Theology After Wittgenstein - Fergus Kerr

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

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

He makes some fascinating applications of this shattering of Cartesianism:

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

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

Idolatry and Fertility

The worship of the fertility gods and goddesses expressed through idol worship draws attention to created objects themselves.

Could we say that is the attempt to make the divine immanent through made objects that is (partly) the problem with idolatry? It is not accidental surely that worship of the pagan deities (as portrayed by the OT) is worship of the fertility/agricultural deities is it?

Pseudo-Dionysius II

Reading on into The Mystical Theology, which is described as the key text for Pseudo-Dionysius's thought, I read -

The fact is that the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing. [MT 3]

Now, to me a crucial observation about all of this is simply that Pseudo-D seems quite happy to talk about it. Which is to say, he is quite far from speechless. He is quite confident to circumscribe the unknown by his knowledgeable words... this seems problematic to me. If this is so, then his humility is more than a little false.

It is interesting how much the theophany at Sinai is for Pseudo-D a paradigmatic encounter with the divine, in the dark cloud or shadow of the unknowing. And so it might have been if it were not for the incarnation of the Word. In Hebrews 12 we read:

18 You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; 19 to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them, 20 because they could not bear what was commanded: "If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned." 21 The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, "I am trembling with fear." 22 But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, 23 to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, 24 to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel...

USB ports - help anyone?

The four USB ports on my computer seem to have ceased functioning. What could be the problem, and what can I do about it?

[Advice from those who really know, please!]

Pseudo-Dionysius, scriptural theologian

I am reading Pseudo-Dionysius - the darling of apophatic theology - for the first time. I was rather surprised to read him affirming quite strongly a very orthodox view of the scriptures as revelation of the divine (shows what my prejudices were I guess):

...we must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed. (The Divine Names 588A).

Which is to say: philosophy ought to be silent concerning God; but there is a given language for God in the Scriptures that we are bound to employ.

Perhaps he was a Barthian?

'May' vs 'Might'

In English usage, what is the difference between 'may' and 'might'? When might (or is it may) one use 'might' rather than 'may'?

For example is it this:

While Rahner and others might be right in urging a broadening of the concept of martyrdom...

or this:

While Rahner and others may be right in urging a broadening of the concept of martyrdom...

and why?

And who cares?

Transportation as punishment

On 13th May 1787 11 ships loaded to the gunwales with a human cargo set sail from Portsmouth for Botany Bay, in the land of New South Wales discovered by Captain James Cook some seventeen years previously. The 1420 souls aboard – somewhat more than that arrived at the other end – were to begin a colony in the form of a prison under the governorship of Captain Arthur Phillip – a colony built by forced labour at the barrel of the gun and at the crack of the cat o’ nine tails. Their journey must have been as terrifying in prospect as it was remarkable in completion. What could a poorly educated horse thief or pickpocket have imagined lay before him across the sea?

Transportation provides a fascinating case study in the history and methods of criminal punishment. Its need arose out of changing social conditions in England in the 18th century – the increasing urbanisation and population growth in Britain owing to the industrial revolution resulted in a terrific displacement of persons and, naturally, in an increase in crimes against property in particular. Whereas localised crimes of a relatively minor nature could have been dealt with by temporary and economic measures such as the stocks in rural districts, the rapid growth of the anonymous city meant that the means of administering punishments in this way was far less manageable. A village miscreant could have been quickly isolated, condemned and shamed by a community familiar to him or her. In the streets of London, it was easier to slip in and out of the crowd unnoticed.

Transportation was not a new punishment in 1787. But Cook’s discovery of an apparently empty and vast island at the other end of the globe made it a more attractive solution to the perennial problem of punishment. Transportation was, it was argued, more humane than the noose. The prisons of the day were notoriously overcrowded and disease-ridden; and in fact the government had resorted to putting its prisoners in prison-hulks moored on the Thames. More space was needed in the jails. What is more transportation was a means of excreting the waste matter from the body of society for its general health: the community stood only to benefit from the disposal of its more annoying and troublesome members. This was opportunity to lance the boil. It had its deterrent effect, too: New South Wales was to the eighteenth century mind surely further away than the moon is to ours – it was a terrifying prospect. And, it could also be argued, transportation was a great opportunity for the rehabilitation of the convict: if he survived the journey and the beatings and did not starve and served out his seven- or fourteen-year sentence he could find himself presented with all the opportunities of a new life in a new country.

Everard Digges La Touche

My predecessor as a lecturer at Moore College, Everard Digges La Touche, Church of Ireland clergyman and author of a brilliant work of Christology, saw WWI as a holy war against German liberal Protestantism. He joined up to fight against it...

The report of his service is here. I quote an excerpt from it:

"At the outbreak of war in 1914, he tried first to join as a chaplain, then in the ranks of the 2nd. Battalion, Australian Inf. In November 1914, he was rejected because of his severe varicose veins, so he immediately went away and had an operation. This meant that he was too late to join the 2nd. Battalion, but as soon as he was well he joined the 13th and rose to Sergeant. You might wonder why this clergyman, who was not in A1 physical condition, and with the responsibility of his wife, Eve, and two young sons, was prepared to go off and fight, but one of his men summed him up, saying "he convinced us of the righteousness of our cause and likened this present struggle for liberty to a Holy Crusade, so when we finally sang "Onward Christian Soldiers", we meant it".

He was commissioned as a 2nd. Lt. in the 2nd. Battalion when an officer was needed to take reinforcements from Alexandria to Gallipoli, for the August attack. On the morning of the 6th, August 1915, he landed his men at Anzac Cove. As a Reinforcement Officer he could then have chosen to go back to Alexandria, but the official historian says that he begged leave to join the attack at Lone Pine. At 5.30, he went over the parapet with the first rush, only to fall, mortally wounded within a few seconds. He managed to roll down the slope of the spur and crawl back into the Australian lines, dying "among his own people" as Charles Bean the Australian war historian described it.”

They don't make 'em like they used to!

The Postmodern Absolute?

I thought this observation by everybody's favourite (non South American) Marxist Catholic Terry Eagleton was intriguing. He's talking about the critique of absolutes by postmodernists, and wondering if they have engaged in some sleight of hand:

It may also be that even postmodernism, with its aversion to absolute foundations, secretly smuggles such an absolute in to the argument. It is not, to be sure, God or Reason or History, but it behaves in just such a bottom-line sort of way. Like these other absolutes it is imossible to delve beneath it. For postmodernism, this is known as Culture... (The Meaning of Life, p. 31)

Culture, indeed. But what is meant by 'Culture' here?

Mark D Thompson on the future of church...

Some great stuff from me learned colleague:

We never want to return to the strict formality and artificiality which characterised at least some Christian gatherings in the past. Gathering with God’s people must mean taking each other seriously as well as the opportunities for service that arise when we are together. The critical difference between ‘church’ and our own private prayer and Bible reading is that we are together, ‘in the fellowship of his people’. And that fellowship must have a sense of reality about it. Precisely for this reason the work of ministry has ‘building each other up’ as a proper concern. But in our rush to address the imbalances of the past and to work together for the good of the body, it is at least theoretically possible to ignore that this happens as we meet with, or better, are met by God in his word. Church is not just a study group or a training centre. Church is a gathering around the powerful, confronting and encouraging address of the living God. Recapturing this sense of the significance of our gatherings might actually prove to be an important part of getting on with the mission.

'nuff said.

Professionalism vs Amateurism in Church: a Third Way?

In church on Sunday the PA was not turned on as the pastor stood up to welcome us AGAIN. It happens every week: and we kind of laugh it off. After all, church is a voluntary society, and we couldn't possibily criticise; people are not professionals, and are offering their time for no payment, and presumably are doing their best etc. We bumble through. (It's a very English way to be!)

You may be able to tell that I am increasingly frustrated with this. And my immediate response is to say 'we need a more professional (American) attitude!'. But then I caught myself: is this word what we want? Do we want 'professionalism?' The production of our church services would be cleaner and tighter and less distracting...after all.

But I don't think 'professional' is right either, and I think we need to expunge all talk of professionalism from our midst! It sends the wrong message. What we need is: nuture of our gifts, and a determination to give the people of God nothing but the best you can possibily do for the sheer love of them and God. What we need is a taking seriously of the need to nuture and perfect and practice our gifts as a way of honouring them as God-given for the purpose of up-building his church.

O'Donovan on punishment II

In his chapter on punishment, O'Donovan carefully distinguishes between divine and human punishment so as to show human punishment its limited scope. But in doing so, he shows that punishing is something that God does:

Ontologically native to God, punishment takes some excusing in terms of extrinsic goods, when practices among consanguinous humankind. Ways of Judgment p.114

It is a side-comment only, but a huge statement in the context of contemporary theology: punishment - ie, 'a judgment enacted on the person, property, or liberty of the condemned party’ is something not foreign but rather proper to God, requiring no other justification other than that it is an exercise of his supreme dominion.

Ruth Gledhill on Wycliffe

Well blow me down, Ruth Gledhill has written just about the only sensible article on the Wycliffe affair. Now, lets be clear - The Times has had a job to win me over after a frankly appalling article on the Sydney diocese a few years back (was it 20+ factual errors? I forget: it was basically copied it out of a hatchet job in Theology by a chap called Humphrey Southern). But this piece is a professional piece of journalism that doesn't make opinion into fact (Stephen Bates' stock-in-trade). Amazing!

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: the offending article was NOT written by Ruth Gledhill as I originally claimed but by her colleague Mary Ann Sieghart. It is a true shocker (a 'Barry Crocker' as we call it back home). See for yourself:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mary_ann_sieghart/article830129.ece

Atheism in vestments

Despite the overt atheism of most of the leading postmodern thinkers, their concern for explicitly theological themes is obvious. Indeed, “fascination” would not be an inappropriate word to use.[1] Several theologians, for their part, have responded by a complete embrace of postmodern anti-logocentricism and espoused a postmodern via negativa, drawing on an aspect of the Christian tradition represented by Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and others. Daniel Bulzan agrees that the postmodern and the apophatic are very similar.[2] Kevin Hart (an Australian!) ignores the protestations of Derrida himself and argues that negative theology is a form of deconstruction.[3] For him, only negative theology resists deconstruction. He writes:
Negative theology, properly understood, is that theology...which works at once inside and outside onto-theology, submitting its images of God to deconstruction.[4]

However, negative theology has been baptised via Greek thought about God in terms of attributes; and postmodernity has not freed itself from this mode of discourse. As Ingraffia points out, negative theology remains part of a Hellenist dialiectic with positive theology; and remains far from the biblical God who has revealed himself.[5] Bulzan, in response to Don Cupitt and Mark C. Taylor, points to the collapse of personal identity in the mystic and the postmodern; and the need for a properly biblical theology of language that would clarify its link with creation and ontology. Indeed, those theologians for whom postmodernity is a given are little more than Feuerbachian anthropologists for whom God is not even absconditus, but mortuus. Ward rightly complains that
The theological, stripped of any transcendence, becomes the incarnational to the point at which a Christian atheism emerges.[6]
It is merely an “atheism in vestments.”[7]


[1] G. Ward, “Theology and Postmodernism”, 435
[2] D.Bulzan, “Apophaticism, Postmodernism and Language: Two Similar Cases of Theological Imbalance” in Scottish Journal of Theology 50/3 (1997) 261-287
[3] K.Hart, op.cit., p.186
[4] ibid.
[5] B. Ingraffia, op.cit., p.226-7
[6] G.Ward, “Postmodern Theology” in D.F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed. 1997), p.591
[7] F.C.Bauerschmidt, “Aesthetics - The Theological Sublime” in J. Milbank et al (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), p.217

O'Donovan on Just War and Martyrdom

It is hard to please everyone all the time.

When it comes to martyrdom, I think OMTO'D has the lines just right here:

...a Christian witness to God's peace must always be acted out agianst the horizon of suffering and martyrdom. Suffering and martyrdom mark the point at which the possibilities of true judgment run out within the conditions of the word. They are necessary components of Christian practical reason, because they demonstrate the vulnerability of the praxis of judgment, and so protect it from serious misunderstanding. Judgment is an undertaking always under threat within the terms of this world, always liable to be overwhelmed by violence. It cannot possibly issue a licence to avoid defeat by all possibe means...Yet the horzon on which we are called to suffer and to die rather than wrong our neighbour is not reached before we actually reach it. The possibilities of active witness to God's peace are not exhausted until we have exhausted them, which we will not have done if have not explored them. In this context...the dutuies which confront us do not BEGIN with martyrdom; they END with it, when we have gone as far as we are permitted to go, done as much as we are permitted to do. Martyrdom is not, in fact, a strategy for DOING anything, but a testimony to God's faithfulness when there is nothing left to do. p. 9-10

I love that: martyrdom is no strategy. How could it be?

Is Jazz the Meaning of Life?

Terry Eagleton is one of my favourite literary critics. Formerly a Marxist, he has always stood against the tide of the obsession with theory. These days, so I understand, he is trading as a Catholic. His review of Dawkins' book was absolutely outstanding.

He talks about human freedom in terms of a jazz ensemble - a nice metaphor. You improvise, but you play in terms of the group. But then:

Is jazz, then, the meaning of life? Not exactly. The goal would be to construct this kind of community on a wider scale, which is a problem of politics. It is, to be sure, a utopian aspiration, but it is none the worse for that. [Old Marxists never die!] The point of such aspirations is to indicate a direction, however lamentably we are bound to fall short of the goal. What we need is a form of life which is completely pointless, just as the jazz perfomrance is pointless. Rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itslef. It needs no justification beyond its own existence. In this sense, the meaning of life is interestingly close to meaninglessness. Religious believers who find this version of the meaning of life a little too laid-back for comfort should remind themselves that God, too, is his own end, ground, origin, reason and self-delight, and that only by living this way can human beings be said to share in his life. p. 174

Rahner vs Balthasar: martyrdom in contemporary Roman Catholicism II

Balthasar’s small work specifically on martyrdom relates to grander themes in his entire oeuvre; however, it particularly reflects Balthasar’s dismay at Rahner’s famous ‘anonymous Christian’ idea. Balthasar points out that is precisely at the point of martyrdom that this notion becomes untenable. Rahner stands accused of switching the moment of decision for the Christian from the encounter with the crucified Christ which demands our faith to the moment when one is – as any human person is – met by the need of the neighbour for love. That is not to say that Balthasar is opposed to the works of love that might result in a bloody martyrdom: only that this is not the point of decision for the Christian, the Ernstfall which generates the life that follows. That belongs only to the cross and resurrection of Christ. It is only from these events that the Christian life truly springs:

What then should a Christian be? He should be one who offers up his life in the service of his fellow man because he owes his life to Christ crucified.

While Rahner and others might be right in urging a broadening of the concept of martyrdom, they do not sufficiently ties it back in the events that gave it birth. Witness-bearing, for Balthasar, may take a variety of forms, granted. What Balthasar wants to re-assert is that martyrdom is an ‘act’ of faith – and that faith as faith in the God of Jesus Christ:

Man becomes aware of the nature of his particular mission in life when he calmly puts his trust in God. But whatever particular Christian state the believer may live in, he lives as one who has died and been resurrected, because his while existence is an attempt to make a loving and thankful response to God ‘by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20).

Balthasar’s suggestion helps not to foreclose the possible range of consequences of a life of authentic Christian witness (which is the concern of Rahner and Boff); but also ties it inextricably to the work of Christ in the believer, such that it could never be said that martyrdom anything other than a divine act.

Hauerwas on Narrative theology

A key question for narrative theologians is this: 'how may the claims of a story to shape our lives be judged?'

Stanley Hauerwas offers four “working criteria”, without claiming for his list completeness or absolute clarity:

First, a story must display the power to release us from destructive alternatives.
It must, secondly, it must display ways of seeing through current distortions.
Thirdly, it ought to allow room to keep us from having to resort to violence.
Lastly, it should show a sense for the tragic: how meaning transcends power.

This list of criteria appears to be a little arbitrary, or linked to Hauerwas’ own ethical preferences (for non-violence, for example). Has he at this point reintroduced some abstract ethical ideas having previously disavowed them? Perhaps this is the weakness of the narrative turn that Hauerwas advocates: are these criteria prior to, or the result of a narrative understanding of discourse? Even despite his protestations about the provisionality of his criteria, there is no clear answer given (in this essay) as to how these have arisen. One proposal at this stage would be for an appeal to a master-story – namely the one that Christians tell about Jesus Christ and his Father - that narrates these criteria as the ones by which subsidiary stories ought to be evaluated (and adopted or rejected); and I suspect this is what Hauerwas has in fact done (and does do in practice) but appears to conceal somewhat. Towards the end of his essay, he more explicitly suggests that it is the acceptance of certain stories as “canonical” that marks religious faith. What this means in effect is that through these stories recognized as canonical we “discover our human self”, and are able to judge the adequacy of “alternative schemes for humankind”. Again, we need to ask “why are these stories canonical?” Isn’t this shifting the plausibility problem rather than answering it?

Further, Hauerwas’ criteria appear to ask which narrative works best, leaving him open to the charge of pragmatism. He freely concedes that there may be a plurality of narratives that meets his criteria. However, if these narratives make contradictory, even inimical claims about the world, and God, but work equally well to (say) steer us from violence, are we not able to make further discrimination between them? Are the differences between them merely irrelevant in that case? For those who inhabit these competing stories, it is unlikely to be an easy matter to cast off some parts of the narrative as unimportant.

There are many stories that do not exhibit these criteria and yet have claims to shape our lives. In our time as in the ancient world, stories of violent vengeance make powerful and popular appeal to the ideal of individual, extra-legal action to resolve outstanding moral business. Violence is essential for a feeling of justice in the resolution of these tales. This is even now advocated by Peter A. French, The Virtues of Vengeance ([Lawrence]: University Press of Kansas, 2001), who analyses the pursuit of vengeance in Western films like The Searchers and Unforgiven. Hauerwas would, no doubt, say that these are “bad” stories...But then, he already decided this on - well what grounds exactly?

Richard Rorty - the priority of democracy to philosophy

Richard Rorty is a more than somewhat provocative thinker. In an essay entitled 'The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy' he puts forward the pragmatic argument that, as his title suggests, what really should concern us is the forging of democratic agreements on which some progress can be achieved, rather than speculating on unsolveable philosophical issues. Liberal democracy should give up pretending that it is founded on a grand metaphysical principles like 'rights' etc and instead realise that it is merely the best working solution to the problem of political community. So, he writes:

The philosophical tradition has assumed that there are certain topics (for example, 'what is God's will?' 'What is man?'...) on which everyone has, or should have, views and that these toics are prior in the order of justification to those at issue in political deliberation. This assumption goes along with the asumption that hman beings have a natural center that philosophical inquiry can locate and illuminate. By contrast, the view that human beings are centerless networks of beliefs and desires and that their vocabularies and opinions are determined by historical circumstance allows for the possibility that there may not be enough overlap between two such networds to make possibile agrement about political topics, or even profitable discussion of such topics.

Truth, in the Platonic sense is 'simply not relevant to democratic politics'. Neither is a notion of the self: even a very loose and postmodern one. You just don't need to bother yourself with it! Now, you gotta like that for straight shooting!

He goes on:

The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional theological toics. Like the rise of large market economies, the increase in literacy, the proliferation of artistic genres, and the insouciant pluralism of contemporary culture, such philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness helps along the disenchantment of the world. It helps make the world's inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.

Well, what a relief!

The Joshua Tree

I recently purchased the CD version of U2's 1987 classic The Joshua Tree. I bought the vinyl version the day it became available 20 years ago. I was 17 and already a fan of U2, so I was not coming to it cold. But I don't think this album has ever been surpassed in all their catalogue.

It has what the truly great albums have, and that is a thematic and musical continuity. What I mean is that you have to listen to the songs as a collection of songs: they inform one another, echo back of each other. U2 badly wanted for this in The Unforgettable Fire 1984, but spoiled it by overdone production and a couple of their lamest tracks ever ('Elvis Presley in America', 'Indian Summer Sky'). The missed again with Rattle and Hum, a tediously long album with at times all their tendency to self-righteousness and pomposity on display ('Silver and Gold').

None of that is here, though there are 'issues' and 'issue songs'. America is the theme, but so are death and loss and grief. The people in the songs expressing longing and don't yet see the way to answer it. The ambiguity of faith and doubt in 'I Still haven't Found What I'm Looking For' is matched by the love-hate of 'With or Without You'. And so on. Morever it is an album with a landscape: it seems to refer to places so often...

Anyhow - here are 8 album highlights for me:

1 - Bono's hope of meeting his dead friend again 'when the stars fall from the sky' in 'One Tree Hill'. Here is a man in his mid-twenties realising he is mortal. It hurts. But here is a song with an eschatology. A song about grief in a major key.

2- Edge's major 7th note in the guitar part of 'I still haven't found what I am looking for' - this ONE note sums up the whole song.

3 - the Helicopter drums in 'Where the Streets have no name'.

4 - bass line in 'Bullet the Blue Sky', my favourite all time U2 song.

5 - 'fighter planes' guitar effects, same song.

6 - 'Running to a Stand Still' - how can something so sweet be made of so few components.

7 - The major key and brightness of 'Red Hill Mining Town' which is talking about the end of generations of working in the same place. There IS something left to hold on to...

8 - Bono's talking in 'Bullet the Blue Sky'. The cheesiest moment on the album perhaps? But it works.

Ricoeur on punishment

Reading Ricoeur has been very stimulating, though at times he comes accross almost as a naive thinker. He says this in a touching essay about the excess of grace, called 'the Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God':

...are we not invited to discern even in the most just punishment, the disquieting countenance of wrath and vengeance? It is good that, goaded by the paradoxes of Jesus we would distrust our better works. But it is not only a question of distrust Does not the more positive way become for us deliberately to orient punishment to improvement rather than expiation? Because on which side is the gospel? Is it on the side of the vengeance of society or on the isde of the rehabilitation of the culpable?

This is well said: a Christian ethics of punishment must stem from the evangel of mercy, surely... And yet, Western society is speeding fast away from this logic.

Cuteness and its relevance for ethics

Yesterday I killed a baby.

It was a baby squirrel. I saw it on the grass, its cute head poking out with its big doey eyes. Only then I noticed that it had fallen from a tree and had broken its back and was obviously dying a slow and painful death. So, I pulled off my right boot and administered the coup de grace - a violent and savage act which felt very unfamiliar to me in my protected suburban experience. Its little body lies on the lawn now, drenched with the overnight rain.

In discussions about abortion and other ethical issues the emotive and splenetic reactions of those involved are often discarded. To be thoroughly rational and modern people, we are supposed to relativise our emotional responses, or protect ourselves from them. We can accept abortion but not infanticide because we can easily protect ourselves from the cuteness of the baby involved: it is a face hidden from us, a ghostly presence we can shield ourselves from. We are afraid that we will love what we see, so we try hard not to look. Strangely, we know our own 'weakness' - our recidivism as far as guilt goes and so on, and our attachment to cute things. There is a feeling of contempt for those who act merely out of emotion.

But shouldn't our feelings - whether of compassion or disgust or sorrow - be rather a guide for us ? Isn't our capacity for empathy one of the best things that human beings have to help us make moral decisions? To be sure, we can manipulate this tendency: the animal rights/anti-abortion campaigners who show us shocking images of dismembered babies and tortured animals play on our disgust as much as our tenderness. But they are onto something, aren't they? Not to say of course that we should act only out of our visceral reactions to things; only rather to suggest that this visceral reaction is not as unhelpful and distorting as we might think. We are meant, as new parents (for example) to fall for our babies, because we are meant to care for them. Cuteness protects children from infanticide, or ought to.

Jesus himself was often moved by the plight of those he encountered. He appears rather prone to follow his gut reaction, if truth be told! He sees the leaderlessness of Israel, or the corruption of the temple courts, or the pain-racked body before him, and he is quite clearly - and physically - 'moved' to action.

As for the squirrel: I noticed that in deciding to end its life I had to both feel and think. My response to its cuteness and then shock at its pain meant that I had think how to act in a way that cared (in a small way) for it. It wasn't the dilemma of the century of course! And, I don't feel that its cuteness is overcome or put aside by thinking through what the most practical and reasonable thing to do was. I still feel a small sorrow for the squirrel.

Helen Garner – Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law

[For non-Australian readers: Helen Garner is one the best contemporary Australian writers.]

Joe Cinque is dead.

It was his girlfriend, Anu Singh, a pretty and bright law student at ANU who injected him first with Rohypnol (the “date-rape” drug) and then an overdose of heroin; and did nothing during the several hours it took him to die. Her confused and desperate call to the ambulance was too little, too late.

It was a bizarre killing: made even more so by the revelations that Singh had held a dinner party in the days before at which she had made no secret of her intent to carry out a murder-suicide. But then, our newspapers are full of bizarre killings. So what drove Helen Garner to write about this case?

Garner can’t quite explain it. As she tells it, she happened across the story at a moment of personal crisis for her:

… I had recently been forced to acknowledge that I was a woman at the end of my tether. I was fifty-five. My third marriage had just collapsed in a welter of desolation. I was living alone in Sydney, in a rented flat, on the fifth floor of a building on the top of a hill. I had no job, and lacked the heart to look for one. I knew I had to get out of my own head, to find some work to do. (p.13)

Garner admits that her interest in the crime was at least at first because she wanted to look at a woman tried with murder. Feeling pain, anger and humiliation, she wanted to know “if anything made them different from me”. (p.25) There is no illusion of mere objectivity in Garner’s non-fiction: that of an absent, disinterested observer. Garner is as much a character in the narrative as Anu Singh and Joe Cinque’s mother. And it is the rawness of Garner’s hurt spirit that gives her the ability to record so sensitively the pain, bewilderment and grief of others.

The narrative of the book begins in the court case against Anu Singh. Garner is able to reflect on her own petty snap judgments and bitchiness as she finds herself intuitively disliking Anu Singh. But her intuitions haven’t let her down: though she is unable to interview the young woman and her accomplice, she speaks to acquaintances, to her father and combs over the court documents.
Singh does not come over well (unsurprisingly): she is obsessive and manipulative, on Garner’s account; she shirks the responsibility of her actions by pleading psychiatric illness. Her father, a Dr Singh, appears likewise appallingly self-centred and greedy, oblivious to the real pain in Cinque’s family. Under cross-examination Dr Singh, asked about his religious beliefs and those of his daughter, replies “She is too young to have any beliefs.” (p.29) The reader is left to infer that such beliefs may have saved Anu from herself. The psychiatric evidence seems unable to explain the “simple wickedness” at the heart of the story.

Garner finds herself dismayed by the short sentence handed out to Singh. And so the focus of her story turns to Joe’s mother, Maria. Striking up a real friendship with Maria and her family, she finds that justice system as not mollified their grief and anger. Through these interviews, Garner finds her self compelled to keep on with the project of the book because something remains deeply unsatisfied and unsatisfying in the story. Joe Cinque’s blood is, we might say, crying out from the ground.

Towards the end of the book, Garner seeks out the judge in the case, Justice Ken Crispin. This is a telling conversation. Crispin, an active Christian, is convincing in word and person, and does not resile from the moral difficulties of the case. He admits that Madhavi Rao, Singh’s friend, failed in her duty of care to Joe Cinque – knowing what was happening but doing little to intervene - but that the law does not make this criminal.

But deep questions remain. As Garner puts it:

I listened to him without arguing. But I was thinking, Where does all the woundedness, the hatred go? What becomes of the desire for vengeance, for a settling of the score? (p.318)

But though she suspects how the Christian Crispin might answer - that this is the province of the Almighty – she holds the question back because “we weren’t in a church. We were in the Supreme Court, the temple of reason.” (p.320) I think this was a pity: while I respect Helen Garner’s amazing courage in her quest, I think that this bracketing of religious discussion out of the public forum leaves a vacuum that Garner struggles to fill. I suspect that she herself knows this.

What she discovers is that human justice struggles at the point of atonement. As Justice Crispin says, very rarely in the sentencing process is satisfaction achieved. So we cry out again and again with Garner, where does it go? Where, O God, does it go?

At the sentencing of Anu Singh, Joe Cinque’s parents had made a speech to the waiting media in front of the court saying that they hoped that somebody would kill one of the judge’s children so that he would understand. What they didn’t know at this stage is that this judge had indeed lost a child. He knew something of their griefs; he was not unlike them in their suffering.
In the end, Garner offers the book to the Cinque’s as their “consolation” – a word evoking the momentous declaration of Isaiah 40:1. And what is their consolation? The book remembers Joe, and defends him. In the end Anu Singh and her calamitous behaviour fade: and what Garner leaves us with is a celebration of the life of this ordinary, dearly loved boy.

Rahner and Cavanaugh: martyrdom in Roman Catholicism

Karl Rahner has been among the most prominent voices urging for such a broadening of the notion of martyrdom. Traditionally, those who have died in active struggle have been excluded from consideration as martyrs, however righteous the cause. While he recognizes the important caveats that must be observed (in order to exclude, for example, the crusading knights of the Middle Ages), Rahner argues that this element of active struggle often springs directly from a pure inner conviction about Christ:

…the death Jesus ‘passively endured was the consequence of the struggle he waged against those in his day who wielded religious and political power. He died because he fought: his death must not be seen in isolation from his life. Putting this argument the other way around, someone who dies while fighting actively for the demands of his or her Christian convictions…can also be said patiently to endure his or her death.

He is joined in this plea by the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who, hearkening back to Origen (over the head of Augustine) argues for the inclusion of ‘political martyrs’: by which he means to indicate those who witness to the truth of the kingdom in active struggle against oppression. The emphasis within this conception of martyrdom falls almost entirely on the activity performed by the martyr, and its (presumed) resemblance to the teaching and action of Christ himself. This has of course a particular application in the Latin American context in which liberation theology arose. However, the difficulty that Boff runs into (and Rahner risks) is that he makes abstract principles distilled from the life of Christ by whatever hermeneutical process fundamental to the recognition of a martyr aside from the actual narrative of that life. As William Cavanaugh puts it (speaking of Boff and fellow theologian Sobrino) they ‘assume that the content of Christ’s life, death and resurrection can be isolated apart from their form’. If martyrdom is reduced in this way to some principle – ‘love’ or ‘justice’ – apart from imitating the pattern of Christ’s life, then it is susceptible to becoming criteria-less. It loses its distinctly Christ-like characteristics that might mark it out from other sorts of acts. Cavanaugh continues:

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

Perhaps one of the problems here is in the Roman Catholic need to identify exactly who is and who isn't a martyr/saint...

The Ugley Vicar: What’s really wrong with English Conservative Evangelicalism

This is a fascinating insiders critique of uk Conservative evangelicalism

here

Having said that he also has a go at the 'open' evangelicals too,

here

It is time to ask open evangelicals whether blood is thicker than water... if you look at the Fulcrum site (on which there is much GREAT material) you get the impression that the only enemies of the gospel in the C of E are the conservative evangelicals. Really.

Alasdair MacIntyre on 'morality'

MacIntyre makes a great critique of what we call 'ethics' or 'morality': which these days seems to be shunted off into committees, of all things...

...there is no word correctly translated by our moder word 'morality' in any ancient or medieval language. And this lack of a word is a symptom of the different way s in which different forms and aspects of social life were classified in the societies in which those languages were spken and written.... [ he notes that this is true of 'art' as well...] ... so when later modern historians of ethics...have extracted from the writings of ancient or medieval authors that which, according to the modern conception, belongs to ethics, we have too often projected back on to the past categories alien to that past with two highly misleading results. p. 191

In sum:

1 - we detach arbitrarily parts from wholes without which they become distorted, and;

2 - we obscure that moment when 'morality' becomes a distinct category from ourselves.

JP II on martyrdom

Always a canny fellow, John Paul II wrote often about martyrdom and its significance for all humanity as well as for his church. Check this out:

Martyrdom, accepted as an affirmation of the inviolability of the moral order, bears splendid witness both to the holiness of God's law and to the inviolability of the personal dignity of man, created in God's image and likeness. This dignity may never be disparaged or called into question, even with good intentions, whatever the difficulties involved. Jesus warns us most sternly: "What does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? " (Mk 8:36).

Martyrdom rejects as false and illusory whatever "human meaning" one might claim to attribute, even in "exceptional" conditions, to an act morally evil in itself. Indeed, it even more clearly unmasks the true face of such an act: it is a violation of man's "humanity", in the one perpetrating it even before the one enduring it. Hence martyrdom is also the exaltation of a person's perfect "humanity" and of true "life", as is attested by Saint Ignatius of Antioch, addressing the Christians of Rome, the place of his own martyrdom: "Have mercy on me, brethren: do not hold me back from living; do not wish that I die... Let me arrive at the pure light; once there I will be truly a man. Let me imitate the passion of my God".

I enjoy here the connection between human identity/ meaning and martyrdom, and how martyrdom both at once is the destruction of a human being's humanity and also the unmasking of the inhumanity in the perpetrator and in addition the vindication of the humanity of the martyr (as far as God is concerned). Of course, the Passion of Christ is the model - think how Mark interweaves all of these aspects.

Searching for the way to say it...

Two questions of finding the write theological language confront me as I write:

1 - I keep wanting to say 'God' and 'human' as if they are opposites, but it strikes me that this isn't as simple as it looks. So, for example when I write -

Christian martyrdom is an act of God, not of human beings

- isn't this a false dichotomy because of Jesus Christ, who makes possible a kind of divine-human act? Isn't the opposition more between divine and non-divine? Is that the right language?

2 - I keep going to write 'the Church' out of habit - meaning 'the Church visible', as in -

the Church must always remember what the particular task for which they carry divine authority is.

- only as a Protestant I am not sure that this is meaningful language. Can I really talk about the visible church as a unity that can act, think, decide, live in this way? Isn't it more accurate - and more biblical - to speak of 'churches' when talking of the people of God under this aspect, and reserve 'the Church' for the final eschatological gathering?

Waddesdon - The Rothschild estate

Who is in the pew?

On the pulpit in Salisbury Cathedral: St Paul (I think...)

Some thoughts towards an article addressing the issue raised in this post, namely 'who is in the pew as the preacher preaches, theologically speaking? Here is my preliminary list:

1. a creature, addressed by God and called to respond.


2. a creature among other creatures, like and unlike.


3. a creature who is, here and now, here and now.


4. a creature of flesh and blood.


5. a creature of hand, heart and head


6. a creature of imagination and memory


7. a creature tempted and tested by the devil


8. a creature scarred by sin


9. a creature facing death


10. a creature whose flesh Christ took on, and for whom Christ died


11. a creature addressed by God, and called to respond
    

Somehow, I would like to get Jesus in there earlier. But I kinda like the way this ends, which means you can take the Jesus bit and read it all back in to the others. In fact, the incarnation, life of obedience, passion and resurrection give us most of these again in a second way. And, also, I make no distinction between believers and unbelievers here. Ought I?

The wisdom of Allberry

Talking to Sam Allberry today, curate of St Ebbe's, about preaching, he came up with a couple of golden sayings. Or, he may have stolen them, but they were pretty good anyway:

Don't turn church into an airport lounge - the kind of place that is threatening to no-one but home to no-one either.

Preaching ought to be to the converted.

Preaching is truth through personality.

Eliot spotted in the Unreal City

I was walking down a London street yesterday and saw this quite by accident. Delightful happenstance!

O'Donovan on punishment

Oliver O'Donovan does talk good sense about a lot of things, not least on the matter of punishment. He takes from Grotius the cue that punishment is 'ontologically native to God'. He repudiates some of the contemporary theology that denies this (namely that of Gorringe) in the name of dening that punishment of any kind is valid, but fails to do so coherently, or theologically.

He writes:

When we speak of God's own 'punishing' we are speaking of his judgement within the quasi-political context of his own covenant-faithfulness. Divine punishment...is God's disclosure of himself as our good, revealing the truth of our wrong. For this reason Christians have always found it necessary to speak of divine punishment in connection with the Atonement, for the Atonement is the supreme demonstration of God's covenant-faithfulness. Ways of Judgment, p. 107

Charles Taylor on Salman Rushdie

For purposes of my thesis I was delighted to discover a comment by Charles Taylor on the Rushdie controversy of the late 80s. What Taylor rightly observes is that The Satanic Verses 'is a profoundly Western book', whatever its exotic subject matter.

In Rushdie's book, one has the comfortable sense that exactly the things which repel him from religion...are the things its devotees cherish. They experience exactly the same spiritual realities, and just reverse the sign. Rushdie's book is comforting to the western liberal mind, which shares one feature with that of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the belief that there is nothing outside their world-view which needs deeper understanding, just a perverse refection of the obviously right. To live in this difficult world, the western liberal mind will have to learn to reach out more.

Quite. But, can it? The western liberal mind always already has ordered views other than its own, either by means of a progressivist narration ('oh, they are so primitive, we got over that years ago') or by demonising it as 'intolerant'. So, why will the western liberal even see the need to reach out? Isn't it rather a matter of teaching the world to behave in the right way?

MacIntyre and the failure of Culture

Every culture is characterised in part by what it conceals and obscures from view, by what its habits of mind prevent it from ackonwledging and appropriating. We err therefore in so largely, sometimes exclusively writing the history of ideas, of science, of art, of culture in general in terms of positive achievement. Culture is present also in failure and it can in crucial respects blind the educated to what needs to be seen. So it was with the failure to understand the work of Aquinas in the late Middle Ages. So perhaps it may be with us... . p. 169

This is a rather a gloomy - characteristically grumpy we might say - assessment of the state of intellectual enquiry! MacIntyre characterises the reception of Aquinas' grand synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine as a rank failure, with the usual suspects - Occam and Scotus - taking a beating on this. And in Meister Eckhart's sermons, the business of theological thinking becomes (for MacIntyre) separated from rational thinking: preaching becomes a matter of rhetorical effect, a 'mere rationalization of the preacher's processes'. This effect MacIntyre sees very much in evidence today.

Aussie theoblogians hard at work

Jason has started a great series on Names and the Name: catch the first two posts here and here.

Byron has just completed his momentous series entitled "Would Jesus vote Green?" and you can find the whole series linked to one post now.

Ben starts a new series on encounters with tradition today.

Rory has got some stuff to say about Atheism and Christopher Hitchens.

Marty has completed five terrific 'Postcards from Karl'

Moffatt's great ten-part series on the Spirit has finally come to a close, as well.

David Hohne is asking how to become 'A more apolegetic person', echoing sentiments found here on this blog.

And a visit to Michael Bird's site is never a waste of time, that's for sure.

Where the project is at the moment - any thoughts?

"Our intention in this thesis has been to give a theological (rather than, say, historical or sociological) account of Christian martyrdom and of at least some of the implications of that account. In particular the question of identity was raised as a matter on which an explication of martyrdom could potentially shed considerable light. The basic theological datum with which we began was the martyrdom in the form of witness (‘white’ martyrdom) was inseperable from the identity of the Christian, with bloody (or ‘red’) martyrdom as its ‘external representation’. Bloody matyrdom then is a sign of what the inner reality of the Christian life is like.

We hastened to recognise at this stage that discussions of martyrdom occur under pressure of a severe critique: it is certainly no longer a given that martyrdom is esteemed as a form of death just in and of itself. Rather, martyrs are accused of denying life and of perverting love, of resiling from their duty to do good, of neglecting the bonds of family and friendship, of extreme egotism of a destructive kind. The spectre of religious violence hangs always and already over any discussion of martyrdom in the modern setting. Martyrs are more likely to inspire fear than reverence. However, is it the case that Christian martyrdom really falls under this critique? Chapter one, then, examined two powerful and very different attempts to describe authentic selfhood in the contemporary world and asked whether either of them could be reconciled with an identity informed by the idea of Christian martyrdom. Of Charles Taylor it could be said that he was bending over backwards to make room for the possibility of Christian martyrdom, or something like it, in his account of authenticity; but is not firm enough about the potential for inauthenticity. Martyrs are not those who accept that their understanding of reality is just one amongst many, after all. Salman Rushdie, for his part, presents a far more irascible figure. He is vehemently opposed to martyrdom as a model for human self-identity: it is far too emedded in traditional ways of seeing the world that do not adequately understand the shifting and liquid conditions of the present order. It is insufficiently open to new experiences and corrupting of the love between individuals. It perpetuates the cycle of violence by preaching resentment and hatred, by viewing the subject as identifiable through his or her victimhood. It allows human beings excuses for not feeling and for not living as they might. It is the result of fideistic religion that cordons itself off from reason. However, Rushdie’s account is not without its own difficulties: it is hard to see that he has successfully escaped from the ‘self-determination’ problem that Taylor derides in his account. Furthermore, while his depiction of martyrdom may be valid for some Christian and other religious martyrdoms, it is certainly not the case that his criticisms of martyrdom in this guise fairly describe a Christian martyrdom that is true to its own sources – in the example of Christ himself, in the canonical Scriptures and in the ripening tradition.

In fact, what Rushdie seeks in a self-identity is in some ways quite similar to that which is described by Christian martyrdom. Rushdie seeks to free the individual from the matrices of the past: culture, religion, race, gender and so on. He applauds the embrace of ‘the new’, delights in unforeseen possibilities and the potential for boundary-crossing connections between human beings in the name of peace. However, the characters that Rushdie introduces are still masters of their own destinies and makers of their own images. They are paragons of freedom, above all.
Into this context we offered our reading of Christian martyrdom as generated by Eliot in his perceptive play. The meaning of the martyrdom is informed, as we watch the visitation of the Tempters to Thomas, by that which the martyr renounces. Many of things renounced are very good and worthy ways to be: they are all the more powerful as temptations for being so. These are promising potential selves, full of opportunity to be useful to society and fulfilled and powerful as an individual.

The First Tempter offers Thomas the chance to guard himself against the twists and turns of fate by persuing a life of ease and security; or at least, he offers him the yearning for the time when he had this life. Tranposing this temptation into the terms offered by Martha C. Nussbaum in her analysis of Greek tragedy, we saw how the management of luck and the securing of safety was (and remains) a crucial component of successful existence in a world fraught with chance. However, the martyr walks away from this potential for security. Discipleship of Christ is described as not a matter for looking back to home, or even looking around in the present for cover against whatever may come, but rather for looking ahead to the eternal city promised in the gospel of Jesus (as we discovered with Augustine’s help). The martyr steps out into risk knowing that there is no turning back and that the cost may be great. However, he or she is not merely a thrill-seeker, riding a wave of risk all the way to the shoreline; on the contrary, the risk is taken in the context of hope secured in the ascended Lord Christ. This risk-taking by the disciple also exposes the temporary nature of human fortifications against luck.

The Second Tempter, in a tactic pursued also by the Fourth, tries to catch Thomas in a double-bind. On the one hand he offers to him the chance to make peace with his (God-appointed) ruler so that the two may collaborate in performing the business of government: meteing out justice for the good of the people. The price? ‘A certain submission’ to the king. When Thomas draws back from this, appealing to the ‘power of the keys’, the Tempter accuses him of power hunger. We saw next in our discussion of John Rawls that this temptation is not unique to conditions of monarchy and papacy: in fact, even under contemporary forms of liberal order a version of this temptation will be on offer. Churches may be tempted to secede their distinctive speech in favour of being able to participate in the public square; or may be accused of sectarianism if they refrain. The response from Scripture and the tradition (this time chiefly Augustine, Tyndale and O’Donovan) was to advance the insight, revealed in the martyr’s renunciation, that power and authority have a singles source though a dual expression. This helps both to relativise the power of the imperium and to show it as circumscribed by divine authority at every point; and also to encourage the Church that in the gospel it has its own authority – though it is of a distinctively non-coercive and persuasive nature.

The Third Tempter on the other hand, also interested in power, offers to Thomas the option of rebellion against the king. There is a case to be made here: tyranny is worth fighting against after all. There may be more authentic and more just forms of government available. Surely the martyr, having renounced collaboration with the ruler must persue subversive and destabilising activity to be consistent. Again the case is made that this is the way in which more just outcomes for the English people can be persued. What is more, this is a path of action, of putting noble thoughts into concrete practice. Once more we see how this may be consonant with a powerful and comprehensive account of the good life in action, as we find it this time in (a Nussbaumian reading of) Aristotle. Yet again, the martyr must also refuse. The form that his resistance to power takes is loyal; he does not hold national identity as an absolute value by any means; and he refuses to assert himself by seizing at action that will achieve that end. In fact (as we saw with the assistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer), he rather acts ‘passively’: which is to say, in a way that takes responsibility for others, that is prepared to suffer what may come.

In the Fourth Tempter we have the most surprising of the temptations and another one that takes a two-fold course: martyrdom itself is offered, first, with Thomas imagining how he will be remembered and honoured by posterity, and secondly with imagining the crown of heaven being placed on his deserving temple. The renunciations of the first three temptations runs headlong into this fourth: if Thomas imagines himself accruing heavenly merit and forcing the divine hand on account of his repudiation of the secured self, the powerful self and the active self, he is sorely mistaken. He must also set aside the martyred self. We find these temptations maintained first in the representation of the ancient ‘honour ethic’, with all its military trappings; and secondly, in the theology of heavenly rewards which is widespread in religious accounts of martyrdom including some Christian ones, admittedly. Both of these descriptions of martyrdom were proven to be problematically self-justifying. The insight given in the renunciation of this temptation is that, as Thomas is able to declare to his congregation in the Cathedral on St Stephen’s Day, martyrdom is itself an act of God. The making of martyrs is given to divine providence and not to human hands. As we saw, it was Augustine in particular who had to wrestle with this in the context of great enthusiasm for martyrdom in the church of his day. The Christian offers himself or herself in free obedience as a witness to the divine rule; the outcome is not for him or her to determine.

In chapter six our focus was drawn to the twin poles of temptation and providence. These themes had been constantly with us as we examined the four temptations – the move is the narrative is away from temptation and, not towards a construction of a new identity or self, but towards a vision of the providence of God: namely, faith. We asked ‘who killed the Archbishop?’, which is to do just as the play itself invites us. Using Riceour’s insights, we determined that peirasmoj – a concept inclusive of trail and temptation – is part of the ‘narrative logic’ of martyrdom. Peirasmos, we determined, was an inescapable condition for human beings; but it is not clear from within the human sphere by what strength a human being may overcome it. It is an inescapable and undefeatable given. There is no self, no identity that a person may put forward or construct in order to overcome and endure peirasmoj with any hope for success. What is more, peirasmos is so severe as to threaten the individual with her own disintegration as a person. By investigating the narrative logic of martyrdom, once again with the aid of the narrative structure provided for us by Eliot in his play, we determined that it is the Christian faith in the providence of God, consummated in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, which is the foundation for resistance and renunciation of peirasmos. Christ himself undergoes peirasmos as a trial and as a temptation, and is revealed as overcoming both.

In this last chapter we have attempted to bring our study to its consummation by returning – conveniently by means of critical discussion of Murder in the Cathedral in performance – to the question of whether martyrdom represents in fact the utter breakdown in communication between two competing views of the world. What we suggested by our discussion was that Christian martyrdom, as a testimony to truth, does not repell but rather invites. The dramatic form that martyrdom takes draws the observer into the narrative thought-world which is shaped by peirasmoj from the human side and providence from the divine side, and ultimately finds these two aspects conjoined in the (hi)story of Jesus Christ."

Phillip Jensen on Eulogies

An interesting take on the shifting shape of funeral services here. What a culture says and does at death is always evidence of what that culture understands meaning, identity and purpose to be. Diarmaid McCulloch often cites wills, for example, as evidence for the change from old Catholic to new Protestant beliefs during the Reformation period...

The survival of the Cathedrals

Salisbury Cathedral

Diarmaid MacCulloch reckons the synthesis of Reformed theology and Cathedrals makes for the distinctive, if paradoxical, nature of Anglicanism:

..there was nothing like the English cathedral close, with its round of regular liturgy involving a large staff of clergy and elaborat music sung by paid professionals, nothing of which seemed at the time to have much relevance to a Protestant Church. The English survival is a puzzle: a cynical view is that cathedral estates and offices could act as a reservoir of patronage for the powerful... But perhaps more important was the stubborn love of church choral music shown by that midwife of the Church of Englan, Elizabeth I. ...Strangely this exquisite sacred music...had virtually no effect on musical and devotional life in English parish churches from Elizabeth's reign to the time of the 'Oxford Movement'... the parishes sane metrical psalms in the manner of Geneva, at least until the major evangelical 'revival' in the eighteenth century popularised a new sort of hymn... Nevertheless the survival of the cathedral tradition had huge significance for the future of Anglicanism. It struggled through whatmight have seem unpromising Elizabethen years to reveal the potential for liturgical spleandour in Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (a development which, almost certainly, he would not have welcomed). Reformation, p. 511

This tension between parish worship and Cathedral worship is something that is still in evidence: not always a happy synthesis you would have to say.

Ricoeur on Narrative Theology

Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

At the end of his article 'Biblical Time' Ricoeur, asserting that the strands of the OT combine to produce a very complex notion of 'time', critiques the proposal for a kind of narrative theology:

...the project of a merely narrative theology is a chimera. What it fundamentally fails to understand is first the primitive overlapping of narrative and law in the Torah, then the dialectic between the whole of tradition as prescriptive as well as narrative with prophecy and its eschatological indication. Next, a simple narrative theology misses the deepening of the transitory character of historical accomplishments through the immemorial time of wisdom, and, finally, and most important of all, the powerful recapitulation of all these figures of time in the 'today' of the hymn.'

See, the bible is not just a narrative: it's a musical. At one and the same time, you have a particular history, and a universal history of the world; you have action and commentary on that action; you have the past sung into the present, and the future promised. He's spot on, but I can't help feeling that Reformers knew this already. Certainly, my old teacher Graeme Goldsworthy has been saying this for years. Still it is nice to have someone with Ricoeur's street cred saying the same thing.

Ricoeur on Biblical Time

Ricoeur points out that the dichotomy between so-called Greek time (as circular) and Hebraic time (as linear) is facile and won't hold. He then goes on to describe 'biblical time' in terms of the intersection of the different literary genres within the scriptures and their perceptions of time.

So:

The instruction issuing from the successive legislations, unified under the emblem of Sinai and Moses, colors the narratives themselves. These narratives, under the pressure of the prescriptive, become narratives of the march of a people with God under the sign of obedience and disobedience.

He calls this the 'narrativisation of ethics and the ethicisation of narratives'. What has this to do with time, especially? Well:

...the law qualifies not just the event of its giving but all the narratives in which this giving is encased, in such a way that the founding events become events that do not pass away but remain.

More words, for preachers

Oxford, at dusk: the Broad

1. Preaching is an honouring of the capacity of words to do their job: to offer praise to God

2. The task of the preacher is to take us to see the world with the eyes of faith…using only words. But words are capable of doing this.

3. The sermon is not a verbal technique, as if it is merely some aesthetic object. But, it can be beautiful, and moving. And artful.

4. Words, even in sermons - perhaps especially in sermons - can do tremendous damage. Handle with care.

5. Preaching begins with listening: it is attentive to the word (and the words) of God. This in a way is the only necessary skill, the only prerequisite for method.

6. Preaching is about transforming language because it is about transforming thought. Preaching teaches the church how to talk about the world, the real world as it is really is (as to how it appears). Preaching gives us the conceptual tools with which to see what we can’t by our nature see.

Andrew Cameron on the good life

H/T to Rory for this one:

"…Christian Ethics is best understood as a response to the way God's kindness bubbles over into every area of life. As such it is simply an extension of the gospel. Christians may therefore talk about life, and then even live it, in such a mesmerizingly beautiful way that those who see and hear cannot help but want to know more of Christ. It is in this sense that Christians are in the business of saying “Yes” to the world."Andrew Cameron, "How to Say YES to the World—Evangelical Social Ethics", RTR, 66:1 (April 2007), 24.


This kind of fits well with the whole David Bentley Hart thesis too...

Play resumes...

A thumping victory by the Merton-Mansfield (& Wycliffe!) team over Corpus Christi.

Words, for preachers

That's my brother, Lt David Jensen, 2RAR, setting the East Timorese straight. He's not a gorilla by the way.

With speech, humanity is a bit like a gorilla with a loaded pistol: the explosive weapon is in the hands of someone who has an uncertain control of it. While on the one hand we know that our words have immense power to harm or to do good, we are not always masters of what we say. The connection between words and things has become slippery: not because of some philosophical problem but because those who wield them are deceitful and prone, not just to experience human limitations, but to mistakes.

However, God chooses to use human words in his salvation of the world: not overcoming their creaturely limits, but sanctifying them for his purposes. The paradigm is the calling of the prophet Isaiah (in Isaiah 6): terrified by his vision of God’s glory and holiness, he is rightly a reluctant prophet. As he says: ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips’. But an angel brings a burning coal to touch his mouth. God in calling him purifies his speech so that he can use it to address his people.

It ought not to be surprising then, that with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit after the ascension of Jesus, God enables people to talk about him with their limited human words. In fact, more than just talk about him: it ought not be a surprise that God uses the words of human beings to bring about his mighty purposes – to advance the redemption of the world and to give life to the dead. Pentecost is a miracle of redeemed human speech, a reversal of the divisions of Babel. The gospel of Jesus is a word of new creation with its own new grammar: it is a whole new language to learn.

A picture of Sydney every day

This is a lovely site for the homesick!

Must reads?

So, help me out here: what are the must-read theological books that are coming out soon or have recently appeared?

I take many of my recommendations from Ben (or from people on his site) I must admit. I am looking to pick up Paul DeHart's The Trial of the Witnesses though it seem to be dealing with a meta meta discourse. Peer group pressure is a wonderful thing!

I still have much of The Beauty of the Infinite to deal with, too. Hmm.

The spectacle of Martyrdom

Martyrologists who exaggerate the details of the suffering and torture of the martyrs in order to increase the rhetorical impact of their work are in fact doing the martyr a great disservice. The risk here is that the martyr is painted as merely a victim, and the rhetorical impact of telling the story is then limited to pathos for the suffering of the victim. The content of their witness then disintegrates...

The gospels show the way here: as we read of the death of Jesus, we may feel pity for the disciples, and sorrow for the role our fellow human beings played in his execution, and even disgust and outrage at the injustice perpetuated: but the evangelists do not draw us to pity Jesus. They do not dwell on the gruesome details of his torture and suffering (pace Mel Gibson); they do not portray him as powerless or voiceless; they do not depict the sadistic pleasure of his executioners. Jesus is no victim; events do not get out of hand for him at all – he is seen as always ahead of them. His innocence is not established merely so we can feel appalled at the miscarriage of justice, but so that we can understand the significance of his sacrifice in a theological matrix.

There were (and are) worse, more painful deaths; there certainly were (and are) more pitiable victims of injustice. Jesus is not, like some protagonist in a Greek tragedy, the victim of a twist in fate or the misalignment of the planets. An account that emphasizes the pathos of Jesus’ death quite misses the point – which is that the cross of Christ is the expression par excellence of the divine rule over all. It is the moment of the enthronement of Israel’s messiah in Zion and over the whole world. Likewise, a martyrology that dwells too luridly on the blood that flows is not a martyrology but a victimology. A death cast in these terms in the end witnesses only to itself as a death. The best of the early martyr-acts, for all their faults, do not lapse in this direction: Polycarp, for example, though of great age, dies in such a way that his captors look more pitiable than he. Events are not in their control (nor Polycarp's); but Polycarp's faith and asssurance makes it a triumph. Who could feel sorry for him?

Martyrdom as communicative act III

I am trying hard here to express a question that is bugging me a little... Martyrdom is an act of witness - which implies that it is an act which communicates a particular meaning or significance. Now, of course, if anyone recognises the divine agency at work in and the divine authority revealed by the act of martyrdom, it is because the Holy Spirit gives it to them to so recognise it. It is not the act in and of itself that communicates this: it is the Spirit testifying through it. Like the parables of Jesus, spiritual insight, given from above, is required to really understand in full.

Now, not recognising this is a mistake Christians often make. We see this when they point to- and even focus on - the extreme suffering of the martyr, or to the pathos of their words, or to the miraculous signs that attend the martyrdom (these have been features of martyrology since the beginning). It was fascinating that, when the recent Turkish martyrdoms were first reported, the writer felt compelled to exaggerate the extent of the torture of the victims - something that a later (very wise) letter sought to correct. (This was of course the mistake made by Gibson in The Passion of the Christ - imaginging that he needed to focus on the torture as a device to move the audience with sympathy for Christ, as if that was the means by which the gospel would be best communicated. Wrong, wrong, wrong.)

BUT: it is not aside from or arbitrarily next to the drama of a martyrdom that the Spirit testifies. It is in the very structures of this particular action that he works. Which is to say: just because spiritual insight is needed to fully understand does NOT mean that what we have before us is otherwise unintelligible. Again, taking the parables as an analogy: the parables are not runes that need to be decoded only by the select few to whom has been given the secret key. Far from it: the meaning of the parables is available for public scrutiny. A martyrdom occurs in front of us and, we may say, it has terms on which it makes sense - though we may not accept those terms of course.

In sum: while affirming the sheer givenness and transcendence of the knowledge of God, I also want to affirm that revelation does not occur arbitrarily or outside of the ordinary world of speaking and acting, but rather through it and in it.

Thomas Aquinas on fortitude and martyrdom

Aquinas considers the issue of courage/fortitude and martyrdom: is it an act of fortitude? Certainly, the early martyrologies apply soldier-like qualities to the martyrs.

...it belongs to fortitude to strengthen man in the good of virtue, especially against dangers, and chiefly against dangers of death, and most of all against those that occur in battle. Now it is evident that in martyrdom man is firmly strengthened in the good of virtue, since he cleaves to faith and justice notwithstanding the threatening danger of death, the imminence of which is moreover due to a kind of particular contest with his persecutors...
Two things must be considered in the act of fortitude. One is the good wherein the brave man is strengthened, and this is the end of fortitude; the other is the firmness itself, whereby a man does not yield to the contraries that hinder him from achieving that good, and in this consists the essence of fortitude. Now just as civic fortitude strengthens a man's mind in human justice, for the safeguarding of which he braves the danger of death, so gratuitous fortitude strengthens man's soul in the good of Divine justice, which is "through faith in Christ Jesus," according to Rm. 3:22. Thus martyrdom is related to faith as the end in which one is strengthened, but to fortitude as the eliciting habit.

Now, I am by instinct repelled by this, because the emphasis on 'courage' is misplaced I think. It places all the weight on the analogy between martyrdom and secular acts, and on the virtues displayed by the martyr. So, the witness of the martyr ends up being to his or her own fortitude rather than on to Christ himself. What might rescue this account for me is that Aquinas acknowledges this fortitude as a gracious gift coming from without and strengthening the person, rather than a matter of significant and impressive inner resolve. It is so abstract, though, isn't it? 'the good of Divine justice' is what we are strengthened in rather than in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ... though technically they are the same thing I guess.

Vaughan Roberts on Daniel 7

Harlech Castle, Wales.

Vaughan Roberts (of St Ebbe's C of E the rector) preached a terrific sermon on Daniel 7 today - one that rang all sorts of bells in my thesis addled brian. He started with the martyr question: if I was in the situation of having to chose life or martyrdom, what would I do? The right answer is, of course, 'I don't know'... Why? Because martyrdom is not within our human power; and because it isn't about exercising courage.

And this was the earth-shattering point: it is about vision, aka faith. That is, the vision we get in Dan 7 - the vision of the temporary state of the empires and the sitting on the throne of the ancient of days, and the handing of authority to the Son of Man - is visible to the eyes of faith. And it is this vision - a revelation that is given, of course - of the way things truly are that makes it possible for the Christian to say 'I can be none other than what I am'. This is a vision of the providential work of God worked out in Jesus, the Son of Man.

So, what makes a martyr distinctively Christian is this vision of the rule and authority of God in Christ Jesus. Without that vision: nothing. Martyrdom (contra Aquinas) is the result of faith.