Owen Chadwick interviewed

Amongst the great delights which the Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has provided to viewers of youtube and of his website is this interview with the great historian Owen Chadwick. I'm currently myself listening to the interview - a particular highlight so far is Chadwick's identification of Hitler as the key reason behind his turn to Christianity.

The Date of Christmas

It is widely known that the tradition which ascribes the birth of Jesus to the 25th December is far from historically secure. If an origin is to be found for the tradition of celebrating Christmas on the 25th December, it is securely available in the late 4th century writing of John Chrysostom (or John of the golden tongue), the influential Greek speaking preacher of the Antiochene church in Asia Minor.

John is one of those fourth century preachers who has left a huge volume of written material to posterity (the same can be said of only very few figures of the pre-4th century church). He was a supremely impressive public speaker (hence his nickname), but he was also a devoted scholar of Biblical texts. Included among his surviving works is a number of commentaries on the (canonical) Gospels and other important writings. It is an accident of fortune that John's view of the right day for the celebration of the birth of Jesus has happened to be the one which has survived to the present - at least in the west. Certainly, at least one Christian writer before John seems to have been unequivocally opposed to the notion of celebrating the occasion of Christ's birth. Origen, writing in the 3rd century, regarded the celebration of divine 'birthdays' as essentially a pagan mode of religious observance. Though Origen is the only influential thinker on record explicitly denouncing the idea of celebrating the occasion of Christ's birth, the celebration is at no stage mentioned in the catalogues of festivals compiled by the 2nd century writers Irenaeus of Lyons and Tertullian of Carthage. It should be conceded, however, that people were nevertheless interested in knowing the date of Jesus' first earthly appearance, even if they didn't celebrate the occasion. The second century writer Clement of Alexandria and a number of Gnostic traditions, for example, contain some evidence of curiosity about the issue.

By the time of the late 4th century, Christianity in the Roman empire was no longer an endangered sect, but a publicly funded religious body in a period of rapid socio-economic expansion. The need to harmonise the religious activities and habits of observance of the disparate co-religionists of various cities became more pressing. When John Chrysostom addressed his congregation on the subject of the correct date of Christmas in c.388 (this date, he argued, was 25th December), he had to convince one faction within his audience that they were celebrating the festival on the wrong date. What were his arguments in favour of the 25th? It turns out that he only stressed one important piece of evidence: the existence of the 'census papers' of Jesus and his family in the Roman archives (in the city of Rome; cf. also Tertullian, Adv. Marcionem 4.7). These census papers, he suggested, should settle the issue. The mention of the census is a direct reference to Luke-Acts, whose author places a large emphasis on the inter-relatedness of the circumstances of Jesus' birth and the requirement of the Roman authorities that inhabitants of Judaea (or, according to Luke, 'the whole world') at that time had to register their details with a Roman censor. Arguing that these old documents still existed, John claimed that the Roman church possessed an authoritative position to declare the right day for the celebration of Christmas on account of its certain fidelity to the documents' testimony. And since the Roman church celebrated on the 25th December, this had to be regarded as authoritative. (But 'Did authorities within the Roman church *really* scrutinize these documents in order to confirm the 25th as the right date?', we might justifiably ask).

Throughout the West, in Rome and beyond, Christmas had been celebrated on the 25th December for a good few years by the time John wrote: helpfully, he succeeded in encouraging the recalcitrant among his eastern co-religionists to reconcile this part of their sacred calendar with that of their western counterparts. Elsewhere in the east, as is confirmed by John's contemporary, Gregory of Nyssa, the 25th December had indeed become a standard date, and Christ's birth had become a celebrated occasion, though variant traditions did still exist and some Christians celebrated Christmas on other dates, while others, like Origen, refused to celebrate the occasion whatsoever. Such disagreements recur even now.

Problems exist, of course, in John's argument. It suffices to note that if Luke is right and Jesus really was born in Bethlehem because his parents needed to go there to register with the Roman censor, it is a little implausible to suppose that the 25th December stands any chance of being the right date. Would a Roman censor really have called for census details to be provided in the middle of December, the most onerous time of year to travel? More importantly, the census is not mentioned in either Matthew or John (and not either in Mark, whose Gospel contains absolutely no details about the circumstances of Jesus' early years). The story that Jesus and family travelled to Bethlehem to register with the censor must rest on the authority of Luke alone. (The census itself, however, certainly happened: it is attested in Josephus).

The birthplace of Jesus is disputed. Like Luke, Matthew also insists Jesus was born in Bethlehem: arguably, however, both writers felt this needed to be his birthplace because the Jewish prophet Micah (Mic. 5:2) had specified that Bethlehem would be the birthplace of the Messiah. Aligning him with such a tradition was in the interests of both authors - and perfectly possible, given that Mark's Gospel, upon which both seem to have relied as a source, contained no specification of the location of Jesus' birth to the contrary. The reality is that Jesus could easily have been born in Nazareth, a town in the area around which much of his ministry took place, but also his 'home town' where, strikingly, 'his own people' did not recognise him as Lord (Mk. 6:1-13). For me, it makes little difference any which way. The fact that he was born is what matters. The date? The 25th December will do nicely.

To every reader of this blog, I wish you a very merry Christmas.

Praying with Tony Blair and George W. Bush

One of the things that media critics of the Blair/Bush foray into Iraq like to bring up as evidence of the hopelessly blundering nature of its conception is the fact that the two leaders - reputedly - sat down to pray together at Camp David in 2003 before finalising the decision to go ahead with the invasion. The main concern of the critics seems to be that the two of them might have begun to believe that they were under a divine mandate to invade Iraq. But this isn't what prayer is and it isn't what asking God for guidance is about. In a way, you could say, it might even represent a small comfort that praying is what the two of them saw fit to do when making a momentous and difficult decision. For all of his awkwardnesses in conversation, George Bush in a recent interview made this clear. All things considered, he comes out of it rather well, I think.

Evangelical Theology: Some Quibbles

I record here some issues I recently covered in discussion with an evangelical Christian regarding three important areas of theological interest: a) the question of self love and human sinfulness, b) thinking about the devil/evil, and c) death and atonement.

a) (An) 'evangelical' position: "Sin is any behavior that is done out of self-importance and self-love. We were created to love and glorify God and we owe the same love to his creations, our fellow men, but we sin in making ourselves the object of our love and glorification and in justifying our actions by those terms."

Response:
I think this profoundly misses the point. Look again at Lev. 19:18. 'Love your neighbour AS YOURSELF'. The implication being, of course, that we are naturally self loving. This is not condemned by Jesus - although it's a matter of some controversy in Augustine who (interestingly) you go on to mention in your next sentence (cf. O. O'Donovan, The problem of Self Love in St. Augustine). Anyway, the point is that we ARE the object of our love (like it or not), although not necessarily of our 'glorification' (an entirely different matter altogether). Self love isn't sinful. The wrong kind(s) of self love are sinful,as are the wrong kinds of God-love and neighbour-love.

b) (An) 'evangelical' position: "We must be wary of saying anything about Satan that isn't in the bible. Satan is not explicitly described as a fallen angel and ruler of a demonic realm called Hell, this comes mostly from Milton and worldly church traditions."

Response:
The Bible is of course the vital source for our Christian thinking. As far as I'm concerned, I have to be wary about how I think/talk about the devil with respect to more authorities than the Bible, however. I'm wary of what the Bible says, what tradition has maintained in different ecclesial contexts, what my faculties of reason tell me, and what my experience of worship and prayer reveals to me. This, by the way, is known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. If church traditions/reason/experience illumine the Bible in ways that shed true light on the text (even if this means the original biblical author wouldn't have thought/been able to think in precisely the terms in question), then I feel under the obligation of the holy spirit to make sense of the text/God's revelation with respect to them. Moreover, upon what criterion are we to know a 'worldly' church tradition from an 'unworldly' one? Aaaargh, let's not open the hermeneutical can of worms: so much is written about that and I think all parties concerned would be better off reading more elsewhere. Suffice to say it's a gloriously provocative idea that one can in any way determine what is 'worldly' and what isn't. It was upon precisely this issue that we confront the most basic challenge of Jesus to those he offended! They presumed to know what 'unworldly' (i.e. Godly) holiness was - and he (the Messiah!) didn't fit the bill. We should be extra careful, then, if we want to go down anything like the same road without an overriding sense of our human proclivities to get things profoundly wrong (as they did). To answer the question more directly, it shouldn't matter a jot that Milton imagined hell and Satan in different and more developed ways than did the biblical authors. He also thought in English. The point, in each case, is that we must judge what he has to say for its theological penetration and truthfulness: for this, we need not require his worldview to correspond exactly with that of the biblical authors. The holy spirit didn't just stop work after the biblical canon was compiled. The spirit of truth and understanding still serves to build up knowledge in the community of believers, whether in Milton or whoever else. We can't rule him out of court on principle.

c) (An) 'evangelical' position: "All throughout the bible, God makes abundantly clear that death is necessary for atonement of the inequities of sin".

Response: Look again at John 8 (Jesus' intervention to prevent the 'just' stoning of the adulteress). It's death to sin that God wants, not physical death (!). Jesus' death is necessary only because of his and the father's love (Jn. 15), not because of 'inequities', and this love extends to the lost, the outcast, and to those we consider 'enemies'. By conquering the devil in his death and resurrection, he made us 'dead to sin' so that we might 'live unto righteousness' (1. Pet. 2:24). This is true of ALL of us, Christians or not: God's love - and Christ's love - knows no limits. We can know this only if we accept the love which has been made manifest and open our hearts and 'doors' to the gift of the spirit (Rev. 3).

I accept that the sacrificial imagery of Hebrews presents a different picture. But the Bible has never spoken with just one voice and there has never been total agreement amongst Christians about exactly what Jesus' life and death 'meant'. The witness of Hebrews merely reflects this fact and I see no reason to be worried about allying oneself with other schools of interpretation if their witness appears, under the guidance of the spirit, to be more true. Jesus himself, after all, carved his own particular path through the midrashic quagmire of Torah interpretation by rejecting or suppressing some ideas and accepting or prioritising others. We must do the same.

Experience, Nature, Morality, Evil

Life is often *experienced* as a difficult battle to pursue certain choices, to suppress certain urges, to make good on certain goals or ideals. In each case, forms of opposition are felt. When we try and do what we deeply feel to be good, competing urges and temptations toward bad things naturally arise. We have to fight them if we are successfully to pursue good. The so-called seven 'deadly' sins used to give many people a natural reference point here. When trying to be industrious, people had to fight sloth. When trying to be frugal and healthy, people had to fight avarice and gluttony. When trying to be sexually upstanding, they had to eschew lust and, I suppose, envy. Very little about our experience today has changed, except, that is, our tendency *not* to associate these oppositions with a deeper spiritual struggle - going on both within us and in the world at large.

Experience in the universe, with its (once abundant) cosmic forces 'unperceived,', 'unrecognised'' or 'disbelieved' by many is typically (and fittingly) now talked about in a suitably more banal way. We hesitate to say 'evil' - unless, that is, we write for the tabloid press and we're talking about a paedophile or a serial killer. We prefer 'bad', or 'not nice' or some overly used swear word which loses all serious force and content when applied both to the actions of rapists and killers - for the simple reason that we use the same words more lightly or humorously in conversation with our friends. Our language, I suggest, distortively suppresses the reality of the presence of 'evil' by not daring to speak its name. 'Criminal' or 'scum' might be the best we can do to describe certain perpetrators of seriously evil deeds. But when we resort to labelling a person in this way - as the tabloid press inevitably do - we fail to make the (very necessary) distinction which Christian thinkers have tended to try so hard to make between the 'sinner' and the 'sin'. The former is not essentially 'evil'. The latter is. (We should never believe, no matter how convinced we may be, that a person is completely or irretrievably evil. This may at times prove incredibly difficult. Evil may have infected their thoughts and motivations to such a great degree that we cannot discern the presence of anything we might think 'good' or any cause for optimism regarding the person's spiritual health. The point, though, is that we must believe God can cure even the most sick - those most spiritually barren and caught up in the mesh of evil - and must pray for him to release goodness once again in the person concerned. If the spirit can breathe life into the physically dead, he can breathe life into the spiritually dead. In time, we must pray, this will happen).

I acknowledge that all I have offered here is an argument for re-introducing a certain way of thinking, speaking and interpreting into our moral and experiential discourse. Why might it have any bearing on what it actually 'out there', what is true, what is real? Is there really an 'evil' agency in the universe - or at least our lives within it - which is attempting to have its say in our lives and which sometimes has its say and wins the day? Or is this simply a bizarre way of thinking about our lives which bears no relation to what's actually going on. There's no 'evil', we might think, in cancer or flooding waters. Only 'nature' taking its course and coming into conflict with our environment (and our lives) as it does so.

The physicalist-materialist-naturalist aspect of the enlightenment legacy our culture so deeply espouses - or believes it does in many of its more 'enlightened' circles - certainly thinks as much. This (often unspoken) paradigm, I think, fails a number of important litmus tests and I want briefly to mention one problem here as an example. (This, I expect, will feed into a further series of posts on this subject).

The first problem is simply this: I think the materialists are doing something bizarre when they refuse to attribute a moral dimension to what they'd call 'natural processes'. Why should I not refer to the tidal wave that killed thousands of people (or the 'natural processes' that gave rise to it) as an instance of evil. To me it's evil. The physical world 'acted' in an undeniably evil way. Does the physical world 'act'? Yes. All the time. But does it act in a 'moral' way - or, that is, with respect to moral agency? There's reason, I think, to suspect (at the very least) that it might.

My faculties of moral reasoning are, as far as the materialists would have it, themselves part of the 'natural' order - as, of course, are theirs. Why, though, should we delimit the presence of 'moral' agency to the context of human (and possibly 'animal') minds - 'natural' as they are - and deny this quality to other 'physical' phenomena? Why couldn't the universe itself (a universe, after all, which gives rise to these 'physical' human minds) actually have a 'moral' aspect to it as well as - or even, perhaps, instead of - what we customarily label its 'natural' aspect? If human existence is 'moral' existence, and moral existence is undeniably 'natural' too, why is it safe to assume that non-human 'natural' things do not havea moral aspect to them? They, like us, are present in the 'natural' world. As are the 'forces' which shape them - which, as we know, are underneath it all (from the perspective of particle physics) very much like the forces which shape our human lives. The moral versus natural dichotomy has to be on some level false and unsustainable - at least, that is, when we consider the case of humans as simultaneously 'moral' and 'natural' (where does the one 'start' and the other 'end'?). I think the materialist would have to concede this. Having done so, why should it be possible to suggest that 'nature' dictates, governs and/or circumscribes morality? Couldn't the reverse be true? Couldn't it be, that is to say, that 'moral' forces dictate, govern and determine 'nature'? That, certainly, is what most of us feel, I think, at the level of our human experience of reality - insofar as we insist, that is, on using the terms 'moral' and 'natural' to describe it. It's our moral natures that matter most to us, surely, not our 'natural' ones. In our lives we're bothered primarily with questions of what we should do, and only secondarily - and in relation to this - with questions concerning what the 'natural' features of ourselves and our world are like.

If this seems a fair description, and if it rings true in respect of one part of 'nature', (our lives) who's to say there's no merit in the proposition when we come to consider the phenomenal existence of other worldly things?

Christian ideas in Coldplay

The lyrics of much modern popular music give little cause for reflection. I remember pondering for quite some time as a teenager in the 90s who loved some songs by Oasis what their lyrics meant. Part of the delight of listening to the songs, I think, was the task of trying to work out what those catchy but elusive lyrics might best be taken to mean. 'So Sally can wait, she knows it's too late...' And so on. Who was Sally? In what sense might the addressee of 'Don't look back in anger', one of their most famous songs, put her 'life in the hands of a rock and roll band and throw it all away'? And why would anyone 'stand up beside the fireplace'? I was evidently not alone in having such thoughts. Noel Gallagher, the song's composer and lyricist was asked by another curious party about what he had meant when he wrote the words. His answer? Quite a disappointment: he'd been high on cocaine and simply wrote down words that sounded good next to each other. The 'revolution from bed', to which the song refers, was a simple casual reference to one of those iconic moments in the career of John Lennon, whom Oasis were intent on eulogising - but it bore no reference to any wider pattern of thinking in Don't Look back in Anger. How could listening to the song, then, stir such enjoyment in a listener like myself - including, I might add, a genuine enjoyment of its lyrics - when, at root, those lyrics represent little more than a casually thrown together pattern of banal vagaries? One for the philosophers, perhaps.

I'm not a massive fan of Coldplay. But since I have lived life for a while now as someone who decries the absence of deep and systematic thinking in the world of popular culture - and whose patience with banal lyrics is in most cases beyond exhaustion (unless the song really is exceptional - I would make a case for Pork and Beans by Weezer) - I have been interested recently to listen to Viva la Vida, a song they released earlier this year. The song, certainly, has a catchy tune. But it's the lyrics that I really liked. And I liked them, I must be clear, because I heard genuinely thoughtful and interesting content in amongst them - and, an added bonus, some pretty clear allusions to some paradigmatic Christian ideas. References to 'missionaries in foreign fields', St. Peter at heaven's gate, the troubled predicament of a king and his feelings of abandonment and dispossession, and even to the topography of Rome and Jerusalem. This is not the first time I've detected Christian sentiment in Coldplay songs. Their song 'The Message' contains a number of very obvious borrowings from the Christian hymn Love Unknown, (a hymn known to me in the form it was set to music by John Ireland), whose lyrics were written in the 17th century by Samuel Crossman. Having googled this, I came across an excellent post on another blog which teases out some of the similiarities and differences between the use of the same lyrics between Coldplay and Crossman.

I want to end this post on a negative note, however; for while it's uplifting to find a mainstream band such as Coldplay exploring and utilising Christian themes and ideas in their music, it saddened me to think that if their band members were to make any public display or profession of Christianity (and I should say here that I have no idea whether Chris Martin, the lead singer, or any other band members think of themselves as Christians), I strongly suspect it would be a total PR disaster. There are ways, of course, to present Christian ideas - and their presentation need not be a disaster. But the declaration of one's own allegiance to them would no doubt alienate many young people who 'know better'. Or maybe I'm wrong about this? If Coldplay were to declare themselves Christians in an interview, perhaps no one would really be surprised. The harm, surely, would be greater for a band like Oasis: their image, no doubt wouldn't take such a revelation well at all! But even with a band like Oasis, their (more thoughtful) lyrics might be taken to bear in an interesting way on Christian thinking. The lyrics of Champagne Supernova and Little by Little and even, if I'm really pushing it, Live Forever, could perhaps be taken as starting points here. For me, at any rate, to think through why these lyrics 'work' in their own often peculiar ways (when they do) inevitably involves thinking through what they have to tell me about Christianity. Coldplay certainly make the connection explicit at certain places; as an interpreter of an Oasis song, you have to be more imaginative. But the connection can still be made, I think.

Not taking Catholic Communion

There was a Catholic mass held today in the college chapel in place of the usual weekly Anglican eucharist. It was a fun service; some good singing, a nice sermon by the university's Catholic chaplain, and it was good to be re-familiarised with some of the niceties of Catholic worship which you don't get in the Anglican church. I couldn't help but try to end the Lord's Prayer with 'For thine is the kingdom...' but had to stop myself going any further because the Catholic version breaks after 'deliver us from evil'. For the record, it's worth stating as a quick word of explanation that I'm a baptised Catholic who received his first holy communion in the church before defecting in the direction of the Anglican communion while still young. And I've remained, when I've worshipped, primarily a worshipper in Anglican settings ever since.

What surprised and to some extent disappointed me today was the refusal of the bread and wine on the part of a good many members of the (Anglican) congregation at the Catholic mass. The priest could easily have stated that he was only happy to administer to Catholics. But he didn't do this, although he did state that anyone who preferred to have a blessing than receive communion was welcome to. I tried for a large part of the rest of the service to think about why the actions of the people who'd refused communion might be defensible. But I couldn't - at the end of it all - come up with anything. The same Jesus, the same Lord, the same creeds: granted that history separates Catholics and Anglicans in various ways. But history likewise separated tax collectors and sinners from the priestly castes in a number of ways, just as it has always separated those who wantonly refuse to be reconciled on the basis of past or present misgivings. The point of the eucharist is to emphasise that sitting down to eat and drink is what comes first, before we allow the awkward wrinkles of our human history to have their say in attempting to thwart our attempts to be together in unity. Jews have always known this and it's not a little sad that the central institution of the Christian religion - deriving, as it does, from Jewish origins - can fail so manifestly fully to unify God's people around God's gifts.

It's surely right to remember the past and to regret what has transpired. But the past is dead and gone and the present is the home of the living spirit in us. God's work of unity and reconciliation should not be blocked by pious attempts on our part to place awkward boundaries - grounded in our ideological takes on our often bloody and tragic human histories - in its way. The spirit - and God's love in it - are more unbridled than that.

Loshon Hora

Idle gossip, which may be true enough, but which has no concern for the wider good of the party being discussed, is rightly warned against by Torah-observant Jews. They call it Loshon Hora. That the ancient rabbis derived the prohibition from Lev. 19:16, a passage which directly precedes the love command - 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' - of Lev. 19:18 makes it doubly interesting. I have little doubt that the love command was taken by ancient Jews - and early Christians - to lie in a significant way in the avoidance of Loshon Hora. St. Paul's excursus on love in 1 Cor. 13 is surely informed by his own awareness of this link: indeed, the following verses seem a pointed recognition of it...

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1. Cor. 13:4-7).

The good Christian knows that Loshon Hora is unacceptable. He may learn from his Jewish friends to give it its name, to espy opposition to it being worked out in his scriptures - written as they were by Jews - and to acknowledge the point of overlap between the two traditions, both of which seek to uphold the command to love which both regard as the highpoint of the law. Avoidance of unnecessarily speaking evil about others is essential to the keeping of the commandment to love. Jews and Christians agree on this point.

Irenaeus on the Fall

I was interested to read a passage in book III (23,6) of Irenaeus' Against All Heresies this evening. Irenaeus in this passage ties in a very attractive reading of the story of Adam and Eve with an interpretation of the meaning of human life and death through history. Death, I understand him to be saying, is God's way of mercifully intervening to save us from ourselves in our naturally transgressive lives: it shows us that he sets a fixed limit to our sufferings and views the bringing of death as a 'good' act on God's part. Evil is shown to have an end; not that life itself is inherently evil, but that human behaviour seems within the context of life inescapably to tend in an 'evil' direction. This, for Irenaeus, is what the Garden of Eden shows us. Deliverance from evil, of course, is the last petition in the Lord's prayer. The final conquest of evil is what we all await. This happens throughout our lives and is God's ongoing project. It will one day be complete, but for now the fact that all human lives have a finite span - so that suffering cannot ever truly win the day - attests in some degree to the reality of God's saving and nourishing activity.

Here's the passage:

'God acted out of compassion [when driving Adam and Eve out of paradise] so that human beings might not remain transgressors forever, that the sin with which they found themselves burdened might not be immortal, that the evil should not be without end and therefore without remedy. God therefore halted them in their transgression by interposing death...by setting them a term through the dissolution of flesh which would take place in the earth, in order that human beings, by 'dying to sin' (Rom. 6:2), should begin one day to 'live to God''.

Biblical Hermeneutics: A brief comment

This brief post is written in response to a request from a friend for an outline of the basics of my position on biblical hermeneutics - which is to say, the interpretative strategy/ies I adopt when I engage with the Bible. My sole intention here is to sketch out a few fundamentals which I regard to be pretty basic to my view of Biblical interpretation. It's not an attempt to be 'systematic' or 'scientific', nor is it an attempt to be uncontroversial. But it addresses what, for many people in the contemporary church, has seemed a particularly important set of issues - and, I suppose, here, if I am honest I am no exception.

The most basic thing I can say is that I do not adopt any kind of position which insists upon the use of the words 'inerrant', 'infallible', and 'without error' in relation to the Biblical text. To me, the use of these words in respect of the Bible is both naive and unhelpful. The Biblical text is not God and it is not appropriate to use these words in respect of it. (The same, by the way, goes for the church and the pope...more on that, perhaps, in another post). But if the text is not these things, it is still held (at least by me) in high regard, for a number of reasons.

a. As historical evidence/testimony, both of physical events and of theological outlooks.

b. As evidence of multivalence and variety in Jewish and Christian tradition, when it comes to talking about, thinking about and experiencing God...a variety which demands humility from modern day interpreters.

c. As evidence of unity in a number of essentials, such as the focus on the Mosaic covenant, the foundation stories of Israel and the important position of the Temple.

d. As a vital source of inspiration for the devotional lives of subsequent people, both in private and public contexts.

e. As an adaptable vessel through which life in God can be communicated, in conjunction with the activity of the spirit through the church.

The Biblical text admits of different interpretations by different believers. That this is so is well demonstrated by the differences which have characterised outlooks on passages and themes within it down the centuries. Certainly, there is a need to recognise that certain outlooks and passages in the Bible stand in marked opposition to ways of thinking we hold dear today. But does the Bible demand that we align ourselves more directly with all its ideological outlooks, rather than those it seems to us to have right at the heart of its tradition - a tradition which continues in the form of the church today? No one, surely, would argue this. We are all pickers and choosers when we come to the Bible and its interpretation, whether we are fundamentalists or not. And this is the odd thing about the Richard Dawkins criticism that 'fundamentalists' are being 'truer' to the Bible than non-fundamentalists.

The 'rules' of interpretation, insofar as these can be formulated, are in actual fact indecipherable from 'rules' about the integrity of a Christian life, lived as a whole - in dialogue with the Bible, certainly, but also in dialogue with subsequent written tradition and church life, and with fellow believers and non-believers and in prayer. All of these serve to shape the religious life - and Biblical interpretation has to take on a valid form in reference to each. This may mean that we interpret differently in different contexts. But why not aim for a more catholicising style of interpretation, which attempts to draw all people into the question of the textual interpretation of the Bible, and the question of living with integrity. This, as I see it, is the function of the truly lived and truly loving human life - rather than the narrowly sectarian one which refuses to shift beyond the realms of its own self encoded comfort zone.

Biblical interpretation is not a 'science', at least not in any popularly understood sense of the word which has been left untouched by the recent assaults of the philosophers of science of the late twentieth century: the biblical interpreter has no recourse to a reliable empirical vacuum in which he can conduct his research. His is rather a contextual task, which admits of different appropriations of the same truth in different circumstances: as the community, in totum, moves forward through time, it is certainly to be hoped that agreement will be more fully felt about how to read the Bible and about what the Bible is, both within and without the church. But the attempt to present the Biblical texts as self evidently revelatory of higher truths, in particular and already established ways to people, is to miss profoundly the point that the text only attests to the life of God insofar as it possesses the power to illuminate and lead in NEW ways we had not previously thought to be possible precisely through those people. And it is through service to people that the text can become alive to us in new ways too.

A Sermon I gave [4]

If we accept that to be human is, whether we like it or not, to have ‘gods’ – whether they are microscopes or electrons or chromosomes, as in the case of the scientistic fundamentalists I have been describing – or football players, popstars or film actors, as in the case of many of the rest of us, it’s worth entering seriously into the business of thinking about the kind of God or gods we in our heart of hearts really want to have. And here, I think, the Christian Gospel offers us some vital insights. Crucially, it insists that the thing about most so-called gods is that they are dead. Not dead in some bare physical sense: David Beckham is very much alive and well, of course, as are many of the other gods of stage and screen whose lives we are tempted to mould ours around, both in terms of the money we apportion to them and in terms of our efforts to look and be more like them. But they are certainly dead nonetheless, and it is important to appreciate how this is so. They are dead, I think, because what they offer to their devotees is so often offered only in exchange for some reward: it is a form of pay packet, in other words, or some other form of gratification for an ailing sense of self esteem.

The radical thing about the Christian God is that he is not motivated by these things – he doesn’t need a paypacket and his self-esteem does not need to be bolstered. And gods who need paypackets or bolstered self esteem aren’t, I would suggest, in spite of appearances, particularly powerful or even interesting gods. It’s not that such gods are wholly bad or evil or conceited: that’s not it. It’s just that what they really are is human, all too human, just like us: which, to be clear, is not to say wholly bad or evil or conceited but just enough of each to make worshipping them a morally dubious activity, curiously similar in character, I would wager, to worshipping oneself or one’s own sense of ‘Reasoning’. And even if these ‘human’ gods can be very good at singing a song or bending a football over a wall, they’re still not – in the big scheme of things – worth climbing trees to see.

For they would let you look at them for a while but sooner or later would demand a pay packet or some words of eulogy to enhance their deficient senses of self esteem. They might, it is true, tell you that you’re worth a million dollars and that you ought to think more of yourself – even deserve to do so – just like they think they do; I’m thinking here of the Gok Wans and Trinny and Susannahs of this world – people who despite the best assurances and their brash and confident public exteriors nonetheless exude – at least in the eyes of the more perceptive media commentators – a real and nagging lack of self esteem. If some of us find ourselves being taken on board by the message of self fulfilment and self realisation of a Gok or a Trinny, do we really find the gospel they offer, upon reflection, a satisfactory one?

Would Trinny advise us to hold off on the expensive hand bags and necklaces and embrace us in a new light for having sold half our goods to the poor, as Jesus does in the story of Zacchaeus? Would Gok advise us to seek out the needy – as opposed to the local John Lewis – in our search for a renewed sense of life’s meaning?

Even if Gok and Trinny profess to care about the decisions we might make in the absence of their involvement (and here, I think, we can reasonably doubt their sincerity), there is no reason to suppose that the decision to do things such as these – which play no discernible part in their self improving teachings – would be regarded as anything other than at best strange, at worst stupid. For Trinny and Gok, giving your money and attention to them and to designer shoemakers and store managers, rather than to the poor, the outcast, the sick and the spiritually weak and vulnerable is how best to reach a satisfactory sense of self love.

The gospel these celebrity gods most usually preach is the Gospel of the cultivation of self, without reference to or emphasis on the importance of the cultivation of others. That this gospel stands in ideological contradistinction to the Christian gospel is so obvious as to be hardly worth saying. But it can nonetheless never be said enough that the Christian gospel’s leading idea is that the most pressing concern of humans is the love of God and the love of neighbour. And the love of self, insofar as it is important, is important only insofar as these other loves are in view. The kind of self love, then, which separates itself off from the business of loving God and of loving one’s neighbour on this view radically misses the mark. As, for that matter, does the kind of neighbour love which separates itself off from the business of loving God. For it is only through attempting to love our neighbours and attempting to love God at the same time in our innermost being that we can experience the love of God for us.

The God of Jesus Christ exemplifies this divine love, which takes the form of the gift of salvation to those who don’t have it. This gift is not an empty one: it is above all a gift of freedom from dead gods and an introduction to life with a living one through his forgiveness and our repentance, and the interchange of these in the life of the church. God’s gift is an invitation to experience and participate in a creative energy which works remorselessly and creatively in and through people – not for its own gain, but gratuitously, for their sake. It can be a guide as we proceed in the difficult, challenging and uncomfortable directions it leads us in, directions which defy even our most earnest attempts to impose regimes of ‘order’ on what is going on. And in the context of the gratuitous relationships which it opens up, we begin to discover that we are known and loved in ways we previously had not thought to know and love ourselves. For God comes to our houses while we are tax collectors and sinners, before we have begun to understand what his love is really like and before we have begun our attempts to exemplify it in our lives.

And as the third chapter of the book of Revelation, my other text this evening, asserts in the plainest possible terms, when he comes to our houses, God says: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me’. As for dead gods, they don’t knock. They are themselves, like us, the unwilling subjects of this true God’s saving action: for like us, they are unwilling to open the door to let in true love, as opposed to the merely self gratifying and misguided love which they can find already inside their houses. The tragic pedicament of these gods is that they and their followers have not yet found outside the love and life which Zacchaeus, the tax collector who wanted to see and know the truth and who climbed his tree and opened his door, found there.
Amen.

A Sermon I gave [3]

Continued again...
Above all, I would suggest, we see Zacchaeus going through a number of the motions which characterise much of the devotional activity which goes on across the whole spectrum of cultural activity in human societies, both in the world of Luke’s Gospel and in our own. In the story, one person – Jesus – becomes an object of interest to another, Zacchaeus, whose eagerness to see Jesus has him make special provisions to do so. At the risk of offering a mundane comparison, an obvious parallel in the contemporary world are those who show up early and queue at celebrity book signing events. Forward planning is essential: the competition to meet the interesting and famous person concerned is always strong. Another aspect of the Zacchaeus story which is worth emphasising is that he wants above all to see Jesus – to have a good view of him – and it is in order to achieve this aim that he makes his special provisions. Again, one understands his inclinations. Seeing interesting and famous people is one of the best ways of enhancing one’s experience of their interest or fame. And fame fascinates; it captures the imagination. Live appearances are invariably more exciting than ones which are experienced second hand through the medium of another person’s account. Seeing for oneself is more satisfying. And when it comes to seeing interesting people, box office seats are often preferable, whether at football games, comedy shows, the theatre, the opera, or even the visit of a prophet, as in the case of Zacchaeus: they give you a better view, even if, perhaps, you have to sacrifice something in terms of atmosphere when you sit in them.

Finally in my list of generic characteristics of Zacchaeus’ behaviour, there’s his actual encounter with Jesus: in the encounter, Zacchaeus ends up doing what he knows will be pleasing to Jesus. He acts in a radically morally upstanding way, which not only justifies Jesus’ singling him out for visitation in spite of his past misdeeds and in spite of the criticism Jesus receives for doing so. Zacchaeus also ends up exemplifying something of Jesus’ own character by exhibiting a special concern for the plight of the poor. In the latter case, what we clearly have is, at least on one level, classic fanlike adoration. Emulation of one’s heroes is just a standard feature of our behaviour as humans. As creatures of habit and imitation, the desire to emulate comes naturally to us – and the people we find to be the most impressive, attractive and interesting, or, from a more sinister perspective, the most powerful, are the ones we often do our best to emulate. This desire – whether it is consciously felt or expressed or not – motivates us as we go about our daily lives; it serves to shape how we think and behave in a wide variety of ways, from how we have our hair cut to how we pronounce our words and how we think about our personal relationships, and the ideological stances we adopt in the context of those relationships and in the context of the world at large.

Even if it seems uncomfortable for some people to admit it, we all have our heroes, whether we acknowledge them as such or not. Even for the person who adamantly maintains that they have no heroes, certain ideas and people nonetheless end up playing privileged and pivotal roles in shaping their lives. The fact is unavoidable. The determined individualist may be absolutely his own authority in his own mind but he is still implicitly paying homage to the philosophical and cultural currents which made his very individual viewpoint intellectually conceivable and/or respectable. Whether he acknowledges them or not, then, he has his heroes, in the sense of the creative forces which have served to shape his being. And the point can be extended in the context of discussions with atheists and agnostics: one can say simply ‘you have your gods, whether you acknowledge them or not. We all do’. And for most of us, having our gods means taking an interest in certain other people, such that we wish to see and hear about them in order to shape ourselves around who they are and what they are like. It’s an inescapable fact of our human situation.

Now the dyed in the wool atheist may recognise all this. And it is true that none of it may faze him. Yes, he will say, I have my gods – although I in my detached rationalism know better than to think of them in reference to this strange and defunct word, ‘god’ which you mistakenly use – and I prefer them to yours. Well, one might answer, this may be so for you and for others with such an anodyne sense of effortless wisdom. But isn’t it rather disturbing, I would continue, that many who would invoke the respectability of your view seem to have such a hard time abandoning this language of divinity, and the habits of worship which usually accompany it – whether in the context of how they think about beautiful or impressive people, or of those that do a particularly good job at beating others in sporting competitions. Is it obvious, after all, that a regime of thinking which has given rise to forms of worship which are markedly similar to the long abandoned Graeco-Roman and celtic polytheisms of our ancestors – with their exotic and unpredictable gods, and their locally oriented mythologies and folktales – represents a step forward into a new and rational post-Christian age? I can envisage the kinds of protest which such a question might engender. But I would counter them by maintaining that the sort of inane and naive mysticism of the scientistic rationalist who expects everyone to appreciate the beauty of the universe through the lens of a microscope or telescope and who eschews the idea of corporate worship stands too far removed from the visceral world of social reality to be itself worthy of serious consideration. The debate is between the different forms of corporate worship which society allows to exist – not, at least so far as I can see, with the possibility that we might one day be rid of this awkward beast, ‘religion’, altogether. For corporate worship will continue to happen in churches or in stadiums, in shops or in nightclubs.

A Sermon I gave [2]

Continued...
Growing up in Southampton, it was standard practice where I lived for the hero of the local football team at the time, Matt Le Tissier – a one club man who stayed at Southampton throughout his entire career – to be referred to as ‘Le God’. Not only was Le Tissier a brilliant football player who enabled the local team to flourish in matches against rival teams from across the country; he was also loyal to the people who had paid his wages from the time of his first arrival at the club in his early teens; he visited schools and hospitals; he opened bars and restaurants and promoted local businesses; and he repeatedly refused to leave Southampton for more lucrative deals in, dare I say it, more fashionable parts of the country; he really seemed to have a genuine affection for the people of Southampton and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity: as far as I know, he still lives there today.

In view of his perceived virtues, the name ‘Le God’ has seemed an entirely appropriate and uncontroversial one for the people of Southampton when they refer to Matt Le Tiss. And this was the case even when he took a walk on the proverbial wild side and left his wife and young family to begin an extra-marital relationship with an actress from that dreadful Aussie soap Neighbours who was passing through town with the pantomime. No doubt his personal situation had its complexities. And I do not want to give the impression of speaking glibly here about the broken home of a man who had two young children at the time. What I do want to dwell upon, however, is the fact that as far as Matt the hero, Matt ‘Le God’, was concerned – not much had changed at all, even in spite of his domestic difficulties. Just as they had always done, Southampton supporters continued to make bowing gestures to him when he went across to take his trademark corners. The stadium announcers still used messianic language to describe his achievement in ‘saving’ Southampton FC from relegation from the Premier League, year after year. Matt Le Tissier never once stopped enjoying what cliché obsessed football commentators call a ‘cult’ following among Southampton supporters: and he was and still is referred to as the ‘Messiah’ of the south coast. And while the metaphors begin to mix when he is referred to as Saint Matt, that too is no less appropriate a name for him at a football club whose nickname is ‘the saints’ and whose club crest features, amongst other things, a halo.

If what I have said so far seems as though it’s merely setting the scene for a wide-ranging polemical critique of what I, seeing things from a blithely Christian perspective, see to be some of the unfortunately ‘paganistic’ tendencies of the essentially misguided devotional lives of many living in the developed world of the present day, I want to state unequivocally now that this is not the simple message I have it in mind to preach to you in this sermon. For simple it is not. The dissection, and still less the dismissal, of major currents of talking and thinking in the contemporary world around us is, if conducted with due attention, inevitably a complex business. But the chief thought I have had over the past week, as I have been preparing to speak about the story of Zacchaeus in chapter 19 of Luke’s Gospel, has been of the difference between misguided devotion in this world of ours and the kind of devotion a Christian would think of as being guided by God. For what Luke’s account of Zacchaeus purports to offer its readers is a clear case of divinely guided and divinely oriented devotion. And it is a challenge to the reader of Luke’s account to enter into the risky and precarious task of defining what seems misguided about other kinds of devotion, both in Luke’s world and our own, if he or she is to make sense of the special qualities of Zacchaeus’.

The Gospel accounts, after all, are elsewhere more explicit about the distinction between guided and misguided devotion: indeed, a positive and apparently absolute distinction is offered. ‘You cannot’, we are told, ‘serve both God and Mammon’ – Mammon being the name of the false god of riches and wealth. And perhaps the most salient feature of the story of Zacchaeus is that we have the case of a man who had previously served Mammon coming full circle to serve God. Or, at least, that’s the subtext. But it is possible to draw out more from the story, I think, than just the idea of the absolute incompatibility of serving both God and Mammon.

A Sermon I gave [1]

I post here, in case anyone wants to read it, the text of a sermon I recently gave in my college chapel. It's rather long, but I hope not too rambling, and was a joy but also a challenge to write. I have split it up into 4 posts.

Revelation 3:1-6, 14-end; Luke 19:1-10
May I speak to you tonight in the name of the Father, the son and of the holy spirit. Please have a seat.

A fact which often escapes the notice of those who bemoan the celebrity obsessed culture which we 21st century westerners live in today is that people have always had their icons, their heroes, their gods; fellow human beings whom we can look upon, compare ourselves to, admire and venerate. A recently published book argues not altogether unconvincingly that what we now call celebrity culture was a very familiar theme a very long time ago in the ancient Graeco-Roman world – one of the few significant differences between the mental landscape of their world and ours being that we today are perhaps a little more particular about the dividing line between human and divine than they were back then. David and Victoria Beckham may look or seem divine to some of us today, just as Alexander the Great and the emperor Augustus seemed to many back then, but in our wisdom we know better to think of David and Victoria as gods in any serious sense of the word. That seems about right. They aren’t immortal or omniscient or anything else we customarily ascribe to divinity. But even if we’re hesitant to invoke the language of divinity too readily when we refer to the likes of the Beckhams, it is nonetheless certainly true that for many of us they play the role of objects of intrigue: beautiful (perhaps), fascinating (to some), removed (on occasion); glamorous (in the eyes of many), stylish (to a degree), even mysterious (when they aren’t talking). Something about them, at any rate, captivates rather a lot of us. And yet we know better – or so we think – than seriously to think of David and Victoria as ‘gods’. If pushed, we might remark that they’re far too fraught, human, unintelligent and even boring truly to deserve the label. And that we know this is evidence, I think, of at least some idea on our part of what we think – and perhaps implicitly understand – God is really like: not so fraught, not so human, not so unintelligent, and not so boring.

And yet. In other ways, it seems to me that the ways in which we talk about the Beckhams and other celebrity figures whom our culture produces, celebrates and critiques is less obviously suggestive of sophisticated theological awareness. For it’s not uncommon, after all, to hear people bandying about phrases like ‘he or she is a god’, or ‘he’s my god’ or ‘he’s God’s gift’ or – more popularly still – ‘he’s a legend’ when talking of such people or even in respect of lesser lights still in these blasphemous days of ours. Certainly one accepts that when people use these phrases, they are not meaning to subscribe to their full and complete sense: when we talk of ‘playing God’, for example, a pejorative meaning is still possible. But our intellectual alarm bells might nonetheless ring when we hear this language: since it’s certainly the case that the boundary between the words we use to express ourselves and the thoughts we think and the feelings we feel is not in every context an obvious and altogether secure one. By speaking in a certain way, that is to say, we may open up a space for ourselves to think and feel in precisely that way. And in the concrete example I have mentioned, that may mean that if I say to myself and others every Saturday afternoon that David Beckham or some other human is a God or a legend, it may be that I am opening a space in which such propositions become in a sense true both for myself and for others around me. And this would be at the very least ironic, and at the most tragic, if at heart I know better than to subscribe to such a crude idea of divinity.

The Story of Zacchaeus (Luke 19)

For anyone interested in reading my sermon, which follows in the next post, it will be useful to read in conjunction with it the following text, drawn from Luke's Gospel, which tells the story of Jesus' involvement with Zacchaeus, a tax collector, in Jericho.

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today." So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. All the people saw this and began to mutter, "He has gone to be the guest of a 'sinner.' "But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, "Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount". Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."

Prayer: Some Collected Thoughts [2]

‘In praying, do not heap up empty phrases’ – Gospel of Matthew 6:7.

‘Prayer of the kind I have been trying to describe is precisely what resists the urge of religious language to claim a total perspective: by articulating its own incompleteness before God, it turns away from any claim to human completeness. By ‘conversing’ with God, it preserves conversation between human speakers’ – Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology 13.

‘Prayer of petition is a form of self-exploration and at the same time self-realization. If we are honest enough to admit to our shabby infantile desires, then the grace of God will grow in us; it will slowly be revealed to us, precisely in the course of our prayer, that there are more important things that we truly do want. But this will not be some abstract recognition that we ought to want these things; we will really discover a desire for them in ourselves. But we must start where we are’ – Hebert McCabe, God Still Matters 74.

‘God’s directing creativity is the answer to the question of the meaning of prayer, especially prayers of supplication and prayers of intercession. Neither type of prayer can mean that God is expected to acquiesce in interfering with existential conditions. Both mean that God is asked to direct the given situation toward fulfilment. The prayers are an element in this situation, a most powerful factor if they are true prayers.’ – Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 267.

‘Prayer only makes sense within a certain type of universe. The mechanical world of Laplace’s calculator, where both past and future are inexorably contained within the dynamical circumstances of the present, would be too rigid a world to have prayer (or humanity, for that matter) within it...it is also not the world of modern science. Prayer also only makes sense with a certain kind of God. A God totally above the temporal process, with the future as clearly present to him as the past, would be a suspect collaborator in the encounter of prayer...The cross provides the only framework in which we shall begin to make sense of the Christian experience of prayer’ – John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence 72, 76.

Prayer: Some Collected Thoughts [1]

The pun of the title is intentional. This is the second post in succession which merely rehearses the views of others. But I feel there's value in linking together the thoughts of fellow believers in this way. They certainly inform and shape my own views. And precisely this method was favoured by the great De Lubac himself as well as in the excellent recent work by Olivier Clement on the Roots of Christian Mysticism. To draw together the wisdom of the past and to forge it into a glorious harmonious symphony of praise is all the theologian can do. And if the moral ambition of the historian of Christianity is to make the living faith speak in places and times where it cannot at present do so, then the method is acceptable to him too. For the effort to regain meaning and context in particular past circumstances cannot be justified if it is made at the expense of a much greater loss. If the following passages represent merely a synthesis of my own reading and thinking on the question of prayer, I trust they are no worse for it. Their intention, however, is to capture the essence of prayer in others' lives - in the present and past - and to represent something of what the Gospel has had to say on the matter.

‘The fear of prayer: is it fear of illusion, or fear of truth? Fear of psychological complications or fear of God? And is it not at the same time fear of finding one’s self and fear of losing one’s self?’ – Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, 191.

‘One who strives after pure prayer will hear noises and uproar, voices and insults. But he will not be dismayed nor lose his composure if he says to God, ‘Thou art with me, I fear no evil’ – Evagrius of Pontus, On Prayer, 97.

‘They asked Abba Macarius, ‘How should one pray?’ The old man replied, ‘There is no need to lose oneself in words. It is enough to spread out the hands and to say, “Lord, as you will and as you know best, have mercy”. If the battle is fierce, say “Help!” He knows what is suitable for you and he will take pity on you’ – Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Macarius 19.

‘Prayer is continuous when the spirit clings to God with deep emotion and great longing, and remains forever attached to him by faith and hope in all the actions and events of destiny’ – Maximus Confessor, Asceticism 25.

‘When the spirit dwells in a person, from the moment in which that person has become prayer, he never leaves him. For the Spirit himself never ceases to pray in him. Whether the person is asleep or awake, prayer never from then on departs from his soul’ – Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetic Treatises 85.

Beautiful words from Henri De Lubac

‘Among philosophers there are some who do not want to see the problems of existence: witness a whole genealogical tree of rationalists. There are some who simply declare such problems to be already solved; such is the whole spiritual family that has a so-called ‘mystical’ tendency. Then there are some who do not want to have any solutions for them; such are many agnostics and also numerous existentialists who make this decision as a matter of principle. There are some who want to solve these problems only with the tools of reason. And there are some who, out of sheer despair of reason, blithely impute to it what they take to be faith. Finally, there are some who see and admit that what is involved here is more than just great problems. With them reason can do its proper work; but from the bottom of their hearts the cry always explodes: ‘I stretch out my arms to my deliverer’.

I don't think he wrote anything which strikes home as truly as this passage from his Paradoxes of Faith. The sense of stretching one's arms out to one's deliverer from the bottom of one's heart is the sense which, for me above all, captures the essence of the Christian yearning for God which needs to be seen at the root of - and in spite of - all attempts at philosophical or anti-theological 'systematizing'.

Praying like an Evangelical

I realised last night that I really can't pray like an evangelical. Not that I often attempt to - but when in the company of evangelical Christians, it's nice to show you're willing to fit in in ways that seem ok. But small group prayers in which different subjects are picked out and God is asked this way or that? It's not a team sport and God is not a lord of the manner who needs to be persuaded this way or that. Thus, the exercise has its limitations.

My stumbling and mumbling prayers which I offer in silence, and which are complemented by the bold liturgical prayers of church services and by the Lord's Prayer, offer what is for me the most comfortable point of reference. Persuasion doesn't come into it: humility and the chance to profit from centuries of wisdom and tradition does. Which is not to say that other kinds of praying are necessarily bad or wrong. Just that when it comes to praying like an evangelical, something feels wrong, skindeep, out of order - merely touching the surface - or, at worst, profoundly missing the depth of the possibilities of prayer. This is not to disavow the wonderful possibilities of charismatic worship or experience. But it is to warn against its potential to misconstrue a relationship with God.

Change, Barack Obama and Sam Cooke

Since this is a blog about 'History and Spirit', and since I have not written anything here for a while now, it makes sense on the day of Barack Obama's victory in the US presidential election to break my silence. Throughout the election, Obama made full use of the slogan of 'change' - deliberately, I think, evoking the language of one of the most searing songs of the prematurely deceased soul singer Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come. Now that he's won the 'change', perhaps, has come. A 75% electoral turn-out ensured that the US elected its first black president. Mention, of course, should be made of John McCain - an honourable man and war-hero who would have made a far superior president to George W. Bush. But Obama was always going to win if the electorate showed up at the polls in force, and that is precisely what they did. Change, and the chance to elect an inspiring young leader with anti-war and left wing social policy inclinations, was always going to prove an attraction.

For now, the substance of the 'change' Obama has promised remains unseen. But his has been a message many have felt themselves capable of believing and it is to be hoped that he will not leave them feeling underwhelmed by what he manages to deliver. More, in short, needs to be done - both in the US and elsewhere - to spread the benefits of civilisation, medicine and technology to those who currently have no access to them. If Obama can take steps to achieve this - perhaps, for example, by confronting the barons who hold the US pharmaceutical companies in their grip - then the change he has promised will indeed correspond to the change which Sam Cooke predicted decades ago.

Schopenhaurian Pessimism

I sometimes wonder how other people cope with bouts of depressing Schopenhaurian pessimism. It’s not easy to bring this sort of stuff up in casual conversation. It’s even less easy to experience. But for my own therapeutic purposes, I’m going to point here to a few fundamentals of the condition I’m referring to. In the first place, I identified it with Schopenhauer because he was both a cosmic pessimist and a man who had high regard for the ‘will’, which I would narrow here to simply ‘my human will’. Like many Christian theologians and mystics – including, I’d venture, both Jesus himself and St. Paul – Schopenhauer came to the verdict that individual wills need to realise their true position within a wider totality of (cosmic) Will. Not an easy thing to do, we can safely say, if even Jesus found himself struggling to do it – recall his diligent praying and conversation with God before his renewed assurance to carry out his purpose (‘not my will, but thine’) was attained. Whereas the Will of Jesus’ father had as its end goodness/good – we must surely think so?! – the Will of Schopenhauer’s universe is a malevolent beast which runs ‘the show’ without recourse to any higher principle than the perpetration of evil, pure and cynical. Or at least that’s the rather scary conclusion I understand the old fellow to have come to. An interesting thing about this picture is that it links a – or even the – central analytical category of academic psychology, the Will, with a theological disposition. Of course, many philosophers have done precisely this, and in other ways, but it’s worth noting all the same that Schopenhauer makes this connection because he makes it more directly than most (as, of course, did Nietzsche).

The sense that it is appropriate to join Schopenhauer arises, I think, from the sense that Christianity’s own ways of coping with the questions at stake are found wanting by comparison. The sense, for example, that St. Paul’s realisation of his wretchedness, of the sorry and profound limitedness of his own will-power, does something apart from testify to us of our persistent and unending failure to live up to (or even fully to recognise) what we know to be true and good. What this wretchedness can instead speak of, perhaps, is a worldview which would find even unChristian Manichaeism optimistic: a dark, dark, evil place in which souls are interred, and in which they are blind even to the extent that they cannot so much as recognise what is truly good in order to feel deficient in relation to it. Whereas Paul can feel himself at least to ‘know’ good, albeit somewhat inexactly, any such knowledge in the Schopenhaurian universe would be mere delusion: true ‘goodness’ is not just unattainable, as Paul felt it to be: it is non-existent. In the darkness which instead predominates, all that is is evil, or, at least, we cannot be sure that it is not. In this world, it is St. Paul’s mistaken sense of truth, and not just his anguish, which testifies to his fraught, failed humanness which exists only in the context of gloom, gloom, gloom.

What might speak to us in this darkness to communicate the presence of truth, of good or goodness, of beauty and love, in such a way that we can feel confident to identify them? Schopenhauer answers ‘nothing’, as does the depressing pessimism I have named after him. Christianity answers ‘the body of Christ’ in its relation to his people, the people of ‘Israel’. And in reality, this answer ought to be recognised, I think, as something of a ‘shot in the dark’ – and I mean here the important double sense of this phrase, in its denoting a ‘shot of light’ as well as its more usual meaning of ‘a high stakes gamble’. This ‘shot’ is, perhaps, something – and, it might be admitted – something precious indeed in an often dismal, cruel, arbitrary world.

The best therapy I can think of for the Schopenhaurian affliction is of the simplest sort. It is to take an ever higher view of all in the universe which we can feel passionately to be beautiful, true, good, just and right. The key thing here is that the degree of our passion must depend upon the extent to which these characteristics can be thought truly to lie together in any given belief or practice. Which, I suppose, means I am saying that something will be all the more ‘just’ only if it is all the more true, all the more good, all the more right, all the more beautiful. And I am saying the same by extension of all of the concepts just mentioned in their relations to one another. The concepts are best regarded as working together, rather than in isolation, I think. The idea here is that they might serve mutually to strengthen one another and to move towards a harmony of relations, so that we have no justice which is not right and true and good. What ‘justice’ would it be if it were not these, after all?

It is, in any case, to the extent that these phenomena can be thought to strengthen one another in an ever progressing unity that they can (perhaps) more effectively combat the threat of Schopenhaurian affliction, when it comes around – and it will continue to come around, I suspect, until their unification is full and complete. If, moreover, true love is characterised by the total and complete and full unity of these phenomena, then it is right for the Christian to speak of his longing for the eventual, complete realisation of true love. And he must be emboldened to hope for the truth of his gospel – namely, that this true love has already been made known to him as a ‘shot in the dark’, during the course of its being made complete. And this, finally, brings me back to something I said right at the beginning: that it is not easy talking with other people about one’s bouts of Schopenhaurian pessimism. I think, though, that when it seems appropriate, it is necessary to try. For pessimism struggles to remain pessimistic, perhaps, if it can open itself in communication. For if communication in its very nature implies the presumption that the apprehension of greater truths is possible through its agency, then one can perhaps hope that along with the greater truths it might yield may come also greater justice, greater beauty and greater good. One can only but hope. I wonder what Schopenhauer would say.

Anne Frankishness

A confession: before going to sleep for the past few nights, I have been enjoying my newly purchased copy of Anne Frank's diary. I've been really enjoying it. The blurb on the dustjacket says it all when it champions Anne as a humanist of the first order, and it accurately describes her as fully displaying both an innocence and an uncanny perspicuity in her descriptions of human relationships. I haven't got to the end of the diary yet, but I know what's coming. A picture of the grave of Anne and her sister on the back of the book says it all. In spite of this the book has been an uplifting read: I am amazed that Anne was happy to expose some of her most intimate thoughts and feelings to a wide audience of readers. (She planned to submit the diary to a publishing company who had advertised an interest in disseminating memoirs of the war). In our age of 'reality' entertainment and 'confessional' TV and radio broadcasting, I've yet to encounter anything approaching the sensitivity, honesty and genuineness of Anne in her diary. People of her time period may have been 'repressed' in ways we now aren't (for better or worse), but I feel certain that our culture promotes new and different kinds of 'repression', which come with their own drawbacks and frustrations. Which means there's all the more reason to read Anne's diary.

The Church of Violence

As I was sitting today in the local church in London, talking with a friend, I heard a shout and a bang from outside the church door, where a man and a woman had been sitting, arguing. Clearly, someone had been hit. The woman - she was about 40 - rushed in to the church, crying. No one followed. My friend and I wondered what to do. We walked over and she said she had been hit and that she was afraid. I asked if she wanted help: did she want me to check if he had gone, or if he was still outside. Did he have a weapon? No, apparently. I went out to look, and as I did, the man came in. The couple began arguing with one another. It was a desperate, pitiful scene. She accused him of hitting her and of being prone to violence. He was accusing her of abusing his children. She was saying she didnt want to be with him any more. He was saying that she had to stay with him. The conversation was heated.

With the threat of more violence in mind, my friend called the police. It seemed the right thing to do. I went over to the couple and offered them two chairs at the back of the church to sit down in. This was partly a strategy to stop him from getting her against the wall, and talking right into her face. It half-worked. Soon enough, the police arrived. They asked us what had happened and we told them. If we hadn't seen the violence, nothing could be done, we were told. We hadn't seen it, but we'd heard it. But that wasn't enough.

From what I could tell, the police did an admirable job of calming things down. They parted the man and the woman from one another, and sent each went away from the church in separate directions after about 10 minutes of discussion. What more could the police do? The officer who talked to us impressed me. He was courteous and understanding and somewhere in conversation he slipped in the sage remark that 'we all have our domestic issues'. True enough. But it's still sad that physical violence so easily appeals to us as a useful means of communication: it helps us get our stubborn point across, when all else fails. And I can't think that it really does the job we want it to. Not really.

Of course, 'violence' - loosely conceived - is a fact of all human relationships. We do violence to each other's wills and inclinations when we come into contact with one another and attempt to do anything other than gratify. We strive to bend and shape others around our own agendas and presuppositions. Forms of 'violence' are enacted on humans around us in the world, all of the time, with our complicity. Some are pernicious; some are not. Most of us don't stick out our own necks out to stop what is pernicious. We are inclined not to. Such neglect of the needs of others is perhaps the grossest, and most tragic, example of what might be called 'indirect' violence. Everyone is complicit in it - some more than others.

Reflecting on some of these things a little later, I reminded myself that the Christian church was an appropriate setting for the events I witnessed: acts of human violence are never out of place in churches. Violence in the church has a strange and perhaps awkward double aspect. On the one hand, it has tended to be condemned - although perhaps not to the extent and frequency that we would like. Christians campaign for peace, mercy, love and forgiveness. Can these things truly be pursued through the use of violence, in any sense of the word? (Contextual factors have tended to decide the matter). On the other hand, it is well remembered that acts of violence give life - they are truly vital - both to the church and its congregations. The taking of the apple; the crucifixion, spearing and abandonment of Jesus; the acts of the martyrs. And, according to some theologies, the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. We can look out more broadly too: what kind of beauty, what kind of joy, what kind of pleasure would there be without violence? Theologies of the Cross, however morbid and offensive some of them are, also make this point clear.

The most fundamental truth about Christian conceptions of violence, of course, is its recognition of the bare necessity of taking violence onto oneself for the sake of others. Only then can we respond adequately to violence: in the most difficult way. Maximilian Kolbe understood this. Jesus knew it too. As did Mahatma Gandhi. be the proponents of penal substitutionary models of the atonement seem to know it: but the challenge to them is to make good on their insights, rather than simply to (try to) enshrine them in crypto-Pauline dogmas about divine wrath and - bizarrely - in foundationalist epistemic principles.

What needs to be recognised above all is that for Jesus, the overriding concern was to plug a hole in the system of violence we all inhabit. He stood in the eye of the storm and took the consequences of worldly violence onto himself. He refused to shy away from it, and refused to respond to it in kind. He refused to avenge it. He tried instead to overcome it - by serving as a revolutionary exponent of a different kind of 'violence'. This violence would be restorative and constructive. It would be concerned with building up and seeking out, not breaking down and hiding away.

The tragedy is that only Jesus and a few other humans have ever shown themselves capable of such acts of constructive, restorative violence. The decision truly to suffer in place of others, for their sake and out of the desire to address the destructive violence the world wreaks on them, is a rare decision indeed. But it is the hallmark of true, full love to engage in constructive violence. Constructive violence in self sacrifice for others is the Christian calling. And its perpetrator is the holy spirit, whose divine fruit is forgiveness and the power truly to forgive. For those of us who have only a tiny taste of the fruit of this spirit - for those of us, that is, who can't think to give of ourselves enough to taste more - we can be comforted in our measure by the saving knowledge that our Lord knows and pities our weakness and has worked and is working - both in himself and in us - to address it.

Dawkinsian Philosophy

Richard Dawkins is a scientist, a scientist who is better qualified than any 'theologian' - so he says - to unlock 'the truth' about the universe. When it comes to 'philosophers', as opposed to 'theologians', he's not quite so dismissive. The views of 'philosophers' are deferred to in Dawkins' recent book, The God Delusion - for example, the (atheistic) philosophers A.C. Grayling and Daniel Dennett. These are authorities whose arguments Dawkins feels he can rely upon. Richard Swinburne, for example, is classed as a 'theologian' and criticised as a representative of 'theology', as is Keith Ward, and, from the more distant past, Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm and others.

Dawkinsian 'philosophers' have to be atheists, and his 'theologians' have to be theists. There have certainly been many theistic philosophers, however, and it's pretty clear (at least to me) that many of the 'theologians' Dawkins scorns are in fact as 'philosophical' as the atheists he calls 'philosophers'. Meanwhile, there have been many atheistic theologians. What, after all, is 'theology'? A minimal definition would be that it is 'God-talk' or 'reasoning about God' and is done by theists and atheists alike. So, according to this definition, Dawkins is a theologian too, although, perhaps, he is a theologian who disagrees with the views of other theologians who hold different opinions. What's certain is that most theologians try to be 'philosophical' - and claim to be thinking 'philosophically' in their theology to greater or lesser extents.

The rhetorical tactic of dressing wolves in sheep's clothing - deferring to people whose arguments are deemed attractive as 'philosophers' and dismissing those whose arguments are deemed unattractive as 'theologians' - is not obviously a charitable one. And I do believe it is a consciously adopted rhetorical tactic. It shows Dawkins neglecting the 'principle of charity' in argument - and this isn't the only example of his doing so. How, though, does flouting this principle, which might be thought to constitute an important building block in any 'Reasoned Discourse' (a nice idea and his own darling), contribute to the advancement of his own case in rational terms? It surely doesn't (unless the sophists had it right), but it certainly makes for a decent put-down - and, hence, for a decent claim to power over those who can't detect the spin in his rhetoric. I have to say, in fairness to Dawkins, that I'd rather inhabit a world in which his argumentative assumptions - rather than those of young earth creationists - call the rhetorical shots. Still, it'd be nice if neither were being deployed: a hollow dream, I know.

This Blog

The title of this blog is borrowed from a wonderful book on the scriptural exegesis of the 3rd century Christian thinker, Origen of Alexandria, by Henri de Lubac. It is intended in its present context to refer to attempts to speak about spiritual meaning in the context of human history. These attempts can take on a variety of guises, as de Lubac himself knew well. They can be strictly historicizing in character, which is to say that they can seek merely to explain the ways in which past people understood the meaning of past happenings in light of their spiritual ideas. Or they can take on a more presentist philosophico-theological tenor and begin to speak of how people in our own world might understand the past - either as a whole, or in respect of single events or experiences. Each of these areas of thought will be mentioned in entries to this page, which will touch upon the ideas of a range of thinkers, past and present. Both areas of thought matter. They might even relate to each other in an important way.

Even if one is not a historian or a philosopher of history or a theologian, everybody adopts ways of thinking about matters pertaining to history and spirit, whether as a result of reflection or not. Although there is no reason to suppose that reflection alone is conducive to the accurate portrayal of the past or to the accessing of correct modes of thinking about it, I don't think it can hurt in either case. My own feeling is that without reflection, historical thinking rapidly becomes unfaithful to its past objects and presentist in character. Some people don't think the potential for such infidelity and (naive?) presentism to be a problem. But I am inclined to suppose that it must be. Why should I remain unopposed to the loss of information and perspective on our ancestors and on the world which shaped ours? I can foresee that good answers to this question could be conceived. What, for example, if moving away from more strictly historicizing modes of thinking about the past could lead in our present-day society to greater levels of equality, welfare and value in people's lives? It's a good question, and if we could be sure that a positive answer to it were possible, a genuine case could be made of its strength. In the absence of relevant or sufficient information, however, there is no reason to let it win the matter. I trust that there remains, then, a moral case - or, at least, moral potential - for historical thinking, at least, that is, of a certain kind. I am not at all arguing for the validity of Hegelian historicism or any other such philosophy of history, although I certainly don't dissent from the view that (forms of) such philosophies of history are possible (and perhaps even worthwhile).

As for spiritual thinking, this is a kind of thinking which tends to speak positively of reflection. Certainly, most 'spiritual' thought has wanted to privilege certain kinds of reflection and to abandon others. Against this, my own view is that 'spiritual' thinking - and it is a good question what exactly might be said to characterise 'spiritual' thinking - must be open to honest reflection on all things. Maybe the posts of this blog will bear that view out and go some way to support it. For I certainly cannot speak from my own experience of the kind of prayer, the kind of worship and the kind of 'spiritual' life which in principle refuses to meditate on certain issues, no matter how difficult or arcane they might seem to some (or even to myself). Everything in my experience has to be left open to reflection and this is almost itself an article of faith, I suppose. No corner of the universe can be ciphered off and dismissed as irrelevant. Radical openness, and the potential for continuing questioning about truth and meaning on all fronts. Answers are important too, of course. I will end this first post by confessing my own dedication to the idea that a lowly crucified rabbi offers more of those than an educated Platonism. Cause, then, for further reflection - at least for me.