The Doubting Believer I - Abram & Sarai

I The Doubting Believer

Perhaps to our contemporaries doubting seems more authentic than believing. There’s a certain credibility to being a doubter; an apparent courage and honesty to scepticism with its brave face set towards the unknown.

But it strikes me that doubt is an often unacknowledged state of life among Christian believers and that it can be a matter for despair and even shame. It strikes me also that, for many students, College itself can be a place in which doubts arise with a force that completely knocks us off balance. It was certainly my experience that this was the case.

There are many Christians carrying on a silent struggle with doubt. In fact, there are many Christian leaders wrestling with doubt. Often, we find it difficult to share this with others. Sometimes this is because the nature of the doubt itself is hard to articulate. But mostly, this is because in a community which is supposed to be a believing community – that’s its very identity – to admit to doubt is to strike at the very core of what the community is. So, there is an element of shame associated with having doubts. There’s the feeling that I’ll be letting people down if I acknowledge these uncertainties.

The shame prevents us from being honest about our doubts, and so people are isolated in them. But worse – the Christian community still operates with a definition of doubt that is chiefly intellectual. Doubts must be, the thinking goes, problems with the propositions of the Christian faith. I am struggling, we imagine the doubter saying, with believing in the virgin birth. And so our remedies for the problems of doubt are chiefly intellectual. Trouble believing in the resurrection? Well, here is some more proof that it occurred. Doubts about the Bible? Here’s an article to read proving it is the word of God.

Doubt is a complex condition that involves a mixture of intellectual difficulties, existential and personal problems, and the possibility of sin. There is not then a straightforward and simple cure for doubt.

But like suffering, doubt is an experience that Holy Scripture knows. The Word of God itself acknowledges that it is a word that will be doubted as well as believed – and indeed that it will be doubted by those who also believe it.

And so we are well advised, I think, to drop some soundings into the pages of Scripture in our quest to understand doubt and how to live with and through it. And so my intention is to engage with three Biblical characters who doubt: today, Abram and his wife Sarai in Genesis 16; next week, the Teacher in Ecclesiastes 11; and lastly, Thomas Didymus, the doubter, in John 20.

II Impatient doubt

Our first doubter, is Abraham - or rather our first doubters are Abram and his wife, Sarai, for they are certainly in it together.

At the point at which I want to dip into his story, in Genesis 16, we find that Abram and Sarai are still childless. And the strain is starting to tell:

Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; so she said to Abram, "The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her." Abram agreed to what Sarai said.

Childlessness is of itself heart-breaking enough. But in these circumstances the disappointment and frustration must have been acute. Why? At seventy-five years old, Abram was not interested in moving to the Gold Coast and playing a few rounds of golf. He had sold up and moved everything had to a hostile territory.

And of course it was all on the basis of the word of God that came to him as we have it reported for us in Genesis 12:1-3: the promise of a land, a people and the protection of a blessing. Now ten years on, they have very little to show for their investment.

And though Abram had shown faith in moving from his home in Ur, he had also shown a tendency to want to take matters into his own hands. Immediately in Genesis 12 we find him engaging in an act of self-protection, as he deceives Pharaoh about the true identity of his wife – an episode that he will astonishingly repeat in Genesis 20 with Abimelech.

In Genesis 15, Abram engages in a round of parleying with the Lord in which he demands from him more assurance that the promises are in earnest. Even as he accepts God’s word in 15:6 – that verse which is so important to our NT reading of Abraham – Abram turns around and demands from God more concrete evidence (in 15:8): O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?

And what he receives as an answer is the extraordinary drama of the making of the covenant in the gloom, with its bizarre and bloody ceremony, and its terrifying vision of the determination of the Lord himself to make God on his promises.

Isn’t that enough?

Well, no. When chapter 16 opens we discover that it has now been ten years since the move to Canaan, and for all the fiery words in the night there is still no baby. And so Sarai comes up with a plan.

It is, I think, too easy for us to write Abram and Sarai off as silly and faithless. We forget what exactly is being asked of them at this point. The promise was deeply personal, because it involved the human bodies of this aged couple. This was a matter of the nitty-gritty of human reproduction. And they must have known, as they saw their bodies fade, and weaken and slide towards death, that the likelihood of any child arriving in the course of nature was now extremely remote.

And what did they have to show for that decade of waiting? They had two words from God, and even a promise sealed in the blood of animals. But what was that worth? Was this promise empty? Anyone can make promises and seal oaths. Was in fact the case – and it must have crossed at least Sarai’s mind – that Abram had simply been deluded when he heard the voice of the Lord? And when she thought about the small print of the contract, Sarai could remember that it had specified that the heir to be expected was to be ‘a son coming from your own body’- that is, from Abram’s. No mention had been made of her as a necessary sharer in the promise. And so, her plan seems reasonable enough. Indeed, as she says ‘The Lord has kept me from having children’. If she has no children as yet, is it not that the sovereign Lord has not merely a bit slow about delivering on his promises, but is actually himself keeping her from having children? Is there not the feeling that God is being somewhat perverse in this plan?

As I said, it is too easy for us to stand over this pair of doubters and to approach them from the high moral ground. But I think the text itself doesn’t want us to be such unsympathetic readers. Scripture refuses to let us have a cheap shot at Abraham and Sarah. What God promises them is, on any reasonable account, unlikely.

And don’t we too know this kind of doubt?

We have more in common with this couple than perhaps we realise. Their doubting is characterised by impatience at God’s timing on the one hand, and bewilderment as to his methods on the other hand. It is not doubt as to God’s existence, nor even doubt as to the goodness of his final plan for things, but doubt as to his chosen methods. I don’t doubt God, but I do know the weakness of human flesh, particularly my own, though I am pretty sure of the grubbiness and weakness of other human flesh as well.

What can God mean by making such fallible and broken vessels the channels through which his plan for redemption comes to the world? It seems perfectly plausible for God to be a transcendent and independent being who is mighty to act and whose word becomes reality even as he says it. But when he gets entangled in human affairs and even binds himself to the performance of human bodies – even rather embarrassingly, in the bedroom – then it is that the realist and the pragmatist in me says, ‘couldn’t he do it better?’ It’s as if his sovereignty works in theory, but not so well in practice.

This is the strange nature of this kind of doubt – it is a doubt that actually begins with doubt of ourselves as fallen creatures and weak bodies and grows into a doubt against the God who would interact with such creatures as we are. It’s the perverse reverse of Calvin’s idea that the knowledge of ourselves goes hand in hand with the knowledge of God: doubt of ourselves as the possible instruments of God’s work in the world leads inexorably to doubt of God himself.

III Giving God a helping hand

It is not as if this doubt of God is unreasonable or idolatrous, as other forms of doubt may be. This kind of doubt is merely a preference for the possible over the impossible, for the likely over the unlikely. It is a pragmatic kind of doubt.

But the temptation that comes with this doubt is to try to secure God’s promises for him. That’s what Sarai tries to do of course by presenting the Egyptian Hagar to Abraham as his bedmate. She exchanges the impossible for the possible. At least Hagar is still ovulating, after all. Sarai gives here to Abram as a wife, not merely as concubine – there seems to be no suggestion that some kind of lustful desire in the 85 year old Abram is being quenched in the curious arrangement. But even so, the methods are questionable. We’ve seen this couple alter their marriage arrangements before, and it hasn’t been exactly honourable.

Sure enough, Hagar becomes pregnant. Is this finally a tangible result that goes beyond a mere word from God? Has Sarai’s scheme been a success?

But we see almost immediately that the outcome is miserable for all three adults. Hagar’s scorn of her mistress is met by Sarai’s mistreatment and Abram’s apathy. Though Hagar had been given to Abraham as a wife, she never stopped being a servant. Had Sarai realised the impropriety of her actions and regretted them, that she so resented Hagar even while she was carrying the precious baby?

The temptation to shorten the gap between promise and fulfilment is there for us, as well. Our impatience with God’s timing and our frustration with his methods can lead us to want to speed it all up a little. There are times when we know an outcome that God clearly wants and explicitly promises could be reached more quickly and effectively if only we were allowed to choose the methods. We could surely grow the church more quickly than it is growing if we preached the gospel as message of personal improvement. We could certainly protect our denomination from false teaching more effectively if we were able to engage in dubious political tactics in order to get the result we want. If I slander the character of a person who is an opponent of the gospel, then I protect the gospel, don’t I? If I engage in dishonest rhetoric from the pulpit so that people can believe the truth, am I not justified? Do not God’s ends justify any means? God is sovereign – but can’t I help it along a bit?

IV God’s arm will not be twisted

The irony of Sarai’s story is of course that though Hagar’s baby is not the baby of the promise to Abram, her baby becomes the recipient of his own promise. God does not allow Hagar to become the hapless victim of the schemes of Sarai. She is met by the angel of God in the wilderness and hears from him a promise that is strikingly similar to the promise Sarai hoped her offspring would receive:

"I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count." (Gen 16:10)

But she has not gained Abram and Sarai’s promise. This man, ‘a wild donkey of a man’ will not be the nation through whom all nations are blessed. Quite the opposite: he will live in hostility to his brothers. He stands as a sign that the history of Abram and Sarai’s children will be filled with conflict and struggle before the plan of God is complete.

What the narrator ensures that we see is that God’s promising is not thwarted by Sarai’s attempt to hi-jack it. The baby Ishmael, who looks like he is a jigsaw piece from another puzzle that just won’t fit in easily anywhere, is in fact the vehicle for God’s work, but in a new way. God will not be trapped by the letter of his promises, it turns out. His arm cannot be so easily twisted. But at the same time, Ishmael is still the son of Abraham and Sarah, and God has not forgotten him.

We cannot create the conditions under which God will act. He is not like Baal, whose prophets thought they needed to cajole him into action by dancing and cutting themselves. We long for revival to come to this city and to our nation, don’t we? Has not God promised that his word will not return to him empty? Can we not create the conditions under which God must surely appear in mighty salvation? If we held more all-night prayer vigils, would we surely not unleash him to do miracles? God is not a latent power that we can use like a spell. And yet that does not make him weak, or untrue to his own word. It is just that his word is not beholden to ours’. We should be less surprised that God is so surprising. And perhaps this is the path out of our doubt about his readiness to act and about his curious methods: would a God we could so easily predict be God? As Paul explains it in 1 Corinthians 1-3, the gospel of Jesus Christ just does not conform to human expectations about how divinity should act.

It turned out that for Abram and Sarai, God was waiting until the most impossible moment before he would deliver on his promise. Both Abraham and Sarah in turn would laugh when they heard this promise again, knowing how old they were. There aren’t too many people in Scripture whose response to the voice of God is laughter, are there? It had got the point of comedy as far as they were concerned.

But the joke was on them. When the baby was born, he was given the name Isaac, which means ‘he laughs’, because, as Sarah would say ‘God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me’. That wasn’t to be scoffed at.

V God’s impossible possibilities

The story of Abram illustrates for us that faith is not heroic. It might seem strange that the New Testament presents doubting Abraham as an exemplar of faith. In Romans 4, his faith is offered as the great outflanking manoeuvre in the historic pattern of God’s justification of his people – he believed, and his faith was credited to him as righteousness. In Hebrews 11, he is listed in the roll call of the faithful forerunners of those who now believe.

But in being an example of faith, Abraham is not a hero of faith. Faith is not some virtue like courage which deserves credit by being righteousness. Biblical faith is a hearing of the word of God as the word of God. Now this word of God is always spoken to us in the midst of a life in which it is contested and disputed, and even flatly denied. It is a word about ninety-year old women having babies, or bedraggled slaves becoming great nations, or about the dead coming back to life. There is always with this word of God that we receive another way of looking at it. As word about the future, as a promise, it never comes to us as a completely fulfilled word. There is always a gap. And so we should not be shocked or dismayed when our questions start to fill that gap: how is God going to bring his word to pass? What is God’s plan in this bleak circumstance? Why are so few people responding to the gospel at the moment? What proof can I have of God’s commitment to his promises? This side of the end of all things, Christian faith will always be attended by these questions.

So why believe? In his shambolic way, against all hope, Abraham believed, though the evidence of his body ‘as good as dead’ contradicted the promise he heard. Why?

Because the character of God has its own inner logic. The word of God rings true to who God is as he reveals himself to us in the history of salvation. It is the evidence of what God actually does that compels us to believe. The truth that we receive when we belief is not deducible in the ordinary sense, or calculable, or even possible as we recognise it. It does not follow natural laws. But it is consistent with the miracle that there is something rather than nothing. Abraham was ‘fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised’.

There was another woman for whom pregnancy was an impossibility. Not this time because of old age or infertility, but because of her virginity. When the angel’s word came to her, she rightly asked ‘how can this be, since I am a virgin?’

The angel’s reply contained the single theological truth that we need to cling to in the face or our own sinfulness and death, and in the face of the impossibility that these can be overcome by any strategy we can devise:

Nothing is impossible with God.

Theology and the Future of Humanity - a sketch for a lecture

What will become of us? Or, what will we become? Or, lest the notion of ‘becoming’ sound too passive: what can we become? There is no doubt that the destiny of humanity is rushing up to meet us at a speed unprecedented in human history. We are closer to the future than we ever have been before. A number of meta-narratives compete to describe the future of humanity. Some are infra-historical, and describe the future of human being, in progressive terms, as moving from glory to glory. The genre of this narrative is epic, with Adam cast as the epic hero emerging triumphant from the struggle of history. Others are apocalyptic, and describe the future in terms of an often disastrous rupture with the present, usually on account of human evil or ineptitude. Adam is cast in this narrative as a tragic protagonist, victim of his own nature.

These descriptions of the future of humanity may be religious or materialist. However, in neither type of story is the other possibility adequately described. The progressivist narrative (‘epic’) cannot account for the brute historical fact of human recidivism. The apocalyptic vision (‘tragic’) is deeply misanthropic, and in denial about the remarkable achievements of human beings. Both story-types are forms of an idealism which into which the actual human experience must be squeezed without remainder – which explains why they are currently in unresolved combat.

We can illustrate this from a reading of UK author Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth. Smith’s rich, sprawling, picaresque narrative of late twentieth century London is a telling description of life in a post-colonial Western city, where human identity is being re-shaped in the multicultural melting-pot. The novel humorously presents and critiques several competing futurisms – religious, political and scientific. For Smith, human destiny is not something we have a lot of say over. We may have small prisms of choice, but for thoroughly postmodern Zadie, to claim to have a uniform explanation, whether it be religious or rationalist, flies in the “teeth” of the hilarious that is happening all around us. In the words of those other misanthropes Radiohead: “we’re all accidents waiting to happen.” We are after all, victims of the random. The best future humans, for Smith, are those that don’t succumb to some fanatical programme for change, but just love. Smith’s answer to the tension between ‘epic’ and ‘tragic’ stories is ‘comic’. For her, Adam is a clown.
What then of ‘theology’? In a sense all of these narratives are ‘theological’, whether explicitly so or not. A Christian theology, however, presents a point from which both kinds of narrative may be subject to critique. Much of Smith’s critical vision finds itself endorsed from a Christian theological point of view. However, Christian theology tells a story of its own (‘gospel’) about the future of humanity. Adam, in this story, is redeemed by the second Adam.

As Irenaeus of Lyon observed, the New Testament compresses the story of humanity into the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which took place by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 4:17) that is the type of our destiny, sown in dishonour and raised in glory. Having made reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, Jesus of Nazareth is the exact radiance of God’s being, the image of the invisible God. Remarkably, the transformation was won from within the human sphere, by a man in the likeness of sinful flesh.

From Sydney to Skopje 6

On Saturday morning we drove to Strumica, about 150 klms from Skopje. Strumica is a town of about 50,000 people surround by villages and farms, and behind them (as everywhere in Macedonia) mountains.

On Saturday I spoke at the Evangelical church in Strumica on 'The Christian Life'. There were 30 or so present including a group that had driven an hour from the town of Stip.



In the evening, I gave my 'Martyrdom and Identity' lecture to an audience of about 60 in a local hotel. There was an interview organised beforehand with the local TV station. I was simply asked 'why are you here and what are you talking about about' - to which I said some things about the death of Christ and its implications for life today!

We stayed overnight in Kosta's family's home in a local village and woke up to fields of poppies, free range chickens and the clip-clopping of horse and carts.

I first went to preach at the church in the village of Monospitivo - which is actually the parent church to the one in the much larger town of Strumica. We sang Amazing Grace and Great is thy Faithfulness in Macedonian. The number gathered was larger than I expected - and the welcome was warm. The pastor suggested that Sydney and Monospitivo might be made sister cities...!


It was then off to Strumica for the 11am service, where I preached once more - the last of my speaking engagements in Macedonia.

The afternoon afforded time for a quick look at some natural wonders, before we journeyed back to Skopje. There had been a small earthquake while we were away!



Tomorrow morning I begin my trip home to Sydney. Almost home!

From Sydney to Skopje 5

On Wednesday night, the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture held an event at a centrally located venue in Skopje at which I spoke on 'Martyrdom and Identity'. Professor Ljubomir Cuculovski of the Philosophy department at the University very kindly agreed to be a respondent to my paper. We then had a very interesting and pleasant discussion with those present, in which Macedonian Orthodox, Protestant, and more secular views were aired and respectfully engaged with. There were upwards of 50 people there). This event has been perhaps most representative of what the BIFC is about.



On Thursday, I had an interview with a journalist from the Macedonian government television station. It is the middle of an election campaign here, so that she was able to slot us in was an answer to prayer. I was able to speak about Christian martyrdom and to underline the importance of the person and work of Christ. The programme will appear soon.



I then went to preach at the Thursday evening church service at the Evangelical Church. I preached on Jesus's work to defeat the works of the devil, from 1 John 3:8.

Today, Friday, Kosta and I were interviewed by a young documentary film maker who is trying to produce a film on the importance of love for religious traditions. Her first question? 'What is the basis for your belief?' We had a really interesting discussion on whether love is God (as opposed to God being love).




I then held a seminar on 'Research Methods' for the BIFC. This was an open invitation once more. This time the venue was the BIFC's offices in Skopje. Seven people attended, from Orthodox, Protestant and other backgrounds. We were able to talk about the importance of scholarly research actually serving others and not being just an end in itself.



It's off to Strumica in the east of Macedonia this weekend for more lectures, seminars and sermons!

From Sydney to Skopje 4

After preaching twice on Sunday, Monday was a public holiday - which has afforded me some time to look around and take in the lovely scenery which surrounds Skopje.

But it was back to work on Tuesday. First, I had the opportunity to address a public meeting at the University of SS Cyril and Methodius on the topic 'The Gospel according to Mark Zuckerberg? Mastering the New Social Media'.

This event was co-hosted by the department of Political Science and the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture. It was well-attended and the discussion was vigorous and interesting!

From there I went to a meeting of the student group Egzodus and spoke on 'The word of God is not in chains'.

On the Birthday of the KJV: why should we care? | Eternity

On the Birthday of the KJV: why should we care? Eternity

From Sydney to Skopje 3 - Theological Anthropology

I am here in Macedonia as a guest of the newly founded Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture, which is run by my good friends Kosta and Nada Milkov:




One of the things that the BFIC would like to promote is a series of lectures/seminars for pastors called 'Theology for Life'. Yesterday I began teaching a group of around twenty evangelical pastors and pastor's wives from all over the country and from Bulgaria as well my 'Theological Anthropology' material. There were Baptists, Congregationalists, independents, and others too. The material was designed for Moore College's MA course/4th year programme - that is, for theology graduates who are in pastoral ministry or about to enter it, but with a degree of assumed knowledge. The group of pastors and their wives certainly all fit this profile, and participated knowledgeably and insightfully. I am completing the course today (Saturday) by teaching from 9am to 6pm. I believe we will be stopping for lunch!

Here is Kosta at the church building where the seminar is being held.

This is the Evangelical Church of Macedonia in Skopje.

This is the seminar about to get down to work.

And here we are four hours later having finished for the evening. It was a very enjoyable time with a lot of stimulating discussion and plenty of laughs!

From Sydney to Skopje 2

So I have mostly recovered from my jetlag, and I don't look so much like this anymore:

I have been resting up good at Kosta, Nada and Gabriella's flat in Skopje:

They have real mountains here - and you can almost see them in my poor photograph:

Then on Thursday afternoon I went to my first speaking event at the Evangelical Church in Skopje. I was speaking on 'The Christian Life - Faith, Prayer, Obedience:

30 or more people turned up from 4pm, and then at 6pm my last talk was part of a service that including singing and prayer. We sang 'Blessed be the Name' and 'Lord I lift your name on high'. As it turned out, we were also visited by a mission team from a bible college in Tirana, Albania who in turn brought with them some Italians. So I had my talk translated into Macedonian, Albanian and Italian. It was a lively meeting!

We then went out for some food:

Tomorrow I am teaching Theological Anthroplogy to a group of pastors and others. Ciao!

From Sydney to Skopje 1 - Vienna Airport

True Feelings Conference - Brochure and Registration now available.

Brochure HERE

Register online HERE

Andrew Cameron's Joined-Up Life

My colleague and friend Andrew Cameron has just published his book Joined-Up Life. It's an account of what we usually call 'ethics'.

Anyone who knows Andrew will know that he is one of the most perceptive and interesting Christian thinkers around. I am about 100 pages in and I can say already that the book marries pith and profoundity - no mean feat.

If you are free, and in Skopje on 4th May...

Euthanasia as corrosive of care relationships

I was once privileged, when I was a School Chaplain several years ago, to lead an hour-long discussion with a class of sixteen year olds on the question of suicide.
As Chaplain, I was privy to information that many in the class were not: that there were at any given time as many as ten students in the school for whom there was grave concern about the possibility that they might attempt self-harm.

The question I put to the students was this: what would you do if a friend of yours told you that they had decided to kill themselves?

The answer was chilling – more chilling than they realised. As one they insisted that, although this was a sad circumstance, you ought not intervene and tell someone else they couldn’t do it, if that was their decision. You could certainly not say to the person that they were doing the wrong thing.

For the students, the autonomous decision of the individual was absolutely sacrosanct, even to this terrible point.

This story is not about euthanasia, exactly, but it is about the kind of moral language we are equipped with and with which we are equipping young people. And it demonstrates the prison into which we have locked ourselves with the language of free choice. The priority of the individual’s right to choose renders us inarticulate just where we most need to say something. It coarsens our moral language. It makes us unable to say to someone else: ‘You can rely on me to stay with you and preserve your life as far as I can even when you feel like doing harm to yourself.’

It is the language of moral autonomy that propels the push for voluntary euthanasia, and renders us speechless to oppose it. For if my individual freedom to choose is the trump card in all moral questions, then the best thing that the law can do is to facilitate that choice. In this instance, that means legislating so as to enable the medical profession to assist in the suicide of terminally ill patients in their care should the patient seek to be so assisted. If individual choice is ultimate, then it seems to me there is no argument.

But I would argue that, as a theological perspective shows us, individual choice is not ultimate. It is part of a whole suite of moral factors that have bearing on these very complex and difficult circumstances. The choice to end one’s own life is, in most circumstances, an immoral choice that the law should protect us from making; and in which the law should protect others from complicity.

Why is this?
Because we are, as the Christian story tells us and plain observation confirms, not essentially agents of individual choice, but creatures made for community. We are made for love and trust more than we are made for freedom. And it is to love sustained by trust that we owe our moral decision-making, and not to freedom. It is not permission that we need, but a knowledge of what our licence to act in a certain way might cost others.

We should remember that for Christians, life itself is not an absolute good, nor even the highest of goods. Christians carry before them an astonishing symbol - the cross of Jesus Christ. At the very centre of the Christian gospel is an act of voluntary self-sacrifice to suffering and death. This is what Christians call ‘the good news’. That free laying down of one’s life becomes in the New Testament the very source of life for those who follow Christ. And it becomes the model for their lives in turn. The Christian is called to a cross-shaped existence as an echo of and a testimony to that relinquishing of a life that others may live. Christians are those who are ready to die for what they believe – and have done so in their droves down the centuries.

What does this teach us? That life is good as a wonderful gift from a good creator, but that it is not the ultimate good. There are some things that are worth giving up your precious life for. As American theologian Stanley Hauerwas says: ‘Dying is not the tragedy but … dying for the wrong thing’. Christians repudiated the Roman cult of noble suicide to preserve one’s honour. But they certainly accepted that a violent death might well be the price of a life lived in the service of God. Greater love has no-one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

What the martyrs show us is that death is unavoidable – but that the manner in which one dies may remarkably affirm human life. If a death affirms human life it must do so by affirming the communities of trust and care that are basic to human existence. One of the basic conditions that shapes human community is our willingness to live and our assumption that others share it.

If we have some manner of control about the manner of our dying, then, let us rule out the possibility that the voluntary euthanasia proposal may well afford us. Because death seems so lonely, the temptation to which we may succumb is to think of our dying as an isolated incident quite apart from anyone else. What is in fact the case is that in calling on others to assist us in ending our life, we are normalising this manner of death. We are inviting the medical profession to ask why the person in the next bed has not chosen the same but is insisting on staying alive when the bed is needed and the palliative care is expensive. We are inviting our community to increase its loveless-ness towards the elderly and the sick – after all, if their choice is to stay alive, then they can be blamed for it.

Law is a blunt instrument in the moral life. I am not heedless that the change in the law is sought for the purpose of alleviating great suffering. But the law can help us here by preparing us for the human-ness of our death. It can restrain us from insisting on a death which will corrode the community’s commitment to care for the elderly and the sick. It can restrain our tendency to see the aging population as an accounting problem. It can restrain us from investing far too much moral authority in the medical profession, under the illusion that men and woman of science deal only in tangible facts. It can restrain us from on insisting on a right to die which comes at the cost of another’s right to stay alive.

The pressure on the sick, the disabled and the dying is already there. We cannot, as those who are schooled in the gospel of Jesus Christ, commit to a policy which deepens their abandonment, nor can we commend it to our community.

Is God a bloke? | Eternity

Is God a bloke? Eternity

Sydney and Anglican: A Fresh Look at Mission

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Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts IV

What might humans “do” with the arts? Will we be wasting our time in creating art or thinking about it when “the time is short”? Will art have a diverting or even corrupting influence on us, leading us to idolatry or immorality? Surely not. Art is a good part of God’s good creation; the freedom, ability and materials necessary to produce art are his gifts. Yet, like everything created, it is in bondage to decay as a result of sin (Rom 8:20-1). The effect of Christ’s work is not just a return to the way things were, but promises a transformation of creation (Rev 21:5). However, that redeemed people are satisfied with cosy banality when they have a foretaste of such splendours is bewildering and disappointing. Having glimpsed eternity in the resurrection of Jesus, will we not be more aware of that which demeans our humanity? As we reform our bodies in conformity with their heavenly destiny, so oughtn’t we to reform our imaginations in line with Paul’s evocation of the true, honourable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable and praiseworthy in Phil 4:8? In the best hymns, for example, are united words that are neither merely theologically correct nor trite but rich and evocative with music that serves those who sing it by lifting their spirits in glorifying God. Neither sentimentality nor mere formalism have a place. The Christian hope gives us confidence there is in the arts potential for real communication and pleasure. The Christian hope gives us a grasp of reality that richly informs discussions of the arts. The Christian hope speaks of God’s judgement, and thus allows for a thorough critique of the abuses of art. The Christian hope also draws our imaginations to Christ. There is then every good reason for a Christian delight in the arts. Indeed, for Christians to maintain that there is a real joy in the arts glorifies God. Far from wasting time, they are (potentially) a redemption of time. The arts, created and experienced under the fear of God, have, like sex, their own peculiar ecstatic holiness.

Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts III

Can art be a “redeeming of the disorder mirroring God’s redeeming work in Christ”? Could creative endeavour be a part of the re-creation? There is a danger in speaking as if the arts in themselves extend Christ’s work, or as if artistic “inspiration” could be akin to “sanctification”. However, we can view human art as anticipatory. When order is wrested from the hands of chaos in a work of art, may we not catch a glimpse of the final goal of creation? The human imagination knows that something is not right with the present world. Art can turn us in the direction of a perfection we do not possess. The Christian is aided by the theme of Sabbath, which encapsulates this tension: while being a chance for enjoyment of God’s creation, it is also a reminder of the future “rest” not yet attained, but promised in Christ. There is no natural theology in the human arts; but the arts may display inklings of what Christians know and worship. In his speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17, Paul is able to take the words of a pagan poet - “For we too are his offspring” - as his text. Even art such as Francis Bacon’s - which explicitly denies God - is still asking the God-question.

Of course, I can also hear Karl Barth’s thundering “Nein!” Barth was emphatic that there was no relation at all between the arts and theology. And yet his love of Mozart’s music led him to make the astonishing claim that the composer should hold a “place in theology, especially in the doctrine of creation and in eschatology” . He wrote in the context of a discussion of the “shadowside” of creation, thinking of finitude and all its effects. Barth heard in Mozart an expression of the goodness of creation, including its limits; and that “creation praises its Master and is therefore perfect.” This is in harmony with the Wisdom literature. Inklings of God are present in the human arts (just as they are in nature); the Christian has been given the eyes to see them. The musical, poetic and painterly renditions of the human condition may take us to the “very threshold of transcendence and the theological;” but it is only encounter with Christ that takes us over it. Works of art are altars to an Unkown God - the God that makes himself known in the glory of the incarnate Word.

Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts II

In thinking theologically about the arts we will be naturally attracted to the doctines of creation, humanity, and revelation. But it must be stated from the outset that all of these have a disctinctive Christ-shape in true Christian thought; so that we will need to bring Christ to bear at every point of our discussion. Creation is dependent on God - but is not God. The doctrine of the Trinity helps to explain how God may relate to the world and yet not be the world. Further, unity and diversity are both true aspects of the created order. Humanity is given a unique role in the creation as the divine viceroy. Creation was not created “perfect” in some Parmenidean sense, but “very good”. It was in need of subduing, naming and enjoying. Human beings were given the capacity to imagine, to describe, to exercise choice; and to become second-order creators, working to shape God’s creation according to these gifts. John Calvin even went as far as to say that the human capacity for art is innate. Built into the structure of the world was the Sabbath, a rest for humans from their work. Art is a part of the subduing, naming and enjoying of God’s world: it interacts with creation and gives it order and new significance. The incarnation further reminds us that matter is not intrinsically evil. Conversely, the Christian doctrine of creation does not allow the human being to worship the creation, even when he or she makes it into art. The wisdom literature of the Old Testament explores the relationship of man and woman to God and to creation. “The fear of Yahweh” is the principle which explains both the freedom and the limit of human wisdom. On the one hand, humble service of and deference to the mighty creator and sustainer of the cosmos enables a person to comprehend experience, because it recognises divine order. There is no sacred/secular division - all the world is God’s. On the other hand, the phrase is a reminder of the limits placed on human wisdom. It recognises the hubris of men and women, and rebukes it. Above all, Jesus Christ provides the model of true human wisdom; and as Paul explains (1 Cor 1-2), Christ’s cross is the wisdom of God in action, confounding proud human wisdom. “The fear of Yahweh”, then, provides a useful motto for discussion of the arts. Christology declares the radical fallenness of the world—the miracle of the incarnation illustrates the depth of the despair. Goodness, beauty and truth are disrupted. Ugliness and disorder arise. While God’s order remains, humanity’s contact with that order is tenuous. However, the advent of Jesus Christ points us beyond the fall to the reconciliation of all things in Christ. The world, which was made through Christ, runs to the order of Christ. As art eloquently explains, human society is troubled by death. Christ’s resurrection from the dead points to the end of death’s rule and to the future transformation of the present order. The testimony of the Apostles is to the resurrected Christ’s Lordship over the world. What occurs in Christ is a re-creation - a new humanity is formed, by the Holy Spirit, in the present age. This is a people with imaginations re-formed as hope in Christ. They experience a present resurrected reality (John 10:10, Col 3:1-5); and they anticipate the perfecting of their bodies by godly obedience expressed in service. Here is the beauty of holiness, rather than the holiness of beauty. A similar kind of inversion is achieved in the pattern of God’s work in Christ. The image and glory of divinity itself, Christ emptied himself of all claims to equality with God, and submitted himself to the ugliness of the cross. Isaiah wrote of the Suffering Servant: “ - so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals -” (52:14). The cross is a moment of grotesque ugliness; and yet also it is moment when a restoration of beauty is wrought. Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar compared faith to an aesthetic contemplation of the God’s work in the world. What God has done in redemption through Christ is itself a work of art, and one that counters proud human ideas of beauty. The doctrine of revelation points to the Christ’s uniqueness as God’s Word. Both visual and verbal descriptions are used of him: he is the “Word” and the “image” of God (John 1, Col 1). The arts then, do not contain of themselves a revelation, however they might mimic it. Yet given the success of God’s communicative act in Christ, we can have confidence that there is an order to creation and that are more than merely arbitrary meanings in art. Ultimately, the cosmos, though marked by sin, is a coherent realm in which meaningful artistic interactions may take place.

Sublime Depravity - Human nature and the arts I

Dorothy Sayers once wrote:

The Church as a body has never made up her mind about the Arts, and it is hardly too much to say that she has never tried. She has, of course, from time to time puritanically denounced the Arts as irreligious and mischievous, or tried to exploit the Arts as a means to the teaching of religion and morals....And there had...been plenty of writers on aesthetics who happened to be Christians, but they seldom made any consistent attempt to relate their aesthetic to the central Christian dogmas.

The goal of this paper is take up Sayer’s challenge by attempting to relate the arts to the major themes of the Christian faith. By “the arts” I mean the whole gamut of human imaginative and creative activity, including literary, musical, architectural, theatrical, visual, and even televisual arts. Art involves the imaginative arrangement and presentation of matter, such as words, or paint, or notes. It is universal and ubiquitous—no human society is without some form of art, and virtually no human being would live out of contact with art. The arts are held to engender an aesthetic response, meaning that something more than a merely sensory or intellectual or even emotional may be felt when we experience art.

Like work, art is cursed. As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes:

Art is not isolated from the radical fallenness of our nature. It is an instrument of it. Art does not lift us out of the radical evil of our history but plunges us into it. Art is not man’s saviour but a willing accomplice in our crimes.

The human imagination reveals its own fallenness in its art. Not only do inherently corrupt forms of art—blasphemy, pornography, idolatry, kitsch, propaganda—proliferate; but our expressions of order are subject to chaos, and our hopes are subject to despair. And yet the arts have the capacity to elevate us, to provide some of our most glorious moments, to show us most in tune with ourselves and the world, even to give us inklings of the divine. As within man and woman themselves, there remains the tension between the potential both for great beauty and also great vileness.

The Christian response to the arts has been likewise rather ambivalent, for several reasons. First, the strength of the second commandment has been taken as a warning against depictions of the divine. Christ is the only true image (eikon) of God (Col 1:15): our imaginations are not permitted liberty concerning Him.

Second, the gospel mission (because “the time is short”) holds an absolute precedence over artistic activity. The old created order is beyond redemption (it is said) and will soon be exposed to fire. The human arts have no eternal value; so that they are not worth cultivating.

Third, since art often involves the outward expression of the inward state of the human psyche, evangelical Christians, who have a strong doctrine of inner sinfulness, may well fear what such expression reveals. That is, the public projection in art of inner depravity may draw a censorious response, rather than an intelligently engaged one, from conservative Christians.

Fourth, Protestant evangelicals have displayed a suspicion of metaphor and representation—which are central to the arts—perhaps derived from the priority of the sensus literalis in scripture reading.

Fifth, as the religious and the aesthetic are felt by some modern theologians to be responses to the same thing, more orthodox Christians have recoiled from the arts. Paul Tillich saw in art an revelatory expression of the “Ultimate Concern”. The beautiful is also holy and transcendent. For Tillich, art and theology both touch on what really “is”. Certainly, modern artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Rothko have painted as if this was the case. However, for those who would uphold the Christ revealed in the scriptures as God’s unique revelation, Tillich’s claim for art is extremely unsatisfactory. But what is to be said, thought and felt about the arts if what is said is to be theologically accurate?

Love and Loss

Tennyson’s doubt is in many ways very contemporary. Like us, he was stunned and exhilarated by the pace of technological change. The power of experimental and observational science to explain the natural world seemed to make God somewhat surplus to requirements. The traditional concept of God was, so it seemed, redundant. The rationalistic philosophy of the age, when applied to biblical studies and to theology more generally, did much to erode confidence in a verbal revelation of God given in a propositional form.

But this did not, then as now, lead to a decline in religious belief as such. Rather, it sought out new forms. If religious faith could not be established by reason, perhaps experience might provide an alternative channel to the divine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, theologians began to emphasise the more mystical and experiential aspects of Christian faith. Religious dogmas were not to be taken as direct descriptions of realities but rather as metaphors for encounters with the divine. Though people like Tennyson did not feel that they could any longer accept Christian orthodoxy, they were reluctant to pursue pure atheism. There was inside them a deep conviction that there was something transcendent. Not that they could name it, or give it a face – they could only grope towards it in the dark.

And then there was the experience of love and loss. Perhaps the Victorians in their time, before the wide acceptance of Darwinian views, were more ready to sanctify these powerful feelings. They seemed to come from some extra-phenomenal source; to be an intimation of immortality. We are more ready to see the pains and joys of human fellowship as demanded of us by our biological selves than as evidence of a holiness beyond us. Nevertheless, the popular sense of the ‘spiritual’ remains in many people, and permeates these moments at which heart is most evidently exposed. It is in our most intimate relationships that we feel most connected to the truth about who we are as individuals and most certain about our steps into the world; and we have the gratifying experience of being able to provide this for others. The reciprocity of human relationships take us beyond ourselves to ourselves.

Death remained the final, impermeable barrier. Poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries like John Donne certainly feared death as the curtailment of love and the rotting of the human body. Death was a demonic, personified figure who stalked his victims. Donne needs to draw on all the resources of his Christian faith to repudiate it in ‘Death be not proud’. But the grieving of the nineteenth century wails in a different key – one that we moderns more readily recognise. The loss is not felt as the result of being tyrannised by a sinister force. It is now a brute fact in a remorseless universe which is governed only by a God who remains unmoved at the plight of the creatures who experience it. To face death or to grieve is not be part of a dramatic struggle in which Mordor has temporarily got the upper hand. It is at least possible to express anger against that force. Death for a Tennyson and for we his twenty-first century descendants is sad and bewildering. It flaps its wings in the face of our confidence in human technological mastery of the world.

I falter where I firmly trod: Tennyson and doubt

Alfred Tennyson was indeed a striking young man, over six feet tall and powerfully built. The mass of his somewhat unkempt black hair was set upon a noble head. His face carried an intense expression of melacholy.

The son of a gloomy Lincolnshire clergyman, he arrived at Cambridge in 1827 already an accomplished and precocious poet. The Somersby rectory had been a dysfunctional household to say the least, with the eleven children largely left to amuse themselves by wandering around the local marshes and fens. If Tennyson was shy at first, his prodigious ability and intensity of personality soon attracted others; and he found some companionship in an intellectual society known as ‘The Apostles’.

In Tennyson’s second year at Cambridge, another young man arrived at the University who would become the kind of intimate friend that his childhood had lacked. His name was Arthur Hallam, the son of a leading historian and scholar, and in his own way remarkably gifted. In the cynicism of the times in which we live, we have lost the ability to talk about the power and the depth of friendship without hinting at some sexual overtone.

There was no hint of anything erotic in the relationship between the two men. That would be to miss just how profound the intimacy of their friendship became as a friendship. Indeed, Hallam became engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily. They shared not in an amorous passion, but in the delights of intellectual discovery and in the vigorous discussion of any topic they could think of. They shared with one another their difficulty they found at maintaining religious belief and yet the sense of loss they felt in not believing. Criticism of the text of the Bible and scientific discoveries about the age of the earth had appeared to challenge the faith of many of the best minds at Cambridge; and Tennyson and Hallam were no different. Certainly nothing in Tennyson’s upbringing at the rectory would have commended Christian faith to him as anything but a burden to be borne.

The summer of 1833 began with Hallam spending time at the Tennyson home in rural Lincolnshire, in the English midlands. These were memorable weeks – a sweet time that Tennyson would always remember with some sense of pain because they were never to be repeated. In August, Hallam’s father took him on a journey to the European continent. On Sept 15th, Henry Hallam returned to his hotel in Vienna only to discover his son in an armchair, dead of a cerebral haemorrhage.

The blow this struck to Tennyson was overwhelming. His grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson, would later write:

The sudden extinction of his friend, with all his infinite capacity for affection and his brilliant promise, struck at the very roots of his will to live. Could it really be that all this great spiritual treasure was annihilated: that all human love and all man’s spiritual effort are but a momentary ripple on the ocean of eternity? Was the world wholly without purpose and man an irresponsible toy for the gigantic forces of Nature? If so, what value could there be in life?

If you have ever had a chance to walk about a Victorian graveyard you will be struck by the openness and even sentimentality with which they regarded death. We are not unlike them, in that terrible griefs affect us too. But we have less experience of them, and fewer words with which to express our loss. We are not given to the public elaboration of our feelings – we do not feel that anyone would be interested in our thoughts about the brevity of life and the nearness of our mortality.

But Tennyson was to make an art form of grieving. He was too sorrowed to attend the funeral, and did not visit Hallam’s tomb until after he was married. But he could not stop his pen:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hapless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
Death in Life, the days that are no more.

The poem which made Tennyson’s career as a poet, In Memoriam A.H.H., is a lengthy reflection on the death of his friend which did not appear for seventeen further years. It is a poem of grief at the loss of a dear friend. But it also a poem about the pain of losing faith. Tennyson was one of the great doubters of his age. His was still very much a Christianised society, and in general traditionally orthodox Christian views held sway. However, developments in astronomy and geology had seemed to contradict Biblical cosmology as it had been traditionally understood. The world was not new, but rather very, very ancient. The universe was far more vast than had been previously imagined. It seemed less and less that humankind occupied anything like a significant place in that universe. If humankind felt small, and lonely, there was at the same time an optimism about human technological progress. This was the age of the industrial revolution, of the steam engine and the factory. People still wanted to believe, but wanted to do so in all sincerity given what they now knew about the world. Was there a way forward for them?
Added to this for Tennyson was the personal existential crisis occasioned by the loss of his friend. It seemed to be exactly the kind of random occurrence that would characterise a heartless universe. And yet, he was not ready to give up on faith entirely. Here’s a passage from In Memoriam:

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

All that is happening and all that has happened to him has led to uncertainty. His feet now ‘falter’, where once before he had been confident of his footfall upon the ground of faith. His ‘weight of cares’ – primarily his deep sense of loss for his friend – causes him to fall upon the ‘world’s altar-stairs’. The picture reminds me of the burden Christian carries in John Bunyan’s great Christian classic Pilgrim’s Progress. Only this burden is not the poet’s sin, but rather his ‘weight of cares’. The path to God (a stairway to heaven?) is shrouded in darkness. He is not yet ready to declare that this is a road to nowhere, to cite the Talking Heads. But all he can do is reach out his ‘lame hands of faith, and grope’. He can have no certainty about what he is reaching for, but only in the end a faint trust. The ‘dust and chaff’ that gathers suggests the dust to which Adam is told he will return in Genesis 3 on account of the curse. It is a mark of mortality and an intimation of death. The poet calls, not to a personal God who reveals himself in the traditional and Biblical sense, but rather to ‘what I feel is Lord of all’. Who or what is this dark divinity, shrouded in mystery and unknowability? He hopes for a hand to reach out to meet his groping arm, but with no confidence, however much he wishes it. What is the ‘larger hope’? He doesn’t quite know, other than to say that hope is, perhaps inexplicably, part of his experience too.

Tennyson became famous through this poem because its themes of grief, loss and doubt resonated deeply with his Victorian contemporaries. The twentieth century poet T.S. Eliot wrote of In Memoriam: 'It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.’ It was profound in the honesty with which it faced the most difficult and personal questions of all – to do with love and death.

Tennyson was unshaken in his conviction that his friend had lived on in some form; and he never

rejected belief in the existence of God. One of his last poems was the famous ‘Crossing the Bar’, an expression of hope at life’s end:

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

But despite believing in the immortality of the soul and in his ‘Pilot’, it could never be said that he was an orthodox Christian believer in any sense. That conviction had long been shaken loose from him in his sorrows.

The atheists are right

My piece at Anglican Media this week

Seeking Common Ground

In debating the issue of same-sex marriage on Facebook recently, a journalist friend of mine stated that he had not found any ‘convincing non-religious arguments’ that would prevent a change to the marriage act.

‘Non-religious arguments’: it sounds like a reasonable requirement for any public discussion, doesn’t it? The argument goes something like this. I am certainly free to hold views based on entirely religious reasons; but when I step into the public square, I must shed these and speak in an entirely non-religious way if I am to convince. I might believe that left-handed people ought to be banned from public transport because an angel told me, but in seeking to convince others of this view I need to leave the angels behind and argue on an angel-free basis. Otherwise I am simply attempting to ‘impose my views on others’.

Former British PM Tony Blair encountered this resistance to public religious speech a number of times. He was once told by his spin doctor Alastair Campbell, when he was about to talk about his Christian faith in an interview with Vanity Fair, that ‘we don’t do God’. Later, when Blair said that he was ultimately answerable to God for commanding the invasion of Iraq, he was met with a withering barrage of attacks from media pundits who were alarmed that this might mean a somehow unjustifiable intrusion of the religious into the political at the highest level.

The alarmed reaction that Blair experienced is not because these ‘religious’ reasons are not convincing to many people. Plainly, religious reasons do have an enormous power to convince many people, even in the UK and Australia. Evoking the ‘image of God’, for example, is an extremely powerful component in an argument for social equality. It was heard frequently on the lips of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the years of apartheid. When the leaders of the mainline churches speak, it is evident that they are given a hearing – if not always by the media, then certainly by the wider public. They can in fact openly appeal to the Bible or to theological ideas as part of their public utterances. If they want to get their point across to many people they need not, it seems, have one way of speaking in the cloister and another in the plaza .

It is not then because of lack of effectiveness that there is an appeal to trade only in ‘non-religious’ reasoning. Rather the opposite: the fear is that these religious arguments are all too effective. But it seems as if religious arguments are not open to the kind of scrutiny that non-religious ones are. They cannot convince the non-religious, and so they are imposed (if they can be) by majorities, or by noisy minorities. Secularists want to object that even if these reasons are compelling to lots of people they are illegitimately used as public reasons.

I think three particular questions are worth putting in response to the claim that public reasons ought always to be ‘non-religious’. First: is it in fact the case that the line between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ is as easy to determine as it sounds? An argument based on a passage of the Bible, for example, sounds as if it is obviously going to fall into the ‘religious’ (and therefore illegitimate) camp. But you could easily make a case that the Bible has an historic moral authority in Western culture, government and law quite apart from any sense that it is the revealed Word of God, as orthodox Christians hold. For example, an appeal to Jesus’ teaching to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ would be entirely acceptable to most people in a public debate. Would such an appeal amount to a ‘non-religious’ reason? Or is it ‘religious’?

Conversely, when a politician makes an appeal to ‘Australian values’ or to ‘the ANZAC spirit’, are these not ‘religious’ claims? When they speak in this way, they draw on a mythology about the past that is not subject to quantification or contradiction in an economic or scientific sense. They are appealing to a sense of civic piety that is arguably every bit as religious as the public utterances of a bishop. In fact, the original meaning of the word ‘religious’, which comes from the Latin word religare (‘to bind, fasten’), had everything to do with the sorts of public duties and civic values of Rome to which the citizenry were bound. ‘Religion’ in this sense is very much part of the public space.

Second: are ‘religious’ arguments so hermetically-sealed that they are not in fact open to challenge and counter-claim from those who do not share them? In many cases, the secular commentator feels quite happy to intervene in religious discourse. As an example we could cite the judgement frequently offered in the media that there are ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims or Christians, and that this is a bad form of religion. From a secular standpoint commentators feel that it is legitimate to criticise the wearing of the burqa or female circumcision (for example).
What’s more, arguments that religious people put forward are not usually as simplistic as ‘an angel told me’, despite the way in which they are often portrayed. Each of the Christian denominations, for example, is in possession of extensive traditions of reasoning from their foundational principles and dogmas – reasoning which is in principle available to be understood and debated by others, especially when it is used to make arguments in favour of this or that public policy. That is not to say that there won’t be significant and passionate disagreement on what constitutes a valid argument, but an argument is better than silence.

If the first two questions were an appeal to secularists to relax a bit about ‘religious’ reasoning into public debate, the third question is one for the Christian church: is it not the case that we owe our neighbours a ‘reason for the hope that is within you?’ (1 Peter 3:15). In other words: in public debate, victory isn’t everything. We could simply say: it is not worth discussing the matter, since enough people accept our point of view without explanation in any case. This is how a lot of politics gets done, unfortunately. I think this would be an unacceptable abuse of the public space. Secularists may not agree with the reasons that we put forward, but it honours the sanctity (if I may use such theological language!) of the process of public debate about our common life if we at least seek to persuade those with whom we disagree.

Overcome with emotion?

In October 2004, my mother-in-law died of breast cancer at the age of 62, not much more than a year after being diagnosed. Being the only member of the family experienced at public speaking – and indeed, at running funerals - I was quite willing to take on the duties of giving the eulogy at the funeral service when I was asked to by my father-in-law. In addition, since I was Jackie’s son-in-law and not directly related to her, I could be expected and indeed expected myself to maintain my composure in the delivery of the task in a suitably controlled tone, allowing the mourners to grieve in quiet privacy.

The tears, then, took me quite by surprise. I was not far into retelling Jackie’s life story – from her childhood in London to her arrival in Australia in the 1960s and her conversion to faith in Christ. At some point in this narrative, I was quite overcome by the occasion. My voice quavered; I could feel myself flushing red; and my face contorted itself. I could barely continue to read, because I couldn’t see the page in front of me. What words I could get out were squeezed out through my throat, and I found myself gasping for breath in between watery sobs. Afterwards my six year old son said to me ‘your face was all screwed up, Dad’.

I retell this story not because I am hoping to elicit sympathy but rather because of its ordinariness as an episode of the human emotions at work. The strong emotion seemed to come to me in a way that I couldn’t predict. It was as if there were a force outside of me working on me and causing me to lose self-control of my body in a way that was understandable but still within Anglo-Saxon culture somewhat shameful, especially for men. I am not normally conscious of doing things with my body that I don’t directly will. Yet in this moment, normal operations seemed to be suspended and the emotion took control of me.

It is an ordinary episode, but no less complicated for being so. It illustrates how troublesome emotions are in thinking cohesively about human being. This difficulty pans out in three overlapping ways, to do with agency, the body and reason.

The first difficulty is best explained by asking: in what sense was I an agent of my own sobs? Can I really speak in this way, of an emotion controlling me, since the emotion could not be anyone else’s? The sobs certainly emanated from my mouth and in my voice. They happened to and in my body. But I was not intending or willing to sob; in fact, I was willing the opposite. Yet I sobbed, and not some demon that had entered me, or some ventriloquist pretending to be me.
Second, at the moment of intense emotion, the human being seems to become almost alienated from his own body. Because these emotions are exhibited in such an obviously visceral fashion and yet carry with them unwanted consequences such as the stigma of cultural shame, the human subject may feel that ‘I’ am other from my physical body. There must be then a purer, non-physical form of ‘me’ – to which perhaps I can ascend once I am free of the untrustworthiness of my flesh. Even a more honourably perceived emotion like the feeling of loss shares enough in common with the more base desires of our bodies – feelings like hunger, sexual desire, need for sleep – that in experiencing it we still frequently experience this otherness from our bodies. Indeed, if I am to speak of some ‘higher’ set of emotions, where do I ‘feel’ them if not in my body?

Third, my perception of myself as a primarily rational creature is disturbed by the experience of strong emotion. But this is because of a hidden assumption that ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are discrete centres of my person, with reason the more nearly ‘spiritual’ or more distinctly human of the two. Yet my strong emotion was in fact tied to rational propositions about the occasion. I did not feel at all the same way about the funeral, at which I had ministered, for a woman in her early forties who had committed suicide even though the circumstances were arguably more tragic. I knew Jacky as my friend and mother-in-law, and as my wife’s mother and the granny of my own children. I could calculate what her loss would mean for us. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt about it.

These difficulties are enough to engender a philosophical, psychological and anthropological discussion of the emotions, such as philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum provides in her masterful work Upheavals of Thought – The Intelligence of the Emotions. The task of a theological anthropology, however, is to begin analysing questions like this in the light of a particular context, namely God. For a Christian anthropology, that context is framed by the themes of the creation of man and woman in the image of God on the one hand and the presence of sin in human life on the other. These two themes are set in tension with one another not just in the Biblical story, but in the existence of every human person. To what degree is this or that feature of my humanity reflect my likeness as a creature made in the divine image to the creator? Or is it in some way a result of that disorder of personhood that stems from my participation in human fallen-ness? But Christian anthropology will also speak of a destiny for human beings. The two themes of theological anthropology have their resolution however in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Theological anthropology, like all properly Christian theology, must speak an evangelical word, in which the image of God humankind is redeemed and perfected. It has, in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a pattern to which human creatures will one day be conformed (Rom 8:29).

Returning to my troublesome emotions, then: was this event God’s will for creatureliness in me? If God has no ‘body, parts or passions’, and yet my emotions are an irreducibly physical component of me, ought I in seeking to be more like him look to some future beyond or without my body? Or must I think of myself dualistically, as most of the Christian tradition has done, having a distinct ‘soul’ for the purer emotions like joy and hope as well as a body for my appetites like hunger and thirst? Has ‘reason’, or the ‘rational soul’ a more exalted seat in me? What would an account of the human emotions look like in the light of the resurrection of the dead? In what sense can the three problematic aspects of human emotion – to do with agency, body and reason – be addressed from a theological perspective?

How to destroy a human being

In 2004 a series of images seeped out into the world’s media that seemed to emerge from the pit of hell itself. Abu Ghraib prison had been known, under the rule of Saddam Hussein, as the closed door behind which the very worst of his terrors was carried out. By now in the hands of the conquering US military, it was evident that the means and methods of prisoner treatment had not significantly changed. The pictures revealed that a programme of torture, rape, abuse and humiliation was part of the experience of daily life at Abu Ghraib under US control.
It is the unselfconsciousness of the images that is perhaps what is so disturbing about them. They look like a series of holiday snaps – the toothy grins and thumbs-up gestures of the US guards point to the camaraderie they were evidently feeling in their shared experience. They seem utterly detached from the prisoners whom, by complete contrast, lie prone and passive or cringe in terror. They recoil from the lunges of dogs. They stand masturbating while a female guard watches and points. They lie in naked pyramids of flesh. They hang by their chained wrists from the bars of their cells. In one image, a hooded Iraqi prisoner stands elevated on a box with his arms outstretched. His fingers are attached by metal clips to wires. He is clearly under the impression that the wires are electrified, and that he is about to experience extreme pain and possibly death.

Torture is usually the most secret of acts, usually concealed from the world by the thickness of prison walls. Torturers do not like to put their work on their public record. Though posing the prisoners for photographs as if they were some tourist attraction seemed to be part of the torture itself, it was also a naïve mistake. It revealed what was meant to be kept hidden. Here finally we could catch a glimpse of the torturers craft from the inside. It made the world witnesses to their work, and led to the shame and imprisonment of the perpetrators – if not those who ordered them to carry out a ‘hard’ interrogation.

There was also in the revelation of the photographs in the western media the shocking realisation that the torturers were not operating at the behest of a Saddam or a Mugabe or a Pinochet, but were the representatives of a modern, liberal western democracy. The self-image of westerners as enlightened and reasonable people was shattered. In fact, democracies have not ever ceased to deploy torture as a method. In his book Torture and Democray, US-Iranian political scientist Darius Rejali shows how even modern democracies have used torture – those regimes that describe themselves as humane and supportive of human rights. The terrible secret at the heart of democratic regimes is that even in the name of humanity we led to destroy the human – an act that is ultimately self-destructive. As the Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo said: ‘The torture? A more serious blow to the United States than September 11, 2001 attacks. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves.’ Attempts to isolate the prison guards Lynndie England and Charles Graner from the military hierarchy and to depict them as uneducated and Southern were a predictable response from the media and the judiciary to the possibility of a general complicity in the acts that were depicted in the photographs.

As the Abu Ghraib photographs reveal, in torture bodily pain is only one aspect of the process and interrogation for information is only one of the goals. In fact, torture involves the deconstruction and dismemberment of the human person – which is both its overriding purpose and its means. In his remarkable book Torture and Eucharist US theologian Cavanaugh cites the case study of Arturo, a torture victim of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Arturo told his therapist: ‘I feel as though I were not myself’ (p. 41).

Thus, in torture we can observe in a chilling way a kind of negative anthropology: the torturer has to tacitly acknowledge what a human being is, in order to pull him apart. Evil speaks a kind of truth - in order to undo it, it has to acknowledge it. In torture we have a perverse revelation of the human in the attempt to make her disappear. The horror of torture shows us how vulnerable a human is, too: that our bodily life places us in the path of circumstances that may separate us from ourselves.

Is Ned Flanders a Violent Man?

For Australian readers, my piece 'Is Ned Flanders a Violent Man?' has been published in Quadrant magazine.