Samson: a tricky case study

Then Samson called to the LORD and said, "O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged upon the Philistines for one of my two eyes." And Samson grasped the two middle pillars upon which the house rested, and he leaned his weight upon them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other. And Samson said, "Let me die with the Philistines." Then he bowed with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were in it. So the dead whom he slew at his death were more than those whom he had slain during his life.


A suicide bomber of a kind? Or a glorious martyr?

Augustine for his part writes that it was an exception ordered by God:
When God orders, and shows without ambiguity that he orders. no one will bring an accusation against obedience. Who will lay a charge against a loyal compliance?

A convenient case of the 'teleological suspension of the ethical', a la Abraham and Isaac?

Lacey Baldwin Smith gets it wrong...

In his book "Fools, Martyrs, Traitors - The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World", Lacey Baldwin Smith writes

Jesus the martyr, the man who elected to suffer and die, not the risen Christ, became the inspirational source for the philosophy of martyrdom that emerged during the next three centuries. p. 87

This strikes me as almost entirely misguided. It was in fact the resurrection - and ascension - that propelled martyrdom; or, at least, the resurrection as the vindication of the suffering and death. The martyrs did not merely die out of some imitation of Jesus' heroism, but out of a hope borne from his rising to life. They did not die merely out of admiration for him. They did not display courage only, but courage along with hope.

Perhaps the error here is: Jesus is not a martyr but a model for martyrs. Martyrs are not imititating Christ in his martyrdom, but rather becoming martyrs out of imitation of Christ.

Glorious...

As the Westminster Confession states it, the supreme goal of human beings is “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Human destiny – our noblest aspiration - lies Godwards: in the experience of heavenly bliss enfolded in his arms, glorifying him by loving him for his own sake.
The goal of glorifying God is not a means to some other end: it is its own end. As Moltmann puts it, “it is simply meaningful in itself.” As Augustine, in his On Christian Doctrine, explained: “sinners make use of God in order to use the world; but believers make use of the world in order to enjoy God.” Therefore, our relating to our world and even to ourselves is ordered to this glorious purpose.

And as Moltmann sees it (picking up an idea with strong roots in the Reformed tradition) the glorification of God is not primarily an ethical thing: it is aesthetic. This idea picks up from scripture the visually radiant scenes of God’s glory: Moses’ radiant face, the encounter of Isaiah with God in Isaiah 6, the glory of the light of God in John’s gospel, the woman’s hair in 1 Corinthians 11 and the sheer glow of the heavenly city in Revelation 21-22. The appropriate response to the vision of God’s glory is doxological; and so we are lead by the heavenly creatures and the beasts in Isaiah and Revelation: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, the whole earth is full of his glory.”

How does this relate to our question? The goal of glorifying God is goal in the sense of a telos; but it is also our true destiny, because God himself will bring it about. But how? Moltmann describes the glorification of God not merely in terms of the self-glorification of a narcissistic deity, or as the result (in Hegelian terms) of his self-realisation through the process of history, but more as the overspill [my term] of his divine life into the creation. The language of the pleroma, the fullness of God, in John 1:16, Eph 3:19 and elsewhere reflects this idea, as does the remarkable promise of God being all in all in 1 Corinthians 15:28. As Moltmann puts it, “The fulness of God is the rapturous fullness of the divine life; a life that communicates itself with inexhaustible creativity…The fulness of God is radiant light, light reflected in the thousand brilliant colours of created things.” Jesus himself of course continually compared this future for humanity with God as a joyful wedding feast. It is a moment of ecstatic consummation to which the first imagined human reaction is profound joy.

The human identity is thus ordered to this particular destiny. It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which took place by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 4:17) that is the type of our destiny, sown in dishonour and raised in glory. Having made reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, Jesus of Nazareth is the exact radiance of God’s being, the image of the invisible God: he fairly glows with God. Remarkably, the transformation was won from within the human sphere, by a man in the likeness of sinful flesh.

The promise of Christian eschatology is then something like this, from Philippians 3: “…our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” The new humanity will be glorious, but glorious because it is washed in the overspill of God’s own glory.

More Badiou

Differences, like instrumental tones, provide us with the recognizable univocity that makes up the melody of the True. p. 106

Badiou shows that Paul presents us with a schema of discourses. In Paul's thought world, both 'Jew' and 'Greek' operate as subjective dispositions or regimes of discourse: ways of thinking and speaking in others words. Jewish discourse is the discourse of the sign, the demand for miracles. On the other hand, the Greek discourse is the discourse of the logos, the demand for wisdom/rhetoric. The Jewish discourse is about election and exception; the Greek one is based on cosmic order and nature.

Paul's profound idea is that Jewish discourse and Greek discourse are the two aspects of the same figure of mastery. For the miraculous exception of the sign is only the 'minus-one', the point of incohernece which the cosmic totality requires in order to sustain itself...the Jew is in exception to the Greek. Neither of the two discourses can be universal, because each supposes the persistence of the other, ...and secondly, that the two discourses share the presupposition that the key to salvation is given to us within the universe, whether it be through the direct mastery of totality (Gk wisdom) or through mastery of the literal tradition and the deciphering of signs (JEwish ritualism and prophetism).

Humanity is riven in two, inevitably, on either conception.

The announcement of the gospel, that word about an event, is made without wisdom or depedence on sign (thought it is not the absolute destruction of either). The event of Christ's resurrection subverts both of these two discourses by not being dependent on either. It is the language of 'naked event', not of proof. Paul does not prove his gospel: he preaches it.

Paul sets up Christian discourse only by distinguising it further from a fourth possibility: the mystical 'discourse of non-discourse'. It is interesting to me that Badiou shows Paul repudiating this apophatic way, given its recent resurgence in those theologians interested in Derrida in particular.

Badiou on Paul

Alain Badiou's book 'Saint Paul - The Foundations of Universalism' is, like Zizek's work, a cheeky attempt to recover the genius of Paul for the 21st century.

In brief, his thesis is that Paul was able to combine the notion of truth with the subjectivity of the inward experience in a remarkable way:

...Paul himself teaches us that it is not the signs of power that count, nor exemplary lives, but what a conviction is capable of, here, now, and forever. p. 30

Badiou reads Paul's lettes as 'interventions' - that is, they are radically situational, militant documents, more Lenin than Marx, more Wittgenstein than Russell (more Luther than Calvin, I would add.) Paul is an 'antiphilosopher', propounding a 'speech of rupture, and writing ensues when necessary.' p. 31 His is the thought of event and conviction rather than Law or Logos.

Paul operates out of an inward, subjective but nonetheless actual truth, the truth of his conversion. This kind of truth has little time for outward customs, which a merely limp enactments incapable of really mirroring or capturing or expressing the inner conviction.

The Wreck of Human Culture

John Carroll, professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is not afraid of big ideas. His 2004 book The Wreck of Human Culture – a substantial reworking of a 1993 effort – ­is a passionate, daring and sustained attack on the bloodlines of what we call “the West.” He calls his book “a spiritual history of the West.” He writes with a refreshing polemical zeal and with none of the hedging and over-qualifying so characteristic of academic prose.

Carroll’s claim is that “humanism” – by which he means the intellectual and cultural movement originating in the Renaissance – has had its deficiencies exposed in the latter-day collapse of western culture. Most particularly, the humanist belief in the supremacy of the human free will as alternative to obedience to God has been revealed as self-defeating – not least by the devastating symbolism of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The strategy Carroll employs for demonstrating this thesis is a selectively genealogical one. In a deliberate snub of postmodern orthodoxy, he examines some of the finest works of high culture in the humanist half-millennium: Hamlet, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Rembrandt and Poussin, Mozart and Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzche, the novels of Henry James and the films of John Ford. It is an idiosyncratic choice and an unorthodox method, which Carroll justifies because these exceptional masterpieces have “tapped the deepest truths of their time” (p.9). His interaction with these works is stimulating and masterful and makes The Wreck of Human Culture a pleasure to read.
Crucial to the history Carroll traces is the famous sixteenth century debate over the freedom of the human will between the doyen of European humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the German reformer Martin Luther. Carroll bravely reads Luther as more anti-humanist than anti-Roman Catholic. The irenic Erasmus was a reasonable man. If there is no human free-will, he argues, why should the wicked reform? But Luther’s teaching of justification by faith alone meant a complete rejection of this reliance on human will and reason. For Luther, the human being is a slave to sin and sentenced to death; and must come, empty-handed, to the cross of the crucified Christ. Mere morality was a hopeless absurdity. The heart of the Protestant reformation, rooted in the writings of Paul, is an acknowledgement of the helplessness of the human as a result of sin and death and a need for absolute dependence on God. Humanism, with its alternative diagnosis of the basic goodness of human beings and their freedom to be moral, leads inevitably to the rejection of God. There are some mealy-mouthed versions of Christianity that espouse this kind of thinking, even today: but the calamities of history must be held up against them as evidence. Man has proved a very poor god; and ultimately, death still undoes him.

Luther’s insight is as crucial today as it ever was. What Protestant - in other words, Biblical - Christianity offers is a radically different diagnosis of the human condition. The humanist vision has been played out in full and now offers no comfort to the human soul. Carroll offers his work as a contribution to the funeral of humanism (p.268), with a warning for us not to give it another run.

But what does he offer as an alternative? Carroll enjoins the West to start again, to reach back into the past and recapture that right “enthusiasm for man and his works that the Renaissance attempted to enshrine” (p.266). He means by this a simple delight in place of the infatuation with the human that has bought us so badly undone. Carroll writes: “The culture of the West will not be renewed until the moment it kills Luther’s monster [ie death], and once again achieves a death of death” (p.267). For Carroll, it is in the art of Poussin that a particular alternative is indicated. Though the Frenchman Poussin was a Roman Catholic, Carroll claims that in his pictures he was able to represent Luther’s great ideas. He, too, sees that “darkness where the light of neither law nor reason shines” (p.70). He, too, sees the necessity for life and hope to come from outside sources and to be recognised as gifts. Yet he differs from Luther, writes Carroll, in that he appeals to a radically different divinity – “the sacred breath moving through the mythos” (p.71).

William Cavanaugh: Torture and Eucharist

Cavanaugh's book is a lucid and fascinating application of theology to recent history. He successfully keeps the lines open between the experience of those in Chile under Pinochet's regime and his conceptual/theological discussion. One of the interesting things here is that he recognises that martyrdom, which relies so much on the public nature of the suffering and the memorialisation of the martyr in stone and ritual, is thwarted somewhat by the modern regime's ability to operate in secret; and even its ability to not NOT kill but only torture its victims. The old pattern of martyrdom is not allowed a staging by contemporary states.

A couple of quotes on the way:

The imitation of Christ is not reducible to some principle such as “love”, but is rather a highly skilled performance learned in a disciplined community of virtue by careful attention to the concrete contours of the Christian life and death as borne out by Jesus and the saints p. 62

What is needed instead is rather a more eschatological and more ecclesial notion of what is meant by dying for one’s faith…one which does not make sharp distinctions between the ‘religious’ dimension of confessing Jesus as Lord and the “political “ implications of such a confession… The ancient church understood the martyrs’ deaths as an inevitable consequence of imitating Jesus, who was put to death for inaugurating a new reign which stood in contrast to the powers and principalities of the world. p. 62

He futher writes:

A martyr is one who lives imaginatively as if death does not exist.

and:

The eschatological imagination sees that, although they presume to kill us, Christ has vanquished the powers of death once and for all. The eschatological imagination of martyrdom is not a vertical ascension to another place and time, a distant heaven; the movement instead brings a foretaste of heavenly space-time to earth. p. 65

Marilyn McCord Adams on redemptive suffering...

An interesting comment from Regius Prof Marilyn McCord Adams:

Christians can be martyrs and fill up the sufferings of Christ (Col 1:24) only to the extent that he cleanses them first. That is why continual repentance is not only necessary for the Christian's own reconciliation with Christ but also the best contribution he can make toward solving the problem of evil.

So, then, the work for Christians to do in the face of evil - in the first place - is to deal our own personal evils such that we may become effective witnesses to the judgment and redemption of God.

The shape of my project...

Well I am after your advice again!

I am at the point in my project when I really need to decide what it is about more specifically. Martyrdom as a theological theme provides the core, I know this already (that is, it is not a historical study of certain martyrs, but a conceptual/theological application/exploration of the concept of Christian martyrdom). I also know that I will be using TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral as the springboard for my discussion, and that methodologically I will use scriptural exposition and reference to a small bullpen of thinkers from the tradition. Here are the two alternatives I have before me at the moment:

1) Who are Christian martyrs?
When the martyr Secunda said to her interrogator 'I wish to be none other that I am ' who was it that she understood herself to be? How did those who remembered and celebrated her death understand her identity? What kind of self is the Christian martyr? This dissertation seeks to explore and expound Christian identity via the motif of martyrdom, which is the possibility latent in the Christian identity. Martyrdom thus analysed suggests itself as a great way to understand Christian identity in its own terms and in comparison to alternatives. So, how might a discourse of authentic selfhood (for example), one of our contemporary ways of thinking about selfhood, accomodate or interpret martyrdom and its self-denial?

Which is to say, the point of all this discussion of martyrdom is to outline a 'martyrological self' or a 'witnessing self'. The issue here is inteded to be the question of identity, or selfhood, though in fact I may decide that the Christian martyr refuses to BE a self as we understand it, and sees himself/herself in terms of another self.

2) What good do Christian martyrs do?
This study seeks to answer the question what good do Christian martyrs do? That is: following Dr Susan Parsons’ comment ‘the martyr sets ethics on edge’ we inquire as to how and why this is. Or, to put it another way, what kind of practical rationality can include Christian martyrdom as its highest expression, or at least as the external representation of its inner reality?

We pose this question in a context in which the very notion of religious martyrdom itself is viewed with considerable suspicion. It is a concept often critiqued as not good or as a lesser good: as denying the good of life; as promoting a victim complex, and thus the pursuit of violent retaliation by religious groups; as neglecting real opportunities for service and justice; as chasing shadows rather than concrete, this-worldly realities; as hypocritically and egotistically pursuing its own self-dramatisation and heavenly honour (martyrdom as a form of narcissism).

This is then, a more directly ethically oriented study, trying to understand what kind of act Christian martyrdom is in moral/theological terms. Is it an act at all, indeed?

Pacificism?

We have been reading Stanley Hauerwas and so inevitably we came upon the issue of pacificism, which he advocates strongly. In one of his toughest articles, Hauerwas argues that Just War theories are a failure of the Christian imagination, or of faith: that we fail to believe that God could bring about communities - and even countries - of peace on the earth, assuming that war is inevitable this side of Jesus' return. Assuming the inevitability of war dooms you to always pursue it and justify it.

The exegetical force of Hauerwas' argument (which he gets from Yoder of course) is that this is what Jesus himelf would have taught, and certainly what he would have enacted (notwithstanding that he doesn't call on soldiers in his audiences to leave the army but rather to be just soldiers...).

I am impressed but not convinced. I cannot see but that the kind of eschatological peace that Hauerwas hopes for is not given to nations in this way in this age, at least certainly not permanently. I cannot but see that we are left to make tragic calculations about the justice of the wars that might be pursued and that it is often our right calling to do so. We may so define just war so that it could never be pursued. But still we might retain the possibility that force may be needed to protect the innocent and pursue justice...

A evening with John Milbank

Speaking off the cuff, John Milbank gave a very interesting and compelling account of his own theological programme, or agenda. It was polemical and aggressive in tone, to say the least!

The great insight of Radical Orthodoxy is the claim that there is no such thing as the secular. Milbank pointed to the fading away of sociology as a discipline as vindication of his own book in particular. He mentioned Benedict XVI's Regendsberg address as evidence of his own influence! Which is to say, the claim that the Pope made that faith and reason integrated is the best, nay only defence against the arrogance of reason unfettered and the lunacy of pure fideism. What both he and the pope agree on is that there is the need for a 'mediating metaphysics'.

1. Achievements. Milbank claimed that RO is one of the most influential and significant movements in theology today. It claims to revision philosophy as well as theology and to bring theology back to the centre of thought as in the medieval university. He claimed that the movement had global reach.

2. Themes 1. RO is a critique of the secular. The secular is an illusion! This is to me is the great attraction of RO. It has real apologetic teeth at this point. There is no neutrality when it comes to metaphysics. It is all metaphysics - just good or bad metaphysics. In analytical philosophy we see not argument but a buried theological decision. Theology saves common sense!!
2. Postmodernism. RO is very positive about the destruction of modernism and wishes to 'embrace the postmodern flux'. The flux is however not a cause for despair AT ALL but a sign of divine plenitude. Once again, I find this a very attractive feature of RO.
3. RO rests on a peculiar and contested genealogy. This to me is the least interesting feature of the movement. Duns Scotus is cited as the point of departure - where subsequent Christianity went wrong. As a post-Reformation theologian, this leaves me a little sidelined!
He went on a little here to speak about the mode of theological writing. The point is, that if you stick to pure rational discourse, you will go wrong, says Milbank. He has a bit of a point here: Christian theology when it attempts a pure rationality fails to capture the richness of its own scriptures. I would cite 17th C. scholastic protestantism as guilty of this. Narrative and metaphor in fact SAVE the grand tradition, says JM. To strip them away is a fatal move.
4. Theological ontology... RO talks a great deal of participation in the divine being. This it has learnt from thinkers like Maximus, and this participation is expressed liturgically and especially eucharistically. This is unashamedly platonistic - Milbank says that Christianity is inherently Platonist.

3. Criticism. Milbank said there were no serious criticisms. Sure, he said, you get politically correct US rant and you get a British version which is nitpicking about his reading of various thinkers, but these are not serious.

4. Future directions. JM spoke here of a number of themes that he was interested in exploring: geopolitical theology, the idea of gift exchange and so on. He was quite unabashed about being a supercessionist! He also spoke of an educational programme: theologians should be soaked in the classics and in philosophy and literature. And he has an interest in parish life and so on. He claims an ecumenical reach beyond Anglicanism.

A vigorous question time followed.

John Milbank on Radical Orthodoxy After Seven Years

This was a lecture/debate I attended here in Oxford last night.

Milbank began by eschewing 'false humility'! And went from there making sweeping and hubristic claims for his own project! It was a tantalising performance.

A summary and reflection to come.

Martyr of the Month - Charles Godden

I cite the following from a Moore Theological College newsletter.
Recently, the Sydney Synod (rather gracelessly in my view) refused an opportunity to recognise Godden as a martyr on the grounds that he was not called upon to give up his faith!


OUR FORGOTTEN MARTYR
Remembering the death of Charles Christopher Godden
BY JOHN HARRIS
On 16th October, 1906, on a lonely jungle track high on the slopes of the brooding
volcano that is the island of Ambae, Charles Godden met his violent death, Moore
College’s first and only Martyr.

An orphaned country boy, Charles was converted at confirmation classes in Euroa,
Victoria. He immediately offered for the ministry. At 19, he entered Perry Hall,
Nathaniel Jones’s little college in Bendigo. In 1897, when Jones was appointed
Principal of Moore College, he brought Charles with him. He was ordained by the
Archbishop of Sydney in 1899 and appointed to St Michael’s Surry Hills.

A year later, the Bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson, spoke at St Michael’s of islanders
‘crying out for someone to teach them the gospel’. Charles instantly offered for
missionary service. He wrote prophetically, ‘There have already been six martyrs … I
shall therefore have the opportunity of glorifying God by my devotedness to the lost
sheep whom the Good Shepherd is seeking.’

After training on Norfolk Island, he was appointed to Ambae, part of the New
Hebrides but now the independent nation of Vanuatu. He reached the isolated little
Lolowai mission on the coast in April 1901 during the last days of ‘blackbirding’, the
infamous Queensland labour trade. Just 24 years old, he was the only missionary,
visiting coastal people by boat and venturing inland to jungle villages. He gained a
reputation for his enthusiasm for teaching the Bible, his medical skill, his efforts to
begin schooling for children and his devotion to the discipling of new converts.
In December 1905, Charles returned to marry Eva Dearin at St Michael’s Surry Hills.
His best man was David Knox, Broughton Knox’s father. Charles spent some of his
leave drafting an Ambae translation of Mark’s Gospel. In April 1906, the couple
arrived at Lolowai mission amidst a crowd of islanders with welcoming flowers.
In October a Christian family from a jungle village asked him to come to baptise new
converts. Lolowai people warned him not to go. Alameamea, a ‘blackbirded’ labourer
returned after being jailed and tortured in Queensland, had threatened to kill the first
white man to tread on his land. Charles, however, considered it his duty. He left
Lolowai on Monday 15th October, travelling down the coast by boat and walking up
steep jungle tracks.

After the baptisms, while walking back down, Alameamea shot him with a musket.
His companions fled. He fell to the ground and his assailant rushed out, striking him
in the neck with an axe. His friends returned, tearing up clothes to bind his wounds.
Carrying him down the mountain, they rowed him home along the coast. Just as
they reached Lolowai, Charles died of his wounds. His final words were: ‘Let there
be no fighting because of me. Let there be peace.’

His grave is at Lolowai. A stone cross in the jungle marks the place of his
martyrdom. A simple monument at a little church high up the volcano contains the
stones on which his blood fell. He has two memorials in Australia, one in St John’s
Euroa and another in the Moore College Chapel.

He was the first Australian missionary to die in Melanesia and one of the first
evangelicals to be martyred as a missionary anywhere in the world.

God's word is not chained

It is an honour to give this sermon at St Giles Normanton in the memory of George Seamer, a man who stood firm on the Word of God.

My text today is these verses from 2 Timothy:
8 Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel, 9 for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God's word is not chained. 10 Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.
[2 Timothy 2:8-10]

On October 6th, 1536, in a prison yard in the castle of Vilvoorden just north-east of Brussels a 42-year-old Englishman named William Tyndale was strangled and then burnt at the stake for heresy and treason. Tricked and betrayed by an agent of King Henry VIII, he had endured 500 days of harsh imprisonment and a farcical trial prior to his execution. As he died, it is reported that he cried out ‘Lord open the King of England’s eyes!’

What was the nature of his crime? Why was he such a threat to the King and to the Church that he had to be silenced?

Apparently fluent in eight languages, the scholar Tyndale’s crime was to translate, print and distribute parts of the Bible into the English tongue, something that had been expressly made illegal in 1409. Tyndale’s life was committed to the power of words. He was convinced that God himself has spoken in words that ordinary people could understand.

The God of Jesus Christ is not a mysterious, distant and unknown deity who, if he speaks at all, speaks in a babble of Latin. By no means: the message of Jesus Christ and his victory over the devil and the grave is for all people everywhere, of every tribe and every tongue.

This message is not static, but dynamic: it is marvellously potent. It is the power of life itself! What Tyndale realized was that power of God himself lay not in the structures of the church, or with popes and bishops, or even with Kings, but in the word of God, living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.

Tyndale staked his life and safety on the power of God’s word. He knew that the word of God in the hand of the ploughboy was dynamite to kings and popes because it was the word about the rule of the Lord of lords. The irony of it was that not so long after Tyndale’s death King Henry himself authorized an English translation of the Bible which was substantially based on Tyndale’s work and which forms the basis for our English translations up to the present day.
God’s word is not chained!

Tyndale knew this because he knew what the apostle Paul knew.

These few words from 2 Timothy 2 are written by a man who also knew the deprivation and despair that comes with the loss of freedom. This was the man who had a calling from God to preach to the Gentiles, from one end of the earth to another. He had big plans: even to visit Spain with his good news, at the far edge of his known universe. But: he wasn’t going there while he was rotting away in chains. He wasn’t able to be with the churches that he had planted, or to be there in person to guide Timothy, timid Timothy, through his first stumbling steps in ministry. Was the mission going to fail? The question must surely have crossed Paul’s mind. What was the future to be? How could the gospel of Jesus possibly go forward with its chief apostle off the pitch and out of action? Would the Christian movement wither away and become a quirk of history, an artifact to be discovered and pondered over by antiquarians but of no ongoing significance?

If Paul knew first hand the impotence of his imprisonment, he knew also the shame of being chained up ‘like a criminal’, as if he was not the messenger of a mighty and glorious God but one of the numberless villains and vagabonds that frequented the Roman Empire. He was being treated as an enemy of good order and a threat to peace. This was not supposed to be the position of a respectable and cultivated Roman citizen; he was certainly not going to get access to the top end of town in his current position, nor influence the movers and shakers in society. What influence could he possibly have as a common criminal?

But the problem of the apostle’s imprisonment was deeper even than this: it was a real question mark over God himself. For, if his great apostle to the Gentiles is cooling his heels under house arrest somewhere in the empire, what is God doing? Is he really as powerful as he pretends? Is he really the master of events, or have events somehow conspired to master him? Is trust in the promises of this God somehow misplaced, if so little apparent progress can be charted?
It is a question we ourselves may feel like asking, even today. We experience from some quarters an open hostility to the gospel and a flagrant rejection of the word of God as if it were a polite suggestion.

That is more often a voice from within the church, sad to say.

From without, we experience rather the complete apathy of our friends and neighbours, the yawns and bored stares rather than the raised voices. Perhaps it is the apparent dagginess and the irrelevance of the gospel to most people that is more depressing than its explicit rejection by some. For every full church in the UK, there is at least one down the road that is virtually empty.

We may well ask: where today is the evidence of the power and authority of God?

But let us turn back to Paul at this point. What is his response?
He is not despairing: for, as he says: ‘God’s word is not chained!’

Why can he be so sure? Why can he be so confident when the evidence of the shackles jangling around his wrists would say otherwise?

What Paul says is that it is in the nature of his message. His gospel is what gives him confidence in his gospel.
And what is his gospel?
Have a look at verse 8. He asks his readers to ‘remember Jesus Christ’ – and two things about him in particular.

It has two parts:
First, Jesus Christ was ‘raised from the dead’.

That is to say, this man, the figure at the centre of Paul’s preaching, had been victorious over sin and death! The prison of the tomb could not keep him in. The chains of death and hell could not hold him: on the contrary, on the third day he had risen victorious. His grave is empty!

It is worth us pausing here to think: what kind of power is needed to raise the dead? Clearly this is not merely a human power: it is beyond the power of human beings to achieve. It is a power beyond our ordinary conception of what is powerful.

The word that Paul preaches is a message not only about life beyond death: it is a message of the defeat of death. It is a declaration that death has been reversed.

So: Paul’s gospel is about God’s power to reverse the effects of sin and death. It’s an announcement of the forgiveness of sins! And it’s a message from the same God who called light out of darkness and called things that are not as though they were.

What’s more: this power is also the power to transform lives. It’s a power that makes a difference for individuals. Paul could talk about this from his personal experience, of course: a man who once sought to murder the followers of Jesus but then miraculously became one of his leading followers. In Romans 8:10-11 he writes:

10 But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.

People here today know about this. People here have been changed by the power of God’s word, brought out of darkness into God’s wonderful light; they know the power of God’s word to liberate us from captivity to sin and death. People here live in full expectation that sin and death will not have the last word; and that they will have eternal life together with God. Like Paul, they have experienced it for themselves – they have heard this word of God and know how powerful it is.

The second part of Paul’s gospel: Jesus Christ was ‘descended from David’

This may at first seem like unremarkable thing to say. After all, lots of people could claim that they were descended from David: Joseph for example. But here it is far more significant that that: as the son of king David, Jesus was the heir to Israel’s throne and to all the promises of God that came to David. Back in 2 Samuel 7, God had made a covenant with King David that his kingdom would be without end. He had said to David:

12 When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

A son is promised; a direct descendent of David who will rule, and for ever. Though David will one day die, this Son of David, will live and live. In his gospel, Paul proclaims Jesus Christ as the one through whom God’s promises come to fruition.

God is powerfully true to himself. The true king who has ascended on high and NOW rules! The resurrection was not just the beginning of new life for Jesus: it was his enthronement as Israel’s mighty king: the king who was to rule not only Israel but the nations as well. All authority in heaven and earth is given to him. Jesus now rules: he is LORD. This was another way in which Paul summarized his gospel: Jesus is Lord.

And so, Paul’s gospel is powerful precisely because it is about power: it is a message about who is in charge, really. It is a word from and about a king who calls on people everywhere to recognize his authority and to submit to him as the son of David and the true heir to his throne. This word of God, about the rule of Jesus, has no regard for what human beings think is powerful: even though it be spoken by a man in rags or a by a poor woman it demands that kings, and princes and presidents and prime ministers and chief executives submit to his rule and the rest of us along with them.

So: Paul is able to say that God’s word is not chained because of what that word, his gospel: it is about: Jesus, raised from the dead, descended from David. And for Paul this means that he endures everything for the sake of others who believe it. He is able to withstand even his imprisonment, with all its deprivations and shames, because he knows that God’s word is powerful to accomplish his will. He is not despairing. He is not browbeaten. He is not bullied into silence, or embarrassed into defeat. Paul is all the more encouraged to continue on in hope, knowing that if even he should die with his mission unfulfilled that God’s word go to the grave with him. He endures everything (vs 10); he puts up with the trails and persecutions with an unbattered confidence in the power of the gospel. He knows that his own failings and weaknesses and sufferings are not an obstacle to God accomplishing his word.

So: for us there is I think a great comfort, but also a strong rebuke as well. We’ll start with the rebuke:

There is a sharp reminder for us that when we think that the word of God is chained to our programmes, our business, our effort, and way of doing things we are completely and arrogantly mistaken. It is a great temptation for evangelical churches in these days of thinking strategically about our church’s mission, and analyzing church growth, and signing up for programmes and courses and what have you. We do tend to think that the gospel could not possibly go forward without us and without our strenuous efforts. Our busy-ness which we offer to God to use does not make him dependent on us, though he certainly loves to make use of us. We must certainly resist this belief in our own indispensability: but I am afraid that in lots of evangelical churches resistance to this temptation has been rather minimal. We have started to believe in the power of the means that we use to do evangelism and run church services and not in the Word of God itself. We have fallen in love with our own technical excellence and forgotten that the only thing that advances the cause of the gospel is the gospel: that it is a powerful word about a risen king, a word that doesn’t need power-point to make it powerful. This morning I would like to invite us to re-consider our attitudes in this matter – not that programmes or thinking about the practicalities of our mission are wrong, but that we put them in the right place and recognize afresh our dependence on God’s word.

But also and more obviously here we have a great comfort: the word of God is not chained - so do not fear and do not despair at the attacks on the gospel or at the apathy of the wider community. Do not be afraid of standing on the word of God: where else can one stand? Do not be perplexed by the self-serving cleverness of those people who would tell us otherwise. Do not be surprised by resistance to the gospel – it is in its nature that it is a message as much rejected as accepted. Do not be surprised when the gospel is criticized for its irrelevance or its dowdiness – people need to find excuses to evade it, after all. But there is no need for us to be cowed or depressed either. Rather we can take great strength from the fact that God’s word does not return to him empty. This was after all the word that created the worlds, that caused the sun to shine and put the moon in its place; this is the word that rules the sea and the stars. God said, and it was so. And it is the word that brought Jesus out of the tomb; it is this word that rules: it is the authoritative word, the last word.

Let this church then be one that never ceases to rest wholly and only on the word of God, and nothing else. Let it be fearless in its declaration of the message of the gospel of Jesus, though it be foolishness or a stumbling block to others. Let it not trust in the brilliance of its ministry team or the magnificent planning, efficiency and wisdom of its PCC. For the word of God is not chained.

William Tyndale not only translated these magnificent words, he believed them too. And, he was not despairing even though his opponents in this work were popes and kings. He was not despairing even as he went to the stake with his work incomplete, and with the full realization of his dream – that the bible be freely available to all English men and women in their own tongue – was several decades away. His example is a great witness for us in our experience today of hostility and apathy to the word of God to endure everything.

Let’s finish with Paul’s words:
2 Timothy 2: 10 Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. 11 Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him; 12 if we endure, we will also reign with him. If we disown him, he will also disown us; 13 if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself.

Straining at gnats?

In the debate about sexuality a comment often heard from the more liberal side is that sexual matters ('sleeping arrangements') are a matter of very small importance compared to the really large issues of injustice and poverty.

The accusation from liberal quarters of the church is that conservatives are obsessed with sex, and that relative to bigger issues sex is unimportant. This is usually accompanied by something about how Jesus doesn't mention sex that much and is more concerned with greed and war etc etc.

But: sex IS important. It is such a crucial and personal feature of human life and identity; and it is such a yardstick for difference between the Christian community and the world around us, and always has been since the earliest days, not true? Sex is not merely a private matter (a Hauerwasian observation): any feminist knows this. (And actually, Christians knew it first).

And, concern for war and greed and sexual behaviour need not be mutually exclusive, surely? And, why is it the conservative side that is 'obsessed' and the liberal side not? Who keeps pushing the issue forward? Who makes an idol of sexual identity such that it trumps unity and biblical teaching?

I am interested not so much in the mud-slinging, as in the 'this is more important than this' argument. Granted, I think there is a critique to be made of an evangelical spirituality that is more concerned with swear-words and tax returns than about global poverty and mega death. This issue is perhaps: where does the ethics of individual personal everyday actions fit in with the so-called 'bigger' issues? And, does the practice of not-swearing, or at least, of keeping language holy (and the practice of chastity for the matter) actually form part of a larger whole?

How to talk right?

In our Hauerwas seminar today we spent a good deal of time reflecting on the Hauerwasian mode of discourse: polemical, violent (even), subversive, angular. Of course, to be studying this writer in the home of good manners (ie Oxford) amongst a people skilled in the art of not saying the truth is an interesting juxtaposition! Hauerwas's speech is justified in that he brings to light through dissonance the deeply embedded pagan assumptions of much Christian discourse in the West. The truth ought to be offered so that one may respond to it, if it is indeed the truth; and, the truth often comes through unpicking the assumptions that clump around its opposite.

The thing that saves Hauerwas from being just a naughty boy is that he has done his homework. Behind every verbal missile is a depth of thinking and reading, and a coherent and complex framework. It is thrilling that Christian speech can be so dynamic, and also alarmed that it can be so rude! The truth ought to be so divisive.

Where it goes wrong is that imitators of the Hauerwasian style (or imitators of other similarly aggressive and polemical Christian thinkers) imitate it as a style. There is the provocation of the prophet and then there is plain bad manners. The two are not the same; and just because something is done with no taste and complete bad manners does not make it true, or right; and certainly, the person who is merely rude can not call themselves persecuted when they are attacked.

Does this bother you? David Hicks in Guantanamo

David Hicks is an Australian suspected of involvement with the Taliban in Afganistan. He has been detained without trial or charge since 2002.

I have no doubt that he has some objectionable views and may have got up to some reprehensible activity: but the way in which this whole procedure has been carried out without the bounds of ordinary systems of justice bothers me a great deal.

Why has justice been so slow in coming? What is going on? Am I right to be concerned?

Some stirring words from Stan about preaching

" When was the last time you preached or heard a sermon on war? Furthermore, when was the last time you preached or heard a sermon on abortion? When was the last time you preached or heard a sermon on the kind of crae we ought to give to the ill? When was the last time you preached or heard a sermon on the political responsibilities of Christians? The problem is that we feel at a loss about how to make these kinds of matters part of the whole church. So, in effect, preaching betrays the church. I do not mean to put all the blame on preaching, but ministers do have opportunities to address moral issues that almost no one else in this society has - except for television. It is not much, but it is something. At least preachers can enliven a discourse that is not alive anywhere esle, and people are hungering to be led by people of courage." (Hauerwas Reader, p, 622)

I generally can't stand 'issue' sermons, because they are so much opinion and so little word of God. They are so prone to all the worst vices of preaching. But if we preach the scriptures, won't these matters arise ALL the time? Oh, for courageous inhabitants of the pulpit!

'Order' in Genesis 2 - 3

I am teaching a class in Moore's Introduction to the Bible.

This week we are looking at one of my favourite sections: Genesis 1-11.

But there is a strange comment in the notes about the order of creation and its reversal in the fall. That is, in Genesis 2 you have a hierarchy of man, woman, creature; in the fall the problem is the woman listens to the creature and the man listens to the woman; and then in judgment, the right order is restored as God addresses man, woman, creature. I have heard this preached in sermons, read it in books and heard it bandied about as evidence of the order and the sin which is at root the upsetting of this order.

Only: in Genesis 2 we don't EVER see order established in this way! In fact, the creatures are made it seems before them both... It is a curious logic indeed.

A Christian but a passive thing...

I was reading Tyndale, our martyr of the month today. Wow:

'A Christian man in respect of God is but a passive thing, a thing that suffereth only and doeth nought, as the sick in respcet of the surgeon or physician doth but suffer only. The surgeon lanceth and cutteth out the dead flesh, searcheth the wounds, thrusteth in tents, seareth. burneth, seweth or stitcheth and layeth corsies to draw out the corruption, and last of all layeth to healing plasters and maketh whole. The physician likewise giveth purgations and drinks to drive out the disease and then with restoratives bringeth health. Now if the sick resisteth the razor, the searching iron and so forth, doth he not resist his own health and is cause of his own death? So likewise is it of us, if we resist evil rulers which are the rod and scourge wherewith God chastiseth us, the instruments wherwith God searcheth our wounds, and bitter drinks to drive out the sin and to make it appear, and corsies to draw out by the roots the core of the pocks of the soul that fretteth inward. A Christian man therefore receiveth all things of the hand of God both good and bad, both sweet and sour, both wealth and woe.'

'A passive thing'. Well Tyndale was writing this in exile on the continent in fear for his very life at the hand of his own king, which gives us some perspective here, too...