According To Bill

The Christian story, according to Bill Hicks:

Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love.

JVG 1

C.S. Lewis defined an unliterary person as someone who reads books only once.

In honour of my second reading (yes, that makes me better than you) of N.T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God (JVG), I'm going to post some selected quotes as I go along. Expect maybe one or two a week. If you've read the book already this will be a nice refresher. If you haven't, then perhaps something you read here will spark enough interest to make you go out and get a copy. You would not be wasting either your time or your money should you do so - that's a guarantee.

The point of having Jesus at the centre of a religion or a faith is that one has Jesus: not a cypher, a strange silhouetted Christ-figure, nor yet an icon, but the one Jesus the New Testament writers know, the one born in Palestine in the reign of Augustus Caesar, and crucified outside Jerusalem in the reign of his successor Tiberius. Christianity appeals to history; to history it must go. The recognition that the answers we may find might change our views, or even our selves, cannot and must not prevent us from embarking on the quest.

A Narratable Gospel?

We have not thought of Paul as a storyteller, for the Jesus stories of the Gospels are absent from his letters. Yet his use of narrative is very important…because Paul’s central concern was to use the narrative [of Jesus] to form a moral community. The pivotal story for Paul was simple and astounding: God’s son and anointed one was the very Jesus who was most shamefully crucified, dead, and buried, but whom God then raised from the dead, exalted to share his own throne and very name in heaven, to sit at God’s right hand as Lord until all things would be subjected to him and God alone would reign in righteousness over all his people and creation. The drama of Paul’s career turns on his recognition that that story shattered and recreated his own conception of a life lived in obedience to God’s will.

This paragraph is from The Origins of Christian Morality by Wayne Meeks, which is then quoted by Richard Hays in his essay "Is Paul's Gospel Narratable?"

I'm in love with the last sentence by Meeks, and will echo it to form a definition of repentance:

Repentance means recognizing that the story of Jesus shatters and recreates our conception of a life lived in obedience to God's will.

Jesus In Summary

Who is Jesus? Here's a thoroughly biblical summary of the man from Terry Eagleton:

Jesus...appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, carelss about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one.

Sex (Talked About) On The Beach - Part 2

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.

- Henri Nouwen

This is by no means unrelated to the previous post. The will to power comes more easily, more naturally than the will to love. The former thus impinges on our "love lives", with promiscuous sex, prostitution and pornography the results.

Nouwen wrote the above quote in relation to Christian leadership. I wonder if those Christian leaders who have been caught up in sex scandals have had ministries of power rather than of love; ministries of controlling people rather than loving people?

A Recent Debate, A Sad Parable

Sometimes, Dutch homosexual Catholic priests know exactly what they're talking about:

"I have the impression that many of the debates within the Church around issues such as papacy, the ordination of women, the marriage of priests, homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and euthanasia take place primarily on a moral level. On that level, different parties battle about right or wrong. But that battle is often removed from the experience of God's first love which lies at the base of all human relationships. Words like right-wing, reactionary, conservative, liberal, and left-wing are used to describe people's opinions, and many discussions then seem more like political battles for power than spiritual searches for the truth.
Christian leaders cannot simply be persons who have well-informed opinions about the burning issues of our time. Their leadership must be rooted in the permanent, intimate relationship with the incarnate Word, Jesus, and they need to find there the source for their words, advice, and guidance."

I read this in the wake of a recent debate between uberBaptist Al Mohler (above, rightwing) and some members of the BioLogos Foundation. You can find a summary of goings on here and here.

Sadly, this debate is a parable for the kind of discussions that Nouwen criticises. It reflects a battle for knowledge/power rather than a "spiritual search for the truth" rooted "in the experience of God's first love". I am guilty of such a posture myself. I want to have the best, most defendable moral and intellectual knowledge, and so easily forget Paul's warning:

...if I...understand...all knowledge...but have not love, I am nothing.

Gift

The celebration of a day of rest was, then, the announcement of trust in this God who is confident enough to rest. It was then and is now an assertion that life does not depend on our feverish activity of self-securing, but that there can be a pause in which life is given to us simply as a gift.

- Walter Brueggemann

The Mission

Promoting the gospel to the world is more than a rescue mission (though it is certainly that as well); it is a reality mission. It is our plea to all to acknowledge that they belong to one Lord.

- John Dickson

Authority of Scripture

The most powerful argument for the truth of Scripture is a community of people who exemplify the love and power of the God that they have come to know through the New Testament. Apart from the witness of such communities, formal arguments for the authority of Scripture carry little weight.

- Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament

God Is Not A Micro-Manager

I'm stealing the following quote from the blog כל־האדם

It's found in John Goldingay's Old First Testament Trilogy, and makes me very much want to read it.

The First Testament story never talks about God having a plan for the world or a plan of salvation or a plan for people’s individual lives, and the story it tells does not look like one that resulted from a plan. God certainly had an aim, a vision, some goals, and sometimes formulates a plan for a particular context, but works out a purpose in the world in interaction with the human beings who are designed to be key to the fulfilling of those goals. God is not a micro-manager who seeks to make every decision for the company, but the wiser kind of executive who formulates clear goals but involves the work force in determining how to implement them, and also recognizes that the failure of members of the work force will require ongoing flexibility in pursuing these goals. The story does not give the impression that from the beginning God had planned the flood, or the summons of Abraham, or the exodus, or the introduction to the monarchy, or the building of the temple, or the exile, or the sending of a messiah. It portrays these as responses to concrete situations, while all are outworkings of God’s purpose and character. Our security lies not in the world’s actual story being the outworking of God’s plan (that would be scary) but in its unfolding within the control of an executive who will go to any lengths to see that the vision gets fulfilled–even dying for it. In this sense the lamb of God was slain before the world’s foundation. God has always been that kind of God.

There Are No Christians

...if we can say that there are some Catholics who are Christians, can we not equally say that there are some Evangelicals who are Christians? Or perhaps better still, shouldn’t we simply leave the judging to the One who will judge justly? If we don’t, then where will the madness end? Calvinists will admit that some Armenians are Christians, hyper-Calvinists will concede that some Calvinists are Christians, and so on until eventually we’ll have a denomination of Christianity that claims there are actually no Christians at all...

Little did I know when I wrote this that Karl Barth, through his commentary on Romans, has already begun this peculiar denomination of Christianity:

Rightly understood, there are no Christians: there is only the eternal opportunity of becoming Christians - an opportunity at once accessible and inaccessible to all men.

I wrote about this potential with exasperation, but maybe this Barth fellow has a point.

Unintelligible

...our task is not to explain 'the meaning' of the text, but rather show how our lives are unintelligible if Jesus Christ is not the Lord.

- Stanley Hauerwas

I'm still trying to figure out if that's the most brilliant piece of advice you can give to a preacher, or a recipe for sermonic suicide.

Sermons

Sermons must not give closure. Sermons must leave the congregation poised for more gifts to be given that may threaten us out of our socks....Because...what we know is that God's good future will not be a re-iteration of what we have known in the past; it will be new.

- Walter Brueggeman

Planting Roses

You are not oiling the wheels of a machine about to roll over a cliff....You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are -- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself -- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one's fellow human beings and for that matter one's fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world -- all of this will find its way, through the resurrection power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.

- N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope

Incomprehensibly Daring

The comments section at the aforementioned Storied Theology blog threw up a great quote from Jewish philosopher Martin Buber:

To the Jew the Christian is the incomprehensibly daring man who proclaims redemption to an unredeemed world.

Not A Court Drama

There is a new blog on the market by scholar J.R. Daniel Kirk. Just when I was beginning to question the raison d'etre of blogs, reading Storied Theology gave me hope. For example, how about this for pulling the pin out of a grenade and launching it into the ranks of centuries of theology:

The structure of the universe is not law, the story of the universe is not a court drama.

Now I like A Few Good Men as much as the next person, but I think I'm ready to hop on board Kirk's train when he says this.

And then there's his take on the one we Christians call "God":

We have not spoken of the Christian God when we have spoken of a “spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” We have talked about an ideal for a divinity. We speak of the Christian God when we speak of the God who has acted to send His own Son, to give that Son up for us all, to raise that Son from the dead, and to see to it that the message of this son is sent to the ends of the earth.

In other words, one of the most important pay-offs for being willing to have our transhistorical theological categories exchanged for the biblical categories is that it creates space to reconceive of the identity of God as put on display in the biblical narrative itself: a God who is relentlessly on mission to draw the world to Himself.

Praise be to the blogging gods, for they have looked favourably on us in this new year.

Down With That Sort Of Thing

...real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right....And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.

But think what happens if the Exodus is the primal scream that permits the beginning of history.

- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

Christianity has been the single most creative cultural, ethical, aesthetic, social, political, or spiritual force in the history of the West, to be sure; but it has also been a profoundly destructive force; and one should perhaps praise it as much for the latter attribute as for the former, for there are many things worthy of destruction.

- David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions

Criticism, destruction, grieving - not words you'd associate with Western Christianity today. Perhaps not even words we would want to be associated with.

Thou Shalt Love

The answer to this question is universally familiar. Millions of tongues testify to it evening and morning: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might.” Thou shalt love -- what a paradox this embraces! Can love then be commanded? Is love not rather a matter of fate and of seizure and of bestowal which, if it is indeed free, is withal only free? And now it is commanded? Yes of course, love cannot be commanded. No third party can command it or extort it. No third party can, but the One can. The commandment to love can only proceed from the mouth of the lover. Only the lover can and does say: love me! -- and he really does so. In his mouth the commandment to love is not a strange commandment; it is none other than the voice of love itself.

- Franz Rosenzweig, quoted in The Unsettling God by Walter Brueggemann

Can one who loves command another to return that love? Is “Love me” a valid request from the mouth of a lover? Is it a valid request from the mouth of God, or does it make him a narcissist? Do different rules apply to creator and creature?

Perhaps the word “command” evokes the wrong imagery, conjuring up a military scenario rather than the relation of a lover to his beloved. We are not called to love god because he insists, or because arbitrary punishment awaits disobedience to the command. We love god because he is love, and because he first loved us -- and continues to love us -- even when we were at our most unlovable.

“Love me” from the lips of god is not the command of a master to his slave, but the free choice made available to a bride - a bride whose perfect bridegroom has just uttered the most emphatic “I do” in all of history.

In other news, Walter Brueggemann is fast becoming a favourite author of mine after reading only 1.1 of his books. If there are any others of his out there that I need to read then do inform.

Worth Less

Every single moment on this planet from here on out, human beings are worth less. Not more; less.

Perhaps it's his deep religious heritage, perhaps it's because he's simply a very angry man, but whatever the reason, David Simon is a great embodiment of the prophetic imagination that is sketched in Walter Brueggemann's excellent book. Or at least a great embodiment of one half of that imagination - the criticism half. He goes on to pronounce that

At every given moment where this country [The U.S.] has had a choice...to exalt the value of individuals over the value of the share price, we have chosen raw, unencumbered capitalism. Capitalism has become our god.

Listen to the rest of what Simon has to say here.

A Cultural Consciousness

A society without a cultural consciousness of the absolute, such as we are in the process of creating, is like a lawn laid on top of a concrete yard: it may briefly give the impression of health, but eventually, for obvious reasons, it withers away. What is called secularism, therefore, strikes not merely at specific religions, or even religions in general, but at the very capacity of humans to be human.

So says Irish Times columnist John Waters. Read the full piece here.