Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Blogging...
If you are any sort of blogger, you will have moments when you wonder about the medium and where it is all going... I admit to a faint embarassment when I admit off line that I have a blog. It is like admitting that you like to smoke... Because for some people contempt for blogs is stock in trade.
It is true that blogs contain some of the freshest ideas going... it is amazing what you can learn from reading blogs...but, also: I have never seen such undigested rubbish as I have seen on blogs. I have never encountered such nastiness as I have seen on blogs. In the old world, your average nutter was happily isolated. In the blogging world, your average nutter can actually find a whole community of nutters out there. Seeing some of the blogs that are out there reminds me that having a blog is no great achievement...
It is true that blogs contain some of the freshest ideas going... it is amazing what you can learn from reading blogs...but, also: I have never seen such undigested rubbish as I have seen on blogs. I have never encountered such nastiness as I have seen on blogs. In the old world, your average nutter was happily isolated. In the blogging world, your average nutter can actually find a whole community of nutters out there. Seeing some of the blogs that are out there reminds me that having a blog is no great achievement...
Friday, June 20, 2008
Stephen Edmonson writes:
‘These developments [ie, historical criticism et al] over the last four centuries have shut off any direct approporation of Calvin’s scriptural hermeneutic for contemporary interpreters concerned with the historical sense of the text. …it is problematic at this point to offer an historical reading of Scripture that is either unitive or generally theological, much less one that roots the unity of the narrative in a robust Christology. Calvin’s history is not our history.’
Hmm... So, what is the way forward for biblical theology? The genie can't just be put back in the bottle - can it?
‘These developments [ie, historical criticism et al] over the last four centuries have shut off any direct approporation of Calvin’s scriptural hermeneutic for contemporary interpreters concerned with the historical sense of the text. …it is problematic at this point to offer an historical reading of Scripture that is either unitive or generally theological, much less one that roots the unity of the narrative in a robust Christology. Calvin’s history is not our history.’
Hmm... So, what is the way forward for biblical theology? The genie can't just be put back in the bottle - can it?
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Bible read by Aussies?
In my investigations about audio bibles it struck me that there is no Aussie audio bible available. Does this matter? Would it be a powerful thing for Australians to hear the bible in their own language? Ought it not be a key component of Connect '09?
And: who would be a good actor/reader? And, which version would you choose?
And: who would be a good actor/reader? And, which version would you choose?
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Lectures - for or against?
A while back I wrote about what makes a good lecturer.
I have been thinking - and reading - again about lectures and their place in tertiary education, and especially in the preparation of Christian ministers. Most seminaries I know of have a very heavily lecture-based programme, with few tutorials or seminars, if any. In contrast to university teaching, which is usually a rather sparsely arranged timetable of lectures, seminaries crowd their days with alloted teaching hours. Partly, I speculate, this is because of a view of theology as not only a method to be demonstrated but a body of knowledge to be passed on in an authoritative way by recognised teachers. Also, theology is such a composite of disciplines - language, history, text-interpretation, philosophy - that it is hard to leave anything out of the programme, or to allow for an option-based course of study.
But, speaking from my experience as a student, I found lectures a largely very frustrating and slow way to learn, unless the lecturer was peculiarly good. It is particularly inefficient if the lecturer feels he/she has to cover everything in a particular course, because the lectures are replacing the role played by a text book. Further, a lecturing style that depends on the questions of students loses impact with large classes. And, frankly, I am not interested in the ignorance of my fellow students (and neither are they in mine!). In theological colleges, lecturers are often too nice (believe it or not!) to students and pander too much to their worst vices (especially by catering to their passivity in learning...).
So: lectures - for or against? What are lectures good for? When do they work, when do they fail? What can a lecture give that you can't get from a book in less time?
I have been thinking - and reading - again about lectures and their place in tertiary education, and especially in the preparation of Christian ministers. Most seminaries I know of have a very heavily lecture-based programme, with few tutorials or seminars, if any. In contrast to university teaching, which is usually a rather sparsely arranged timetable of lectures, seminaries crowd their days with alloted teaching hours. Partly, I speculate, this is because of a view of theology as not only a method to be demonstrated but a body of knowledge to be passed on in an authoritative way by recognised teachers. Also, theology is such a composite of disciplines - language, history, text-interpretation, philosophy - that it is hard to leave anything out of the programme, or to allow for an option-based course of study.
But, speaking from my experience as a student, I found lectures a largely very frustrating and slow way to learn, unless the lecturer was peculiarly good. It is particularly inefficient if the lecturer feels he/she has to cover everything in a particular course, because the lectures are replacing the role played by a text book. Further, a lecturing style that depends on the questions of students loses impact with large classes. And, frankly, I am not interested in the ignorance of my fellow students (and neither are they in mine!). In theological colleges, lecturers are often too nice (believe it or not!) to students and pander too much to their worst vices (especially by catering to their passivity in learning...).
So: lectures - for or against? What are lectures good for? When do they work, when do they fail? What can a lecture give that you can't get from a book in less time?
This one's better?
Monday, June 16, 2008
Things Fall Apart - a sermon on Judges 19-21
I preached this sermon at St Mary's Maidenhead, 16 June, 2008. Apologies for posting it in full like this, but it helps me to have it here. Broughton Knox famously used to begin his sermon classes by saying 'where did this sermon fail?' I think I could make several suggestions! No doubt my friends in the blogosphere will be happy to add to my list.
"I want to start by turning with you to the last verse of the passage:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.
Being able to do as you see fit, or to being given the right to determine what is right for yourself sounds great, doesn’t it? One of the most famous graffiti slogans of the May 1968 student revolutions in France – that moment in recent which has proved incredibly influential in Western culture – was it is forbidden to forbid. That could be a motto for today: to find yourself as your own moral yardstick is exactly what we 21st century people think of as maturity and freedom. It is mature because determining what is right in your own eyes is taking responsibility for yourself and your own actions, isn’t it? It is freeing yourself from having moral training wheels and riding the full size adult bike. And it is the freedom to be true to yourself, not beholden to moral standards that are imposed on you from outside – whether that is in the name of God or someone else. Ultimately, what matters is being true to your own vision of what is right and wrong – acting according to your own deeply-held convictions and intuitions, being an authentic and individual person because you answer the call of the voice within you, in your heart, and because you reject the rules and regulations that come from without, imposed on your life by others. What is right for me is right for me, in my perspective – this at least I know, whether or not it is right for you or not. This is what we want our children to learn: an independence rather than a conformity in choosing right and wrong, an ability not to accept everything there are told. It sounds like the height of civilisation.
But what is it like to live in such a world? Can human beings live like this, with every doing as he or she sees fit? In Judges 19-21 we have a ghastly reminder of what life is really like when everyone in a society becomes his or her own judge. Even a society with a claim to be the people of God himself is capable of terrible cruelty. In reality, men and women – and especially men concerning women, it seems – are only too ready to be completely barbaric, given the opportunity. No matter how enlightened are our minds, the heart of humankind is dark.
The chapter we heard read for us is just the beginning of a series of events that are a blot on Israel’s history and show that the high hopes for Israel’s future are completely in tatters. Just as last week you saw that Israel had chosen to worship God not in the way he commanded but according to their own choices, they are now choosing to determine right and wrong for themselves. Noticeably missing from this episode is … a Judge. No redeemer is sent by God to liberate Israel from her captivity to another nation, the Philistines or whoever. And this is mainly because Israel is not invaded in this episode. She doesn’t need saving from the grip of another nation; here, she is in captivity only to her own corruption.
The story unfolds in three stages. First, in chapter 19 we have the strange episode of the Levite with no name and his concubine. It starts, as you heard, with the man pursuing his runaway girl to her father’s place. And no matter what the argument was between the couple, the father-in-law and the husband seem to get on famously, and so it is with some effort that the Levite actually makes to leave to go home. And that is what causes the problem, because they are caught out on the road as night approaches; and they are somewhat afraid of seeking hospitality among foreigners in the city of Jebus. The man says (look at vs 12) "No. We won't go into an alien city, whose people are not Israelites. We will go on to Gibeah." Of course – among fellow Israelites we will be safe.
It is a horrible error of judgement – though an understandable one. The old man takes them home from the city square in Gibeah; but the mob still gathers, and demands the visitor so they can rape him. Of course it reminds us very strongly of another incident in the Old Testament – the story of Lot entertaining the angelic visitors in the city of Sodom, whose citizens also demanded that he send out the men so that they could have sex with then. Now, make no mistake: in the old story, these were pagans, non-Israelites, and this was a story that showed how disgusting and barbaric they were. And this episode is the reason that God destroys the city utterly.
What is different now? The mob in question are from Israel, and so are their would-be victims. Israel has become as bad as ever Sodom was… that is the extent of their distance from the God who had redeemed them.
And just as Lot offered his virgin daughters to the mob instead of his visitors, here too, a misguided sense of hospitality reigns: the old man offers his own daughter and the concubine as substitute victims for the Levite (vs 24). In the end it is the Levite who pushes out his concubine to mob, so that they can gang-rape her.
In the morning, there she is on the step. Is she dead at this point? We don’t know: but her humanity has been taken – utterly betrayed and unprotected by her husband, she has been treated like a piece of meat by the mob. As if to underscore that she has been destroyed as a person by this terrible night, her husband – who clearly had a talent for grand public statements – hacks her into pieces and sends her in twelve grisly packages to the tribes of Israel. And, after they got over the surprise and the smell no doubt, verse 30 explains that Everyone who saw it said, "Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do!"
Well this then is the beginning of the second phase of the terrible tale; for the Israelites gather in response to the Levite’s call to work out what they ought to do about this terrible mob in Gibeah. Notice that Levite’s story tends to gloss over his own role in the death of his girl. It is self-justifying stuff – and our sympathy for him ought to drain away at this point. And so begins a terrible and destructive campaign of civil war, in which Israel, like the concubine, ends up being dismembered. There is death and destruction on a massive scale, even by today’s standards.
In this episode there is some inquiring after the Lord’s decision: but only as to which tribe is to go up first against the Benjamites (see vs 18). At the very opening of the book of Judges (1:2) is was the tribe of Judah who was to be in the vanguard against the Canaanites in winning the land. Once again, Judah is go ahead of the others: but this time, it is to their defeat.
Now this is an unexpected twist; why do they get defeated in this? Isn’t their cause right? Aren’t the Benjamites an awful crew of gang-rapists who need swift and sever justice? Isn’t the Lord behind that kind of thing? But this story isn’t as simple and straightforward as that. That Judah gets defeated here shows that in some way all Israel compromised, and that God won’t be manipulated by groups of human beings for their own purposes – especially in war.
We have to pass over the details of the civil war: it is enough to say that, like all civil wars, the consequences were devastating, the violence horrendous and the destruction enormous. The flower of Israel – all the best warriors and fighting men - are killed. By the end of the chapter, not only Gibeah but the whole tribe of Benjamin has been ruined. Only 600 men are left, even the women and children having been slaughtered in the struggle.
And now we reach the third part of the story: because the other tribes in Israel get caught in a bind here. See verse 1 - they make some rash promises – there are a few of those in Judges, aren’t there? – and then realise that they are dooming Benjamin to death. That they are hacking off one of their own limbs, because they are guaranteeing that Israel will never be whole again. And this, they realise effects them, because they will not truly be able to be Israel without Benjamin, yet they have promised not to provide them with wives. Here’s the dilemma, from vs 15ff:
15 The people grieved for Benjamin, because the LORD had made a gap in the tribes of Israel. 16 And the elders of the assembly said, "With the women of Benjamin destroyed, how shall we provide wives for the men who are left? 17 The Benjamite survivors must have heirs," they said, "so that a tribe of Israel will not be wiped out. 18 We can't give them our daughters as wives, since we Israelites have taken this oath: 'Cursed be anyone who gives a wife to a Benjamite.'
So, wives have to be found, and in large numbers… This leads to two mass abductions of women – firstly, of 400 virgins from Jabesh Gilead; and then 200 women of Shiloh are seized. This all because the Israelites are sticklers for their vows. Once again, their moral compass seems to be off: they are justifying the rape, en masse, of 600 women, because of their dutiful observance of their own promises. They have got things out of proportion... it is fair to say that here Israel is trying to do the right thing, trying to calculate the way forward through some very difficult problems. But in doing so it is coming up with some very tenuous and problematic solutions. In one sense, the behaviour of the mob in Gibeah – who are not trying to do good – is compounded by people who are trying to do good – to bring about restitution and righteousness. They only make it worse.
And so, by the end of the chapter the gap that the Lord in Israel made seems to be filled; but if you are a sensitive reader you won’t be feeling as if balance has been restored and all is right with the world and everything is tied up with a bow once again at this point. Something deeply troubling has occurred. The writer doesn’t shove it down our throats, mind you: he doesn’t have to. We can see that Israel looks as if it has completely unravelled. And so, we get to that strange ending of this blood-sodden book:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.
The results of Israel’s lack of attention to the word of God and their stubborn insistence in deciding what was right for themselves are plain to see. At this point, Israel is not different to the nations around. And we ought to pause here to remember just how contemporary this story is. It would be easy to see this story, and the other stories of the book of Judges as being part of another world. We don’t recognise the place names, and the customs. It can feel more like Mordor than here. But we can only think that with a wilful blindness to what we 21st century people are like. We think because of our technology that we are more civilised and less prone to this kind of outrageous behaviour, less willing to condone the mistreatment and rape of women, less liable to go to war for trivial or misplaced reasons. Only someone without access to a newspaper could think that this is so. The story of the concubine could have happened today. If there is anything the history of the 20th century has taught us, it is that the animal brutality of human beings is not far from the surface. As the scholar George Steiner once said:
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
Being cultured or sophisticated or educated doesn’t protect us from ourselves.
And not even being Christian does: the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which people hacked each other to death with machetes, involved professing Christians. In fact, before the genocide, Rwanda was called the ‘most Christian country in Africa’, with a strong evangelical church. And yet this did not prevent an orgy of murder and rape. The book of Judges serves as warning to us that being inattentive to the word of God can only lead to moral and social chaos. That moral independence we so desire, that we think is a sign of our maturity and freedom, that we think can be attained by superior education and advanced knowledge of science or even by correct and true religion, is in fact a dangerous temptation. Christians like us are just as capable of becoming blind to our faults as anyone else. Being told to look inside our hearts to discover there what is right and wrong is a frightening idea, if you know the true nature of the human heart.
So what are we to do? Let’s look again at that last verse:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.
Is this a suggestion that in fact Israel had its political system all wrong? That the answer to this chaos is to institute a centralised and powerful system of government capable of bring about some order, or exercising some decent authority? Is that what is needed?
It should only take you a minute to think through the later history of Israel to realise what a crock that suggestion is. You couldn’t have sat down in the dust, with the nation collapsed around you in the period of the exile and thought, well, yes, having a king was what we needed all along. Obeying the king who was intent on accumulating his own wealth and on providing shrines for all the other gods was not really any better than everyone doing as he saw fit, according to his own heart. What Israel really needed was not a systematic change of the style of government, but a king after God’s own heart – a ruler who would rule as God would rule, not in the interests of his own power, but for the good of all; and the people of Israel themselves needed a change of their own hearts.
This is where the book of Judges shows that it raises more questions than it answers. We can’t read it well without remembering that it is part of a bigger story – a story that tells of God’s faithfulness to his own promises as much as it tells of Israel’s repeated faithlessness. God alone fulfils his promises in this case despite of not because of his people. In fact, the two tribes that survived until the time of Jesus were… guess which? This is a huge encouragement at this point, of course: you might have thought at the end of the book of Judges that the whole Israel idea was dead and buried – or at best badly tainted. But God, the Lord of Israel, is not finished. And, he has provided for us in Jesus a king after his own heart: a true leader and Lord; and he has sent his Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we might respond to him in faith and obedience, as Israel failed to do.
We may well look around today and see that God’s people are in disarray. We can see deep uncertainty, even amongst avowed followers of Jesus Christ, as to what is right and what is wrong. We hear even Christians appealing to what their hearts are telling them over and against what the Bible plainly teaches. We are under tremendous pressure to conform to the culture around us, and in many ways we do just that. We are divided by multiple disagreements over things that are great and small. We are tempted to engineer our own solutions, or to trust in our own techniques and stratagems for building the church. And yet we need not be dismayed; because if Israel got this low and this corrupt and yet still God remained true, then we need not doubt him today.
God is working His purpose out as year succeeds year,
God is working His purpose out and the time is drawing near;
Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be,
When the earth shall be fill'd with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.
"I want to start by turning with you to the last verse of the passage:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.
Being able to do as you see fit, or to being given the right to determine what is right for yourself sounds great, doesn’t it? One of the most famous graffiti slogans of the May 1968 student revolutions in France – that moment in recent which has proved incredibly influential in Western culture – was it is forbidden to forbid. That could be a motto for today: to find yourself as your own moral yardstick is exactly what we 21st century people think of as maturity and freedom. It is mature because determining what is right in your own eyes is taking responsibility for yourself and your own actions, isn’t it? It is freeing yourself from having moral training wheels and riding the full size adult bike. And it is the freedom to be true to yourself, not beholden to moral standards that are imposed on you from outside – whether that is in the name of God or someone else. Ultimately, what matters is being true to your own vision of what is right and wrong – acting according to your own deeply-held convictions and intuitions, being an authentic and individual person because you answer the call of the voice within you, in your heart, and because you reject the rules and regulations that come from without, imposed on your life by others. What is right for me is right for me, in my perspective – this at least I know, whether or not it is right for you or not. This is what we want our children to learn: an independence rather than a conformity in choosing right and wrong, an ability not to accept everything there are told. It sounds like the height of civilisation.
But what is it like to live in such a world? Can human beings live like this, with every doing as he or she sees fit? In Judges 19-21 we have a ghastly reminder of what life is really like when everyone in a society becomes his or her own judge. Even a society with a claim to be the people of God himself is capable of terrible cruelty. In reality, men and women – and especially men concerning women, it seems – are only too ready to be completely barbaric, given the opportunity. No matter how enlightened are our minds, the heart of humankind is dark.
The chapter we heard read for us is just the beginning of a series of events that are a blot on Israel’s history and show that the high hopes for Israel’s future are completely in tatters. Just as last week you saw that Israel had chosen to worship God not in the way he commanded but according to their own choices, they are now choosing to determine right and wrong for themselves. Noticeably missing from this episode is … a Judge. No redeemer is sent by God to liberate Israel from her captivity to another nation, the Philistines or whoever. And this is mainly because Israel is not invaded in this episode. She doesn’t need saving from the grip of another nation; here, she is in captivity only to her own corruption.
The story unfolds in three stages. First, in chapter 19 we have the strange episode of the Levite with no name and his concubine. It starts, as you heard, with the man pursuing his runaway girl to her father’s place. And no matter what the argument was between the couple, the father-in-law and the husband seem to get on famously, and so it is with some effort that the Levite actually makes to leave to go home. And that is what causes the problem, because they are caught out on the road as night approaches; and they are somewhat afraid of seeking hospitality among foreigners in the city of Jebus. The man says (look at vs 12) "No. We won't go into an alien city, whose people are not Israelites. We will go on to Gibeah." Of course – among fellow Israelites we will be safe.
It is a horrible error of judgement – though an understandable one. The old man takes them home from the city square in Gibeah; but the mob still gathers, and demands the visitor so they can rape him. Of course it reminds us very strongly of another incident in the Old Testament – the story of Lot entertaining the angelic visitors in the city of Sodom, whose citizens also demanded that he send out the men so that they could have sex with then. Now, make no mistake: in the old story, these were pagans, non-Israelites, and this was a story that showed how disgusting and barbaric they were. And this episode is the reason that God destroys the city utterly.
What is different now? The mob in question are from Israel, and so are their would-be victims. Israel has become as bad as ever Sodom was… that is the extent of their distance from the God who had redeemed them.
And just as Lot offered his virgin daughters to the mob instead of his visitors, here too, a misguided sense of hospitality reigns: the old man offers his own daughter and the concubine as substitute victims for the Levite (vs 24). In the end it is the Levite who pushes out his concubine to mob, so that they can gang-rape her.
In the morning, there she is on the step. Is she dead at this point? We don’t know: but her humanity has been taken – utterly betrayed and unprotected by her husband, she has been treated like a piece of meat by the mob. As if to underscore that she has been destroyed as a person by this terrible night, her husband – who clearly had a talent for grand public statements – hacks her into pieces and sends her in twelve grisly packages to the tribes of Israel. And, after they got over the surprise and the smell no doubt, verse 30 explains that Everyone who saw it said, "Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do!"
Well this then is the beginning of the second phase of the terrible tale; for the Israelites gather in response to the Levite’s call to work out what they ought to do about this terrible mob in Gibeah. Notice that Levite’s story tends to gloss over his own role in the death of his girl. It is self-justifying stuff – and our sympathy for him ought to drain away at this point. And so begins a terrible and destructive campaign of civil war, in which Israel, like the concubine, ends up being dismembered. There is death and destruction on a massive scale, even by today’s standards.
In this episode there is some inquiring after the Lord’s decision: but only as to which tribe is to go up first against the Benjamites (see vs 18). At the very opening of the book of Judges (1:2) is was the tribe of Judah who was to be in the vanguard against the Canaanites in winning the land. Once again, Judah is go ahead of the others: but this time, it is to their defeat.
Now this is an unexpected twist; why do they get defeated in this? Isn’t their cause right? Aren’t the Benjamites an awful crew of gang-rapists who need swift and sever justice? Isn’t the Lord behind that kind of thing? But this story isn’t as simple and straightforward as that. That Judah gets defeated here shows that in some way all Israel compromised, and that God won’t be manipulated by groups of human beings for their own purposes – especially in war.
We have to pass over the details of the civil war: it is enough to say that, like all civil wars, the consequences were devastating, the violence horrendous and the destruction enormous. The flower of Israel – all the best warriors and fighting men - are killed. By the end of the chapter, not only Gibeah but the whole tribe of Benjamin has been ruined. Only 600 men are left, even the women and children having been slaughtered in the struggle.
And now we reach the third part of the story: because the other tribes in Israel get caught in a bind here. See verse 1 - they make some rash promises – there are a few of those in Judges, aren’t there? – and then realise that they are dooming Benjamin to death. That they are hacking off one of their own limbs, because they are guaranteeing that Israel will never be whole again. And this, they realise effects them, because they will not truly be able to be Israel without Benjamin, yet they have promised not to provide them with wives. Here’s the dilemma, from vs 15ff:
15 The people grieved for Benjamin, because the LORD had made a gap in the tribes of Israel. 16 And the elders of the assembly said, "With the women of Benjamin destroyed, how shall we provide wives for the men who are left? 17 The Benjamite survivors must have heirs," they said, "so that a tribe of Israel will not be wiped out. 18 We can't give them our daughters as wives, since we Israelites have taken this oath: 'Cursed be anyone who gives a wife to a Benjamite.'
So, wives have to be found, and in large numbers… This leads to two mass abductions of women – firstly, of 400 virgins from Jabesh Gilead; and then 200 women of Shiloh are seized. This all because the Israelites are sticklers for their vows. Once again, their moral compass seems to be off: they are justifying the rape, en masse, of 600 women, because of their dutiful observance of their own promises. They have got things out of proportion... it is fair to say that here Israel is trying to do the right thing, trying to calculate the way forward through some very difficult problems. But in doing so it is coming up with some very tenuous and problematic solutions. In one sense, the behaviour of the mob in Gibeah – who are not trying to do good – is compounded by people who are trying to do good – to bring about restitution and righteousness. They only make it worse.
And so, by the end of the chapter the gap that the Lord in Israel made seems to be filled; but if you are a sensitive reader you won’t be feeling as if balance has been restored and all is right with the world and everything is tied up with a bow once again at this point. Something deeply troubling has occurred. The writer doesn’t shove it down our throats, mind you: he doesn’t have to. We can see that Israel looks as if it has completely unravelled. And so, we get to that strange ending of this blood-sodden book:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.
The results of Israel’s lack of attention to the word of God and their stubborn insistence in deciding what was right for themselves are plain to see. At this point, Israel is not different to the nations around. And we ought to pause here to remember just how contemporary this story is. It would be easy to see this story, and the other stories of the book of Judges as being part of another world. We don’t recognise the place names, and the customs. It can feel more like Mordor than here. But we can only think that with a wilful blindness to what we 21st century people are like. We think because of our technology that we are more civilised and less prone to this kind of outrageous behaviour, less willing to condone the mistreatment and rape of women, less liable to go to war for trivial or misplaced reasons. Only someone without access to a newspaper could think that this is so. The story of the concubine could have happened today. If there is anything the history of the 20th century has taught us, it is that the animal brutality of human beings is not far from the surface. As the scholar George Steiner once said:
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
Being cultured or sophisticated or educated doesn’t protect us from ourselves.
And not even being Christian does: the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which people hacked each other to death with machetes, involved professing Christians. In fact, before the genocide, Rwanda was called the ‘most Christian country in Africa’, with a strong evangelical church. And yet this did not prevent an orgy of murder and rape. The book of Judges serves as warning to us that being inattentive to the word of God can only lead to moral and social chaos. That moral independence we so desire, that we think is a sign of our maturity and freedom, that we think can be attained by superior education and advanced knowledge of science or even by correct and true religion, is in fact a dangerous temptation. Christians like us are just as capable of becoming blind to our faults as anyone else. Being told to look inside our hearts to discover there what is right and wrong is a frightening idea, if you know the true nature of the human heart.
So what are we to do? Let’s look again at that last verse:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.
Is this a suggestion that in fact Israel had its political system all wrong? That the answer to this chaos is to institute a centralised and powerful system of government capable of bring about some order, or exercising some decent authority? Is that what is needed?
It should only take you a minute to think through the later history of Israel to realise what a crock that suggestion is. You couldn’t have sat down in the dust, with the nation collapsed around you in the period of the exile and thought, well, yes, having a king was what we needed all along. Obeying the king who was intent on accumulating his own wealth and on providing shrines for all the other gods was not really any better than everyone doing as he saw fit, according to his own heart. What Israel really needed was not a systematic change of the style of government, but a king after God’s own heart – a ruler who would rule as God would rule, not in the interests of his own power, but for the good of all; and the people of Israel themselves needed a change of their own hearts.
This is where the book of Judges shows that it raises more questions than it answers. We can’t read it well without remembering that it is part of a bigger story – a story that tells of God’s faithfulness to his own promises as much as it tells of Israel’s repeated faithlessness. God alone fulfils his promises in this case despite of not because of his people. In fact, the two tribes that survived until the time of Jesus were… guess which? This is a huge encouragement at this point, of course: you might have thought at the end of the book of Judges that the whole Israel idea was dead and buried – or at best badly tainted. But God, the Lord of Israel, is not finished. And, he has provided for us in Jesus a king after his own heart: a true leader and Lord; and he has sent his Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we might respond to him in faith and obedience, as Israel failed to do.
We may well look around today and see that God’s people are in disarray. We can see deep uncertainty, even amongst avowed followers of Jesus Christ, as to what is right and what is wrong. We hear even Christians appealing to what their hearts are telling them over and against what the Bible plainly teaches. We are under tremendous pressure to conform to the culture around us, and in many ways we do just that. We are divided by multiple disagreements over things that are great and small. We are tempted to engineer our own solutions, or to trust in our own techniques and stratagems for building the church. And yet we need not be dismayed; because if Israel got this low and this corrupt and yet still God remained true, then we need not doubt him today.
God is working His purpose out as year succeeds year,
God is working His purpose out and the time is drawing near;
Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be,
When the earth shall be fill'd with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Sacha Wittgenstein
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not about to make this a 'how cute is my kid' blog, but:
Sacha, aged 5, says to me the other day -
I am still thinking about it...
Sacha, aged 5, says to me the other day -
Opposite is opposite of same
I am still thinking about it...
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Audio Bibles
Hey - does anyone have any advice on audio bibles?
I would like to get one I can listen to in the car - so either one I can burn onto CDs, or one that is already on CDs.
I don't much like cheesy synth music in the background, but if that's the way it comes, so be it... NIV or ESV.
Let me know!
I would like to get one I can listen to in the car - so either one I can burn onto CDs, or one that is already on CDs.
I don't much like cheesy synth music in the background, but if that's the way it comes, so be it... NIV or ESV.
Let me know!
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Richard Muller, and the uses of tradition accounts/genealogies in theology
I have finally started reading Richard Muller's The Unaccommodated Calvin. And a scholarly work with a more authoritative tone I have yet discovered. Muller knows his stuff, and knows he knows his stuff. In a nutshell, his thesis is that Calvin needs to be understood in his own context and on his own terms, and that this yields a more complicated picture than the one we usually get. Calvin must not be accomodated to any latter-day matrix or theological system, whether Barthian or even 'Calvinist'. Furthermore, you cannot see him as utterly divorced from the intellectual context that preceeded him, even when he differed from it. And again: you can't conclude from a simple reading of the later edition of the Institutes that 'Calvin's doctrine of XYZ was...'. His writings are more complex and variegated than that. He showed more development and more subtlety.
So, is it possible to learn from Calvin, or indeed any figure from history, without the historian always blowing the whistle? Muller concludes, nicely that
A clever theologian can accomodate Calvin to nearly any agenda; a faithful theologian - and a good historian - will seek to listen to Calvin, not to use him. p. 188
But I want to know: how? Given all the caveats that Muller has laid down, is there any way of accessing Calvin for today? How would he have us do this?
Whch leads me to a methodological point. It is standard practice in theological (and some philosophical) thinking to give an account of the tradition in which you stand, and also to show how you are correcting a tradition that went wrong at point X with thinker Y. It's a rhetorically powerful move, of course. Theology does this much more than other disciplines, because it believes in continuity as essential: even Luther and Calvin were at pains to show that they were not merely innovators, for example. And yet, this is a process that is evidently fraught with danger. We can give a wry smile now at the neo-orthodox accounts of 'Calvin against the Calvinists', for example, which have been proven to be simplistic. John Milbank has been taken to task for his sloppy readings of Dun Scotus (Milbank cites Scotus as the point at which theology got it all wrong and it has been downhill ever since).
But, under Muller's method, is such a process even possible? Is it possible to narrate the tradition in the way that theologians of all colours do as a matter of course?
So, is it possible to learn from Calvin, or indeed any figure from history, without the historian always blowing the whistle? Muller concludes, nicely that
A clever theologian can accomodate Calvin to nearly any agenda; a faithful theologian - and a good historian - will seek to listen to Calvin, not to use him. p. 188
But I want to know: how? Given all the caveats that Muller has laid down, is there any way of accessing Calvin for today? How would he have us do this?
Whch leads me to a methodological point. It is standard practice in theological (and some philosophical) thinking to give an account of the tradition in which you stand, and also to show how you are correcting a tradition that went wrong at point X with thinker Y. It's a rhetorically powerful move, of course. Theology does this much more than other disciplines, because it believes in continuity as essential: even Luther and Calvin were at pains to show that they were not merely innovators, for example. And yet, this is a process that is evidently fraught with danger. We can give a wry smile now at the neo-orthodox accounts of 'Calvin against the Calvinists', for example, which have been proven to be simplistic. John Milbank has been taken to task for his sloppy readings of Dun Scotus (Milbank cites Scotus as the point at which theology got it all wrong and it has been downhill ever since).
But, under Muller's method, is such a process even possible? Is it possible to narrate the tradition in the way that theologians of all colours do as a matter of course?
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Thanks are due...
My interest in the topic of human identity – and the thought that Christian martyrdom might have some bearing on it – was provoked in the first instance by my daily encounters with the teenage skeptics that inhabited the classrooms of St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney, Australia, where I was School Chaplain from 2000-03. They were adamant that they were not going to accept a thin gruel of moralism from me as an alternative to the freedom to choose who to be on their own terms. Clearly, different ways of being a self were at issue. Thanks are due to them for not allowing their resident theologian to be happy with the glib answers that came immediately to mind.
I have been richly blessed by having, in Professor Oliver O’Donovan and Dr Bernd Wannenwetsch and more latterly Professor Nigel Biggar, teachers of the finest calibre in the field of moral theology. I am grateful in particular for the direction and stimulus given by my supervisor Dr Wannenwetsch throughout the writing of the thesis; and for his scholarly and personal example.
I would not have been able to consider coming to Oxford at all if not for the remarkable generosity of Mr Vanda Gould. In addition, he has been a source of prayerful encouragement and pastoral care to the whole family in his regular visits, emails and phone calls. I would like also to thank the Trustees of the Joan Augusta Mackenzie Travelling Scholarship, and the Principal, Bursar and Council of Moore Theological College, Sydney, for the Roberts Prize and other discretionary funds that were made available to us during our time in the UK. We have been truly blessed in this regard.
Friends new and old have been an integral part of the mostly solitary experience of writing a thesis. In particular, Kosta Milkov, Christopher Barnett and Guido de Graaff have been magnificent fellow travellers, along with Russ Dawn, Jonathan Brant, Matheson Russell and Charles Byrd. Reading new theological texts with the members of OXCAT on Friday afternoons has kept me going; and it was a joy to rediscover Calvin and more with Sam Allberry. We will never forget the welcome and support of the staff and members of St Ebbe’s Church of England. Justin Moffatt and David Höhne kept chivvying me along; Alan Lukabyo and Stephen Jacobs kept writing real letters, on actual paper. Bec Watson and Karen Beilharz sent Campos coffee beans. My sister, Anna Cox, and her husband Matthew brought me a new computer when the old one died. There were people I hardly know - and some I do - who stopped by my blog to give me helpful advice or pointed me to an overlooked reference.
My parents-in-law, Richard and Jackie Wallder, did not live to see the end of this project, though they were instrumental in it coming to pass. We miss them. To my own parents I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude. My mother, Christine Jensen, made more than one trip from Australia to keep us all going. My father, Peter Jensen, has read and re-read my work, often telling me what it was that I was trying to say when it had become unclear even to me. I don’t know what I would have done without him.
These years, though not without trials, have been happy ones for a young family. The joy of my life continues to be that I share it with my four intriguing and wonderful children, Simon, Sacha, Matilda, and our very own English rose, Freya; and with Catherine, who bore the load more than anyone, and to whom this thesis is dedicated, with love.
I have been richly blessed by having, in Professor Oliver O’Donovan and Dr Bernd Wannenwetsch and more latterly Professor Nigel Biggar, teachers of the finest calibre in the field of moral theology. I am grateful in particular for the direction and stimulus given by my supervisor Dr Wannenwetsch throughout the writing of the thesis; and for his scholarly and personal example.
I would not have been able to consider coming to Oxford at all if not for the remarkable generosity of Mr Vanda Gould. In addition, he has been a source of prayerful encouragement and pastoral care to the whole family in his regular visits, emails and phone calls. I would like also to thank the Trustees of the Joan Augusta Mackenzie Travelling Scholarship, and the Principal, Bursar and Council of Moore Theological College, Sydney, for the Roberts Prize and other discretionary funds that were made available to us during our time in the UK. We have been truly blessed in this regard.
Friends new and old have been an integral part of the mostly solitary experience of writing a thesis. In particular, Kosta Milkov, Christopher Barnett and Guido de Graaff have been magnificent fellow travellers, along with Russ Dawn, Jonathan Brant, Matheson Russell and Charles Byrd. Reading new theological texts with the members of OXCAT on Friday afternoons has kept me going; and it was a joy to rediscover Calvin and more with Sam Allberry. We will never forget the welcome and support of the staff and members of St Ebbe’s Church of England. Justin Moffatt and David Höhne kept chivvying me along; Alan Lukabyo and Stephen Jacobs kept writing real letters, on actual paper. Bec Watson and Karen Beilharz sent Campos coffee beans. My sister, Anna Cox, and her husband Matthew brought me a new computer when the old one died. There were people I hardly know - and some I do - who stopped by my blog to give me helpful advice or pointed me to an overlooked reference.
My parents-in-law, Richard and Jackie Wallder, did not live to see the end of this project, though they were instrumental in it coming to pass. We miss them. To my own parents I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude. My mother, Christine Jensen, made more than one trip from Australia to keep us all going. My father, Peter Jensen, has read and re-read my work, often telling me what it was that I was trying to say when it had become unclear even to me. I don’t know what I would have done without him.
These years, though not without trials, have been happy ones for a young family. The joy of my life continues to be that I share it with my four intriguing and wonderful children, Simon, Sacha, Matilda, and our very own English rose, Freya; and with Catherine, who bore the load more than anyone, and to whom this thesis is dedicated, with love.
Monday, June 02, 2008
Handing in, today
Today's the day I hand in my thesis.
I am sure it will be an anti-climactic feeling... and then the waiting to have it assessed...
I am sure that I will discover a typo minutes after collecting it from the printers.
But, it is finished...
I am sure it will be an anti-climactic feeling... and then the waiting to have it assessed...
I am sure that I will discover a typo minutes after collecting it from the printers.
But, it is finished...
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