Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts IV

What might humans “do” with the arts? Will we be wasting our time in creating art or thinking about it when “the time is short”? Will art have a diverting or even corrupting influence on us, leading us to idolatry or immorality? Surely not. Art is a good part of God’s good creation; the freedom, ability and materials necessary to produce art are his gifts. Yet, like everything created, it is in bondage to decay as a result of sin (Rom 8:20-1). The effect of Christ’s work is not just a return to the way things were, but promises a transformation of creation (Rev 21:5). However, that redeemed people are satisfied with cosy banality when they have a foretaste of such splendours is bewildering and disappointing. Having glimpsed eternity in the resurrection of Jesus, will we not be more aware of that which demeans our humanity? As we reform our bodies in conformity with their heavenly destiny, so oughtn’t we to reform our imaginations in line with Paul’s evocation of the true, honourable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable and praiseworthy in Phil 4:8? In the best hymns, for example, are united words that are neither merely theologically correct nor trite but rich and evocative with music that serves those who sing it by lifting their spirits in glorifying God. Neither sentimentality nor mere formalism have a place. The Christian hope gives us confidence there is in the arts potential for real communication and pleasure. The Christian hope gives us a grasp of reality that richly informs discussions of the arts. The Christian hope speaks of God’s judgement, and thus allows for a thorough critique of the abuses of art. The Christian hope also draws our imaginations to Christ. There is then every good reason for a Christian delight in the arts. Indeed, for Christians to maintain that there is a real joy in the arts glorifies God. Far from wasting time, they are (potentially) a redemption of time. The arts, created and experienced under the fear of God, have, like sex, their own peculiar ecstatic holiness.

Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts III

Can art be a “redeeming of the disorder mirroring God’s redeeming work in Christ”? Could creative endeavour be a part of the re-creation? There is a danger in speaking as if the arts in themselves extend Christ’s work, or as if artistic “inspiration” could be akin to “sanctification”. However, we can view human art as anticipatory. When order is wrested from the hands of chaos in a work of art, may we not catch a glimpse of the final goal of creation? The human imagination knows that something is not right with the present world. Art can turn us in the direction of a perfection we do not possess. The Christian is aided by the theme of Sabbath, which encapsulates this tension: while being a chance for enjoyment of God’s creation, it is also a reminder of the future “rest” not yet attained, but promised in Christ. There is no natural theology in the human arts; but the arts may display inklings of what Christians know and worship. In his speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17, Paul is able to take the words of a pagan poet - “For we too are his offspring” - as his text. Even art such as Francis Bacon’s - which explicitly denies God - is still asking the God-question.

Of course, I can also hear Karl Barth’s thundering “Nein!” Barth was emphatic that there was no relation at all between the arts and theology. And yet his love of Mozart’s music led him to make the astonishing claim that the composer should hold a “place in theology, especially in the doctrine of creation and in eschatology” . He wrote in the context of a discussion of the “shadowside” of creation, thinking of finitude and all its effects. Barth heard in Mozart an expression of the goodness of creation, including its limits; and that “creation praises its Master and is therefore perfect.” This is in harmony with the Wisdom literature. Inklings of God are present in the human arts (just as they are in nature); the Christian has been given the eyes to see them. The musical, poetic and painterly renditions of the human condition may take us to the “very threshold of transcendence and the theological;” but it is only encounter with Christ that takes us over it. Works of art are altars to an Unkown God - the God that makes himself known in the glory of the incarnate Word.

Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts II

In thinking theologically about the arts we will be naturally attracted to the doctines of creation, humanity, and revelation. But it must be stated from the outset that all of these have a disctinctive Christ-shape in true Christian thought; so that we will need to bring Christ to bear at every point of our discussion. Creation is dependent on God - but is not God. The doctrine of the Trinity helps to explain how God may relate to the world and yet not be the world. Further, unity and diversity are both true aspects of the created order. Humanity is given a unique role in the creation as the divine viceroy. Creation was not created “perfect” in some Parmenidean sense, but “very good”. It was in need of subduing, naming and enjoying. Human beings were given the capacity to imagine, to describe, to exercise choice; and to become second-order creators, working to shape God’s creation according to these gifts. John Calvin even went as far as to say that the human capacity for art is innate. Built into the structure of the world was the Sabbath, a rest for humans from their work. Art is a part of the subduing, naming and enjoying of God’s world: it interacts with creation and gives it order and new significance. The incarnation further reminds us that matter is not intrinsically evil. Conversely, the Christian doctrine of creation does not allow the human being to worship the creation, even when he or she makes it into art. The wisdom literature of the Old Testament explores the relationship of man and woman to God and to creation. “The fear of Yahweh” is the principle which explains both the freedom and the limit of human wisdom. On the one hand, humble service of and deference to the mighty creator and sustainer of the cosmos enables a person to comprehend experience, because it recognises divine order. There is no sacred/secular division - all the world is God’s. On the other hand, the phrase is a reminder of the limits placed on human wisdom. It recognises the hubris of men and women, and rebukes it. Above all, Jesus Christ provides the model of true human wisdom; and as Paul explains (1 Cor 1-2), Christ’s cross is the wisdom of God in action, confounding proud human wisdom. “The fear of Yahweh”, then, provides a useful motto for discussion of the arts. Christology declares the radical fallenness of the world—the miracle of the incarnation illustrates the depth of the despair. Goodness, beauty and truth are disrupted. Ugliness and disorder arise. While God’s order remains, humanity’s contact with that order is tenuous. However, the advent of Jesus Christ points us beyond the fall to the reconciliation of all things in Christ. The world, which was made through Christ, runs to the order of Christ. As art eloquently explains, human society is troubled by death. Christ’s resurrection from the dead points to the end of death’s rule and to the future transformation of the present order. The testimony of the Apostles is to the resurrected Christ’s Lordship over the world. What occurs in Christ is a re-creation - a new humanity is formed, by the Holy Spirit, in the present age. This is a people with imaginations re-formed as hope in Christ. They experience a present resurrected reality (John 10:10, Col 3:1-5); and they anticipate the perfecting of their bodies by godly obedience expressed in service. Here is the beauty of holiness, rather than the holiness of beauty. A similar kind of inversion is achieved in the pattern of God’s work in Christ. The image and glory of divinity itself, Christ emptied himself of all claims to equality with God, and submitted himself to the ugliness of the cross. Isaiah wrote of the Suffering Servant: “ - so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals -” (52:14). The cross is a moment of grotesque ugliness; and yet also it is moment when a restoration of beauty is wrought. Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar compared faith to an aesthetic contemplation of the God’s work in the world. What God has done in redemption through Christ is itself a work of art, and one that counters proud human ideas of beauty. The doctrine of revelation points to the Christ’s uniqueness as God’s Word. Both visual and verbal descriptions are used of him: he is the “Word” and the “image” of God (John 1, Col 1). The arts then, do not contain of themselves a revelation, however they might mimic it. Yet given the success of God’s communicative act in Christ, we can have confidence that there is an order to creation and that are more than merely arbitrary meanings in art. Ultimately, the cosmos, though marked by sin, is a coherent realm in which meaningful artistic interactions may take place.

Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts I

Dorothy Sayers once wrote:

The Church as a body has never made up her mind about the Arts, and it is hardly too much to say that she has never tried. She has, of course, from time to time puritanically denounced the Arts as irreligious and mischievous, or tried to exploit the Arts as a means to the teaching of religion and morals....And there had...been plenty of writers on aesthetics who happened to be Christians, but they seldom made any consistent attempt to relate their aesthetic to the central Christian dogmas.

The goal of this paper is take up Sayer’s challenge by attempting to relate the arts to the major themes of the Christian faith. By “the arts” I mean the whole gamut of human imaginative and creative activity, including literary, musical, architectural, theatrical, visual, and even televisual arts. Art involves the imaginative arrangement and presentation of matter, such as words, or paint, or notes. It is universal and ubiquitous—no human society is without some form of art, and virtually no human being would live out of contact with art. The arts are held to engender an aesthetic response, meaning that something more than a merely sensory or intellectual or even emotional may be felt when we experience art.

Like work, art is cursed. As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes:

Art is not isolated from the radical fallenness of our nature. It is an instrument of it. Art does not lift us out of the radical evil of our history but plunges us into it. Art is not man’s saviour but a willing accomplice in our crimes.

The human imagination reveals its own fallenness in its art. Not only do inherently corrupt forms of art—blasphemy, pornography, idolatry, kitsch, propaganda—proliferate; but our expressions of order are subject to chaos, and our hopes are subject to despair. And yet the arts have the capacity to elevate us, to provide some of our most glorious moments, to show us most in tune with ourselves and the world, even to give us inklings of the divine. As within man and woman themselves, there remains the tension between the potential both for great beauty and also great vileness.

The Christian response to the arts has been likewise rather ambivalent, for several reasons. First, the strength of the second commandment has been taken as a warning against depictions of the divine. Christ is the only true image (eikon) of God (Col 1:15): our imaginations are not permitted liberty concerning Him.

Second, the gospel mission (because “the time is short”) holds an absolute precedence over artistic activity. The old created order is beyond redemption (it is said) and will soon be exposed to fire. The human arts have no eternal value; so that they are not worth cultivating.

Third, since art often involves the outward expression of the inward state of the human psyche, evangelical Christians, who have a strong doctrine of inner sinfulness, may well fear what such expression reveals. That is, the public projection in art of inner depravity may draw a censorious response, rather than an intelligently engaged one, from conservative Christians.

Fourth, Protestant evangelicals have displayed a suspicion of metaphor and representation—which are central to the arts—perhaps derived from the priority of the sensus literalis in scripture reading.

Fifth, as the religious and the aesthetic are felt by some modern theologians to be responses to the same thing, more orthodox Christians have recoiled from the arts. Paul Tillich saw in art an revelatory expression of the “Ultimate Concern”. The beautiful is also holy and transcendent. For Tillich, art and theology both touch on what really “is”. Certainly, modern artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Rothko have painted as if this was the case. However, for those who would uphold the Christ revealed in the scriptures as God’s unique revelation, Tillich’s claim for art is extremely unsatisfactory. But what is to be said, thought and felt about the arts if what is said is to be theologically accurate?

Love and Loss

Tennyson’s doubt is in many ways very contemporary. Like us, he was stunned and exhilarated by the pace of technological change. The power of experimental and observational science to explain the natural world seemed to make God somewhat surplus to requirements. The traditional concept of God was, so it seemed, redundant. The rationalistic philosophy of the age, when applied to biblical studies and to theology more generally, did much to erode confidence in a verbal revelation of God given in a propositional form.

But this did not, then as now, lead to a decline in religious belief as such. Rather, it sought out new forms. If religious faith could not be established by reason, perhaps experience might provide an alternative channel to the divine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, theologians began to emphasise the more mystical and experiential aspects of Christian faith. Religious dogmas were not to be taken as direct descriptions of realities but rather as metaphors for encounters with the divine. Though people like Tennyson did not feel that they could any longer accept Christian orthodoxy, they were reluctant to pursue pure atheism. There was inside them a deep conviction that there was something transcendent. Not that they could name it, or give it a face – they could only grope towards it in the dark.

And then there was the experience of love and loss. Perhaps the Victorians in their time, before the wide acceptance of Darwinian views, were more ready to sanctify these powerful feelings. They seemed to come from some extra-phenomenal source; to be an intimation of immortality. We are more ready to see the pains and joys of human fellowship as demanded of us by our biological selves than as evidence of a holiness beyond us. Nevertheless, the popular sense of the ‘spiritual’ remains in many people, and permeates these moments at which heart is most evidently exposed. It is in our most intimate relationships that we feel most connected to the truth about who we are as individuals and most certain about our steps into the world; and we have the gratifying experience of being able to provide this for others. The reciprocity of human relationships take us beyond ourselves to ourselves.

Death remained the final, impermeable barrier. Poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries like John Donne certainly feared death as the curtailment of love and the rotting of the human body. Death was a demonic, personified figure who stalked his victims. Donne needs to draw on all the resources of his Christian faith to repudiate it in ‘Death be not proud’. But the grieving of the nineteenth century wails in a different key – one that we moderns more readily recognise. The loss is not felt as the result of being tyrannised by a sinister force. It is now a brute fact in a remorseless universe which is governed only by a God who remains unmoved at the plight of the creatures who experience it. To face death or to grieve is not be part of a dramatic struggle in which Mordor has temporarily got the upper hand. It is at least possible to express anger against that force. Death for a Tennyson and for we his twenty-first century descendants is sad and bewildering. It flaps its wings in the face of our confidence in human technological mastery of the world.

I falter where I firmly trod: Tennyson and doubt

Alfred Tennyson was indeed a striking young man, over six feet tall and powerfully built. The mass of his somewhat unkempt black hair was set upon a noble head. His face carried an intense expression of melacholy.

The son of a gloomy Lincolnshire clergyman, he arrived at Cambridge in 1827 already an accomplished and precocious poet. The Somersby rectory had been a dysfunctional household to say the least, with the eleven children largely left to amuse themselves by wandering around the local marshes and fens. If Tennyson was shy at first, his prodigious ability and intensity of personality soon attracted others; and he found some companionship in an intellectual society known as ‘The Apostles’.

In Tennyson’s second year at Cambridge, another young man arrived at the University who would become the kind of intimate friend that his childhood had lacked. His name was Arthur Hallam, the son of a leading historian and scholar, and in his own way remarkably gifted. In the cynicism of the times in which we live, we have lost the ability to talk about the power and the depth of friendship without hinting at some sexual overtone.

There was no hint of anything erotic in the relationship between the two men. That would be to miss just how profound the intimacy of their friendship became as a friendship. Indeed, Hallam became engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily. They shared not in an amorous passion, but in the delights of intellectual discovery and in the vigorous discussion of any topic they could think of. They shared with one another their difficulty they found at maintaining religious belief and yet the sense of loss they felt in not believing. Criticism of the text of the Bible and scientific discoveries about the age of the earth had appeared to challenge the faith of many of the best minds at Cambridge; and Tennyson and Hallam were no different. Certainly nothing in Tennyson’s upbringing at the rectory would have commended Christian faith to him as anything but a burden to be borne.

The summer of 1833 began with Hallam spending time at the Tennyson home in rural Lincolnshire, in the English midlands. These were memorable weeks – a sweet time that Tennyson would always remember with some sense of pain because they were never to be repeated. In August, Hallam’s father took him on a journey to the European continent. On Sept 15th, Henry Hallam returned to his hotel in Vienna only to discover his son in an armchair, dead of a cerebral haemorrhage.

The blow this struck to Tennyson was overwhelming. His grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson, would later write:

The sudden extinction of his friend, with all his infinite capacity for affection and his brilliant promise, struck at the very roots of his will to live. Could it really be that all this great spiritual treasure was annihilated: that all human love and all man’s spiritual effort are but a momentary ripple on the ocean of eternity? Was the world wholly without purpose and man an irresponsible toy for the gigantic forces of Nature? If so, what value could there be in life?

If you have ever had a chance to walk about a Victorian graveyard you will be struck by the openness and even sentimentality with which they regarded death. We are not unlike them, in that terrible griefs affect us too. But we have less experience of them, and fewer words with which to express our loss. We are not given to the public elaboration of our feelings – we do not feel that anyone would be interested in our thoughts about the brevity of life and the nearness of our mortality.

But Tennyson was to make an art form of grieving. He was too sorrowed to attend the funeral, and did not visit Hallam’s tomb until after he was married. But he could not stop his pen:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hapless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
Death in Life, the days that are no more.

The poem which made Tennyson’s career as a poet, In Memoriam A.H.H., is a lengthy reflection on the death of his friend which did not appear for seventeen further years. It is a poem of grief at the loss of a dear friend. But it also a poem about the pain of losing faith. Tennyson was one of the great doubters of his age. His was still very much a Christianised society, and in general traditionally orthodox Christian views held sway. However, developments in astronomy and geology had seemed to contradict Biblical cosmology as it had been traditionally understood. The world was not new, but rather very, very ancient. The universe was far more vast than had been previously imagined. It seemed less and less that humankind occupied anything like a significant place in that universe. If humankind felt small, and lonely, there was at the same time an optimism about human technological progress. This was the age of the industrial revolution, of the steam engine and the factory. People still wanted to believe, but wanted to do so in all sincerity given what they now knew about the world. Was there a way forward for them?
Added to this for Tennyson was the personal existential crisis occasioned by the loss of his friend. It seemed to be exactly the kind of random occurrence that would characterise a heartless universe. And yet, he was not ready to give up on faith entirely. Here’s a passage from In Memoriam:

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

All that is happening and all that has happened to him has led to uncertainty. His feet now ‘falter’, where once before he had been confident of his footfall upon the ground of faith. His ‘weight of cares’ – primarily his deep sense of loss for his friend – causes him to fall upon the ‘world’s altar-stairs’. The picture reminds me of the burden Christian carries in John Bunyan’s great Christian classic Pilgrim’s Progress. Only this burden is not the poet’s sin, but rather his ‘weight of cares’. The path to God (a stairway to heaven?) is shrouded in darkness. He is not yet ready to declare that this is a road to nowhere, to cite the Talking Heads. But all he can do is reach out his ‘lame hands of faith, and grope’. He can have no certainty about what he is reaching for, but only in the end a faint trust. The ‘dust and chaff’ that gathers suggests the dust to which Adam is told he will return in Genesis 3 on account of the curse. It is a mark of mortality and an intimation of death. The poet calls, not to a personal God who reveals himself in the traditional and Biblical sense, but rather to ‘what I feel is Lord of all’. Who or what is this dark divinity, shrouded in mystery and unknowability? He hopes for a hand to reach out to meet his groping arm, but with no confidence, however much he wishes it. What is the ‘larger hope’? He doesn’t quite know, other than to say that hope is, perhaps inexplicably, part of his experience too.

Tennyson became famous through this poem because its themes of grief, loss and doubt resonated deeply with his Victorian contemporaries. The twentieth century poet T.S. Eliot wrote of In Memoriam: 'It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.’ It was profound in the honesty with which it faced the most difficult and personal questions of all – to do with love and death.

Tennyson was unshaken in his conviction that his friend had lived on in some form; and he never

rejected belief in the existence of God. One of his last poems was the famous ‘Crossing the Bar’, an expression of hope at life’s end:

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

But despite believing in the immortality of the soul and in his ‘Pilot’, it could never be said that he was an orthodox Christian believer in any sense. That conviction had long been shaken loose from him in his sorrows.

The atheists are right

My piece at Anglican Media this week

Seeking Common Ground

In debating the issue of same-sex marriage on Facebook recently, a journalist friend of mine stated that he had not found any ‘convincing non-religious arguments’ that would prevent a change to the marriage act.

‘Non-religious arguments’: it sounds like a reasonable requirement for any public discussion, doesn’t it? The argument goes something like this. I am certainly free to hold views based on entirely religious reasons; but when I step into the public square, I must shed these and speak in an entirely non-religious way if I am to convince. I might believe that left-handed people ought to be banned from public transport because an angel told me, but in seeking to convince others of this view I need to leave the angels behind and argue on an angel-free basis. Otherwise I am simply attempting to ‘impose my views on others’.

Former British PM Tony Blair encountered this resistance to public religious speech a number of times. He was once told by his spin doctor Alastair Campbell, when he was about to talk about his Christian faith in an interview with Vanity Fair, that ‘we don’t do God’. Later, when Blair said that he was ultimately answerable to God for commanding the invasion of Iraq, he was met with a withering barrage of attacks from media pundits who were alarmed that this might mean a somehow unjustifiable intrusion of the religious into the political at the highest level.

The alarmed reaction that Blair experienced is not because these ‘religious’ reasons are not convincing to many people. Plainly, religious reasons do have an enormous power to convince many people, even in the UK and Australia. Evoking the ‘image of God’, for example, is an extremely powerful component in an argument for social equality. It was heard frequently on the lips of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the years of apartheid. When the leaders of the mainline churches speak, it is evident that they are given a hearing – if not always by the media, then certainly by the wider public. They can in fact openly appeal to the Bible or to theological ideas as part of their public utterances. If they want to get their point across to many people they need not, it seems, have one way of speaking in the cloister and another in the plaza .

It is not then because of lack of effectiveness that there is an appeal to trade only in ‘non-religious’ reasoning. Rather the opposite: the fear is that these religious arguments are all too effective. But it seems as if religious arguments are not open to the kind of scrutiny that non-religious ones are. They cannot convince the non-religious, and so they are imposed (if they can be) by majorities, or by noisy minorities. Secularists want to object that even if these reasons are compelling to lots of people they are illegitimately used as public reasons.

I think three particular questions are worth putting in response to the claim that public reasons ought always to be ‘non-religious’. First: is it in fact the case that the line between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ is as easy to determine as it sounds? An argument based on a passage of the Bible, for example, sounds as if it is obviously going to fall into the ‘religious’ (and therefore illegitimate) camp. But you could easily make a case that the Bible has an historic moral authority in Western culture, government and law quite apart from any sense that it is the revealed Word of God, as orthodox Christians hold. For example, an appeal to Jesus’ teaching to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ would be entirely acceptable to most people in a public debate. Would such an appeal amount to a ‘non-religious’ reason? Or is it ‘religious’?

Conversely, when a politician makes an appeal to ‘Australian values’ or to ‘the ANZAC spirit’, are these not ‘religious’ claims? When they speak in this way, they draw on a mythology about the past that is not subject to quantification or contradiction in an economic or scientific sense. They are appealing to a sense of civic piety that is arguably every bit as religious as the public utterances of a bishop. In fact, the original meaning of the word ‘religious’, which comes from the Latin word religare (‘to bind, fasten’), had everything to do with the sorts of public duties and civic values of Rome to which the citizenry were bound. ‘Religion’ in this sense is very much part of the public space.

Second: are ‘religious’ arguments so hermetically-sealed that they are not in fact open to challenge and counter-claim from those who do not share them? In many cases, the secular commentator feels quite happy to intervene in religious discourse. As an example we could cite the judgement frequently offered in the media that there are ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims or Christians, and that this is a bad form of religion. From a secular standpoint commentators feel that it is legitimate to criticise the wearing of the burqa or female circumcision (for example).
What’s more, arguments that religious people put forward are not usually as simplistic as ‘an angel told me’, despite the way in which they are often portrayed. Each of the Christian denominations, for example, is in possession of extensive traditions of reasoning from their foundational principles and dogmas – reasoning which is in principle available to be understood and debated by others, especially when it is used to make arguments in favour of this or that public policy. That is not to say that there won’t be significant and passionate disagreement on what constitutes a valid argument, but an argument is better than silence.

If the first two questions were an appeal to secularists to relax a bit about ‘religious’ reasoning into public debate, the third question is one for the Christian church: is it not the case that we owe our neighbours a ‘reason for the hope that is within you?’ (1 Peter 3:15). In other words: in public debate, victory isn’t everything. We could simply say: it is not worth discussing the matter, since enough people accept our point of view without explanation in any case. This is how a lot of politics gets done, unfortunately. I think this would be an unacceptable abuse of the public space. Secularists may not agree with the reasons that we put forward, but it honours the sanctity (if I may use such theological language!) of the process of public debate about our common life if we at least seek to persuade those with whom we disagree.

Overcome with emotion?

In October 2004, my mother-in-law died of breast cancer at the age of 62, not much more than a year after being diagnosed. Being the only member of the family experienced at public speaking – and indeed, at running funerals - I was quite willing to take on the duties of giving the eulogy at the funeral service when I was asked to by my father-in-law. In addition, since I was Jackie’s son-in-law and not directly related to her, I could be expected and indeed expected myself to maintain my composure in the delivery of the task in a suitably controlled tone, allowing the mourners to grieve in quiet privacy.

The tears, then, took me quite by surprise. I was not far into retelling Jackie’s life story – from her childhood in London to her arrival in Australia in the 1960s and her conversion to faith in Christ. At some point in this narrative, I was quite overcome by the occasion. My voice quavered; I could feel myself flushing red; and my face contorted itself. I could barely continue to read, because I couldn’t see the page in front of me. What words I could get out were squeezed out through my throat, and I found myself gasping for breath in between watery sobs. Afterwards my six year old son said to me ‘your face was all screwed up, Dad’.

I retell this story not because I am hoping to elicit sympathy but rather because of its ordinariness as an episode of the human emotions at work. The strong emotion seemed to come to me in a way that I couldn’t predict. It was as if there were a force outside of me working on me and causing me to lose self-control of my body in a way that was understandable but still within Anglo-Saxon culture somewhat shameful, especially for men. I am not normally conscious of doing things with my body that I don’t directly will. Yet in this moment, normal operations seemed to be suspended and the emotion took control of me.

It is an ordinary episode, but no less complicated for being so. It illustrates how troublesome emotions are in thinking cohesively about human being. This difficulty pans out in three overlapping ways, to do with agency, the body and reason.

The first difficulty is best explained by asking: in what sense was I an agent of my own sobs? Can I really speak in this way, of an emotion controlling me, since the emotion could not be anyone else’s? The sobs certainly emanated from my mouth and in my voice. They happened to and in my body. But I was not intending or willing to sob; in fact, I was willing the opposite. Yet I sobbed, and not some demon that had entered me, or some ventriloquist pretending to be me.
Second, at the moment of intense emotion, the human being seems to become almost alienated from his own body. Because these emotions are exhibited in such an obviously visceral fashion and yet carry with them unwanted consequences such as the stigma of cultural shame, the human subject may feel that ‘I’ am other from my physical body. There must be then a purer, non-physical form of ‘me’ – to which perhaps I can ascend once I am free of the untrustworthiness of my flesh. Even a more honourably perceived emotion like the feeling of loss shares enough in common with the more base desires of our bodies – feelings like hunger, sexual desire, need for sleep – that in experiencing it we still frequently experience this otherness from our bodies. Indeed, if I am to speak of some ‘higher’ set of emotions, where do I ‘feel’ them if not in my body?

Third, my perception of myself as a primarily rational creature is disturbed by the experience of strong emotion. But this is because of a hidden assumption that ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are discrete centres of my person, with reason the more nearly ‘spiritual’ or more distinctly human of the two. Yet my strong emotion was in fact tied to rational propositions about the occasion. I did not feel at all the same way about the funeral, at which I had ministered, for a woman in her early forties who had committed suicide even though the circumstances were arguably more tragic. I knew Jacky as my friend and mother-in-law, and as my wife’s mother and the granny of my own children. I could calculate what her loss would mean for us. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt about it.

These difficulties are enough to engender a philosophical, psychological and anthropological discussion of the emotions, such as philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum provides in her masterful work Upheavals of Thought – The Intelligence of the Emotions. The task of a theological anthropology, however, is to begin analysing questions like this in the light of a particular context, namely God. For a Christian anthropology, that context is framed by the themes of the creation of man and woman in the image of God on the one hand and the presence of sin in human life on the other. These two themes are set in tension with one another not just in the Biblical story, but in the existence of every human person. To what degree is this or that feature of my humanity reflect my likeness as a creature made in the divine image to the creator? Or is it in some way a result of that disorder of personhood that stems from my participation in human fallen-ness? But Christian anthropology will also speak of a destiny for human beings. The two themes of theological anthropology have their resolution however in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Theological anthropology, like all properly Christian theology, must speak an evangelical word, in which the image of God humankind is redeemed and perfected. It has, in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a pattern to which human creatures will one day be conformed (Rom 8:29).

Returning to my troublesome emotions, then: was this event God’s will for creatureliness in me? If God has no ‘body, parts or passions’, and yet my emotions are an irreducibly physical component of me, ought I in seeking to be more like him look to some future beyond or without my body? Or must I think of myself dualistically, as most of the Christian tradition has done, having a distinct ‘soul’ for the purer emotions like joy and hope as well as a body for my appetites like hunger and thirst? Has ‘reason’, or the ‘rational soul’ a more exalted seat in me? What would an account of the human emotions look like in the light of the resurrection of the dead? In what sense can the three problematic aspects of human emotion – to do with agency, body and reason – be addressed from a theological perspective?

How to destroy a human being

In 2004 a series of images seeped out into the world’s media that seemed to emerge from the pit of hell itself. Abu Ghraib prison had been known, under the rule of Saddam Hussein, as the closed door behind which the very worst of his terrors was carried out. By now in the hands of the conquering US military, it was evident that the means and methods of prisoner treatment had not significantly changed. The pictures revealed that a programme of torture, rape, abuse and humiliation was part of the experience of daily life at Abu Ghraib under US control.
It is the unselfconsciousness of the images that is perhaps what is so disturbing about them. They look like a series of holiday snaps – the toothy grins and thumbs-up gestures of the US guards point to the camaraderie they were evidently feeling in their shared experience. They seem utterly detached from the prisoners whom, by complete contrast, lie prone and passive or cringe in terror. They recoil from the lunges of dogs. They stand masturbating while a female guard watches and points. They lie in naked pyramids of flesh. They hang by their chained wrists from the bars of their cells. In one image, a hooded Iraqi prisoner stands elevated on a box with his arms outstretched. His fingers are attached by metal clips to wires. He is clearly under the impression that the wires are electrified, and that he is about to experience extreme pain and possibly death.

Torture is usually the most secret of acts, usually concealed from the world by the thickness of prison walls. Torturers do not like to put their work on their public record. Though posing the prisoners for photographs as if they were some tourist attraction seemed to be part of the torture itself, it was also a naïve mistake. It revealed what was meant to be kept hidden. Here finally we could catch a glimpse of the torturers craft from the inside. It made the world witnesses to their work, and led to the shame and imprisonment of the perpetrators – if not those who ordered them to carry out a ‘hard’ interrogation.

There was also in the revelation of the photographs in the western media the shocking realisation that the torturers were not operating at the behest of a Saddam or a Mugabe or a Pinochet, but were the representatives of a modern, liberal western democracy. The self-image of westerners as enlightened and reasonable people was shattered. In fact, democracies have not ever ceased to deploy torture as a method. In his book Torture and Democray, US-Iranian political scientist Darius Rejali shows how even modern democracies have used torture – those regimes that describe themselves as humane and supportive of human rights. The terrible secret at the heart of democratic regimes is that even in the name of humanity we led to destroy the human – an act that is ultimately self-destructive. As the Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo said: ‘The torture? A more serious blow to the United States than September 11, 2001 attacks. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves.’ Attempts to isolate the prison guards Lynndie England and Charles Graner from the military hierarchy and to depict them as uneducated and Southern were a predictable response from the media and the judiciary to the possibility of a general complicity in the acts that were depicted in the photographs.

As the Abu Ghraib photographs reveal, in torture bodily pain is only one aspect of the process and interrogation for information is only one of the goals. In fact, torture involves the deconstruction and dismemberment of the human person – which is both its overriding purpose and its means. In his remarkable book Torture and Eucharist US theologian Cavanaugh cites the case study of Arturo, a torture victim of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Arturo told his therapist: ‘I feel as though I were not myself’ (p. 41).

Thus, in torture we can observe in a chilling way a kind of negative anthropology: the torturer has to tacitly acknowledge what a human being is, in order to pull him apart. Evil speaks a kind of truth - in order to undo it, it has to acknowledge it. In torture we have a perverse revelation of the human in the attempt to make her disappear. The horror of torture shows us how vulnerable a human is, too: that our bodily life places us in the path of circumstances that may separate us from ourselves.

Is Ned Flanders a Violent Man?

For Australian readers, my piece 'Is Ned Flanders a Violent Man?' has been published in Quadrant magazine.

Trusting to Know

What are the practices of knowledge that cultivate the necessary trust under which it flourishes? Firstly, listening to the Word of God is an essential practice – not because the Bible is an epistemological text book, but because (as we have seen) it tells us with remarkable explanatory power about ourselves as knowers and the world we seek to know. It is because that Word of God is a divine declaration of the significance and meaningfulness of all we know. The scriptural gospel both encourages us in our human capacity and rebukes our pride. Along its spine is the story of the divine creator whose unshakable commitment is to the world that he has made and the men and women who inhabit it. Though human beings may know truly and even know truth without knowing Christ, they cannot know without him. Knowledge flourishes best within earshot of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Second, curiosity about God’s world is an appropriate expression of the creation mandate. That humankind has an almost insatiable thirst for knowledge about the world in which they live and of which they are a part is part of the way we were designed to interact with the creation that we might serve it. The contemporary epidemic of boredom – and particularly, of boredom with the real (as opposed to virtual) world – is deeply dehumanizing. Christian educators must surely seek to give nurture to the curiosity of students about the created order. An environment in which the activity of knowing is celebrated and enjoyed is essential to the flourishing of human beings as knowing animals.

Third, the cultivation of the virtue of epistemological humility is indispensible to true knowledge of the world. The scientific method itself, properly understood, recognizes the limitations and provisionality of human knowledge – without thereby despairing about the possibility of knowledge. The proper basis for the growth of human knowledge is the admission of incompleteness and even error. This is one of those truths that we can learn from observation; but it finds its confirmation and explanation in the gospel word which judges human beings. Schools must teach their students to say ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I was wrong’. Without these phrases, there is less chance to say ‘I know’.

Fourth, as knowing is a collective practice, a critical respect for tradition and for knowledge from and of other cultures enhances the ability of human beings to know. The current shape of most curricula recognizes this. However, it is not only essential to recognize that history is an important subject in and of itself, but that each subject area has its own history of inquiry, error, revision and understanding. Tradition is not prescriptive. It requires a practice of receiving it respectfully but critically. Anglican Christians in particular are well placed, as heirs of the sixteenth century reformation, to accord to the traditions of human knowledge the kind of critical respect that enables its development. Learning to see from the perspective of other cultures is also a marvelous aid towards the development of a proper regard for one’s own subjectivity.

Fifth, enabling communities of trust – trust in the coherence and meaningfulness of the world, in the potential for meaningfulness of human words, and so on – is the basis for the transformation of domestic and public life. By contrast, the erosion of trust in the political and economic sphere is deeply destructive of community. As we have seen, there is an urgent need for the schooling future citizens in the responsibilities that come with the possession of knowledge and the virtues that are needed for maintaining it.

KNOWLEDGE IN CHRIST (OLIVER O’DONOVAN)

The work of Anglican evangelical moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan in his landmark book Resurrection and Moral Order provides a constructive account of the nature of knowledge in Christ. While his purpose is to provide a description of how specifically moral knowledge can be accessed, his schema certainly invites application across a broader field. O’Donovan addresses the question, as we have here, of how it is that we can say truthfully that we know things about the order of created universe when we ourselves belong to it and cannot find a vantage point to consider it from above (as God does)? What kind of knowledge does the gospel invite us to seek and entitle us to say that we have, and to try to impart to those we educate? O’Donovan sketches four features:

a. OF THINGS AS PART OF THE WHOLE
In the first place, this knowledge in Christ is knowledge of things ‘in their relations to the totality of things’. That does not mean that it is given to human beings to know everything, or even of everything. But we do know what we know as part of a coherent whole. The universe has a purpose and an order, the broad outline of which is discernible in the evangel. If the restoration and fulfillment of the created order is announced to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ, then it is possible to see that the world which we inhabit is a totality. The things and events we encounter in the world, though they may not in themselves look significant, gain significance from their connectedness to other things and events. These together make up a unified totality of objects and occurrences.
Seeking to grasp the shape of this totality has been until relatively recently one of the primary tasks of human knowers. It was this idea that stood behind the founding of the modern universities, even as late as the 19th century. Science and religion were not held apart but were invited to enrich one another mutually – for knowledge could not be total without both perspectives. We moderns benefit in every way from their partnership. The fragmentation and specialization of knowledge which we have latterly experienced is evidence of a despair that things could ever been known completely and in all their relations.

b. FROM WITHIN
At the same time this knowledge is known by knowers who are themselves a part of what they know. Though it is the empirical scientist’s ideal, we never can know at a distance. We are only artificially able to isolate the objects of our inquiry. We cannot transcend the things we seek to know. The historian is herself an historical being; the biologist part of a biological system. Especially, we see this as the natural sciences examine the largest questions of all – as to our origins and as to the boundaries and the essential properties of the universe: at these limit-points scientists inevitably wax philosophical. As O’Donovan points out ‘We expect scientific knowledge to ‘comprehend’ or ‘contain’ its object, whereas in this knowledge the object contains us.’ (p. 79) This reminds us that, though we may have knowledge of the totality, it is never total or complete knowledge.

c. FROM A HUMAN POSITION
It is also the fact that whatever knowledge we have is knowledge from a human position. This is a refinement of the notion of the ‘from within-ness’ of our knowledge. Humans know as other creatures do not. We name the creatures; they do not name us – they do not know us as we know them. To human creatures is given the task of recognizing the true nature of the things around them. In their calling to dominion over the creatures of the earth, sky and sea, men and women are equipped with the capacity to know and the authority that comes from such knowledge. The business of knowing things is task in which humankind is expected to be faithful and to use in the service of the creator.
We do indeed need to recall that in this as in other God-given tasks man and woman have been miserably deficient to the detriment of the creation itself. As in other things, knowledge is checked by the fallen-ness of would-be knowers. Human beings are not now some other creature because of the fall. But they are not the beings that they were supposed to be. We know truly, but also falsely, in error and in lapse of judgement. We are by turns enlightened and confused. The cancer of ignorance weakens the bones of our knowledge. We construct false totalities and invest ordinary material objects with divine properties.

d. NOT OF THE END OF ALL THINGS
So then, we must reckon with what we do not know. What we successfully apprehend of the created order does not include its end. We do not see far beyond the horizon – the destination of all things lies hidden in the sovereign power of God. There is no philosophy of history aside from that which is revealed to us in the Scriptures.

Nine aberrant forms of Christian leadership

In preparation for my talks at the SUEU Leadership conference I have been thinking about when Christian leadership goes wrong. That's pretty much all the time, given human limitations and sinfulness, I guess. But I guess we can't help thinking it could all be so much better. In this list I haven't included the nakedly corrupt, abusive and immoral - in one sense, they don't need describing. However those forms of leadership will flourish where Christians forget that Christian leaders are certainly to be held accountable and are as frail and temptable as anyone else. I should say upfront that I certainly recognise aspects of some of these in my own ministry.

1. The Narcissist The easiest way to spot a narcissist is when they are confronted by criticism. The narcissist usually goes a long to shield themselves from any criticism, and will usually employ or work with those who don't dare to contradict them. But when criticism does come through, the narcissist deflects it by saying that the person who gives it is either bad, or mad. The criticism itself may be described as persecution, and evidence that the true gospel is being preached.
Theological solution The narcissist has an insufficient doctrine of sin in the life of the believer and, in practical terms at least, is too positive about the progress of their own sanctification. A mature leader develops a healthy attitude to criticism which enables one to discern which criticism is valid and which is unwarranted.

2. The Control Freak The control freak will always want to live in a world in which they are able to be omniscient and omnipotent - hence, control freaks find it hard to grow churches beyond a certain size. They can't trust anyone. They tend to be inflexible about rules, and closed to ideas that they didn't think of. They find it hard to descriminate between issues that really matter, and issues that don't. They want to know what their congregation is doing.
Theological solution The control freak needs to really know and practice in real life the Sovereignty of God. Strangely, leaders who are controlling will very often preach this doctrine as a means to bolster their own sovereignty... which shows that they haven't understood it at all. It's a stressful existence.

3. The Wimp The weak and indecisive leader is often imprisoned by the awareness of their own weakness and so becomes the opposite: authoritarian. An authoritarian leader is very often a weak leader trying to overcompensate. He or she is so befuddled by advice that he/she just has to ignore it, or chose one advisor and make them infallible. Sometimes they theologise their weakness as Christlikeness...., or make it seem spiritual.
Theological solution The weak leader can take great heart from the number of biblical weak and fearful leaders there are and that God has used! Moses, or Gideon, for example. But the weak leader needs a doctrine of the Holy Spirit - to know and realise that they are empowered and authorised by the power and authority of God himself. And they need to develop a courage based on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead in the power of the Spirit, a Spirit which gives us grounds for confidence.

4. The 'I don't do windows' leader This leader has isolated their leadership role to one particular gift and doesn't stray much from it. Usually this means the preparation and delivery of sermons. On the one hand, this can come from a belief in the giftedness of the body of Christ in all its diversity. But this belief is take out of all proportion: the church and the world have needs that need serving. They have bought the contemporary notion of giftedness as a kind of internal and ontological property belonging to each believer - and not the equipping of God's people by the Holy Spirit to do what needs doing for the sake of his people.
Theological solution See above - a proper understanding of the nature of those gifts for the edification of the church is needed.

5. The Macho This leader has a reading of complementarianism that anchors it in a particular reading of maleness and femaleness, and is unaware how culturally bound it is. Leadership is male; therefore, maleness must be emphasised. You hear them using lots of military metaphors and talking about extreme sports as an analogy for the Christian life. Jesus is spoken of as the epitome of this kind of masculinity.
Theological solution A proper Christology - which means a proper reading of the gospels - will see that the picture of Jesus' masculinity is far less like a kind of 1st century Rambo than the Macho thinks.... he got beat up and killed, after all!

6. The Member of the Guild The aim of this Christian leader is to match it with his or her peers from college (or wherever). Their frustration (or smug satisfaction) with their church is because if it won't perform as expected, then they will look dumb at their next reunion. They minister and pastor, but as a means to an end. Their ministry is all technique and no heart. They ensure that they are seen as a 'player' in denominational politics.
Theological solution Whose church is it after all?

7. The Self-legislator The self-legislator is a child of the revolution. Rules and institutions get in the way of the gospel, as far as they see it. They are happy to take the denominational badge, but show contempt for denominational distinctives and denominational officials. 'It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission' is their mantra.
Theological solution Again, the doctrine of sin in the Christian life reminds us that making oneself accountable to others is imperative. There is an overconfidence in one's own ability to determine Scriptural truth without reference to others - thus a misunderstanding of the clarity of Scripture as it was developed in the Reformation. There is also a failure to see the work of the Holy Spirit as active in the life of the church over the course of history.

8. The Change-averter The change-averter is deeply conservative and will put the brakes on any change whatsoever as a point of principle. They can't quite explain why change is bad or why the status quo is better, but they are able to kybosh almost any new thought by throwing dust in the air. For them, seniority alone is the best qualification for leadership in the church.
Theological solution Once again, a proper view of sin ought to help us have a critical reception of traditions. Some are good and worthy; others are the result of human imperfections and limitations. Discernment is needed in these matters.

9. The Pragmatist Whatever works is the bottom line here. The pragmatist hasn't bought a theological book since leaving college and his or her shelves are covered with secular leadership books. Or, if they are a lay person you will most likely hear them complaining about the lack of application in the sermons.
Theological solution Pragmatism is not bad, but the church is not a company and the ministers are not the CEO. The gospel is not a programme or advertising slogan.

Holding back on lay administration

Sydney Anglicans have with great patience and restraint argued their case for lay administration over many years. They have marvelled at the way in which this has been equated with the open endorsement of a form of immorality against which Scripture directly speaks in other Anglican churches. They have been astonished at the passionate response to this attempt to change church order, when significant challenges to orthodox doctrine and ethics - and indeed, church order - go unremarked. They have been surprised at the innovations contemplated in the name of equality and mission, but resisted on this particular matter. If lay administration is a second order issue, as even Nicholas Taylor will admit, then why has it elicited so much hostility?

Despite all of this, I would like to argue that Sydney ought not go ahead with lay administration in the foreseeable future. I don’t think that there are any theological objections insofar as I would (and have) happily receive the Lord’s Supper in a Baptist church from a lay person and consider that the sacrament was in no way deficient – in fact, I would find it offensive were any Anglican to suggest it was in some way incomplete celebration. However, I do think it is not wise or necessary to proceed with this innovation at this time. I have six reasons.

First, despite what some of its proponents claim, it is not in fact a ‘gospel issue’. Calling it a gospel issue posits an either-or that is simply not accurate. It confuses gospel issues with church order issues. The reason for calling it a gospel issue is that reserving the act of administration at the Supper for the ordained priest/presbyter allegedly communicates a view of the sacrament which sets it apart from the Word and makes it a special means of grace in addition to the gospel in some way – along the lines of a Roman Catholic theology of the sacraments. However, there is no sense in which a Communion service run in the evangelical parishes of the diocese of Sydney could ever be confused in that way. The usual practice communicates anything but a sacerdotal view of the Supper - and there is no evidence that anyone thinks that it does. The ministers do not normally robe or even wear collars these days. The locally authorised liturgies specifically rule out a sacerdotal interpretation of the Communion. Who administers at the Supper becomes then a matter of church order rather than of the gospel itself.

Second, Sydney diocese has an enormous opportunity for a leadership of service within the Anglican Communion in the first decades of the twenty-first century – in countries where it is often difficult to be a Christian such as Egypt, Madagascar and Myanmar. Anglicans in these countries may class themselves as ‘evangelicals’ but may often just understand themselves to be ‘Anglican’ without reference to a party. They are conservative in theological outlook and looking for help in mission. They are reluctant to accept it from the liberal wing of the church, especially from the Episcopal Church of the USA which they feel has become morally compromised since consecrating two actively homosexual bishops. They are concerned that the same spirit of private judgement and self-legislation without wider consultation is at play in Sydney. Perhaps in Sydney we may quibble with their judgement on this matter. And yet cooperation with these churches is an opportunity for proclaiming Jesus. Can we not bear with the brethren on this matter for the sake of the good it might bring? Is it really of such importance in our own context that we cannot hold back? Is it really affecting our mission here in Sydney?

Third, evangelicals in other parts of the Anglican Communion aren’t calling for it with any enthusiasm. At present, many evangelicals look to Sydney for support and to see what might be achieved by evangelicals within an Anglican framework. That relationship would certainly be compromised by pushing ahead with lay administration. Sydney-trained clergy in other parts of the world would be given fewer opportunities and viewed with greater suspicion as a result of this change. In fact, Sydney-trained clergy serving outside Sydney have often called on Sydney to exercise restraint in this matter.

Fourth, simply as a matter of tactics lay administration is ill-advised. Currently, the North American liberals are tearing the Anglican Communion apart with their innovations. They have acted precipitously and selfishly. They have severely compromised the integrity of the Anglican Communion. The Sydney diocese does not share, as a matter ecclesiological conviction, the view of the unity of the Communion that others do. However, moving forward with lay presidency offers a chance for people to compare the two kinds of innovation and to view them as equivalent. A Communion wanting to appear even-handed may expel Sydney just as it expels ECUSA. Far better to allow the crisis over homosexual bishops to play itself out in the Communion and see what new state of play eventuates then to give those whose hatred of Sydney is implacable a cause to move against it.

Fifth, it is simply the case that no practical necessity drives lay administration in Sydney. There are plenty of candidates for ministry, and plenty of serving presbyters – certainly compared to other dioceses. The current practice is for a monthly communion or perhaps less. Almost every practical concern could be overcome. The current policy of only ordaining as presbyters those who are rectors is perhaps an obstacle, in that congregational leaders may frequently not be presbyters. I would be in favour of returning to the old system. Nevertheless, diaconal administration - which is currently in place – has made this need less urgent.

Sixthly, even though in my judgement no real case of any substance has been put against lay administration, the arguments have singularly failed to convince the wider Anglican Communion even slightly, let alone others in the Australian church. Many of those not convinced would count themselves as dear friends of the Sydney diocese. Whatever one’s opinion of the matter, this is precisely the opposite of the case with women’s ordination, where a clear majority of the Australian church were in favour. It may seem that almost four decades is a long time to be considering a change such as this. But more work is needed from the Sydney point of view to convince others of the pressing need – if pressing it is – for this change. It is telling that no significant monograph from a Sydney theologian has appeared in support of lay administration. Could Sydney really push ahead with the change without majority approval at a national level?
This may seem like a surprising conclusion. However it is arguably more consistent with the Christian gospel, which enjoins us not to insist on our own rights but to consider the needs of others. For a chance of sharing with the Anglicans of Myanmar or Egypt or Chile in their call to preach the gospel, I would readily lay down my insistence on a particular change of church order on which nothing of consequence hangs (if we are to be honest about it). Though no substantial arguments have appeared to counter lay administration at a theological level, here is an opportunity to show patient endurance for the sake of others. Are we mature enough as an institution to take that opportunity?

Ross Gittins on leadership in contemporary Oz

.....It's a dramatic demonstration of the way Australians are losing the ability to fall in behind a leader.
All of us know the nation's problems won't be overcome without decisive leadership. We regularly bewail our politicians' lack of courage and conviction, their reluctance to risk their personal survival in the country's best interests.
Yet we give our leaders so little loyalty. The announcement of a government decision is taken as the occasion for the outbreak of dissent. All those with a reason for objecting cry out and their criticism is amplified by the media, whereas those who agree fall silent. No one feels obliged to actively support the leader, even if just because she is our leader and someone has to accept ultimate responsibility for deciding what we'll do and how we'll do it.
Of course, no one wants to live in a country where the leader's will is never challenged. We each have the democratic right to oppose all government decisions by all legal means. But we also have the democratic right to support, defend or even just acquiesce in the judgment of the people we elected to lead us.
Ross Gittins

The Eternal Difficulty of Leadership

The Australian federal election campaign of 2010 was the perfect illustration of the contemporary problem of leadership. And it’s this: we want a leader we can trust, but we aren’t ready to trust anyone. Or to put it another way: we want a leader who is real, but we aren’t prepared to believe anything they say.

The most telling moment was when Julia Gillard, who had followed perfectly the formula for contemporary electioneering by repeating her ‘moving forward’ phrase over and over again like we were idiots, announced that she was throwing away the script and that we were now going to get the ‘real Julia Gillard’ – which chiefly meant speaking without notes and answering questions. Only, anyone could see that this was itself a strategy, a tactic driven by polls and market research, which was saying that we voters want authenticity in our leaders, and even if we are idiots don’t like to be told that we are. We could have no confidence that this was anymore the real Julia than the moving forward Julia. Even if it was the ‘real’ Julia, we had no way of believing that it was – there was the crafted and practiced ‘spontaneity’, but not the unguarded moment that tells us the truth about her real character.

This is not only a problem for Gillard. Modern politics is – and thus modern politicians are - all persona and no person. I think this is why we are fascinated by the private lives of those who lead us – because we want to see if their public pose is authentic, or whether it is just a trick in order to get us to follow them. If we could discover, by combing through their garbage, some piece of authentically human detritus – a leg razor with real hairs in it, a half-eaten burrito, a discarded condom wrapper, some left over antibiotics – we might begin to believe in them as real. What makes it really complex is that having discovered they are real, we might not want them to lead us anymore.

Such are the peculiarities of leadership in the 21st century. Like so many things in contemporary life, our attitude to leaders is paradoxical: on the one hand we are incredibly gullible when it comes to some forms of leadership and some leaders. On the other, we are deeply cynical towards those who lead us. We want to be lead, desperately; but the possibility of a human being fulfilling our expectations is unlikely.

We see this in the cult of celebrity. Fame conveys on people a kind of tacit authority. Bizarrely, expertise or success in one area we feel leads to expertise in another. It conveys a kind of transferrable authority – my ability to play cricket or to sing translates into an ability to choose which brand of cola to drink. That’s why advertisers love celebrity endorsements. It comes because good leadership is so attractive to human beings: we deep down want to believe that there are leaders out there who make a difference and who are worth trusting and are perhaps a cut above the ordinary. We really want there to be leaders who are able and who care for us and are not just drunk on fame or power. That is the attraction of the The West Wing: the fantasy that anyone as intelligent and good as Jed Bartlett could ever get elected.

We like the feeling a good leader gives us, because good leadership can take us further than we thought it was possible to go. As the American author David Foster Wallace said in 2000:

A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own ... A leader's true authority is the power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not in a resigned or resentful way but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, how you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you wouldn't be able to if there weren't this person you respected and believed in and wanted to please.

Being led feels great. You can see the potential danger here: good leadership is so powerful it is almost intoxicating. But we so rarely find this. We want Bartlett, but if there ever was a Bartlett, we wouldn’t believe in him. We always fear that we have a Richard Nixon (the US President who resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal in 1974). We are suspicious and cynical about leaders and their spin, especially in the political world. We have been so often bitterly disappointed in leaders and in leadership. The sincerity of politicians is so carefully calculated and practiced that we just don’t believe it any more. Leaders have become such successful actors and manipulators that we just don’t know when we are getting real and when we are getting fake. That’s the Julia Gillard problem. And to be fair, it is hard to know how she (or anyone else) could ever overcome it.

It is a human problem, actually. Human leaders are only human. They are finite. They do not know everything. They cannot do everything. And they are, everyone of them, failures. They fail - sometimes terribly. Even their mundane failures are still failures. However, leadership - built as it is on power and authority – is a concept of such transcendence that it is almost divine. It is not accident that since ancient times leadership has been associated with the sacred – and that some leaders have even pretended to divinity itself. No human being is really worthy of the tasks and responsibilities of leadership.

Is there something lost in the prevention and/or relief of suffering?

[being the second part of the piece begun in the previous post]

Evangelical Christians are certainly of the view that human suffering ought to be prevented and relieved wherever possible, and where the means of doing so are ethical. It is not accidental that evangelical Christians, along with Christians of other traditions, have frequently been advocates for the development of medicine and the care of the sick and suffering. As Professor Rodney Stark showed in his book The Rise of Christianity, the early Christians were notable for their determination to alleviate the suffering of the sick. The belief in an orderly universe governed by a good God has long been recognised as the stimulus to medicine, over against the view that the world is beholden to competing pagan deities or to capricious chance.

The gospels record many instances of Jesus’ work as a healer of disease and disability – and his compassion for the suffering of those so afflicted. The apostles likewise are depicted as restoring physical wholeness to several individuals. Christians are called upon to pray for the sick (James 5:14-15). Following these examples, it would be remarkable for a Christian to see the relief and prevention of suffering as undesirable.

The Bible warns human beings against all forms of utopianism. Though human ingenuity will lead to the amelioration of the human condition in many respects, suffering will emerge in new forms. Though it is the Christian view that suffering of one kind or another is inevitable, this does not mean that Christians are resigned to suffering such that they will do nothing to alleviate it.

It is possible, however, that Christians will feel the need to object to certain calculations about the alleviation of suffering if they are based on the assumption that suffering is unredeemable. The elimination of suffering is not always the highest good. Suffering may not always destroy human dignity; it may indeed enhance it – for example, when one is able to suffer in the place of or for the good of others. Believing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, Christians hold that suffering is not ultimate in human life.

Is there value in suffering?

[Being a draft towards short piece I have been asked to write]

From the point of view of biblical faith, there is no inherent value in suffering. Like much that is evil in our world, human suffering is a perversion and a disruption of what should be. It has entered the world because of the dislocation of the relationship between human beings and their creator – the good God who purposed his creation for his own delight and that of his creatures. Suffering is an aberration – it has no value for its own sake. It is not good in and of itself. In the Psalms of the Old Testament, we read some impassioned pleas to God about the absurdity of suffering.

That is not to say that there can be no value in suffering. As renowned British author C.S. Lewis once wrote: ‘it is His [God’s] megaphone to rouse a deaf world’. Human suffering is a sign that something is not right with things as they stand. The disjunction between our understanding of normality and wholeness and our experience of suffering, whether bodily or mentally, ought to prompt the human search for God. It would seem that the human condition were utterly tragic, otherwise.

At the heart of all orthodox and biblical is the story of the terrible suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross. This suffering was inflicted by corrupt religious leaders and an inept bureaucratic machine. And yet, the worst of human degradation of another was also found to be the point of God’s action to rescue humankind. The New Testament reads this story in the light of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah’s vision of a ‘suffering servant’ who would redeem his people by bearing the iniquities of the people.

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. (Isa 53:4-5 New International Version)

This particular suffering victim produced a triumph of healing – not merely because it was a noble example of stoicism in the face of physical pain and personal shame, but because this suffering achieved the reconciliation of human beings to God.

The suffering of Jesus Christ subsequently becomes a pattern for his disciples. The New Testament does not appeal to them to seek out suffering. Rather, it depicts suffering as inevitable in a fallen world. The apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans:

but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. (Rom 5:3-5 NIV)

In writing in this way, Paul is not enjoining Christians to pursue suffering as a good in of itself; but rather describing how suffering, far from being an obstacle to God’s purposes, is actually used by him to achieve what he has planned. Christian discipleship means giving one’s self over to a divine designation, even if that means suffering and death. In the face of the trials and temptations that are an inevitable part of human experience, the Christian life is an offering of one’s self up to the providence of God as it is evidenced in the life, death, resurrection and promised return of Jesus Christ. This may or may not be a suffering path.

Though some Christians have glorified suffering for its own sake, this is a false trail. Truth and love are the non-negotiables, not pain. The final scene of the Book of Revelation depicts a world from which suffering and mourning and pain have been blessedly eliminated.

Thinking about Knowing still

As Wittgenstein demonstrated, we cannot live, even at the level of everyday life, without trusting. And yet trust is a theologically ambivalent starting point for a theory of knowledge because of the persistent untrustworthiness of human beings after the Fall. Not only have the noetic effects of sin crippled our perceptions, they have given us reason to doubt the motives of others.

However, the Scriptural testimony is that God addresses us even in our sinfulness. He speaks the gospel word, in Christ: the word that judges and the word that redeems. That it judges means that it holds forth the promise that God will render all our actions meaningful. That it redeems is a promise that even though it is currently in bondage to decay, the created order has not fallen back into the chaotic void of the pre-creation. This is grounds for a realism of sorts - the goodness of God in the gospel is grounds to believe that the world is largely as we experience it.

Revelation is the basic means by which we learn anything, earthly or heavenly. The English theologian Colin Gunton wrote: ‘All kinds of things are revelatory…not necessarily of God… but of themselves, or of the order of things in the world.’ Revelation is after all the making known of that which would otherwise remain hidden or unknown. The concept that we need to help us here is that of mediation. Our access to information and knowledge is never absolute or unrestricted. It is always comes to us from outside of ourselves and involves us in acts of trust - in our physical faculties, in our peers and elders, in our experts and in God. That there is mediation involved in our knowing is not a grounds for a radical scepticism just because it is possible that we are deceived or deluded. If we acknowledge the presence of mediations we can check them and scrutinise them, evaluate them and give them their due.

Theologically speaking, it is the Spirit of God who governs the process by which our senses and our minds work together to gain any knowledge of the world (as David Hohne writes). Jesus taught that the Spirit is ‘the Spirit of Truth’ and that ‘he will lead you into all truth’; and so we are to trust that it is God by his Spirit who providentially enables human beings to learn things about the world – even if these things are not ultimately salvific. The completed and perfected form of human knowing comes through the revelation of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ, which becomes (for those who trust) saving knowledge of God as Father.

Knowing, then, is a human practice which requires cultivation. It is a skill which requires exercising. The possibility of knowing is embedded in common human life. It is dependent on the development and the maintenance of structures of trust. The more we are able to trust - our senses, each other, the experts, and God - the more, and the better, we know. Conversely, trust can easily be eroded to the great detriment of the human community. Crank theories, scuttlebut, and greed flourish where trust has been destroyed.

Draft material on Reformed/presuppositional epistemology in education

Compared to the Roman Catholic schools, the Reformed tradition of schooling is a relative newcomer to the Australian scene. It is represented in Australia by the Christian Parent-controlled Schools (CPCS). The umbrella network of most of these is Christian Education National (CEN). The basic 'in-theory' positions of these schools can be found in the Educational Creed of the CEN. What is immediately obvious is a far more pessimistic view of the human capacity to acquire knowledge on account of the ‘noetic effects of sin’ – namely, that sin has affected our natural human capacity to know things about ourselves, the world and God. The noetic effects of sin means that man without grace, whilst able to discern some correct knowledge of the world, has a thoroughly anti-God foundation at the heart of his knowledge. Thus, to know truly, one's heart must first be changed by grace, so that one then gains true noetic foundations. Additionally, teaching should be done out of a Christian worldview since a non-Christian worldview is idolatrous. This also requires teachers to themselves be Christians, since not only are they teaching that worldview but modelling it also.

For the Reformed schools (and for Reformed thinkers such as the US theologian John Frame), the Bible is ‘indispensable and determinative for our knowledge of God, of ourselves, and of the rest of creation.’ This means that the Bible is absolutely central to the whole educational task, for without it, there is no remedy to the corruption of the human ability to know even quite basic things about the world. This corruption is so extensive that ‘no area of human knowledge is free of this sinful falsifying.’ Only where ‘the fear of God is re-established by God's grace in the heart of men as the indispensable foundation of all wisdom and knowledge’ is there true education. Whereas in the Roman Catholic view grace comes from the redemptive work of Christ accessed in the sacramental ministry of the Church, in this context grace is received through the inscripturated Word of God by the activity of the Holy Spirit.

The Reformed Schools’ position is quite hostile to the notion that knowledge from secular sources can be successfully appropriated into the Christian worldview:
… although, by the grace of God, men who reject the Word of God as the ordering principle of life provide many valuable insights into the common structure of reality, yet because the religious direction of their thought remains radically opposed to that of the covenant community in Christ, there can be no possibility of a synthesis of their systems of thought with the scripturally directed thought which Christ's covenant community is called to pursue.
Common grace operates in order to enlighten even unbelievers as to aspects of the reality of the world, but the mind hostile to God cannot easily segue into ‘scripturally directed thought’. Indeed there is a skeptical approach to the possibility of unbelievers knowing anything much at all.

Whereas the Roman Catholic view is too blithe about the effects of sin on humanity’s ability to successfully know things about the world, the Reformed Schools view is far too pessimistic. There are instances in Scripture itself where wisdom gleaned from pagans is appropriated into the divine revelation (Proverbs, Acts 17). The noetic effects of sin grip us most in the areas of theology and morality – but in other areas the distortion is surely less acute. The non-Christian scientist may indeed make an extraordinary and completely rational contribution to human knowledge – and that contribution may be untainted by their unbelief.

Furthermore, this view makes Scripture do work that it is not designed to do. John Frame, for example, claims to be articulating a ‘biblical epistemology’. But Scripture offers us no such thing. It certainly has things to say that are relevant to epistemology, but to say that it offers a single epistemological approach is simply a confusion of categories. We may even say that Scripture does not offer a complete world view, either: it requires supplementing from other sources.

Draft material on Roman Catholic epistemology in education

Traditionally, Roman Catholic educators have drawn upon the thought of Thomas Aquinas as it was transmitted and interpreted in the 19th century. Professor John Elias of Fordham University writes: ‘The Thomistic philosophy of education, however, largely fostered by Jesuits involved in higher education, achieved near-official status among Catholic educators’. At the heart of a Thomistic view of education (properly termed ‘neo-Thomistic’) is the contention that it is possible for individuals, with the help of divine grace, to arrive at absolute truths. Bestowed with both the responsibility and freedom to achieve the knowledge necessary to salvation, the human being can be aided by education in this process. The grace of God provided in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ and accessed via the sacramental ministry of the Church, is available to enlighten the mind and strengthen the will.

A particular feature of Roman Catholic education under the influence of this form of neo-Thomism has been the emphasis placed on human rationality and the inherent spirituality of each individual. Thus, a liberal arts curriculum was advocated by neo-Thomistic writers such as the French theologian Jacques Maritain as a means to the moral formation of students. Religious truth undergirds the study of the humanities because a narrow concern for this world only is ultimately dehumanising. Furthermore, in the neo-Thomistic view philosophy of education, learning and knowledge were grounded on a realist epistemology – namely, the view knowledge is objective and unchanging, and that what is truly known by human beings corresponds to what actually is. As Professor Elias puts it, for neo-Thomism

Learning takes place when individuals with intelligence and free will come to a knowledge of objective reality, including fundamental truths about God, the nature of persons, and the nature of the world. Learning means acquiring intellectual virtues…with God’s grace and a helpful teacher there is confidence that persons will arrive at the truth.

Since the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council, the influence of this form of Thomism has been somewhat diluted by the acceptance of other philosophies of knowledge and by the influence of movements such as Liberation Theology (and educators such a Paolo Freire). This makes it difficult to generalise about what is actually happening in Roman Catholic schools. Indeed, the official documents of the Church display an undercurrent of frustration with the lack of a coherent and distinctively Catholic educational practice. These more recent documents, published by the Vatican and locally, retain the basic pattern found in neo-Thomism without simply returning to it. In John Paul II’s encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio he asserts both the objectivity and knowability of the world and the centrality of persons as knowing subjects in that world. In Fides et Ratio he wrote:

…the history of thought shows that across the range of cultures and their development certain basic concepts retain their universal epistemological value and thus retain the truth of the propositions in which they are expressed. Were this not the case, philosophy and the sciences could not communicate with each other, nor could they find a place in cultures different from those in which they were conceived and developed. The hermeneutical problem exists, to be sure; but it is not insoluble. Moreover, the objective value of many concepts does not exclude that their meaning is often imperfect. This is where philosophical speculation can be very helpful. We may hope, then, that philosophy will be especially concerned to deepen the understanding of the relationship between conceptual language and truth, and to propose ways which will lead to a right understanding of that relationship.

Broadly speaking, this kind of insight informs contemporary Roman Catholic thinking about the process of knowing in the context of education. For example, the 1977 Vatican document entitled ‘The Catholic School’ states:

The school considers human knowledge as a truth to be discovered. In the measure in which subjects are taught by someone who knowingly and without restraint seeks the truth, they are to that extent Christian. Discovery and awareness of truth leads man to the discovery of Truth itself. A teacher who is full of Christian wisdom, well prepared in his own subject, does more than convey the sense of what he is teaching to his pupils. Over and above what he says, he guides his pupils beyond his mere words to the heart of total Truth.

There is a valuing of truth, since all truth leads to Truth. Human knowledge is not created by the knower, but is discovered by her. In turn, this knowledge is part of the divine Truth. The distinctively Roman Catholic confidence in the innate rationality and spirituality of the human subject is very much in evidence.

As such, there is in evidence a very positive account of the role that modern philosophy might play. As the Second Vatican Council said:

The philosophical disciplines should be taught in such a way that students acquire in the first place a solid and harmonious knowledge of the human being, of the world and of God, based upon the philosophical heritage which is enduringly valid, yet taking into account currents of modern philosophy.

Thus, while the insights of contemporary philosophy are studied and even incorporated into thinking about educational theory and practice, it is still the case that any epistemology that does not give sufficient emphasis that we can know objective truth is not an accurate representation of Roman Catholicism.

From a reformed and evangelical perspective it is this confidence in the ability of the human knower to know that is the most significant point of departure from the Roman Catholic view of knowledge. As the German theologian Helmut Thielicke wrote, ‘[I]n this whole matter...what is involved is not an ontic, but a noetic problem.’ That is, there is agreement amongst orthodox Christians as to the nature of things as they are, but disagreement as to the human capacity to infer moral and divine truth from the natural order of things. Roman Catholic educators are, as we have seen, rightly insistent that learners need to acquire moral virtues in order properly to learn. The implication (though it is not stated in this way) is that in their ‘natural’ state, human beings are sinfully ignorant. It is sin that corrupts and prevents knowing, and grace is needed to remedy this corruption. However, the Roman Catholic view is that education can operate as a cultivation of that innate and undestroyed spiritual rationality given to each human being. It is too optimistic about the human capacity to know not only truly but rightly; and somewhat naïve, perhaps, about the extent to which secular philosophical systems can be incorporated into the Christian outlook.

Trust no-one: A Brief Report on Contemporary Knowledge

The state of contemporary knowing labours under four difficulties: the fragmentation of knowledge, the volume of disordered knowledge, the corrosion of trust and the bombast of modern science.

First, we have in our time experienced a profound sense of the fragmentation of knowledge. Specialisation and expertise have overtaken a sense of knowledge as a unified whole. The university, with its ideal of an integrated understanding of knowledge has become in reality the multi-versity, with competing and overlapping disciplines fighting for scarce funding rather than sharing their learning. At the same time, there is in evidence a rising scepticism in the humanities about the possibility, or even the desirability, of true knowledge of things as they really are. This condition has been brought about by 1) an increasing awareness of the contribution that knowers bring to the process of knowing and 2) the suspicion that the ‘Truth’ has been and is being used as a regime of power. [Foucault]

Second, we have also experienced an exponential growth in the volume of things that are available for the ordinary person to know. However, the organization of knowledge has not become any easier. The sheer mass of information that we can readily access is completely overwhelming - disempowering even. The internet has intensified this feeling many times over. At the beginning of 2008 there were 108 million websites. How can you know anything when there is so much to know? The kind of knowledge that only used to be available to career academics in possession of special access to the dusty backrooms of the British Museum and the Bodleian Library is now a few mouse-clicks away. But being able to know so much doesn’t lead to more satisfactory conditions for knowing; it rather increases the anxiety that knowers may feel. The mass of information is neither integrated, nor ordered.

Third, we have experienced a corrosion of trust in those whom we trust to lead us in the business of knowing. In other words: knowledge is a moral issue. Necessarily, we turn to experts in order to compensate for our anxiety about knowledge. What would we do without them? We rely on them to fix our cars, to give us financial advice, to heal our bodies, to manage our diets, and to tell us that the computer is completely cactus because of the faulty motherboard. I have no way to really check the expert's advice. I can get another opinion, but then it is just a case of expert against expert, and I am no better off. We just have to believe them: which means they have an incredible amount of power over us. And yet, we are less and less certain that we can in fact trust others. The case of climate change is a good example. Is it the case that the climate is changing because of human created environmental damage? Well, many of the experts are agreed that this is the case. I might say 'science says so'; but when I do, I am just saying that the expert scientists are saying this at the moment. I personally have no idea whether it is or not. I am completely unable to evaluate the scientific data for myself - and if I could I wouldn't have time. So I am in the hands of the experts, who will decide government policies and how I should bag my rubbish. But whose interests do experts serve? And why should I trust them? Even though the case that there is indeed a human induced climate change is relatively well-established, a great deal of mistrust prevails.

The rise to prominence of evolutionary psychology potentially corrodes trust in knowledge further. If what we learn and know is driven by what a person’s need to survive and pass on his or her genes, then we can’t be certain that any other person’s claim to knowledge is in fact the case; only that it works to give them some advantage. It is not a novelty to observe that 'knowledge is power' - Sir Francis Bacon wrote it sometime in the seventeenth century; but it is one of those truths that keeps getting truer. Evolutionary psychology explains how that knowledge may merely consist of those claims to ‘truth’ which a person can use to gain power over others.

My fourth point perhaps seems like a contradiction to the others. In the midst of the storm of anxiety about knowing the nature of things, ‘science’ offers itself as a safe harbour of knowledge. In fact, more than this: the more general uncertainty about things expands, the greater the triumphalist claims of science. The claim often made in the material sciences - that there is a total explanation available for all things on offer in the hard sciences not in need of any further supplement from any other discipline - is as bombastic as the scepticism in the humanities is timid. Far from being counter-evidence, the rise of science-as-a-bulwark-of-certainty-against-the-doubters, is evidence of the conditions of fragmentation, disorder and mistrust under which the contemporary knowing subject labours. Like certain types of religious fundamentalism, the increasingly strident insistence of the scientific paradigm as the answer to all questions is a symptom of the very uncertainty it claims to have banished.