Faith and Theology

Teaching the Apostles' Creed: videos

2013-05-15T19:33:00.002+10:00

This year I'm trying to devote as much of my energy as possible to teaching (i.e. learning!) the Apostles' Creed. I've been teaching an undergraduate class on the Apostles' Creed, leading retreats and seminars on the creed, writing about the creed (starting soon I hope to do a monthly magazine column on the creed), and I've just finished teaching an intensive course for lay preachers on the Apostles' Creed.

You'd think it might get boring after a while, or that you'd run out of ideas, but actually I've found it very refreshing and stimulating. Theologians can easily give the impression that they're building castles in the sky – developing a completely abstract conceptual system that long ago lost contact with ordinary reality – so there is something impressively sober and concrete about sticking to the creed in all its objective plainness and clearness. The Apostles' Creed is just there – and theology, as reflection on the creed, isn't guesswork or speculation but a description of something that's actually there.

Anyway on Sundays I'm also doing a series of sermons on the Apostles' Creed. Videos of the first few are available, and if you're interested I'll add links to the rest of the series in the coming weeks. Here are the first three:

1. I Believe

2. In God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth

3. And in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord.

A funeral homily

2013-05-13T18:29:00.003+10:00

Preached last week in Swansea by Kim Fabricius

The historian Professor Gareth Elwyn Jones, MBE, MA, MEd, PhD, DLitt, FRHistS died on April 20th. He was a universally respected figure in Welsh academic life, and the pre-eminent authority on the history of education in Wales. In 1992, at the age of 53, Gareth was severely injured in a car accident, and subsequently confined to a wheelchair – which didn’t stop this teacher’s teacher from teaching, nor interrupt the steady stream of rigorously researched and elegantly written articles and books, nor dampen his deeply Christian courage and joie de vivre.

Though Gareth and Kim did not know each other well, it was Gareth’s wish that Kim take his funeral, which took place on May 7th at Tabernacle United Reformed Church, Swansea. Professor David Howell gave the eulogy for his friend and colleague. Then Gareth’s wife Kath, herself a formidable teacher and writer, and his two children, Bethan, a university lecturer in English, and Matthew, a musician, paid wonderful tribute to Gareth as husband and father. Bethan (on clarinet) and Matthew (on violin) also played two pieces of music intimately connected to life with father. Then Kim preached the homily.

Kath, Bethan, Matthew, family, friends:

In January 1939, Donald Bradman hit his fourth consecutive century, Superman made his debut in the comics – and Hitler called for the extermination of the Jews.

Later that year, in Wales, for the first time ever, both chair and crown were withheld at the National Eisteddfod – and the first wartime civilian evacuees arrived from across the border.

And there were some notable births in Wales: Donald Anderson, Rhodri Morgan – it was a good year for the Labour Party – and, rewinding to January – the 30th – in Abergavenny, to a father who was a local Congregationalist minister and a mother who had trained as a nurse, one Gareth Elwyn Jones.

Dates and facts. Dates and facts.

Via Morriston, Swansea, the family settled in Whitland, Carmarthenshire. To improve his educational prospects, little Gareth was sent to Caterham, a Congregationalist school in south London. But Surrey is not exactly Carmarthenshire: Gareth hated it. He returned to Whitland to excel at the local grammar school; then on to Swansea to read history.

During his time in Swansea, Gareth worshipped at Walter Road Congregational Church. So did another Swansea student, a philosopher in a department world-renown as a centre of Wittgenstein studies. Perhaps she cited the great Austrian philosopher to the lad sitting next to her in the pew – “If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done” – because in 1963 Kath and Gareth were married in Newport.

Dates and facts. Dates and facts.

Then off to Croydon – ironically, a town just a few miles from Caterham – where the newlyweds began to teach. But only for two years. Hiraeth: back to Wales, to Cardiff, then to Swansea, Pennard, where Gareth and Kath settled – and then, as we’ve heard, the CV takes off. Jones the lecturer; Jones the professor; Jones the dean; Jones the article and Jones the book; Jones the distinguished man of letters – eventually there would be over 20 of them following his name. In short, Jones the teacher and Jones the learner – and the terrific teacher precisely because the lifelong learner. Meanwhile, Jones the husband had also become Jones the dad: Bethan born in 1971, Matthew in 1973.

Date and facts. Dates and facts.

And then there were church commitments, community responsibilities, and even some time for leisure. Gareth worshipped here, at Tabernacle, where he became a deacon and elder. He served on the governing bodies at Bishopston Comprehensive School and Pentrechwyth Primary School. And the camping, the cricket, and – yes – the cars ... the collision, on July 3rd, 1992 ... and then the chair...

Dates and facts. Dates and facts. It’s time to move on from dates and facts. Gareth spent his professional life contending against the Gradgrindian – and, alas, Govean – notion that history is reducible to dates and facts. Dates and facts are just data. Things only begin to get interesting, and the real work of the historian only begins, with the conversion of dates and facts into evidence, and the deployment of evidence in the intellectual venture of reconstruction and interpretation, which while partial and provisional might just turn out to be “true”. Why study history? “There are only two good reasons,” observes Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: “to enhance life and prepare for death.”

So the date and fact of Gareth’s accident – fine. But what did his disability do to him, and more, what did Gareth do with it? Hemingway said that life breaks everyone, but some grow strong at the broken places. Gareth grew strong at his broken place. His can-do mindset and professionalism – unabated. His cheerful, generous spirit and lofty idealism – undaunted. His devotion to his family, eventually as a delighted tad-cu – unreserved. Not dates and facts, here we are talking about character, shaped by a story. And as a student of John Fines, Gareth knew the crucial importance of story in fashioning human identity. Who am I? I am my story.

Or rather, I am the one who is the intersection of stories. My personal history intersects with contemporary history – the present is simply what the past is doing now; intersects with various narratives, domestic, national, and global; cultural narratives that colonise our lives and give them direction: narratives of money and power, health and beauty, and an obsession with denying death at all costs. Bewitching narratives, but narratives that are quite unable to deliver the purpose they promise, and narratives that finally shape grotesquely distorted characters.

The good news is that we meet here today in the context of a bigger narrative, a cosmic narrative, an eternal narrative that yet intersects with time. It is, of course, the narrative of Jesus – his life, death, resurrection – and his continuing story – Christ reigns as Lord of history, hidden in it: human history is his-story. It is the story that informs and transforms us in an altogether different way from the stories of our time. It is the story that in our doubts gives us faith, in our despair gives us hope, and in our fears gives us peace. It is the love-story of God’s passionate embrace of the world in Jesus, the story in which Gareth has played his part so well – and now moves on to play other roles in the chronicles of heaven. And it is an endlessly unfolding story, the story – as C. S. Lewis puts it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – the story “that goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

It is my belief that we are all characters in this story, though some of us may have lost the plot. Perhaps on an occasion like this, in which we celebrate Gareth’s earthly life, grieve its end, and celebrate its final integration into God’s never-ending story – perhaps this is a good time to begin to find the plot again – find faith again – and play our own parts with commitment, imagination, gratitude, and joy.

Bonhoeffer on the magical powers of leadership

2013-05-10T23:57:00.001+10:00

Thanks for the interest in my paper on Bonhoeffer's critique of leadership. This should eventually be published in a collection of essays resulting from the colloquium, so I'll let you know when it's available. In the mean time, here's another excerpt from the first part of the paper (before it gets into a detailed reading of Life Together – “God hates visionaries” and all that):

Bonhoeffer spent much of his life opposing leadership. When Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor in 1933, Bonhoeffer was one of the first voices in Germany to urge for caution. Just two days after Hitler’s installation, 26-year-old Bonhoeffer gave a radio broadcast on “The Younger Generation’s Altered View of the Concept of Leader [Führer].” Bonhoeffer acknowledged that leadership is a normal and necessary part of life. “Naturally, there have always been leaders. Where there is community there is leadership.” But he argued that the concept of political leadership had been transformed in modern Germany; the German Youth Movement had dangerously projected all its longings and aspirations on to the concept of the Leader. Thus, Bonhoeffer said, “the originally prosaic idea of political authority is transformed into the political-messianic idea of leader that we see today.” Authentic leadership, in Bonhoeffer’s view, is the administration of an objective office. “The leader points to the office.” Where political leadership fuses with quasi-religious functions – giving people hope, investing their lives with meaning, awakening their spiritual yearnings – it becomes a dangerous and potentially unlimited power. Leadership becomes “personal and not objective.” In such circumstances, the leader (Führer) can very easily become the misleader (Verführer) – not so much because of anything innately bad in the leader, but because of the powerful illusory longings projected on to the leader. As a sort of definition of authentic leadership, Bonhoeffer remarks: “The true leader must always be able to disappoint.” Though the radio address was cut off before it finished, Bonhoeffer’s text concluded with the somber warning that all leaders are only “penultimate authorities” under the authority of God; the “leader and office that turn themselves into gods mock God.”

In the years that followed, Bonhoeffer applied his critique of political leadership to the question of leadership in Christian communities. In the 1933 Bethel Confession, drafted by Bonhoeffer and Hermann Sasse, the nature of Christian ministry is defined in explicit contrast to leadership. “The power of the ministry,” the confession states, does not depend “on the powers with which a human soul may be gifted.” Hence “we … protest against the attempt to apply the modern leadership principle to the preaching ministry.” Christian ministry, as “service to the Word,” is indeed “the opposite of any magical powers of leadership.” Here the point seems to be that Christian ministry consists in responsibility to an objective office and an objective word that God has given; it does not depend on influence, charisma, or what Bonhoeffer elsewhere called the “melting together” of souls.

Bonhoeffer's critique of leadership

2013-05-09T17:52:00.000+10:00

On the weekend I'll be presenting a paper at a colloquium on interfaith persepectives on leadership. My paper (representing the Protestant tradition) is on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological critique of leadership in Life Together. Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

Eight decades later, Bonhoeffer’s dark warnings about the dangers of leadership sound eccentric to a culture marked by a seemingly boundless enthusiasm for leadership, charisma, and influence. The current neglect of a more cautionary perspective on leadership is hard to account for, given that the greatest and most charismatic leaders of the past century have also been responsible for the greatest wickedness. Bonhoeffer’s warnings – written before the beginning of the Second World War – sound today like prophecies. His critical perspective on leadership, informed by Protestant tradition and by keen observation of the political culture of 1930s Germany, remains a prophetic challenge to any account in which leadership as such is regarded as an unequivocal or unambiguous good. For Bonhoeffer, the good to which we ought to aspire is participation in an ordinary, flawed human community. What such a community needs is not vision or influence or psychological management, but “the one word and deed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.”

Banishing Falstaff: Shakespeare and the moral vision of comedy

2013-05-03T13:01:00.002+10:00

I wrote this piece for ABC Religion & Ethics, and have reposted it here.

Falstaff is Shakespeare's greatest comic figure. He is one of those characters who seems too big for his own play. But Falstaff is not merely a comic character: the very principle of comedy seems incarnate in him, just as the principle of tragedy seems incarnate in the spectacle of King Lear howling at the storm. In Lear, tragedy assumes cosmic dimensions; it is as if the whole mad universe were raging in the mad king’s cries. In Falstaff, comedy likewise takes on gigantic proportions, as if the foundations of the world were shaken with laughter at Falstaff's wit.

Yet the paradox of Falstaff is that he is not the kind of person we would ordinarily like. The great challenge of performing Falstaff on stage is to portray a character who is at once morally reprehensible and irresistibly loveable. Falstaff cannot be a villain; he cannot be a mere rogue; he cannot be a clown; he cannot be (not for a second) a tragic figure. We have to feel huge revulsion and huge love all at the same time, and for all the same reasons.

John Bell's performance of Falstaff in the Bell Shakespeare production of Henry 4 is a triumph, precisely because Bell's Falstaff is so repulsive and so loveable.

In Bell’s hands, Falstaff becomes a beer-bellied Australian bogan. He spends his time carousing on a set that seems a cross between a brothel and a backyard shed. He wears denim and leather with chains, a grungy biker. He slumps on a vinyl sofa with a hooker on his knee, swigging Jim Beam from the bottle. With his red nose, scraggly white beard, and twinkling eye, he looks for all the world like a degenerate Santa Claus.

And yet we love – no, we adore – that Falstaff.

What Falstaff represents is nothing more or less than life. Life itself, life as such, the sheer indomitable fact of being alive. That is why Falstaff is so fat. He is larger than life, more human and more alive than ordinary mortals. When Hal points out that the grave gapes for Falstaff “thrice wider than for other men,” it is true symbolically as well as literally. No ordinary grave could hold Jack Falstaff, for he is no ordinary mortal. He is large, he contains multitudes. When old Falstaff condescendingly tells the Lord Chief Justice, “You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young,” we feel the truth of it in our very bones. Falstaff's body might be “blasted with antiquity,” as the Chief Justice alleges, yet nobody is younger than he. He is young because he is youthfulness itself, the very energy and drive of life.

Yet in the final scene, a scene that has scandalised generations of playgoers and critics, Hal banishes his friend Jack Falstaff. Our minds recoil from the thought of it – even though, objectively speaking, Falstaff deserves whatever he gets. It is not just that we like Falstaff and want things to turn out well for him. It is that a rejection of Falstaff seems the same as a rejection of life – an incomprehensible, nonsensical act. As Falstaff himself has intimated, to reject him is to reject everything: “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”

But perhaps the point of this difficult scene is just to show that Falstaff can be rejected. For all his irresistible charm, it is still possible to turn him away. The significance of the last scene is that it makes comedy more vivid by revealing its limits. Falstaff can be banished; life can be refused. We'd never have believed it if we didn't see it played out before our eyes. When we see it happen, we are agitated. We are disquieted. We are moved. We are ready to rush to Falstaff’s defence. His rejection moves the audience to accept him all the more, to say Yes to life by saying Yes to sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff.

Falstaff’s banishment reveals something of the central mystery of his character. For all his irrepressible wit, for all his invincible ingenuity, for all his boundless capacity to extricate himself from difficulties, to catapult his corpulent person over every obstacle – for all that, there is a strange vulnerability at the core of Falstaff's being. There is, indeed, a sense in which he is the most elementally vulnerable character in the play, vulnerable in a way that reminds us of Shakespeare's great tragic figures.

Falstaff's invincibility, after all, really just lies in the way others open their hearts to him. He has – or is – “the spirit of persuasion.” We feel moved to love him even when we know he is bad. We find ourselves believing in him even when we know he is lying. To the extent that we cannot help but love him – to that extent, but no further – he is an impregnable castle. When Mistress Quickly accuses Falstaff before the Lord Chief Justice – “he hath eaten me out of house and home; he hath put all my substance into that fat belly of his” – she ends her wild litany of accusations, in one of the finest moments of the Bell production, by running to Falstaff, embracing him, and sobbing the rest of her speech into his shoulder, while he comforts her forgivingly.

That is the form that every moral objection to Falstaff has to take. We begin, quite properly, by reproaching him, and end up embracing him and begging his forgiveness. When, earlier, Mistress Quickly berates Falstaff for evading his debts, he starts out on the defensive but ends with a triumphant show of magnanimity: “Hostess, I forgive thee. Go, make ready breakfast. Love thy husband, look to thy servants, cherish thy guests. Thou shalt find me tractable to any honest reason; thou seest I am pacified still. Nay, prithee, begone.”

Yet we are confronted, at the end of the story, with a person who knows Falstaff, understands him, loves him – and rejects him. This person has just become king. In Henry IV, it is power that refuses life by refusing Falstaff.

At the Bell Shakespeare production last night, we were scandalised by this monstrous wrongness, this insult against the human spirit, this denial of life and joy. Seething with indignation in our seats, we were compelled to make the better choice. We despised the king and all his pomp, and our hearts went out to Falstaff. To the extent that it opens our hearts to Falstaff, Henry IV is a deeply moral play – not a moralising play, God help us, but a grand hilarious demonstration of the absolute, unqualified, unbounded goodness of life. By moving us to say Yes to Falstaff, the play makes us participants in a moral world where life is more important than power and joy is stronger than death.

But if we prize power above joy, we will find prostitutes and tax collectors – yes, even old Jack Falstaff – entering the kingdom ahead of us. If, like Hal, we banish Falstaff from our hearts, we will wake up one day to discover that we have really only banished ourselves.

Doodlings from the dugout

2013-04-29T08:23:00.002+10:00

by Kim Fabricius

This Sunday, the sermon – will it be a sacrament of divine disclosure, or a sacrilege of self-deception? There is, of course, no guarantee. And that goes for the eucharist as well.

Last Saturday the theme of Swansea’s most confrontational city-centre evangelist was evolution. The earth, he shouted, is six-and-a-half thousand years old, so why would you believe a newfangled 19th century theory that says man is descended from monkeys? And I thought: what a prodigy of self-refutation: Ecce simius!

I think that we should look more to Cain than to Adam if we want to understand the phenomenology of original sin. Surely the fundamental primal feeling of human beings is not that I have done something wrong but that someone has done something wrong to me – and that I am owed. Hence our rebellion against grace and the challenge of a truly disinterested faith.

That God is a speaker, not a writer, is clear from Genesis 2:18. A writer can never get enough solitude.

“Religion is what one does with one’s solitude.” No, that’s masturbation. Alas, solitude is what people often do with their religion.

In his recent Assholes: A Theory (2013), Aaron James argues that the distinguishing features of the asshole are his entrenched sense of entitlement and his immunization from critique. Add American exceptionalism, and throw in the state of Texas or the city of New York, and the theory has extraordinary explanatory demographic power.

“The poor you will always have with you.” Yes, and the rich too. Not to mention the assholes (Jesus was, after all, responding to Judas in all his sense of self-importance).

Many US citizens seem to keep their baptismal certificates and their passports in the same drawer. The ones that have passports.

Grief, great grief, psalmist grief, pitched-past-pitch-of grief (Hopkins) – it is, literally, overwhelming. Not inner-whelming, it does not just well up, it crashes down with crushing force, dense with affliction. And because this weight drops extra nos, it can only be lifted or borne extra nos. Grief is death at work in the living. Only the one who has rolled away the stone can remove the burden of grief, or at least help us carry the load.

With one voice the British press proclaims that the death of Margaret Thatcher marks the “end of an error”. Or did I mishear?

“It is just this lack of connection to a concern with the truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.” That’s Harry Frankfurt (in On Bullshit), perfectly articulating my thoughts on the apotheosis of Margaret Thatcher, as the commentariat took leave of its senses. But as an American living in the UK I have not been smug. Déjà vu: I happened to be in the US at the time of the funeral of Ronald Reagan.

Then there was Boston. Bombast and bomb-blast. It was a good week for the principalities and power. Btw, P + P were also observed in Washington hobnobbing with morally and mathematically challenged congressmen – 3 bomb-dead is .0001% of 30,000 annual gun-dead. Finally (barely worth a parenthesis, I know), on the day of the Boston bombing, over 30 people were killed in car-bombings in Iraq.

In Alice Sebald’s The Lovely Bones, the heroine Susie Salmon says, “There wasn’t a lot of bullshit in my heaven.” See I Corinthians 2:9.

The events in a graveyard just outside Jerusalem around 30 CE explain why Christ is Lord of the dance – and the origins of rock-and-roll.

Many thanks to Jason Goroncy at Per Crucem ad Lucem for his heads-up post on David Lipsey’s new biography (and long-awaited retrieval) of Dag Hammarskjöld, Dag Hammarskjöld: A Life, in which he refers to Rowan Williams’ review of the book. Williams mentions Lipsey’s judicious treatment of the issue of Hammarskjöld’s homosexuality. Conclusion: Hammarskjöld might have been gay; on the other hand, he might have been “that most alarming of sexual deviants in twenty-first century eyes, a willing and self-aware celibate.” So much for the old saying that to a Hammarskjöld everything looks like a Niels.

That God might be angry with me doesn’t move me to repentance, but that God might be disappointed with me, even ashamed of me, above all, that he might be saddened, even hurt by me – Dad, I’m so sorry!

There are prayers of praise and petition, prayers of thanksgiving and intercession, prayers of confession and commitment. Big prayers, fine prayers. But God is our friend as well as our Lord, so don’t forget the small-talk, just shooting the breeze (πνεύμα).

The wise know when and when not to give a shit.

Very few people know what the hell they are doing, but staying with that thought for very long is a sure way to paralysis and madness.

He had the kind of OCP that when you met him on the street and said, “Hi. Nice day, isn’t it? How are you?”, he would answer with meteorological and medical reports including temperatures, pressures, and prognostications.

That the good are often worse – much worse – than the bad is rather evident from the gospels. After all, it was a cabal of pastors and politicians, not publicans and prostitutes, that conspired to kill Jesus. Which is why I take Luke 5:32 to be one of our Lord’s more ironic statements.

In Luke, Jesus dies the serene death of the proto-martyr. In John, Jesus dies with an exclamation of conclusive triumph. And many apologists place the cry of dereliction in Mark and Matthew in the context of the affirmative ending of Psalm 22 (a truly Christological hermeneutic would reverse the framing). No, Jesus dies with a woeful wail in absolute despair, identifying with our own experiences of God-forsakenness, precisely so that utter hopelessness henceforth becomes an impossible possibility. And God is silent – until Sunday. The unassumed is the unhealed.

Here is the difference between envy and jealousy: I am envious of the dead; I am jealous of the living.

Why, when I visit people with severe dementia, do I feel that I should take off my shoes? Why this sense of the holy, of the divine presence? (Which, I suggest, makes sense of the world’s strategic way of dealing with the aged-demented by clinical ostracism and senicide: it materially focusses the marginalisation and death of God.) It can’t be just their helplessness and powerlessness, a diminishment they share with the gravely frail and disabled. No, I think it is the fact that they simply are, that they live in a kind of eternal now. Does that make sense?

I turn 65 in October and become a pensioner. Several colleagues have spoken to me about the difficulties of retirement, particularly their manifold feelings of dislocation and loss – the painful withdrawals from their intimate family of faith, from their role as local leader, and from their sense of pastoral neededness. So I will no longer be the Reverend Fabricius, I’ll just be Kim. In fact, however, that’s all I’ve ever been – just Kim. No, the real angst of retirement is that it prefigures your expirement. It is the vocation of ministers to teach the art of dying. Physician, heal thyself.

Letter to a Chinese student, baptised on Easter Sunday

2013-04-18T00:49:00.000+10:00

Dear K.,

I don't mind admitting that I'm always a bit worried when I turn up to church on Easter Sunday. Worried that we'll get it all wrong. That there will be no joy, no amazement, no startling sense of the magic of the thing. I worry that the songs will be gloomy museum pieces, the prayers morbidly introspective, the sermon a self-congratulatory piece of apologetics or a few sneering scraps of historical criticism.

I worry that we will sing our songs and pray our prayers and have our tea and biscuits and then all go home afterwards without actually celebrating anything. This worries me especially here, in Australia, where (you will have noticed) we are not very good at celebrating things. On occasions when other people would celebrate, we Australians mill about uncertainly, hands in pockets, vaguely or acutely embarrassed. You can turn up to a wedding, a funeral, the birth of a baby, even Easter Sunday, and you'll always find us standing about like that, exchanging dry remarks about the traffic and the weather, just when we ought to be shouting, weeping, rending our clothes, kissing strangers, firing pistols in the air. We like the idea of celebration, we have heard of it, but it is a language we never learned, and our bodies don't know the rules.

That's why Australians don't do Easter very well. That's why I was worried, as always – half hopeful and half already-depressed – when I turned up to church on Easter Sunday.

Yet there you were, a university student from China. You had come to be baptised.

You looked pretty nervous when they brought you ought in front of everyone. Someone poured water into the big marble font. You made promises. You turned to Christ. You confessed your belief in God the creator, God the redeemer, God the sanctifier. Then you made a profound bow from the waist – we Australians could never bow like that – and water was poured over your heard, three times, your baptism, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Watching all this, I thought we would hear mighty trumpets and see the sky roll up like a scroll. When the water ran down your head I clutched the pew in front of me, expecting earthquakes. When the Name of the Trinity was pronounced I thought it was the end of the world. I expected zombies or something of that order – that all the graves would open and the grinning dead would rise. When you stood up straight and faced us, I thought the last judgment had come. I thought every woman who had ever longed for motherhood would know all of a sudden that she was, miraculously, with child. I thought the violent and the proud and the ones who stir up war would all be cast aside like rag dolls, and the refugees and homeless would be out there dancing in the streets in shining clothes. I thought we would all find out we'd won the lottery and we would all join hands together, and all the children would go home to find their houses made of gingerbread.

But there was nothing like that. Just you, standing there facing us with your wet black hair, your lovely Chinese eyes, smiling. A candle burning on the table. Water dripping on the floor.

I thought: a baptism – a real Easter!

And for one big glad moment I believed everything, Christ's dying and rising, the truest thing that ever happened, I believed it all and saw the truth of it as clear as water, saw it right there written on your face, written all over your baptised body.

I left the church and went out in the dark. Everything was the same, everything was different. I walked under the trees. A car went by. It might have been raining. Right there on the path I danced a little jig. It was Easter Sunday, Christ was risen, you were risen with him, it was the first day of creation, and I felt for all the world like Fred Astaire.

Yours, &c.,

Come into my heart, Lord Jesus: Origen and Augustine on the roomy heart

2013-04-12T13:44:00.001+10:00

As a little boy there was a song I loved to sing. I learned it from my mother. She taught it to me and I sang it, and all my life it has replayed inside my mind.

Into my heart, into my heart,
Come into my heart, Lord Jesus;
Come in today, come in to stay,
Come into my heart, Lord Jesus.

It was (or so I thought in those days) a song about conversion, about getting saved, being born again. A Sinner's Prayer. At Sunday School they were always warning us to make sure we'd invited Jesus into our hearts. In another song I remember from those days, the human heart was compared to a castle where Jesus lives:

Joy is the flag flown high from the castle of my heart,
For the King is in residence there.

It seemed a pretty grand thing, to have Jesus living in your heart. And we always felt sorry for the poor non-Christians, those people who went about like walking ghost towns, their interior houses empty and abandoned. Our most fervent wish was that they too might one day invite Jesus into their hearts, that they too might one day be able to run the royal insignia up the flagpole.

I suppose it's good to learn that sort of thing when you're still a child, before you get too disillusioned about the capacities of your own (or anybody else's) heart. It never occurred to me to doubt that my heart was spacious enough to accommodate a person like Jesus, or that it was the kind of place a person like that would want to live. When I invited Jesus, rather generously, to come into the house of my heart, it never occurred to me that he might take one look inside and say, "Sorry, this isn't quite what I had in mind. Do you have anything with an extra bedroom? And a view?" Nor did it occur to me that he might want to buy the house (like so many people in my neighbourhood in Sydney) only in order to demolish or renovate – that he might show up on the first day with trucks, sledgehammers, men in hardhats; that he might be the kind of homeowner who tears out the kitchen sink and knocks down walls.

That's the way some of the great patristic writers spoke about Jesus. They described the heart as a house for Jesus – but a house in dire need of rebuilding and repair. To start with, it's far too small. If Jesus is going to live here, there will have to be extensions. And it's all looking pretty rundown. The roof leaks. Mold is growing on the walls. The front door is hanging off its hinges. There are strange smells in the hallway. Weeds are growing up through the floorboards. Jesus is moving into your heart not because these surroundings are fit for him, but because he enjoys the challenge of fixing up old places like this – a broken-down dump of a house.

In the opening pages of his Confessions, Augustine poses the riddle of how an infinite God could be contained in any place. If God is the one who contains all things – if God is the environment in which all creatures live – then how could God be located within any of those creatures? What part of creation could possibly contain God? The very thought of it is absurd, like trying to grasp the horizon in your hand, like trying to pour the ocean into a teacup. "To what place can I invite you, then, since I am in you? Or where could you come from, in order to come into me?" (Confessions, 1.2.2). Yet God loves the human heart and wants to dwell there. Augustine is deeply moved by this thought, that God would choose to take up lodgings in such a humble dwelling.

But there's a problem. God arrives, suitcase in hand, and knocks on the door of our heart. And he can hardly fit inside. The place is too small. And it's a mess, a ruin, a veritable pigsty. Yet God isn't deterred. God wants to live here: the place has a lot of promise; and besides, God likes the neighbourhood. So there's only one for it: God rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.

As Augustine puts it: "The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild it" (Confessions, 1.5.6).

What Augustine is describing here is not what we would call a conversion experience. He's describing a process that will continue for the rest of his life. God renovates slowly, persistently, with boundless patience, and with loving attention to even the smallest details. My whole life will be nothing but the story of God's renovation. My whole life is one of God's repair projects. It's not the once-off experiences that matter – not any single episode of inviting Jesus into my heart. What matters is the process; what matters is that my heart gradually becomes bigger, wider, cleaner, more orderly. What matters is that it slowly becomes, over a whole lifetime, an inhabitable place for God.

Two centuries before Augustine, Origen had also spoken of the gradual process by which our hearts become dwelling places for God. But if Augustine's language evokes scenes of a dilapidated Roman villa, Origen's language has about it a certain characteristic oriental, Jewish, Old Testament flavour: his themes are learning and feasting.

For Origen, the heart is repaired and expanded by learning. As we learn more about God, gradually increasing our knowledge by daily increments, our hearts grow wider. At first the heart is too small, like (he says) the heart of a little child. But when it has grown big enough, Jesus is able to move in and take up residence there. And the goal of life, Origen thinks, is to become roomy for Jesus – to give Jesus room to move about easily and freely. As we grow, we are able to "offer such roomy hearts to the Word of God that he may even be said to walk about in them, that is, in the open spaces of a fuller understanding and a wider knowledge" (Commentary on the Song of Songs, 2.8).

To you and me, this vision – of God inhabiting the domain of our understanding – might seem rather dry, too cold and intellectual. But for Origen it is the highest mysticism. To be sure, the whole process involves thought, reflection, study of scripture: all this is the necessary work of renovating our shabby home. But once Jesus moves in, he is festive and full of cheer. He lays a feast, and the Father and the Spirit celebrate together at the table: "Blessed is that roomy soul [latitudo animae, in Rufinus' Latin translation], blessed the couches of her mind, where both the Father and the Son, surely together with the Holy Spirit, recline and sup and have their dwelling-place!"

Moreover, when Jesus takes up residence in the house of the heart, he brings with him every good thing. "With what precious stores, think you, with what abundance are such Guests regaled?" The purpose of life, in Origen's view, is to grow through learning – not because learning is an end in itself, but because through learning the heart grows wider, and such a spacious life can be a home where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit recline together and share a feast.

In Rublev's icon of the Trinity, it is usually said that we are invited to take up a seat, that the fourth place at the table is for us. But here is how Origen might see the icon: Jesus has laid a feast; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are reclining together at table; and the human heart is that table, the humble venue of eternal feasting, eternal joy.

Dipsy doodlings

2013-04-08T08:12:00.000+10:00

by Kim Fabricius

Sometimes someone will say to me after a service, “That sermon really made us think.” Which vexes me because it suggests, first, that some Christians have to be made to think, and second, that the church is some kind of discussion group. They shouldn’t and it’s not.

I’ve preached people into my church and I’ve preached people out of it. I’ve no doubt which were the better sermons.

A woman once asked me why I never preach on taking Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour. “Because, ma’am, I preach on the Bible.”

So you’ve taken Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour. Where? Bowling?

I’m all for being born again, as long as it’s again and again … and again. Otherwise, I’m for rebirth control.

Any preacher who brandishes a book and declares “God says …!” can only be waving the Qur’an, not the Bible.

Paul – great writer, lousy speaker (II Corinthians 10:10, 11:6): i.e., better read than said.

Some evangelists put notches in their Bible the way gunslingers put notches in their Colt 45. Indeed for some evangelists their Bible is their Colt 45. Come to think of it, vice versa too.

He was one of those haunted, hunted Christians who, I imagine, when he was four or five, saw a picture of the crucifixion, asked his parents why this man looks so unhappy, and was told, “Because of you!”

What is the difference between evangelism and proselytism? That’s easy. Proselytism has no ears, it’s all mouth. Some Christians speak of evangelism and dialogue, or even pit the former against the latter. No! Evangelism is intrinsically dialogical, or it is – exactly! – proselytism.

How powerful is the love of God? So powerful that it can do absolutely nothing to protect us.

Word-care is only half the battle – and the second half. Ear-care comes first.

Christianity is small in the UK, BIG in the US. That is partially because the secularisation thesis has purchase in the UK in a way that it doesn’t in the US – yet. But it’s also because American religious space contains such influential church leaders as Osteen, Dobson, Driscoll, Warren, and Piper, and such hot button theological issues as creationism, the historical Adam, complementarianism, premillennialism, and eternal damnation. (One issue, really: biblical inerrancy.) Compared to such cyclopean religion, small is beautiful.

It is true that, for church or society, sexuality cannot be a purely private matter, but it is a shame the way it dominates debate in the pubic square.

Sometimes when talking ecumenism with Catholics (“My way or the highway” – the Via Appia – heading southeast), I think, “When in Rome, do as the Visigoths”.

The History Channel’s The Bible is not a docudrama. It is not even a documelodrama. It is a docusoap, so embarrassingly awful that cardboard cut-outs would deepen the characterisation and speech balloons would improve the dialogue. When will the doyens of evangelical culture learn that crap religious painting, poetry, music – and film – do the faith no favours. Indeed, it would seem that the more “called” and “inspired” the creators feel, the tackier their productions. It takes a Pasolini (gay and atheist) or a Monty Python (satirists, parodists) to make a good film on a religious theme; and, ironically, it is kitsch like The Bible that is an insult to the Lord.

In Jesus God takes time to have a word with us.

The difference between a charlatan and a sage is that the one speaks imperiously about truth, the other speaks modestly about truthfulness.

People mainly leave the church for one of two reasons: it’s either the assholes or the problem of suffering. And I always think: What’s taken you so long?

Faith without works or works without faith? Hmm… I’ll take the latter: I may still be sinful (Romans 14:23), but at least I’m still alive (James 2:20).

“Speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). Hmm… Often used at meetings, as an introduction to an intervention, a kind of biblical “With respect …” But it’s not the pretence of affection that concerns me. Indeed the more genuine the affection, the more I get nervous, lest it lead me to drop my guard when it comes to the “truth”. After all, Job’s friends were utterly sincere in their companionate compassion – and then they spoke theology so pernicious that it pissed off not only their mate but the Lord himself. Only then, after Job refuses to play ball, do they get nasty.

The book of Job is not a theodicy, it is (a) an exercise in theological bullshit detection, and (b) a theological therapeutics, the divine healing of the suffering ego incurvatus in se by exocentric expansion, first in solidarity with the poor, then in wonder at the universe.

In 2004, the Philosophy Department at Swansea University, once world renown as a Centre of Wittgenstein studies, was terminated (Wittgenstein’s “full stop” with a vengeance). Last summer, the front of the main administrative building, Fulton House, was renovated (it now looks like a mini mall, with the Chaplaincy Centre cunningly reshituated between the men’s and women’s toilets). Last September, the University launched its £200 million second campus expansion plan (called the “Humanities and Other Useless Knowledge Campus” – just kidding: the “Science and Innovation Campus” – what else?). And now, at the end of April, the University Bookshop will sell its last tome and textbook (a university without a bookstore, for Chrissake!). Instead of publishing an Annual Report this year, the University Council should write a suicide note.

The trick is to walk on your knees and pray on your feet.

We are most at worship when we are not at worship.

What do Barth, Paul, Wesley, and German Protestantism all have in common?

2013-04-05T08:32:00.000+11:00

You guessed it: they each have an upcoming conference.

In May, the University of Geneva is hosting a conference on The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: Reconsidering 1 Corinthians 1-2.

In June, Princeton Seminary is hosting a conference on Karl Barth in Dialogue: Encounters with Major Figures.

In July, the Australasian Centre for Wesleyan Research is hosting a conference in Sydney on Holy Trinity – Holy People.

Also in July, there will be a conference in Heidelberg to mark the 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism: Our Only Comfort.

Any other interesting conferences on the horizon?

Update on the Barth manuscript!

2013-04-02T23:00:00.002+11:00

Thanks for all the interesting emails I received concerning the amazing discovery of material from Barth's Church Dogmatics, Volume V. Thanks especially to the journals and magazines who made inquiries about publishing special features on this exciting manuscript discovery: you made my day!

I hope you enjoyed the rest of your April Fools' Day too.

Notes on a manuscript discovery: Karl Barth's rough outlines for Church Dogmatics, Volume V

2013-04-01T22:52:00.002+11:00

If you move in Barthian circles, you've probably heard by now about the rumored discovery a few weeks ago at the Barth-Archiv in Basel. While examining some of Barth's handwritten lecture notes from the 1960s, a Hungarian doctoral researcher claimed to have discovered a series of handwritten outlines for the fifth volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics – the unwritten final volume on eschatology (die Lehre von der Erlösung) that had formed part of Barth's original plan, though he died before completing even the fourth volume. Towards the end of his life Barth was often asked about the last volume of his Dogmatics, but he refused to speculate about it. It has always been believed that he never committed any thoughts to paper about this projected volume. But the Hungarian researcher identified a sequence of notes that look like a series of alternative plans for Volume V. The notes are interspersed haphazardly through an exercise book containing jottings for two public lectures that Barth delivered in 1968, the last year of his life.

When I heard about this manuscript discovery a couple of weeks ago, I was sceptical. Since then, I've exchanged a long string emails with the director of the Barth-Archiv, who has been busily studying the sequence of notes, trying to decipher Barth's (notoriously illegible) handwriting and to piece together the various fragments of notes. In the latest communication from him (which I received about an hour ago), he confirmed that he believes these are indeed a series of short sketches for a final volume of Church Dogmatics. It is hoped that a simple transcription of Barth's notes will be published later this year in the Basel journal, Theologische Zeitschrift, so that scholars can have access to the material as soon as possible.

In the mean time, I have been given permission to say a few things here about these handwritten notes. Please understand that what I will supply here are only provisional summaries; I have received these details by email from the director of the Barth-Archiv as he has been working through the material. I haven't seen this material at first hand, and I've been asked to emphasise the difficulty and ambiguity of some of Barth's notes, not only on account of Barth's handwriting and the damage to some parts of the manuscript (see below), but also because of the way these notes are freely interspersed throughout the exercise book, more or less seamlessly interwoven with other notes that Barth was preparing for the two public lectures. (Luckily we have the full text of these two lectures, which has made it possible to distinguish the notes associated with the lectures from this other layer of material.)

Keeping all that in mind, here are some of the general details as I have received them. Barth appears to have sketched out several different possible approaches to the doctrine of redemption, as follows:

(1) In one approach, he proposes revisiting each previous doctrine from the Dogmatics in reverse order, showing how the conceptual architecture of each doctrine is broken open – and ultimately reorganised – when it is reinterpreted as part of a theology of the Holy Spirit. After working back through reconciliation (volume IV), creation (volume III), election (volume II), and revelation (volume I), the Dogmatics would end where it began: in the doctrine of the Trinity – not, this time, as a doctrine of revelation, but as a doctrine of final redemption.

(2) In another approach, Barth loosely structures the doctrine around the Old Testament canon, with doctrinal sections corresponding to Law, Prophets, and Writings. Most of his notes concentrate on the second category; what he seems to have in mind is a schema in which the whole Bible (and the whole of dogmatics) is permeated by a prophetic dimension. In what looks like a programmatic statement, he writes: "Dogmatics in whole, and not just in part, is prophecy. The Spirit of which it partakes is always and everywhere a Spirit of prophecy."

(3) In another approach, Barth sketches out three eschatological temptations, modelled on the three temptations of Jesus in Luke's Gospel: his headings are "Turning Stones to Bread"; "Power and Glory"; and "The Pinnacle of the Temple". He notes how in each instance Jesus resists and disarms the temptation of eschatological triumph. This is followed by notes on what might be called an eschatology of the cross (my phrase, not Barth's).

(4) In yet another approach, Barth has some brief (still undeciphered) notes under six paired categories: God and the angels; the angels and man; man and the demons; the demons and nothingness; nothingness and creation; creation and God. On the page he has drawn a circle, tracing a line of thought that begins and ends at the same place (i.e., God). Barth notes that the doctrine of redemption has to be understood as a doctrine of God the Redeemer, not of redemption viewed in abstract terms. Beneath this, he has added a curious gnomic comment: "Apokatastasis: untie the knot!"

(5) In one part of the book, Barth seems to have been making notes on several of Mozart's operas. It appears that he was trying (seriously? or in jest?) to derive a principle of doctrinal categorisation from the operas. These notes have covered two sides of a page in the exercise book; however, the page is badly water damaged, and only the first two lines, together with a few words and phrases here and there, remain visible.

(6) Elsewhere, Barth considers organising his doctrine around four main sections, each corresponding to one of the letters of the Hebrew tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God. There are some comments here that seem to relate to Kabbalah. There is a passage that looks like an experiment in automatic writing. Barth's notes here seem confused, and he does not develop this plan in any clear direction. But what he seems to have in mind is eschatology as an utterance of God's name in which ("nevertheless – or precisely thereby!") God remains hidden, veiled in the very act of God's final unveiling. There is a cryptic comment in this connection too: "Rapprochement with v. Balthasar. Mysticism!"

It must be emphasised again that these approaches to the doctrine of redemption are not always clearly delineated. The notes for one approach sometimes blend imperceptibly into the next. Barth drops a line of thought and then picks it up again later in the exercise book. Most importantly, it is not clear whether these notes were envisaged as distinct possibilities, or – as I have begun to hypothesise – the various dimensions of a wider picture.

But what is that wider picture? Under what imaginable circumstances could these wildly different theological arrangements all fit together? And what does it mean for our reading of the Church Dogmatics – that majestic bastion of theological rationality – if its author was, in his last days, looking for a way to transform the whole elaborate edifice into a gesture of mysticism?

Update: I hope you enjoyed the rest of your April Fools' Day too!

Meeting mystery: an Easter sermon

2013-03-30T19:12:00.002+11:00

by Kim Fabricius

A few years ago, just before Easter, I went along to a meeting at the university where a leader from a local church spoke on “The Resurrection of Jesus”. His talk was a tour de force. The sceptics’ arguments against the resurrection – that Jesus hadn’t really died, that the disciples stole the body, that it was all either a hoax or a hallucination – these the speaker roundly refuted. And then, comprehensively marshalling the evidence in favour of the resurrection – the witness of the disciples, and especially the women (you wouldn’t invent the testimony of women in first-century Israel); the conversion of the persecutor Saul into the apostle Paul; the observance of Sunday as the Lord’s Day (not Saturday, the traditional Jewish day of worship); the birth and mission of the church, believers willing to die for their faith – marshalling all this evidence, the speaker claimed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. Frank Morison, an advertising agent turned lawyer, who wrote a best-selling book called Who Moved the Stone?, with its own comprehensive demonstration of the facticity of the resurrection – Morison himself couldn’t have been more persuasive.

I looked around. The audience was very impressed. “Awesome!” they said, openly or tacitly. But in my heart there was no hallelujah. In fact, I felt curiously deflated. Indeed the evening left me feeling as cold as that mobile stone. But why?

Partly, I suppose – not the speaker’s fault – because I’d heard it all before.

Partly, also, because of the way the speaker narrowed the significance of the resurrection of Jesus to life after death – and then to my life after death – which I take to be a rather egotistical reduction of an event so momentous that it embraces the renewal of all creation. Why care about my butt if the rest of the world is going to hell in a handcart?

Then there was the rather unpleasant way the speaker dismissed those Christians who might disagree with him, including some very eminent theologians – he mentioned a couple – whose depths he couldn’t begin to fathom.

But the main reason why for me the talk fell flat is this. It was as if the speaker had it all sorted out; it was as if the resurrection of Jesus were easy. But it’s not! The resurrection is bloody difficult! I don’t mean (if you like) the “technology” of it, I mean the way the resurrection is existentially disturbing, threatening, explosive. Above all, I left the meeting with no sense of mystery, and therefore with no sense of God, because God is mystery, ultimate, irreducible mystery.

Of course the speaker was, in fact, quite representative, doing what we are all tempted to do – me too – when it comes to God: construct the perfect argument, arrive at a definitive answer, achieve theological clarity and closure – Bingo! To extend the legal metaphor, we push ourselves forward as judge and jury to reach a unanimous verdict on how God makes sense. Alas, in trying to make God manageable, in attempting to master the mystery, we turn God into an idol, a deity under our control; at our worst, a god we co-opt for our own religious agenda.

The resurrection of Jesus, however, puts an end to all such self-serving manipulation of God. For note well: the resurrection of Jesus is fundamentally a message about God. “Jesus is alive!” doesn’t quite capture this significance. “Christ is risen!”, because God raised him, does. The subject of the resurrection is God. Indeed Karl Barth called the resurrection “a paraphrase of the word ‘God’”. The resurrection defines who God is: God is the God who raised Jesus from the dead. And in raising Jesus God identifies himself with Jesus and vindicates the cause that got Jesus killed – championing the poor and the shafted, challenging the rich and the powerful, rejecting the way of violence of good guys and bad guys alike.

Are you following me? Not too closely, I hope! For, again, that is the point – the point missing in that talk: the first followers of Jesus couldn’t follow it either! The Easter narratives – they are not straightforward accounts, they are “the witness of the overwhelmed” (Helmut Thielicke). It is not only futile, it is misconceived to treat them as “evidence”, to deploy them to “demonstrate” that the resurrection is a “matter of fact” which any disinterested observer must concede to be the case, such that those who don’t are either pig-headed or big-headed. For Jesus did not become an object of inspection available to anyone, he revealed himself only to those for whom the question of faith had already been raised – and dashed. It’s not that we don’t have history here, but it’s history not as we know it, Spock: it’s history that upends history as we know it.

Examine the Easter narratives. Look at how disjointed, inconsistent, even contradictory they are (a rather obvious fact that the speaker failed to mention). Look at how the writers struggle, tongue-tied, wholly inadequate to the task of articulation, unable to integrate the event into the language of experience. Look, finally, at the first reactions of the witnesses themselves: neither joy, nor relief, nor comprehension, but dread, dumfoundedness, and doubt. Jesus is hardly recognisable, he appears as a stranger, and he remains a resident alien – a mystery – now here, now there – even when the penny finally drops. It’s not “O happy days! It’s just as he said!”, but “Who dat man?!” and “What the hell was that?!” As a character says in a famous story by Flannery O’Connor, “Jesus thrown everything off balance.” As the old spiritual has it, the resurrection, no less than the cross, “causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.” If you could feed the data into a human seismograph, you would get an earthquake that goes off the Richter scale. And why?

For one thing, the resurrection of Jesus radically ruptures the natural order of the universe. Everyone dies and dead people stay dead – what is more certain than that? But this provocative Galilean rabbi – he dies alright, but he doesn’t stay dead. Here, in a graveyard in Jerusalem, the world breaks open – and its reordering begins.

For another thing, when, in the iconic film, the Terminator says, “I’ll be back!”, what’s he coming back for? It’s such an ominous promise because he’s returning for payback. Just so in antiquity it was thought that ghosts often appeared to exact revenge, a belief that Shakespeare exploits in Hamlet. And Jesus – of course he’d been stitched up by the Sanhedrin, executed by the Romans, and jeered by the mob, but he’d also been deserted by his disciples. “Jesus is back, no one is safe, lock your doors!” – wouldn’t that be your first reaction? And though they’ll be wrong about Jesus, they’ll be right about themselves: all their weaknesses, failures, sins exposed. The shock of the resurrection is the shock of the unmasking of their stupidity and betrayals. Revealed is a picture that is not pretty: it is humanity’s ugly heart of darkness.

But despite this sordid reality of the human condition – hear the Good News of Easter! – in the face our faithlessness, God remains faithful, his mercy measureless, his grace relentless (God is infinitely resourceful at dealing with ingratitude). And so, after all – but only after all – after being thrown off balance and knocked flat by meeting mystery, we may indeed get up, know the joy of forgiveness, take courage, and – most important of all – Go! Go witness! For that’s the upshot of all encounters with the risen Christ: “Scat! Scoot! Go! Tell! And show what you tell, with your lives, that I’m still here, that I’ll always be here, not un-crucified but risen, still me but more-than-me – me-in-my-church – and so still at it, still revealing to the world what a proper human being and a proper human community look like!”

Enough already! As the King himself said – Elvis I mean!: “A little less conversation, a little more action, please!” So let’s sing, let’s pray, let’s eat. And then: Scram!

Jesus, the Easter bunny, and even more

2013-03-30T10:00:00.001+11:00

A delightful sweet short video for children about the meaning of Easter, from Worshiphouse Kids:

Letter to a nun

2013-03-25T12:41:00.000+11:00

Dear Sister,

First of all, I have to ask you to forgive me for rifling through your things. I didn't mean any disrespect. I'm not (normally) the kind of person who goes around looking through a woman's private belongings. It's just that I happened to be walking past when I saw the boxes. A huddle of boxes along the kerb in front of the house. Big boxes stuffed with books and papers. Up and down the street people had dumped their unwanted things on the kerb – sofas, swing sets, garden furniture, broken suitcases, old children's toys – because it was the allocated day when the council trucks come and take it all away.

And there, Sister, were all your boxes. Not broken furniture or toys but books about music, liturgy, the Roman mass, the poetry of Jeremiah. So you see, my curiosity got the better of me. How could I help myself? I'm the sort of person who can't enter a house without staring at the bookshelves; so how could I walk on by without stopping to peer into your boxes?

That's how I came to be there on the path outside your house, stooped over your things, examining the contents of your life, the things you had thrown away. I picked up a book. You had written your name in the front, with the letters "O.P." after your name. So you are a Dominican, I thought, a nun.

I thumbed through a printed collection of medieval music manuscripts. I opened a pocket-sized edition, very old, of The Imitation of Christ. I picked up a somber-looking volume on theology and music. Nearly every page was underlined and annotated. I noticed one paragraph in particular that had attracted your attention: "What is needed is a new theology of music to provide a sound basis for the use of music in the liturgy today. It would be based on both scripture and tradition and would seek to find its origins in the apostolic Church. It would question why the Old Testament psalm remains the essential Christian song, and it would develop the 'new song' symbolism inherited by Christianity from Judaism and attributed to Christ." Beside that remark about the psalms, you had pencilled a shrewd, skeptical little question mark.

Sister, I was getting to like you.

I went to another box. Liturgical materials. Prayers. Sheet music. Church bulletins. Notes from various retreats. Scraps of ecclesiastical business printed on folded green paper. The Church, the Bride of Christ, the mystical Body of Christ – it all seems pretty humdrum once you start going through the paperwork, don't you think so, Sister?

Then, deeper in the box, the photographs began. Photographs tied together in neat bundles. On each bundle, a name. A strip of negatives attached. Hundreds of photographs. They were spilling on to the ground. Embarrassed, I stuffed them back in the box, but more fell out the other side. Down there somewhere was a well, a fountain of photographs. I saw children, weddings, old people, a bundle of pictures of the same person across time – the baby, the schoolboy, the university graduate, the young couple with children, the old couple, the old man standing alone. Your collection of lives, all assembled here in one place, here in these cardboard boxes by the side of the road.

In the next box I found your birthday cards. On top, cards with the number 80 blazoned across the front. Beneath those I saw cards with the number 70. I scooped up an armload of cards and saw, way down near the bottom, an older card with a picture of a faded birthday cake, the number 50 barely visible in faded silver.

In another box I found your notebooks, your diaries, a thicket of hardbound journals, spiral-bound notebooks, curious handmade paper stitched together in hand-stitched notebooks. Perhaps from India, I thought. I picked one up, a cracked blue notebook, and flicked through the pages, wanting to see your neat blue handwriting but not to intrude on your private thoughts. My eyes caught on one sentence:

"The door is not closing properly."

I'm sorry, Sister, I read that part by accident. I didn't mean to read a word. Ashamed, I closed the book. (I hope you got your door fixed.)

Another box, filled with pictures. Curling paper posters that had been pulled down from your walls. The angel Gabriel. The annunciation. Adam and Eve. Some saint I'd never seen before. Cheap reproductions of Renaissance paintings. An icon of the Virgin, gold paint shining even down there in the corner of the box.

Then under the pictures I found the little boxes. A cigar box with tiny notes and bits of string and plastic clips. A red cardboard box with pens, stamps, key rings, a smooth stone paperweight. A handmade box with candles, a fridge magnet, a tiny cast-iron sculpture. A square wooden box with jewellery, a ring, five brooches, a necklace, another ring, a broken bracelet, an orange stone. A rosary. Other smaller things, broken, inexplicable.

I'd had my suspicions, Sister, but not till I saw the jewellery did I understand what had happened. That some time after your eightieth birthday you must have died. I thought what it would be like to die like that, an old woman, a nun, no children or grandchildren gathered about, no one to reassure you that your years were blessed and that your name will be remembered. When you took vows and entered religious life, did you know it would eventually come to this? Did you see that a life devoted to prayer would have to be a life of obscurity, a life easily packed up in boxes and taken away, vanishing without a trace one afternoon? Will anyone remember you, Sister?

I put your things back into the boxes. I thought: Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us. I thought: Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. I thought: God will remember you, Sister. God forgets the names of the powerful but remembers the poor.

They have raked up the pieces of your life like old leaves, Sister, and piled them on the roadside to be taken away. But it is precious, every last bit of it, and God will forget nothing.

I hope you don't mind, Sister, but I have salvaged a few of your things and taken them home with me. I took a candle that had burned halfway down and the wax was very beautiful. We will burn it tonight, my wife, my children and I, while we share the evening meal. I took a postcard with a Leunig picture. I took your stone paperweight, no bigger than a thumbnail. Sister, I will give it to my daughter. She will love it for the same reason you did, because it is so small and because it looks like a tiny frog.

I took one of your books too, a book of poems. The first lines in the book are by Longfellow:

And the night shall be filled with music,

And the cares that infest the day

Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,

And as silently steal away.

God rules the world through wisdom (not power): another note on Origen

2013-03-19T23:49:00.002+11:00

When talking about creation, Christians easily slip into the language of power and control. Feminist theologians in particular have been sensitive to the problems with such language, and have pointed out the incoherences of a picture in which God seems to be acting on the same plane as other powers. As though God were one agent competing with all the rest, so that an exercise of divine power would place corresponding limitations on creaturely agency. As though divine "action", in other words, were basically the same sort of thing as human "action" (except stronger).

The thought of Origen – here as elsewhere – is uncannily prescient in its awareness of the way a language of power can lead to dead-ends in our understanding of God and creation. Origen is rather skeptical about the language of power, omnipotence, and control; as he sees it, the world is subject to God not through power but through Wisdom.

Fundamental to Origen's system is the belief that Wisdom (sophia) is in the beginning with God. She is eternally at God's side, rejoicing in God's presence (Proverbs 8:30-31). Eternally she contemplates the depth of the Father and shines out from the Father. God is light, and Wisdom is that light's brightness. Indeed where it was customary to regard "Word" as the primary title of the Son of God, Origen argues that the Son is called "Word" only in a secondary and derivative sense. "Word" – and other New Testament titles of Christ – describes Wisdom's relation to us once she has turned toward us in the history of redemption. The Son of God is Wisdom eternally and primordially, but subsequently becomes Word for our sake, in order to announce God's Wisdom to us (Commentary on John, 1.289). In relation to God, the Son is Wisdom; in relation to us, he is Word.

Using a classical Platonic metaphor, Origen argues that creation came into being according to an outline present in this divine Wisdom: "For I think that just as a house and a ship are built or devised according to the plans of the architect, the house and the ship having as their beginning the plans and thoughts in the craftsman, so all things have come to be according to the thoughts of what will be, which were prefigured by God in wisdom, 'For he made all things in wisdom' [Psalm 103:24]" (Commentary on John, 1.113).

The world is a copy of eternal Wisdom. And once the world has come into being in this way, God continues to relate to it through Wisdom. All things are subject to God not because God is stronger (or needs to be stronger) than creatures, but because creatures are drawn from the pattern of God's Wisdom and continue to exist by participating in Wisdom. "The universe is held in subjection by reason and wisdom, and not by force and necessity" (First Principles, 1.2.10).

In an extended illustration, Origen likens Wisdom to an image in a mirror. The Father looks into the mirror and what he sees is the Son. Every time the Father moves, the image moves too in perfect synchronicity. "There is one and the same movement, so to speak, in all they do" (First Principles, 1.2.12). And what the Father sees is not simply the Son as a divine person, but the Son as Wisdom – as the personal, living architecture of creation. The Father contemplates the whole universe in the image of the Son, and each time the Father moves the whole universe (so to speak) moves with him. God rules the world, one might say, by knowing it – by contemplating the world in the mind of the Son/Sophia. Creation exists – at any moment – to the extent that God allows it to "share in the divine wisdom" (Commentary on John, 1.244).

What this demonstrates is that God's relation to the world does not need to be mediated by some additional thing called "power". God does not need to control the world. God looks the world into being. Or we might also say – since what God loves is Wisdom – God loves the world into being. The mode of God's relation to the world is sovereign, loving attention. It is as God looks at God that the architecture of creation shines in God's presence. Wisdom shines; in her all things become bright.

Damnable doodlings

2013-03-17T22:38:00.000+11:00

by Kim Fabricius

The resignation of Benedict XVI gives new meaning to the old joke that the best time to think about retirement is before the Boss does.

hans+V:X – the papal password of Benedict XVI.

Some say Benedict XVI was a disappointment to the women’s movement. I’m not so sure. I mean look at the swanky scarlet shoes – by Stefanelli. The man was a curial Carrie Bradshaw.

I understand the papal conclave sought permission to use the theme song of Two and a Half Men to jazz up the Ceremony of the White Smoke.

What is the difference between a president stacking the Supreme Court with ideological ringers and a pope packing the College of Cardinals with theological clones? Oh, I know – American exceptionalism – the Holy Spirit.

“That the Church dares – in a world nauseous with false egalitarianism – to declare things too holy to be dressed in anything but a finery I cannot afford, a secrecy I cannot know, and a reverence I can only hope to attain – all this convinces me that she alone is the throne of Eternity on earth.” —Bad Catholic on the papal conclave. “There are three forces, the only three forces that are able to conquer and hold captive forever the consciences of these weak rebels for their own happiness – theses forces are: miracle, mystery, and authority.” —The Grand Inquisitor to Jesus.

How does one account for the election of an outsider Argentine pope? According to the message which the Lord gave Diego, son of “Chitoro”, in the sixth month of 1986, when Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín was on the throne: “un poco con la mano de Dios.”

“Francis, go and repair my house which is falling into ruins.” The new pope begins to get up to speed on his reading:

Suggested film-title for the narrative of the November 2012 General Synod of the Church of England: Dead Church Kneeling. Without a Bishop Prejean.

Augustinianly speaking, the difference between a cathedral and a prison fellowship is the difference between a courtesan and a hooker: it is solely one of opulence and style.

You know that faith-shaped hole that some say is in each of us? Judging from their input, amiable atheists like Alain de Botton evidently think it is located between what Forrest Gump calls the but-tocks.

I’ve been reading some of Al Mohler’s stuff online. Sorry about the pun, but the words “root canal” come to mind. And shouldn’t that be El Mohler?

Beatrice Marovich suggests, quite brilliantly, that we should judge a book by its cover. I would add another criterion of judgement: blurbists (NB: not blurbs but blurbists – the names alone suffice). For films too. So with testimonies by Joel Osteen and Rick Warren, and endorsements from Glenn Beck and the Dove Foundation, I can say, enthusiastically, that the History Channel’s The Bible is brilliant, awesome, a celluloid miracle. Which, coming from this blogger-blurbist, should be the kiss of death.

Paul “persecuted” Christians. We can be more specific. Paul was a bounty hunter (whose payment was treasure in heaven). More, he terrorised the church – which makes him a terrorist, doesn’t it?

Scholars have spilt a lot of ink puzzling over Paul’s “thorn in the flesh”. A modern translation might help us tease out an answer: Paul’s “pain in the ass”. Then – context, context, context: a letter to those faultless Corinthians – the answer becomes obvious: the church itself! Grace sufficient and power made perfect in weakness indeed.

Berry, Wendell –

E-reader, Kindle –

They don’t go together somehow.

Unless he can use it to plough.

Some recent studies suggest that Facebook and Twitter are as addictive as alcohol and cocaine. With, however, none of the benefits.

Piscine culinary proverb: to sear the cod is the beginning of wisdom.

Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole – as in (the example I always use) “Get your ass over here!”

Sermons are like apples. They come in sharp and sweet, crisp and soft, dry and juicy, and they ripen at different times of the year. And no one likes the core.

Parents, don’t try to teach your kids right from wrong. Rather show them how to detect bullshit and recognise beauty – i.e., show them what is real; oh, and bums – how funny they are, especially the squishy ones.

Marx memorably wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Events in the UK suggest that this observation now needs revision, as we experience a non-identical repetition of the neo-liberal policies of Margaret Thatcher. The “facts” remain tragic, perhaps more tragic than the original: (a) because in the aftermath of the greed-fuelled 2008 financial crisis, the contemporary Tory “there is no alternative” austerity mantra constitutes both an amnesty to the malefactors of the market as well as a punitive burden on its victims; (b) because there is no principled political alternative, as the coalition-partner Liberal Democrats are hopelessly compromised, while Labour remains ideologically contaminated and clueless; and (c) because I suspect that the Church of England under Justin Welby will not provide the kind of prophetic, not just letter-to-the-editor witness exercised under Robert Runcie and proclaimed in Faith in the City (1985). Marx, though, was right about the farce – which, however, you will find not in the “facts” but in the vaudevillian “personages” of the oligarchy.

The Bible remains a best-seller – despite the Sermon on the Mount. Or perhaps because of it – ear candy.

Whatever the linguistic, grammatical, textual, and exegetical analyses, if in key Pauline passages pistis christou isn’t a subjective genitive, we’re all fucked. Karl Barth in Romans taught me that, and it’s been personally confirmed on every one of my nearly 13,000 days as an ever-falling follower of the Fast One.

Whenever shit happens, I think, “Where isn’t God in all this?”

Heaven is a classroom: Origen's pedagogical theology

2013-03-14T00:10:00.005+11:00

Of all the things I like about Origen, what I like best is that he is a teacher.

We have the testimony of Eusebius that Origen was a distinctive and charismatic teacher. Eager students flocked to him. He taught them the whole sweep of Greek intellectual culture, allowing them to explore everything and anything. Nothing was off limits. "We took our fill of everything and enjoyed the good things of the soul", writes one student. By stages Origen would lead them through Greek philosophy, geometry, arithmetic, literature – until finally they came to the pinnacle of all learning, the interpretation of scripture.

Origen's students loved him. He was called "philosophy's guide", a "divine man". Numbered among his pupils were not only bishops and scholars but also ascetics, saints, martyrs.

In an infamous passage, Eusebius relates that Origen castrated himself in order to secure the trust of his female pupils and to ensure that his relationship with them was not misunderstood by others. The castration story (generally presumed to be apocryphal: let us hope so) would be shocking enough as a tale of heroic asceticism. But actually the point of the story, as Eusebius tells it, is not ascetic triumph over the body but simply a teacher's total commitment to pedagogy, to teaching and learning at any cost. Origen wants his female pupils to trust him implicitly; he is unwilling to let any obstacle get in the way.

To read Origen today is to follow the mind of a great teacher, boundless in curiosity, alert to difficulties, always on the lookout for opportunities to learn something new, always ready with an apt illustration to ease the burden of heavy concepts. Whatever he happens to be thinking about, you find him thinking like a teacher. His approach to exegesis, theology, prayer, the spiritual life – it is pedagogical through and through. And some of his most charming eccentricities come from his teacherly habit of mind.

If you take a group of people and ask them what they find most striking about the Gospel accounts of Jesus, I expect they'll mention his miracles, his supernatural powers, his return from death, perhaps his uncommon attentiveness and human warmth. But what amazes Origen most of all is Jesus' accomplishment as a teacher. Origen is stunned that Jesus could teach so well, and could fill the world with his teaching, in an educational career that lasted little more than a year. Good teaching requires constant improvement and growth; it takes years of practice to make a great teacher. How could anyone have been so good a teacher – the best teacher who ever lived – in just one year? Jesus is a pedagogical miracle: that's how Origen sees it.

And then there's heaven. If I ask you what heaven will be like, you'll perhaps mention light or harmony or happiness or feasting or some sort of über-erotic fulfillment. But when Origen tries to imagine the life of eternal blessedness, all he can think of is an everlasting classroom. We will sit down at heavenly desks in heavenly lecture rooms and Someone will lecture to us. In this manner our minds will be constantly enlarged, our hearts purified, as we spend eternal ages penetrating more and more deeply into the mysteries of divine Wisdom. To live eternally is to grow eternally: and you grow by learning. So, Origen reassures us warmly, heaven will be one long never-ending education.

Throw away your spurious monographs on "Eastern" and "Western" views of personhood; forget all those trite textbook distinctions between "Greek" and "Latin" doctrines of the Trinity. If you want to know the real substantive difference between the Greek and Latin theological traditions, here it is: St Augustine thinks of school as one of the most lamentable effects of the fall – school as hell on earth – whereas Origen thinks heaven will be school writ large. Now there's a division worth arguing about.

Even the most controversial part of Origen's theology – his universalism – is really just another byproduct of his pedagogical mindset. When Origen suggests that all the wicked, including the fallen angels, will eventually be saved and reconciled to God, it's not because he has a soft view of divine justice, or because he failed to notice all those biblical texts about fire and judgment. It's just that he can't believe anyone could suffer all those fiery torments without eventually learning something from the experience. Sure, you might start off in hell; but eventually that's got to teach you something – right? And so by learning you'll be purified, until eventually you make it up to heaven – that is, to the heavenly classroom where the "process of instruction and rational training" begins (First Principles, 2.3.1).

"A process of instruction and rational training": if that sounds dull to you it is only because you don't love learning the way Origen loves it. When our author wrote those words his body quivered with excitement.

Origen knew scripture and the mysteries of the faith better than anyone. Yet he knew that all the learning of this life is only preparation for the life to come. Even the profoundest scholars are like children learning the alphabet; but one day we shall step through the doorway, and in that big bright classroom in the sky we will finally learn to read.

Letter to a pastor with cancer

2013-03-10T23:11:00.004+11:00

My dear brother in Christ,

Tonight at church you told us you have cancer. We had gathered as we always do. To make time for God's eternity. To hear and say the great earth-shaking things. We sang the psalms and from our lips the mighty words rolled down like rivers, gushing up from ancient wells. One of us got up to read the parable of the prodigal. Our hearts were broken when he left his father's house, our hearts were glad when he turned his face towards home, our hearts were nearly bursting when his father ran to meet him, and when, to our amazement, he told the other son, We had to celebrate. We listened, we prayed. We brought gifts and silence; we brought our hearts and lives. We invoked the holy name of God. We tasted powers of the age to come.

But it was only after all this that you stood behind the great big open book and told us, quite calmly, that you have cancer. That it is aggressive. That the prognosis is not good. That your family is in shock. That your home is haunted by grief and questions.

You told us you didn't want the cancer, you wished you didn't have it, but you are looking for the way of Christ in this. You told us this would be your new path of discipleship, a new form of following. You reminded us of the command repeated more than any other in our scriptures: Do not be afraid.

Some were weeping; I heard them. Your wife was crying too. You asked the congregation if you could lay your ministry aside a while to follow Christ down this new path. You asked (as if you needed it) our permission. You told us you would pray for us. You named the name of Jesus (a name you love), a strong name (as you have always loved to call it).

When you spoke to me you said you wished you were high up at that friend's cabin, up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. You would rest yourself under a tree nine hundred years old, covered by its shade under the sacred silence. You said there is a place up there you love to walk, where if you leave the trail your footprints would be there a hundred years and in all that time no one would ever see them.

You told me: Soon I will need prayers. Soon I will need that cabin in the mountains, the place my wife loves best. Soon I will need some serious margaritas.

Standing in the gathered congregation, you told us: In all this I hear Christ calling. You told us: I do not want this, but I want to know Christ and to follow where he leads.

I thought: pastor.

I thought: friend.

I thought: O my brother.

Pastor, brother, friend – I will pray for you. Each Friday I will go hungry, and hollow out my spirit so that the prayers come out clear and right. And just in case God will not hear me, I'll ask my children to pray too (for children cannot pray wrong, they don't know how to do it any way but right).

You stood behind the Bible and addressed us with the Christ-light burning in your eyes. You raised your hands and voice in blessing and sent us out to follow in Christ's way. We sang the last song. I thought: another week, and then another, and then the Great Joy will be upon us. We will celebrate the Easter feast and sing the songs of death's defeat.

Tonight I saw death's shadow and was not afraid. The light I saw in your eyes was Easter light, my brother, and to the God of Easter morning I will pray.

Yours, &c.

Dorty doodlings

2013-03-02T21:29:00.003+11:00

by Kim Fabricius

The fool says in his heart that there is no God. But one who says in his heart that there is may also be a fool – and a hypocrite to boot.

Calvin was a Cancer, Arminius was a Libra. It was never going to work out.

The turban often features in negative portrayals of Muslims. Interestingly (according to the OED), from the Persian dulband, via the Turkish tülbent, we get the English word tulip. Interestingly, because TULIP often features in the negative portrayal of Calvinists. Or rather some Calvinists; for example, Westminster Confession Calvinists. The difference is that the latter negative portrayal may be accurate.

Abraham Kuyper famously said, “There is not a single square inch of creation concerning which Christ does not say, ‘Mine!’” Which rather makes Jesus sound like a spoiled child clutching his ball on a playground. I think what Christ says is more like, “Mia casa, tua casa.”

In an earlier doodling I suggested that a Pelagian is an Augustinian is who has never grown up. I should add that there are also Augustinians who have never grown up – precisely because they think they have. And then there are Barthians and Williamses …

The difference between a Barth and a Piper is that the former glorifies God, the latter deifies Glory.

Barth famously suggested that we should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. There are, however, exceptions. For example, from preachers who occupy the pulpit with the AV and the Daily Mail you will hear sermons that manage to combine the unctuous and the odious.

I remember, as a convert, being YRR. Hell, I’m now ORR. But young or old, it is unseemly for the Reformed to be, in spirit, trop sérieux et grincheux.

I think that the traditional furniture of Judgement is all wrong: I see God sitting in a rocking chair, not on a throne. How can you cwtch up to Tad on a throne?

On Matthew 3:11: John came with water to rid us of our sins; Jesus comes with fire to rid us of our virtues.

True Christian virtues may be described as “hobbits of the heart”.

We know the sanctity of a saint when we see one. If, stupidly, a church insists on sainthood being verified and ratified, surely it should not be by the dubious searching for and demonstration of a couple of miracles, but by the candid concession of shadows, weaknesses, sins.

In salvation-history there are pauses, breaks, excursuses, digressions – synaptic, dramatic, provocative, quirky – a succession of dashes, the holiest of punctuation marks, immortally enshrined in the poetry of St. Emily of Amherst –

God’s answer to prayer is: “Pray.”

“Please, Sir” / “Yes, Ma’am”: Gethsemane in inclusive language.

How Facebook Has Brought Me Closer to God; Tweety Bird: Microblogging with the Holy Spirit; and Social Networking: the New Reformation. Available soon from Screwtape Publishing House, in Christian bookshops near you.

It should hardly be surprising that the aggressive and violent make the best pacifists. After all, the sensual and passionate make the best monks.

Friends, on those extremely rare occasions when I poke the bear of the United States, remember that I am as American as Limbaugh, lynching, and lethal injection. And Lebowski, Little Big Horn, and left field.

Take ordinary Patriotism. Stew in a marinade of exceptionalism. Add ignorance, amnesia, fear, and lies. Stir vigorously. Grill under the intense heat of a national anthem, with its themes of battle and victory, written by a resentful ex-pacifist POW. Garnish with God. Voilà: Hatriotism.

The Star-Spangled Banner is unsingable. It is also very hard to sing.

So the AFA is outraged by SNL’s trailer of Djesus Uncrossed. AFA, I share your pain and ire. With the NRA as a co-litigant, I’d sue for infringement of copyright.

Going to church to learn how to be a Christian can be like going to demolition derby to learn how to drive.

In the old Danish fairy tale, a child declares that an emperor has no clothes. In the contemporary British version, a writer suggests that a duchess has far, far too many. Both are statements of the bleedin’ obvious about royalty as spectacle and illusion – and both are denied by people mesmerised by the propaganda of its media sycophants.

No man is an island, but one island is a Man. Two, if you live in Wales: Barry (see Gavin and Stacey).

Burial or cremation? WWJD?

Lecture in Adelaide: Rowan Williams and theology in the public square

2013-02-24T18:25:00.004+11:00

Tomorrow I'll be heading down to Adelaide to give a commencement lecture for St Barnabas' Theological College. It will be held at St Peter's Cathedral, with a commencement service at 6.30, followed by the public lecture at 7.30. I'll be speaking (gasp) twice, with a homily in the worship service followed by a lecture on "Rowan Williams and Theology in the Public Square."

For the lecture I'll be suggesting a typology of four main types of public theology:

1. Proclamation (directly presenting the Christian message in the public square)

2. Policy (directly attempting to influence policy or public institutions)

3. Re-description (attempting to show that some aspect of a society or its history is only fully intelligible within a Christian frame of reference)

4. Imagination (a more general attempt to cultivate a rich imaginative vision of the world as seen through Christian eyes)

And I'll try to show that each of these approaches is always pressing towards something beyond itself – towards a public embodiment of the Christian message in particular lives. Here's an excerpt from the last part of the paper:

To make room for God: that is the final aim of any public theology. To make room for God in human life and room for God in the public square. All our theological speech is gesturing towards this. In the end it is only life itself, a life reoriented around God, that can convey all that Christian faith means. This kind of public engagement is what Williams has called “taking responsibility for God.” In an essay from the new volume on Faith in the Public Square, Williams describes the public religious life as a life that “takes on the task of ensuring a habitation for God,” a life that “offers hospitality to God, so that this place, this identity, becomes a testimony.” Where this occurs, he suggests, one’s life becomes a sign, a word, a living sacred text. It is here that “we begin to learn how to be a sign inhabited by God’s meanings.” And this is what the public square needs most of all: not just more discussion and debate about God, not just a deeper consideration of Christian ideas, but the visible presence of symbolic lives, lives that mean God.

On finding a diary in the bottom drawer

2013-02-20T13:00:00.001+11:00

I was rummaging in the bottom drawer looking for some old papers when I found it. One of those big plain A4 books, rather business-like with its matter-of-fact black cover, red spine, red corners. More like an accounting ledger than a personal diary. Which explains my surprise when I opened it and saw the first page:

A JOURNAL OF READINGS,

(MAINLY THEOLOGICAL)

B. Myers.

July 2002 to July 2004

If you had told me that such a book existed I would never have believed you. I pride myself on being a thoroughly careless, disorderly, haphazard sort of reader. As a matter of principle I allow my reading to be guided by a certain prodigious laziness. I read whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it. I can re-read the same book a hundred times. I can devour an author's complete works in a spasm of devotion and then, as long as I live, never give another moment's thought to that writer or any of their books. I am not the kind of person who keeps a record of the books I read. Would you keep an orderly account of all the occasions in your life when you have sung songs, or drunk wine, or made love? Reading belongs to the domain of the spirit; it is not groceries, not income and expenditure, not the sort of thing that belongs in a black A4 ledger.

Yet there it was, as plain as day. My own handwriting staring back at me. I had recorded the title of every book I read for two years, and (what is worse) documented my opinions about each one after reading it. I must have been 24, newly married, a student, pimples on my chin, somewhere halfway between a man and a boy. And in those two years I somehow managed to record – I have just counted them – 163 books, 163 sovereign verdicts on the quality of those authors' writing and the correctness of their Views.

It must have been a feverish couple of years. It must have taken a toll on my eyesight. It must have been the time in my life when I first discovered that I could not see the road at night when driving. The first time I drove the car on to the footpath and sat there, bewildered, squinting through the windscreen and trying to find the edges of the road. My astonished surprise when the optometrist handed me my first pair of glasses and all of a sudden the world became clear as a movie, all the edges of things glistening, sharp as knives.

What led me to that bespectacled state? What prompted me to sacrifice my eyesight at such a tender age, reading books all day and (one must presume) staying up half the night to finish them?

Thumbing through the diary I see that mostly it was Karl Barth, all the volumes of Church Dogmatics and anything else I could get my hands on, as well as dozens upon dozens of impressive-sounding tomes of Reformed theology. Seventeenth-century treatises on predestination. A thicket of dull studies in science and religion. Whole truckloads of T. F. Torrance, Emil Brunner, Anselm, Descartes, and every few pages another one by Barth. And Plato – lots of Plato. I never knew I ever read so much Plato, or liked it so well, or that Plato and Karl Barth had ever been so close together in my mind, growing up side by side like two trees in a garden.

I steal a sideways glance at the scribbled notes. Most of it I can't bear to read. It is always disappointing to discover what a pompous arse you are, how sure of yourself, how confident in your own abilities, how easily you pass judgment on good and bad, truth and error, wrong and right.

Opinion is a beggarly thing; I should have learned as much from Plato if I'd been paying attention.

Is my 24-year-old self really the right person to be assuring you that a certain critique of St Augustine is "perfectly convincing", or that the climactic scene in Seneca's Oedipus is "poorly executed", or that Moltmann's small-print sections in Theology of Hope are "learned and acute", or that Clark Pinnock is too self-absorbed to be interesting, or that Bernard Ramm's prose style is one of the most "shamefully incompetent" spectacles in modern theology?

At a few points I see glimmers of promise. Observations that are simpler, more objective and serene, a little less pretentious. Like the single-sentence summary of Augustus Strong's The Great Poets and Their Theology: "He reveres Shakespeare & loathes Goethe." Or the verdict on Hans Schwarz's Creation: "Lots of science, not much theology." Or the description of "the pleasant lack of nervousness and anxiety" in Anselm's writing. Or the observation that Plato's genius is encapsulated in a remark of Socrates to Euthyphro: "Come, then, let us examine what we are saying."

There are mysteries in this diary too, peculiar dimensions of myself that I can no longer access. One note begins with the apology: "In the midst of many more pressing matters, I had time only to read the first half." More pressing matters? Many? Here I was sitting around all day reading 163 books – recording them in an A4 diary – and still I imagined that somewhere in my life there were things that could be described as "pressing"?

Or there is the mystery of retrospective vision, a thing that is always so enchanting about one's own old diaries. That the bits I thought were important turn out to be irrelevant, while the bits I thought were trivial turn out to be of huge significance. That's how I feel when I notice the January 2004 entry for Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? I still remember where I was the day I read that book. I remember the impression it made on me, days later, the way it shook me, the way I kept turning it over in my mind for weeks, years afterwards. Yet in a diary where even the most pedantic monograph and the most boorish piece of Calvinist propaganda is honoured with its own meticulous description and review, Balthasar's Dare We Hope is noted – just the title – without a single word of comment.

The most arresting feature of this diary, however, is the way it documents an entire philosophy of reading. This philosophy of reading – let's call it the Reading Mirror – takes it for granted that the whole purpose of books is to reflect back to ourselves our own preferences, assumptions, and opinions. My 24-year-old self sums this up rather bluntly on 6 December 2002, noting – after reading Donald Bloesch's Theology of Word and Spirit – how satisfying it is "to find someone with whose views I feel I can almost entirely agree."

Isn't that where so much of our reading goes wrong? We turn to books, lots of books, looking always for the same thing: ourselves. And we end up finding just what we were looking for. The ego remains at the centre, absorbing other minds and worlds into itself.

There is a whole approach to education that uses books like this. Good books are the ones that share my prejudices and affirm my experiences; bad books are the ones that are strange to me, books full of alien prejudices and remote experiences, books that offend my sense of being at the centre. On these terms even the best books become unfruitful. The seed falls on stony ground; it springs up momentarily but withers, having no roots.

But the seed that falls on good soil brings forth grain – some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

I have laid the diary back in the bottom drawer. I will leave it there with the other orphans – the papers, files, notebooks, scrawled addresses, unanswered letters, the detritus of a life. Perhaps one day, ten years from now, I will discover it again. Perhaps then it will surprise me all over again, once I have forgotten that it exists, once I have ceased to believe that such a person who read those books and wrote those things could ever have existed. That's the thing about old diaries. I close the drawer. The house is quiet as I go back to my chair and to my book.

Teaching the doctrine of the Trinity

2013-02-18T08:14:00.000+11:00

In the coming semester I'll be teaching a subject on the doctrine of the Trinity, focusing on close readings of three formative Christian texts. The classes are on Thursday nights over twelve weeks (and as always, auditors are welcome to come along!). I'll be teaching each class with Matt Wilcoxen; we'll engage in discussion and debate together, instead of presenting monological lectures. I've pasted below the introduction and weekly schedule – I'd be interested to know if any other educators out there have approached the subject this way, or have used a similar kind of dialogical lecture form. Classes don't start for a couple of weeks yet, so all ideas and suggestions are welcome!

Introduction

In this subject, you are invited to explore the central mystery of the Christian faith: the mystery of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is the belief – shared by all the main historic Christian traditions – that within God there is a living threefold movement, and that this divine three-in-oneness is the secret of the world’s creation, redemption, and final restoration.

It was the experience of salvation in Christ that led early Christian thinkers towards a doctrine of the Trinity. From the earliest days, Christians were convinced that in Christ they had experienced God’s saving self-revelation. And if Christ reveals God – if, looking at Jesus, you find yourself looking at God – then Christ must somehow be said to share in God’s divinity. Otherwise, you wouldn’t really have met God in Christ, and God would remain unknown. The doctrine of the Trinity was formulated as a way of safeguarding these basic convictions about salvation and revelation.

In its briefest form, this doctrine can be summarised with the statement that God is “one being, three persons.” In the more elaborate language of the Nicene Creed, the doctrine of the Trinity centres on the affirmation that “Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, [is] eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made.”

How exactly does this language about the Trinity relate to our ordinary Christian experience of salvation? How does it relate to the spiritual life? How does it relate to the way we read the Bible? And is this doctrine really just one theory among others? How can be sure that we really know anything about God at all?

These are some of the key questions that we’ll be exploring throughout the semester. We will be reading and studying three major Christian thinkers: the Greek-speaking theologian Gregory of Nazianzus (329-389/90); the North African bishop Augustine of Hippo (354-430), and the twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). We will be focusing especially on these writers' patterns of biblical exegesis, and on the way they view theological reflection on the Trinity as a path of spiritual transformation. These are creative, challenging, highly imaginative Christian thinkers. At first it will take some patience and hard work to get familiar with them. But they will amply repay as much effort as you bring to them.

Our weekly classes will be led by two lecturers, Ben Myers and Matt Wilcoxen, who will engage in discussion, debate, and dialogue about each week’s reading. Make sure you’ve read the text before you come to class – underline, annotate, jot down one or two questions that arise for you from the reading – so that you can join in the discussion.

This is an exciting topic, and these are exciting Christian texts. We look forward to learning together with you over the coming semester!

Weekly Schedule

GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS: THE REVELATION OF THE TRIUNE GOD

Text: Gregory, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations

1. The spirituality of theology (Oration 27)

2. The unknowable God (Oration 28)

3. The revelation of the Son (Oration 29)

4. The light of the Spirit (Oration 31)

AUGUSTINE: THE WAY INTO THE TRIUNE GOD

Text: Augustine, The Trinity

5. Jesus, the divine Saviour (selections of Books 1 and 4)

6. The life of the mind: A wounded image of the Trinity (Books 9-10)

7. The healing of the wounded image (Book 14)

8. Knowing the triune God from the inside (selections of Book 15)

KARL BARTH: THE OVERFLOW OF THE TRIUNE LIFE

Text: Barth, "The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country," CD IV/1 (study edition), §59.1

9. Jesus, the humble Lord (pp. 150-69)

10. Divinity and kenosis (pp. 169-86)

11. The humble God (pp. 186-98)

12. Naming God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit (pp. 198-204)

Assessment

* Assessment 1: short research paper on Gregory's scriptural exegesis

* Assessment 2: short research paper on Augustine's images of the Trinity

* Assessment 3: theological essay drawing on the class texts, with essay questions on topics like spirituality, exegesis, gender, language, art, and preaching.

Dissident doodlings

2013-02-16T10:20:00.002+11:00

by Kim Fabricius

The pope tweets – and then retires. You think that’s a coincidence?

The 2013 Super Bowl was the eschatological full Monty: two weeks of purgatorial tack, including Bible-bashing bullshit; the heavenly butted Beyoncé at halftime; two teams elegantly beating the hell out of each other; even a power blackout, surely God’s judgement (Katrina-lite) on the Big Easy’s hookers, gamblers, and gays.

Let’s get this, er, straight: God does not hate fags. God not only loves gays, he likes, enjoys gays, delights in their company (cf. James Alison). God does not hate fag-haters either, God loves homophobes too. Maybe (with Alisonian generosity, though it’s a stretch) God even likes them. It would be nice if they would return the favour.

Any reservations I had about gay marriage – ever since I gave it any thought, I have always supported the blessing gay unions – have finally dissipated after observing the way it has divided the Tories and undermined their chances of winning the next general election. I mean, that’s got to be providential, right?

An NRA national convention is not a pretty sight: a spectacle of mass mensicide.

Initially horrified to hear that there are American churches where you can bear firearms at worship, I now think, hey, at least there’s always a chance that someone will shoot the preacher.

Responding to an excerpt from an interview with N.T. Wright in which the British scholar speaks of the incredulity with which the developed world regards the religious right’s opposition to a national healthcare system, one blogger commented: “Yes, of course American conservatives want more sick and dead people. That’s it exactly.” He thought he was being ironic.

In the early 70s I settled in the UK as an expat. Today I’d be an asylum seeker. A recurring nightmare is that I am in a holding cell at Heathrow awaiting rendition.

Know your Bible, keep the commandments, exercise self-control, choose a righteous lifestyle (for sin is a matter of choice and you’re responsible), keep yourself pure (for the world is corrupt), grow up (don’t be a baby), suffer in silence, be a good citizen, fear hell, keep it simple. Recognise your kind of Christianity in these ten, er, propositions? Don’t let it worry you that a Pelagian could tick all the boxes.

A Pelagian is an Augustinian who has never grown up.

It figures that Marilynne Robinson is a Calvinist: her writing is irresistibly graceful.

I really like Anne Lamott, I do. I sense a soul-mate (getting wrecked and reading recklessly opened her mind). But now that I have read three of her many books – well, you should read it too.

Imagine having a “personal relationship with Jesus”. Exactly.

For some complementarians, it’s wasn’t Adam and Eve, it was Adam and Jeeves.

The Bible, of course, is a library, not a book. Still, you may read it from cover to cover – though the wisest theological and literary strategy is to start at the end and work backwards, for that’s the only way the Bible really makes sense.

It embraces the intellectual, the somatic, and the improvisatory – the restlessly probing mind, the desiring body, the spirit in pilgrimage – and the full range of the affections – praise and joy, anguish and lament, acceptance and protest. That is why, for me, jazz is the epitome of (dreadful term, I know) Christian music.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Of course: the political and electoral systems of liberal democracies are a game, a game that’s fixed, a game of two haves.

The only good argument for Establishment I know is that Rowan Williams now sits in the House of Lords (as [the Red?] Baron Williams of Oystermouth) – admittedly beside the atrocious argument of George Carey.

If the living dead are zombies, then the dead living are …? Fundies, I guess (cf. Jaroslav Pelikan on the “dead faith of living people”). Call them pistiscides.

The question is not WWJD but WIJD.

On the kingdom of God belonging to children, after he had finished the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Now let’s play pretend …”

The good news is that grandchildren are the most wonderful creatures in the world. The bad news is that you’ve got to have children to get them.

Favourite word-play of all time: Obit anus, abit onus. – Schopenhauer, on the death of a woman to whom he had been paying disability allowance for 26 years after physically throwing her out of his apartment.

Speaking of Schopenhauer, I’ve just been re-perusing a collection of his works – for light relief after finishing Robert Martin’s biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Opening Day for the Mets this year is April 1. You couldn’t make it up. Mind, it’s also the day after Easter, and the day my wife had a quadruple bypass four years ago. Hope springs eternal!

A letter to Pope Benedict XVI

2013-02-13T03:57:00.000+11:00

Your Holiness,

I hope you will forgive me the impertinence of writing to you – I who am not only young and a layperson but also one of those "separated brethren" of the protestant churches. The only claim I can make on your attention is that I have prayed for you sometimes, and so have come to feel that curious bond of affection that grows up between lives otherwise so widely separated but joined, as if under one roof, in prayer.

So you are stepping down, handing the job over to a younger man. You explain that you are tired and old, that you want to retire to the cloister and eke out your last days in lonely prayer. When your predecessor, Blessed John Paul II, noticed that he was no longer young, he turned even his age and illness, even his dying, into a visible sign of God's presence in frail flesh. But you've taken another road. The silence of the cloister, and beyond that the silence of the grave and the deeper silence of the living Word, have been calling to you, and you have answered that call.

And who could blame you? You haven't exactly presided over the brightest hour of the church's history, have you? But none of us gets to choose our time. We are here, now, and we have to make the best of it, even if at times we seem to spend our lives paying off the debts of former generations, or suffering for their mistakes. Leading the church must feel sometimes like trying to keep a ship on course when someone else has been there before you putting holes in the hull. And then you get to the end of it all and wonder whether you did a decent job or whether you just created more holes for the next person to deal with.

But forgive me, Holy Father, I am forgetting myself. It is, after all, the church we're talking about (I will even use the Catholic capital for once: the Church), not just some troublesome institution. And the church has no leaders, only servants. Or rather it has one leader, always the same, he who loved us and washed us from our sins by his own blood. How easy to forget that the church today – with all its troubles, its sins, its sadness, its calamitous attempts to manage its PR – is the very same church that was planted in the testimony of apostles, watered by the blood of martyrs, nourished by the prayers of holy saints. How easy to forget that the church is not ours but God's, and that God leads and sustains the church by secret means of which no tongue can tell. You never forgot this, Holy Father, that is why you had the freedom to take this step, to lay aside your office and creep unburdened into the mystery of prayer.

I don't know what your legacy will be, Holy Father, and none of us can guess where the church's future lies. Except to say that the church's life today is hidden in the same place it was always hidden, in Christ who is in God.

Today, Holy Father, when the ash of last year's burned palm branches is smeared across my face, I will pray for you. I will pray for your successor – brave fellow, whoever he is! – and for all those poor courageous souls who hand their lives over into the service of God's church, living by trust when they cannot see the way, living by hope when their hearts are heavy, living by love because love is at the bottom of it all – for God is love.

Yours respectfully in Christ, &c.