Author: Jason Goroncy

Gabriel Fackre on Theodicy

Always stimulating, theologically-rich and pastorally-informed, Gabriel Fackre is always worth reading. Earlier this year he posted the following thoughts on theodicy:

‘Smuggled into the conventional answers to the problem of evil is the notion of power along the lines of an oriental potentate who is in absolute dominating control over every event, a kind of John Wayne writ large. However, biblical power has to do with ‘God’s weakness [that] is stronger than human strength’ (1 Cor 1:25), one defined as such by the empty cross. This is a divine power mighty enough to hold back divine power. It is an almightiness that leaves room for the world to go its own way, yet works tenderly, patiently and persuasively ( a note struck by the early church fathers), and only prevails after long struggle at the very close of history, the End of time. Almighty power is in the future tense.

Because the biblical story of God’s power is a real struggle that means that wherever we can join in it and ‘resist the powers of evil’ … , we do so. Instead of assuming that every evil that happens is God’s will, we ‘come to grips spiritedly with it’ (see Barth’s Letter To Great Britain from Switzerland in 1941), in the confidence that its power has already been broken on Calvary and will finally be totally defeated in the world to come.

This is the faith Job, finally, arrived at when he said, ‘I know that my redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand on the earth’ (19:25), the declaration we make so joyously when we sing it in Handel’s Messiah. Just how God will right every wrong and mend every flaw is not for us to know, but that it will be so is our confidence. And it is the faith we express at Christian burial, one in Paul’s future tense, in the very face of suffering and death:

‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? … No in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:35–39)’.

In the ensuing discussion, Fackre presses that ‘we are able to live with evil in the present because grace makes is possible to do so. That grace includes our knowledge from the cross of God’s own vulnerabilty. God is sharing in that very suffering with us and thereby we are participating in God’s own suffering (Bonhoeffer), so graced by a Companion with us “in whatever happens.” But, finally, it is our Romans 8 confidence that has the last Word’.

Richard Floyd, who incidentally has written a most helpful introduction to Forsyth’s doctrine of the atonement entitled When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, enters in and reminds us that any attempt at theodicy requires, if not a complete rejection of the task, at least a certain humility about its limits.

Fackre’s post creates some very interesting discussion, not least because of the introduction of Forsyth into it.

The Times They Are A Changin’

In her book Faith and Betrayal: A Pioneer Woman’s Passage in the American West Sally Denton provides us with a glimpse into raising children in upper-crust London in the mid– 1800’s. Jean Rio Baker is married to Henry Baker, and they have eight young children, less the one who has died as a toddler. Jean Rio later forsakes this life in the pursuit of Mormonism in America:

“Child rearing was left to governesses, and the children were taught what one of them called ‘the pure Queen’s English’ by private tutors, [while] Jean Rio pursued her musical career throughout Europe. A cook and butler handled domestic matters, and Jean Rio and Henry took their meals separate from the children. The family regularly attended public celebrations for Queen Victoria, and, to judge from their proximity to the royal family at these times, the Bakers were apparently among the elite of mid-nineteenth-century London society.

“Henry, a prominent engineer, built a miniature steam locomotive for his children. The couple routinely read Shakespeare aloud to their children from a leather-bound volume of the complete works – a book Jean Rio would eventually carry with her to Utah, along with many others. ‘They were taught personal cleanliness, morals, manners, and religion in no uncertain terms,’ wrote a descendant. As each child turned fourteen, he or she was invited to the family dinner table, having received training in etiquette. At that age, the sons were presented with a silver watch and chain. By that age as well, the children were expected to have mastered the common requirements in history and literature, as well as bookkeeping and higher mathematics that included algebra. Upon turning sixteen, the boys received a gold watch and, as son William George remembered the symbolic rite, were told by Jean Rio and Henry that they would now be expected to conduct themselves as proper gentlemen at all times. All the children learned horsemanship and regularly rode the bridle path in Hyde Park; it was a proficiency that would serve them well in their future lives on the American frontier.”

Sally Denton, Faith and Betrayal: A Pioneer Woman’s Passage in the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 13–4. (HT: Delancey Place)

Oh how times have changed!

On Discipline: Some Thoughts

John Wilmot (1647–1680) was the 2nd Earl of Rochester, a poet, and a friend of King Charles II. He once opined, ‘Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories’. Not a few of us parents know how he feels, and that not least when it comes to the vexed question of discipline. When I only had a dog, I was an ‘expert’ on parenting, and made sure as many parents as I knew understood what a great resource they had in me. But now I’m a dad of an actual person – a person (like me) with a will of their own; and I’ve now lost count of how many times I’ve said to my 18-month-old daughter, ‘That’s not your draw … you know that’s not your draw’, or ‘No, BooBoo (my affectionate name for her), I asked you not to touch that’.

In a post (or even an entire monograph) one cannot say everything that could – or perhaps even should – be said about discipline, though one must say something, while being encouraged that the conversation that we enter on this issue goes back a long way (and may it continue). Tell me that Cain and Abel’s folks didn’t have a few chats about it! That said, with so many opinions, agendas, fears and practices that abound, one does embark on any public discussion of parental discipline with a certain amount of trepidation. Suffice it to say that despite the passion that erupts in some parents on this issue, and despite the reality that there may indeed be some models that are better for some kids (and parents/carers) than others no one model is best in every situation. We not only all cook lasagne differently, we all parent, and discipline, differently. This is not to suggest, however, that all lasagne recipes are equally good.

In his delightful book A Little Child Shall Lead Them: Hopeful Parenting in a Confused World, Johann Christoph Arnold, reminds us that in an age when discipline of any kind is regarded by many as physical abuse, it is tempting to dismiss wholesale the Old Testament proverb about sparing the rod and spoiling the child. (Indeed, one of the most helpful books that I have ever read on parenting – though it is not directly about parenting – is Join Up in which Monty Roberts suggests that the rod in question here is that of the fishing kind). Arnold suggests that even if we reject physical punishment (which, incidently, he does not), we can find sound wisdom in other proverbs, and he cites 19:19: ‘Reprove your child, for in this there is hope’. The reason: Whenever children are conscious of having done something wrong and there are no consequences, they learn that they can get away with it. ‘It is a terrible thing’, he writes, ‘for a child to get that message. With younger ones, the issue might seem unimportant; their misdeed may actually be small, but the lessons they learn will have repercussions far into the future’. Discipline so conceived is essentially a positive thing. Moreover, it has goal; namely, to nurture a child’s will for the good.

With our 18-month-old, after it is established that she really is being naughty (and there is not some other reason for her behaviour) the good old ‘time out’ (or threat of) seems to do the trick most of the time. Hopefully it will for many years yet. It enables us to be assertive, and to clearly follow through when a threat has been made, and ignored. That said, parenting (like good lasagna making) requires creativity too, and that no less in matters of discipline. In his sapient book, The Secret of Happy Children, family therapist and parenting author Steve Biddulph devotes a chapter to the issue of being assertive (as opposed to aggressive) parents. Assertive parents, he contends, are ‘those who are clear, firm, determined and, on the inside, confident and relaxed. Their children learn that what Mum and Dad says goes but, at the same time, that they will not be treated with put-downs or humiliation’. He also suggests that it is not a skill we are born with so much as one we can take time (if we will) to learn. He summarises:

· Be clear in your own mind. It’s not a request; it’s not open to debate: it’s a demand which you have a right to make, and the child will benefit from learning to carry it out.

· Make good contact. Stop what you are doing, go up close to the child and get her/him to look at you. Don’t give the instruction until s/he looks at you.

· Be clear. Say, ‘I want you to … now. Do you understand?’ Make sure you get a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.

· If they do not obey, repeat the command. Do not discuss, reason, get angry or scared. Breathe slowly and deeply so that you become calmer. What you are signalling to the child is that you are willing to persist on this one and not even get upset about it. This is the key step, and what matters most is what you don’t do. You don’t enter into debate or argument, you don’t get heated, you simply repeat the demand to the child.

· Stay close if there is any chance that the child will not carry out the task fully. When the task is completed (say, putting away toys), then don’t make much of this either. Simply say, ‘Good,’ and smile briefly!

It seems to me that one of the most important things to remember with whatever form of discipline is employed is that one be not only persistent but also consistent (and this extends to backing up your partner; if you disagree with their call, talk about it later, in private). Again, Arnold: ‘Aside from creating confusion in a child’s mind, inconsistency also prevents the formation of the boundaries that every young child needs. Even though he may resist at the beginning, he will thrive on routines once they are established’.

It also seems to me that one’s disciplining will only ever be productive if our kids feel our love as strongly as they feel our desire to correct them. Isn’t this precisely the way it is with God whose discipline of his people always occurs within the context of his covenant love for them, a covenant that is unilateral and so not ultimately threatened by our rebellion. In other words, discipline is effective when it takes place in the context of a pre-existing relationship of love and trust. Which is why it’s basically futile for absent parents to try and discipline. And which is why at the heart of any discussion of discipline must be the reality of forgiveness. Forgiveness for our children … and for their parents. True discipline is never an end in itself. It never shames, but always liberates. Its goal is always redemptive, always reconciliatory, always freeing, always hopeful, always manifesting the triumph of grace. Only in the context of grace are we set free to love our kids enough to discipline them for their good, and are they set free to be the people they were created to be.

Image: Rembrandt, ‘Reconciliation Between David and Absalom’, 1642. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

Bring back the verve!

In his On the Basis of Morality Schopenhauer is scathing on Hegel:

‘If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus … scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.’ – Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, 15-16.

I like thinkers who don’t mince words; it’s one of the many reasons why reading Luther is such a refreshing experience. Of course, one need not be as undisciplined and as bad-mannered as a Hauwerwas – or even a Luther at times – in doing so. Anyway, the point of all this is simply to say that just when I was feeling tempted to say that contemporary theology has lost its verve, I came across these fighting words by Hunsinger on Postliberalism:

‘If postliberal theology depends on the existence of something called the “Yale School,” then postliberal theology is in trouble. It is in trouble, because he so-called Yale School enjoys little basis in reality, being largely the invention of theological journalism. At best it represents a loose coalition of interests, united more by what it opposes or envisions than by any common theological program’. – George Hunsinger, ‘Postliberal theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42.

Now I’m just feeling tempted to say that most contemporary theology (and politics for that matter) has lost its verve. Is this because it has no verve-creating Gospel?

Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

In today’s New York Times, Stanley Fish gives us a heads up on two soon-to-be-published books on the theodicy question. The two authors are Bart D. Ehrman (a theist turned agnostic) whose book is entitled God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer, and Antony Flew (an athiest turned theist) whose book is entitled There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. While both come from opposite directions they meet, or rather cross paths, on the subject of suffering and evil.

Fish suggests that while ‘Flew is for the moment satisfied with the intellectual progress he has been able to make … Ehrman is satisfied with nothing, and the passion and indignation he feels at the manifest inequities of the world are not diminished in the slightest when he writes his last word’. Fish asks, ‘Is there a conclusion to be drawn from these two books, at once so similar in their concerns and so different in their ways of addressing them? Does one or the other persuade?’ Fish contends that while the odd reader may have their mind’s changed as a result of reading either book, ‘their chief value is that together they testify to the continuing vitality and significance of their shared subject. Both are serious inquiries into matters that have been discussed and debated by sincere and learned persons for many centuries. The project is an old one, but these authors pursue it with an energy and goodwill that invite further conversation with sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike’.

Fish concludes: ‘In short, these books neither trivialize their subject nor demonize those who have a different view of it, which is more than can be said for the efforts of those fashionable atheist writers whose major form of argument would seem to be ridicule’.

While these two books testify to humanity’s ongoing quest for a theodicy (or an atheodicy), Forsyth was right to press that the real question is not the justification of evil – as any attempt at a theodicy is ultimately to retreat into an ideology, which is the one thing we must not do – but the justification of God for whom there can be no rational vindication, as the Cross bears witness. I am reminded here of Bonhoeffer’s assertion in Creation and Fall, Temptation (pp. 84-5), that the question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the ‘question of why’ can always only be answered with the ‘that’, which burdens humanity completely. The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.

Ratzinger on the Relationship between the Magisterium and Exegetes

Just finished reading Ratzinger’s 2003 address ‘On the Relationship between the Magisterium and Exegetes’ which he presented on the 100th Anniversary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. I’ve always enjoyed Ratzinger’s writing, and this piece is no different. I thought I’d just share a few gems:

‘The pilgrim people of God … knows … that it neither speaks nor acts by itself, but is indebted to the ne who makes them a people: the same living God who speaks to them through the authors of the individual books [of Scripture]’.

‘The mere objectivity of the historical method does not exist. It is simply impossible to ompletely exclude philosophy or hermeneutical foresight’.

‘A God who cannot intervene in history and reveal Himself in it is not he God of the Bible. In this way the reality of the birth of Jesus by the Virgin Mary, the effective institution of the Eucharist by Jesus at the Last Supper, his bodily resurrection from the dead – this is the meaning of the empty tomb – are elements of the faith as such, which it can and must defend against an only presumably superior historical knowledge. That Jesus – in all that is essential – was effectively who the Gospels reveal him to be to us is not mere historical conjecture, but a fact of faith. Objections which seek to convince us to the contrary are not the expression of an effective scientific knowledge, but are an arbitrary over-evaluation of the method. What we have learned in the meantime, moreover, is that many questions in their particulars must remain open-ended and be entrusted to a conscious interpretation of their responsibilities. This introduces the second level of the problem: it is not simply a question of making a list of historical elements indispensable to the faith. It is a question of seeing what reason can do, and why the faith can be reasonable and reason open to faith’.

‘Faith and science, Magisterium and exegesis, therefore, are no longer opposed as worlds closed in on themselves. Faith itself is a way of knowing. Wanting to set it aside does not produce pure objectivity, but comprises a point of view which excludes a particular perspective while not wanting to take into account the accompanying conditions of the chosen point of view’.

You can read the entire address here.

A Bush Christening

 

On the outer Barcoo where the churches are few,
And men of religion are scanty,
On a road never cross’d ‘cept by folk that are lost,
One Michael Magee had a shanty.
Now this Mike was the dad of a ten year old lad,
Plump, healthy, and stoutly conditioned;
He was strong as the best, but poor Mike had no rest
For the youngster had never been christened.

And his wife used to cry, `If the darlin’ should die
Saint Peter would not recognise him.’
But by luck he survived till a preacher arrived,
Who agreed straightaway to baptise him.

Now the artful young rogue, while they held their collogue,
With his ear to the keyhole was listenin’,
And he muttered in fright, while his features turned white,
`What the divil and all is this christenin’?’

He was none of your dolts, he had seen them brand colts,
And it seemed to his small understanding,
If the man in the frock made him one of the flock,
It must mean something very like branding.

So away with a rush he set off for the bush,
While the tears in his eyelids they glistened —
`’Tis outrageous,’ says he, `to brand youngsters like me,
I’ll be dashed if I’ll stop to be christened!’

Like a young native dog he ran into a log,
And his father with language uncivil,
Never heeding the `praste’ cried aloud in his haste,
`Come out and be christened, you divil!’

But he lay there as snug as a bug in a rug,
And his parents in vain might reprove him,
Till his reverence spoke (he was fond of a joke)
`I’ve a notion,’ says he, `that’ll move him.’

`Poke a stick up the log, give the spalpeen a prog;
Poke him aisy — don’t hurt him or maim him,
‘Tis not long that he’ll stand, I’ve the water at hand,
As he rushes out this end I’ll name him.

`Here he comes, and for shame! ye’ve forgotten the name —
Is it Patsy or Michael or Dinnis?’
Here the youngster ran out, and the priest gave a shout —
`Take your chance, anyhow, wid `Maginnis’!’

As the howling young cub ran away to the scrub
Where he knew that pursuit would be risky,
The priest, as he fled, flung a flask at his head
That was labelled `MAGINNIS’S WHISKY’!

And Maginnis Magee has been made a J.P.,
And the one thing he hates more than sin is
To be asked by the folk, who have heard of the joke,
How he came to be christened `Maginnis’!

 

(A B Banjo Paterson, ‘A Bush Christening’, 1893)

Bruce McCormack to Lecture at St. Andrews

The Frederick and Margaret L. Weyerhaeuser Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary, Bruce L. McCormack, will give the Scottish Journal of Theology Lectures at St Andrews University the week of December 3-6, 2007. His lectureship is titled ‘The Eternity of the Eternal Son: A Reformed Version of Kenotic Christianity’, and will include four lectures. For more information about times and locations, contact St Mary’s College at the University of St Andrews. I know at least one guy in St Andrews who can’t wait. Bring it on Bruce!

The Scapegoat and the Trinity

While I don’t concur with every idea in this Good Friday sermon by Hans Urs von Balthasar (for example the notion that ‘that there is room in [the Triune life] for all the alienation and sin of the world’; some things simply just need to be destroyed and are beyond redemption or reconciliation!) I was greatly encouraged reading this sermon today and thought it worthwhile reproducing here that others may also be encouraged.

‘Nearly two thousand years ago a trial took place that resulted in the death of the condemned man. Why is it that, even today, it will not allow mankind to forget about it? Have there not been countless other show trials down the years, particularly in our own time, and should the crying injustice of these trials not stir us up and preoccupy us just as much as that ancient trial at the Passover in Jerusalem? To judge by the constant and even increasing flood of books and discussions about Jesus, however, all the horrors of the extermination camps and the Gulag Archipelago matter less to mankind than the sentencing of this one innocent man whom, according to the Bible, God himself championed and vindicated—as is evident from his Resurrection from the dead.

The question is: Was he the one, great and final scapegoat for mankind? Did mankind load him with all its guilt, and did he, the Lamb of God, carry this guilt away? This is the thesis of a modern ethnologist, René Girard, whose books have attracted much attention in America, France and recently in Germany. According to this view, all human civilization, right from the outset, is constructed on the principle of the scapegoat. That is, men have cunningly invented a way of overcoming their reciprocal aggression and arriving at an at least temporary peace: thus they concentrate this aggression on an almost randomly chosen scapegoat and appoint this scapegoat as the sacrificial victim, in order to pacify an allegedly angry god. According to Girard, however, this divine anger is nothing other than men’s reciprocal rage. This mechanism always needs to be set in motion again after a period of relative peace if world history is to proceed in any half-tolerable way; in this context it reached its absolute peak in the general rejection of Jesus by the gentiles, the Jews and the Christians too: Jesus really did take over and carry away the sins of all that were loaded onto him, in such a way that anyone who believes this can live in peace with his brother from now on.

Girard’s ideas are interesting; they bring the trial of Jesus to life in a new way. But we can still ask why this particular murder, after so many others, should be the conclusive event of world history, the advent of the end time? Men have cast their guilt onto many innocent scapegoats; why did this particular bearer of sins bring about a change in the world as a whole?

For the believer the answer is easy: the crucial thing is not that this is an instance of our wanting to rid ourselves of guilt. Naturally, no one wants to admit guilt. Pilate washes his hands and declares himself guiltless; the Jews hide behind their law, which requires them to condemn a blasphemer; they act in a pious and God-fearing way. Judas himself has remorse for his deed; he brings the blood money back and, when no one will take it from him, throws it at the high priests. No one is prepared to accept responsibility. But precisely by attempting to extricate themselves, they are convinced by God that they are guilty of the death of this innocent man. Ultimately it is not what men do that is the determining factor.

The crucial thing is that there is Someone who is both ready and able to take their guilt upon himself. None of the other scapegoats was able to do this. According to the New Testament understanding, the Son of God became man in order to take this guilt upon himself. He lived with a view to the “hour” that awaited him at the end of his earthly existence, with a view to the terrible baptism with which he would have to be baptized, as he says. This “hour” would see him chained and brought to trial not merely outwardly; it would not only tear his body to pieces with scourges and nail it to the wood but also penetrate into his very soul, his spirit, his most intimate relationship with God, his Father. It would fill everything with desolation and the mortal fear of having been forsaken—as it were, with a totally alien, hostile and deadly poisonous substance that would block his every access to the source from which he lived.

It is in the horror of this darkness, of this emptiness and alienation from God, that the words on the Mount of Olives are spoken: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. ” The cup of which he here speaks is well known in the Old Testament: it is the cup full of God’s anger and wrath, which sinners must drink to the dregs; often it is threatened or forced upon unfaithful Jerusalem or enemy peoples like Babylon. The cry from the Cross is uttered out of the same horror of spiritual blackness, the cry asking why God has forsaken this tortured man. The man who cries out knows only that he is forsaken; in this darkness he no longer knows why. He is not permitted to know why, for the idea that the darkness he is undergoing might be on behalf of others would constitute a certain comfort; it would give him a ray of light. No such comfort can be granted him now, for the issue, in absolute seriousness, is that of purifying the relationship between God and the guilty world.

The man who endures this night is the Innocent One. No one else could effectively undergo it on behalf of others. What ordinary or extraordinary man would even have enough room in himself to accommodate the world’s guilt? Only someone who is a partner of the eternal Father, distinct from him and yet divine, that is, the Son who, man that he is, is also God, can have such capacity within him.

Here we are faced with a bottomless mystery, for in fact there is an immense difference between the generating womb in God the Father and the generated fruit, the Son, although both are one God in the Holy Spirit. Nowadays many theologians say, quite rightly, that it is precisely at the Cross that this difference becomes clearly manifest: at this precise point the mystery of the divine Trinity is fully proclaimed. The distance is so great—for in God everything is infinite—that there is room in it for all the alienation and sin of the world; the Son can draw all this into his relationship with the Father without any danger of it harming or altering the mutual eternal love between Father and Son in the Holy Spirit. Sin is burnt up, as it were, in the fire of this love, for God, as Scripture says, is a consuming fire that will not tolerate anything impure but must burn it away.

Jesus, the Crucified, endures our inner darkness and estrangement from God, and he does so in our place. It is all the more painful for him, the less he has merited it. As we have already said, there is nothing familiar about it to him: it is utterly alien and full of horror. Indeed, he suffers more deeply than an ordinary man is capable of suffering, even were he condemned and rejected by God, because only the incarnate Son knows who the Father really is and what it means to be deprived of him, to have lost him (to all appearances) forever. It is meaningless to call this suffering “hell”, for there is no hatred of God in Jesus, only a pain that is deeper and more timeless than the ordinary man could endure either in his lifetime or after his death.

Nor can we say that God the Father “punishes” his suffering Son in our place. It is not a question of punishment, for the work accomplished here between Father and Son with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit is utter love, the purest love possible; so, too, it is a work of the purest spontaneity, from the Son’s side as from the side of Father and Spirit. God’s love is so rich that it can also assume this form of darkness, out of love for our dark world.

What, then, can we do? “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.” It was as if the cosmos sensed that something decisive was going on here, as if it were participating in the darkness invading the soul of Christ. For our part, we do not need to experience this darkening, for we are already estranged and dark enough. It would suffice if we held onto our faith in a world that has become dark all around us; it would be enough for us to be convinced that all inner light, all inner joy and security, all trust in life owes its existence to the darkness of Golgotha and never to forget to give God thanks for it.

At the very periphery of this thanksgiving to God, it is legitimate to ask that, if God permits it, we may help the Lord to bear a tiny particle of the suffering of the Cross, of his inner anxiety and darkness, if it will contribute to reconciling the world with God. Jesus himself says that it is possible to help him bear it when he challenges us to take up our cross daily. Paul says the same in affirming that he suffers that portion of the Cross that Christ has reserved for him and for other Christians. When life is hard and apparently hopeless, we can be confident that this darkness of ours can be taken up into the great darkness of redemption through which the light of Easter dawns. And when what is required of us seems too burdensome, when the pains become unbearable and the fate we are asked to accept seems simply meaningless—then we have come very close to the man nailed on the Cross at the Place of the Skull, for he has already undergone this on our behalf and, moreover, in unimaginable intensity. When surrounded by apparent meaninglessness, therefore, we cannot ask to be given a calming sense of meaning; all we can do is wait and endure, quite still, like the Crucified, not seeing anything, facing the dark abyss of death. Beyond this abyss there waits for us something that, at present, we cannot see (nor can we even manage to regard it as true), namely, a further abyss of light in which all the world’s pain is treasured and cherished in the ever-open heart of God. Then we shall be allowed, like the Apostle Thomas, to put our hand into this gaping wound; feeling it, we shall realize in a very bodily way that God’s love transcends all human senses, and with the disciple we shall pray: “My Lord and my God.”‘


Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Crown the Year With Your Goodness: Sermons Through the Liturgical Year (trans. Graham Harrison; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 82-6.

Does evil exist?

In an interview in The Christian Century (January 10, 2006), David Bentley Hart addresses the question ‘Does evil exist?’ His answer:

‘If by “evil exists” you mean that evil possesses a real substance of its own, and that it therefore exists in the way goodness exists (or, for that matter, a tree, a rabbit, an idea or a dream exists), in point of fact Christian tradition has usually denied this quite forcibly. Patristic and medieval thought (drawing, admittedly, on Platonic precedent) defined evil as a privation of the good: a purely parasitic and shadowy reality, a contamination or disease or absence, but not a real thing in itself. This, incidentally, is a logically necessary claim if one understands goodness and being as flowing alike from the very nature of God and coinciding in him as one infinite life. That said, there surely is no contradiction between God’s omnipotent goodness and the reality of evil. It may seem somewhat trite to invoke the freedom of creation as part of the works and ends of divine love, or to argue that the highest good of the creature – divinizing union with God in love – requires a realm of “secondary causality” in which the rational wills of God’s creatures are at liberty; nonetheless, whether the traditional explanations of how sin and death have been set loose in the world satisfy one or not, they certainly render the claim that an omnipotent and good God would never allow unjust suffering simply vacuous. By what criterion could one render such a judgment? For Christians, one must look to the cross of Christ to take the measure of God’s love, and of its worth in comparison to the sufferings of a fallen world. And one must look to the risen Christ to grasp the glory for which we are intended, and take one’s understanding of the majesty and tragedy of creation’s freedom from that’. (HT: RLF)

Beet on Immortality of the Soul

In 1846, English Congregationalist Edward White attracted attention with his defence of the doctrine of conditional immortality, after which the doctrine of annihilationism gathered significant popularity, even more than universalism had previously done. One significant advocate of the position was the Wesleyan theologian J. Agar Beet (1840–1924) who in his classic work, The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest, took on the tradition head on. Here’s a few thoughts from that book:

 

‘The following pages are … a protest against a doctrine which, during long centuries, has been almost universally accepted as divine truth taught in the Bible, but which seems to me altogether alien to it in both phrase and thought, and derived only from Greek Philosophy. Until recent times, this alien doctrine has been comparatively harmless. But, as I have here shown, it is now producing more serious results … It will of course be said, of this as of some other doctrines, that, if not explicitly taught in the Bible, it is implied and assumed there … They who claim for their teaching the authority of God must prove that it comes from Him. Such proof in this case, I have never seen’. – Joseph Agar Beet, The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1901), v–vi. 

‘Of the six modern works quoted in this chapter [Beet outlines positions from Oosterzee, Pope, Laidlaw, Salmond, Welldon and Clarke], not one attempts to prove from the Bible, although some of them endeavour to prove in other ways, or assume without proof, the endless permanence of all human souls. This affords a presumption hardly distinguishable from certainty that this doctrine is not directly or indirectly taught in the Holy Scriptures. And in a matter pertaining altogether to the unseen world, other proof is worthless. It may therefore be dismissed as no part of the Gospel of Christ’. – Joseph Agar Beet, The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1901), 80.

Missiologists meet to Brainstorm on Asia Mission

Today, some prominent western missiologists have met in Bangkok with some of their Asian counterparts for the first international conference of the Asian Society of Missiology. Meetings will take place over the next few days on the theme ‘Asian Mission: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow’. It would be good to remember these meetings in our prayers.

Dr. Timothy K. Park, ASM president and associate professor of Asian Mission at Fuller Theological School of Intercultural Studies has commented: ‘Asian churches are emerging as new forces of world mission, but have not been fully developed to play their unique roles in the missionary movement of the Church’.

More information here.

The Politics of Hypocrisy

John Pilger, one of my favourite journalists, has written a wee piece in this week’s Guardian which turns the spotlight onto British, North American, Australian and Israeli business interests in Burma – all, of course, at the expense of justice. Thank you John. Here’s the piece:

‘The news is no more from Burma. The young monks are quiet in their cells, or they are dead. But words have escaped: the defiant, beautiful poetry of Aung Than and Zeya Aung; and we know of the unbroken will of the journalist U Win Tin, who makes ink out of brick powder on the walls of his prison cell and writes with a pen made from a bamboo mat – at the age of 77. These are the bravest of the brave. What shame they bring to those in the west whose hypocrisy and silence helps to feed the monster that rules Burma.

Condoleezza Rice comes to mind. “The United States,” she said, “is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place in Burma.” What she is less keen to keep a focus on is that the huge American company, Chevron, on whose board of directors she sat, is part of a consortium with the junta and the French company, Total, that operates in Burma’s offshore oilfields. The gas from these fields is exported through a pipeline that was built with forced labour and whose construction involved Halliburton, of which Vice-President Cheney was chief executive.

For many years, the Foreign Office in London promoted business as usual in Burma. When I interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi a decade ago I read her a Foreign Office press release that said, “Through commercial contacts with democratic nations such as Britain, the Burmese people will gain experience of democratic principles.” She smiled sardonically and said, “Not a bit of it.”

In Britain, the official PR line has changed; Burma is a favourite New Labour “cause”; Gordon Brown has written a platitudinous chapter in a book about his admiration of Suu Kyi. On Thursday, he wrote a letter to Pen, waffling about prisoners of conscience, no doubt part of his current empty theme of “returning liberty” when none can be returned without a fight. As for Burma, the essence of Britain’s compliance and collusion has not changed. British tour firms – such as Orient Express and Asean Explorer – are able to make a handsome profit on the suffering of the Burmese people. Aquatic, a sort of mini-Halliburton, has its snout in the same trough, together with Rolls-Royce and others that use Burmese teak.

When did Brown or Blair ever use their platforms at the CBI and in the City of London to name and shame those British companies that make money on the back of the Burmese people? When did a British prime minister call for the EU to plug the loopholes of arms supply to Burma. The reason ought to be obvious. The British government is itself one of the world’s leading arms suppliers. Next week, the dictator of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, whose tyranny gorges itself on British arms, will receive a state visit. On Thursday the Brown government approved Washington’s latest fabricated prelude to a criminal attack on Iran – as if the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan were not enough for the “liberal” lionhearts in Downing Street and Whitehall.

And when did a British prime minister call on its ally and client, Israel, to end its long and sinister relationship with the Burmese junta? Or does Israel’s immunity and impunity also cover its supply of weapons technology to Burma and its reported training of the junta’s most feared internal security thugs? Of course, that is not unusual. The Australian government – so vocal lately in its condemnation of the junta – has not stopped the Australian Federal Police training Burma’s internal security forces.

Those who care for freedom in Burma and Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia and beyond must not be distracted by the posturing and weasel pronouncements of our leaders, who themselves should be called to account as accomplices. We owe nothing less to Burma’s bravest of the brave’.

www.johnpilger.com (HT: Guardian Unlimited)

Scandalised by my own hypocrisy (which is no excuse for Rice’s, Brown’s or Howard’s), I am regularly reminded of Kierkegaard’s words from his Either/Or:

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; … In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.

Rembrandt: David and Uriah

Uriah has risen from the table
At which they have been talking.
He is beginning to walk away.

His right hand is laid across his breast
The way a Diva might take a bow.
Or the President salute the flag
His left hand clasps his belt,
A soldier’s grip.

Like everything else in Rembrandt
It is the moving moment he conveys,
The motif of motion: happening action.
And this, the moment, is fissile.

‘I was this morning early at your door
While sleep still held you unawares…’

But now he knows his heart
Has been inundated, his dreams
Are couriers to nightmare.

The moment is turning hard,
And the moment slowly
Astonishes his heart,
Slowly, inexorably, as coral.

David Broadbridge (HT: The Liberal)

The Musical Mystique: Defending classical music against its devotees

‘He played Bach at a subway door and failed. She played Bach on a subway platform with success. What does this say about Bach? Subways? Classical music?’

In the latest edition of The New Republic, Richard Taruskin – author of The Oxford History of Western Music and the revised edition of Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (with Piero Weiss) – gives us a really engaging (and lengthy) review of three books:

Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value, by Julian Johnson (Oxford University Press),

Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer’s Ears, by Joshua Fineberg (Routledge), and

Why Classical Music Still Matters, by Lawrence Kramer (University of California Press).

Taruskin recounts Joshua Bell’s sublime music-making in different locations:

1. Outside a burning building (not one fireman stopped to listen!)

2. At a car crash site (one paramedic actually pushed him aside!)

3. During a graduation exam (shushed by the invigilators!)

4. At a school play (thrown out by angry parents!)

5. On an airport runway (passing jet liners seemed oblivious!)

Taruskin’s response: ‘In one respect … the caper was instructive. It offered answers to those who wonder why classical music now finds itself friendless in its moment of self-perceived crisis – a long moment that has given rise in recent years to a whole literature of elegy and jeremiad’.

He proceeds to suggest that German romanticism is the ‘veritable mummy’ that still ‘reigns in many academic precincts, for the academy is the one area of musical life that can still effectively insulate its transient denizens (students) and luckier permanent residents (faculty) from the vagaries of the market’.

In a world (and blogoshere) of far too many positive book reviews, Taruskin’s criticism of Johnson’s book are refreshing – whether or not it is fair. He describes it as ‘a sort of Beyond the Fringe parody of a parish sermon in some Anglican backwater, [that] will convince no one but the choir. To have such a voice advocating one’s own cause is mortifying’.

My favourite quote of the review, however, is reserved for Fineberg:

Art is not about giving people what they want. It’s about giving them something they don’t know they want. It’s about submitting to someone else’s vision; forcing your aesthetic sense to assimilate the output of someone else’s … All art demands a surrendering of your vision in submission to the artist’s or at least the museum or concert curator’s.

Pascal on Misery and Diversion

‘The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is mainly what prevents us from thinking about ourselves, leading us imperceptibly to our ruin. Without it we would be bored, and this boredom would drive us to seek a more solid means of escape. But diversion amuses us and guides us imperceptibly to death’. – Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 6.

Lunch and the afterglow

I just came across this wee reflection by Geoff Bullock (whose blog is well worth the visit) and thought it worth sharing here.

A sleepy Monday,
lunch with my son.
I spent the time listening to his dreams,
watching my features move under his face.
Fatherhood is one of the greatest joys.
I continually find myself amazed
by the emergence of young lives
full of drive and vision.
He left in a hurry with a firm handshake,
and a gentle and affectionate pat,
impatient to meet a young man’s afternoon.
For the next few minutes I sat alone at the table,
with my mineral water and pot of tea
basking in the afterglow of the past hour.