Martyrdom in the Gospel of Judas

Harold Attridge has a fascinating review article of some books on the gnostic Gospel of Judas here.

Interestingly, Elaine Pagels and Karen King read the Gospel of Judas as an anti-martyrdom tract - in contrast to the orthodox promotion of martyrdom, which they read as propping up the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Of course, a contemporary theological protest against martyrdom is very much in evidence in their sympathetic reading of Judas. Attridge puts it this way:

'Not far below the surface of their analysis, it should be said, lies a fairly clear theological position that is open to debate. Their book, in other words, offers not simply a historical analysis but also a contemporary argument, though the two are almost always interconnected. They clearly want to protest the kind of religiosity that glorifies martyrdom, a glorification they see as contrary to efforts to improve the human condition. In an age of suicide bombers and jihadists, many might sympathize with that critique of a bloodthirsty religion. But perhaps there is also something to be learned from the Church that celebrated martyrs, told tales of their gory ends, built shrines to their memories, and linked their deaths with that of Jesus.

'A yearning for death and fascination with pain and suffering are certainly pathological and inimical to human well-being. Yet suicidal martyrs are only a part of the story of early Christianity and the contemporary Church. Alongside the fanatics, and probably outnumbering them, were those who insisted that divine reality demands both justice and compassion, that violence is not the way to solve human problems, and that by the example of their deaths they were upholding, and helping to spread, these beliefs. It is a willingness to stand firmly for peaceful Christian values, even at the cost of death, that the Christian martyrological tradition celebrates, and can be seen from many examples, starting with Saint Stephen in the first century and Perpetua and Felicity in third-century Carthage, and continuing on to Archbishop Oscar Romero and Sister Jean Donovan and her companions in twentieth-century El Salvador.'

This is well put. There is no point in denying there were maniacal martyrs in the early church - there certainly were! But that is not the whole story, not by a long shot.

-ize or -ise ?

So: which is to be preferred?

'Relativize' or

'Relativise'?

Shall I will?

OK -

account for the difference in usage between 'shall' and 'will'.

When will I use 'shall'? And when shall I use 'will'?

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VIII

Intellectual Deviation Story Right at the close of The Secular Age, Taylor deploys this term to refer to other historical accounts which are not, he feels, in conflict with his, although they are different. He cites John Milbank's work as an example. Milbank sources the rise of the secular to the work of Scotus and Occam - the nominalists who critiqued late medieval realism (a la Aquinas). The link is made between nominalism and mechanist science; an instrumental view of human agency; and the distinction between nature and supernature. The sense of a great analogy of being falls away. Once this move has been made, God becomes more easily conceivable as a Prime Mover and Designer.



This is what Taylor calls the 'Intellectual Deviation' story, or ID. He accepts it as complementary to his version, but doesn't think that it is the main story behind secularity. Rather, Taylor sees what he calls the Reform Master Narrative as the most important explanation. ID is not the mass phenomenon it needs to be to pull off the secular turn... It just doesn't deliver enough social imaginary to be convincing.

Sermon for Anzac at St Helen's Bishopsgate, London

It is said of Alan Bond, the famous 80s business tycoon, that, with his yacht Australia II trailing by three races to one in the final of the America’s Cup, he reminded his team of Gallipoli and then said: ‘We had our backs to the wall there and we won that one...’

Bond’s mistake is forgiveable: it is certainly strange that Australians and New Zealanders choose to celebrate a military disaster. But I think it is a happy oddity. Anzac Day is a great day for a war remembrance because we are reminded by it of the moral ambiguity and futility of war. We not tempted by the memory of April 25th 1915 to indulge in a sickening triumphalism; neither is it a day that brings old resentments bubbling to the surface. This day tells us that it is hard to make sense of war, because war itself is a grim absurdity.

The generation that lost its young men in the trenches recognised this. As the task of memorialising the dead began, the sheer horror of what had occurred evidently sank in. There were heroes, but not many. How do you honour the deaths of those who were evaporated by heavy explosives, or who drowned in the mud? What honour was there in dying that way, or of lying falling on a piece of ground that would be lost to the enemy in a few months?

And so, the one Bible verse that is most frequently found on war memorials and graves is the one from John’s gospel – a saying of Jesus himself: ‘Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’. This almost makes sense: it speaks of sacrifice for others in a way that isn’t saying something about dying for love of my country, or the empire, nor for love of some great principle or cause, whatever that might be. We modern people in our ignorance and inexperience of the real world are now more hesitant to accept that these things are worth dying for in the first place. But, to die for your friends? – It’s a thought that resonates with antipodeans, because we know what counts is your friends – your mates. But can those whose intent it was to kill others really be given credit for the greatest of all loves? That was their calling as soldiers, after all. Can applying this verse to the fallen give their deaths meaning, or redeem something for us from the absurdity of war? I confess that I feel more than a little disquiet when I read these words on a memorial of war.

Whether it can or no, the memorial makers at least knew where the template for loving sacrifice of a life was to be found. They knew, in a way that we have perhaps forgotten, that Jesus’ death on the cross was the sacrifice of love par excellence. Jesus dies ‘for his friends’ – in their place and for their benefit. He dies for his friends because they are threatened by great enemies – evil, sin and death – and helpless to battle them alone. These enemies are more fierce and more insidious than Turks, or Germans, or Viet Cong or the Taliban. They have us in their grasp and won’t release us.

He was not a conscript, but a willing volunteer. He left the safety and comfort of his Father’s throneroom and faced down the things that threaten us with with utter disintegration, seeking the reconciliation of human beings with their God. He himself suffered the indignity and apparent futility of a cruel and violent death, offering his own body as a sacrifice for the sins of humankind. Yet this was not meaningless suffering. This was the greatest of loves: it was selfless, painful and costly. But it was not pointless: it was a death that defeated death. Death and sin were outflanked by this divine man’s death.

War continues: and it stands as evidence of the spiritual darkness that still besets all of us despite our potential for noble and valorous action. We should remember on Anzac Day that the most glorious things human beings do are found next to the most obscene. Courage and inventiveness lie side by side with incompetence and bloodthirstiness. Remembrance of war should never be a comfortable thing, if we are to be honest. It should never be romanticised. As the generations of those who actually witnessed the two world wars passes on, we may be tempted to forget how awful war was for them; and to remember not the real Gallipoli, but the Gallipoli that Mel Gibson was at. It’s a temptation we would do well to resist.

When we pause at a war memorial, however, and read the text ‘Greater love has no-one than this’ we have reason to feel something else, too: gratitude. Gratitude to those who served and died to protect others certainly, whatever we feel about war itself. But, moreso, we be can thankful to Jesus Christ who died to set us free from sin, evil and death: all the components that go to make up a war. The death of the soldier may or may not have been in vain; it certainly did not bring an end to hostility between human beings. But by using this verse, even wrongly, the survivors are bearing testimony both to the inescapable power of the evil which brings us down and also to a death which did make a real difference. The death of Jesus Christ signals the end of enmity – between God and humankind, and between human beings themselves. There is the possibility for us now, in accepting his offer of friendship, of experiencing for ourselves the greatest of loves – an offer we have only to receive.

Brief Editorial

Apologies for the silence: a bout of tonsillitis laid me low all week.

Next week, we are off to Devon for some holidays!

See you all soon.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VII

Secularity 1, 2, 3 Taylor distinguishes between three senses of 'secularity'.
Secularity 1 has to do with public spaces allegedly emptied of God. Our common institutions and practices have been deliberately drained of any reference to God or to the ultimate. You can do politics, and never meet God.

Secularity 2 has to do with the falling off of religious belief and church attendance. Of course, 1 and 2 are not at all the same, though they are often felt to be. The framers of secularity 1 had no intention of inducing secularity 2 (think of the American Constitution).

Secularity 3 however is the one that interests Taylor the most. It is related to both the other senses, but: it focuses on the conditions of belief. This shift to secularity consists in a move 'from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace' (The Secular Age p. 3).

Thus, Taylor says, is his intention: 'the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others'.

Now, church attendance in the US may be as high as mosque attendance in Pakistan. But it still may be the case that the US is secular in the 3rd sense. Why? That's what Taylor wants to know.

In a way, he will 'blame' Protestantism and particularly Calvinism for making an option possible...

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VI

The Immanent Frame In trying to describe the 'conditions of belief' which now obtain in the modern West, Taylor coins the term 'The Immanent Frame'. The buffered self which arises in the age of Reform (of which more later) moves in a constructed social space 'where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular' (The Secular Age, p. 542).

In addition, this frame constitutes now the 'natural' order as distinct from the 'supernatural' one. Instead of the two orders being intertwined, the transcendent is now seen as quite separate from the immanent - which condition of course makes it possible later on to disavow the transcendent altogether.

So, the rise of the individual, now called to a more rigorous and disciplined life in the affirmed ordinary world, coupled with the emphasis on constructive action (because Providence itself now works via the medium of human action) and seen in the context of time now measured accurately by machines rather than charted by prophets or seers in epochal terms - these conditions comprise 'the immanent frame'.

If you are to be a religious believer, you have to believe against the backdrop of these conditions of belief, then.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - V

Horizons of Significance For Taylor, our selfhood is necessarily dialogical. We are selves with reference to 'horizons of significance', as he explains in his The Ethics of Authenticity.
Personal authenticity can’t be defended in ways that deny horizons of significance. In fact (and here Taylor is especially suggestive of the theological) even the sense that choice is the root of my personal significance is grounded on the understanding that ‘independent of my will there is something noble, courageous, and hence significant in giving shape to my own life’.(p. 39)

Horizons of significance come to us from outside of ourselves: they are given. There is already, anterior to the choices of the individual, a picture (or pictures) of what human beings are like, or ought to be. Even positing self-choice in itself as a moral ideal requires that there are choices that themselves are significant. As Taylor says, ‘[I] can define my identity only against the background of things that matter’ (p. 40); and if I am to bracket out from consideration history, nature, society and everything except for that which I find in myself, I am surely not choosing for myself anything other than the trivial. ‘Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands’ (p. 41). Some reference to the self-transcending – whether God, nature, nation, ideology or whatever else – is necessary for authentic selfhood. Choice itself cannot be basic.

Fair enough: but is it a distraction to see this as pre-theological in some way? Can we just substitute in any 'horizon', as if there were ready made alternatives that we could just attatch?

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - IV

The buffered self. This is one of my favourited Taylorisms, suggesting as it does a figure wearing a kind of padded suit...

The buffered self is the self that develops in early modernity in contrast to the 'open and porous and vulnerable' self of the previous epoch. That former individual, living in a world that was held to be 'enchanted', was vulnerable to the world of spirits and powers. The porous self is exposed to the whims of a suprahuman benevolence or malevolence residing in the cosmos. His feelings are bound up with goings on that are external to him - the motions of the stars and so on. He lives in a world not inconceivably that far different from a Bosch painting.

The buffered self, by contrast, is able to take a distance from everything outside the mind. This self can 'see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it'. (The Secular Age, p 38). The buffered self may read a Bosch painting as a code for various inner states, but he has been taken out of the world in which these are thought of as external conditions.

However (and here is Taylor's punchline): despite the appearance of the buffered self there is also a powerful nostalgia for the porous self. Of course, we do this as mere tourists, trying to get an impression of what it must have been like to be really porous by having our stars read - but, as Taylor says, 'Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane. You can't get a frisson from what is really in fact terrifying you.' (p. 38) Taylor of course goes on to chart the role of Protestantism in producing the buffered self.

I am interested that this powerful nostalgia for the porous self is being played out within Christian theology at present. The Radical Orthodoxy is only its most esoteric and elitist manifestation. But popular spirituality both Catholic and Protestant evinces this yearning to be more porous - more richly metaphysical in its encounter with the phenomena of the material world. I think our 16th century forebears, who were so relieved to be liberated from enslavement to this kind of vulnerability to the world inhabited by ghosts and demons, would have thought this daffy, just as Taylor points out.

Peter Bolt's Living with the Underworld

I have just received my copy of my former teacher and colleague's new book, Living with the Underworld (available to British readers here). I will be writing a review for The Briefing.

But, can I say how excited I am by the book thus far. Firstly, here is theology written for a general adult audience that is not insulting to their intelligence but is fast paced and engaging. There are some big ideas in this book, but the writing is crisp and light, and certainly not without plenty of wit. It is a journey into the underworld with Tony Soprano as our guide.

Bolt also touches on a number of issues of how the Biblical cosmology ought to be read by modern readers without having to engage in a wholesale demythologisation programme. So, there is some interesting theological method being developed in the background, too. Go read it and see!

A taster:

It is a pity that moralism has always been so rampant amongst people who say they are trying to live by the Bible. if Christians were to read the New Testament and grasp its central message, they could never join the moralists, and they would be the most sympathetic people this world has ever seen. p. 68

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians III

By the way, you really must check out The Immanent Frame.

Social Imaginary Taylor uses this term in his latest work The Secular Age, but also in Modern Social Imagineries. He means by it to indicate something of the way people imagine their social existence. It is crucially an act of imagination rather than an intellectual scheme: it involves the myths and stories and legends that we tell about our common life and identity, and so on. As Taylor puts it, he means how people 'fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations'. (MSI, p. 23)This term, then, can include the way ordinary people think about their common identity as well as a more elitist, theoretical account.

Of course, it is a complex business to describe a social imaginary, because it is a complex idea! It 'incorporates a sense of the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life.' (MSI, p. 24) And yet, this term is crucial for Taylor's project: because it is 'social imaginaries', modern and less modern, that he is largely in the business of describing. It is part of his intellectual bravery that he is willing to embark on such a risky strategy, because it is so obviously open to challenge at every point of the description.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - II

The Affirmation of Ordinary Life: This term is probably not really a Taylorean invention, but it features very prominently in his account of the history of ideas. As he says, the affirmation of ordinary life 'has become one of the most powerful ideas in modern civilisation' (Sources of the Self , p. 14). Though it has avowedly secular variants (such as utilitarianism), it is a term associated with the theological shift in the Reformation period away from the spirituality of the elite and towards the sanctification of the everyday. 'With the Reformation, we find a modern, Christian-inspired sense that ordinary life was..the very centre of the good life.' (p. 13). You could, with Luther, praise God while changing a baby's nappy. You could labour in your dead-end job and still possess the dignity and spirituality of a monk.
The fruit of this affirmation of the ordinary include a protest against needless suffering and an emphasis on human welfare and dignity. And it underlies much of political self-understanding in the West even today.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - I

Readers of this blog - both of you - know that I am a bit of a fan of Canada's greatest contemporary philosopher, Charles Taylor. Not that I am uncritical: but, what a voice he has! Taylor, like many great philosophers, works up his own vocabulary - a repository of terms which become a shorthand for the arguments already established. I thought a glossary of these terms might be a useful thing. However, I find that whenever I propose to myself that I will do a series on this blog, it is a guarantee that I won't complete it... so, no promises...

Subtraction Story - In his The Secular Age, Taylor calls a 'subtraction story' any of those 'stories of modernity in general and secularity in particular which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.' (p. 22) These stories chart the emergence and liberation of true human nature from the imprisoning forces of religion, now set aside. The Secular Age is Taylor's vigorous response to this kind of narrative. He wants to argue that subtraction stories are mistaken because they do not see the new-ness of Western modernity. Secularity comes not from seeing things that were there in the first place, but from the construction of new self-understandings and practices - things that cannot be seen as always residual in human life.

MacIntyre and stories

Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

...man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' We enter human society, that is, with one of more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they ae in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be constured. It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kinds, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the dram into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. After Virtue, p. 216

This is even more so of being a follower of Christ, yes?

More Ricoeur, this time on death and narrative

As for death, do not the narratives provided by literature serve to soften the sting of anguish in the face of the unknown, of nothingness, by giving it in imagination the shape of this or that death, exemplary in one way or another? Thus fiction has a role to play in the apprenticeship of dying. The meditation on the Passion of Christ has accompanied in this way more than one believer to the last threshold.' Oneself as Another, p. 162

By 'fiction', Ricoeur isn't saying 'it's made up': rather, he is pointing to the literary features of the account.

Ricoeur on Literature & Ethics

A moment of clarity looms up through the fog:

There is no ethically neutral narrative. Literature is a vast laboratory in which we experiment with estimations, evaluations, and judgments of approval and condemnation through which narrativity serves as a propaedeutic to ethics. Oneself as Another, p. 115

[propaedeutic = 'a prelimary body of knowledge or rules necessary for the study of some art or science']

Total Church - my review

And quite a lot of other material about the book, too.

Philosophy and Theology

I have to say Paul Ricoeur's Gifford lectures published as Oneself as Another ranks among the most difficult books I have ever tried to read.

But I was interested to read in the first chapter to the book how Ricoeur sees his largely philosophical work in relation to theology. He had, he said, written a couple of more explicitly theological chapters, but does not include them in this book.

He is adamant that he doesn't want his philosophy of the self to be seen as a crypto-theology. It is certainly the case that he discovers all these conceptual difficulties and problems that seem to be suggestive of a theological resolution. Does not the philosophy of the self point us inevitably to the need for some kind of divinity? This is the move he wants to resist

And, what's more, he doesn't want to see it the other way around: theology as taking the place of philosophy. Theology doesn't give the 'ultimate foundation' (rationally speaking) that philosophy strives for but can never attain. That would be stretching theology to do work it isn't designed to do:

If I defend my philosophical writings against the accusation of crypto-theology, I also refrain, with equal vigilance, from assigning to biblical faith a cryptophilosophical function which would most certainly be the case if one were to expect from it some definitive solution to aporias that philosophy produces in abundance... (p. 24)

No: theology does not answer the questions that philosophy has raised. The irretractable problems that a philosopher discovers are not susceptible to a theological answer. The problems remain, and remain to be addressed by philosophy. What he has instead from theology is assurance, which is to be taken by faith. This is how he puts it:

The dependence of the slef on a word that stripsit of its glory, all the while comforting its courage to be, delivers biblical faith from the temptation, which I am here calling cryptophilosophical, of taking over the henceforth vacnt role of ultimate foundation. In turn, a fiath that knows itself to be without guarantee...can help philosophical hermeneutics to protect itself from the hubris that would set it up as the heir to the philosophies of the cogito (ie Descartes) and as continuing their self-foundational claim. (p. 25)

What is 'the self' anyway?

In his monumental work Oneself as Another Paul Ricoeur makes a distinction between the two major meanings of the word ‘identity’ in terms of the Latin words idem or ipse.[1] Idem-identity has the sense of ‘sameness’. Under this definition, a person’s identity can constituted from matrices or horizons that stem from comparison to others. So, I identify with those who are the same as me and over against those who are different. On the other hand, ipse-identity invites an understanding of identity in terms of ‘selfhood’. As an identity, the self ‘has to be reflexively made’.[2] Self-identity refers at the outset to the one I am speaking about when am able to speak self-consciously about myself. It is already an indication of self-awareness, a capacity for ‘seeing’ oneself. We might describe it as a mental gaze at one’s own reflection in a mirror. This self-awareness is not self-understanding as such, or an appreciation of the meaning of oneself; but it is a prompt to self-understanding. The very notion of oneself invites one on a quest to discover or make sense of who it is one is talking of when one refers to oneself.

If I am to make sense of myself, I need a point of reference or comparison. I must be able to trace in some way a coherence, a pattern in this entity I name ‘self’. Time offers that to me in two ways: firstly, by an act of remembering I can trace my own actions and experiences across time. I can begin to see patterns of cause and effect; to makes sense of motivations and intentions; to have feelings of nostalgia and regret; and so on. In other words, I begin to see my own narrative emerging, the story of my self. In turn, secondly, I can begin to exercise my other mental faculty relating to time, my imagination, and to project into the future the next stages in the emplotment of my life.

To persue this invitation to understand oneself, then, suggests that it is a narrative that is needs to be understood – in Ricoeur’s terms, the ‘hermeneutics of the self’. It is true to our experience of embodiment to think this way, too: that we are not selves known in abstract, as if we are static types, but rather that we are revealed, to others as well as to ourselves, as characters in a sequence of causally related events. We notice then of course that were are not, even in this moment of reflexivity, cut off from the phenomenal world – but rather, thoroughly situated within in it. In other words, this reflexive sense of identity finds its expression in the form of a narrative. That is what our memories do for us: they narrate the self into identity, interpreting the past for us and projecting out of that past a future, the open horizon to which our personal history is moving.[3] Story is a remarkable mnemonic device. In fact, personal identity takes this narrative form because of its inherently historical nature.

What we have in narrative is a binding together of word and event: the event is described and given coherence by the application of the shape and categories of narrative. Narrative applies a causal and teleological form to events as we experience them; though this is not altogether arbitrary. The sequentiality of events invites the search for causal links between them. This is something we recognize even in our own bodies: as they change over time, collecting scars and wrinkles, we experience in ourselves the results and effects of our experiences. This is not to say that our narrating of the events of our experience is the final truth about them; or, that every account that we give of events we have experienced is absolutely comprehensive. It is the tracing of a path through a forest as best we can: though we do no see every tree in the forest, and though at times the going is rough, and we lose our bearings, we still are able to make our way. Though there is difficulty, there is not incoherence, necessarily.

If ipse-identity requires narration, then it also draws the self into realm of the ethical. This is for two reasons. One the one hand, the realisation that we are actors and agents, who may participate and contribute to the chain of causality. As selves in time, we are immediately in the position of asking what it is we are going to act in a way that it is consistent and coherent with our conception of our self-identity. How are my actions going to make sense as coming from me, as being ‘mine’? Insanity is a way of describing someone whose actions do not emerge from some evident sense of self – a judgement even the insane person might make as they find themselves unable to answer the question ‘why did you do that?’

The second point is not unrelated: the notion of the self is also an invitation to pursue the ‘true’ or perhaps ‘authentic’ self. The corollory of this that individual must have, or develop, some conception of the good by which to judge the self that might emerge. Yet, with the turn of the self to the good does not come an automatic description of the good. So, if the chosen measure for self-realisation is ‘authenticity’, for example, then the concept must be given some relatively substantial account if the authentic self is to be recognised when it appears. Which is to say: the hermeneutics of the self orients the self to the pursuit of the good, without also giving thereby a definition of what the good is. That discovery remains to be made; or, that revelation remains to be given...

[1] Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 2.
[2] Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity : Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1991), p. 3.
[3] George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology : Recovering the Gospel in the Church (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), p. 107.