Text/Notes of the Heretics series: 1. Marcion

There is some repetition of material already posted here, but I have posted the full text of the Necessary Heresies series given at St Ebbe's for the benefit of those who came (largely). I crave your indulgence!

1. Are heresies necessary?
I have rather provocatively entitled this series ‘Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us’. This seems at first to be rather counter-intuitive: surely the heretics of Christian history are to be avoided at all costs? Surely their teaching was precisely (and by definition) false teaching as opposed to the truth of the gospel? Surely the obvious thing is to steer well clear of them?

I would actually argue rather the opposite. The heretics of Christian history were not obviously wrong in their time: in almost every case their teaching was persuasive and powerful. All heretics made the claim that their teaching was Biblical and Christian. And, I want to suggest, every heretic gets at least something right – and often, they have an insight that is profoundly true. All the best untruths are of course half-truths.

And, further, it is because heresies have arisen in the history of the church that the church has been prompted again and again to decide what it thinks on certain essential questions: what books are and are not in the Bible? Is Jesus fully God and fully man, and if so, how is this possible? Is there a new revelation of God? Are human beings basically good or basically sinful? Without the heretics, a clear Christian answer to these questions – what we call ‘orthodoxy’ - might not have been given.

Heresy is by its nature attractive. This may run counter to our modern image of the heretic as the lone voice against the herd mentality of the group, the outsider crushed by the power that can’t face the truth. But that is manifestly not the case in Christian history: heretics posed a threat precisely because they did attract followers. What’s more, heretics posed a threat because they offer plausible explanations of the Christian faith; they bring clear answers to difficult questions, and they offer to smooth over the bumps in Christian experience. Heresy is not simply a matter of wrong teaching as opposed to right; it is frequently a matter of presenting a short cut, a cheap or easy explanation, or a philosophically or morally more acceptable answer to some of the most vexing issues for Christian believers. And so, for its part, orthodoxy, or ‘right-teaching’, frequently persues a more difficult path. Think of the Trinity: well, actually, that itself is the problem. How does one think of the Trinity? Well, an easy way to explain it would be to say ‘there is one God who wears three masks’. Or, ‘there are three gods who act together by agreement’. Or, ‘there are three parts to the one god’. These are all intelligible, but they are all heresies. The great councils of the early church decided instead that God was to be described as having one being in three persons. We search in vain for a nice analogy to make this intelligible, or a formula to explain it. Yet this accords with the Biblical truth most faithfully and with the experience of the churches as they received and lived out the gospel. This was orthodoxy.

The purpose of these three lectures is to listen hard to the heretics. I am not interested in them for their own sakes, but because each of them identifies something which is real challenge for us as modern-day believers, and for which we may be tempted – as indeed they were – to take an easy way out.

2. The monstrosity of God
The Old Testament – if you haven’t noticed – has some very difficult passages for a modern person to read. For example:
Is 45:7 ‘I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things,’

Or:
1 Samuel 15:2-3 2 Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"

What kind of a God is this? Is it possible that the God of Jesus Christ could speak of himself as the author and engineer of evil? Do we read here of the deity authorizing – even commanding – genocide, whose horrors we know only too well? Is he somehow murderous? Does he have a dark heart, a demonic side?

We could go further: can the creator of such a world in which we live – a world in which good and evil wrestle with one another, a world of tsunamis and famines and wars – could he really be a good God? Could he really have his creation’s best interests heart to be responsible for such chaos and impurity? Is not the mess we see somehow a reflection on the creator’s character? And this God, what’s more, declares that he will judge the world according to a law that his given that nobody is able to keep!

Consider how this contrasts with the gospel of love and faith and freedom preached by Jesus and Paul – the words of healing and forgiveness. Can we really accept these as being from the same God?


3. Enter Marcion
Marcion was a wealthy Christian ship-owner and a member of a Roman church in the mid-second century. As a respected member of the church, when he began to expound his teachings he soon won a following. Even though he was excommunicated in 144 AD, and his large financial contributions returned, he went around the empire propagating his version of Christianity and apparently succeeded in developing a network of churches.

He only wrote a single work, the Antithesis, which has now been lost. He was often labelled a Gnostic, and there are considerable similarities with Gnostic teaching in his system. He drove a wedge between the supreme God of goodness and the inferior God of justice – naturally Jesus reveals and represents the supreme God. Jesus' emphasis on love and forgiveness was incompatible with the teaching of Moses on retributive justice. The OT is full of contradictions and cannot be reconciled to the NT writings.

Marcion, therefore, rejected the whole of the OT. But he went even further. The Twelve had misunderstood Jesus as the Messiah of the OT God. This corruption of the true gospel Marcion sourced to Galatians. Only Paul understood the real significance of Jesus; and perhaps because of his link to Paul, only Luke's gospel was held to be trustworthy.

But even within this pruned canon, there needed to be some editing. Marcion refused to accept passages which he regarded as Jewish additions. References to the OT were expunged. Galatians 3:16-4:6 was removed because of the mention of Abraham. It was radical surgery indeed.

Marcion’s challenge was essentially two pronged:
a) on the one hand it was a challenge as to the source of our knowledge about God and authorised teaching, the Bible. While there had been some attempts to collect a list of the agreed and approved books of the Christian scriptures prior to Marcion’s appearance, Marcion was now offering an alternative and established list of authorised writings, held together in his mind by a common theme. Marcion and his followers could, they claimed, point to a common body of teaching in written form. Here, he said, was an end to disagreement about the extent of the new scriptures. Here was an end to Christian embarassment about the sheer Jewishness of the OT with its irascible and cantankerous God.

b) But, on the other hand, Marcion’s challenge emanated from a particular vision about the nature of the Christian faith itself. What he had picked up on was the radical nature of Paul’s challenge to our natural religious assumptions; the sheer newness that is offered in a faith of the resurrection and the Spirit; the attack on dead legalism. This was the genius of Christianity, Marcion had decided, and he went about cutting out pieces of Scripture that didn’t fit, to such an extent that he was left with not much.

4. Marcion was right…
Things is: Marcion had a point. He had sensed that in Christ something radically NEW had come, something that couldn’t have been foreseen. Here was indeed a message of the triumph of love over the law, of the triumph of grace over condemnation. Here indeed was a way in which all peoples could participate in a divine life regardless of their fleshly condition – whether as Jew or Gentile. Here was the grounds for a new community that would be marked as no community had before it by its love one for another without need for rule or judge. Here in the gospel of Jesus that Paul preached was indeed a message of transformation and liberation, a heavenly vision of a life of faith and love instead of an earthly yoke of dreary law.

Indeed, in the 19th Century, historian Adolf von Harnack considered Marcion about the greatest church theologian between Paul and Martin Luther:
"…That in the century of the great mixture of religion the greatest apparent paradox was actually realized: namely, a Paulinism with two Gods and without the Old Testament; and that this form of Christianity first resulted in a church which was based not only on intelligible words, but on a definite conception of the essence of Christianity as a religion, seems to be the greatest riddle which the earliest history of Christianity presents. But it only seems so. The Greek, whose mind was filled with certain fundamental features of the Pauline Gospel (law and grace), who was therefore convinced that in all respects the truth was there, and who on that account took pains to comprehend the real sense of Paul's statements, could hardly reach any other results than those of Marcion. The history of Pauline theology in the Church, a history first of silence, then of artificial interpretation, speaks loudly enough. And had not Paul really separated Christianity as religion from Judaism and the Old Testament? Must it not have seemed an inconceivable inconsistency, if he had clung to the special national relation of Christianity to the Jewish people, and if he had taught a view of history in which for paedagogic reasons indeed, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort had appeared as one so entirely different?"

That is the appeal of Marcion: he tidied it all up! Can we really imagine that the God of law is also the God of grace? Can we really imagine that the God of the Jews is ALSO the God of the Gentiles?

5. Responses
But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! The church of old determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.

F.F. Bruce points out that:
...the chief importance of Marcion in the second century lies in the reaction which he provoked among the leaders of the Apostolic Churches. Just as Marcion’s canon stimulated the more precise defining of the NT canon by the Catholic Church, not to supersede but to supplement the canon of the OT, so, more generally, Marcion’s teaching led the Catholic Church to define its faith more carefully, in terms calculated to exclude a Marcionite interpretation.

The church had to respond to both of Marcion’s challenges, then: to clarify which books would be in its canon or list of the Christian scriptures and to clarify what their relationship was the OT; and also to define its faith more carefully. The Churches had to recognize the rootedness of their faith in the Jewish testament, to recognize that their Lord was the Jewish messiah: in fact, he was only intelligible against his Jewish background.

There was the obvious textual issue against Marcion, of course: it was clear that he had decided beforehand what was inconsistent with his vision of say Paul’s teaching and had no textual grounds for his editing other than his personal whim. Further, the apostles had from the earliest times practiced together the reading of the OT as God’s holy word. Certainly too it was the case that the writers of the NT and Jesus himself made explicit appeal to the OT. For Christians then, it would just not be an option, no matter how new and radical their gospel was, to consider the OT obsolete.

The question of whether the Church's canon proceeds or follows Marcion's is not yet settled among scholars. The Fathers assert that he was selecting and rejecting books from a pre-existing church list. Von Harnack claimed that it was the other way around – the church responded to Marcion's canon with its own, adding Petrine or Johannine elements to counterbalance the Pauline. Perhaps the safest historical judgement is that Marcion's canon accelerated the process of fixing the Church's canon. It was a process already begun; but Marcion's criticisms forced orthodox Christians to examine why and what they already believed.
Metzger: “Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia."

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.
Theologians like Irenaeus now appealed explicitly to the dramatic narrative of the whole Bible to show how Jesus fit in to the promises and patterns given in the OT as the second Adam. They realized that Jesus was not revealing a new God, but the same creator and law-giving God. Whatever Christian theology did from that point on, it had to do with the creator and law-giver as identical with the God revealed in Jesus. One significant implication of this realization was the affirmation of the created world, and the human body: if the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, was the creator of the world, then the creation itself must not in essence be bad. Whatever chaos and corruption we observe must be on some other account.

So, the church chose the harder way: it decided that even if having the whole bible meant coping with and addressing some apparent tensions, it would have to do this if it were to be a faithful and obedient church and true to its nature – true to its Lord. Though it had to cope with some tricky parts of scripture, it had far more to lose by going with Marcion than it stood to gain.

The Play Ethic – A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living by Pat Kane

Lego. We all played with as kids, right? (Well if you were born in the 60s or 70s you did). It’s time to get your old Lego out of the garage at Mum’s, because the Lego company have set up a business consultancy and training arm called “Serious Play” (don’t believe me? check out www.seriousplay.com). Serious Play is:- An innovative, experiential process designed to enhance business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities, Lego Serious Play is an efficient, practical and effective process that works for everyone within an organization.


Um, which means, basically, you go to a work planning-day and you get to play with Lego!! But what the good people at Lego have discovered is this: play works. Playing is something that enhances the creativity and cohesion of groups of people. It engages people, and lets them take risks. Play is unlimited, special and voluntary. And most of all, it is fun.

I learnt about play from Pat Kane’s book The Play Ethic – A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. This sprawling website of a book is perhaps a little less fun to read than it ought to be and could be half as long. It swings between groovy journalist chat and would-be academic prose. However, it contains a real and profound challenge to the way we live life in the west.

Kane makes the case that we have denigrated play for far too long in Western culture such that we have limited the potential for human creativity and enjoyment. For us, work is the serious business. Serious people work hard; and it is morally good to embrace hard work. Both Labour and Coalition politicians appealed to the ethic of hard work in Australia’s recent election. A dole bludger is one of the most shameful people in our culture. Think of the way we speak of “wasting time” as if it is morally wrong.

And yet the digital revolution has spawned a generation of people for whom play is work is play. Kane calls them “Soulitarians”, and travels to Finland to meet some. Finland, he reports, has a tertiary education system with no fees and no deadlines, allowing students to play around with knowledge and technology “feeling their way into their life’s vocation”. It is in this period that some of the most innovative ideas arise – most famously, Linus Torvalds inventing the Linux system at age 21. Publishing the operating system for free, as Torvalds did, is a very Soulitarian thing to do. Very unMicrosoft. Not dot.commerce, but dot.communist, perhaps?

Play is spiritual, says Kane. Of course, Kane talks about spirituality as if it is another way of talking about human beings and their longings He is quite savage in his condemnation of the Puritans for the “250 year suppression of play by the Protestant work ethic” against which he offers the ethic of play. This is “a deeply limited vision of human possibility.” The decline in organized religion has meant a corresponding rise in “disorganized spirituality”. The Protestant work ethic, offering duty, routine, deferral of pleasures, regulation of intensities – offers little, he argues, to the postmodern person who lives in the universe of risk, openness and opportunity.

Those who experience –as so many do – a gap between “their interior richness and the limited expressiveness of their exterior lives” because of the blandness of their jobs will not find satisfying an ethic which holds hard work as belonging to a higher moral order.

Play, on the other hand, is about possibilities and pleasures. It is non-utilitarian and un-economic, when so much of the world is framed by the bottom line. Kane is at pains to assert the productiveness of play, but also wants to show that it doesn’t need justification according to what it produces. Ultimately, it is just a better way for everyone to live.

These are fascinating challenges directed to the Christian worldview. I am not sure whether he has accurately read the Puritans, but the “work ethic”, whatever its origins, is certainly alive and well in the materialist west. What is needed from Christians is a re-evaluation of the notion of the Sabbath and of the nature of work. Remember that it was God himself who first rested; and his creative work sprang not from mere necessity (though sometimes I have heard God defended as if he is a prisoner to some eternal principle) but from his sovereign freedom.

But also Christian theology urges us to take the long view. Kane describes a brilliant X-Box ad, where a baby is seen being shot out of its mother through the air. As it travels we see it age until it lands, in its coffin, an old man, dead: “Life is short. Play hard”. There is truth to this of course; but the world ordered to Jesus Christ is a place where eternal life is a thing to anticipate; and so there need be no fear of missing out on play time. If anything, play is more an inkling of the world to come than work is...

Collaborating with power? The book of Daniel...

The court tales of the book of Daniel provided for intertestamental Jews (and for the early Christians) a pattern for encounter with foreign rule and also great comfort that the invincibility of the empires of the middle east was largely an illusion. Daniel and his friends witness in each case to the provisionality of the ruler’s rule, but do so in service of the ruler himself! The humour of the stories derives from the depiction of human power over-reaching itself and being thwarted, while Yhwh’s representatives appear completely unruffled. Thus, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue with feet of clay (Dan 2) is mysterious to his magicians and sorcerers and terrifies the mighty king who need fear no-one. It is the man of God to whom is given the insight and wisdom to interpret the meaning of the dream to the king: his role as a service to the king is to remind the king of his personal and political mortality. In the end, this king accepts this verdict, remarkably:

Daniel 2: 46 Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face and paid homage to Daniel, and commanded that an offering and incense be offered up to him. 47 The king answered and said to Daniel, "Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings, and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery." 48 Then the king gave Daniel high honors and many great gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon. 49 Daniel made a request of the king, and he appointed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego over the affairs of the province of Babylon. But Daniel remained at the king's court.

No doubt to hear Yhwh’s praises on the lips of a pagan tyrant was a delight to the book’s first audiences. There is no refusal from Daniel of the king’s homage, nor any sense that Daniel is merely out to protect the interest of the Jews in accepting his high position. Two stories (coupled together in the books chiastic structure) narrate the vulnerability and even the fall of pagan rulers (chapters 4 and 5). In chapters 3 and 6 we are given the two narratives of most interest to our theme: the fiery furnace and the lion’s den. In each instance, the ruler is tempted in his vanity to over-reach himself and demand not just homage but worship from his subjects. This is exactly what the servants of Yhwh cannot give him, though the cost is potentially very great. Their insistence on the truth that the sovereign Lord is the only appropriate focus of human worship in this way is a lesson gratefully learned by the rulers, who then decide that the truly loyal ministers of their government were in fact these Israelites – and that the native Babylonian advisors were finally deserving of the very punishment they had wished for Daniel and his friends. At issue, notably, is right worship, not a merely moral challenge of some kind. The young men give witness to the truth and reality of Yhwh’s rule, specifically. They do not go into the furnace, or into the lion’s cave, in order merely to critique and expose tyranny in its egotism and corruption. This indeed they do, but only as a corollary to their standing for the ultimate power and authority and worthiness of Yhwh as the supreme and sole object of human worship.

Paul Morgan, author of "The Pelagius Book"

Author Paul Morgan produced a novel in 2005 entitled "The Pelagius Book" which is an imaginary reconstruction of the observations of Pelagius' disciple Celestius. In an interview, Morgan gave a very interesting account of why Pelagius had attracted him - and Augustine revolted him:

The Augustinian line was that Christianity and the way the church would develop - and we should remember that the Christian church, which would inherit the mantle of Rome in providing a framework for how people saw the world, saw society, saw themselves socially and psychologically, for the Augustinians over large parts of the Empire, this was dominated by a really quite savage fatalism. They use the word 'grace' and really you know, we can't control our own destinies ultimately, and who knows, it's all a mystery and only God can tell. And really that's a huge absolution of responsibility, personal responsibility. There was a really quite fundamentalist attitude towards the Bible. They were extremely strong on original sin and the shamefulness of the body, but also very distrustful of the intellect as well. So I mean really, you had it pretty tough with the Augustinians, because they were against the body, but they were against the mind as well. In fact, there's some passage by Augustine where he says, 'We should be wary of drawing empirical conclusions from the evidence of our senses because they're rooted in the sinful bodily organs of sense, which can't be trusted.' I mean, you can't win with this guy...

Pelagius was almost certainly trained as a lawyer and you can see this in his words. One of the very fascinating fragments of his writings, or writing about him that does survive is fascinatingly a part of his trial for heresy, where he actually takes apart the argument for original sin in just a few sentences, on almost purely logical grounds. He just says, 'Look, God created us and gave us free will. Why would he give us free will and the capacity to be good and then at the same time not give us the ability to do it?' He almost has an 18th century view of the beauty of the logic and rationality of the world, and he sees us in the same way that God's giving free will to humans is part of this. So why would he snatch it away a few seconds after giving it to us? He isn't saying that we can't do evil, do profound evil, but it's our choice that if you want to do something terribly bad...you do it because you take it upon yourself, you don't do it because of some kind of strain of genetic sin that was passed down to you.

Morgan is asking the right questions, though of course he sees things through a very contemporary lens. He criticises Augustinianism for its fatalism, and for its failure to believe in the goodness of the creation. He condemns it for its immorality - for resigning itself to human evil and depending on a divine solution from outside rather than a human one from the inside. It IS a rejoinder to a kind of contemporary scientific fatalism of the genes - that strain of thought which reduces all human choices to genetics (or, in sociology, to environmental factors).

Problem is, of course, he doesn't really understand Augustine (...so he has no chance with Calvin or Edwards!)

Talking about God in public

The second tempter of the martyr Thomas in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral offers him a collaborative arrangement under the power of the king. When he rejects this, asserting instead his episcopal authority, he is accused of being merely interested in power.

The same temptation is offered under very different historical conditions by the late-modern liberal segregation of the sacred (private) from the secular. Religious people are indeed invited to take their place in the business of public reasoning, but on the condition that they jettison those components of their thinking that held by others to be ‘religious’. The most prominent contemporary exponent of political liberalism – indeed, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the last forty years – is John Rawls. Rawls began in A Theory of Justice (1971) to concur with Kant and to try to earth justice solely in a universal and abstract notion of ‘Reason’. However, in Political Liberalism (1993) he suggests the notion of ‘reasonableness’. He distinguishes this from ‘Reason’ by noting that a person acts reasonably when they are willing ‘to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will do so’. From behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, Rawls proposes that people will choose reasonably for fair terms that will receive acknowledgement by ‘overlapping’ consensus. It would be quite possible for people to hold the same political values for quite disparate reasons: but these reasons are in the end quite irrelevant. Rawls writes provocatively, ‘[F]or the purposes of public life, Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle are the same person.’ Rawls claims that this conception of justice is ‘freestanding’: it moves entirely in the practical and political world and leaves philosophy (and presumably theology) untouched. Rawls’ attempt to justify political liberalism at least has the virtue of accommodating the fact of pluralism: it (supposedly) allows for peaceful disagreements, and finds considerable space for positive agreement. Rawls wants to establish more than a modus vivendi: if groups in society are merely tolerant of one another, there is always the possibility of instability if the balance of power shifts and one group gains more power than others. His theory appears also to avoid the difficulty of appeal to some form of ‘comprehensive doctrine’ (the term he uses for ‘the contents of persons’ determinate conceptions of the good’). This modus vivendi forestalls the entry into the public space of the religious in such a way as to protect society from facing discussions about matters which may prevent the productive and safe conduct of its business. However, it also forces religious groups to speak in public only in terms of outcomes and utility, and perhaps about (their own) rights. The business of the actual concrete determination and management of justice must be carried out without reference to the ‘shadowy’ discourse of theology. Any Christian address of a controversial matter of public interest must prove itself in a measurable way, aside from its own logic. Economics is the new queen of the sciences to whom all other forms of knowledge must pay tribute. There is an option, however, delivered by postmodernity and present in the later Rawls. This is the ‘territorial’ option, whereby the religious group asserts and protects its own interests within the public sphere, usually on the basis of ‘rights’. Its speech having been excluded from the public forum, it can now only speak in the language that succeeds in that space, occupy as much of it as possible, and engage in talking mostly in an inner-directed way to its own constituency. The group may even succeed in gaining representatives of its interests elected into government office. The result is that it creates a new public space for itself, which it seeks to enlarge at the expense of other groups. To put it another way: the exclusion from the public forum of religious types of speech means that religious people feel a great difficutly at feeling their point of view is really heard in public. This situation may be accepted by some, who then have to live with the Paul/Saul bifurcation of their identities; but, for others, it is an invitation to occupy as much of the public sphere as possible without feeling the need to talk persuasively in the public sphere at all.

Necessary Heresy 3: Pelagius, or, are we really that bad?

Pelagius was a man who took morality - and the moral responsibility of human beings - seriously. I have no doubt that he would have been witness to tremendous and brutal evils in his time, living as he did around the sack of Rome. His teaching was not that human beings are naturally good - that doctrine would have had no purchase at all amongst those who had seen limbs hacked off and heard the screams of the rape victims. Rather, he held that man and woman were free to choose the right or the wrong. There was no escape behind the veil of determinism, or pleading helplessness as if that was some resassurance. Each of us could and should and would be held fully accountable for our actions. We ought to hear the full impact of God's address to his people 'Be holy, as I am holy'. He would not have said it if was not a moral possibility. Moral pessimissim is insulting to the creator of human beings, who created not puppets or beasts, but persons. Life and death is set before human beings and we are bid by our maker to choose life, true (Dt 30:19)?

For Pelagius, there are three features in action - posse, velle and esse (power, will, realisation). Posse comes only from God, but the other two belong to us. When we choose to do the right, in order words, we can count on power from God to aid us. Not that Pelagius felt he was negating the sovereignty of God by such a teaching; far from it - man's free will occurs only within the sphere of God's permission and generosity, and ought to be used to the ends that God commands.

JND Kelly offers two futher points that Pelagius taught. First, the human will has no bias in favour of evil, not having inherited the spoiled will of Adam. After all, how can we be blamed for another's sin? That makes no moral sense. Adam set in train a custom or a habit of sin, but not a physical geneaology of sin.
Secondly, Pelagius also denies that man has a bias towards the good. Grace is provided as a grace of knowledge: through the law and the example of Christ, God provides us with all we need to know about what to do.

So, it is possible to say with the Rich Young Ruler, 'all these I have kept since childhood'. In fact, the Bible contains many examples of righteous lives. Now, this is not a trivial business for Pelagius: the merit on offer only comes through strenuous effort and application. He is well aware of the high destiny to which human beings have been called and to which they ought to aspire. No doubt he was also aware of Christians who saw grace as either a short-cut to righteousness or who felt that predestination as Augustine and others taught it was a counsel of despair. Here rather was a call to quit moaning and get on with living righteously. Here was a call to be as magnificent as human life can be. It was an attractive teaching then, and remains so...

Kosta Milkov

On Friday afternoon, my study-room mate and good friend Kosta Milkov (second from right in the photo - I am on the far left) was knocked off his bicycle by a car on the Banbury Rd in Oxford.

He landed it seems on his face and sustained multiple fractures to the bones on his face and a broken wrist. He had a six-hour operation on Sunday to re-set his facial bones.

Kosta is an evangelical Christian from Macedonia. He and his wife Nada and their daughter Gabriella are here in Oxford while Kosta works on his DPhil on Maximus the Confessor. They hope to return to minister in the Balkans in the long term, perhaps amongst students in Macedonia.

Thanks to God that his injuries were not more serious in terms of a) his life and b) his brain; and prayers for a swift recovery so he can continue with his important work.

Christ - the FORM of the Christian life

Some Lutheran perspectives on the Christian life: martyrdom is properly a reflection of the form (or to use Luther's term the sacramentum) of the Christian life.

My own doktorvater, Bernd Wannenwetsch:

The whole of our Christian lives as agents is rooted in Christ’s action, which not only provides a model (exemplum) or an impulse (motivatio) or a mere “foundation”, but precisely the proper “form” (sacramentum) of the Christian life. Hence, for Luther, there is no prior “relationship with God” or a priori Glaubensbewusstsein (‘religious-consciousness’: Schleiermacher) that would “set free” the believing individual to engage then in social relationships of a political kind. Instead, there is only a political worship, which simultaneously relates the believers to God and their fellow citizens. (From his article on Luther's Ethics in the Cambridge Companion to Luther)

And in the same vein, Eberhard Jungel: Even those exemplary narratives of Jesus which are oriented toward action, which end with ‘go and do likewise’, only formulate with this imperative a newly discovered indicative, that is, something which the listener must say to himself. They make something self-understandable in a new way which ought always to have been self-understandable but was not. But in order for this to happen anew, man must apparently first be liberated from the pressure to concentrate on himself. It is for that reason that man first becomes a “hearer of the word,” who cannot do anything at all as long as he is listening, and then on the basis of his hearing he can act out of the newly gained freedom so that his action, precisely as activity, remains a doing of the word.

This is especially true with regard to the telling of the Christological story, which bursts apart everything which is obvious and matter of course, in that this story God identifies himself with a crucified person so that there is a story to be told about a crucified God and a man who has been awakened to a new life. The hearer must be drawn existentially into this story through the word, precisely because it is also his story, and this much happen before he can do what corresponds to the story. The story of Jesus Christ, through the word which emerges from it and tells it, becomes a ‘sacrament’ (to speak along the lines of Augustine and Luther) before it can function as an ‘example’ (sacramentum, exemplum). It is the sacramental function of the telling of the Christological story to let the hearer win freedom from himself. …before Jesus Christ comes to be considered an exemplum for our behaviour he must be affirmed as the sacramentum that changes our being…. from God as the Mystery of the World p. 308-9

John Webster on philosophical theology

I breathe a sigh of relief when I read John Webster, because he is brave in defying the dominance of philosophical 'theology' with its mystifying speculations and its second-rate dabblings in fields far from the camp... as he puts it:

...the distinctiveness of a trinitarian dogmatics of the holiness of God will shown in its lack of interest in making use of religious phenomenology as a foundation for positive Christian teaching, or in correlating its findings with inquiries into the phenomena - cultural, anthropological and religious - of 'the holy'.

Trinitarian dogmatics will necessarily make ontotheological claims, though in its own particular way. When theology addresses the matter of God's attributes,

it is attempting a rich set of conceptual enlargements upon God's concrete simplicity, the rendition of his identity which God gives as the one who is.

Such a breath of fresh air to read in this city of dreary speculations!

A Question of Origins

We are intrigued by genealogies. One of the features of Post-Enlightenment thinking that dies hardest is the belief that if you can explain how something came to be you have explained the thing itself. If you can trace the development or the evolution perhaps, of your object of study, you can claim to have understood it. This of course was famously exemplified by Darwinian science; but we can see the same "quest for origins" paradigm in the theology of the nineteenth century. The "Quest for the Historical Jesus" and the developments of source and tradition criticism are examples of massive intellectual endeavours which aimed to illuminate the text of the Bible by reconstructing the "real" world behind it. The documents were sifted, segmented and reconstructed. However, as in dissecting a lab rat, putting the parts back together somehow leaves you with something not quite a rat, or in this case, a text.

There were - and are - two assumptions behind the process, of course: that the earlier stream in the text is more authoritative, and that the church of the first two centuries distorted that authoritative picture. The depictions of Jesus in the gospels, for example, serve the purposes of the communities for which they were written, and tell us more about them than about the historical Jesus. Secondarily, then, the history of the early church becomes a significant matter, because if you can unpick their additions and distortions - and add back in some of which they suppressed or overlooked – then you have a chance of glimpsing the face of the authentic Jesus, the real carpenter of Galilee himself. In particular, Paul is blamed with making Christianity into something that Jesus never intended it to be. (See AN Wilson, for one author who follows this tired strategy).

But the first years of the church are a valid object for historical study in their own right. This is because they, too, represent a miracle. How was it possible that, in the short space of a three centuries, the Christian faith could go from being a tiny Jewish cult to becoming the dominant religion of the Empire? Augustine of Hippo used to use the miracle of the survival and expansion of the church as a pillar of his apologetic method. Nineteenth Century German historian Adolf von Harnack, in his monumental The History of Dogma, sounds rather at a loss to explain this success: Christianity grew with "inconceivable rapidity"; there was "astonishing expansion." He wrote "Christianity must have reproduced itself by means of miracles, for the greatest miracle of all would have been the extraordinary extension of the religion apart from any miracles." Answering this question, the question of the success of the church, is foundational for understanding the development of Christendom and thus the whole culture – ethics, law, politics and art – of the Western world, as well as crucial to understanding the historical Jesus.

We need our Athanasiuses

The rejection of Arianism may have made Christian language more complex; but at least it has militated against an intellectual complacency in the face of the unsettling effects of the gospel…Theology continues to need its Ariuses. – Rowan Williams, 1983


Athanasius’s gift was that he could see exactly what was at stake: he recognised what was being lost in the Arian way of putting things. His passion was for human souls, and for their salvation, primarily. So this was not an abstract debate for him: he could see that salvation itself was what mattered.

Four things:
1) God is mystery, but God reveals himself, in Christ Jesus. The unknowability of God is no longer simply inaccessible. As Williams says, 'there is no overplus of 'unengaged' and inexpressible reality, nothing that is not realized in and as relationship, in God'. In Jesus we are given God, not merely a piece of him. If we are to hold God as mysterious and respond in awe and wonder and speechlessness, it is to be from our worship and thankfulnes: a kind of visceral negative theology, far from the rational negativity of Arius.

2) God reveals himself in Jesus to truly save. If you took the Arian seriously, what account could you give of the salvation of human people? (see quote)..Athanasius once said ‘God became man in order that we might become God’ – that is, that we might share in the life of God himself, God become one of us. (see 1 John 3:2 - ‘we shall be like him’). If Christ was not fully God, how could we ever be assured of God’s saving of us? How could we ever know God in a saving way?

3) God dies for us on the cross. Athanasius could also see that the cross itself does not work if you describe it Arian terms. If on the cross we have a lesser God then how we can not say that there we see nothing but divine child abuse, a torturing of the innocent Son by his commanding Father? Rather, if we understand the cross according to orthodox teaching, then we will understand that the victim was a willing participant in the salvation of the world in his own death. The Son submitted, but did so from a position of free equality with the Father.

4) The love of Christ is truly God’s love. This has huge pastoral ramifications of course, but also practical ones: because here in the submission of the Son to the Father without a loss of equality of being or dignity we see in essence the nature of Christian love. [See Allison quote] The love that Christ expressed on the cross was divine love: and it is the love we are called to echo in our relations too.

Athanasius was a curmudgeonly genius: perhaps we ought to say, that much as we ‘need’ our Ariuses, those who will ask the right questions, we also need our Athanasiuses: those who will remind us that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself; and that in Christ we truly and fully have the eternal God.

The attractions of Arianism

What made Arianism so attractive, and might make it so in its modern versions?

Arianism can be exegetically convincing; and certainly, it was consistent to the form of rationality that pervaded in its own time.

But more than this: Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one's own experience of the invisibilty and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.

The tangibility that God offers us - his entry into our world is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.

Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us - it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built - yes made - across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured than when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.

It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near - that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that that church that I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.

[thanks to Kosta Milkov!]

Rowan Williams on Arius

I have heard Arius labelled a 'biblicist' in the past, and his case as evidence that exegesis will never decide anything. I have also heard the opposite: that here was a rationalist par excellence, determined to squash biblical material into his Middle Platonist framework.

Rowan Williams writes:
One thing which should be noted immediately is that none of this exegetical material, as described or implicitly characterized by Arius' enemies, really supports the idea that Arius was a 'literalist'. It is not literalism to take the Psalms as spoken in persona Christi or to identify the 'Wisdom' of the OT with Christ...Athanasius' objection to Arius' exegesis is not that it is negligent of a 'spiritual sense', that it is 'Judaizing' in character, but that it is arbitrary...

As Williams goes on to explain, Arius was aiming to be both biblically based AND rationally consistent. That is why he and Athanasius went toe-to-toe on exegetical matters; and in the end, perhaps it was a hermeneutical method that seperated them...

Martyrdom in Islam is different

Cook (see last post) writes:

The classical Muslim framework of martyrology is different from that of other faiths. Although the initial Meccan phases involve some physical violence against Muslims for the sake of Islam, this became nothing more than a historical memory. Overwhelmingly, perhaps because of the very success of the faith, Islam had to seek other conceptions of martyrdom. These have been most obviously filled by those martyrs killed in battle - a category comparatively lacking in other faiths - and to some extent those killed in plagues...The Muslim ideal for a martyr became that person - usually a man - who through his active choice sought out a violent situation ... with pure intentions and was killed as a result of that choice. Ideally his actions expressed courage and defiance of the enemy, loyalty toward Islam and the pure intention to please God, since the acceptable manner of jihad was to 'lift the Word of Allah to the highest' (Qur'an 9:41). p. 30

Uniquely, Christians have Christ of course: a death which is a single and unsurpassable pattern for martyrdom and yet which is not merely a martyrdom.

Martyrdom in Islam by David Cook

I received today my copy of a new book by David Cook entitled: Martyrdom in Islam

I purchased this book because I figured that though I am giving a theological account of martyrdom from a confessional standpoint, the phenomenology of martyrdom is a growing field, and the interest in Islamic martyrdom is widespread. It is certainly worth asking the question from the religious studies point of veiw: 'is Christian martyrdom an entirely different entity to Islamic martyrdom?' Cook is a defender of Islam from reduction to its radical elements and argues the case that Islamic martyrdom is not at root about suicide and militancy to the extent that it has been portrayed in the West. His diagnosis of the fear and loathing with which the West regards the whole reverence for martyrs is very interesting, too.

He gives a brief sketch of the rise of Jewish martyrdom in the Seleucid period and beyond as recorded in the books of the Maccabees. Jesus for him is 'the best known Jewish martyr'. What he doesn't ask is whether there were pagan sources which are relevant for the study of Christian martyrdom (and are thus inherited by Islamic hagiographers): interestingly, the early Christian theologians like Origen and Tertullian do make comparisons with the great pagan noble heroes of yore in their descriptions of martyrdom. As with Christianity, the martyrs of Islam are a crucial reference point for the business of shaping the identity of the group.

Rowan Williams on 'Poetic and Religious Imagination'

In this 1976 essay Williams writes:

The return to language requires an act of faith; and an acceptance of the probability of failure. It is, as such, an exercise in radical humility and an expression of the hope of 'grace', communication surviving the perils of words.

Here is already a theme pervasive in Williams' thought: that so much is fraught about language, but that we are compelled to speak in any case, and so, have to do so in hope. Having surrendered our right to speak to God, we receive back the possibility that our words might actually bring about something new. Poets - even the agnostic ones - show us that this is the case. They of all people are masters of language, and yet they know better than anyone the limitations of language, having traipsed around its boundaries. He goes on:

Beyond silence lies, not childlike directness, but the irony of a recommitment to the world, a discovery of the cost of speech; beyond irony, the discovery of the promise of reconciliation with the present by means of some unimaginable future, and so, the assurance that the return to words is not simply a pointless and disastrous martyrdom, but is itself obscurely redemptive.

The more I read of Williams the more I think he is best seen as poet and mystic more than theologian (though he is that): but this explains why it is so hard to get a handle on his theology, which resists such 'handling' of its own subject...

Necessary Heresy 2: Arius, or, do we really know God?

Arius is perhaps the most famous heretic of them all - not the least because of his formidible opponent, Athanasius! I belong to an Anglican diocese that has been accused of Arianism: of subordinating the Son to the Father. As always, a terminological difference is part of the problem, I think. I would be ready to drop the word 'subordinate' in exchange for 'ordered' so as to indicate to all that I believe the Son is vere Deus, vere homo... Of course one of the ugliest dynamics of being called a heretic, is that when you are called so by the vituperative and quote-twisting kind of person we were called it by, you start to believe that the heresy must be orthodox. It does your head in! (Of course, as Williams shows, it is doubtful if Arius himself was actual Arian, but never mind that...)

G.L.Prestige writes:

Christianity and monotheism alike were imperilled by the Arian attack on Athanasius and the doctrine of the Trinity; for if Christ were not truly God, salvation through His cross remained a purely human, subjective and imperfectly realised aspiration; and if He were in the strict sense a 'second God' - as certain even among those of substantial orthodoxy somewhat loosely called Him - then there was an end to all faith in one controlling ruler of the universe and one undivided object of worshipful devotion.' p. 76

The stakes are very high on this one.

Arius was incapable of uttering an apparent contradiction and revolted from the supposition that vast, intricate problems might present more than one aspect. His two-dimensional mind regarded the divine mystery of revelation in the flat, foreshortened, without depth or background, like a diagram in Euclid...

For heresy, rationalistic short-cuts are almost always the downfall. As Athanasius clarified it:

If you contemplate the Father, who is one distinct presentation of the deity, you obtain a mental view of the one true God. If you contemplate the Son or the Spirit, you obtain a view of the same God; though the presenation is different, the reality is identical. p. 89

But what was the peculiar attraction of Arianism?

The Holiness of Theology - or otherwise

In a recent discussion with friends, this passage from John Webster's Holiness book came under particular focus:

...talk of the sufficiency of Scripture is a warning against allowing theology's imagination to be enticed into giving attention to all manner of sources of fascination; for however enriching and fruitful they may present themsevles to , in the end they nearly always constitute a distraction. Theology cannot be and do and say everything; when theology does strive to relate itself to all kinds of other fields of intellectual and cultural activity, then - however much it may do so in good faith and with praiseworthy intentions - it risks losing its determincy, integrity and stability as the attempt to hear and repeat the one Word of God. (p. 21)

This comment was debated on the grounds that it allowed no room for prevenient or common grace (depending on whether you were a Wesleyan or a Calvinist!); and conceded far too much to secular disciplines such that it could not call them to account or be informed by them at all. We speculated as to what vices Webster was excoriating. What I think he has in mind is the Tillichian correlation of theology to culture, which of course within a decade becomes no more than a curiosity of history. Personally, I am stirred by Webster's vision here: I think theology's inattentivity to its own singular and decisive source - the Word of God - and its own task leaves it incapable of saying anything credible about these other disciplines in any case. At least I guess Milbank is trying: but I think he leaves far too much space for a philosophy which, like a cuckoo in the nest, soon ejects the true children and grows to become bigger than its 'parents' (see photo...)

Marva Dawn - Is it a lost cause?

Review of Is it a lost cause? - Having the Heart of God for the Church’s Children

Youth culture is a mighty powerful force, nourished by advances in communications technology and global industries. As Marva J. Dawn, Lutheran theologian and teacher, points out in her book Is it a lost cause? - Having the Heart of God for the Church’s Children there is a demonic aspect to youth culture that calls for an urgent response from Christians. Her book is a passionate and compassionate plea for Christians to pass on their faith unashamedly to the next generation. Rather than giving in to the culture of instant gratification and over-information, she urges Christian families to stand firm, to reach back into the Scriptures and the best of our Christian heritage to give our young people a sure footing.

Dawn is an idiosyncratic writer (in the best sense of that term) who writes in a personal and appealing way. Her Lutheran background gives her work a refreshingly different “spin” on the issues, and her strong commitment to the truth and authority of the Scriptures is a terrific model. As a person who works with young people, I was stirred by her writing not to give in to the worst excesses of contemporary youth culture – boredom, greed, a flippant attitude to sexuality, and a sense of despair. She encourages Christians not to make corporate worship shallow and trivial in order merely to attract large numbers.

There is plenty of wisdom here, gained through tough personal experience and prolonged Bible study. Perhaps Dawn is more negative towards television and modern entertainment technology than I would be. However, her warnings and encouragements contain a good deal of worthwhile insight.

Augustine on martyrdom

In particular it was the Donatist crisis that prompted Augustine’s reflection on martyrdom in the period 410-415 AD. For the Donatists, literal and bloody martyrdom was a measure of the authenticity and purity of their Christianity, in contrast to that of the tainted Church with its traditores. By contrast, Augustine emphasized the necessity of a true faith and the unity of the Church for authentic Christian martyrdom. Suffering itself is not enough – in fact, Augustine vigorously opposed the Donatist fixation on suffering as an end in itself. Without love, suffering is meaningless – therefore, the schismatics who attack the unity of the church cannot claim the title martyrs because they lack caritas. It was the cause, not the suffering, that made a martyr. The long Christian tradition of glorifying suffering had been a false trail – and pathologically so.

Need a martyr suffer then at all? When the persecutions had ended – what was to become of martyrdom, which had been such a feature of Christian self-identity in the first three centuries? Could there be a retention in some form of the martyrological impetus without the need for shedding of blood? One Christian answer, as Judith Perkins observes, was that the martyrological spirit was sublimated into ascetic practices as a way of replicating the test of the arena. But this was not quite Augustine’s teaching (though he wasn't opposed to asceticism). As he explained, Divine Providence had allowed persecutions in order that the ‘number of martyrs or witnesses for the truth might be completed or consecrated, and that by them proof might be given that we must endure all bodily sufferings in the cause of the holy faith and for the commendation of the truth’ (City of God X.32). In the new era, however, the war was to be waged inwardly. Trials and temptations were not found to be lacking now that the external threat had diminished. Now, temptations were persecutions. The lesson of the martyrs was there for the Christian to learn the virtues of self-sacrifice and patience.

Augustine and the atonement

This little passage from the City of God very helpfully clarifies something I was trying to say a week or so ago: that Jesus is not punished by God on the cross, though he pays the penalty for sin:

...the good and true Mediator has shown that it is sin which is evil, not the substance or nature of flesh, since that substance could be assumed, with a human soul, and preserved free from sin, and could be laid aside in death, and changed into something better by resurrection. He has shown that death itself, although it is the punishment for sin (a punishment which he paid for us, though being himself without sin), is not to be aovided by sinning but rather, if occasion offers, to be endured for the cause of right. For it is just because he died, and his death was not the penalty of sin, that he was able by dying to pay the price of our sins. X.24

And, to boot, a more positive role for the body than Augustine is often given credit for.

Bruce D Marshall - Martyrdom and Truth

A number of authors I have encountered - namely Cavanaugh, Vanhoozer and DB Hart - stress the importance of martyrdom as the form of Christian truth-telling. Martyrdom is of missiological and apologetic importance - of course. It is a witness of a particular kind. In the postmodern as in the premodern world it is the ultimate proof that anyone can offer.

Bruce D Marshall in his book Trinity and Truth joins the ranks of the above. Is focus here is a epistemology. Here is fascinating excerpt in which he compares and contrasts two methods of establishing truth - scientific experiment and Christian practice:

The parallel between Christian practice and scientific experiment is, to be sure, inexact. As the martyr’s willingness to die for her faith in Christ most vividly shows, undertaking the life of obedience for which the gospel calls goes hand in hand with being convinced that the gospel is true, while scientists undertake experiments precisely in order to become convinced (or dissuaded) that an otherwise hypothetical set of beliefs is true. Failure of predicted results, moreover, tends to disconfimr the theory which underwrote the predictions, while Christians think they may and should believe the gospel precisely in the face of their own abject failures to live in a way congruent with it.

But the partial disanalogy apparently fails to bear on the relevant similarity of Christian beliefs to scientific hypotheses: the successful practice of the Christian community and its members might be explained otherwise than by the truth of the beliefs held by those who engage in the practice. An objector to the pragmatic thesis might agree to a significant extent with the Christian community's description of a practice...and might agree that the practice is good and right, but might propose a different, indeed incompatible, account of why the practice goes on and succeeds... (p. 186ff)

So, martyrdom is testimony, and as persuasive testimony perhaps as such there is: but it is not proof unless you already inhabit the world-view and practices of the martyr.

Marshall concludes:

Christians will inevitably encounter a kind of epistemic affliction, because they not only hold true, but insist on treating as epistemically primary across the board, beliefs which will be rationally contestable until the end of time…The affliction which goes with holding these beliefs may go beyond having to avoid giving them up. For the martyr’s willingness to die for her faith in Christ, a perseverance no less arduous for being whilly the Spirit’s gift, is rightly reserved the highest praise. p. 216

To summarise: the truth hurts. (Actually, is this a good title for my dissertation? Martyrdom - the Truth Hurts)

Is Shakespeare an Australian Author?

I had a lovely and lively discussion about this with an English English student who wanted to defend his nation's proprietorial rights to the bard. Surely geographical location counts for something, he said; surely he is more English than anything else?

But as an Australian, my culture and language are unthinkable without Billy the Shake. My education was saturated with Shakespeare; his influence was tremendous on the politics and culture of my country. After all, nations are not places, but ideas. We have every right - even a duty - to study him as one of our own. Shakespeare, we might say, came out on the First Fleet.

I think Shakespeare is more Australian than French: though he knew the French and the Italians, and no doubt he has had enormous influence there and even in Russia. But something is carried in the language itself that means it is not even deliberate for us to own him. He is part of our cultural DNA.

Of course, putting the boot on the other foot, we might say that the England that was Shakespeare's - the 'sceptred isle' - is no more, and has not been for centuries. That notion has long gone. He was not English as we think of English now...

Lyotard on 'perfomativity'...

As Jean-Francois Lyotard describes it, the validity of narrative knowledge has been denied in the modern period and replaced by ‘science’, based on ‘facts’ and producing ‘truth’. However, science cannot point to a unitive function and so requires an external source of legitimation. And so, almost sneakily, science turns to ‘meta-narratives’ to legitimate itself. Despite the insistence of the scientist that narratives are childish and primitive and not subject to argumentation or proof, scientific knowledge itself appeals to narratives for its legitimation: for example, that humanity is a hero of liberty and has a right to science; and that progressive measures to liberate it from the oppressive hand of churches and tyrants will lead humanity to fulfilment; or that humanity is the hero of absolute knowledge, and will more and more depict accurately and efficiently master the world according to its actual nature. Scientific knowledge thus delegitimates itself by referring itself to what it already excludes as invalid: narrative.

This self-refutation has led to a crisis enough; but in addition, the new technology of knowledge has shifted the character of knowledge further. Computerisation has meant acknowledging that human observation is limited; and a new, pragmatic emphasis not on the criterion of truth but on efficiency. The construal of science as a ‘true/false’ game has become an ‘efficient/inefficient’ game instead. This new postmodern discourse, however, does not require external legitimation in the same way that the modern scientific discourse did/does.

Lyotard labels this new basis for knowledge as ‘performativity’ (sounds like management jargon, no?) The goal of knowledge is no longer Truth, which necessitated reference to grand narratives, but now rather efficiency, which is self-legitimating.

To Die For? Martyrdom and The Christian Life

Notes for a talk to St Ebbe's students, at the Ledbury conference.

1. Martyrdom is the external representation of the inner reality of the Christian life. Every Christian is always already a martyr, because every Christian has already died. The life of the follower of Jesus is thus always already a life lived in preparation of the possibility of such a trial. The hatred of the world for Jesus is shared by his followers. They already lay down their lives, and take up their crosses and follow him. They die to the world... Baptism is a symbol of this offering of the old self over to death which is what every Christian does as a testimony to the truth of Jesus Christ. Every Christian, we might say, is already a martyr. That there are some who suffer to the point of pain and death is a glorious sign for us of the reality of this. If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. (John 15:18)

2. To be a martyr is to be a witness.
Martyrdom can be a powerful form of truth-disclosing action. Christian martyrs bear witness to the love of God and the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Those who stake theological truth claims, then, should not oppress but rather suffer oppression.
The witness to the truth is one whose life displays the rightness of the believing, and thus the rightness of the belief. The Christian martyr not only declares but displays what it means to say “Jesus is Lord” or “God is Love”. Indeed, one might go further and say that without martyrs we simply would no longer have the meaning of these propositions

3. Martyrdom is an imitation of Jesus in his passion and death.

4. Martyrdom is not a cult of death, for the Christian martyr loves life. The death of the martyr is not a resignation to fate, but truly has a tragic, mournful aspect: for it points to the value of life. You cannot consider laying down one’s life for your friends a sacrifice of any significance if you hold life cheap. There is a “powerful sense of loss” at the heart of Christian martyrdom, because life is hallowed by it in its fullness. Jesus came to give abundant life (John 10:10), after all – an intensification of life. This is important – the structure of resurrection belief is an affirmation of the goodness of the created order, pointing not its eradication by the coming new order but its transformation.

5. Martyrdom affirms life by renouncing it.
The disciple gives up her life and her pleasures and her security to let God do with them what he may... because she sees these things as they truly are...'giving up' something, even your own life, means renouncing your claim to be a master over it.

6. Martyrdom is a sgn for us of the onging power and effectiveness of the gospel of Jesus in the world.
For Luther it is a sign of the presence of the true church! That people are willing to die shows that the gospel really does work to change the lives of people.

7. As Augustine says: 'it is the not the punishment but the cause that makes a martyr'.
Dying for a heresy is not martyrdom: it is just stupid. And also, the call of a Christian is not to seek bloody martyrdom, but to witness to Christ whatever the risk. The rest is in God's hands...
And so:

8. Martyrdom is an act of God, not of human beings.
You can'T [correction following John's question see comments] self-designate as a martyr, or pursue martyrdom for its own sake. No persecution complexes please!

9. Martyrdom is a sign of the distinctively Christian way in which we (ought to) speak
Christians must offer a suffering witness, not a speech of power. We do not pursue a discourse of rights, unless it is on behalf of others.

10. Martyrdom is a sign of the impermance of earthly power: and it WORKS!
It is loyally resistant... because it says 'Nebuchadnezzar, you are validly at rule, but not permanently, and only because you have been established by a higher ruler.' It exposes the folly of human imperialism. It is a great comfort to the oppressed!

11. Martyrdom is not merely a stand of eternal dissidence; it is a witness to the rule of God in Christ. So, it CAN accept peace terms when they come. We don't need to return to the catecombs to be truly Christian, but we must always be at the ready for the time when the tide turns and martyrdom becomes a possibility again. A careful collaboration with the power of the state is possible, but the church must always remember what its particular task is and not betray its nature by getting involved in the business of government.

12. Martyrdom is a sign that the Christian way of being a self is completely at odds with secular way of being a self.
Life for the Christian is not about pleasure and security. We renounce both - by which I mean we hand them over to God. We order them according to his designations.

Augustine and Preaching

At the Latimer Conference we were treated to a fine paper from Peter Sanlon, a student of Catherine Pickstock's from Cambridge University, on 'The Preaching of Augustine'. It was very stimulating. Sanlon's claim is that Augustine's sermons have been scandalously overlooked in academic study of his work.

One point he made I would like to share here. Augustine as a preacher shaped his preaching according to his theology of humanity. Which is to say, he was aware of what it took to persuade a person, to ask a person to look into their heart in response to the word of God. He quoted Michael Hanby:

It is no accident that charity assumes a paramount importance in the Augustinian tradition and discretion in teh pagan, nor that delight in the one case and assent or choice in the other are the corresponding terms in their respective philosophies of action. The terms denote divergent ontological contexts within which selfhood, action and virtue are construed.

Would that modern day preachers thought so comprehensively about those they were addressing!

Hart on the bad taste of Nietzche

Hart's argument in The Beauty of the Infinite is that Christianity is jolly well the most attractive thing around, if you think about it. And other ways of thinking are, well, dog-ugly...

So he writes about Nietzche:

The most potent reply a Christian can make to Nietzche's critique is to accuse him of a defect of sensibility - of bad taste. And this, in fact, is the last observation that shuld be made at this point: Nietzche has atrocious taste. (p. 125)

!

I always thought that this ought to the Christian strategy to counter the rise of queer culture: camp is not just bad morality: it is bad art.

The ascension

The exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of the Father is a basic component of the NT preaching of the person and work of Christ. In fact, the gospel declaration – “Jesus is Lord” – is a declaration of Jesus ascended: that the story of Jesus did not finish with his bodily resurrection but is ongoing, for he reigns. The ascension is the counterpart to the incarnation as we see in passages like Philippians 2:5-11. This was a favourite theme of our old friend, Irenaeus (A.H. 3.1, 18.2, 19.3.)


“In biblical terms the ascension involves a real departure of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the basis on which we find ourselves compelled to speak of two histories rather than one. Covenant history and world history have divided in this departure, for in and with Jesus the former has already reached its goal. In the resulting gap a place has opened up for the Eucharistic community as a genuinely new entity within world history, albeit a peculiar one with its peculiar view of the way things are.” (D.Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia p. 40)




“Doctrinally, then, the Ascension … marks the culmination of the resurrection gospel – the universalizing of Jesus’ relevance to all aspects of human life, individual and global; the present possibility of a share in Jesus’ loving union with his Father, i.e. a life of both trustfulness and authority; the crowning of the purpose of Jesus’ life and death in the restoration of fellowship between heaven and earth. It represents both the call to witness (and to recognize Christ in the world of which he is declared Lord) and the promise of transformed – ‘deified’ – life, as the ground and source of that witness.” (R. Williams, 1983)

And heaven? What is that?

“’Heaven’ in biblical language is the sum of the inaccessible and incomprehensible side of the created world, so that, although it is not God himself, it is the throne of God, the creaturely correspondence to his glory, which is veiled from man, and cannot be disclosed except on his initiative.” (K. Barth, C.D. III/1. 453)

Twelve Steps For Doctoral Students

Tomorrow I am going help at a seminar at a day hosted by the Latimer Trust at Oak Hill College for people interested in persuing graduate studies in theology.

Here's what I am going to say, or part of it:

Lessons I have learnt about doctoral study on the way:

1. Few books, but good. Learn to be a good re-reader rather than try to read absolutely everything. Who cares if you can read 1000s of mediocre books and articles? Find the best. Read them carefully.
2. It may not look it, but thinking is hard work. Thinking takes time to be good. So you will need rest, and holidays, and fun, and diversions. And these will actually help the work progress! Even TV is good.
3. Footnotes should be fun. Slathering everything in footnotes is a bad habit that helps nothing. References are sometimes necessary, but if a footnote is merely a sign of indecision - 'I couldn't work out whether to put it in or not, so I put in a footnote' - cut it out or add it in.
4. Don't wait for inspiration, start writing from day one! Getting words down on paper is really important, because you actaully do much of your thinking while you are writing. This business of leaving writing till the third year is weird to me.
5. Read outside you topic. Attend seminars and lectures. It is amazing how much benefit I have gained from this. It is amazing how unforeseen connections will spring up from completely unrelated contexts. Also, if you are aspiring to be a teacher in a certain area, use the free time to fill in the holes in your knowledge.
6. Find readers for your work/read others' work. Your supervisor will read your work twice a term, perhaps. You will need more than that! The price you might have to pay, is that you will have to read someone else's work: but the pay-off there is that it is comforting to see how they are struggling too!
7. Overcome the evangelical tendency to polemicise. We tend to see life as a series of battles between the forces of good and the forces of evil. But good scholarship is not about polemics first and foremost. Simple either/ors are a bad habit, because the truth is rarely that simple. Your work will gain in sophistication and ultimately in its polemical usefulness if you can avoid a 'goodies' /'badies' mentality.
8. Find surpring friends. Look for surprising agreements or harmonies with your work in other writers/thinkers. Show how someone completely different to you comes to the same conclusion. This is a very powerful strategy for apologetics, too.
9. Find the toughest opponent. Fall under their sway, if only for a week or two: be convinced by their case for a time. Then your reply will carry authority. Your work is only as strong as the opponents you defeat! My tendency when I started was to find any nutter to have a debate with, because debating nutters is always easier than debating reasonable people whose assumptions on the whole I share but who come to different conclusions...
10. Don't talk about you work when you don't feel up to it. One of the shattering experiences for a graduate student is when a family member or friend asks you, 'so, what are actually doing then'? and NOTHING COHERENT comes out of your mouth. This happens to me ALL THE TIME. And you walk away feeling very discouraged about it. Have a prepared speech perhaps! However: I have found writing and talking about my project in other contexts extremely helpful - I find blogging like this. It is a way of accessing other areas of your brain because it is writing/talking in a different mode, somehow.
11. Trust your methodological instincts; go with what you know. You got this far because you have some idea of what theological work is about. You have read quite a bit already. So, use what you already have to your advantage! I often feel intimdated by those theologians who know more philosophy than me (that's most of 'em): I forget that my training was far more in the area of biblical studies and biblical theology. I need to lean more on this, and see it as an advantage, while at the same time not neglecting to deepen my philosophical understanding.
12. Keep doing ministry. Keep serving the people of God, because the tendency of the doctoral student is to wallow in the solitary self-indulgence of it all. Keep preaching/teaching/ministering. After all, what are we doing it all for? If you aren't already doing some ministry in the church, my question is: what are doing entering into graduate theological study? Are you sure you are called to this?

Addenda: I was going to say something about prayer, but I feel foolish and not a little shame hectoring anyone about prayer. I was also going to say as matter of importance: learn to write well. There is an AWFUL lot of bad and unclear and dull writing out there. Write well.

Canon and on

In recent discussions I have had here in Oxford the issue of the development of the canon has loomed large. Post-liberalism tends to agree with Roman Catholicism that the canon is the creation of the church, or is even a practice of the church. Quotes aren't arguments, but, here are three that caught my eye:

The idea that the Bible should rule the church is not poplar today, when leading scholars in the fields are immersed in their own mythology of cultural relativity, but it is a concept which would have seemed perfectly in order to all the Fathers of the church. Gerald Bray, Creeds, Councils and Chirst, p.52

The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the Church. K.Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1, p.104

…the theological issues related to the historical development of the canon may appear rather perplexing to biblical scholars and theologians who would not want to conclude that the biblical canon is a creation of the church. E. Schnabel, "History, theology and the biblical canon: an introduction to basic issues" in Themelios 20:2, 1995, 16.

Vale Bruce Metzger

Bruce Metzger, the doyen of textual critics in the modern era, died very recently.

I was interested to read him this morning saying this in his book The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance:

Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia. (p. 76)

Of course, it is our postmodern tendency to emphasis the diversity and forget the coherence and unity... or to imagine that such unanimity must only have been achieved by the exercise of a centralised power and the engines of ecclesial bureaucracy.

Rahner on sacraments

Rahner posits the Chuch as the basic sacrament. The other (seven) sacraments occur when the church 'addresses itself to and involves itself totally in existentielly [sic] decisive sitiations in human life'.

He says that, if institution by Jesus is a criteria, then NONE of the sacraments can be traced back to Jesus for certain (following modern Biblical scholarship). Instead, the sacraments flow from the institution of the church by Jesus. The sevenfold sacraments are an interpretation by the church of its sacramental existence.

Man must respond in faith, hope and love: the sacraments are not 'magical', though they have been misunderstood as such.

He goes on to adopt an almost Calvinist description - in all the sacraments is 'the efficacious word of God.' They are a 'tangible word of God'. But also: 'It is precisely in a sacramental word, where the chuch addresses God's word to an individual in his quite concrete salvific situation, that the individual precisely as individual is addressed by the word of God in a way which is not found in the general word of preaching even in a really existentiell sermon...'

Harnack on Marcion

The legendary church historian Adolf von Harnack wrote about Marcion:

The innovations of Marcion are unmistakable. The way in which he attempted to sever Christianity from the Old Testament was a bold stroke which demanded the sacrifice of the dearest possession of Christianity as a religion, viz., the belief that the God of creation is also the God of redemption. And yet this innovation was partly caused by a religious conviction, the origin of which must be sought not in heathenism, but on Old Testament and Christian soil. For the bold Anti-judaist was the disciple of a Jewish thinker, Paul, and the origin of Marcion's antinomianism may be ultimately found in the prophets. It will always be the glory of Marcion in the early history of the Church that he, the born heathen, could appreciate the religious criticism of the Old Testament religion as formerly exercised by Paul. The antinomianism of Marcion was ultimately based on the strength of his religious feeling, on his personal religion as contrasted with all statutory religion That was also its basis in the case of the prophets and of Paul, only the statutory religion which was felt to be a burden and a fetter was different in each case. As regards the prophets, it was the outer sacrificial worship, and the deliverance was the idea of Jehovah's righteousness. In the case of Paul, it was the pharisaic treatment of the law, and the deliverance was righteousness by faith. To Marcion it was the sum of all that the past had described as a revelation of God: only what Christ had given him was of real value to him. In this conviction he founded a Church: Before him there was no such thing in the sense of a community, firmly united by a fixed conviction, harmoniously organized, and spread over the whole world. Such a Church the Apostle Paul had in his mind's eye, but he was not able to realize it...

Harnack could see the real power of Marcion's idea. He felt the temptation that Marcion felt, to make a separation between the two testaments, to put the stress on the radical newness of Paul's gospel and to highlight his critique of the old faith. Marcion was a remarkable planter of church communities - Harnack even goes so far as to make him the inventor of the Catholic church. Without Marcion the church would not have been able to conceive of its scriptures; it would not have been able to conceive of itself.

Rowan Williams and Orthodoxy

Of course in thinking about heresy (see previous post), it is worth thinking about what orthodoxy is. Rowan Williams has a very influential view which he established in his book about Arius: that heresy actually arises from the attempt to go further than our talking about God ought to go; that it results from rationalism - any 'attempt to clean up or rearrange Christian language which results in a major reduction of available resources of meaning.' It usually results when theologians value 'conceptual economy and precision over richness of symbolic resource' (as Higton puts it) 'when they make the attempt to tie things down too neatly, to control the various and excessove language of worship and devotion too closely.'

So, orthodoxy for its part is actually a refusal to go further in explaining, a deliberate drawing of the doctrinal circle in a wide rather than a narrow way. It is a victory for poets over bureaucrats: for those who want language that generates new possibilities of meaning over against those that would close them down and specify and deaden. The Nicene formulae (and their later Chalcedonian counterparts) refuse to explain how their may be a Son and Father who are equally God; or a person who is God and man. For Williams, then, the job of doctrine is to teach us silence as well as to circumscribe and guide our speech. Orthodoxy becomes then the steel framework around which Christians in each generation must build and rebuild, with considerable effort and not a little pain.

Now, parts of this vision strike me as problematic and a kind of postmodern retrojection back on the 4th century (he does this, bizarrely in my opinion, with Cranmer as well!) It could easily be caricatured as a very Anglican, very English approach to doctrine - i.e., the English are happy for minimalist view of the role of laws and constitutions because so much of their culture proceeds by convention and agreement. Notably, in the US, the opposite is true: laws and conventions have to do what they say on the packet. Americans (and other colonials!) find the vagueness of the English not liberating but rather frustrating, and a little dishonest (it isn't, but that is how it is perceived). Williams (showing his Hegelian colours) does rather focus on the agonising process of deliberation as an end in itself over against the decision/s of any such debates, too.

BUT: there is also something very appealing about Williams' notion of orthodoxy too. Earlier, for example, in talking about the atonement we struck an attempt to exclude the very old and certainly biblical idea of sacrificial substitution from an orthodox understanding of the atonement; and on the other side, Vanhoozer's warnings about rationalism and reductionism as tendencies in evangelical theological thinking. Both pitfalls are avoided if orthodoxy is practiced as Williams would have us practice it, certainly.

Necessary Heresy 1: Marcion, or how big is the Bible?

This week at St Ebbe's I am starting a series of three lectures entitled Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us.

We start on Wednesday with Marcion. Marcion - the wealthy son of a bishop (how did THAT happen?) - gained a great deal of influence in the 2nd century church and beyond for his teaching that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was in fact a different deity to that of the New. He rejected the OT as scripture, and also everything but the letters of Paul - and edited those as well! The Christian gospel was as he saw it a repudiation of everything that the OT stood for. Creation was the product of a malicious and wrathful demiurge, from whose clutches we were to be saved by the Son.

What is interesting here is the interplay between the scriptural/textual issue and the theological one. Marcion would have no truck with allegorising the distasteful bits of the OT away to make them palatable. He just wouldn't see them reconciled with the loving deity of the New - and so he rejected them on the basis of this theological criterion.

It is significant that Adolf von Harnack, the great German liberal-Protestant church historian, thought Marcion was the most significant theologian between Paul and Luther. Partly, this is because Marcion did get something right: he did understand the radical newness of the gospel - its breaking out of boundaries and its dissolving of religious strictures and superstitions. He did understand the import of Paul's radical critique of the torah. He did understand the heart of the gospel is not bare law but divine love.

But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! It was of course the mission of 19th century liberal Protestantism to follow Marcion in his excision from the canon of the Bible parts that did not apparently square with gospel as they had determined it. The church of yore determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.

Is this heresy alive and well today?

Vanhoozer and the atonement, more of.

[For your greater edification and entertainment, a photo of me graduating with the Master of Studies (Research) degree from Oxford, a degree I didn't even know I was enrolled for or intend to achieve! But they let you wear a fancy gown, so - what the hey!]

I have been enjoying re-reading some of the essays in The Glory of the Atonement (ed. Hill and James). The survey of the biblical and historical material is thorough and careful and leaves me in no doubt that, if one wants to excise sacrificial language from the atonement (see below) or remove the substitutionary aspect, one does so against the overwhelming testimony of the scriptures and the tradition. Which is not to say that there isn't a subjective side to the atonement: it is just that if one has only the subjective side, it ain't enough.

Anyhow, Vanhoozer's essay is my favourite so far ("The Atonement in Postmodernity") - partly because it serves as a handbrake on some of the other essays. He goes so far as to accept the postmodern critique of theoria, at least up to a point. He writes:

The postmodern challenge requires us to develop a nonreductive doctrine of the atonement that perceives the saving significance of Jesus' death in terms other than this-worldly economies of exchange...

What the doctrine of the atonement attempts haltingly to articulate is the equal ultimacy of God's love and God's light (justice, holiness). On the cross neither mercy nor justice loses out; the cross is rather their mutual fulfillment. It is precisely for this reason that theories of the atonement must resist explanations that reduce the significance of Jesus ' death either to unconditional mercy or to uncompromising justice.

George Pattison on Girard and the atonement...

George Pattison in his book A Short Course in Christian Doctrine adapts Girard's work to Christian thinking about the atonement thus:

Earlier, I looked briefly at René Girard’s theory of sacrifice. …Scapegoating works in the sense that it unifies society (“One man must die for the people”!), but it works only at the cost of a massive collective self-deception, a refusal of the self-knowledge that we are each complicit in and responsible for the violence that the act of scapegoating seeks to purge. Seeing Jesus as the scapegoat who bears our sins and thus takes away the sin of the world is, according to Girard, completely to miss the point of what we actually find in the Gospels. For what we see there is the historically unique witness to the profound injustice of the scapegoat phenomenon and, for the first time in history, a victim who refuses to accept the justice of his death, who, in effect, proclaims that one man should not die for the people. For if each person is, in themselves, a reflection of the image and likeness of God and called to fellowship in the divine life, then no act of killing can be “God’s will”. [Thus the passion narrative] offers a decisive insight into the systemic, structural injustice of the human condition and, through this self-knowledge, demystifies and frees us from the otherwise universal mechanisms of mimetic desire and their inevitable violent outcome. The cross, as witnessed in the Gospels, does set us free. But it does not do so because it is the supreme sacrifice. Rather, it does so because it exposes sacrifice for what it is: murder. If we understand this, then that path is for evermore closed and we are set on the new path of mutual responsibility and care. Where the Church persists in interpreting the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms, however, we may suspect that the lesson has not yet been learned. It is salutary to reflect that the Victorians’ preoccupation with sacrifice and atonement provided an all too easy context for the mystification of what happened in the First World War as a Christ-like sacrifice. Only too late did Europe realize that this was…just plain slaughter.

My question is: has there ever been a time when the church did not interpret the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms - let alone in the explicit and persistent language of the NT itself? The language of 'as witnessed in the Gospels' can only be true on a very bad reading of them. Can we retain some of the insight about the cross - that it puts an end to sacrifice and exposes the death of Jesus as a vile murder of an innocent man - and yet still say as orthodox Christians always have, that it was a sacrifice, supremely so?

Mission is unsafe

Not only are the disciples of Christ called to follow after him: they are also sent by him into the world. The mission of Jesus further exposes his disciples to risk, because he sends them into situations where they will be opposed and rejected, beaten, tortured and killed. They are sent out ‘like sheep into the midst of wolves’ (Mt 10:16). They are not to creep unobserved into the corners of the world; Christ rather calls them to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations, ‘in Jerusalem, Samaria and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) – which activity is most certainly for the public sphere. The churches thus are rightly addressed by Peter as a diaspora (1 Peter 1:1-2): they are a scattered gathering. The gospel expands space and foreshortens time: so, there is now not a location in particular that is more (or less) the site of God’s encounter with human beings. In fact, any place on earth will do. The scattered disciples take refuge in the eschatological and heavenly Jerusalem (as in Heb 12:22-3): they are present with the ascended Christ in heaven as he is ‘with them always, to the end of the age’ by the power of his Spirit.

Calvin on the Extent of the Atonement

My study-room mate here at Wycliffe Hall Russ Dawn has written an interesting paper comparing and contrasting Calvin and his successor Theodore Beza on a number of issues including the extent of the atonement. On the one side, R.T. Kendall claims that Calvin did not teach limited atonement, whereas Beza did. Richard Muller replies that Calvin upheld the Lombardian distinction between the sufficiency of Christ's work for all sin, and the efficiency of that work only for the elect. Russ writes:

It is not patent, however, that Muller has resolved all the difficulties. Kendall, for instance, recognises that in Calvin's thought, although Christ died for all, he only intercedes for the elect, but he interprets this as meaning that for Calvin the decree of election 'is not rendered effectual in Christ's death but in His ascension and intercession at the Father's right hand'...In the final analysis, the best reading is that Beza and Calvin differed on the extent of the atonement. Beza clearly espoused limited atonement, whereas Calvin could clearly express universal atonement, or less clearly express limited atonement. It would be a selective, possibily tendentious reading of Calvin to place him squarely in the camp of the doctrine of limited atonement.

Kendall himself says:

Fundamental to the doctrine of faith in John Calvin is his belief that Christ died indiscriminately for all men. Equally crucial however is his conviction that, until faith is given, 'all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.'

This might be somewhat overstating the case: Calvin doesn't clear up this issue because it wasn't a question he was particularly conscious of. However, what IS interesting in Calvin is that (as with the sacraments) faith, which is itself a gift of God by the Holy Spirit, is needed in order to effect salvation.

Eliot and the city

Some of Eliot’s most important poetry addresses and exposes the false security of urban and suburban life. The strongest polemic from an explicitly Christian perspective is found in the Choruses from ‘The Rock’ where he rails aggressively against modern civilization in all its banality as ‘the land of lobelias and tennis flannels’. Eliot declaims against the city in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. However, even his pre-conversion poetry abounds with the same themes: one thinks of the torpor of Prufrock’s bourgeois routines measuring out his life ‘in coffee spoons’ and making an epic of his boredom and petty insecurities; or of the smog that blankets the city of ‘Preludes’; or of the hallucinatory patchwork of encounters in the London, the ‘unreal city’ of The Waste Land. Even before the introduction of an explicitly Christian theme to his poetry we can see the poetry itself as presented as a revelation of the true insecurity and instability of the city of man. The powerful sense of loss and bewilderment that pervades the earlier poems is coupled to a sense of becoming numbed: the sheer grind of urban life is stupefying. What does mark out a change - and which arguably makes the earlier poetry better as poetry - is that this earlier phase you get the sense of claustraphobic entrapment in modern city life which the poet himself cannot evade: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. In Choruses from 'the Rock' there is more over-againstness; a more polemical and critical edge, perhaps, but with also an alternative vision offered.

We see this also in Murder in the Cathedral when the chorus - who are in their way voices from Eliot's past poetry, with their description of household drudgery and imprisonment of a life lived in fear - are tempered by the group of Priests and by Thomas himself. Thomas ought to have learnt through bitter experience that civilisation is not enough to secure human life against barbarism; but the temptation to return to that safer path - to share in the construction of an apparently greater shield of protection from the worst that humans can do to one another - is very great.