wet lenses

truth & tribes 2. faith

2011-10-20T11:02:00.009+01:00

Have you ever noticed that when people are asked why they are a christian they often answer how they became a christian? How does that sound to people? Doesn't it sound terribly arbitrary? This is an official video testimony from mormon.org. It's terrifyingly familiar, but who's she talking about? Who or what is she in touch with?

Almost out of nowhere this connection was made to some 14 year old boy 200 years ago in New York... but that's the point. She's not in touch with a 14 year old boy 200 years ago in new york, she's in touch with herself. Now some would be thrilled for her, because faith is a virtue. She has become one of millions of "people of faith".

“Faith is vitally important to hundreds of millions of people. It underpins systems of thought and of behaviour. It underpins many of the world's great movements for change or reform, including many charities. And the values of respect, justice and compassion that our great religions share have never been more relevant or important to bring people together to build a better world.” (Tony Blair, Faith Foundation)
Others would be terrified for her because faith is a vice. In getting in touch with herself, she's made herself vulnerable, unawares, to the authority of some sacred book, and misisonaries who will tell her what to do. The 'truth' she's been sold is a bill of potentially harmful goods. And before 9/11, maybe modern western society was happy for that to continue but not since the day world changed - for many new atheists would say with Richard Dawkins, "9/11 radicalised me".

“faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion. (Richard Dawkins, 'Is Science a Religion?', 1997)

Many apologists, myself included, have critiqued Dawkins' view of faith here, but there is actually some ground to it. When people refer to faith traditions or people of faith, don't they mean that faith is some kind of thing that people receive and hold on to? Rather than being that you know, trust or receive something, it is taken to be how you know, trust or receive something. So to some it's a virtue, to others it's a vice; but both are talking about faith as such. Something they've received and are transmitting. What's interesting to me how these notions of faith all find expression in New Testament Greek.

muthos (myth, fable, story). This word is never translated 'faith' in the NT; quite the opposite - e.g. "we will make every effort so that after our departure you will be able to remember these things...for we did not tell you cleverly invented stories (mythoi) when we told you about the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus. We were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (Peter's 2nd letter). Likewise Paul instructs Titus on Crete to appoint elders in every town, because there were (and are) people in the church who were deceiving people and devoting themselves to Jewish myths, stories, genealogies. Paul said this was empty chatter - and Titus needed to shut them up. (Paul's letter to Titus)
nomiozo (to deem/think/suppose by norm, law or custom). Thus people supposed that Jesus was Joseph's son. Not once is this the word translated faith in the bible. It's used of the Athenians - why do you suppose (nomizein) that the divine being is like gold, silver, or stone? That's just what we do around here...Our ancestors built these temples. It's used of the Pharisees who inferred from their traditions that Jesus was out to abolish the torah, Jesus is essentially saying "why are you so accustomed to think the law will be fulfilled like that?" Not once is nomiozo the word used for Christian faith. Not once. Faith is not a habit.
pisteuo (verb), pistis (noun). This comes from the root pito which means to be persuaded, or convinced that something or someone is true. For instance, Paul says he is not ashamed of the gospel because "I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to keep what I have entrusted to him..." Without exception, this is the word translated 'faith' in the New Testament. Bearing in mind that repentance (metanoia) means to rethink; this begins to make sense: the invitation to repent and believe the good news is not to change your lifestyle, but to change your mind - to think again, be convinced of some wonderful news.

I guess Nomiozo cuts two ways. As Alasdair MacIntyre points out, everyone is embedded in a faith tradition, and whether they are rebelling or embracing their traditions, all people are accustomed to thinking, reasoning, deciding, in certain ways - be that atheistic or islamic, confucian or christian. Now, the cultural embeddedness of all human thinking does not necessarily imply cultural relativism (van den Toren, p.45) but to the extent that faiths are merely cultural construction, they are intrinsically exclusive, tribal things, legitimising the habits of a culture. I've found Christian nomiozo is often dangerous because although thoroughly habitualised to christian language, people have a sneaking suspicion it's all just a game, a game they know how to play…but it’s a dangerous game to play, because they begin to think that they're doing God a favour simply by “believing” in him (i.e. reproducing a cultural habit/form). They are not doing themselves or God any favours. God has done them a favour in Christ. The trouble is they're not convinced of that and so they play games to assure themselves that they’re in; to show (whom?) that they belong (to whom?). Thus nomiozo tends to be exlusive and tribal, more like what Peter called "the futile ways handed down to you by your forefathers". I picked up a leaflet at Imperial Chaplaincy saying "how do I become Jewish? with great difficulty..."

By contrast, pistis has an inclusive dynamic to it, and a strength to sustain the scattered. One thing I’ve often wondered is why the centre of Christianity has not stayed put, while the centres of Buddhism, Islam, Confucionism and modern atheism have largely stayed put and remained fairly homogeneous in proselytism, the centre of Christianity has shifted from Israel to Turkey to Asia to Africa, to Europe, the West, and now to the Global South, and even China - something that stubbornly confounds the ideologues of secularisation. As John Micklethwait sees, God is Back. Being the editor of the Economist, he predictably offers a purely market analysis. I'm sure to some extent there will always be nomiozo going on, particularly down the generations, and cultural reconstruction where mission is colonial, but there is clearly more to it than that. I suggest the reason has to do with the appeal to pistis: Christianity is not fundamentally about doing anything, but seeing something – that someone else has in their own person done everything necessary for us.

In contrast to that woman (I, I, I) , the invitation to Christian faith is to see something about him. God's genius was to save people in a way that doesn’t depend at ALL on who they are or what they’ve done or where they come from, but only on his Son. "and you also were included in him when you heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him...by faith you are saved, and this is not of your own doing". Without truth, we become tribal, but when our inclusion is only based on believing this word of the truth, then God's genius is put on display to tribal rulers and authorities and social forces to say there is something here that is true, that no government can control, that no church can contain, that no culture can reduce: E pluribus Unum. And if we together don’t reflect that diversity united in this truth, people will simply dismiss it as a totally predictable, merely cultural phenomenon.

Well, wonderfully, there's now an Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society at the "godless institution on gower street", and I loved their stall because (unlike many CU stalls) it wasn't just a label for a social context; it actually had some content! What a great opportunity for a lunchbar series of discussions hosted by true humanist atheism society... ;) As John Gray of the LSE puts it, Humanism is a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth...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. That'd be a good conversation starter at least...

christian myths in atheism #1: ethics is not relative. How about a lunchbar: is anything really wrong? (WL Craig will be lecturing on this topic at SOAS. 6pm October 18th)
christian myths in atheism #2: nothing in life is to be feared (cf.Matthew Parris, As an Atheist I truly believe Africa needs God): How about a lunchbar: should we be afraid of the truth?

truth & tribes 1. memes

2011-09-30T17:56:00.038+01:00

The idea of memes

In 1976, Richard Dawkins suggested a field of memetics by analogy with genetics. ‘Genes’, of course, are replicators of genetic information we inherit from our parents; they determine (or to be more precise select for) our physical makeup and connect us with our biological ancestors. By analogy to what he calls a Universal Darwinism, Dawkins coined the term ‘Meme’ to refer to replicators of cultural information we inherit from our cultural parents; they determine (or at least select for) our cultural makeup, and connect us with our cultural ancestors. Hairstyles, Fashions, Music, Building styles, Guile Themes, and crucially, ideas ...units of cultural replication are everywhere, especially online.

Just as genes mutate and bring change, so memes (the means by which cultural information e.g. ideas are transmitted) may mutate across the generations, and by analogy with biological evolution, the dubious field of sociobiological evolution is a matter of survival of the fittest. Some memes will be very successful and adapt well to their environment; others won't. If you come to Europe you will see many churches all over the place. The meme for "churches" was clearly very successful here; but you won't see too many mosques. In the Middle East, you'll hardly see any churches - people deciding to replicate those building styles...you'll see many mosques though - the meme for “Mosques” must have been better adapted there. In just the same way,Dawkins sees people of faith as people who blithely reproduce the customs or norms of their/another culture.

Just as in the genetic world you have viruses that lead to odd, unviable strains for a few generations; so you may have intellectual viruses as well, that persuade you to believe silly things – religion being the prime example of such a virus in the system. In other words, faith doesn’t have reasons by which it can be explained, it has causes by which it can be explained away. The rhetoric runs like this:

God isn’t there
Many people believe in God.
What could cause this delusion?

Memes, then are the root of Dawkins' analysis of faith as a virus (and the parallel analysis of faith as a virtue?), because crucially, memes don't propagate because they are necessarily true or good; Like genes they propagate only if they are successful; and harmful parasitical mutations can be very successful indeed. Memes can be transmitted “like viruses in an epidemic” (A Devil's Chaplain, 121). Thus natural selection comes to be the key which opens every lock in the human world; it becomes what Daniel Dennett has called ‘a universal acid’. It eats away facile confidence in systems that claim to be truthful, and it makes it incidentally but not accidentally impossible to maintain that religious belief could have any objective value in a world where ideas are survival strategies.

The irony of memes

Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises. In any wider context, they are hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic. To conjure up memes not only reveals a strange imprecision of thought, but, as Anthony O’Hear has remarked, if memes really existed they would ultimately deny the reality of reflective thought. (Simon Conway Morris, 'Life's Solution', p.324)

The Journal of Memetics opened in 1997 and is now closed. No one is writing fruitfully on the subject. It’s a total pseudo science; the analogy doesn’t hold. As Dawkins himself put it, ‘memes have not yet found their Watson and Crick; they have not even found their Mendel’. But despite being unscientific (there's zero observational basis for memes), the irony of Dawkins' analysis of memes is twofold. First, if it applies at all, it also applies to atheism, (and who says which memes are harmful/helpful if “science has no methods for deciding what is ethical” - ADC 34). The rhetoric cuts both ways:

1. God is there
2. Many people don't believe in God.
3. What could cause this delusion?

Second, the concept of memes must apply to itself. If it becomes a universal solvent, where do you store it? Nothing is safe. Truth dissolves into a field of cultural replication.

‘The term “thought contagion” is neutral with respect to truth or falsity, as well as good or bad. False beliefs can spread as thought contagions, but so too can true beliefs. Similarly, harmful ideas can spread as thought contagions, but so too can beneficial ideas…’ (Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: When Ideas Act Like Viruses, 63)

And the fallout of that for me is very interesting indeed. Without Truth, everything becomes tribal. Truth, you see, mediates cultural distinctions: if there is no Truth then societal walls & cultural wars are concretised. Truth does not harden distinctions between peoples, cultures and societies; it softens them. If Truth is not merely a construct of a particular group imposing its will and asserting itself, then we genuinely have a hope for peace: other wise it's simply going to be a matter of power: whoever shouts loudest, controls the presses, will win; and the voiceless others will always be lost/crushed in the crowd.

What’s he saying papa?
I don’t know but he seems to be saying it rather well…

Truth is depersonalised and reduced to a mere infection of information. So-called truth then will only be an instrument of conformity to the powerful & exclusion to the non-conformists. Instead of appealing to all sorts of people to see the truth of which we are not the incarnation, we will merely assert ourselves and our society, our culture, our history and our will against theirs. I suggest the measure of any group who claim to believe the truth (of which they are not the incarnation) is their unity in that truth across tribal diversity, rather than their uniformity & conformity to one another in the name of truth.

To critics, who at the moment far outnumber true believers, memetics is no more than a cumbersome terminology for saying what everybody knows and that can be more usefully said in the dull terminology of information transfer. (Martin Gardner reviewing Susan Blackmore's Meme Machines)

atheology: imitative & ascetic

2011-09-30T14:21:00.019+01:00

consider not the gods to scan
the proper study of man
is man

I recently sat in on a fantastic seminar where Chris Watkin distinguished what he calls imitative atheism from ascetic atheism. His idea is that in monotheism as in platonism, the world derives its meaning from something els e - whether a personal God or a platonic world of forms. Truth, beauty, goodness, meaning are not exhaustively contained within it, but transcend it. Imitative atheism seeks to hold onto Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Meaning and so on, either by positing something else as a transcendent placeholder (e.g. Hegel's Spirit, or Comte's Humanity) to imitate the role God/forms played in monotheism/platonism, or by attempting to locate them within the world itself (e.g. Harris's Moral Landscape) - a project Thomas Nagel sees as doomed to failure without radically redefining the meaning of the terms sought for.

‘The whole of Positive conceptions [is condensed in] the one single idea of an immense and eternal Being, Humanity…Humanity definitely substitutes Herself for God, without ever forgetting his provisional services...’ (Comte)

‘Reductive physicalism turns this description into an exclusive ontology. The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in [physical] terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed—that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts.’ (Nagel)

Ascetic atheism looks across the table at imitative atheism and says it seems what you’re trying to do is to hang a picture on a wall without a nail and without a hook. By rigorously denying itself everything but what atheism will allow, ascetic atheism doesn't try to have its cake & eat it, but rather concludes that truth, meaning, goodness, beauty etc - are all in flux. There simply are no stable realities, an idea expressed in (the form and content of) Nietzsche's parable of the madman & developed in particular by Michel Foucault who traced out the logic of the image without its God.

Strangely enough, man - the study of whom is supposed by the naive to be the oldest investigation since Socrates - is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things...whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions of an ‘anthropology’ understood as a universal reflection on man, half-empirical, half-philosophical. It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. (The Order of Things)

That's where you end up, given the premises of atheism. I first heard the madman on the lips of Ravi Zacharias in the year 2000, in What Happened After God's Funeral? I recall he coined a phrase I like: that pure atheism like pure reason is like a universal solvent - where can you store it? It either dissolves itself or it denies itself. It's this kind of paradox that reason leads you into which Pascal articulated centuries before Nietzsche. (note that his appeal to humility is a conclusion, not merely a premise: he doesn't merely assert it, he appeals for it; he uses reason to show the limit of reason. )

Man is beyond man. Let us allow the Pyrrhonists what they have so often claimed, that truth is neither within our grasp nor is it our target. It does not reside on earth but belongs in heaven, in God's bosom, and we know it only as much as he is pleased to reveal. Let us then learn our true nature from the uncreated and incarnate truth.

You cannot be a Pyrrhonist without stifling nature, nor a dogmatist without repudiating reason. Nature confounds Pyrrhonists and reason confounds dogmatists. What will then become of you, men who are looking for your true condition through your natural reason? You cannot avoid one of these sects nor survive in either.

Be aware then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourselves! Humble yourself, powerless reason! Be silent, foolish nature! Learn that humanity infinitely transcends humanity and hear from your Master your true condition of which you are unaware. Hear God!

Ironically I'd suggest that atheism can only really be stored in Christ. As Chesterton put it, you can give up on his light but you can't get out of his shadow - but in his light not only are other 'gods' shown up for what they are, we see ourselves truly too: when we see his humanity, we see how far we have fallen but also how deeply we are loved - in the light of the man Jesus we find God is not a bigger image of us; we are a broken image of him, hiding in his shadows.

Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ.” (Malcolm Muggeridge)

So when a few years ago I was invited to debate this house believes God is a human invention at UCL, my response may have been surprising: yes - such are the god delusions of Jeremiah's mockery. But I also believe humanity is a divine invention. How tragic then that those already made in the image of God would seek to make little images, put them in little temples and demean themselves by calling them gods. Religion is such a dehumanising thing.

Idolatry is radical self-harm. It is also radically, terribly ironic. In trying to be as God, we have ended up less human. The principle affirmed in several places in the Bible that you become like the object of your worship (e.g., Ps 115:8; Is 41:24; 44:9) is very apparent. If you worship that which is not God, you reduce the image of God in yourself. If you worship that which is not even human, you reduce your humanity still further. - Chris Wright, The Mission of God, 173

shock doctrine: nothing new under the sun

2011-09-14T23:42:00.027+01:00

When familiar sources of security fail us, we are left adrift in a meaningless void until we can latch onto other idols. And then the never-ending cycle of optimism and despair is reenergised once more. In the absence of biblical hope, which is grounded neither in futurology nor in romantic utopias but in the promises of God, entire societies are held captive to the merchants of fear and death. (Vinoth Ramachandra, Subverting Global Myths)

Along with JFK's (but not CS Lewis' or Aldous Huxley's) death, the moon landings and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's become "one of those days" - the one where you remember where you were, if it were a Friends episode. But streaming through the same TV sets as Friends and 24 may well have compounded the confusion. Ironically Francis Fukuyama, who in 1989 had heralded the end of history, wrote in the Guardian 10 years on that the legacy of November 9th will be "less significant than we feared", & that the noughties will be remembered for the rise of China more than the War on Terror. As Woody Allen put it, prediction is a very dangerous business, especially when it concerns the future...

Justin Neuman has written a fascinating piece, well worth reading on what he calls "9/11 chronomania"...some of the ways 9/11 has 'altered time consciousness & temporal rhetoric in the public square - from the apparent medieval barbarism of al-qaeda confronting the modern progressive society (ironically mirrored in Bush's incredible use of the term "crusade on terror") to the ubiquitous before/after talk - the worst kind I've heard was the Chris Hitchens' unthinkable post-hoc ergo propter hoc justification of the Iraq War as setting the stage for the Arab Spring. Here's Neuman's own precis:

Beginning with the lexicon of the war on terror—with its temporally overdertemined rhetoric of “the homeland,” “preemption,” “fundamentalism,” and, of course, the name-date “9/11” itself—I consider a few cases of what I call 9/11 chronomania—the obsession with time and temporal disruption that characterizes representations of 9/11 across a variety of media forms. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, by refashioning disaster as chronology, the narrative aims to replace victims with knowers—first, by establishing an authorial subject in command of its perceptual, technological, and temporal fields, and second, by attempting to shape personal and collective understandings of 9/11 by securing events unfolding in multiple locations and witnessed in myriad ways on a single, immanent timeline. The goals of such a narrative are clear: the chronometric novella that begins the 9/11 Commission Report is in part a hook designed to catch a national audience primed by thrillers like the television series 24, but it is also an attempt to incrementalize and disaggregate horrific events into an easily understood linear plot as part of a self-professed attempt to salve the wounds of collective trauma.

Isaiah Berlin certainly wasn't the first to hear the sous-entendu of anyone claiming to have grasped the 'plot' of history. but I think his style suspicion of 'plots' seems to lie beneath many of these authors - Naomi Klein, Adam Curtis, John Gray...I wonder if there's something kind of covenantal in the stories we "remember"; in that the stories we tell and retell shape the our relationship to others, to ourselves, to the future and to the past...

Remember, Remember the 5th of November,
Gunpowder Treason & Plot;
I See No Reason Why Gunpowder Treason
Should Ever Be Forgot!

We may then with Ramachandra wonder why it is and has been so often said that 9/11 was a benchmark in the history of our era, a turning point for the world, when for the vast majority of the worlds' peoples, especially the poor, life went on as before; nothing had changed. Indeed, very shortly after 9/11 the theologian John Milbank poignantly asked why there was outrage on such a gigantic scale - his own answer that it highlighted the powerlessness of the strong, and gave an opportunity to strengthen the policing of the market system in whose service the state stands seemed too easy at the time, but what's interesting is that the same answer seems to have been developed by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. By no means a Christian and while not arguing that markets are inherently violent, she maintains that particularly Milton Friedmann's form of 'disaster capitalism' has been propagated through an economic equivalent of shock and awe: to erase and remake the world. Especially as someone musing that the gospel frees us from fear of the natural, I found her analysis fascinating.

“without a story...we are intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented, and the world begins to make sense.”

I think this is spot on. The kind of sense we make depends on the kind of stories we tell. Perhaps part of the problem with the popular Left Behind series is that it gives people a narrative within which something phenomenally wrong begins to make sense, in this case identifying conservative ideology/(*idolatry?) with American foreign policy. But I'm getting ahead of myself... Neuman surveys a vast array of government publications, from the modern/medieval rhetoric to the official 9/11 commission report, which launches with an attempt at a universally accessible "neutral?" (meaningless?) story of 24/Bauer-style timings. A steady barrage of ticking clocks marks the intersecting plots of the four teams of hijackers, a stopwatch-driven succession that culminates in the instant when, “at 8:46:40, American 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.”

The conspicuous precision of the Report’s time measurement—to within the hundredth of a second—should invite us to question why, when tasked with understanding the attacks and their causes, the Report begins by establishing exactly when events occurred; further, what might such chronometric narratives have to say about the legacy of September 11, 2001?

N.T. Wright has often explained his motivation for writing his Evil and the Justice of God was the emergence of a discourse on both sides of the atlantic which started talking in very naive

manichean terms of a cataclysmic struggle of good vs evil. I've written on this here, but

must confess I myself was very much caught up in it at the time (2001-2). It's a compelling (but sel f-legitimating) story, where rhetoric about the incarnation was applied without reprimand to the US/UK state & foreign policy: "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not put it out"; "the city on the (capitol?) hill cannot be hidden"; "the hope of the world" and "the bringers of freedom".

Closer to home, what kind of stories can/must we tell off the back of the London Riots? Are there s

tories that we can tell about ourselves which don't leave ourselves legitimised as the bearers of truth and goodness over and above the ("mindless"/"lawless") bringers of the problem? Amid hugely naive (christian and secular) responses, I thought Mike Ovey hit the nail on the head with his editorial, Them or Us?

In a world of truth decay, I fear the easiest mistake to make is to insist on the half-truth that there is truth to bear, while forgetting that the truth to which we can bear witness is a truth of which we are not the incarnation; or at least a truth in which we only share authentically when we admit that, to coin a phrase, "we are not the light, only witnesses to the light; the true light shines on and shows up every person for who they are: a liar..." This demands what Mary Midgley calls a"quite different and much less straightforward kind of thinking", the kind of which is on display in Ramachandra's brilliant book, Subverting Global Myths (SPCK 2008)

Christian theology is more than a set of doctrinal beliefs of systematic arguments, it is a way of seeing, of so dwelling in a particular language and doing new things with that language so that its revelatory and transformative power is manifest in the world. That language arose out of specific historical events that both constitute us as the ekklesia of Christ and call forth characteristic social practices such as thanksgiving, forgiving, exposing evil (*and I'd add, primarily in ourselves as forgiven sinners who testify), truth telling, welcoming the broken and the hopeless, and bearing testimony to grace. Such theology seeks comprehensiveness because it seeks to bear prophetic witness to the One whose speech acts heal, renew and transform the world in its entirety, but its own speech is always broken, sharing in the not-yet-redeemed nature of the world...

This is what I think Newbigin and MacIntyre are getting at when they say that there is no universal rationality; things really do make sense in stories, but the kind of sense they make can be completely wrong. I'll never forget that Economist Headline, but when I googled that phrase ("the day the world changed"), the two books which came up with that title were written by Christians (RT Kendall & Jon Paulien). With Paul in 2 Cor 5, I suggest they should have known better. We are convinced that One died for all and therefore all died, and He died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who raised Jesus from the dead. The old has gone, the new has come, and knowing the fear of the Lord we try to persuade people. Maybe there's something in the wondrous story after all...

'When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them. The narrative in terms of which he or she at first understood and ordered experiences is itself made into the subject of an enlarged narrative...' (Alasdair MacIntyre, 'Defining a Philosophical Stance')

an apology for praying in public

2011-03-12T08:00:00.047+01:00

In April 2007 Lord Harrison initiated a debate in the House of Lords, arguing that religion was both historically and“very much at this moment” the root cause of “terrible events and some of our most intractable problems”. Baroness Massey of Darwen agreed, pointing out that Christianity was an archaic and malign influence that continued to prejudice people “in relation to sexuality, women, gay people, science and a host of other things”. I wonder what they'll make of this:

An hour of prayer for our Nation and Leaders.
A visible statement of faith.
A brandless, grassroots, flashmob event.
For everyone, led by students.

I think this is good news. But I can understand why it could be bad news. Perhaps my own concern is the potential for naive nationalizing of the OT texts (Joshua/Gideon/2 Chron 7) by eg the Daily Mail (dia)tribe. Partly because Joe & I are in Daniel at the moment (where Dan prays towards Jerusalem exactly in line with 2 Chr 7), and partly because I'm concerned how non-Christians will see it, I've been reflecting how important it is that it's not a show of force but of peaceful prayer. We are not our nation’s religion trying to take the power back, nor even a foreign religion seeking impose its will, nor a superstition hiding in hearts. I’ve been reminded of Michael Green's helpful observation that the Romans also knew only two categories.

*religio* (public show of state sponsored divine approval eg imperial cult - cf 'god bless america', 'send her victorious' or 'allegiance to the atheistic state' would all be religio in that sense. Cf. Nebuchadnezzar's statue in Daniel 3, uniting all tribes in the service of his empire...
*superstitio* (private beliefs, devotions & traditions which were tolerated & allowed to flourish alongside the public *religio* eg householdgods/ancestor worship/good luck charms etc) Cf. Nebuchadnezzar doesn’t call the jews to stop praying to their own god, nor even to believe in but to bow down to his statue in public

What's amusing is that the Romans couldn't figure out what Christianity was – it certainly wasn’t religio as they didn’t worship Caesar or his gods. In fact that's precisely why Christians were among the first to be called atheists, because they rejected the theoi of Rome! So were they dangerous? So thought Pliny the Younger, reporting as Roman Governor of Bythinia to the Emperor Trajan in AD112 :

I interrogated them as to whether they were Christians. If they confessed I interrogated them a second and third time, threatening punishment. If they persisted I ordered them to be led off [to execution]...As for those who denied that they were or ever had been Christians, when they invoked the gods in words given by me, and prayed with incense and wine offerings to your statue, which I had ordered to be brought for this very purpose along with images of the gods, and also cursed Christ (which it is said that no true Christian can ever be compelled to do), I thought they should be discharged….Others named in the document said they were Christians but later denied it saying they had been, but that they had ceased three years ago, or even as much as twenty...they said that this had been the full extent of their guilt or error: they had been accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and to sing antiphonally a song to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by an oath not to some crime, but rather not to commit theft, robbery, or adultery, not to break their trust, and not to refuse to return a pledge when asked to do so… many people of every age, every rank, and of both sexes are being and will be called to trial. Nor is it only cities that are affected, but the disease of this superstition is also reaching villages and farmsteads. It seems possible to check and correct this. It is pretty well agreed that the temples, which had almost become deserted, have now begun to be frequented again, and all the sacred rites which had been neglected for a long time are recommencing and that the flesh for sacrificial rites is being sold, for which up to now it was hard to find a purchaser. (Pliny, Letters, 10.96)

It wasn’t superstitio because it transformed their lives, but it wasn’t a rival religio either - they didn’t worship Caesar but they didn’t pray for his downfall. Instead, these strangers went around declaring that the man with all authority on earth had just been publically killed and raised from the dead – but unlike the gods they feared and the powers that be (better the devil you know?), his rule meant peace on earth and good news for all people: apparently this man didn’t want revenge but repentance...

1 I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— 2 for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 3 This is good, and pleases God our Savior, 4 who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed to at the proper time. 7 And for this purpose I was appointed a herald and an apostle—I am telling the truth, I am not lying—and a true and faithful teacher of the Gentiles. (1 Timothy 2v1-7)

If sin relativises the absolute and absolutises the relative, then Christians are called to support and serve and pray for the state – prayer reminds us and them that we love them but that neither they nor we are absolute, but only enjoy relative rule. So we pray for their guidance and humility, not for their overthrow. As Stanley Hauerwas put it on Radio 4 recently,

“Most of Christianity in recent times - well, since Constantine - thought it needed to rule. I represent what I like to call the peasant view of Christianity. I just want to know who's ruling me and how I can survive them. In the process, I hope to make a contribution [addressed] to those who rule.”

Spot on. Christians recognize both that we’re exiles, and that Jesus is lord. Too often Christians would react to babel by emphasising one without the other (e.g. the so-called dominion movement John Gray calls attention to) , but we must hold to both until he comes, lest we tend to violence. Jesus is our true lionheart, our exiled king who has called his people to exile until his return, and to contribute to the common good in everything, as a testimony to hope of which the world is not worthy.

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity…But inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers…They pass their days of earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. (2nd century Epistle to Diognetus)

This is a key theme of Luke’s gospel, by the way (think of luke 2 in the days of Caesar Augustus…think of Luke 3…some soldiers came… think of Luke 7 the centurion heard of Jesus… think of Luke 22 - “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs?”) . An essential feature of the gospel according to Luke is that Romans have nothing to fear if they recognize Christ as ruler over all - apart from scorn. They don’t have to stop being Roman; they had to start being Christian! An integral part of the gospel according to all four evangelists is the shameful trial but public exoneration of Jesus precisely for the charge of being a religious terrorist; they hated him without a cause. In our turbulent times, I think that's an apologetic element of the gospel we’d do well to re(dis)cover.

Is Christians praying for the government a dangerous thing? A generation ago that would have seemed bizarre to even ask, but welcome home to New Testament Christianity! It's a fair question: when 1000s would be anarchic, what will Christians do? Will they riot (for a rival religion) or hide (in a superstition)? I suggest they pray, and proclaim that Jesus is Lord. Let hatred be without a cause.

aftermath: what would JB do?

2011-03-11T17:00:00.023+01:00

[republished from a letter to supporters in January 2011]

I imagine that most of the attention that students & London occupied up in the public mind last term was over the uncapping of university fees and the ensuing protests which were inexcusably hijacked by mindless anarchists. Some students I know went for a walk the night after the protests, and found some very sad scenes (left). One (*Ella) took a series of photos she called aftermath.

Wherever you stand, I’m sure you can imagine that the sense of betrayal among students made the protests a really big & divisive issue on campuses. Some were pessimists and simply wanted to get on with their degrees, others were optimistic and felt it was their duty to take a stand: on many campuses there were “occupations” of departments by students & staff, in true Marxist/revolutionary style, – some even wore (comedy?) berets! I'm reminded of Terry Eagleton's words:

Christianity is absurdly and outrageously more hopeful than liberal rationalism with its apparently unhinged belief…you might even say the demented Christian belief that not only is the salvation of the human species possible, but contrary to all we read in the newspapers, or see on Fox Television, it has in some sense already taken place. Not even the wildest utopian secularist will assert something as outrageous as that. (p.48-49, but verbatim from limits of liberalism)

As I walked around the UCL campus, I was fascinated to find pieces of graffiti saying “education is not a commodity” and “what would JB do?” In a secular institution founded on Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian principles, this complaint didn’t seem to belong. Utilitarianism is an ethical system which sought to (and did) bring justice by reducing the moral meaning of things to their outcome, making everything amenable to a kind of net moral profit/loss analysis of utility) of any decision/action. If that isn’t commodifying everything, education included, I don’t know what is. Good convo starter: wwjbd? It might be the godless institution on Gower Street, but Michael Sandel is right: the markets leave their mark.

In terms of helping people think Christianly, I was helped by the line my friend Joel Kendall took when he was invited to comment as a Christian on the BBC coverage. Rather than endorse or discourage the protests, he insisted that people are valuable whether they have a degree or not, and commented that perhaps the anger & resentment at this decision reflects a harmful overvaluing of this form of education – a kind of grass is greener theology: if only you can get that university education, then you’ll really be something special…and when you’ve built your life on getting that thing, it does as golden calves do – steal your money and keep you where you are.

losing my religion 2. surprised by love

2011-03-07T12:29:00.010+01:00

To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?

Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius is one such dream. Set to music by Elgar, it follows the romance between a supposed ‘guardian angel’ and the soul of Gerontius, but the divine romance is noticeable by its absence.We do hear faint echoes of the passion but it’s very distant.In stark contrast to Handel’s love, whose tuneful voice was heard from high: Arise! Arise ye more than dead!, for Gerontius neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Spirit’s voice are ever heard.

Much like Freud, we instinctively imagine God would be like George V: a distant Father, enraged by his own ticking clock and unable to rest until he’d secured his legacy (e.g. Philip Pullman’s Almighty - not the creator, but the great pretender to a throne that was never his) - with no time to laugh or play, he spends his days barking at his children to be like him – (pity such as these). People who project these insecurities onto God, and think that he’s brought them into being out of his own insecurities do tend towards one of Freud’s two dysfunctional responses:

distance: liberation, self-discovery, trying to get free from the Father’s grip (they normally end up empty)
drudgery: self-imposed slavery, terrified of feeling the Father’s tightening grip (they normally end up angry)

...But who ever said God was insecure like we are? What if he’s not surprised when we don’t measure up & loves us still? Probably the most famous story Jesus ever told was all about this, actually. It’s about a man who had two sons. Both feared their Father; neither loved him...but both were surprised to discover that he wasn't like they imagined. One loved him for it, one hated him for it. If reality's ever been stranger than fiction, maybe He deserves a rethink.

“So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more. Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from Him. But if the heart be once much taken up with this the eminency of the Father’s love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared unto Him…If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will? Sit down a little at the fountain, and you will quickly have a further discovery of the sweetness of the streams. You who have run from Him, will not be able, after a while, to keep at a distance for a moment.” (John Owen, c. 1657)

losing my religion: 1. surprised by fear

2011-03-01T14:48:00.017+01:00

It is one thing for the Salvation Army to re-equip with electric guitars. But it is quite another thing for religion to deal effectively with the cynicism of young minds which have been nurtured in a century dominated by science. The greatest gift of this century to our posterity is this: we have released our children from the fear of the supernatural. The concept of God is still available for those who need it – but those who do not have no longer to be ashamed and no longer to be afraid.

So wrote Alan Isaacs on the Survival of God in 1966. What happens when faith collapses into psychology? Societal schizophrenia: Christians treat it like a virtue and stop asking, let alone answering questions, and non-Christians treat it like a vice and stop asking, let alone answering questions. Why? Merely out of fear.

Well, so much for the ‘survival of God’. The secularisation thesis (that the processes of modernisation would be one by which religious ideas & institutions lost their social sicgnificance) has been widely discredited. What’s intriguing in this secular age is that news of fear's downfall had apparently been greatly exaggerated. The King's Speech was a story of a terrified prince trapped in an unforgiving advance, but Bertie had to go to Lionel, not his figurative offspring (science & art never leave the basement) to free him from his fear out in the open. This return to the psychological root of fear reflects the postmodern turn of the last 50 years.

You don’t need to be governed by fears…

Postmodernists say that truth itself is tyrannical, a regime of fear that quashes all alterity: expel one tyrant (church?) and you're left at the mercy of another (state?).

Truth isn’t outside power...it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint’ (Foucault)

Solution? trust no one, and find your own voice. The trouble is, better the devil you know, right? If all truth is but a projection of social/psychological phenomena of which we are unaware, then why bother? If no truth can transcend or mediate between cultures, then we're left with power games, culture wars. With no court to appeal to, our own voice can only assert itself - so whoever shouts loudest, controls the presses, makes the movies, manipulates/exploits human psychology most effectively - is king, while other voices are lost in the crowd. Case in point: Nuremberg

what's he saying, papa?
I don't know, but he seems to be saying it rather well.

We are caught between a rock and a hard place: let truth decay and we’re left with nothing but power games – cultural wars (because truth can neither transcend or mediate between cultures); or we keep in continual rebellion against neverending tyrannical regimes of truth, as Alister McGrath observes.

In 1936, Heinrich Rommen (1897-1967) published Die ewige Wiederkehr des Naturrechts (“The eternal return of natural law”). Rommen, a professional lawyer who had been imprisoned briefly by the Nazis for his work with a Roman Catholic social action group, pointed out that Germany’s modern dictators were “masters of legality”, able to use the legal and judicial systems to pursue their own political agendas. Germany’s legal professionals, he argued, were so used to thinking about law in purely positivist terms that they were left intellectually defenseless in the face of the National Socialist threat. In this dire situation, one needed to appeal to a higher authority than the State. Natural law offered precisely the intellectual lifeline that was so badly needed. (Justice and the Transcendent)

I suggest Dad's Army nailed it: just who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? If modernity tended to a harmful rationalist overestimation of human beings which left them vulnerable to the extent to which they could be manipulated unawares, postmodernism tended to a harmful consumerist underestimation of human beings as mere purchasers of whatever stories they're sold. For all its insights, postmodernism must not be allowed to elevate itself to look down on everything else. Insofar as it does, it too becomes just another tyrannical regime of fear that quashes all alterity, even the rumours of a truly alternate psychology of a truly alternate king.

36Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting...
37Then Pilate said to him, "You are a king then?"
Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world— to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is on the side of truth listens to me."
38 “What is truth?” Pilate asked.

...1 Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged...6 As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!” But Pilate answered, “You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.” 7 The Jews insisted, “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God.”

8 When Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid, 9 and he went back inside the palace. “Where do you come from?” he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer. 10 “Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?”

The gospel not only rebels against the world order, in the light of the resurrection, it gives us a transcendent reason to. It is a delightfully different kind of enlightenment, a truth which frees people from fear of the natural - not by the power of a noble lie, but a silence that testifies to the truth of one kingdom which is not of this world but is for this world and has become a court of appeal for the weak when truth is nailed to a cross. Case in point: Bonhoeffer.

losing the wonder

2011-02-20T02:27:00.023+01:00

”I can’t believe I’m walking on Chaucer and Handel and Dickens!”

This well placed line in Westminster abbey jumped out at me during The King's Speech. It's true: we are so caught in our own cultural moment that we miss this, but one of the tragic failures & fallouts of modernism has been the de-enchantment of nature and the loss of meaning – after all, “it’s just a chair…” I mean, what’s one band of metal from another? Why not take that ring and chuck it away? You can always get another one! Well to you it may be just pieces of metal but to Kate Middleton it’s charged with symbol and significance – real significance; imagined, yes, but not illusory – for its significance is not constituted but realised by her imagination. Not everything we imagine leads us into the imaginary, you see...when Einstein imagined himself sitting on a lightbeam, he did so on the way to discovering something amazing and real (...we think).

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. (Albert Einstein, The World As I See It)

Would any true scientist say they'd lost that sense of wonder? Isn’t it that very wonder which drives them to explore? Science starts with “Twinkle Twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are”, a wonder that science didn't generate, but a wonder that generates more and more science, which only adds to the beauty, or tingul.

But whatever happened to our sacred canopy? Modern materialism saws off the very branch (throne?) on which scientists sit to gaze. One of my favourite lines from CS Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawntreader is when a star falls to earth and young Eustace gets uppity: "in our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas", to which a wise man replies, "even in your world, my son, that's not what a star is, but only what it's made of". In contrast to Freud, whose materialism reduced everything to the basement level of his own psychoanalysis, Lewis rejected the “mythology that follows in the wake of science” which is itself unscientific.

“[only] little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science [think that] the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. . . . The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.” (Abolition of Man)

We could say with CS Lewis’ that even in your world, a chair is not what a throne is, just what it’s made of. But that raises the dangerous question, what is the world in which we live? What is the context in which we live, move and have our being - make films, love art, do science, fight wars, raise families? Is it...wonderful? I'd point people to the recent testimonies (I II III) of A.N. Wilson thinking again:

Clever as the professional atheists are, they are missing out on some very basic experiences of life. The worst thing about being faithless? When I thought I was an atheist I would listen to the music of Bach and realize that his perception of life was deeper, wiser, more rounded than my own. (Return to Faith)

Easter does not answer such questions by clever-clever logic. Nor is it irrational. On the contrary, it meets our reason and our hearts together, for it addresses the whole person...The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story. J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it. (Religion of Hatred).

Read the writing (I II) of novelist Marilynne Robinson, or (I II) of physicist John Polkinghorne FRS. I had the honour of hearing John lecture days after the tragic death of his wife, and his meeting of heart and mind was palpable. Christianity is real, you see - it's both intellectually robust and existentially satisfying; it's wonderful.

the king's speech

2011-02-16T10:30:00.063+01:00

Monarchy's been on the mind. With Will & Kate’s do coming up, I’ve been surprised by the level of interest and found myself asking people what they're making of it. One thought has stuck with me. My friend Joe likes monarchy because it’s not modern – he finds token attempts to ‘modernise’ it hopelessly ironic. He’s got a point: it’s hard to think of any institution anywhere in the world more heavily invested in the past. As one cabinet minister said this week, the royals go on, that is what they do. In David Seidler's new screenplay, Timothy Spall's Churchill calls that into question.

Have you thought what you will call yourself? [silence] Certainly not Albert, Sir. Too Germanic. [silence] ...What about George? After your Father? George the Sixth. It has a rather nice continuity to it, don’t you think? (Churchill)

If we're interested in the stories we tell ab out ourselves, then The King’s Speech is one that looks set for loads of Baftas. I loved it. Beautifully shot, very funny, and wonderfully constructed (nb fires, faces, clocks & colours). It's a heavily freudian film about two Fathers who have two sons. King George V has 2 sons: one obsessed with Sex, one repressing Aggression. Another king, Lionel Logue (“my castle my rules”), also has 2 sons: one obsessed with Science, one revelling in Art. The film follows Bertie’s fear of becoming George VI and how Lionel frees him from his fear to find his own voice and speak to a nation on the brink of World War.

Much has been made of the Nixon-Kennedy watershed, when televised media changed political power forever; here is a story of the radio mic ringing the changes for royalty at an empire’s evening. The film opens and closes with kings flanked not by footmen but technicians: now it seems technology sets the stage for kings to speak:

This devilish device will change everything...In the past all a King had to do was look respectable in uniform and not fall off his horse. Now we must invade people’s homes and ingratiate ourselves with them. This family is reduced to those lowest, basest of all creatures: we’ve become actors!” (George V)

But if science reduces kings to actors and thrones to chairs, it doesn't seem to enable anyone to play their role, especially if that role is to sit on a throne. So after the first King’s Speech, we find George V literally barking mad that Albert is unable to read his (Father’s) lines.

“through the m-m... [GET IT OUT BOY!]
marvels of m-m-... [Modern, just take your time]
science, I am enabled this C-C-... [RELAX!]
this Christmas day to speak to my p-p-...[DO IT!]

By the end of the film, Albert (now George VI) is able not only to deliver his own speech but to help a nation face up to Nazi tyranny. So what was the problem? The adorable Elizabeth (my favourite) initially takes a simplistic view – “as I see it, my husband has mechanical problems with his speech”, and her (modern) common sense is shared by both Albert who wants “strictly business, no personal nonsense” and King George V (“it’s easy when you know how – stare it square in the eye, show who’s in command!”), but TKS invites us to see deeper.

“I was afraid of my father, and my children are damn well going to be afraid of me”(Albert)

Freud’s psychoanalysis was a way of explaining (presenting) conscious phenomena in terms of (hidden) connections long drawn in the subconscious. Following Hitchcock’s famous use of elevators, TKS occurs basically at three levels: underground, out in the open and up in the air. These three mirror Freud’s basic analysis of a consciously moral ego caught between a (supposed) amoral subconscious id and an (imposed) imagined super-ego. (NB Inception gets/turns this the wrong way round - down in the basement you find Di Caprio's strongest sense of guilt and moral attachment).

“I can’t remember not doing it” (Bertie)

“Surely a prince's brain knows what its mouth is doing” (Lionel)

So having heard of David (Prince Edward VIII) who ‘stared square into his Father’s face and…lied’, we first meet him up in the air (landing his biplane); while down in his basement we find stacks of red wine and a swinging meat carcus (Bacchus)! Meanwhile Prince Albert’s cramped descent (to room 101, where he finds a model biplane) reveals all sorts of childhood memories (“I always wanted to build models but Father wouldn’t allow it. He collected stamps. I had to collect stamps”) & repressed anger (bl**dy-sh*t-b*gger-f*ck!).

Lionel: vulgar but fluent, you don't stammer when you swear

Bertie: ...because I'm angry!
Lionel: Well that’s a side of you we don’t get to see that often
Bertie: No. No we’re not supposed to really, not publicly.

Bertie’s dilemma, to which his stammer gives expression, is encapuslated in unforgettable words from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (another prince dealing with the death of his Father). Unknown to himself, it’s the first time he hears his own voice:

To be, or not to be: that is the question
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles;
And by opposing end them?

TKS is accessible at many levels, but is so heavily Freudian that it became quite comic, even predictable – more like a code to be deciphered than a story to be entered. Perhaps this is why it almost fails as a history; and becomes instead a film very much stuck in its own time. Compare George VI's day of reckoning in The King’s Speech (2011) with Thomas More’s trial for silence in A Man For All Seasons (1966).

Follow up posts: (I think TKS is the most timely film in years)

losing my religion: surprised by fear
losing my religion: surprised by love
losing my religion: regaining the wonder

anonymous i. who is jonny marco?

2010-12-28T19:20:00.055+01:00

Listening to: Phoenix, Love like a sunset

“Who is Jonny Marco?”
“Umm…”

Somewhere opens with 15 deadpan minutes of (fantastic) soundtrack, while Jonny literally goes nowhere in his Ferrari (a car he gets out of somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the last scene), and laps silent circuits of celebrity status and motel strippers. Out of nowhere, the film's first words are everything. Elle Fanning: “Hi Dad”.

Marco (Stephen Dorff) seems to really be somebody. But it turns out “he” is a bit more of a hollow shell, a package deal shuttled from set play to set play. Whoever he is, Marco is encased in all sorts of moulds, plastic and otherwise, so when his 11-year-old daughter draws a heart on his plaster cast (which he eventually cuts himself free from, like his car), it’s really quite beautiful. Although Coppola holds him at a distance (amusing anonymous text messages punctuate his story), you really warm to Marco.

Not much is said through the whole film, which (via some superb acting) makes some already unsettlingly long shots feel like Coppola's positively playing chicken with you - flirting with the sexualising of his daughter when all you can hear is her skating on (thick) ice; the clink of cutlery while Cleo stares daggers in the (hilarious) ‘morning after’ breakfast scene; the endless driving (where?) when all you can hear is the engine; and perhaps most unsettling of all the plaster cast mould of Marco’s face when all you can hear is his breathing. Coppola holds that tension throughout, until his eventual breakdown when he finally confides over the phone, “I’m f**ing nothing, not even a person”.

“Who is Jonny Marco?”
“Umm…”

Asking who? is not simply asking what? It is seeking what Ricoeur calls an ipse (self-hood) identity, as opposed to an idem (sameness) identity. What's in a name? A name links someone’s past to their future, via nothing but personal narrative. It’s how oneself relates to (itself and others as) another through time. Changing one's name is nothing if not changing the relationship of one’s past to one’s future, and the possibility of getting a new name is really quite profound - especially if that name is Windsor.

For many people a name is just a way of picking out a bundle of racial/social/sexual/economic attributes (we might say “that is Chris”, but not normally “he is Chris”). And so names become another label we either embrace or resist. But in the bible, the question “what is your name?” is huge. It’s not simply “woops I’ve forgotten how to pick you out from other bundles”. It's more personal than that. 'Man' and 'God' are not names; 'Dad' is.

The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered. [Jacob means “deceiver”]
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Isra-el...” [Israel means “struggles with God”]
Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” (Genesis 32)

This may seem alien, but I remember once sitting in on a fascinating discussion that I’d never have encountered but for working with CUs. A discussion got going about Jacob's name, and to what extent our names were important. Those from 1st generation African contexts were thoroughly naturalised to the power of names; some having previously been bound up with animism, or covenants made with ancestors. The more westernised/2nd-3rd generation people were, the more alien this was - names weren’t important, who you were was. I began to think that perhaps the two are more related than we care to admit: ours is after all, a society wrestling with anonymity (case in point: go watch Coppola’s films), and personal identity is often in crisis. Something I've noticed more and more this year in Paul's letters is his insistence that Christian identity is altogether new.

8 Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. 9 But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? (an urgent letter Paul [formerly known as Saul] wrote to churches in Galatia, Turkey c.50AD)

black mass: the end of history

2010-07-22T16:14:00.149+01:00

And did those feet in ancient times
walk upon England’s mountains green?
...And was Jerusalem builded here
among these dark Satanic mills?

Odd, innit. Blighty’s most rousing hymn is a series of questions, the answer to all of which is: “No”. Well, says John Gray, it appeals to a basic human need: ‘Myths are powerful engines of meaning’ (3). Roll on 2014, a montage of 2003, 1966, and ...Agincourt and we'll believe again, no doubt - 50 years of hurt never stopped me dreaming! More seriously, ‘nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life’ (263).

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land!

Blake’s pipedream encapsulates what Gray calls Black Mass (i.e. Christianity backwards). The new Jerusalem pictured in John’s Apocalypse ‘coming down out of heaven from God’ is taken for something we can build up on earth ourselves. Instead of delivering a new world, utopian projects leave us languishing in the familiar, often oppressive, same old order of things.

Utopias are dreams of collective deliverance that in waking life are found to be nightmares. Utopian projects are by their nature unachievable. As Hume put it, ‘All plans of government which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind are plainly imaginary’… To remain within the boundaries of what is believed to be practicable is to abdicate hope and adopt an attitude of passive acceptance. (24-25)

Like Moltmann's Theology of Hope, Black Mass is a call for “realism”, but unlike Moltmann, for whom 'hope alone is realistic', Gray calls us to make do with tents and dream no more of heavenly cities. The bible tells a more nuanced tale of two cities: of Abram called out from Babel to seek the city whose builder and architect is God (Heb 11). At times, Gray almost sounds Christian:

Because human life is marked by human sin, the two cities can never be one. Evil has been at work in every human heart since the Fall of Man; it cannot be defeated in this world. This doctrine gave Christianity an anti-utopian bent it never completely lost, and Christians were spared the disillusionment that comes to all who expect any basic change in human affairs. In Augustinian terms, the belief that evil can be destroyed, which inspired medieval millenarians and resurfaced in the Bush administration, is highly unorthodox (11)

While consistently distancing these views from mainstream Christianity (Augustine, Calvin & Luther: 31,36,44,48), Gray traces the influence of post-millenialism in a relentless history of utopian movements on the political left & right (from the French Jacobins to the US founding fathers, to Lenin, Trotsky & Marx, to Wilson, Hitler, and Thatcher, to the neo-liberalism of Fukuyama, the neo-conservativism of Bush & Blair, and the radical Islamism of Said Qutb).

‘All these prophets imagined they had grasped the plot of history’ (290). Following Isaiah Berlin, Gray exposes the instrumental role of violence in that enlightenment, but it's an idea Gray argues has haunted humanity ever since Luke 24:21, that ‘founding experience of eschatological disappointment’ (4): Christ crucified.

the teaching of Jesus was that the old world was about to come to an end and a new kingdom established. There would be unlimited abundance in the fruits of the earth. Those who dwell in the new kingdom – including the righteous dead, who will be raised back to life – would be rid of physical and mental ills. Living in a new world that is without corruption, they will be immortal. Jesus was sent to announce this new kingdom and rule over it. There is much that is original and striking in Jesus’ ethical teaching. He not only defended the weak and powerless as other Jewish prophets had done, but he also opened his arms to the outcasts of the world. Yet the belief that a new kingdom was at hand was the heart of his message and was accepted as such by his disciples. The new kingdom did not arrive, and Jesus was arrested and executed by the Romans. Albert Schweitzer captured this predicament when he wrote:

“In the knowledge that he is the coming son of man, Jesus lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution that is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn and he throws himself upon it. When it does turn it crushes him”. (9-10)

Doesn’t your heart break for this guy? Relying on NT scholarship 100 years out of date, and he's missed the secret of the kingdom, which calls zealots & saducees to repent.

The thesis of the book is that utopianism springs from two Christian hangovers: teleology (that history has a goal) and eschatology (that history has a finale). An obscure 12th century abbot bungled the doctrine of the Trinity ‘into a philosophy of history in which humanity ascended through three stages’ (12). This had a profound influence on Hegel, who essentially locked God into history and threw away the key. God’s Providence was taken to mean Human Progress, and ‘the early Christian faith in an End-Time initiated by God was turned into a belief that Utopia could be achieved by human action’ (4). From the art of the possible, politics became ‘a surrogate for salvation – but no political project could deliver humanity from its natural condition’ (Straw Dogs). Has Gray been reading Ecclesiastes?

“The philosophers of the Enlightenment aimed to supplant Christianity, but they could do so only if they were able to satisfy the hopes it had implanted. As a result they could not admit – what pre-Christian thinkers took for granted – that human history has no overall meaning” (34)

Here Gray lambasts the naïve rationalist overestimation of human nature prevalent in liberalism, not least among the self-proclaimed ‘Brights’, Richard Dawkins & Daniel Dennett.

‘the comedy is that their humanist creed…is a by-product of Christianity. Contemporary atheism differs from earlier heresies chiefly in its intellectual crudity... these secular creeds are more unreasonable than any traditional faith, if only because they make a more elaborate show of being rational’ (266-7)

‘the most necessary task of the present time is to accept the irreducible reality of religion…Underlying the Enlightenment faith is a denial of the fact that the need for religion is generically human’ (293-4)

They have lost the light of the faith but live in its shadow. Strikes me Pascal is right on this money: man is beyond man, or Lewis: myth became fact. Lunchbar speakers take note: Gray masterfully identifies and prosecutes dead hopes (92), but has no living hope to invite us to! Gray does a great job of shattering the myths, but he has no power to subvert them. The gospel tells a better story.

Secular eschatology is always caught in its own contradiction. It projects into the past a vision of what never was, it conceives what is in terms of what is not, and thefuture in terms of what can never be. (Journalist F.A Voigt, cited p.92)

See, everyone has an eschatology, but most of them are hopeless.

While…preferable to anarchy, government cannot abolish the evils of the human condition…States are at the mercy of events as much as any other human institution, and over the longer course of history all of them fail…there is no reason to think the cycle of order and anarchy will ever end. (264-5)

The resurrection is our reason for hope (1 Pet 1), but remember the disciples' question in Acts 1, “lord will you at this time restore the kingdom (to Israel)?” - Jesus' reply: “it is not for you to know the times or seasons the Father has set by his own authority, but you will receive power to be my martyrs (to the ends of the earth)”. That's what Christian power looks like; it's the secret of the kingdom. Gray documents what happens if we emphasise Kuyper’s theme of lordship without Peter’s theme of exile, in the so-called 'Dominion Movement':

A post-millenial fundamentalist movement holding that a Christian form of government can be achieved in the present age in which every aspect of life will be subject to divine law, the movement has defined its aim as ‘world dominion under Christ’s lordship, a “world takeover”, if you will…we are the shapers of world history’. (162)

History makers take note: here we have no lasting city, we must go to him outside the city and wait patiently for the promise of God (Heb 13), which guards us from both presumption and despair. Literary Critic Terry Eagleton is no longer a Christian (apparently "he was in the 1960s"), but maintains:

Christianity is far more realistic…it takes the full measure of human perversity & depravity…but it's a good deal more audacious about how this dire condition is to be repaired. So it's immeasurably more gloomy…than the bien pensant liberal intelligentsia…and a good deal more cold eyed than the callow upbeat-ness of much American ideology (which tends…to mistake a hubristic "can-doery" for hope). However, it's absurdly and outrageously more hopeful than liberal rationalism with its apparently unhinged belief…you might even say the demented Christian belief that not only is the salvation of the human species possible, but contrary to all we read in the newspapers, or see on Fox Television, it has in some sense already taken place. Not even the wildest utopian secularist will assert something as outrageous as that. (p.48-49, but verbatim from 'Christianity foul' in 2. limits of liberalism)

Some of our timeless evangelistic systems would do well to recover a theology of history. Asking someone what do you expect? is packed with evangelistic opportunity, because the gospel is fundamentally eschatological. It’s not a set of moral principles, it’s momentous news that ‘the times had reached their fulfilment’ (Mk 1:15, Ep 1:10; Ga 4:4; Ac 17:30). In the cross and resurrection, we find the end of the world is packed with hope, where God in Christ begins to rename, reclaim and reconcile all things to himself, even we who were hostile in mind, captive to the spirit of the age and walking according to the basic principles of this age (Gal 1, Ep 2, 1 Co 2); we are those upon whom ‘the end of the ages has come’ (1 Co 10).

The end of the world has come early, and made a new beginning possible. Here is Christian assurance: our final justification has been declared already. Here is Christian ethics: living in the presence of the future. Here is Christian evangelism: spreading the rumour of the new creation, in whose breeze all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling. If you wonder what this sounds like, listen to Jeremy Begbie at CICCU98, or UCBerkeley in 2002, it's beautiful news.

the good man and the scoundrel

2010-06-24T19:03:00.110+01:00

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths, all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like [the gospel]…Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty up close to the facts, or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative…The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read. (CS Lewis, Modern Theology & Biblical Criticism)

Philip Pullman’s latest is precisely this kind of novelistic, realistic re-narrative of the Jesus ‘myth’. As the literary heir to Lewis, Pullman certainly can read, so what’s he up to? 5 thoughts:

1. Title

The title plays on the old adage of a “Jesus of History” (who lived, walked, talked and died in the 1st century) versus a “Christ of Faith” (whom the church confesses, prays to, worships, waits for, etc).

Christ himself, of course, had made so little mark on the world that no one confused him with Jesus, because it was so easy to forget that there had been two of them. Christ felt his own self gradually dwindling away as the Christ of speculation began to grow in importance and majesty.

2. Allegory

I think it’s important to read this allegorically. It’s tempting to react “that’s not how it was…that's just your own speculation”, advancing various examples of how silly it is that Pullman could rewrite the truth about history. But that’s precisely the point. He’s using Jesus & Christ in large part as figurative characters for “history” and “truth”.

‘He [Jesus] is the history, you [Christ] are the truth...[But] truth knows more than history’
‘We are discussing truth, not history’, the angel reminded him. ‘you may live history, but you must write truth’

So the fact that Jesus (history) died in the 1st century is something Pullman takes very seriously. From then on, you only have Christ, who ‘will be able to have Jesus foretell to his disciples as it were in truth the events to come of which, in history, he was unaware’. In fact, in Pullman’s allegory, it’s Christ who precipitates Jesus’ death, and Christ who brings Jesus “back to life again”:

Here am I, my hands red with blood and shame and wet with tears, longing to begin telling the story of Jesus, and not just for the sake of making a record of what happened: I want to play with it; I want to give it a better shape; I want to knot the details together to make patterns...if they weren't there in life, I want to put them in the story, for no other reason than to make a better story.

3. Layers

It's also quite multi-layered, with various undertones of weakness seeking consolation/revenge. Notice for example how Mary/Christ are portrayed compared to Joseph/Jesus:

The first [Jesus] was strong and healthy, but the second [Christ] was small, weak, and sickly. Mary wrapped the strong boy in cloth and laid him in the feeding trough, and suckled the other first, because she felt sorry for him.

Pullman’s Jesus is a strong, charismatic, honest speaker, who believes that the kingdom of God is imminent, but loses that faith in the silence of Gethsemane (echoes of Schweitzer, ‘crushed in the cogs of history’). By contrast, a shady character called ‘the stranger’ (echoes of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor), gives Christ an eye to posterity, to the need for an organised church. “He knows that human beings, being what they are, need structures, they fall into bureaucracy. He knew that the kingdom never was going to come” said Pullman (HT).

Rowan Williams put it well: ‘the nickname conceals what is never said in the text: Christ is in fact Judas’: he doesn't believe Jesus so takes matters into his own hands, and gives Jesus up for utopian dreams.

‘It’s in history that I want to see him rise again’
‘Then believe’
‘and if I can’t?’
‘then think of an orphan child, lost and cold and starving. Think of a sick man, racked with pain and fear. Think of a dying woman terrified by the coming darkness. There will be hands reaching out to comfort them and feed them and warn them, there will be voices of kindness and reassurance, there will be soft beds and sweet hymns and consolation and joy. All those kindly hands and sweet voices will do their work so willingly because they know that one man died and rose again, and that this truth is enough to cancel out all the evil in the world’
‘Even if it never happened’
The angel said nothing. (173-4)

4. Apologetics

Scepticism is nothing new, but the nature of scepticism has changed. With some deep roots in theory, significant offshoots in epistemology have undercut the subject/object distinction on which faith/history claims to sit. In the end, any claim to the objective truth of any matter (not least the gospel) is dismissed – not because it has been examined and found to be false, but simply because it claims to be true. Objective truths are resisted as forms of subjugation.

what you watch, what you read,
what you perceive is to be truth,
it’s all so subjective, so what you believe is up to you
But what are we to believe in
Between the lies and the truth? Youth
The media has vested interest
So what you believe is up to you.
But how are we to make sense of
these turbulent times
When all they do is censor our minds
Only telling what they want us to know
Only half of the story told
(John Butler Trio, Media)

But what if the whole paradigm of History/Faith is unrealistic? Richard Bauckham has proposed a more realistic critical paradigm: the Jesus of Testimony. In testimony, history and faith, fact and significance, though not exhausted, come together rather than having to be prised apart.

‘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…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.’

Testimony is its own evidence, to be evaluated as such: is it internally coherent? is it plurally attested? is it empirically adequate? Is it soaked in the geographical, historical, politicalclimate it purports to swim in? Is it personally plausible? Are biases honest and self-aware? I think we should talk more about the testimony of the Spirit here, not as some merely inward, existential, ahistorical thing (that would reaffirm the history/faith dichotomy), but the testimony of the witnesses to the fellowship in whom there is no conspiracy at all.

5. Witness

Under [the church's] authority, Jesus will be distorted and lied about and compromised and betrayed over and over again…The stranger would have called it letting truth into history. Jesus would have called it lying. (244)

The familiar suspicion of authority permeates Pullman’s writing here as elsewhere. He explains: “My beliefs are those of Jesus as I have him expressing them in the garden of Gethesemane: If there is to be a church, it should be a poor church; it should own no property and make no laws”. There are certainly many pins we could put in his balloon, but perhaps Pullman's suspicion presents a timely challenge to the church?

We must refuse any implicit secularisation thesis, but we must acknowledge this is a secular age, where the king was exiled, and called his people to exile until his return. In wisdom, God has ordained, for the transparency and purity of his witness in the world, that his witnesses authenticate their witness through suffering. It’s not the cost, it’s the strategy (Acts 9, 1 Co 4).

To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. 23When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 24He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness (1 Peter 2)

Calling the Son of God a scoundrel is indeed an offensive thing to say, but that's the context for 1 Peter: exiles don't enjoy the rights of citizenship. What were the beattitudes about? When the good man came, the meek, the merciful, the peacemaker, and lived the blessed life, he mourned, he thirsted for righteousness, he was persecuted, and he was strung up on a cross. Not that there was anything wrong with him, but there was (and is) something badly wrong with the world.

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still scoundrels, Christ died for us. (Paul's letter to the Romans)

I found this comment on youtube: "I wonder: had this book been about Islam & the prophet Mohammad, would the response of been as great as the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy?" …but thats the difference between Mohammed & Jesus. The gospel is that ultimate executive authority in our hostile world doesn't look familiar, it looks alien - it looks like Jesus, the Christ who came to be mocked, humiliated, taken away in oppression & judgment. The Son of God came to bear the weight and shame and blame of our sin. That’s the scandal, that’s the power of the cross. The silence of Gethsemane, like Christ’s silence before the Inquisitor, was where God determined to break the cycle of retaliation. Christian apologetics come from a suffering church, where the witness (‘martyr’) is always on trial.

Nietzsche: theology on trial

2010-04-06T11:52:00.036+01:00

…But this Shame was a bold villain. I could scarcely shake him out of my company. Yea, he would be haunting of me, and continually whispering me in the ear, with some one or other of the infirmities that attend religion. At last when I’d shaken him off, I began to sing:
the trials that those men do meet with all,
that are obedient to the heavenly call
are manifold and suited to the flesh
and come and come and come again afresh

One religious self-deception had very much to do with flesh – the Galatians becoming circumcised to show (whom?) that they belonged (to whom?). But God cannot be mocked – a man reaps what he sows: he can sow to the flesh or to the Spirit. In the end, what counts is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, but new creation in Christ. Luther observed in the Galatians (HT) “the presumption of religion”, in which “they select acts of worship that they themselves like”, based upon “vain imagination and a dream: the invention of an idol in the heart”, whence faith slips into superstition. In this connection, Merold Westphal introduces a helpful distinction

“1st commandment idolatry” (have no other gods before me…aka let nothing come between us)
“3rd commandment idolatry” (not take the name of the LORD your God in vain…aka who I am to you matters to others)

The difference being that the 1st commandment idolaters know they worship another god, whereas 3rd commandment idolaters deceive themselves about this fact – they say YHWH, they say Father, Son & Spirit, but in fact the god they invoke is, to a greater or lesser degree an edition (not a product) of their own resentment/wish fulfillment/ideologies. I don’t think it’s simply an on-off switch, but just to that degree they invoke him as another than he is (Augustine).

Like the ideological [ab]use of [No-]God described by Marx, 3rd commandment idolatry is a form of false consciousness. Unless suspicion brings it to the light of day, it can be quite effective in hiding itself from itself. (Suspicion & Faith, 209)

Reminded of Salieri’s bitter retort (“Man is not mocked…I am not mocked!”) I’m interested how Nietzsche can, in Faithful’s words, ‘tell us…what men are’. On reflection, I offer 4 suggestions from this lent.

1. Nietzsche can unmask Pharisee religion as shameful self-justification

Pharisees thought God wouldn’t establish his kingdom until we cleaned up our act. So they were obsessively clean - externally (shades of Lady MacBeth, out damn'd spot!) - in opposition to those dirty sinners out there; they were the reason we were in this mess. So when the Son of Man came eating & drinking with sinners, the pharisees and experts in the law rejected God’s purpose for themselves (according to Luke). Martin Buber was surely right:

“[if] nothing can so hide the face of our fellow-man as morality can, [so also] religion can hide from us as nothing else can the face of God” (Between Man & Man)

So Pharisees would entertain Jesus, but couldn’t love him. I don’t know if you’ve ever met a forgiven prostitute, but there’s no one so strong, so wreckless, so beautiful as someone who’s been given their dignity back. But to Pharisees, it was repulsive.

If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman she is – that she is a sinner (according to Luke 7:39f...)

But Nietzsche says some nasty things about pity or compassion too, which are very startling until you realise that when he looks at pity or compassion through the eyes of suspicion, he sees another way in which one group of people declares itself superior to another group of people. Appeals to virtue can be used as a way of patting ourselves on the back. Nietzsche himself mentions the Pharisees in this connection (Luke 18:9-14). Well, they have their reward, but Jesus called us to the audience of one. (the good news according to Matthew, ch.6)

Not for our sins alone thy mercy Lord we sue,
let fall thy pittying glance on our devotions too,
what we have done for thee and what we think to do.

The holiest hours we spend in prayer upon our knees,
the time when most we deem our songs of praise will please
thou searcher of all hearts, forgiveness pour on these

And all the gifts we bring, and all the vows we make,
all the acts of love we plan for thy dear sake
into thy pardoning thought, o god, mercy take

bow down thine ear and hear, open thine eyes and see
our very love is shamed, we must come to thee,
to make it of thy grace what thou wouldst have it be

2. Nietzsche would sniff revenge behind retributive justice

Listen to the debates about John Venables, or the practice of torture in Guantanamo – they’re carried on in the language of justice (à la Gilbert & Sullivan), but you don’t have to have too much of an hear to hear that what’s really going on is something like, lock the bast*rds down until the streets are safe again. Nietzsche notices that very very fine line between justice and revenge:

I hear you saying “Ich binn gerecht” (I’ve had justice done),
but it sounds as if you say “Ich binn gerächt” (I’ve had revenge).

Will Self recently articulated this exquisitely on the best Question Time there’s been in a while…

“But there’s something weird, isn’t there, in the kind of British collective imagination about child killers, because there’s a presumption that these boys, who were 10 years old at the time of the crime, must be more evil than an adult killer…thinking “Wow,they must be super evil” …Let’s turn it round the other way and just float the weird, strange idea that they maybe didn’t really know what they were doing. People who read the transcriptions of the case at the time and heard these boys’ testimonies heard very, very confused 10-year-old children talking about something. So people talk in terms of the killers of Jamie Bulger as if they were some kind of Mengele figures, some kind of incredibly evil people. What a frightening thought…that they might not have been evil at all”

Again, I’d take my stand not against the diagnosis of evil, but our distance from it.

3. Nietzsche warns us to keep retributive eschatology in the context of God’s good (new) creation

He quotes a couple of absolutely chilling passages, one from Tertullian, one from Thomas Aquinas, in which both of whom say that one of the joys of heaven will be that there are windows out of which the redeemed can look and enjoy the sufferings of the Damned in hell. Nietzsche says, at that point, “I rest my case”.

Rather than seeing Jesus as the prototype of God’s new world (glimpse Jesus putting an end to death, mourning, crying and pain before he himself dies). The Apocalypse of Peter is a good example of the collapse of NT eschatology:

The future is seen entirely in terms of rewards for the virtuous and punishments for the damned (described at length for the gloating solace of Christian readers). The culmination of this sort of thing is Dante’s Inferno…it is a different world from the characteristic stance of the New Testament, where rewards and punishment are indeed part of the picture, but not the whole of it – where they are, moreover, they are consonant with God’s generosity in Christ. (Michael Green)

4. Nietzsche shows the downward spiral of introversion

Ressentiment starts with an original sense of self-worth in the apprehension of and desire for certain values; the frustration of one's desire for those values; a sense of impotence to achieve those values: a sense of the unfairness or injustice of not being able to attain them; anger, resentment, hatred towards the bearer of those values, and a desire to seek revenge in the devaluation of the originally sought values. The original desire for these values, however, and the negative feelings of rage and hatred for those who possess these values, are not eliminated through this devaluation. They are repressed in the psyche.

One is no longer conscious of one's own desire and one's own rage and spite. This repression successfully eliminates from consciousness the painful frustration of envy, leaving only a feeling of superiority over those who seek and possess the now devalued values; and a confirmed sense of self-worth. The cycle of ressentiment, significantly, begins and ends with an idolatrous basis of self-worth. See? Theology matters.

Nietzsche: the spirit of resentment

2010-04-02T21:28:00.033+01:00

Why, he objected against religion itself. He said it was a pitiful, low, sneaking business for a man to mind religion…and for a man to watch over his words and ways so as to tie up himself from that hectoring liberty that the brave spirits of the times accustomed themselves unto…He objected also that but few of the mighty, rich or wise were ever of high opinion…before they were persuaded to be fools, and to be of a voluntary fondness to venture the loss of all for nobody knows what. He moreover objected…their ignorance and want of understanding in all natural science…and that it was a shame to sit mourning under a sermon; and a shame to come sighing and groaning home; that it was a shame to ask my neighbour forgiveness for petty faults; or to make restitution where I have taken from any. He said also that religion made a man grow strange to the great because of a few vices which he called by finer names, and made him own and respect the base…

200 years after Pilgrim’s Progress and 30 years after On the Origin of Species, Friedrich Nietzsche nicked both ideas and wrote On the Genealogy of Morality (forerunning Foucault’s Archaeology). It runs like this: once upon a time, nobility and virtue was about strength, honour, prestige - think of the Knight, the Samurai, the epics of Homer or Virgil’s heroes. It wasn’t good versus evil, it was goodies versus baddies. And the baddies were the weak, shameful, slithering ones, right? But one day, the weak discover that they have no weapons to fight back with but words; and so they invent good and “evil”.

It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. [But] the lambs say among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—should he not be good?" (GM 1.13)

How do we come to be good? Not positively, but negatively – being sufficiently different from those I take to epitomise evil. Think of the Cold War discourse – both sides pointed to the evils of the other side, and because they didn’t embody those evils, they must be good. Gulags weren’t much of a problem to the Communists because they weren’t capitalists, and that’s where the evil was! Poverty (or Guantanamo) amidst the richest countries in the world wasn’t a problem to the West, because they weren’t communists, and that’s where the evil was! Evil is located out there, in those I resent, and we become good by default. Thence the power of nightmares.

Brian Leiter helpfully captures the object of Nietzsche’s (scorn) as “morality in a pejorative sense”, whose whole purpose is to express revenge, in a giant and irrational resentment (ressentiment, re-feeling) of our actual situation. The ego thus creates the illusion not just of a rival, but of an enemy, an external cause that can be “blamed” for our own failure (our failure, in fact, to be a predator). Ressentiment turns one’s superior into a kind of scapegoat; one had no longer been thwarted by failure in oneself, but by an external “evil”. In this characteristically priestly connection, Nietszche locates this ‘slave revolt in morality’ first among the Jews.

That priestly people…were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies' values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. (GM 1.7)

Pursuing this apparently anti-semitic line has led many (not least Hitler) to connect Nietzsche with Nazi anti-semitism. There may be some truth in that, but I think it is missing his point. Because Nietzsche thinks this re-feeling, this act of revenge, ultimately finds its epitome and cosmic legitimation in the passion of the Christ, the true heir to Israel, the king of the Jews, and speaks of “the birth of Christianity out of the spirit of ressentiment” (GM).

“the little rebellious movement baptized with the name Jesus of Nazareth represents the Jewish instinct once more—in other words, the priestly instinct which can no longer stand the priest as a reality, the invention of an even more abstract form of existence, an even more unreal vision of the world” [Antichrist(ian) §27]

While Jewish resentment focussed on self-pity & resentment against particular historical oppressors (cf. Ex 1-2), Christian resentment (after Jesus) re-felt the value of all the down-trodden (“blessed are the meek”), with a consolatory illusion ("for the meek shall inherit the earth") and salvation in the afterlife - which Nietzsche says is really the denial of life. And there’s the rub, because according to Nietzsche’s Genealogy, this slave morality has remained ever since the collapse of master morality with the Western Roman Empire in the C.5th AD. In this sense, Nietzsche says, the slave has defeated the master, bringing 2000 years of purile unimagination.

While he admits he has no idea how this could have happened - how on earth a bunch of Palestinian peasants managed to turn the world upside down, he says ‘Until we grasp this poisoning of modern man, we have no hope of liberating ourselves and attaining our higher destiny’. This is extremely contemporary, moreso on the continent than here. Michel Onfray quotes Ecce Homo as the basic motivation for his Traité d'Athéologie (Atheist Manifesto).

La notion de « Dieu » a été inventée comme antithèse de la vie - en elle se résume, en une unité épouvantable, tout ce qui est nuisible, vénéneux, calomniateur, toute haine de la vie. La notion d'« au-delà », de « monde-vrai » n'a été inventé que pour déprécier le seul monde qu'il y ait - pour ne plus conserver à notre réalité terrestre aucun but, aucune raison, aucune tâche ! La notion d' « âme », d' « esprit » et, en fin de compte, même d' « âme immortelle », a été inventée pour mépriser le corps, pour le rendre malade – « sacré » - pour apporter à toutes les choses qui méritent le sérieux dans la vie…la plus épouvantable insouciance ! (Nietzsche, ‘pourquoi je suis un destin’ - Ecce Homo §8)

Once again, there’s plenty we could say. Not least he’s TOTALLY missed the resurrection! How did a bunch of peasants turn the world upside down? Here’s how: Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus had been stripped naked, the rulers & authorities had made a public spectacle of him, putting him to open shame, triumphing over him by the cross…right? But God's not some cosmic masochist - the cross is not a glorification of suffering, but salvation from it. (cf. Mark 3:13-30). I don't look at the cross and trust in some self-righteous suicide. The reason Christians persevere through trials & make any progress in this marathon is by fixing our eyes on Jesus,

who for the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (letter to the Hebrews)

Someone like Paul, a violent man, zealous pharisee & persecutor of Christians, would never have thought again about the cross…and yet when he met the risen Jesus, it turned his world upside down, or maybe right way up. This is how Paul began to speak about the cross:

[Jesus] disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, subjecting them to open shame, triumphing over them by the cross (Paul's letter to the Colossians)

Now rub your eyes, blink & read that again. Jesus took the worst the world could throw at him, he took on the power agendas that his own people, and all people, even you and I are complicit in, he died at their hands, but God raised him from the dead. In effect, he stripped them of their power, and said I don't play your games. And as that rumour rippled through the empire, and all down the centuries, that good news has turned upside down, or maybe right way up, how we think about power. Not the power of nightmares but the power of the cross.

“...so what did you say to him?”, asked Christian

“say?”, said Faithful, “I could not tell what to say at first. Yea he put me so to it that my blood came up in my face, even this Shame fetched it up, and had almost beat me quite off....then I thought: this shame tells me what men are, but it tells me nothing what God, or the word of God, is”

an apology for self-awareness

2010-03-31T14:40:00.031+01:00

Our wisdom…consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes, and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves…On the other hand…man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. For, since we are all naturally prone to hypocrisy, any empty semblance of righteousness is quite enough to satisfy us instead of righteousness itself. (Calvin’s Institutes 1.1.1)

What a way to start! 27 year old Jonny’s saying I won’t understand myself by introversion (not cool) …but in ecstasy (cool) before his (hypostasis in ekstasis) in whose image I was made and into which I can be wonderfully restored.

In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to "be myself" without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call "Myself" becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop (CS Lewis, Mere Christianity)

But the frightening thing is that what I so proudly call “Myself” asserts itself not only in irreligion/immorality, but (perhaps even moreso) in religion/morality. This was the insight of Luther, and Barth after him, but it’s all footnotes to scripture…with a brother James of my own, I figure this James really must have seen the real deal in his brother to be so sick of fakes.

26If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. 27Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

To deceive God is ludicrous. To deceive others is easy. But to deceive yourself, that takes talent! So I take it that it a certain degree of introspection (not introversion) is warranted in lent; not as some strange phase of preparation before we hear the good news, but as a normal dimension of life in the light of the good news about him who delegitimises my pride. Merold Westphal's idea of atheism for lent is just that these ‘masters of suspicion’ can actually help us to see through pretensions of piety, by calling attention to 3 mechanisms of self-deception that lie behind religious belief & practice...

psychological weakness seeking consolation (Freud)
sociological weakness/power seeking consolation/justification (Marx)
moral weakness seeking revenge (Nietzsche)

I wanted to complete the trio, and hear Nietzsche’s critique that my religion is nothing but revenge. There's nothing new under the sun - Bunyan’s pilgrim Faithful knew the bold critiques of Shame long before Nietzsche articulated them.

But of all the men that I met with on my pilgrimage, he I think bears the wrong name! The other would be said nay, after a little argumentation and somewhat else, but this bold-faced shame would never have done...

This suspicion of motives is not to be mistaken for a scepticism which doubts the truth (beware the genetic fallacy). Again, it’s the nothing buttery that I’d challenge – the reductionism that leads to the Abolition of Man, as Lewis so ably put it:

You cannot go on "seeing through" things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it...If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To "see through" all things is the same as not to see.

But we mustn’t get so taken up in the refutation of their claims to point where we don’t recognise the how God himself could wield such critiques to root out some of the dangerous self-deceptions involved in false religion; so that facing them can be a vehicle for distilling the pure from the pollution, distinguishing fruitless from faultless religion - putting the witnessing self on trial.

Facing these masters at the school of suspicion is, I suggest, much like all the trials we’ll meet along our way. The prior question is not how we can come to disarm their polemics, but how we can come to see these very polemics as providential instruments in our redeemer’s hands; intended perhaps for harm, but turned in fact, for our health. And unlike the bitterness of self-deception, I guess the counterpart of pure religion is to:

2Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds,
3because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.
4Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
5If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.
6But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; 8he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. (James 1:2-8)

the beginning and the end

2009-07-15T15:56:00.084+01:00

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.”(117)

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, into which God spoke 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

2009-04-09T15:47:00.091+01:00

‘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.

the most basic phenomena are economic phenomena: the way in which a society produces its goods and reproduces itself
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...
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.

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)
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!
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

2009-04-08T09:53:00.024+01:00

‘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:

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)
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.
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

2009-04-06T09:09:00.069+01:00

‘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:

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.
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 (moral 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’

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

2009-03-28T09:00:00.038+01:00

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 “th e 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:

a rationalist overestimation
consumerist underestimation

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?

2009-03-27T09:44:00.014+01:00

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

2009-03-26T16:14:00.035+01:00

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

2009-03-25T08:00:00.004+01:00

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

2009-03-05T08:54:00.088+01:00

‘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

2009-03-04T18:35:00.065+01:00

‘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.

If it is correct to view Genesis 1-11 as an inspired retelling of ancient oriental traditions about the origins of the world with a view to presenting the nature of God as one (consistent), omnipotent, omniscient, and good, as opposed to the fallible, capricious, weak deities who populate the rest of the ancient world; if further it is concerned to show that humanity is central in the divine plan, not an afterthought; if finally it wants to show that man's plight is the product of his disobedience and indeed is bound to worsen without divine intervention, then Genesis 1-11 is setting out a picture of the world that is at odds both with the polytheistic optimism of ancient Mesopotamia and the humanistic secularism and the modern world. Genesis is thus a fundamental challenge to the ideologies of civilized men and women, past and present, who like to suppose their own efforts will ultimately suffice to save them. Genesis 1-11 declares that mankind is without hope if individuals are without God. (Wenham, 53)

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

2009-02-18T21:26:00.100+01:00

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

2009-02-16T11:01:00.026+01:00

‘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

2009-02-09T17:56:00.041+01:00

‘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:

Christian understandings of creation are not undermined when Darwin replaces Owen, but when Gaia replaces God.
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.
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

2008-12-27T17:32:00.044+01:00

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.

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).
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.
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

2008-12-10T09:12:00.013+01:00

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

2008-12-08T14:30:00.045+01:00

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

2008-11-05T14:33:00.047+01:00

‘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?

2008-10-27T21:46:00.023+01:00

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

2008-10-27T00:27:00.041+01:00

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

2008-10-20T13:54:00.039+01:00

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. Postmodernism may present a different kind of scepticism, but Marx & Freud were modern as you like, and even physicists can understand Gilbert & Sullivan!

Kant's dilemma: radical evil

2008-10-19T22:20:00.021+01:00

This distance between the self and its duty, is what Kant gives to free-will. Yet Kant’s confidence in human reason to be able to bridge that gap forces him to believe that the gap is not final: the self is not yet realised. Duty and interest will finally coincide for the self.

The problem, as Mackie points out, is that according to Kant’s earlier critical philosophy, this is the wrong way round: if he is making a factual claim (about the noumenal realm), ‘it cannot be given its sole or basic warrant by the desire to reconcile the two primary judgments that we are inclined to make in the sphere of practical reason’ (p.228). But even more interesting for me is how Kant's confidence stumbles over the problem of ‘radical evil’.

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 this way, which entails a kind of slavery, is for Kant inexplicable, even ‘inscrutable’. In a fascinating footnote in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), he considers the bible’s explanation of a historical fall to be ‘a more accurate specification of the wickedness of our race’! Nonetheless, Kant maintains his confidence in the will to overcome the evil tendency by the pure operation of its rational faculties.

‘This inconceivability, together with a more accurate specification of the wickedness of our race, the Bible expresses in the historical narrative as follows. It finds a place for evil at the creation of the world, yet not in man, but in a spirit of an originally loftier destiny. Thus is the first beginning of all evil represented as inconceivable by us (for whence came that evil to that spirit?); but man is represented as having fallen into evil only through seduction, and hence as being not basically corrupt (even as regards his original predisposition to good) but rather as still capable of an improvement, in contrast to a seducing spirit, that is, a being for whom temptation of the flesh cannot be accounted as an alleviation of guilt. For man, therefore, who despite a corrupted heart yet possesses a good will (Wille), there remains hope of a return to the good from which he has strayed’, (p.38-39)

In the end, ‘Kant is not all that radical on the subject of radical evil!’ (Blocher, Le Mal et La Croix, p.69)

Kant's dilemma: the call of duty

2008-10-19T21:50:00.011+01:00

Kant's deontological moral scheme is concerned with duty (deon). Basically, we discern which of our actions are good by examining our motives – whether they are in line with his categorical imperative:

‘act only according to that maxim whereby [we] can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’

While hypothetical imperatives are obligating only while we have certain desires, categorical imperatives are obligating only because we have rational faculties. I've already pointed out how the Kantian concept of duty presupposes a subject - a rational will which should submit to it, but crucially it also presupposes an object – the self is not yet realized. After all, if what a person must do were already there, the call of Duty would be pointless.

In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant acknowledges this, and postulates the existence of God and personal immortality to guarantee that the categorical imperative can always overcome hypothetical imperatives; that duty and interest will finally coincide for the self (No wonder Kant was impressed by Rousseau). With God and immortality in place, moral judgments such as “you ought to do X” linked duty and interest; in Kant’s language, they were both hypothetical and categorical imperatives. They were categorical because they transcended the individual: “you ought to do X because God set things up like that”; they were hypothetically imperative because they offered what would be teleologically appropriate for a person: “if you don’t do X your essential desires will never be fulfilled”. The self-imposed teleology implicit in ‘enlightenment’ becomes explicit in Hegel:

‘duty is not a restriction on freedom, but only on freedom in the abstract, i.e. on unfreedom. Duty is the attainment of our essence, the winning of positive freedom’ (PhR, §149A)

Notice three things.

For Kant, there are real and universal norms ‘above the will’ to which we must adhere. In a famous passage in The Gay Science (§335), Nietzsche would reject any notion of morality based on conscious motives, or the universalisability of categorical duties. For Nietzsche, norms are self-imposed by a gigantic act of will - either endorsement or resentment
*GOD* here is invoked not as the self-revealing creator-judge, but purely a transcendent something to legitimise Kant’s (albeit brilliant) moral scheme.
This particular relation of freedom to duty is not self-evident; it is derived from a teleology, in Hegel's case that ‘the goal of world history is that Spirit [or Reason] come to a knowledge of what it truly is’ (LHPh book 1). Once we see man as a vehicle for the self-comprehension of absolute Spirit/Reason, it is obvious that he will only realise himself by identifying himself and his own end beyond his particular self in the rational constraints of duty. Yet this is only obvious within the teleological framework, but where do we get that from? This was the central problem the enlightenment posed, and the whole ground for moral duty eventually collapsed under its weight.

faith-heads

2008-10-13T12:31:00.025+01:00

There's a widespread idea of faith-as-such, that is faith regardless of its object. Faith then is either celebrated as a virtue by “people of faith” (you have yours, I have mine) or it’s denounced as anti-intellectual (e.g. Richard Dawkins: “faith is blind trust in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence”).

Many Christians and curious sceptics nurse silent fears about faith, worried that the whole reason Christianity is called a faith is because it lacks both truth & reality. What happens?

faith collapses into psychology: God is not there to believe in, yet somehow we are still able to believe in him. It becomes something we're made to believe, often at a young age, or something we’re able to believe in the absence of evidence, because of some NEED. Faith is not to be explained, only explained away. Faith has causes, not reasons.
christians become schizophrenic, because they’re not sure if they can dare put the object of their faith under intellectual scrutiny. They feel they have to choose between academic and Christian integrity – they can’t have both, so they suppress nagging questions.

Leaving questions unasked is not having stronger faith. It’s being dishonest about your faith. Who are you pretending for? yourself? God? Others? In fact, asking questions requires faith, because we're trusting that the universe won't fall apart even if we can't hold it together. Dealing with honest questions is one of the most liberating things we can do, because we're not God.