Faith and Theology

Berlin notebook: on German sentences

2012-05-28T07:46:00.001-05:00

I was brought up proper. So I know that, in conversation, you should always interrupt the other person halfway through their sentence. It is how you show you're really interested. Speaking is the most enthusiastic form of listening. If your conversation partner says something you like, something you agree with, something you find exciting or important or objectionable or just mildly fascinating, all at once you must sweep into action with a sentence of your own. And if all goes well, you will never have to finish that sentence, because your conversation partner will reciprocate with another good energetic interruption.

Every conversation is a minefield. The things that interest me lie buried just beneath the surface, waiting to detonate as soon as they are touched. The moment you trigger my interest in what you are saying, you can be sure that your own sentences will be blown to smithereens. And, in turn, if I have said something interesting and worthwhile, I naturally expect my sentences to be left unfinished too. Why finish a sentence – finishing things is such a bore – when there is someone else around to start a new one?

And so the whole conversation is carried not by even turns but by a series of abrupt lurches, collisions, and transitions. If nobody does me the courtesy of interrupting me, my statements tend to trail off inconsequentially: as though, without being interrupted at just the right moment, I lose all interest in my own sentences and cannot be bothered trying to finish them. As far as I am concerned, there is only one rule of conversation: the more violent the interruption, the better.

Such conversation is less like tennis than like a game of rugby – not an orderly to and fro, but a wild haphazard flinging back and forth, punctuated by an occasional mad dash or brutal tackle or, if the ball is dropped, a quick ungainly struggle of seizing and grabbing, limbs flailing everywhere. That is how I expect any ordinary conversation to unfold.

My grandmother is a great talker. My mother is a great talker. I am a great talker. God willing, my children and my children's children will be great talkers too.

If my wife is angry with me and wants to torment me, she only has to practise what is called 'active listening': a horrible insulting procedure in which the listener politely nods, raises eyebrows, makes small encouraging indistinct sounds while you are speaking – instead of the proper thing, which is to contradict, expostulate, ridicule, vociferate, interject. Even when I am giving a lecture to my students, I feel restless and deflated if ever fifteen minutes passes without an interjection. It is a sign that I have failed to engage anybody; if they were really interested in what I had to say, they would all be talking right over the top of me. Polite, silent, attentive, 'active' listening is intolerable: it depresses me the way some people are depressed by cursing and shouting and thumping on tables. Hyperactive listening is the only kind I like.

Which brings me to that difficult and delicate subject: the German sentence. For all its elegant clockwork precision, for all its gothic poetical homeliness, the grave disadvantage of the German language is that it cannot be interrupted. For if you interrupt a German sentence halfway through, you might never get to learn what the verb was – whether she agrees to marry you or doesn't; whether their house was destroyed by fire or was saved; whether the person who invited you to dinner is horrified by cannibalism or is an eager practitioner. With the verb coming at the end of the sentence, and with the ever-present possibility that even the most vehemently opinionated sentence might end with that astounding little word nicht, interruption is, for all practical purposes, impossible. There is nothing else for it. You are in for the long haul. You will have to speak in entire sentences, and, what's worse, listen to them too.

Presumably that is where the impressive seriousness of German scholarly discourse comes from: from the habit of listening to a person all the way to the end of the sentence. Academic conferences in English know no such foreign niceties. For us, a gathering of scholars is judged not by who can speak and listen the best, but by who can provide the best and most brilliant interruptions. 'I have heard your subject, I have heard your verb, now let me tell you, sir, what I think!' This is excellent, and it is why our conferences are, as a rule, much more entertaining than the ones in Germany.

You can see the whole difference between these two languages if you walk into a Berlin bar around midnight. In any respectable English pub at that hour, everyone is talking, all together, all at the same time, all constantly and without ceasing. It is not so much a con-versation as a pan-versation. But at this cosy Berlin bar, you find people gathered respectfully in little huddles, speaking and listening in earnest, one voice at a time, everyone taking turns as if the whole thing were supervised by an invisible referee.

I will grant that the Germans invented quantum physics and psychology and moveable type and computers. Fair enough. I will grant that German is the language of science, of philosophy, of theology, of carefully crafted intellectual exchange. Like Latin, it is a language ideally suited to the university. But English – English! – is without rival as the world's great language of magnanimous interruption. A Christian woman I met in Berlin told me she likes to read theology in German, but to worship in English.

English is the language of dialogue – that haphazard rambunctious teemingly unpredictable grand good stuff of human speech. It is the language of Shakespeare and Dr Johnson, of Hollywood and Huck Finn, of Jerry Seinfeld and Jane Austen, of Facebook and Faulkner and Fawlty Towers and the glorious tumultuous clamour of the local pub.

Berlin notebook: in the café

2012-05-19T01:44:00.002-05:00

When I arrive in a city for the first time, my most urgent priority is to find a place to drink coffee in the morning. As a general thing I find morning to be a very unsatisfactory business, an unwelcome accident that brings the calm oblivion of sleep and dreams all screeching to an insulting sudden halt. There are people who talk of climbing out of bed in the morning, or even of quaintly hopping up, but I have never understood these innocuous playground metaphors. I am wrenched out of bed, otherwise I would lie there all day. Amid the violent assault of morning, amid this cruel inhospitable turmoil that is called Waking Up, I have a terrible need for something calm, stable, friendly, and predictable. And so the morning coffee is my anchor. Without a good consoling place to drink some coffee and scribble in my notebook in the morning hours I am all adrift, just as some people come unmoored if you take away the television or the daily crossword puzzle or the telephone call from Mother.

So when we got to Berlin and moved into our apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, I quickly located the coffee shops in the surrounding streets. At first I went to a place called Café CK on Marienburger Strasse. Now by any ordinary standards, this is an excellent place to take your morning coffee. The baristas are friendly and attractive, the coffee is good, the big blue sofas are cosy and anonymous, the walls are adorned with paintings, the music is smooth, a little bluesy, never too loud or too distracting. Everything is in order, as the Germans like to say. But after my fourth consecutive morning at Café CK, I began to feel vaguely troubled and uneasy. Something about the place wasn't right, though I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

On the fifth day I ordered coffee and sat down and looked around me – and that was when it struck me. The place was too clean. The sofas were all as good as new. The floor was polished. The walls looked newly painted. The espresso machine had been lovingly shined and polished like a boy's first car. Even the light fittings all matched; not one was cracked or broken. Everything was, in a word, perfect.

I left without finishing my drink and went out into the street. On the corner a boy was standing on a cardboard box and playing an accordion. I tossed a coin into the hat and crossed the road. I walked to Café Slörm on Danziger Strasse, where the roughly fitted floorboards creak and all the furniture is worn, faded, decrepit, forty years old and falling slowly to pieces. The front door is plastered with stickers that are peeling away to reveal the scrawled graffiti underneath. The coffee tables are rough wooden crates turned upside down with bits of rusted nails jutting from the corners. There are little homemade shelves with flowers arranged in beer bottles beside mismatched lamps in tattered yellow lampshades. The walls are crumbling away to reveal the red bricks underneath; everywhere there are signs of repair, patches of repainting, nails hammered in and pulled out again. Here and there one sees furtive ironic outbursts of graffiti. Against the big front window are some orange vinyl barstools; you can sit there only if you don't mind resting your feet on the cast iron radiator. Or you can sit facing the bar on a row of vintage folding cinema seats; they look extremely chic and extremely uncomfortable.

Out behind the bar there is a second room: you can see it from here, since some practical-minded person has made a window by smashing a rough hole through the dividing wall. In one corner the floor is raised on a carpeted platform, supporting a green sofa and a steel table that looks as if it was once a filing cabinet. Above the sofa, stuck to the wall with tape, a series of nude sketches done in charcoal. Big flat cushions and worn velvet cushions and books and magazines scattered on the floor. A table in the far corner appears to be a sort of workbench; someone has taken apart one of the wooden crates and stretched chicken wire around the sides. Perhaps they will use it for mice, or small rabbits. Perhaps guinea pigs. Or perhaps it is merely art. In another corner a wooden chair is painted all over with whimsical cartoon pictures: a whale sipping Coca-Cola through a straw; vines and flowers sprouting from the wood; an enormous cat with enormous cat eyes. A few more chairs sprawl idly around a three-legged table. In the very back there is a high bird cage, the home of two South American parrots named Paula and Leo. A chalkboard on the wall asks you not to feed the birds. Leo flaps his wings and squawks; the floorboards shudder with punk music; everything is a little too loud and a little too severe.

I sit here and drink my coffee, happy at last, and I have never gone back to that other place with its matching decor and comfortable chairs and shiny bright espresso machine.

The Berlin aesthetic: it had got to me. And as long as I was in that city I could abide nothing that was clean, or new, or flawless, nothing that had not already been repaired and ruined two or three times, nothing that was more than barely serviceable, already (and again) on the brink of decay.

And so at Café Slörm I drink my coffee from a cracked bone china cup while a mangy dog comes over and sniffs around my feet, and the barista sits outside smoking a cigarette on the broken concrete steps. A pretty girl rides by on an old repainted bicycle made of spare parts. The handlebars are very high and wide. I thumb through one of the books on the overturned crate beside me. It is a scholarly monograph, lavishly illustrated, a feminist interpretation of pornographic photography in 1920s Berlin. Some of the pictures are very good.

The music gets louder; it pounds in your head like a hangover. The coffee tastes a little burnt. The yellow armchair is a little too low, and all the vinyl is peeling off the sides. You have to adjust your weight carefully if you don't want to feel the broken springs digging into your back. Like any self-respecting Berlin café, the total effect of the place is to make you feel that you are in someone else's living room – someone who might have, to be sure, some vaguely sinister intentions, but who is nevertheless quite sociable and hospitable on the whole.

I get another coffee. I kick my shoes off and put my feet up on the chair beside me. I scratch a few lines in my notebook and read the chapter about Anita Berber. I study the photographs and conclude that she was rather beautiful, in that vacant pitiless nightmarish sort of way. The sun falls through the window across the floorboards. I close my eyes to the sun and the music and the sounds of making coffee. It is good to be here. Yes, there is a certain tattered homeliness about it all, and everything is all right now, here in the unassuming dilapidated comfort of morning in a Berlin café.

Sarah Coakley: 2012 Gifford Lectures online

2012-05-18T04:09:00.000-05:00

Sarah Coakley recently presented the 2012 Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, and they are now available online (h/t Kevin). Coakley's lectures are titled Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation, and God. You can get the text and handouts for all six lectures here; and the first four are also available as video:

1. Stories of Evolution, Stories of Sacrifice
2. Cooperation, alias Altruism: Game Theory and Evolution Reconsidered
3. Ethics, Cooperation and Human Motivation: Assessing the Project of Evolutionary Ethics
4. Ethics, Cooperation and the Gender Wars: Prospects for a New Asceticism
5. Teleology Reviewed: A New Ethico-Teleological Argument for God's Existence
6. Reconceiving Natural Theology: Meaning, Sacrifice and God

Berlin notebook: on the Berlin aesthetic

2012-05-15T06:53:00.002-05:00

Crossing Eberswalder Straße, I saw an American tourist looking around, perplexed, clutching his camera as he surveyed the street in search of something that might be worth photographing. The woman beside him said cooly, 'I mean, they have buildings here with all the wires hanging out.'

In other European cities the past is always visible. You visit Rome or Prague or Constantinople to see what the past looks like. In fact you could visit those cities almost without noticing the existence of the present, since the present is less solid, less tangible than the continuing presence of the past. But in Berlin there is no past; or rather, the past is visible only as ruins and decay.

The city was reduced to rubble in the Thirty Years' War, and again, three hundred years later, in the Battle of Berlin. 'In other European cities, the past was glorified, the architecture spruced up for tourists to the point of caricature. But here, nobody seemed in a hurry one way or the other. Buildings had been bombed and the city had been ripped apart, but years later holes remained all over the place without explanation or apparent concern. The city moved forward with a lack of vanity that she found relaxing' (Anna Winger, This Must Be the Place).

Berlin is a city founded, time and again, on its own ruins. Urban decay is the Grundprinzip of the city, and the secret to the Berlin aesthetic. In Berlin there is no history, only art. Those bits of the past that remain visible are fragments that have been picked out and arranged for aesthetic and artistic purposes. The city is a gigantic lovely mad assemblage of found objects.

This explains the importance of photography as an art form in Berlin. Photography eschews the sentimental Christian ideals of narrative, history, truth-telling, tradition, and time. Every photograph is only a fragment, a piece of rubble retrieved from the debris of time. 'Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt' (Susan Sontag).

At a gallery in Kreuzberg, I saw the exhibition of a young Berlin photographer. He had photographed sculptures made of urban debris – old brooms, crumpled newspapers, plastic bags, advertising signs, cardboard boxes, broken electrical goods. The objects had been assembled in front of walls and buildings; the sculptures look like random piles of rubbish, but the shadows cast on the walls resemble classical figures from Christian art. The distinct shadowy figures of Christ, St Nicholas, St Sebastian. In this series of shadow photographs – obviously inspired by Plato's theory of forms – one sees the strange distinctive contours of the Berlin metaphysic. Human culture and religion and tradition are shadows on the wall, the beautiful insubstantial images cast by objects more solid, permanent, and original. Except that here the eternal Platonic forms have been replaced by the most transitory, pointless thing in the world: a heap of urban debris.

The Christian myth of primordial harmony is the organising theological principle of most European cities. (That is what separates European cities so markedly from the colourful polytheism of urban India, and from the steel-and-glass Pelagianism of the cities of America.) But in Berlin, the Christian creation-story has given way to a mythology of primordial originary decay: 'In the beginning was the rubble…'

The Roman might well feel that she is living in an eternal city; but the Berliner dwells in the ruins of time. And the ruins of time are beautiful. That is the Berlin aesthetic.

Berlin notebook: on the existence of Germany

2012-05-11T14:16:00.004-05:00

I was well into my twenties before I ever believed in the existence of Europe. Even then I believed only in France. (I also cherished a certain guarded agnosticism about Switzerland; I had been there once, but too briefly to determine if it was real.) It was not till years later that I became firmly persuaded of the existence of Germany.

If this seems surprising, it will be enough to remind you that I come from a remote primordial island-continent known as Australia. Now Australia has many virtues, as everybody knows; but it is a long way from anywhere else, and it is very hard to believe in other places when they are so far away.

My country's immigration policy is one of the natural extensions of this principle. Our attitude towards our own indigenous population is another. If there were once only indigenous inhabitants in Australia, it suggests that once we did not belong here; but we could not have come from any other place, since Australia is – we feel it deep in our bones – the only place. So the existence of indigenous peoples is an unfathomable abyss. It strikes us as an alarming proof of our own nonbeing, and therefore as something that is best simply ignored.

The same conviction also explains what is called the 'cultural cringe' – one of the most peculiar features of the physiognomy of Australian culture. There are countries in which artistic, literary, and intellectual achievements are paraded as marks of national superiority: think of the way Americans will talk about Mark Twain, or Germans about Goethe. But in Australia we apologise for our cultural achievements. The cultural cringe is the belief that nothing of value can come from a place like Australia; that anything of real worth must be created someplace else, or at least receive the imprimatur of other places. So Australians will be embarrassed of a homegrown novelist: but if she happens to win a British literary award, we will praise her and love her and perhaps even buy her books.

The cultural cringe comes about when Australians discover, usually quite late in life, that other places exist – and we never really recover from the shock of it. The shock produces an inverted idealism: instead of believing that my country is the only one, I now understand that it is, after all, a disappointing mirage. Only the other places are real.

Australia thus unites two antithetical (but morally identical) ways of relating to outsiders: either we ridicule foreigners for their funny looks and funny accents, or we abase ourselves before the foreigner – so fashionable! so sophisticated! – and lament that we were ever born in a drab uncultivated penal colony at the bottom of the world.

Even when I had been trying for years, with discouraging results, to learn the German language, I still secretly thought of Germany as a country so far away that it does not exist; and of the German language not as an ordinary means of social exchange between ordinary human beings, but as a sort of magic, something that people like Hegel and Heidegger use for conjuring. I learned German grammar the way seminarians learn their Greek: as if memorising runes. I quoted German the way seminarians invoke The Original Greek in their sermons: as if uttering the syllables of an incantation, something that transcends the limitations of ordinary speech.

But there came a day in my life when I had to admit to myself that Germany exists, and that the German language is really, after all, only – a language. That was a hard day and a hard lesson. For everything in Australia, the whole moral fabric of my childhood world, was premised on the conviction that Australia is the only place, and that any place you cannot reach by the Pacific Highway – radio blaring, elbow out the window, cane fields rushing by – is, strictly speaking, no place at all.

Nowadays though, I like my country all the better for the fact that it is not the only one. I'm glad there is a variety of places in the world; I'm glad there is even, somewhere, a segregated location for all the New Zealanders to inhabit. But in Berlin whenever I meet a person who has never been to Australia, I immediately adopt the persona that I have learned so well over so many years (and that makes Australian expats such powerful ambassadors of the Australian tourism industry). 'What?' I cry in shock, as though I had just met a fellow who had spent his whole life underground. 'Never been to Australia? Never even visited? What the devil have you been doing all these years? Sit down, sit down – two beers, bartender, quickly! – and let me tell you a few things about a magnificent great island at the bottom of the world…'

Psalms for all seasons: a contemporary psalter

2012-05-09T00:43:00.002-05:00

At the opening worship service of the Romans conference, it was a joy to use the wonderful new psalter, Psalms for All Seasons: A Complete Psalter for Worship (Brazos Press 2012). It has multiple versions of each of the 150 psalms (sometimes as many as ten versions of a single psalm), with musical styles ranging from chant and classical hymnody to African American spirituals and contemporary urban music. There are also spoken word and responsorial settings for each psalm. In our service, there was a psalm reading with part of a Wesleyan hymn for the response – it was very well done, and I've been singing it in my head all week. The book also includes brief theological-practical notes on how each psalm can be used in Christian worship.

I sometimes worry that our hymnbooks – where you have a more or less arbitrary selection of songs, arranged by various doctrinal and liturgical themes – create the impression that worship is a matter of human choice. You choose your Sunday hymns as you might choose a dessert from the menu at a restaurant; and you choose them on the basis of thematic relevance (this week, let's sing about love; this week, let's sing about forgiveness), so that entire dimensions of human experience might never once enter into the singing of a congregation.

But with psalmody as an overarching structure, the congregation is invited to share in experiences that might seem quite remote from their own everyday concerns. That is why we find some of the psalms so offensive: we simply cannot conceive of such experiences, even though they are – manifestly – genuine human possibilities. Instead of criticising such psalms, we need to learn how to sing them.

Our own private griefs are, often enough, quite paltry: but we are invited to join in the gigantic earth-shaking laments of the psalms. Our own criteria for happiness are selfish and small: but we are allowed to share in the magnificent heaven-rending joys of the psalmist. Our own love for God is so feeble that we might forget all about God for days at a time: but our hearts are torn wide open as we join our voices to the enormous lovesick longing of the psalmist's praise. We are safe, affluent, protected, untroubled by enemies or oppression: but we learn to join our voices to the psalmist's indignant cries for the catastrophic appearance of justice on the earth.

If your congregation sings only Hillsong choruses, then their emotional repertoire will be limited to about two different feelings (God-you-make-me-happy, and God-I'm-infatuated-with-you) – considerably less even than the emotional range of a normal adult person. It is why entire congregations sometimes seem strangely adolescent, or even infantile: they lack a proper emotional range, as well as a suitable adult vocabulary. But in the psalter one finds the entire range of human emotion and experience – a range that is vastly wider than the emotional capacity of any single human life.

Just to stick with Hillsong as an example: for a congregation to go from singing Hillsong to singing the psalter would be like seeing Shakespeare's plays after you've only ever watched sitcoms – it would be a shock to discover that human beings can be so large, and that they come in so many different varieties. Nobody has ever felt the way Hamlet feels, or felt so much: that's exactly what makes Hamlet important.

To enter into the singing of the psalms is to participate in a pattern of worship that transcends any private experience. As though worship were really worship, not just the expression of private thoughts and feelings. As though the voice that really sings in the psalms were a universal voice, the voice of fallen and redeemed humanity gathered together in one lump – which is to say, Christ's voice.

When the church's singing is structured around Israel's psalms, there is a constant reminder that worship is not primarily a matter of personal choice; that the experience of worship is not primarily my own private experience; that the voice in worship is not even primarily my voice, but the voice of Israel, the voice of Christ, the voice of Christ's people gathered across time and space, learning together how to transmute all the varied raw materials of human experience into the praise of God through the alchemy of Jesus Christ.

Princeton Romans conference: audio and video

2012-05-08T07:32:00.001-05:00

Last week's Princeton conference on Romans 5-8 was terrific. The whole conference had an ethos of serious exegetical, theological, and pastoral reflection on Romans, and there was a remarkable degree of resonance between the various papers, thanks to the careful and ingenious (though self-effacing) orchestrations of Beverly Gaventa, whose Christian warmth and love for St Paul were the real animating pneuma of the whole event.

Happily, all the plenary papers are available in audio and video. Though the whole conference was excellent, if I was to pick one highlight it would have to be John Barclay's paper on Paul's theology of 'the Christ-gift'. (My own paper was on the Christ-Adam typology in Augustine's Confessions – when I revise it for publication, I'm thinking of calling it "A Tale of Two Gardens: Augustine's Confessions as a Narrative Commentary on Romans".)

If you don't do anything else, you really ought to watch the opening sermon by Luke Powery – the guy can really preach! When you hear good preaching like that, the gospel dawns on you as though for the first time. Listening to Luke Powery, I was stunned by the realisation that God loves me – as though I'd never heard of such a thing before!

Speaking of preachers, another highlight for me personally was getting to know the American preacher Fleming Rutledge – a grand and good human being. She has a new collection of sermons on the Old Testament, which I'm eager to read: And God Spoke to Abraham: Preaching from the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2011). She also has a lot of sermons online.

Dooby dooby doodlings

2012-05-06T08:15:00.002-05:00

by Kim Fabricius

America: how can such a “Christian” nation be so entirely lacking in grace? A political elite that, in its cult of human sacrifice, is an Aztecan priesthood in suits. A popular culture that valorises vulgarity, braggadocio, and humiliation. A fuck-you society whose iconic edifice is the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Blackguards are role models, Mammon chairs the school board, pedagogy is a lost and hungry soul. Loving your mother though she’s a whore is one thing, but when she’s Lamia devouring your siblings?

Of course preachers will be hypocrites; hypocrisy is intrinsic to their vocation. They preach with double-vision: they see their congregation, but first they see themselves – and tremble.

Prayer before the “message”: “May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of our hearts – check that: perish the ‘thoughts’ – may my words be entertaining, needs-meeting, biblically cut-and-paste, and go well with my shirt. Patriotic would be good too. And lucrative, please. Amen.”

“I hate the sin, but I love the sinner,” conservatives will say when talking about gay people. But do they have any gay friends? I think what is usually meant is “I love gaykind, not gay people.”

Should we anticipate the last trumpet with terror? It all depends on whether the soloist is a marine blowing “Commence Firing” or a Miles playing “So What”.

In a dream I asked Jesus, “Will anyone go to hell?” And the Lord replied, “Over my dead body.”

I’m a universalist but, as a thought experiment, I can just about imagine a populated hell – with those, like Moses and Paul, who could wish themselves accursed in order to secure the salvation of others. In other words, a hell full of lovers, not sinners. But then the one thing hell cannot abide is love; indeed, an invasion of love would mean hell’s destruction. Hence, the thought experiment collapses into a reductio ad absurdum. Hell remains an empty set.

I see that Rob Bell’s Love Wins is now out in paperback. Bell’s opponents are delighted: it burns even better than the hardback. And speaking of Bell: Okay, Love Wins is a flawed book, but remembering its audience covers a multitude of its sins – people who think Paul wrote, “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is hell.”

What will the people in hell be like? Quite unlike the people who think they know the answer to the question.

A “personal relationship with Jesus” – what’s that all about? If it’s equivalent to “faith in Jesus Christ”, fine. But it’s not, is it? It’s a shibboleth that inflates to an unmediated experience of walking and talking with an invisible person, of spending quality time together, and if it doesn’t work out, well, “Down, dooby do, down down”. In fact, with Luther and Barth, having a “personal relationship with Jesus” could be said to be the opposite of faith, a theologia gloriae, faith being unanchorable in psychology, not a feeling but a self-negation, sub specie crucis. The phrase itself is hardly biblical; indeed it is quite zeitgeisty, religious coinage in our being-in-a-relationship economy. In fact, talking with people about their “personal relationship with Jesus”, I invariably conclude that they are in the realm of projection and fantasy. There. I guess that makes me a sad, if not bad, Christian.

Responses on being given the eucharistic bread with the words “The body of Christ”:

Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist: “Amen.”

Congregationalist, Baptist: “Thank you.”

Catholic: “Duh!”

When, at some future day, our period of civilisation shall lie, closed and completed, before the eyes of later generations, a certain kind of American evangelical theology will stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon of the mental and spiritual life of our time. For nowhere save in this American evangelical temperament can there be found in the same perfection the living complex of conditions and factors – of philosophic thinness, critical perversity, historical preposterousness, and religious fetishism – without which no bonkers theology is possible. And the greatest achievement of this American evangelical theology is the Clouseauean investigation of the life of Adam.

– Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Adam

“Cleanliness is next to godliness.” What was John Wesley thinking when he cited such a pharisaical canard? Maybe of his mum Susanna, telling him to go wash his hands before supper? Still, just to be on the safe side, I’ve added exfoliating gloves and a body polisher to my daily technology of prayer.

Another problem with WWJD ethics: the question induces us to speculate rather than to attend. Or you could say the tense is wrong: the question is not “What would Jesus do?” but “What is Jesus doing?”

Advocates of Just War theory think of it as the middle way between the two extremes of warmongering and pacifism. Yeah, like 2+2=5 is the middle way between 2+2=6 and 2+2=4.

Ideology: If the facts don’t fit, fuck ‘em. The patron saint of ideology is Procrustes.

Cinema’s top 5 quotations relocated in the New Testament:

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” (Mark 7:27).

“Hasta la vista, baby” (Acts 5:3-4).

“In a galaxy far, far away” (John 1:1).

“Do you feel lucky, punk” (Matthew 27:11b).

“Here’s looking at you, kid” (Luke 1:28).

That a biblical imaginary has informed and shaped the minds of our greatest novelists and poets is evident in the fact that theirs are narratives and images of sin, failure, pain and sorrow – and of hope only against hope.

In her recent When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson shows herself, characteristically, to be an acute yet most gracious critic – except when it comes to John Spong. With Spong, Robinson gets luminously sarky. What about? Not so much Spong’s literalist liberalism as his supercilious supersessionism, not so much his intellectual crudity as his moral discourtesy.

Marilynne Robinson is very much like Karl Barth – not a liberal humanist Calvinist but a Calvinist liberal humanist.

Yes, I think I’m in love with Marilynne Robinson. It’s platonic, of course. The adultery is purely intellectual. Still, I’d rather you not tell my wife.

Good critics, unlike good writers, cannot make things, but they can make things better.

Baseball writer Tim Brown began an article dismissing public outrage over Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen, who, in a Times magazine interview, had expressed “respect” for Fidel Castro, by asking, “What, you thought you were getting Henry Kissinger?” No, Tim, a dictator is one thing, a war criminal quite another.

From the crowd, George Carey shouts, “Hit a home run!” From the dugout, Rowan Williams signals for a bunt. The strikeouts mount; the church has forgotten how to lay down a sacrifice.

I don’t have a guardian angel, I’ve got a guardian principality. You guessed it – baseball.

Berlin notebook: on bicycles

2012-04-26T04:04:00.002-05:00

Right now I'm in Berlin for a few months, so I'll be posting a series of notes about the city.

It has been said that great books are the ones that have to teach us how to read them. It is the same with cities. London cannot teach you how to experience New York, any more than Dickens can teach you how to read Dostoevsky. And when you are in Berlin, the correct way to experience the place is by bicycle.

Now there are people – you will have heard of them, I'm sure – who believe that riding a bicycle is a 'sport', a way to keep 'in shape', something that is merely 'good for you'. Nothing is more morally or aesthetically objectionable than such a cyclist, zipping through the traffic lights in his skin-tight lycra suit and his shiny torpedo helmet, austerely sipping water from an aerodynamic flask strapped to his shoulder.

Who is this fellow? What is he about? He is performing that peculiar Calvinistic ritual that is known as Exercise. On the surface he might appear gregarious enough, but in truth he is a mean unsympathetic creature, this secular ascetic with his sculpted buttocks and his strap-on water bottle. He pursues cycling for his own selfish ends, and therefore cannot enjoy it. To him, it is all the same whether the bicycle actually goes anywhere or whether it is fastened to the floor of a gymnasium, a mere simulation, one of those monotonous unmoving Exercise Bikes that are exactly like a real bicycle in every respect except that they have no wheels and cannot propel you along the street.

There are some things that are corrupted by proficiency. The expert lover, the slick preacher, the professional childcare provider – these are not honest things, because good honest preaching and childrearing and lovemaking require some element of awkwardness and ineptitude and surprise, something tenderly human that resists the cold logic of technical mastery. Just so the cyclist: the fast expert sporty cyclist is an ungodly man, you can count on it. He speaks harshly to his children and spends hours grooming his fingernails and has always felt, deep down, that his father didn't love him. He uses the bicycle the way an expert lover uses a woman, his mind absorbed by all the correct techniques for stimulating pleasure, working at her body as cooly and clinically as a pornographer. Such a lover goes nowhere with his beloved, just as the Exercise Cyclist goes nowhere on his bicycle but stays imprisoned in his own immaculate body even as he whizzes through the city looking straight ahead with a steely gaze through four-hundred-dollar wrap-around pink sunglasses.

Expert cycling, therefore, I abhor. Expert cycling belongs in no proper self-respecting city. But the bicycle as a vehicle – the bicycle not as an instrument of self-improvement but as a machine of transportation – the bicycle as a strictly utilitarian way of getting about town – now that is a noble and excellent thing, beautiful and true and good in its wobbly ungainly rattling clattering swiftness, all legs and arms and wheels and whirling gears.

What could be nobler than a bicycle? For in the bicycle, you take the most marvellous, ancient, portentous triumph of human invention and ingenuity – the wheel! – and append it to the human anatomy so simply, so naturally, that you would think the human body had been designed for nothing else than wobbling about town on a pair of wheels. Perhaps a million years from now the human species will be born with wheels instead of legs; it would be an improvement. But for now, this spoked, sproketed, handle-barred, rubber-tyred, pedal-driven apparatus supplies what nature lacks.

Berlin reveals itself to the cyclist, just as Paris reveals itself to the walker and Los Angeles to the freeway driver and Dublin to the drinker. If you want to know what Berlin is, throw away your guidebook, forget about all those tourist sites, and don't even think about setting foot in one of those brand new bright red sight-seeing buses. If you want to know what Berlin is, all you need is some loose change in your pocket, a scarf around your neck, and a bicycle between your legs.

Nothing-better-to-doodlings

2012-04-16T19:12:00.000-05:00

by Kim Fabricius

People will phone me and sometimes begin, “Sorry to disturb you.” I always answer, “Hey, I’m in the business of being disturbed.” I’m serious. Disturbances are the ministerial vocation, the locus of insinuating encounter, the way the good Lord says, “Excuse me …” – and an anticipation of his final interruption.

If life stinks, it’s because human behaviour is almost entirely an involuntary excretion.

Humans, it is said, are the universe becoming self-aware. Bullshit. That we are conscious beings is the grandest of illusions spun by the old Conjurer, the basis of his entire Project Pandemonium. The odd conscious being appears now and then, but we are always quick to kill him. The devil can’t believe his luck.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote: “At death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” At Christ too.

Today I passed an electricity generator and a pylon surrounded by a metal fence. On the fence there was a pictogram of a lightning bolt striking a prone man, and a sign that said “Danger of Death”. The pylon suggested a steeple, the generator an altar, and I thought of the church. But only for a moment.

Is prayer therapeutic? Only if it kills the patient.

Of course, it’s okay to pray in a foxhole. It’s just that if you do not pray in ordinary, prayers in extremis make no sense. That is why our Lord’s cry of dereliction makes total sense: it comes from someone whose whole life was a prayer.

Few things have taught me more about prayer than standing in a long queue.

If (with Barth) sin known is always sin forgiven, in worship should not the Absolution precede, not follow, the Confession? Of course I know that this reversal subverts the entire course of liturgical history, but then as Milton said, “Custom without truth is but agedness of error.” In this case, lex orandi, lex errandi.

Another thing: our personal prayers should begin with forgiveness – but not asking God to forgive me, rather giving voice my forgiveness of others. As in the Duke Ellington sacred song “Don’t Get Down on Your Knees to Pray until You Have Forgiven Everyone”.

The more the emails I send to others, the less I seem to correspond with myself.

To articulate what you know with clarity, economy, and elegance is a great gift. But to articulate what you do not know, if only as a clumsy gesture, is a greater gift still.

We are told to preach our certainties, not our doubts. Bad advice. Because there are false certainties and true doubts. As for tone, better the stuttering than the stentorian.

I have so much respect and affection for Rowan Williams that I have tried – I really have tried – to agree with the suspension of his own theological “opinions” in his irenic arch-episcopal leadership of the Anglican Church. But I have to ask: what if Archbishops Chrysostom, Cranmer, and Romero had taken that vocational view?

Rowan Williams will eventually publish a Summa Theologica. It will be called The Collected Poems.

Professor Steven Pinker,

that prodigious prestidigitator of a thinker,

wondrously waves a wand of statistics and tables –

and pulls Peace from a hat piled with Belsens and Babels.

Two sections of the brain of Albert Einstein will be on display at the Welcome Collection, London from March 29th to June 17th. Professor Richard Tetzel-Dawkins of the British Humanist Association has announced that viewing the relics will grant students the remission of three terms and two final exams from the purgatory known as English university education. The Association had also considered relieving students of any responsibility to read books, before realising that such an indulgence would be completely superfluous.

“Liquid church”. Fine. But bring a straw: it’s a milkshake, not a malt.

I say give Joel Osteen a break. After all, he’s an Oral Roberts University drop-out.

What will hell be like? Ask a Quaker at a Saddleback Seeker Service. Oops – can’t find one?

The problem with WWJD ethics is that you could ask the same question of, say, Gandhi. Whether Christ is living or dead makes no essential difference to an answer that will be trapped in immanence.

Informed as an English major by F.R. Leavis’ “Great Tradition” – which includes George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James – I’ve only just gotten around to Thomas Hardy (who didn’t make the cut). I am relieved to discover that I haven’t missed much. Compared to Middlemarch, Nostromo, and The Portrait of a Lady, Jude the Obscure strikes me as a soap opera.

I had to smile when I learned that this year Opening Day for the Mets falls on Maundy Thursday. The Passion begins. Of course you could also think of it as Advent 1: the theme is death, judgement, hell.

Take a close look at the hand in Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ. Rude Christ?

In July, inshallah, I shall become a grandfather. I told my daughter, “Wonderful, I can be silly again!” Katie replied, “Dad, what do you mean again?”

Audio: G. K. Chesterton on cheese

2012-04-11T06:26:00.001-05:00

After dinner tonight I forced some friends to sit and listen while I read them one of my favourite G. K. Chesterton pieces: his impassioned 1910 essay on "Cheese," from the delightful collection, Alarms and Discursions. I made an audio recording of the reading, and have uploaded it here for your edification (about 6 minutes). "Cheese" is Chesterton at his glorious fat catholic best.

Book spine poetry

2012-04-08T19:24:00.003-05:00

The Eerdmans blog put me on to this gallery of book spine poems. I've never heard of such a thing before, but I think it's a wonderful idea. Luckily, in my house there are books everywhere: and there is almost no method of organisation. On the same shelf you might find Harry Potter, plus a toddler's picture book, plus a book of prayers and something about vampires and the poems of T. S. Eliot, plus a cookbook and a mildewy edition of Thomas Aquinas and something no longer recognisable after the children have defaced it with crayons and sand and glue. A perfect way to arrange your shelves (I discovered) if you are an aspiring book spine poet! So after rummaging around the house for a while, here are five poems – one of which is really a complete systematic theology:

THE NIGHT SWIMMER:

A HEALTHIER LIFESTYLE:

LETTER HOME FROM BOARDING SCHOOL IN WINTER:

SILENT LISTENERS:

THE STORY OF THE BIBLE, TOLD IN EIGHT VOLUMES:

Politics of the empty tomb

2012-04-07T22:19:00.001-05:00

Some excerpts from Christ the Stranger have been posted as an Easter reflection at the ABC site: Rowan Williams and the politics of the empty tomb.

Wackos: A Good Friday sermon

2012-04-06T00:37:00.001-05:00

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

An Amish boy and his father were visiting a mall for the first time. They were amazed by everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that would move apart and then back together again. The boy, Eli, asked his father, Amos, “What be this, father?” The father replied, “Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life. I don’t know what it is.”

While Eli and Amos were watching, wide-eyed, a homely, bent old lady with a cane slowly walked up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened and the old lady walked between them and into a small room behind them. The walls closed, and Eli and Amos observed small numbers light up, red, above the walls, one by one. They continued to watch as the numbers then lit up in reverse direction. Suddenly, the walls opened and out stepped a stunningly beautiful young woman. Amos turned to Eli. “Son,” he said, “quick, get your mother.”

The Amish. What a strange lot of people. Wackos, really. You may have seen them portrayed in the 1985 film Witness starring Harrison Ford. The Amish are a strict Mennonite sect that emigrated to the US in the 18th century, living mainly in Pennsylvania, and still speaking a Swiss German dialect known as Pennsylvania Dutch. There are about a quarter of a million of these rustic oddballs. They all seem to have old biblical names (like Eli and Amos), they make their own clothes, wear plain dress, and live simply, very simply, to the point of refusing to adopt many of the labour-saving conveniences of modern technology. So they limit the use of electricity, don’t like telephones, and ride around in horse-drawn buggies. (You’ll see some with stickers on the rear: “I pray for higher gas prices”.) They run their own one-room schools and discontinue education at the eighth grade so the kids, just turned teens, can go work in the fields. So they’re a bunch of dumb hicks, really, and because the gene pool is so small, some have inherited illnesses.

But if you really want to see these wackos at work, you’ve got to go back to the autumn of 2006 and the Amish community of Nickel Mines. On the morning of October 2nd, a milk-truck driver named Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into the local schoolhouse with a 6mm pistol and, barricading the doors, took the class hostage. He lined up the girls against the blackboard before allowing some adults with infants and all the boys to leave. Then, execution-style, he shot ten girls, aged 6 to 14, five of whom died, before killing himself. The Deputy Coroner, Janice Ballenger, later said, "There was not one desk, not one chair, in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with either blood or glass. There were bullet holes everywhere, everywhere.”

So how did the Amish community respond to this massacre? The Amish take the Sermon on the Mount very seriously, and not just as a set of sublime ideals but as commands of Jesus to be obeyed. They place the highest value on humility, mercy and purity of heart, and reject all violence and vengeance. But pacifism and forgiveness have got to have their limits, right? And surely the line has got to be drawn at murder, and particularly at the murder of children, right?

On the very day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered girls said, “We must not hate this man.” A father said, “He had a mother and a wife and a soul, and now he’s standing before God.”

Well, a couple of old crazy people, no doubt still in shock, even denial. But wait till the loss, the devastation begin to kick in, right? The third stage of grief – it’s anger, isn’t it? There’ll be an explosion of fury, won’t there be, and sooner rather than later in such horrendous circumstances? And like a rock thrown into a still pool, it’ll stir the water into waves of hatred and hostility and an overwhelming demand for retribution, right?

An Amish neighbour of the Robertses knocked on their door. They opened it with trepidation. It was a courtesy visit; the neighbour came in and comforted the killer’s family. More, he acted mercifully. It was only the beginning. Other local Amish folk visited and embraced the family, and not only in its guilt but in its own grief. For heaven’s sake, thirty of them attended the killer’s funeral. And Mary Roberts, the killer’s wife, was one of the few outsiders invited to attend the funeral of one of the victims. And there’s more: these Amish wackos actually set up a charitable fund for the shooter’s family.

Mary Roberts wrote an open letter to her Amish neighbours, thanking them for their unbelievable grace and kindness: “Your love for our family,” she said, “has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you’ve given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family … and is changing our world.”

Well, it was too much. The criticisms poured in. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Forgiveness? And particularly forgiveness when the murderer, dead, could not express remorse, let alone repentance? The man was evil, evil. Not even a man, really, but a monster. Nor did the killer’s family ask for forgiveness, let alone beg for it. No, the Amish community itself, including the families of the murdered children, took the initiative. But note well: for the Amish, loving the enemy does not deny the reality of evil and wrong-doing, rather it acknowledges the darkness of sin even as it begins to dispel it by lighting a way to a future with a promise of hope. The community of faith envisioned by the Sermon on the Mount was not a pious utopia but a visible reality, the commands of Jesus enfleshed as habits of the heart.

But hang on. Get a grip. The Amish are a weird cult, aren’t they? As I say, a bunch of wackos. Look at them with their overalls and pitchforks and funny way of talking and eccentric customs. They’re from another world, aren’t they?

Yes, they sure are. And that’s the point. They’re from another world. They see reality altogether differently from their surrounding culture. And, sure, a lot of the trappings seem bizarre and unnecessary. But the heart of the matter, the kernel not the husk, the way they act, behave towards one another – and more, towards outsiders, people who dismiss, mock, abuse them – isn’t that the way all Christians are called to live? Isn’t that the way our personal, social, and political imaginations are supposed to be structured? Shouldn’t that dissident, nonconformist vision be our defining reality?

In his last moments of excruciating suffering and torment, not only physical but mental and spiritual, Jesus pleaded for the forgiveness of his killers. And when he was raised from death by the Father, he didn’t go searching for his murderers, in bloodlust for revenge. Come to think of it, didn’t he act like one of those wacko Amish? Act like there is no cause worth killing for, act like everyone is worth dying for? Act like everyone is a child of God, act like no one is beyond redemption? Act like however far people stray into the abyss, God calls us to seek them out and fetch them home? That Jesus of Nazareth, yes, what a wacko.

My friends, Good Friday calls us in the most focused and urgent way of all the days in the church’s calendar to ask the question that lies at the core of Christian faith: Which world is the real world? The world of Wallmart and Westminster, of wallets and wars, of what we wear and worry about, of how we calculate and control, of payback and perdition? Or the world we see through the crosshairs of the cross, where self is slain, slayers are forgiven, the excluded are embraced, and peace is not a pipe dream but a way of life, a world where we may hope that all will be saved, even Charles Carl Roberts and that impenitent murderer at Jesus’ side? Luther said crux probat omnia – the cross probes, plumbs, tests all things. The cross alone defines what is finally right, true, eternal. Once again, Good Friday presses us with the overwhelming question: are you willing to take up the cross and count yourself among those the world calls wackos? Of the crucified Nazarene – are you a follower or a fan?

Rowan Williams and the Easter church

2012-04-05T20:20:00.000-05:00

On Radio National this morning, Scott Stephens and I talked about Rowan Williams and the Easter church. You can hear the interview here – it goes for about half and hour.

James-ism: explaining the trinity

2012-04-03T07:04:00.002-05:00

Somehow over dinner my daughters tricked me into trying to explain the doctrine of the trinity. I told it the best I could. One God in three persons. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each one is the whole God, and God is always all three together. Throwing caution to the wind, I even invented a vestigia trinitatis in Jamie's latest box of three-in-one Lego. The same Lego is a car, a boat, and a plane. One Lego, three vehicles. Except that the Lego can never be all three at once (you have to pull the car apart to build the plane), whereas the three-in-one God can be Father, Son, and Spirit all at the same time.

At last they seemed satisfied with these explanations. Four-year-old Jamie hadn't said very much, but he'd been listening intently to my learned disquisition. Then with his mouth full of food, he said proudly: "Actually, I've seen two of those gods."

"Ah," I reminded him with a professorial wag of my finger, "but don't forget, there's really only one God, isn't there?"

My son looked puzzled. He put down his fork. "But you just said there were five gods."

Palm Sunday: a picture poem

2012-04-01T06:51:00.000-05:00

O glad morning,
promised day, the day
you come to us, riding
to the holy city, Israel's king,
glorious through the Golden Gate.

We cut the branches, and wave

your joy, your welcome as you ride,

and shout your praises to the hills,

the Lord's messiah, David’s son,

triumphant king, hosanna! We cast
our coats before you, carpeting your way.
Today if we kept silent even the stones
would shout the benediction of your name.

Come Friday, we will shout again,

and rend your clothes and call you

king, and cut the thicker branches,

cypress, pine and cedar,

and fasten them

with nails,

and

even

the

sun

will

turn

to ashes,

repenting

the day.

Eleven theses on love

2012-03-27T21:55:00.001-06:00

1. I have observed in my own handwriting a peculiar involuntary tic. My capital E is normally executed with three strokes: a sharp L-shape, followed by two swift horizontal strokes. It is a crooked, abrupt, ungainly sort of letter. But whenever I write the word Elise – my wife's name – the E takes on a completely different form and style. It is executed with a single fluid cursive stroke; it is curved, almost elegant, like a back-to-front 3. It is the only time my handwriting produces such a shape. Under all normal circumstances, my E – like the rest of my handwriting – is a rather jagged, haphazard, Runic, pagan-looking thing. But just ask me to spell my wife's name, and that first grapheme is mysteriously transfigured into something smooth, Cyrillic, serenely clean and Christian. As though it were inadequate to assign to her name any regular letter of the Roman alphabet; as though she required her own distinct letter, without which her name cannot be spelled or uttered; as though my love for her were the sanctification of language.

2. Like the Name of God which rebounds silently away from human speech, so love transcends language and eludes the grasp of words. Love is like the trauma that imposes its own peculiar patterns on a person's speech. Love is the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet.

3. Love escapes language, because love transcends the law. It is that towards which law is always reaching; it is that which law has never touched. "Love is the fulfilment of the law" (Romans 13:10).

4. Love is not desire, even though it appropriates desire the way a flame appropriates dry wood. To love is to desire the desire of another. Which means: love is kenosis, love is loss, love is the purgation of desire.

5. The purification of love is the task of life and the purpose of religion. The Christian faith is an ascetic doctrine of life, because it is a doctrine of love and joy. "All true joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism, … the repudiation of the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the one joy" (G. K. Chesterton). Love without asceticism is sentimentality – paltry, small, and sad.

6. The widespread sentimentalisation of romantic love in our society is a casual defacement of the Holy. Our pop songs and romantic comedies and breezy one-night stands are the moral equivalent of scribbling your lover's name beside the toilet in a public restroom. Except that it is God's Name – for "God is love" (1 John 4:16).

7. The experience of falling in love is the emotional shock produced by a sudden reorientation of personal attention. But such an experience is not yet love. To sustain that attention over time, even at great cost, is what it means to love.

8. Love without time is an absurdity, like fire without burning. Love is a mode of attention stretched out across time. Love is the temporal direction of the self. Love is nothing else than a certain object plus devotion plus time. "Love is patient" (1 Cor 13:4). That is why "the choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life" (Martha Nussbaum).

9. Love is mostly failure. If we understood ourselves, we would repent of our loves as one repents of the most appalling crime. Love is so entangled with selfish desire that we cannot even clearly tell the difference; nothing but the day of judgment will distinguish wheat from chaff. God's judgment does for me what I cannot do for myself: it separates one thing, love, from everything else that I am and everything else that I have done. What I need, all I need, is judgment. I live in desperate hope towards God's judgment, which is also God's mercy – the only kind of mercy worth the name.

10. The opposite of love is not hatred, but shame. "Love bade me welcome yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin" (George Herbert). Divine love is the abolition of shame. It is hospitality, welcome, the healing of the wounded gaze. "Love took my hand and smiling did reply, / Who made the eyes but I?" Shame stoops over, looking inward on the self. Quick-eyed love stands up straight, face to face with the beloved.

11. God's Word is love. Simone Weil: "God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion…. This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration."

Karl Barth website

2012-03-27T21:39:00.000-06:00

Karl Barth's great-granddaughter has created a new Barth website as part of a university project. It's well worth a visit, especially for the nice selection of photos, videos, and audio.

And speaking of Barth, I can't resist reposting this from David Williamson – this is Rowan Williams on Barth's obedient theology:

Somewhere in all of this business of theological education we have to come to terms with that sense of an otherness, an elsewhere – not another place, another realm, another world but that which is not simply on the map of our concerns, our security, our ideas. An obedient theology is one which seeks to be formed by what is there and a holy life is one which lets itself be impacted, be impressed by the will of God. For Karl Barth, that meant of course, that an obedient theologian was someone who was free to be the most dramatic possible nuisance in church and world. Obedient to the otherness of God, such a person would be obedient to no other constraints and no tyranny that could be concocted on the face of the earth.

Doodlings: a(nother) Sequel

2012-03-25T16:28:00.001-06:00

by Kim Fabricius

The homophobic Christian world should be applauding gay marriage. If it’s anything like the heterosexual variety, there goes the torrid sex it finds so disgusting.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” That’s Yeats writing seriously in the aftermath of the First World War, anticipating the fantastical apocalyptic prognostications of some churchmen on gay marriage.

I was recently on a radio programme discussing gay marriage with Stephen Green, the leader of Christian Voice, a notorious UK pressure group for Christian values (sic). (Mr. Green supported the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009.) He spoke first. He tried to speak second too. Which was fine by me: I could hardly have done a better job in discrediting his own position.

My own local church is discussing the blessing of civil partnerships. There is an emerging concern that, regardless of the theological merits of the matter, we might become known as the church that does gay marriages. On “not being ashamed of the gospel” takes on a new urgency. I am cautiously optimistic that the church will say Yes, but I’m keeping the room tidy for my old friend Failure, who is a frequent visitor to the manse.

In Jude the Obscure, Hardy uses the phrase “parson in embryo”. Now there’s a kind of abortion I could support.

Start the day by reading the latest news on the Republican primaries. As with Mark Twain’s breakfast of live frog, your day can’t get any worse – unless you choke with laughter and despair.

Mitt Romney is a Mormon, but Rick Santorum is different by only a subtracted letter.

Michael Stafford has recently referred to “the heresy of religious opposition to global warming”. He is too kind. Rowan Williams describes heresies as “near-misses”. But while Arius and Pelagius were at least intellectually and morally around the target, the likes of Perry and Santorum, driven by self-serving economic and ideological interests, couldn’t hit the broadside of Crystal Cathedral with a laser-guided missile.

It’s true that smart people seldom make the world a better place. But then neither do stupid people.

Richard Dawkins and Alain de Botton: bad cop, good cop. The one would have the church executed, the other given a life sentence of community service, ushering in a museum or concert hall. I’d rather take the needle than become a cultural asset.

Tradition may be a wise visitor from a foreign country. Or it may be an old, untraveled, chauvinistic fool. Only an attentive conversation, patient with muddle, will tell, as we hear each other to approximate and provisional truth.

Christ is a stranger because I am a stranger to myself, but he is a stranger who is a friend. That is why my existential homelessness should be not only a matter of woe but also of welcome: Christ bids me to be as hospitable to myself as I am to him, the amicable alien at the entrance to my tent.

Shaw was wrong when he aphorised, “He who can does, he who can’t teaches.” The teacher can do; if he doesn’t, it’s only because he wants tenure.

To get out of Afghanistan would be to dishonour the self-sacrifice of our young men and women. In other words – as Doc Daneeka might put it – we honour the dead by ensuring that there are more and more dead to honour.

On drawing “large and startling figures” (Flannery O’Connor): an American kills a lot of innocent people and he’s a hero who is sick; a Muslim kills a lot of innocent people and he’s a terrorist who is evil.

What is the difference between Christ and us? His sinlessness, his obedience, his being filled with Holy Spirit? Yes, yes. Or: Jesus was awake. The disciples in Gethsemane is the human condition: we sleep.

Bultmannian versicle and response at Easter:

Minister: The Lord is risen!

People: He is risen in creed!

On the evangelical view of hell, you make your bed and you lie in it. The universalist may agree, but he insists that it’s a nap – and that the bed is King size (Psalm 139:8).

Everything depends on your image of God – and therefore, apart from the smile, on not using indelible ink on your pictures-in-progress.

“Cognitive Therapy”? You mean “preaching”?

Of course there are virtuous Christians who sit in boardrooms, and they can make a real difference. After all, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathaea sat on the Sanhedrin.

Pundits write in the Good Church Guide about the “poisoned chalice” of Canterbury cuisine. Presumably because the sommelier is George Carey.

You’ve heard of LEPs (Local Ecumenical Partnerships). The Anglican Communion is a GEP – a Global Ecumenical Partnership. And I fear it will soon fall apart. Which could turn the so-called ecumenical winter into an ice age.

You want a Christ figure? Our old friend Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow. In the winter he’s performing miracles, in March he gets betrayed and crucified. Some pundits say he may now be headed for either Jacksonville or Miami. Florida – the descensus ad infernos. Oops – I just heard the New York Jets signed Tim, so it’s straight ad caelos!

Life is the thesis. Then comes the viva.

The problem with Rowan Williams

2012-03-21T23:03:00.000-06:00

I wrote a short piece about Rowan Williams' resignation for this week's Times Higher Education – you can see it here, and reposted by the ABC here. "Williams believes in the Church more than he believes in his own opinions. All his troubles as Archbishop of Canterbury have stemmed from this fact."

Speaking of Rowan, I'm told the first print run of Christ the Stranger has already sold out – thanks to everyone who bought a copy! There are a couple more blog posts about the book by Rod Green and Mike Bird.

World poetry day

2012-03-21T05:57:00.002-06:00

To mark World Poetry Day, the Centre for Public Christianity asked various people to comment on their favourite Christian poems. I talk about John Milton's Paradise Lost, George Herbert's "Love III", and T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" (someone else already beat me to Four Quartets).

The take-home message: "If you want to know what it feels like to be a Christian, read Herbert." Later this year I'll be giving a lecture on George Herbert to the St James Institute in Sydney, and I'm looking forward to it!

Job opportunity: Archbishop of Canterbury

2012-03-16T07:11:00.003-06:00

So it's official: Rowan Williams is stepping down from the office of Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the year, and will take up a position as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Her Majesty the Queen is now accepting CVs from interested applicants for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. Though no prior experience is necessary, applicants should be strongly motivated, with a proven ability to lead a worldwide communion, work with dangerous animals (including evangelicals and tabloid journalists), reform British society, and generally please everyone at all times. Experience in performing royal weddings and presiding over Lambeth Conferences is also highly desirable. The successful applicant may be required to relocate.

For full details of the salary package, including travel allowance, health benefits, superannuation, and lodgings in a medieval palace, please contact royal.highness@buckingham.co.uk.

The Church of England is an equal opportunity employer. Druids and other minorities are especially encouraged to apply. (Women need not apply at this time.)

On surfing and Shakespeare

2012-03-14T17:47:00.000-06:00

There are some things I never discovered until I was in my thirties: single malt scotch, Shakespeare, the Trinitate of Saint Augustine.

For example. The Shakespeare I was made to read when I was a boy – Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew – was all spoiled for me. Even Hamlet is a play that I have never really learned to love, ever since I was forced to read it by an English teacher named Mrs Macey who gave dreary afternoon orations about the archaic words and the imagery of rot and weeds and poison. Harold Bloom has said that Shakespeare will speak to as much of yourself as you are able to bring to him: and at sixteen years of age I was not able to bring very much, so Hamlet was wasted on me. Even when I read it today I am struck by nothing so much as a dull sense of familiarity, like meeting an old classmate you used to know but never really liked.

But then there are the plays I never read until my early thirties – King Lear, Henry IV, Antony and Cleopatra – and they are the great things, the plays that seem to light up everything, quick as stabs of lightning. They speak to more of me, because I had more of myself to bring when I read them.

The other day I read King Lear again, a text whose every syllable seems charged with revelation, bright and burning yet not consumed like the bush that Moses saw, and I was glad I had never read a thing like that when I was a boy, back when I knew nothing of what a grand appalling thing it is to be alive, back when someone like Mrs Macey would have had to explain it to me.

We are always talking about the things we wished we knew when we were young. Important lessons are learned too late, and we feel that everything might have been different, everything better, if only we had learned those things twenty, thirty, forty years ago. But there are some things that it's good you never saw until you had a few lines around your eyes. There are lovely things that grow only in the desert, and there are truths that cannot take root in the fertile soil of youth but only in the harder, drier conditions of a life that has known failure and disappointment and loss and the joys that come slowly.

This week I learned a truth like that, something I might have learned when I was younger, but am glad I never did.

I lay in the sun. I watched. I waited. I paddled. I looked back in fright. I felt the startling huge push. My head was filled with noise. I pushed myself up on my hands. I was very glad and very afraid. From beneath a great weight I dragged my legs up. I wobbled. I tottered. I – stood!

So it was that, at the age of thirty-three, at a place called Moffat Beach, I learned to ride a surfboard.

Christ the stranger reviews

2012-03-10T17:59:00.001-06:00

Rachel Marszalek has posted a review of my new Rowan Williams book: the beauty of theology. Thanks Rachel!
And Doug Chaplin posts about reading the book through Lent. He also has some good criticisms, which sound right to me.