If Christian schools were really Christian, would anyone want to send their kids there?

I have been asked to write an article about the 'values' education debate in Australia and other Western countries.

It seems, conservative minded liberal politicians are looking enviously over the school railings at Christian/church schools and their popularity/success and wondering why it is that it is so hard to replicate in a state-run system. Left-wing liberals of course jump to the defence of the secular schools by saying, 'no, they do teach a set of common values: tolerance for example. And, um, tolerance. And compassion, perhaps.'

Two observations: the first is that the conservatives have sensed rightly that a secular vision of the state which tries its utmost for the neutrality of all public spaces is unlike to be able to find a vision of the good that can sustain a coherent education system. However: it is pretty hypocritical of them to be harping on this, since it was the economic rationalist version of liberalism that tended to promote a greed is good ethos in any case. If 'values' have disappeared, can conservative liberals really blame radical liberals?

But on the other side (second), the left has it right, too - at least they acknowledge that no neutrality is really possible. So, secular liberalism has to find a persuasive vision of the good to go with its vision of the right. However, they are always going to struggle to do this, since the crucial component of their whole understanding of human life is personal liberty from another's vision of the good.

All the while, the state seems to be looking at the church's schools and saying 'I'll have what they're having' - it seems that we know how to train children to become the members of society that others want to become.

But this is a moment of great danger for the churches and their schools. Because we will always have to ask (and I fear we don't have the courage to) - are our 'values' really Christian, or are they just blandly middle class? Are we just perpetuating the idea that Christian discipleship = a fairly acquisitive politically quiet and socially invisible suburban lifestyle? Are we enjoying providing our culture with exactly what it wants as a market and not actually promoting Christian discipleship?

If Christian schools were really Christian, would anyone (other than Christians) want to send their kids there? I think we should at least ask that question!

John Milton 'On his Blindness'

‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.’

We moderns understand ourselves as acting subjects. What do you do?

The damaging consequences of this view of the acting self are numerous: from an instrumentality in human relationships, to a removal of the dignity of those who cannot act, who are limited in their ability to act (the disabled and the elderly in particular). Even Aristotle’s more moderate vision of a subject who is both responsive and active falls under this critique; for Aristotle cannot envisage a truly good human life without the expression of virtues through action.

But Milton, going blind, sees an alternative in Christian patience; and has 'Patience' say these words above to him.

Serving God is not restricted to the busy.

Rowan Williams on Anglican Identity..

"The different components in our heritage can, up to a point, flourish in isolation from each other. But any one of them pursued on its own would lead in a direction ultimately outside historic Anglicanism The reformed concern may lead towards a looser form of ministerial order and a stronger emphasis on the sole, unmediated authority of the Bible. The catholic concern may lead to a high doctrine of visible and structural unification of the ordained ministry around a focal point. The cultural and intellectual concern may lead to a style of Christian life aimed at giving spiritual depth to the general shape of the culture around and de-emphasising revelation and history. Pursued far enough in isolation, each of these would lead to a different place – to strict evangelical Protestantism, to Roman Catholicism, to religious liberalism. To accept that each of these has a place in the church’s life and that they need each other means that the enthusiasts for each aspect have to be prepared to live with certain tensions or even sacrifices – with a tradition of being positive about a responsible critical approach to Scripture, with the anomalies of a historic ministry not universally recognised in the Catholic world, with limits on the degree of adjustment to the culture and its habits that is thought possible or acceptable."

Hmm... interesting.

nationalism again...

Nationalism is a temptation to which the Christian churches are often prone in the modern era. Bonhoeffer locates the rise of modern nationalism in the era of French Revolution: ‘[T]he nation is a revolutionary concept’. This is hardly a novel reading: however, he makes the provocative assertion that revolutionary nationalism, which is openly hostile to God, arose partly in reaction to the political theology of Catholic Church (lacking the ‘two-kingdoms’ theology of Luther) which was unable to prevent the loss of ‘the unity created by the form of Jesus Christ’.

In the Anglo-Saxon world – and this relates directly to the situation of Archbishop Thomas in this very Anglo-Saxon of plays – the problem has been rather ‘a collapse of the church into the world’. In other words, though there is in the Anglo-Saxon world the phenomenon of a democracy based on a Christian foundation, this has not prevented severe secularization. There is a temptation to blur the distinction between ‘the offices and kingdoms of the state and the church’, a temptation to which modern Protestant Christianity has certainly (for Bonhoeffer) succumbed.[1]

In the Acts of the Apostles, the idea of national identity is not dissolved even as the Gospel spreads to the nations. The symbolic key is Pentecost. This miraculous sign comes not to Gentiles, granted, but to Jews dispersed among the nations and who are speakers of many languages. At this moment they are gathered in Jerusalem for the festival. The tongues of flame lead to the speaking in many tongues: the apostles are given the gift of speaking in the languages of those present. There is not one language that all are given to hear – the miracle is in the apostles’ mouths not just in the hearers’ ears. Peter, for his sermon on the event, takes as his text the ancient prophecy of Joel: ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people’ (2:14). If there is a reversal of Babel here, it is not in terms of a restoration of a primordial universal language. The Spirit, which makes possible the hearing of the gospel of the Son, is the unificatory principle in this event: the message, not the language, is what is held in common. Though dispersed Israel is addressed here, the rest of the narrative of the book shows how this invitation is extended to the Gentiles as well. Interestingly, Luke’s Paul does not renounce or deny his Roman citizenship and is in fact happy to use the fact that he was born to this status to gain a hearing (Acts 22:25-29).

The inauguration of the church does not therefore mean the dissolution of the nations. This is how the promise to Abraham that ‘all nations will be blessed through you’ (Gen 18:18; Gal 3:18) comes to pass in preaching of the apostles. This means an engrafting of the nations into Israel: an offering of membership in the people of God extended to the whole globe (Rom 9-11; Eph 2). John of Patmos seems to imply that nations maintain their identity even in the eternal vision, where they bring their glory and honour (21:26), and receive healing from the leaves of the tree of life (Rev 22:2). Around the great throne is gathered a multitude visible to the seer as ‘from every nation, tribe, people and language’, singing the song of the salvation of the Lamb (Rev 7:9). However, insofar as the nations (and their kings) are ranged against the Lord and his Son, they are utterly defeated (Rev 19:15-16; see Psalm 2). The martyr, therefore, does not witness against all national or tribal identifications per se, but to their relative, penultimate significance.

Thomas Beckett is actually given back to England as her martyr (or at least to Canterbury) – and seen as a focus of national pride. Eliot's play itself is a demonstration of English ownership of this martyr, even in the 1930s. This is an ambivalent side of the story: the ‘having’ of martyrs and saints by various locales perhaps fosters the very kind of tribalism that the martyr dies to avoid. However, there is a sense in which Thomas’ rejection of Englishness as an absolute makes a godly pride in Englishness possible. In addition, the telling and re-telling (or rather, re-enacting) of the martyr’s tale stands as a rebuke to a certain form of nationalism – as evidence of its self-destructive consequences.

This is of course in marked contrast to the use of martyrology as a way of establishing the rightness of my cause and my identity as a victim: this is what suicide bombers do...
[1] ‘Heritage and Decay’ in Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 103-33

Is Australia a Christian Society?

TS Eliot wrote this rather odd book (did he write any other kind?) called 'The Idea of A Christian Society' just before WWII. He saw that English society could choose to become entirely secular (which it has) or actually try to become a 'Christian' society in some way. He meant this in that the society's faith would shape its rhythms of daily, weekly and annual life and its laws and its practices. Sunday rest, for example, would probably be evidence of a 'Christian' society...

The thesis of the book has added and surprising relevance given the current challenge of Islamic theocracy.

In Australia things are of course different. In one sense we have always been secular in psyche. In another sense, you could say that our secularism is a very Christianised secularism, and that the 'mainstream' churches still have a greater hold than they do in Canada, Europe and Britain and even the US. What ever vision of the good remains in Oz in any unified sense is a baptised one. It is the prodigal child of a Christian one. "Compassion" for example, a commonly cited virtue by secular Australians - yet I heard Prof Edwin Judge once argue that compassion was unthinkable without Christianity. Compassion, generosity, forbearance and humility have been taught to us from Christian sources.

The ongoing popularity of faith schools is intriguing too: there is a general recognition from the general public that you can't educate merely out of a sense of 'right' only - you must have some sense of the good, and the neutral secular space can't offer it without becoming what it can't be. Secularism cannot deliver a compelling vision of the good that we are happy to hand on to our children.... [This despite the terrible memories that many people seem to have of Church education!]

Which doesn't really answer the question - but suggests that Australia is still only a generation away from the Christian society it may have once been.

Flying the flag?

Hey, it is great that we made it through to the next round of the world cup. I have even bought me a cheeky gold Aussie shirt to wear in amongst the St George crosses that have swamped England.

Should I wear it to church?

(This is a 'serious' question in that I am asking 'is it appropriate to go meet with one's brothers and sisters in Christ flying the symbol of another - and divisive - allegiance'?)

Matthew’s gospel (4:1-12) reverses the order of the second and third temptations as you find them in Luke. In Dostoevsky’s famous discussion of the temptations in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ from The Brothers Karamazov, this temptation (placed second) is read more with an emphasis on the miraculous aspect. Christ’s refusal of the third temptation, i.e. to bow down to Satan himself, makes the Grand Inquisitor angry because the Church has had to make up the power difference for humankind by intervening.

Barth’s reading differs markedly in that he points out that the scene is not played out on a public stage but has only the two actors. The temptations for him are more about Jesus and his fitness for his task than they are about what humanity will observe.

As if to underscore the invitation to intertwine the holy with the secular, the setting of the third temptation is given as the temple of God in Jerusalem: he stands upon its pinnacle, looking down. In this temptation, Satan plays at piety by quoting the words of Psalm 91 to Jesus. What he invites Jesus to do, apparently, is merely to trust the God in whose name such words of confident hope were uttered. To step off the peak is to pitch headlong into the promise of God himself; but to do so in a very curious way. Taking this step would be an attempt to take with his own hands of what God has promised. It is the making of faith into something which forces the hand of God. As Barth writes:

In an act of the supreme piety…He would have betrayed the cause of God by making it His own cause, by using it to fulfill His own self-justification before God.

It is ‘supreme piety’ perhaps, but this supremely pious leap would have been a leap away from the will of God. This temptation is rejected by Jesus on the grounds that it is a putting of God himself to the test.

It is treating divine power as the wheel that must turn your way, if only you can act upon it with the right amount of force...

some themes in theology...

Being away from home is a good time for self-reflection. So: what would I like to see in a Sydney Evangelical Anglican theology? What themes (and how) have emerged (for me at least) as important and perhaps distinctive - what are the great benefits of theology the way I have learnt it from Moore and Sydney? What themes might appear as correctives to our tradition? Here is a short list:

0 - something about the Trinity. David H. will help me here!

1 - A high view of scripture's authority but coupled with a robust and flexible doctrine of scripture. What this means is not an abstractly drawn doctrine of scripture, but rather a commitment to prioritise the content of scripture. A plain reading of scripture, but not a literalistic or wooden one... Biblical Theology has taught us that the big picture, the grand narrative sweep of the bible is where the action is. (This is why inerrancy is not at all emphasised even by those who would hold it.).

2 - 'the gospel of Christ' as a prominent theme and not just 'Christ' abstracted from the message about him.

3 - the huge importance of eschatology: not pre-mill or post-mill or any of that guff, but as a biblical/theological theme conditioning all the others, and helping us not to fall into speculations or abstractions. (we are not much interested in 'decrees', or causes, or any of that palaver...).

4. A very positive and full doctrine of creation (and new creation) - which leads to a commitment to the world. The resurrection as a sign of this.

5. Sin and evil are radical both individually and globally and so:

6. GRACE (via the cross) is an absolute... it is the start and end of the Christian life - the great reformation cry of justification by faith alone!

7. Yes, penal substitutionary atonement, but as conditioned by the Trinity, and as seen in the context of the other descriptions of the atonement in the scriptures and certainly with an emphasis on the willing obedience of the Son turning aside God's wrath.

8. the priority of the local church as 'the church' as opposed to the denominations. But at the same time a commitment to 'the church/es' in the whole world... no particular church polity has precedence: in fact overemphasis on particular church polities is usually silly.

9. Sacraments are effectual signs! And we ought to dig them! but they are enacted words, so ordered to the Word of God.

10. Oh yeah, God is sovereign, but LOVE is his supreme 'attribute' conditioning all the others. This is actually point 0 I think!



It's a draft. It's a beginning. We could say more....


Please feel free as a non Syd Ev. Anglican to comment!

Antigone and tragic choices

As Nussbaum notes, the strategy of conflict elimination as a solution to the problem of bad luck was a prominent theme in 5th Century tragedy; but has also a modern counterpart. The claim is that ‘the human being’s relation to value in the world is not, or should not be, profoundly tragic…that it is, or should be, possible without culpable neglect or serious loss to cut off the risk of the typical tragic occurrence.’ Sophocles' Antigone is a play, which, in Nussbaum’s reading, examines two attempts to achieve the kind of simplification of the structure of an agent’s commitments and loves that will head off conflict and promote security. This is one vision of eudaimonia achieved by two possible routes.

The plot revolves around the dispute between Antigone and King Creon over the unburied corpse of her brother Polynices, who had been killed attacking the city of Thebes. The religious obligation to bury the corpse (which Antigone desires) is in apparent conflict with the civic duty to leave it unburied as the body of an enemy. Creon does not appear conflicted, however, because he narrows his vision of practical reasoning to include only civic values. As the play opens, he seems to have succeeded in keeping the problem of misfortune at bay. His strategy, however, fails him as the plot unfolds: as he mourns for his dead son he repents of his inadequate practical reasoning that led him into such entanglements. Though it is generally agreed that Antigone’s vision is morally superior to Creon’s, Nussbaum argues that her moral vision is similarly limited. She likewise makes a simplification in her concept of the good: family bonds (and so, the religious duty to care for the dead bodies of family members) for her are the trump card. Nussbaum’s Antigone is at least able to recognize the contingent factors that impinge upon her: that her conception of value is vulnerable to some sets of circumstances. Her vision is ‘the more humanly rational and the richer of the two protagonists: both active and receptive, neither exploiter nor simply victim’.

Neither of these two responses is ultimately satisfactory, however. Antigone also eliminates conflicting obligations by means of a simplification of the world of value. Her subservience to duty makes her cold to other values and leads to her destruction. She is an agent who is more than ‘half in love with easeful death’; and blind to the true nature of piety. However, as Nussbaum shows, an optimistic Hegelian harmonization of the two responses is an option that the play countenances and rejects as well. Rather, she finds in the play

…a practical wisdom that bends responsively to the shape of the natural world, accommodating itself to, giving due recognition to, its complexities…To be flexibly responsive to the world, rather than rigid, is a way of living in the world that allows an acceptable amount of safety and stability while still permitting recognition of the richness of value that is in the world…

So: Nussbaum would argue (and in later pieces she makes these thoughts more explicitly her own) that Antigone shows that the avoidance of conflict is not only impossible: it is also undesirable for the eudaimonistic life. Practical wisdom actually demands that we acknowledge our own finitude and our vulnerability to external factors even those we might call ‘luck’. The conflict-free life would be reduced in value and beauty next to the life which is open to the possibility of conflict. For Nussbaum, managing risk is a matter of being ‘flexibly responsive’ to risk rather than eliminating it. This flexible posture towards the world involves using a specifically practical reason – a reason that does not imagine itself mastering the world and its circumstances but rather reflectively interacting with them.

Nussbaum: The Fragility of Goodness

Nussbaum describes her book as

…an examination of the aspiration to rational self-sufficiency in Greek ethical thought: the aspiration to make the goodness of a good human life safe from luck through the controlling power of reason.[1]

Human practical rationality is not a game played on a smooth playing surface, but rather one with surprising bumps and hollows.[2] Nussbaum finds in the philosophical and literary sources of ancient Greece two ‘normative conceptions’ of how would-be moral agents can respond to this condition. On the one hand, the agent can assert control through uninterrupted, pure activity and through emphasis on the rational aspect of human being over against the merely physical. The eudemonistic life envisaged here is solitary, unimpaired by reference to others. Plato in particular articulates a version of this response, though not uncritically.

On the other hand, the moral agent can be seen as sharing both active and passive components, with the recognition that there are external sources of power that inevitably limit the control one may reasonably expect to have over events. Under this conception, the eudemonistic life is lived alongside and with the cooperation of friends and loved ones.[3] Nussbaum’s Aristotle gives expression to a version of this second normative conception (which Nussbaum herself clearly favours).

A third way? What could a Christian version add?

[1] Martha Craven Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 3
[2] Nussbaum’s suspicion that the problem of luck - and so, risk – is one keenly felt by contemporary people is confirmed by Anthony Giddens, who argues that the culture of late modernity can be regarded as a ‘risk’ culture. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1991), p. 109-43
[3] Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, p. 20-1

Life is/as good ...

The vision of the life of Israel as the covenant people presented in the OT has its hedonistic side. It is not presented as a denial of this-worldly goodness but rather as a fulfillment of it. haretz(‘the land’) in Deuteronomy is characterized by its fruitfulness and by the enjoyment of its good pleasures (e.g. 7:12-18). The land is set aside, as Eden had been, for the activity and delight of the people of God together with him.

However, the warning that comes insistently and repeatedly to the people in Moses’ exposition of the law is not to forget the giver of the gifts in the midst of such luxury (e.g. 8:11ff). The peril of the easeful life is that of distraction from worship of Yhwh. The Sabbath was given prominence in the law as a means by which to avert the forgetfulness of the people. It was a celebration of both creation (Ex 20:11-12) and redemption (Dt 5:12-15) and consecrated to Yhwh as its originator.

In Deuteronomy’s version of the commandment, the memory of ceaseless slave-labour under Pharoah is invoked. By contrast, life for all in the land - including even livestock – is to be regulated by the divine rest. Here a rhythm of work and ease is built into the community’s life together as a signal of their identity. Rest is blessed as an activity that Yhwh himself enjoys; and it is also construed as an act of worship so that the delight in the pleasures of the created order and the benefits of redemption at Yhwh’s hand might not descend into mere hedonism and a corresponding neglect of the needs of the more vulnerable members of the community. The Sabbath is to be ‘an enactment of peaceableness that bespeaks the settled rule of Yahweh’.[1]

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), p. 185

Oops: just realised I posted this thing a few days ago... not that anybody seemed to notice! Thanks guys!

Nussbaum's method...

Martha Nussbaum uses a very interesting method of doing philosophical reflection. She does not write abstract pieces, but rather interacts with the dramatic and narrative texts of the classical period and also the modern novel. Literature, in other words.

She does so because 'speculative prose' is not the mode best suited to ethical thinking - something she says the Greeks recognised. This is not just a matter of form either: the choice that Plato made not to write in a literary form was a statement of what he thought he was doing as a philosopher.

As she writes:
Our Anglo-American philosophical tradition has tended to assume that the ethical text should, in the process of inquiry, converse with the intellect alone; it should not make its appeal to the emotions, feeligs, and sensory responses. Plato explicitly argues that ethical learning must proceed by seperating the intellect from our other merely human parts...The conversation we have with a work of tragic poetry is not like this. Our cognitive activity, as we explore the ethical conception embodied in the text, centrally involves emotional response. We discover what we think about these events partly by noticing how we fell; our investigation of our emotional geography is a major part of our search for self-knowledge.

I think what she says here could apply to much theological thinking, which proceeds as if the intellect must be seperated from our other merely human parts... And yet the major texts of Christianity - ie the Bible - do not come to us in that form... What would theology look like if it proceeded by a more Nussbaumian method?

Nostalgia and the Exile...

When we speak of longing for home as a theme in the OT, things are somewhat different in the Exilic period.

Rather than being called out from slavery towards a new life of freedom with Yhwh, she now found herself re-enslaved and outcast. The laments of exile exhibit a powerful tone of disconnection and longing characteristic of the nostalgic vision:

By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1-4) (stop thinking of disco music...)

The memory of Zion is invoked with all the pain of its bitter loss – and a song about the end of singing. The circumstances are very different from those of the Exodus: here is the forced removal of a people from their homeland and the attempted destruction of their identity as a people through enslavement (as had certainly happened to the tribes of the North).

Nostalgia might be forgiven a people in those conditions. Yet the Hebrew Scriptures – many of which date from this period or after – most assuredly do not present a nostalgic vision of the past. The climax of the narrative of the Former Prophets in the David-Solomon era is not presented merely as some Golden Era to which Israel should return with all haste. The prophetic call to restoration came with recognition that the old order was even at its height not yet all it could have been. Jeremiah, for example, envisioned a ‘new covenant’ surpassing the Exodus covenant because the torah would now be internalized by the people and not just mediated through the writing on stone tablets (31:31-34). Ezekiel’s great temple (Ez 40-48), described in such extraordinary detail, clearly exceeds the former temple in its globally significant dimensions and in its overflow of the divine glory (43:1-12). In the book of Haggai, the rebuilt temple is compared unfavourably to the old one; but the divine promise is that ‘the latter splendour of this house shall be greater than the former’ (Hg 2:9). The rise of apocalypticism in the latter half of Daniel and Zechariah suggests that longing for a mere repetition of Israel’s past was a cul-de-sac. On the historical horizon, no redevivus was possible. The consolation of Israel’s lament could not - would not - come in the form of a return to the past. Her previous faithlessness stood in the way of this; if the covenant were to be re-established, it would have to be on a new footing. Israel was to remember the past with tears; not those of longing but rather those of sorrow and confession, in preparation for the coming of Yhwh’s comfort and restoration (cf Is 40:1ff).

The scene which encapsulates this tension in the historical experience of Israel is found in Ezra 3:11-13. When finally the foundations of the new temple had been laid with the permission of Cyrus the Persian, there is described a scene of great celebration and joy. And yet, intermingled with this is the sound of the older generation – who had seen and now remembered the first temple – weeping aloud at the sight of the foundations. The result is a sound which is ambiguous:
…the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping, for the people shouted so loudly that the sound was heard far away (Ez 3:13)

The sorrow and joy blend so as to become indistinguishable. The text does not elevate one noise as the appropriate response to the moment over against the other here. The elders realize perhaps that the ‘Zion’ of their longings is not a matter merely of laying bricks in the ground. The new generation has on the other hand discovered in this moment not a new identity but the foundations of a new identity.

Martha C Nussbaum and Transcending Humanity

Martha C. Nussbaum wonders what to do with the yearning we all have to 'transcend' our humanity. "Human beings want to be immortal and ageless", she writes, and she's right. (This is what wrinkle cream is for, isn't it?) But the problem is when we find non-human, or humanity-denying solutions to this in an attempt to leave our humanity behind. What she yearns for is a way of transcending humanity ('internal transcendence') that at the same time affirms our humanity, in its bodily finitude and its dependence on others, its 'situatedness' (to borrow Benhabib's term). She rejects as incoherent the aspiration to leave behind altogether the constituitive conditions of our humanity and to seek for a life that is really the life of another sort of being.

Fair enough.

But she is sharp enough to realise that Christianity offers something entirely different to this in its vision of transcending humanity:

'what a profound response to the problem is embodied in Christianity...For Christianity seems to grant that in order to imagine a god who is truly superior, truly worthy of worship, truly and fully just, we must imagine a god who is human as well as divine, a god who has actually lived out the non-transcendent life and understands it in the only way it can be understood, by suffering and death.'

Her problem seems to be that she cannot see how the Christian ideal avoids lapsing into an 'external transcendence' of a non-human kind... She would prefer that we turn our longings for transcendence to this-worldly and humanity-affirming activities, striving for human excellences and to extend the capacity of human beings.

I would have thought that in Christ we have a both-and...

'Rest' and relaxation in Israel

The vision of Israel presented in the OT has its hedonistic side. 'ha-eretz' (‘the land’) in Deuteronomy is characterized by its fruitfulness and by the enjoyment of its good pleasures (e.g. 7:12-18). The land is set aside, as Eden had been, for the activity and delight of the people of God. The warning that comes insistently and repeatedly to the people in Moses’ exposition of the law is not to forget the giver of the gifts in the midst of such luxury (e.g. 8:11ff).

The peril of the easeful life is that of distraction from worship of Yhwh. The Sabbath was given prominence in the law as a means by which to avert the forgetfulness of the people. It was a celebration of both creation (Ex 20:11-12) and redemption (Dt 5:12-15) and consecrated to Yhwh as its originator. In the Deuteronomic version of the commandment, the memory of ceaseless slave-labour under Pharoah is invoked.

By contrast, life for all in the land - including even livestock – is to be regulated by the divine rest. Here a rhythm of work and ease is built into the community’s life together as a signal of their identity. Rest is blessed as an activity that Yhwh himself enjoys; and it is also construed as an act of worship so that the delight in the pleasures of the created order and the benefits of redemption at Yhwh’s hand might not descend into mere hedonism and a neglect of the needs of the more vulnerable members of the community. The Sabbath is to be ‘an enactment of peaceableness that bespeaks the settled rule of Yahweh’.[1]

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), p. 185

von Balthasar and impassability

In his Mysterium Paschale Hans Urs von Balthasar tries to understand how the incarnation and death of Christ can be squared with the eternal nature of God. Does God suffer in some way? Is he 'changeable'?

The idea he expounds here is that the incarnation and passion were already existing 'possibilities' or 'realities' within God himself from the beginning. The Lamb of Rev 13:8 was after all 'slain before the foundation of the world'.

He quotes PT Forsyth saying:
'There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all...His obedience as a man was but the detail of the supreme obedience that made him man.'

The cross in other words already 'exists' in the relationship of the Son and the Father from before all worlds... it is not a new thing in that sense. Or, it always was a new thing...

Creation 'Science' and Calvin

I have to say that Creation 'Science' makes me hopping mad (and perhaps it is too easy a target for hopping and not many of my readers will demurr, though I could be wrong)... so forgive the lack of balance in what follows. I know it comes from an often godly desire to uphold the authority of the Bible, but as such it is a human attempt and actually serves to diminish its authority. It is bad science, but - worse - it is bad exegesis and bad theology. Though well intended, it is apologetically disastrous.

I always think it is weird how the 'Creation' 'Science' people like Answers in Genesis put lists of qualified scientists on their website. On the one hand, 'Creation' 'Science' urges us to mistrust secular science and the academy; on the other, they plead for credibility from the very thing they repudiate. Which is to be? Further, though apparently we can't trust non-christian scientists to date the earth, we can trust them to come up with life-saving drugs... There seems to be a real confusion here.

Interestingly Calvin in his fabulous Institutes II.14-16 has a very high view of the capacity for 'secular' human science within its prescribed limits:

'if we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonour the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in slight esteem, we contemn and reproach the Spirit himself.'

Mmm... pears...

Augustine’s development of the biblical tradition intensifies the typological reading of the OT found in Hebrews and also in Paul. Human longing may have false objects, including that found in the form of nostalgia for the past. However, this longing for the soul’s true home has a true object in the city of God revealed in the Son. But it is not enough to say that this lies completely in the future: two more observations are required.
Firstly, the Son ‘Today’ reveals the time of the Father, such that the city of God is now here already present, and the Church in Christ is now already present in it. Though invisible, it is visible to the eyes of faith.
Second, Augustine’s point is that the fact of the longing itself reveals that is something remembered; and thus not only does the city of God lie ahead but it is also the soul’s origin. It is not then the longing for the past itself that is denied but rather any imperfect and merely penultimate objects of this longing.

Which for Augustine, means pears... He says in the Confessions:

'There is an appeal to the eye in beautiful things [like pears!]...This life we live here below has its own attractiveness, grounded in the measure of beauty it has and its harmony with the beauty of all lesser things....Yet in the enjoyment of al such things we commit sin if through immorderate inclination to them - for though they are good, they are of the lowest order of good - things higher and better are forgotten, even You O Lord...' (II.5)

Like Christ, the martyr experiences in the most extreme form the press of time.The witness that the martyr makes is to his renunciation of the nostalgic vision of the past with its ripe pears and her affirmation of homesickness for the kingdom of God.

At the crossroads...

The Church and its members stand at the crossroads between times, as it were; and the complete pattern of progress on the journey is not visible to it. And yet there is a sense in which the journey is already over, and the Church has come to its heavenly home.

In his poem “Burnt Norton” Eliot writes (with strong allusion to the incarnation and passion) ‘only through time time is conquered’. Is ‘conquered’ the best theological verb to use? The incarnation of the Logos in time offers time to a divine experiencing of it. Time, and its sinister twin, Death, were not avoided by him by transcended in him. If they are ‘conquered’ by him it is not because they are denied by him but rather because they are experienced by him. Both remain, but their negative affects are attenuated.

As von Balthasar (reading Augustine) says, temporality as it stands ‘is an absence of the creature from unified eternity’ – which means death. It is not possible to grasp eternity in time: even Augustine’s impressive inventory of his memory does not lead him unambiguously to that condition. It is only by obedience, and in ‘acceptance of the renunciation which is imposed upon him’ that the journeying Christian and the pilgrim Church can experience that indwelling of the eternal in the temporal.

Remembering Augustine

The Confessions themselves represent an attempt to adopt a stance to the past that avoids the nostalgic vision for the pre-conversion self. Augustine attempts not so much to have done with the past but to order it aright by narrating it as confessio - adopting a stance critical of his former self. What is intriguing in relation to our current discussion is the philosophy/theology of memory he gives in book X of the Confessions. Memory was described by Plato in terms of the soul’s reminiscence of its own origin within the world of ideas. Augustine baptises this conception;[1] and because the origin of the soul which it remembers is now the eternal and living God, the capacity of memory is found to have a indescribable depth. Commenting on 1 Cor 2:11 (‘no man knows the things of a man, save the spirit of a man that is in him’), he explains that it is only through God, whom man himself does not know, that man can know himself (X.5-6). God, then, lies within his memory, and yet is not contained by his memory.[2] This tension is replicated in the human subject itself: the vast caves of the memory hold immensities that are not conceivable even to the soul that contains them. Augustine’s subterranean journey through the caverns of his own memory leads to encounter with his own past self:

…in my memory too I meet myself – I recall myself, what I have done, when and where and in what state of mine I was when I did it. X.8

However, this strange meeting is partial and fleeting:

In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? X.8

How shall he then find the God for whom he searches? He equates the search for God with the search for ‘the happy life’ (X.20). This longing for the happy life is universal, he says, even amongst those who cannot consciously remember being happy, strictly speaking. Yet this longing for happiness is evidence that in fact all human beings have known the happy life – for if it were not in their memories they would not know it to love it.[3] God has never been absent from his memory, in fact; he always deigned to dwell in it:

Certain I am that You dwell in it, because I remember You since the time I first learned of You, and because I find You in it when I remember You. (X.25).

[1] Roland Teske, "Augustine's Philosophy of Memory," in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 150
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study (London; Sydney: Sheed & Ward, 1968), p. 2-3
[3] Teske, "Augustine's Philosophy of Memory," p. 154; Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study, p. 5

Calvin's reticence

I know it's not fashionable....

But I have been re-reading Calvin's Institutes of late. What has intrigued me in particular is his theological method. First of all, he starts from humankind and works out, like the good humanist that he was: knowledge of ourselves is what he seeks, though of course (and this is where he differs from an Erasmus) that knowledge will only be found in reference to God and in comparison to his holiness.

Calvin is insistent - repeatedly insistent - that theology must not indulge in speculation as to the inner working of the divinity. The scripture is a revelation which is accomodated (like a nurse-maid lisping!) to we daft human beings and our limited and corrupted faculties: we must reckon with that if we are tempted to look behind it and rationalise God's mysteries. There is certainly an inscrutability about Calvin's God...

Now I do think that the accomodation hermeneutic has its problems, especially when it is inconsistently applied (ie, when ever Scripture appears to contradict your theological system you say 'of course, this is just accomodationary'). But I really like Calvin's 'less is more' approach to theological reasoning. Seeking rationalist unificatory patterns behind the witness of the scripture is a dangerous practice.

Notably, he does not begin with election/predestination under the heading of the knowledge of God the creator, but places these doctrines much later, in his discussion of soteriology (ie how we are saved).

On Longing...

Nostalgia is a form of longing: specifically a romantic longing for the past. In her critical account of the ‘social disease’ of nostalgia in postmodernity, Susan Stewart defines it as ‘the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition’. That is to say nostalgia makes the idealized and exaggerated past into the site of immediacy, presence and authenticity. Stewart further describes nostalgia as a narrative form about the past which only heightens the sense of lack felt in the present. It focuses on what has been lost rather than what it is possible to gain. The problem is that nostalgia itself recognizes the very impossibility of a return to the past: hence the irony in Stewart’s definition which captures so well the temptation facing Thomas. As she puts it, nostalgia is ‘the desire for desire; it is a desire that folds back on itself in a deliberate (and for Stewart, self-destructive) sadness which is ultimately inauthentic.

Ultimately her accusation is that nostalgia makes an idol out of the past. Is this a bit harsh? I happen to like 80s parties and Happy Days... after all? Isn't innocent fun? Well not for Stewart: she sees this stuff as symptomatic of an ideological conservatism, a desire for comfort that blinds us to the urgent present. It is a malignant cultural tendency, for her.

There has to be place for a proper traditionalism that doesn't treat the past like nostalgia does. It would be easy to slip into a kind of amnesia without some way of bringing the past present. But there certainly is a fawning traditionalism: the kind that builds neo-gothic cathedrals in the Antipodes!

Of course, this is all reminiscent of the great theologian of longing: Augustine. Stewarts definition of nostalgia as ‘desire for desire’ meets its counterpart in Augustine’s confession of being ‘in love with love’ in his Confessions. In the latter part of the Confessions, Augustine writes powerfully about memory (revealing his Platonic influence). However the best memory - and the supreme and right object of the heart's longing - is the memory of the beatific vision which lies in the future!


Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 23