in spite of Marcion's denial, was the direct Creator of the universe, and who, instead of numerous degenerating emaninations or a multiplicity of defective local gods and goddesses, had one single divine Son or Image as the full expression of His being throughout eternity, and the complete revelation of His deity in terms of human life. This was a very different idea of God from anything propounded in the speculations of the highest paganism. It was clear and definite where they were vague; it was rooted in history, while they were floating in imaginitive abstraction. While they rejected the world, it accepted the world and provided for the fulfilment of its purpose even in teh act of its transformation into new heavens and a new earth... p. 37

The Christian Bible then is directly a result of Christian theology: the decision to include the OT was in part necessitated by who the Christian gospel said that God himself was. The Bible does not merely generate Christian theology; it reflects it. Well: that's not quite right, or at least, not quite the full story. But certainly, the rootedness of the gospel in salvation-history is very early on discovered to be non-negotiable; and so: yes, we read the OT as Christian scripture.

Is postmoderism passe?

While giving my lecture on the clarity of scripture on Wednesday, a man asked me: 'is the whole postmodernism thing now old-hat? Can we now say we have moved on?'

I found it a hard question to answer - partly because any of those zeitgeist questions are impossible to give an answer to I guess. As a lay person, I think his frustration was with popular pomo: pomo as it has been filtered down through newspapers and education departments and so on. Derrida for dummies...

I guess also that the term postmodernism is itself used to describe a variety of things: from a high-blown francophone post-Nietzchean linguistic turn to the fact that Pulp Fiction has several narratives in a non-linear fashion. It is a style as well as a philosophy.

So: how should I have answered his question?

One Faith – JI Packer and Thomas C. Oden

Evangelicals seem to be great squabblers. They divide over all sorts of issues: from creationism to the millennium and all the bits in between, it seems. The word “evangelical” itself seems particularly rubbery, implying “fundamentalism” to some, “charismatic” to others, referring to a liturgical style at one point or to a right-wing social programme at another. It can appear that to be an evangelical is to live in a lonely world. What I mean is: there just aren’t that many amillennial paedobaptist four-point Calvinist theistic-evolutionist episcopalian congregationalist non-charismatic complementarians out there...[and if you are out there, could you please give me a call?]

The thesis of One Faith-the Evangelical Consensus by J.I. Packer and Thomas C. Oden is that a comparison of statements of faith from across the evangelical world in fact reveals a remarkable consensus of belief. The evangelical movement, much derided in some quarters as an aberration or a dinosaur, is in fact a growing cohesive global entity. The creeds compared show that this unity is founded on an orthodox doctrine of God in three persons, and on the evangelical distinctives of the authority of scripture, the necessity of the atoning blood of Christ for the forgiveness of sins, justification by grace through faith alone, the work of the holy spirit in conversion and the hope of Christ’s return.

After an interesting introduction, the bulk of the book is a list of creeds garnered from evangelical organizations world-wide and compared on various topics. It isn’t exactly a scintillating read, I have to say, and never quite rises to the dizzying heights its editors promise. The worth of the book is more as a reference with an essay attached. Disappointingly, while doctrinal statements from Canada, Belgium, Japan and South America are used, not one Australian statement made it into the lists. Left off again!

The listing of the extracts from the statements offers, however, heart-warming evidence that evangelicalism is a vibrant world-wide movement with a remarkable consensus of belief shared by its adherents - despite denominational, national, linguistic and other differences. Our theological views cannot be dismissed as eccentric, novel or aberrant; in fact, they are biblically and historically grounded and intellectually robust.

The section on “the People of God” reveals very little on church order and sacraments – it is characteristic of evangelicalism that matters ecclesiological are held to be second-order. The evidence presented in this book proves that evangelicals have always sought to work across denominational boundaries and are still seeking to do so without waiting for merely bureaucratic solutions. Here is indeed a true ecumenism. I was encouraged to remember that true agreement on the great truths of the faith is widespread.

However, I wonder whether the book concealed some of the deep differences among evangelicals, too. While the section on scripture contained some very strong affirmations of the authority and inerrancy of the Bible it is clear that this is worked out in vastly different ways among people who would own the name “evangelical”. Evangelical scholars need to continue to work hard at clarifying their doctrine of scripture. The section on “the Last Things”, also papered over some very wide cracks...

Les Murray's Collected Poems

[Yes, English readers: there are Australian poets who write about subjects other than sport...]

It's a body-prayer, a shower: you're
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)

I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety.

I found at first, reading Murray, that his work was prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work: the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion. Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the languauge the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronize the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.

…It's called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low…(p.480)

When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)

He speaks the accent of the Aussie outsider, the "battler" of popular legend. For example, he rails against the Australian tendency to savage well-known females like Hanson, Lawrence, Chamberlain and Kernot:

In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press
At any given moment

With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space. (p.466)

This political no-woman's land is shared by the dirt farmers and the aborigines, adrift from privilege and the language of "rights". One of Murray's pet hates is the way in which (white) academics and bureaucrats have turned the language of Aboriginal rights against country people, as if their rural cousins are to blame for their bad conscience. The perhaps surprising affinity between rural whites and their aboriginal neighbours he captures in an early poem entitled "Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit":
Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: "Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can" (p.432).

Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbringing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:

Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)

He writes in his collection of prose The Quality of Sprawl that "in the Free Church service of my childhood, with its emphasis on the sermon, there wasn't enough receptive silence; there was no sense of ceremony deepened to the point where human activity briefly fell away and God was present." It is this "presence" that Murray tries to capture in his poetry. After all, as he writes in "Poetry and Religion" (p.265), "Religions are poems." What he means is that true religion is a "dreaming", an act of the imagination. Just as you can't pray a lie, so "you can't poe one either." God is "the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned."

It is this "presence" which fills Murray's luminescent nature poetry. The series of animal poems, entitled sure enough "Presence: Translations from the Natural World" (p.355-378), serve to illustrate. "Bat's Ultrasound" ends with this remarkable coda:

Ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
Ere your raw row) we air our array,
Err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
Our eerie u our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (p.355)

Murray's eye captures the glint of God in the creation in a way that Gerard Manley Hopkins did a century ago; and as with Hopkins, the beauty and playfulness of his language mirrors what he sees in nature. It is a sublime tuning of the gift of language to the divine key. Murray's ear is also "rare". I am reminded in these poems of the playful and yet awe-some animal poems of the Bible, whose point is to draw glory to the creator from contemplation of the creatures: Job 38-39 and Psalm 104.

Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the "religion" of Australia. He recognizes that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for "national and communal identity". The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:

In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)

Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. He urges Australian Christians not to "be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we've agreed to take part in after all" (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).

There is of course a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness. Read his poetry alongside the excellent biography by Sydney Anglican Peter Alexander.

Global Warming hits Oxford

Rahner comments on verbal inspiration

I was intrigued to find sections in Rahner's book Foundations which support the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture as doctrines of the Catholic church.

Rahner makes a telling comment I think about Protestant doctrines of scripture:

...the old Reformation doctrine of scripture alone, which was necessarily and intrinsically connected with the notion of a verbal inspiration of scripture, is untenable from a historical point of view, nor is it taught any longer in contemporary Evangelical (ie Lutheran) theology...Only when scripture is understood as the one and only product which comes immediately from God independently of any historical and very differentiated process of becoming can I ascribe to scripure an authority which makes it completely independent of the living testimony of the church. But basically, one cannot abandon the principle of an absolute verbal inspiration of scripture, as in fact has happened, and still maintain the principle of scripture alone in the sense which it had in the time of the Reformation.... p. 362

I think this is quite perceptive. Verbal inspiration is quite a costly doctrine to jettison if you are trying to hold to a principle of scripture alone...

Rahner on Sola Fide

Rahner makes a virtuoso attempt to outline a Catholic ecclesiology that has a place for the Reformation as a movement within Catholicism. Interestingly, he goes to the Reformation solas and tries to show how, in fact, these were and are true Catholic teachings.

About Sola Fide he says:

'...the act of response to God's grace which alone gives salvation is not a work, but rather, in Pauline terms, it is faith. The Catholic doctrine is that this faith is not merely a dogmatic theory, that this faith must be based interiorly on a hope in the pure grace of God, and that this faith must be interiorly illuminated and fulfilled by what Holy Scripture calls love, calls justifying and sanctifying love. Basically an Evangelical Christian cannot raise any objections against this...' p. 361

Well, wait a minute! Perhaps not an objection, more a quibble: I do think he has clarified helpfully that faith does not equal 'some knowledge believed' (which causes such great confusion). I just don't understand what love is doing there: what can he possibly mean by this love that justifies/sanctifies? What texts is he refering to? Isn't this just a way of sneaking works back in there (in a semi-Pelagian move)?

Of course the Catholic church may decide it agreed with the Reformation all along on this, but unless it becomes the 'article on which the church stands or falls' (Luther), there is still a large difference.

Rahner on Church...

We are looking at Rahner as the counterpoint to Calvin on the church. Here's what he has to say:

If, then, there are very many Christians today who basically regard the different ecclesial communities as equally legitimate churches, this relativistic opinion in ecclesiology presupposes either that the church of Jesus Christ as he willed it does not exist at all, or that in spite of divisions among Christians it exists to such an extent that it does not really have to be brought about. Basically, then, all ecumenical efforts and endeavours for a single church would be superfluous to begin with, or ecumenical endeavours only strive for an additional unity which ultimatley would have nothing to do with the essential unity of the church which already exists. Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 353-4

To which I say, 'well, yes...!' If by unity, he means a kind of organisational or heirarchical unity, which is no unity at all unless there is a single mindedness of course...

A latent rationalism?

Paul Jewett writes:

Though essential to the Protestant view, the doctirne of the perspicuity of Scripture runs the risk of fostering an exegetical methodology that conceals a latent rationalism. It may be assumed that because of its intrinsic clarity, Scripture can be understood by anyone possessed of native intelligence. At one level, of course, this is true. One can know Scripture, since it is a human book, "from a human point of view", even as one can know Christ "from a human point of view" ... But though it is fully human, Scripture is not merely human. It rather bears witness to the divine majesty of him who addresses us in it, which is to say that its meaning is not simply at the disposal of our native intelligence. God, Creation & Revelation, p. 148

This latent rationalism is not always avoided, alas! But I would like to develop his christological analogy somewhat: Scripture is fully human but not merely human, yes; and this means that the human aspect of it is not somehow short-circuited in the processs of revelation. It is not that our rational processes are somehow denied as we read, or that these rational processes are over-ridden by some other more spiritual method, or insight. It is in, and through, this very human act of reading human words that the process of divine revelation takes place and the Spirit works!

So: it may be even and especially be at the scholar's desk that the Holy Spirit works to reveal Christ!

Martyrs and Scripture

Trust Calvin to tip me the wink that the clarity of scripture is a doctrine confirmed by the witness of the martyrs:

Now with what assurance ought we to enlist under that doctrine which we see confirmed and attested by the blood of so many holy men! They, having once received it, did not hesitate, courageously and intrepidly, and even with great eagerness, to suffer death for it. Should we not accept with sure and unshaken conviction what has been handed on to us with such a pledge? It is no moderate approbation of Scripture that it has been sealed by the blood of so many witnesses, especially when we reflect that they died to render testimony to the faith; not with fanatic excess (as erring spirits sometimes accustomed to do) but with a firm and constant, yet sober, zeal toward God... (Inst. I.viii.13)

Of course, this testimony is not sufficient to establish the authority and the clarity of scripture. But it is certainly a necessary condition of it... It is interesting to note how soaked with scripture the early accounts of the deaths of the martyrs are; and how little (by contrast) some ecclesial conception appears. This is even true of Ignatius of Antioch, strangely! Notice too how the mode of death - not in fanatic excess but in sober zeal - figures here. Of course, he has an eye to various Radical Reformation movements here....

'Do you understand what you are reading'

In Acts 8, Philip wanders off down a wilderness road away from Jerusalem. There he meets an Ethiopian eunuch, an important public official under Queen Candace. Here is obviously a man of no small authority and intelligence. What is more, he is devout, having come up to Jerusalem to worship such as he could given his physical condition. Here is a man with the ability and the hunger to know God. Seated in his chariot, we find him catching up on his reading of the prophet Isaiah.
What is not in question is the significance and authority of the scriptures: the eunuch knows already that Bible study is indispensible. His problem is not with the authority of scripture. His problem is with the clarity of scripture.


Philip, overhearing him reading from this book, asked him a great question:

Do you understand what you are reading?

The reply comes:

How can I, unless someone guides me?

And with that, Philip is invited to explain the scripture and its fulfilment in the good news of Jesus.

Now, this text has been used a model for the necessity of authorised interpretation of the scriptures. So Jaroslav Pelikan:

...if sola scripture was not enough for all these devoted readers of OT scripture without th enormative interpretation that was provdied by the apostolic witness, does the written codification that apostolic witness, in turn, in the books of the NT by itself render obsolete the Ethiopian's question, "How can I understand, unless someone instructs me?" Or does the history of the church and of its controversies raise anew the Apostle Philip's question ... It is the consensus of Orthodox and Catholic teaching that the continuing apostolic witness of the church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as tis has been set forth in tradition, liturgy and creed, performs the same function for the iterpretation of the "Scripture" (now consisting of both the Old and New Testament) as it did for the "Scripture" when this consisted of only the OT... (Acts, p.116)

But this misses I think the point of the text itself entirely - which is not that there always needs to be an authorised interpreter of the written word, but rather that the gospel of Christ Jesus provides the hermeneutic key that clarifies the Scriptures. Under Pelikan's construal the problem is only displaced. Note the effect of this encounter: the Ethiopian is converted and gets baptised. This clarity is not a matter of quibbling over a text: this encounter actually results in the spiritual transformation of the reader.

Actually, also: he discovers not the meaning of the text so much as how the text describes Jesus Christ... the focus is shifted from the text to Christ.

Martin Luther on Changing Nappies in Faith

I knew there had to be a theology of changing nappies. Martin Luther - probably the first theologian in the history of the church to have changed nappies (is this true?) - wrote this:

Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason... , takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, "Alas, must I rock the baby, change its nappies, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores... ?

What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or change its nappies, or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labor, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight...

God, with all his angels and creatures is smiling--not because the father is changing nappies, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.

Aahh yes. I did three of these in 20 minutes not long ago, all in faith. (BTW: for 'natural reason' read: it stinks! But notice: it is not about giving the father hat-tips for doing domestic tasks.)

Brief Sydney Lives

OK, sorry to alienate my non-OZ readers (again), but here's an idea for a book I will never write (another one).

Its title is Brief Sydney Lives. It follows in the tradition of a book from the 17th century called Aubrey's Brief Lives. The idea is to write a brief - 500 words - pen portrait of the colourful characters from Sydney's history; and to write them with extreme prejudice and a great deal of wit and zest. The selections are to be eccentric, the writing one-eyed and biased. That is to say, this is not wikipedia we are writing now!

Who would qualify? Well, the key thing is they have to be a SYDNEY person. So, former PM Gough Whitlam in my opinion would not qualify, because his chief impact was on a national level. Likewise, Don Bradman, our most famous cricketer, who spent most of his career in South Australia would not qualify. But Victor Trumper would...

So would:

Roger Rogerson
Bea Miles
Arthur Stace
John Macarthur
Elizabeth Macarthur
William Bligh
Patrick White
Brett Whiteley
Harry Seidler
Michael Hutchence
Geoffrey Edelsten
Kerry Packer
Bob Gould
Samuel Marsden
Sallie-Ann Huckstepp
Robert Askin

Who else?

Providence means 'how'...

Reflecting on providence - and especially on Abraham's discovery of God the provider - with my supervisor yesterday he observed that God's providence is not a teaching about the ending of all questions about why something might have happened to me or to my loved ones. Rather, trust in God's providence is reflected in a transformation of our questions, from 'why' questions into 'how' questions. Trust in the providence of God means knowing that 'God works all things etc'; but it is not a claim about how this is going to be brought about. It is not a trust indicative of an end of questions, therefore; indeed, the Bible invites precisely this kind of questioning from the human side and doesn't give us a secret knowledge into the workings of providence that they might be silenced.

Following our meeting together, I learnt that another (young-ish) friend of mine, in addition to Byron, has contracted cancer...

You gotta love this city...

Author Oliver James in his book Affluenza says that Sydney (my home town) is the most vacuous city on the planet. Materialistic, craven, shallow, banal, spirit-less. Workaholic & shopaholic.

Can it be true? It is hard to dream when you feel you are in heaven already I guess:

Paul Kelly once sang:
Have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?
Sydney shines such a beautiful light
And I can see Bondi through my window way off to the right
And the curling waves on a distant break
And the sleeping city just about to wake
Have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?
But that beauty conceals - well, that's the trouble, it doesn't conceal anything! As the Whitlams (a great Sydney band) sang:
"My city is a whore, opened herself to the world
Jumped up and down in pastel shirts
And lathered up thinking about designs for T-shirts"

Or we could say with John Birmingham, a historian of the city: 'In the end there was, it seemed, no outrage so profane it could not come to pass in Sydney'...

Here's our old friend, TS Eliot, who never went to Sydney, but might have written these words for us:

O weariness of men who turn from God
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited.
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains.
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

Some further idle and incomplete thoughts about the clarity of scripture

Thought 1: The clarity of scripture is in fact a far more important doctrine to defend than inerrancy. Inerrancy is a red herring for evangelicals and is divisive. It focuses our attention on the wrong thing entirely, that is, the matter of 'errors' or lack thereof. Whereas, if scripture is not clear, Protestantism is a bad joke and we should become Roman Catholics tomorrow. Scripture itself does not claim its own inerrancy (nor its errancy), whereas a very strong biblical case can be made for clarity.

Thought 2: The clarity of scripture is an evangelical clarity. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that both unites scripture and renders it clear - not that the OT was without clarity. Jesus is the 'Yes' who both explains and fulfils the promises of God. The Ethopian eunuch appeared baffled by his reading of Isaiah until he met Philip who explained it to him. We shouldn't be distracted by the presence of an interpreter here: the point is not: 'you need an authorised interpreter' but rather 'Jesus makes sense of it'.

Thought 3: Of course, the doctrine of the clarity of the scriptures has little to do with how simple or how hard the scriptures are to understand. Indeed, in 2 Peter 3 Peter complains that Paul's letters have things in them that are less than crystal. Having said this though: scripture isn't as tough as is often made out!

Thought 4: The clarity of scripture is primarily a teaching about the effectiveness of scripture to do its job, which is to present us Christ Jesus. It is more about discipleship and holiness than it is about linguistic theory.

Thought 5: But the clarity of scripture DOES have implications for linguistic theory. It certainly did in the Reformation (or at least was in dialogue with 16th century humanism); it does also today...

'YOU': You oughta talk...

'YOU': You oughta talk...

New series on Words begins today!

A bit of Dutch clarity

Herman Bavinck, the Dutchman whose works are just being translated into English, gives a strong account of the clarity of scripture as a Protestant sine qua non:

'The teaching of the perspicuity of Scripture is one of the strongest bulwarks of the Reformation'.

It was true in the 16th century; it is true now. As Bavinck reads the history of theology, the clarity of scripture was upheld from the earliest times and even as late as Gregory 1 and beyond. In fact, it is not until the 12th century that the obscurity of scripture becomes a teaching of Rome. Of course, the corollory of scripture's obscurity is an infallible magisterium, who alone can interpret. Which, in effect, means that authority as both norm and judge belongs to the hierarchy of the church alone.

It is funny how contemporary this problem is. Intepretation is a necessary activity of course; but interpretational activity can be carried out with ceding all the authority to the interpreter. However, as in Rome, so in modern liberal Prostantism (which is like Rome without all the good bits): it is just that the interpreter in whom authority is thought to reside is an individual not a church hierarchy...

Individual readers and churches do have responsibility to judge what they read, says Bavinck; but neither the conscience nor the magisterium are infallible. They are not the highest court... They may err. Indeed, do!

Four lessons from Anthony Giddens for preachers

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

He identifies four 'tribulations of the self':

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

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

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

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

Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine

I have been slowly making my way through George Lindbeck's landmark book The Nature of Doctrine. In short, he argues that Christian doctrines are in fact regulative rather than propositional: that is, they are not chiefly first-order propositions with ontological reference but rather second-order rules of speech. They are agreements to speak in a certain way. They are paradigms for thinking and talking, mostly. He says of the creeds:

Rule theory...allows (though it does not require) giving these creeds the status that the major Christian traditions have attributed to them, but with the understanding that they are permanently authoritative paradigms, nor formulas to be slavishly repeated.

Fair enough.

It is striking that the beginning of his discussion is a concern to mediate between different types of Christian theologies. He begins in the ecumenical setting - so his whole purpose is to find a way of classifying statements made in that setting. It is, it seems to me, a Study of Religions kind of work. So I am puzzled about its influence on theological work, somewhat. He has relativised the doctrinal differences between Christian traditions...because different statements might fit authentically within different traditions and not others...

I blame you and I forgive you

'To forgive is to blame, not to punish'.

I don't know if Byron has already commented on this thought from Volf's book Free of Charge, but it struck me afresh this morning. Forgiveness is actually an act of judgement rather than a lack of judgement.

As Volf goes on, he sees judicial punishment as now shorn of its retributive force (this sounds like Girard) because Christ is the end of retribution. He heralds a new way of blaming: forgiveness, which may of course be coupled with discipline and so one, but not retribution.

As Volf goes on:

Standing as I do in the tradition of Martin Luther, I think Christ took all the punishment upon himself. None of it can be justly doled out to anyone anymore. Expiation on the part of an offender replaces forgiveness and removes the reason for it. It cannot supplement forgiveness. The heart of forgiveness is relinquinshing retribution... . p. 171

Six theses on Temptation and Providence

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

BB Warfield by Ben Myers

Ben has an intriguing set of propositions to offer about BB Warfield, a much-maligned figure in American evangelical theology.

Standing in the tradition of the Reformation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girard and distinctives

Rene Girard, whose book Violence and the Sacred I have been reading with a group that meets over warm beer, claims that it is not differentiation between people but its end that causes violence and upheaval. Loss of distinctiveness is disastrous. At least, that is how the Greek tragedians saw things.

He says: 'Order, peace, and fecundity depend on cultural distinctions; it is not these distinctions but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group at one another's throats.' p. 52

This is emphasised by the presence in mythology and in classical literature (and biblical literature) of the phenomenon of warring brothers, and especially twins. Think Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau: they are two similar to ever live in peace with one another.

Modern society's aspiration to equality among its citizens prevents us from perhaps getting how dangerous an idea it can be! As Shakespeare puts it in Troilus and Cressida:

How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows!

Do we see this rationale also in Paul's description of the organic order of the Christian community in 1 Corinthians? Differences for him in that epistle are not the cause of disorder but in fact the fount of a unique kind of peace and order; an order that is both 'natural', and also 'spiritual'...

Hmm. (scratches non-existent beard.)

The clarity of scripture

It has long been the passion of my colleague Dr Mark D Thompson to defend the doctrine of the clarity of scripture.

I shoulda known it all along, but he is absolutely right, and timely.

In the name of 'hermeneutics' all sorts of crimes are being committed, frankly; and the trend even amongst Protestants is to exalt the clarity and authority of the church and its traditions over the scriptures (which are held to be dark, mysterious and indeterminate). Disagreement is taken as evidence that there is no clarity to be had.

For his part, John Webster says 'very simply, the church alone is not competent to confer authority on Holy Scripture, any more than it is competent to be a speaking churc before it is a hearing church, or competent to give itself the mandate to be apostolic.'

Webster then brilliantly restates the clarity of scripture, reminding us that 'reading scripture is inescapably bound to regeneration'. If there is dispute, or lack of clarity, it lies in the unwillingness we have to submit to the scriptures. This is not a philosophical matter, so much as an ethical and spiritual one.

It is worth noting that the clarity of scripture is not a Reformation innovation. Irenaeus addressed the Gnostics with their fanciful interpretational practices by asserting the plain meaning of the text of scripture. This doctrine has a very long tradition indeed.

BTW, Webster offers a convincing critique of JAK Smith's defence of hermeneutics, too!

Hart again

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


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

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

You and Gender

Over at my YOU project I have been sketching my way towards a chapter on gender. Love to have your input.

the great disintegration
help
fit
a gentle ribbing
shameless
of frogs and snails
'this is my lover...'

Calvin on leaving a church

No doubt in Calvin's time they didn't have the phenomena of church-hopping. However, lest we think he has a merely functional view of the visible church, he says:

...However it may be, where the preaching of the gospel is reverently heard and the sacraments are not neglected there for the time being no deceitful or ambiguous form of the church is seen; and no one is permitted to spurn its authority, flout its warnings, resist its counsels, or make light of its chastisements - much less to desert it and break its unity. For the Lord esteems the communion of his church so highly that he counts as a traitor and apostate from Christianity anyone who arrogantly leaves any Christian society, provided it cherishes the true ministry of Word and sacraments. He so esteems the authority of the church that when it is violated he believes his own diminished. (Institutes IV.1.10)

Arrogantly is the key adverb (ok I admit it, I wrote adjective the first time!), isn't it?

Is Calvin guilty of individualism?

I have begun attending a Systematic Theology Reading Group at the university chaired by Dr Philip Endean SJ on Calvin's Ecclesiology. Fascinating to dialogue with a Rahner scholar about Calvin! The accusation against Calvin was aired last week that he was an individualist: on the basis that his ecclesiology is the end of his system rather than the beginning of it, and that he calls the church the 'external means or aims by which God invites us into the society of Christ and holds us therein'.

I think this accusation misses a crucial distinction in Calvin's thought between the visible and the invisible Church. The visible church granted he treats as a means to an end, and it does not loom large in his system. The emphasis on inward faith rather than outward formal church attendance or membership or ritual does lead to an emphasis on the individual believer. However, the people of God united with Christ most certainly do feature in Calvin. Calvin's believer is by faith called into membership of the invisible and eschatological family of God in Christ Jesus. The true church itself belongs to the realm of faith: 'just as we must believe therefore that the former church is invisible to us [ie, the heavenly church] is visible to the eyes of God alone, so we are commanded to revere and keep communion with the latter [ie the visible earthly church], which is called 'church' in respect to men'...

The visible church, though, has still a role: Calvin is not docetic about this. The visible church is aptly entitled 'mother'. He says: '...there is no othr way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breats, and lastly unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels...Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from he school until we have been pupils all our lives.'

The squares of course with the utter seriousness with which Calvin took the business - the discipline and ceremonies and government and teaching - of the earthly church.

The words of Jesus - in red

As Prophet, Priest and King, Jesus Christ exercised the authority of God on earth.It is of course from this enfleshed Word that we learn not about what God is capable of doing but what he wills to do and does do.

First, the life of Jesus was marked of course by dynamic activity – a virgin birth, and many miracles and healings. Yet, though his ministry had the character of a challenge he refrained from taking up arms against the rulers of the world. His consummate ‘act’ was becoming subject to the power of those who killed him.

Secondly, he spoke, powerful, life-giving words – ‘Talitha koumi’; ‘Lazurus, come out!’; ‘Peace! Be still!’ – and yet also spent his days in patiently teaching his disciples from the Scriptures about the cross-shaped pattern of their discipleship.

Thirdly, he also demonstrated in his life and death the utter covenant faithfulness of God; he was the proof that God had remembered his people, and that their consolation was near – as the aged Simeon and Anna recognized when they met the child Jesus at the Temple. In this cruciform way Christ was indeed ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24).

David Bentley Hart and Postmodernity

Sorry, Byron: I couldn't wait, and I have to confess to having dipped into The Beauty of the Infinite. It is one of those books with strong opinions - which have their own allure. His shredding of Tillich - whose theology is, in my opinion, best seen as a curious mid-century cul-de-sac - had me cheering in the stands.

Hart, like many theologians I like, is not unsympathetic to postmodernity; or rather, he sees postmodernity as moment of some opportunity for theology - 'an auroral astonishment following upon a nocturnal oblivion' (p. 5) at the moment when we discover that Enlightenment reason's attempt at universalising has failed. Having said that, he has a real go at the postmoderns too, bless him, for not being postmodern enough.

Here he finds a point of convergence:

'...if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to become a truth, from whose historical contigency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wresting of abstract principles from intractable facts..' (p.5)

Some aphorisms about blogging

I have been blogging for a while now, and I feel quite the seasoned blogger. What have I learnt? Here are, I believe, some of the deep truths of blogging:

1. Typing out a quote without commenting doesn't count as blogging: it is just typing. [You know who you are...;-) ]

2. Writing an inflammatory blog in order to get a bit of discussion going can backfire, because people will think you are a grumpy person in general.

3. The state of one's blog is likely to be similar to the state of one's desk. Well, mine is...

4. The ideal blog entry is 200-350 words. Ask me to scroll down? You gotta be kidding.

5. In the blogosphere, the one principle that is a constant is vanity.

6. Lists work really well on blogs. So do series. I can't really do either.

7. It is possible to be really really obsessed about blogging.

8. The kids don't blog: blogging is a middle-aged (ie, over 21) thing. The kids do facebook and myspace, where they can post lots of pictures of themselves at drunken parties and type swears.

9. Sometimes it is sooo much easier to blog than it is to write a thesis; so much easier that I can end writer's block by tricking myself into blogging what I want to write. Copy-paste-done!

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?