the beginning and the end

In 1931, the Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper commented that

“The conflict (today) is not between faith and science, but between the assertion, that the cosmos as it exists today, is either in a normal or abnormal condition. If it is normal, then it moves by means of an eternal evolution from its potencies to its ideal. But if the cosmos in its present condition is abnormal, then a disturbance has taken place in the past, and only regenerating power can warrant it the final attainment of its goal. This, and no other is the principal antithesis, which separates the thinking minds in the domain of Science into two opposite battle-arrays.”

We’re wary of eschatology - it sounds like Tim Wahey’s retarded Left Behind series. But we’re all familiar with archaeology...

- Arche means ‘beginning’ so archaeology is about how things begin
- Eschaton means ‘final/end’ so eschatology is about how things end

John Gray says ‘our only real religion is a shallow faith in the future; and yet we have no idea what the future will bring’ (161). But everyone has an eschatology, and most of them are hopeless – what do you expect?

• Nihilism (nothing is God): things really do end. For better or worse, game over. The cosmos dies a heat death; history is literally heading nowhere. As Ecclesiastes put it, “Everything is meaningless”
• Pantheism (everything is God): things never end. History is cyclical, life and death, good and bad, Ying & Yang, just go on forever. As Ecclesiastes put it, “There is nothing new under the sun”
• Deism (God is nowhere to be seen): the end is escape. If you can, get out of this cosmos to wherever God is, but as Ecclesiastes put it, “God is in heaven, you are on earth, so…shut up”.

Hopeless eschatologies are miserable comforters, but hear Job’s song for the deaf:

I know that my redeemer lives, and in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself – my eyes shall behold and not another – how my heart faints within me! (Job 19:25)

The Old Testament's hope was resurrection, and the New Testament's Christian is someone who lives in the age to come. I remember being surprised when someone first showed me the vision the bible ends with - what does it remind you of?

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. (Revelation 21)

For me, Biblical eschatology stands out…the end is a new beginning. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life…(sing it Simone!) What’s new? Hendrickson comments on this passage:

‘The word used in the original implies that it was a ‘new’ but not an ‘other’ world [the original has kaine not neos]. It is the same heaven and earth but gloriously rejuvenated…Nature comes into its own’

Its more than a cosmic mulligan: the sea's gone (NB Apocalyptic imagery pictures what you wouldn't immediately see, not what you would). This is OT picture language, where again and again the sea was a place of darkness, confusion, threat: of chaos over which God ruled and through which God saved. Revelation pictures beasts as coming out of the sea, and in the passage just before this one, the sea gives up its dead. But here it’s gone altogether. In other words, nothing will threaten God’s purposes any more, nothing will spoil God's new world. I guess biblical eschatology is kinda like a new architecture: same stuff, but a whole new order of things.

“Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away" He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:3-4)

Commenting on 2nd century tendencies to see eschatology as primarily a retributive matter of legal rewards and punishment, Michael Green and Graeme Goldsworthy both lament that Gnosticism (spirit good/matter bad) and Marcionism (NT Good God/OT Bad God) were undermining the Old Testament theology of creation as cosmos, not chaos. Significantly, that theology underlies the biblical wisdom literature.

So Proverbs discern order: the wise/righteous flourish, but compare Psalms 1 & 73: the fool/wicked may flourish and (Job) the wise/righteous suffer. Ecclesiastes sees death make a mockery of all “wisdom”. God's created order has, in Goldsworthy's words, been invaded, hidden and confused...but is still found in all manner of places. Biblicaly, wisdom is both a response and a vocation: a response to a cosmos, a call to a new (but not another) cosmos. The first witnesses to the resurrection must have looked back to Isaiah 65-66 and looked forward to a future packed with hope: the death & resurrection of Jesus relativised the here and now.

‘We are citizens of a world which does not yet appear, and at the same time we must go on living in a world to which we have become aliens’ (Gospel & Wisdom)

That's why Christian faith is essentially believing a promise about the future, and...that's why it's hard.

Marx: instrumental religion

‘A great reversal happens: God, who should be worshipped, becomes an object to be used; creation, which is for our use and blessing, becomes the object of our worship’ (C. Wright, TMOG)

In Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Salieri makes a deal with God (although there’s no indication God ever signs on), and promises to worship and serve God on condition that God makes him famous. When Mozart becomes more famous than he, and deservedly so, he breaks off his deal with God because it’s no longer useful. Focussing less on the individual than on the social group, this is essentially Karl Marx’s (1818-1883) critique of instrumental religion.

Central to Marx’s account is his “materialist conception of history”: world history (cf Hegel) is the history of class struggle: societies have a material basis, political structure & ideological superstructure.

1. the most basic phenomena are economic phenomena: the way in which a society produces its goods and reproduces itself
2. an economic system depends on a political structure to reproduce it: so a slave society will police slave ownership as a form of private property...
   
3. Marx calls any ideas that legitimise the system ideology: You can’t impose power & wealth differentials with just a police force. You need most people believing in the system: “the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class”.

So for Marx, religion will be construed in every epoch by the ruling class as a sort of heavenly legitimation of the status quo

‘Religion is the general theory of the world – its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal basis for consolation and justification’ (Critique of Hegel’s Phil. of Right)

For instance, by some strange readings of the book of Genesis – (the curse of Ham, etc) many Christians concluded (despite the gospel) that God had divinely ordained that black people should serve white people. And that reading of the bible was integrated into a package deal with the trinity, the incarnation, the death of Christ on the cross for our sins - all of this divine truth included the justification of both slavery in America and apartheid in South Africa.

But consider consolation: “In heaven all God’s children got shoes” (here on earth they go barefoot in the cotton fields). In slave religion, the suffering and injustice they were experiencing at that time could be put in its place. But the future never breaks into the present, so “It will be righted when we get to the promised land” might as well be, “it won’t be righted until then: this is your lot”. It's a protest that never does anything. Justification and Consolation become flipsides of the same coin (“so much for the social principles of Christianity”). Marx goes on...

‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress, the protest against real distress [they don't got shoes now]. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual circumstances, it is the opium of the people.’

Opium keeps you passive. Opium is what you take when you can’t face the situation and you’re desperate for something to numb the pain. But for Marx, mankind must ditch religion & face reality: we’ll never solve the world’s ills by simply dreaming of a better one.

‘The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the people should shake itself free of illusion…is the demand that it should abandon a condition which needs an illusion.’

Now, as with Freud, there are pins in Marx’s balloon too. Marx can’t establish the historical materialism on which the whole thing sits (but life isn’t less than material). And where does he get these so-called social principles of Christianity? Did Martin Luther King call the ruling classes to be less Christian or more Christian? Sure, Christianity was used to justify apartheid, but the anti-apartheid movement was largely driven by people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu. So Marx’s critique of instrumental religion simply can’t be the whole story about Christianity. The problem is, it’s part of the story.

1. Marx can reveal instrumental religion as a human problem, not a peculiarly theistic one. Marxism itself was just another such ‘general theory of the world’, another presumptuous weltanschaunng. In 1980, Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lamented with a bitter irony the instrumental atheism at the heart of Marxist regimes:

   ‘A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged’ (The Discreet Charm of Nihilism)

2. Marx is catastrophic for hollow religion & Christian hypocrisy - uttering sweet nothings about eternal life and future justice which never break into the present, either in evangelism or care. In contrast to say, Islam (demanding abstinence & celibacy now for 72 virgins & rivers of wine in paradise), the Christian church should be a foretaste, an outcropping of heavenly citizenship. So in a sense, Marx is footnotes to God's own critique of his people

   "I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! (Amos 5)

   NB We must be careful - Israel shows that we are part of the problem, not part of the cure. In Jesus, the only genuine article (cf Mozart?), God took Israel's and our responsibility onto his own shoulders, and defeated death itself as a promise we can stake our lives on that he won't lose his world to joyriders. While Christian hope means justice now counts, Jesus’ words about Lazarus’ comfort are not empty – God will vindicate his people, even the slaughtered, when Jesus returns to judge the world in justice. Boy, to belong to him on that day!
   
   
3. Marx is identifying what the bible calls idolatry - using God to serve myself. Marx has taken a theologically motivated critique of instrumental religion and tried to make it a critique of religion as such. Westphal suggests we re-appropriate it, back into its original home: of biblical, theological concerns. He quotes John Calvin:
   

   Tyrants and their cruelty cannot be endured without great weariness and sorrow…When any one disturbs the whole world by his ambition and avarice, commits plunders or oppresses miserable nations, when he distresses the innocent, all cry out, “How long?” And this cry, proceding as it does from the feeling of nature and the dictate of justice, is at length heard by the LORD…And this feeling, is it not implanted in us by the LORD? It is as though God heard himself, when he hears the cries and groanings of those who cannot bear injustice” (Comm. on Habakkuk).

It is as though God heard himself. Perhaps God would say to Marx, I’m with you on that – I hate that kind of religion too – we’d better get rid of it. But your marxist religion isn't much better. Idolatry is a human problem, not a theistic one. But if instrumental religion isn't the whole story, we're left with Paul Ricoeur's question: once we get rid of the idols, what's left?

Freud: interpretation of religion

‘You have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you. Grant me, O Lord, to know and understand whether first to invoke you or to praise you; whether first to know you or call upon you. But who can invoke you, knowing you not? For he who knows you not may invoke you as another than you are.’ (Augustine of Hippo, 397 AD)

In contrast to Augustine, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) thought the source of religious longing was much less lofty. Central to Freud’s account is psychoanalysis of a self (ego) in constant internal tension between this deeply amoral source of its desires (id) and some imposed moral ideal (super-ego). According to Freud, the id is filled with 2 desires in particular that go against our professed values: a whole set of ‘sexual’ and ‘aggressive’ desires.

Insofar as we’re morally trained, we don’t want to acknowledge them, and so we hide these from ourselves and others. Instead, we disguise these suppressed wishes and give them a symbolic satisfaction in our dreams. When whatever’s standing for the desires is sufficiently disguised that we don’t recognise it for what it is, we can go ahead and enjoy it. That’s the basis of his Interpretation of Dreams.

Freud then takes this idea of wish fulfilment and applies it to his Interpretation of Neurotic Symptoms. Take Lady MacBeth, scrubbing away, “out damn’d spot!” She’s not telling the dog to leave, nor is she trying to get dirt off her hands; she’s trying to assuage her guilty conscience (the fact that she’s a murderer). In order not to have to deal with that guilt, she’s disguised it symbolically as dirt on her hands, that she can wash away, but of course it doesn’t work.

Freud treats religion as a neurotic symptom, with wish fulfilment at the heart: we feel the indifference of nature and the cool demands of culture and we cover up the cold by wishing into existence the kind of protection we would like - and that’s all there is to theistic belief:

‘Over each of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the over-mighty and pitiless force of nature...We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order to the universe and an afterlife; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it be?’ (Future of an Illusion, 1927)

Now there are plenty pins we could put in Freud’s balloon. We might say he’s committing the genetic fallacy; we might point out that he’s vulnerable to the tuquoque objection: if religious belief is childish wish fulfilment, isn’t atheism nothing but adolescent rebellion, the ultimate aedipo complex? But Freud knew that psychoanlaysis can’t settle the question of truth. I find it more interesting to ask what it can do:

1. Freud can help maintain a realistic view of ourselves in a fallen world, and help save us from overestimating humanity.

   ‘Whether or not he is responsible for the Christian Church’s tendency to equate original sin with concupiscence, St. Augustine was not wrong, I think, to use (male) sexual desire as a prime example of the extent to which human beings are considerably, [even] if not absolutely, driven by physical, psychic, and social forces of which they have little understanding, and over which they have even less control.’ (Nigel Biggar, p.3)

2. Freud can point out how I might revise and domesticate God, so that he becomes a talisman, ‘only seemingly stern’ - more like the doting Grandfather than the disciplining Father. Not necessarily to manufacture God ex nihilo, but perhaps as Augustine said, to invoke him as another than he is: a god-lite, tamed to just an extent that God becomes a useful commodity - I think someone once called this the Gagging of God.
   
   
3. Freud can help reveal idolatry as a human problem, not a peculiarly theistic one. Writing in 1930, Freud commented on the alarming unease about technological mastery of nature - far from alleviating human misery, what we once thought were the desires of our hearts would actually compound it (I can’t help being reminded of the inherent insecurity of power exposed in Daniel 2:1-15).
   

   Science and technology...are in actual fulfillment of almost every fairy tale wish...long ago [man] formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed every thing that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore that these gods were cultural ideals. Today he has come very close to the attainment of his ideal, he has almost become a god himself...But present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike Character. (Civilization and its Discontents, 38-39)

   As a Christian, I can understand this - sin (mis)takes good things through which God satisfies us for ultimate things in which satisfaction lay - instead of loving God and using other things to enjoy him, we love the things and use God to get them. Hence Augustine's appeal to love God and do what we want, and C.S. Lewis profound discovery of joy.

Psychoanalysis cannot show that Freud has the whole story, whether religious belief (theistic/atheistic) is nothing but neurotic wish fulfilment, but can serve as a healthy dose of iconoclasm for lent. Paul Ricoeur concludes that:

‘Psychoanalysis is necessarily iconoclastic, regardless of the faith or non-faith of the psychoanalyst, [but] this ‘destruction’ of religion can be the counterpart of a faith purified of idolatry…The question remains open for every man whether the destruction of idols is without remainder; this question no longer falls within the competency of psychoanalysis.’

atheism for lent

‘dear children, keep yourselves from idols’ (1st John 5:21)

I was recently invited to speak against the motion this house believes God is a human invention at UCL, but unfortunately it was too late notice this time. Many think that when you encounter an anti-religious argument the first thing you should do is to refute it, although as we’ll see I don’t think that’s not the most interesting thing you can do. There is too much nuance in the biblical critique of idolatry to defend “God” as such - I’d have argued along these lines:

1. Feuerbach, Freud, Marx & Dennett give significant critiques of human pretensions about “God” but fail to show the incoherence of a God who imagined us. The arguments cut both ways, and can’t settle the question of truth.
2. The arguments don’t apply to a self-revealing creator who stands in judgment over all human projects, so Jesus’ shocking but sustainable claim to be that God breaking into history is meaningful and warrants investigation.

In a fantastic paper refuting the common idea that the early apologists were syncretists, I’ve stumbled across this intriguing quote from a 2nd century apologist, known as Justin Martyr:

‘we are called atheists, and we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned, but not with respect to the most true God, the Father of righteousness, temperance and the other virtues, who is free of all impurity. We worship and adore both him, and the Son who came forth from him…and the prophetic Spirit, knowing them in reason and truth’ (Apology I.6)

Merold Westphal suggests a healthy dose of atheism for lent. Applying Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, Westphal commends Freud (disguised weakness seeking consolation), Marx (sociological power seeking justification) & Nietzsche (sociological weakness seeking revenge) as ‘theologians of original sin’ for a period of self-examination:

‘[These three] describe ways in which sin works in the world with more sensitivity and perceptiveness than most theologians are capable of generating. Theologians often stay so closely tied to abstract metaphysical categories that they lose contact with real life – and noone’s ever accused Marx, Freud & Nietzsche of that! They are also good Calvinists, in that they have a strong sense of the fact that…no dimension of one’s life is immune from sinfulness…the process of sanctification is lifelong’

Eternal life is never a question of whether we worship, but what we worship, as Jesus himself knew (according to John, 4:22), saying: ‘we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews’. Last week, Dan Strange helpfully introduced apologetics as a cultural and spiritual discipline for those both with and without Christian faith.

misreading humanity

One who has understood the nature of responsibility has understood the nature of man (Emil Brunner)

Can we blame flaws in the human brain for the current economic crisis? That was one question thrown up by Jonah Lehrer’s The Decisive Moment, R4’s book of the week a few weeks back, and it is intruiging stuff, exploring the relationship between decisions and dopomine! But C.S. Lewis warned of “the abolition of man” if we reduce humanity to “nature” and fail to keep & guide our means within the absolute values of what he called the Tao. John Stott cites B.F. Skinner’s response that what would be abolished is ‘only autonomous man,…the man defended & flattered by the literature of freedom and dignity’ (in Stott, ch.4).

We must be circumspect – Nigel Biggar sounds history’s warning that ‘moral idealists, not ordinary, muddled human animals, do the most harm’. Nonetheless, if the corrupted moral character of human nature corrodes the markets rather than vice versa, then it’s clear that how we answer this question, what is human nature? – is one of the most significant problems of our time. Biggar identifies two corrosive views to which a liberal society is particularly prone, and between which we must find a way if a liberal society is to be humane. One is the persistent enlightenment fantasy that humans are rational individuals, fully aware of their own best interests and perfectly capable of deciding for themselves how they should be served.

The rationalist overestimation is harmful, for in the name of the “free market” and its “”rational consumers” it denudes us of social protection against those who would make money out of exciting our anxieties and desires…Rationalist overestimation is one of the harms that liberal society, as we currently have it, does to its members. Consumerist underestimation is another. Human beings are more than their hedonic appetites and aversions. (Biggar, Saving the “Secular”, p.3)

Recent history tells us nothing if not that individuals are alarmingly susceptible to being spellbound and driven by self-destructive social forces of which they have little understanding and over which they have less control. Hence Gray’s reference to Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity” (we’ll come back to that). But we must be careful not to throw the real baby out with the naïvely idealist bathwater. Throwing out Kant's rationalism, Nietzsche & those after him called for a total re-evaluation of man as a mere consumer – an unaware bundle of amoral appetites and hidden aversions. Films like Gattaca, if we can excuse the tagline, are surprisingly bearable explorations of how, in Stott’s words,

‘the human spirit (not to mention the Christian mind) protests against the reductionism, which declares a human being to be nothing but a computer (programmed to perform and respond) or an animal (at the mercy of his instincts)’ (Cross of Christ, 111)

Aka, there’s no gene for the human spirit. Human beings yearn (and are called) to invest in something intrinsically worthwhile and permanent – see the Orange ads, or the enormous (if slightly ironic) success of Oliver James’ Affluenza. In resisting the rationalist overestimation, we don’t have to endorse the false alternative of a consumerist underestimation of ourselves. We must recognize diminished responsibility, but as long as we can distinguish choice from cause, would from could, desire from drive, then responsibility (and thereby humanity) means something.

a theologian [who] endorses the distinction that some utilitarian philosophers make between the biological and the personal dimensions of human life…might still resist understanding personal life in the subjectivist terms of a capacity for “autonomy,” for arbitrary self-direction, for launching and sustaining “projects”…Instead, he might think of it in terms of “responsibility” – that is, a capacity to respond to goods given in creation, and to a vocation from God. (Biggar, 15)

So I wonder if Kant’s notion of crooked timber points the way out…it’s a corollary of his problem of radical evil – that he finds in the human race an irrational inclination in the will away from its rational duty and ultimate purpose, preferring its own pleasure and advantage. For the free-will (Wille) to choose (Willkür) in that way, which entails a kind of slavery, is for Kant inexplicable, even ‘inscrutable’. Nonetheless his reason recognises the problem, and that, perhaps, is the key. The fish feels wet.

do free markets corrupt moral character?

Last December, the Templeton Foundation sponsored this public discussion at the Institute of Directors. Amusingly, it was free, so muggins went along. Transcript here, video here. I was astonished to hear such a dignifying clarity on the problem:

I would not say that free market corrodes the moral character. I would say the reverse. The decline of moral character...has corroded and is still corroding the system of the free market. (Bernard Henri-Lévy)

The thing to keep in mind always is that economic systems do not create human nature; rather, they provide a context for how it plays out. It is human nature that creates economic systems, and out of the crooked timber of humanity, as Kant put it, nothing straight can be built. (John Gray)

human nature affects the way we behave in markets far more than markets affect our human nature… (Jagdish Bhagwati)

The great economics thinkers were acutely aware of the link between morality and money. Even Adam Smith, Gray points out, was one of the free market’s sharpest critics, demanding an Army to keep it in check. More interestingly, Henri-Lévy took us back to Leviathan, where Thomas Hobbes proposed money as the way out from the radical individualism of his ‘state of nature’, the continual struggle or ‘war of all against all’. This abstract instrument, this neutral tool, this mediation between men called ‘money’, could engender a sense of social ownership called ‘commerce’. I’ll quote BHL at length:

In the French enlightenment, under Voltaire, Diderot and so on, ‘commerce’ has a double meaning. It meant, of course, the exchange of merchandise mediated by money and it meant also the relationship between souls and minds.

Even Karl Marx, in some of his most lucid & intelligent texts...describes the greatness of America where he says the speed of the circulation of money engenders some sort of sense of otherness, a sense of responsibility, a sense of going out of oneself, which are good.

When the anti-globalization movement claims that market capitalism brings misery, it is just false. These are provincial people, seeing the world only from the Western point of view. They do not go to the places where the market has not yet introduced its principles and its laws and see that these are the places where misery is the deepest. There is no society where people are more greedy, violent and insular than the so-called archaic societies, which are fairly said to be pre-capitalist or pre-market. So clearly, these vices and defects are not invented by the market.

Nonetheless…the capitalist free market as it has existed in recent years was absolutely unsustainable, and we have now seen this. It has been the reign of greed, of thumos, of the competitive spirit, which is the expansion of the ego. So it is the reign of this free market – which was supposed, according to Hobbes, according to Lévinas, to create a sense of otherness – which is creating on the contrary, terrible and disgusting indifference to the fate of the other & of the poorest. Free markets do bring prosperity, but those who ruled the free markets in the last years & decades did not give a damn if it created prosperity in spite of themselves, in spite of their intentions. It was the reign of an utter and terrible egoism.

I said in my text that Communism was the reign of irresponsibility; that it was a school of irresponsibility – of impossibility to take decisions and so on, but Capitalism as it works now is also a school of unresponsibility – of unaccountability. Look at these famous toxic products, which the [initial] bail out was supposed to recover and repackage, like the bad radiation of chernobyl which had to be closed off and isolated. It could not be done. Why? Because nobody knows where they are…Nobody knows who has what. This is the proper definition of unresponsibility. So this is the free market of today, and this is what is dying, exploding, and dying under our eyes.

I remember hearing Michael Ramsden a few years ago (whose doctorate was on systemic moral risks in financial markets), saying that if people thought the kind of moral failures seen in Enron & Worldcom were one-offs, then the markets would recover fairly quickly, because trust would return; but if people thought moral failures were systemic, running through the whole system, then he could only expect major banking collapse while they sorted themselves out. His point was that ‘the cost of ethical compliance is high, but the cost of failure is catastrophic’. Question is who can afford not merely to espouse but to live an ethic of responsibility.

It’s fascinating to read, again and again in the Old Testament, Israel's God says he is the LORD and detests inaccurate weights and measures. Israel was an agricultural community. Weights and measures were the basic unit by which they determined value. When those units themselves, therefore, if they were to become corrupt, the whole system would become corrupt. That is why God detested it. By excluding an ethos from our life both privately and publically, the very units by which we begin to measure value have themselves become corrupt, and the whole thing’s on the brink of collapse.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real (Iris Murdoch)

gospel and kingdom

My reading of the good news according to Mark has been transformed this year by Tom Wright's simple observation that Jesus' call to repent, and believe the good news that the kingdom of God was at hand didn't come in a vacuum, but into a divided nation, pursuing all sorts of agendas.

Jesus grew up in the shadow of kingdom-movements. The Romans had conquered his homeland about sixty years before he was born. They were the last in a long line of pagan nations to do so. They had installed Herod the Great, and then his sons after him, as puppet monarchs to do their dirty work for them. Most Jews resented both parts of this arrangement, and longed for a chance to revolt. And any first-century Jew, hearing someone talking about God's kingdom, or the kingdom of heaven, would know. This meant revolution.

But they weren't just eager for freedom in the way that most subject peoples are. They wanted it because of what they believed about God, themselves and the world. If there was one God who had made the whole world, and if they were his special people, then it couldn't be God's will to have pagan foreigners ruling them. What's more, God had made promises in their scriptures that one day he would indeed rescue them and put everything right. And these promises focussed on one thing in particular: God would become king. King not only of Israel but of the whole world. A king who would bring justice and peace at last, who would turn the upside-down world the right way up again. There should be no king but God, the revolutionaries believed. God's kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, was what they longed for , prayed for, worked for, and were prepared to die for. (p.27-30)

So when Jesus of Nazareth bursts onto the scene, ‘proclaiming the gospel of God’, it's with loaded words: “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” Before reading Wright, I'd always felt a bit confused because this seemed to mean 3 apparently unconnected things: (1) Jesus is Lord so (2) apologise for things you've done wrong and stop doing them but (3) believe the good news that Jesus died for your wrongdoing. But repentance literally means a rethink, so what were they thinking before?

• Pharisees: God won't come back until we get our act together - we must impose stricter religion
• Saducees: There's no resurrection - we must build his kingdom ourselves, here and now
• Tax Collectors & Sinners: We've blown it. God's never coming back - we'd better build other kingdoms now
• Rich/Rulers: We make the best out of bad situations – things better not get too bad, but if they do, I guess we’ll cover it.
• Zealots: God's kingdom will have no end. Sooner or later, this one will - we're wasting time unless we hasten its downfall.

But all of a sudden, Jesus was going around announcing that God's kingdom, the long promised reign of heaven was approaching like an express train. Now I do actually think that thinking and doing are connected (because ethics flows from our allegiance & worldview), but I’ve found it fascinating how Jesus' call to repent and believe the good news actually looks quite different as he encounters different people. Here's how I see it:

• The Pharisees had underestimated sin – No amount of religion could work from outside-in & clean their hearts. Jesus had authority to clean his people from the inside-out (7:1-23).
• The Saducees were badly mistaken – they’d underestimated both God and his promises. In Jesus, God would do what they never dreamed possible! (12:18-27)
• Tax Collectors & Sinners had given up too easily, and underestimated the God of outrageous grace who had come the distance to be with them again. (2:13-17)
• The Rich/Rulers needed to lose the kind of power that put them in control of their lives, but they really could entrust themselves to Jesus, even if it meant losing everything. (10:13-31)
• The Zealots were taking God’s work into their own hands, and would die by the sword. Ironically, Judas ended up hastening the true king’s downfall, while Men like Barrabas would find freedom only as Jesus died for them (15:1-32)

Jesus was not bringing an agenda for their problems; Jesus was a problem for all their agendas. In their different ways, Jesus called them to repent, literally to change their minds about God/heaven, and believe the good news - that what they longed for was already at hand in Jesus, the Christ...the king, who had come to die.

26The written notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. (according to Mark, ch.15)

till kingdom come

It has been said that sin relativises the absolute and absolutises the relative. By failing to contextualise oneself & one's own culture before going into another, a “Christian Mission” can become a cover for colonial terror. I was taught by a New Zealander last year, who mentioned an old native saying,

“When the white men arrived, we had the land, they had God
When the white men left, we had their God, they had our land”

No wonder people are suspicious. With a strong doctrine of sin, one suspects that much “Christian” work is tainted by empire building, an echo of the modern project of ‘civilisation’, but tragically, that’s what can happen when Christians use the bible to ‘tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear’.

Genuine mission, the kind that transforms continents, always proclaims a gospel (eu-angel-ion i.e. good news) which is proved genuine by the fact that it always labours to adapt, but never simply fits in, anywhere (cf sunni islam or liberal christianity). Benno van den Toren describes the unique task of evangelical contextualisation:

‘It is crucial...that evangelicals continue to ask what proper contextualisation should look like. Although the Gospel in its entirety needs to be contextualised, it should not be adapted to culture in a manner that makes it lose its counter-cultural edge. It is precisely as a foreign and critical message, which speaks of a salvation that comes from elsewhere, that the Gospel can be a truly liberating force. That is why proper contextualisation is only possible when we go beyond a mere effort to synthesise Gospel and context, but instead evaluate the culture in the light of the Gospel message. Thus the context as a source of theological reflection should always be evaluated in the light of Scripture as the primary norm.’ (‘Down to Earth: the Promise of Contextual Theology’)

The only kingdom Christian theology legitimates is the kingdom of God which comes from outside, which comes in Jesus, which we await – and insofar as it has not yet come, all other kingdoms are called into question (judgment), not least the Christian's. This certainly helps me understand Israel’s conquest of the land - God’s grace delegitimized both Israel and her enemies - hence the warning in Deuteronomy 9,

⁴ After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, "The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness." No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you. ⁵ It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. ⁶ Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD youmisr God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.

Likewise, on the day itself, in Joshua 5, someone called "the commander of the armies of the LORD" shows up, whom Joshua asks, “so are you for us or for our enemies?” “Neither”. That 'neither' sets the stage for a story of grace, because how do you bargain with a God who doesn't need you?

And how do you pray? In the light of 1 Timothy 2, I remember thinking that "Lord of all nations, whose kingdom is above all earthly kingdoms, who judges all lesser sovereignties...protect them from any moral arrogance" compared pretty well with "Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us..."

sacred ground

‘Man’s relation to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature…No item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes’ (Lynn White Jr, in Science 1967)

White famously argued that this kind of Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt for the exploitation of the planet. The question is whether he's blaming the Ark for the Flood. Clearly we should question White's reading of Genesis if he thinks that being creation’s crowning glory makes humanity the only good (telos) in creation. Genesis 1 does nothing if it doesn't establish a whole order of good ends for creation - flourishing in doing what God said! To flatten that hierarchy and consign the universe as instrumental to a single end (ourselves) is the peak of anthropocentric hubris, the suspicious legitimation of what Gerald McKenny calls the Baconian project:

‘The instrumental approach to nature was supported by a theological conviction that God has ordered it for the preservation and enhancement of human life. Nature is therefore governed by divine providence...but the conception of a providential order has changed...the conception of nature as a teleological order from which a hierarchy of ends could be derived was replaced by the burgeoning conception of nature as a law-governed mechanism, susceptible to human control and neutral regard to ends’ (p.311)

• Is the bible's de-godding of nature a devaluation of nature?

On the contrary: it grounds its value. In a world where images of sun/moon/harvest gods filled little temples, sacred spaces, the image of this God was already walking the earth. That gives extraordinary dignity to human beings but also huge value to the planet - as the temple in which we serve this God. No wonder Genesis 4 describes the fat of the land as an offering of worship. Starting with an allotment, the whole planet was to be this God’s sacred space.

That was certainly an engine for change in modern Europe, launching Luther’s move away from monasticism and toward what Max Weber called “the Protestant work ethic” - the service of God in the whole of life: Christianity gets life going! In exactly the same way, Matthew Parris recently reported in the Times that ‘As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God’:

‘Christianity, post-reformation & post-Luther…smashes through the crushing passivity of African anxiety, the fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things…Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted…Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete. (The Times, 27-12-08)

Without that Christian aesthetic, Richard Leakey could only lament that a Picasso has a monetary value while the Serengeti does not. So while blaming anthropocentric, self-legitimising Christianity for the ecological crisis, White & his followers are equally adamant that ecology is ultimately a spiritual issue. In the end, White advocates a rethought Christian vision - heretical only to what I’d call a babylonian captivity of christianity (to borrow Luther's famous phrase).

‘Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny. I propose the profoundly religious, but heretical St Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.’

lonely planet

‘The ancient oriental background to Genesis shows it to be concerned with rather different issues from those that tend to preoccupy modern readers. It is affirming the unity of God in the face of polytheism, his justice rather than his caprice, his power as opposed to his impotence, his concern for mankind rather than his exploitation. Whereas Mesopotamia clung to the wisdom of primeval man, Genesis records his sinful disobedience. Because we tend to assume these points in our theology, we often fail to recognize the striking originality of the message’

To a world which feared the sun god, the moon god, the zodiac, the sea god…, the bible’s Beginnings introduced a God who spoke the sun, moon, sea & stars into being. The cosmos was not full of gods-in-the-gaps; there was one God who opened the whole show – ‘lights, camera, action’. Genesis genuinely freed people from fearing nature, and called human beings to stand tall, no longer to cower before the planet, now they knew the producer.

By grounding the scientific credo that nature is cosmos not chaos, this de-godding of nature was a foundational motivation for the development of modern science. You can see why, historically, Genesis was also often cited to legitimate the broader modern project of mastery over nature, but in ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’, Lynn White highlighted the potential for abuse:

‘Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.’

This is why John Gray & others want to reconnect with that primal animism to humble the modern hubris which sees human flourishing as the only point of nature. He’s following the problem famously outlined by Isaiah Berlin: if the universe is consigned a single end (telos), then universal progress simply becomes a question of means, 

‘capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors…all moral problems can thereby be turned into technological ones.’ (Two Concepts of Liberty).

As a result, ‘postmoderns’ like Jacques Ellul tended to be suspicious of technology (‘technique’) per se, advocating instead a Gaian return to ‘mother nature’. But we’re left with the rather difficult problem: what is nature? Gaia robs any basis for distinguishing the good from the bad. Chesterton's medical mistake becomes clear: ‘what is wrong with the world is we do not ask what is right’.

But what if Ellul hadn’t got the whole story? What if he was only lamenting the (sinful) misuse of technology? Surely the de-godding of nature also frees people to heal the sick, to build dams, to harvest crops, to dig wells & harness the ground. Technology can heal and as well as harm - Aldous Huxley completes the picture:

‘We are living today not in the delicious intoxication of the early successes of science, rather in the grizzly morning after, where it has become apparent that what science has actually done is to introduce us to improved means in order to obtain hitherto unimproved or rather deteriorated ends.’

Having argued that Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt for the ecological crisis facing our world, White leaves us with a painful irony: more ‘technology’ cannot ultimately help, unless put to work within a new teleology.

‘What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one’

pest control

I love Sir David Attenborough. If you haven't had the chance to see his recent programme celebrating the 150th of Darwin’s Origin, here's the end. It was striking that his first & last words on this beautiful portrayal of the interrelation of life were appeals to humble human hubris, the kind that finds divine legitimation in the book of Genesis.

‘Above all, Darwin has shown us that we are not apart from the natural world. We do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and processes, as are all other animals on earth, to which indeed we are related.’

It was a powerful reminder of Ecclesiastes 3, written c.900 BC, (Ecclesiastes is Greek for ‘The Teacher’ – probably King Solomon)

‘As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath ; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless.’ (v18-19)

Nonetheless, in an interview with the journal Nature, Attenborough explains how Darwinism finally liberates us from what he called ‘the influence of the Book of Genesis’.

‘That basic notion, that the world is there for us (and if it doesn't actually serve our purposes, it's dispensable) has produced the devastation of vast areas of the land's surface. Of course it's a gross oversimplification, but that's why Darwinism, and the fact of evolution, is of great importance’

It’s all footnotes to this landmark paper by Lynn White Jr., professor of History at the University of California, back in 1967, arguing that ‘Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt’ for the ecological crisis facing our world.

‘What did Christianity tell people? …Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature…No item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes…Although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God's image’

Now, this is an extremely dualistic reading of Genesis, pitting man over and against nature in the created order. I'd suggest he's actually reading the Baconian project of man re-ordering nature back into Genesis. We can examine how far this is authentic Christianity later, but it certainly is what John Gray calls humanism. In line with White's rejection of any transcendence over nature for man to share, Gray advocates the Gaia hypothesis, that planet earth resembles a kind of living being, mother nature.

‘Humanism is a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth. In contrast, the Gaia hypothesis...re-establishes the link between humans and the rest of nature which was affirmed in mankind's primordial religion, animism. In monotheistic faiths, God is the final guarantee of meaning in human life. For Gaia, human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mould.’ (p.33)

White’s paper turned out to be hugely influential and is widely quoted in the ecological movement. Here’s conservationist Max Nicholson:

‘The first step must be plainly to reject and to scrub out the complacent image of Man the Conqueror of Nature, and of Man Licensed by God to conduct himself as the earth’s worst pest’

Again, that kind of complacent license sounds more like modernity gone wrong than Christianity gone right – what kind of God would create such a wonderful world & then license its abuse? Certainly not the God of Israel, who is jealous for the land (Jer 12:4), pledges himself to sustain the whole creation (Psalm 24) and then calls his people to live wisely: ‘the righteous man looks after his animals’ (Prov 12:10). That the earth and everything in it belongs to him makes every act of exploitation symptomatic of human joyriding. It reminds me of Chesterton’s remark: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried”.

Still, for some, Darwinism provides the key - ‘removing the masks from our animal faces’ (Gray, p.38) humbles proud and reckless human beings. Ironically, the modern project of mastering nature, (oddly epitomized in Darwin’s own voyage half way across the world) eventually brought about a humiliating end to its own bold presumption that ‘man is the measure of all things’.

‘Scientific liberation from theological dogma and animistic superstitions was thus accompanied by a new sense of human alienation from a world that no longer responded to human values, nor offered a redeeming context within which could be understood the larger issues of human existence…He was not God's noble creation with a divine destiny, but nature's experiment with an uncertain destiny…Man was not an absolute, and his cherished values had no foundation outside of himself. Man's character, mind and will, came from below, not above. The structures not only of religion but society, of culture, of reason itself now seemed to be relatively arbitrary expressions of the struggle for biological success. Thus too was Darwin liberating and diminishing.’

Christian understandings of creation & human dignity are not undermined when Darwin replaces Owen, but when Gaia replaces God. Contra Gray, God dignifies us in our choices and calls us into question. He does stand in judgment over all human exploits, but in doing so affirms the immense dignity of being human - the "larger issues of human existence". Thus too is the gospel liberating but not diminishing.

the terror of babel

‘The capital issue’, writes Lyotard, ‘is terror’. Foucault's archaeology gets going because ‘Truth isn’t outside Power’. Despairing of ends (eschatology), Derrida genuinely thought ‘deconstruction is justice’, and so on. Justin Thacker has really helped me to see this ethical motivation of the postmodern philosophers: they rejected both Christianity and traditional epistemology because neither integrated philosophy with ethical life. Ouch.

‘what is important in a text is not its meaning, what it is trying to say, but what it does and causes to be done’ (Lyotard)

Derrida was born 1930, Foucault 1926, Rorty 1931, & Baudrillard in 1929. Thacker points out how the revelation of the concentration camps shook all their foundations - ‘those hollow faces plague our reflections’ , confesssed Lyotard. Postmodern thinking, if it means anything at all, calls for a relentless attentiveness and sensitivity to dissident voices.

Sensitised by WW2 & Auschwitz, these guys had seen real hope in marxist critique - that all terror was symptomatic of class struggle, labour pains that would finally be overcome with a day of total social overhaul and re-identification of one with another (in his chapter on ‘Englightenment and Terror in the 20th Century’, John Gray deconstructs this as pseudo-eschatology). But in the disappointments of Algeria & finally the événements of 1968, history mocked not only marxist ideology but the presumption of ideology per se: nothing was heading anywhere particular.

‘it is time to get rid of the illusion that universal history provides the universal tribunal, that some last judgment is prepared and fulfilled in history’ (Lyotard, 1974)

Having understood terror as the unethical oppression and exploitation by those in power, Lyotard appeals not first and foremost for a new way of thinking but a new way of living - no longer to find ethical motivation in universal history. In other words, what postmodernism is suspicious of is not great stories, but self-legitimising stories; the sort of power trips which actually spring from deep insecurity (as Marx, Freud, Hitchens or Pullman could tell you). 

‘many evangelical thinkers don't really understand postmodernism very well…[they] treat postmodernism as being about how you know things - 'epistemology' - in the first instance…The power of postmodernity is actually in its ethics - that it challenges and questions power. In other words, it has a better (if incomplete) understanding of human sin than enlightenment rationalists did.’ (Michael Jensen)

On one hand all these stories attempt to lock God into history, as a creator who endorses their history as divinely planned. On the other hand they are all attempts to lock God out of their history, so that he cannot stand over it in judgment and scatter their plans. Under postmodernism, all human appeals to ‘universal history’ are rightly unmasked as petty excuses. It's babel all over again.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." (Genesis 11)

Both testaments of the Bible repeatedly condemn people who surround themselves with ‘false prophets’, who would tell them what they wanted to hear. Indeed, those the bible identified as true prophets were usually delegitimising, speaking of coming judgment, even calling the greatest kings to account. By actually reading Lyotard (now there’s an idea...), Merold Westphal observed that

‘the biblical meganarrative is not primarily a legitimising narrative; it’s not an ideology in that Marxist sense of the term. Its function is not to legitimise us, as the bearers of truth & goodness, but to point beyond us to a locus of truth and goodness to which we are committed, by which we are moved, but of which we are not the incarnation!’

What if the gospel never quite fits into history, because the God who will have the last word broke into history? In so doing, Jesus once met a rich young ruler who wanted to buy into what God had promised to Jesus - 'to inherit eternal life'.

That man had power - if Jesus had said, “build a hospital!” “Set up an international aid agency!” “Take a lorry load of supplies to India!”- he'd probably have done it, yet he went away tragically sad, because Jesus assured him that he couldn't buy it - in fact he first had to sell up first, and become like a little kid, with nothing. The strange thing is the little kids were welcome to come, without fear.

the selfish green

‘What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny--that is, by religion.’ (Lynn White Jr., March 1967)

In March 2008, Sir David Attenborough, Professor Richard Dawkins, Dr Jane Goodall and Professor Richard Leakey gathered for a fascinating discussion in Bristol, The Selfish Green. It’s gripping viewing.

Who do you think voices the most biblical ideas? Otherwise, notice:

1. the need to ground an environmental ethic

‘one of the things we have totally failed to do, and which I don't know necessarily the answer to, is to give nature, ecosystems, what we're trying to conserve, a value - a monetary value. One of the failures of the economic thinking is we can value an object of alleged beauty like a Picasso, but we cannot value the Serengeti except in terms of whether tourists go or don't go...But it's not who sees the Picasso that makes its value, it's the Picasso that's valuable, and I think we've got to get a new mindset on this question of the value of ecosystems.’ (Richard Leakey)

2. the bankruptcy of consumerism

‘It's EO wilson who said that if every human being on the planet today acquired the standard of living of the ordinary (not the extra wealthy) person living in America, we'd need 4 new planets. So we need somehow to persuade people that life is not only about money and stuff - life is about more. We need people to find a meaning and different values in life, so that they make do with less and have what they need, and aren't always reaching for what they want but don't need.’ (Jane Goodall)

3. the call for repentance

‘What we're talking about…will require people not just paying lip service, but really believing it's true and putting things behind it. Now that means that they ought to be converted. They ought to actually think that the natural world is precious. That is step 1. If they don't think that then they aren't going to make the sort of sacrifices that are necessary to be made. That's why all of us in this festival are engaged in this business, I believe, because WE get huge pleasure and delight out of seeing these things, and WE believe they're precious, and others ought to see WHY that is so.’ (David Attenborough)

4. the comparison with slavery

‘We have made advances. We have now reached a stage where just about everybody in the world thinks that slavery is beyond the pale, cannibalism is beyond the pale. There are other things that used to be accepted and one would have said just as pessimistically, "oh you'll never get rid of slavery, how could you possibly get rid of slavery?" - and yet we've done it. So I do think that there might be grounds for hope’ (Richard Dawkins)

I intend to show 3 things in these next 2 posts:

1. Christian understandings of creation are not undermined when Darwin replaces Owen, but when Gaia replaces God.
2. Non-Christians are recognising & grieving human sin more than many Christians & are literally calling for repentance (utter changing of mind), but are crying out for compelling reasons.
3. The bible really does contain good news about what it really means to be the image of God, and gives us reasons for hope.

‘On the face of it, from what we've just heard, it's a pretty grim outlook...Humans have the power - they are the most intelligent of all the species on the planet. But the [selfish] gene, if I understand your usual account of it, means that we as humans think short term and cannot think in the future, long term – and therefore, paradoxically perhaps, we are instrumental in our own downfall, unless there is something more to the gene than I've outlined it.’ (Jonathan Dimbelby)

Intriguing that the discussion ended with reference to Albert Schweitzer.

christianity is not a metanarrative

For Jean-François Lyotard, ‘L'incrédulité à l'égard des métarécits caractérise le postmoderne’. A meta-account is typical of modernity in the following sense: The pre-modern world legitimated its cognitive and social practices by telling mythological, ideological & religious stories – stories which were relegated to myth under the conditions of modernity. But how does modernity legitimate its own cognitive and social practices? Ironically, it turns to [its own] philosophers to tell it stories: grand tales in which modernity is the goal of history.

‘Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a meta-discourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth’ (TPC - read the Introduction here)

The key word here is legitimation. Whether the meta-narrative of Hegel, Smith, Locke or Marx [NB hardly the great thinkers of the Christian tradition], meta here indicates a change of level – second order story to legitimate first order practices. Together with Heidegger's critique of onto-theology, Lyotard's incrédulité towards metanarratives is normally assumed to constitute a devastating critique of any theology ancient enough to posit a creation & restoration. Merold Westphal is one of a growing number who think this conclusion doesn't follow from careful analysis. He gives 3 reasons why Christianity is not a meta-narrative in Lyotard's analysis.

1. The Bible’s big level meganarrative is not 2nd order discourse legitimising 1st order practices; it is 1st order events & practice: unfolding & retelling the meganarrative then enacting the story through sacraments & ethics. It’s not a story about something else; the Christian meganarrative is kerygma (news) not apologetics (defence).
2. Christianity’s primary function is not to legitimise either modern knowing (science) or the modern state (democratic capitalism) or the modern revolution (redistribution of work), and indeed critiques modernity from outside.
   
3. Insofar as democracy, theocracy, capitalism, communism, the church, science & technology as we practice them become the unrestrained will to power of a human community which makes itself absolute, the gospel delegitimizes them, and calls them into question (judgment).

Westphal concludes that both the secular postmodernists and the Christians who agree that Lyotard is a threat to christianity (half are happy about it half are unhappy), are both mistaken:

‘There is no threat to Christianity in Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives except insofar, once again, as christian thinking slips into that temptation, and thinks that the grand story it tells serves primarily to legitimise our knowings and our practices. Just to the degree that we think that we are the purpose of the biblical narrative to legitimise, then we’re sliding into metanarrative, and at that point, Lyotard himself becomes a prophetic voice from outside, to whom we ought pay attention’

I'll offer some critical reflections, but I think he's quite right.

the psychology of eyewitness memory

Richard Bauckham has produced a landmark study motivating a new paradigm in New Testament historiography. Since Rudolf Bultmann et al., form criticism has been the dominant paradigm, prioritizing the significance of the literary form of individual units of traditions that the gospels incorporate. By emphasising the creativity of early Christian communities after a long period of oral tradition before anyone wrote anything, form criticism distills the ‘Jesus of History’ from the ‘Christ of faith’. How else can we look at it?

Noting that Paul (Gal 2:1-9; 1 Cor 15:5) & Luke (Lk 1:1-4) themselves both seemed to undermine both these assumptions, Bauckham proposes that ‘testimony’ is the most helpful category in which we can understand how the gospels give us access to the real Jesus.

'Testimony is both a historical and a theological term. In testimony history and faith, fact and significance, come together, rather than having to be prised apart.'

To cut a long story short, Bauckham has argues at length that John’s gospel was written by an eyewitness (although not the apostle), while the others are based on eyewitness testimony (e.g. of Peter, women, disciples, soldiers, shepherds, …), such that the historical reliability of the gospel traditions depends to a large extent on the memories of the eyewitnesses. Interestingly, Bauckham devotes an entire chapter (13) to recent research in cognitive psychology, drawing implications for gospel studies: what events, aspects, factors and forms are memorable?

• Unique and unusual events, consequential or salient events, and events in which the eyewitness is emotionally involved are remembered better than others.
• Recollected events seldom include dates or temporal indications those integral to the story; the gist of an event is often accurately recalled, while details may vary.
• Frequent rehearsal of memories highly improves accurate remembering, rather than searching ones failing memories for recollections long left dormant.
• Memory itself always structures the events it recalls – memories have forms even before the eyewitness first tells the story, which are honed in the first few recountings of the story. This is a rapid process for an individual, and once complete, the form will remain fairly constant – we do not need to appeal to community creativity to explain various conventional forms in which traditions are cast (parable, healing miracle, etc)
  

All of which fit naturally with the gospels. But are we justified in believing testimony?

‘Testimony is a speech act in which the witness’s very act of stating p is offered as evidence “that p”, it being assumed that the witness has the relevant competence or credentials to state truly “that p”’ (Vanhoozer, First Theology, 269)

Paul Ricoeur speaks of the two inseparable aspects of testimony: on the one hand, its quasi-empirical aspect, the testimony of the senses, the report of the eyewitnesses as to facts; and, on the other hand, the interiority of testimony, the engagement of the witness with what he or she attests. A faithful witness is not merely accurate, but is faithful to the meaning and demands of what is attested. Bauckham concludes,

‘Reading the gospels as testimony differs significantly from attempts at historical reconstruction behind the texts. It takes the gospels seriously as they are; it acknowledges the uniqueness of what we can know only in this testimonial form. It honours the form of historiography they are, but at the same time we can now recognise that testimony is the appropriate category with which to read the gospels in faith and for theology. These eyewitness testimonies speak to us from the inside of the events, experienced by those who recognised the disclosure of God in them. They give us not the tired old dichotomy between the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith’, but the ‘Jesus of testimony’, a category in which historiography and theology need not be at odds, but can converge.’

the death of sacrifice

In the wake of Obama’s victory and Remembrance Day, Guy Dummann reflected on ‘the death of sacrifice’:

This time of year is always strange for me. An atheist by conviction and a pacifist by default, I nonetheless always find myself going to our local church to attend the service of remembrance. With a simple wish to remember the sacrifice of those who have died for their God, country or notion of freedom. Ninety years after Armistice, only the last of these well-worn causes still sees active service, and after eight years on the front lines of George Bush's various wars, even that is looking rather threadbare.

Dummann comments that in Britain, ‘in our national cynicism, the Thatcherite mantra of personal gain has become so ingrained that no one bothers to appeal to anything else. Even army careers are advertised exclusively on the basis of what they offer for personal development’. Ironically, it was the “great” war itself , the memory of thousands gunned and drowned in Belgian mud, which probably did most to topple confidence in some grand scheme worthy of our all, as Wilfred Owen famously lamented:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion & the Death of Utopia, John Gray argues that ‘the old Lie’ and others like it were the 20th century's throbbing hangover from Christian eschatology: the ingrained hope of a new world order brought about through some cataclysmic events. For Gray, only the Gaia hypothesis correctly judges that “human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mould” and will safeguard us from all utopian False Dawns.

While it's fascinating to see Ian Hargreaves tie himself in knots trying to avoid Gray's conclusions here, it's strange that in this tired morning after, even Guardian journalists ‘nonetheless envy the old beliefs in duty and sacrifice’, a dream Obama has certainly recaptured.

‘Rarely does the notion of duty as a source of genuine motivation arise at all, and when it does, its once frequently asserted connection with pleasure has well and truly died, and the idea of sacrifice – beyond the world of chess at any rate – has perhaps never been more out of favour than today. Which made it all the more refreshing to hear the term cropping up in Barack Obama's acceptance speech.’

Alister McGrath highlights “the imaginative failures” of pietistic protestantism and of institutional atheism. Perhaps Christmas, like Obama’s election, like Remembrance day, is another ‘strange time’ for many, when they recall distant memories when their imagination was captured by good dreams, not just bad ones?

At church on Sunday, Frog distinguished 2 kinds of pretending: negatively, imagining to escape reality; but positively, imagining on the road to discovering. Repentance is the end of the former, but if the latter remains unfulfilled, it breeds disappointment, cynicism, eventually despair. BUT ‘despair too, presupposes hope’ (Moltmann), and who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it patiently’. (Rom 8)

the audacity of hope

‘For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer[ed] hope of national redemption...Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead. Mr Obama is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.’ (The Economist)

Too right. Sure, we live in a cynical age, and part of me doesn't like his idealism, but (along with the rest of the world) I still prefer it to the rhetoric of fear of "countries who don't like us very much". Barack's audacity has got me back into Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope: on the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology (1967). I picked it up in Oxfam last year and the Intro. is a classic in its own right...

It is usually said that sin in its original form is man’s wanting to be as God. But that is only the one side of sin. The other side of such pride is hopelessness, resignation, inertia and melancholy… Hopelessness can assume two forms: it can be presumption, praesumptio, and it can be despair, desperatio. Both are forms of the sin against hope. Presumption is a premature, selfwilled anticipation of the fulfilment of what we hope for from God. Despair is the premature, arbitrary anticipation of the non-fulfilment of what we hope for from God. Both forms of hopelessness, by anticipating the fulfilment or by giving up hope, cancel the wayfaring character of hope. They rebel against the patience in which hope trusts in the God of the promise. They demand impatiently either fulfilment ‘now already’ or ‘absolutely no’ hope.

Thus despair, too, presupposes hope. ‘What we do not long for, can be the object neither of our hope nor of our despair’ (Augustine). The pain of despair surely lies in the fact that a hope is there, but no way opens up towards its fulfilment. Thus the kindled hope turns against the one who hopes and consumes him. ‘Living means burying hopes’, says Fontane in one of his novels, and it is these ‘dead hopes’ that he portrays in it. Our hopes are bereft of faith & confidence.

Hence despair would seek to preserve the soul from disappointments. ‘Hope as a rule makes many a fool.’ Hence we try to remain on the solid ground of reality, ‘to think clearly and not hope any more’ (Camus), and yet in adopting this so-called realism dictated by the facts we fall victim to the worst of all utopias – the utopia of the status quo (p.23)

…Neither in presumption nor in despair does there lie the power to renew life, but only in the hope that is enduring and sure. Presumption and despair live off this hope and regale themselves at its expense…Hope alone is to be called ‘realistic’, because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught. It does not take things as they happen to stand or to lie, but as progressing, moving things with possibilities of change. Only as long as the world and the people in it are in a fragmented and experimental state which is not yet resolved, is there any sense in earthly hopes…Hope and the kind of thinking that goes with it consequently cannot submit to the reproach of being utopian, for they do not strive after things that have ‘no place’, but after things that have ‘no place as yet’ but can acquire one. (p.24)

A few days ago I was in a fancy French restaurant in Faringdon for someone's birthday. Yuppy law-conversion crowd - one of whom turns to me and says ‘you can't hold moral convictions if you're going into criminal law - you have to defend people you know are guilty’. I expressed my surprise, thinking you'd need extremely strong moral convictions to believe even the worst criminal deserves the best defence he can get. But I could tell he was bearing too much weight on his shoulders. He was essentially advocating a vigilante legal system, which cuts undignified corners on people it thinks/knows guilty. The good news for him was that God has taken final and full responsibility for justice off our shoulders, so he needn't despair if our legal system gets someone off because he did his job too well. Yet this promised hope of future justice means every fragment of justice we can achieve will count in the end, as Moltmann concludes:

‘[Christian hope] sees reality and mankind in the hand of him whose voice calls into history from its end, saying, ‘Behold, I make all things new’, and from hearing this word of promise it acquires the freedom to renew life here and to change the face of the world.’ (p.25)

All the best, Barack.

is christianity a straitjacket?

Sisters…let me tell you who it is that we must fight…It is the Magisterium, the church. For all its history…it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. And when it can't control them, it cuts them out…they cut their sexual organs, yes, both boys and girls – they cut them with knives so that they shan't feel. That is what the church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.

Serafina Pekkala (witch in Pullman's The Subtle Knife)

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way

John Stuart Mill (19th century political philosopher)

O liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!

Madame Rolland (on her execution, Place de la Révolution, 1792)

Love God and do what you want

Augustine of Hippo (5th century theologian)

If God did not exist, everything would be permitted

Fyodor Dostoevsky (20th century author)

What is the seal of liberation? No longer being ashamed infront of oneself

Friedrich Nietzsche (19th century philosopher)

I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

Paul of Tarsus (apostle)

'conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man. Enough manipulation of the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes...[for] to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever - what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken - that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, for all I know of Pol Pot

Isaiah Berlin (20th century Historian of Ideas)

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life

British Humanist Association (The Atheist Bus Campaign’ 2008)

So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.

Jesus of Nazareth (Christ)

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality… I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.

Aldous Huxley (20th century author)

we psychologists have we have discovered that to be free from sin, that is, to have the excuse of being sick rather than being sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost…In becoming amoral ethically, neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity and, with neurotics themselves, we find ourselves asking, ‘Who am I? What is my deepest destiny? What does living really mean?’

O. Hobart Mowrer (Professor at Harvard & Yale)

they move all the farther away from freedom because, as they mistake unbridled license for freedom, which is its very opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them up to seducers who only increase their chains.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (18th century political philosopher)

worldviews are not paradigms

Realists find motivation in Hilary Putnam’s No Miracles Argument (NMA), that “[scientific] realism is the only philosophy that does not make the success of science a miracle” (p.73). That is, the repeated novel predictive success of mature scientific theories demands explanation; we’re unwilling to call it a coincidence, so we formulate scientific realism: theoretical terms in our successful mature theories latch onto real entities and structures in the world somehow.

Realism faces the problem of Radical Theory Change: some of our best mature theories which made successful novel predictions, have been radically overturned – not by theories which incorporate the old entities but refer to them in a different sense (e.g. Newton --> Einstein), but by theories which positively rule out entities previously central to the theories (e.g. Maxwell’s Aether, the caloric theory of heat or phlogiston in the theory of combustion). Many such examples in the past seem to undermine NMA: there is no cumulative success to be explained, motivating Larry Laudan's pessimistic meta-induction on science itself:

“Just as no term used in the science of more than fifty (or whatever) years ago referred, so it will turn out that no term used now (except maybe observation terms, if there are such) refers”.

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn argued that the history of science was not characterised by linear continuity but successive of revolutions: complete overhauls of the conceptual consensus, marked by such landmarks as Aristotle’s Physics, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Lavoisier’s Traité Élémentaire and Newton’s Principia, inasmuch as they laid out new normative methods (eg Lavoisier’s chemical balance or Newton’s calculus). ‘Normal science’ then ensues, until enough anomalies precipitate a crisis of consensus and a search for a new model for research. Progress in science, then, is a function of paradigmatic revolutions, not linear achievement.

I often hear analogies with paradigms invoked when talking about worldviews - usually to support crude evidentialist confidence in the compelling power of ‘data’ to precipitate a change in worldview. This is slightly misleading, as the crisis is sociological not empirical, in the breakdown of consensus in the scientific community; anomalies are not so much between theory and data as between the different 'worlds' scientists inhabit.

‘when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them...though the world does not change with the change of a paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.’ (p.125)

As it stands, Kuhn’s account is profoundly anti-realist, locating scientific ‘truth’ not in correspondence with the world but in stable consensus. Indeed, Kuhn's analysis of the scientist's world as constituted by paradigms is the paradigmatic (sorry) postmodern critique of science - the working out of Kant's corrosive separation of noumenal and phenomenal worlds. As such, it cannot be adequate for a Christian discussion of worldviews, pending what we make of Kuhn's (controversial) Incommensurability Thesis. A Christian worldview is not arbitrarily true simply because it is agreed, but true because it encounters and processes the world as it really is.

scepticism & suspicion

Philip Pullman recently wrote in the Guardian,

Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks...My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true.

Suspicion operates at a deeper level than scepticism and we must never confuse the two if we want to communicate.

• Scepticism doubts the contents of beliefs - are they really true?
• Suspicion doubts the motives of beliefs - are they really honest?

‘The hermeneutics of suspicion is the deliberate attempt to expose the self-deceptions involved in hiding our actually operative motives from ourselves individually and collectively in order not to notice how and how much our behaviour and beliefs are shaped by values we profess to disown.’ (Merold Westphal)

How does it work? Westphal suggests the The Pirates of Penzance!

Frederic has found himself apprenticed to a band of pirates by mistake. He’s hoping to be freed on his 21st birthday, but meantime he & his pirate buddies are having a party on the Cornish coast. Fred’s by himself when all of a sudden he’s surprised by a bevy of beautiful young maidens, who turn out to be the daughters of the Major General. Hoping that if one of them would be good enough to marry him, he could be free, our hero decides to announce himself...

oh is there not one maiden breast,
which does not feel the moral beauty
of making worldly interest
subordinate to sense of duty?
Oh would not willingly give up
All matrimonial ambition
To rescue such a one as I
From his unfortunate position?

(chorus) …From his unfortunate posiiiiition…

The girls won’t have any of it, ‘no, no, not one’ … ‘yes, one’ – the beautiful Mabel, who replies,

O sisters, deaf to pity’s name, for shame!
it’s true that he has gone astray,
But pray, is that a reason good and true
Why you should all be deaf to pity’s name?

So you’ve got Kantian vs Aristotelian ethics right there:

• He appeals to the girls on the basis of duty (Kant) – let duty overcome your worldly desires!
• She rebukes them in terms of virtue (Aristotle) – if you had a virtuous nature, you’d respond!
  

So here’s this lofty moral discourse about virtue and duty, but the sisters see that what’s really going on is something a little bit more mundane: he's a hunk, she's a babe.

The question is, had he not been a thing of beauty
Would she be moved by quite so keen a sense of duty?

Being properly Victorian, Fred & Mabel can’t even acknowledge the existence of sex appeal, much less have anything to do with it. So they’re engaged in massive denial and self-deception, thinking that this is a question of duty & pity! And the sisters are the hermeneuts of suspicion. They see right through it, what this moral discourse is really doing – what motivates it, what it’s covering up, and that it’s something not nearly as lofty.

Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud "masters at the school of suspicion". I'm uneasy with an increasing tendency to box scientists/engineers as 'modern' sceptics, as if only artists/sociologists felt 'postmodern' suspicion. Aside from the fact that Marx & Freud were modern as you like, even physicists can understand Gilbert & Sullivan!