My selection focuses in the main on works which exclude from their purview a particular focus on the exegesis of Biblical texts. The theory of interpretation is discussed in a number of them, however. I would rank them as doing the most to shape my thinking about philosophy and theology out of all the books I've read in the fields. I will compile a similar list of books dealing with the New Testament and early church in due course.
20. Denys Turner, Faith Seeking.
19. Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason.
18. John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension.
17. W.D. Davies, Christian Engagements with Judaism.
16. Owen Chadwick, Hensley Henson: A Study in the Conflict between Church and State.
15. Herbert McCabe, Faith within Reason.
14. Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism.
13. Robert Morgan, The Nature of New Testament Theology.
12. John Macquarrie, A History of Twentieth Century Religious Thought.
11. John Barton and Robert Morgan, The Oxford Companion to Biblical Interpretation.
10. George Pattison, A short course in the Philosophy of Religion.
9. John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized.
8. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology.
7. Keith Ward, God, Chance and Necessity.
6. Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters.
5. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History.
4. Ian Ker, Newman and the Fullness of Christianity.
3. Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery.
2. Blaise Pascal, Pensees.
1. Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith.
Showing posts with label Theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theology. Show all posts
Friday, 3 April 2009
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
How to be an atheist: A lesson in Muscularity
I begin this post with an excerpt from an essay in Denys Turner's excellent book 'Faith Seeking', which occurs at the conclusion of the Yale philosopher-theologian's challenge to contemporary atheists. Turner writes as follows right at the conclusion of his discussion:
'So, 'How to be an atheist?' It is not easy; you need to work at it. Be intellectually adult, get an education, get yourself a discipline; resist all temptation to ask such questions as you do not know in principle can be answered, being careful to suppress any which might seem to push thought off civilized limits; be reasonable, lest you find yourself being committed to an excessive rationality; and have the good manners to scratch no itches which occur in intellectually embarassing places - at least in public...if you want to be an atheist, then, it is necessary only to find that the world is to be a platitudinously dull fact. But, I warn you, to be as resolute as it takes in the conviction of such cosmic dullness requires much hard work, not a little training, and a powerful mental asceticism. Anything less resolute, and you run the risk of affliction by theological itches...' [Faith Seeking, p.22]
Perhaps the thing I like most about this description is its stern focus on the drab conformity of much atheism, which consists in its sweeping under the proverbial carpet of life's big questions. The image which comes most readily to my mind in this context is the desire of Adam and Eve to 'hide' from God in the garden of Eden, post fruit taking, a desire which - Paul assures us (1 Cor. 15:22) - leads only to death. In Christ, meanwhile, hiding is unnecessary. Being made alive involves coming out into the open; it involves countering and reacting against the drab conformity which life in hiding demands.
However, when light comes into the world, to evoke an image from John's Gospel, some people prefer to stay in the darkness. The darkness is comfort in numbers, the realm of uncontroversy and macho back slapping; the darkness is a world in which deaths are plotted, and where the demise of the wilfully unrecognised light is hoped for. The darkness refuses to stretch out its arms to its deliverer and instead reaches to its own deliverance, which it finds confirmed in others doing the same thing. Johannine imagery, for all its worth here, only takes us so far.
What Turner's comment invites us to understand is that 'atheism' - conceived in its opposition to Christian faith - thrives in its contemporary forms on being 'civilized', staying 'rational', and refusing to move into 'uncivilized' or 'irrational' circles or trains of thoughts. The complaint owes its urgency, I think, not only to the author's Marxist sympathies. It also comes out of a genuine understanding of how the Pharisaic legalism which the Gospels can so strongly protest against can work. Not, you will understand, that I think Jesus was 'out to get' the Pharisees or to rebel against 'Pharisaism' per se: it is more likely, certainly, that he saw in Pharisaism much that was worthy of admiration, much to be commended - but also the potential for abuse, serious abuse - and this was something, I think, which certain Pharisees were themselves not particularly given to seeing. In a way, Pharisaism in its negative guises (the guises which Jesus protested against) and Atheism (that is, Muscular, Legalistic, Atheism with a capital A) are natural bedfellows.
They both start from principles of order and rationality, on the need for being civilized. And they take strong exception to acts of dissidence or words of complaint against them. And if we return to Denys Turner's words, they both require a stringent intellectual regime to support them, in which asking certain questions is ruled out de rigueur - on the basis of some unstated, hidden, a priori reasoning. Christian faith, and Christian lives, are best realised very often as acts of dissidence, as sustained attempts to break through barriers of order and rationality which are constructed in the name of reason, order and being civilized. Love, and loving behaviour cannot be relied upon to conform to these expectations; the holy spirit, the spirit of love, is too unbridled for the harness of pure reason, pure order, pure civilization, as they are conceived by Muscular Atheists. For their constructions - made apart from a political stance which finds its origin in the desire for love of God and neighbour (does love consist above all in its rationality??) - miss the mark very profoundly. And this is so even while the most collegiate support for the atheist worldview is available among friendly peers who would also sweep a certain kind of question under the carpet as part of the intellectual training in rationality and being civilized which Good Atheist Thought relies upon.
As for Christianity, meanwhile, the only wisdom, the only reason, consists in the love of God and of neighbour (which is like it). And here, a point which many Christians themselves miss needs to be made: to love as Christ demands is not to sit cosily in intellectual communion, with regimes of reason and order comfortably in place. For that is what the Pharisees and the Atheists do. To love is to believe, to be Christlike, and to pick up our crosses and follow: to love is to do what is right and to feel and think it throught doing it. And doing means challenging, overturning, reinventing, creating. This means, very often, doing what the legalists would have you not do: it involves overthrowing their tables, cracking the intellectual whip and breaking down the barriers of order and reason which they construct to maintain their communities of cosy control and peer support. God's love seeks people out: it won't let them hide. It's a lesson many Christians - myself included - need constantly to remind ourselves of.
As for Christianity, meanwhile, the only wisdom, the only reason, consists in the love of God and of neighbour (which is like it). And here, a point which many Christians themselves miss needs to be made: to love as Christ demands is not to sit cosily in intellectual communion, with regimes of reason and order comfortably in place. For that is what the Pharisees and the Atheists do. To love is to believe, to be Christlike, and to pick up our crosses and follow: to love is to do what is right and to feel and think it throught doing it. And doing means challenging, overturning, reinventing, creating. This means, very often, doing what the legalists would have you not do: it involves overthrowing their tables, cracking the intellectual whip and breaking down the barriers of order and reason which they construct to maintain their communities of cosy control and peer support. God's love seeks people out: it won't let them hide. It's a lesson many Christians - myself included - need constantly to remind ourselves of.
Monday, 23 February 2009
Aelred of Rievaulx on Friendship
Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx, the 12th century Christian mystic who lived as a Cistercian monk in Yorkshire, is a beautiful and well known tract which is well worth a read. It certainly qualifies, I think, as a 'classic' of Christian spirituality. I'm about half way through it (the book takes a dialogue form - in style it is in this respect not dissimilar to Plato - and the Aelred character is the centrepiece and a compelling discussant). I reproduce here one of my favourite lines from the text, where Aelred asks his discussant Ivo the following:
'Have you forgotten that Scripture says: 'He that is a friend loves at all times' (Prov. 17:17). Our [St.] Jerome also, as you recall, says: 'Friendship which can end was never true friendship' (Jerome, Letter 3.6 in Patrologia Latina 22:335). That friendship cannot endure without charity having been more than adequately established. Since then in friendship eternity blossoms, truth shines forth, and charity grows sweet, consider whether you ought to separate the name of wisdom from these three'.
The striking thing about the text is the essential link it insists upon between eternity and friendship, and with truth and charity, and finally with wisdom. All this links beautifully with at least two crucial biblical motifs: God as love/charity (1 Jn. 4:16) and Christ as truth (Jn. 14:6). And the link between wisdom and the presence of Christ (so e.g. Col. 3:16) is also clearly in view. It's a clarion call to remember that true love inextricably reflects and exists in the truth and love of God in Jesus Christ. Aelred, to repeat, is well worth a read.
The striking thing about the text is the essential link it insists upon between eternity and friendship, and with truth and charity, and finally with wisdom. All this links beautifully with at least two crucial biblical motifs: God as love/charity (1 Jn. 4:16) and Christ as truth (Jn. 14:6). And the link between wisdom and the presence of Christ (so e.g. Col. 3:16) is also clearly in view. It's a clarion call to remember that true love inextricably reflects and exists in the truth and love of God in Jesus Christ. Aelred, to repeat, is well worth a read.
Thursday, 19 February 2009
A Review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion
The book aims to put the 'scientific' boot into 'religion'. In this respect, its author knows he is doing nothing new. Since the 1800s, popular works have been written which have described how 'science' should render 'religious' beliefs and practices obsolete. Dawkins is in some ways a sophisticated contributor to this discourse - though this can be explained for the most part in terms of the competence of his rhetorical sleights of hand, whether intentional or not - and in a number of ways disappointing.
For a start, his thesis is not that science 'disproves' religion. That would be - according to his own criteria of judgement - something he could only show by publishing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal evidence to that effect. And Dawkins does not claim to possess such evidence. So, the author is careful throughout to avoid using scientific jargon to describe the project he's engaged in. Herein lies the book's rhetorical sophistication. It presents itself as the argument of a scientistic rationalist. But it does not attempt to root its assertions concerning the non-existence of God (it is 99.99% that he does not exist, we are told) in scientific proofs.
That leads to an interesting fact about the book. You're not reading science; you're reading philosophy (and, dare I say it, theology). Dawkins knows these aren't his fields. He's curiously damning about one of them ('theology') and doesn't really mention the other ('philosophy'). This is an important fact I've discussed elsewhere. Interestingly, all of the God Delusion's 'philosophers' are atheists or agnostics, whereas all of its 'theologians' are theists. This rhetorical tactic of separating people into 'philosophers' and 'non-philosophers' on the basis of their belief in God is hardly charitable. Especially when you consider how many of the greatest 'philosophers' the world's ever seen have been theists: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and, amongst modern day philosophers, e.g. Plantinga. The failure to explore the relationship between philosophy and theism in the book is baffling.
Now it's true that there are lots of atheistic philosophers too. Everyone knows about Bertrand Russell and David Hume. But the God question didn't just disappear when their arguments appeared - at least, not in the minds of very many of the world's best philosophers. Is this important fact considered by Dawkins?
No, not really...he's more interested in pursuing the unsophisticated arguments of unsophisticated theists (his highly questionable claim to have refuted the cosmological and ontological arguments for the existence of God apart). And that, for most people (including perhaps himself) will be satisfactory. Fundamentalist believers make easy targets for many people, and it hardly takes an Oxford professor to take a swipe at them for most people to believe they're pretty nuts. What you might expect from an Oxford professor, though, is a little more respect for and awareness of the nature and history of philosophical argumentation, especially if that's what he's engaging in.
Many very eminent scientists are theists - contrary to what Dawkins implies in his book - and he doesn't confront in the God Delusion the kinds of ideas they might seek to offer in opposition to his. Check out John Barrow, John Polkinghorne, Freeman Dyson or Arthur Peacocke. And as for the philosophers, you'll hardly hear a peep from Dawkins about Plato, Hume, Aquinas or Kant. And that seems rather a shame, because these are the guys many of the philosophical academy would turn to if they want to get serious about the history of theism and philosophical arguments for or against it.
Philosophy, however, can't and doesn't work like science. Atheism and 'Reason' won't be true bedfellows until it can. And it's worth emphasising that very many philosophers - including very many atheists - see no reason to believe the harmonisation of 'science' and 'philosophy' will ever happen. But why?!
Philosophical ideas constitute 'evidence' (one of Dawkins' favourite words) of a very peculiar kind. It's not easy to twist them into irrefutable proofs about the external world, as centuries of logicians have found out (often to their dismay). Words and ideas are very tricky customers. It's very difficult to know for sure what they can and can't tell us about what's true, what's real. How good a job can they do? To take a simple example: if there were a God (and how would we know for sure that he was there?), how much could words and arguments do to describe 'him' and how much would it be beyond their power to describe? Any answer to such a question relies on the individual insights of the person who answers. If a person makes the decision beforehand that 'God' cannot possibly be describable in language, then it's no surprise if the person doesn't end up believing in a God knowable only through words and arguments. If, on the other hand, one begins with the premise that a certain combination of words and arguments could 'prove' God's existence or character, then investigation into the presence of such a God could proceed. But the ground rules have to be established. That's what Dawkins (writing in his new role as a philosopher) fails to understand and it's one reason why his academic reviewers have been so unimpressed by his book.
Consider the following: someone decides that 'God' must be the character described with complete accuracy in the pages of the Bible OR just a big fantasy. You choose either one or the other, if those are the only options, don't you...But should these be the only two options? For centuries, Christians (and Jews) have opposed simple minded interpretations of the Bible and have fully admitted that it's riddled with problematic statements and self contradictory claims. It doesn't stop them believing in God. God is more than the Bible. The Bible is first and foremost an important historical record. Only once it is interpreted as history can it be used for the purposes of philosophy or theology. But these sensible, considered positions aren't addressed by modern anti-religion polemicists such as Dawkins. And the failure to address them makes the God Delusion inadequate as a work of philosophy. And since it is not 'science' either, what is it?
Well, it's certainly a crowd pleaser. Witness the statements of applause in the dustjacket of the book. But is 'truth' being conveyed to the crowd in a 'reasonable' way which handles the 'evidence' fairly? Hardly. If it were, the book would be in a top scientific journal. Whole areas of philosophy would have become no-go areas. The great religious institutions (all of which pay attention to the findings of science, at least in their modern incarnations, despite Dawkins' suspicions) would have closed down. And yet none of this has happened.
The best conclusion to draw is that the God Delusion fails in its most basic ambitions - to show that all ideas of 'God' should be considered as species of 'delusion' - but nevertheless succeeds as an entertaining but extended rant, whose chief value is in undermining naive kinds of theism (the kinds, the author insists, which persist amongst almost all 'religious' people). For those who continue to seek God, however, the 'God Delusion' will not offer an insurmountable barrier. Dawkins himself sees the attractions of Jesus. 'Atheists for Jesus', he advocates. Well, if Jesus was God or the son of God (whatever we take these words to mean), he's clearly not far away from 'getting God' after all. His real truck is with unthinking, dishonest fundamentalism. This is something he has in common with many of the world's most religious people. The real 'delusion' is that of the insufficiently thoughtful.
Friday, 19 December 2008
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.
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.
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.
Monday, 24 November 2008
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''.
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''.
Friday, 21 November 2008
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.
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 [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.
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.
Monday, 10 November 2008
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.
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
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.
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.
Friday, 5 September 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
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.
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.
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