Nostalgia and Lot's Wife

The faith of Abraham – that emblematic faith for the Scriptures and the Christian tradition – was expressed in his leaving behind the comforts of Ur and heading for an unseen land of Yhwh’s choosing. It is the faith of a wealthy man, a man with a considerable amount to lose. However, the step that the martyr is called to is not the faith of first setting out, but a faith-on-the-way. This temptation he encounters having already set out on his journey away from his luxurious past towards the kingdom of God. We do not find Abraham, despite his faults, hearkening back to Ur and the lifestyle he has lost.

Within the Abraham cycle, there is however one figure known for succumbing to the temptation to look back: Lot’s wife. With the brimstone hailing down on her home, she looks longingly back. If the salty judgment on her seems harsh, it serves to underscore her lack of belief that the call of God to the future really is the future. That is to say: she can see plainly that there is no way back to the past and yet her heart is still in Sodom and Gomorrah. She still yearns for that which she knows had fallen under the judgment of God. Her sin is a nostalgic longing for the past, not a faithful longing for Yhwh’s future.

Lot’s wife serves as a precursor to the great moment of inbetween-ness in Israel’s history – the wilderness journey between Egypt and the Promised Land. Moses’ wrestle with the people in the desert is often cast in terms of their longing for the pleasant Egypt of their enslavement in preference to the hardships of their journey. With their backs to the Red Sea and with Pharaoh’s army closing in on them, they complain: ‘[I]t would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!’ (Ex 14:12). Likewise, their hunger (Ex 16:3; Num 11:4-6) and their thirst (Num 20:1-8) contrast with the plenty that they had had in their former home in bondage to Pharaoh.

Their looking-back is not at all unreasonable. As for Lot’s wife, the difficulties and uncertainties of the journey of faith contrasted unfavourably with the simple pleasures and security of the past. The experience of being a refugee has little to commend it, especially when the basic requirements of daily living are not apparently being met. The disconnection of personal and communal identity involved is also what is at issue for the Israelites. Far better to be the slaves of the Egyptians and to know who one is than to be trapped in this condition of uncertainty – dis-located and dis-identified. Throwing off the shackles of Pharaoh means disavowing his identification of them as a slave-people. Israel is not the maker of her own identity however; rather, she called to an identity that is given to her by Yhwh. Yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt is a yearning to be identified as one formerly was, a longing for the old self. In the end, this nostalgia for the past self presents a rosy vision of what once was. The speech of the Israelites about the Egypt that they have left behind seems to bear little resemblance to the real Egypt. Slave labour, racial segregation and ethnic cleansing were conveniently excised from the Egypt of their complaints to Moses. There is a tendency to lie that comes with the nostalgic vision. It is a self-delusion of the heart: it trades in the desire for what once was, even though the route back is impossible to traverse.

If you were having a girl baby...

What name would you choose from below?

Freya
Eloise
Celeste
Bridie
Sabrina
Arabella
Miranda
Violet
Chloe

Or would you be able to suggest another perhaps?

Amyraldian ... and proud!

You can check out some debate over on Mandy Curley's site. Amyraldian by the way is a term used to label those Calvinists who do not hold to Limited, or particular atonement - the teaching that Christ only died for some (the elect) and not for the whole world.

We could also ask about why this debate matters so much? That would be a really great question to ask to people of both sides.

For me, it goes to the nature of God and to a very significant hermeneutical issue: do we assume that behind the God we meet in scripture is another more logical God? And, do we let the narrative of Scripture govern our theology or is our theological system the determiner of scripture? (BTW I am immune to the insult 'Barthian'!). It is worth noting that many of the texts that LA proponents offer as evidence do not overtly teach it to the exclusion of the non-LA position. Carson in his Love of God book is quite excellent on this. I have a couple of theological (rather than exegetical) points to add for consideration:
1 - i haven't seen anyone deal with my contention that LA is the result of starting the theological system with an abstract doctrine of God conditioned by the philosophy of Aristotle rather than with the drama of salvation-history and especially Christ. You can see this tendency in Owen and others however biblically committed they thought they were. Owen uses Aristotelian language and categories which then govern his whole theological system.
2 - a conceptual difficulty also arises because the atonement is conceived of as being an amount of 'stuff' that you can limit, like liquid in a bottle.
3 - the syllogism on which in depends (something like 'what God wills, sin cannot deny') is perhaps the problem. There is a hermeneutical problem here, isn't there, because the nature of God has already been decided...
4 - it is worth asking how the doctrine of creation - and God's love for all that he has made - fits in.
5. The relation of election in the whole biblical narrative to God's plan for the whole world needs to be accounted for. God's particular election has the whole cosmos in view, even when you think of Abraham and Israel...
6. LA (I would argue) is not Christocentric enough: since the full revelation of God's wrath and his love in his Son, the whole world is now judged according to this standard... The rejection of God's offer of redemption really is inexcuseable. But if LA holds of course it isn't a real offer anyway...
7. I am always suspicious of theology falling into too neat a 'system.' This is not an anti-rationalism: rather it suggests that theology has become beholden to some other system of rationality other than its own...

Of course there is more to say, and more lucidly.

Secular Western Liberalism in my sights again...

Secular western liberalism is a species of political thought that consciously rejects religious ideas from public consideration. It argues that for peaceful human cohabitation a truce needs to be achieved between conflicting visions of human flourishing.

Postmodern critiques of secular western liberalism expose its weaknesses, especially in the areas of epistemology and anthropology. Lyotard and Foucault have uncovered the hidden metaphysical, even theological, commitments of liberalism, suggesting that its appeal to universal or rational concepts is less compelling than at first glance. However, the postmoderns were themselves guilty of some problematic arguments...

Secular western liberalism trespasses frequently beyond the boundaries of the role of ‘contributing to a social order less unjust’. At least in part this is because of the deliberate step liberalism has taken away from divine authority that it might assert its own (covert) theology instead. It would be preferable for liberalism to name its theological commitments; or at least to assert openly its ‘thick’ moral vision and give up the pretence of moral minimalism. Public discussion of preferred theologies and of the telos of human life need not exclude in this way some of the strongest commitments people have (namely, their religious ones); neither would religious people be asked to frame their public discourse according to the theological and/or moral commitments of liberalism. In turn, the theological and moral assertions of secular western liberalism could be properly evaluated, if at least they were made explicit.

What must be heard is a call to the end of the open hostility of contemporary liberal order to Christianity. We can see in liberalism a prodigal child of Christianity: a millennium of Christendom meant that politics in the west has been moulded out of theological clay. We would not assert, for example, that Freedom and Equality are bad ideas in themselves; rather, that without an understanding of them as they were given birth by Christian theology they lack coherence and may become harmful. Christians can support a vision of liberal order that permits people freely to hear and respond to the gospel of God, which itself calls its hearers to deep concern for justice and peace in the present age while at the same time promising a final divine intervention to ‘shatter the spear’. However, the dominant form of liberal order on the contemporary scene is remorselessly secular...

janani luwum, archbishop and martyr

The story of Archbishop Luwum of Uganda is a remarkable one: we don't have many martyrs in the Anglican communion (though we have made a few). He was murdered by Idi Amin in 1977. You can pick up the full details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janani_Luwum

Like many modern martyrs, the exact meaning of his death is contested. Was he killed as the authorities said in a car crash? Was he shot by Amin himself? And how exactly did the death of Luwum testify to Jesus? Did he rebel to late? Or should he have been more compliant?

Anyhow: ponder his life - and his death - for a minute.

Salman Rushide and the Satanic Verses

I have been reading Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses partly because of its status as a cultural icon of our times. It is a fascinating self-fulfilling prophecy: an attack on fanaticism and revealed religion which becomes the focus for fanaticism.

The controversial part of the novel hinges on a confusion of identity between Satan and Gabriel: Mohummed (Mahound in the book) is unable to discern their voices as they whisper the Quranic verses to him and so delivers some non-monotheistic pronouncements. A major oops..

Anyhow, the point is ask the believer in a divine speech: can you tell that its the voice of an angel you are hearing and not the voice of a devil? And what is in fact the difference in any case, since both are servants of God? Are not both in the case just pieces of divine ventriloquism?

NT Wright and AE McGrath actually liberals?

This is one to goad the fans of NTW a bit (and let's face it, it is about time!! ;-) ). Andrew Moore writes in Anvil (20/1 2003):

'In seemingly conceding to the historian the authority to judge the truth of the Gospels, and in apparently removing from the theologian the right to challenge the scientist on theological grounds, have Wright and McGrath adopted the liberal principle?...
Is Christian truth to be measured on the same scale, construed in the same terms, as scientific and historical truth? Wright and McGrath seem to want to have it both ways: they wish to grant normativity to both Christian truth and to scientific and historical truth. My argument is that this option is not open to us: Christian truth is revealed principally in the person of Jesus Christ. It is unique because he is unique.'

Might he not have a point here? Perhaps he is being unfair to NTW and AEM. And the question ought to asked - if you go down this Barthian track are you not conceding the field to the sceptics? To which Moore might reply: 'yes - but it isn't a field worth having'...

George Pattison on Preaching as sacrament

Oxford Professor of Divinity George Pattison writes in his 'Short Course in Christian Doctrine':

'...if we no longer live in a golden age of Christian preaching, few Christians will not at some point have experienced something of the sacramental dimension of preaching- that preaching, no less than the sacraments more narrowly understood, is a way of God becoming present in time to the believing community. Preaching too can be a way of making-present the 'conversation in heaven' to which God is constantly drawing us. Seeing preaching as sacramental in this way goes against the widespread assumption by both preachers and congregations that preaching is primarily a form of teaching, the aim of which is simply to offer an explanation or application of the biblical text, or to demonstrate the logical, historical or psychological grounds for accepting Christian belief. On such a view the purpose of pracehing will primarily be to persuade, convince or, simply to argue a point...' p. 108

His point: that preaching ought to be done as if we are encountering God himself in the preaching of the sermon - that is, that he is communicating to us in it. I wouldn't use the word sacrament as he does perhaps (in fact, I think the sacraments are types of WORD!), but you get his drift...

Wouldn't this change the whole tone of the sermon? And for the better?

narrating yourself?

It is pretty much axiomatic among contemporary thinkers (secular and theological) to use the category of narrative in relation to the self - as a way of understanding or interpreting the self. Ricoeur, Taylor, Benhabib, Giddens, Hauerwas: even Hannah Arendt was using this idea in the 1950s. The value of this perspective lies in the way in which you can analyse a self as a body and not just a mind, as an individual-in-relation and not an individual-in-isolation, and a person in time and history and not a person somehow standing aloof to the conditions and passing of time. Time, body, mind, action, others.

But what does it mean to 'self-narrate', or to see oneself in terms of a narrated life? It is both a hermeneutical and an ethical response to the question posed by existence. Telling your story both interprets the events that have already happened and plots a trajectory into the future. 'Narrating' means 'ascribing some form or meaning to a series of events'.

One responds to the events of one's life as a sequence of cause and effect, as an emplotment (Ricoeur's term). One chooses subsequent attitudes and actions in keeping with the pattern that emerges over time (perhaps) or in response to some deeply held intuition about what should happen next. One plays a role as a character in relation to other characters, as an actor situated next to other actors ('neighbours' even). So, we might ask, what genre is my life? Tragic? Comic? Epic? Romance? Fairy Story? Absurdist Drama?

Seeing life in narrative terms can factor in things outside our control that are crucial to who we are: our gender, our national indentities, our accidents, our historical circumstances. The thing about a narrative is that it is like DNA: no narrative is completely the same as another's, though it may resemble it in type. It is a great way to identify someone.

It is interesting to think about biography and autobiography here. Both of these never quite contain the actual narrative of the person, do they? Autobiography - the telling of one's own tale - is so often an exercise in self-deception, or in choosing the wrong genre. And the problem is that it is always a tale half-told, because your death is not included! To include the manner of dying seems to be essential to the genre of the story.

Is it ever possible to tell the truth about oneself?

kata'angelism: a contribution to missiology

Missiology seems to me to be a rather odd thing to study. It is highly dependent on the findings of sociology - which are notoriously variable and uncertain. On the other hand, I am certainly aware - and passionately believe - that theology HAS to take mission seriously if it is to be true to itself. AND that Christians need to be better listeners to their own culture etc...

Anyhow, my proposal is that the church ought not to accomodate the gospel to its culture but rather trade on its dissonance with culture. Why not proclaim the real gospel and not sweeten the pill? What do I mean:

I mean, tell them that when Christ calls a man he bids him come and die (with Dietrich B.). Tell them they are going to suffer persecutions and humiliations. Tell them that they might as well forget about respectibility; and that they are going to have far fewer sexual partners and drink less. Tell them are going to have un-PC views, and so be out of kilter with the cool inner city crowd. Tell them that they will no longer be numb to the sufferings of others or be able to stand by. Tell them that they may be poorer and be called to live in a smaller house and not wear a Rolex. Tell them their family may reject them or consider them an embarassment... Tell them they will actually feel bad when they do the wrong thing. Tell them that they will have to deal with church and all its human mess.

Then hand out the comment cards...

What do you think?

I need your advice

Ok, this is the bit where I seek advice as to how my dissertation paper (which is meant to be a 15000 words foray into my eventual thesis) ought to proceed. I am kinda hoping that I will get some clarity by just typing... so here goes.

As y'all know, I am asking about martyrdom and the self: that is, I want to ask 'what difference does christology make for being a human self'? and martyrdom is very interesting way of lancing that boil. That is, what kind of self is the martyr? I think it is an interesting question, especially when you put it next to the usual ways in which we think of telling our own stories/identifying ourselves etc.

My strategy? I am using TS Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral (about Thomas Becket the martyr archbishop) to generate the concepts, language and structure of the discussion so that I have something substantial to get to grips with. From there I flesh out the concepts with stuff from the scriptures and the tradition. Thomas is in the play met by four tempters who he refuses, thereby suggesting exactly what martyrdom isn't, very helpfully. In the dissertation I am taking ONE of the temptations and giving it a working over. (The examiners are supposed to go 'wow, he should be allowed to do the rest of these!')

Now, in this paper I have two possible ways of proceeding: A and B.
A:
1. martyrdom is a way of narrating yourself that is pretty weird.
2. Here are the ways in which we (modern/postmoderns) narrate ourselves today.
3. Here is how via Eliot's play we can see that a martyr self-narrates (partly)
4. See the differences/similarities?

OR

B:
1. martyrdom is a way of narrating yourself that is pretty weird.
2. Here is how via Eliot's play we can see that a martyr self-narrates (partly).
3. NOW compare it with some ways in which we (moderns/postmoderns) narrate ourselves today

Which is it? (Sorry for the echoes of 2WTL...!)

Mad as an animal rights activist?

The Animal Rights movement in the UK is far more visible than it is in Oz. Britain is beset by some really passionate people prepared to take extreme measures for their cause, including in one celebrated case, digging up the corpse and bones of the granny of a guinea pig farm owner and hiding them.

Generally everybody thinks they are maniacal idiots. They don't accept the normal rationality of society and so are subject to ridicule. They make a big and ugly noise on Oxford's streets and they wave placards with gruesome pictures in our faces. They are obsessive people who won't abide the law.

But are Christians really any different? Are we not fanatics? What exactly is wrong with fanaticism (except the grave-robbing bit...)

Paul Zahl and Biblical Theology

http://www.tesm.edu/deans-corner/dcblog/bibtheo

This little article is a US evangelical episcopalian's take on what in Moore College/Oak Hill circles has become known as 'biblical theology'. In brief, Zahl's take on it is a Lutheran one: pointing out that the Goldsworthy-style biblical theology has a strongly Reformed heritage for starters. His complaint is interesting: that BT collapses the OT into the NT, such that you cannot hear the message of the OT except as a kind of pre-NT. Certainly, I have heard preaching on the Psalms for example which allows no other reading than the christological one - a method which I think is hard to sustain and necessarily subdues some of the best bits! Often the schema is used more rigidly than you would ever hear from Graeme himself (as always happens with systems and schemas...)

Zahl accuses BT of 'colonizing the Old Testament on behalf of the New.' His (very Lutheran!) response is that the OT is God's 'first word' designed to convict the world of sin - to which the NT, his 'second word', is the complement. The OT, if you like, is the bad news, and the NT is the good. (perhaps this caricatures PZ's position, but ... maybe not).

There is something in this I think. However, is not Christ the lynchpin here? Is not God's word in the OT AND the NT still Christ?
AND - doesn't Zahl's proposal risk minimizing the aspects of the OT which consist of promise, redemption and grace? Is the law really just a matter of a very high standard which no-one can keep but which makes you feel really bad? Why does the Psalmist (19, 119 eg.) delight in the law in that case?

It should be remembered also that BT is a response to so much evangelical preaching on the OT which was either hopelessly allegorical or hopelessly moralistic. (sometimes you feel that same principles could have been drawn from Homer or Jane Austen). BT reminds us that the bible is a grand narrative of redemption and to locate ourselves according to that narrative when we read the OT. Thoughts anyone? (btw, do read Zahl's very brief article as well).

The Great Evangelical Bible Swindle

In standard evangelical church services these days (at least the ones I go to) it is usual practice to read the Bible only from the passage to be preached on. It is rare to have an accompanying reading from the other testament, and unheard of to have a Psalm.

I think myself this is terrible. If you pop into a more Catholic or more liberal church - one supposedly less commited to the authority of the Scriptures, you will get in fact a feast of scripture. I went to church at an Anglo-Catholic parish in Cornwall and this was in fact the case. It was brilliantly read. (Fortunately, there was no sermon: the effect may have been spoiled!)

Why is this so? Is there are fear of unexplained readings? In which case, what kind of doctrine of Scripture are we practicing? Or is it that reading aloud well is a lost art? Have we fallen for a new kind of clericalism? I think there is a tendency for evangelical ministers to treat their congregations like idiots. They forget that we can absorb far more than one point on any given Sunday. And they don't trust us to hear the word of God for ourselves. It is unprotestant!!

What we lose is the rich symphony of scripture week by week, and all those passages that will never get preached on.

What can be done to arrest this dumbing-down? Who will join me in the campaign to get the BIBLE BACK INTO CHURCH??

Seyla Benhabib: postmodernism and feminism and the 'end of the self'

Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-US feminist political philosopher I have been reading...

What is she talking about? The philosophical debate she enters is one in which the reasoning subject of Kantian philosophy has been severely attacked by postmodern thinkers in particular. But is there any 'universal human' we can rescue?

Postmoderns wish to destroy all essentialist conceptions of human being or nature. In fact Man on this account is a social, historical or linguistic artifact not a noumenal or transcendental Being. 'Man' is a construct of our discourse. 'Man' is forever caught in the web of fictive meaning, in chains of signification, in which the subject is merely another position in language. Taken very strongly, this means that the subject dissolves into the chain of significations of which it was supposed to be the initiator. Ouch!

For Benhabib, this version is NOT compatible with the goals of feminism.

She admits: ‘Surely, a subjectivity that would not be structured by language, by narrative and by the symbolic codes of narrative available in a culture is unthinkable. We tell of who we are, of the ‘I’ that we are, by means of a narrative.’ p.214 BUT: we can concede all that but we must argue that we are not merely extensions of our own histories but are author/characters in our own stories…

She attacks Judith Butler's position that we are all self-constructed performers:
‘if we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and only let it rise if one can have a say in the production of the play itself? Butler's work undermines the normative vision of feminist politics.

Further, she says, it is impossible to get rid of the subject altogether and claim to be a fully accountable participant in the community of discourse and inquiry: the strong thesis of the death of the subject undermines the discourse of the theorist herself. Good point!

INSTEAD: we can think of the self as a subject, but as a 'situated subject': that is, a person who is a body and so gendered, situated in time and space and so on, and so place in a context of unique or close to unique conditions from which the self responds and reasons.

She says:
‘my goal is to situate reason and the moral self more decisively in contexts of gender and community, while insisting upon the discursive power of individuals to challenge such situatedness in the name of universalistic principles, future identities and as yet undiscovered communities.’ p.8
Nice.

it wasn't just a rain shelter...

thinking about the self with Linda Woodhead

Linda Woodhead makes a very perceptive observation when she says that the common dictum that 'the postmodern self is fragmented' needs to be looked at more closely. In fact, the fragmentary thesis is worked out in several different ways, and there is major disagreement about the processes by which the self became fragmented anyways.

She asks: was the self ever a stable entity? Can we point to an easier period to be a self? Woodhead questions the handwringing 'we are in a time of crisis' assumptions that undergirds a lot of secular and theological thinking (she has Anthony Thistleton in her sights, for one).
Thinkers construe 'the self' in one of four ways:

1 - it is bestowed. That is, there is an authoritative source/s from which selfhood comes to us. True selfhood responds to the bestowal.
2 - it is rational. That is, the self is a thinking reasoning entity above all else. Being a true self is being more reasoned.
3 - it is boundless. That is to say the self is a free entity. True selfhood = freedom!
4. - it is effective, in the sense that it is chiefly an expressive entity.

Theological thinkers usually try to assert the first type of self over against the others. That is, they say - people think of themselves as (say) rational selves but that isn't right - they are and should realise that they are bestowed selves.

Woodhead says: wait a second - it is more complicated than that...

Church Buildings

OK - time for honesty: which are the best and which is the worst church building? Now, to answer the question, you are gonna have to say WHY. Which means, come up with some criteria as to what makes it the best or the worst. It might be that the people can testify to a building that has really grown on them over time. For example: I went to a mission at West Wollongong Anglican (terrific people). They have a highly unusual building to say the least, much derided by even the congregation. However, it was actually a good building to be in, to preach in and to sing in (in my opinion) and it felt like a warm and yet reflective environment too. Again, i worked in St Andrew's Cathedral, a beautiful building, brilliantly restored but quite awkward for some kinds of meeting. However it did start to grow on you after a while because it was light and yet at the same time serious: and filled with people it can really be a glorious place to worship god in.

The issue behind the issue is - to what degree are aesthethics important? To what degree to pragmatics over-rule everything? hey, it would also be great if we could be able to attach photos to the posts...Ahh. Now we have had some interesting personal testimonies to warm us up (so to speak) - let's have some reflections on what it is we are looking for... do pragmatic and bodily considerations trump all? Do the aesthetics count for anything? Is the 'it's just a rain shelter' philosophy really enough?

The worst 'church building' I had experience of was Unisearch House when Mathias united its congregations for a year or two back in the 90s. It was terrible: it was ugly and the acoustics meant that you couldn't hear the singing of anyone but those around you, and the preacher seemed like he was talking through a loud hailer. It was an unpleasant place to be and mitagated against community. You couldn't find it in the dark, or park within cooee. The standard of the music went down (I was one of the musicians) beacuse it was given a 'why bother' kind of attitude. What if: a new suburb was opening up and you had been zoned space to build a church building: what would you tell the architect? Should the church building look like every other building, or should it look different? What values should it project to the community and to those who use it?

The desire for heavenly glory

The desire for heavenly glory is what the brothers Zebedee, James and John, bring to Jesus in Mark 10:35-45. The story seems to sit as a counterpoint to the promise of eternal life as an affirmation of the disciples in 10:29-31. The approach of the brothers in the first place is crass in its attempt to elicit a blank cheque from the Messiah: (‘we want you to do for us whatever we ask’ 10:35). Their request is not a small thing either, as it turns out: to be seated in the places of honour next to the exalted Son in his heavenly session (10:37). They wish to usurp the highest positions in order that they might bask in the glory of the Christ. The abruptness of the request should not prevent us from seeing it as a genuine desire for closer proximity to holiness and a desire to be seen as pleasing in the sight of God. They are willing to take their discipleship of Christ to the very throne-room of heaven.

Jesus’ reply reminds them of the true demands of that discipleship if it is to be true discipleship of the true Christ. Their request betrays in fact their ignorance of the path he is about to tread (‘you do not know what you are asking’ 10:38). The real proposition for the follower of Jesus Christ is the one he next puts to them: ‘Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?’ (10:38). The ‘cup’, in Mark’s symbolic world the cup of divine judgment from Isaiah 51:17, 22, returns as a recognizable image in Gethsemane when Jesus cries out ‘[T]ake this cup from me’ (14:36). Can the brothers join with Jesus in the God-forsakenness of the execution of the Christ? Likewise, the baptismal image points forward to the bloody conclusion of Jesus’ earthly career. Origen for one reads both images as referring to martyrdom: his reading is confirmed by Jesus’ prophecy about the brothers (10:39). However, Origen curiously seems to imply that a promise is hear given to those who would pursue martyrdom of a greater reward, as if Jesus’ question (‘can you…?’) is a condition that the brothers can chose to meet. He overlooks the brothers inability to realize the full meaning of their own question; and the rebuff strongly implied in ‘to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant’ (10:40). The request for the seats of privilege is not denied outright: the brothers will learn the real meaning of following Jesus in due course. God’s hand will not be forced in the name of serving him. ‘The first shall be last, the last first’ does not mean that being the last ought to be pursued as a way of coming first - as if this were the point of Jesus’ reversal. Rather, it is a promise of vindication given to those who would follow him in the giving of life in service (10:45).

Too neat?

Who wants to be a saint?

In a letter to Eberhard Bethge written in July 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remembered a conversation with ‘a young French pastor’ (identified by the editor as Jean Lasserre):

He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast.

Bonhoeffer’s intuition is that intending ‘to become a saint’ is not the way to become one. Even though desiring the honour of heaven appears to be a way to surmount the lust for earthly glory, it is merely a displacement of the same desire.

Hmm: here's a problem then. What place does the heavenly prize have in the motivation of the holy to serve God? Does the offer of a heavenly reward or a martyr’s crown corrupt the pursuit of true sanctity? The question is most troublesome: the very idea of martyrdom threatens to collapse under its weight. Is the heavenly city merely the earthly city on a larger scale? Is the desire for a higher place in heaven, which Origen among others certainly believed would be bestowed on the martyrs, any better than a desire for earthly glory? Could we discover ourselves in an untenable situation of wanting that for which the desiring makes the having apparently impossible?

Help me out here...

Radiohead's OK Computer: Airbag

Airbag [Elation]

“Airbag” opens with a swirling, distorted guitar figure and a crashing drum loop like Mack trucks rumbling past on a motorway; and bizarrely, sleigh bells. It’s a grim and slightly menacing sound alleviated only by some angelic-choir synth. The guitar lead flexes up and down a middle-eastern mode, sounding like a call to prayer.

in the next world war
in a jack-knifed juggernaut.

It’s a diabolical scene, a postmodern-ordinary apocalypse: the freeway car/truck crash.

In a voice that is dreamy and unreal, Thom Yorke tells a mini-narrative of a quasi-religious experience: the feeling of elation you get when you almost die in a car crash. It is an unlikely scene for an epiphany: the modern motorway is a soul-less no-place from which nature has been erased; a not-anywhere-really, a place for flesh and blood to be ground down by steel and rubber; where the natural sounds are the shriek of brakes and the suck of tyres.

As the music builds, soaring wordless monk-chant vocals come in, adding to the sense of a new beginning of spiritual dimensions.

I am born again.

It’s a moment of sheer grace. The buzz of adrenaline creates a feeling of that life is new. This is consciously religious language: but in the dark asphalt world of the song perhaps that is as good as it is ever going to get. Yet Thom howls triumphantly:

In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe!

His brush with death makes him feel impregnable and immortal. For a moment, he forgets the vulnerability of the human body before the whizzing masses of the mechanical monoliths, and feels superhuman, capable of might feats.

I’m amazed that I survived/ An airbag saved my life.

Technology is one of the great themes of OK Computer. Here at least technology is a life-saver: his face instead of beating the steering wheel of his fast german car plops gently into the inflating airbag, and he walks away from the accident. The technology may have created the danger, but also saved his life.

It’s faintly ridiculous, of course. The scene for this exhilarating experience is banal and dispiriting. The salvation is only momentary. But for a moment, life is precious and delightful: ironically, it takes a flirtation with death to fill us with an appreciation for life.

But it isn’t a moment of grace: it is only luck.

Talking to an atheist...

What follows is an email I sent to an atheist who emailed me after I wrote a review of Sam Harris' The End of Faith.


Dear Mr Coupland,

Like many atheists I have spoken with – and like Sam Harris - you employ what I would call a ‘scatter gun’ method in attack and the ‘small target’ method in defence. By which I mean this: that you put forward arguments of differing nature across a range of fields, some of which are important and serious, some of which are red herrings and some of which are just (with respect) ill-informed. You attack Catholics as if they are fundamentalists, Protestants as if they are Catholics.

On the defence you posit atheism as not really asserting anything at all and so don’t feel you have a case to answer. Hence, to any suggestions that you might show some proof for your position, you don’t respond, since you claim you aren’t asserting anything.

Let me try to clarify: some of your arguments are philosophical, or have a philosophical position at the root - so, vis a vis ‘miracles’, you rule them out a priori whatever the evidence because of a philosophical position. Some of your arguments pertain to the Bible and the reliability of its sources. Some of your arguments relate to the morality of religious groups/ the church. And so on.

Now, I could answer in detail each of these, but I think I’d be wasting my time. Clearly anyone who cites Barbara Thiering as an authority over the vast majority of non-confessional scholarly academic opinion (the Jewish Oxford scholar Geza Vermes for example) is following a pattern of prejudice not ‘reason’. Because I think the real issue is not logical or rational but existential. Clearly, your religious upbringing has prejudiced you against Christianity and other religions. If you hadn’t had that upbringing, perhaps you would have been less likely to pursue atheism as an adult. This may sound impertinent, but of course it is the logic you use to characterize religious believers…

My contention is that atheism is as much a matter of ‘belief’ as theism is. Not that belief is bad: it is in fact something humans do all the time everywhere. We do not subject even very important beliefs to scientific scrutiny: that would be both laborious and unnecessary. We take many things on trust (or ‘faith’). Not that trust is ‘blind’ as you say it must be; not at all. It is just what we do all the time because we can’t know everything! We base our lives around the credibility of those we know and whose authority we trust. Generally I don’t ask my wife to take a cat scan to understand her mental states. When you believe the words of a guy with a M.D. and a white coat about your body you are exercising trust. We may of course be deceived, or have our trust misplaced; but that is a necessary risk that all humans take at both trivial and profound levels. We need to do this to be what we are. It is a false dichotomy to pit so-called ‘reason’ against ‘faith’.

Is atheism like this? Of course it is. It is existentially convenient for some not to believe in God, because it may justify their hatred of the church or religious people (and religious people have of course on occasion acted appallingly). It may underpin their politics or their ethics (it is no accident that atheism has been historically associated with libertinism). It may quiet their uneasy consciences. It may be that they want to sleep in on Sunday mornings. The atheist has to believe the impossible and the illogical: that the universe has no cause and no beginning. He or she has to believe that there is no life after death. He or she has to take the infinitesimal odds that life began from the primordial soup by blind chance. You have to believe that despite the deeply held sense that the majority of us have that some things humans (religious ones often) do are really profoundly evil, that this is nothing but a matter of power and that justice really only boils down to whatever it is we can enforce. And so on… Sure, I think you can take those odds, and you can believe atheism. But don’t call it other than what it is: a belief! Don’t be shy! Then, we can talk about which beliefs are more justified, more plausible or more likely. It interests me that you seem very happy to have faith in the authority of scholars whose credibility is highly dubious because it supports your belief (I can’t believe you seriously suggest the ‘Jesus wasn’t really dead’ argument – to put that forward really takes some believing!) I may be wrong, but I doubt you have checked all the evidence for yourself first-hand. But then it was you who said ‘don’t believe everything you read’… you must be a very busy man, what with learning all those ancient languages and visiting archaeological sites and deciphering ancient manuscripts and the like!

Ahh: you are now going to bring the tooth fairy out and dangle her in front of me (along with Santa Claus). This is the small target defence. Basically, you say, it is very hard to prove a negative proposition, even ones that the majority of us know to be obviously true (ie “the tooth fairy doesn’t exist”): so we ought only to accept those positive propositions for which there is proof and deny those for which there is no proof (ie “there is no positive proof for the tooth fairy, therefore she does not exist”). However: proving the existence of anything or anyone other than yourself is actually very difficult if you have such a high standard of evidence. Now, we can I suppose trust our senses to give us trustworthy data – but even this is not always the case. We know that people can have sense experiences of things that don’t exist – and we ordinarily class them as mentally ill. It is even harder when it comes to historical figures or people that you haven’t met. I take it you believe that I exist and do so along with Winston Churchill, Henry VIII and Julius Caesar though you have very little direct empirical evidence of any of us. And yet your proof for these beliefs is actually quite flimsy, if you compare it to the standard of proof you are demanding for the existence of God.

In addition, it is important to say that believing in God isn’t like believing in the tooth fairy at all of course. The difference is of course massive and obvious: the tooth fairy has no link to the way things are in the world. And very few people have ever claimed to have an experience of the tooth fairy. In addition, we might say, that it is part of the definition of the tooth fairy that she, like unicorns and Homer Simpson, is fictional. So it is commonly agreed by all that the type of existence she has is as a fictional or mythical entity as part of a game we play with children. On the other hand, the vast majority of human beings over history and across cultural differences testify to the existence of God in some form: they have posited (and continue to do so) that it was reasonable to believe from observing the way the world is that it was the work of a creator being of some kind. And many many people testify to having had experiences of God of some kind. The neurological data used to explain away religious experience that Harris introduces seems to me to be completely silly and typical of his arguments: he thinks by explaining a cause of something he has explained the entire thing away. This is a net full of red herrings… Now, truth isn’t democratic (thank goodness) of course. But if you are to assert something against the vast majority of the race in this way I think you do have to offer some kind of proof. Otherwise, stop being an atheist and be honest: you are really an agnostic.

Or, you could join Professor Anthony Flew, who after a lifetime of advocating atheism in public has decided that theism is the most defensible position philosophically (without becoming religious in anyway).