On the Explicit Nature of Mumford and Sons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...