Month: October 2015

On the relationship between systematic theology and analytic philosophy

As one who basically shares David Bentley Hart’s assessment of Anglo-American analytic philosophy as ‘degradingly barren’ and as ‘a silly game with poorly formulated rules, which serves as an excellent tool for avoiding thinking deeply about anything irreducible to crude propositions’, and who has enormous respect for Alan Torrance, I was interested in this recent discussion here between Helen De Cruz, Kevin Hector, and Alan on the (blessed and vexed) relationship between systematic theology and analytic philosophy.

And while I am considerably less sanguine than is Alan about the merits of analytic philosophy as a particularly helpful handmaiden in the pursuit and articulation of truth (partly on the grounds expressed in the interview about the ahistorical, acultural, and apolitical character of the way that Anglo analytic philosophers seem to go about their task; I have similar concerns, too, about those who undertake studies on Søren Kierkegaard, for example, with little or no concern to understand or attend to the context of village Lutheranism in nineteenth-century Denmark, or those who write books about Bonhoeffer as if he were a North American version of a Sydney Anglican (as opposed to an Anglican who happens to live in Sydney)), I was very grateful for the discussion, and for some of the acknowledgments contained therein, and for the opportunity to revisit the questions. I thought others might be too, so here ’tis:

On religion and civil society: a response to Simone Sinn

Last week, I was again in Geneva participating in a colloquium on religion and state. The meeting had a particular focus on the ways in which Christianity and Islam conceive and negotiate their relationship with the state. It was, as I anticipated, a stimulating event. I was invited to give a response to a very fine paper by Simone Sinn of the Lutheran World Federation. I enjoy doing such things. The tricky bit about doing it this time, however, was that I first heard the paper at the same time as did everyone else; i.e., I never received a copy of the paper in advance. But like one of Alexander Pope’s fools, I braved upon ground where angels might think a couple of times before venturing, and hazarding a guess (which was pretty accurate, as it happens) at where Simone’s paper might go – and in a desperate state ripping shamelessly from Rowan Williams (especially his wonderful collection of essays in Faith in the Public Square) – I tentatively offered the following words (and some good discussion ensued):

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Taking some bearings

Ongoing deliberations about Turkey’s admission to the EU and, of course, what is being called ‘Europe’s refugee crisis’, have exposed even further all manner of concerns about what we might call Europe’s historic Christian identity and indeed about the idea of ‘Europe’ itself. As we speak, in my own country (which remains, in many ways, an outpost of Europe), there is widespread anxiety regarding the arrival of refugees, especially those from Muslim-majority lands, and concentrated protests going on regarding the building of mosques and the recent granting of a visa to a certain Dutch politician with a very interesting hair style who plans to launch a new political party in Australia. So, what a time to be thinking about these things!

The one thing that is certain in this current climate is that things are ‘deeply uncertain and fluid’. ‘There is’, as Rowan Williams has noted, ‘widespread impatience with transnational institutions, from the EU to the UN, yet equally widespread anxiety about the dominance of a single power. We are increasingly aware of the issues that cannot be solved by single sovereign states on their own – ecological crisis, terrorism, migrancy – yet are uncomfortable with any notion of global jurisdictions’. The global north is increasingly conscious of facing a highly critical, if internally diverse, Islamic world and is struggling to know how best to respond to its presence outside and inside its own borders. ‘Enlightenment liberalism, the self-evident creed of reasonable people, now appears as simply one cultural and historical phenomenon among others. Its supposed right to set the agenda for the rest of the world is no longer beyond question, however much the American Right or the European Left assume that their positions are the natural default beliefs of intelligent human beings, and that cultural and religious variety are superficial matters of choice or chance’.

As Williams also notes, the narrative, standard just a few decades ago, of a universal drift towards so-called secularization has had to undergo radical modification, a challenge severely hindered by the fact that so much of Europe seems to have developed a severe case of amnesia regarding its own complex history dating back at least as far as the Germanic, Turkic and Slavonic migrations that destroyed the Roman Empire between 376 and 800 CE. This is not a situation, in other words, that was birthed in the Enlightenment. Rediscovering this story, it seems to me, is critical if current challenges are to be responded to responsibly and constructively. I am grateful, therefore, for Simone’s paper and her efforts to locate more recent public discourse in some larger historical frames, with her two twentieth-century examples from Germany and Indonesia. This kind of work is important if we are to avoid the unhistorical and facile optimism that characterizes so much contemporary debate on all fronts.

Some theological commitments

Simone is equally concerned to bring other resources – explicitly, theological resources – to this task. This is highly proper, not least because the central and foundational convictions of political liberalism in Europe are an explicit fruit of its Christian history. Particularly, ‘the distinctively European style of political argument and debate is made possible by the Church’s persistent witness to the fact that states do not have ultimate religious claims on their citizens’.

Simone focuses on two theological commitments that, in her words, ‘enable an affirmative understanding of civil society’. She names here anthropology and political ethics. As important and fruitful and these two fields of enquiry might be, uprooted from some even more basic theological commitments I’m not convinced that they provide for the Christian community the robust ‘theological motives’ (to use Simone’s phrase) or theological muscle that the opportunities and challenges before us call for. More germane and fertile enquiry might be had by attending more explicitly to implications perhaps yet unearthed or unapplied to this new context in the following five areas:

Incarnation. There are questions to be asked, for example about the character of Christ’s body as ‘extendible’ and ‘transposable’ and ‘unstable’, a body that can expand itself, for example, to incorporate other bodies and ‘make them extensions of his own’, as Graham Ward argues. What might be some implications for the church of its own claim that in Christ the world has been given a body that ‘can cross [all] boundaries, ethnic boundaries, gender boundaries, socio-economic boundaries’, and religious boundaries, for example, boundaries unpoliced by the church?
Trinity. Recent decades have witnessed significant interest among theologians – both Roman Catholic (e.g., Karl Rahner, Jacques Dupuis, Gavin D’Costa, Raimundo Panikkar) and Protestant (e.g., Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Clark Pinnock, S. Mark Heim, John Hick) – to explore more intentionally ways in which the revelation of God’s triune mode of being might constitute a constructive basis or ‘roadmap’ for a positive interpretation of religious diversity and even religious pluralism from the standpoint of Christian theology. I understand that there has been a formal dialogue between French Muslims and Roman Catholics around this very question.
Pneumatology. There are also questions to revisit here regarding the implications of the claim that the church has no monopoly on God’s Spirit but that the Spirit belongs to everybody, and to nobody; questions constructively explored some decades ago in the work of John V. Taylor.
Soteriology. What bearing might faith’s claim that there can be no salvation apart from my neighbour, for example, have to our discussion on life together in changing territories?
Ecclesiology. Are there not pressing questions also to be asked here about the strangely eschatological and provisional nature of the Christian community’s place in the world (something exposed, thank God, through the erosion of the Constantinian arrangements)? And then there are critical questions too about the alternative citizenship of the church and its sharing a common life with those who do not share that citizenship.

On the public commons

Simone champions the widely-held view that the notion of a ‘“civil society” presupposes a space … where citizens can organize themselves voluntarily around common interests or common goals’, a space, she says, where ‘active citizenship is experienced and exercised’, and, we might add (drawing on the work on John de Gruchy), a space ‘in constant need of broadening and deepening, and therefore of debate and [of] clarification’. Such a commitment need not, of course, be grounded in any consensus about what constitutes ultimate truth, or even agreement that such an oddity may exist. It requires only that citizens seek to meet in such a space, and a just state that will regulate its chaotically pluralist character. (I was at this point in Simone’s paper reminded of that pioneering Scottish architect and architectural theorist Alexander Thomson who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, championed a vision of public space that is both open and horizontal, and whose work was informed by a deep conviction that the so-called private life of the home be not divorced from the public space of the street where the community gathers to make and to carry out ideas together.)

Lest the liberal state loses its essential liberalism, that public space and ‘active citizenship’ of which Simone rightly speaks must engage also in a continuing dialogue with religious communities, and those with each other. Failure to do so would mean that the state would become ‘simply dogmatically secular, insisting that religious faith be publicly invisible; or … chaotically pluralist, with no proper account of its legitimacy’ except that ‘the state is the agency that happens to have the monopoly of force’ (Williams). Luke Bretherton, in his book Christianity and Contemporary Politics, argues much the same – that it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that ‘there is an increasingly constructive engagement between [itself] and minority religious groups’. To be sure, the source of our common life does not itself rest in the state any more than it rests in any other intermediate institution, guild, religious or civil association, each of which ought, in Williams’ words, to ‘have a natural liberty to exist and [to] organize themselves’. But the state is given a unique vocation to, to some degree, regulate this social variety and ‘chaotic pluralism’, a role that is an implicit outworking of any political philosophy that rejects a sacralized sovereignty. The challenge, therefore, is for the apparatus of the state to become what Williams calls ‘a reliable and creative “broker” of the concerns of the communities that make it up’.

The history of Islam, particularly outside of its historic-majority cultures, is a history characterised by the experience of negotiating and renegotiating its way in a great variety of settings. This is indeed the character of all living faith. Some Muslim scholars, such as the Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan (who teaches at the University of Oxford) insist that there is in Islam no absolute theological commitment to an imposition of specifically Muslim law even in majority contexts. In his book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, he contends that Muslim identity need only be at odds with Western cultural identity where certain cultural habits are in direct conflict with Islamic precepts. This means, he argues, not only that there is no single ‘homeland’ for Muslims, but also that Muslims can be at home, can adapt in truly integrated rather than in ‘hodgepodge’ ways, in any geographical and political environment. And so they must, he insists, avoid ‘self-ghettoization’, avoid becoming ‘spectators in a society where they were once marginalized’, avoid retreat from the public commons and what Ramadan calls ‘the service of all, for the good of all’. ‘The “way of faithfulness”’, writes Ramadan, ‘compels [Muslims] not only to respect plurality but also to step outside the [intellectual, religious, and social] ghettos, [and to] know each other better’, to be constantly renegotiating the new public spaces, as must the church, and to act together to ‘ensure the fullest possible statement of shared moral goals and anxieties’ (Williams) in the public commons.

I share Simone’s conviction that viable civil societies in religiously plural contexts presuppose viable interreligious relations, with a high priority given to efforts at the local level where the freedom to engage in ‘convivial and cooperative relations’, however difficult and unstable, and to do so in ways that avoid what Luke Bretherton calls ‘religious vandalism’, yields – dare I say it – signs of the Spirit’s work, signs indeed that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and all those who live in it’ (Ps 24.1). All this, for me, is an outworking of an implicit christology which resists existing in a vacuum, which rejoices in the fact that ‘dialogue among the religions is no longer a luxury but a theological necessity’ (David Tracy), and which welcomes the encounters, challenges, and fresh questions that a rapidly-changing Europe (and Australia) occasions.

The Indian theologian Stanley Jedidiah Samartha (incidentally, I suspect that we could learn a great deal from the Indian experience vis-à-vis religious plurality) sees in the coming of Jesus part of ‘God’s dialogue with humanity’. Our dialogue with people of other faiths, he argues, is part of our participation in God’s dialogue with humanity, and this, as Karl Barth insisted, is grounded in God’s own intratrinitarian dialogue. Of course, as Williams has suggested elsewhere, part of what happens in a good dialogue between people of different faiths is, one hopes, learning to see what the other person’s face looks like when it is turned towards God. To shut out that possibility is to reject the invitation to grow up, and it is to abandon the difficult gift of ‘hard silence – a stepping-back from the urge to solve things prematurely’.

Some concluding thoughts

Simone’s paper is a welcome invitation to imagine a space less threatened by the ignorance that engenders and nourishes fear, and to embrace the unforeseen possibilities that a future which must not neglect its past – lest Europeans (and Australians too, for that matter) become a thriftless people – ought neither to be yoked to it.

In 2005, Rowan Williams delivered a speech not too far from here at the Palais de Congrès de Lyon. His speech was entitled ‘Is Europe at its End?’, and he concluded, as will I, with these words:

In short, my hopes for the future of Europe are that it will continue to be a culture of question and negotiation – because I believe that this is the way it is truest to its Christian roots. But given the enormous dangers of a dominant secularism, a denial of the public visibility of religious commitment and its role in managing and moulding social identity, I hope for a political climate in Europe that is open to co-operation between state and religious enterprise. If this does not happen, the state becomes unselfcritical in its godlessness and religious communities become isolated and defensive; they too lose the capacity for critical awareness.

Leonardo Boff on Papa Francisco: Iglesia en salida, ¿de dónde y hacia dónde?

It was probably over twenty-five years ago, but I can still remember the moment when I first read Leonardo Boff. I can’t now remember if it was his Introducing Liberation Theology or his Jesus Christ Liberator, or something else. I can hardly even remember what any of his main arguments were. I can, however, remember being struck by a way of approaching the theological task itself that I had hardly ever encountered before. I wondered, is it really possible for theology to be so unenslaved to dogmatic minutiae, to bear so few signs of the overly-apologetic anxiety that so marks the discipline, to appear so unhindered by the opinions of his protagonists, to care so deeply and so courageously for the world, to so reek of Christ? I wondered, is this really theology at all? And while I did (and do) not share Boff’s mind on a number of subjects, there could be no doubting that here was a dear brother and teacher in Christ, labouring with that same bold freedom and disembarrassment and urgency and risk that I also encountered in Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.

I relived some of those same moments again tonight when I happened across this recent statement (3 July 2015) from Boff, now 76. It is testimony to life’s celebration in the thick of fossilising death, to joy’s protesting hope amidst despair, and a summons to the Christian community to heed Pope Francis’ call to turn away from those patterns of non-cruciform power and self-service and self-preservation and religiosity that so often characterise its life and to turn towards the compassionate and thoroughly-worldly tradition of Jesus; a summons, put otherwise, to become contemporary with Christ. I thought it worth reposting:

Celebrando todavía la extraordinaria encíclica sobre “el cuidado de la Casa Común”, volvemos a reflexionar sobre una perspectiva importante del Papa Francisco, un verdadero logotipo de su comprensión de la Iglesia como “una Iglesia en salida”. Esta expresión encierra una velada crítica al modelo anterior de Iglesia que era una Iglesia “sin salida” debido a los diversos escándalos de orden moral y financiero, que forzaron a renunciar al Papa Benedicto XVI, una Iglesia que había perdido su mejor capital: la moralidad y la credibilidad de los cristianos y del mundo secular.

Pero el logotipo “Iglesia en salida” posee un significado más profundo, hecho posible porque viene de un Papa fuera de los cuadros institucionales de la vieja y cansada cristiandad europea. Esta había encerrado a la Iglesia dentro de una comprensión que la volvía prácticamente inaceptable para los modernos, rehén de tradiciones fosilizadas y con un mensaje que no mordía los problemas de los cristianos y del mundo actual. La “Iglesia en salida” quiere marcar una ruptura con aquel estado de cosas. Esta palabra “ruptura” irrita a los representantes del stablishment eclesiástico, pero no por eso deja de ser verdadera. Y entonces surge la pregunta: “salida” de dónde y hacia dónde? Veamos algunos pasos:

Salida de una Iglesia-fortaleza que protegía a los fieles de las libertades modernas hacia una Iglesia-hospital de campaña que atiende a toda persona que la busca, sin importar su estado moral o ideológico.

Salida de una Iglesia-institución absolutista, centrada en sí misma hacia una Iglesia-movimiento, abierta al diálogo universal, con otras Iglesias, religiones e ideologías.

Salida de una Iglesia-jerarquía, creadora de desigualdades hacia una Iglesia-pueblo de Dios, que hace de todos hermanos y hermanas: una inmensa comunidad fraternal.

Salida de una Iglesia-autoridad eclesiástica, distanciada de los fieles o incluso de espaldas a ellos, hacia una Iglesia-pastor que anda en medio del pueblo, con olor a oveja y misericordiosa.

Salida de una Iglesia-Papa de todos los cristianos y obispos que gobierna con el rígido derecho canónico hacia una Iglesia-obispo de Roma, que preside en la caridad y sólo a partir de ella se hace papa de la Iglesia universal.

Salida de una Iglesia-maestra de doctrinas y normas hacia una Iglesia-de prácticas sorprendentes y de encuentro afectuoso con las personas más allá de su pertenencia religiosa, moral o ideológica. Las periferias existenciales ganan centralidad.

Salida de una Iglesia-de poder sagrado, de pompa y circunstancia, de palacios pontificios y titulaciones de nobleza renacentista hacia una Iglesia-pobre y para los pobres, despojada de símbolos de honor, servidora y portavoz profética contra el sistema de acumulación de dinero, el ídolo que produce sufrimiento y miseria y mata a las personas.

Salida de la Iglesia-que habla de los pobres hacia una Iglesia-que va a los pobres, conversa con ellos, los abraza y los defiende.

Salida de una Iglesia-equidistante de los sistemas políticos y económicos hacia una Iglesia-que toma partido a favor de las víctimas y que llama por su nombre a los causantes de las injusticias e invita a Roma a representantes de los movimientos sociales mundiales para discutir con ellos cómo buscar alternativas.

Salida de una Iglesia-automagnificadora y acrítica hacia una Iglesia-de verdad sobre sí misma y contra cardenales, obispos y teólogos celosos de su status pero con cara de “vinagre o de viernes santo”, “tristes como si fuesen a su propio entierro”, una Iglesia, en fin, hecha de personas humanas.

Salida de una Iglesia-del orden y del rigorismo hacia una Iglesia-de la revolución de la ternura, de la misericordia y del cuidado.

Salida de una Iglesia-de devotos, como esos que aparecen en los programas televisivos, con curas artistas del mercado religioso, hacia una Iglesia-compromiso con la justicia social y con la liberación de los oprimidos.

Salida de una Iglesia-obediencia y de la reverencia hacia una Iglesia-alegría del evangelio y de esperanza todavía para este mundo.

Salida de una Iglesia-sin el mundo que permitió que surgiese un mundo sin Iglesia hacia una Iglesia-mundo, sensible al problema de la ecología y del futuro de la Casa Común, la madre Tierra.

Estas y otras salidas muestran que la Iglesia no se reduce solamente a una misión religiosa, acantonada en una parte privada de la realidad. Ella posee además una misión político-social en el mejor sentido de la palabra, como fuente de inspiración para las trasformaciones necesarias que rescaten a la humanidad para una civilización del amor y de la compasión, que sea menos individualista, materialista, cínica y desprovista de solidaridad.

Esta Iglesia-en-salida ha devuelto alegría y esperanza a los cristianos y reconquistado el sentimiento de ser un hogar espiritual. Por su sencillez, despojamiento y acogida con amor y ternura se ha granjeado la estima de muchas personas de otras confesiones, de simples ciudadanos del mundo e incluso de jefes de Estado que admiran la figura y las prácticas sorprendentes del Papa Francisco en favor de la paz, del diálogo entre los pueblos, de la renuncia a toda violencia y a la guerra.

Más que doctrinas y dogmas es la Tradición de Jesús, hecha de amor incondicional, de misericordia y de compasión que por él se actualiza y revela su inagotable energía humanizadora. Pues, entre otras cosas, este es el mensaje central de Jesús, aceptable por todas las personas de todos los rincones.

Seeking hospitality in Melbourne

There is a Christian missionary family (of 5), including three young children, who are currently serving in Siberia with Pioneers. They will be returning to Melbourne on furlough for six months from 11 January, and they are looking for a place (min 2 bedrooms) to stay, preferably somewhere in either Melbourne’s North, East, or South (including Mornington Peninsula) which is where their main supporter base is. They would prefer to remain in the one place so that their kids could attend the one school.

If you or someone you know may be able to help, then please get in touch with me via the Contact page.

If you’re a Facebooker, then please feel free to spread the word too.

faithfulness, through a glass darkly

To think about love as that which is sourced in God, which moves us towards healing, which is open to others, which refuses the bondage of disembodiment, which takes risks, and which carries with it certain responsibilities, is to recall that love is not too far removed from that other fruit of the Spirit that ought to characterise the Christian community; namely, faith. For the Christian community, to faith is to risk the entirety of its existence by leaning unreservedly into the Word who addresses it and who calls it away from its own life-less patterns of self-reliance and into God’s true freedom.

It is important to remember that faith is neither the ‘idolatry of certainty’ (Monika Hilder) nor the same as belief. To believe is part of faith, but faith also involves not believing, questioning, doubting, exploring, or not knowing what to believe. A faithful response to God includes the courage to explore further, to value mystery rather than carrying the burden of knowing all that is to be known. And a faithful community is one that welcomes and holds together all of these dimensions of faith – rejoicing, resting, anguishing, risking, exploring, being unstable bearers of live questions. Faith communities devoid of such dimensions are communities in danger, or worse, of not growing up at all.

It is not insignificant that the Bible has no arguments for the existence of God. It is not insignificant that the Bible offers little reason to think that faith should be facile and unambiguous. Indeed, the Bible is unfilled by comfortable and reassuring words about the life of belief and trust. It is unfilled by presentations of a God who expects or demands doubtless faith. If Abraham and Moses and Hannah and Job and Mary and Jesus and Simeon and Paul suggest any pattern, then our knowledge of God and of God’s ways is characterised not by epistemological certainty but by being found caught up in a reality planned and constrained only by mysterious love, love which appears to have little difficulty in making space for angst and struggle and disbelief, and which is at home looking through a glass darkly. Indeed, in a sense these are a kind of argument for God.

Faith is always being called into risky business. The faithful deal with shadows, partaking little of ‘the optimistic gleam of scientific progress’ (Catherine Keller). Faithful communities are therefore unavoidably characterised by some confusion, some doubt, and some ambiguity. Indeed, these are part of their gift and witness. And trusting this is a sign of their faithfulness to the One whose ways are not like ours.

[Image: David Mello]

Alfonse Borysewicz on ‘news of another mass shooting in the United States’

Alfonse Borysewicz wrote to me today saying that he had now lost count at how many shootings there have been since he wrote the Foreword to Tikkun Olam (2013,) which begins with these words:

‘I awoke to the news of another mass shooting in the United States, this time at a cinema. Once again, the news was met with outpourings of grief and shock, and with the same reluctance to engage with the questions that similar prior events had brought to the surface. Unfortunately this plague will be repeated soon enough in some other form and at some other place; it is just a matter of time’.

Prayers ascending for Chris Harper Mercer, for those who have died and were injured at his hands, for the Umpqua Community College, and indeed for all those victims and perpetrators of senseless violence in Syria, Burma, Nigeria, and elsewhere, for a President who has the power to drop nuclear bombs on Koreans but no power to take guns away from those he has been elected to govern, for Alfredo Prieto, and for all those who love them. Kyrie, eleison.