Click here to view the embedded video.

But it isn’t a groundbreaking revelation of the whys and woes of Australian politics.  Tanner gives a thorough commentary – particular with regard to the events surrounding the 2010 federal election – but often he is simply shedding light on the bleeding obvious: our politics has become driven by spin, show-horses get more power than work-horses, and ideas and thoughtful governance are being forced to give way to the charade of “look like you’re doing something and don’t offend anyone important” (crf. p15).

Much of this book explores the codependent interplay between journalists and politicians.  ”Calm makes for terrible telly” – Tanner quotes Michael Roux on page 58 – and so politicians are forced to create drama and manhandle debate into narratives that excite but don’t invite a consideration of social value.

There was a modicum of challenge for me: I was one of those who bemoaned the “Kath & Kim” nature of the last Federal election campaign which seemed ruled by focus groups made up of the disengaged.  My opinion firmed up – let’s get rid of compulsory voting – let the engaged people vote, and the disengaged exercise their abstention by default.  Tanner himself muses on the possibility (p208).  The challenge is in the recognition that I am, perhaps, one of the “cultural elites” with “waning power… to enforce notions of respectability and community values across our society.” (p180).  I hope not.   I long not for enforcement but for engagement, yet we are caught in a spinning spiral of cynicism and childish, formulaic, leadership-by-the-numbers.

The book is a good read.  It will continue to form some of the political engagement I have the opportunity to participate in these days.   My one frustration was that Tanner does not leave us with a solution.  I think perhaps it will take a crisis and a miracle to restore our national political integrity, let us pray they go together.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Public Domain day recognises the pieces of work that would have entered the public domain in America in 2012 if the law hadn’t changed in 1978.  It would have included works from 1955 such as Tolkien’s, The Return of the King, and Disney’s Lady and the Tramp.   These are no longer private works, they are public works – they have entered our public conscience, part of our corporate DNA.   When my young daughter insists on playfully eating the same piece of spaghetti as me it is clear that idea, that expression no longer “belongs” to Disney, even if we let them exclusively exploit it for a while, it belongs to all of us.

Read more about Public Domain Day: here

Someone sent me the following amusement, which I will not be taking up, but I like the idea.  From engadget a report of a 3D-printing service to turn your minecraft maps into real life objects!

This means, unfortunately, that I have had to implement the inconvenience of including a captcha input to prove the input is from a human.

It also means that if you have posted a question in the last four days I will not receive it as all new Q&A submissions for that period are being deleted.

Thanks,

W.

1. Tasmania, Tsunamis and the Prophecy of Dr. Owuor & A significant reply to Dr. Owuor – I’ll put these together (they were in first and second spot).  Dr. Owuor certainly drives a lot of google searches here.
2. The Q&A page.  I’ve enjoyed Q&A.  Keep the Q’s coming.
3. Review: From Good Man to Valiant Man. Lot of these coming from America where Lifekeys is making inroads. This post was written early 2010 and is showing some longevity.
4. Review: The Wingfeather Saga – Books 1 and 2. Traffic was helped by a retweet by @AndrewPeterson, the author.  Thank you!
5. Copying Gmail Contacts between accounts. Bit embarrassed about this one actually as the post only contains a half-solution – a basic script for moving contacts (which can be done with import/export features anyway) – which was meant to end up providing a proper syncing function but never got there.  Also an old post showing longevity.
6. Q&A: Should we stone Harold Camping as a false prophet? Along with Dr. Owuor I have to thank the spiritual nutters out there for generating discussion.
7. Bound for South Tasmania. This was the post that announced our news of moving to Hobart.  Probably shows how many facebook friends my wife and I have between us that would bother to click on a link we posted!
8. Q&A: As an Anglican, what do you believe [about the intermediate state]? and Q&A: Do you “remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy”? were part of a number of questions asked anonymously by (it turned out later) my good friend Mick Foster.  They were good questions and a lot of people appreciated the answers.
9. What is Ownable? kept the copyright issue live on the blog.  This is a long-living post from 2009.  There will be more on this topic  soon.
10. M’Cheyne Daily Bible Reading Glad to see this make the top ten.  It’s a resource from the blog for providing daily bible readings.

Hi Vestry,

I don’t know, there can sometimes be a lot of rabbits beneath the church – 10′s, 100′s!

You question goes to viability and numbers, but also goes to the essence of ‘what is church’ – what exactly would be “folded up”?

1) Essence of church – without wanting to put in a big ecclesiological treatise, let us say that a church is a local community of the people of God through which the Spirit is at work in the ministry of Word and Sacrament.

2) Numerical viability.  At what numerical point does this essence disappear?  Obviously you cannot have a church of one. Jesus talks about where “two or three are gathered”  (Matthew 18:20) in the context of bearing witness to the truth in confronting sin – perhaps that’s enough. Early churches, based on the synagogue model, expected 10 men to form the community – it might be myth, but I’ve heard this was the basis in early-Anglican-reformation days for only having a service of Holy Communion if 10 households signed up to receive it.  More recently viability has been financially determined – the ability to support a paid cleric who can provide the ministry of word and sacrament, or where the ministry is provided voluntarily and locally, to simply maintain the necessary organisational infrastructure.  One wonders what the correlation to the essence of church is, however – after all a lounge room doesn’t take much to maintain and it may have a lot of rabbits underneath!

So if by “folded up” you mean ceasing to meet and no longer being church – my answer would be “not necessarily”, even “no!” – particularly if there were no other churches nearby.  If by “folded up” you mean something like “change the way in which the ministry is organised” or “sell the building” – my answer would be “probably” – but you wouldn’t really be folding up, you would simply be changing the form in which the essence of the church is held.

Of course, if a group meets in the name of Christ only but is not essentially the church then it should either get serious or pack up and go home, irrespective of size or the local rabbit population.

Which means I responded to the gift of Bear’s autobiography with something of a girlish giggle.  And now I’ve got round to reading it.  Very quickly.  Because it’s hard to put down.  It’s written in short sharp chapters that have much the same pace as MvW  tracing his survival journey through school, SAS training, and climbing Everest, with some reflective commentary on his more recent life at the end.

There were some surprises. I hadn’t known Bear was an Eton old boy, for instance.  I had assumed his faith was found later in life for some reason.

There were also some points of identification for me.  The sense of drive built upon a complex childhood.  The awkwardness with girls.  The consuming danger of “never doing anything else of value with my life” (Page 372).  The faith, built on an unashamed childlikeness of “Please, God, comfort me” (Page 93) resonates with my own, as well as the pattern of calling going through birth, death and resurrection (Page 181).

Bear admits he had to learn the art of story telling.  He seems to have mastered it.  The realism is such that I know that I do not ever want to offer for the SAS, or climb Mt. Everest – yet I am now more motivated to seize hold of the purposes, plans and challenges that God has put before me.  It has ignited a fire for further faithfulness and has provided pressure away from cruising through life.

I must admit to some jealousy.  Half way through I found myself thinking “lucky bastard” in my head – to have had the opportunity to live life on the exciting edge must have required some good fortune that passes others (myself?) by.  But then I realised something:  Bear gives the date of his arrival at the SAS barrack gates, March 23 1994.  It was the same date that my wife and I started “going out.”  Since that date the adventure I have had, with stimulating wife and precious children, and the shared joys and fire of ministry and sickness and the evil black dog and all those other adversities is a true (ongoing) adventure.  I’m just as much a lucky (grace-receiving) bastard as him, and given the tenor of the final family-man chapters of his book  I think he would agree with me.

There is a companion volume of philosophical theory and The Mar Saba Codex was consequently touted as being fast-paced, suspenseful, with interesting characters in interesting places.  Although I wasn’t expecting anything Dan Brown-esque I was hoping to find something with some grip and engagement.  I was a little disappointed.  The characters are monochrome, the plot somewhat-stagnant, and the eventual suspense anticlimactic.  I realised I was reading what could only be called a “narrative philosophy” – a sequence of dialogues loosely tied together around a mythical motif that attempts to espouse the benefits of a form of humanism that feels it necessary to demand the second mile from the Christian church and the borrowed guise of the Christian cloak.  I feel no need to read the companion volume.

The narrative is wrapped around the finding of a letter written by an early bishop called Theophilus.  The letter affirms an understanding of Jesus that underplays (eliminates?) the divine, eschews trinitarian theology, and embraces a somewhat-non-theistic somewhat-Jewish human messianicism.  As we are introduced to the main characters – in particular Jack Duggan, a former priest-in-training, ongoing ancient-text expert and now disgruntled journalist – this letter is set up as a touchstone against dogmatism, absolutism, and revelatory epistemology – as if the divinity of Christ somehow is the cornerstone for all that is wrong with the Christian religion.

For instance,

“I gave up believing in belief a long time ago.” Duggan was faintly dismissive, “It’s about power and very little else…”

“Choice is by definition heresy,” said Mayle, reminding Duggan of an ancient truth, “You can’t have choice if truth is a fixed entity. You either believe, or you do not believe.”

In Paul’s hands, the term ‘Christos’ has been used to create a God-man, a theologically inflated figure that even in Theodore’s day, had generated bitter conflict for Christians and pagans alike.

In the Nazoraen view, which was the Aposotolic view, Jesus had not been the Second Person in a divine trinity… Only later… has this act of believing in Jesus been transformed by St. Paul into the magical rite of salvation through faith alone.

I did begin to wonder if Lockhart was going to simply use the characters’ voices to tear down.  It is one thing to fight against an edifice – but is it from a substantive philosophy that can build in its place?  There are hints at the beginning that become explicit at the end – a subjective, experiential, humanism is Lockhart’s answer

“Faith is more than knowing doctrine and Church teachign ; it is discovering God in experience and allowing experience to inform conscience.”

“The ‘I Am’ of your being is not in place. ‘Recognize what is before your eyes, and what is hidden will be revealed to you.’ That’s a quote from the Gospel of Thomas. The person who wrote those words was wide awake…. It’s the Christianity behind the Christianity.  It’s what’s been lost to doctrinalized Christianity for centuries.”

And all this is well and good, I guess.  Lockhart is a decent writer and a stimulating intellect.  I could enjoy engaging with his ideas in their own right.  But why this task of whiteanting them into Christian spirituality – a spirituality that he doesn’t seem to grasp?  He sees no positive in engaging with the bible as revelation, the sense of dependence on God is assumed to be stultifying and imprisoning, not releasing and freeing as so many have found it to be.

In the midst of all the voices – which I take to be Lockhart’s own because they all sound so similar – the crux of the issue, becomes the point.

“God had never at any time worked miracles to make up for human deficiency.”

Lockhart’s philosophy, then, like all humanism, is a gospel only to the elite, the intellectually rigorous (for some definition of that) – the well able, the unbroken, the self-actualised – the non-deficient.  In reality, the outcome of such a framework is the fruit of selfish selves.  We do have a human deficiency, without God working miracles, there is no answer from humanism in the real world.

Perhaps this is why I found the story ultimately unreal.  From the depiction of an Anglican Archbishop of Sydney – the sort of character I know quite well in my real world – that is simply strange, to a plotline involving an AWOL pope that requires a shark to be jumped.  Maybe it was just because all the typos continously broke down the fourth wall.

But it was a good stimulation.  It caused thoughtfulness on my part.  It  demonstrates an expertise and an academic studiousness that I do not and can not match.  At the book launch Douglas Lockhart offered me a conversation over a glass of wine, or a decent whiskey.  Perhaps I’ll go find him and take up the offer.