Hey any help with this little speech by Thomas in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral?
"They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.
They know and do not know, that action is suffering
And suffering action. Neither does the agent suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
In an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still".
Thursday, December 15, 2005
In Thomas Becket’s sermon on martyrdom in T.S. Eliot’s drama Murder in the Cathedral the audience hears these words:
Consider also one thing of which you have probably never thought. Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen. Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs. We mourn, for the sins of the world that has martyred them; we rejoice, that another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and for the salvation of men.[1]
Martyrdom takes place paradoxically as a moment of delight and of mourning. Archbishop Thomas makes plain the double-edge of the sign of martyrdom – that it reveals both a demonic repudiation of God and a glorious acceptance of him in the one event. Thomas reveals in his sermon that behind the play’s presentation of historical events contrived by human agents lies the counter-narrative of Christ, that the feast of Christmas celebrates. The providential design of God is always in consideration when it comes to martyrdom:
A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident…A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.[2]
Martyrdom is ultimately an act of God and not of the machinations of human plotters, nor even of the martyr him- or her-self. At least, the martyr acts in so far as he freely conjoins his will to the divine will – not in order that he might be glorified as a saint, but in order that the will of God be done, as Thomas has said earlier “that the wheel may turn and still/ Be forever still.”[3]
Thomas knows just what it is that he has renounced in accepting the path of martyrdom, which makes the sermon a moment of quiet resolution in the face of what is to come. He is visited in the first act by four tempters.[4] The first offers to him the path of sensuality and the good life. The second points out to Thomas the possibilities of political power that lay before him in returning to the king’s side – even the good he may do by means of this power. After all, as he puts it: “Power is present. Holiness hereafter.”[5] The third tempter, though similarly a tempter to power, conversely offers him the chance of an allegiance of church authority with the barons in open defiance of the king. Lastly, and with most subtlety, comes the fourth tempter, who encourages him to “think of glory after death”, for “Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb”.[6] If he seeks the way of martyrdom he will not only bear the crown of glory but be able to enjoy the spectacle of his enemies “in timeless torment…beyond expiation.”[7] This is most troubling for the protagonist and hardest to renounce: it is most difficult to disentangle his own will-to-glory from the rightness of the path he is about to take. As he says:
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.[8]
This turning of his motive towards his own self-interest would corrupt his martyrdom. Thomas recognizes that it can scarce be avoided.
And yet, knowing the complications and the risk of perdition, Thomas offers in his sermon his own resolve to submit only to the will of God. He renounces the pragmatism and hedonism of the tempters, and the thinking of those who “argue by results…to settle if an act be good or bad”;[9] in sight of the swords of his killers he gives his life “To the Law of God above the Law of Man”, in confidence that:
We have only to conquer
Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
Now is the triumph of the Cross, now
Open the door! [10]
Thomas neither acts nor even suffers for his own ends. He takes his decision “out of time”.[11] It is, in other words, an eschatological decision: while it is open to question and scrutiny as to his motives and to the relative impact of the act in time, what really matters is whether his act stands (or falls) in eternity. As a true martyr he displays a self-abegnation that is a true expression of his faith in Christ.
The play itself invites the process of a judgment “in time” as with no small irony the four assassins offer their rationalizations for their actions, in plain ignoble prose. They explicitly make appeal to the “fair play” of the English audience, who feel themselves privileged as judges over the action they have just witnessed. Thomas was a provocateur; he had a fanatic’s death-wish; he was complicit in the politics of the day; and so on. Eliot admits to the table the quite credible counter-witness of the knights; and they appear to have the last say. However, the play closes not on this note but with the song of the Chorus celebrating the entry of Thomas into glory. And at this point another kind of invitation is issued: an invitation to thankfulness and repentance:
Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,
Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire… [12]
The audience is pointed to their own complicity in the shedding of blood through their tolerance of injustice and apathetic acceptance of the status quo; and invited to contemplate the example of Thomas in his submission to the will, and the love, of God.
Eliot’s re-narrates the murder of Thomas as a martyrdom for the twentieth century testifying against both cynical political pragmatism, and an ultimately self-regarding religious fanaticism. The passion of Thomas is conjoined to the passion of Christ, as in the early Christian Acts of the Martyrs; his suffering echoes Christ’s suffering and is made meaningful in those terms. However, an ambiguity remains - exactly in the way Eliot himself envisages it. On the historical plane, the nature of Thomas’ death remain subject to an element of concealment. Are not the knights quite plausibly arguing against the reading of Thomas’ death as a martyrdom? Isn’t the verdict of the chorus, simply posited as it is at the end of the drama as a kind of divine judgment (in the manner of Sophoclean tragedy) a presumption of a divine perspective on these events that isn’t really available (except in the theatre)?
[1] Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, p. 56
[2] Ibid., p. 57
[3] Ibid., p. 32
[4] Allusions abound in the scene to the Temptation of Christ by Satan. The downfall of Thomas is being narrated in imitation of Christ’s death.
[5] The words of the Second Tempter. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, p. 37
[6] Ibid., p. 47
[7] Ibid., p. 48
[8] Ibid., p. 52
[9] Ibid., p. 79
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 91
Consider also one thing of which you have probably never thought. Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen. Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs. We mourn, for the sins of the world that has martyred them; we rejoice, that another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and for the salvation of men.[1]
Martyrdom takes place paradoxically as a moment of delight and of mourning. Archbishop Thomas makes plain the double-edge of the sign of martyrdom – that it reveals both a demonic repudiation of God and a glorious acceptance of him in the one event. Thomas reveals in his sermon that behind the play’s presentation of historical events contrived by human agents lies the counter-narrative of Christ, that the feast of Christmas celebrates. The providential design of God is always in consideration when it comes to martyrdom:
A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident…A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.[2]
Martyrdom is ultimately an act of God and not of the machinations of human plotters, nor even of the martyr him- or her-self. At least, the martyr acts in so far as he freely conjoins his will to the divine will – not in order that he might be glorified as a saint, but in order that the will of God be done, as Thomas has said earlier “that the wheel may turn and still/ Be forever still.”[3]
Thomas knows just what it is that he has renounced in accepting the path of martyrdom, which makes the sermon a moment of quiet resolution in the face of what is to come. He is visited in the first act by four tempters.[4] The first offers to him the path of sensuality and the good life. The second points out to Thomas the possibilities of political power that lay before him in returning to the king’s side – even the good he may do by means of this power. After all, as he puts it: “Power is present. Holiness hereafter.”[5] The third tempter, though similarly a tempter to power, conversely offers him the chance of an allegiance of church authority with the barons in open defiance of the king. Lastly, and with most subtlety, comes the fourth tempter, who encourages him to “think of glory after death”, for “Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb”.[6] If he seeks the way of martyrdom he will not only bear the crown of glory but be able to enjoy the spectacle of his enemies “in timeless torment…beyond expiation.”[7] This is most troubling for the protagonist and hardest to renounce: it is most difficult to disentangle his own will-to-glory from the rightness of the path he is about to take. As he says:
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.[8]
This turning of his motive towards his own self-interest would corrupt his martyrdom. Thomas recognizes that it can scarce be avoided.
And yet, knowing the complications and the risk of perdition, Thomas offers in his sermon his own resolve to submit only to the will of God. He renounces the pragmatism and hedonism of the tempters, and the thinking of those who “argue by results…to settle if an act be good or bad”;[9] in sight of the swords of his killers he gives his life “To the Law of God above the Law of Man”, in confidence that:
We have only to conquer
Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
Now is the triumph of the Cross, now
Open the door! [10]
Thomas neither acts nor even suffers for his own ends. He takes his decision “out of time”.[11] It is, in other words, an eschatological decision: while it is open to question and scrutiny as to his motives and to the relative impact of the act in time, what really matters is whether his act stands (or falls) in eternity. As a true martyr he displays a self-abegnation that is a true expression of his faith in Christ.
The play itself invites the process of a judgment “in time” as with no small irony the four assassins offer their rationalizations for their actions, in plain ignoble prose. They explicitly make appeal to the “fair play” of the English audience, who feel themselves privileged as judges over the action they have just witnessed. Thomas was a provocateur; he had a fanatic’s death-wish; he was complicit in the politics of the day; and so on. Eliot admits to the table the quite credible counter-witness of the knights; and they appear to have the last say. However, the play closes not on this note but with the song of the Chorus celebrating the entry of Thomas into glory. And at this point another kind of invitation is issued: an invitation to thankfulness and repentance:
Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,
Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire… [12]
The audience is pointed to their own complicity in the shedding of blood through their tolerance of injustice and apathetic acceptance of the status quo; and invited to contemplate the example of Thomas in his submission to the will, and the love, of God.
Eliot’s re-narrates the murder of Thomas as a martyrdom for the twentieth century testifying against both cynical political pragmatism, and an ultimately self-regarding religious fanaticism. The passion of Thomas is conjoined to the passion of Christ, as in the early Christian Acts of the Martyrs; his suffering echoes Christ’s suffering and is made meaningful in those terms. However, an ambiguity remains - exactly in the way Eliot himself envisages it. On the historical plane, the nature of Thomas’ death remain subject to an element of concealment. Are not the knights quite plausibly arguing against the reading of Thomas’ death as a martyrdom? Isn’t the verdict of the chorus, simply posited as it is at the end of the drama as a kind of divine judgment (in the manner of Sophoclean tragedy) a presumption of a divine perspective on these events that isn’t really available (except in the theatre)?
[1] Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, p. 56
[2] Ibid., p. 57
[3] Ibid., p. 32
[4] Allusions abound in the scene to the Temptation of Christ by Satan. The downfall of Thomas is being narrated in imitation of Christ’s death.
[5] The words of the Second Tempter. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, p. 37
[6] Ibid., p. 47
[7] Ibid., p. 48
[8] Ibid., p. 52
[9] Ibid., p. 79
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 91
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason
The work of John Milbank is a daring attempt to demolish secular social theory from a Christian perspective. This audacious move is a characteristic of the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement, whose other chief protagonists are Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock. Milbank proclaims nothing less than to prove that the ‘governing assumptions’ of theories like secular western liberalism are ‘bound up with the governing assumptions of orthodox Christian positions’. In fact, it is not necessary to try and relate theology and social theory to one another, for, as Fergus Kerr summarises, ‘theology is already social theory, and social theory is already theology’. What Milbank attempts is to expose the theology (and anti-theology) implicit in the so-called secular disciplines like sociology. Conversely, and with much deference to Augustine, he extrapolates the social theory inherent in theology.
Milbank’s critique of political liberalism shares much in common with those of Foucault and Lyotard. Indeed it is self-consciously postmodern: Milbank explicitly adopts the Foucauldian tactic of an historicizing, ‘genealogical’ inquiry in order to expose the network of power struggles and claims to dominance at the root of liberal thinking. He claims that the discourses of liberalism, from which the secular is first constructed, read the world in terms of an ‘ontology of violence’ – ‘a reading of the world which assumes the priority of force and tells how this force is best managed and confined by counter force’. Violence is assumed to be basic; as a result, political theory is developed assuming that violence has to be forcefully surmounted. Following Foucault, Milbank asserts that any truth claims are in fact a means to assert the dominance of the inevitably clashing centres of power in society. Kant’s liberalism, for example, makes claims about freedom that are really only gestures in a wrestle for power. The liberal move – the ‘Kantian delay’ – only temporarily staves off the nihilism of Nietzche.
Milbank’s scepticism removes for him the possibility of theology building on the foundations of some secular discipline:
Theology has frequently sought to borrow from elsewhere a fundamental account of society or history, and then to see what theological insights will cohere with it. But it has been shown that no such fundamental account, in the sense of something neutral, rational and universal, is really available. It is theology itself that will have to provide its own account of the final causes at work in human history, on the basis of its own particular, and historically specific faith.
Consequently, Christianity does not recognise this ontology of violence but rather thinks of the prime reality as a ‘harmonic peace’: Milbank at this point introduces the triune God as ‘transcendental peace through differential relation’. The meta-narrative of Christianity – its ‘counter-story’ – is at least no less credible than the meta-narratives of violence by which modern social theories (including and especially liberalism) describe themselves, since all alike are unfounded in the traditional sense. The existence of a primal violence is challenged by a counter-history, which is established by the coming of Christ into history; a counter-ethics, in which love becomes the core of virtue; and a counter-ontology, in which true peaceful co-existence is won from violence by the practice of forgiveness. Christianity, for Milbank, is unique in that it
…does not allow violence any real ontological purchase, but relates it instead to a free subject who asserts a will that is truly independent of God and of others, and thereby a will to the inhibition and distortion of reality.
Echoing Augustine, Milbank posits the Church as the political anti-type or counter-society. In the Church there is an ‘ontological priority of peace over conflict’ : there, ‘difference’ is the foundation not for violence but for harmonious peace. Here is one of Milbank’s great difficulties; for the Church as a historical entity has not fulfilled this ‘vision of paradisal[sic] community’. As he rather wistfully admits:
Insofar as the church has failed, and has even become a hellish anti-Church, it has confined Christianity, like everything else, with the cycle of the ceaseless exhaustion and return of violence.
Nevertheless, it is the Christian vision of ontological peace that provides the only alternative to absolute nihilism.
Milbank’s critique of liberalism is dazzling. He is able to show how secular liberalism, like other theories of society, is not secular at all but in fact involves necessarily theological or anti-theological moves. He is able to show how liberal thinking has its own mythos or meta-narrative, despite its pretensions to an abstract universalism; and how it has not finally eluded the gravitational pull of nihilism’s black hole. His introduction of the Christian meta-narrative in response rightly points to the distinctive Christian emphasis on relationality generated by the triune God as an attractive conceptual alternative.
Nevertheless, Milbank’s thesis is problematic for a number of reasons. First, his self-conscious appeal to postmodern thinking enables him to make a devastating critique of secular reason; his own evasion of the critique is less than convincing. He adopts Foucault’s notion of genealogy, by which the power claims implicit in the political discourses he examines are brought to light and exposed as relying on an ‘ontology of violence’. And yet he also claims that his Christian ‘ontology of peace’ escapes this Foucauldian critique. An Icarus flying too near a postmodern sun, he relies on Foucault to prove that Foucault is ultimately wrong.
Secondly, Milbank’s strategy rests on a questionable ecclesiology, which is far too sanguine about the ‘church militant’. His is an over-realised ecclesiology, blurring the traditional distinction between the church visible and the church invisible, focussing on the concrete historical institutions of the universal Church at the expense of its local congregational instances. More recent ‘Radical Orthodox’ writings have tended to make the Eucharist the means by which the ‘ontology of peace’ is realised, following an almost medieval sacramental theology. Christopher J. Insole goes so far as to accuse Milbank of a tendency to theocracy. And yet Milbank seems genuinely baffled by the refusal of the Church to be itself within history. Within the Scriptures themselves, the churches were as much a site of struggle as of peace (the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, to take but one example, or the Corinthian church). Peace with God was declared in the gospel, but by no means automatically or easily realised in ecclesial relationships. God’s once-for-all act of reconciliation on the cross is not continued or repeated in the acts of the church this side of Christ’s return.
Thirdly, it seems pertinent to ask, along with Wannenwetsch, if the only way to defeat the violent ontologies of secular reason is by positing an alternative ontology. Milbank has difficulty, having so successfully deconstructed the ontology of political thought, in convincingly constructing something of the same species. The proclamation of the gospel of peace, which founds the church, is not a counter- ontology, but a promise. Further, the NT describes the cross of Christ as achieving peace through a victory against the powers of sin and evil – depicted in terms of a violent exclusion (see Rev 19-22 for just one example).
This third complaint leads to a fourth, which is that while Milbank offers a virtuoso reading of vast tracts of political philosophy, liberation theology and postmodernism, his method is insufficiently grounded in basic Scriptural exegesis. He offers almost no reflection on Israel’s political life; nor does he offer extensive readings of the relevant NT material – all of which ought to condition his explanation of the Church as alternative polis. Strangely, though he claims to be offering Christianity as an alternative meta-narrative, he nowhere offers his retelling of that story at any depth nor an engagement with the authoritative texts of the tradition he is advocating.
Milbank’s critique of political liberalism shares much in common with those of Foucault and Lyotard. Indeed it is self-consciously postmodern: Milbank explicitly adopts the Foucauldian tactic of an historicizing, ‘genealogical’ inquiry in order to expose the network of power struggles and claims to dominance at the root of liberal thinking. He claims that the discourses of liberalism, from which the secular is first constructed, read the world in terms of an ‘ontology of violence’ – ‘a reading of the world which assumes the priority of force and tells how this force is best managed and confined by counter force’. Violence is assumed to be basic; as a result, political theory is developed assuming that violence has to be forcefully surmounted. Following Foucault, Milbank asserts that any truth claims are in fact a means to assert the dominance of the inevitably clashing centres of power in society. Kant’s liberalism, for example, makes claims about freedom that are really only gestures in a wrestle for power. The liberal move – the ‘Kantian delay’ – only temporarily staves off the nihilism of Nietzche.
Milbank’s scepticism removes for him the possibility of theology building on the foundations of some secular discipline:
Theology has frequently sought to borrow from elsewhere a fundamental account of society or history, and then to see what theological insights will cohere with it. But it has been shown that no such fundamental account, in the sense of something neutral, rational and universal, is really available. It is theology itself that will have to provide its own account of the final causes at work in human history, on the basis of its own particular, and historically specific faith.
Consequently, Christianity does not recognise this ontology of violence but rather thinks of the prime reality as a ‘harmonic peace’: Milbank at this point introduces the triune God as ‘transcendental peace through differential relation’. The meta-narrative of Christianity – its ‘counter-story’ – is at least no less credible than the meta-narratives of violence by which modern social theories (including and especially liberalism) describe themselves, since all alike are unfounded in the traditional sense. The existence of a primal violence is challenged by a counter-history, which is established by the coming of Christ into history; a counter-ethics, in which love becomes the core of virtue; and a counter-ontology, in which true peaceful co-existence is won from violence by the practice of forgiveness. Christianity, for Milbank, is unique in that it
…does not allow violence any real ontological purchase, but relates it instead to a free subject who asserts a will that is truly independent of God and of others, and thereby a will to the inhibition and distortion of reality.
Echoing Augustine, Milbank posits the Church as the political anti-type or counter-society. In the Church there is an ‘ontological priority of peace over conflict’ : there, ‘difference’ is the foundation not for violence but for harmonious peace. Here is one of Milbank’s great difficulties; for the Church as a historical entity has not fulfilled this ‘vision of paradisal[sic] community’. As he rather wistfully admits:
Insofar as the church has failed, and has even become a hellish anti-Church, it has confined Christianity, like everything else, with the cycle of the ceaseless exhaustion and return of violence.
Nevertheless, it is the Christian vision of ontological peace that provides the only alternative to absolute nihilism.
Milbank’s critique of liberalism is dazzling. He is able to show how secular liberalism, like other theories of society, is not secular at all but in fact involves necessarily theological or anti-theological moves. He is able to show how liberal thinking has its own mythos or meta-narrative, despite its pretensions to an abstract universalism; and how it has not finally eluded the gravitational pull of nihilism’s black hole. His introduction of the Christian meta-narrative in response rightly points to the distinctive Christian emphasis on relationality generated by the triune God as an attractive conceptual alternative.
Nevertheless, Milbank’s thesis is problematic for a number of reasons. First, his self-conscious appeal to postmodern thinking enables him to make a devastating critique of secular reason; his own evasion of the critique is less than convincing. He adopts Foucault’s notion of genealogy, by which the power claims implicit in the political discourses he examines are brought to light and exposed as relying on an ‘ontology of violence’. And yet he also claims that his Christian ‘ontology of peace’ escapes this Foucauldian critique. An Icarus flying too near a postmodern sun, he relies on Foucault to prove that Foucault is ultimately wrong.
Secondly, Milbank’s strategy rests on a questionable ecclesiology, which is far too sanguine about the ‘church militant’. His is an over-realised ecclesiology, blurring the traditional distinction between the church visible and the church invisible, focussing on the concrete historical institutions of the universal Church at the expense of its local congregational instances. More recent ‘Radical Orthodox’ writings have tended to make the Eucharist the means by which the ‘ontology of peace’ is realised, following an almost medieval sacramental theology. Christopher J. Insole goes so far as to accuse Milbank of a tendency to theocracy. And yet Milbank seems genuinely baffled by the refusal of the Church to be itself within history. Within the Scriptures themselves, the churches were as much a site of struggle as of peace (the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, to take but one example, or the Corinthian church). Peace with God was declared in the gospel, but by no means automatically or easily realised in ecclesial relationships. God’s once-for-all act of reconciliation on the cross is not continued or repeated in the acts of the church this side of Christ’s return.
Thirdly, it seems pertinent to ask, along with Wannenwetsch, if the only way to defeat the violent ontologies of secular reason is by positing an alternative ontology. Milbank has difficulty, having so successfully deconstructed the ontology of political thought, in convincingly constructing something of the same species. The proclamation of the gospel of peace, which founds the church, is not a counter- ontology, but a promise. Further, the NT describes the cross of Christ as achieving peace through a victory against the powers of sin and evil – depicted in terms of a violent exclusion (see Rev 19-22 for just one example).
This third complaint leads to a fourth, which is that while Milbank offers a virtuoso reading of vast tracts of political philosophy, liberation theology and postmodernism, his method is insufficiently grounded in basic Scriptural exegesis. He offers almost no reflection on Israel’s political life; nor does he offer extensive readings of the relevant NT material – all of which ought to condition his explanation of the Church as alternative polis. Strangely, though he claims to be offering Christianity as an alternative meta-narrative, he nowhere offers his retelling of that story at any depth nor an engagement with the authoritative texts of the tradition he is advocating.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Friday, December 09, 2005
The 39 Articles
We live in an age which doesn’t really like ideology very much. Systems of doctrine and great schemes of knowledge have caused plenty of trouble in our world. Demanding that there is a right way to think seems to be a way to bully others. The great “isms” of the 20th century – Marxism, Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism – left the globe awash in blood; the religions of the world are famed for their links to violent outrages. And for most right-thinking people in the West enough is enough: enough with the doctrines that claim to have an answer for everything, that say they can make a complex world neat and tidy by imposing a grid of ideas and forcing everybody to fit. It was almost ninety years ago that the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are filled with passionate intensity.
His words have a contemporary ring: wouldn’t it be better to “lack all conviction” and just get on with everybody? Hasn’t “passionate intensity” wreaked enough havoc, caused enough megadeath? Aren’t convictions inherently dangerous? Aren’t convictions “prisons”, as Nietzsche thought? (Anti Christ p. 184)
Furthermore, we live in a deeply skeptical age. Many people doubt that anyone can have confidence in things you can’t experience first hand. I was going to say that people doubt things you can’t experience with your senses, but it is true that there is quite a lot of “spirituality” about – that is, it is quite fashionable to speak of yourself as “a spiritual person” who is in some way in contact with the divine or the higher being or something like it. To speak of having personal religious experiences is quite common. I can be sure at least about what I feel. But to speak confidently of things that seem so outside of oneself – to say that the one God is three persons, for example – is surely impossible. To make statements about what you believe seems to be just the wishful thinking of another age.
However, much as we might imagine that it is the path to a safer world, it is impossible to live without convictions. Believing - that some things are true and that some other things are not, and that some things are good and that some other things are less good – is a part of what it is to be human. Even the person who loves peace and whatever it takes to achieve it, so that they can get on with their life as they wish to live it, is saying something about what they believe to be most important, and is staking a commitment to it. Sometimes these beliefs may be carefully worked out and thought through; sometimes they may be merely what everyone else thinks; and sometimes they may be “gut reactions”, things we are aware of the level of our instincts. But these are all at some level “convictions” about how things are and how they ought to be. So, the question is not “do I have convictions” but rather “what am I convicted about”?
Christians are people who have a particular set of convictions. Primarily, they are convicted that in Jesus of Nazareth, a human person like one of us, God the creator took on human flesh, died for sins and rose again; and that today among us we may know him by his Spirit.[1] Now, this isn’t a dry-as-dust set of propositions put to them in some kind of philosophy tutorial: it means for them that they had encountered the very source of life itself in Jesus. It transforms their lives. For the earliest Christians, this explained why they were worshipping this Jesus - a man - as the only true God – something that had been unthinkable before. These “convictions” were not a matter of ticking the box on some survey; they were a life-transforming reality, something that many of them would be happy to die for, as it turned out.
This small group of convictions obviously needs a bit of mulling over, and explaining. And there are any number of questions that you could put to them. And so, since the time of the early churches, Christians have attempted to put some flesh on the bones, so to speak: to clarify and interpret and explain them, to say what they weren’t saying sometimes as much as what they were. And so, they produced at various times great statements of the faith in order to say as clearly as possible, “these are the things which we are convinced are true (and here is what we know isn’t)”. One of these was the great creed known as the Nicene Creed, developed over the course of the 4th century AD. In it, the churches asserted that the Jesus they worshipped was both fully man and fully God.
This is an interaction with another statement of faith: a set of Christian convictions produced by leaders of the Church of England as their statement of belief in the 16th century – The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. The Church of England – known today as the Anglican, or Episcopal Church in many parts of the world – had its beginnings not with high-minded theological convictions but with the needs of international politics. In 1534, Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic church and the authority of the Pope and made himself supreme governor of the Church in England – in the first place because he needed a divorce from his Spanish wife in order to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn.
And yet there were matters of genuine theological conviction in play – it was more than a just a matter of a king’s love life. The movement we know now as the Reformation had begun to sweep Europe in the 1520s under the influence of people such as Martin Luther in Germany and Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland. Its influence had certainly been felt in England: so much so that King Henry had written a piece staunchly defending the Pope’s position against Luther! In brief, the Reformation made a two-pronged attack on the version of Christianity that the Roman Catholic church was at that time presenting.
The first substantial issue was a matter of authority. The champions of the Reformation saw themselves as returning to the Bible as the supreme authority in the Christian faith. Only Scripture was ultimately authoritative: not the Church itself or its Pope or its traditions. These needed to be under the Bible, and shaped by it. And so translating and distributing the Bible was a major task that the Reformers and their supporters undertook at this time.
The second substantial issue was answering the question of how someone might be saved (what theologians call soteriology). All were agreed that the death of Jesus for sin was a necessary component of human salvation – but how did the whole scheme fit together? In the medieval period, various theories had been suggested as to how this came about. How much was human effort, and how much was God’s work? For example, one theory demanded that a person had to do whatever was within them to please God; recognizing this, God would graciously accomplish the rest in Christ. By their intense study of the Bible, the Reformers had discovered that no human effort was required for salvation at all – not the least because no human effort could achieve it. Rather, a person is justified by faith in the work of Christ on the cross only, and not at all by their own efforts to please God.[2] Doing good things was only the outworking of what God had done, not part of the process of being saved in the first place.
These two themes, as we shall see, underlie the attempt to provide a summary of the Christian faith that we find in these articles; for through Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and others Reformation ideas – particularly those of Luther, and later John Calvin - became a feature of the Reformation in England. In many ways the Thirty-Nine articles are a statement of faith for their own time. They reflect the controversies of their day, not ours. For example, there is an extended statement on the Lord’s Supper – which was a real bone of contention between the Reformation and the Roman Catholic church. They are certainly not a perfect list. They seem to leave out what to us may seem like important things – they say hardly anything about the return of Christ, or about the Creation of the world, for example. And they overemphasize perhaps unimportant things – a whole article is given over to Jesus’ descent into hell, and another to the swearing of oaths. At points they reflect the necessary evil of compromise rather than present a single pure vision of what is true. The grubby fingers of the committee process is certainly in evidence.
So: are they worth studying today? Today very different issues confront all Christian believers and Anglicans among them. We ask, what is the right way for Christians to behave sexually? How can we square our faith with the scientific knowledge on which we so depend? What is the best way to order our churches and what should our services look like? How should we relate to the political world in which we live? I would argue that the convictions outlined here are most certainly worth revisiting in our times. These articles are not an embarrassing skeleton in the Anglican closet but rather the result of a careful listening to the Bible and its teaching. They are an attempt to express what God says to his people in the Bible. In them, the Church of England declares itself subject to God’s Word in Scripture, and not free to do anything else but listen to what the Bible says and respond in obedience. Those who framed them were well aware that times would change, and that there would be different customs and cultures in which Christians would have to live out their faith. They themselves had lived through turbulent and difficult times, when beliefs were in a tremendous flux and when there was enormous pressure on individuals to change their beliefs to suit the times.
Our times are no less tricky. The churches that identify with the Anglican tradition are no less in a crisis of self-identity today. People who call themselves “Anglican” seem to spend an enormous amount of energy disputing what that exactly means and over who has the right to call themselves really “Anglican”.[3] The Thirty-Nine Articles - along with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer - are to this day a touchstone for what being an Anglican might be.
But more than this: these articles are reminder that for all Christians convictions do matter. They remind us that even though stating what you believe is not easy, that it is a task incumbent on Christians of every time and place. They are not a dull list of abstract statements, but the implications of thinking through a living faith in Jesus Christ, God’s Son. Agreeing to them is not at all the same as having a saving faith in Christ Jesus; but they help to protect and frame and shape the preaching of that same Jesus Christ by some of those who would follow him.
[1] There are a couple of early summaries of Christian belief in the Bible itself. 1 Cor 15
[2] This is a really brief summary of the Reformation which is one of the most interesting periods of history that anyone can study.
[3] I frequently hear people use the word “Anglican” to mean a more formal style of church service, as in “that church is more Anglican than this (usually more laid-back) one is”.
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are filled with passionate intensity.
His words have a contemporary ring: wouldn’t it be better to “lack all conviction” and just get on with everybody? Hasn’t “passionate intensity” wreaked enough havoc, caused enough megadeath? Aren’t convictions inherently dangerous? Aren’t convictions “prisons”, as Nietzsche thought? (Anti Christ p. 184)
Furthermore, we live in a deeply skeptical age. Many people doubt that anyone can have confidence in things you can’t experience first hand. I was going to say that people doubt things you can’t experience with your senses, but it is true that there is quite a lot of “spirituality” about – that is, it is quite fashionable to speak of yourself as “a spiritual person” who is in some way in contact with the divine or the higher being or something like it. To speak of having personal religious experiences is quite common. I can be sure at least about what I feel. But to speak confidently of things that seem so outside of oneself – to say that the one God is three persons, for example – is surely impossible. To make statements about what you believe seems to be just the wishful thinking of another age.
However, much as we might imagine that it is the path to a safer world, it is impossible to live without convictions. Believing - that some things are true and that some other things are not, and that some things are good and that some other things are less good – is a part of what it is to be human. Even the person who loves peace and whatever it takes to achieve it, so that they can get on with their life as they wish to live it, is saying something about what they believe to be most important, and is staking a commitment to it. Sometimes these beliefs may be carefully worked out and thought through; sometimes they may be merely what everyone else thinks; and sometimes they may be “gut reactions”, things we are aware of the level of our instincts. But these are all at some level “convictions” about how things are and how they ought to be. So, the question is not “do I have convictions” but rather “what am I convicted about”?
Christians are people who have a particular set of convictions. Primarily, they are convicted that in Jesus of Nazareth, a human person like one of us, God the creator took on human flesh, died for sins and rose again; and that today among us we may know him by his Spirit.[1] Now, this isn’t a dry-as-dust set of propositions put to them in some kind of philosophy tutorial: it means for them that they had encountered the very source of life itself in Jesus. It transforms their lives. For the earliest Christians, this explained why they were worshipping this Jesus - a man - as the only true God – something that had been unthinkable before. These “convictions” were not a matter of ticking the box on some survey; they were a life-transforming reality, something that many of them would be happy to die for, as it turned out.
This small group of convictions obviously needs a bit of mulling over, and explaining. And there are any number of questions that you could put to them. And so, since the time of the early churches, Christians have attempted to put some flesh on the bones, so to speak: to clarify and interpret and explain them, to say what they weren’t saying sometimes as much as what they were. And so, they produced at various times great statements of the faith in order to say as clearly as possible, “these are the things which we are convinced are true (and here is what we know isn’t)”. One of these was the great creed known as the Nicene Creed, developed over the course of the 4th century AD. In it, the churches asserted that the Jesus they worshipped was both fully man and fully God.
This is an interaction with another statement of faith: a set of Christian convictions produced by leaders of the Church of England as their statement of belief in the 16th century – The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. The Church of England – known today as the Anglican, or Episcopal Church in many parts of the world – had its beginnings not with high-minded theological convictions but with the needs of international politics. In 1534, Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic church and the authority of the Pope and made himself supreme governor of the Church in England – in the first place because he needed a divorce from his Spanish wife in order to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn.
And yet there were matters of genuine theological conviction in play – it was more than a just a matter of a king’s love life. The movement we know now as the Reformation had begun to sweep Europe in the 1520s under the influence of people such as Martin Luther in Germany and Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland. Its influence had certainly been felt in England: so much so that King Henry had written a piece staunchly defending the Pope’s position against Luther! In brief, the Reformation made a two-pronged attack on the version of Christianity that the Roman Catholic church was at that time presenting.
The first substantial issue was a matter of authority. The champions of the Reformation saw themselves as returning to the Bible as the supreme authority in the Christian faith. Only Scripture was ultimately authoritative: not the Church itself or its Pope or its traditions. These needed to be under the Bible, and shaped by it. And so translating and distributing the Bible was a major task that the Reformers and their supporters undertook at this time.
The second substantial issue was answering the question of how someone might be saved (what theologians call soteriology). All were agreed that the death of Jesus for sin was a necessary component of human salvation – but how did the whole scheme fit together? In the medieval period, various theories had been suggested as to how this came about. How much was human effort, and how much was God’s work? For example, one theory demanded that a person had to do whatever was within them to please God; recognizing this, God would graciously accomplish the rest in Christ. By their intense study of the Bible, the Reformers had discovered that no human effort was required for salvation at all – not the least because no human effort could achieve it. Rather, a person is justified by faith in the work of Christ on the cross only, and not at all by their own efforts to please God.[2] Doing good things was only the outworking of what God had done, not part of the process of being saved in the first place.
These two themes, as we shall see, underlie the attempt to provide a summary of the Christian faith that we find in these articles; for through Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and others Reformation ideas – particularly those of Luther, and later John Calvin - became a feature of the Reformation in England. In many ways the Thirty-Nine articles are a statement of faith for their own time. They reflect the controversies of their day, not ours. For example, there is an extended statement on the Lord’s Supper – which was a real bone of contention between the Reformation and the Roman Catholic church. They are certainly not a perfect list. They seem to leave out what to us may seem like important things – they say hardly anything about the return of Christ, or about the Creation of the world, for example. And they overemphasize perhaps unimportant things – a whole article is given over to Jesus’ descent into hell, and another to the swearing of oaths. At points they reflect the necessary evil of compromise rather than present a single pure vision of what is true. The grubby fingers of the committee process is certainly in evidence.
So: are they worth studying today? Today very different issues confront all Christian believers and Anglicans among them. We ask, what is the right way for Christians to behave sexually? How can we square our faith with the scientific knowledge on which we so depend? What is the best way to order our churches and what should our services look like? How should we relate to the political world in which we live? I would argue that the convictions outlined here are most certainly worth revisiting in our times. These articles are not an embarrassing skeleton in the Anglican closet but rather the result of a careful listening to the Bible and its teaching. They are an attempt to express what God says to his people in the Bible. In them, the Church of England declares itself subject to God’s Word in Scripture, and not free to do anything else but listen to what the Bible says and respond in obedience. Those who framed them were well aware that times would change, and that there would be different customs and cultures in which Christians would have to live out their faith. They themselves had lived through turbulent and difficult times, when beliefs were in a tremendous flux and when there was enormous pressure on individuals to change their beliefs to suit the times.
Our times are no less tricky. The churches that identify with the Anglican tradition are no less in a crisis of self-identity today. People who call themselves “Anglican” seem to spend an enormous amount of energy disputing what that exactly means and over who has the right to call themselves really “Anglican”.[3] The Thirty-Nine Articles - along with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer - are to this day a touchstone for what being an Anglican might be.
But more than this: these articles are reminder that for all Christians convictions do matter. They remind us that even though stating what you believe is not easy, that it is a task incumbent on Christians of every time and place. They are not a dull list of abstract statements, but the implications of thinking through a living faith in Jesus Christ, God’s Son. Agreeing to them is not at all the same as having a saving faith in Christ Jesus; but they help to protect and frame and shape the preaching of that same Jesus Christ by some of those who would follow him.
[1] There are a couple of early summaries of Christian belief in the Bible itself. 1 Cor 15
[2] This is a really brief summary of the Reformation which is one of the most interesting periods of history that anyone can study.
[3] I frequently hear people use the word “Anglican” to mean a more formal style of church service, as in “that church is more Anglican than this (usually more laid-back) one is”.
Monday, December 05, 2005
Martyrdom - something to die for?
The Greek word marturion of course means "witness" or "testimony". Already in the NT we see the possibility of this idea being linked to the shedding of blood - a testimony unto death. Jesus himself of course did exactly this. The gospel accounts - especially John - make much of the sham trial at which Jesus was convicted as a kind of ironic antitype of the real eschatological trial at which he was mightily vindicated. The truth about Jesus' "kingdom of God" and all his teaching about his Father and himself and the state of the world under sin were all revealed by his death and resurrection.
The life of the follower of Jesus is thus always already a life lived in preparation of the possibility of such a trial. The hatred of the world for Jesus is shared by his followers. They already lay down their lives, and take up their crosses and follow him. They die to the world... Baptism is a symbol of this offering of the old self over to death which is what every Christian does as a testimony to the truth of Jesus Christ. Every Christian, we might say, is already a martyr. That there are some who suffer to the point of pain and death is a glorious sign for us of the reality of this.
Martyrdom is a radically unsettling idea for the secular individual. The world characterised by avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure, even in its most honourable forms, has little place for the possibility of martyrdoms. The old rhetoric of martyrdom applied to the war-dead now seems rather hollow given that these lives were given to dubious causes and by questionable means. A life in which the possibility of martyrdom has been accepted is not a life that appears to be lived to its greatest possibility. It is perhaps freely determined, but it is given away too cheaply; it has too little regard for the ties of family and friends; it is too committed to a notion of 'truth' which has fallen into disrepair. It is too unassertive and too tragic. It tries to make meaningful that which we have decided already is meaningless - suffering. The martyr is committed to another way of understanding the world - a "superior realm of signification" (Castelli) - an understanding which is not merely an idea for the martyr, but in the act of offering of the body to its own destruction becomes a material reality. At this moment, the testimony of the martyr to the other-worldly reality intersects with the material world and displaces the complancy of the materialist. It makes the lovers of comfort uncomfortable.
Martyrdom is not a cult of death, for the Christian martyr loves life. The death of the martyr is not a resignation to fate, but truly has a tragic, mournful aspect: for it points to the value of life. You cannot consider laying down one’s life for your friends a sacrifice of any significance if you hold life cheap. Charles Taylor notes that there is a “powerful sense of loss” at the heart of Christian martyrdom, because life is hallowed by it in its fullness. Jesus came to give abundant life (John 10:10), after all – an intensification of life. This is important – the structure of resurrection belief is an affirmation of the goodness of the created order, pointing not its eradication by the coming new order but its transformation. Liberation theologian Boff writes: “The resurrection of the martyr Jesus Christ has, among others, this theological significance: who loses his life in this way receives it in fullness. To the martyr is reserved full participation in the meaning of life, that is, enthronement in its immortal kingdom.”
Martyrdom exposes the death of Adam for the hollow sham that it is. The martyr who dies the death of Christ by faith shows that death has lost its sting. He or she does not embrace oblivion or rush headlong into nothingness; rather, it is an entry into an endless end (Karl Rahner).
The martyr is an imitator of Christ par excellence. The early martyrologies dramatized martyrdoms as repetitions of the passion of Christ.
Of Sanctus, the martyr of Lyons, it is written by Eusebius: ‘And his body was a witness of his sufferings, being one complete wound and bruise, drawn out of shape, and altogether unlike a human form. Christ, suffering in him, manifested his glory, delivering him from his adversary, and making him an example for the others, showing that nothing is fearful where the love of the Father is, and nothing painful where there is the glory of Christ.’
Of Blandina: ‘Blandina was suspended on a stake, and exposed to be devoured by the wild beasts who should attack her. And because she appeared as if hanging on a cross, and because of her earnest prayers, she inspired the combatants with great zeal. For they looked on her in her conflict, and beheld with their outward eyes, in the form of their sister, him who was crucified for them, that he might persuade those who believe on him, that every one who suffers for the glory of Christ has fellowship always with the living God.’
The gesture of the suicide bomber is not at all the same, though an attempt to use the same word is made. The self-destruction of the suicide bomber is a radical denial of the goodness of life. By his or her gesture, he or she says like the martyr “I testify to another reality, superior to this one.” However, this other reality is not of the nature of an affirmation of this one, but its denial. By choosing death, he says to the enemy: “you have made my life not worth living: let me return the favour”. He cannot find any corrupt judicial process, or false testimony, or unjust law to take his life, so he does the job himself. He aims to produce fear; and by and large succeeds, because secularism has no good alternative. His gesture does not call for those outside his tribe to be included in it, but rather points to the ongoing exclusion of most people from it. His death does not expose state-sanctioned violence for what it is; but rather perpetuates it. Where the true martyr may actually absorb spilt blood and by the beauty of his or her gesture reveal to a culture the futility of its persecutions, the suicide bomber only invites a conversation in blood. He proclaims his own victimization and makes a victim of himself at his own hand, which
Martyrdom is a political gesture. It is a witness to citizenship in another kingdom, to service of another Lord. The earliest martyrs instantly recognized – or were forced to recognize – that theirs was a choice between two forms of worship, two forms of citizenship. When the aged Polycarp was commanded to sacrifice to the genius of Caesar and to revile Christ, he replied to his persecutor:
Fourscore and six years have I been His servant, and He hath done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?
For Polycarp there was no choice: the two Kings were rivals. Only one was worthy of his allegiance. Polycarp’s “he hath done me no wrong” seems a little subdued, admittedly. But, has Caesar saved him? His reasoning is the simple logic of the servant.
The early martyr narratives emphasis the possibility of escape for each martyr – just as Jesus was at all times in the gospel narratives shown as going to the cross freely, though he could have escaped. The voluntary act of choosing for martyrdom shows that Caesar’s coercive power has not succeeded. The martyr is a revolutionary in that way, for the political power that would exercise itself through killing the body is shown to be no power at all.
But while martyrdom unsettles the secular self, the rhetoric of martyrdom itself is not unproblematic. The Christian church has made martyrs as well. It is a fact of history that those who have martyred readily make martyrs of others, (apparently) unconscious of how self-defeating it is. The celebration of martyrs can appear to link sacrifice and violence inextricably. The glory of martyrdom requires a culture that punishes heterodoxy violently; and it reflects a culture that makes violent death meaningful.
The martyr is first of all a witness, then a performer of a dramatic action, which is in turn witnessed. It is a witness that compels further witness. It “requires an audience, retelling, interpretation, and world– and meaning-making activity. Suffering violence is in and of itself not enough” (Castelli, p. 33). Interestingly, baptism is a kind of proto-martyrdom, with the act of testimony to Christ and renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil. The plunging into the water symbolises a death and then a rising to new life. In 1 Tim 6:12ff Paul explicitly compares the "good confession" of Jesus under Pilate with the confession of Timothy made at his baptism.
The life of the follower of Jesus is thus always already a life lived in preparation of the possibility of such a trial. The hatred of the world for Jesus is shared by his followers. They already lay down their lives, and take up their crosses and follow him. They die to the world... Baptism is a symbol of this offering of the old self over to death which is what every Christian does as a testimony to the truth of Jesus Christ. Every Christian, we might say, is already a martyr. That there are some who suffer to the point of pain and death is a glorious sign for us of the reality of this.
Martyrdom is a radically unsettling idea for the secular individual. The world characterised by avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure, even in its most honourable forms, has little place for the possibility of martyrdoms. The old rhetoric of martyrdom applied to the war-dead now seems rather hollow given that these lives were given to dubious causes and by questionable means. A life in which the possibility of martyrdom has been accepted is not a life that appears to be lived to its greatest possibility. It is perhaps freely determined, but it is given away too cheaply; it has too little regard for the ties of family and friends; it is too committed to a notion of 'truth' which has fallen into disrepair. It is too unassertive and too tragic. It tries to make meaningful that which we have decided already is meaningless - suffering. The martyr is committed to another way of understanding the world - a "superior realm of signification" (Castelli) - an understanding which is not merely an idea for the martyr, but in the act of offering of the body to its own destruction becomes a material reality. At this moment, the testimony of the martyr to the other-worldly reality intersects with the material world and displaces the complancy of the materialist. It makes the lovers of comfort uncomfortable.
Martyrdom is not a cult of death, for the Christian martyr loves life. The death of the martyr is not a resignation to fate, but truly has a tragic, mournful aspect: for it points to the value of life. You cannot consider laying down one’s life for your friends a sacrifice of any significance if you hold life cheap. Charles Taylor notes that there is a “powerful sense of loss” at the heart of Christian martyrdom, because life is hallowed by it in its fullness. Jesus came to give abundant life (John 10:10), after all – an intensification of life. This is important – the structure of resurrection belief is an affirmation of the goodness of the created order, pointing not its eradication by the coming new order but its transformation. Liberation theologian Boff writes: “The resurrection of the martyr Jesus Christ has, among others, this theological significance: who loses his life in this way receives it in fullness. To the martyr is reserved full participation in the meaning of life, that is, enthronement in its immortal kingdom.”
Martyrdom exposes the death of Adam for the hollow sham that it is. The martyr who dies the death of Christ by faith shows that death has lost its sting. He or she does not embrace oblivion or rush headlong into nothingness; rather, it is an entry into an endless end (Karl Rahner).
The martyr is an imitator of Christ par excellence. The early martyrologies dramatized martyrdoms as repetitions of the passion of Christ.
Of Sanctus, the martyr of Lyons, it is written by Eusebius: ‘And his body was a witness of his sufferings, being one complete wound and bruise, drawn out of shape, and altogether unlike a human form. Christ, suffering in him, manifested his glory, delivering him from his adversary, and making him an example for the others, showing that nothing is fearful where the love of the Father is, and nothing painful where there is the glory of Christ.’
Of Blandina: ‘Blandina was suspended on a stake, and exposed to be devoured by the wild beasts who should attack her. And because she appeared as if hanging on a cross, and because of her earnest prayers, she inspired the combatants with great zeal. For they looked on her in her conflict, and beheld with their outward eyes, in the form of their sister, him who was crucified for them, that he might persuade those who believe on him, that every one who suffers for the glory of Christ has fellowship always with the living God.’
The gesture of the suicide bomber is not at all the same, though an attempt to use the same word is made. The self-destruction of the suicide bomber is a radical denial of the goodness of life. By his or her gesture, he or she says like the martyr “I testify to another reality, superior to this one.” However, this other reality is not of the nature of an affirmation of this one, but its denial. By choosing death, he says to the enemy: “you have made my life not worth living: let me return the favour”. He cannot find any corrupt judicial process, or false testimony, or unjust law to take his life, so he does the job himself. He aims to produce fear; and by and large succeeds, because secularism has no good alternative. His gesture does not call for those outside his tribe to be included in it, but rather points to the ongoing exclusion of most people from it. His death does not expose state-sanctioned violence for what it is; but rather perpetuates it. Where the true martyr may actually absorb spilt blood and by the beauty of his or her gesture reveal to a culture the futility of its persecutions, the suicide bomber only invites a conversation in blood. He proclaims his own victimization and makes a victim of himself at his own hand, which
Martyrdom is a political gesture. It is a witness to citizenship in another kingdom, to service of another Lord. The earliest martyrs instantly recognized – or were forced to recognize – that theirs was a choice between two forms of worship, two forms of citizenship. When the aged Polycarp was commanded to sacrifice to the genius of Caesar and to revile Christ, he replied to his persecutor:
Fourscore and six years have I been His servant, and He hath done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?
For Polycarp there was no choice: the two Kings were rivals. Only one was worthy of his allegiance. Polycarp’s “he hath done me no wrong” seems a little subdued, admittedly. But, has Caesar saved him? His reasoning is the simple logic of the servant.
The early martyr narratives emphasis the possibility of escape for each martyr – just as Jesus was at all times in the gospel narratives shown as going to the cross freely, though he could have escaped. The voluntary act of choosing for martyrdom shows that Caesar’s coercive power has not succeeded. The martyr is a revolutionary in that way, for the political power that would exercise itself through killing the body is shown to be no power at all.
But while martyrdom unsettles the secular self, the rhetoric of martyrdom itself is not unproblematic. The Christian church has made martyrs as well. It is a fact of history that those who have martyred readily make martyrs of others, (apparently) unconscious of how self-defeating it is. The celebration of martyrs can appear to link sacrifice and violence inextricably. The glory of martyrdom requires a culture that punishes heterodoxy violently; and it reflects a culture that makes violent death meaningful.
The martyr is first of all a witness, then a performer of a dramatic action, which is in turn witnessed. It is a witness that compels further witness. It “requires an audience, retelling, interpretation, and world– and meaning-making activity. Suffering violence is in and of itself not enough” (Castelli, p. 33). Interestingly, baptism is a kind of proto-martyrdom, with the act of testimony to Christ and renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil. The plunging into the water symbolises a death and then a rising to new life. In 1 Tim 6:12ff Paul explicitly compares the "good confession" of Jesus under Pilate with the confession of Timothy made at his baptism.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Bonhoeffer and "authentic" humanity
Well it's about time I posted again. Sorry to anyone who has been checking this site to see any updates...
In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer spoke of a “sincerely intended love for humanity that amounts to the same thing as contempt for humanity”.[1] This particular notion is founded on evaluating human beings “according to their dormant values”,[2] aspects not visible on the surface always or even at all, but always felt to be potential somehow. The great problem of this way of thinking is that extraordinary evil can be excused on its account, as it had been of course in Bonhoeffer’s own time. “One loves”, he wrote,
a self-made picture of human beings that has little similarity to reality, and one ends up despising the real human being whom God has love and whose being God has taken on.[3]
In other words, we count the potential human and not the actual one; we may even appease what is monstrous in the actual one because we are imagining the potential one. The problem with an "ethic of authenticity" is that it invites an evaluation of some potential self and not the self as it really is. Bonhoeffer’s reply gives a reason as to why finally the ethics of authenticity is not as companionable to Christian theology as might have first appeared:
Only because God became human is it possible to know and not despise real human beings. Real human beings may live before God, and we may let these real people live beside us and before God without either despising or idolizing them…The reason for God’s love for human beings does not reside in them, but only in God. Our living as real human beings, and loving the real people next to us is, again, grounded only in God’s becoming human, in the unfathomable love of God for us human beings.[4]
[1] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 87
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer spoke of a “sincerely intended love for humanity that amounts to the same thing as contempt for humanity”.[1] This particular notion is founded on evaluating human beings “according to their dormant values”,[2] aspects not visible on the surface always or even at all, but always felt to be potential somehow. The great problem of this way of thinking is that extraordinary evil can be excused on its account, as it had been of course in Bonhoeffer’s own time. “One loves”, he wrote,
a self-made picture of human beings that has little similarity to reality, and one ends up despising the real human being whom God has love and whose being God has taken on.[3]
In other words, we count the potential human and not the actual one; we may even appease what is monstrous in the actual one because we are imagining the potential one. The problem with an "ethic of authenticity" is that it invites an evaluation of some potential self and not the self as it really is. Bonhoeffer’s reply gives a reason as to why finally the ethics of authenticity is not as companionable to Christian theology as might have first appeared:
Only because God became human is it possible to know and not despise real human beings. Real human beings may live before God, and we may let these real people live beside us and before God without either despising or idolizing them…The reason for God’s love for human beings does not reside in them, but only in God. Our living as real human beings, and loving the real people next to us is, again, grounded only in God’s becoming human, in the unfathomable love of God for us human beings.[4]
[1] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 87
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Authenticity
The ideal of authenticity is very strong in western culture. That is to say, people feel they ought to live a life that is authentic to who they really are. They want to live according to the truth of themselves as beings. This longing is partly in response to a sense that cultural conditions - technology, urbanisation, mass immigration - have made discovery of authenticity in life much harder, because our freedom has been so restricted.
It looks pretty selfish, and it has had some nasty outworkings. If you think that the authentic me is only discoverable internally to myself, from some intuitive sense of who I am without the constraints of what others say or the influences of others, then you can see what would result. If the ideal of authenticity is coupled with self-defining freedom, then what we are left with is a mess.
Interestingly, our great heroes are the artists who create (not copy or imitate). Rock musicians, for example, need to write AND perform the songs, because we value originality as a sign of authenticity. These heroes are above the constraints of ordinary relationships and boring morality. They can do what the heck they want - they do it almost on our behalf, because the rest of us can't.
But is the ideal of authenticity itself the problem? Charles Taylor (a Canadian philosopher) thinks most definitely not. Seeking to fulfil ones sense of self is surely one of the most basic drives of any human being. However, if the MEANS to fulfil myself is cut off from factors that are external to me - friends, family, morality, even God - then authenticity lapses into incoherence as a human ideal.
But authenticity isn't necessarily defeated by this. Authenticity as an ideal to strive for at least acknowledges that we human beings at least begin as strangers to ourselves. We do not start as people at one with who we are and what we are here to do, but rather feel we need to seek it. We are 'fallen', 'in the dark'.
For me, the question is: can this discussion of authenticity as an ideal be appropriated for theological discussion of what human selves are about?
I think that we should not be surprised to discover human beings longing to discover who they really are: one of the effects of the fall has been to hide even our true selves from view, to obscure us from ourselves. What do I mean? We seem to be at odds with those things that are essential to our identity formation: God, friends, family, others, world. We also aware of our own possibilty, and our own falling short of that self we imagine ourselves to be.
That the answer to the quest for the self is not found within the self is no surprise either for a theological world-view. The self is never posited as an enclosed independent system in a world-view that begins with a creator.
But is following another, namely Jesus Christ, in tune with this ideal of self-discovery? Can we say that becoming a follower of Jesus is finding your true self?
It looks pretty selfish, and it has had some nasty outworkings. If you think that the authentic me is only discoverable internally to myself, from some intuitive sense of who I am without the constraints of what others say or the influences of others, then you can see what would result. If the ideal of authenticity is coupled with self-defining freedom, then what we are left with is a mess.
Interestingly, our great heroes are the artists who create (not copy or imitate). Rock musicians, for example, need to write AND perform the songs, because we value originality as a sign of authenticity. These heroes are above the constraints of ordinary relationships and boring morality. They can do what the heck they want - they do it almost on our behalf, because the rest of us can't.
But is the ideal of authenticity itself the problem? Charles Taylor (a Canadian philosopher) thinks most definitely not. Seeking to fulfil ones sense of self is surely one of the most basic drives of any human being. However, if the MEANS to fulfil myself is cut off from factors that are external to me - friends, family, morality, even God - then authenticity lapses into incoherence as a human ideal.
But authenticity isn't necessarily defeated by this. Authenticity as an ideal to strive for at least acknowledges that we human beings at least begin as strangers to ourselves. We do not start as people at one with who we are and what we are here to do, but rather feel we need to seek it. We are 'fallen', 'in the dark'.
For me, the question is: can this discussion of authenticity as an ideal be appropriated for theological discussion of what human selves are about?
I think that we should not be surprised to discover human beings longing to discover who they really are: one of the effects of the fall has been to hide even our true selves from view, to obscure us from ourselves. What do I mean? We seem to be at odds with those things that are essential to our identity formation: God, friends, family, others, world. We also aware of our own possibilty, and our own falling short of that self we imagine ourselves to be.
That the answer to the quest for the self is not found within the self is no surprise either for a theological world-view. The self is never posited as an enclosed independent system in a world-view that begins with a creator.
But is following another, namely Jesus Christ, in tune with this ideal of self-discovery? Can we say that becoming a follower of Jesus is finding your true self?
Monday, October 31, 2005
Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas is a fascinating thinker who reckons that narrative and character are the keys to moral thinking in the Christian life. He writes this:
"We do not become free by conforming our actions to the categorical imperative but by being accepts as disciples and thus learning to imitate a master. Such discipleship can only appear heteronomous from the moral point of view, since the paradigm cannot be related to, or determined by, principles known prior to imitation. For the Christian, morality is not chosen and then confirmed by the example of others; instead, we learn what the moral life entails by imitating another.”
What he empahises is that Christian moral teaching is not something "out there", abstracted from the people who live such teaching out in their daily lives.
He thinks too, that Protestant doctrines of justification haven't helped us to live out our discipleship in the world actually:
“The Protestant condemnation of moral theology did not help, as Protestants did little more than assert that good works “flow” from faith. Concern for moral development from the Protestant perspective was thus seen as a form of works righteousness”.
The result he says is that Protestant morality has just been an adaptation of local moral values and ends up being just "decency".
I think he has a point: when i hear people explain what it is to be Christian in practice sometimes it just sounds like they are just talking about middle-class moral decency and not the kind of costly discipleship that Jesus seems to advocating.
He also says:
“What is crucial is not that Christians know the truth, but that they be the truth”.
Which brings me to a further issue: what is the role of suffering for the Christian? Can middle-class white educated Christians (like me) with every privilege going really speak of themselves as taking up their crosses and following Jesus in any convincing way?
"We do not become free by conforming our actions to the categorical imperative but by being accepts as disciples and thus learning to imitate a master. Such discipleship can only appear heteronomous from the moral point of view, since the paradigm cannot be related to, or determined by, principles known prior to imitation. For the Christian, morality is not chosen and then confirmed by the example of others; instead, we learn what the moral life entails by imitating another.”
What he empahises is that Christian moral teaching is not something "out there", abstracted from the people who live such teaching out in their daily lives.
He thinks too, that Protestant doctrines of justification haven't helped us to live out our discipleship in the world actually:
“The Protestant condemnation of moral theology did not help, as Protestants did little more than assert that good works “flow” from faith. Concern for moral development from the Protestant perspective was thus seen as a form of works righteousness”.
The result he says is that Protestant morality has just been an adaptation of local moral values and ends up being just "decency".
I think he has a point: when i hear people explain what it is to be Christian in practice sometimes it just sounds like they are just talking about middle-class moral decency and not the kind of costly discipleship that Jesus seems to advocating.
He also says:
“What is crucial is not that Christians know the truth, but that they be the truth”.
Which brings me to a further issue: what is the role of suffering for the Christian? Can middle-class white educated Christians (like me) with every privilege going really speak of themselves as taking up their crosses and following Jesus in any convincing way?
Monday, October 24, 2005
An introductory paragraph
“Yes: we are all individuals.” (The Life of Brian)
Imitation of others is not merely a matter of choosing some deeds over others but is basic to the formation of the self. Though the idea that our identities are a composite of those we know is not one that contemporary culture enjoys, it is really not a matter of choosing whether we will imitate someone, but who it is we will imitate. Sociologist George Herbert Mead wrote “the individual develops a self by first becoming an object to himself and he does this by adopting the ‘attitudes’ of the individual members of the group to which he belongs”.The moral self is constructed from the impress of other selves: usually consisting of a conglomeration of parental and societal influences. In the contemporary world of course celebrity and fame have assumed an exalted position in imitation: the exalted figures are, ironically, paradigms of individual freedom and hedonistic excess.
Imitation of others is not merely a matter of choosing some deeds over others but is basic to the formation of the self. Though the idea that our identities are a composite of those we know is not one that contemporary culture enjoys, it is really not a matter of choosing whether we will imitate someone, but who it is we will imitate. Sociologist George Herbert Mead wrote “the individual develops a self by first becoming an object to himself and he does this by adopting the ‘attitudes’ of the individual members of the group to which he belongs”.The moral self is constructed from the impress of other selves: usually consisting of a conglomeration of parental and societal influences. In the contemporary world of course celebrity and fame have assumed an exalted position in imitation: the exalted figures are, ironically, paradigms of individual freedom and hedonistic excess.
Friday, October 21, 2005
"Jesus the exemplar": what could that mean?
[This may be long and rambling but I would appreciate your comments: one of my supervisors has asked me to "open myself to the kiss of imagination"(!) and write something "wild" in order to hone in on my thesis topic.]
Well, then, what role has/does/should Jesus of Nazareth in moral theology?
"Jesus plays a normative role in Christians’ moral reflection."
"Jesus lived a particular life that has universal meaning; the analogical imagination recognizes how to be faithful to Jesus in ever new situations."
William C. Spohn Jesus and Ethics p.2; p. 186
It is scarcely disputable that Jesus plays “a normative role” in the moral reflection of Christians.
What is in dispute is what that normativity consists of. I like Sphon's observation, that Jesus lived a particular human life - located in space and time quite precisely, and not repeatable, unique in many ways, but that it has a "universal meaning". Jesus' human particularity must be upheld: he is not the instance of a type, or the first of many Christs. You cannot paint an African Christ, or a female Christ, or a Western, blond Christ (more to the point) without doing real violence to true meaning of Christ. He was "like us in every way", but precisely in being himself: he couldn't have been just any of us for exactly that reason.
This means that Jesus' life is made available to us as a pattern of life but only in a way that is conditioned by this particularity and uniqueness. However, I would want to strength the "analogical imagination" idea and say that Jesus is still present, but in a way universally present. He has overcome that particularity by being pneumatologically present in the members of the body and by incorporating them into himself, so that they are at home with him, his brothers and sisters under the Fatherhood of the Father.
Karl Rahner writes:
The imitation of Christ does not consist in the observance of certain moral maxims which may be perfectly exemplified in Jesus, but which have an intrinsic value in themselves independently of him…[but] in a true entering into his life and in him entering into the inner life of the God that has been given to us.
The great Roman Catholic theologian gets it right here: following in the way of Jesus Christ is not a matter of pursuing the values that Jesus represented or embodied, though it is often presented as such. Discipleship of Christ is not merely a matter of resembling him in actions but of "participation" in his life: living with him. "Entering into his life", as Rahner puts it.
The resurrection is a key here because an exemplar can be dead, a mere memory we invoke. But Christ - according to the fundamental Christian testimony - is not dead: he is risen. The resurrection explodes the regular use of Christ as a pattern, because in seeing him resurrected by his Father in the Spirit we know that we can never without external aid follow him in this. We could conceivably even suffer a more a tragic death than Christ's, on behalf of others even: but the resurrection is his and his only to share with us by faith.
Interestingly, the New Testament has a role for a mediated pattern of the way of Christ, in that the apostles and saints were to be afterChrists - I think this Stanley Hauerwas' term.
Well, then, what role has/does/should Jesus of Nazareth in moral theology?
"Jesus plays a normative role in Christians’ moral reflection."
"Jesus lived a particular life that has universal meaning; the analogical imagination recognizes how to be faithful to Jesus in ever new situations."
William C. Spohn Jesus and Ethics p.2; p. 186
It is scarcely disputable that Jesus plays “a normative role” in the moral reflection of Christians.
What is in dispute is what that normativity consists of. I like Sphon's observation, that Jesus lived a particular human life - located in space and time quite precisely, and not repeatable, unique in many ways, but that it has a "universal meaning". Jesus' human particularity must be upheld: he is not the instance of a type, or the first of many Christs. You cannot paint an African Christ, or a female Christ, or a Western, blond Christ (more to the point) without doing real violence to true meaning of Christ. He was "like us in every way", but precisely in being himself: he couldn't have been just any of us for exactly that reason.
This means that Jesus' life is made available to us as a pattern of life but only in a way that is conditioned by this particularity and uniqueness. However, I would want to strength the "analogical imagination" idea and say that Jesus is still present, but in a way universally present. He has overcome that particularity by being pneumatologically present in the members of the body and by incorporating them into himself, so that they are at home with him, his brothers and sisters under the Fatherhood of the Father.
Karl Rahner writes:
The imitation of Christ does not consist in the observance of certain moral maxims which may be perfectly exemplified in Jesus, but which have an intrinsic value in themselves independently of him…[but] in a true entering into his life and in him entering into the inner life of the God that has been given to us.
The great Roman Catholic theologian gets it right here: following in the way of Jesus Christ is not a matter of pursuing the values that Jesus represented or embodied, though it is often presented as such. Discipleship of Christ is not merely a matter of resembling him in actions but of "participation" in his life: living with him. "Entering into his life", as Rahner puts it.
The resurrection is a key here because an exemplar can be dead, a mere memory we invoke. But Christ - according to the fundamental Christian testimony - is not dead: he is risen. The resurrection explodes the regular use of Christ as a pattern, because in seeing him resurrected by his Father in the Spirit we know that we can never without external aid follow him in this. We could conceivably even suffer a more a tragic death than Christ's, on behalf of others even: but the resurrection is his and his only to share with us by faith.
Interestingly, the New Testament has a role for a mediated pattern of the way of Christ, in that the apostles and saints were to be afterChrists - I think this Stanley Hauerwas' term.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Bernd Wannenwetsch on sex and the Trinity
Bernd Wannenwetsch replies to an advocate of Christian homosexual marriage, raising some interesting issues for applying the Trinity to our social relationships:
"This necessary move to the doctrine of creation within the doctrine of the Trinity makes a crucial difference to Rogers’ (pro-homosexual marriage) argument, which brings the Trinity into immediate relation with marriage. The Trinity may be the “paradigm or perfect case of otherness as an exchange of gift and gratitude”, as Rogers says. But it cannot as such render the proper model for sexual unions exactly because the Trinity is not a bodily union…
Now it is easy to see why this non-bodily “perfection” of communion may provide a model perfectly suited for Rogers’ claim, which feeds on the marginalization of the meaning of bodily differences. But invoking the Trinity to suggest a “richer” and theologically fuller account of marriage should not make us overlook the bare fact that nowhere in the Scriptures are human sexual unions intended to mirror the Trinity (or at least the union of the Father and Son). Rather, they are specifically assigned to mirror the union of Christ and the church which is a “material”, sensual, in fact a bodily relationship.
That these bodily differences characterize our creaturely existence, means that we should mirror God’s will for human beings to the extent that it can be known from (the witness of) God’s deeds in creation, salvation and perfection. Therefore, when Rogers claims “marriage can represent the Trinity in space and time” he claims at the same time too much and too little. Seeking the sort of perfect community in mirroring God’s Trinitarian life seems to be, at best, a triumphalist anticipation of the eschaton, and, at worst, a denial of our creaturely finitude. "
anyone?
"This necessary move to the doctrine of creation within the doctrine of the Trinity makes a crucial difference to Rogers’ (pro-homosexual marriage) argument, which brings the Trinity into immediate relation with marriage. The Trinity may be the “paradigm or perfect case of otherness as an exchange of gift and gratitude”, as Rogers says. But it cannot as such render the proper model for sexual unions exactly because the Trinity is not a bodily union…
Now it is easy to see why this non-bodily “perfection” of communion may provide a model perfectly suited for Rogers’ claim, which feeds on the marginalization of the meaning of bodily differences. But invoking the Trinity to suggest a “richer” and theologically fuller account of marriage should not make us overlook the bare fact that nowhere in the Scriptures are human sexual unions intended to mirror the Trinity (or at least the union of the Father and Son). Rather, they are specifically assigned to mirror the union of Christ and the church which is a “material”, sensual, in fact a bodily relationship.
That these bodily differences characterize our creaturely existence, means that we should mirror God’s will for human beings to the extent that it can be known from (the witness of) God’s deeds in creation, salvation and perfection. Therefore, when Rogers claims “marriage can represent the Trinity in space and time” he claims at the same time too much and too little. Seeking the sort of perfect community in mirroring God’s Trinitarian life seems to be, at best, a triumphalist anticipation of the eschaton, and, at worst, a denial of our creaturely finitude. "
anyone?
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
use of Greco-Roman background
How ought knowledge of the historical and cultural context be applied to Paul’s thought, especially as exemplified in 1 Corinthians? Since H.-D. Betz's 1979 commentary on Galatians, Paul’s epistles have been read in the light of the alleged influence of the various streams of First Century Greco-Roman culture. The tendency is to read for (and emphasize) similarity with the background and not to notice difference. It is frequently assumed that Paul is a creature of his times, incapable of challenging the mores and fashions of his day; or, perhaps, of producing from a synthesis of various strands of thought something novel. So it is suggested that Paul uses conventional Greco-Roman rhetoric (so Betz); or apes Platonic thinking about hierarchies (so Castelli); or imports a particular local ideology of the body (so Martin). While in general, the investigation of the conditions for the production of any text is to be applauded, this strategy risks becoming blind to the originality of Paul and the uniqueness of his message; and of a perhaps arbitrary selectivity over which elements of Greco-Roman culture are to be applied in each case.
So, the question is: (humanly speaking) is Paul a genius who come up with something new, or merely a product of his times? To what degree ought we to see his thought as ground-breaking?
So, the question is: (humanly speaking) is Paul a genius who come up with something new, or merely a product of his times? To what degree ought we to see his thought as ground-breaking?
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Dining with Terrorists anyone?
My review of "Dining with Terrorists" is online here:
http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/culture/reading/dining_with_terrorists/
Love to hear your thoughts. I wrote it along time before the recent spate of "terrorist" attacks...
http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/culture/reading/dining_with_terrorists/
Love to hear your thoughts. I wrote it along time before the recent spate of "terrorist" attacks...
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Imitation as an ethic for today? Some po-mo babble
The value of imitation as an ethic has its detractors. Is the imitation of an example a feasible approach to ethical thinking today? Gender theorist Judith Butler, in an essay entitled “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, argues in the context of sexual – and particularly homosexual – self-identification that the rhetoric of imitation is dependent on an ordering of the inferior and derivative copy to the superior and authentic original:
[R]econsider then the homophobic charge that queens and butches and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real. Here “imitation” carries the meaning of “derivative” or “secondary”, a copy of an origin which is itself the ground of all copies, but which is itself a copy of nothing.
For Butler, however, imitation is dubious because the so-called imitated is dependent on the imitator for its status as the original:
Logically, this notion of an “origin” is suspect, for how can something operate as an origin if there are no secondary consequences which retrospectively conform the originality of that origin? The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives…the entire framework of copy and origin proves radically unstable as each position inverts into the other and confounds the possibility of any stable way to locate the temporal or logical priority of either term.
Butler seeks thereby to subvert the entire logic of imitation by undoing the precedence of the original. She cites in particular Jacques Derrida’s riff on Mallarme’s “Mimique”, his “The Double Session”. Derrida’s strategy is to show that an imitator, such as a mime artist, does not in fact imitate some prior thing, but instead actually constitutes the spectre of the original in and through the mime:
[H]e represents nothing, imitates nothing, does not have to conform to any prior referent with the aim of achieving adequation or verisimilitude. One can here foresee an objection: since the mime imitates nothing, reproduces nothing, opens up in its origin the very thing he is tracing out, presenting or producing, he must be the very movement of truth. Not, of course, truth in the form of adequation between the representation and the present of the thing itself, or between imitator and imitated, but truth as the present unveiling of the present... but this is not the case.... We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing: faced, so to speak, with the double that couples no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least, that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference... this speculum reflects no reality: it produces mere "reality-effects"... in this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh...
Further, the structure of imitation, for Derrida, is radically compromised because the imitation can only exist insofar as it is not a perfect imitation. If imitation succeeds too well, then it dissolves itself:
For imitation affirms and sharpens its essence in effacing itself. Its essence is its non-essence…A perfect imitation is no longer an imitation…Imitation does not correspond to its essence, is not what it is – imitation – unless it is in some way at fault or, rather, in default. It is bad by nature. It is only good insofar as it is bad.
Imitation undoes itself. Derrida is mainly concerned with mimhsij in the aesthetic sphere, as in Plato and Aristotle; Butler, by casting human identity as performative, appropriates Derrida’s deconstruction of mimetic ideas for what is essentially an ethical discussion.
[R]econsider then the homophobic charge that queens and butches and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real. Here “imitation” carries the meaning of “derivative” or “secondary”, a copy of an origin which is itself the ground of all copies, but which is itself a copy of nothing.
For Butler, however, imitation is dubious because the so-called imitated is dependent on the imitator for its status as the original:
Logically, this notion of an “origin” is suspect, for how can something operate as an origin if there are no secondary consequences which retrospectively conform the originality of that origin? The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives…the entire framework of copy and origin proves radically unstable as each position inverts into the other and confounds the possibility of any stable way to locate the temporal or logical priority of either term.
Butler seeks thereby to subvert the entire logic of imitation by undoing the precedence of the original. She cites in particular Jacques Derrida’s riff on Mallarme’s “Mimique”, his “The Double Session”. Derrida’s strategy is to show that an imitator, such as a mime artist, does not in fact imitate some prior thing, but instead actually constitutes the spectre of the original in and through the mime:
[H]e represents nothing, imitates nothing, does not have to conform to any prior referent with the aim of achieving adequation or verisimilitude. One can here foresee an objection: since the mime imitates nothing, reproduces nothing, opens up in its origin the very thing he is tracing out, presenting or producing, he must be the very movement of truth. Not, of course, truth in the form of adequation between the representation and the present of the thing itself, or between imitator and imitated, but truth as the present unveiling of the present... but this is not the case.... We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing: faced, so to speak, with the double that couples no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least, that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference... this speculum reflects no reality: it produces mere "reality-effects"... in this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh...
Further, the structure of imitation, for Derrida, is radically compromised because the imitation can only exist insofar as it is not a perfect imitation. If imitation succeeds too well, then it dissolves itself:
For imitation affirms and sharpens its essence in effacing itself. Its essence is its non-essence…A perfect imitation is no longer an imitation…Imitation does not correspond to its essence, is not what it is – imitation – unless it is in some way at fault or, rather, in default. It is bad by nature. It is only good insofar as it is bad.
Imitation undoes itself. Derrida is mainly concerned with mimhsij in the aesthetic sphere, as in Plato and Aristotle; Butler, by casting human identity as performative, appropriates Derrida’s deconstruction of mimetic ideas for what is essentially an ethical discussion.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Juengel
Eberhard Juengel:
"The truly human person is the person who is definitively recognized by God, and in that way one who cannot be discredited by anything or anyone, not even by him- or herself; a person who is, however, liberated by just this irrevocable recognition for ever more human activity...The most human kind of conduct is probably still that which is truly natural or self-evident, or which at least ought to be self-evident, however inconspicuous it may be."
He is inspired in this by Martin Luther, who saw the truly human person as the righteous person - in our case therefore the justified person.
Thoughts anyone?
"The truly human person is the person who is definitively recognized by God, and in that way one who cannot be discredited by anything or anyone, not even by him- or herself; a person who is, however, liberated by just this irrevocable recognition for ever more human activity...The most human kind of conduct is probably still that which is truly natural or self-evident, or which at least ought to be self-evident, however inconspicuous it may be."
He is inspired in this by Martin Luther, who saw the truly human person as the righteous person - in our case therefore the justified person.
Thoughts anyone?
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Imitating Christ
Interesting stuff by Hans Conzelmann in his 1 Corinthians commentary (p.179-80):
"His (Paul's) exemplariness consists in the fact that - in himself, objectively, on the basis of his calling - he is nothing. In all the passages on the imitatio Pauli the paradox of this exemplariness appears... The imitation of Christ takes its bearings not on the person of the historical Jesus, not on his way of life, but - in the sense of Philippians 2:6ff - on his saving work."
Paul never knew the earthly Jesus, as far as we know: at least, not as a disciple. While he quotes teachings of the Lord not found in the Gospels, what drives his sense of his own calling and his instructions to his followers is rooted in Paul's gospel - the gospel of the crucified and risen Messiah. His "principal norm" is the gospel itself, and for Paul this means that the self-sacrifice and suffering of the cross and the exaltation (by the Spirit) of the resurrection. It also means the binding of the Corinthians into a new set of relationships, with God and with each other.
So: the imitation of Christ in 1 Corinthians takes place in not only in echo of his sacrificial and suffering work on the cross but also proleptically, in advance of his return, in terms of his resurrected, "second Adam" identity.
In 1 Corinthians both flanges of the gospel are prominent in response to "ethical" or sociological issues. Their imitation of Paul and Jesus takes place in the context of their new identity as Jesus body/the temple of the Holy Spirit...
Oh, and it involves their bodies...
"His (Paul's) exemplariness consists in the fact that - in himself, objectively, on the basis of his calling - he is nothing. In all the passages on the imitatio Pauli the paradox of this exemplariness appears... The imitation of Christ takes its bearings not on the person of the historical Jesus, not on his way of life, but - in the sense of Philippians 2:6ff - on his saving work."
Paul never knew the earthly Jesus, as far as we know: at least, not as a disciple. While he quotes teachings of the Lord not found in the Gospels, what drives his sense of his own calling and his instructions to his followers is rooted in Paul's gospel - the gospel of the crucified and risen Messiah. His "principal norm" is the gospel itself, and for Paul this means that the self-sacrifice and suffering of the cross and the exaltation (by the Spirit) of the resurrection. It also means the binding of the Corinthians into a new set of relationships, with God and with each other.
So: the imitation of Christ in 1 Corinthians takes place in not only in echo of his sacrificial and suffering work on the cross but also proleptically, in advance of his return, in terms of his resurrected, "second Adam" identity.
In 1 Corinthians both flanges of the gospel are prominent in response to "ethical" or sociological issues. Their imitation of Paul and Jesus takes place in the context of their new identity as Jesus body/the temple of the Holy Spirit...
Oh, and it involves their bodies...
Thursday, September 22, 2005
The question of the day is:
What does Paul mean when he invites the Corinthians to imitate Christ in 1 Corinthians (4:16-17 and 11:1)?
What specifically is he enjoing the Corinthians to do or be in this imitation?
Some (Michaelis) have said that "imitation" here actually means "obey" not "mimic". "The call for an imitatio Christi finds no support in the statements of Paul".
However, I think you can make a good case here that Paul actually points to Christ's example of suffering self-sacrifice, of laying down of rights. That is what is going on in 1 Cor 8-11:1, where Paul is urging the Corinthians NOT to insist on their rights but to conisder the rights of others a priority. This theme is what you see in Phil 2 and Eph 5: an imitation especially rooted in the incarnation and cross...
This discussion is relevant because it bears on the shape of the fulfilled or truly human life modelled for us by Christ... so what is it particularly about that life that we ought to resemble?
What does Paul mean when he invites the Corinthians to imitate Christ in 1 Corinthians (4:16-17 and 11:1)?
What specifically is he enjoing the Corinthians to do or be in this imitation?
Some (Michaelis) have said that "imitation" here actually means "obey" not "mimic". "The call for an imitatio Christi finds no support in the statements of Paul".
However, I think you can make a good case here that Paul actually points to Christ's example of suffering self-sacrifice, of laying down of rights. That is what is going on in 1 Cor 8-11:1, where Paul is urging the Corinthians NOT to insist on their rights but to conisder the rights of others a priority. This theme is what you see in Phil 2 and Eph 5: an imitation especially rooted in the incarnation and cross...
This discussion is relevant because it bears on the shape of the fulfilled or truly human life modelled for us by Christ... so what is it particularly about that life that we ought to resemble?
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Well I hope the formatting is more readable!
Pannenberg goes on to argue that in each of these we need to inquire as to the relationship of the conceptions of man’s essence to the historical figure of Jesus himself. So, for example, Paul’s use of the Adam typology in 1 Cor 15 and Romans 5. What happened to Jesus - the resurrection - happened with the horizon of universal human hope found in apocalyptic literature (though P says "the experience of Jesus as risen occurred within the horizon of universal human hope", carefully hedging his historical bets). In Paul there was a shift of course: he took the pattern of true humanity found originally in the distant past and threw it into the eschatological future, picking up what had already been hinted at in Daniel 7 and so on. Jesus is the “last Adam” – in other words, the “last-first”… a future-type, not a prototype...
The NT certainly picks up traditional (not necessarily OT) anthropologically related themes/titles and relates them to Jesus – especially the idea of the image of God. P. thinks also the Johannine logos idea is true here, though what OT provenance this has he doesn’t mention.
WP positively evaluates Luther’s “Jesus as prototype of justifying faith” model, by claiming that it best reflects the reality of Jesus “perceived behind the Synoptic tradition.” That word "behind" is revealing...
Intriguingly he also points out: “Our understanding of man today is deeply stamped by the centuries-long influence of Biblical thought, and especially of the figure and message of Jesus…the correspondence of anthropology and Christology has been operative in the whole history of ideas in Europe since the rise of Christendom” p.203
This would be an interesting thesis to develop: that is can the correspondence of anthropology and Christology be demonstrated from an analysis of secular anthropologies? Where would one go to find out? The classical humanist tradition? The Enlightenment? What would be the most interesting period to isolate, or who would be the most interesting figure to study in this regard?
Monday, September 19, 2005
How is Jesus exemplary human?
Just to follow on from Byron's mention of Karl Rahner in an earlier discussion, an interesting quote from him:
Rahner: “Christology is the beginning and the end of anthropology, and this anthropology in its most radical realization, namely Christology, is in all eternity theology”. Schriften zur Theologie (1960), Vol IV, p.151
Wolfhart Pannenberg (in Jesus- God and Man) lists these ways in which Jesus’ humanity has been held to be of exemplary significance for humanity in general:
a. the incarnation of the Logos consummates the nature of man as living being having the Logos. Only through the incarnation of the Logos does the true man come into existence. (Irenaeus, Athanasius)
b. Jesus is the man who brings the universal striving towards an imitation of God – ethical perfection – to its goal. Ethical perfection, in other words. (Paul of Samosata and the Antiochenes)
c. Jesus fulfills the duty of obedience incumbent on all human beings and the duty of satisfaction through his death. (Anselm and the medieval church)
d. Jesus is the prototype of God’s dealings with humanity and thus of justification by faith. On the cross he upholds the right of God who judges and yet remains righteous before God. (early Luther)
e. Jesus realizes true humanity in that in him the consciousness of god that establishes the unity of human existence is dominant. (Schleiermacher)
f. Jesus is the prototypal man who as the one completely obedient to God was completely dedicated to his fellow man. (Barth)
g. As the Son, Jesus is in a prototypal way what all people ought to be: the reality of sonship that it intended for all in trusting obedience to the Father and in free responsibility for the inheritance of the creation entrusted to him. (Gogarten)
h. Jesus is eminently the believer who exposes himself directly to God’s future. Jesus is the essence of faith and faith is the essence of what he did. (Ebeling)
i. Jesus is the highest perfection of the human: he is the fulfillment of that unlimited openness which is constitutive for being human and whose truth is openness for God. (Welte, Rahner)
An intriguing list, with several of the items overlapping somewhat...
Pannenberg asks: in all these “is the change of Christological conceptions perhaps explained as a change in the image of man?” Haven’t the universal ideal images of man hidden the uniqueness of Christ? At
MJ says: yes, isn’t the trouble here that we begin with some idea of what human aspiration and destiny and meaning is and then determine how Jesus fulfils that? Is this valid? Does the Bible do this? Shouldn’t we rather decide what Jesus is and so see what humanity ought to be from there?
Rahner: “Christology is the beginning and the end of anthropology, and this anthropology in its most radical realization, namely Christology, is in all eternity theology”. Schriften zur Theologie (1960), Vol IV, p.151
Wolfhart Pannenberg (in Jesus- God and Man) lists these ways in which Jesus’ humanity has been held to be of exemplary significance for humanity in general:
a. the incarnation of the Logos consummates the nature of man as living being having the Logos. Only through the incarnation of the Logos does the true man come into existence. (Irenaeus, Athanasius)
b. Jesus is the man who brings the universal striving towards an imitation of God – ethical perfection – to its goal. Ethical perfection, in other words. (Paul of Samosata and the Antiochenes)
c. Jesus fulfills the duty of obedience incumbent on all human beings and the duty of satisfaction through his death. (Anselm and the medieval church)
d. Jesus is the prototype of God’s dealings with humanity and thus of justification by faith. On the cross he upholds the right of God who judges and yet remains righteous before God. (early Luther)
e. Jesus realizes true humanity in that in him the consciousness of god that establishes the unity of human existence is dominant. (Schleiermacher)
f. Jesus is the prototypal man who as the one completely obedient to God was completely dedicated to his fellow man. (Barth)
g. As the Son, Jesus is in a prototypal way what all people ought to be: the reality of sonship that it intended for all in trusting obedience to the Father and in free responsibility for the inheritance of the creation entrusted to him. (Gogarten)
h. Jesus is eminently the believer who exposes himself directly to God’s future. Jesus is the essence of faith and faith is the essence of what he did. (Ebeling)
i. Jesus is the highest perfection of the human: he is the fulfillment of that unlimited openness which is constitutive for being human and whose truth is openness for God. (Welte, Rahner)
An intriguing list, with several of the items overlapping somewhat...
Pannenberg asks: in all these “is the change of Christological conceptions perhaps explained as a change in the image of man?” Haven’t the universal ideal images of man hidden the uniqueness of Christ? At
MJ says: yes, isn’t the trouble here that we begin with some idea of what human aspiration and destiny and meaning is and then determine how Jesus fulfils that? Is this valid? Does the Bible do this? Shouldn’t we rather decide what Jesus is and so see what humanity ought to be from there?
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Enhypostasis/Anhypostasis
Classical Christology has described the relationship of the two natures of Christ by using the rather arcane-sounding terms anhypostasis and enhypostasis. What does this mean? Well, firstly, the human nature of Jesus has no hypostasis, or “person”, of its own, but subsists only as the human nature of the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. His human nature is anhypostatic in that it has no personhood, or independent reality of its own (the word ‘subsists’ is used rather than ‘exists’ to indicate this dependence): rather it is hypostatized in union with, in (so, enhypostasis), the person of the Logos. This is how Chalcedon is explained: we have in Jesus one person in two natures. The subject of this human nature is divine.
Now, all of this seems impossibly abstract. Also, how can it be possible to have a true human nature that is not personal, or whose person is not human? Is the human nature of Jesus then merely an outer shell, or a disguise perhaps? These are good questions to which I do not have an immediate answer. But in fact something rather important is being said here: that Jesus is not a man who merely fulfilled the potential of human beings better than others have done; he is real man only as the Son of God (so Ivor Davidson). Barth says: “God and Man are so related in Jesus Christ that He exists in Man so far and only so far as He exists as God, i.e., in the mode of existence of the eternal Word of God.” (CD I.2.163) In other words, Jesus’ humanity is the humanity of God.
Why does this matter? I want to inquire as to how Jesus’ humanity relates to, and so identifies or prescribes, the humanity of the rest of us. This description of J’s human nature may actually compromise this as a possibility, because it sounds like his humanity is only the generalized humanity of the human species and not that of an individual: in which case is it real humanity? Real humanity is only ever instanced as individual. In addition, it sounds like this formulation makes J’s human flesh only a passive recipient or instrument of divine power. Perhaps we need to think of it the other way round… Any suggestions?
Now, all of this seems impossibly abstract. Also, how can it be possible to have a true human nature that is not personal, or whose person is not human? Is the human nature of Jesus then merely an outer shell, or a disguise perhaps? These are good questions to which I do not have an immediate answer. But in fact something rather important is being said here: that Jesus is not a man who merely fulfilled the potential of human beings better than others have done; he is real man only as the Son of God (so Ivor Davidson). Barth says: “God and Man are so related in Jesus Christ that He exists in Man so far and only so far as He exists as God, i.e., in the mode of existence of the eternal Word of God.” (CD I.2.163) In other words, Jesus’ humanity is the humanity of God.
Why does this matter? I want to inquire as to how Jesus’ humanity relates to, and so identifies or prescribes, the humanity of the rest of us. This description of J’s human nature may actually compromise this as a possibility, because it sounds like his humanity is only the generalized humanity of the human species and not that of an individual: in which case is it real humanity? Real humanity is only ever instanced as individual. In addition, it sounds like this formulation makes J’s human flesh only a passive recipient or instrument of divine power. Perhaps we need to think of it the other way round… Any suggestions?
Monday, September 12, 2005
Sunday, September 11, 2005
The Bible and Theology...
In one of the discussions Craig S asked about a comment I made about the reluctance to use the Bible in modern academic theology.
I guess I mean that in general in the academic practice of theology the Biblical scholars have tried to do their work with as little reference to systematic theology as possible AND vice versa. IN short, it's a turf war. The NT and OT guys and girls say to the theologians "you can't do that - that's our job" when the theologians start to do some exegesis of the text! Even quite conservative Biblical scholars seem reluctant to allow a place for a theological use of the Bible.
From the other side, the Bible is just not regularly seen as the authoritative source of the knowledge of God by academic theologians: partly I think because they fear that their use of their Bible is trespassing on another's field of expertise, as I said...Theology is held to more akin to philosophy and distant from the historical nitty-gritty of Biblical studies. And perhaps this is reflected in the differance between continental, rationalist thinkers and Anglo-Saxon empirical scholars. (It's a bit like Sydney and Melbourne...cultural differences do shape us more than we think!)
Writers like Francis Watson (NT scholar) and John Webster in Aberdeen as well as NT Wright and OO'D have reacted strongly to this in the contemporary British scene. They think this seperation of the departments of theological knowledge is disastrous. I agree! But of course, this begs the question of how the Bible ought to be related to theology...
What do people reckon?
I guess I mean that in general in the academic practice of theology the Biblical scholars have tried to do their work with as little reference to systematic theology as possible AND vice versa. IN short, it's a turf war. The NT and OT guys and girls say to the theologians "you can't do that - that's our job" when the theologians start to do some exegesis of the text! Even quite conservative Biblical scholars seem reluctant to allow a place for a theological use of the Bible.
From the other side, the Bible is just not regularly seen as the authoritative source of the knowledge of God by academic theologians: partly I think because they fear that their use of their Bible is trespassing on another's field of expertise, as I said...Theology is held to more akin to philosophy and distant from the historical nitty-gritty of Biblical studies. And perhaps this is reflected in the differance between continental, rationalist thinkers and Anglo-Saxon empirical scholars. (It's a bit like Sydney and Melbourne...cultural differences do shape us more than we think!)
Writers like Francis Watson (NT scholar) and John Webster in Aberdeen as well as NT Wright and OO'D have reacted strongly to this in the contemporary British scene. They think this seperation of the departments of theological knowledge is disastrous. I agree! But of course, this begs the question of how the Bible ought to be related to theology...
What do people reckon?
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
A sermon preached in Moore College Chapel, Tues 6th Sept 2005
Judge not
Do not Judge, that you may not be judged!
We cannot not judge.
Judging is a human necessity; and when we’re told we must not judge we risk losing something irreplaceable. You cannot have justice without judgment; we must not imagine that by, refraining from acts of judgment, justice will be delivered and good order upheld. That simply is not possible.
And to have judgment, you must have a judge, or judges: judgment, which is necessary for justice, depends on the activity of judging: naming things as they truly are, discriminating between right and wrong, rewarding, and punishing. There needs to be a business of judging done by people who judge – whether it be officials appointed to the task of administering the court system or the primary teacher awarding grades to her students.
And yet, right now, where we live, judging smells very badly.To judge is understood in the vernacular as to condemn: and as such, it is the activity of bigots and hypocrites. It carries the flavor of a generation now thankfully sitting out their days in nursing homes with blankets over the knees. It is the opposite of “open-mindedness”, that great contemporary absolute. “A mind is like a parachute”, as the bumper-sticker says: “it works better when it’s open”.
People fail to distinguish between judgment and prejudice, in other words. Judging – as it is currently misunderstood - puts the judge in a position of superiority and places the judged under them; and feeds all our worst fears of power and abuse. Judging applies the private preferences and choices of one individual to another, and so threatens to compromise the individual’s sacred right to judge for him- or herself.
And perhaps worst of all: judging breeds hypocrisy, the great sin of politicians and churchmen alike. Isn’t the person who readily judges, we suspect, ignoring or, more than likely, covering for some deficiency in their own character?
The Jerry Springer Show is a fine example of this bizarre desire to show reserve in judgment at all times. He parades before his audience the most ugly and contorted freaks he can find and has them unravel their twisted lives toe-to-toe with each on stage. And then he delivers a little homily at the end, having remained impassive throughout; and his little homilies say nothing other than “emotions do run high when love is concerned, don’t they?” He would never say “infidelity is wrong and these people are messing up their lives and the lives of those around them”: it wouldn’t cross his mind to be so, well, judgmental.
We might expect more help from Jesus. But he says: “do not judge, so that you will not be judged”. No teaching of Jesus has been more often turned on his disciples by those outside the church. This verse has been graffitied on Moore College’s walls. People who were not Christian feel that here they have a good case against those that are in accusing them of not following the teachings of their Lord; for Christians have been very good at judging. By asserting that there are objective, even God-given, moral standards of human behaviour Christians are implying that those who do not share those standards are to be judged. Instead, in this teaching, direct from the Sermon on the Mount, we have a Jesus who appears tolerant and accepting. We judge: he says do not judge.
But what is Jesus actually saying? Is he really warning against any human decision that might privilege one way of looking at the world over another, or one way of behaving over another? Is he really advocating indiscriminate acceptance?
Certainly, the people of Israel had been given authority to judge civil disputes and an office of judge to enact judgment (Lev 19:15; Deut 17). And it was lack of judging that was held against Israel in the prophets – Jeremiah 5 provides one example of many. It was neglect of the function of justice in their community that was so culpable: the distorting of justice lead to the distorting of the community of God’s people – the neglect of orphans and widows for example.
And Paul adds his voice to the call for God’s people to judge, and judge soundly. In 1 Corinthians 5 and 6, he says that Christians ought to judge one another as those who will one day judge the world. Sound judgment is needed to maintain the purity of the people of God, lest they be corrupted by the appalling behaviour of the man who was living with his father’s wife - on whom Paul himself pronounces judgment.
But Jesus says, do not judge. Can he really mean this? I am well aware of the tendency of Christian interpreters to take shortcuts with Jesus’ radical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount – like the preacher I once heard who said “this is the standard we can’t keep; just as well justification by faith comes in and makes up the difference”; or the school of commentary which seems to be designed to show how Jesus is not saying really what he is saying actually. It will not do to let us off the hook so easily.
But we ought to remember what target Jesus has in his sights here. He takes aim at the kind of stony-hearted legalism that admits of no give or take, the judging that is self-righteously punitive and applies standards to others that are different to the standards applied to the self. This is the kind of judging that results in the bizarrely comical picture of the person with the log in his eye pointing out the speck in the eye of his neighbour. It is judging in its condemnatory aspect that it is on view here: the kind of judging that writes the other person off on the slightest pretext without subjecting itself to the same scrutiny. It is the attitude of the Pharisee who sees the wretched Tax Collector at the temple and says “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
Funnily enough, despite all the fear of judging in our culture, we actually delight in this sort of judging. On Saturday I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is a remarkable movie of a terrific book. Enjoyable as the story was, it was an old-fashioned morality tale, where we are free to enjoy the horrible fates meted out to horrible kids such as Augustus Gloop, the great big greedy nincompoop, who was sucked up into a pipe while drinking from a river of chocolate – as well he might be. It makes us feel so good to know there is someone morally inferior to us because they are fat. The pleasure of the story is the self-righteous pleasure of siding with the innocent Charlie in condemning all those awful children who get their just deserts.
The Mobile Phone has become the instrument of judgment as we given the chance by reality TV to judge the moral behaviour of contestants and have them ritually humiliated and removed from our screens. The crowing of the media vultures over the carcass of politician John Brogden was another example. Who among us is not guilty of making a tasteless remark? Clearly the Telegraph would have sold a lot of papers if they had followed through on the story by publishing yet more rumours after his resignation; clearly readers take great pleasure in the moral collapse of a person. Brogden’s suicide attempt brought an end to that caper. But the disturbing reality is that the media’s actions were a reflection of the readiness to judge without mercy that lurks within the soul of this community. We love to judge; but we are without a public mercy.
And yet the eschatological consequence of this type of judging is perfectly clear: do not judge, so that you may not be judged. Your condemnation of others is ultimately the reason for your own condemnation. It is this sort of judging that brings down the judgment of God, for it usurps the judgment that belongs to God. As Jesus goes on:
For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
The promise of the measure is that, by judging, you are building your own gallows. There is an ultimate judgment and this is performed by the ultimate judge. And if you think to treat others severely and without remorse, then so shall it be for you too. If you are unable to forgive another, then don’t think that forgiveness will be accorded to you. If you are unable to exercise grace in your judging, then don’t imagine that grace will be shown you. It’s the lesson of the ungrateful servant of Matthew 18 who is forgiven a small fortune, yet presses the debt of one who owes him a tiny amount.
The other side of the coin is given to us in the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” A sign of receiving the gospel is the preparedness not to judge, but to forgive. Of course, forgiveness involves a kind of judging itself; it discriminates between right and wrong and good and evil. As ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain writes: “ ‘Judge not’ is…not an injunction to spineless acceptance but a caution against peremptory legalisms that leave no space for acts of compassion and witness.” Jesus’ command transcends the false dichotomy that our culture has of judging and tolerance, and exposes its hypocrisy.
Which is the point: judging begins with God and is delegated temporarily to us. We do it imperfectly, but necessarily. All human judging takes place in anticipation of God’s final judgment and recognizes that human judges are to answer for their judging. And so Jesus’s warning is well given: before you pass judgment, hesitate. Pause and consider that you will face the divine judge who judges perfectly – the judge who has no favourites. Human judging ought to begin with a judging of the self: attending to the speck - all is it a log – in my own eye.
We cannot not judge. It is our calling as human beings to judge in the sense of “properly discriminate”. In fact, life is filled with thousands of daily discriminations. Judging preserves and builds individuals and communities. But human judgment takes place as a delegated task and recognizes its own provisional nature ahead of the final judgment.
As pastors who hold out the hope of the gospel we ought to model this judgment with mercy. There are many people in our community who would not dare darken a church building because they are divorced, or living in a de facto relationship, or homosexual, or smokers, or whatever, and they reckon they would feel judged by the people in church. Can we wield the word of God in such a way as we show that we too are subject to it and that discriminating between right and wrong does not mean condemning someone like a disused building? The messages we church people send to our community is that we are in the business, not of pursuing good, but of reveling in our condemnation of other people. What are we doing to counter this impression?
We would do well also to listen to James, who writes:
11 Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12 There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbour?
How quick we are to condemn one another. How soon we forget that ultimate judgment is not our domain. How long we hold grudges. How soon we declare, even just to ourselves, that someone is beyond the pale. I say this of course looking at you through several logs in my own eye. Jesus’ warning is for us to heed: though we cannot not judge, and must judge, we must do so as those who will be judged and whose only hope is the perfect mercy shown us by the Judge himself. How could we who have been shown grace not show that grace to others?
notes: I got some stuff from an article by Jean Bethke Elshtain. in First Things.
Judge not
Do not Judge, that you may not be judged!
We cannot not judge.
Judging is a human necessity; and when we’re told we must not judge we risk losing something irreplaceable. You cannot have justice without judgment; we must not imagine that by, refraining from acts of judgment, justice will be delivered and good order upheld. That simply is not possible.
And to have judgment, you must have a judge, or judges: judgment, which is necessary for justice, depends on the activity of judging: naming things as they truly are, discriminating between right and wrong, rewarding, and punishing. There needs to be a business of judging done by people who judge – whether it be officials appointed to the task of administering the court system or the primary teacher awarding grades to her students.
And yet, right now, where we live, judging smells very badly.To judge is understood in the vernacular as to condemn: and as such, it is the activity of bigots and hypocrites. It carries the flavor of a generation now thankfully sitting out their days in nursing homes with blankets over the knees. It is the opposite of “open-mindedness”, that great contemporary absolute. “A mind is like a parachute”, as the bumper-sticker says: “it works better when it’s open”.
People fail to distinguish between judgment and prejudice, in other words. Judging – as it is currently misunderstood - puts the judge in a position of superiority and places the judged under them; and feeds all our worst fears of power and abuse. Judging applies the private preferences and choices of one individual to another, and so threatens to compromise the individual’s sacred right to judge for him- or herself.
And perhaps worst of all: judging breeds hypocrisy, the great sin of politicians and churchmen alike. Isn’t the person who readily judges, we suspect, ignoring or, more than likely, covering for some deficiency in their own character?
The Jerry Springer Show is a fine example of this bizarre desire to show reserve in judgment at all times. He parades before his audience the most ugly and contorted freaks he can find and has them unravel their twisted lives toe-to-toe with each on stage. And then he delivers a little homily at the end, having remained impassive throughout; and his little homilies say nothing other than “emotions do run high when love is concerned, don’t they?” He would never say “infidelity is wrong and these people are messing up their lives and the lives of those around them”: it wouldn’t cross his mind to be so, well, judgmental.
We might expect more help from Jesus. But he says: “do not judge, so that you will not be judged”. No teaching of Jesus has been more often turned on his disciples by those outside the church. This verse has been graffitied on Moore College’s walls. People who were not Christian feel that here they have a good case against those that are in accusing them of not following the teachings of their Lord; for Christians have been very good at judging. By asserting that there are objective, even God-given, moral standards of human behaviour Christians are implying that those who do not share those standards are to be judged. Instead, in this teaching, direct from the Sermon on the Mount, we have a Jesus who appears tolerant and accepting. We judge: he says do not judge.
But what is Jesus actually saying? Is he really warning against any human decision that might privilege one way of looking at the world over another, or one way of behaving over another? Is he really advocating indiscriminate acceptance?
Certainly, the people of Israel had been given authority to judge civil disputes and an office of judge to enact judgment (Lev 19:15; Deut 17). And it was lack of judging that was held against Israel in the prophets – Jeremiah 5 provides one example of many. It was neglect of the function of justice in their community that was so culpable: the distorting of justice lead to the distorting of the community of God’s people – the neglect of orphans and widows for example.
And Paul adds his voice to the call for God’s people to judge, and judge soundly. In 1 Corinthians 5 and 6, he says that Christians ought to judge one another as those who will one day judge the world. Sound judgment is needed to maintain the purity of the people of God, lest they be corrupted by the appalling behaviour of the man who was living with his father’s wife - on whom Paul himself pronounces judgment.
But Jesus says, do not judge. Can he really mean this? I am well aware of the tendency of Christian interpreters to take shortcuts with Jesus’ radical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount – like the preacher I once heard who said “this is the standard we can’t keep; just as well justification by faith comes in and makes up the difference”; or the school of commentary which seems to be designed to show how Jesus is not saying really what he is saying actually. It will not do to let us off the hook so easily.
But we ought to remember what target Jesus has in his sights here. He takes aim at the kind of stony-hearted legalism that admits of no give or take, the judging that is self-righteously punitive and applies standards to others that are different to the standards applied to the self. This is the kind of judging that results in the bizarrely comical picture of the person with the log in his eye pointing out the speck in the eye of his neighbour. It is judging in its condemnatory aspect that it is on view here: the kind of judging that writes the other person off on the slightest pretext without subjecting itself to the same scrutiny. It is the attitude of the Pharisee who sees the wretched Tax Collector at the temple and says “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
Funnily enough, despite all the fear of judging in our culture, we actually delight in this sort of judging. On Saturday I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is a remarkable movie of a terrific book. Enjoyable as the story was, it was an old-fashioned morality tale, where we are free to enjoy the horrible fates meted out to horrible kids such as Augustus Gloop, the great big greedy nincompoop, who was sucked up into a pipe while drinking from a river of chocolate – as well he might be. It makes us feel so good to know there is someone morally inferior to us because they are fat. The pleasure of the story is the self-righteous pleasure of siding with the innocent Charlie in condemning all those awful children who get their just deserts.
The Mobile Phone has become the instrument of judgment as we given the chance by reality TV to judge the moral behaviour of contestants and have them ritually humiliated and removed from our screens. The crowing of the media vultures over the carcass of politician John Brogden was another example. Who among us is not guilty of making a tasteless remark? Clearly the Telegraph would have sold a lot of papers if they had followed through on the story by publishing yet more rumours after his resignation; clearly readers take great pleasure in the moral collapse of a person. Brogden’s suicide attempt brought an end to that caper. But the disturbing reality is that the media’s actions were a reflection of the readiness to judge without mercy that lurks within the soul of this community. We love to judge; but we are without a public mercy.
And yet the eschatological consequence of this type of judging is perfectly clear: do not judge, so that you may not be judged. Your condemnation of others is ultimately the reason for your own condemnation. It is this sort of judging that brings down the judgment of God, for it usurps the judgment that belongs to God. As Jesus goes on:
For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
The promise of the measure is that, by judging, you are building your own gallows. There is an ultimate judgment and this is performed by the ultimate judge. And if you think to treat others severely and without remorse, then so shall it be for you too. If you are unable to forgive another, then don’t think that forgiveness will be accorded to you. If you are unable to exercise grace in your judging, then don’t imagine that grace will be shown you. It’s the lesson of the ungrateful servant of Matthew 18 who is forgiven a small fortune, yet presses the debt of one who owes him a tiny amount.
The other side of the coin is given to us in the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” A sign of receiving the gospel is the preparedness not to judge, but to forgive. Of course, forgiveness involves a kind of judging itself; it discriminates between right and wrong and good and evil. As ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain writes: “ ‘Judge not’ is…not an injunction to spineless acceptance but a caution against peremptory legalisms that leave no space for acts of compassion and witness.” Jesus’ command transcends the false dichotomy that our culture has of judging and tolerance, and exposes its hypocrisy.
Which is the point: judging begins with God and is delegated temporarily to us. We do it imperfectly, but necessarily. All human judging takes place in anticipation of God’s final judgment and recognizes that human judges are to answer for their judging. And so Jesus’s warning is well given: before you pass judgment, hesitate. Pause and consider that you will face the divine judge who judges perfectly – the judge who has no favourites. Human judging ought to begin with a judging of the self: attending to the speck - all is it a log – in my own eye.
We cannot not judge. It is our calling as human beings to judge in the sense of “properly discriminate”. In fact, life is filled with thousands of daily discriminations. Judging preserves and builds individuals and communities. But human judgment takes place as a delegated task and recognizes its own provisional nature ahead of the final judgment.
As pastors who hold out the hope of the gospel we ought to model this judgment with mercy. There are many people in our community who would not dare darken a church building because they are divorced, or living in a de facto relationship, or homosexual, or smokers, or whatever, and they reckon they would feel judged by the people in church. Can we wield the word of God in such a way as we show that we too are subject to it and that discriminating between right and wrong does not mean condemning someone like a disused building? The messages we church people send to our community is that we are in the business, not of pursuing good, but of reveling in our condemnation of other people. What are we doing to counter this impression?
We would do well also to listen to James, who writes:
11 Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12 There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbour?
How quick we are to condemn one another. How soon we forget that ultimate judgment is not our domain. How long we hold grudges. How soon we declare, even just to ourselves, that someone is beyond the pale. I say this of course looking at you through several logs in my own eye. Jesus’ warning is for us to heed: though we cannot not judge, and must judge, we must do so as those who will be judged and whose only hope is the perfect mercy shown us by the Judge himself. How could we who have been shown grace not show that grace to others?
notes: I got some stuff from an article by Jean Bethke Elshtain. in First Things.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Ashes to ashes...
Well, we face the unhappy prospect of arriving in the UK the day after Australia loses the Ashes for the first time in 17 years... or to face the massive disappointment of the Poms if they don't win... oh well.
I am reading: NT Wright's book on Scripture. It is very good indeed: because he recognises that theology and biblical studies need to be friends. So little theology is done with any bible in view at all. That's one of the reasons I am going to work with Oliver O'Donovan, because he conspicuously DOES use the Scriptures in doing theology. I guess the trouble is, that using the bible in theology involves being a non-specialist somewhere. I'll admit it, my Hebrew ain't great... Collaboration is perhaps the answer.
I am reading: NT Wright's book on Scripture. It is very good indeed: because he recognises that theology and biblical studies need to be friends. So little theology is done with any bible in view at all. That's one of the reasons I am going to work with Oliver O'Donovan, because he conspicuously DOES use the Scriptures in doing theology. I guess the trouble is, that using the bible in theology involves being a non-specialist somewhere. I'll admit it, my Hebrew ain't great... Collaboration is perhaps the answer.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
A paper for the NSW Ecumenical Council Theological Reflection Panel:
PROCLAMATION: An Anglican View
by Rev M.P. Jensen
One of the greatest of Anglican preachers, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral John Donne, once wrote:
“if there be discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ”.
Would it be fair to say that across the churches there is just such a “discounting or slackening”? Certainly, within the Anglican Communion there is a trend against the proclamatory aspect of the Christian gathering. The sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few minutes and has become instead of a proclamation of the word of God a mere moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper column.
Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks of Peter Cook’s famous lampoon or Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no longer, or very rarely, are the best sermons printed and read. (I was however intrigued to see that the new IPOD technology is being used by church members to listen to recordings of weekly messages downloaded from the church’s website.)
I suspect there are several reasons for the general decline. Certainly, one of them is that there has been an awful lot of boring, overlong, self-indulgent and incompetent preaching! Another is that the evident humanity of most preachers leads us to suspect whether their words could possibly be “God’s words”: they are someone whose frailties we know too well, whose lack of skill with oratory we suffer and who is as susceptible to tears and tiredness as we are. In the midst of a beautiful liturgy filled with sonorous ancient words and majestic music in a glorious building, the utterance from the pulpit feels like a prosaic interruption. With Eliza Doolittle we say “words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”
But if the humanity of the preacher is not enough to make us doubt the value of proclamation, the contemporary suspicion of words themselves increases the threat to the sermon. This of course resonates with apophatic tradition, and it is no accident that Derrida, Foucault and others were attracted to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus and others. Words are too susceptible to become the instruments of power or spin; words are too slippery, too inexact, too imperfect an instrument; words are too limited to contain the transcendent Almighty. As Gregory of Nazianzen once prayed:
you remain beyond the reach of speech.
All that is thought stems from you,
But you are beyond the power of thought.
Archbishop Peter Carnley, former Anglican Primate of Australia, pointed out in his recent book Reflections in the Glass that the theology must start from a core Anglican – indeed Christian - belief in the unknowability and sheer transcendence of God. Yet Christian belief must not overbalance in this direction such that God’s revelation of himself in the gospel of Jesus Christ is lost. My observation of Anglican discussions is that there has been a growing embarrassment at speaking about God directly as if he could be known – as if to talk of knowing him implies mastering him in some way.
However: Christian worship is never of a God unknown, but of a God who speaks about himself to us. Have we, or have we not, a gospel: a message that originates from the divine? The contrast between the paganism of the Athenians and Paul’s message in Acts 17:23 is apposite:
23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim (katagge,llw) to you.
These are presumptuous words indeed, if human words cannot meaningful speak about the divine. And yet Paul is not presenting his message as yet another attempt fitfully to describe God from the human side, but as a decisive intervention from God in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.
The sending of the Logos into the realm of women and men - the incarnation, in other words - is often described as the central theological theme of Anglicanism. The incarnation of Son in the likeness of sinful flesh means that that enormous gulf between God and humanity has been overcome. It means that human flesh is an entirely possible dwelling place for divinity. It also means that human words are entirely possible as vehicles for divine self-communication. Gnosticism – which decried the flesh and emphasized the concealment of a mystery rather than its revelation – has been rejected consistently by Christians since the time of Irenaeus as anti-human. Body is not to be played off against the soul; neither is the intelligible to played off against that which is beyond reason. Paul’s preference for intelligible words over ecstatic tongues in the Christian meeting in 1 Corinthians 14 is instructive.
In the gospel of Jesus Christ men and women are addressed by the God who creates with a word. This mustn’t be understood reductionistically, of course, as if God could be contained or captured by human words. The prologue of John’s gospel sums this up well:
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. (John 1:18)
God is beyond us and our words. But we are not beyond him and we are not beyond the sound of his voice. Nor is it beyond the people of God to pass on what we have heard God say. As the apostle Peter writes:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim (evxaggei,lhte) the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).
Those who have heard the call of God are commissioned to proclaim his works to the nations as a priestly duty. Just as Jesus himself came to proclaim a message of good news about himself – “the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18-19) - so his apostles were commissioned to rehearse the life, death, resurrection and glorious return of their Lord in the hearing of the nations. And it is this repetition of the mighty deeds of God in Christ that forms the basis of the act of proclamation that features so strongly in Anglican worship in its Reformed Evangelical expression.
The Anglican tradition, especially in its Evangelical form, has always, therefore, had a very high view of Scripture as the authoritative, God-breathed (qeo,pneustoj 2 Tim 3:16), witness to Christ. This is not the place to present a full-blown description of that theological step; however, this helps us understand John Donne’s comment. Proclaiming the word of scripture is the way for the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). In his framing of the Anglican liturgy, Thomas Cranmer put a priority on the reading of the whole Bible in the vernacular language once a year; so that
the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of the Holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion. (The Book of Homilies)
At the ordination of every Anglican minister, the Bible is given as a symbol of their authority and task: to minister in word and sacrament. The Bible, not the cup, is the symbol of the ordained ministry for Anglicans.
The ministry of proclamation, therefore, is not merely the giving of opinions or perspectives. It is a recital of God’s word to human beings, and in this derivative sense may properly be called “the word of God”. It therefore requires an attitude of fear and trembling from the one who would so preach. It asks for an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion and for the forming in the proclaimer an attitude of receptive and humble listening. The pulpit in the Anglican church is not merely the preserve of the priest or even of Anglicans: it may be perfectly appropriate for a layperson or even a non-Anglican to speak, as in fact happens frequently. But the pulpit ought to be guarded with some jealousy as the place from which the word of God is proclaimed and taught to the people of God. The Lord our God uses the proclamation of his Word to remind us that his word is
living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)
PROCLAMATION: An Anglican View
by Rev M.P. Jensen
One of the greatest of Anglican preachers, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral John Donne, once wrote:
“if there be discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ”.
Would it be fair to say that across the churches there is just such a “discounting or slackening”? Certainly, within the Anglican Communion there is a trend against the proclamatory aspect of the Christian gathering. The sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few minutes and has become instead of a proclamation of the word of God a mere moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper column.
Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks of Peter Cook’s famous lampoon or Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no longer, or very rarely, are the best sermons printed and read. (I was however intrigued to see that the new IPOD technology is being used by church members to listen to recordings of weekly messages downloaded from the church’s website.)
I suspect there are several reasons for the general decline. Certainly, one of them is that there has been an awful lot of boring, overlong, self-indulgent and incompetent preaching! Another is that the evident humanity of most preachers leads us to suspect whether their words could possibly be “God’s words”: they are someone whose frailties we know too well, whose lack of skill with oratory we suffer and who is as susceptible to tears and tiredness as we are. In the midst of a beautiful liturgy filled with sonorous ancient words and majestic music in a glorious building, the utterance from the pulpit feels like a prosaic interruption. With Eliza Doolittle we say “words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”
But if the humanity of the preacher is not enough to make us doubt the value of proclamation, the contemporary suspicion of words themselves increases the threat to the sermon. This of course resonates with apophatic tradition, and it is no accident that Derrida, Foucault and others were attracted to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus and others. Words are too susceptible to become the instruments of power or spin; words are too slippery, too inexact, too imperfect an instrument; words are too limited to contain the transcendent Almighty. As Gregory of Nazianzen once prayed:
you remain beyond the reach of speech.
All that is thought stems from you,
But you are beyond the power of thought.
Archbishop Peter Carnley, former Anglican Primate of Australia, pointed out in his recent book Reflections in the Glass that the theology must start from a core Anglican – indeed Christian - belief in the unknowability and sheer transcendence of God. Yet Christian belief must not overbalance in this direction such that God’s revelation of himself in the gospel of Jesus Christ is lost. My observation of Anglican discussions is that there has been a growing embarrassment at speaking about God directly as if he could be known – as if to talk of knowing him implies mastering him in some way.
However: Christian worship is never of a God unknown, but of a God who speaks about himself to us. Have we, or have we not, a gospel: a message that originates from the divine? The contrast between the paganism of the Athenians and Paul’s message in Acts 17:23 is apposite:
23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim (katagge,llw) to you.
These are presumptuous words indeed, if human words cannot meaningful speak about the divine. And yet Paul is not presenting his message as yet another attempt fitfully to describe God from the human side, but as a decisive intervention from God in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.
The sending of the Logos into the realm of women and men - the incarnation, in other words - is often described as the central theological theme of Anglicanism. The incarnation of Son in the likeness of sinful flesh means that that enormous gulf between God and humanity has been overcome. It means that human flesh is an entirely possible dwelling place for divinity. It also means that human words are entirely possible as vehicles for divine self-communication. Gnosticism – which decried the flesh and emphasized the concealment of a mystery rather than its revelation – has been rejected consistently by Christians since the time of Irenaeus as anti-human. Body is not to be played off against the soul; neither is the intelligible to played off against that which is beyond reason. Paul’s preference for intelligible words over ecstatic tongues in the Christian meeting in 1 Corinthians 14 is instructive.
In the gospel of Jesus Christ men and women are addressed by the God who creates with a word. This mustn’t be understood reductionistically, of course, as if God could be contained or captured by human words. The prologue of John’s gospel sums this up well:
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. (John 1:18)
God is beyond us and our words. But we are not beyond him and we are not beyond the sound of his voice. Nor is it beyond the people of God to pass on what we have heard God say. As the apostle Peter writes:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim (evxaggei,lhte) the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).
Those who have heard the call of God are commissioned to proclaim his works to the nations as a priestly duty. Just as Jesus himself came to proclaim a message of good news about himself – “the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18-19) - so his apostles were commissioned to rehearse the life, death, resurrection and glorious return of their Lord in the hearing of the nations. And it is this repetition of the mighty deeds of God in Christ that forms the basis of the act of proclamation that features so strongly in Anglican worship in its Reformed Evangelical expression.
The Anglican tradition, especially in its Evangelical form, has always, therefore, had a very high view of Scripture as the authoritative, God-breathed (qeo,pneustoj 2 Tim 3:16), witness to Christ. This is not the place to present a full-blown description of that theological step; however, this helps us understand John Donne’s comment. Proclaiming the word of scripture is the way for the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). In his framing of the Anglican liturgy, Thomas Cranmer put a priority on the reading of the whole Bible in the vernacular language once a year; so that
the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of the Holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion. (The Book of Homilies)
At the ordination of every Anglican minister, the Bible is given as a symbol of their authority and task: to minister in word and sacrament. The Bible, not the cup, is the symbol of the ordained ministry for Anglicans.
The ministry of proclamation, therefore, is not merely the giving of opinions or perspectives. It is a recital of God’s word to human beings, and in this derivative sense may properly be called “the word of God”. It therefore requires an attitude of fear and trembling from the one who would so preach. It asks for an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion and for the forming in the proclaimer an attitude of receptive and humble listening. The pulpit in the Anglican church is not merely the preserve of the priest or even of Anglicans: it may be perfectly appropriate for a layperson or even a non-Anglican to speak, as in fact happens frequently. But the pulpit ought to be guarded with some jealousy as the place from which the word of God is proclaimed and taught to the people of God. The Lord our God uses the proclamation of his Word to remind us that his word is
living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)
Monday, August 08, 2005
HR McIntosh again:
“The manhood of Jesus, then, is a manhood essentially one with ours.” p. 400.
"Everywhere the integrity of Jesus’ life as man is clear. His body was flesh and blood like ours. It capacity of pain, of privation, of fatigue; its tears and agony and cries; its shrinking from the hour of death; its sensitiveness to the contact of other men; its susceptibility to the influence of nature, felt the thrill of gladness begotten by the sunlight and the flowers, - all this is authentically human."
“The manhood of Jesus, then, is a manhood essentially one with ours.” p. 400.
"Everywhere the integrity of Jesus’ life as man is clear. His body was flesh and blood like ours. It capacity of pain, of privation, of fatigue; its tears and agony and cries; its shrinking from the hour of death; its sensitiveness to the contact of other men; its susceptibility to the influence of nature, felt the thrill of gladness begotten by the sunlight and the flowers, - all this is authentically human."
Thursday, August 04, 2005
I am caught right now in that spider's web of contemporary life, the on-hold telephone enquiry... I look at my bank account and see that three companies are helping themselves to our funds because we have never closed this or that or because they can't get it in their heads that we don't want their life insurance anyway!!! ARGGHHH!! Vodaphone, Optus, St George Bank... curse you! (actually spoke to a very nice man called Tristan at St George) I wonder what it must be like to work on the other end of the phone, given that NO-ONE is happy with these institutions...
Monday, August 01, 2005
Oh boy do we need somewhere to store our stuff!!!
In any case:
just sent off a paper for publication in which I argue that God's mode of speaking in scripture is characterised by gentleness... I fear it has truck-sized holes, but there you go.
Also, thinking about the human nature of Christ: how is it representative of humanity in toto? Does it work as a kind of depersonalised "humanity"? Cyril in the fifth century set forth the doctrine of anhypostasia as a way of saying that J's humanity was impersonal.
R.C. Moberly writes:
"human nature which is not personal is not human nature." Atonement and Personality, p. 92
"If he might have been, yet He certainly was not, a man only, amongst men. His relation to the human race is not that He was another specimen, differing by being another from everyone except Himself. His relation to the human race was not a differentiation, but a consummating relation [interesting language here - MJ]. He was not generically, but inclusively, man." Atonement and Personality p. 86
"Inclusively" and "consummating": that's an interesting way of conceiving the relation of Christ's humanity to the humanity of the rest of us...
Here is John Baillie in reply:
"Surely, whatever else Jesus was, He was a member of the human race, the human species, a man among men, or one man among others. However true may be the conception of human solidarity, or of the solidarity of Christ with mankind, or of Christ as the 'representative Man' through whom we come to God, it remains true that He was a man among men." God Was in Christ p. 87
In any case:
just sent off a paper for publication in which I argue that God's mode of speaking in scripture is characterised by gentleness... I fear it has truck-sized holes, but there you go.
Also, thinking about the human nature of Christ: how is it representative of humanity in toto? Does it work as a kind of depersonalised "humanity"? Cyril in the fifth century set forth the doctrine of anhypostasia as a way of saying that J's humanity was impersonal.
R.C. Moberly writes:
"human nature which is not personal is not human nature." Atonement and Personality, p. 92
"If he might have been, yet He certainly was not, a man only, amongst men. His relation to the human race is not that He was another specimen, differing by being another from everyone except Himself. His relation to the human race was not a differentiation, but a consummating relation [interesting language here - MJ]. He was not generically, but inclusively, man." Atonement and Personality p. 86
"Inclusively" and "consummating": that's an interesting way of conceiving the relation of Christ's humanity to the humanity of the rest of us...
Here is John Baillie in reply:
"Surely, whatever else Jesus was, He was a member of the human race, the human species, a man among men, or one man among others. However true may be the conception of human solidarity, or of the solidarity of Christ with mankind, or of Christ as the 'representative Man' through whom we come to God, it remains true that He was a man among men." God Was in Christ p. 87
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Monday, July 25, 2005
blog begins
well here goes:
Today I have been reading Frei's The Identity of Jesus Christ in preparating for moving to Oxford University on 12th Sept to start my DPhil. It's pretty interesting:
I want to think about how/whether Jesus is a paradigm for humanity. Perhaps that means "how people have seen him as this". I have a hunch that the Garden of Gethsemane is going to be a key facet of my thinking somehow...
Today I have been reading Frei's The Identity of Jesus Christ in preparating for moving to Oxford University on 12th Sept to start my DPhil. It's pretty interesting:
I want to think about how/whether Jesus is a paradigm for humanity. Perhaps that means "how people have seen him as this". I have a hunch that the Garden of Gethsemane is going to be a key facet of my thinking somehow...
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