Words

Since October I have been on a mission to write 56,000 words. So far I have written about 46,000. That means I'm averaging just over 153 words per day, which is about 10 words per waking hour. That's right. 10. You're impressed. I can tell.

It sounds a bit rubbish when I reduce it to numbers, but it's been quite a slog so far, yet a hell of an enjoyable one. The final essay I wrote captures the experience well. I was tormented by it, thinking about it all the time, settling on a position and then almost immediately moving away from it. And in the end, I found refuge in the theologians that have accompanied me since I first began my studies in Belfast: Brueggemann and Barth. (That said, Barth wouldn't appreciate my allowing "natural theology" a certain claim.)

The essay itself is a theological reading of the conquest narrative in Joshua. I evaluate the readings of Calvin, Stephen Williams, Douglas Earl, and Eric Seibert, and then propose a hermeneutical lens of my own. How convincing or useful it is I don't really know. But have a read and see what you think:

Theological Reading of Joshua 1-11

Virginity: Overrated?

I read two articles via Facebook this morning:

Have We Made an Idol out of Sexual Purity?

"We're married, we just don't have sex"

The first one makes the point that virginity has become so prized that those who no longer possess it are sometimes viewed as irreparably damaged Christians. Their special present to their spouse has already been unwrapped, and it's now soiled with bodily fluids. The shame that one feels at such a scenario may have been wiped clean by Christ's own bodily fluid (blood), but something has been lost that's never coming back. You may be convinced that there is no condemnation in Christ, but there certainly is regret.

The author blames this perspective on the idolisation of the purity ideal.

[Spoiler alert] I recently watched Chasing Amy, which deals with a similar topic though on a whole other level. A man falls in love with a woman, but the woman is gay. She is gay not so much by nature as by choice (if you'll allow me that distinction). She eventually falls for him and they end up in a strange and strangely sweet relationship. But here's the problem: she has a past! Of course the man knew this, but only to a limited extent. When he discovers the full extent of his new girlfriend's sexual history, however, he is disgusted. He thought he was the first man she had ever been with, but my word was that not the case. And so he makes her feel shame. It doesn't matter that she is madly in love with him and committed to him and that the past is in the past. She has become damaged goods in his eyes.

Given the woman's extraordinary sexual escapades it is tempting to forgive the man for reacting the way he did. Yet in the end it is quite obvious who is in the wrong. I mention this film because it portrays how Christians are sometimes made to feel with regard to sexual purity: on the one hand, disgust or resentment over a standard that was breached in the past, on the other hand, unacceptable, damaged, inferior. To the extent that this article criticises this tendency it is to be lauded.

Yet there are problems with it. First, the author separates holiness from the body, as if holiness has nothing to do with what we do with our genitals. This leads to a further distinction between "sexual purity" and "spiritual purity" which is at best problematic. I understand the desire to move away from the sex-obsessed discourse of evangelicalism. The Christian church has always had the sexual life of humans in view, yet it is arguable that the ascetical teaching of the Church has historically been more concerned with what you do with your money or your food than with what you do with your sexual organs.

Nevertheless, virginity was a topic addressed by many Christian theologians, and was widely considered a virtue to be prized. The apostle Paul, for example, encourages people to remain virgins so as to better serve the Lord. And my new friend Maximus the Confessor thought that virginity as a "single" was the highest form of self-control. The lowest form was marriage with lots of sex. The next lowest was marriage with a little bit of sex. After that, marriage with sex only for the sake of procreation. And just below virginity, marriage with sex only for the sake of procreation, and then after one or two children are born no sex at all. In other words, the less sex the better.

This segues nicely into the second article, which is written by an asexual man who is married to a woman and who does not have sex with her. It's a sort of reverse Mayor Quimby: "This is my wife, but I am not sleeping with her." He is a virgin not so much by choice as by nature (if you'll allow me that distinction. If you will, then I wonder if virginity by nature would be considered ethical by Christian theologians such as Maximus, or is it the choice of virginity that makes it a moral act?).

What is most peculiar about this situation is how in line it is with early Christian teaching on sexual ethics and how out of line it is even with sex-obsessed evangelicals.

Which leaves me wondering: is the issue a matter of "conservative" vs "liberal" attitudes to sex, or something deeper - something which includes our rather laissez-faire practices with regard to money and food?

Barely Trinitarian

I have a confession to make: I am a student of theology who dislikes reading about the doctrine of the Trinity. When reading Tertullian for my dissertation I usually sprinted through his work on the Trinity. I have read a lot of Karl Barth, but I have not read a lot of Barth on the Trinity. David Bentley Hart's Beauty of the Infinite opens its dogmatic part with a chapter on the Trinity. It was the last chapter I read, and even then I only half-read it at best.

Perhaps the Trinity is like Guinness or coffee or a Terrence Malick film: appreciation for it is earned through hard work, and even then appreciation is not guaranteed. But rather than put the work in, I begin with the conclusion that nobody who writes about the Trinity knows what they are writing about. Don't get me wrong: I presuppose the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity as best I can. But I'm happy to take it as mystery pointing to a mystery and then move on to other things that make for better reading.

Since this can't go on forever, is there any writing on the Trinity that will make me not want to skip over all those other writings on the Trinity?

Body and Soul

The 20th century's pre-eminent philosopher made the following profoundly Christian statement:

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

This is a re-jigging of Jesus's statement that his disciples will be known by their fruit. As I read Jonathan Edwards I am encouraged to find amidst his talk of affections and ideas and minds and hearts that same commitment to the indispensability of bodily praxis:

…if a professor of Christianity manifests in his behaviour a pitiful tender spirit towards others in calamity, if he is ready to bear their burdens with them, willing to spend his substance for them, and to suffer many inconveniences in his worldly interest to promote the good of others’ souls and bodies; is not this a more credible manifestation of a spirit of love to men, than only a man’s telling what love he felt to others at certain times, how he pitied their souls, how his soul was in travail for them, and how he felt hearty love and pity to his enemies; when in his behaviour he seems to be of a very selfish spirit, close and niggardly, all for himself, and none for this neighbours, and perhaps envious and contentious?” 

- Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections.

Chastity

Maximus the Confessor finds in the heron a supreme example of chastity. How so?

They say that a "heron" is a bird, and it lives with such chastity that whenever it is about to come together for sexual intercourse it mourns for forty days, and after these, again, another forty days.

Cue the "that sounds just like my wife" jokes.

Battle of the Anthems

The World Cup is, among other things, a war of national anthems, which themselves usually have some kind of war behind them. These patriotic tunes which open every game of the tournament are somewhat at odds with the make-up of "national" teams these days. Many players cannot sing them, either because they don't know the words or because the words don't reflect their convictions or sense of identity (or, as is the case with Ireland, they don't know the language!). What it means to be German or French or Irish may no longer be reflected (or may never have been reflected) in the ideological lyrics that accompany the often beautiful melodies.

To my ears, no melody is more beautiful (and, perhaps, no lyrics are more troubling) than the German national anthem, Deutschlandlied. The part about Germany being above everything in the world is left out, however, so the usual cliches about fraternity and justice are all that is sung by some, though by no means all, of the German players. Podolski, Ozil, Khedira and Boateng remain silent in the video below as their team mates belt out the lyrics with gusto. One wonders what this obvious divide does to team spirit? Certainly this cosmopolitan German team, for all its talent, has not been exemplary in its cohesion in the way that previous German teams were. Time to ditch Deutschlandlied?

Leaving all this to one side, however, the tune is elegant and graceful, and remains my favourite World Cup anthem. Here is what Chris De Burgh of, er, Guardian Sport, has to say about it:

I have a great connection with this piece of music, which was written by Haydn in 1797. I went to Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and they had a beautiful chapel where we had matins most days. I remember singing the hymn Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken, to this tune, which with 800 voices was a thrilling sound. I was brought up Church of Ireland, and one of my earliest memories would have been in church with mum and dad, listening to this melody. There’s an interesting thing with music like this, how the beat falls with the melody; they often say music is mathematical in construction and this is a very good example. The melodic pattern repeats itself several times throughout, then you have a mid eight, and for me the most thrilling part is the reprise, those rising notes, and then it hits the top. It’s a hell of a piece of music.

Here, also, is the hymn version of the song, mentioned above by De Burgh:



I look forward to my local Church of Ireland (which, on the topic of nationalism, has a British flag hanging up inside!) belting out this song some time.

Uniqueness not a Virtue?

Q & A sessions at the end of a lecture/talk are brilliant, even if the questions tend to be in the form of either a) "Here is an interesting thought I have. Can you confirm for everybody here that it is interesting?" or b) a completely irrelevant or bizarre line of inquiry that gets the conversation nowhere. At a Terry Eagleton lecture last week there were quite a few questions veering towards the second form, yet it was precisely in his answers to these questions that Eagleton's true genius, and his patience, was revealed. I didn't ask him a question, partly because I get nervous in these situations and partly because I'm afraid of asking a question that takes one of the two forms mentioned above. Of course as soon as I left the building I had formulated in my head a question which perhaps would have been worth asking, namely: How does Terry Eagleton's interpretation of Jesus relate to the metaphysically-tinged creeds of the Church? 

Eagleton made two intentionally provocative statements in his lecture. The first was "God does not have genitals." The second was "God is an animal." I wondered about the relation between these statements, since they are essentially contradictory. It seems to me that the creeds provide a way to hold them together, but Eagleton's interpretation of Jesus basically removed metaphysics (and therefore later Christian understandings of Jesus) from the picture. I wondered if that was his intention, or if he thought his reading of the Gospels could be squared with the creeds. Perhaps that line of questioning would have been too confessional for Queen's, which Eagleton memorably described as a "constitutionally godless institution."

Anyway, I bring up Q & A's not only to name drop, but because I listened online to a Q & A after a Miroslav Volf lecture on faith and violence, and something he said has got me thinking, or at least has got me thinking that I need to get thinking. Here is what he said:

There is so much talk about Christian uniqueness, as if uniqueness were a value. But it isn't. It's a fake value. Truth is a value, but not uniqueness. The fact that Christian faith is unique, I'm troubled by this. I want a state of affairs in which Christian faith isn't unique....In heaven it won't be unique. It just will be. Truth. So if we emphasize uniqueness we are interested in difference. And there is a kind of a pride associated with a stress on uniqueness which wants others to be different than we are, wants others to be outside so that we can reel them in....I think that's a mistake.

The reason Volf's words have got me thinking is because they are quite at odds with much of what I have read in the last 5 years, which has been about the distinctiveness or uniqueness of Christianity and its ethics.

Barth's Theological Method

I have been reading Barth for about five years now. My birthday present in 2010 was the Church Dogmatics, which at a special price of $100 may just have been the biggest bargain since 5p Woppa bars. (Church Dogmatics will now set you back $995, and Woppa bars no longer exist.)

The beauty of Barth's billion pages of theological reflection is that, due to his particular way of writing, you can just jump in to any volume at any point, and it will more or less make sense. He is always circling around the same object, looking at it from different angles, emphasising different parts of the whole. This method is captured in a little technique that Barth uses repeatedly. For example, he takes the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbour" and examines it using different emphases. So...

Thou shalt love thy NEIGHBOUR.

Thou shalt LOVE thy neighbour.

Thou SHALT love thy neighbour.

It is a simple method, homiletical in nature, and it is this simplicity that makes Barth's theology so forceful and so compelling. Barth is said to have summed up his theology with the children's song "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so." The volumes of Church Dogmatics can almost be understood as different emphases on this sentence.

JESUS love me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

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

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

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

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

Breaking the Cycle

Since I first watched The Wire, I have only watched one TV series in its entirety: The Wire. As of yesterday, that is no longer true. I have watched Friday Night Lights. And in its own very different way, it is equally magnificent.

Well, "equally" is pushing it. Season 2 of The Wire is a masterpiece of bold and complex storytelling. Season 2 of FNL is crap. Really, really crap. That it was cut short because of a writers' strike may just have been the show's saving grace. From then on in the show lived up to the standards it set itself in the first season.

Though it went through something of an identity crisis, a run-of-the-mill teen-centric drama this is not. If The Wire is really about Baltimore, FNL is really about small-town Texas. These two places might seem like world's apart, and in many ways they are, but the presence of Michael Jordon (a different one) in both shows hints at a deeper correspondence. The two Americas that David Simon likes to speak of are both on display in FNL, though it must be said that there is an (unrealistic?)optimism in FNL that is utterly absent from The Wire. Yet perhaps, just perhaps, that is more a criticism of the latter than the former.

***Spoiler alert for FNL*** That said, I like to see a certain pessimism in FNL which may or not be intentional. One of the most surprising plots in the show is its (tentative) criticism of the military. It leaves us, to some degree, resentful of a soldier. That is something of a miracle for a series which is set in Texas and which aired on network television. In the final montage, we see one of the high school football stars in military gear, headed off to base camp to begin life as a soldier. The scholarship he presumed upon never materialised. He hadn't thought of anything other than playing football. So he hands his State championship ring over to his sweetheart, gets on a bus, and joins the army. This might be meant as a touching moment, but given what we have witnessed in the previous five seasons I have my doubts. Are we not in fact seeing the emergence of a new Saracen family, destined to end in division, resentment, and death?

There is also the character of Julie Taylor, fictional proof of Shakespeare's comment that good wombs can sometimes bear bad sons or daughters. For all the infectious virtue of her mother and father, she is annoying and immature to the end, evidence that life does not always correspond to our formulae.

Where FNL really triumphs - and in this it also mirrors The Wire - is in its development of what appear initially to be throw-away characters. In one way, the show can be said to find its centre in Billy Riggins and Buddy Garrity. More than the Taylors, they embody Texas, and that is what this is all about.

There are many great scenes, numerous inspirational speeches, and excellent passages of American Football action. The game itself - since it is so scripted - is almost designed to be televised, so when it is depicted on television it is just like watching the real thing. But it's not really the winning or the losing that matters. This is hammered home to us in that wonderful portrayal of the final game. The coin is tossed, a sign that fate (or perhaps destiny) has more of a say than we like to think when it comes to winning and losing. There are, after all, things that we cannot control. Fitting, then, that the final shot of the final game is quarter-back Vince Howard throwing a Hail Mary. We do what we can, and then we pray like hell that it all turns out okay. But it's the doing what we can for which we are responsible. Or as Coach Taylor says, it's in the trying that character is revealed.

If I have a favourite scene, it is one that is of little consequence to the plot, but which captures the heart of the show. A few of the high school football players meet on their respective balconies in a hotel before a game. They don't realise that Coach Taylor is also outside, listening in on what they have to say. A lesser show (or season 2 of this show) would have them saying all kinds of stuff that would create drama for later on. This show just has them talk and joke with each other, with Coach Taylor enjoying the moment.