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.