An Evangelical Manifesto

H/T to Craig for this: a group of prominent Evangelical leaders in the US have released this statement, entitled 'An Evangelical Manifesto'. It is not brief - 7,000+ words - but, by golly, it is fascinating. It is an attempt to grab back Evangelical identity from its political uses in the US, and to distinguish Evangelicalism from fundamentalism. Here's a bit to chew on:

...the Evangelical message, "good news" by definition, is overwhelmingly positive, and always positive before it is negative. There is an enormous theological and cultural importance to the power of No, especially in a day when Everything is permitted and It is forbidden to forbid. Just as Jesus did, Evangelicals sometimes have to make strong judgments about what is false, unjust, and evil. But first and foremost we Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything. The Gospel of Jesus is the Good News of welcome, forgiveness, grace, and liberation from law and legalism. It is a colossal Yes to life and human aspirations, and an emphatic No only to what contradicts our true destiny as human beings made in the image of God.

There's much more, too. It needs thinking about and digesting.
Notable names amongst the signatories include Miroslav Volf, Kevin Vanhoozer, Darrell Bock, Leighton Ford, Walter Kaiser and Alvin Plantinga.

Sin in the Life of the Believer - 1

Sin is a remarkably persistent feature of the Christian life.

At least, it is of mine.

Despite of all the thousands of sermons, the stirring songs, despite all the evenings spent in bible study groups, the private prayer and bible study, the encouraging words of other Christians, the evident work of God in and around me, the conventions and conferences – I still look into my heart and find there envy, lust, anger, pettiness, selfish ambition, meanness and greed. Quite a collection, isn’t it? And I have become used to seeing them there, and resigned to it. They do not shock me at all. “After all”, I tell myself, “we will always sin this side of Jesus’ return.”

But in the life of a Christian, sin is an absurdity. In the unbeliever, sin is a symptom of rebellion against God’s authority. But the Christian has submitted to God’s authority, and received new life and has a life hid with Christ in God, and faces no condemnation. The Christian is no longer a slave to sin. Yet, sin still rides on the Christian like a stowaway. We live within a world-wide-web of evil; and despite the call to be different to it, we still log on. We still suffer the effects of sin; and we still transmit them.

Even more than suffering, the absurdity of sin leads to spiritual despair. “ I know it’s wrong and I know Christianity is true” said the high school student in my office. “But I just can’t handle life as a hypocrite and I don’t think I can give up going to parties and drinking too much. Life with a conscience is too hard.” The presence of those creeps in my own heart causes me to despair ever of overcoming them and so I give way to their power. They make everything so complicated. I feel like a drowning man.

So, what to do then?

Ambrose on Justice

A great discovery for me has been the writing of Ambrose of Milan. It is striking how contemporary he is in charting a course between submission to the state and subversion of it. Here he is writing about justice in The Duties of Clergy (which I think he grasps in a beautifully biblical way):

The foundation, then, of justice is faith, for the hearts of the juts are precoccupied with faith; and the person who justly accuses himself constructs his justice upon good faith, for his justice is apparent when he confesses the truth. So the Lord says through Isaiah, "Behold I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone." This refers to Christ as the foundation of the church. For the faith of all believers is simply Christ; and the Church is, as it were, the form that justice takes, the common right of all. Her prayer is the prayer of the community' her works are the works of the community; her trials are the trials of the community. A just man, in sum, worthy of Christ, is someone who accepts that he is not his own. And that is why Paul insisted that Christ must be the foundation; because faith is the foundation of our works of justice, it is on him that they should be constructed.

1 Samuel 13-31 - 6

So the damage of Saul has taken a lifetime to undo, even though he appeared doomed from the start of his reign. Kingship has not yet proved a solution for Israel for their complaint. While Saul is not portrayed as greedy in the way Samuel feared kings would be, he is vain, lazy, rash, moody and willful. Sometimes he is just plain stupid. The narrative portrays him as to blame for his own downfall; but at the same time, there is nothing he can do to change the outcome, it seems. The hand of Yhwh is guiding events as always. In one sense, too, Saul takes the wrap for the folly of Israel in demanding a king. The wickedness of Israel in pleading for a king has had devastating effects. She has learnt a terrible lesson; the new true king had better take note, and Israel with him. Otherwise the terrible consequence of disobedience – that God would stop communicating with them – would be meted out on them too.

Was he doomed from the very start? D.M.Gunn is a scholar who thinks so, and points to the deliberate contrast between God’s instruction to Samuel to “appoint for them a king” in 1 Sam 8:22 and his later announcement that he had provided for himself a king from the sons of Jesse in 16:1. By this reading, Saul is a king who cannot succeed because he was never truly acknowledged by God as his choice in the first place. The rejection of Saul is God’s response to the people’s rejection of him. This perhaps explains why Saul is condemned for apparently trivial offences – when later we see David doing worse and surviving as king. But as the rejection sayings in 15:23, 26 insist, it is Saul’s repudiation of Yhwh that has provoked Yhwh’s repudiation of Saul.

On the other hand, there is no question but that David is the right man. He is a model of trust in Yhwh and loyalty to his anointed, although of course ironically it is he who is the true anointed. He refuses to take matters into his own hands and assassinate Saul (and Nabal); but rather trusts in the promise and intention of Yhwh who will manage events without David’s intervention. That said, he is also portrayed as decisive, charismatic and effective: brutal when necessary but also just. He is not greedy for spoil as Samuel had feared a king would be. Are there perhaps some shadows emerging in David’s character? The incident with Abigail innocently shows his weakness for a pretty feminine face. Certainly as a military figure he involved in killing on a large scale. He appears to sail close to the wind with his pragmatism when he makes friends with King Achish, and was apparently only providentially spared from warring with Israel.

The joy of being CROSS

I was thinking just this morning how much of my internet browsing involves finding reasons to get cross. There are websites that make cross; blogs that make me cross; discussion forums that make me very cross; and so on. For example, I always read Mike Carlton of the Sydney Morning Herald not because I agree with him EVER, but because he makes me so jolly cross. And it is amazing how much emotional energy I can waste on this. Believe me, I have lost sleep over internet discussions. Real sleep! There are really valuable online debates that you can observe and participate in, but sometimes it isn't worth it all.

I am saying this not merely as a personal confession (perish the thought) but because I think I am not the only one! Being cross is a strangely addictive feeling. It gives one a sense of high dudgeon and moral outrage and self-righteousness. It gives one a sense of purpose in a strange way. By which I mean: we actually enjoy our crossness. Love it. It is a form of entertainment.

But how pathetic is it, really?

Change your life...

It's part of the Berlin wall...

1 Samuel 13-31 - 5

However the story is interrupted at this point by the terrible narrative of the witch or medium of Endor. Saul enlists the help of a medium to raise the ghost of a rather grumpy Samuel. As appropriate to Torah, Saul had expelled all the witches and wizards from the land, but now he has need of one and so goes contrary to his own principles. Once again, Saul is seen to have the desire to consult Yhwh but on his terms and using inappropriate means. His consulting the spirit of Samuel is a desperate act, as he himself says. God no longer replies to him by prophets or by dreams. Samuel’s answer is doom –laden – a prophecy of the death of Saul and his sons at the hands of the Philistines.

The stage is set for the collapse of the house of Saul at the hand of the Philistines and David. However, David is prevented from making the blunder he has so far avoided ie fighting against the anointed of Yhwh. He is spared the ignominy of warring with God’s people. The other Philistine kings reject Achish’s trusted mercenary (who ironically has been lying to him all along). Thus by the providential hand of Yhwh David takes no active part in Saul’s downfall and is also kept a free force able to fight for Israel when the Philistines defeat the armies of Saul and Jonathan.

The Ziklag incident (ch.30) delays the end further. We see in this episode David the great warrior, taking command of his potentially murderous group in the aftermath of a devastating raid by the Amalekites; and organizing successfully to take his revenge. David is a man of decisive action and military ability; but he also takes great care to distribute the spoils of victory in a just way. Here is perhaps a king who will not take, take, take: but one who will give. In vs 26 David’s language starts to assume the tone of one who fights the fights of Yhwh: he speaks there of “the spoils of the enemies of the Yhwh”, as he hands over the loot to the elders of Judah.
The final scene of 1 Samuel is the defeat of Saul and the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. The pathos is maintained by Jonathan’s death: we the readers are not to feel too triumphant here. The demise of this flawed king comes at the cost of defeat for Israel. Ironically, it is Saul himself who lifts up his hand against Yhwh’s anointed – perhaps this too is a false step, proving Saul a blunderer to the last. The bodies of Saul and his sons are shamed by the Philistines in the same way David had dismembered the fallen Goliath. The territories of Israel beyond the Jordan are occupied by the Philistines; and so the reign of David begins with a military complication that needs resolving.

1 Samuel 13-31 - 4

Interestingly, David’s deviation from religious practice in the Abinadab episode is not classed as disobedience in the way that Saul’s religious deviations were. Why?

The incident of Nabal and Abigail illustrates contrasting responses to Yhwh’s anointed. Abigail’s resourcefulness and her beauty win her a husband and David and his men win provisions. This is an interesting variation on a stock rape and pillage by a maraudering band. David does not have to steal Abigail from her stupid husband. Rather he is struck down by Yhwh. Abigail’s speech to David captures in a nut-shell the presentation of David in this story, 25:30ff: “and when the Lord has done to my lord according to al the good that he has spoken concerning you, and has appointed you prince over Israel, my lord shall have no cause of grief, or pangs of conscience, for having shed blood without cause or for my lord taking vengeance himself.” The long-term benefit of a clear conscience outweighs the rash moment of anger, even when it is provoked. Nabal’s death at the Lord’s hand without David’s intervention foreshadows the death of Saul to come.

David’s alliance with the King of Gath shows the level of desperation he has reached, as he explains in 27:1. This wins David peace from Saul, but obviously puts him in an invidious position: living outside Israel and in league with her enemies. By being more than a little loose with the truth, David is able to convince Achish that he is making raids on Israelite territories, when in fact he and his men were attacking the Canaanite tribes. It seems in 28:1-2 that David will even fight against Israel, such is the trust he has won. What will happen? Will David prove to be a mercenary of questionable loyalty, happy to kill the men of Israel?


to be continued

1 Samuel 13-31 - 3

At the end of the story Saul appears to have forgotten the name of his court harpist: it may be that we do not have a strict chronological series of events presented here. At this point the close relationship between Jonathan and David begins. This is the tragic romance of the book: Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as his own soul. Of course we reading from our cultural perspective find the closeness of their relationship quite confronting and more than a little homoerotic. David’s relationships with the women in his life do not seem as deep or affectionate. However, we must be careful not to project our own cultural expectations back on to the text at this point. The affection between the two young men, as we readers know, complicates matters extraordinarily. Jonathan is the heir apparent. It is he who stands to lose most from the rise of David and the fall of Saul. Yet he is a model of faithful friendship, protecting David from Saul’s rages in chapter 20, and providing for his escape by the symbol of the arrow. We readers know that Jonathan is a major obstacle to the rise of this second king in Israel; which heightens the tragedy for us as we realize that these close friends must eventually be separated. What the bond between the two men ensures for us is that this civil war between David and Saul is not a struggle to be continued by their descendents. Even the man who stood to lose most saw in David the true destiny of Israel according to Yhwh’s choice.

Saul’s envy of David grows with David’s success and fame. The women of Israel sing “Saul has slain his thousands, but David has slain his tens of thousands.” Even in the process of arranging marriage to Michal, David excels himself by returning with twice the number of Philistine foreskins as a comically grisly present for his king. In 18:28 Saul comes to the fatal realization: Yhwh is with David, and even Saul’s daughter loves him. Saul thus veers between anger and fear, with murderous consequences. From then on, David becomes a man on the run, hunted by Saul and operating as a freedom fighter on the boundaries of Israel. He never quite pursues out and out war with Saul; but he does make a tentative alliance with the Philistines, especially King Achish. In 24 and 26 we are told of incidents where David had the chance to kill Saul and yet held back, both taunting Saul with his power over him and assuring him of his respect for Yhwh’s anointed. This technique of the repetition of similar stories in the same narrative is commonly used in biblical literature: and yet critics of the old school have viewed this as sloppy editing or the presence of two traditions or versions of the same incident. However, as Robert Alter shows in his book The Art of Biblical Narrative, the repetition of two very similar scenes is a literary device the authors of scripture deploy quite deliberately.

To be continued

Black Watch

In a comment on a previous discussion, Drew alerted me to a very recent play, Black Watch. The play follows in the tradition of Journey's End, and The Long and the Short and the Tall, stage plays which described the horrors of war. Black Watch, based partly on interviews with real soldiers, does it for the current Iraq war.

Towards the end, one of the officers offers a monologue including this comment:

We in the West have failed to understand the logic of suicide terrorism. The choice to become a religious martyr is the outcome of a struggle to establish an identity in adolescence. The possibility of death, once accepted, presents an alternative idea of the self as a religious warrior. They're looking for glory, and they seem to be finding it in martyrdom. Glory, however, is something which my boys are very unlikely to emerge with. The controversy around this war means there'll be no victory parade for us... (p. 58)

I am interested that this text connects some of the themes of my study. Interestingly, the play is about the struggle for identity and an idea of self in the young soldiers on the Western side...Of course, I think Christian martyrdom evades this characterisation. This comment is revealing as to the extent that martyrdom is understood as a flashpoint... it's the possibility of death. In the West, it isn't accepted that this could present an alternative and valid idea of the self...

1 Samuel 13-31 - 2

The stage is obviously set for the entry of David, the man truly after God’s own heart.

Once again, the narrator comes at this important moment from several angles: his anointing by Samuel in Bethlehem, his ability as a musician and the slaying of Goliath. As we meet the shepherd boy we are told he “ruddy, and had beautiful eyes and was handsome”: he has the charismatic looks of a potential hero. That he is the least of the sons of Jesse is emphasized in 16:1-13: once again the Lord has chosen contrary to human expectation. He is anointed in this private way by Samuel, so that now in Israel there are two anointed kings, a situation that obviously needs resolution.

The David and Goliath story, which the narrator tells in detail, introduces David as a warrior in Israel. Like the boy Samuel, the boy David is able to teach his elders something about trust for Yhwh. David’s speech in 17:45ff is a paradigm for holy war. The battle is Yhwh’s: it is he who determines the victor, regardless of the disparity in power or weaponry from a human point of view. It is Hannah’s song fully illustrated once again: the theme is the same! The humble overthrows the mighty. Though his anointing is still secret and David does not appear to act out of a consciousness of being the anointed one, he has by his character displayed the attitude expected of God’s king in battle – not intimidated by enemies but rather trusting completely in the power of Yhwh. His weapon is his faith.

John Milbank doesn't like computers...

'Computers ... in so far as they impose the reign of information, are the enemies of truth and democracy. Our gaze at their screens is the constitution through watching and receiving of inherently violent transactions which in the end, when we step through their looking-glass, always involve real physical violence.

On line, therefore, we are clubbing each other to death, but invisibly, very very gradually and at a huge remove. When this process does appear, then we finally see what we collectively do, but assume that it has nothing to do with us, individually. But just as breathing is the most massive combustion, so also this slowed-down and distributed violence is actually increased violence, like a torture that is all the more torture through being long drawn-out.'
from Being Reconciled p. 37

Think about that when you next play Scrabbulous....

Him

I am also experimenting with a follow up to the YOU book, called HIM.

I'd love your thoughts.

Augustine and Calvin: do heavenly rewards spoil everything?

For Augustine love of God absorbs and reorders all other types of love; so that the one who desires the Heavenly City is driven by the vision of the holy God for which there are many benefits of course: though these are not the point. For him:

The earthly [city] lifts up its head in its own glory, the Heavenly City says to its God: ‘My glory; you lift up my head’ (Psalm 3:3). (Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, XIV.xxxviii. )

God himself is the glory of the Eternal City; it is in the longing for and submitting to God that glory and honour are returned to the Christian. Under this way of conceiving it, the true martyr does not pursue the golden crown or the higher position in heaven; rather she testifies merely to her love of God, and seeks his honour – and in doing so, basks in his radiance.

It still might be possible, however, to see in 'the love of God' the operation of an system of exchange. Calvin, at pains to show that he agrees with Augustine, at the same time clarifies and even extends his thought by means of the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith. He interprets the promises of heavenly rewards a promise that comes after the 'free covenant of his mercy' - sealed not by meritorious works but indeed by grace through faith. The assurance given to believers that theie tribulations are not in vain is given in addition to the strength to endure. Without the free bestowal of grace upon the ungodly in Christ, there is no 'crown of righteousness' (2 Tim 4:8). As Calvin writes:

...the righteousness of good works depends upon the fact that God by pardon approves them. III.xviii.5

The emphasis lies on the self-consistency of God rather than on the rendering of a due payment.
For the purposes of the present discussion this is significant because of the motivation implied: the language of heavenly reward is not used in order to motivate a self-interested desire for heavenly reward: such a thing is impossible, in fact. Rather, heavenly rewards remind us of faithfulness of God to his promises.

1 Sam 13-31: an interaction - 1

The second half of 1 Samuel narrates the enmeshed tales of the fall of the house of Saul and the simultaneous rise of the house of David. But both houses are enmeshed in ways that ensure that the tragedy of the fall of Saul is fully felt by the readers. David is linked to the family of Saul by marriage to Michal and by his deep friendship with Jonathan. But it is also David’s insistence that the Lord’s anointed be protected at all costs – even when he is the mortal enemy seeking to hunt him out and kill him – that serves to prevent the reader from too readily casting Saul as a despised villain. This in fact heightens the tragedy, prolonging the civil war and means that Saul has to bring about his own destruction. Of course, the secret to the whole narrative is that it is Yhwh who is sovereign over Israel and the life of her king.

Monarchy gets off to an inauspicious start in 1 Sam 13-15. From the very beginning of his rule it is clear that Saul is doomed. By 13:13 Samuel is declaring the whole thing off: using language that pre-empts the covenant in 2 Sam 7, he tells Saul that his kingdom will not continue. The air of inevitability hangs over his decline and fall from here on. The effect of this is tragic: we know the outcome of this phase of the story must end in his demise. The question for the reader is “how?”
His crimes do not appear that severe: merely filling in for a late prophet in the matter of sacrifice at the behest of the people. The dialogue between Samuel and Saul reveals a little more. In 13:11 Saul’s words suggest he felt that he was losing his grip on the people, and was responding in order to maintain his popularity. In 13:13 Samuel views the sin as disobedience of a direct command of God; and then implies that by contrast with the man the Lord is about to appoint that Saul is definitely not a man after his own heart.

Just as his anointing was a complex story told from several angles, so the reason for his decline is given to us over several episodes. We are given the story of his rash oath, of which Jonathan fell victim – a story which hearkens back to the story of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges, but with a different outcome illustrating perhaps a man of insufficient integrity; and of his sparing the Amalekite king Agag contrary to the clear command of God. By these incidents, Saul is proven to be rash and far too easily prey to the will of the people. The rejecting of Saul is more fully ratified by Samuel’s curses in 15:10-35; and symbolized terribly in the tearing of Samuel’s cloak. Saul makes a pitiful grasp for power, but it will be no use. In 16:14ff we find him tormented by an evil spirit; and he becomes prone to depressive episodes and murderous rages.

To be continued...

The Anglican Thirty-Nine

But, as one closes down...

I have started a new site for the purposes of writing about and commenting on the Thirty-Nine Articles. Some of the material at first may be familiar to long-time readers of this blog. Hopefully, more progress will be made on the idea this time!

Closing down Youbook blog

The YOU project is with the publishers, and I am excited about a possible release later this year. Karen did amazing editing work. So, the blog that helped get it going is closing down. Thanks everybody!

Martyrdom in the Gospel of Judas

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

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

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

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

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

-ize or -ise ?

So: which is to be preferred?

'Relativize' or

'Relativise'?

Shall I will?

OK -

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

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

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VIII

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



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

Sermon for Anzac at St Helen's Bishopsgate, London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brief Editorial

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

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

See you all soon.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VI

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

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

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

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

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - V

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

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

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

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - IV

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Bolt's Living with the Underworld

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

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

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

A taster:

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

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians III

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

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

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

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - II

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

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - I

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

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

MacIntyre and stories

Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

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

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

More Ricoeur, this time on death and narrative

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

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

Ricoeur on Literature & Ethics

A moment of clarity looms up through the fog:

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

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

Total Church - my review

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

Philosophy and Theology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is 'the self' anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hans Frei on Typology or Figural reading

Hans Frei has done most in recent decades to rehabilitate figurative or typological reading as a necessary component of Biblical hermeneutics. Building on the work of literary scholar Eric Auerbach, Frei argued that the Bible points to its own unity and inner coherence by inviting figural interpretation. In Auerbach’s terms:

Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or person in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. The are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act.[1]

In other words: typology shows that two events or characters are part of the one connected stream of history in way that is not necessarily obvious from mere analysis of causality. The prefiguring of one by the other is discerned by (or, perhaps better, revealed to) the reader. In theologian Frei’s words:

In figural interpretation the figure itself is real in its own place, time, and right and without any detraction from that reality it prefigures the reality that will fulfill it. This figural relation not only brings into coherent relation events in bibical narration, but allows also the fitting of each present occurrence and experience into a real, narrative framework or world. Each person, each occurrence is a figure of that providential narrative in which it is also an ingredient.[2]

Unlike allegorical reading, typological interpretation points to the embeddedness of the events in a common narrative framework governed by providence.[3] These are ‘real’ or ‘historical’ at least in the sense that they gain their meaning from a relation to divine providence – the same providential narrative in which the reader of the text then in turn finds herself.[4]

This observation dovetails with Nicholas Lash’s proposal for a ‘performative’ reading of Scripture. There is a sort of double typology at work: the reader of Scripture is invited to see not only types of the Messiah in the OT narratives, but also then to model his own life (and death) after the pattern of the life of Christ. The structure of shadow and fulfilment is not repeated in the life of the believer (the believer’s life is not the reality prefigured in some way by Christ); but the typological similarity serves to bind the disciple into the same reality as the world of the text, within the frame of the same providential narrative. The text may serve not only as a type of Christ but also, in a secondary way, as a type of the follower of Christ.

[1] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 73.
[2] Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative : A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 153.
[3] The great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, for his part, wrote: ‘Typology points to future events that are often thought of as transcending time, so that they contain a vertical lift as well as a horizontal move forward.’ Is ‘transcending’ the right verb? Typology as it is used in the NT, and as observed by Hans Frei, reconfigures time certainly, but doesn’t overcome or dispense with it (if that is what is meant by ‘transcending’ here). Northrop Frye, The Great Code - the Bible in Literature (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul Ltd, 1982), p. 82.
[4] This is what Frei argued had been ‘eclipsed’ in all the debates about what it was the texts refered to.

The Centre for Public Christianity

These guys are good, very good.

Nicholas Lash on Performing the Scriptures

This notion of ‘performing the Scriptures’ was highlighted in an influential essay by Nicholas Lash.[1] He begins from the rather obvious point that reading or interpretation of a text depends largely on the kind of text being used: ‘different kinds of text call for different kinds of reading’.[2] To read some texts – in particular, those texts which are ‘works of art’ – does require the assistance of experts; however, the role of experts in reading texts while indispensible, is subordinate. Their expert ‘reading’ is not the fundamental form of interpretation. Rather, ‘there are at least some texts that only begin to deliver their meaning in so far as they are ‘brought into play’ through interpretative performance’.[3]

Having used King Lear and a Beethoven score as examples, Lash now applies his insight to the New Testament, suggesting that ‘the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of scripture is the life, activity and organization of the believing community’.[4] Christian practice can properly be described as ‘interpretative action’ – a performance of the texts, in other words. This performance, in its turn, is an enactment of the conviction that the best (‘best’ because most appropriate to the text in question) reading of these texts is as the story of Jesus, human beings and God. The performative interpretation of Scripture can also be called ‘Christian discipleship’. Lash allows that performances may differ over history, as circumstances change; but though the story may be told differently, it cannot be a different story if it is to be a performance of this text. The original meaning of the text gives an appropriate constraint to later performances of it.

This points to an important difference between Scripture and King Lear, which has to do with history. The New Testament self-conciously adheres to particular past events. Its original meaning was not merely that Jesus Christ was representative of certain fundamental human virtues, but that he was one man ‘in whom the mystery of divine action is seen to have been embodied and disclosed’.[5] So, for Lash, to suppose that we could render an authentic performance of the New Testament utterly disconnected from the historical would be to tell a different story from the one the New Testament itself tells. Lash goes on: ‘…for the practice of Christianity, the performacne of the biblical text, to be true…must not be not only ‘true to life’, but ‘true to his life’; and not only ‘true to his life’, but ‘true to God’.[6]


[1] Nicholas Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005).
[2] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 38.
[3] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 41.
[4] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 42.
[5] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 45.
[6] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 45.

Romance, by Christine Breillat - a review

I wrote this review of Christine Breillat's film 'Romance' in 2002. I was invited to see it by Anglican Media Sydney, and to participate in a panel organised by the Sydney Morning Herald. The film had been banned, and then the ban overturned. The panel included a feminist, a pornographer who had formerly been a censor (would you believe), a 'concerned parent', and me, the Christian.


Let me be direct: don’t go and see this movie. Romance is crude, pretentious, repugnant, sad and dull. I could not recommend this film to anyone, on either moral and artistic grounds. However, should this film have been banned (as it was momentarily by the Australian office of Film and Literature Classification)? Should Christians have campaigned against the public screening of this and similar pieces?

Having seen the film (participating in a panel run by the Sydney Morning Herald at the behest of Anglican Media), I think not. If you list the various sexual activities depicted in this film you would be likely to question my judgement: genital nudity, oral sex, sado-masochism, rape, and most controversially, scenes of actual (as opposed to simulated) sexual intercourse - the whole repertoire. However, there were certain features of the context of these depictions, as I will explain, that made them different in character even to some less technically revealing M and MA-rates films.

Romance is a deliberately ironic title. Director Catherine Breillat narrates the sexual odyssey of Marie, a young school teacher. Marie is in love with the narcissistic Paul, but he is sexually cold. As a result, she leaves his bed and seeks satisfaction in bold sexual experimentation with a variety of partners. None of the new experiences seem particularly satisfactory; some are even abusive. The men Marie meets are her biggest problem - though she desires them, they are almost all twisted in some way. Her sequence of experiences lead to a devastating rape at the hands of a casual lover. Eventually, her only liberation from her relationship is through a pregnancy and the murder of Paul. We are then treated to a technicolour childbirth scene - which drew the only gasp of shock from the audience!

This is a French film with all the surrealism and metaphysical ruminating, existentialism and feminism one could want for. It is not particularly erotic. In fact, the result of showing so much was rather comic at first, and then extremely dull. Having prayed “lead me not into temptation” as I entered the cinema, I found my prayer unexpectedly answered. It is a cold journey: the audience is not drawn to sympathise with any character in the traditional way. Marie’s sexual journey is a tragic, frustrating and disappointing one.

I would not call Romance pornographic. Pornography exploits desire in search of profit. It is about lust, quick, on-tap, sexual fantasy without the bother of a relationship. Romance was bad - even revolting - but it wasn’t porn. It was sexually cold. It was aimed at a cappuccino-drinking, art-house crowd and will only be shown in small inner-city cinemas. If it hadn’t been banned, it wouldn’t have made it to our screens at all, I daresay.

The experience of viewing Romance led me to several observations. The first is that the response of law - banning in this case - is almost always counter-productive, especially when the work involved has something to say, not just an intent to titillate. Advocating a ban is a simplistic reaction to something which asks for a more complex response, and inevitably brings more people in to see the film! Romance continues an ongoing exploration of female sexuality in our society which includes women’s magazines and televised inanities like Sex in the City and Ally McBeal. At least this film is honest, and doesn’t glamorise promiscuous sex, unlike Pretty Woman and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Here was a raw and open portrayal of the curse’s consequence for the female: “your desire will be for him, and he will rule over you” (Gen 3:16). For all her attempts at liberating herself, Marie repeatedly assumes attitudes of submission to men, even in her fantasies. While claiming feminist credentials, I felt that Breillat allowed us to see the degrading of Caroline Ducey, the actress playing Marie. I was interested that the representative feminist on the panel was quite disappointed with the film.

Secondly, even though I would not have others banned from seeing this film, I must discourage them. The cinema opens our souls like almost no other art form. Our eyes are the lamps of our whole bodies, as Jesus said (Matt 6:22); what we see effects us. In some way, human beings feel that to watch acts of whatever type is to participate in them in some way, to come dangerously close to committing the act itself. The veterans of war know this too well. Our memories capture images, and they may never fade away. Christians know the fragility and vulnerability of the inner human only too well. While allowing a choice for adults to view this film, we can also urge them to choose not to.

Thirdly, as was all too evident at this special preview screening, sixties-style liberalism is a hypocritical and condescending ideology. In an introductory lecture, we were told of the “principled” distributors and film reviewers who pushed for the review of the ban; and of the speaker’s fundamentalist father, who didn’t understand art. Liberalism pretends to appeal to “principles”, like “freedom of speech” and “the right for adults to choose what they watch”, all the while advocating nothing of the sort. Would the liberal press have argued so strongly for the right to see an anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi film? Or a gory anti-abortion film? Of course not - and neither should they. We are all absolutists, and we all believe in censorship, ultimately. But liberals try to conceal their absolutism with an appeal to these golden principles of the Enlightenment. It is about time their bluff was called!

The dangers of small beer...

John Dickson on Easter

This is a terrific piece by Dr John Dickson.

He resists trying to prove too much.

Anzac Day in London

I am delighted to have been invited to speak at St Helen's in London for a lunchtime service on Anzac Day.

I guess it's our equivalent of Remembrance Day, though it is particular to our own antipodean experience.


Any suggestions of what to talk about - especially given that it is combined NZ and Australian service? Texts and topics greatly received.

Emotions and ethics

Once, a while back, I mused about cuteness and its relevance for ethics. It seems to me that our affective reactions are by and large not part of the way we frame discussion of ethics, in the churches or in the West in general.

Charles Taylor writes this:

Modern enlightened culture is very theory-oriented. We tend to live in our heads, trusting our disengaged understandings: of experience, of beauty (we can't really accept that it's telling us anything, unless about our own feelings); even the ethical: we think that the only valid form of ethical self-directon is through rational mazims or understanding. We can't accept that part of being good is opening oursleves to certain feelings; either the horror at infacticide, or agape as a gut feeling. The Secular Age, p. 555

Of course, the picture is more complicated than this. In one sense, the West celebrates and even sacralises the expression of feelings.

Conversational Terrorism

I love this page about conversational terrorism.

Some of these tactics seem awfully familiar.

“That inscrutable object of adulation”

A lecture I once gave... [the title comes from an essay by RS White “Don Bradman: That Inscrutable Object of Adulation” Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region, ed. Bruce Bennett and Dennis Haskell (Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, Nedlands, 1992), pp. 193 - 200.]


'Every culture throws up its heroes: figures that take on iconic status for the culture and in some way embody the dreams and aspirations of the culture. In Australia we have several: Ned Kelly, Simpson and his donkey, Breaker Morant, Gough Whitlam, Dawn Fraser and others. Study of these figures is a short-hand way of analysing a culture. But that doesn't mean it is a simple matter...

And so I have chosen to give an hour to thinking about Don Bradman: partly at least because of my own passion for cricket and the availability of resources about him; but mostly because he is a remarkable figure, a person so dominant in his field that his achievements seem almost superhuman.

And yet Bradman remains an enigmatic figure: an idol of Australians who yet remained somewhat aloof; a tall poppy who managed himself with modesty; a man who to the end replied to hundreds of fan letters and yet was almost reclusive. It striking that Australians should so revere a man in so many ways unlike them. Why, we dare to ask? And what does Bradman symbolise for Australians?

The history of Australia as a unified entity is comparatively brief. Though to us it seems as if states rights are a fairly insignificant matter, in the nineteenth century the states could not even agree on a common railway gauge. While the various football codes and other sports were regionally aligned, cricket evolved as a uniquely national sport in a federated Australia. To this day, no other national sport captures the imagination of the nation in quite the same way; no other sport is so central to our cultural self-identity. Only swimming perhaps is a rival.
Cricket was first played in Australia in December 1803 by the officers of the ship Calcutta. Australian natives quickly took to the sport and were aided in the spread and growth of the game by the waves of fresh immigrants arriving from cricketing England. Cricket was a suitable game for our climate; and it finds a place in both rural and urban settings quite comfortably.
The first test match was played in Melbourne between Australia and England, before Australia had even become a nation. Much to everybody’s surprise, Australia won by 45 runs. Finally, the young upstart nation had found a way to compete against the home country: a way to shine in international company and particularly to gain the notice of the Home Country.

The Boy from Bowral
Donald George Bradman was born in Cootamundra in August 1908. He was the son of carpenter. In 1911 the family moved to Bowral, where the young Don grew up in a cricketing environment. As a young boy he entertained himself at home by hitting a golf ball against a cylindrical corrugated iron water tank. With this tricky game he honed his hand-eye co-ordination. In 1950 he wrote “I can understand how it must have developed the co-ordination of brain, eye and muscle which was to serve me so well in important matches later on.”
He does not ever seem to have been particularly religious, though he sang as a youngster in the church choir at Bowral...

The Bodyline Series
...
Bodyline was a watershed: here was a genuine cause for indignation against the colonial power. Australians revered the English and felt very much part of the British Empire: and yet the values that they felt essential to that Empire, embodied in the game of cricket, were here being treated with cynicism and contempt by the honoured representatives of England herself. The myth of glorious mother England was exposed as a fallacy; just as it would more seriously in the Second World War. And secretly perhaps Australians felt proud: proud that our Don Bradman was so good that the English had to sell out their values to try and defeat him.

The Invincibles
We pass over the great swathe of Bradman’s career that ran from 1933 to 1947, including the war years when no cricket was played and when Bradman’s health took a turn for the worse. It was in 1948 that he returned to England for the fourth and last time as a player and now as captain.

The tour was long anticipated: though the clouds of war had lifted, the English were still suffering the deprivations of food rationing and the various other effects of an arduous struggle. Bradman led an all-star Australian line-up unsurpassed for sheer all-round talent and maturity until perhaps the present day. The team remains the only team of any nation to have gone through England without losing a single game. Against Essex they were able to score 721 in a single day. And they won the tests 4 to nil.

Bradman’s last test was to be at the Oval in London. As walked to the wicket he was not aware that if he scored just four more runs he would be able to boast a test average of 100 (the next nearest player in the low 60s). The Englishman gave him three cheers. Then he settled over the bat. The bowler was Eric Hollies, a leg spinner from Warwickshire. The first ball Bradman played carefully. The second ball turned the other way, deceived Bradman and crashed in to the stumps. He had been bowled for a duck, and so his average remained at an incredible 99.94. Though he was so extraordinarily dominant in the game over twenty years, his last innings was a reminder that even Bradman was mortal.

So what do we make of this amazing figure in Australian social history? Bradman was no larrikin, no show pony – unlike many of our other sporting heroes. The Bradman museum website offers this conclusion:
Don Bradman has offered all Australians the same silver-lined story. The hope to achieve great heights from humble beginnings.



This is too simplistic in my view. The Bradman myth is far more complex.
He was a private, modest and direct man who was undemonstrative and reserved. He was not a drinker and enjoyed playing the piano to relax. He was not a womaniser or a gambler. In fact, he caused some dissension in the ranks of his team-mates because he was not seen to relish carousing.

Perhaps his quite reservation was in fact a reminder of what a previous generation actually admired in a person: a steely resolve and a self-discipline, a resourcefulness and a dedication that was needed to survive in the midst of the Great Depression. He was not flashy or flighty: he was just very very good at batting.


Since his death in 2001, Bradman’s character has come under more scrutiny. Suggestions of some ruthlessness in his business dealings in South Australia as a stockbroker have been aired; also Bradman’s parsimony and conservatism as a cricket administrator has been criticised by a younger generation of players, now themselves esteemed commentators (Ian Chappell being chief among them).


Certainly it mattered as it always has that England be the vanquished. Bradman perhaps best represented our belief in ourselves as a new nation ready to throw off the shackles of colonial influence and go it alone with sheer resourcefulness, native talent and iron determination. The friendly environment of sport was a lot less awkward than a war of independence. But there was still something of the cheeky little brother in Australian's love of sticking it to the Poms. Perhaps, as Australia passes from adolesence into adulthood as a nation, figures like Bradman will seem less important.

Learning the biblical languages

Now, don't get me wrong here: in principle, I am in favour, strongly in favour, of trainees for pastoral and teaching ministry being made to learn Greek and Hebrew.

In practice, I have yet to see how this actually works. Learning a language to a proficient level is extremely time-consuming for most students - Hebrew especially so. My own experience of three years of studying Hebrew in the context of a busy theological degree was that, while I could pass the course well, I don't think I was ever able to get a 'feel' for the language such that I can use it. It was useful of course to learn something of the atmosphere and fluidity of the language, and to gain an insight into the Hebrew mind - but for all that effort I think the results were paltry. And the opportunity cost was high, too: I could have been reading more and more widely in theology and history. My bet is that hardly any pastors would use Hebrew on a regular basis. So, was the time well spent? I am not convinced.

Greek is easier and more containable, of course, but still: the hours that an average student spends on Greek will be far and above the value it grants. Mostly we do not reach a level of Greek that enables us to make independent translational and interpretational decisions. We turn out to be still reliant on lexicographical sources.

In addition: a little learning is a dangerous thing. Teaching some Greek and Hebrew to students can give them a false confidence as to their ability to read the text in the original in a sensible way and come to useful, interesting and sound theological conclusions. It can give them the sense that now the text has been decoded, there is no more work to do. The tendency to make lexicography into theology (to use Gordon C's phrase) is the fruit of this.

So: let's have a discussion about the Biblical languages and their value for theological training for most pastors! How can they be taught so that a level of proficiency can be reached? Is it worth persisting, and why? Convince me!

Take the hermeneutics quiz...

... and tell me what you scored.

I got 71, which, in author Scot McKnight's book makes me a 'progressive!' I thought I was more moderate than that...

martyrdom and bellydancing...

We were talking about martyrdom and the act of relinquishment of self-hood that it models. And then my friend (whose identity I won't disclose) said:

it is kinda like doing the shimmy in belly dance... you gotta learn how to stand right, to position yourself, to hold it... and simultaneously let go so that your fat wobbles

Personally, I wouldn't know... but if she says so!

Reading the Bible in the old South Africa

Richard Burridge, who wrote a remarkable work on the genre of the gospels, has a new book called Imitating Jesus - An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. While I have yet to discover what he means by 'inclusive' - a word that normally makes me reach for my gun, because it is a such a loaded term - I have been impressed by his determination to recover the role of the Bible, and of the Biblical Jesus, in ethics. He relates the problem to the apartheid era in South Africa, when genuine Christians prayerfully earnestly and intelligently reading their Bibles decided that it supported racism. Does this mean that the Bible ought to be rejected, because it is open to such uses? By no means: though merely appealing to the Bible does not guarantee good reading of it.

Interestingly, he quotes CESA Bishop Frank Retief's submission, made in 1997, to a hearing of 'Faith Communities'.

...when the government made legislation that accorded with our moral or biblical understanding, we supported them. However, on the great issue of justice for all, we were often insensitive. We had not made the connection between gospel and society...We were witnesses to how the Bible and its message can be misused to support an evil ideology. National government used the Bible to support its policies, to give the impression that they were a Christian government. But then so did some liberation theologians who finally supported violence as a means of continuing the struggle...Where we have been negligent, careless and insensitive to biblical injunctions and mandates as we have been, may the Lord graciously forgive us....The fact that the Bible was used in the past to condone injustice does not mean its true message may be ignored today...It is our belief that this day and hour calls for men and women of conviction and integrity to apply the message of the Bible more accurately and faithfully to our emerging society... p. 397-8

I have met Bishop Frank and heard him speak, and I find this an impressive and moving statement. But, Burridge asks, what gives him and others (and the rest of us) confidence that we aren't making similar mistakes now?

Burridge gives an analysis of how the South African churches got into this mess - and notes on the one hand a lack of self-criticism and on the other a theology which overlooked the central place of Jesus for all Christian ethics. Could a church that was actually prioritising Jesus - the Jesus of the gospels, but also the Jesus of Paul and the other authors of the NT - have allowed itself to lapse so badly? Make no mistake, there was some sophisticated theological and exegetical work done in the theological faculties of South Africa in the apartheid era... but, says Burridge, the voice of Jesus was strangely silent even so.

So, argues Burridge, if churches want to avoid falling into the group-think which has resulted in such terrible misusing the Bible, they need to practice self-reflection and self-criticism as a matter of course. And also, they ought to pay attention to Jesus.

[Note: to any South African readers - I am only here reporting from Burridge. I cannot know and do not pretend to know what it was to live in those times and to be a Christian in those times. Nor do I know what it is to live as a Christian with this as a legacy - though Australian Christians have made their own mistakes of course.]

Talal Asad explains why we find suicide bombing horrific

Asad's examination of this subject should cause the secular liberal west an uneasy conscience. It is a fierce account indeed.

Why is that suicide bombing produces this reaction of particular horror from westerners? He gives four reasons, each of which points to 'identity being destroyed'.

1- an unexpected suicide is always shocking - it disrupts the pattens of everyday life with an unregulated violence. War, by contrast, though even more horrible possibly, is legitimated and deemed necessary to defend our forms of life.

2 - we in the west depend on laws which make crime and punishment seperable. But in suicide bombing, there is no possibility of punishment or restitution.

3 - modern subjectivity is held together by the tensions between individual self-assertion and collective obedience to the law, reverence for human life and its legitimated destruction and so on. Suicide bombing pays no regard to this fragile balance of tensions on which the democratic state seems to depend.

4 - Asad suggests that the Judeo-Christian tradition has bequeathed to secular witnesses the thought that there ought to be redemption in death. The suicide bomber communicates only that there is death and only death...

How much of this loathing is ALSO felt at the thought of martyrdom? I think a great deal. Asad is right: it isn't the idea of a redemptive death that is abhorrent to the secular person. Despite WWI, we accept deaths in the cause of horizons of significance like 'democracy' not exactly readily, but certainly, we find them intelligible. And we don't overturn governments that sanction this kind of sacrifice. But public deaths for a religious cause are horrifying because religion is essentially private. That dividing line is brutally shattered in martyrdom, as it is in suicide bombing.

Volf on 'soft difference'

Miroslav Volf's article entitled 'Soft Difference' from Ex Auditu in 1994 is one of those ones I come back to again and again. In it he tries to describe from 1 Peter the way in which the Christians are supposed to differ from their surrounding culture. It is, he says, a 'soft difference'...

It might be appropriate to call the missionary distance that 1 Peter stresses soft difference. I do not mean a weak difference, for in 1 Peter the difference is anything but weak. It is strong, but it is not hard. Fear for oneself and one's identity creates hardness. The difference that joins itself with hardness always presents the other with a choice: either submit or be rejected, either "become like me or get away from me." In the mission to the world, hard difference operates with open or hidden pressures, manipulation, and threats. A decision for a soft difference, on the other hand, presupposes a fearlessness which 1 Peter repeatedly encourages his readers to assume (3:14; 3:6). People who are secure in themselves—more accurately, who are secure in their God—are able to live the soft difference without fear. They have no need either to subordinate or damn others, but can allow others space to be themselves. For people who live the soft difference, mission fundamentally takes the form of witness and invitation. They seek to win others without pressure or manipulation, sometimes even "without a word" (3:1).

Benny Hinn tours Australia

This is a fascinating article on the Hinn ministry. But the two journalists concerned practice an act of deception on him, by pretending that one of them was wheelchair bound...anyone else got a problem with that? Hmm.

Nevertheless, Hinn seems to be fair game.

The article finishes:

Could it be that my scepticism blinded me to the possibility that God was in that place? Were we mocking God's work and, despite the excesses, Hinn is an instrument of healing? It is possible that a very few were healed? But I say that is despite Hinn. I judge him by the measure of the one he claims to be following. Jesus never promised people wealth, or instant healing. He didn't promise his disciples houses on the coast. Pastor Benny has recast Jesus in his own image. He has forgotten that his Lord died, humiliated, tortured, alone and penniless. But how do you sell that?

Quite. Well said.

Talal Asad - On Suicide Bombing

Talal Asad is a terrifically interesting writer on religion and secularism - though his views are certainly not incontestable. I picked up a copy of his book On Suicide Bombing.

In its opening pages he writes that:

...I draw on some aspects of Christian theology: the crucifixion is the most famous suicide in history, whose horror is transmuted into the project of redeeming universal humanity - again through a combination of cruelty and compassion. p. 3

I did a double-take of course. A suicide? Hmm... Turning to the later passages in his book he DOES have some very interesting things to say about the atonement (as Charles Taylor does in The Secular Age). But he takes as his guide Aulen's very dated Christus Victor...