Was Calvin any better (a cheeky post?)

The Hildebrandian option was tried in a Protestant form (it could be argued) in Calvin’s Geneva. To his credit, Calvin was not satisfied with the banal merger of spiritual into political order which was the tendency of the Lutheran princes; nor was he in any sense convinced by the Anabaptist aversion to politics. Calvin's thought shows a determination to keep the two kingdoms parallel with one another, after the manner of Gelasius. So, though it would be hard to make absolute the case from Calvin’s writings that theocracy was his preferred response to the issue at hand, in practice the submission of secular authorities to the person of Calvin (though he was without office) in Geneva, and the continued fussy intrusion of the consistory courts on the daily life of the town meant that the difference from the Pope’s Christendom was only really a matter of scale.

Papal authority

Papal power finds its emblematic exponent in Gregory VII (Hildebrand) and the ‘reforms’ which he initiated in the eleventh century. Since Gelasius in the fifth century the powers of priest and king had been arranged in separation and in precarious balance with one another; though, by the time of the Carolingian dynasty, this had apparently been misunderstood as a submission of the church to the emperor.[1] Gregory was determined to command the obedience of the kings and bishops of Christendom. He wielded the threat of excommunication; and, in an unparalleled step, took for himself the position of supreme and universal judge. He wrested back the legacy of Gelasius for the side of the papacy. The Dictatus Papae (1075) is a terse list of assertions of papal will over secular princedoms and local sees without qualification. We may note two of these decrees:

VIIII Quod solius papae pedes omnes principes deosculentur; (only the pope's feet may princes kiss)

and

XII Quod illi liceat imperatores deponere. (the pope can depose emperors)

The pope alone is he whose feet may be kissed by the princes it is his right to depose; which gives the pope a unique secular power in addition to his spiritual authority. In him the two power are thus to be brought to heel.

The unity of the papal powers has its theological source in the power of the keys given to Peter by Jesus in Mt 16:18-19, to which Gregory repeatedly refers. The power of the keys he interprets as that power to administer a binding justice on earth as in heaven. In a gloss on this passage he writes:

Are kings excepted here? Or are they not of the sheep which the Son of God committed to St Peter? Who, I ask, thinks himself excluded from this universal grant of the power of binding and loosing to St Peter unless, perchance, that unhappy man who, being unwilling to bear the yoke of the Lord, subjects himself to the burden of the Devil and reuses to be numbered in the flock of Christ? His wretched liberty shall profit him nothing; for if he shakes off from his proud neck the power divinely granted to Peter, so much the heavier shall it be for him in the day of judgment.[2]

Moreover, he claims that the see of St Peter is actually in possession of the merits of St Peter such that it can assume an authority of innocence compared to the guilt of kings that approach it. Gregory urges on kings a rightful humility corresponding to Christ’s own humility, the humility that Saul lacked:

If they humbly imitate him, they shall pass from their servile and transient reign into the kingdom of eternal liberty.[3]

However – and this is the accusation that the Tempter makes, too – the papacy at this point seemed to exempt itself from the virtue of humility; and to so assure itself of its inherited Petrine merits that it is immune to the lust for power which so affects princes. It was of course the indubitable historical reality of papal corruption that made the Gregorian edifice crumble.

[1] Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100-1625 (Grand Rapids, Mich., Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1999), p. 178.
[2] Letter 8.21 in Ibid., p. 243-44
[3] Letter 8.21 in Ibid., p. 249

Rushdie doesn't like martyrdom much...

In martyrdom we find victimhood and religious self-identity combined in a potentially lethal way: it is not an accident that Rushdie opens his novel with the act of a person claiming martyrdom for herself. He has elsewhere written: ‘[O]nly fanatics go looking for martyrdom’. It is for him an inauthentic and dangerous way to establish one’s identity. In the chapter entitled ‘Ayeesha’, Gibreel has a vision that he, as an angel carries ‘the Imam’ – a character strongly resembling the Ayatollah Khomeni – back to the capital city of Desh. Gibreel notices the streets swarming with people, converging in a regular pattern upon a grand avenue leading towards the palace of the Empress (who echoes the hated Shah of Iran, disposed by the Islamic revolution of 1978). The people march in their hundreds towards the gates of the palace:

Seventy at a time, they come into range; the guns babble, and they die, and then the next seventy climb over the bodies of the dead, the guns giggle once again, and the hill of the dead grows higher. Those behind it commence, in their turn, to climb. In the dark doorways of the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing their beloved sons in to the parade, go, be a martyr, do the needful, die. ‘You see how they love me,’ says the disembodied voice. ‘No tyranny on earth can withstand the power of this slow, walking love.’

This scene of ‘slow, walking love’ is viscerally awful, especially from the point of view of a secular individualist like Rushdie: the filmic quality of the narration adds to the revulsion that the reader must feel. That the mothers approve of the death march adds to its horror, that people could be so possessed of an irrational desire to self-destruct. For his part, Gibreel lamely suggests to the Imam that they are in fact driven not by love of him, but rather by hatred for the Empress: a revolutionary zeal in other words, rather than a religious devotion. The Imam replies:

They love me…because I am water. I am fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or a tock.

The religious emphasis on the transcendent, in other words, enables the appalling scene before us, because it holds out the promise of something even more substantial than one’s own life. It promises a substance more solid than the power of empires, which come and go along the ebb and tide of history. The cost of offering oneself to the Imam – life itself – is nothing compared to the reward that he promises.

Gurus and growing up...

OK, a little bit more of a pastoral discussion: but no smacking!

As a young Christian, as I suppose is true of any young person, I was quite actively on the lookout for gurus. I was hungry to be someone's disciple: to find someone who had the bigness of vision and insight and wisdom so that I could latch on to them. There were two or three people who filled this role especially. I remember hanging on their every word, hungry for a little attention ("a shoe, a shoe! It is a sign...") and ready to do what they said to the letter.

But of course, it never lasts: because as you grow older and get to know the person better you get to see them as an ordinary fallible person - that they make mistakes, that they are guilty of faulty logic, that they have character flaws. This can be quite a traumatic period I think - especially as some people invest far more than I ever did in their gurus. It can be devastating to realise that the person isn't what you thought they were, especially if you have incorporated a great deal of their way of thinking into your own decision making about your life. But, it is also extremely liberating - the moment when you realise that the guru's advice is not right and make your own decision! At best, you then become friends with the guru ... i would have to say that by and large the guys I held up as gurus have now become my genuine friends: the dynamic has shifted.

What do we make of this phenomenon, especially within the church? Especially as a pastor, is it in the best interests of the other person to cultivate these kind of relationships? It is an incredibly powerful feeling to have people attach to you and to offer you the keys to their life! I think a crucial thing is if the pastor has the capacity to release the person from this kind of attachment by exposing the real them. It is unhealthy for these relationships to continue into adulthood - they may be useful for a time, but they do not allow the person to grow in to a mature and responsible Christian person capable of discerning the guidance of the Holy Spirit in their own life. And yet, I have seen pastoral relationships where this is the case: where people have real difficulty in breaking this dynamic with a pastor and moving on to maturity, even well into mid-life. At its worst, the pastor has become instead of a witness to Jesus, an alternative to him, grabbing more than a little of his limelight.

Hauerwas vs O'Donovan on martyrdom

Stanley Hauerwas asserts with no small vigour the view that by ‘taking up Rome’s project’ and making it their own, the Christians were bankrupting themselves of their own witness.[1] In accepting the power of Rome as a weapon for their own armoury, the church was conceding its own identity to the world against which the martyrs had so successfully fought. Martyrdom stood as a sign against Rome’s attempt to victimize Christians. Though the refusal to obey Caesar was (it seemed to the pagans) an irrational act, it witnessed to a higher rule; and by doing so, undid that rule’s claim to absoluteness:
‘The church – exactly because it does not seek to rule through violence, though it necessarily manifests God’s rule – triumphs by remembering the victory of the Lamb through the witness of the martyrs.’[2]

The new offer of a share in Rome’s rule was an understandable temptation, because Christians had always proclaimed the ultimacy of God’s politics; and here was a chance to exercise that politics – to demonstrate in practice the truth of the claim. For the ancient Christians so for the Christians of today: the temptation of collusion with rule threatens to dim the light of the church’s witness to the risen Lord of all. Hauerwas sees the issue as being ‘how we [i.e. the church] can witness to God’s rule through church without ruling’.[3] In other words: no matter how friendly and peaceable the offer of co-operation be, the answer for Hauerwas will always be ‘no’.
For Oliver O’Donovan, however, the victory of the martyrs is to be understood somewhat differently. He finds Hauerwas’s version of Christendom to be historically doubtful, for Hauerwas too readily assumes that the Christians who applauded the conversion of Constantine did so because they wanted to pursue the growth of the church by means of the apparatus of the empire. In fact, the picture is more complex: there were those who warned about the dangers, and those who declared no more than that the ruler had submitted to the rule of Christ. They were not ‘taking up Rome’s project’. This is not collaboration with coercion, necessarily. Rather, the very hope of vindication for which the martyrs yearned had, in part and temporarily, come to pass. Yet, under the ministrations of a Hauerwas, this same hope comes to look like a temptation! Rather, for O’Donovan:
…since true martyrdom is a powerful force and its resistance to Antichrist effective, the church must be prepared to welcome the homage of the kings when it is offered to the Lord of the martyrs.[4]

It is not surprising – indeed it makes good theological sense – that the rule of God should manifest itself in history though not yet absolutely. Martyrdom is not merely a stance of eternal dissidence; it is a witness to the rule of God in Christ. As such, it can be faithful witness to say yes as well as no. Hauerwas’s martyrs die shouting ‘they make take our lives, but you will never take our freedom’ just as Mel Gibson’s William Wallace did. And yet, as Augustine himself said ‘it not the punishment, but the cause, that makes a martyr'.

[1] Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), p. 39
[2] Ibid., p. 38
[3] Ibid., p. 43 Hauerwas’s somewhat surprising ally is Augustine (or at least, his re-reading of Augustine).
[4] O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations - Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, p. 215

Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker is perhaps the most influential exponent of what became known as ‘Erastianism’ in the Anglican tradition. The eighth book of his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, published posthumously from notes he made rather than from a finished text, seeks an alternative to the apparent disloyalty of Allen’s papalism and Cartwright’s separationism. After all, as he argued, in Elizabethan England the Church and the Commonwealth could not be distinguished by differences in membership:

‘We hold that seeing there is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a member of the Commonwealth, nor any man a member of the Commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England, therefore as in a figure triangular the base doth differ from the sides thereof, and yet one and the selfsame line, is both a base and also a side; a side simply, a base if it chance to be the bottom and underlie the rest: So albeit properties and actions of one kind do cause the name of a Commonwealth, qualities and functions of another sort the name of a Church to be given unto a multitude, yet one and the selfsame multitude may in such sort be both and is so with us, that no person appertaining to the one can be denied to be also of the other.’ (VIII.i.2)

What the rather clumsy metaphor of the triangle illustrates is that for Hooker it is the ‘properties and action’ and ‘qualities and functions’ that distinguish church from commonwealth, not the membership. It is, firstly, a matter of looking at the same thing from different angles, and, secondly, of discerning different actions carried out by the same people. As Hooker understands it, the church is after all that society which maintains the true religion as Israel had done of old. He will happily admit that prior to Constantine, the church of Rome and the commonwealth of Rome were two different societies. However, when the state embraced Christ, that separation could not be maintained:

‘The Church and the Commonwealth therefore are in this case personally one society, which society being termed a Commonwealth as it liveth under whatsoever form of secular law and regiment, a Church as it hath the Spiritual law of Jesus Christ, forasmuch as these two laws contain so many and so different offices, there must of necessity be appointed in it some to one charge and some to another, yet without dividing the whole and making it two several impaled societies.’ (VIII.i.4)

The theological lynchpin of Hooker’s account of church and state is his direct unmediated comparison of the ‘Commonwealth of the Jews’ with the ‘Commonwealth of England’. He asks:

‘If therefore with approbation from heaven the Kings of God’s own chosen people had in the affairs of Jewish religion supreme power, why not Christian Kings the like power in Christian religion?’ VIII.iii.4

Like David, Asa, Jehosaphat, Hezekiah and Josiah before her, the Christian monarch could assume supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs – calling together general councils and the making of church laws. Futhermore, kings were to be exempt from subjection to Ecclesiastical Courts. For Hooker, the complete overlap between the commonwealth and the church meant that the analogy with Israel was obvious and decisive.

Constantinianism, continued...

If on the one hand John of Patmos accentuates the bestial aspect of the imperium, it is a tone moderated by the refusal of Paul to see the powers as falling outside of divine providence. For both, the expectation was that hostility to those bearing the Messianic name would be a feature of the new age. This is as it turned out, although sporadically rather than consistently in the first few centuries. For some Christians, the lack of hostility was problematic, so accustomed had they become to identifying with the idea of martyrdom. The longing for a martyr’s death was so strong that Augustine, for one, spent not a little effort in reminding Christians that martyrdom was not to be invited. Origen in his Exhortation to Martyrdom falls just short of recommending Christians provoke it where it is not on offer. Stories are told of Christians presenting themselves for martyrdom at the local governor’s door, much to his annoyed surprise! The martyrs had been so exalted that it was hard to think of martyrdom as not the norm; and Origen (for one) had declared it a sure path to heaven.

Thus the conversion of Constantine, which itself almost immediately followed a period of intense persecution (that of Diocletian), was not an eventuality for which there were obvious theological resources. As O’Donovan writes ‘[T]here was no revealed political doctrine in the New Testament, prescribing how the state was to be in Christ.’[1] The Christians were as unprepared for the peace as they had been prepared for the war. Where it had been the tendency prior to 315 to demonize the imperium as implacably hostile to the kingdom of God (forgetful of Romans 13), in the new dispensation it was perhaps rather the tendency to sacralize the emperor. The temptation was to see this as the moment of victory – that here was an end to the need for mission because the mission had apparently been accomplished.

[1] Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations - Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 219

A Rushdie of Blood to the Head

The act that begins the action of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is a sadly familiar act of religious terrorism. A group of Sikh fanatics have hijacked an airliner and its passengers, the Boeing 747 Bostan. Tavleen, their female leader, is heard saying to her colleague as she executes a hostage:

Martyrdom is a privilege…We shall be like the stars; like the sun. (p. 86)

Even though her fellow-terrorists fight her, in the end it is Tavleen who explodes the bomb as they fly over the English Channel, ‘and the walls come tumbling down’ (p. 87): she herself is killed and the plane destroyed; and frenetic and bizarre narrative is strangely propelled as the two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha fall towards the earth.

It is of course somewhat old hat to say that Salman Rushdie’s fiction both represents and expresses the clash of religious and secular world-views in an unprecedented way. His 1989 book The Satanic Verses provoked outrage from Muslims which culminated in the Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa. Ironically, the book itself was a thinly-veiled attack on the kind of murderous religious fanaticism that it provoked. Though Rushdie took aim at the excesses of Sikhs and Christians in the book (and has attacked Hindu extremism in others of his works), Muslims were right to feel that they were its chief target, especially given the extended passages that related to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed (called ‘Mahound’ by Rushdie).

However, it would be a mistake to characterize Rushdie as merely an anti-religious zealot. Discussion of religion naturally emanates from the discussions of identity-politics that are more deeply entrenched in his work. Rushdie is witness to a world in which personal and communal identities are constantly shifting against a backdrop of massive and rapid historical, cultural and political change. The drawing of borders on maps has enormous – sometimes enormously destructive – consequences for individuals on the ground and how they identify themselves (the partition of India in Midnight’s Children being but one example). It is a world of immigrants and exiles, no longer at home and yet deeply homesick. This fluidity of identity is experienced with delight by some Western individualists; yet is easy to see how this ‘freedom’ is frequently experienced as anxiety. Those who are in situations where they are (or feel themselves to be) on the outer as a minority or a perhaps a disempowered majority struggle to find the capacity to assert their identities alongside those given more easy access to a satisfactory identity. The question that Rushidie’s characters - who are frequently thrown in to new situations that make their former understandings of themselves impossible to sustain - continually ask of each other, themselves and even of God, is ‘what kind of idea are you’?

The Edict of Milan (315) - when the Empire Christianised officially (or thereabouts) - was the surprising vindication of the martyr’s cause, it seemed. Even the New Testament itself does not foresee a triumph of this scale. It is scarcely imaginable for Paul as he pens the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Romans that the Imperator might in fact invite the active participation of Christians in his government and offer them a share in his rule. The obedience of the believer to the superior authority (13:1) is in surprising recognition of the divine source of the exousia This is not the default position in the New Testament by any means, and certainly it was not the experience of the early Christians, who could point rather to their experience of unjust rejection at the hands of the rulers who seemed to have set their faces determinedly against the Almighty and his Holy One. In fact, the church had its existence from the fact of Jesus’s sham trail and execution: it knew of itself from this moment of victimization. Its earliest narratives testified to its angularity to the government and citizens of the Empire.

Two remarkable things are salient in Paul’s thought here. First, the apostle does not lapse into a dualism at this point and comfort the believer by pitting Caesar’s regime holus bolus against Christ’s. He is consistent to his own statement of the unity of the power of God, his earlier theme. God has no favourites: the gospel is for all, Jew first, then Gentile. His judgment is similarly universal in scope; that the ruler is his unwitting agent in judgment is not as surprising as it might initially sound. But what is more: 'he is the servant of God to you for good' ! The ruler is the servant of God for the good of the Christian! There is a stern warning to not to resist the authority; which is to say that the superiority of the authority of God does not obliterate the operations of human authority.

Second, Paul refuses to cast the Christian in the role of the victim seeking vengeance. The comfort comes not from knowing that one is rightly a victim and so justified in seeking reprisal, but rather from the controlling hand of providence. The ruler – even the vain and idolatrous emperor – was unwittingly the servant of God, doing the business of a deity he did not even acknowledge. These were not his ancestral gods, but the God of a very minor group indeed – not even of a nation. Yet their insignificance was not evidence of the impotence of their God.

News item on smacking

here

Constantinianism, anyone?

Oliver O'Donovan is often accused of 'Constantinianism', especially by the likes of Stanley Hauerwas and his followers. In fact, at a recent conference I am lead to believe that this accusation was given quite an airing - though not in his presence! What I think they mean is that he does see some positive place for state-craft, and a requirement for the church to be at least attuned to it, or in conversation with it, especially when providence delivers a repentant 'king'. What were the Christians supposed to do come the Edict of Milan 315 AD? Say to Constantine, 'thanks, but no thanks'? Does the church really insist that the state return to its former persecuting ways and undo its gesture of repentance? I suppose it is easier to live with a hostile state because we all know where we stand!

Of course, the Constantinian arrangement has produced some rather rotten fruit: medieval papalism on the one hand, and Erastianism on the other. One makes the church into a (parallel?) secular power (the pope having armies for example) to which kings must give allegiance; the other makes the church merely the puppet of the state (as with the German Christians in the 1930s). Strangely, in both cases there is an exchange of evangelical authority for the instruments of earthly rule. In the case of papalism, a misapplication of the doctrine of the keys from Matthew 16 is brought forward: 'binding' and 'loosing' become acts of judgment and punishment in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities. The context of Peter's declaration of Jesus as Messiah is eclipsed...

Today in the West (at least in the US and Australia - Christians in the UK seem politically toothless) a resurgence in the political power on offer to Christian groups appears as a temptation for them to forget their primary task of preaching the gospel and instead pursue what are actually secular ends by secular means. The terrible danger is that we think we are building the kingdom of heaven by engineering a 'Christian' government. But that does not necessarily mean that the repentant politician or the political party which wants to know what Christians would like to see should be left swinging in the wind.

Martyrdom, as ever, provides an interesting point of divergence between the two views. O'Donovan sees martyrdom as a possibility latent in the Christian experience but at times not a necessary path to pursue, when the ruler appears to be genuine in his/her desire to submit to the authority of God. Hauerwas would ask at this point 'why isn't anybody killing us?' and seek to emphasis the points of divergence to such a degree as to produce a violent reaction against the church... While I am attracted to Hauerwas' radicalism, I am also disturbed by it!

Wrestling with the Mystery

Ever since I read Peter Carnley's version of Anglican Orthodoxy - which was so counter to everything I had ever thought - I have been struck by the place of mystery in Christian theology. It is important for Rowan Williams, too: though for these theologians who place great emphasis on the apophatic and mystical traditions in Christian theology I think there is a lack of a corresponding affirmation of a positive revelation. In the negative theology there is a hidden arrogance I think: that they can somehow see beyond the revelation to say that God is not like that. That is to say, they seem to claim for themselves a privileged position from which they can see and interpret the true reference of theological statements. It is its own form of speculation...

But they have highlighted something very important, to be fair, someting that evangelical theologians are prone to forget. That is, that mastering speech about God is never a possibility for human beings; that in the revelation of God in Christ which we encounter in the Bible we are still met by something beyond us. The trinity is the great example - God is revealed to us as trinity, but in this revelation he still retains his difference from us, his mystery (we might say).

Karl Barth writes:
Theology means rational wrestling with the mystery. But all rational wrestling with this mystery, the more serious it is, can lead only to its fresh and authentic interpretation and manifestation as a mystery... C.D. 1.1.368

This is surely no more than what Paul had in mind when he exclaims in Romans 11: 33-36

33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34 "Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?" 35 "Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?" 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

Of course, we need to place this in the context of all that Paul has affirmed theologically in the preceding chapters. But still, there is a line that even the apostle himself refuses to cross. It's a question of tone, in part, isn't it? As the preacher mounts the pulpit, does he do so with trembling knees and stammering tongue?

William Tyndale - Martyr of the Month

Well the dangers of starting a 'series' are obvious (remember the 39 Articles?)... but here goes with the Martyr of the Month series.

William Tyndale is a great way to start us off. Of course, he was renowed as a bible translator, and it was for pursuing this illegal activity that he was caught by the authorities, tortured and burnt in 1536.

I think Tyndale knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that the scriptures in translation were political dynamite. In the hands of a people well-versed, the word of God would transform everything. The Authority of the Word would itself relativise the power of the Pope and the power of the King. And yet, he did not counsel insurrection, but rather obedience to Kings and princes.

His work The Obedience of a Christian Man is a remarkable piece of English Lutheranism - a withering critique of Papal absolutism and a muscular statement of the sole authority of Christ in his Word. It was because - and insofaras - the scriptures themselves testified to Christ the Lord that they a power to challenge thrones and popes.

Hear him addressing his enemies, in full knowledge of what they could and as it turned out did do to him:

Christ is the cause why I love thee, why I am ready to do the uttermost of power for thee, and why I pray for thee. And as long as the cause abideth, so long lasteth the effect even asit is always day, so longas the sun shineth. Do therefore the worst thou canst unto me: take away my goods: take away my good name: yet as long as Christ remaineth in mine heart, so ong I love thee not a whit the less and so long art thou as dear unto me as mine own sould, and so long am I ready to do thee good for thine evil, and so long I pray for thee with all mine heart. For Christ desireth it of me and hath deserved it of me. Thine unkindness compared unto his kindness is nothing at all, yea it is swallowed up, as a lottle smoke of a mighty wind, and is no more seen or thought upon. Moreover, that evil which thou doest to me, I receive it not of thine hand, but of the hand of God, and as God's scourge to teach me patience and to nurture me...

Violence: what is it?

Following on from our lively discussion of smacking - there was some dispute about the use of the word 'violent' (that is, that this word implied an unwarranted aggression). I know online sources are a bit unreliable, but Wikipedia's definition is interesting:

"Violence is deliberate behaviour resulting in physical injury to other human beings, or more broadly to other animals as well, and is often, but not necessarily, associated with aggression. Some forms of violence are socially and legally sanctioned, others are crimes. Different societies apply different standards relating to approved and non-approved forms of violence.
Forms of violence include:
Assassination
Assault
Boxing
Corporal punishment
Domestic violence
Drive-by shooting
Dueling
Genocide
Judicial execution
War
Martial arts"

This is a more neutral definition of violence - in which case smacking is most certainly violent. It is just a sanctioned form of it.

Balthasar on the Ernstfall

Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a very special book called The Moment of Christian Witness (Ernstfall = decisive moment). I like it because it is biblical, theological and exciting. In part the book is an attack on the 'anonymous Christian' idea of Rahner - that somehow, acts of true Christian love can be meritoriously performed by those who are not expressly or openly Christian. Balthasar writes:

The love of Christ is not only the inner core, and the blood of Christ is not only the outer skin; faith is founded on the unity of the two. And for this reason it is not possible to shelve or postpone the decision to an assent of faith. (p.100)

That is, you cannot split away love as if it has not relation to the cross of Christ. The anonymous Christian on the other hand is dispensed from the criterion of martyrdom...he or she can disown or never own Christ and yet still be 'Christian', it would seem... Balthasar shows by his analysis the indispensibility of martyrdom for thinking about Christian identity.

Trying to get a handle on my project...

Some people seem to be able to trot out their complete doctoral thesis outline at an early stage.

This is not me. My work seems to be more evolutionary... I am try not to lose my nerve over this of course! The worst moments are when someone asks you 'so, what is your thesis on?' and nothing much coherent or convincing comes out of your mouth. Arghh!

However: here is an attempt to get my thoughts together at this stage, almost a third of the way through (!). Please feel free to chip in your two cents worth, and please excuse the academic-ese:

What kind of self is a Christian martyr? This dissertation seeks to explore and expound Christian identity via the motif of martyrdom. Martyrdom is the possibility latent in the Christian identity, for all Christians are called to the ‘witness’ or ‘testimony’ (martyrion) that might result in bloody martyrdom.[1] As Balthasar writes:

…this does not mean that every single Christian must suffer bloody martyrdom, but he must consider the entire case as the external representation of the inner reality out of which he lives.[2]

Christian baptism is a symbol of the offering of the old self over to death which is what every Christian does as an identification with Jesus Christ. It is a kind of proto-martyrdom, with its act of testimony to Christ and renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil.[3] The martyr ‘externally represents’ the church’s way of understanding both the world and the situatedness of the self in that world. It is an understanding which the martyr shows is not merely theoretical, for in the act of offering of the body to its own destruction it is revealed as concrete. At the point of the sword, the testimony of the martyr to another reality intersects – fatally – with the material world. An analysis of martyrdom thus suggests itself as a way to understand Christian identity, both on its own terms and in comparison with alternatives.

However, we must surely be aware of how dissonant this witness is with non-theological conceptions of human meaning and purpose. Part of this dissonance lies in the inevitable association of martyrdom with the spectacle of horrendous religious violence that is the signs of our times. As the suicide bomber shows, the line between killing and dying for a cause is all too thin: to the secular mind the two are barely distinguishable as species of insanity.[4] The association of martyrdom with fanaticism, religious violence and the spectacle of suffering complicates discussion about the meaning of martyrdom as a self-narration. It is a problematic and contested discourse – perhaps supremely so. How might a discourse characterized by the notion of the ‘authentic’ self (for example) accommodate the possibility of self-abnegation to the kind and degree that the martyr demonstrates? Martyrdom – even the possibility of martyrdom – seems to be the enemy of human potential. True, it may be freely determined (though only as a form of suicide), but it is given away too cheaply; it has too little regard for the ties of family and friends; it is too committed to a notion of ‘truth’ which has fallen into disrepair...

In order to elucidate martyrdom as a way of seeing the self, this study makes use of T.S. Eliot’s martyrological drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935) as a lens by which to focus the theme. In the instance of Eliot’s literary creation Thomas we are given an imaginative reflection on martyrdom in the Christian tradition as a whole.


[1] See e.g. Mt 10:18f.
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, Communio Books (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 22
[3] Origen makes the connection between the baptismal promises and the test of martyrdom explicit in his Exhortation to Martyrdom. Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom; Prayer; First Principles, Book Iv; Prologue to the Commentary on 'the Song of Songs'; Homily Xxvii on 'Numbers', trans. Rowan A. Greer, The Classics of Western Spirituality. (London: S.P.C.K, 1979), iii.17, p. 157-8
[4] As Salman Rushdie puts it:: ‘Only fanatics go looking for martyrdom.’ Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002 (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 240

Rowan Williams on 'Judgement'

One of the most prominent themes in Rowan Williams' theology is that of 'judgement'. He means the word in all of its senses - discretion or discernment, criticism, and in some senses, the 'final' judgement that lies ahead.

This quote is fairly typical:

part of my thesis is that the interpretation of the world ‘within the scriptural framework’ is intrinsic to the Church’s critical self-discovery. In judging the world, by its confrontation of the world with its own dramatic script, the Church also judges itself: in attempting to show the world a critical truth, it shows itself to itself as Church also.
On Christian Theology p. 31

What he has in mind by this term is the inexhaustible critical function that the narratives of Jesus have over the world and the church. In this sense there is a call for judgement by the church, but only insofar as it involves a self-criticism that involves giving attention to the pattern of life that was Jesus's and a recognition of the provisionality of our speech about God and its tendency to serve our ideological ends.

Slavoj Žižek Again - he's kinda fun!

Žižek writes:

Christianity introduced into this global balanced cosmic Order a principle that is totally foreign to it, a principle which, measured by the standards of pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion: the principle according to which each individual has immediate access to universality...I can participate in this universal dimension directly irrespective of my special place within the global social order. The Fragile Absolute, p. 120

Z applies this to our thinking about human rights (so-called): a set of universal principles that all of us imagine we have access to in some way. This is Christianity's idea secularised... under the Christian way of thinking, it is that which transgresses and upsets the primordial balance of things that is holy: not the ways things are as we find them. It is not our place in the global order of things that matters but rather that which undermines said order - ie, the gospel of Christ, he who calls on us to hate our mother and father etc. A funny version of 'family values', isn't it?

Simon at the beach in Cornwall

Kevin Vanhoozer 'The Drama of Doctrine'

This book represents a landmark in genuinely reformed evangelical thinking about the theological task.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, who is currently Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is well known for his work on questions of fundamental theology (First Theology) and hermeneutics (Is There A Meaning in This Text?). As usual, in The Drama of Doctrine he manages to combine real creativity and a remarkable knowledge of contemporary debates with faithfulness to conservative evangelical orthodoxy – which ultimately of course means faithfulness to the scriptures themselves.

This work is occasioned by the calcification of contemporary evangelical theology and the unwillingness of church pastors to pay any attention to it at all out of suspicion and/or boredom. In answer to serious cultural, intellectual and theological challenges, evangelical theological voices have certainly been more loudly raised; but they have not been persuasive in the debate or attuned to the pastor’s weekly task of proclaiming the gospel to contemporary people. Evangelical scholars have either retreated further into fortress of Enlightenment rationalism (Carl Henry, Wayne Grudem) or given craven concession to postmodernism (Stanley Grenz). The situation into which The Drama of Doctrine is written calls for a reinvigoration of the theological task in a way which avoids both of these dire pitfalls.

The purpose of this work is to present Vanhoozer’s vision of a ‘canonical-linguistic’ theology organized around the metaphor of dramatic performance. Doctrine is not merely a set of flat propositions, but rather a dramatic direction to be performed by Christians, individually and collectively. That is to say, it is a gospel to be lived! The exposition of his theme falls into four parts. In the first, “The Drama”, Vanhoozer shows how theology responds and corresponds to the words and deeds of God and serves as ‘direction for the church’s fitting participation in the drama of redemption’ (p. 31). It is rooted in the gospel itself as its first premise. Second (“The Script”), Vanhoozer addresses the place of Scripture and tradition and how they should relate. Against the post-liberals who make scripture merely subject to the church, he wishes to affirm sola scriptura. However, he is receptive to the insight that these doctrines of scripture do describe and prescribe ecclesial practices of scriptural reading. This is the real strength of the book, in this reviewer’s opinion: Vanhoozer has offered a way forward from the intractable battles about the doctrine of scripture without conceding its constitutive and authoritative place for the church’s life. Here is at last an evangelical doctrine of scripture which does not ignore ecclesiology. With John Webster, Vanhoozer also argues that Scripture has less an epistemological than a soteriological function.

Part III (“The Dramaturge”) fleshes out the role of the theologian in the ‘canonical-linguistic’ approach to theology following the theatrical model. Vanhoozer coins the term ‘post-conservative’, a move which nods to the emphasis on communal practices in post-liberalism and yet preserves an authoritative canonical script. The theologian engages in both practices of scientia in interpreting scripture and sapientia in reading and engaging with the contemporary cultural context. The aim of the theology is to enable Christians to better ‘perform’ the Christian life as disciples of Jesus by ‘improvising’ on the script(ures). Vanhoozer here proposes a move beyond both propositionalism and foundationalism in theological method while affirming the place of propositions and foundations as necessary to theology.

The fourth part (“The Performance”) extrapolates the task of theology in its congregational and pastoral setting, using the doctrine of the atonement as a case study. Doctrine is something that we are invited to live out in the church and the world: “The direction of doctrine…enables us…to render the gospel public by leading lives in creative imitation of Christ” (p. 32). One of Vanhoozer’s favourite themes – martyrdom – here emerges as a disturbing sign to the church of what imitating Christ might mean. It is a rare piece of systematic theology that can address the Christian walk so concretely. Under this schema, and with his ears attuned to postmodern currents, he is able to emphasise the need for action without losing the theological reason for it. Doctrine and ethics flow seamlessly together - as of course they should.

Some features of the book serve to dampen my overall enthusiasm. First: the guiding metaphor of ‘drama’ is a well chosen development on the insights of narrative theology; but it does at points feel stretched further than it will go. In particular, the pastor as ‘director’ (Part IV) feels like a poorly chosen equivalence and smacks somewhat of clericalism. Surely it is the Spirit who directs the church. Second, Vanhoozer’s incessant quotation of other authors impedes the smooth flow of his text; and at times appears forced. He seeks congruity in quotes but not in arguments; but when he quotes someone – say, Geoffrey Wainwright on the role of the sacraments (p. 412) - who is diametrically opposed to his conclusions, it is less than convincing as an appeal to authority. Third, Vanhoozer tends to state rather than argue his case. He articulates his point with great clarity and even aesthetic flair. This is a deliberate and self-consciouslessly postmodern strategy of depending on the explanatory power of the ideas themselves to convince his readers rather than leaning on some evidence external to the subject matter. With that I have much sympathy: however, this reader felt that there may have been more for Vanhoozer to offer by way of argument. I am surprised he spends so little time, for example, on showing how the scriptures themselves demonstrate his case by presenting a word that demands performance from its readers.

However, these shortcomings should not deter potential readers. This is a courageous and timely book that exemplifies theology taking mission seriously; and should be read by pastors, students and teachers who are like-minded. Vanhoozer does not ignore or side-step the toughest questions of postmodernism. Most salutary is the call of this book for the churches to renew our communal practices. Vanhoozer shows what an evangelical theologian can achieve if he or she is truly attentive to the task of serving the church. His vision is to recapture the reformed vision of deep theological reflection as belonging to pastors and lay people, not the preserve of the academy. Here is no brittle orthodoxy; rather, we have in The Drama of Doctrine an imaginative reiteration of evangelical truth.