World XI

For those of you interested in football:

My flatmate and I handpicked a unique world XI to challenge any that you can come up with. The stipulations are as follows: the players have to be talented, lazy, and dislikable. They can be deficient in one area provided they make up for it in another. See if you can improve our team or even handpick a whole different 11.

.................................................Dida..................................................

Lucas Neill...........Younes Kaboul.........William Gallas*.......Winston Bogarde

........David Bentley......................Guti......................................Robinho........

........Adebayor........................Ibrahimovic................Berbatov.................

* Just can't think of someone better at the moment

We originally had Barthez in goal, but took him out because he's retired. We were going to do the same with Bogarde, but decided it would be quite fitting for a retired Bogarde to be still in contention. After his shenanigans at Chelsea the man is almost immortal. We have Assou-Ekotto waiting on the sideline just in case.

Guti is our man to pull the strings in midfield, always ready to find the penetrating runs of the forwards with a killer pass. Should Guti prove unsuccessful, however, there is a plan B already in place. Bentley may not have Berbatov's pace, but his crosses from deep will cause any defence problems, especially with Ibrahimovic's raised foot lurking in and around the penalty area. On the other wing, Robinho is there to provide some much needed flair.

The strikers speak for themselves really. All there on merit. They will pluck balls out of the sky with the deftest touch all day. They'll be economical with their energy, sure, and they may not do much scoring. But you can be sure that when one of them does find the net, it will be one of the all-time great goals.

Some near misses were Mauro Camaronesi, Kevin Prince-Boateng, and the aforementioned Assou-Ekkota.

Managing the team is David O'Leary, who will be assisted by the vastly experienced Terry Venables, who flew in from Costa Del Sol as soon as he heard about the project we've started. We're also proud to announce that we've secured Sven Goran Eriksson as director of football.

Deus Ex Machina

Cain and Abel are the first children of Adam and Eve. Cain murders Abel, and receives judgement from God. He responds by saying,

My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.

Simply put, Cain is afraid of the big, bad world; afraid that "the others" will kill him when they find him.

This begs the question, who are the others? Who are these people that Cain is afraid of? His own brothers and sisters that Genesis fails to mention? Does he then go on to marry one of them in the land of Nod? Most theological schemes would demand positive answers to these last two questions. This I find troubling.

Is there a way out of this conundrum? More specifically, a way that doesn't involve secret siblings prone to incest? I just hate it when I have to solve conundrums by introducing incestuous children to the plot.

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.

A God in Relation: Unsettling

The film Amadeus portrays how quickly a relationship with God can disintegrate when bound to our "religious" ways of thinking and conducted on our terms alone. Consider Antonio Salieri's pious prayer as a boy:

Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen.

His prayer appears to have been answered initially with him enjoying success as the court composer in Vienna, but along comes Mozart, and everything changes. God's glory was to be celebrated all right, but it was not to be celebrated through the music of the chaste Salieri. Instead, the voice of God was to be heard through licentious Mozart, that despicable jar of clay gifted with all that Salieri longed for and more.



This he could not handle; this he had to renounce, and in so doing he was forced to renounce God himself:

From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able.

The tragic irony is palpable. Through Mozart's music, Salieri was confronted with the glory of God that he longed to see celebrated, but he could not look on it in awe and wonder. All he felt was disgust and injustice. The god he thought he knew was a fraud created by the religious mind. The real God -- the God "incarnated" in the music of Mozart -- was revealed to him, and the shocking revelation led him to turn away, knowing full well what -- or rather, whom -- he was rejecting.

An unsettling God indeed.

Bob, Jennifer and the Jack of Hearts

A man who once fraternised with a male prostitute, a recording artist who has recently revealed she is in a relationship with another woman, and a pastor - all claiming to be on a journey towards the truth, all claiming to be Christians, all appearing on Larry King Live.

I didn’t see the show, but I read the transcript. How could I not with such a, ahem, festive line up? I may discuss some of what was said another time, but my initial reaction is simply this: Why?

Why did this dialogue take place on national television? Assuming Ted Haggard, Jennifer Knapp and Pastor Bob Botsford to be Christians and thus members of the Church, is there a justifiable reason for opinions to be aired and judgements to be made outside of a church context? Who benefits when Christians argue about the sinfulness (or lack thereof) of homosexuality in a secular environment? This is akin to the church members of Corinth going to court against one another, thus bringing what should have been church-related matters into a non-church environment. As Gordon Fee points out, Paul’s correction of this behaviour is a correction of the Corinthians’ failure to let the church be the church.

The media has no interest in enhancing the unity of the church. This self-serving moral compass (the media, not the church…oh no - never the church) wants scandal and bickering and contradiction. It wants the Westboro Baptist Church, not Redeemer Presbyterian; it wants Pat Robertson, not John Stott. This may sound like I want to isolate the church from “real life”, to cover up its failings so that it appears good from the outside looking in. I don’t. As recent church history in Ireland tragically demonstrates, this can only end badly.

What I am advocating is for debates such as the one in question to be kept in their proper context. Since the matter of homosexuality and its relation to Christian discipleship is a community-of-faith matter and a Scripture-interpretation matter, it has no business being discussed outside of the church. In fact, this debate is unintelligible outside of the church; unintelligible in the world of the ‘No-God’ (to use some Barth-speak in an effort to delude myself into thinking I know what he’s on about).

One of the conclusions of Richard Hays’s book Echoes of Scripture... is that the Bible can only be read faithfully by members of the new covenant founded in Christ and energised by the spirit; that is, by members of the church, for whom the text of Scripture not only stands as a word spoken over and against our own words, but as a word to be “made flesh” in the life of the community.

This community, and not the bright lights of a television studio, is the place to thrash out thoughts and feelings about homosexuality. In the world of television, Jennifer Knapp becomes a mere idea, a political pawn to be used by both sides of the divide, a discussion topic for pseudo-theological bloggers to vent ab…oh…right. I’ll be off, then.

Something Odd

I noticed something odd today. I was trying to learn the following little ditty on piano this morning:



There's a part that requires some quick back and forth with the ring finger and the baby finger. I don't know if it's because of my poor playing skills or because I'm just badly put together, but it was like I had no control over what was happening with these two fingers.

Then I did a test.

With my left hand I held the thumb, pointer and middle finger of my right hand, leaving only the two maverick fingers free. I then motioned my ring finger towards my palm. Nothing unusual to report there. However, when I did the same with my pinky, my ring finger just started moving along with it, all on its own! What the mess is up with that? Why can't I move my baby finger without moving the ring finger? Is it a normal bodily function, or is there something wrong with me?

To all you pianists out there, can this deformity be overcome? Can practice give you mastery over your own digits, rendering each one subject to your every command? Do I just have do what the Bride did in Kill Bill, and concentrate all my will power on wiggling my big toe baby finger?

I can't help wondering what Heidi Montag would do...

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.

Barth's Next Conquest

Karl Barth has made several passes at me. He's winked his eye in bookshops and whispered sweet nothings into my ear on various websites. I've let my guard down a couple of times, but I couldn't help myself. I've heard from his previous lovers that he is the real deal. "Once you go Barth there's no going back" is what they say. His reputation is second to none.

And yet, our liaisons have thus far left me feeling cold, distant, like an outsider who doesn't get the joke. There are brief moments where I see what all the fuss is about, but most of the time I'm left dazed and confused, sensing greatness but not understanding it.

I want to understand it. I want to be Barth's next conquest. What will it take? Where does one begin with this Swiss maestro? I haven't read much theology, so perhaps I need to chase after some of Barth's uglier friends before I go for the man himself. Or maybe there is a hermeneutical key that will unlock Karl Barth's meaning for me; some sort of secret password that will make his most difficult work read like Ann and Barry.

It might simply be that I need to stop the silly flirtation and make a serious statement of commitment: Church Dogmatics, here's an obscenely large space on my Shelfari "Now Reading" list; I want you to fill it, all 795 volumes of you.

Whatever it takes, I want to know Karl Barth; or rather, be known by him. Help me achieve this goal.

More Foundational

But what if God’s commitment to the cosmos he created is more foundational than God’s desire to see the Law maintained?

This is a question posed and answered over at Storied Theology. Dr Kirk talks about the magic deeper still that the witch did not know, and which we can so easily remain oblivious to despite its revelation in Christ.

If you read nothing else this week, read this post.