Bishop Nazir-Ali's address was not directly on 1 Corinthians but addressed 'The Unique and Universal Christ and Religious Pluralism'. Paul's determination to know nothing but Christ and him crucified is a model for us today.
The plural culture in which we find ourselves still has a vestigial awareness of Christ. Jesus is an admired man - but not more than this. The atheist still turns to the Sermon on the Mount. Philip Pullman's new book is about the good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ. So: how is Jesus viewed in contemporary culture.
The Qu'ran's interest in Jesus is doctrinal. It seeks to deny what Christianity affirms about Christ. In the traditions there is more an eschatological concern - about the return of Jesus. He will convert everyone to Islam and lead everyone in prayer behind Mohummed. Among the Sufi, Jesus is an example of ascetic practice. In Judaism, there is some re-evaluation of the role of Jesus. Vermes and Cohn-Sherbrock in different ways regard Jesus as a Jewish figure. In Hinduism: for some Hindus, Jesus is a significant object of devotion.
All these people have these views about Jesus: what did Jesus think of himself? Did Jesus say anything about himself? Dodd says 'Jesus was the embodiment of the kingdom'.
What can we say about Jesus self-understanding?
The BBC series on Jesus' miracles was presented by a Muslim! But it was presented quite respectfully. It was claimed: 'the divinity of Jesus is demonstrated by his miracles'. His miracles over nature, his authority over the supernatural, and his forgiveness of their sins: point us to his divine nature. The Qu'ran, he said, does not emphasise the miracles of Jesus.... (I lost the thread a bit here)
What of Jesus' use of the Son of Man? Andy Angel's research: a distinction between a general and an emphatic use of the Son of Man. If the evangelists had mean to have Jesus meaning 'A son of man' they could have. And yet they most certainly do not: as Charlie Moule always said, Jesus calls himself THE Son of Man. BTW, the Aramaic section of Daniel is where the Son of Man is mentioned. There, the Son of Man is served, in the sense of 'the worship of God'... in Dan 7 we see that 'all nations will worship the Son of Man'... Jesus understanding himself in this sense is clearly significant.
Jesus' refusal of the Messiah title was on account of the misuse of this title without its full sense. Jesus himself drew attention to Psalm 110 - how can it only be about the Son of David? Likewise Psalm 45. Tom Wright points out that the figure of the Son of Man was associated with the messianic expectation. The reason Jesus was reluctant to accept the title was because it had been reduced in terms of the witness of the OT.
What of the Son of God? This is always a sticking point in Christian-Muslim dialogue. We cannot understand Jesus without a sense of his intimacy with his Father. But you can't understand the significance of Jesus' person without an understanding of the work. The Anglican emphasis on the incarnation has led to a very attentuated account of Christ's work. We must at once agree that subjective accounts of the atonement are important. He shows God love for us. This exemplary aspects of the atonement do have a place amongst Muslims, strangely. Despite the denial of the cross! But the subjective aspects are not enough indeed. He is a representative, but also our substitute. Standing in our place he turns away God's anger from what he have become. If Jesus understood his work in terms of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible, then we cannot escape that he would have thought of his work as substitution... God made him he know no sin to be sin ... And then Jesus is victor - an aspect in Athanasius. What gives the martyrs confidence going to their martyrdoms? It was the confidence of the victory that Jesus won on the cross. Christ as victor gave Martin Luther's theology its vigour.
What does this mean? 'If Christ is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all'... this is true of culture, too. Culture, as the non-biological aspect of the human condition, which makes art and science possible and so on: also manifests all that is wrong with the human condition. Remember Niebuhr? Not an endorsement of any culture. The Bible is the only tradition that provides for adequate self-criticism...
We are moving to the position of Christ against culture... we have been salt. But do we now need to change the metaphor from salt to light?
Nazir-Ali pointed to some examples where the gospel has transformed culture. In South America, Pentecostalism (for example) has done what liberation theology could only theorise about... a transformed spiritual and so social and economic situation. Abp David Gitari of Kenya said that the gospel affirmed some things in Kenyan gospel. Other things were unchanged - like, the food one might eat. There were things that the gospel could tolerate for a while, while things were then changed. For example, men and women meeting apart; or polugamy. (That is, giving up polygamy was a generational shift). Then there were things that the gospel could not tolerate: twin killing and cattle rustling!
It was, as Goldingay argues, the monotheism of the Hebrews that led to their fundamental egalitarianism - over and against the Canaanite world. And yet... Abraham makes on offering to Melchizedek. This is fundamental to the idea of mission in the NT - think of the god-fearers, for example. Nazir-Ali claimed that people in the image of God may know something of the God that made them. The Lordship of Christ needs to be acknowledged in the encounter with other faiths - whether that is in judgement or in recognition.
Is it possible for religions themselves to be converted to Christ? (John V Taylor)
Hinduism, for example, is unrecogniseable following its encounter with the gospel... many important aspects have been deeply changed by Christian influence. Another scholar seeks to show how Jesus is the Christ according to the logic of Islam (N-A is interested, but not optimistic). Gregory the Great told St Augustine to purify the shrines and put them to Christian use... how far can we go with this?
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Roy Ciampa - Sexual Ethics in 1 Corinthians
Sex & the City of Corinth: Sexual Ethics in 1 Corinthians
Paul is a 'task' theologian - this is not an abstract piece of ethical reasoning. His focus in 1 Cor 5-7 is the problem of porneia and what to do about it (or, not do!).
What's going on in Corinth? 1 Cor 7:1 - 'what is 'touching' and ow was sex conceived in the Roman world? Most scholars think that it means 'sexual relations'; and so concluded that there are two opposing schools of thought in Corinth, licence and abstinence. The euphemism, Roy concludes from a new study of 25 references, refers not to marriage or sexual relations in general, but to immoral or violent or even pederastic sex.
Sex in the Roman world was debated. Was it to be engaged in for pleasure or just for procreation? Even those who though it could be recreational thought that married sex was chiefly for procreation. The Roman man had plenty of other opportunities for recreational sex.
What counted as adultery? Well, not just any sex outside marriage, but sex with other people's wives. Sex with prostitutes or slaves was not considered adultery by the Romans.
Paul is not talking about 'homosexuals' as we do in modern western discourse. There was no notion of sexual identity - though a strong sense of gender identity. The true noble man was the penetrator, not the penetrated. Many married men who practiced heterosexual sex with their wives also engaged in homosexual acts with male household slaves, prostitutes or others who may have been willingly or unwillingly penetrated.
One of the terms that Paul uses (often translated 'male prostitues') literally means 'soft men'...
The Roman man was not expected to be a virgin until married. On the contrary, they were expected to be sexually experienced (though not with other men's wives). Practising Jews DID expect their sons to arrive as virgins on their wedding day. Jewish men married younger.
It seems unlikely that there was a Corinthian push for ascetic celibacy (though Paul of course recommends it to those with the gift). Paul's portrayal of the Corinthian inclinations seems to tell this story.
Touching is not the same as porneia, though it is close. Porneia is not about sex for procreation vs sex for pleasure but about sex within marriage and sex that trangresses that boundary.
Roy argues for a Theocentric glory ethic - it is about the glory of God, even in our sexual life and the need to glorify God with our bodies. This is key for chapters 5-7. It is ultimately to do with God's honour and glory. Our lives are not about us, but about him. Much of Paul's use of purity language is based on the believers as the temple of God.
But also: a 'revisionist property ethic'. Whose property were you? One's sexual experience would be determined by those whose property one was. Slaves and wives were understood to be the property of the paterfamilias. Paul introduces as radical revision of the property ethic: we are not our own; we were bought at a price! Purchased by him, we are to honour our owner in our sexual behaviour. The wife is understood to have authority over the husband's body! This has radical implication for what a husband could or could not do. And so the husband is NOT free to use prostitutes and slaves and so on. You can't defraud your spouse. Remember that the typical Roman couple were vastly age-differentiated.
Paul's sexual ethic was remarkably egalitarian. While Roman marriage and Roman sex were highly hierarchical and unilateral - for Paul marriage is to be marked by radical mutuality and respect for the other. 'Touching' was not a mutual experience. You don't in this sense 'touch' each other. A Roman man would unilaterally 'touch' another. It was an asymmetrical power relationship. Paul instead emphasises MUTUALITY - husband to wife/wife to husband, and so on. The older Roman husband is expected to have agreement with his wife about their sex life, very much his junior. Paul expects them to be discussing and negotiating about their sex life.
Paul is heir to the rich Jewish and Scriptural ethic which was positive about the pleasure of companionate sexual relationships. 'One flesh' - is the basis of this mutuality. In the opening of chapter 11, you get the impression that it WON'T be balanced: but the only ministries discussed are praying and prophesying and women are allowed to do both.
Paul's ethic entails a reappropriation of Jewish scriptural ethics. This is reflected in his vice list 6:9 - asrenokoitai - this was a new term in the 1st century or so, probably based on Lev 20:13.
Paul's ethic was an eschatologically conditioned ethic. Paul recognizes the ultimacy of the resurrection and the shadow it casts over our present experience. 1 Cor 6:13-14 reminds us that what we do in our bodies (inc sex) matters, because in the end God presides over the destruction and resurrection of our bodies.
Paul's ethic is a pastorally realistic ethic - he recognises the power of sexual longings and attraction. He is not unrealistically idealistic: it is better to know one's limits than to exceed them. Paul's ethic clearly rejects extra-marital and (therefore homosexual) sex, but the church has not been concerned enough for those who cannot follow Paul's advice and yet do not have the gift of celibacy. Flippancy is not adequate.
Paul is very much aware of his own personal preference and temperament an dis very careful not to impose on them to others... 'not I, but the Lord'.
The wisdom of the cross leads to the glorificaton of god in the temple of the body.
Paul is a 'task' theologian - this is not an abstract piece of ethical reasoning. His focus in 1 Cor 5-7 is the problem of porneia and what to do about it (or, not do!).
What's going on in Corinth? 1 Cor 7:1 - 'what is 'touching' and ow was sex conceived in the Roman world? Most scholars think that it means 'sexual relations'; and so concluded that there are two opposing schools of thought in Corinth, licence and abstinence. The euphemism, Roy concludes from a new study of 25 references, refers not to marriage or sexual relations in general, but to immoral or violent or even pederastic sex.
Sex in the Roman world was debated. Was it to be engaged in for pleasure or just for procreation? Even those who though it could be recreational thought that married sex was chiefly for procreation. The Roman man had plenty of other opportunities for recreational sex.
What counted as adultery? Well, not just any sex outside marriage, but sex with other people's wives. Sex with prostitutes or slaves was not considered adultery by the Romans.
Paul is not talking about 'homosexuals' as we do in modern western discourse. There was no notion of sexual identity - though a strong sense of gender identity. The true noble man was the penetrator, not the penetrated. Many married men who practiced heterosexual sex with their wives also engaged in homosexual acts with male household slaves, prostitutes or others who may have been willingly or unwillingly penetrated.
One of the terms that Paul uses (often translated 'male prostitues') literally means 'soft men'...
The Roman man was not expected to be a virgin until married. On the contrary, they were expected to be sexually experienced (though not with other men's wives). Practising Jews DID expect their sons to arrive as virgins on their wedding day. Jewish men married younger.
It seems unlikely that there was a Corinthian push for ascetic celibacy (though Paul of course recommends it to those with the gift). Paul's portrayal of the Corinthian inclinations seems to tell this story.
Touching is not the same as porneia, though it is close. Porneia is not about sex for procreation vs sex for pleasure but about sex within marriage and sex that trangresses that boundary.
Roy argues for a Theocentric glory ethic - it is about the glory of God, even in our sexual life and the need to glorify God with our bodies. This is key for chapters 5-7. It is ultimately to do with God's honour and glory. Our lives are not about us, but about him. Much of Paul's use of purity language is based on the believers as the temple of God.
But also: a 'revisionist property ethic'. Whose property were you? One's sexual experience would be determined by those whose property one was. Slaves and wives were understood to be the property of the paterfamilias. Paul introduces as radical revision of the property ethic: we are not our own; we were bought at a price! Purchased by him, we are to honour our owner in our sexual behaviour. The wife is understood to have authority over the husband's body! This has radical implication for what a husband could or could not do. And so the husband is NOT free to use prostitutes and slaves and so on. You can't defraud your spouse. Remember that the typical Roman couple were vastly age-differentiated.
Paul's sexual ethic was remarkably egalitarian. While Roman marriage and Roman sex were highly hierarchical and unilateral - for Paul marriage is to be marked by radical mutuality and respect for the other. 'Touching' was not a mutual experience. You don't in this sense 'touch' each other. A Roman man would unilaterally 'touch' another. It was an asymmetrical power relationship. Paul instead emphasises MUTUALITY - husband to wife/wife to husband, and so on. The older Roman husband is expected to have agreement with his wife about their sex life, very much his junior. Paul expects them to be discussing and negotiating about their sex life.
Paul is heir to the rich Jewish and Scriptural ethic which was positive about the pleasure of companionate sexual relationships. 'One flesh' - is the basis of this mutuality. In the opening of chapter 11, you get the impression that it WON'T be balanced: but the only ministries discussed are praying and prophesying and women are allowed to do both.
Paul's ethic entails a reappropriation of Jewish scriptural ethics. This is reflected in his vice list 6:9 - asrenokoitai - this was a new term in the 1st century or so, probably based on Lev 20:13.
Paul's ethic was an eschatologically conditioned ethic. Paul recognizes the ultimacy of the resurrection and the shadow it casts over our present experience. 1 Cor 6:13-14 reminds us that what we do in our bodies (inc sex) matters, because in the end God presides over the destruction and resurrection of our bodies.
Paul's ethic is a pastorally realistic ethic - he recognises the power of sexual longings and attraction. He is not unrealistically idealistic: it is better to know one's limits than to exceed them. Paul's ethic clearly rejects extra-marital and (therefore homosexual) sex, but the church has not been concerned enough for those who cannot follow Paul's advice and yet do not have the gift of celibacy. Flippancy is not adequate.
Paul is very much aware of his own personal preference and temperament an dis very careful not to impose on them to others... 'not I, but the Lord'.
The wisdom of the cross leads to the glorificaton of god in the temple of the body.
Keith Condie on Barth on 1 Corinthians
Keith Condie asks: why look at Barth? Because he was a great theologian and a great exegete too! How does he argue for the coherence of 1 Corinthians?
1. The Resurrection of the Dead in historical context
By the time of his first pastorate 1911 Barth was a convinced liberal. But he was challenged by his pastoral context. What could you preach? By 1915 he had worked out his new approach - see the Epistle to the Romans. Christianity is about God - the God who is totally other, coming to us on his own terms. In the Gottingen years (1921-25) he was preoccupied with teaching both historical theology and NT exegesis.
In 1923, he gave his lectures on 1 Corinthians - published in 1924. Webster says that this is the most accomplished commentary work from these years. The commentary needs to be read on its own terms: it is not exhaustive, it is not thematic. Best seen as an attempt to restate what the text says - in order to allow the inherent clarity and force of the text be felt. Explicate the text! 'God is saying to you that' not 'this verse means this'. Interpreted as revelation, which is a slap in the face! It is saying something to us here today. SO: you have to be alert to the rhetoric of the text. Any genuine interpretation will be open to its own inadequacy. The transcendence of God's word is at play here.
2. Barth's thesis: 1 Corinthians as the key to understanding the epistle.
The unity of the letter only becomes clear when you reach chapter 15... the solution to all the other problems is found in the resurrection of the dead. The problem is that the human elements are flourishing in Corinth... In 1-4, the Corinthians have become puffed up with egoism, forgetting that all they have is from God. In 5-6, the church is sick if it does not react against expressions of human exuberance in the moral sphere that ignore the place of God. In 7, a warning against hubris in the arena of sexuality - even if ascetic. 9-10 - human freedom is not absolute... the community and the glory of God must be considered. Knowledge must not be used contrary to love. Freedom doesn't protect them from idolatry. In 11, there is a critique of human self-assertion that fails to recognise the enormity of the divide between the human and the divine and fails to remember the Lordship of Christ. In 12-14 - they are full of the Spirit and of God, but they appear unredeemed: hence the exhortations to unity and order.
That is: all that the Corinthians have is from God. Paul is critiquing a form of flourishing Christianity that has become an end in itself - a rearing up against God. Thus: chapter 15... the Corinthians have failed to reckon with the resurrection of the dead. They thought that they had the full picture of Christian experience. They failed to reckon with the fact that they must die. God has revealed another reality - and that is a sharp critique of the practice of the Corinthian church. The kingdom of Christ must become the kingdom of God. Their version of Christianity is an illusion. So, how are we to be the church NOW? The future has stuck a hand back into the present... being human means being reconstituted.
3. Coherence in 1 Corinthians: Barth in comparison with Ciampa/Rosner
There are of course, significant methodological differences between the two. C/R are trying to explain the literary form of the text in front of them. Barth is offering a theological reading. The Sache of the text of 1 Cor is what he is trying to explicate. All of this derives from Barth's convictions about what theology is about! It should lead to astonishment! Webster reminds us that KB is a church theologian more than an academic theologian (MJ: unbelievable how people round these parts refuse to see this). Keith says: you could do what C/R do without being Christian!! But you couldn't do what Barth does as a non-Christian.
There is a difference in eschatology, but both C/R and KB see chapter 15 as the climax of the letter. It has been commonplace to claim the Corinthians had an over-realised eschatology (as KB does). For KB, the Corinthians seem to think they have it already. But this isn't KB's emphasis - it is more upon what is the SOURCE of the Corinthians' experience. Where does it come from - themselves or God? For C/R, they are not being Christian enough.
Both interpretations see a focus on God as being ultimate in the concerns of the letter.
4. The relevance of Barth's perspective today
How do we relate all the pieces of the theological process to ourselves? Read it 'objectively'? This was the enlightenment project.
This divorce between the Bible and Theology was challenged by Barth way back when. The Theological Interpretation of Scripture movement is the exciting development which builds on this insight. It acknowledges that we do not interpret dispassionately or neutrally. We can beneficially read the Scriptures from within the community of faith. God must shape any theological exercise or practice. Barth reminds us that we need to pay attention to the...TEXT! or we may fail to hear what God is saying.
Grace is central in Paul's theology, if Barth is right. We tend to think of this in terms of justification by faith. But, there is something else going on here... with DEATH. Dead people don't help themselves: resurrection is an act of sheer sovereign grace from God. This parallels the logic of J by grace through faith. This says KB is central to all Paul's letters. The Corinthians were rebuked by this.
It is also a reminder that expressions of the Christian faith need to be capable of self-criticism. The Corinthians believed their own press-releases. The problems with all social entities is that they become self-reinforcing... it becomes very hard to question them. This problem occured in Corinth: the letter is a WEIGHTY ATTACK ON CHRISTIANITY!!!! Just as the prophets attacked Israel, so also... God's people can become God's enemies.
Barth's reading of the letter batters human pride. God hates and opposes human pride. Barth spells out the solution: listen to God's testimony about himself - he raises the dead. God is not man said in a loud voice... And he challenges worldliness. How can we remain worldly.
C/R provide an elegant and persuasive structure. But lets not downplay what Barth achieved: reading the text against the flow of scholarship! Barth wanted us to listen to God in Scripture... the Corinthians believe not in God but in their own belief in God.
Rosner on 1 Corinthians
Brian Rosner opened the 2010 Moore School of Theology by presenting his (and his co-author Roy Ciampa's) thesis that 1 Corinthians is a unified and coherent letter - flying in the face of many recent views. Murphy-O'Connor for example writes:
The salient feature of 1 Corinthians is the absence of any detectable logic in the arrangement of its contents.
Scholars commonly see the ethics and theology of the letter as being completely disconnected.
Brian showed in response how, for example, the theme of love is not merely confined to a single chapter in the letter but flows out of the whole thesis.
Rosner and Ciampa assert:
In 1 Corinthians Paul tells the church of God in Corinth that they are part of the fulfillment of the OT expectation of world-wide worship of the God of Israel. Therefore, as God's end-time temple, they must act in a manner appropriate to their pure and holy status by becoming unified, shunning pagan vices and glorifying God as they reflect the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Brian also presented the view of fellow present Matthew Malcolm, a student of Anthony Thistleton:
1 Corinthians is a unified composition that exhibits kerygmatic rhetoric. The Jewish motif of dual reversal, whereby boastful rulers are destined for destruction while righteous sufferers are destined for vindication, serves as an influential conceptual motif in the formulation of Christian kerygma and may be seen as an interpretative framework and rhetorical available to Paul and Sosthenes...
Either way, the methodological assumption to test is that the letter is a whole - and that themes introduced in one part of the letter are connected to the other themes and motifs.
The salient feature of 1 Corinthians is the absence of any detectable logic in the arrangement of its contents.
Scholars commonly see the ethics and theology of the letter as being completely disconnected.
Brian showed in response how, for example, the theme of love is not merely confined to a single chapter in the letter but flows out of the whole thesis.
Rosner and Ciampa assert:
In 1 Corinthians Paul tells the church of God in Corinth that they are part of the fulfillment of the OT expectation of world-wide worship of the God of Israel. Therefore, as God's end-time temple, they must act in a manner appropriate to their pure and holy status by becoming unified, shunning pagan vices and glorifying God as they reflect the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Brian also presented the view of fellow present Matthew Malcolm, a student of Anthony Thistleton:
1 Corinthians is a unified composition that exhibits kerygmatic rhetoric. The Jewish motif of dual reversal, whereby boastful rulers are destined for destruction while righteous sufferers are destined for vindication, serves as an influential conceptual motif in the formulation of Christian kerygma and may be seen as an interpretative framework and rhetorical available to Paul and Sosthenes...
Either way, the methodological assumption to test is that the letter is a whole - and that themes introduced in one part of the letter are connected to the other themes and motifs.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Are Sydney Anglicans Fundamentalists?
The insistence on the authority of Scripture means that, theologically speaking, Sydney Anglicans are very conservative. They are anti-progressive in the sense that the Word of God ‘stands written’: there is no further revelation, nor any virtue in ‘moving on’ from Scripture. It is a good deposit to be guarded, the ‘faith once delivered to all the saints’ (ref). But it would be a mistake to call them ‘fundamentalists’ in the modern sense. They often are so called by their detractors, but the term of abuse is for the most part inaccurate and unfair.
There are Christians who would call themselves ‘fundamentalists’, chiefly living in the USA. Fundamentalism was a movement that began in 1920 in response to theological modernism and originally indicated that one was committed to the ‘fundamentals’: the basic tenets of orthodox Christianity. Chiefly today, Christian fundamentalism is distinguished by teachings like six-day Creationism, pre-millennial eschatology and a particularly right-wing approach to politics. None of these things is characteristic of Sydney Anglicans. Like millions of other Christians, they trace their heritage to mainstream and orthodox theologians like John Calvin and Martin Luther, who upheld the supreme authority of Scripture in the church. Holding to the supreme authority of Scripture does not in itself make you a ‘fundamentalist’, however irritating this is to Christians who differ. What it does mean is that tradition, reason and experience will never trump Scripture as an authority.
In a piece entitled ‘What Shall We Do With The Bible?’, published originally in 1987, Archbishop Donald Robinson recounted the shift in the usage of the term. When he went to Sydney University in 1940, he was not unhappy to own the label ‘fundamentalist’. It merely indicated then that he was not a modernist, and was committed to the authority of Scripture. As the term increasingly was being used by the opponents of evangelicals to caricature and abuse them, prominent evangelicals began to disavow it from the 1950s on – especially in the UK. Leading British evangelical Anglican John Stott was in the vanguard. As Robinson writes:
He said we ought to discard it [the term fundamentalist] because it had become associated with three extravagances, first, a total rejection of all biblical criticism, secondly, excessively literalist interpretation of the Bible and thirdly, certain rather mechanical theories of the nature of biblical inspiration. Those extravagances, he said, were no part of the orthodox evangelical position or of the IVF in particular.
J.I. Packer, another leading British evangelical likewise detested the term as a description for evangelicalism, and authored a book called ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God – with the inverted commas in the title indicating that he thought that the word was not something he could now own.
It was clearly a word that made evangelicals wince, and so their opponents continued to use it. And evangelicals continued to seek to distinguish themselves from it. A leading American evangelical named E.J. Carnell argued that fundamentalism had become more of a religious attitude than a theological position. Fundamentalists claimed to sit under Scripture’s authority, but in fact they followed their own traditions and habits in interpreting the Bible. They had not developed an affirmative world view and would not try to connect their convictions with the culture. Their only goal was to negate modernism. But once modernism itself had died away, fundamentalism had no obvious raison d’etre. It became a highly rigid and ideologically driven form of Christianity, incapable of recognising incompleteness and inconsistency in its own position or of tolerating it in anyone else. As Carnell wrote:
‘Fundamentalism is a lonely position. It has cut itself off from the general stream of culture, philosophy and ecclesiastical tradition. This accounts, in part, for its robust pride. Since it is no longer in union with the wisdom of the ages, it has no standard by which to judge its own religious pretense’.
This characterisation of fundamentalism as a mentality rather than a particular position was taken up by Old Testament scholar James Barr in his 1977 book Fundamentalism, in which he offered a sweeping critique of the Inter-Varsity Press and its publications.
Donald Robinson is at pains to show how his evangelical commitment to the authority of Scripture does not operate as a mere ‘religious mentality’. He concedes that some evangelicals are indeed guilty of the kind of attitudes decried by Carnell and Barr. But being committed to the authority of Scripture ought to result in a theological method that is not subject to the charged laid against fundamentalism, not at all. Robinson wrote:
The first task of theology as I see it is the understanding of the revelation of the Scriptures in their own original terms, that is, in the language and cultural forms in which it was originally given. The second task is to express and interpret that understanding in relation to the language and cultural forms of our own day and in response to questions and concerns which arise from our own life, some of which did not arise in the life of Bible times. Yet even the disciplined theological task which I have described is not a static of isolated one. It does not take place in a vacuum. There is an always has been the continuous fellowship of the people of God, the actual living of the life of faith by individuals and churches, the preaching of the gospel and the exercise of various spiritual ministries .
For Robinson, the practice of the authority of Scripture ought to result in a rigorous Biblical scholarship and attentiveness (though not concession) to contemporary questions and concerns. And it ought to take place in conversation with and with respect to the venerable tradition of Christian – and not necessarily just evangelical - interpretation of the Bible.
In outlining this method and in exemplifying it in his work over four decades as a churchman and a scholar, Robinson bequeathed to Sydney Anglicans the possibility of an intellectually robust evangelicalism. He showed how a Reformation conviction about the supreme authority of Scripture need not be at odds with scholarly integrity; nor need it result in the kind of defensive obscurantism displayed in fundamentalism. To this day, the students at Moore College, who have access to the best and most comprehensive theological library in the southern hemisphere, are encouraged to read and to learn from the works of scholars from a variety of traditions and not just those that agree with them.
The challenge remains though for a new generation of Bible-believing card-carrying evangelicals. It is easier, in a sense, to be what your critics claim you are. Fundamentalism as a mentality is an easy temptation to fall for, especially when the authority of Scripture is under attack. But it is a lazy and ultimately corrupt form of thought. Are Sydney Anglicans fundamentalists? I don't think they have been in the past, as Archbishop Robinson explains.
There are Christians who would call themselves ‘fundamentalists’, chiefly living in the USA. Fundamentalism was a movement that began in 1920 in response to theological modernism and originally indicated that one was committed to the ‘fundamentals’: the basic tenets of orthodox Christianity. Chiefly today, Christian fundamentalism is distinguished by teachings like six-day Creationism, pre-millennial eschatology and a particularly right-wing approach to politics. None of these things is characteristic of Sydney Anglicans. Like millions of other Christians, they trace their heritage to mainstream and orthodox theologians like John Calvin and Martin Luther, who upheld the supreme authority of Scripture in the church. Holding to the supreme authority of Scripture does not in itself make you a ‘fundamentalist’, however irritating this is to Christians who differ. What it does mean is that tradition, reason and experience will never trump Scripture as an authority.
In a piece entitled ‘What Shall We Do With The Bible?’, published originally in 1987, Archbishop Donald Robinson recounted the shift in the usage of the term. When he went to Sydney University in 1940, he was not unhappy to own the label ‘fundamentalist’. It merely indicated then that he was not a modernist, and was committed to the authority of Scripture. As the term increasingly was being used by the opponents of evangelicals to caricature and abuse them, prominent evangelicals began to disavow it from the 1950s on – especially in the UK. Leading British evangelical Anglican John Stott was in the vanguard. As Robinson writes:
He said we ought to discard it [the term fundamentalist] because it had become associated with three extravagances, first, a total rejection of all biblical criticism, secondly, excessively literalist interpretation of the Bible and thirdly, certain rather mechanical theories of the nature of biblical inspiration. Those extravagances, he said, were no part of the orthodox evangelical position or of the IVF in particular.
J.I. Packer, another leading British evangelical likewise detested the term as a description for evangelicalism, and authored a book called ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God – with the inverted commas in the title indicating that he thought that the word was not something he could now own.
It was clearly a word that made evangelicals wince, and so their opponents continued to use it. And evangelicals continued to seek to distinguish themselves from it. A leading American evangelical named E.J. Carnell argued that fundamentalism had become more of a religious attitude than a theological position. Fundamentalists claimed to sit under Scripture’s authority, but in fact they followed their own traditions and habits in interpreting the Bible. They had not developed an affirmative world view and would not try to connect their convictions with the culture. Their only goal was to negate modernism. But once modernism itself had died away, fundamentalism had no obvious raison d’etre. It became a highly rigid and ideologically driven form of Christianity, incapable of recognising incompleteness and inconsistency in its own position or of tolerating it in anyone else. As Carnell wrote:
‘Fundamentalism is a lonely position. It has cut itself off from the general stream of culture, philosophy and ecclesiastical tradition. This accounts, in part, for its robust pride. Since it is no longer in union with the wisdom of the ages, it has no standard by which to judge its own religious pretense’.
This characterisation of fundamentalism as a mentality rather than a particular position was taken up by Old Testament scholar James Barr in his 1977 book Fundamentalism, in which he offered a sweeping critique of the Inter-Varsity Press and its publications.
Donald Robinson is at pains to show how his evangelical commitment to the authority of Scripture does not operate as a mere ‘religious mentality’. He concedes that some evangelicals are indeed guilty of the kind of attitudes decried by Carnell and Barr. But being committed to the authority of Scripture ought to result in a theological method that is not subject to the charged laid against fundamentalism, not at all. Robinson wrote:
The first task of theology as I see it is the understanding of the revelation of the Scriptures in their own original terms, that is, in the language and cultural forms in which it was originally given. The second task is to express and interpret that understanding in relation to the language and cultural forms of our own day and in response to questions and concerns which arise from our own life, some of which did not arise in the life of Bible times. Yet even the disciplined theological task which I have described is not a static of isolated one. It does not take place in a vacuum. There is an always has been the continuous fellowship of the people of God, the actual living of the life of faith by individuals and churches, the preaching of the gospel and the exercise of various spiritual ministries .
For Robinson, the practice of the authority of Scripture ought to result in a rigorous Biblical scholarship and attentiveness (though not concession) to contemporary questions and concerns. And it ought to take place in conversation with and with respect to the venerable tradition of Christian – and not necessarily just evangelical - interpretation of the Bible.
In outlining this method and in exemplifying it in his work over four decades as a churchman and a scholar, Robinson bequeathed to Sydney Anglicans the possibility of an intellectually robust evangelicalism. He showed how a Reformation conviction about the supreme authority of Scripture need not be at odds with scholarly integrity; nor need it result in the kind of defensive obscurantism displayed in fundamentalism. To this day, the students at Moore College, who have access to the best and most comprehensive theological library in the southern hemisphere, are encouraged to read and to learn from the works of scholars from a variety of traditions and not just those that agree with them.
The challenge remains though for a new generation of Bible-believing card-carrying evangelicals. It is easier, in a sense, to be what your critics claim you are. Fundamentalism as a mentality is an easy temptation to fall for, especially when the authority of Scripture is under attack. But it is a lazy and ultimately corrupt form of thought. Are Sydney Anglicans fundamentalists? I don't think they have been in the past, as Archbishop Robinson explains.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Natural Law 13
Can anything be saved from the wreckage? Barth’s position - another ”Nein!” - is perhaps too extreme. Several Protestant thinkers have found a place for a modified doctrine of Natural Law. Calvin helpfully gives his doctrine of Natural Law clear demarcation in the light of his more Augustinian doctrine of sin. Barclay argues for a “creation ethic” that starts with special revelation and deploys good sense. With greater sophistication, O’Donovan reminds us that the critique of Thomist epistemology (begun by the nominalists and continued in the Reformation) need not affect ontological issues. Thus, while we might seriously doubt human access to “Natural Law”, we need not repudiate the notion of a divine order in the world. Just because until the coming of the Word of God we could discern no meaning in creation does not mean that it had no meaning. In particular, Christian eschatology gives to the world a highly specific telos. O’Donovan also wants to apply salvation-history to creation, to avoid a static view of nature endemic in Thomism. Brunner, in the light of what he saw in Europe in the 1940s, allowed that the “orders of creation” were not hidden from those who do not know the Creator, but that no concept of true Justice may be obtained from this primitive knowledge.
Thus, we may allow a carefully demarcated role for a natural ethic of some type; but only within an understanding of nature (and especially human nature) that is informed from the start by the divine revelation of the scriptures. The Bible itself appeals to inklings of eternity within the human heart; but the construction of an ethical system from this point is a most uncertain enterprise. Most critically, the catastrophe of the Fall cannot be mitigated by an appeal to human reason which, like our other parts, lies also under the Curse.
Thus, we may allow a carefully demarcated role for a natural ethic of some type; but only within an understanding of nature (and especially human nature) that is informed from the start by the divine revelation of the scriptures. The Bible itself appeals to inklings of eternity within the human heart; but the construction of an ethical system from this point is a most uncertain enterprise. Most critically, the catastrophe of the Fall cannot be mitigated by an appeal to human reason which, like our other parts, lies also under the Curse.
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Natural Law 12
Second, we might complain with reason that Natural Law is the product of classical theism rather than a biblical theology. It serves an ontology of God that is Greek, not Christian. The criticism of natural theology, that it leads to an abstract concept and not to a personal God here also applies. Barth rightly asks:
What has that metaphysics of being to do with the God who is the basis and Lord of the Church?
He goes on:
This [Christian] God is replaced by the divine image of being, the god-concept of ancient philosophy.
At the heart of Aquinas’ doctrine there is an analogia entis - thus the “Eternal” and “Natural” laws. Human beings are “co-ordinated” to God (Barth’s term) by this (pagan) metaphysical analogy, over against the humanity of Christ. Brunner
What has that metaphysics of being to do with the God who is the basis and Lord of the Church?
He goes on:
This [Christian] God is replaced by the divine image of being, the god-concept of ancient philosophy.
At the heart of Aquinas’ doctrine there is an analogia entis - thus the “Eternal” and “Natural” laws. Human beings are “co-ordinated” to God (Barth’s term) by this (pagan) metaphysical analogy, over against the humanity of Christ. Brunner
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Natural Law 11
There are two other areas of concern. First, Natural Law reasoning rejoices in what it sees as an apologetic advantage (over divine-commnd theories) in its non-reference to God. Yet as Grotius observed, God is not necessary for Natural Law at all. Rather than leading the non-believer to God, it may lead him or her merely to an atheistic formulation of Natural Law such as that of Hart. Alternatively, a Christian version of Natural Law must rely on such Christian premises as would likely negate any so-called apologetic advantage. Vacek writes:
...natural-law ethics need not refer to God for either the content or the obliging force of our moral obligations.
A practical agnosticism can be the result.
...natural-law ethics need not refer to God for either the content or the obliging force of our moral obligations.
A practical agnosticism can be the result.
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Natural Law 10
Fourth, the doctrine of Natural Law is at best “a very general moral outlook”. It has difficulty in showing how its basic principles may be translated into reliable and specific practical maxims. We may complain that the first precept is not self-evident but rather tautological. Once again, the sheer variety of outcomes in Natural Law thinking is evidence.
Fifth, does Natural Law give an adequate (in biblical terms) account of the distortion of human reason by sin? Barth fulminates:
...we cannot accept that merely relative and quantitative scope and significance of the fall, that doctrine of the nature of man which regards it as merely sick, dereanged and impotent, that talk of a remnant of the original divine image and likeness which remains in spite of the fall. This explains whu we have to object against Roman doctrine that...it misunderstands and distorts in the most dangerous way the seriousness of sin and therefore the seriousness of the human situation in relation to God.
On these grounds, Barth might allow a pre-lapsarian role for Natural Law; but the fall has so affected our human nature that even our reason is distorted. Brunner, in his earlier work, criticised Catholic ethical teaching as
not aware of this conception at all; for it is extremely unpalatable.
Of course, Thomas does account in part for the obfuscating power of sin. However, he views human nature as retaining its natural outline (pura naturalia); when not only our will, but our knowledge is corrupted by the effects of sin. Ultimately, Thomas’ anthroplogy is more in harmony with Aristotlean categories than scriptural principles.
Fifth, does Natural Law give an adequate (in biblical terms) account of the distortion of human reason by sin? Barth fulminates:
...we cannot accept that merely relative and quantitative scope and significance of the fall, that doctrine of the nature of man which regards it as merely sick, dereanged and impotent, that talk of a remnant of the original divine image and likeness which remains in spite of the fall. This explains whu we have to object against Roman doctrine that...it misunderstands and distorts in the most dangerous way the seriousness of sin and therefore the seriousness of the human situation in relation to God.
On these grounds, Barth might allow a pre-lapsarian role for Natural Law; but the fall has so affected our human nature that even our reason is distorted. Brunner, in his earlier work, criticised Catholic ethical teaching as
not aware of this conception at all; for it is extremely unpalatable.
Of course, Thomas does account in part for the obfuscating power of sin. However, he views human nature as retaining its natural outline (pura naturalia); when not only our will, but our knowledge is corrupted by the effects of sin. Ultimately, Thomas’ anthroplogy is more in harmony with Aristotlean categories than scriptural principles.
Monday, September 06, 2010
Natural Law 9
Third, does Aquinas adequately describe the nature of human beings as rational? This exposes two problems: anthropology has radically altered our understanding of the nature of human beings; and the notion of reason itself has undergone massive debate in the seven centuries since Aquinas. Thielicke writes:
...Natural Law in any given instance depends on the view of man which underlies it. But this view of man is something which is quite inconstant...hence there can never be such a thing as Natural Law which is of unchanging and universal validity.
Could human nature ever be known in the detail required to construct a Natural Law? Natural lawyers tend merely to insist that human nature is rational nature. The notion of reason itself, which is so crucial to Natural Law, has also been subject to much debate. Post-enlightenment rationality (and in particular practical reasoning) is of a different genus to that of Aquinas. While making this point, Crysdale almost ludicrously tries to adapt modern statistical reasoning to a Natural Law outlook.
...Natural Law in any given instance depends on the view of man which underlies it. But this view of man is something which is quite inconstant...hence there can never be such a thing as Natural Law which is of unchanging and universal validity.
Could human nature ever be known in the detail required to construct a Natural Law? Natural lawyers tend merely to insist that human nature is rational nature. The notion of reason itself, which is so crucial to Natural Law, has also been subject to much debate. Post-enlightenment rationality (and in particular practical reasoning) is of a different genus to that of Aquinas. While making this point, Crysdale almost ludicrously tries to adapt modern statistical reasoning to a Natural Law outlook.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Natural Law 8
Second, the sheer diversity of moral principle and practice in the human experience mitigates heavily against the universalism of Natural Law. Thomas is aware of this difficulty, but his rejoinder, that the reason may be darkened by passion or racial proclivity, is inadequate in that it presupposes the successful attainment, sans grace, of the Natural Law in at least some human beings. The possibility that no human being has attained such knowledge is not considered.
The ascription of a telos to aspects of the natural order is almost arbitrary in the practice of Natural Law, as the controversies over the various Papal Encyclicals show. Various structures in the created order or society, such as procreation or the family, are assumed by their presence to be God-given and thus given a higher moral rating. Thus the objectivity and rationality that Natural Law claims for itself is compromised by the mutability of its detailed precepts. It becomes difficult to defend Natural Law as an objective and reasonable system when the precepts it allows seem so relative and subjective.
The ascription of a telos to aspects of the natural order is almost arbitrary in the practice of Natural Law, as the controversies over the various Papal Encyclicals show. Various structures in the created order or society, such as procreation or the family, are assumed by their presence to be God-given and thus given a higher moral rating. Thus the objectivity and rationality that Natural Law claims for itself is compromised by the mutability of its detailed precepts. It becomes difficult to defend Natural Law as an objective and reasonable system when the precepts it allows seem so relative and subjective.
Friday, September 03, 2010
Natural Law 7
There are five ways in which the question of knowledge is a problem for Natural Law. First, how does a human being actually know that “good should be done and evil avoided”? Can a more persuasive account be given for the operation of synderesis on the human heart? Lewis inquires:
...it is no good saying there are Natural Law precepts unless one can explain how “ordinary men” know them.
Is Aquinas an intuitionist? Daniel Maguire portrays Aquinas’ teaching as “affectivity” (or “gut-feeling”), a position rebutted successfully by Scott Davis. However, Thomist Natural Law is a form of intuitionism, in that it requires a moral proposition to be per se notum; and while Aquinas wants to appeal to reason as the ground of the doctrine, the primary precept must be understood pre-reason, that reason may build from it. This explanation is vague, to say the least.
...it is no good saying there are Natural Law precepts unless one can explain how “ordinary men” know them.
Is Aquinas an intuitionist? Daniel Maguire portrays Aquinas’ teaching as “affectivity” (or “gut-feeling”), a position rebutted successfully by Scott Davis. However, Thomist Natural Law is a form of intuitionism, in that it requires a moral proposition to be per se notum; and while Aquinas wants to appeal to reason as the ground of the doctrine, the primary precept must be understood pre-reason, that reason may build from it. This explanation is vague, to say the least.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Natural Law 6
At first glance, the doctrine of Natural Law has a great deal to commend it to the moral theologian. The scriptures themselves offer ample testimony, it would seem, to the presence of some kind of inward and general moral knowledge by which humanity understands the divine imperative. Budziszewski offers some dubious examples, but there are several valid references. There is the witness of the created order to the character of its creator (Ps 19:1-6; 104; Rom 1:20); and the conscience whereby the law is “written on their hearts” (Rom 2:14-15). Wisdom literature seems to allow the application of reason in the understanding of morality. Further, the judgement of God is pronounced on pagan nations throughout the Old Testament (for example on the Canaanites for necromancy in Dt 18:9-14) when no explicit specially-revealed divine decree pertains to them.
Natural lawyers like Budziszewski (and Tony Abbott!) defend Natural Law on the grounds of its use as an apologetic contact point with the non-Christian world. Natural Law gives us reason to be optimistic about moral and political discussions, because even if the non-Christian denies knowledge of right and wrong in Christian terms, we can assume (according to Budziszewski) that he or she is deliberately suppressing the truth. Natural Law addresses the human ethical condition from the level, not of knowledge, but of will. Knowledge is assumed.
Ironically, it is this very area of knowledge in which the Thomist doctrine of Natural Law is most vulnerable. The epistemological question must head a critique of the doctrine. Helmut Thielicke writes:
In this whole matter...what is involved is not an ontic, but a noetic problem.
Natural lawyers like Budziszewski (and Tony Abbott!) defend Natural Law on the grounds of its use as an apologetic contact point with the non-Christian world. Natural Law gives us reason to be optimistic about moral and political discussions, because even if the non-Christian denies knowledge of right and wrong in Christian terms, we can assume (according to Budziszewski) that he or she is deliberately suppressing the truth. Natural Law addresses the human ethical condition from the level, not of knowledge, but of will. Knowledge is assumed.
Ironically, it is this very area of knowledge in which the Thomist doctrine of Natural Law is most vulnerable. The epistemological question must head a critique of the doctrine. Helmut Thielicke writes:
In this whole matter...what is involved is not an ontic, but a noetic problem.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Natural Law 5
Natural Law since Aquinas has followed several rivulets aside from the main stream. In the fourteenth century the nominalism of William of Ockham stressed the absolute power and freedom of God. Along with Duns Scotus, he deviated from the Thomistic doctrine by eliminating reason from the basis of Natural Law. In the sixteenth century, both Luther and Calvin held to versions of Natural Law, as did Hooker. Hugo Grotius, whose major work is On the Law of War and Peace (1625), provided for a secular version of Natural Law by observing that since this law was the law of our rational human nature, God was not an essential part of the doctrine, an autonomy affirmed by the Spanish Jesuit Suarez. Natural Law thinking has thus developed into a theory of universal human rights. The doctrine underwent a revival in Catholic teaching in the nineteenth century during the pontificate of Leo XIII as a counter to socialism and the rising tide of mistrust in divine revelation. The world, if it ignored the Word of God, might at least listen to reason. “Right reason” and Natural Law continue to be the basis of official Roman Catholic ethical teaching, from Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae down to John Paul II.
Aside from the institutional endorsement of Natural Law, there are several advocates of Natural Law theory on the contemporary scene which are best described as adjustments to the Thomist position. Two powerful Protestant proponents of Natural Law, to whose arguments we will return, are Oliver O’Donovan and Emil Brunner. Among the Roman Caholics, Finnis and Grisez offer a theories founded on “pre-moral pratical principles” identifying the various kinds of human good that are self-evidently worth pursuing. For Finnis these are life, knowledge, play, aesthtic experience, sociability, practical reasonableness, and ‘religion’. At a second level are “modes of responsibility”, which correspond to virtues. Moral rules (unsuprisingly for Finnis those of a peculiarly Roman Catholic sort) result from deductions at a tertiary level.
Aside from the institutional endorsement of Natural Law, there are several advocates of Natural Law theory on the contemporary scene which are best described as adjustments to the Thomist position. Two powerful Protestant proponents of Natural Law, to whose arguments we will return, are Oliver O’Donovan and Emil Brunner. Among the Roman Caholics, Finnis and Grisez offer a theories founded on “pre-moral pratical principles” identifying the various kinds of human good that are self-evidently worth pursuing. For Finnis these are life, knowledge, play, aesthtic experience, sociability, practical reasonableness, and ‘religion’. At a second level are “modes of responsibility”, which correspond to virtues. Moral rules (unsuprisingly for Finnis those of a peculiarly Roman Catholic sort) result from deductions at a tertiary level.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Natural Law 4
For Aquinas it is a basic axiom that we should do what is good - which he locates in terms of the natural and essential inclinations of human beings. The application of his general conclusions, such as individul survival or social harmony, are then outlined in increasing complexity, so that in the end by a coherent logic he can build an impressive moral edifice.
...In questions of theory, truth is the same for everybody, both as to principles and to conclusions, but only in those principles which are called [by Boethius] ‘common conceptions. In questions of action, however, practical truth and goodwill are not not the same for everybody with respect to particular decisions, but only with respect to common principles; and even those who are equally in the right on some particular course of action are not equally aware of how right they are.
Further, Aquinas distinguishes between the determinations and conclusions of Natural Law. Restitution of a victim, for example, is a conclusion of Natural Law; whereas the content of the restitution is merely its determination. Lastly, it is worth noting that while Aquinas is certainly no utilitarian, neither is his ethics purely deontological, as has been often assumed. The precepts of the Natural Law aim at the goodness of the end over (even) the goodness of the act performed. Where Aquinas differs from utilitarian thought is that he does ascribe intrinsic value to human actions, in a manner subordinate to the ends. In addition, the good which is the end is not merely defined in terms of human pleasure. In this way, Aquinas can argue teleologically that adultery, homosexuality, drunkenness, gluttony, suicide, murder, lying and promise-breaking are unnatural and therefore contrary to Natural Law.
...In questions of theory, truth is the same for everybody, both as to principles and to conclusions, but only in those principles which are called [by Boethius] ‘common conceptions. In questions of action, however, practical truth and goodwill are not not the same for everybody with respect to particular decisions, but only with respect to common principles; and even those who are equally in the right on some particular course of action are not equally aware of how right they are.
Further, Aquinas distinguishes between the determinations and conclusions of Natural Law. Restitution of a victim, for example, is a conclusion of Natural Law; whereas the content of the restitution is merely its determination. Lastly, it is worth noting that while Aquinas is certainly no utilitarian, neither is his ethics purely deontological, as has been often assumed. The precepts of the Natural Law aim at the goodness of the end over (even) the goodness of the act performed. Where Aquinas differs from utilitarian thought is that he does ascribe intrinsic value to human actions, in a manner subordinate to the ends. In addition, the good which is the end is not merely defined in terms of human pleasure. In this way, Aquinas can argue teleologically that adultery, homosexuality, drunkenness, gluttony, suicide, murder, lying and promise-breaking are unnatural and therefore contrary to Natural Law.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Natural Law 3
The locus classicus of Thomas’ doctrine of Natural Law is the six articles of 1a2ae, 94. The Natural Law he describes as a habitus, because it is present in the human conscience or synderesis; it “stays always in man” (semper in homine manet). The question of how Natural Law is known by the human subject is a vexed one worthy of further discussion; suffice to say that the Natural Law is the underlying assumption behind human moral discourse. It may be termed a habit not because it is a quality whereby one acts, but because it is steadily held. There is but one precept of Natural Law which Aquinas reveals by analogy with the basis of human apprehension in the real. Like the first principles of natural science, the first principles of practical reason are per se notum - “self-evident”. Practical reason first apprehends the good; thus the first precept of Natural Law, upon which all others are based is:
that good is to be done, evil to be avoided.
All drives of human nature, then, insofar as they can be “governed by reason” (regulantur ratione) are covered by Natural Law. The secondary precepts of Natural Law, which cover a vast range of human activity, derive from this primary command. Thomas tackles next the vexing problem of the universality of Natural Law. In theory, Natural Law must be universally applicable; but even cursory observation can identify the sheer diversity of human desires and behaviour. Aquinas’ solution is to point to the proper priority of the human intellect: humans may be blocked from knowledge of the good by “passion or bad custom or even by racial proclivity”; but all human inclinations should be governed by the intellect. Natural Law in the primary precept is immutable; but may be added to in the secondary precepts in special circumstances - by divine command, for example. It is the first, common precepts that, according to Aquinas, even the effects of sin cannot cancel in the human heart. Sin has effect on the secondary precepts up to a point. Human nature remains essentially sound despite sin: the human desire for virtue is blocked rather than corrupted at the source.
that good is to be done, evil to be avoided.
All drives of human nature, then, insofar as they can be “governed by reason” (regulantur ratione) are covered by Natural Law. The secondary precepts of Natural Law, which cover a vast range of human activity, derive from this primary command. Thomas tackles next the vexing problem of the universality of Natural Law. In theory, Natural Law must be universally applicable; but even cursory observation can identify the sheer diversity of human desires and behaviour. Aquinas’ solution is to point to the proper priority of the human intellect: humans may be blocked from knowledge of the good by “passion or bad custom or even by racial proclivity”; but all human inclinations should be governed by the intellect. Natural Law in the primary precept is immutable; but may be added to in the secondary precepts in special circumstances - by divine command, for example. It is the first, common precepts that, according to Aquinas, even the effects of sin cannot cancel in the human heart. Sin has effect on the secondary precepts up to a point. Human nature remains essentially sound despite sin: the human desire for virtue is blocked rather than corrupted at the source.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Natural Law 2
The Roman Stoic jurist Cicero gave Natural Law its classic pagan formulation. The Natural Law must needs be the law of right or sane reason. He wrote:
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.
Cicero held that Natural Law was really only discerned by the intelligent man. This is because he understood “nature” as related to reason in the human instance. Natural Law is not inscribed on nature per se, but is available to the human intellect.
This notion was baptised by Justin Martyr in the second century:
In the beginning He made the human race with the power of thought and of choosing the truth and doing right, so that all men are without excuse before God; for they have been born rational and contemplative.
However, the first systematic articulation of Christianised Natural Law theory was in the Summa Theologiae, that “great Gothic cathedral of human thought” (O'Connor) (and other works) of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Aquinas’ doctrine of Natural Law is not held in isolation from the rest of his thought; nor even the rest of his ethics. Rather, as Jean Porter insists, his thinking is continually informed by his Christian convictions and concerns. As Leo Strauss has explained, Thomas’ doctrine of Natural Law differs from the classical theory in that whereas the classical ethicists begin with everyday notions of justice and ascend to the sublime truth by a dialectical process, Thomas begins with God and His Eternal Law. He distinguishes the lex aeterna from the lex naturalis. These are but two of five types of law that Aquinas recognises. The Eternal Law is defined as the providence of God which regulates the universe proceeding from the intellect and will of God. Natural Law is the aspect of Eternal Law which applies to human beings alone and is in accordance with human nature, thus:
...Natural Law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures.
As O’Connor explains:
...Natural Law may be regarded as eternal law in so far as it is intuitively and innately knowable.
Aquinas here provides a corrective to Ulpian’s version of the doctrine , which allowed Natural Law as belonging to all creatures. Thomistic Natural Law applies only to rational human beings.
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.
Cicero held that Natural Law was really only discerned by the intelligent man. This is because he understood “nature” as related to reason in the human instance. Natural Law is not inscribed on nature per se, but is available to the human intellect.
This notion was baptised by Justin Martyr in the second century:
In the beginning He made the human race with the power of thought and of choosing the truth and doing right, so that all men are without excuse before God; for they have been born rational and contemplative.
However, the first systematic articulation of Christianised Natural Law theory was in the Summa Theologiae, that “great Gothic cathedral of human thought” (O'Connor) (and other works) of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Aquinas’ doctrine of Natural Law is not held in isolation from the rest of his thought; nor even the rest of his ethics. Rather, as Jean Porter insists, his thinking is continually informed by his Christian convictions and concerns. As Leo Strauss has explained, Thomas’ doctrine of Natural Law differs from the classical theory in that whereas the classical ethicists begin with everyday notions of justice and ascend to the sublime truth by a dialectical process, Thomas begins with God and His Eternal Law. He distinguishes the lex aeterna from the lex naturalis. These are but two of five types of law that Aquinas recognises. The Eternal Law is defined as the providence of God which regulates the universe proceeding from the intellect and will of God. Natural Law is the aspect of Eternal Law which applies to human beings alone and is in accordance with human nature, thus:
...Natural Law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures.
As O’Connor explains:
...Natural Law may be regarded as eternal law in so far as it is intuitively and innately knowable.
Aquinas here provides a corrective to Ulpian’s version of the doctrine , which allowed Natural Law as belonging to all creatures. Thomistic Natural Law applies only to rational human beings.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Natural Law I
What follows is a thirteen part series on the subject of Natural Law!
The doctrine of Natural Law argues that there is a law or rule of action inherent in the nature of things. For human beings, behaviour must be consonant with human nature, which is always held to be rational. In the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law is the result of divine providence being embossed on natural human reason. For him,
Natural Law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures.
It is possible to hold a minimal version of the doctrine of Natural Law within the context of a well-rounded theological ethic. However, the Thomist version of the doctrine, which is its most refined elucidation, leaves no room for confidence that adequate account has been given of either theological or empirical data. Natural Law strikes several problems of an epistemological nature. Further, lex naturae gives a poor explanation of human diversity unless its scope is so reduced as to make it a truism. Perhaps most significantly, Natural Law theory underplays the corruption of human reason by sin.
The doctrine of Natural Law has its origin in antiquity. The writings of Heraclitus and Plato reveal an understanding of the notion, but its clarification was left to Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics he wrote:
The natural [law] is that which has the same validity everywhere and does not depend upon acceptance...Natural Laws are immutable and have the same validity everywhere (as fire burns both here and in Persia)
Aristotle drew the distinction between Natural Law, which is unchangeable and universal, and the variance of humanly-enacted laws. His primary concern was with biological phenomena, which led him to adopt a model where the Natural Law was analogous to fusiV - nature, or reality. Human beings are by nature rational; and the inner principle governing human life is reason.
The doctrine of Natural Law argues that there is a law or rule of action inherent in the nature of things. For human beings, behaviour must be consonant with human nature, which is always held to be rational. In the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law is the result of divine providence being embossed on natural human reason. For him,
Natural Law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures.
It is possible to hold a minimal version of the doctrine of Natural Law within the context of a well-rounded theological ethic. However, the Thomist version of the doctrine, which is its most refined elucidation, leaves no room for confidence that adequate account has been given of either theological or empirical data. Natural Law strikes several problems of an epistemological nature. Further, lex naturae gives a poor explanation of human diversity unless its scope is so reduced as to make it a truism. Perhaps most significantly, Natural Law theory underplays the corruption of human reason by sin.
The doctrine of Natural Law has its origin in antiquity. The writings of Heraclitus and Plato reveal an understanding of the notion, but its clarification was left to Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics he wrote:
The natural [law] is that which has the same validity everywhere and does not depend upon acceptance...Natural Laws are immutable and have the same validity everywhere (as fire burns both here and in Persia)
Aristotle drew the distinction between Natural Law, which is unchangeable and universal, and the variance of humanly-enacted laws. His primary concern was with biological phenomena, which led him to adopt a model where the Natural Law was analogous to fusiV - nature, or reality. Human beings are by nature rational; and the inner principle governing human life is reason.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Canons X
Is the Western Canon still tenable? The very concept of Canon - which imbues groups of writings with status and authority - looks extremely tenuous in the fractured and diverse post-modern world. Given the close association between Christianity and Christian ideas and the Western cultural heritage, will the demise of the Western Canon presage the demise of the Canon of Holy Scripture? Evangelical Christians are often predisposed as a result of this connexion to culturally conservative positions. Is this a healthy alliance given the incisive ethically-based contemporary attack on Western culture?
No, it most certainly isn’t. Christianity needs to renew its status as counter-cultural and seek, by proclaiming its Gospel, repentence, atonement and reconciliation between and within cultures as far as possible. Sensitive reading of the Canon will assist the process of humble cultural and personal reflection. Often by placing literature in a Canon however, it has been hermetically sealed from the careful and exacting reading that is necessary. Great literature, almost by definition, stimulates both individual and collective self-examination which is sometimes painful. However, history has illustrated what the Bible already teaches: that the reading of literature cannot keep us from the terrible effects of human evil and self-destruction. The failed moral optimism 0f the nineteenth century must not be re-endorsed.
The great books that comprise the Canon continue to be great. It is worthwhile for many reasons to “rub your nose in the stuff”. These works rise above the squabblings of academics. Let them be read, but not “canonically” - if that means granting them an authority they do not have or using them in the subjection of others. Let them be read, but not if that means importing into reading our own ideological proclivities at every turn. Let them be read, but not without due consideration of historical contexts. Let them be read, but not without appreciation of creative genius, imagination and artistry.
No, it most certainly isn’t. Christianity needs to renew its status as counter-cultural and seek, by proclaiming its Gospel, repentence, atonement and reconciliation between and within cultures as far as possible. Sensitive reading of the Canon will assist the process of humble cultural and personal reflection. Often by placing literature in a Canon however, it has been hermetically sealed from the careful and exacting reading that is necessary. Great literature, almost by definition, stimulates both individual and collective self-examination which is sometimes painful. However, history has illustrated what the Bible already teaches: that the reading of literature cannot keep us from the terrible effects of human evil and self-destruction. The failed moral optimism 0f the nineteenth century must not be re-endorsed.
The great books that comprise the Canon continue to be great. It is worthwhile for many reasons to “rub your nose in the stuff”. These works rise above the squabblings of academics. Let them be read, but not “canonically” - if that means granting them an authority they do not have or using them in the subjection of others. Let them be read, but not if that means importing into reading our own ideological proclivities at every turn. Let them be read, but not without due consideration of historical contexts. Let them be read, but not without appreciation of creative genius, imagination and artistry.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Canons IX
It is important to recognise that Canons are also a way of reading. A Canon exists within a reader’s reading brain, offering a highly specific component of the multi-functional process of reading. This has several ramifications. Firstly, to read a work canonically is to read it in reference to its place in a larger body of writing, and thus to be aware of its relations - by allusion, influence and repudiation - of other works within that body. These works are part of a tradition, as F.R. Leavis termed it, “The Great Tradition”; indeed Bloom sees the tradition, in Freudian terms, as an attempt of one generation to overcome the mastery of the previous. The Canon operates both directions in time: just as it is impossible to read Joyce without noting the influence of Homer, the Canon has the effect of making all reading of Homer post-Joycean. Allusion operates as a powerful coding mechanism, using images, quotes, characters, plot structures and devices, names, places, genres, tropes, types and phrases. By providing helpful footnotes to modern editions, scholarship has made modern readers better readers, but perhaps lazier as well.
Secondly, in including a work in the Canon the intentions of the author may of course be disregarded or superceded. The fantastic history of the interpretation of the Song of Songs is a case in point. Both the Rabbis and the Fathers ignored the appearance of the Song as an erotic poem and interpreted it canonically (as they saw it) - that is, non-erotically. The intentions of the (human) author were not important. Gibbons The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written as a serious historical work. Today, when it is included as a canonical work it is on the basis of its great literary style and imagination rather than historical insight.
Further, the notion of Canon does imply authority. In the realm of scripture this is a familiar concept, but what of the literary world? As we shall see, canonical writings have been accorded a certain kind of authority over and against other works. The Canon is further given the task of being the repository of cultural value and memory - not in the narrowly historical sense, but as source of the mythology that all cultures need. For example, nineteenth century Australian poets like Patterson and Lawson successfully mythologised the Australian landscape and sense of national self. The task of cultures is to reflect on their heritage rather than accept or reject it out of hand. The Canon may hinder this process of mature cultural reflection by creating out of the past a package which extremists, radical or conservative, can deny or affirm holus bolus.
Lastly, many of these approaches are reductionistic - the literary value that distinguishes the Canon is either a purely aesthetic function, or it is merely ideological. The most prominent left-wing critics reduce all aesthetic value to a matter of politics only; but, on the other hand, it is equally a fallacy to remove all political or moral considerations from the discussion of literature. Beauty is not Truth, but it is part of the Truth. How can the aesthetic be separated from the good? Modern critics want either to relativise the beautiful, or to relativise the good.
Secondly, in including a work in the Canon the intentions of the author may of course be disregarded or superceded. The fantastic history of the interpretation of the Song of Songs is a case in point. Both the Rabbis and the Fathers ignored the appearance of the Song as an erotic poem and interpreted it canonically (as they saw it) - that is, non-erotically. The intentions of the (human) author were not important. Gibbons The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written as a serious historical work. Today, when it is included as a canonical work it is on the basis of its great literary style and imagination rather than historical insight.
Further, the notion of Canon does imply authority. In the realm of scripture this is a familiar concept, but what of the literary world? As we shall see, canonical writings have been accorded a certain kind of authority over and against other works. The Canon is further given the task of being the repository of cultural value and memory - not in the narrowly historical sense, but as source of the mythology that all cultures need. For example, nineteenth century Australian poets like Patterson and Lawson successfully mythologised the Australian landscape and sense of national self. The task of cultures is to reflect on their heritage rather than accept or reject it out of hand. The Canon may hinder this process of mature cultural reflection by creating out of the past a package which extremists, radical or conservative, can deny or affirm holus bolus.
Lastly, many of these approaches are reductionistic - the literary value that distinguishes the Canon is either a purely aesthetic function, or it is merely ideological. The most prominent left-wing critics reduce all aesthetic value to a matter of politics only; but, on the other hand, it is equally a fallacy to remove all political or moral considerations from the discussion of literature. Beauty is not Truth, but it is part of the Truth. How can the aesthetic be separated from the good? Modern critics want either to relativise the beautiful, or to relativise the good.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Canons VIII
For Christians, the similarity to theological ideas of many of the terms and concepts used in this discussion may result in a knee-jerk conservatism. We may feel that attacks on the Western Canon in which not a few Christian themes are intertwined do damage to Christianity itself. Exegesis, hermeneutics, typology, allegory and homiletics are all terms and concepts that literary studies has adapted from biblical studies. The idea of a “Canon” - a grouping of significant texts - also found a secular application. This is no accident - the study of literature has attempted to replace religion as a moral force since the nineteenth century, as we have seen.
Do Christians, then, think differently about Scripture and literature? In theological study there has indeed been a debate on similar lines regarding the Canon of Scripture. Brevard Childs has for many years defended the intrinsic authority and unity of the biblical Canon as the founding bond of an interpretative community, namely the church. However, James Barr is convinced of an extrinsic ground to the Canon - in starting with the completed Canon, the church was taking its stand on something external to the Bible itself. This liberal Protestant position is, strangely enough, almost identical to the Roman Catholic understanding of ecclesiastical authorisation of the Canon.
However, there is the intrinsic power of the Word of God in the Scriptural Canon which sets it apart from “ordinary” literature. By claiming this much for the Bible, we needn’t accept that the Western Canon has a similar power or authority. The analogies that have been drawn between imaginative writing and Holy Scripture since the Romantic period - such as the idea of “inspiration” - are only analogies. That they collapse, if they do, need not compromise our view of Scripture.
What can we then say about the Canon in response to these various approaches? Readings account is many ways the most convincing. Like the dragon, the Canon (in literary terms) is a large, mythological beast. Purported to be the list of books sanctioned for study in educational institutions, “Canons” by and large do not actually exist per se. The use of the term”Canon” which is meant to imply the say-so of a church-like institution here breaks down. While there are indeed powerful imprimaturs given from within the literary world, there is no fixed list of what constitutes Literature and there never has been. There is no literary equivalent to the standard metric weights kept in a safe somewhere in Paris. Canons are in fact centrifugal. That is, they have a solid core of largely undisputed material with an indistinct fringe. Very few would dispute that the Western Canon has at its heart the work of a writer like Shakepeare, but the status of sixteenth century poet Mary Wroth is far less certain. The notion of “Canon” in the literary world invites debate and contention as to its contents. The setting up of a fixed list of texts would be productive only of tedium!
Do Christians, then, think differently about Scripture and literature? In theological study there has indeed been a debate on similar lines regarding the Canon of Scripture. Brevard Childs has for many years defended the intrinsic authority and unity of the biblical Canon as the founding bond of an interpretative community, namely the church. However, James Barr is convinced of an extrinsic ground to the Canon - in starting with the completed Canon, the church was taking its stand on something external to the Bible itself. This liberal Protestant position is, strangely enough, almost identical to the Roman Catholic understanding of ecclesiastical authorisation of the Canon.
However, there is the intrinsic power of the Word of God in the Scriptural Canon which sets it apart from “ordinary” literature. By claiming this much for the Bible, we needn’t accept that the Western Canon has a similar power or authority. The analogies that have been drawn between imaginative writing and Holy Scripture since the Romantic period - such as the idea of “inspiration” - are only analogies. That they collapse, if they do, need not compromise our view of Scripture.
What can we then say about the Canon in response to these various approaches? Readings account is many ways the most convincing. Like the dragon, the Canon (in literary terms) is a large, mythological beast. Purported to be the list of books sanctioned for study in educational institutions, “Canons” by and large do not actually exist per se. The use of the term”Canon” which is meant to imply the say-so of a church-like institution here breaks down. While there are indeed powerful imprimaturs given from within the literary world, there is no fixed list of what constitutes Literature and there never has been. There is no literary equivalent to the standard metric weights kept in a safe somewhere in Paris. Canons are in fact centrifugal. That is, they have a solid core of largely undisputed material with an indistinct fringe. Very few would dispute that the Western Canon has at its heart the work of a writer like Shakepeare, but the status of sixteenth century poet Mary Wroth is far less certain. The notion of “Canon” in the literary world invites debate and contention as to its contents. The setting up of a fixed list of texts would be productive only of tedium!
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Canons VII
5 - Extrinsic Arguments
Many authors attempt to account for the Canon on sociological or historical grounds only. The very notion of a Canon is elitist, archaic, oppresive - superstitious even - and thoroughly arbitrary. It is a tool of imperialism and/or patriarchy. Consequently, many non-western writers hold this view. Abdul R. JanMohamend writes of “attempts by ethno-centric Canonizers in English and other (Western) language and literature departments to ignore Third World culture and art...” . Feminist writers may also claim to subvert the very “idea (and ideal) of the Canon”.
6- Canon as “Figure”
Bill Readings, a proponent of deconstruction, holds that the Canon is a self-imploding literary construct. “Canonicity”, he writes, is “inherently deviant from any fixed form that a Canon might assume...[it] is a process, like writing, divided againts itself”. Canons are attempts to preserve texts in written form, to achieve stability and closure against the instability of speech. However, Readings argues, following Jacques Derrida, that writing is itself inherently instable and self-contradictory. Canon operates in culture as a substitute for memory. It is a way of reading a text.
Many authors attempt to account for the Canon on sociological or historical grounds only. The very notion of a Canon is elitist, archaic, oppresive - superstitious even - and thoroughly arbitrary. It is a tool of imperialism and/or patriarchy. Consequently, many non-western writers hold this view. Abdul R. JanMohamend writes of “attempts by ethno-centric Canonizers in English and other (Western) language and literature departments to ignore Third World culture and art...” . Feminist writers may also claim to subvert the very “idea (and ideal) of the Canon”.
6- Canon as “Figure”
Bill Readings, a proponent of deconstruction, holds that the Canon is a self-imploding literary construct. “Canonicity”, he writes, is “inherently deviant from any fixed form that a Canon might assume...[it] is a process, like writing, divided againts itself”. Canons are attempts to preserve texts in written form, to achieve stability and closure against the instability of speech. However, Readings argues, following Jacques Derrida, that writing is itself inherently instable and self-contradictory. Canon operates in culture as a substitute for memory. It is a way of reading a text.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Canons VI
2 - Conservative Culturalism
This view, of which T.S. Eliot is the most famous exponent , holds that the Canon defines a collective identity - in his words, the English “native element.” The culture is formed by an elite kind of writing - of which, naturally, Eliot’s notoriously “difficult” poetry was a model. The Canon is a great “Yes” to the culture it defines.
3 - Liberal Culturalism
There are many critics who argue for the inclusion of new works in the Canon, or perhaps the construction of new Canons - of works by women, for example. The notion of Canon developed on intrinsic grounds is implicitly approved: merely the content of the existing Canon is contested. The Canon remains “an organic totality that defines the culture it affirms”.
4 - Liberal Idealism
This view holds that the Canon operates as a negative ideal - a challenge that must be met by diversity. There is then a kind of dialectical relationship between the Canon and the culture. The Canon is a repository of humane ideals which function to make us struggle rather than confirm our smugness. It has a regulating impetus, saying to the modern world “Go thou and do a little differently”. Canonical literature is more diverse than at first appears.
This view, of which T.S. Eliot is the most famous exponent , holds that the Canon defines a collective identity - in his words, the English “native element.” The culture is formed by an elite kind of writing - of which, naturally, Eliot’s notoriously “difficult” poetry was a model. The Canon is a great “Yes” to the culture it defines.
3 - Liberal Culturalism
There are many critics who argue for the inclusion of new works in the Canon, or perhaps the construction of new Canons - of works by women, for example. The notion of Canon developed on intrinsic grounds is implicitly approved: merely the content of the existing Canon is contested. The Canon remains “an organic totality that defines the culture it affirms”.
4 - Liberal Idealism
This view holds that the Canon operates as a negative ideal - a challenge that must be met by diversity. There is then a kind of dialectical relationship between the Canon and the culture. The Canon is a repository of humane ideals which function to make us struggle rather than confirm our smugness. It has a regulating impetus, saying to the modern world “Go thou and do a little differently”. Canonical literature is more diverse than at first appears.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Canons V
III
The differing approaches to the Canon issue may be summarised under six headings. (which I pinched from Bill Readings)
1 - Conservative Idealism
The aim of this position as far as possible is preservation of the “existing” Canon. In such literature may be found transcendental and uplifting values. They represent an ideal of literary merit. The Canon is “closed”. There is a growing band of more conservative authors, such as Robert Alter, Allan Bloom and Alvin Kernan who want to defend the Canon, or to bemoan its loss as an armageddon for Western culture. David Lehmann in his book Signs of the Times - Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, writes of a “programmatic assault now in progress against the venerable idea of the Canon....The determination of a Canon, a syllabus, a reading list of any kind, is stripped of all but political considerations, with results that are nothing if not arrogant” .
Harold Bloom, as we have seen, argues vehemently that Canonical writings possess a purely aesthetic superiority, which in part explains how they have attained their Canonical status.
The differing approaches to the Canon issue may be summarised under six headings. (which I pinched from Bill Readings)
1 - Conservative Idealism
The aim of this position as far as possible is preservation of the “existing” Canon. In such literature may be found transcendental and uplifting values. They represent an ideal of literary merit. The Canon is “closed”. There is a growing band of more conservative authors, such as Robert Alter, Allan Bloom and Alvin Kernan who want to defend the Canon, or to bemoan its loss as an armageddon for Western culture. David Lehmann in his book Signs of the Times - Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, writes of a “programmatic assault now in progress against the venerable idea of the Canon....The determination of a Canon, a syllabus, a reading list of any kind, is stripped of all but political considerations, with results that are nothing if not arrogant” .
Harold Bloom, as we have seen, argues vehemently that Canonical writings possess a purely aesthetic superiority, which in part explains how they have attained their Canonical status.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Canons IV
3 The problem of Western aesthetics
The problem of articulating the nature of aesthetic merit continues to vex Western culture. The notion of beauty is in many ways intuitive, and the reader or observer decides what is beautiful on an inarticulate level. Aesthetic theories have never been entirely convincing. This has led to a deep mistrust of the idea of the aesthetic. For political critics like Eagleton, the idea of the “aesthetic” is mythical, an instrument for denying the ideological forces at work in art and literature.
The intuitive sympathetic response of people to the aesthetic quality of great literature was the reason that the study of a Canon of great literary works was developed on such a large scale in the nineteenth century. In response to the crushing Utilitarianism of Benthamite England and the sheer drear of industrial work, the Canon of literature promised a realm for the imagination. However, the perceived failure of religion is the most significant reason for the development of English studies in the nineteenth century. George Gordon, one of the first professors of English at Oxford delivered this message at his inaugural lecture:
England is sick, and...English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.
English was a liberal, humanising pursuit, dulling the razor’s edge of extremism. The aesthetic response of the reader supposedly taught him or her universal human values. Even the Bible was recast in the role of a literary rather than a religious document - Matthew Arnold, for one, advocated ignoring the gauche doctrinal aspects of the Bible in favour of its literary qualities. The Canon, then, has been part of a specifically pedagogical programme aimed at enlightening the morally backward masses in culture and ethics. It was however, some time, before “English” was accepted as a subject worthy of study in the major Universities, rather than a matter of developing “taste”, as if reading the right books was akin to choosing the right drawing room curtains, or the selection of imaginary cricket teams. It was rather the domain of the Schools of Arts, Mechanic’s Institutes and women’s colleges. English literature was the new opiate for the masses who did not study Classics.
The moral/aesthetic ideal was renewed in the twentieth century by a group of Cambridge academics - F.R.Leavis, editor of Scrutiny; Q.D.Leavis, I.A.Richards, L.C.Knights and William Empson. The argument was similar to the nineteenth century one, but the tone was more aggressive, heated, urgent. Rigorous critical attention was demand to the “words on the page”. Mass commercial society was reducing life to banality; literature would lift it to a level of vitality. To study English was to encounter the core of intellctual life - far more important than mere science, law, history or philosophy. The critic had a prophetic role to play, because literature was now a matter of high moral seriousness involving social and political questions. Leavis followed a modus operandi familiar to Christian exegetes: his insistence on ‘close reading” was a form of exegesis. He coupled this rigour with the tone of a preacher.
Where Leavis preached his criticism with a quasi-religious fervour, his Cambridge colleague I.A. Richards founded his approach on a science - psychology. In the scientific age, we must look to poetry to supply a soothing balm to the troubled human psyche. Literature was the hope of the side as far as social order went. “Poetry”, he wrote, “is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos.” In his book Practical Criticism, Richards wrote up the results of quasi-scientific “experiments” on the reactions of readers to poetry.
Would the reading of literature make you a better person? Could it save society? Would it halt the march of barbarity and vulgarity in the modern world? If this was still believed in 1939, it was difficult to believe in 1945. The volume of Goethe on the shelf of the camp commandant does not seem to have restrained his savagery. Indeed the totalising nationalism of which our world has been so lately cursed has a relationship to the use of such literature in the formation of a national literary heritage. However, an optimism about the achievements and possiblities remained, especially among the New Critics of North America in the post-war period. Perhaps in reaction to the terrible events of the immediate past, they sought to study texts in isolation from the historical circumstances of their production. The literary text (preferably a poem for the New Critics) was like a “well-wrought urn”, to quote the title of Cleanth Brooks’ book. The author’s intentions were unknowable and in any case, irrelevant. Great literature could stand on its own (iambic?!) feet. In a different way, the New Critics believed in the social possibilities of literary study: the balancing of the tensions of complex language forms mirrored the process of liberal democracy. John Crowe Ransom wrote that the poem was “Like a democratic state, so to speak, which realises the ends of a state without sacrificing the personal charcter of its citizens”.
In more recent times, Harold Bloom has argued for the aesthetic value of Canonical literature in The Western Canon. For him, however, aesthetic value is not to be entangled with morality. In this work, the scholar holding two of America’s most prestigious professorships (Yale and NYU) vigorously defends the Canon with all the rhetorical strength he can muster. “Without the Canon”, he writes, “we cease to think”. Bloom argues that considerations that are either moral or ideological have no place in the question of the literary Canon. He does not equate the Western Canon with western cultural imperialism. “The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature.” What counts, Bloom insists, are aesthetic qualities, not agendas of one kind or another. The relativisation of beauty is his great enemy. Aesthetic value must pass the test of history: a work must survive the struggle between texts within culture. “The Western Canon is a kind of survivor’s list”. Canonical works “live”: they have a vitality which sustains their presence in the cultural memory. However:
If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation...All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.
The problem of articulating the nature of aesthetic merit continues to vex Western culture. The notion of beauty is in many ways intuitive, and the reader or observer decides what is beautiful on an inarticulate level. Aesthetic theories have never been entirely convincing. This has led to a deep mistrust of the idea of the aesthetic. For political critics like Eagleton, the idea of the “aesthetic” is mythical, an instrument for denying the ideological forces at work in art and literature.
The intuitive sympathetic response of people to the aesthetic quality of great literature was the reason that the study of a Canon of great literary works was developed on such a large scale in the nineteenth century. In response to the crushing Utilitarianism of Benthamite England and the sheer drear of industrial work, the Canon of literature promised a realm for the imagination. However, the perceived failure of religion is the most significant reason for the development of English studies in the nineteenth century. George Gordon, one of the first professors of English at Oxford delivered this message at his inaugural lecture:
England is sick, and...English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.
English was a liberal, humanising pursuit, dulling the razor’s edge of extremism. The aesthetic response of the reader supposedly taught him or her universal human values. Even the Bible was recast in the role of a literary rather than a religious document - Matthew Arnold, for one, advocated ignoring the gauche doctrinal aspects of the Bible in favour of its literary qualities. The Canon, then, has been part of a specifically pedagogical programme aimed at enlightening the morally backward masses in culture and ethics. It was however, some time, before “English” was accepted as a subject worthy of study in the major Universities, rather than a matter of developing “taste”, as if reading the right books was akin to choosing the right drawing room curtains, or the selection of imaginary cricket teams. It was rather the domain of the Schools of Arts, Mechanic’s Institutes and women’s colleges. English literature was the new opiate for the masses who did not study Classics.
The moral/aesthetic ideal was renewed in the twentieth century by a group of Cambridge academics - F.R.Leavis, editor of Scrutiny; Q.D.Leavis, I.A.Richards, L.C.Knights and William Empson. The argument was similar to the nineteenth century one, but the tone was more aggressive, heated, urgent. Rigorous critical attention was demand to the “words on the page”. Mass commercial society was reducing life to banality; literature would lift it to a level of vitality. To study English was to encounter the core of intellctual life - far more important than mere science, law, history or philosophy. The critic had a prophetic role to play, because literature was now a matter of high moral seriousness involving social and political questions. Leavis followed a modus operandi familiar to Christian exegetes: his insistence on ‘close reading” was a form of exegesis. He coupled this rigour with the tone of a preacher.
Where Leavis preached his criticism with a quasi-religious fervour, his Cambridge colleague I.A. Richards founded his approach on a science - psychology. In the scientific age, we must look to poetry to supply a soothing balm to the troubled human psyche. Literature was the hope of the side as far as social order went. “Poetry”, he wrote, “is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos.” In his book Practical Criticism, Richards wrote up the results of quasi-scientific “experiments” on the reactions of readers to poetry.
Would the reading of literature make you a better person? Could it save society? Would it halt the march of barbarity and vulgarity in the modern world? If this was still believed in 1939, it was difficult to believe in 1945. The volume of Goethe on the shelf of the camp commandant does not seem to have restrained his savagery. Indeed the totalising nationalism of which our world has been so lately cursed has a relationship to the use of such literature in the formation of a national literary heritage. However, an optimism about the achievements and possiblities remained, especially among the New Critics of North America in the post-war period. Perhaps in reaction to the terrible events of the immediate past, they sought to study texts in isolation from the historical circumstances of their production. The literary text (preferably a poem for the New Critics) was like a “well-wrought urn”, to quote the title of Cleanth Brooks’ book. The author’s intentions were unknowable and in any case, irrelevant. Great literature could stand on its own (iambic?!) feet. In a different way, the New Critics believed in the social possibilities of literary study: the balancing of the tensions of complex language forms mirrored the process of liberal democracy. John Crowe Ransom wrote that the poem was “Like a democratic state, so to speak, which realises the ends of a state without sacrificing the personal charcter of its citizens”.
In more recent times, Harold Bloom has argued for the aesthetic value of Canonical literature in The Western Canon. For him, however, aesthetic value is not to be entangled with morality. In this work, the scholar holding two of America’s most prestigious professorships (Yale and NYU) vigorously defends the Canon with all the rhetorical strength he can muster. “Without the Canon”, he writes, “we cease to think”. Bloom argues that considerations that are either moral or ideological have no place in the question of the literary Canon. He does not equate the Western Canon with western cultural imperialism. “The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature.” What counts, Bloom insists, are aesthetic qualities, not agendas of one kind or another. The relativisation of beauty is his great enemy. Aesthetic value must pass the test of history: a work must survive the struggle between texts within culture. “The Western Canon is a kind of survivor’s list”. Canonical works “live”: they have a vitality which sustains their presence in the cultural memory. However:
If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation...All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Canons III
2 The problem of Western discourse
Tension over the Canon has also pointed to the problem of discourse in contemporary discussion, highlighted by Jacques Derrida and others. Western thinking has historically given prominence to the author-ity of the Author of the text. French structuralist critic Roland Barthes proclaimed “The Death of the Author” in his essay-cum-obituary of 1964. By “Author” he meant the author as used by critics to author-ise a particular interpretation of a text over another, the author as the object of discovery. He wrote:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture...Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing...We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
The presence of the Author in the text is a powerful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. The study of “Classics” - works by “great” “authors” - is thus dramatically undermined, so it seems. Barthes saw that texts had to be “disentangled” rather than “deciphered” - the notion of an “ultimate” meaning is untenable. Barthes was of course sensitive to the theological consequences of his manifesto: the Death of the Author was also the Death of God, the ultimate Author.
As a consequence, notions of literary value break down, a savage blow to the Western Canon which was conceived as a repository of values. Reading now needs to be suspicious of the construction of reality in texts, not sympathetic to it, less still guided by it. The perceived order in the rhetoric of the West is susceptible to deconstruction.
Tension over the Canon has also pointed to the problem of discourse in contemporary discussion, highlighted by Jacques Derrida and others. Western thinking has historically given prominence to the author-ity of the Author of the text. French structuralist critic Roland Barthes proclaimed “The Death of the Author” in his essay-cum-obituary of 1964. By “Author” he meant the author as used by critics to author-ise a particular interpretation of a text over another, the author as the object of discovery. He wrote:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture...Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing...We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
The presence of the Author in the text is a powerful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. The study of “Classics” - works by “great” “authors” - is thus dramatically undermined, so it seems. Barthes saw that texts had to be “disentangled” rather than “deciphered” - the notion of an “ultimate” meaning is untenable. Barthes was of course sensitive to the theological consequences of his manifesto: the Death of the Author was also the Death of God, the ultimate Author.
As a consequence, notions of literary value break down, a savage blow to the Western Canon which was conceived as a repository of values. Reading now needs to be suspicious of the construction of reality in texts, not sympathetic to it, less still guided by it. The perceived order in the rhetoric of the West is susceptible to deconstruction.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Canons II
II
The contemporary debate about the Canon highlights three major problems that Western culture has yet to resolve - the problem of Western history and politics, the problem of Western thinking, and the problem of Western aesthetics.
1 The problem of Western history and politics
Discussion of the Canon of Western Literature uncovers the problem for Western culture of its dubious history. Leading contemporary (well, he is dead now) cultural critics such as Palestinian-American Edward Said rightly point to rather equivocal past of Western culture. In his magisterial book Culture and Imperialism, Said aims
...to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the creative or interpretive imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire...Since narrative plays such a remarkable part in the imperial quest, it is therefore not surprising that France and (especially) England have an unbroken tradition of novel-writing, unparalleled elsewhere.
Literature, then has played a role in the dubious process of Empire. Much undoubted good has come from the hegemony of the West in the modern world. Yet the construction of a monolithic cultural identity, to which poetry and narrative literature are fundamental, has been to the specific exclusion of other cultural identities - classes, races, even genders. We may cite for example even the English language itself - today, truly a world language, opening exciting possibilities for communication between peoples; but at the same time privileging some and disadvantaging others, working against diversity, by its power sucking the life out of other languages. Said admires the great literary works of the Western tradition as an unparralleled corpus of imaginative literature; but he deplores the use of this corpus in the exercise of power and privilege.
If the Canon is an instrument of oppression, exclusion and elitism, how can it maintain any credibility? Wouldn’t it be better to dismantle the very idea of a Canon as outmoded and imperial? Terry Eagleton, the marxist-learning formerly professor of English at Oxford, argues for the dismantling of the idea of “Literature” on ideological grounds. He proposes rather the study of “discourse”, by which he means everything from Shakespeare and Tolstoy to advertising copy and government memoranda. A document surveying “The Humanities in the Princeton Undergraduate Experience 1989” summarises the debate:
Is there a Canon of great books? What is a masterpiece? Who decides what the ‘great books’ are?...Are the currently revered books chosen ‘by Western white men for Western white men’ as some critics claim? Do colleges and universities have an obligation to expose undergraduate students to some of the great works of Western civilisation by requiring some course or set of sourses designed specifically for that purpose? Do we also have an obligation to expose students to the work of other cultures and of the historically dispossed within our own society?
The contemporary debate about the Canon highlights three major problems that Western culture has yet to resolve - the problem of Western history and politics, the problem of Western thinking, and the problem of Western aesthetics.
1 The problem of Western history and politics
Discussion of the Canon of Western Literature uncovers the problem for Western culture of its dubious history. Leading contemporary (well, he is dead now) cultural critics such as Palestinian-American Edward Said rightly point to rather equivocal past of Western culture. In his magisterial book Culture and Imperialism, Said aims
...to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the creative or interpretive imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire...Since narrative plays such a remarkable part in the imperial quest, it is therefore not surprising that France and (especially) England have an unbroken tradition of novel-writing, unparalleled elsewhere.
Literature, then has played a role in the dubious process of Empire. Much undoubted good has come from the hegemony of the West in the modern world. Yet the construction of a monolithic cultural identity, to which poetry and narrative literature are fundamental, has been to the specific exclusion of other cultural identities - classes, races, even genders. We may cite for example even the English language itself - today, truly a world language, opening exciting possibilities for communication between peoples; but at the same time privileging some and disadvantaging others, working against diversity, by its power sucking the life out of other languages. Said admires the great literary works of the Western tradition as an unparralleled corpus of imaginative literature; but he deplores the use of this corpus in the exercise of power and privilege.
If the Canon is an instrument of oppression, exclusion and elitism, how can it maintain any credibility? Wouldn’t it be better to dismantle the very idea of a Canon as outmoded and imperial? Terry Eagleton, the marxist-learning formerly professor of English at Oxford, argues for the dismantling of the idea of “Literature” on ideological grounds. He proposes rather the study of “discourse”, by which he means everything from Shakespeare and Tolstoy to advertising copy and government memoranda. A document surveying “The Humanities in the Princeton Undergraduate Experience 1989” summarises the debate:
Is there a Canon of great books? What is a masterpiece? Who decides what the ‘great books’ are?...Are the currently revered books chosen ‘by Western white men for Western white men’ as some critics claim? Do colleges and universities have an obligation to expose undergraduate students to some of the great works of Western civilisation by requiring some course or set of sourses designed specifically for that purpose? Do we also have an obligation to expose students to the work of other cultures and of the historically dispossed within our own society?
Friday, August 13, 2010
Canons
I
It is now considered a truism that the study of the humanities within the university is in a state of foment. The English faculty at the University of Sydney, where I studied form 1989-92, provides a not unusual case study. For years the department had insisted on a core of study made up of traditional literary classics, from Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Pope to Keats, Austen and Dickens. The Twentieth Century was represented by Woolf, Joyce, Yeats and Eliot; and we even studied the writings of such latter-day stars as Helen Garner and Thomas Pynchon. The core was supplemented by a smorgasbord of optional courses which tended to reflect the predilections of the faculty. The reading was at times a chore - I would not have chosen to read several of the authors. Often I was pleasantly suprised, or challenged - but not always. Yet, as one of my favourite teachers said: “If you are going to study literature, you’ve got to rub your nose in this stuff.”
The year after I left, however, the faculty controversially voted to revamp its syllabus in a way which reflected a philosophical change in the way literature was to be understood. A core syllabus was no longer required: students could choose their entire course of study. An undergraduate student, then, could avoid studying Shakespeare or Austen if she wanted to. It was no longer deemed necessary to a literary education to receive instruction in classic or “Canonical” works. The focus of what had been “literary” study was now more broadly “cultural”. Works by minority groups or by women were given a space under the new umbrella.
That the stakes were high was revealed by the arresting acrimony under which the whole syllabus review was undertaken. For example, Andrew Riemer, now chief literary reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, and one of Australia’s foremost writers and critics, resigned in protest after more than two decades at the University. He made no secret of his disgust at what he saw as the erosion of important standards. What occurred at the University of Sydney happened not in isolation, but as one of the results of a debate about culture that has affected the teaching of literature everywhere, a debate that has focussed on the issue of the Canon.
The Greek word kanon originally signified a measuring rod. However, its subsequent uses have been with reference to collections of books: first, to the list of books that comprised the Old and New Testaments; and second, in a literary context to refer to the set of works (of which the Bible is one), which, by a cumulative consensus in the past, have come to be considered “major” and to serve as the persistent subjects of literary history, criticism, and scholarship.” It is common to speak of the Canon as being that of the Western cultural tradition. The Canon is meant to include those works that are called “Literature”; indeed, the two terms are coterminus. In current practice, “Canon” is also used to signify the key authors in a literary subgrouping. For example, a recent (well, 10 years ago now!) edition of Southerly was devoted to the “Australian Canon”.
The notion of the Canon has been one of the most keenly contested areas of literary study in the last two decades. It would be difficult to find a University whose faculty of English has not been rent asunder over the issue of the Canon, because it directly affects what is taught. In fact, the Canon is what is taught, pretty much. Yet the Western Canon as commonly conceived has come under intense pressure from the ideological interests that now permeate English faculties; and even the idea of Canonicity itself has been called into question.
What we might call “Western” culture - the heritage of those societies having origin in the west of Europe - is a culture which Christianity has shaped profoundly. Indeed, the Judaeo-Christian tradition must be counted as one of the two pillars on which the entire Western tradition of intellectual and cultural endeavour, from biology to poetry, is founded (the Graeco-Roman being the other). Western culture and Christianity are yoked together, historically speaking. The spread of Western power and influence roughly coincides with the spread of Christianity. Western political, economic and military thinking has theological roots. In many painful passages of history the “Western” and the “Christian” have been indistinguishable. Until comparitively recently the term “Christendom” was used to indicate what is now meant by “the Western world”.
However, we live in a time of a thorough reconsideration of the Western cultural heritage. In the post-holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-colonial age the Western past is no longer something of which simply to be proud. The unprecedented power of this culture has come at the cost of tremendous human suffering. The utopia of Western technological progess is for everyone else an apocalypse. Political post-millenialism of the kind seen even now in the USA has been manifestly dishonest. The success of the West has, it seems, less to do with the blessing of God and more to do with simple theft and murder.
In recent years the literary academy has been the site of a new self-loathing towards the cultural heritage of the West; and it is the “great” books of Western literature - the Western Canon - that are the focus of the discussion. Is the Western notion of what is aesthetically pleasing tainted with the bloodguilt of that culture? Do the works that comprise the Canon represent the tools of centuries of oppression? Can we ever extricate Christianity from Western culture, or are the two joined at the hip? In the discussion that follows I hope to shed some light on these difficult questions.....
It is now considered a truism that the study of the humanities within the university is in a state of foment. The English faculty at the University of Sydney, where I studied form 1989-92, provides a not unusual case study. For years the department had insisted on a core of study made up of traditional literary classics, from Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Pope to Keats, Austen and Dickens. The Twentieth Century was represented by Woolf, Joyce, Yeats and Eliot; and we even studied the writings of such latter-day stars as Helen Garner and Thomas Pynchon. The core was supplemented by a smorgasbord of optional courses which tended to reflect the predilections of the faculty. The reading was at times a chore - I would not have chosen to read several of the authors. Often I was pleasantly suprised, or challenged - but not always. Yet, as one of my favourite teachers said: “If you are going to study literature, you’ve got to rub your nose in this stuff.”
The year after I left, however, the faculty controversially voted to revamp its syllabus in a way which reflected a philosophical change in the way literature was to be understood. A core syllabus was no longer required: students could choose their entire course of study. An undergraduate student, then, could avoid studying Shakespeare or Austen if she wanted to. It was no longer deemed necessary to a literary education to receive instruction in classic or “Canonical” works. The focus of what had been “literary” study was now more broadly “cultural”. Works by minority groups or by women were given a space under the new umbrella.
That the stakes were high was revealed by the arresting acrimony under which the whole syllabus review was undertaken. For example, Andrew Riemer, now chief literary reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, and one of Australia’s foremost writers and critics, resigned in protest after more than two decades at the University. He made no secret of his disgust at what he saw as the erosion of important standards. What occurred at the University of Sydney happened not in isolation, but as one of the results of a debate about culture that has affected the teaching of literature everywhere, a debate that has focussed on the issue of the Canon.
The Greek word kanon originally signified a measuring rod. However, its subsequent uses have been with reference to collections of books: first, to the list of books that comprised the Old and New Testaments; and second, in a literary context to refer to the set of works (of which the Bible is one), which, by a cumulative consensus in the past, have come to be considered “major” and to serve as the persistent subjects of literary history, criticism, and scholarship.” It is common to speak of the Canon as being that of the Western cultural tradition. The Canon is meant to include those works that are called “Literature”; indeed, the two terms are coterminus. In current practice, “Canon” is also used to signify the key authors in a literary subgrouping. For example, a recent (well, 10 years ago now!) edition of Southerly was devoted to the “Australian Canon”.
The notion of the Canon has been one of the most keenly contested areas of literary study in the last two decades. It would be difficult to find a University whose faculty of English has not been rent asunder over the issue of the Canon, because it directly affects what is taught. In fact, the Canon is what is taught, pretty much. Yet the Western Canon as commonly conceived has come under intense pressure from the ideological interests that now permeate English faculties; and even the idea of Canonicity itself has been called into question.
What we might call “Western” culture - the heritage of those societies having origin in the west of Europe - is a culture which Christianity has shaped profoundly. Indeed, the Judaeo-Christian tradition must be counted as one of the two pillars on which the entire Western tradition of intellectual and cultural endeavour, from biology to poetry, is founded (the Graeco-Roman being the other). Western culture and Christianity are yoked together, historically speaking. The spread of Western power and influence roughly coincides with the spread of Christianity. Western political, economic and military thinking has theological roots. In many painful passages of history the “Western” and the “Christian” have been indistinguishable. Until comparitively recently the term “Christendom” was used to indicate what is now meant by “the Western world”.
However, we live in a time of a thorough reconsideration of the Western cultural heritage. In the post-holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-colonial age the Western past is no longer something of which simply to be proud. The unprecedented power of this culture has come at the cost of tremendous human suffering. The utopia of Western technological progess is for everyone else an apocalypse. Political post-millenialism of the kind seen even now in the USA has been manifestly dishonest. The success of the West has, it seems, less to do with the blessing of God and more to do with simple theft and murder.
In recent years the literary academy has been the site of a new self-loathing towards the cultural heritage of the West; and it is the “great” books of Western literature - the Western Canon - that are the focus of the discussion. Is the Western notion of what is aesthetically pleasing tainted with the bloodguilt of that culture? Do the works that comprise the Canon represent the tools of centuries of oppression? Can we ever extricate Christianity from Western culture, or are the two joined at the hip? In the discussion that follows I hope to shed some light on these difficult questions.....
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Nietzche and Christian eschatology.
Nietzsche famously called Paul ‘the greatest of all apostles of revenge’. In his vehement treatise The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche described this Pauline Christianity as driven by ressentiment – which names the feeling of the weak/slave to the strong/noble. It was this ressentiment that had driven Paul to cast his Christianity as a life-denying eschatology and drained whatever dignity Jesus Christ had brought to it. Christian eschatology, as Nietzsche reads it, is a form of systematic cruelty against the natural shape of human life – a wicked instrument of priestcraft.
This Christian denial of life consists in that it renders weak and passive the man who would otherwise ennoble himself through action in the world. In this we can see a convergence with Arendt’s thought. Thus:
Whom then does Christianity deny? what does it call 'world'? Being a soldier, being a judge, being a patriot; defending oneself; preserving one's honour; desiring to seek one's advantage; being proud.... The practice of every hour, every instinct, every valuation which leads to action is today anti-Christian...
The hypocrisy of the nineteenth-century prince who can call himself a Christian and yet acquit himself impressively as a man of action produces in Nietzsche a visceral reaction. Nietzsche quite rightly recognizes the critique of human pride in the Christian gospel and claims that this cuts against the grain of that which is most natural to human life: to act and to be proud in action.
For Nietzsche, Paul’s apocalyptic gospel renders any ethical teaching he might give not only meaningless but abominable. As so many (including Arendt) have done before and since, he attempts to drive a wedge between the Jesus of benign practical good works and the Paul of dangerously abstract apocalypticism. We see this in Section 42 of The Anti-Christ. Nietzsche says of Paul:
What did this dysangelist not sacrifice to his hatred! The redeemer above all: He nailed him to his Cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel -- nothing was left once this hate-obsessed false-coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality, not the historical truth!
Nietzsche portrays Paul as the real sacrificer of Christ. He is the one who reduces the living, flesh-and-blood Christ of the gospels to a trick of the metaphysical light. By not making even the slightest use of the life of the Redeemer, Paul perpetrated an unparalleled fraud on mankind. He was unable to make use of anything real, and instead inculcated the grand deception of Christian apocalypticism. For Nietzsche, ‘Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that entire existence beyond this existence – in the lie of the ‘resurrected’ Jesus.’
For our purposes in this paper it is important to note that Nietzsche refers explicitly to 1 Corinthians in Section 45. The talk of judgement (1 Cor 3.16-17; 4.2, etc) and of the overthrow of the strong/mighty/wise by the apocalyptic action of God (1 Cor 1.20ff) outrages him. Interestingly, these same texts are all linked very closely to what Rosner and Ciampa describe as the 'backbone' of 1 Cor 1-4 -- the quotations from Isaiah and Jeremiah about the expectation-shattering action of God (which Paul urges has happened in the crucifixion of the Messiah).
This Christian denial of life consists in that it renders weak and passive the man who would otherwise ennoble himself through action in the world. In this we can see a convergence with Arendt’s thought. Thus:
Whom then does Christianity deny? what does it call 'world'? Being a soldier, being a judge, being a patriot; defending oneself; preserving one's honour; desiring to seek one's advantage; being proud.... The practice of every hour, every instinct, every valuation which leads to action is today anti-Christian...
The hypocrisy of the nineteenth-century prince who can call himself a Christian and yet acquit himself impressively as a man of action produces in Nietzsche a visceral reaction. Nietzsche quite rightly recognizes the critique of human pride in the Christian gospel and claims that this cuts against the grain of that which is most natural to human life: to act and to be proud in action.
For Nietzsche, Paul’s apocalyptic gospel renders any ethical teaching he might give not only meaningless but abominable. As so many (including Arendt) have done before and since, he attempts to drive a wedge between the Jesus of benign practical good works and the Paul of dangerously abstract apocalypticism. We see this in Section 42 of The Anti-Christ. Nietzsche says of Paul:
What did this dysangelist not sacrifice to his hatred! The redeemer above all: He nailed him to his Cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel -- nothing was left once this hate-obsessed false-coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality, not the historical truth!
Nietzsche portrays Paul as the real sacrificer of Christ. He is the one who reduces the living, flesh-and-blood Christ of the gospels to a trick of the metaphysical light. By not making even the slightest use of the life of the Redeemer, Paul perpetrated an unparalleled fraud on mankind. He was unable to make use of anything real, and instead inculcated the grand deception of Christian apocalypticism. For Nietzsche, ‘Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that entire existence beyond this existence – in the lie of the ‘resurrected’ Jesus.’
For our purposes in this paper it is important to note that Nietzsche refers explicitly to 1 Corinthians in Section 45. The talk of judgement (1 Cor 3.16-17; 4.2, etc) and of the overthrow of the strong/mighty/wise by the apocalyptic action of God (1 Cor 1.20ff) outrages him. Interestingly, these same texts are all linked very closely to what Rosner and Ciampa describe as the 'backbone' of 1 Cor 1-4 -- the quotations from Isaiah and Jeremiah about the expectation-shattering action of God (which Paul urges has happened in the crucifixion of the Messiah).
Thursday, July 29, 2010
The devil he is
If the devil exists, he pesters you with doubts. One of his tricks, if he exists, is to get to you to doubt even his existence. In which case, if he doesn’t exist, then attack was merely a projection of something in you. He has no power; it is a toothless attack. Ha!
But wait. Weren’t you just a minute ago convinced that he, or something like him, was real? Didn’t you hear him speaking to you, as sure as eggs? Now you say he doesn’t exist! Can you trust yourself, then, to know reality from fantasy? Isn’t it you, in fact, who is unravelling?
You’re on a roll now. Did that dark thought you had never conceived before emerge from the sweaty locker rooms of your own soul? That plausible devil: he’s your own creation, then?
These are the wiles of the devil or some of ‘em.
*
Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:11-12)
If only the experience of wrestling with doubt was as dramatic as it sounds in Ephesians 6. Paul makes us imagine the Christian striding out like Luke Skywalker to clash light sabres with the devil. He is easy to spot because he wears black and rides a Harley, and has some serious tattooing on his right arm about how he'll dismember the mothers of those who stand in his way.
But that's not how it goes. The devil – if it is him - always comes in disguise. Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Or, as something less than an angel of light. He speaks reasonably to reasonable people. He makes a good deal of quiet sense, in a completely perverse way. His talk has, (as Rowan Williams puts it) an 'Escher-like quality, landscapes turning inwards on themselves in visual but plausible absurdity.' It's the kind of remorseless, undefeatable logic that drives you to insanity.
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov is the most rationalistic and agnostic of the three Karamazov brothers in Dostoyevsky's great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Yet it is he who has a nightmarish encounter with the devil. The devil comes to him in the guise of a rather ingratiating and certainly not very frightening middle-aged man, looking a little down on his luck. He's a ‘banal devil’, a 'sponger'. Is he a vision, or is he real? Does he have an independent existence, or is he a parasite (a ‘sponger’) on Ivan's fevered imagination? Does he come from within Ivan, or from some source without? Ivan says to him:
I sometimes don't see you, and don't even hear your voice, as last time, but I always guess what you're driveling because it is I, I myself who am talking and not you!'
So, the challenge is for the devil to produce a thought in Ivan that he has never thought before. He says:
Though I am your hallucination, even so, as in a nightmare, I say original things, such as have never entered your head before, so that I’m not repeating your thoughts at all, and yet I am merely your nightmare and nothing more.
He is prepared to concede to not existing, for then he would have triumphed.
Paul dramatises the battle in Ephesians 6 exactly because this clash doesn't look obvious. He calls it a war because it looks like a friendly chat. It is hard to see it for what it is. The nature of this confrontation is that it always makes you wonder whether there actually is a confrontation. It talks to you of your own hysteria.
But wait. Weren’t you just a minute ago convinced that he, or something like him, was real? Didn’t you hear him speaking to you, as sure as eggs? Now you say he doesn’t exist! Can you trust yourself, then, to know reality from fantasy? Isn’t it you, in fact, who is unravelling?
You’re on a roll now. Did that dark thought you had never conceived before emerge from the sweaty locker rooms of your own soul? That plausible devil: he’s your own creation, then?
These are the wiles of the devil or some of ‘em.
*
Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:11-12)
If only the experience of wrestling with doubt was as dramatic as it sounds in Ephesians 6. Paul makes us imagine the Christian striding out like Luke Skywalker to clash light sabres with the devil. He is easy to spot because he wears black and rides a Harley, and has some serious tattooing on his right arm about how he'll dismember the mothers of those who stand in his way.
But that's not how it goes. The devil – if it is him - always comes in disguise. Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Or, as something less than an angel of light. He speaks reasonably to reasonable people. He makes a good deal of quiet sense, in a completely perverse way. His talk has, (as Rowan Williams puts it) an 'Escher-like quality, landscapes turning inwards on themselves in visual but plausible absurdity.' It's the kind of remorseless, undefeatable logic that drives you to insanity.
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov is the most rationalistic and agnostic of the three Karamazov brothers in Dostoyevsky's great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Yet it is he who has a nightmarish encounter with the devil. The devil comes to him in the guise of a rather ingratiating and certainly not very frightening middle-aged man, looking a little down on his luck. He's a ‘banal devil’, a 'sponger'. Is he a vision, or is he real? Does he have an independent existence, or is he a parasite (a ‘sponger’) on Ivan's fevered imagination? Does he come from within Ivan, or from some source without? Ivan says to him:
I sometimes don't see you, and don't even hear your voice, as last time, but I always guess what you're driveling because it is I, I myself who am talking and not you!'
So, the challenge is for the devil to produce a thought in Ivan that he has never thought before. He says:
Though I am your hallucination, even so, as in a nightmare, I say original things, such as have never entered your head before, so that I’m not repeating your thoughts at all, and yet I am merely your nightmare and nothing more.
He is prepared to concede to not existing, for then he would have triumphed.
Paul dramatises the battle in Ephesians 6 exactly because this clash doesn't look obvious. He calls it a war because it looks like a friendly chat. It is hard to see it for what it is. The nature of this confrontation is that it always makes you wonder whether there actually is a confrontation. It talks to you of your own hysteria.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Devoted Conference
This new conference looks really exciting. Devoted conference is planned to be an annual event celebrating the Puritans.
This year they are looking at Owen and Baxter. These guys will be hard acts to follow!
This year they are looking at Owen and Baxter. These guys will be hard acts to follow!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Marilynne Robinson: 'Absence of Mind'
Apologies to regular readers of this blog for my loss of blogging mojo lately. I guess what with weekly posts at Anglican Media and a monthly article in Eternity magazine I have been reaching my output limit. In other news, a book that Tom Frame and I have co-authored on the 39 Articles is hitting the presses soon - and should be out in a couple of months.
I am a huge fan of author Marilynne Robinson, whose novels Home and Gilead were for me the discoveries of 2008/9. But Robinson is an extraordinary essayist, too.
Her latest offering Absence of Mind is a brilliant and profound reflection on the 'problem of mind' which seems to feature strongly in what she calls 'parascientific' literature - by which she means the writings of Dawkins, Pinkers, Dennett and co. Robinson calls them on their reductionistic accounts of human thought - do not the history of art, literature and music tell against them at every point?
It is an immensely subtle book, and I see I am going to have to re-read it. Nuts. But her basic thesis is something like this:
Those who claim to dismiss the mind/body dichotomy actually perpetuate it when they exclude the mind's self-awareness from among the data of human nature. p. 118
Ponder that.
I am a huge fan of author Marilynne Robinson, whose novels Home and Gilead were for me the discoveries of 2008/9. But Robinson is an extraordinary essayist, too.
Her latest offering Absence of Mind is a brilliant and profound reflection on the 'problem of mind' which seems to feature strongly in what she calls 'parascientific' literature - by which she means the writings of Dawkins, Pinkers, Dennett and co. Robinson calls them on their reductionistic accounts of human thought - do not the history of art, literature and music tell against them at every point?
It is an immensely subtle book, and I see I am going to have to re-read it. Nuts. But her basic thesis is something like this:
Those who claim to dismiss the mind/body dichotomy actually perpetuate it when they exclude the mind's self-awareness from among the data of human nature. p. 118
Ponder that.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Seven Sins of Sydney
I had this thought for a series entitled: the Seven Sins of Sydney.
The idea would be to really ask: what are the deep moral faultlines that run through the city we love? Let's not be trite about this. You could say 'Greed', but the trick would be to nail down excatly how greed is expressed in Sydney, and not elsewhere.
It sounds, in a way, a pompous project. But is no different than Tim Friedman's songs which skewer Sydney's pride, and its shallowness, and its greed.
Question is: what are the Seven Sins?
Here's a sketch:
1 - The Pursuit of Space - It's built on a wholesale theft of Real Estate. We clamber over one another to get a slice of the view...
2 - Loyalty to Mates - it trumps every other value...
3 - Excessive Punishment - from the flogging parson on...
4 - Brawling
5 - Confusing the Penultimate for the Ultimate
6 - Work till you drop
7 - Smutty little secrets - Sydney and sex...
Any others?
The idea would be to really ask: what are the deep moral faultlines that run through the city we love? Let's not be trite about this. You could say 'Greed', but the trick would be to nail down excatly how greed is expressed in Sydney, and not elsewhere.
It sounds, in a way, a pompous project. But is no different than Tim Friedman's songs which skewer Sydney's pride, and its shallowness, and its greed.
Question is: what are the Seven Sins?
Here's a sketch:
1 - The Pursuit of Space - It's built on a wholesale theft of Real Estate. We clamber over one another to get a slice of the view...
2 - Loyalty to Mates - it trumps every other value...
3 - Excessive Punishment - from the flogging parson on...
4 - Brawling
5 - Confusing the Penultimate for the Ultimate
6 - Work till you drop
7 - Smutty little secrets - Sydney and sex...
Any others?
Monday, June 21, 2010
Talking about Progressive Christianity
I participated in an ABC show about 'Progressive Christianity' and you can listen to it here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2010/2924630.htm
The fascinating thing to me about Progressive Christianity is the apparent contradiction between the radical sceptism to the point of paranoia about orthdox Christianity on the one hand and the gullible blind faith about the claims of the Jesus Seminar on the other. Or: the contradiction between the extreme rationalism on which it is founded (disbelief in miracles, for example) and the extreme fideism about other beliefs that are held.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2010/2924630.htm
The fascinating thing to me about Progressive Christianity is the apparent contradiction between the radical sceptism to the point of paranoia about orthdox Christianity on the one hand and the gullible blind faith about the claims of the Jesus Seminar on the other. Or: the contradiction between the extreme rationalism on which it is founded (disbelief in miracles, for example) and the extreme fideism about other beliefs that are held.
Saturday, June 05, 2010
5 reasons why I don't like lists of Bible verses
Often writers of theological essays will pull out a statement and then offer a list of bible verses to back it up, in brackets. People seem to think this is indicative of how scripturally based a piece of theology is. I don't like this. Why?
1. Instead of drawing my attention to the text of Scripture, it actually makes me skip over it and move on. It makes me think I know the Bible when I don't.
2. SO OFTEN, when I look up the verses in a list, they don't say what the author claims they self-evidently say. Or, they say it in a very, very different way. Or, a subtle point is lost.
3. It looks messy. (OK, that's not so important!)
4. It treats the Bible like a bank of data to be mined, and not a narrative of salvation-history.
5. It means a tendency to prefer 'direct-statement' evidence in theological argument over the testimony of say, the character of God revealed in his might acts, or the nature of the literary context.
A great example of this is Is 45:7.
I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the LORD, do all these things.
Which apparently looks like it charges God with direct agency in evil. I've seen it cited in lists of bible references as a proof text to this end. But this short-cuts an enormously complex and very serious exegetical AND theological discussion which needs to be had... don't it?
What I do instead is that I try to quote the actual words of a particular text, and refer to those. Not without its own difficulties, but I think it is preferable.
1. Instead of drawing my attention to the text of Scripture, it actually makes me skip over it and move on. It makes me think I know the Bible when I don't.
2. SO OFTEN, when I look up the verses in a list, they don't say what the author claims they self-evidently say. Or, they say it in a very, very different way. Or, a subtle point is lost.
3. It looks messy. (OK, that's not so important!)
4. It treats the Bible like a bank of data to be mined, and not a narrative of salvation-history.
5. It means a tendency to prefer 'direct-statement' evidence in theological argument over the testimony of say, the character of God revealed in his might acts, or the nature of the literary context.
A great example of this is Is 45:7.
I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the LORD, do all these things.
Which apparently looks like it charges God with direct agency in evil. I've seen it cited in lists of bible references as a proof text to this end. But this short-cuts an enormously complex and very serious exegetical AND theological discussion which needs to be had... don't it?
What I do instead is that I try to quote the actual words of a particular text, and refer to those. Not without its own difficulties, but I think it is preferable.
Friday, June 04, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Article in National Times... on Artifical Life
Playing God?
The fun thing about this was that it was a facebook collaboration! I asked for help and got great insights and interesting links. Thanks to Chris Wark, Chris Stafferton and Mike Higton.
The fun thing about this was that it was a facebook collaboration! I asked for help and got great insights and interesting links. Thanks to Chris Wark, Chris Stafferton and Mike Higton.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Unspeakable Comfort
Here's some Weekend Away talks I am planning. Happy for feedback- why else does one have a blog?
‘UNSPEAKABLE COMFORT’: The Sovereignty of God and the Christian Life
There is unspeakable comfort – the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates – in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. – JI Packer
While our neighbours talk about luck or destiny, the usual response of Christians to a significant crisis in life is to appeal to God’s sovereignty. We respond to crisis or accident or disease with ‘God is in control’, as if that by itself were a comforting truth.
It is important to know that life is not “just a bunch of stuff that happens”, to use the immortal words of Homer J. Simpson. But if God is remorseless, or uncaring, or - worse – malevolent, then his being in control becomes anything but a comfort to us in affliction. After all, if God is in control, then how do we not blame him for my friend’s depression, or the fatal car accident, or whatever it is?
This series of talks will address one of the Bible’s greatest themes: the sovereignty of God. It will show what it means for us to say ‘God is in control’. We will think about how and where he has shown us this control; and we will see how it changes everything about the way we live.
1. The Comfort of Sovereign Love
2. The Grace of Sovereign Choice
3. The Peace of Sovereign Power
4. The Joy of Sovereign Hope
‘UNSPEAKABLE COMFORT’: The Sovereignty of God and the Christian Life
There is unspeakable comfort – the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates – in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. – JI Packer
While our neighbours talk about luck or destiny, the usual response of Christians to a significant crisis in life is to appeal to God’s sovereignty. We respond to crisis or accident or disease with ‘God is in control’, as if that by itself were a comforting truth.
It is important to know that life is not “just a bunch of stuff that happens”, to use the immortal words of Homer J. Simpson. But if God is remorseless, or uncaring, or - worse – malevolent, then his being in control becomes anything but a comfort to us in affliction. After all, if God is in control, then how do we not blame him for my friend’s depression, or the fatal car accident, or whatever it is?
This series of talks will address one of the Bible’s greatest themes: the sovereignty of God. It will show what it means for us to say ‘God is in control’. We will think about how and where he has shown us this control; and we will see how it changes everything about the way we live.
1. The Comfort of Sovereign Love
2. The Grace of Sovereign Choice
3. The Peace of Sovereign Power
4. The Joy of Sovereign Hope
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Crisis? What Crisis?
It would not do, if one were writing an apostolic letter today, to speak so imprecisely about ‘this present crisis’, as Paul does in 1 Cor 7: 26, and expect to be understood. The twenty-first century began with an act of violence that its perpetrators wished to invest with apocalyptic symbolism that was hard to misread. The decade since has been one of ‘wars and rumours of wars’. So-called ‘rogue states’ have started nuclear weapons programmes. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008, deemed worthy of and recognised everywhere by its own three-letter acronym (GFC), continues to unravel the world’s prosperity. Perhaps most ominous of all, human-induced climate change haunts contemporary politics and economics. There is no shortage of crises; and each doomsday scenario has its prophets who are willing to recount humanity’s collective sins and to point to the way in which our punishment is coming, and speedily. The question the contemporary world has to grapple with is not so much deciding whether or not there is a crisis but which crisis to confront as a matter of first priority.
While the language and tropes of religious apocalyptic have been commandeered
by contemporary prophetic movements, there is simultaneously a hostility to the use of apocalyptic and eschatological rhetoric in its original setting. In fact, the eschatological impulse from within religion is itself held in part responsible for a number of the impending crises. The secularist apocalyptic nightmare involves those inspired by religious visions of the future wreaking disaster on the present. Forty years ago, Jürgen Moltmann wrote that
Always the protest against the Christian hope and against the transcendent consciousness resulting from it has stubbornly insisted on the rights of the present, on the good that surely lies always to hand, and on the eternal truth in every moment.
It is now not merely that Christian hope ‘cheats man of the happiness of the present’ ; it is that Christian hope is accused, along with other religious accounts of hope, of making his present tenuous and fearful. An account of the good (and so, the good life) that places the human life in the context of the eschatological, and most especially in the realm of the apocalyptic, is unlikely to be recognised generally as such. This is the seriousness of the difficulty confronting the Christian ethicist today.
While the language and tropes of religious apocalyptic have been commandeered
by contemporary prophetic movements, there is simultaneously a hostility to the use of apocalyptic and eschatological rhetoric in its original setting. In fact, the eschatological impulse from within religion is itself held in part responsible for a number of the impending crises. The secularist apocalyptic nightmare involves those inspired by religious visions of the future wreaking disaster on the present. Forty years ago, Jürgen Moltmann wrote that
Always the protest against the Christian hope and against the transcendent consciousness resulting from it has stubbornly insisted on the rights of the present, on the good that surely lies always to hand, and on the eternal truth in every moment.
It is now not merely that Christian hope ‘cheats man of the happiness of the present’ ; it is that Christian hope is accused, along with other religious accounts of hope, of making his present tenuous and fearful. An account of the good (and so, the good life) that places the human life in the context of the eschatological, and most especially in the realm of the apocalyptic, is unlikely to be recognised generally as such. This is the seriousness of the difficulty confronting the Christian ethicist today.
Sunday, May 09, 2010
The Catechist launched!
An exciting new web magazine has just been launched by students from Moore College:
The Catechist.
The first issue is on "Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the Real World".
The Catechist.
The first issue is on "Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the Real World".
Monday, May 03, 2010
Union with Christ in Karl Barth
In Barth, the theme of unio Christi is not explicitly addressed until late in the fourth volume of the Church Dogmatics. He places it under the heading of ‘Vocation’. As is well known, Barth’s soteriology is profoundly christocentric. Reconciliation with God can only be found in Christ, who is the locus for all the themes of reconciliation: election, justification, sanctification and so on. For Barth, the role of union with Christ is circumscribed by his insistence on the actual moments of event, decision and personal encounter, on the one hand; and, on the other, his emphasis on the objective work and experience of Christ as opposed to the human response of faith and obedience.
Barth is no mystic, and so is determined to distinguish himself from the charge. He deploys the term ‘fellowship’. He emphasises that the Christian’s relationship to Jesus Christ is one of ‘encounter’ or ‘confrontation’ . ‘We have’, he writes, ‘and encounter in time between two personal partners who do not lose but keep their identity and particularity in this encounter’ (IV.3.2.547). Union with Christ does not involved an extension of the incarnation, but rather a response to the prophetic call of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. ‘The Christian’s union with Christ consists in this dynamic relationship of call and response, in which the Christian is voluntarily united with Christ in will and action, knows the self to be justified and sanctified in Christ, and awakens to his or her genuine humanity’ (Evans, p. 244). Barth’s objectivism – a response to the subjective experientialism of his forebears – means that he can only distinguish the Christian from the non-Christian by dint of knowledge of the work of Christ. Evans concludes:
...for Barth’s view of the unio Christi, act has replaced state and condition, reconciliation accomplished has to a considerable degree overshadowed redemption applied, and the extra nos has eclipsed the intra nos. In short, “union with Christ”... has been largely replaced by “reconciliation already in Christ”.
Barth is no mystic, and so is determined to distinguish himself from the charge. He deploys the term ‘fellowship’. He emphasises that the Christian’s relationship to Jesus Christ is one of ‘encounter’ or ‘confrontation’ . ‘We have’, he writes, ‘and encounter in time between two personal partners who do not lose but keep their identity and particularity in this encounter’ (IV.3.2.547). Union with Christ does not involved an extension of the incarnation, but rather a response to the prophetic call of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. ‘The Christian’s union with Christ consists in this dynamic relationship of call and response, in which the Christian is voluntarily united with Christ in will and action, knows the self to be justified and sanctified in Christ, and awakens to his or her genuine humanity’ (Evans, p. 244). Barth’s objectivism – a response to the subjective experientialism of his forebears – means that he can only distinguish the Christian from the non-Christian by dint of knowledge of the work of Christ. Evans concludes:
...for Barth’s view of the unio Christi, act has replaced state and condition, reconciliation accomplished has to a considerable degree overshadowed redemption applied, and the extra nos has eclipsed the intra nos. In short, “union with Christ”... has been largely replaced by “reconciliation already in Christ”.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Charles Hodge and Unio Christi
In the midst of a battle for the very soul of American Christianity, Charles Hodge of Princeton was a defender of Reformed Orthodoxy over and against even Calvin, where necessary. In response to a subjectivism which emphasised the inner life, he pushed the elements of federalism to the extreme, especially by emphasising the extrinsic elements of the system. In speaking of original sin, for example, Hodge sought to make the federal union – that representative relationship – independent of hereditary considerations. Adam’s posterity is sinful by dint of his federal headship in which they are united, rather than the natural union of physical descent. The key notion is ‘imputation’, which for Hodge does not indicate either personal identity with nor mutual participation in. It is an extrinsic and legal issue.
In soteriology, Hodge is keen to affirm the central place that union with Christ has. Through union with Christ by faith the benefits of Christ are received by the Christian enture. This union is firstly a ‘federal union’ which has its basis in the pretemporal covenant of redemption between the first and second persons of the Godhead. This union is must be realised in the lives of the covenant people. For Hodge, then, ‘there is a federal union rooted in the eternal covenant of redemption, and the legal benefits promised by this covenant and merited by the work of Christ are imputed through faith to the believer in an extrinsic relationship. Any source or locus of legal of legal merit, such as the humanity of Christ, remains utterly outside the Christian. There is a vital or spiritual union, in which the believer receives the Holy Spirit as a representative of Christ, a Christ who is most certainly absent with respect to his humanity’ (Evans, p. 208).
As far as the ordo salutis goes, Hodge posits a temporal as well as a logical order in redemption. Regeneration gives rise to faith, which is then the legal instrument of a legal union with Christ (hence justification). Following this, the Holy Spirit is imparted which makes for the spiritual union with Christ experienced in sanctification. Justification is a single moment in time – whereas sanctification is a progressive work. Here is Hodge:
As soon, however, as it exercises faith, it receives the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, God’s justice is thereby satisfied, and the Spirit comes and takes up his dwelling in the believer as the source of all holy living. There can therefore be no holiness until there is reconciliation with God, and no reconciliation with God except through the righteousness imputed to us and received by faith alone. Then follow the indwelling of the Spirit, progressive sanctification, and all the fruits of holy living. (Systematic Theology, III:172)
In soteriology, Hodge is keen to affirm the central place that union with Christ has. Through union with Christ by faith the benefits of Christ are received by the Christian enture. This union is firstly a ‘federal union’ which has its basis in the pretemporal covenant of redemption between the first and second persons of the Godhead. This union is must be realised in the lives of the covenant people. For Hodge, then, ‘there is a federal union rooted in the eternal covenant of redemption, and the legal benefits promised by this covenant and merited by the work of Christ are imputed through faith to the believer in an extrinsic relationship. Any source or locus of legal of legal merit, such as the humanity of Christ, remains utterly outside the Christian. There is a vital or spiritual union, in which the believer receives the Holy Spirit as a representative of Christ, a Christ who is most certainly absent with respect to his humanity’ (Evans, p. 208).
As far as the ordo salutis goes, Hodge posits a temporal as well as a logical order in redemption. Regeneration gives rise to faith, which is then the legal instrument of a legal union with Christ (hence justification). Following this, the Holy Spirit is imparted which makes for the spiritual union with Christ experienced in sanctification. Justification is a single moment in time – whereas sanctification is a progressive work. Here is Hodge:
As soon, however, as it exercises faith, it receives the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, God’s justice is thereby satisfied, and the Spirit comes and takes up his dwelling in the believer as the source of all holy living. There can therefore be no holiness until there is reconciliation with God, and no reconciliation with God except through the righteousness imputed to us and received by faith alone. Then follow the indwelling of the Spirit, progressive sanctification, and all the fruits of holy living. (Systematic Theology, III:172)
Friday, April 30, 2010
Union with Christ in Federal Calvinism
(reference: William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation)
In the era of Reformed Orthodoxy, however, the ordo salutis becomes an increasingly prominent feature of theological schemas. Whereas Calvin held the extrinsic and forensic union with Christ together with the experience of the transforming work of the Holy Spirit, these now become separate moments in the ‘golden chain’ of salvation. The notion of the ‘substantial’ union of the believer with Christ drops out, and is replaced by theories of ‘virtual communion’ – which is to say, union with Christ is elided with the benefits formerly ascribed to union with Christ – receiving the forensic benefits of salvation and experiencing the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. This can be seen in the work of John Owen, for example.
The rise of the ordo salutis in the early seventeenth century was in the first instance a device designed to counter problems of personal assurance. In order to preserve the sheer graciousness of justification, it was separated from sanctification and placed in a different dogmatic locus. Salvation is not now the organic unity that is observable in Calvin’s work; it becomes a series of acts.
What this means is it the unio Christi becomes bifurcated in federal theology. The union with Christ that results in justification is a forensic relationship by which Christ as the federal head passes on his righteousness by imputation to the believer. The union that passes on the transforming benefits of the Holy Spirit is another By the time of Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), writing in the mid-seventeenth century, different unions with Christ are beings distinguished – ‘Legal’, on the one hand, and ‘Mystical’, on the other. Further, the adoption of the federal terminology stressed the extrinsic, especially with regards to imputation.
In a parallel movement, the piety of the Puritans also utilized ‘union with Christ’ as an idea, and exerted its own influence on Reformed theology. Calvin’s notion of the union with the humanity of Christ as the means by which redemption is applied to us disappears; and in its place the humanity of Christ becomes an object of devotion. The sacraments feature less and less as a means by which Christ’s presence is mediated to the believers, and instead Puritan piety turns inward to find the activity and reality of Christ.
In the era of Reformed Orthodoxy, however, the ordo salutis becomes an increasingly prominent feature of theological schemas. Whereas Calvin held the extrinsic and forensic union with Christ together with the experience of the transforming work of the Holy Spirit, these now become separate moments in the ‘golden chain’ of salvation. The notion of the ‘substantial’ union of the believer with Christ drops out, and is replaced by theories of ‘virtual communion’ – which is to say, union with Christ is elided with the benefits formerly ascribed to union with Christ – receiving the forensic benefits of salvation and experiencing the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. This can be seen in the work of John Owen, for example.
The rise of the ordo salutis in the early seventeenth century was in the first instance a device designed to counter problems of personal assurance. In order to preserve the sheer graciousness of justification, it was separated from sanctification and placed in a different dogmatic locus. Salvation is not now the organic unity that is observable in Calvin’s work; it becomes a series of acts.
What this means is it the unio Christi becomes bifurcated in federal theology. The union with Christ that results in justification is a forensic relationship by which Christ as the federal head passes on his righteousness by imputation to the believer. The union that passes on the transforming benefits of the Holy Spirit is another By the time of Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), writing in the mid-seventeenth century, different unions with Christ are beings distinguished – ‘Legal’, on the one hand, and ‘Mystical’, on the other. Further, the adoption of the federal terminology stressed the extrinsic, especially with regards to imputation.
In a parallel movement, the piety of the Puritans also utilized ‘union with Christ’ as an idea, and exerted its own influence on Reformed theology. Calvin’s notion of the union with the humanity of Christ as the means by which redemption is applied to us disappears; and in its place the humanity of Christ becomes an object of devotion. The sacraments feature less and less as a means by which Christ’s presence is mediated to the believers, and instead Puritan piety turns inward to find the activity and reality of Christ.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)