Charismata

For Further Consideration:

2012-01-31T16:29:00.000Z

Can we not maintain that our social action is a work of love than of hope?

- Stephen Williams

For Future Reference

2012-01-28T12:51:00.000Z

I was recently asked about the films I like the most. The only one that consistently comes to mind is Heat. In the interest of being able to answer that question with more conviction and variety in the future, here is a list of some of the films that I most enjoy.

Clear And Present Danger
Memento
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
In the Loop
Reservoir Dogs
True Romance
No Country for Old Men
3:10 to Yuma
Matchstick Men
The Dark Knight
Lars and the Real Girl
The Tree of Life
Amadeus
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Half Nelson
Where Eagles Dare
L.A. Confidential
The Bourne Ultimatum
Good Will Hunting
The Godfather
Of Gods and Men
The New World
Wedding Crashers
Dodgeball
The Edge
Zodiac
The Social Network
Unbreakable
The Matrix
Wall Street
The Game
Once
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Liar, Liar
The Thin Red Line
Cast Away
The Silence of the Lambs
Se7en
Meet the Parents
Red Cliff
Thank You For Smoking
Shine
Fargo
A Few Good Men

The Case For Repentance

2012-01-24T10:18:00.004Z

Formal apologetics debates allow "for the audience to make up their own minds about where they think the truth lies."

William Lane Craig simultaneously captures the essence of the apologetic goal, and delegitimates it as a Christian enterprise. When we present Christian truth in this way, we display our ignorance of that important word μετάνοια - Repentance. This is not a call for us to make up our own minds. This is first of all indicative of the reality that we don't possess minds that are worth making up. They are too corrupt. Repentance is a call for a change of mind, a transformation of mind, that causes one's mind to be at home in the noetic of the kingdom.

If Lee Strobel is right about us being on the cusp of a golden era in apologetics -- and I imagine he has a new book coming out arguing that that is precisely the "Case" -- then the Christian church is about to do battle with the very thing that is trying to defend it.

The spirit of Karl Barth must be resurrected as his body turns in its grave!

CD II.1 - God Does Not Exist...kind of

2012-01-20T17:31:00.002Z

I would pay decent money to see a debate between a resurrected Hitchens and Barth. Maybe some day, and maybe I won't even have to pay.

Popular atheism rests on a negative answer to the question, Does God exist? If I am reading Barth rightly - and that is always a large "if" -- then Christians cannot answer that question in the way that atheism (and Christianity) thinks that they must. We do not know what existence or being is, and then try to work our way to a god who ticks this box. God does not exist in the way that a human exists, or in a way that a fairy or a leprechaun or a piece of bread exists. God does not just have being, but has the very power of being. He reveals Himself to us as the One in whom we live and move and have our being, and because He reveals Himself to us as this One, we know that He is and that we are -- not in the same way, but in a quite distinct way. For us to try and move from "we are" to "He is" without the grace of revelation is either a hopeless exercise or an exercise in idolatry

For Christians, we only inquire into the possibility of God's existence on the basis of God's making Himself known through His Word, and on the basis that the One we inquire about is not a sharer in the thing we know as our existence, but is its Redeemer, Creator an Lord.

Communities and Atonement

2012-01-19T18:50:00.000Z

Theology shapes society. The habits of a family in Kilarney depend on what is written about God in Duke University. The work of theology has social consequences; and not only liberation theology or practical theology, but the kind of theology that at first blush seems utterly unrelated to the real world.

Perhaps in our secular society we think theology has lost this kind of power, but as James Beckford points out, "the deregulation of religion is one of the hidden ironies of secularization". By releasing religion from state control and removing it to the margins of society, secularization has put the Christian church in the place from which it originally turned the world upside-down. Theology has as much power as ever to effect not only societal change, but the emergence of communities that are genuine alternatives to the dominant reality.

Though it forms an aside in an incredibly bulky chapter, Charles Taylor puts forward an argument that the theology of the Reformation -- specifically, its theology of the atonement -- gave rise to the "humanist hostility to mystery", and played "an important role in the later rise of unbelief". If the irony of secularization is that it empowers counter-narratives, or re-formations in society, the irony of the Reformation is that it empowered the secularization of society. If nobody learns from history, then perhaps this is a sort of back-and-forth that will play out till kingdom come.

And what was it about this particular theology of atonement that caused it to have such dramatic social effects? It led to "horrifying conclusions" such as the doctrine of the damnation of most humans, or the doctrine of double predestination.

What is the name of this horrifying theology of the atonement?

The juridical-penal model, or the penal-substitutionary model.

If Charles Taylor's brief assessment is close to the truth, then the hegemony that this model still enjoys signifies a failure of theology in its task of speaking correctly of God. The ones who speak of God to congregations in cities and towns and villages must learn to articulate the mystery of human sin and God's grace using language that would not be out of place in the story of the prodigal son.

Perhaps the de-throning of the juridical-penal model of atonement is necessary if Christian communities are ever to be truly alternative in a world that knows well the value of channelling violence onto some for the sake of the protection of the many. Or to put it another way, perhaps we can never have nonviolent communities without a nonviolent atonement.

Volf On Violence

2012-01-17T23:06:00.000Z

Religions advocate nonviolence in general, while at the same time finding ways to legitimate violence in specific situations; their representatives both preach against war and bless the weapons of their nation's troops. And so the deep religious wisdom about nonviolence boils down to a principle that no self-respecting war-lord will deny, namely that you can be violent whenever you cannot be nonviolent, provided your goals are just (which they usually are for the simple reason that they are yours). Religious dialogue or no religious dialogue, without the principled assertion that it is never appropriate to use religion to give moral sanction to the use of violence, religious images and religious leaders will continue to be exploited by politicians and generals engaged in violence.

- Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 286

Church Boundaries Made Simplistic

2012-01-16T12:40:00.004Z

Biblically speaking, the line between what kind of behaviour excludes one from church participation and what kind of behaviour does not falls somewhere in this grey area.

And even at that, the one who is excluded is so treated for the sake of his eventual inclusion.

Conclusion: Churches don't have boundaries for the sake of labelling people as "in" or "out", "saved" or "damned". Boundaries exist for the sake of holiness - the holiness of those who participate in the body of Christ and the holiness of those who do not.

The church as a holy people must make those who are not the church aware of their need for holiness. That the church as a holy people can include those steeped in such unholy professions as prostitution and banking completely confuses things.

Margin Call

2012-01-15T15:55:00.003Z

"We used to make stuff in this country....build stuff. Now we just put our hands in the next guy's pocket."

- Frank Sobotka

Margin Call comes at the problem from a different angle than season 2 of The Wire, and comes at it 8 years later too, and with far less subtlety, but the similarity of perspective is found in this fact: two of the key players in Margin Call are engineers who turned their hands to the intangible world of finance; who went from building bridges to putting their hands in the next guy's pocket. What's more, it is these two who form the moral centre of the film. That they do so and it makes perfect sense is what makes the film so compelling, if not disturbing and even flat-out wrong.

Season 2 of The Wire begins with a party-boat full of rich people that has engine trouble. They are in the shipping lane and need to be brought in to shore to fix the damage. But one of the party's hosts takes a police officer aside, dips into his deep pockets, and pays the officer to simply toe the boat out of the way of the ships so that the party can continue uninterrupted: "A lot of partying going on now and I wouldn't wanna cut it short for a little engine trouble." Metaphors right, left, and centre here.

Margin Call shows us what happens to this party when someone informs the hosts that they -- and the many people who've accepted the invitation to come on board -- are in a boat that is about to go up in flames.

Performative Before Propositional

2012-01-14T17:13:00.000Z

From Moneyball to Evangelism

2012-01-14T12:56:00.000Z

Moneyball is a good film, but it's real strength is as an example of a paradigm shift. The heart of the story is that "the game done change".

Against the backdrop of the dominant rationality, Billy Beane's rationality is non-rational. He trades excellent players and buys obscure players that don't fit into the present system. The Coach tries to merge the two rationalities together, but they do not mix, and Billy Beane looks like the fool that everyone thought him to be.

But when Beane's rationality is fully adopted rather than merely merged into the already existing one, the results begin to come. What is learned is that you cannot see the game of baseball the way you've always seen it, and then try to fit Beane into that picture. Your vision of the game, your perception of what makes sense and what doesn't, must be transformed.

Paradigm shifts are always resisted, but they are the stuff of life. In an ideal world, competing rationalities will not to be judged based on who has the most power to make their rationality the dominant one, but rather based on whose rationality leads to the telos, the goal.

In baseball, the goal is generally agreed upon - win the World Series. In life, however, the goal is not nearly so universally agreed upon, if the notion of a goal is even accepted in the first place.

To bring this down to the level of theology, this makes apologetics (or even evangelism) something more than what it is seen to be (though it often isn't even seen to be this) - a dialogue between competing rational paradigms whose intersections are largely trivial. Apologetics/evangelism is, at its heart, in the realm of desire and goal. If we do not want the same things from life, then the dialogue will produce more heat than light, or simply nothing at all.

This is the reason Christian proclamation to the world (and to the church) must begin with the word "repent": we say on the basis of the life of Jesus that what we want is not what is good for us, and so our desires must change.

How desires change is a question I cannot answer.

CD II.1 - Remaining a Mystery

2012-01-12T17:14:00.000Z

Richard Dawkins decries religion because it makes a virtue out of the willingness to leave things unexplained. Science, however, boldly knows of no such willingness. It marches forward relentlessly, seeking to explain away everything in its path.

But not every object or event can or should be explained. It is not insufficient of religion to stop short of some explanations (which, lamentably, is something that religion often fails to do). It is insufficiently human to seek to explain everything.

Barth's theology is a theology of God extra nos - God outside of us. We do not begin with a our explanations of the universe that lead us to posit the existence of "God". We begin with the God who cannot be explained by us outside of His own revelation to us that is grasped in the obedience of faith. Any other God is no God at all. Or, anything that Dawkins' net catches isn't God.

It is not God who stands before us if He does not stand before us in such a way that He is and remains a mystery to us.

So much for 99.9% of apologetics, then.

Getting Closer to the Gospel

2012-01-10T18:36:00.000Z

Commenting on the Parable of ~~the Prodigal Son~~ T~~he Lost Son~~ ~~The Lost Sons~~ The Prodigal God, Miroslav Volf has this earth-shattering thing to say:

...the relationship did not depend on moral performance and therefore could not be destroyed by immoral acts.

The son remained this father's son. The father remained this son's father. At least in the father's eyes. The relationship could never be earned; it was created by the grace of nature to begin with, and sustained by the nature of grace in the end.

We want moral order, we want just deserts, we want lex talionis, we want the world of the older brother. What's more, we want a cross that bends to the will of this moral order, and a Jesus whose relationship to his father did depend on moral performance. We want the revelation of a righteousness that is not only witnessed to by the law, but is achieved by doing the deeds of the law. We cannot understand "apart from the law". We do not want a world whose nature is grace, whose law is the lawlessness of unconditional love.

But the father wants to throw a party that celebrates not moral performance but the return to his gracious home made possible by his act of embrace that redefines our moral universe.

Exclusion and Embrace: The Self and Its Centre

2012-01-07T13:47:00.000Z

What is a human? What behaviour is appropriate for humans? What behaviour is good for humans? Do the answers to these questions stem from our nature? Is there an immutable, original essence to a human being that determines what we are, who we are, and the kinds of things we ought to do and ought not to do?

Christians may call this essence the “image of God” – inherent to our creation is likeness to this being who is eternal and immutable, therefore who we are, what we are, and what we ought to do are questions that have eternal, immutable answers. Any contingency that exists in our self-understanding ends with God, the uncontingent one. When we peel back the layers of our history and our culture and our rationalities, we get an essence to which our stories and our cultures and our rationalities must conform. Our cultures have changed down the years, but our justice within these shifting cultures either does or does not meet the immutable standard of justice determined by God and determined in humans as image bearers of God.

Human beings do not get to make up their own essence, or essences. Human beings do not determine what they are and what they should do. As created beings we have been given an essence, and our faithfulness to God is measured by our faithfulness to this essence – faithfulness to this self that is our true nature and which goes all the way back to the beginning, to the decision of creation, to the eternal moment right before history and contingency began.

There is a problem, however. The Apostles Paul says that this self has been crucified; it no longer lives. As Volf explains, this ahistorical essence is not our centre, if it ever was. We understand what it is to be human by appealing to history; not the history of all human beings, but the history of one human being in whom all of history is judged and with whom all humans have been crucified. We may still say that our essence is our being made in the “image of God”, but we can only understand that term by the story of the Christ who is that image. Union with this Christ now determines our self, and we must know his life if we are to live as we ought to live. His life does not confirm everything we think with regards what it means to be human. He does not obey a law that we know in advance of his coming, a moral code that is inherent to our nature. We do not know what love is, and then affirm that Jesus loves. We do not know what justice is, and then affirm that Jesus does justice. The life of Jesus must shatter all of our preconceived notions of justice and love that we think are immutable, and rebuild them with his story as their foundations.

Following Jesus does not mean that he gives us the power to live a virtuous life that we know apart from him. It means to really follow him as people whose selves are not our own, not eternal and immutable, but rather dead and made alive again only insofar as they are lived in de-centring dependence upon the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us. This dependency, this uncertainty and discomfort about where the living Jesus would lead us, is now our essence, our centre.

...the new centre of the self is not a timeless “essence,” hidden deep within a human being, underneath the sediments of culture and history and untouched by “time and change,” an essence that waits only to be discovered, unearthed, set free. Neither is the centre an inner narrative that the reverberating echo of the community’s “final vocabulary” and “master story” has scripted in the book of the self and whose integrity must be guarded from editorial intrusions by rival “vocabularies” and competing “stories.” The centre of the self – a centre that is both inside and outside – is the story of Jesus Christ, which has become the story of the self. More precisely, the centre is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected who has become part and parcel of the very structure of the self.

Questions and Thoughts Sparked by The Beginning of Exclusion and Embrace

2012-01-06T15:47:00.003Z

What does it mean to be countercultural when you are irrevocably a product of a particular cultural, still being shaped by a particular culture, and still contributing to a particular culture?

Is the directive to be countercultural not very much a part of our cultural ethos?

From what standpoint can we criticize the practices of those around us if we are in a position whereby we benefit from and even carry out those practices? Does this explain our glossing over of greed, hoarding, possessiveness, usury, covetousness, racism, sexism, elitism, militarism, and our choice instead to focus on the practices that we see ourselves are distant from: homosexuality, ignorance of God’s Word, lack of family values, promiscuity, adultery?

How does the church create distance from culture and evaluate what it is necessary to be distant from? Distance from culture is necessary for the church to be the church in opposition to the world, but how the church should be distant causes opposition within the church. In practice there is not distance but distances – some churches are more distant than others; some church members are more distant than others, or at least distant in the way that they deem right.

It seems almost foolish to talk about the church being the community of people who are empowered to embrace violent oppressors when these same communities cannot even embrace one another. The one who calls the other “liberal” cannot have fellowship with the one who calls the other “conservative”; the one who calls the other “compromised” cannot have fellowship with the one who calls the other “idealist”; the one who calls the other “fundamentalist” cannot have fellowship with the one who calls the other “progressive”; the one who calls the other “intolerant” cannot have fellowship with the one who calls the other “tolerant”; the one who calls the other “judgmental” cannot have fellowship with the one who calls the other “judgemental”.

More than churches distancing themselves from culture to make space for the other and to judge the evil in every culture, churches distance themselves from other churches based on what kind of “others” a church accepts into itself uncritically (homosexuals, rich people, racists, pluralists etc) and what kind of evil the church does and does not judge. And these are often churches who largely agree on doctrinal issues.

It does not seem logical that following the way of the cross will lead to inclusion or embrace, though we often speak as if it is. The cross may be the outpouring of sacrificial love, but it is also the place where the one who loved in this way was abandoned by most of his friends, scorned by his enemies, and forsaken by God himself. The cross as a particular moment in history spoke only of the world’s rejection of Jesus. His being lifted up on the cross did not draw men to himself. It scattered them; sent them away smug, or disillusioned, or afraid. The crucified Jesus was alone at the height of his love. If we love in this same way, why should we expect our situation to be any different?

And yet Paul desired to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. This was integral to his gospel. He founded communities on this message. Paul and these people looked at the cross and saw something that nobody saw on the day of Jesus’s crucifixion. The saw that Jesus was not alone. They saw themselves as crucified with him. They saw God in him, reconciling the world to himself in this particular body – a body which created enough distance from the world to incorporate the world itself. This was a body offered to God as a sacrifice; a body that was so engaged in countercultural practice that nobody in the culture could interpret what was happening; nobody could recognise this moment as love.

We often think of countercultural as meaning simply that we are against certain things within a culture, but this pure againstness is to strip countercultural of its radicality. This is to be countercultural in the way that our world allows us to be countercultural. To be truly countercultural means to be for something that the world does not know; that the world cannot interpret within its given framework; that the world cannot name when it sees it. The name of this something is “kingdom of God”.

Out of the dozens of references to the kingdom of God in the Gospels, only three are uttered by people other than Jesus, and the Gospels show us that none of these people knew what they were talking about. Jesus had to show them.

Conan at his Best

2012-01-05T22:15:00.000Z

Your school motto is vox clamantis in deserto, which means 'Voice crying out in the wilderness'. This is easily the most pathetic school motto I have ever heard. Apparently it narrowly beat out 'Silently weeping in thick shrub' and 'Whimpering in moist leaves without pants.'

Submarine

2012-01-05T21:51:00.001Z

If Submarine has any value as a coming-of-age drama -- and it surely does -- it is this: it shows us that as we grow up, we need to receive more grace than we give. For the final scene alone I commend it, though I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments when I wished that final scene would come a little sooner.

CD II.1 - The Correct Sense of the Word

2012-01-05T21:19:00.001Z

Karl Barth says that the doctrine of God is learning "what we are saying when we say 'God'". We must learn to say this word in the "correct sense". This begs the question, How are we to know what the correct sense of this word is?

The answer is the Church. The Church is first of all a hearing Church. It is a listening community, called into existence by the Word of God and then speaking that very Word out of this prior listening.

Barth begins with the fact that "through His Word God is actually known and will be known again." If the cause is the Word of God, the effect is the Church. The extent to which the Church is really the Church is the extent to which God is known. The Church does not posses the Word of God, but is itself possessed by it, judged by it, reformed by it, redeemed by it. The Church lives by the grace of this Word in which God has given Himself to her, not for her manipulation or coercion, but for her obedience of faith. 'There is no knowledge of God outside of the Church' must be held together with 'There is no Church outside of the obedience of faith that comes from the hearing of the Word.' These are not really two statements but one.

God is not known apart from this obedience of faith; apart from the Yes that is said in response to God's prior Yes; apart from the human decision and act that corresponds to the divine decision and act. Anyone standing outside of this position cannot know God by Barth's very definition of knowledge of God, and therefore cannot talk about God in the correct sense of the word. This, for example, makes debate about the existence of God futile, because the two debaters ought to be talking about two very different objects. If they are not, then one of them is not what they think they are.

What I love about Barth is that his theology is a theology of grace all the way down. At the heart of the universe is this decision of the supreme Subject to be known as an Object by subjects other than Himself. Our search for truth comes to an end and begins afresh when we are brought into new being by this grace; when we are made part of the hearing Church that lives not by bread alone but by the Word of God.

For just as certainly as grace is truth, so certainly can truth only be had as grace.

A Secular Age: Human Flourishing

2012-01-05T12:35:00.002Z

In the good ol' days, religion was everywhere. Religion was not a part of life; one's life was part of a religion which touched every sphere of a community. This is not the case any longer, and Charles Taylor explores why. According to Taylor, we live in a secular age which seeks to liberate us of our need of God, thus relegating his existence -- if he does exist at all -- to that of personal saviour, belief in whom has no bearing on public life.

Our secular age is defined by three aspects of belief:

1. The sphere of belief has shifted from public to private.

2. The prevalence of belief has diminished. We have put away childish, naive notions of a divine being.

3. The conditions of belief or the nature of belief have changed.

Taylor focuses on this third aspect, with our shift to immanence being the condition that has paved the way for the removal of God from both the public and the private sphere of life. By "immanence", Taylor means that the question, What constitutes a full life? can be answered with reference to nothing outside of human possibility and no final reality other than human flourishing.

Though I'm only about 2% into the book, there are two things worth mentioning:

Christianity has a specific vision for what constitutes human flourishing. Many Christians in our secular age (and it remains to be seen if Taylor follows this pattern or not) talk about it as if we all more or less agree with what flourishing looks like, with religious people then going beyond that to the transcendent, or foregoing it for the sake of the flourishing of others. This may be a reality, but if not carefully articulated it is quite often a dangerous one that justifies the kind of public Christianity manufactured in the United States, the kind of private Christianity lived out by far too many churches in the West, and the kind of missions work that we then engage in. We do not invoke "God" in politics in order to legitimate our own concept of flourishing that is wholly independent of the God revealed in Jesus. We do not seek to flourish just like those around us, except with the added aspect of church attendance and the knowledge that we and not them get to go to heaven when we die. And we do not renounce our wealth in the West in order to go to the South or to the East and make them more like us. Liberation must be something other than the have-nots becoming the haves; the poor becoming the rich. If that is our goal for those who are in desperate need, then by the time we are finished with them it will become impossible for them to enter the kingdom of God, for they will be just like us.

I don't think Christians have to say that we are interested in something beyond human flourishing - that we are in touch with the transcendent as well as the immanent. I think what we have to say is much more radical: There really is nothing for us beyond human flourishing, but human flourishing is not a human possibility, and it cannot be understood apart from the God who became human in Jesus.

What "self-sufficient humanism" cannot understand is this: The foregoing is the flourishing. The relentless sharing is the possession of an abundant life. The servanthood is the greatness. The kenosis is the fullness. This is God's humanism, to use Barth's term, and it only makes sense in light of His kingdom that is being formed on earth as it is in heaven.

The irony of our secular age is that in seeking to flourish apart from the God who became human it became impossible for humans to flourish, for it is this God alone who makes human flourishing both possible and describable.

Drive - What's Going On?

2012-01-03T18:36:00.005Z

A man must have a code. Omar wouldn't point no gun on no citizen who wasn't in the game. Neil McCauley would not attach himself to anything that he couldn't walk out on in 30 seconds flat if he felt the heat around the corner. The Driver in Drive would be available to whoever hired him for 5 minutes, no matter what happened in that period of time. But either side of it he is off the clock.

As is often the case, however, a woman throws a spanner in the works; the code is threatened.

The woman never hires Driver, but the central job in the film is one he is doing for her and her young son. At the beginning of the film, Driver's code operates in the context of an independent life - a life where he has to care about no one but himself. Those five minutes are the only time of interaction between him and the people he is working for. After that, he is as good as dead to them, and them to him. There is a scene where an old "employer" runs into Driver at a diner, and the employer starts talking about the old job and the possibility of another one. Driver aggressively enforces his code - the five minutes of availability were up long ago, and if the guy doesn't leave him alone then he's going to get his teeth kicked in.

And yet there is this woman and her son who need his help and are completely unaware of it; who need more than five minutes. The tension of the film lies in watching Driver's code begin to crack. The carefree life that he can live with such regiment is thrown into turmoil by meaningful relationships.

That all of this is played out with almost Terrence Malick levels of dialogue is really quite impressive to behold. The atmosphere is simmering, the action intense. Though on the surface it seems the relationship between a man and a woman is the central component, this is not necessarily the thing you end up caring for. The film doesn't leave you rooting for the two leads to get together amidst forces that pull them apart. In fact, the film quite possibly shows Driver spending as much time with her son as with her, and he says almost nothing to either of them.

So what do you end up caring about? The safety of the woman and her son is one thing, though even that is marginal. What ultimately matters is the life of the driver. The word "existential" has been used to describe the movie. His existence as subject is what matters. We see the film through his eyes. As the all-important heist goes down, we are in the car with him, waiting, seeing, feeling. And as the action comes to a crescendo, we want only for him to survive.

His code is designed to keep him alive. But what happens to him when those five minutes are not long enough to get the job done?

This is a very good film with an exquisite sound track. It is not pleasant viewing, but it is compelling. It would hardly be high praise to say that it's the best film I've seen in 2012, but I will say this: it will take something quite brilliant to better it.

Barth For Dummies by a Dummy

2011-12-31T16:06:00.000Z

I'm only beginning to delve into the theology of Karl Barth. When asked to sum up his contribution to theology and how his legacy is felt today in two thousand words, this is the best I could muster up. I'm quite confident it has holes and misunderstandings, but if nothing else the labour behind these words got me excited about Barth, so the journey toward understanding will continue. In fact as of tomorrow my scheduled reading of Church Dogmatics begins! Anyway, while this is child's play for anyone familiar with Barth, it might give those of you who aren't a small taste of what this colossal figure has to offer the church today.

1. Introduction

1.1 Barth In Overview

“Theology is thinking what to say to be saying the gospel.”[1] That Robert Jenson could write these words at the end of the 20^th century is a testament to the contribution Karl Barth made to theology from the beginning of that same century to his death in 1968. Though uninterested in mere repetition,[2] Barth was not seeking to say anything new. In fact the vanity of such newness was precisely what Barth fought against, understanding as he did that new theology would inevitably find ways to co-operate with ‘Third Reichs’. Rather, Barth’s contribution to Christian theology was to “begin again at the beginning”[3] – that is, to begin again with the revelation of God in Christ; to begin again with the only given we have: the gospel of Jesus.

Barth saw his role -- indeed the role of all theology -- as that of John the Baptist: simply pointing once again to Jesus.[4] His contribution was to direct theology back to the “theological subject”: the theos that gives theology its origin, content, and telos. In light of the context in which he found himself, this “is one of Karl Barth’s greatest achievements.”[5]

1.2 Barth In Context

Identifying and appreciating Barth’s contribution to theology entails an understanding of his context. Barth describes the dominant Protestant theology of his time as follows:

To think of God meant for them, with scarcely any attempt to hide the fact, to think of human experience, particularly of the Christian religious experience. To speak about God meant to speak about humanity, no doubt in elevated tone, but once more and now more than ever about human revelations and miracles, about human faith and human works.[6]

That being said, it was not so much the theology of the time that led to Barth’s break with his liberal heritage, but rather the disobedience of the church to which this theology led. In Barth’s own words, it was “the failure of the ethics of modern theology at the outbreak of the First World War” which played a “decisive role” in his turn from Protestant liberalism to “dialectical theology”.[7] A contextual reading of Barth must appreciate that Barth, first of all, saw the need to change the church’s obedience. He then saw that the only way to do this was to change the church’s imagination by pointing her once again towards “the image of the invisible God,”[8] to whom our talk and our lives must conform.

Stanley Hauerwas says that, “Barth rightly refused to separate our knowledge of God from how we are to live if God is properly acknowledged.”[9] This was the motivation behind Church Dogmatics: to properly identify and acknowledge God as God, and thus bring about the obedience of faith. For Barth, this meant talking about God extra nos and God pro nobis – God outside us and God for us. Contrary to his theological contemporaries, Barth understood in a fresh way that the latter cannot be understood without the former, and vice-versa.

2. Theological Contribution

2.1 God Extra Nos

“The Gospel is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from men.”[10] Barth took God’s otherness with utmost seriousness. At a time when Feuerbach’s thought found empirical proof within Protestantism, Barth sought first to listen to and then speak of a God who is “the pure and absolute boundary and beginning of all that we are and have and do; God, who is distinguished qualitatively from men and from everything human, and must never be identified with anything which we name, or experience, or conceive, or worship, as God.”[11]

God extra nos means not only that God is not derived from something in human nature, but that He is not bound to any reality we might call “the nature of God”. Barth stressed relentlessly the utter freedom of God. God is free to choose the kind of God He wants to be, and in so choosing He is that God and none other.[12]

Theology, for Barth, was discourse about this theos, who could never be our own creation or a projection of our perverted desires. But how can we know such a God? Barth would describe such knowledge as an impossibility. But it is an impossibility made possible by this God’s self-revelation, which is at once a veiling and an unveiling; a gift that cannot be grasped or possessed, for as mystery – as Trinity -- it remains outside of us as the frontier of a new world.[13] Our knowledge of God is “our inclusion in God’s self-knowledge,”[14] yet even in this inclusion there is exclusion until the eschaton when God will be all in all. Revelation has been given extra nos, and revelation awaits extra nos. As William Stacy Johnson writes, “[F]or Barth the event of revelation in Jesus Christ is not simply a ‘given’ to be possessed or described but an event that is still unfolding, a dramatic ‘giving’ of God the Creator, Reconciler, Redeemer, which invites a dynamic, constructive response.”[15]

2.2 God Pro Nobis

The remarkable contribution that Barth made to theology was his emphasis on the otherness and unknowability of God extra nos in the face of human arrogance and potential. But the majestic contribution of Barth to theology was to describe how this God extra nos is also God pro nobis in a way that does not diminish his God-ness but rather reveals its true shape. Green says that, “the centre of Barth’s theology is the freedom of God acting in love toward humanity in Jesus Christ, which sets us free in all spheres of life – politics, art, economics, science, and especially theology and church – for a life of co-humanity and the praise of God.”[16]

John 1:14 plays a decisive role in Barth’s theology. “The Word made flesh” is not just the means that the God extra nos decided to employ in order to reveal Himself to humanity. That God really became man in Jesus of Nazareth gives character, shape and content to this word “God”. In a passage from his lecture ‘The Humanity of God’, Barth says,

How should God’s divinity exclude his humanity? For it is God’s freedom for love, and therefore his freedom to be not only in the heights but also in the depths, not only great but also small, not only in and for himself but also to be with another who is different form himself, to give himself for this other, since there is room enough for it for community with humanity.[17]

God extra nos is utterly free and utterly decisive. His free decision is to be God pro nobis. Yet God is for us not as the One who safeguards or guarantees the future that we decide. Rather, He is for us as the One who poses our future;[18] indeed, as the One who is our future. Barth’s theology was headed towards the time when God would be all in all. The God outside of us will have no future outside of Himself. He will have no history without us because He is for us – for us in a way that only He decides, because He is for us not only as our reconciler but as our Lord.

God pro nobis means that God wills not to be God without His creatures. We know this because He has become a creature like us – “at a definite point in space and time there lives and dies a human being like us all. In this human being God’s Word is revealed to us.”[19] The unity of God extra nos and God pro nobis is found in Jesus Christ. Revelation is the event of God’s history breaking into human history in the particular form of this God-man. Everything must now be seen in light of Him.

In an address delivered in 1949 on the subject of “A New Humanism”, Barth says, unapologetically, “the Christian proclamation is the proclamation of Jesus Christ.”[20] Indeed, Jenson remarks that, “The Kirchliche Dogmatik is an enormous attempt to interpret all reality by the fact of Christ.”[21] Such an attempt was revolutionary in a time when the theologians of the Church were looking to ground reality in things other than the Christ given to us in Scripture and in the proclamation of the Word – the Christ who reveals the God extra nos and pro nobis. Barth sought only to follow the command of God to the disciples in the face of Jesus’ transfiguration: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”[22]

3. Barth’s Legacy: Past, Present and Future

3.1 The Ethical Telos

As mentioned above, Barth aimed to contribute not only to the orthodoxy of the Church, but to her obedience which flowed out of her thinking about God. Barth’s desire was for the Church to be the Church. This could only happen as the Church listened to the Word spoken by the God outside of her and corresponded to the actions of the God who is for her – indeed, for the whole world:

Confronted with the mystery of God, the creature must be silent: not merely for the sake of being silent, but for the sake of hearing. Only to the extent that it attains to silence, can it attain to hearing. But again, it must be silent not merely for the sake of hearing but for that of obeying. For obedience is the purpose and goal of hearing. Our return to obedience is indeed the aim of free grace. It is for this that it makes us free.[23]

Barth was not a contributor to dead orthodoxy. His concern was for the glory of God and the salvation unto obedience of humanity, which he saw not as two things but one.[24] Our end is not only to think after God but to obey Him. Indeed, such thinking and obedience are inseparable, which was a reality embodied by Barth himself.[25]

It was the disobedience of the German church that caused Barth to begin again at the beginning; to be silent in the presence of God’s Word. His silence led to hearing afresh the Word of God spoken through His Son, and it was his goal that not only he would hear, but that the Church would hear and obey this Word which has given itself to the Church in love and freedom, and which in this giving has summoned the church “in the same instant to faith, obedience, gratitude, humility and joy.”[26]

3.2 Present and Future

The extent to which the above seems obvious is to extent to which Karl Barth’s legacy is still felt today. Daniel Hardy writes that, “The influence of Karl Barth has been so extensive as to be virtually coterminous with the history of theology during and since his lifetime.”[27] Hardy may be overstating the case, however. John Webster makes note of how Barth has been largely ignored by evangelicals in North America and Britain, who have been absorbed with issues not at the forefront of Barth’s theology: “It has thus proved easier for English-language systematic theology to work in relative independence from Barth’s corpus.”[28]

As regards Barth and Catholicism, a deeper understanding of the interactions with Catholic theologians that shaped Barth’s theological trajectory can potentially generate fruitful ecumenical discussions today. Keith Johnson divides Barth’s theological history into four stages, showing that while stages 1 and 3 find Barth in sharp conflict with Roman Catholic doctrines, stages 2 and 4 contain “interesting points of contact between Barth’s mature theology and Catholic theology.”[29] This bodes well for the future of ecumenical dialogue.

There is ongoing conversation to be had about reading Barth’s work as congenial towards postmodernism. Gary Dorrien writes that, “Barth thought about Christianity in a way that often remarkably prefigured the insights of Thomas Kuhn, Alisdair MacIntyre, and various postmodern critics of the Enlightenment quest for universal reason.”[30] In our postmodern context, Barth’s theology demonstrates a way of speaking about God – and therefore ourselves and the world -- that does not rely on our individual pure reason abstracted from any story or tradition, but relies only upon the mysterious gift of the Word of God, given to us in the story of Jesus. Webster writes that, “One of Barth’s chief legacies is that he offers an example of one who told the history of thought and culture, and, therefore, the history…of theology, from the perspective of gospel, church, and faith.”[31]

Yet while Barth’s theology is at home in postmodernism, it remains also a stranger carrying a message from the “strange, new world of the Bible”. Barth was postmodern enough to know that “isms” are often blatant or latent ideologies, including postmodernism. In line with Barth, therefore, the gospel cannot be heard today as an optional truth in the world of postmodernism, but only as the truth that calls all other truths – including the truths of postmodernism – into question.[32]

In the end, Barth was not too concerned about whether his work was adhered to by later generations. He had no desire to create a thing called “Barthianism”.[33] And he was certainly unconcerned about whether his theology would fit in with the philosophical traditions of the future. The legacy which Karl Barth sought to give the church today – indeed, the church of every day – was to cause her to turn again and again to the “theological subject”, i.e. the triune God revealed in Christ.[34] His theology was never intended to be an end, but only another finger pointing to the Alpha and Omega who must have the first Word, and who will most assuredly have the last.

[1] R.W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God, 32

[2] Cf. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, 16: “[D]ogmatics does not ask what the apostles and prophets said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets.”

[3] Cf. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, 868: “[I]n dogmatics strictly speaking there are no comprehensive views, no final conclusions and results. There is only the investigation and teaching which take place in the act of dogmatic work and which, strictly speaking, must continually begin again at the beginning in every point.”

[4] Clifford Green tells of the painting ‘Crucifixion’ by Grunewald, which hung over Barth’s desk: “In it John the Baptist points with elongated index finger to the figure of Jesus on the Cross.” C. Green (ed.), Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom, 11

[5] Jenson, Systematic Theology, 60n100

[6] Karl Barth, from a lecture entitled ‘The Humanity of God’, quoted in Green, Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom, 48

[7] Ibid., 49

[8] Col. 1:15

[9] S. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 142

[10] K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 28

[11] Ibid., 330-1

[12] Cf. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 140: “According to Barth, God’s being is most decisively construed by the notion of decision. God is so unmitigatedly personal that his free decision is not limited even by his “divine nature”: what he is, he himself chooses. But that must be to say, God is the act of his decision. Thus the doctrine of election, of God’s choice “before all time,” is for Barth the center of the doctrine of God’s being.”

[13] Cf. Barth, CD 1.1, 371: “God gives Himself entirely to man in His revelation, but not in such a way as to make Himself man’s prisoner. He remains free in His working, in giving Himself.”

[14] K.A. Richardson, Reading Karl Barth: New Directions for North American Theology, 131

[15] W.S. Johnson, ‘Barth and Beyond’, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2146

[16] Green (ed.), Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom, 11

[17] K. Barth, ‘The Humanity of God’, quoted in Green, Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom, 48

[18] Cf. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 16: “[Israel’s] God is not salvific because he defends against the future but because he poses it. 16

[19] Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.2, 36

[20] K. Barth, God Here and Now, 4

[21] Jenson, Systematic Theology, 21

[22] Matt. 17:5 (NIV)

[23] K. Barth, CD II/2, 30, quoted in Richardson, Reading Karl Barth, 169

[24] Cf. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3.1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 228

[25] Cf. Johnson, ‘Barth and Beyond’, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2146: “In a number of little-known addresses and letters, Barth had proclaimed as early as 1933 that one was not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in Germany if one was not also preaching specifically against the persecution and disappearance of the Jews.”

[26] K. Barth, CD II/I, 550, quoted in Richardson, Reading Karl Barth, 155

[27] D.W. Hardy, ‘Karl Barth’, 39

[28] J.Webster, ‘Theology After Barth’, 250

[29] K.L. Johnson, ‘A Reappraisal of Karl Barth’s Theological Development and his Dialogue with Catholicism’, 23

[30] G. Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, 12

[31] J. Webster, ‘Barth, Modernity and Postmodernity’, 13

[32] Cf. Barth, Romans, 35: “The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths….Anxiety concerning the victory of the Gospel – that is, Christian Apologetics – is meaningless, because the Gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome.”

[33] Cf. Barth, God Here and Now, 124: “…all words ending in “ism” are inappropriate in serious theological language.”

[34] John Webster writes that, “What Barth expected of his readers…was that they should take with ultimate seriousness, with a kind of joyful earnestness, not what he himself had to say, but rather the object of his testimony, which was none other than the name of Jesus Christ, the sum and substance of the gospel, and beginning and end of the works and ways of God.” J. Webster, ‘Barth, Modernity and Postmodernity’ in Karl Barth: A Future for Postmodern Theology?, 1-2

A rant on MI:4 that is, apologetically, all over the place

2011-12-31T15:07:00.004Z

Here is something of a post-match analysis of the latest film in the Mission Impossible cash cow. I strongly disliked Ghost Protocol, with one of the main reasons being that I simply didn't care about the central crisis of the story: a madman who is intent on blowing up the entire world. On the surface it would appear that there could be no more wicked act than the extermination of all of humanity, but the reality is that wickedness is most truly wicked when it is particular. If the madman was intent on exterminating every female from the face of the planet, or every Muslim, and it showed his brutal treatment of these particular people, then that would be something to get enraged over. But to simply want to get rid of everybody is a perverted form of equality.

In pains me to say it, but the James Bond approach to crisis in action films -- a madman hell bent on world domination -- doesn't work any more. This might go some way to explaining why the last three or four Bond movies have been quite dreadful. In our age of globalization, we need something particular to care about. It is this narrative of the particular -- and not the fight choreography that the latest Bond film shamelessly imitated -- that makes the Bourne action series work. It is one man's search for his true identity in the midst of a very sinister side to U.S. foreign policy (Chomsky might argue that that's the only side). We learn that Jason Bourne is a pawn in the hands of powerful American bureaucrats who are playing a game that "ends when we've won" - a game that costs the lives of innocent civilians. They have named Jason Bourne like they have named everything else, and they have used that power to serve their own political and economic ends. Foucault talked of power as knowledge - those in power declare what the facts are, what constitutes knowledge; those in power get to name things "Jason Bourne" and "good" and "axis of evil".

In Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and James Bond, the bureaucracy and their pawns are actually the good guys. The evil that they will do anything to stop -- even if it requires evil means -- is some entity that they get to name as "mad" or "evil" or "terrorist" or "threat", and we're given nothing that would bring such labels into question. This idealogical narrative worked on the back of the particular conflict that got named World War II -- a conflict where the line between the good guys and the bad guys was reasonably clear -- but it works no longer because that narrative has been exposed as a fallacy weaved by powers more intent on world domination than the powers they are trying to stop in the name of "good". U.S. collaboration with Nazis post-war blurs any kind of line that had been previously drawn.

Except of course maybe the narrative does still hold credibility and appeal, because Ghost Protocol has a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Smooth action sequences get you a long way these days.

Perhaps my initial statement is wrong. Perhaps MI:4 is deeply flawed not because it deals with a world domination/destruction that is too big and too general to care about, but because it completely fails to see who is most likely to bring such a scenario about.

Not Only Eastern Europe

2011-12-31T12:23:00.000Z

The second major competitive bloc is based in Europe and is dominated by Germany. It's taking a big step forward with the consolidation of the European Common Market. Europe has a larger economy than the United States, a larger population and a better educated one.

If it ever gets its act together and becomes an integrated power, the United States could become a second-class power. This is even more likely as Germany-led Europe takes the lead in restoring Eastern Europe to its traditional role as an economic colony, basically part of the Third World.

Noam Chomsky, ~1993

Things I Liked - Things I Didn't Like

2011-12-28T14:08:00.001Z

Some things I liked this year, and some things that I didn't:

Films:

I liked The Tree of Life. In fact I liked it so much that I bought it as a present for someone else, partly so that I could watch it again. I've written about it here already, so all I will say is that it is a beautiful film that captures childhood memories in a way that I thought they could never be captured outside of our internal imaginations. It is two hours of imagination-on-screen, which is what the art of film is all about.

I didn't like The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Granted I'm not well versed in the mythology of the series, but I thought this film was flat, contrived, and rather pointless. To call the human characters one dimensional would be generous, therefore it didn't matter how good the ape story was. For the story to work, it required caring about what the humans were doing, and the film failed to evoke such care.

TV:

[Since I can't think of any new television shows I watched] I liked The Wire. I watched the first season again for about the fourth time, and it never fails to leave a new impression. Its deconstruction of institutions is remarkable, as is its narrative about who the real targets are: The mid-level drug dealers, the drug kingpins, the suppliers, the politicians who are knee deep in drug money, the international terrorists. If The Wire is ambiguous about who the bad guys are, it's not because all of the bad guys have some good in them. It's because in the present arrangement of things we're given little choice but to be bad, and what is badness when there is no choice involved?

I didn't like Rev. The second season has made me question the first season in the same way that the second Matrix film made me wonder if I was blinded to the flaws of the first.

Books:

I liked Hannah's Child. How could you not?

I liked Gilead. If Gilead was a film, it would look something like The Tree of Life. It's full of beautiful snapshots and thoughtful reflections that are soaked in grace. That I enjoyed this novel even more than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Road is a testament to its quality.

I liked What Uncle Sam Really Wants. A short book that left me open-mouthed on several occasions. I couldn't believe what I was reading, which makes me believe that what I read might just be true.

I didn't like Love Wins. Al Mohler -- who would cause me to change my mind for the sole purpose of disagreeing with him -- called this book a "theological striptease". I couldn't agree more. Sex sells, and this book did precisely that and little else.

I Like My God Like I Like My Books

2011-12-27T01:19:00.001Z

I used to think that books existed primarily to make me smarter. Then five minutes ago I read this:

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, at a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. - Franz Kafka

Walter Brueggemann invokes this image of an axe to describe the work of the prophets who speak the Word of God. That he does so is fitting, because before Kafka there was the author of Hebrews, who used words similar to Kafka's to describe the work of God's words - the work that makes them necessary hearing:

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

A good book does not confirm us in our present state, but confronts us with an alternative reality that evokes a new way seeing and hearing and feeling and thinking. So must a good God.

A Peaceable Christmas: The Glory of Incarnation

2011-12-24T16:45:00.001Z

In the grandest of all the Christmas narratives, God's way of peace amidst human hostility is prefigured, waiting to be fleshed out as the story of Jesus is told.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory...

A simple description of incarnation is: glory. Unique glory "as of the only son from the Father". Incarnation, therefore, does not name what we see when we see a human being behaving like God. Incarnation names what we see when we see Jesus. Compared to this seeing, all other seeing is blindness. By the grace of this seeing, we see everything else in the light of the glory unveiled. By the grace of this glory, we too are called to share in it. What is this glory?

Christ’s moment of most absolute particularity – the absolute dereliction of the cross – is the moment in which the glory of God, his power to be where and when he will be, is displayed before the eyes of the world. (D.B. Hart)

In short, the cross of Christ is the glory of God. It is on the cross that the narrative of violence is once-for-all confronted by the narrative of peace. Here light shines in darkness, and darkness cannot overcome it. Here glory is seen as the Giver who is himself the act of giving and the gift itself. This is what it means to say "incarnation". This is also the story of God's peace - it is relentless offering, relentless giving, relentless sacrifice for the sake of even the worst other. It ends in death - but it begins again with resurrection, by which Jesus is announced as the true lord and form of all creation and by which all creation is made new. Hart can thus say,

The resurrection – far from liberating Christ’s otherworldly essence from the servile form in which it has hitherto been hidden – vindicates and imparts again the whole substance of Christ’s earthly life, the shape of its particularity, which is, precisely in its humble and slavish form, an overcoming of earthly powers. His is a pattern that sinful history cannot accommodate (which is why pagan critics from Celsus to Nietzsche can find no way properly to account for the figure of Christ or for the force of his presence in time), but this is not to say that he must in consequence withdraw from history; rather, he initiates a real counterhistory, a new practice and new form of life that is – as it happens – the true story of the world.

The peace promised at Christmas only makes sense in light of the peace that Jesus breathes over his disciples after his resurrection. Or to quote the best thing I've read about Christmas in a while, "the real meaning of Christmas is Easter."

Yet the story does not end there. The peace pronounced by Jesus is followed by a commissioning; by vocation: "As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you." In once sense, it is finished. In another sense, it has only just begun. The church is not incidental to the peace made possible by Christ. The church is a witness to what is already true and to what will be even truer in the future. But such witnessing does not take the form of an idle spectator. It is -- it must be and can only be -- the witness of participants:

The church exists in order to become the counterhistory, nature restored, the alternative way of being that Christ opens up: the way of return. (Hart)

Zizek Defining the Undefinable in 8 Words

2011-12-23T20:44:00.000Z

Postmodernism: the defeat of modernity in its very triumph.

A Peaceable Christmas: Only The Beginning

2011-12-22T13:17:00.000Z

In Luke's Christmas narrative, angels announce peace on earth. In Matthew's Christmas narrative, the king of the Jews slaughters children in Bethleham in order to do away with Jesus. The violence of humanity is confronted by the peace of God, but the violence does not disappear. Rather, it intensifies. Perhaps this gets us to a meaning of Jesus's mission statement that he came not to bring peace, but a sword. He knew that his way, his politics, would not simply cause enemies to disarm themselves, turning their swords into plowshares. Instead, his way was a threat to enemy authority and rule, and the only way they knew to deal with threats was death. Violence is the empire's weapon, death is the empire's solution.

At Christmas there is an attempt on Jesus's life. It might seem a somewhat crude question, but it just occurred to me - if Jesus were killed in Herod's Christmas massacre, would his death have had the same effects as the death he suffered in his thirties? Judging by the Apostle's Creed we might posit that it would have -- though we would have to substitute 'Pontius Pilate' for 'Herod the Great' -- but surely not. Surely Christmas wasn't enough. Surely the death of God incarnate wasn't enough. (There's a sentence to quote out of context if you want to get me in hot water!)

The fact that Jesus was spared by God at Christmas is a sign that Christmas is only the beginning of the story of God's peace on earth. It is only a hint of what is to come. In Matthew and Luke's narratives, it is hinted that the powers that be will not be pleased with what God is up to. He will not support their violence, as well intentioned as it might be. He will not sanctify it. He will not justify it. He will grieve it:

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes."

Christmas is not the good news of a new metaphysics. Incarnation does not name a static reality that is salvific in and of itself. It names the story of God with us in this particular way, in this particular child who would grow up to be a king unlike all the other kings of all the other nations. Incarnation names the story of the things of God that alone can make for peace: Love of enemies, refusal to repay evil with evil, forgiveness of our debtors, dinner with strangers.

Ultimately, Incarnation names the passion narrative, the definitive confrontation between our violence and God's peace. God will not support our violence. He will not sanctify it. He will not justify it. He will weep over it, but not only that - He will forgive it, because He justifies by resurrection the One who,

"when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed."

A Peaceable Christmas

2011-12-20T21:22:00.002Z

Incarnation in Matthew is not the news of a unique metaphysics that the world did not know. It is the announcement of a political and ethical counter-reality that the world refused to know. 'Emmanuel' names the divine decison that human violence is to be confronted by the peace of God.

It is promised to Joseph that this gift of a son "will save his people from their sins." What kind of salvation will this be? That question can be answered by asking a prior one - From what kinds of sins will this people be saved from?

Commenting on Micah 1:13, James Mays says that 'the chariot is the chief sin' of the people of Israel. Their militarization, their excessive accumulation of weaponry to secure their "vital interests", is a direct affront to the way that Yhwh would have them walk. In Isaiah 2, the prophet says that Israel's God has rejected his people because "their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots." Israel's desire to be like the nations around them extended to their resolution to violence. Like all of us, they were determined to keep what they had and regain what they once had, and would use force as the chief means of doing so. It is in this force that their trust lay.

Jesus is given to save people from such trust. He is given as a sign that there is an alternative way to live in a world that has been ubiquitously "reinvested with the truth of violence". He is given as the embodiment and teacher of that way. He is that way, and those who read and hear this gospel are called to follow him.

Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

These words were originally spoken to King Ahaz, mentioned already in Matthew's gospel as a descendant of David and therefore an ancestor of Jesus. Jerusalem was under threat, yet in the face of Syrian violence the people of Israel were told to trust not in their military might but in their God, whose presence alone could make for peace. The people of Israel quite rationally refused such risky trust, yet their commitment to the way of violence caused them to suffer the violence of various empires. "They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."

It is into a sea of violence that Jesus is plunged. The salvation that he will secure for his sinful people can only be constituted by a parting of this sea by the peaceable hand of God.

The Way formed by this parting is where Jesus is, and it is where the church must be too if she is to live and preach the salvation that is meaningless without discipleship.

What They Love

2011-12-19T19:20:00.000Z

Jamie Smith says that in order to know a person don't ask them what they believe but rather what they love. One way to determine what someone loves is to see what gets them excited; what event they look forward to.

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't just get excited upon reading that David Bentley Hart has a book coming out early 2012. It's called The Devil and Pierre Gernet, and it's a collection of stories.

Why would an eminent theologian decide to turn his hand to narrative? Because...

God is no more likely (and a good deal less likely) to be found in theology than in poetry and fiction.

Whose Freedom? Which Religion?

2011-12-19T12:27:00.002Z

Civil religion begins and ends with the freedom of human beings:

"There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment...and that is the force of human freedom..." - George Bush

That is why atheists are right and rational to call "God" into question: they understand that the underlying premise of civil religion with which they agree -- that is, absolute human freedom -- has no need of God. In fact, what they know and what the Christians engaged in civil religion don't is that this underlying premise would work better without him. (So called "New Atheism" is far more practical than it is philosophical.) Atheists are not trying to turn Christians into something different - into atheists. They are trying to turn Christians into better versions of what they already are.

True religion begins and ends with the freedom of God. This is a freedom that atheists and Christians cannot be free from, because it is a freedom for them. If there is a centre to Barth's theology, Clifford Green says it is this:

the freedom of God acting in love toward humanity in Jesus Christ, which sets us free in all spheres of life – politics, art, economics, science, and especially theology and church – for a life of co-humanity and the praise of God.

Theologian of Freedom

2011-12-12T23:26:00.000Z

God sends him – from the realm of the eternal, unfallen, unknown world of the Beginning and the End….God sends him – into this temporal, fallen world with which we are only too familiar; into this order which we can finally interpret only in biological categories, and which we call ‘Nature’….God sends him – not to change this world of ours, not for the inauguration of a moral reformation of the flesh, not to transform it by art, or to rationalize it by science, or to transcend it by the Fata Morgana of religion, but to announce the resurrection of the flesh; to proclaim the new man who recognizes himself in God, for he is made in His image, and in whom God recognizes Himself, for He is his pattern; to proclaim the new world where God requires no victory, for there He is already Victor, and where He is not a thing in the midst of other things, for there He is All in All; and to proclaim the new Creation, where Creator and creature are not two, but one.

- Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief

While David Hart's criticism that Barth is insufficiently Acts 17:28ist may stand (I have no idea if it does or not), passages like this demonstrate the work of theology as a joyful work, as Barth thought it ought to be.

Barth was -- in more ways than one -- unapologetically Christian in his theology. If that sounds like an obvious thing to say about a Christian theologian, it is largely because Barth endeavoured to make it so.

A Classic Memory

2011-12-10T14:51:00.000Z

There is, for all intents and purposes, only one match in the football calender. It is Barcelona versus Real Madrid. It's the only game I care about, because Barcelona embody everything that I love about football, and Madrid embody everything that I hate. I love Messi, I hate Ronaldo. I love Guardiola, I hate Mourinho. I love proactive football, I hate reactive football.

Needless to say, I would quite like it if Barcelona win tonight, though I fear the worst.

In view of El Clasico, here is my favourite moment from the last few in memory.

It is the second leg of the Spanish Super Cup. Madrid -- having begun their pre-season early in order to lay down a marker right at the beginning of the season -- are losing 2-1 in the Nou Camp, and 4-3 on aggregate. Mourinho decides to introduce youth team product Jose Maria Callejon to the cauldron. He is young, impish, and eager to make an impression in the biggest game of his life up to this point.

In the middle of the park, Iniesta has the ball at his feet, shielding it from the new arrival. Rather than accept his fate, Callejon decides instead to kick the back of Iniesta's legs a few times, just to let the old guard know that there is a new kid in town, and he's not to be trifled with. Iniesta wins a free kick, but sets aside his calm demeanour for a brief moment as he squares up to his opponent. Callejon appears to have gotten under his skin. Feathers have been ruffled. Mourinho is impressed. Nothing further happens at present, but a history has been formed between Spain's World Cup hero and a Spanish unknown. What kind of fireworks will their next encounter produce? A few minutes later, this happens:

Beautiful.

Iniesta and Callejon share an apology and an embrace in the end.

There are some players you don't want to mess with because they'll batter you. There are those special players you don't want to mess with because they'll nutmeg you.

Barth and Universalism

2011-12-09T18:46:00.000Z

From the little of Karl Barth that I've read, here is a crash course on Barth and universalsim - the belief that every human being will be saved.

Nein! Why? Because a grace that must save all people could not be free grace; it could not be the grace of a God who is free.

And yet, as Barth asks, "would it be God's free grace if we could absolutely deny that it could do that?" It would not, and so to reject the possibility that every human being will be saved is to reject the nature of God's free grace; indeed, it is to reject the freedom of God to be and do what He wills. Barth says unequivocally that "there is no theological justification for setting any limits on our side to the friendliness of God towards humanity which appeard in Jesus Christ".

Barth has a timely word for those of us who are so antagonistic towards universalism. Listen to him:

Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God's grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty!

The Political Cross

2011-12-01T15:42:00.002Z

In light of the cross, does all suffering take on significance and meaning? In separate works, David Bentley Hart and John Howard Yoder have a bit of a go at popular pastoral theology that seeks to understand the trials of life as our cross to bear, or as all part of the grand narrative that God is weaving behind the scenes, and if we could only see the big picture we would rejoice in our sufferings as we are exhorted to do.

But what does it mean to suffer with Jesus? For Yoder, this is nothing other than a political suffering; the suffering of one who belongs to the kingdom of God and is therefore violently opposed by the kingdom of this world.

The cross of Christ was not an inexplicable or chance event, which happened to strike him, like illness or accident. To accept the cross as his destiny, to move toward it and even to provoke it, when he could well have done otherwise, was Jesus’ constantly reiterated free choice; and he warns his disciples lest their embarking on the same path be less conscious of its costs (Luke 14:25-33). The cross of Calvary was not a difficult family situation, not a frustration of visions of personal fulfilment, a crushing debt or a nagging in-law; it was the political, legally to be expected result of a moral clash with the powers ruling his society. Already the early Christians had to be warned against claiming merit for any and all suffering; only if their suffering be innocent, and a result of the evil will of their adversaries, may it be understood as meaningful before God.

The cross, therefore, is not the symbol of suffering in general, nor does it give meaning and redemptive quality to all suffering. The cross is a concrete form of suffering that is vindicated by resurrection. What is that concrete form? Jesus tells us in the Beatitudes:

Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

What then of other types of suffering? What of the death of a child? What of the natural disasters that have wreaked havoc on the world? What comfort does the cross hold out to those who know such suffering?

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy…We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

A Conclusion About Theology

2011-11-30T20:19:00.001Z

One of the most sage theological lessons I've learned was from the fictional preacher Robert Boughton. In a discussion with some folk on the murky subject of predestination, he said amidst the frustration of ambiguity that,

To conclude is not in the nature of the enterprise.

There are those -- Christian and non-Christian -- who think that it is precisely the nature of theology to draw conclusions. In the land of relative truth, the man with one conclusion is king. And so we clamour for that conclusion, not in a journey towards liberating truth but in a quest for dominating power.

Theology, however, does not wield truth but rather serves it, stands under it, moves towards it, and rejoices in it. It seems strange that the author of a massive theological work entitled Church Dogmatics would side with Rev. Boughton, but the more I read by/about Karl Barth the more apparent it is that his theology was not about conclusions but about beginnings. He was always going back again to the beginning -- the beginning of theology, the beginning of life, the beginning of knowledge: God's revelation in Jesus. The task of theology is not only to say this, but to learn and re-learn how to say everything in light of this. This is why Clifford Green can state that,

Theology for Barth is a pilgrim venture always open to revision, a self-critical discipline, ever seeking to give a better account of its subject matter.

As a theologian who preceded both Boughton and Barth once wrote, "We know in part" (1 Cor. 13). Any theological reflection that is not aware of this conviction is dangerous, because the only thing worse than a person who claims there is no truth is the person who claims he is giving you the whole truth.

The War on (benign) Drugs

2011-11-25T14:46:00.000Z

The Wire (there he goes again) is, amongst other things, an argument for the legalisation of drugs by way of a scathing critique on the so-called War on Drugs, which Noam Chomsky says "has little to do with drugs but a lot to do with distracting the population, increasing repression in the inner cities, and building support for the attack on civil liberties".

Legalising a drug like heroin has always seemed foolish to me. Even Bunny Colvin couldn't convince me otherwise. Heroin ruins lives, and that's all the reason I need to make its possession and distribution a criminal offense. But then I read this:

Heroin is not a poison. Contrary to popular belief, pure heroin, properly handled, is a benign drug. In the words of a 1965 New York study by Dr Richard Brotman: 'Medical knowledge has long since laid to rest the myth that opiates observably harm the body.' Contrary to popular belief, it is rather difficult to kill yourself with heroin: the gap between a therapeutic and a fatal dose is far wider than it is, for example, with paracetamol. It is addictive -- and that is a very good reason not to use it -- but its most notable side effect on the physical, mental and moral condition of its users is constipation. The truth is that all of the illness and misery and death which are associated with heroin are, in fact, the effect not of the drug itself but of the black market on which it is sold as a result of this war on drugs.

Maybe Bunny was right all along.

An Order of Vision

2011-11-20T21:40:00.000Z

I've been ~~looking up words in the dictionary~~ reading a portion of David Hart's masterpiece The Beauty of the Infinite as part of an assignment. Most of it I can't understand, but when I read a passage that I can, there are few more satisfying feelings in the world of theology. Not only because it makes me feel smart for about 15 minutes, but because the form and style of Hart's writing reflects, however vaguely, his subject matter. This is how theology ought to be practiced: with gusto and beauty.

Everything Nietzsche deplored about Christianity – its enervating compassion for life at its most debile and deformed, the Gospels’ infuriating and debased aesthetic, which finds beauty precisely where a discriminating and noble eye finds only squalor and decadence – is in fact the expression of an order of vision that cannot be confined within the canons of taste prescribed by myths of power and eminence, because it obeys the aesthetics of an infinite that surpasses every sinful ordering, every totality, as form, as indeed the form of peace: an order of vision that thematizes the infinite according to the gaze of recognition and delight, which finds in every other the glory of the transcendent other, and which cannot turn away from the other because it has learned to see in the other the beauty of the crucified. Because the God who goes to his death in the form of a slave breaks open hearts, every face becomes an icon: a beauty that is infinite. If the knowledge of the light of the glory of God is given in the face of Jesus (2 Cor. 4:6), it is knowledge that allows every other face to be seen in the light of that glory. - D.B. Hart

Not Only Your Loved Ones

2011-11-08T17:26:00.000Z

In preparation for reading Karl Barth I've decided to read about Karl Barth. Here is a little story told by Eberhard Busch that seems to capture something of the joy that Barth took from being a theologian.

When Barth was old, he always treasured conversations with small or large groups of people who wanted to discuss with him topics that were on their hearts. On one such occasion a lady asked him, "Herr Professor, can I be sure that I will see my loved ones in heaven?" He spontaneously replied, "To be sure, you will see not only your loved ones'!"

Classic Yoder

2011-11-04T11:11:00.000Z

What happens when Christianity is not the empire, and what happens when it is:

Before Constantine, one knew as a fact of everyday experience that there was a believing Christian community but one had to "take it on faith" that God was governing history. After Constantine, one had to believe without seeing that there was a community of believers, within the larger nominally Christian mass, but one knew for a fact that God was in control of history.

On living as a Christian:

What would happen if everyone did it? If everyone gave their wealth away what would we do for capital? If everyone loved their enemies who would ward off the Communists? This argument could be met on other levels, but here our only point is to observe that such reasoning would have been preposterous in the early church and remains ludicrous wherever committed Christians accept realistically their minority status. Far more fitting than "What if everybody did it" would be its inverse, "What if nobody else acted like a Christian, but we did?"

Love, Suffering, and the Image of God

2011-11-03T21:07:00.000Z

Can God suffer?

In a hardly surprising answer given the title of the book in which it is found (The Crucified God), Jurgen Moltmann argues that the God who really is God must suffer if he is to be the kind of being worthy of this loftiest of descriptions. Suffering is not merely an experience God can stoop to. Rather, suffering is an experience that gets to the heart of what it means to be divine. After all,

...a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is also a loveless being. Aristotle's God cannot love; he can only be loved by all non-divine beings by virtue of his perfection and beauty, and in this way draw them to him. The 'unmoved Mover' is a 'loveless Beloved'.

Perhaps this is part of what it means to be made in the image of God - we are fellow sufferers. We feel loss, we feel rejection, we feel distance, we feel pain, we feel injustice, and we weep over such things as those being conformed to the image of God in Christ. Indeed, our weeping is integral to our being conformed.

One of my favourite passages in Scripture is in Acts 20, when Paul is giving a farewell speech to the elders of the church in Ephesus. This is the last time they will see each other face to face, and emotions run high:

And when he had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all. And there was much weeping on the part of all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again. And they accompanied him to the ship.

More than any of the wondrous turns of phrase and theological profundities in Paul's New Testament letters, it is this short narrative that reveals the apostle's heart. The gospel creates the kind of friendships that make absence worth weeping over.

And Paul wept.

This should not surprise us. Paul is the man who wrote that if he had all faith and all knowledge but did not have love, he would be nothing.

Love is the sin qua non of Christianity, and because of this, so is suffering.

Constrained Freedom

2011-11-02T18:03:00.001Z

...nothing frees a person so much as knowing surely what their task is.

- Seerveld

Freedom today is often just another name for fear of commitment. We do not want the task of committing to a person, committing to a place, committing to a church, committing to a job, because to do so would jeopardise our notion of freedom, which is the last sin left.

But a commitment-free life is far from a life of freedom. We have been sold the line that the obstacles to freedom are constraints, boundaries, rules, dependence, particularity, accountability within a community. But the truth is that a life free of these things is bondage to emptiness and loneliness. We become our own tyrants, as Hauerwas and Willimon put it; slaves to the whims of our selfish selves.

Chesterton warned that if we free a tiger from his stripes, then we may well be freeing it from being a tiger altogether. It is these stripes that Seerveld is calling us to know and embrace. These stripes are our vocation, our task as a human being, and without them we can never be free.

Change?

2011-10-27T20:07:00.000+01:00

I'd like to think I've grown up. Or changed for the better. I want to believe that if now faced with similar circumstances to those past, I would be the kind of person who would do things differently - who would do the right thing (if there is such a thing).

But I can't be certain. For better or worse, I am my history; or, at least, I am the story that I tell myself about myself, the truths and the lies. What is the present but a culmination of interpreted pasts? What is the future but more of the present? What am I but the deeds I have done? I am their creation, as they are mine.

But I am not alone. There is a history outside of my history that is dying to break into my history; or rather, dying for my history to break into his his story. This story is told by another about another and it is nothing but the truth. It does not obliterate my story. It redeems it; offers transformation from fate to destiny. My present moment is determined by the past, but not only my own. The past of another is always present, carrying newness, life, and hope for a future radically different from my past and present. There is another doer, another actor, whose deeds and acts out-form my own.

He offers new creation.

Defending Natural Revelation

2011-10-26T09:49:00.000+01:00

Natural revelation names what God shows us of himself through creation. Jesus, therefore, is the telos of natural revelation. He is the pinnacle of God's creation - the Word who was born of a woman into the created world. In the man Jesus, the distance between creator and creation is effaced, and revelation springs forth from the transformed and transforming naturality of his life.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life... - 1 Jn. 1:1

Tolerance

2011-10-25T00:07:00.000+01:00

Stanley Hauerwas said it succinctly:

Tolerance kills us.

I haven't read enough Hauerwas to know what he might mean by this, but Slavoj Zizek offers some clues:

Tolerance means don't harass me; don't harass me means come too close to me....In other words, tolerance means I am intolerant to your over-proximity to me. Tolerance means don't come too close; stay at the proper distance.

Tolerance is distance. Distance is loneliness. And loneliness kills us.

Our Moral Universe

2011-10-24T21:17:00.000+01:00

Nicholas Wolterstorff said something I had never heard before when he gave a lecture here in Belfast during the summer. Without knowing the exact quote, he said something along the lines of, Why do we think that God has to punish every wrong deed?

Without presuming to know what he was getting it, it struck me as I was reading on the nature of grace that at the control centre of the universe we have placed punishment in the hotseat. Punishment is the default divine response to wrongdoing. Punishment gets the first word. Punishment is primary. Without this arrangement, we live in an immoral universe.

So the story goes.

But what if grace is in the hotseat? What if grace is the default divine response to wrongdoing? What if grace gets the first word? What if grace is primary?

In Christian discourse, grace is mostly talked about in punishment's shadow. Grace is what happens when the primacy of punishment is foregone. God must punish us to bring balance to a moral universe. God has no obligation to be gracious to us.

But the moral universe is not subject to an adapted form of Newton's third law of motion, with grace as the occasional exception to the rule. Rather, the moral universe is subject only to the rule of God.

And at the core of this rule is not lex talionis, but love.

My Theological 15 Minutes

2011-10-21T01:43:00.000+01:00

Today I attended an inter-church dialogue featuring N.T. Wright as the keynote speaker. I can't remember the title of it, but it was something long-winded that probably took a general synod months to formulate. There is a lot I could share from the day, but here is a little snippet that is something of a personal milestone - the moment I first felt like a theologian.

It was in a seminar on Hope and History. We talked about remembering rightly, about the need to learn from the past and to pursue an ethical vision for the future. We talked about lament and repentance and the general ignorance of history amongst young people today. We talked about upcoming commemoration services and what the response to them might be. But over all this discussion, one woman's question on the violence inherent to our national identity remained unanswered. We even came back to it having acknowledged our oversight, yet immediately we moved on. But just as the discussion was about to be wrapped up, I dropped my bombshell on the playground of Irish theologians [!]. It took the form of an honest question:

When did it become possible to be a Christian and to be violent?

This, I think, is a historical, ethical and theological question that needs to be answered if the church is ever to speak of "hope" in any meaningful, christian sense of the word.

And with that question, my 15 minutes ended and the feeling of absolute theologian-ness vapourised, remembered only on a blog that diminishes my chance of ever being considered a serious theologian with every passing post.

It was fun while it lasted, though.

Truth Is More Self-Involving Than It Used To Be

2011-10-19T18:41:00.000+01:00

My answer to the question, What role does Scripture have in God's ongoing revelation to the world?...boiled down to the bare essentials:

In summary, we cannot speak of scripture’s role in God’s ongoing revelation without speaking of the church that reads scripture as a testimony to the gospel of God, a witness describing the world not as it appears to be, but as it is: redeemed by the love of God in Christ. To a watching world, it is not merely argument from scripture but embodiment of scripture that speaks the deepest truths to the greatest powers. If I may paraphrase the One who teaches us to read scripture rightly, it is by this that the world will know the authority of scripture and the truth to which it attests: if the church who reads it has love for one another.

A Missed Trick

2011-10-19T18:25:00.000+01:00

Since its en vogue for Christians to comment on books that they've not yet read, there is something about Scot McKnight's latest offering, The King Jesus Gospel, the strikes me as odd. On his blog, McKnight has stated the methodology behind the book. Basically, the sources he uses to define the gospel are the four canonical gospels, the preaching in Acts, and chapter 15 of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. The latter is the most important for McKnight's project, providing the hermeneutical lens through which we see other gospel texts.

My question is, where's Galatians? This is probably an earlier source than any of the others, and it is a letter that deals specifically with a community who are getting the gospel wrong. In short, it makes little sense to leave it out of the list of primary sources. Of course on the face of it, Galatians seems to be on the side of those who tell the "soterian gospel", so perhaps that is why McKnight's methodology has no room for it. But I think there was an opportunity to pull off some methodological jujitsu and use the force of Galatians against those who wield it. For example, Richard Hays and N.T. Wright have demonstrated ways to read Galatians that subvert the individualistic readings that have prevailed.

In short, I think a trick was missed, at least in terms of the book's stated methodology. And because of that...

Farewell, Scot McKnight.

Theology and Love: Barth and Von Balthasar

2011-10-12T12:52:00.000+01:00

There's a famous story about a lecture that Karl Barth gave in the States, after which he was asked to sum up the findings of his career as a theologian. He paused for a moment and replied,

Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

The humour and simplicity of this reply both veil and unveil Barth's absolute conviction that this is the supreme content of revelation. Theology that does not begin and end with the love of God in Christ is nothingness. Creation is an act of love. Covenant is an act of love. Incarnation is an act of love. Crucifixion is an act of love. Redemption is an act of love. Judgement is an act of love. In this story of the world we are confronted with God's love, which is a love that is not easily recognised given that it's supreme expression was a bloodied Jew dying a criminal's death on a roman cross.

I can't explain how and why that is love for me and you. And it is not a self-evident truth, no matter how easily the words "Jesus died for you" roll off our tongues. But to use a Hauerwasian turn of phrase, the work of theology is not to explain or rationalise the love of God. Rather, the work of theology is to help us see the world as unintelligible if it is not loved by the God revealed in Jesus.

The Bible that Barth read gives us a world that is the theatre of the love and the glory and the holiness of God. The preaching of the Word is a description of that world and an invitation to enter its strangeness. It is an invitation to walk by the way of grace. Christian theology has everything to do with that Way, or it profits us nothing.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar gives Barth's playful response above some scholarly frill:

Christian self-understanding (and therefore theology) can be interpreted neither in terms of a wisdom that surpasses the knowledge of the world's religions through a divine utterance (ad majorem gnosim rerum divinarum) nor in terms of man's definitive achievement of personal and social fulfillment through revelation and redemption (ad majorem hominis perfectionem et progressum generis humani), but solely in terms of the self-glorification of divine love: ad majorem Divini Amoris Gloriam.

Thoughts on The Tree of Life

2011-10-09T16:29:00.001+01:00

There are scenes in The Tree of Life during which I'd love to sit down with Terrence Malick and ask him what the mess is going on. But to be honest, I expected as much. This was to be a visually stunning film with a perplexing, open-to-several-interpretations 'plot'. That is what I came into the experience prepared for.

What I wasn't prepared for was the simple, lucid story(-ies) involving a father, a mother, and their three sons. This was, by some distance, the most authentic -- the most beautiful -- portrayal of a family that I've witnessed on film. It's not for everyone, but certainly all parents and children should watch it.

Malick begins by displaying creation in macro terms. Stuff explodes, planets are born, seas begin to roar. We see life through the eyes of a god. The heart of the film, however, involves us seeing life through the eyes of a child. And through the eyes of this particular child, we see ourselves. Innocence, freedom, playfulness, harshness, resentment, disobedience, guilt, forgiveness - in Malick's theologically dense terms, we see the experience of nature and we see the experience of grace, played out in the relationships created by a family.

Given the film's title, the echoes to some of the genesis narratives are not hard to hear. The eldest boy, Jack, assumes the role of Adam who lost innocence, and Cain who experienced jealousy. We watch this boy playing and eating and doing his chores, and we see him little by little inheriting the nature of his father. This is not an evil nature, but it is a nature that knows nothing of grace. The mastery of the film, however, is that Jack's world is not fated. There are other presences -- his mother and his brothers -- who know what it means to love.

I won't be spoiling anything by telling you that one of the sons dies. We discover this at the very beginning of the film, with the majority of the remainder being a series of flashbacks. Given this tragic event, you might think that this film leaves us pondering the question, "Why would a good God allow such a horrible thing happen to this God-fearing family?" You'd be right to a degree, but Malick offers no answers as a response, no way of making sense of the son's death. All he offers is a glimpse of this family as they wrestle with the forces of nature and grace. The question Malick ultimately wants us to wrestle with is printed on the screen before any events transpire:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Malick wants us to ponder the thought that grace has been wrestling with nature since the beginning, and in this present moment we are given an invitation:

...there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.

Through the story of an ordinary childhood, we are left with little doubt as to which is the more excellent way.

Maybe I Was Wrong About What Barth Was Right About

2011-10-08T20:36:00.000+01:00

Revelation is indeed the truth: the truth of God, but necessarily, therefore, the truth of man in the cosmos as well. The biblical witness cannot bear witness to the one without also bearing witness to the other, which is included in it.

- Karl Barth

Boo Denominations!

2011-10-05T21:58:00.000+01:00

Here are a couple of playful images posted over at Robin Parry's blog:

An Approach to Scripture

2011-10-05T20:06:00.000+01:00

When we approach Scripture, should we approach it from the standpoint of an I-It relationship or an I-Thou relationship? Both approaches seem to have problems. I-It turns Scripture into a lifeless, passive text that gives us all the power. I-Thou suggests that in dealing with Scripture we are dealing with God himself, thus turning the Bible into an idol.

Perhaps what we encounter in our reading of Scripture is not God directly but the community of God's people who bear faithful witness to the God who makes their life as a community possible. The Thou is not God; it is the Spirit-inspired community through whom alone we can come to know God.

I will have to think about this a lot more, but might it be fair to say this?:

Paul (and the rest of the NT writers?) did not write what we call Scripture so that its readers would come to know God. Scripture therefore, is not primarily -- or at least not only -- a revelation of God. It is a revelation of what it means to be the people of God. The New Testament was written so that its readers would know who the people of God are, and the kind of life which constitutes that people.

To use Hays against Hays, the Bible is about God and us. It has to be. Paul's ecclesiocentric hermeneutic demands that we take the church's role in the drama with full seriousness, because it is through the church the wisdom of God is manifested.

Of course this being true, what I have presented becomes a false dichotomy. Paul wrote Scripture so that his readers would become the kind of community in which and through which God can be known. To paraphrase Barth, the revelation of God and the people of God, the people of God and the revelation of God, are not two things but one.

The little I know of Barth tells me that he might rightly disagree with such a statement, but that's neither here nor there.

A Great Sentence

2011-10-03T12:22:00.001+01:00

If you take the ruling ideology seriously you are one step from being a dissident.

- Slavoj Zizek

To paraphrase, if you take Christianity seriously you are one step from being a heretic.

To be somewhat playful, for Zizek, this entails living in the realm forged by a crucified revolutionary who died an atheist. Zizek is right to a degree, but he is not "heretical" enough. To be truly heretical, we must live in the realm forged by a crucified and resurrected revolutionary. To live in light of crucifixion is foolishness; even heresy. To live in the light of resurrection means that that heresy is our only hope.

To find out more about what Zizek means by his quote above, you could spend an hour and a half watching this lecture. This is the kind of thing normal people do in their spare time, right?

Q:

2011-09-29T22:12:00.000+01:00

At this time and place, what would Christians have to do that is faithful to the gospel that would also cause them to be persecuted?

Or,

At this time and place, what are Christians doing that is faithful to the gospel that is also causing them to be persecuted?

Not that I'm looking for it, of course.

Text and People

2011-09-29T14:40:00.000+01:00

I am in the middle of reflecting upon the role of scripture in God's ongoing revelation to the world. From my "research", one of the tentative conclusions I'm drawn to is that scripture is only useful to the extent that a community of readers has been made competent to read it rightly.

In the fourth chapter of Echoes -- the chapter on the possibility of a Pauline hermeneutic found in 2 Corinthians -- Richard Hays takes this community beyond the written text, beyond readership, and into the realm of embodiment where not texts but lives are read.

...in the new covenant incarnation eclipses inscription.
By incarnation I mean not the incarnation of the divine Son of God as a human being, but the enfleshment of the message of Jesus Christ in the community of Paul’s brothers and sisters at Corinth. That fleshy community is, according to Paul, Christ’s letter, which is to be recognized and read by all people (v. 2b)....In this eschatological community of the new covenant, scribes and professors will be useless, because texts will no longer be needful. Scripture will have become a “self-consuming artefact”; the power of the word will have subsumed itself into the life of the community, embodied itself without remainder.

I'm not sure that what Hays writes can be sustained. These words, after all, are the words of a professor who is exegeting a written text - moreover, a professor who is very much a part of the "eschatological community of the new covenant" and by no means useless.

Perhaps Hays is thinking more of our final destiny as the people of God, which he imagines as a scriptureless destiny. This ties in with some of the things Sameul Wells writes, especially his notion that the location of theology -- that is, the location of the word about God -- is not in sacred texts but in a sacred people.

Death as Justice?

2011-09-27T00:27:00.001+01:00

Arguments regarding the death penalty are generally arguments about justice. Can execution be justified or can it not? I don't have any easy answers, but here are a few reflections:

This is not the same question as, Does X deserve to die? The real question is, Would X's death promote justice? Punishment must always be for good and not for ill, because the purposes of God are always for good and not for ill. Framing the question with death getting the last word is already to lose the struggle for justice.

If death is not the answer, then what is? It is easy to say that execution is unjust, but what is the just alternative? 10 years in prison? 30 years? A life time? I recently listened to a lecture by Richard Rorty where he congratulated our progressive society for leaving behind such primitive forms of justice as the stocks. The very last question he was asked during the Q and A stopped him in his tracks and pointed out the most common form of justice today: throwing people in a cage and treating them like zoo animals. Is that progress? Is that justice? Christians needs to criticise what needs to be criticised. It is a vital part of our prophetic ministry. But there must also be an energising, an envisioning of alternatives that better serve God's mission to justify the whole creation. And if the prison system is the best we can come up with, then perhaps there are few more important tasks for Christians today than to visit those in prison.

Justice is ultimately relational. Murder is an act of injustice. It does not so much destroy relationships as it does create relationships of hate and mistrust. Executing a murderer seeks to promote justice not by healing relationships but by ending them. This can never be justice, because it is anti-relational. Christianity only makes sense if we take it as a given that there is no relationship that is irredeemable. The vilest offender can be forgiven and restored to a community in some shape or form. Like it or not, we must side with the offender and seek justice for him or her. This doesn't mean making light of atrocities or blocking some form of punishment, but it does mean acknowledging that people already did the worst thing they could do when they executed Jesus of Nazareth, yet his death and resurrection has paved the way for even those people to be forgiven and given the chance of new life. The power of execution is opposed to the power of the gospel, and so we must oppose it. Not merely because execution is bad, but because the gospel really is good news about the triumph of life over death that must be proclaimed and heard.

The Nature of Scripture

2011-09-26T19:20:00.000+01:00

Here are two views on the nature of Scripture and the nature of our interaction with Scripture.

...in the process of examining and determining proper Christian belief no appeal can be made against Scripture. Anyone who says, “Scripture teaches that such-and-such is true, but I disagree and urge that Christians believe something contrary to Scripture” is departing from foundational Christian thinking in precisely the same way that a United States judge would be departing from American jurisprudence and his or her own oath by saying “The Constitution holds that such-and-such is a basic principle and right, but I disagree and rule against the Constitution.” That is unthinkable.

- Roger Olson

What Olson deems unthinkable, Terrence Fretheim deems necessary. For this seasoned Old Testament scholar, the God-breathedness of Scripture does not mean that everything is settled. Indeed, Fretheim asserts that the Bible is not always trustworthy in its portrayal of God himself. Therefore as Abraham and Moses could dialogue and dispute with God regarding God's character and actions, so must we if we are to be faithful. Fretheim isn't directing this comment to Olson's above, but it certainly works as a riposte to what might be called the traditional view of Scripture:

Once again, this [that is, the traditional view of Scripture] implies that experience is finally drawn back into the Bible and its perspective, and such experience cannot stand over against the Bible and speak a “no” to one or another matter of which it speaks. But it must be said clearly that God is actively engaged in that worldly experience, and God may work in and through that experience in such a way as to bring a critical word to bear on the Bible. Difficult issues of discernment and criteria are quickly at hand, but we cannot in the face of those difficulties simply retreat into the narrative world of the Bible. For God is never simply “at home” in such a retreat.

- Terrence Fretheim

The Seeds of Capitalism

2011-09-25T18:27:00.000+01:00

"Private vice can be publicly beneficial"....That is, a just and beneficial social order could be built on the basis of, not individual virtue, but individual self-interest. Self-interest, even avarice or greed, might lead to public benefits. This was utterly foreign to ancient/medieval thought. If you asked Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas, if we start with a group of individuals whose behaviour is dominated by vices -- namely, they're selfish -- can we design a system which will, without them undergoing a conversion, take their selfishness and together weave out of that a result that's good for all, Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas would have said, "Of course not. Garbage in, garbage out. You start with vice at the basis of your system, you're going to have a vice-ridden system." The modern idea of spontaneous order implies that you can.

And of course, in there are the seeds of capitalism.

- Lawrence Cahoone

The Church, The World, and The Bible: Three Approaches

2011-09-23T19:57:00.000+01:00

1. The Bible is a book for the church and the world. The world is called to live by the same vision as the church.

2. The Bible is a book for the church, not the world. The church is called out of the world to live by an alternative vision.

3. The Bible is a book for the world because it is a book for the church. The alternative vision lived out by the church is a summons for the world to leave everything behind and live likewise.

R.E.M.

2011-09-22T20:54:00.001+01:00

On the day of R.E.M.'s break up I think it only fair to post my favourite song from my favourite album of theirs - in fact it's one of my favourite albums of all time. I bought it when I was quite young because it was on the cheap and I knew that R.E.M. gave us 'Everybody Hurts' - the first song I learned on the guitar. Hope wasn't what I expected, it wasn't how I imagined it would sound like, but great art converts us; it pushes back our horizons of expectation and opens up appreciations that were never there - in this case, my appreciation for repetitive electro-pop and references to alligators.

A Mess of Thoughts on God and Feminist Theology

2011-09-22T14:09:00.000+01:00

At chapel on Tuesday our lecturer in church history and historical theology played this video:

The first line is "God is not a man", with the rest of the verses continuing that exercise in negative theology, eventually leading to choruses of affirmation: God is love, and God is good.

Of course any theology student knows that God is not a man, but our imaginations fuelled by our language tells us something very different. God is not mother but father. God is not she but he. God's is not hers but his. God is not queen but king. To refer to God as anything but a man seems at best a helpful deviation from the norm, at worst an utterance of blasphemy. Our images of God, the language we use to describe God, is what we know of God. And based on our use of images and language, God, for all intents and purposes, is a man. It is written into our trinitarian confession - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

To describe God as a man is of course biblical. The almost exclusive use of masculine words as descriptions of God is a practice rooted in Scripture. We are taught by none other than Jesus to pray "Our Father". But as I said a couple of posts ago, what is biblically faithful is not necessarily theologically faithful. I am not arguing the case for liberal protestantism. I am not wincing at the particulars of Scripture. Quite the opposite, I am questioning whether it's faithful to turn those particulars into universals. In much theology today, God as Father is no longer a culturally embedded expression in a certain time and place, but a literal description that transcends time and space.

The Bible makes no apologies for being a product of its culture, nor should we. Even as a product of its culture, it was always challenging the status-quo, always standing as a witness to a more excellent way. If we are to be faithful to the God of the Bible, we will speak of a God who does not baptise the status quo (even the status quo of the Bible), but who offers an alternative vision for life in the world. This vision begins with our language about God. We can say that God is not a man. We can say that God is not a republican. We can say that God is not a unionist. We can say that God is not a capitalist or a democrat or a conservative or a liberal. But these isolated statements are not our theology. Our theology is the songs we sing in church, the sermons we listen to, the prayers we utter, the evangelism we engage in, the kind of love we show to enemies and friends. Our theology is rooted in our life as members of the church, and that life is nothing less than an alternative to the politics of the world.

The world understands God imaged as a man, though biblical faith moves against our presumption that we know what kind of person we are talking about when we use the word "man". The world does not understand God imaged as a woman, and neither does the church. Perhaps we can only know what it means to pray "Our Father" when we learn to pray "Our Mother". God is at once neither and both.

The Value of Science, The Value of Not Science

2011-09-09T21:23:00.000+01:00

What science is good at is predicting and controlling the environment. Scientists know what their job is. They know how to get it done....But the reason people are dubious about science is they want truth to be redemptive; they want truth to add up to wisdom. And knowing how things work, which is all that science can give us, doesn't amount to wisdom, it doesn't redeem the human condition. In certain moods it can strike you as relatively unimportant.

- Richard Rorty

The Bible and Theology

2011-09-09T13:28:00.003+01:00

Theology is word work. It is a linguistic enterprise, which means it is a cultural enterprise. For that reason, I sometimes think that biblical theology fails - not at being biblical, but at being theology. Take the term "kingdom of God". Biblically/historically speaking, this was term was at the centre of Jesus's proclamation. As 1st Century Palestinian theology, its articulation would have resonated with the culture of its day. Of course this isn't incidental, because it was necessary for Jesus to be a product of this particular culture at this particular time if he was to be the rescuer of the world.

My issue is that the term "kingdom of God" carries little cultural weight in the time and place I was raised in. In the 1st Century, to confess Jesus as king was, as others have noted, to simultaneously confess that Caesar was not. This kind of confession was political, subversive, and inherently relevant, because it was rooted in the language and practices of its time. An Irishman saying that "Jesus is king" no longer has that same direct impact. I do not speak of kings, I do knot know what it is to have a king. The confession Jesus is King means almost as little to me as the confession Jesus is Sultan. Neither metaphor is rooted in the culture I have grown up in, therefore neither metaphor provides me with the kind of theology that is needed today.

I have, as usual, no prescriptions. In fact I think my diagnosis needs a heck of a lot more work. I'm going on instincts here, and little else. I think the broader point I'm trying to make is that what is biblical is not necessarily theological. Or to put it another way, what is faithful to the Bible is not necessarily faithful to the God of the Bible today.

Gilead: Some Snapshots

2011-09-07T12:14:00.000+01:00

Gilead is a novel written from the perspective of an old preacher in a small American town who is about to die. The old preacher is married to a younger woman and is the father of a seven-year-old boy. In light of his age and the boy's, he decides to write letters to his child telling about his life past and present in the hope that this son of his will know the kind of man his father was.

To call the novel a "christian novel" would be misleading, given how shallow most other things are that have the adjective "christian" preceding them. The novel, however, is soaked in Christianity. It is like an extended exercise in the art of theological reflection, with Ames interpreting life through the lens of Scripture, spiritual experience, John Calvin, and Karl Barth, while also not shying away from those who would challenge the reality of the faith.

One such person was his brother, Edward. Heralded as the next great preacher of Gilead, he was sent off to Germany with financial backing from the church in order to study for the ministry. He came back to Gilead an atheist. This poignant dinner table scene captures the ramifications of this small-town catastrophe:

He and my father had words when he came back, once at the dinner table that first evening when my father asked him to say grace. Edward cleared his throat and replied, "I am afraid I could not do that in good conscience, sir," and the color drained out of my father's face. I knew there had been letters I was not given to read, and there had been somber words between my parents. So this was the dreaded confirmation of their fears. My father said, "You have lived under this roof. You know the customs of your family. You might show some respect for them." And Edward replied, and this was very wrong of him, "When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things." My father left the table, my mother sat still in her chair with tears streaming down her face, and Edward passed me the potatoes. I had no idea what was expected of me, so I took some. Edward passed me the gravy. We ate our unhallowed meal solemnly for a little while, and then we left the house and I walked Edward to the hotel.

Edward is far from the villian of the novel, however. Ames admires his brother, and calls him "a good man". Rather, the tension of the novel is created by the arrival home of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Ames's good friend and fellow preacher. Boughton is a slippery character whose presence carries tremendous ambiguity. A sort of triangle forms between Ames, Boughton, and Lila (Ames's wife). This is not a sleazy love triangle, however. Ames never portrays his wife as anything but a saint. One of the most beautiful aspects of the novel is Ames's love for and fascination with his wife. Reflecting on his first sight of her at the back of his church service, he writes,

...it seemed as if she didn't belong there, but at the same time as if she were the only one of us who really did belong there.

From that moment on, Ames was captivated. Lila burst into his long-settled routine and his small corner of the world in Gilead would never be the same:

...there I was trying to write a sermon, when all I really wanted to do was try to remember a young woman's face.

The details of their marriage are captured with succinct charm:

She began to come to the house when some of the other women did, to take the curtains away to wash, to defrost the icebox. And then she started coming by herself to tend the gardens. She made them very fine and prosperous. And one evening when I saw her there, out by the wonderful roses, I said, "How can I repay you for all this?" And she said, "You ought to marry me." And I did.

Ames is marked by an appreciation and reverence for the gift of life given by God, and the gifts that make up that life. His struggle is knowing how to -- even wanting to -- share those gifts with John Ames Boughton. It is a beautiful struggle.

I will not say you need to read this book. To say so would be to abuse the word "need". But this is an exquisite book that deserves to be read. There are far too few of those being written today.

My Latest (Hauerwas-Inspired) Conviction

2011-09-04T23:04:00.000+01:00

It is wrong for Irish Christians to sing the Irish national anthem.

A One-Paragraph Short Story

2011-09-04T18:44:00.000+01:00

Inspired by a fellow bus traveller...

She has him saying things she always wanted to hear. But the words don't do what she thought they'd do. They are not at home in her. They are well-meaning strangers playing the role of friends. Though uneasy as hostess, she invites them in over and over again, hoping to become comfortable in their presence. She even sends out similar words to him, charged with the task of doing something in her as much as him. "Can my words to him create in me that which his words to me cannot? Must I rely on another to kindle love within me? Who creates love, anyway?" She has wanted so long to be loved, and now she is, by a decent, kind, man. She thinks maybe she has wanted it so long that she has simply forgotten to love in return. "Time with him will help me remember." It doesn't. He cries like he's never cried before after she says goodbye.

Writing For the Church

2011-08-31T12:18:00.000+01:00

This summer I was given the opportunity to write for a particular church. I was given a text (1 Chronicles 29) and a theological theme (Giving), with the instructions to write ten short devotional pieces that would be read by a congregation. This is the most important task I have been given as a writer.

Much of what I've written in the last 3 years is intelligible to those outside of the church. I'm uncertain whether that's good or bad. But my hope with these devotional pieces is that they only begin to make sense to those who are part of a community that names a crucified Jew as the living ruler of the world. As the person who wrote them, you might assume that they make sense to me. That I know what I'm talking about.

I don't. I am guilty of saying more than I know. In writing for the church, I am writing also for myself. In the words of John Ames, I'm "trying to say what is true", which often involves saying more than one can know. But thanks be to God, Christianity is not a life of explanation but manifestation. The truth of Christian life cannot and will not finally be explained, least of all by me. It can only be only shown. And that showing takes a life time as members of Christ's body.

The mystery of writing for the church is this: The church is not an audience for your writing, as if the church depends on what you write. Rather, you depend first on the church in order to write and in order to demonstrate the truth of your writing.

Recessional Christianity

2011-08-30T08:03:00.000+01:00

The clue to the problem with this sickening piece is in the title, where the word "blessings" could be replaced with "$2 billion" and the meaning would not change.

Isn't the Lord just marvellous that he would allow Christian publishers to cash in on the recession.

Promo Videos And Books

2011-08-23T15:56:00.003+01:00

The promo video for Love Wins did its job, but it has left me wary of such tactics precisely for that reason. Scot McKnight's promo video for The King Jesus Gospel therefore leaves me uncomfortable. McKnight is a much more weighty author than Bell...in every sense of the word. Therefore the video (posted below) strikes me as an unnecessary imitation of Rob Bell's sales technique. Christians don't write books in order to sell them. A book that claims to bring us face to face with the original gospel cannot be commodified, yet that is exactly what is inferred by having a promo video attached to it. Especially a promo video that claims to disclose the true gospel to a church that is mired in counterfeits. I'll be damned if I don't wanna find out what that true gospel is...although chances are McKnight has proclaimed it already in the excellent A Community Called Atonement.

Anyway, I am wary of claims to uncover what the church has hidden for years. And I am doubly wary of such claims being made through a promo video designed to increase the sales of a book.

Taking Postmodernism to Task

2011-08-21T09:59:00.000+01:00

What postmodernism was/is doing, according to Terry Eagleton:

[A]lienating us even from our own alienation.

Replace 'postmodernism' with 'Facebook', and does this still hold? Of course if it does, how would we ever know?

Five Favourite Footballers - Valeron

2011-08-17T16:53:00.000+01:00

Although about seven years past his prime at the time, this four-minute video captures the subtle genius of Juan Carlos Valeron.

He is the most creative player I have ever seen - the archetype of what it looks like to play "in the hole". Diego Tristan and Roy Makaay have him to thank for their reasonably successful careers, with the latter acknowledging that Valeron is the best player he has played with. I have him to thank for mapping out the way football ought to be played.

The Mission of Theology

2011-08-15T13:21:00.000+01:00

Every so often I find myself in the middle of an existential crisis. What on earth am I doing studying theology? What's the point of this alien discipline? Wouldn't I be better off just getting on with the real stuff of life?

Then I am reminded of the home of theology, and where I need to be:

Christian theology is relevant because it fulfills its mission: shaping a community of peace.

So says David K. Clark in his essay on "narrative apologetics". The message is disturbingly simple:

Outside of a community of peace, theologians are of all people most to be pitied.

Creation and Evolution

2011-08-10T01:31:00.000+01:00

I'm interested in the Creation versus Evolution discussion not so much as regards which is true but rather how to read the Bible faithfully within this discussion. As a Christian, I take as a given the reality that the God revealed in Jesus is the Creator of creation, though as this God revealed to Job, I have no idea what God as Creator really means. I wasn't there.

But is that the end of the story?

In what I've read on this discussion there is a reality conspicuous by its absence in any Christian talk of creation or evolution, and that reality is New Creation. If the resurrection of Jesus changes everything, then one of the things it changes is our understanding of what it means for God to be Creator. New Creation is an ambiguous reality. It is here, but not quite. The seeds have been planted, but the flower is not yet in full boom. The child has been conceived, but there is growth in the womb still to be done. There is new creation, but it is still being created.

Moreover -- and I may come back to this with a giant eraser after I've slept on it -- creation gets to be part of its creation. God as Creator chooses to be co-Creator, at least when it comes to his most glorious creation. That is not to suggest equality between Creator and creature, but rather what Brueggemann might call "incommensurate mutuality". I think of Paul's directive to the Philipians to "work out your salvation...for it is God who works in you..." New Creation is not a passive process from humanity's perspective. We are actively involved in one way or another, not as isolated individuals but as a church - building each other up, iron sharpening iron, allowing the creative grace of God to flow through us and to cause us to be participants in the new creation of our brothers and sisters. Paul could even know himself as Timothy's father in the faith, recognising that God had made him part of this young man's birth into the family of God. This may all sound very "unphysical", but I think that is to draw lines between physicality and character that Scripture doesn't always know.

The particulars of reading old creation texts through the lens of new creation texts (and experiences) could provide some space for an imaginatively faithful rendering of the hotly contested phrase "In the beginning, God created..."

The Steps to True Belief

2011-08-09T18:43:00.000+01:00

Stephen N. Gundry on theologian Paul Tillich:

At best Tillich was a pantheist, but his thought borders on atheism.

From Gundry's evangelical perspective, it seems it's better to be a pantheist than an atheist. Perhaps Christians are aiming too high. Instead of trying to convince atheists to jump straight into theism, pantheism may provide a suitable launchpad if we can get them there. We could even push for panentheism in one leap if we're feeling especially persuasive! What might be the next step after that? Catholicism?

I wonder what someone might say of me when I am departed?

At best Kelly was a _______, but his thought borders on _________

Feel free to fill in those blanks with as serious or as humorous an answer as you like.

In the Wind

2011-08-08T22:51:00.000+01:00

A reed in the wind

Moved by its nature

And the nature around

Leaning left, posing no resistance.

Tomorrow may be right,

It has no preference.

Save when the wind silences.

It stands up straight, always

As if this were its true nature:

To be unmoved.

But true nature is not made to be alone.

What if the reed only stands straight

To be caught in the wind once more when it speaks?

Moving to be moved by something greater

Out Of Our Hearing

2011-08-07T19:47:00.000+01:00

One of the challenges of preaching: The church is a community of people who have lived near a waterfall their whole lives. Allow some patients from a psychiatric ward to explain:

Harding gives him a blank look. 'Exactly what noise is it you're referring to, Mr McMurphy?'

'That damned radio. Boy. It's been going ever since I come in this morning. And don't come on with some baloney that you didn't hear it.'

Harding cocks his ear to the ceiling. 'Oh, yes, the so-called music. Yes, I suppose we do hear it if we concentrate, but then one can hear one's own heartbeat too, if he concentrates hard enough.' He grins at McMurphy. 'You see, that's a recording playing up there, my friend. We seldom hear the radio. The world news might not be therapeutic. And we've all heard that recording so many times now it simply slides out of our hearing, the way the sound of a waterfall soon becomes an unheard sound to those who live near it. Do you think if you lived near a waterfall you could hear it very long?'

If a tree falls, and everyone around is so used to it, does it make a sound?

The Correct Question

2011-08-06T22:33:00.001+01:00

A bombshell from McClendon's Ethics:

So the correct Bonhoeffer question to put to one who believes as I do that violence is not an option for the disciples of Jesus Christ is not the often-heard "Then what would you do about Hitler?" Quite possibly there was nothing that Dietrich Bonhoeffer alone could have done about Hitler, except possibly to help a few Jews escape Germany and help a few friends of a better German future make contact with their Christian friends in other countries. The correct -- because realistic and responsible -- question has been better put by Mark Thiessen Nation: "What would you do with a church which chooses to go along with a government that systematically eliminates Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, and mounts a war that would lead to the deaths of more than thirty-five million people?" That question makes it clear that (from the standpoint of Christian solidarity) it was not Brother Dietrich but we who failed.

This reinforces a growing conviction that it is not the church's vocation first to be against the world. Rather, the church is first to be against the church.

Five Favourite Footballers - Riquelme

2011-08-06T15:01:00.000+01:00

If Xavi and Iniesta play in the future, then Juan Roman Riquelme plays in the past. I mean that in two senses. The first is that he is an anachronism, a player who would have fitted in seamlessly to a bygone era when athleticism and workrate were not prerequisites for attacking players, but in the modern game he looks strangely out of place. The second sense is that he plays the game at his own mercilessly slow pace - while others around him are running to and fro, Riquelme is in a time zone of his own - sometimes lost, but sometimes so in control of a game that he is untouchable.

My first proper exposure to him was a friendly against England in 2005, in which he was magnificent. He played the role of conductor, or quaterback or whatever word you want to use, and played it as well as I've seen it played. He was Argentina's fulcrum in a team that was (I think) the favourites to win the World Cup in 2006. They ended up being defeated in the quarter-finals, but that should never have happened. Jose Pekerman brought on Julio Cruz instead of Lionel Messi, and the rest is history. This was a very good Argentina team, second only to Spain in the last 10 years, but for one reason or another they failed to deliver on their talent. The story of Riquelme's career, some might say.

His time at Villareal was nothing less than extraordinary, mind you. One performance that sticks out the a Champions League quarter final against Inter Milan, which had England 2005 written all over it. Riquelme lived up to his monicker "Lazy genius", controlling the game in slow motion, and almost pulling off one of the most audacious shots I've ever seen.

He is a strange player to categorise. You could argue that he is selfish, always demanding and hogging the ball. But you could also argue that he is only doing that because he knows he can make the optimum use of it with a clever flick or a perceptive pass. For a selfish player, he has a habit of giving the ball to a teammate who is in a better position to score than he is. This habit, for me, is the fundamental aspect of a good player. Riquelme has it down to an art. (See his two assists in the recent friendly against Arsenal for proof that the habit dies hard).

Reading Romans: A Summary

2011-08-05T14:21:00.000+01:00

We commonly read Romans through the lens which makes us see guilt as our biggest enemy, and our greatest need as affirmation despite our guilt. This is a legitimate, but limiting reading. We more faithfully read Romans through the lens which makes us see death and its deathly practices as our biggest enemy, and our greatest need as life and its life-giving practices - found only through participation in the death and life of the crucified resurrected Jesus by the power of the spirit. A phrase which characterises this life that we need -- that is, this life that we were created (and re-created) for?

Shalom with God.

Question

2011-08-03T15:37:00.000+01:00

I hate to go to my readers for anything but approval, but does anyone know of a (good) book that deals with the relationship between aesthetics and ethics?

The Church as Artistic Operation, Part 2

2011-08-03T15:28:00.000+01:00

Speaking from a similar perspective to Walter Brueggemann, Richard Hays calls the church to fulfil her destiny as a people of artistry. This is a short but necessary read for Christians who have been trained to think that art is superfluous for the work of God.

If theological education focuses only on ideas and fails to reflect on their artistic milieu, we will be quite literally tone-deaf or insensible to major elements of human experience, and we will fail to perceive ways in which the gospel may challenge and transform us.

Five Favourite Footballers - Iniesta

2011-08-01T16:02:00.000+01:00

I lived in the age when Championship Manager was the touchstone for football wisdom. My real knowledge of football was mediated through a computer game. In fact, what was true in the game became absolute truth. It didn't matter that Ibrahim Bakayoko was an incompetent fool when I saw him playing for Everton. He was a Championship Manager jewel, and that was the most important thing about him. It didn't matter that I had never seen Marc Emmers play before. He guaranteed me an 8/10 in most games, and that was the only truth I cared about. In fact, so real did Championship Manager become that two of my most treasured players in the game were actually created by the game itself - fictional Scandanavian's called Magnusson and Skulason - legends when played "in the hole".

Which brings me to Andres Iniesta. I have always been known as a manager who gives youth a chance. In 01/02, my eye glanced over the attributes of a teenage Iniesta, and I liked what I saw. He was versatile, and was above average in a lot of areas without excelling in any one facet of the game. In time he became a fixture in my midfield, with a keen eye for a goal. The decision to start him was perhaps more sentimental than anything else. I adopted him as my computerised son, and wouldn't let any charges of nepotism get in the way of his journey to stardom.

With my passion for Championship Manager waning, I had the unique experience of finally meeting Andres Iniesta in the flesh. The best analogy I can think of is the move from online dating to a real life meeting. What does he look like? Is he as talented as the computer says he is? Iniesta's substitute appearance against Chelsea -- in the game made famous a) for being brilliant and b) for that Ronaldinho goal -- allayed all of my fears. He forced a marvellous save out of Cech and (I think) hit the post. He was a short, slight, pale 20 year-old who looked like a boy among men, but who played with the confidence of someone who knew he belonged on any football pitch. Crucial goals in a Champions League semi-final and a World Cup final only confirm that confidence he has.

Iniesta is gifted with a velvet touch and the ability to see things that most players just can't see. Those two attributes are no more present than in these few seconds against Athletic Bilbao.

I like to think of Iniesta as a fusion of Messi and Xavi., combining precise dribbling skills with a perceptive passing range and the wisdom to know and control the flow of a game. Someone said that Xavi "plays in the future". But he doesn't play there alone. Iniesta is right beside him, which is why the two together control every game they take part in. "Geometry in motion", said George Hamilton during Barcelona's triumph over Manchester United in Rome.

Iniesta is a player reared under the conviction that giving the ball away is the ultimate sin. Living under this conviction might stultify a lesser player, but with Iniesta you are left to marvel at the creative ways through which he not only retains possession of the football, but also nears it to the opposition's goal. A dink, a lob, a backheel, a chip over the top, a through ball along the ground, a mazy dribble followed by a last second off load with the outside of the foot, and of course his signature quick shift of the ball from one foot to the other. Every game produces moments that are worth watching again and again, and are worth trying to replicate.

Iniesta is known as the "anti-galactico". He is an unlikely superstar, but he is now regarded as one of the best players in the world, a vital component to the two best teams in the world. But to me he will always be my Championship Manager prodigy who came good - the anti-Bakayoko, if you will.

Five Favourite Footballers

2011-07-29T16:09:00.000+01:00

Those who know me know that I love football. And Haribo. But mainly football. Because it's good to write about things other than the usual schtick, and because most of my theological thinking over the next couple of weeks will be poured into a project for the good people of First Assemblies of God, Worcester, I plan on dedicating the next five posts to my five favourite footballers.

Rules of Engagement

1. Tangible achievement counts for little. These players will not be selected based on trophies won or individual honours received. They will be selected because watching them play has given me pleasure and has made me want to play the way they play.

2. I'm not saying you have to be a mercurial playmaker to make the list, but it will help.

3. I cannot select Michael Laudrup, even though his YouTube clips are the best out there. I wasn't really watching football when he was in his prime, so he must be excluded. The same goes for anyone who's prime was in 1995 or earlier.

4. There will be no ranking until after all five posts are completed. The order they come in will therefore be arbitrary.

5. Feel free to comment on the predictability of my choices, or perhaps leave some YouTube evidence for why I have or haven't got a clue. Memorable moments, blatant cheating, choking under pressure, rising to the occasion, interesting facts/stories - it's all good.

Assumptions

2011-07-27T10:02:00.000+01:00

The assumptions we build our lives on:

We are rational creatures, and

The height of humanity is rationality.

The assumptions Christians ought to build their lives on:

We are creatures, and

The height of humanity is obedience to our creator.

Man's Struggle

2011-07-22T00:23:00.002+01:00

The Wire is not just a television show - it is a sociological phenomenon for those with eyes to see. It is a devastating critique of an ideology that orders some lives while bringing chaos to others. It has been labelled "Dickensian". I might call it Hauerwasian or Brueggemannian, in so far as it is a prophetic voice naming the American empire for what it is/what it does - though the kind of hope that Hauerwas or Brueggemann might invoke in the face of this empire is largely absent.

But that doesn't mean the show is without hope, or without nourishment for the soul. The end of an article by Brian Cook in 2008 gets to the heart of The Wire. It is at this heart that David Simon's Jewish rootage can be discerned, with the core of his creation being man's "struggle". Jacob struggled with God and triumphed. The outcome that The Wire envisions is ambiguous at best, but it always portrays the struggle as one that must be had, whether it gets results or not.

...ultimately, the show is most enjoyable because...the value it holds most high is struggle. Its heroes and anti-heroes might be victims, but they are not passive. Rather, they are actively driven by a dissatisfaction with the status quo. What marks the show's few villains are their complacency and acceptance of "the way things are." What defines the show's heroes is that they will fight -- their clueless bosses, their politicians, their rivals, their lovers, their addictions, themselves.

Will they win these struggles? This season, most signs point toward "no." But rather than despair, that leads me to recall the words of journalist I.F. Stone:

The only kinds of fights worth having are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing -- for the sheer fun and joy of it -- to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.

The bleakest thing about The Wire is that it's ending after the current season.Desperate Housewives, meanwhile, is set to go on until 2011. Now that's a depressing thought.

The Semiotics of the Cross

2011-07-21T00:10:00.000+01:00

Hauerwas and Willimon on the semiotics of the cross:

The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's.

Unsurprisingly, a book co-authored by Hauerwas and Willimon is absurdly quotable, and opens up a whole new thought-world in a sentence or two. Expect more from Resident Aliens in the future. For instance:

Our society...is built on the presumption that the good society is that in which each person gets to be his or her own tyrant.

Missions Apart From Conversions

2011-07-20T15:23:00.001+01:00

Last week I wondered what impact a cultural-linguistic perspective on religion would make on the church's understanding of its task of evangelism. If that opening sentence hasn't succeeded in deterring you from reading any further, then have a look of what Lindbeck himself has to say on the matter of the church's "missionary task". Without wanting to overstate the case, Lindbeck's proposal has completely changed how I view missions/evangelism. Not because I agree (or disagree) with him, but simply because I am now forced to wrestle with what it is he says.

...it can be argued in a variety of ways that Christian churches are called upon to imitate their Lord by selfless service to neighbours quite apart from the question whether this promotes conversions. They also have scriptural authorization in passages such as Amos 9:7-8 for holding that nations other than Israel -- and, by extension, religions other than the biblical ones -- are peoples elected (and failing) to carry out their distinctive tasks within God's world. If so, not everything that pertains to the coming of the kingdom has been entrusted to that people of explicit witness which knows what and where Jerusalem is and (as believers hope) marches toward it, if only in fits and starts. It follows from these considerations that Christians may have a responsibility to help other movements and other religions make their own contributions, which may be quite distinct from the Christian one, to the preparation of the Consummation. The missionary task of Christians may at times be to encourage Marxists to become better Marxists, Jews and Muslims to become better Jews and Muslims, and Buddhists to become better Buddhists (although admittedly their notion of what a "better" Marxist," etc., is will be influenced by Christian norms). Obviously this cannot be done without the most intensive and arduous conversation and cooperation.

As a matter of interest, what is the relationship between "missions" and "evangelism"? Are they two different words for the same reality? Is missions broader than evangelism, or is evangelism much broader than is commonly understood?

Discontinuity Embodied

2011-07-20T00:50:00.000+01:00

For 50 minutes The Crystal Maze consists of a range of skill games, mystery games, mental games, and physical games, each carefully designed to test the logical, mechanical, dexterical, lexical, and mathematical faculties of the contestants. And then for the grand finale they throw the six contestants into a giant ball and get them to frantically grab at gold notes, making them look like complete plonkers.

It's like Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov getting to the World Chess Championship final, with the tournament organisers then forcing them to mud wrestle for the title.

I love it.

The (Possible) Failure of a Cognitivist Approach to Evangelism and Discipleship (Or, My Most Boring Post Title Yet)

2011-07-14T12:51:00.001+01:00

Religion cannot be pictured in the cognitivist (and voluntarist) manner as primarily a matter of deliberately choosing to believe or follow explicitly known propositions or directives. Rather, to become religious - no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent, is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, nor that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways. Sometimes explicitly formulated statements of belief or behavioral norms of a religion may be helpful in the learning process, but by no means always. Ritual, prayer, and example are normally much more important.

- Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine

I'm far from an expert on evangelism and discipleship, but would it be fair comment to say that in the last 300 years the almost exclusive form of evangelism and discipleship in the West has been "cognitivist", and that this form -- or rather, the people who have employed it -- have largely failed in their task to make disciples in the mold of Jesus?

This is the form in caricature:

These are the absolute fundamental things that we believe. Do you believe them too? Yes? Then you are now a convert to Christianity. Now we will give you more stuff to believe, thus forming you into a mature Christian.

I think Lindbeck's notion of "interiorizing a set of skills by practice and training" opens up the possibility of a far deeper and richer form of discipleship, although I do wonder what his cultural-linguistic approach to religion does for evangelism.

On the Explicit Nature of Mumford and Sons

2011-07-13T18:38:00.000+01:00

I've struggled to come to terms with Mumford and Sons. I feel like I should like them, and at times I do like them, but I just can't embrace them as a band that I intentionally listen to. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think I know at least one of the reasons:

They are too explicit.

The cornerstone of anything whose currency is words is truth telling. Even in fiction. Of course when it comes to words, there are different ways of stringing them together depending on the form you want to create. Poems, essays, novels, letters, journalistic articles, bus timetables all have different ways of telling a truth. When it comes to writing a song, its form most resembles the poetic or the narrative form. In fact a song is basically a poem or a story with a melody. And because this is the form of a song, the best songwriters learn to master this form. They tell a truth, but they tell it in this form.

Rhyming can be part of this form, but just because your words rhyme it doesn't mean you are writing in the form, with the primary task now being to write good rhymes instead of bad ones. Good rhymes are an aid to the primary task of a song, but they are not the task. The task, in the words of Emily Dickonson, is to "tell all the truth but tell it slant". You approach your feeling, you approach your story, you approach your philosophy or theology, but you approach from a different angle, and you tell it from a different angle. You do not come right out and explicitly say,

In these bodies we will live, and in these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, you invest your life

(Incidentally, Awake My Soul is probably my favourite song on the album)

This gives me, the listener, very little work to do. It gives me very little scope for imagination. The songs bears all in just two lines, and there is nowhere else for it (or me) to go. It is naked. It is explicit. I'm reminded of Orson Welles's philosophy for the creation of a scene -- which I think ought to be true, mutatis muntandis, for the creation of a song:

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

I think the profound irony at work in the film and music business is that most of the films and concerts that attract the largest numbers of people are actually the least "social acts". These events are little more than filmmakers and bands spoon feeding an audience that hasn't been trained to think artistically and creatively, that hasn't been trained to bring something to the table. In fact the audience has been trained in the opposite - sit passively and receive/be gratified/be entertained. (And unfortunately, as in world so in church.)

Lumping Mumford and Sons in with some kind of soulless industry is harsh, but if you saw the kind of people who attended their show in Galway back in March then you would begin to ask some questions. Philistines, I tell you!

Of course the criticism I'm leveling at Mumford and Sons could probably be leveled at any number of artists that I regularly listen to, but as Linton Barwick says, "by God it's a useful hypocrisy".

People and Scripture

2011-07-12T16:36:00.000+01:00

According to Friedrich Schleiermacer, we must "avoid the impression that a doctrine must belong to Christianity because it is contained in Scripture, whereas in point of fact it is only contained in Scripture because it belongs to Christianity."

One of the areas I would like to explore further as I continue my theological journey is the relationship between the people of God and Scripture, and the nature of the things which this relationship seems to generate - doctrine, ethics, ecclesial practice etc.

Right now my conviction is that some of us have the relationship backwards. This thinking posits that Scripture comes first, and out of it the people of God are formed. But in reality it is the people of God who are formed first, and it is through this people that Scripture is produced. This applies not only to "back then" but very much to the here and now. The people of God, the interpretive community, continues to produce Scripture in the sense that it continues to produce the reality in which Scripture is read as Scripture. Of course the body of people only produce this reality by their connection to the head of the body and by the life of the spirit flowing through them.

Back to Schleiermacher's point, we don't say that God is love because our Scripture says it. Rather, our Scripture says it because that is the kind of God who is revealed to (and who even creates) the people of God in the Christ-event, and these unveiled and newly created people are witnesses to and ambassadors of this same love. "God is love" is only contained in Scripture because there existed (and exists) a people of God for whom these words are intelligible and meaningful, in so much as they point to a reality that exists outside of the words but which nonetheless must be named with words.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, or if I even agree with Schleiermacher (or myself), but this is my quick attempt at drawing a monster, so to speak.

About a Friendship

2011-07-12T12:50:00.001+01:00

Song writers do not tend to write songs about a friendship. Why is that? Film makers do not tend to make films about a friendship, unless there is a girl who gets in the way of it. Why is that? Have we lost the ability to tell good stories about friendship? Have we actually devalued friendship to the point where we don't have many good stories to tell? A film about friendship that comes to mind is The Social Network, but the story it tells is "death of friendship" stuff. That is what makes the film so good. It may not be historically accurate, but it rings true.

As for books about friendship, I don't know what the landscape looks like. I'm stuck reading theology. But one book of note is Hauerwas's memoir, which is a book about his friends almost as much as it is a book about himself. Or should I say, it is a book about his friendships, which give us glimpses into the kind of person he is by showing the kind of person he is as he relates to his friends and as they relate to him. Hauerwas might say that he is un-understandable without his friends. In fact he may actually have said that. I don't remember. As I like to say, creativity is forgetting where you read it.

And so to the inspiration of this post - a song about a friendship, written in the early 90's by one of my musical heroes. They don't write 'em like they used to.

do you remember our first subway ride?

our first heavy metal haircuts?

our last swim on the east coast?

and me with my ridiculous looking pierced nose?

i remember your warm smile in the sun

the daydreaming boy without a shirt on

the birmingham barfly father

left the mother of three sons

you’re the oldest juvenile delinquent bum

my best friend

Connections

2011-07-11T23:45:00.000+01:00

I have three drawings done by my middle nephew -- now almost 5 years old -- and given to me for my 25th birthday. The first is a monster, the second is a lion, and the third is, well, probably another monster. Luke was the artist, after all, and monsters are his specialty. The drawings consist mainly of haphazard squiggles, though there is always a central component which differentiates one work from the other. The first monster has his sharp teeth, the lion has his mane, and the other monster has his big mouth.

I imagine if I showed Luke the drawings even today he would be embarrassed by them. He is only 8 months older than he was at their conception, but his talent has no doubt developed, and his monsters and lions have probably gained all sorts of new features that he can weave together. And in ten years' time he will not even remember the kind of art he was commissioned to do for my birthday by his patron and mother. He most likely won't believe that the drawings I now have in my room are his own. He will show me the incredible monster that he just drew for his art class, and it will bear practically no resemblance to his earlier work.

But the earlier work is still his. It represents the best of what he could do at the time. He will have learned to do more skillful work, yet he could never have learned without the work which he may one day look at with embarrassment, disbelief, or laughter. The connection, the dependence of the future on the past, isn't obvious, but it's there. This he must also learn.

Me too.

Neighbours and Fences

2011-07-09T22:06:00.001+01:00

I sit on theological fences. I wish I didn't. I wish I had a stance on every issue. I wish I had a side. But I think my wish is misguided. Stanley Hauerwas said something remarkable in his memoir. He said he isn't bothered about what he believes - he cares only for what the church believes.

What the church believes, however, is often in tension with, well, what the church believes! In this light, sitting on fences is not necessarily a sign of indecisiveness. It is a sign that we see through a glass, darkly. It is a sign that we know in part and theologise in part. It is a sign of the time we live in - a time of incompleteness; a time with a future that will surprise us and our systems.

Perhaps what the church needs is precisely more people who sit on theological fences, who live in the tension created by what the church believes.

Incidentally, it seems to me that a lot of recent theology is done from the fence. "Third Way Theology" it might be called, whereby the author seeks to open up a third option in the Barth-Brunner debate, in the liberal-conservative dichotomy, or in the evangelical-emergent struggle for example. It remains to be seen whether this approach will tear down fences or erect new ones. Each case will be different, I suppose. The questions to ask are, Is the theologian genuinely trying to bring neighbours together? or is she merely trying to mark out a plot of land that she can call her own for the sake of academic notoriety or position? Our natural inclination toward Frost's "Good fences make good neighbours" dies hard. I guess a primary task of the theologian is to remember that we're all playing in the same field, and the person we are playing with -- or rather, who is playing with us -- owns the field. Moreover, the fences that we erect in this field, and the fences we sit on, are temporary.

Imagining God

2011-07-09T14:26:00.002+01:00

Garrett Green wrote in Imagining God that it doesn't matter if the exodus "really" happened. Scripture's authority lies not in how accurately it depicts "the facts" but in its unique ability to renew our imaginations with metaphors which are faithful to the kind of God God is. Scripture renders to us a "paradigmatic imagination", a lens through which we see God, the world, and ourselves in God's world. It is this seeing that constitutes religion.

Green writes,

...religion is imaginative, religious language is metaphorical, and theology is hermeneutical.

That is to say, theology is the interpretation of metaphors that have been been revealed from the imagination of God to the imagination of God's witnesses - most significantly, the witnesses who saw Jesus as the imago dei.

With our imaginations as the locus for God's self-revelation, Green has attempted to move beyond the dualism of "fact" or "fiction", of "illusory" or "real". One of the memorable quotes in the book is the paraphrase of a sentence in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians:

The illusions of God are more real than the realities of men.

Obviously there are a lot of words that Green fleshes out -- imagination and metaphor to name two big ones -- but how does any of the above strike you? I can't help but think of Caird/Wright's dictum, "Christianity appeals to history, and to history it must turn" and find that what Green says is very much at odds with what these eminent NT scholars propose. Of course there is the slippery slope of moving from the exodus as something whose "real" happening doesn't matter to the resurrection as an event whose "really happened-ness" is irrelevant for faithful imagination. But then the book of Exodus and the Gospel narratives are different books with different purposes. Suffice to say, slippery slope arguments are usually red herrings.

On Understanding Bonhoeffer

2011-07-08T16:49:00.001+01:00

I've started and re-started Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer about four times now, never getting past chapter two. I recognise it -- or at least I've been told to recognise it -- as a book I need to read, but I have felt unable to read it. There is a weight and seriousness to it that I am not used to. As I've read its opening passages, the act of merely reading it creates an unease, with the book constantly saying back to me, the reader, "You need to do more than read me".

I never understood the weight of Bonhoeffer's words, the seriousness with which he can say, "When Jesus Christ calls a man, he bids him 'Come and die'" and really mean it...literally. But having watched Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, some semblance of understanding has emerged. There is nothing special about the film, but it does give you the sense that there is something special about the life that it portrays.

In the final scene, it finally dawned on me. It finally dawned on me what kind of conviction it takes to utter what Bonhoeffer uttered in Discipleship. What he wrote always appeared so morbid to me, so heavy, that I could not handle it. So I'd put the book down. To live as Bonhoeffer urged us to live -- or rather, to die as Bonhoeffer urged us to die -- made little sense in light of the now -- the eternal now, as Brueggemann puts it. But Bonhoeffer, like all of the Christians of the past that we hold up as types or examples, imagined a future.

He stands at the entrance to a prison yard, looking directly at the hanging dock which has his name written all over it. This is his immediate future, and it offers no hope. He is ordered to strip naked, which he does while maintaining his gaze on that deathly object. "Was everything I've done, everything I've stood for, worth bringing me to this point?" he seems to ask himself. Coming towards him from behind is his interrogator, his enemy. "You tremble, pastor. Afraid?", he asks. He so desperately wants the immenent prospect of death to defeat the man who has always seemed so willing to die. "I'm cold", Bonhoeffer replies. The SS agent is perturbed by the response, but wrestles once more for the upper-hand, for the last word: "So...this is the end."

"No" says Bonhoeffer, and with that he walks towards his death.

It is this "No" that makes sense of everything that Bonhoeffer writes. In fact it is this "No" that makes sense of everything that any Christian has ever said that is worth listening to.

Two Kinds of Atheism

2011-07-05T22:16:00.000+01:00

The atheism of imagination is a much more formidable opponent to theology than positivist skepticism because it takes religion seriously.

- Garrett Green

It's fashionable for belief in God/religion to be the punchline of many a joke these days. The thinking seems to be that if religion can be made fun of then it can't possibly be true or carry any real weight in th elife of a human being. This is why Hitchens is a more successful evangelist and apologist for atheism than Dawkins - he's funnier. He can get more laughs at religion's expense. Positivist skepticism's logical conclusion isn't the construction of a new reality free of the tyranny of religion - its logical conclusion is a never-ending joke, because it can't live without the punchline provided by religion.

But the best jokes are those which take the subject of the joke most seriously. The atheism of imagination wants to show religion to be a powerful but calamitous force in the world; it wants to expose the Future Planning Committee as the War Committee. It can taste the irony, and wants everyone else to have a sample too. Positive skepticism wants to strip religion naked and play willy banjo.

Where Green may be mistaken is in calling the atheism of imagination an opponent of theology. The task of theology can only be enriched by alternative voices who take its subject matter seriously enough to challenge it. Real opposition of theology can only be an inside job, carried out by theologians who know not what they have been given and who know nothing of the gifts that can be received from unexpected places.

The Most Insightful Review of Transformers 3 That You'll See...

2011-07-05T12:01:00.002+01:00

Our Problem

2011-06-23T12:23:00.000+01:00

Our problem is that we have made the family (or marriage) into a more holy and fundamental sphere of life than the church, but the New Testament sees things very differently. Very differently.

I don't like that that might be a problem, but is it?