The latest New Statesman is a special issue on God and belief. Some of the more interesting pieces are:
These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes [sic] in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves”.
That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had “universal jurisdiction” statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against “ourselves”, or “our” allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the west, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial, he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. The then home secretary, Jack Straw, let him escape back to Chile.
The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W Bush with that of Pinochet. “Outside [the United States] there is no longer the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,” he said. “So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as ‘former president George Bush’ [but] as a current war criminal.” For this reason, Bush’s first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques for use in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, said: “We have clear evidence that Mr Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture.”
The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing 600,000 peasants to death in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said: “I take my daily orders from Dr Kissinger.”
Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions relating to Blair’s wars. Spain’s celebrated judge Baltasar Garzón, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W Bush, Blair and the former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq – “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history – a devastating attack on the rule of law” that had left the UN “in tatters”. He said: “There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay.”
This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the west. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa – the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.
Today, the unreported “good news” is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once-sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at a remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R L Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter . . . I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete.”
Blair, too, is safe – but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing “an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges”, according to the international law authority Richard Falk. He cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. At present, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for the former prime minister’s prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, a former judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court, E W Thomas, wrote: “My predisposition was to believe that Mr Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate.”
Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli “peace prize” worth $1m. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long exposed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister – a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his “project” and crimes is an embarrassment, and preferably forgotten.
On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer’s former leading Blair fan, declared that “this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried”. He demanded, “Did Blair never ask what was going on?” This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: “Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?” In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Saddam Hussein’s “contribution to international terrorism” and his “frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction”. Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a “point of principle” for Blair who, he later wrote, was “fated to be right”. He lamented, “Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short.”
In the subsequent six years, at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.
Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour – in Australia, the original Murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the “mystical” Blair in the Guardian of more than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous grovelling to the Nazis: “I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them.”
With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as “a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion”. She asked him: “What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability . . . [sic]?”
A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about “values”. Doogue said to him that “it was the bifurcation about right and wrong, that’s what I thought the British found really hard [sic]”, to which Blair replied that “in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was”. It was his classic lie, and it passed unchallenged.
However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his “James Bond-ish Gulfstream” where she was privy to his “bionic energy levels”. She wrote: “I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?” Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. “That is war, I’m afraid,” said Blair, “and war is horrible.” No counter came that Gaza was not a war, but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair’s task “to prepare them for statehood”. The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man “has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated”. The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that “women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him”.
These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a “prayer breakfast” with President Obama, the yes-we-can man now launching more war.
“We pray,” said Blair, “that in acting we do God’s work and follow God’s will.”
To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair’s “faith” represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation of the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part – or who, like Alastair Campbell, offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some – might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: “Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, four million refugees, countless maimings and traumas.”
These are indeed extraordinary times.
[Source: New Statesman]
Surprise, surprise: a recent survey has found that New Zealanders are becoming less religious:
‘There has been a sharp rise in the number of New Zealanders with no religious affiliation, new research shows.
In a study by [Massey] University, 40 per cent of respondents say they have no religious affiliation compared to 29 per cent 17 years ago. Just over a third of New Zealanders describe themselves as religious.
Fifty-three per cent say they believe in God (although half of those say they have doubts), 20 per cent believe in some form of higher power and about third say they don’t believe or don’t know.
However, 60 per cent say they would prefer children to have religious education in state primary schools with strongest support for teaching about all faiths.
Researchers from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Marketing received responses from 1000 people as part of the International Social Survey Programme.
Professor Philip Gendall, who led the research team, says the view that New Zealand is a very secular country, is supported by the relatively low levels of active involvement in religion. “The survey shows that God is not dead, but religion may be dying,” Professor Gendall says.
“There is evidence that New Zealanders have become less religious over the last 17 years; however, most New Zealanders believe in God and there has been no change in the proportion of those who say they believe in a higher power.”
“So perhaps the apparent decline in religiosity reflects a decline in traditional religious loyalties – rather than a decline in spirituality as such.”
The study found that significant numbers of New Zealanders believe in the supernatural with 57 per cent believing in life after death, 51 per cent believing in heaven and 36 per cent believing in hell.
A quarter of those surveyed think star signs affect people’s futures, 28 per cent say good luck charms work and 39 per cent believe fortune-tellers can foresee the future.
The survey also asked questions about euthanasia and 70 per cent of respondents supported assisted suicide for someone with a painful incurable disease, provided a doctor gives assistance’.
[Source: Scoop]
‘The difference, even contrast, between the one-time, initial act of God that establishes our relationship with him and the changing, oscillating events in our history may move us deeply, so that we experience the encounter of the absolute, timeless, divine activity with our time-bound history as a profound mystery. In the case of Paul, on the other hand, it is not clear that this issue was significant for him. He never phrases his absolute pronouncements regarding our inclusion in the divine grace in abstract terms that circumvent the practicalities of what we experience and do. Likewise, he does not separate the evaluation of these processes from those foundational certainties. He rather links the revelation of divine grace with the wealth of all its consequences. He connects our individual experiences with the full depth of their source’. – Adolf Schlatter, The Theology of the Apostles: The Development of New Testament Theology (trans. Andreas J. Köstenberger; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998, 249
[BTW: this is my 1000th post!]
I have posted earlier on the theologies of childhood proffered by Calvin, Schleiermacher, Barth and Jensen (all Reformed perspectives), and on that of Karl Rahner. In this post, I turn to Australian Roman Catholic theologian Anthony Kelly on the ‘saturated phenomena’ of the child[1]. In his essay, ‘Spirituality and the Child’, Kelly identifies five phenomena of the child:
1. A unique ‘revelation’. The child comes in the form of a unique ‘revelation’, breaking into the experience of human community as the ‘occurrence of the new, at once a gift and a promise given into the heart of life’. In this way, the child is a ‘focus of wonder at the generativity of the universe’. The child calls the whole human family to a ‘new responsibility, if parents and relatives are to receive this gift of a new beginning in reverence and care. Consequently, the child invites certain questions: In a child, what new thing is being given and revealed?
2. An ‘event’. The child is an ‘event’. Despite the vulnerability of both the child and parent, the event or advent of a child has the potential to affect the lives and thinking of all around it. It evokes a new sense of both the past and the as-yet-undetermined future. Consequently, the arrival of a child is ‘an open-ended, transformative event. It is no fait accompli in terms of assignable causes and predictable effects, but an advent whose significance overflows as a unique new presence within the constitution of family, society and even world-history. To this degree, it is in the nature of such an event to resist calculated prediction of outcomes, but to inspire waiting, fidelity and hope, if what is given is to be received in its incalculable significance’.[2] The event – or advent – of the child also poses a number of questions:
3. A gift and event. Kelly writes:
Despite the possibilities of violence and exploitation inherent in a grossly sexual objectification of relationships, the child is a witness to something else. He embodies, within the intimacy, ecstasy and generativity of our incarnate existence, a distinctively personal order of relationships. For she implicitly demands to be received as something more than a biological product of two sexual agents, and so to provoke a larger sense of life.[3]
This invites further questions:
4. Something akin to a work of ‘art’. Like any work of art, the phenomenon of the child resists one-dimensional interpretations, resists detainment, resists ‘pre-designed space’. Instead, ‘its power is to command its own space and change the place given it’.[4] Kelly cites the poem, ‘Five Days Old’, by Australian poet Francis Webb (1925-1973). For most of his life Webb suffered with mental depression and was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1950s. ‘He spent most of his adult life in and out of psychiatric hospitals, writing poetry against terrible odds’.[5] In England during the war, he was being treated by a young Canadian doctor who had invited him home around Christmastime. The young parents put their five day old Christopher John in the poet’s arms, and left him alone for a while. This poem was the result:
Christmas is in the air.
You are given into my hands
Out of quietest, loneliest lands.
My trembling is all my prayer.
To blown straw was given
All the fullness of Heaven.
The tiny, not the immense,
Will teach our groping eyes.
So the absorbed skies
Bleed stars of innocence.
So cloud-voice in war and trouble
Is at last Christ in the stable.
Now wonderingly engrossed
In your fearless delicacies,
I am launched upon sacred seas,
Humbly and utterly lost
In the mystery of creation,
Bells, bells of ocean.
Too pure for my tongue to praise,
That sober, exquisite yawn
Or the gradual, generous dawn
At an eyelid, maker of days:
To shrive my thought for perfection
I must breathe old tempests of action
For the snowflake and face of love.
Windfall and word of truth.
Honour close to death.
O eternal truthfulness, Dove,
Tell me what I hold –
Myrrh? Frankincense? Gold?
If this is man, then the danger
And fear are as lights of the inn,
Faint and remote as sin
Out here in the manger.
In the sleeping, weeping weather
We shall all kneel down together.[6]
5. The ‘face’ of an other. So Kelly:
The face of the other is not a projection on one’s part of the other as an object, useful, exploitable or ignored … It stands for the totality of the reality of the other as given, calling me to responsibility. To allow oneself to be ‘faced’ by the other in this way, is to be called out of oneself, to make room for this other, however unsettling this may prove.[7]
Again this raises a series of challenges:
[2] Anthony J. Kelly, ‘Spirituality and the Child’ in Children, Adolescents and Spirituality (ed. Marian de Souza and Winifred Wing Han Lamb; Adelaide: ATF Press, 2008), 14. Italics mine.
[3] Ibid., 15.
[4] Ibid., 15.
[5] Carol Treloar, ‘Poetic Australians’, The Advertiser, 7 September 1991.
[6] Francis Webb, ‘Five Days Old’ in The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse (ed. Kevin Hart; Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 225. Italics mine.
[7] Kelly, ‘Spirituality and the Child’, 17.
Yesterday’s New Statesman includes a piece by Eric Stoddart on Christians and bereavement wherein Stoddart makes the following claim about Christians who believe in hell:
‘… the hell-believing Christian carries an additional burden of uncertainty, sometimes significant fear, that their loved one will not be raised to enjoy everlasting life or, worse, be raised to everlasting punishment. There is a Christian form of grieving and it relies on the Jesus who wept being the Jesus who was resurrected’.
From one of my favourite books:
‘… if eschatology is concerned with the reaching of a goal, then there can in principle be no eschatology in the Old Testament. It is only possible in and through the history of Jesus Christ’. – Adrio König, Here Am I: A Believer’s Reflection on God (Grand Rapids/London: Wm. B. Eerdmans/Marshall Morgan & Scott, 1982), 170.
'Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu', by Guy Maestri
Best books: Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy, After War, Is Faith Possible?: The Life and Message of Geoffrey “Woodbine Willie” Studdert Kennedy (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2008). (Reviewed here)
Best music: Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Gurrumul [2008: This is one of the best albums I’ve heard in a long time]; U2, No Line on the Horizon [2009]; Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs – Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 [2008]; The Panics, Cruel Guards [2008]; Paul McCartney, Flaming Pie [1997].
Best films: The Reader [2008]
Best drink: 2007 Two Paddocks Pinot Noir
‘To be a Christian is per definitionem to be in Christ. The place of the community as such, the theatre of their history, the ground on which they stand, the air that they breathe, and therefore the standard of what they do and do not do, is indicated by this expression. Being in Christ is the a priori of all the instruction that Paul gives his churches, all the comfort and exhortation he addresses to them. – Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2, p. 277.
David Jensen teaches reformed theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. His delightful book, Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood (posted on here and here), focuses on the covenant grace of God which welcomes and encompasses vulnerability in human persons. Children (among others) constitute such authentic personhood. He suggests that to be a child is to be three things:
1. Chosen by God;
2. Open and vulnerable to the grace that makes life possible; and
3. A pilgrim, oriented Godward and toward the present.
1. Chosen by God – Children of election
Children are loved because of the simple fact that they are. The divine election
distances a theology of childhood from utilitarian considerations, where children are considered worthy because of something they possess (such as beauty) or provide (such as happiness to a parent). A revised doctrine of election claims first and foremost that children are worthy because God chooses them as subjects of divine love … In a society where genetic technologies promise a day in which parents will be able to select the “best” traits for their own children and filter out what is undesirable or unworthy, election proves subversive: God values infinitely those who are seen as disposable and valueless. God’s electing grace is the eternal yes to our tendency to say “no” to children. We neither choose children, nor do they choose us; and eternal choice precedes both parent and child. (pp. 44, 46)
2. Childhood vulnerability in difference
Living in God’s image, children are metaphors of openness to the One who creates each of us differently. Despite bourgeois longings to the contrary, there is no such thing as a model child … What some of the classic theologians have dismissed as the hallmarks of selfishness – the wails of hunger, the cries to be held – are actually the marks of relationship and dependence of life in God’s world. Infants cry not out of selfishness, but to speak of a profound need for another … (pp. 47, 49)
3. The Pilgrim Child
Jensen considers children as pilgrims, as persons who are beginning to question life and to journey in it, who are as much – indeed more – oriented to the present as to the end. He writes:
Children subvert our understanding of pilgrimage in their attentiveness. They are pilgrims not because they are on their way somewhere, not because they are growing up to be somebody, but because they are already somewhere and somebody. Children’s pilgrimages call us to become who we already are: children of God, attentive to the surprise an mystery of creation … To be a pilgrim as children are is to live in the present, and to pay close attention to the immediacy of the journey … This present-orientation of childhood pilgrimage is not hedonistic, but the immediate delight of God’s world: an orientation that is not simply on the self, but on self-with-others … [Children’s] present-orientation affirms the enduring value and significance of human relationships. (pp. 53, 54; see also pp. 121-2)
For Jensen, such pilgrimage involves play (with its decidedly eschatological bent, so Zechariah 8:5: ‘The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there’), imagination and attention.
The Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts is hosting an international conference at which artists, biblical scholars, historians, theologians and others will explore the shaping impact of the Psalter on western imagination.
I have posted on Alfonse Borysewicz before: here and here. In the latter post I mentioned that Alfonse would be delivering the Brooklyn Oratory‘2009 Baronius Lecture. He has been kind enough to send me a copy:
Baronius Lecture 2009 – Alfonse Borysewicz
Oratory Church of St. Boniface, Brooklyn, New York
There is a story about a rabbi going to see another rabbi and finds himself immersed in the reading of the Torah. “What are you doing?”-“I’m trying to interpret a passage that I’ve been studying for years and can’t explain completely to myself.” “Let me see: I’ll try to explain it to you myself.” “That won’t do any good, I can explain it to other people; what I can’t do is explain it to myself.”
In 1977, on my first day of seminary, after two years of college at a Jesuit university in Detroit, I found in my hands a book of poems by Gerard Manly Hopkins. To this day I still make pilgrimages with that old college Penquin paperback; particularly one poem, “Carrion Comfort,” which has become a personal mantra for me. The opening lines of this heart-felt poem are:
NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist-slack they may be-these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more….
Three decades have passed since I finished my seminary studies, and, in a clumsy way, decided not to become a priest, and instead have spent now 30 odd years working as a painter, first in Boston, with quick recognition and subsequently in the New York art world. Today when I ask myself if I can be a contemporary artist and a practicing Catholic, Hopkins’ words, “despair” , “weary” and “these last strands of man,” squeeze me hard. For me this question is a real-life drama. And it is not as simple as one might think.
In his autobiography, Henry Adams, heir to two presidents and an accomplished author of biographies, novels, a nine-volume history of the US, and works on education and art, portrays himself as a misfit. From a literary standpoint his life was an extraordinary success, but in his own estimation he had failed miserably. He saw himself as a human fossil, a survivor from an earlier era confronted with a bewildering, changing world. In The Education of Henry Adams, he wrote: “What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?”
Like Adams, I’m often tempted to see myself as a human fossil. As a practicing Catholic I am in many ways a product of other centuries, yet contemporary art requires me to play-exclusively- the game of the twenty-first century, a world that changes even faster than the one Adams lived in. With the compounded temptation to idolize an ever increasing material and technological world at the expense of a sacramental vision of the world.
In the book The Church Confronts Modernity, published by Catholic University, several authors reflect on the church and culture in Quebec, Ireland, and the United States. With regard to the “home country,” so to speak, one author makes a distinction between two Catholicisms in America: one emphasizing authority, one emphasizing individual conscience. The former highlights knowing the church’s teachings; the other, being a good Christian. The first views modern society as evil, the second as God’s creation. And so it goes.
Regardless of which model you follow, the dilemma is the same: either you can risk denying your ultimate identity by changing (or pandering), or else by refusing to change you can become obsolete, out of step with the modern, or should I say, the lost modern world.
When I was in my thirties, my paintings, though they were full of religious meaning for me, were safely abstract, and I was welcomed into the gallery scene of the time. As I entered my forties, my Catholicism became more important to me (the culture wars, raising children, terror and war, etc.), and my paintings began to change (less abstract, more representational with direct religious imagery). This new work was no longer welcome in the galleries that had once shown my work and, it seems, in the dialogue of the culture. Recently I have come to the realization that my erasure from the art world was no fluke. Rather my initial 15 years of success was the fluke. That is to say, my intuitive drive to unite my art with my faith and religion was doomed to fail in the culture world at large from the get go. The boulder I have been pressing to move, the truncated and distorted views of God and the Faith and the Church, has been there for centuries. And it’s taken me 51 years to realize this. But the wonder and gift is I have realized this. The question now is do I attempt to participate in the contemporary culture-art world by changing and updating or as Zsigmond Moricz wrote in the great Central European classic novel of a budding artist’s struggle, do I remain “faithful unto death”?
Why remain faithful to religious imagery in an increasing secularized world? This is a question I often ask myself at around five AM when I wait for the sunrise and the soon honking horns outside my window. Why am I still pressing this boulder that has cost my family and I so dearly? It is an old question, and one that lives at the heart of Christian worship, which brings ancient events into the here and now by presenting us with images. Our liturgy, so beautifully celebrated in this Church, celebrates events that take place in the present, and are at the same time linked to a historical past we can barely imagine. Yet this is what both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance did: they portrayed biblical stories in a contemporary setting.
I can think of many more recent artists who do this, but one American nomadic modernist in particular comes to mind: Marsden Harltey of New York and Maine, who in 1941 painted Fisherman’s Last Supper, an ordinary family at dinner minus the loved ones lost recently at sea. From this fishing village portrait to the Ghent Altarpiece or The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, all imply, as Heather Dubrow writes in The Challenge of Orpheus, that “the figure within it is, as it were, alive and well in that very church at that very moment.” Saint Augustine echoes this: “Easter happened once yet the yearly remembrance brings before our eyes, in a way, what once happened long ago.” Why this recreation of Christian events, reoccurring from medieval peasants to the geniuses of the Renaissance to New York neurotics like Marsden Harltey and myself? Augustine answers: “for fear we should forget what occurred but once, it is re-enacted every year for us to remember.”
One cannot talk about American Catholic identity, culture, and the artistic endeavor, without (forgive me) genuflecting to the writer working from Milledgeville, Georgia-Flannery O’Connor. Echoing Chesterton, O’Connor insisted that the free will essential to Catholicism also freed the imagination. As she put it: “The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain in that way.” In other words, do you live and create in an ordered autonomy where your freedom is guided by transcendent values or a radical autonomy where anything goes. Or, in short, a freedom that views life as a gift or a freedom that views life as something to me manipulated. I think the latter is the prevalent operative mode in our culture today, though recently it is showing signs of stress. As Karl Barth writes even God put limits on God’s own freedom by resting on the seventh day of creation.
So where am I? Like Adams, am I a misfit? With my sacred obsessions, I feel like a genetic mutant unfossilized from the thirteenth century into the twenty-first. When asked why she had a penchant for writing about freaks, Flannery O’Connor replied, “because I can still recognize one.” Why, in a culture divorced from and hostile to religious devotion, am I painting religious images and icons? Because, as O’Connor said, “I can still recognize one.”
The Czech philosopher Habermas warns us that “global capitalism’s triumphal march encounters few genuine oppositions and, in that regard, religion, as a repository of transcendence, has an important role to play. It offers a much-needed dimension of otherness: the values of love, community, and godliness to help offset the global dominance of competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and manipulation that predominates in the vocational sphere.” Or more basic, I don’t want my children or their children, my friends and their friends, or the passerby/stranger to abandon or forget their place in, as Pope Benedict illuminated in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, in this ongoing love story. To bring it back home from a hymn sang here two just two Fridays ago at the noon mass (#630 Lord, Whom Love is Humble Service):
Still your children wander homeless
Still the hungry cry for bread
Still the captives long for freedom
Still in grief we mourn our dead
As. O Lord, your deep compassion
Healed the sick, and feed the soul.
Use the love your Spirit kindles
Still to save and make us whole.
Look around, folks. You might not see anything like this for some time to come. Honestly, I have nowhere to go with these works. The galleries won’t exhibit them; they’ve abandoned religious expression. Except for occasional moments like this, the Church and its parishes won’t display them. They have neglected or forgotten their own heritage, and so my work seems unusual to them at best, or at worst, dangerous. The universities, well, they will only show them on PowerPoint. ..Or perhaps Saul Bellow was right when he said “art can’t carry the weight of religion.”
My hero, the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, saw the crisis of culture and faith years ago. In 1967, he wrote: “There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this and that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not a numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transition to be made, strong enough to refuse half measure and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait….”
In 1987, desperately hungry for a community to worship with, I took a bike ride to the Cathedral of St. James and found my home. After that first mass and walking up to Fr. Jim Hinchey inquiring about Baptism for my daughter in budding he soon put me to work in the bookstore. Then the transition from St. James to here when Fr. Dennis Corrado implored me to make a processional cross, do some gold leafing, and more…I will never forget his mandate: “Alfonse don’t worry about money because we don’t have any.” Though profoundly grateful to have worked in this church, to bring my art in this sacred space, I don’t think I can stomach again, like I did a few weeks ago and again ten years before, right here, holding the ladder while Fr. Mark Lane balances himself like an acrobat on these ladders to reach a hook, without a nerve in his body trembling while I shook below.
As for myself, like Saint Augustine, I have become a question to myself. About a year ago the Jesuit magazine printed an article about my works entitled “An Ordinary Mystic”. I actually brought up the Rahnerian idea after hearing about it from a friend; a beautiful idea. As my friend
Jesuit Michael Paul Gallagher writes “ future believers will have to be mystics or else they will not have faith. Clearly this cannot mean that everyone has to have the special gift of mystical saints. Rather it suggests that, in a more secular context, faith will have to be grounded in a personal experience of grace. It will need an ability to recognize the Spirit at work in one’s ordinary life.”
On the question of whether one can be a Catholic artist and be a contemporary painter, I will defer. I’m too saturated, too involved, too subjective, too neurotic to answer. They say that one doesn’t look at icons, but they look at you. My paintings, my icons, are looking down at you. Let me know. There-on my left-is Mary Magdalene. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard writes “the words of the angel to Mary Magdalene at the grave could be used here: Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus of Nazareth; because until confidence appears, the person who seeks Jesus at first actually experiences fear before him, before his holiness.” Or as the filmmaker Bresson in Diary of a Country Priest, echoing St. Therese of Lisieux , all is grace.
‘[The] movement of God’s holy love into the heart of the world’s evil and agony is not to be understood as a direct act of sheer almighty power, for it is not God’s purpose to shatter and annihilate the agents and embodiments of evil in the world, but rather to pierce into the innermost center of evil power where it is entrenched in the piled-up and self-compounding guilt of humanity in order to vanquish it from within and below, by depriving it of the lying structures of half-truth on which it thrives and of the twisted forms of legality behind which it embattles itself and from which it fraudulently gains its power. Here we have an entirely different kind and quality of power, for which we have no analogies in our experience to help us understand it, since it transcends every kind of moral and material power we know, the power which the Bible calls grace …’. – Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005), 136.
Richard Floyd enters blogdom with a delightful rumination on ‘How Communication Technology has Changed the Scholarly Life‘ and A Hymn for Lent.
‘Most everyone – conservative, orthodox, or liberal – seems to have trouble thinking the cry [of desolation] could be real. It seems as though having dispatched him to a humiliating, cruel, and agonizing death, we are surprised and shocked that he should find it all that bad. We just can not give up on making him our religious hero, desperately seeking in him the last spark of divinity, the courage, the faith, that will somehow see him through and thus enable us to avoid facing the end. There must be some way for him to transcend the fate to which we have dispatched him. It is as though by crucifying him we had merely provided the occasion for him to exercise his divinity, or as though as his murderers we hope that our crime was all a bad dream. For if he goes into the blackness of death forsaken even by God, what chance do we have?
But that is, of course, precisely the point. We have no chance. He comes to die for us, to enter into the blackness, the nothingness of death alone. Thus he goes the road of being human to the end. But it is even more than that. He took our place. He took our nature, being born under the law. He was made a curse for us, and he followed the course to death on the cross. In the end he cries out in an agony that Mark concentrates into the totally human question, “Why?” And there is no answer. Beyond the “Why?” there is only God. We are, once again, simply brought up against God. God is done to us. The true human can only wait on God here. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” The human Jesus brings us to that end. This is his self-emptying (kenosis). Not that he divests himself temporarily of some divine prerogatives, but that he pours himself out into that last desolate cry.
Only by so pouring himself out can he finally be for us. Were he to hold something back or somehow to be protected from the stark reality of the death, he would be our lawgiver but not our Savior. His dying words to us would be some sort of admonition to stop our perfidy, shape up, and perhaps take him down from the cross before it all goes too far. His dying would be perhaps just the supreme example of how to die, and so the most strenuous law of all. That, one might say, is the theological way of taking him down from the cross. Only by truly dying does he put an end to us as old beings so that we can be made new. Only so do we come up against the one who calls into being that which is from that which is not’. – Gerhard O. Forde, Theology is for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 112-3.
© 2009. Photo taken by John Roxborogh, when Robert Jenson visited the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership in Dunedin. Used with permission.
Here’s a list of recently posted notes on Robert Jenson‘s 2009 Burn Lectures delivered at the University of Otago:
The video podcasts of those lectures are now available for download as MP4s. See here for details.
For his grand finale Robert Jenson offered a practical demonstration of what had been argued for in the first five lectures, namely, a creedal critical exegesis of Scripture. Due to time limitations Jenson took as his text Genesis 1:1-3 only. The joy of hearing him on this text was that it touched on many of the key themes of Jenson’s thought and gave us a kind of overview of his doctrine of creation and time.
His starting point was the observation that, although the two well-known translations of Genesis 1:1 are both grammatically possible, the shift in the NRSV to the temporal subordinate clause (‘when God created the heavens and the earth’) is a move from the most straightforward and default translation to something that more closely reflects the religiosity of ancient paganism. (There is no reason, Jenson contends, to abandon the LXX and KJV here) It is a departure from radical Judaism to a view of the universe in which chaos is antecedent to and coeval with God’s creating. Jenson noted that if in the beginning there is both God and chaos then both God and chaos are involved – at least at one level – in our creation. Creedal criticism, where the creed provides the lens for our suspicion of appearances, makes us immediately alert to this reading which assimilates YHWH to the anthropomorphic gods of religion. Even if it is only chaos it is a foothold outside God – a point of independence – something other than the absolute beginning of the Christian faith. It challenges our faith in the world’s ‘self-founded timeless being’. It is, says Jenson, Scripture’s scandalous ‘metaphysical put-down’ that we try and avoid. Interestingly, Jenson notes this same impulse in the cosmologist’s attempt to avoid creatio ex nihilo by means of positing multiple universes – a totally untestable and therefore unscientific hypothesis, which has nothing other than the conviction of ‘no absolute beginning’ as its basis.
With an eye on the creed Jenson continues: ‘Who is this God who tolerates no antecedents of his work?’ Creedal criticism assumes it to be obvious that it is the Father of the Son, Jesus Christ. It thus justifies the gloss ‘In the beginning the Father of Jesus created the heavens and the earth’. Thus we may conclude that ‘the contingency of the world is founded on the contingency of the life of Jesus’.
Jenson cites Westermann to claim that Genesis 1:1 is a caption summary for the whole story that follows. This then leads on to 1:2, which is where the creation narrative properly begins. Jenson claims that the best scholarship locates this verse in the post-exilic editing of a priestly savant in the second temple and then poses the question of whether this scholar was (a) thinking paganly or (b) using pagan language of Near Eastern mythology to serve the purposes of 1:1. Under the guidance of the creed, Jenson choses to read it the second way. His account of 1:2 is something like this. Given the unavoidable sequentiality of the narration of events, the writer wields the language of subsistent nothingness as a place-marker to indicate an absence. There can be no question about before. In Jenson’s phraseology, ‘To ask what was God doing before he created the world is a dumb question.
Again in verse 3 Jenson’s creedally-suspicious mind spots ideology at work in the NRSV’s translation of ‘a wind from God’ where in every other instance of the phrase ruach elohim is translated ‘Spirit of/from God’. What’s more, because Genesis 1:3 is a late text the tradent knew this title. Jenson’s creedal reading thus concludes ‘The Holy Spirit agitated the empty possibility posited when God begins to create and there is nothing’. What’s more, this suggests that there is an ‘inner liveliness in God’ which is directed towards making something when there is nothing.
At this point Jenson offered asides on the Nicene concept of the Holy Spirit as ‘enlivener’ and the folly of continuing to insist on the filoque which was after all an illegal addition.
From here the story of creation begins: (a) God said let there be light; (b) God saw that the light was good; (c) God separated the light from the darkness. The world simply is an affirmative response to God’s command: ‘That’s all there is to it’! And this explosion of energy (light) is good (for something). Here Jenson explores all the non-creedal and non-trinitarian puzzlements surrounding this text. A monotheistic/Unitarian/Aristotelian God cannot speak. For such a god eternity is necessarily silent. At best, if a god like Aristotle’s did speak it would be an act of condescension. Moreover, for such a god to speak presupposes a polytheistic pantheon. However the creedal critic knows that not only can the Triune God speak, but God can be conceived as a conversation. ‘God is a conversation’. Only the Triune God who is a conversation can issue a command to creation before creation existed because the second person of the Trinity is himself a creature – Jesus of Nazareth. At this point Jenson talked of a conversation in which the Son, as the creature Jesus Christ, hears and speaks. ‘In what language does God speak?’, Jenson provocatively asks. In the language of Spirit – that universally self-translating language heard by the prophets, and which at Pentecost all the nations heard as their own.
And God saw that the light was good. Was it good because he saw it so, or did he discover it to be good? Jenson responds that there is ‘no humanly ascertainable difference’. However the key question Jenson moves quickly on to is, ‘Good for what?’ And here he refers us to the second and third articles of the creed – that is, that creation is the good stage for the drama of Jesus Christ. Moreover, this 78-year old ‘unreliable’ Lutheran affirms with Barth that creation is the ‘outer basis’ or ground for the covenant and its events, and that covenant is the inner ground of creation.
What about darkness? Does God create a non-good. Jenson accepts Augustine’s reading of darkness as absence, where light runs out. Evil is the ‘running out’ of being in its finitude. Thus like the dimming of light an apparent necessity (or at least an actuality) of created finitude. The creation of life includes within it ‘death on an enormous scale.’
The story moves from the creation of life (‘energy’ in (post-)modern parlance) to its endless differentiation. Jenson comments: ‘Never rest too much on agreement between science and theology’ precisely because science is constantly changing and it is inherent in its claim to be science that it is open to such change. So Jenson argues, our priestly savant used the best science of his day to tell of God’s creation of the world – ‘what other science was there?’ We ought to emulate his courage?
Question time followed. The first question in the gladiatorial fray went to the heart of Jenson’s theology asking whether the creatureliness of the Son (no logos asarkos) implied the eternity of creation (pantheism?). Jenson, clearly familiar with the need to defend this ‘novelty’ in his thought, was surprisingly brief in his response. It was two-fold: (a) his Ockham’s razor saw no need for a pre-incarnate logos (begging some prima facie questions posed by John’s prologue, of the Word’s becoming) and (b) a pre-incarnate logos becoming flesh presupposes a common timeline in divine and human history. This doesn’t correspond to Jenson’s view of the relation between time and eternity, and is a nonsense. However, he didn’t feel the need to defend this claim here. No doubt time did not permit.
Further questions focused on theodicy. In different ways, Jenson’s succinct conclusion was that ‘we can’t get God off the hook for evil. We can’t do it, but we have confidence that God can do it!’ Jenson mentioned in passing the open theist theodicy which diminishes the notion of omnipotence so that God is not morally responsible for all that happens. Jenson is not personally happy with this, but was not completely dismissive either.
The lecture was a powerful presentation of Christian reading/exegesis which depends on the premises of his previous lectures (see I, II, III, IV and V). One might reasonably be not entirely convinced by Jenson’s radically post-modern/pre-modern scepticism with respect to objective meaning in texts (see Lecture 5) and therefore have some doubts about the pathway Jenson takes to a theological interpretation. Are authorial intentions really as private as Jenson suggests (and Vanhoozer, for example, denies)? A comment Jenson made to post-graduates at a seminar on Wednesday morning about the infinite malleability of texts makes one wonder about the distinction between reading a text and projecting onto the text – if this distinction is lost the proposal of a creedal exegesis seems to have a certain kind of arbitrariness. However, even if Jenson is wrong about hermeneutics, it does not follow that his theological reflections on the text of Genesis 1 are wrong, just that its relation to something one might call ‘the meaning of Genesis 1’ is different from how he conceives it.
One might also think that Jenson’s suggestion that the contingent creaturely life of Jesus is part of the eternal life and conversation which is the Triune God requires considerably more unpacking than Jenson is want to do. Might Jenson’s formulation suggest that this creature who is also creator might be in fact self-creating? Might Ockham be cutting himself shaving?
A final thought: however one arrives, one never leaves a Jenson lecture unchanged. Whether he is lecturing on theology proper, on eschatology, on the Trinity, on culture, on anthropology, on ecumenism or on the relationship between Holy Scripture and the Church’s Creeds, Jenson is undoubtedly one of the most original and erudite theologians of our time. Certainly, as one commentator noted, ‘Jenson’s mind makes stimulating company’. One comes away from this series of Burns Lectures with a renewed love for Scripture, with a new appreciation of the abiding witness and value of the Church’s Creeds, and with a lively sense of doxological fervour for the Triune God. At the end of the day, isn’t that what all theology exists to be about?
Past Lectures:
1. Creed, Scripture, and Their Modern Alienation
2. The Tanakh as Christian Scripture
3. The New Testament and the Regula Fidei
5. The Creed as Critical Theory of Scripture
Notes by Bruce Hamill and Jason Goroncy
‘Although contemporary people often think of architecture as static or perhaps stifling, buildings often “live.” Medieval Christians attempted to translate their spiritual sensibilities into some sort of structure that would communicate life – even long after the builders died. Chartres Cathedral would not exist if not for the two great institutions of the Middle Ages – the monastery and the parish church.
To medieval people, church buildings expressed their spirituality – their visions, virtues, and dreams of God. Church buildings were the geography of paradise, the actual location where God’s reign of beauty and justice could be experienced. Buildings, and the arts and liturgies therein, demonstrated the mysterious interweavings of the worlds, the playful combination of this world and the one beyond. Holiness was translated into visible structures where people might see, touch, and feel the beauty of God. Medieval builders captured this sense, creating sacred spaces that were both spiritually unpredictable and theologically structured at the same time.
Because the church building was holy geography, communities spend enormous resources of time, money, and talent constructing church buildings; the church stood as both a location of paradise and an icon of communal identity. Medieval people associated the actual building with God’s reign and were ferociously protective of their churches. In the 1130s, Peter of Bruis, a French preacher, promoted the idea that God had no use for church buildings. To him they interfered with the purity and simplicity of faith. Peter urged Christians in the town of Saint-Gilles to give up their church and burn its ornaments, including its crosses, dramatically illustrating the point by lighting a pyre. The people of Saint-Gilles, whose church was a major pilgrimage site, responded by tossing poor Peter on his own bonfire’. – Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story (New York: HarperOne, 2009).
‘Texts by themselves do not automatically flaunt the meaning they harbour’. From this postulation Professor Jenson proceeded – in this his fifth Burns Lecture (for earlier lectures see I, II, III, IV) – to challenge Modernist attempts to discern what the text is ‘really saying’. He warned of the limited value of efforts to understand ‘who is up to what’ with any particular writing (authorial intent), but also that the Church cannot simply opt out of Modernity’s critical agendas. The question becomes then which critical theory to adopt.
Jenson advanced that the Church is the body which must interpret the biblical texts, and to do so in light of the regula fidei, the Apostle’s Creed, and with the Triune God who is ‘up to something’ in these texts. ‘Acknowledging God’, he said, is a necessity for every interpretation except of that of the nihilist. The Triune God is a Person, and as such is the metaphysical bond between reality and discourse about reality. The alternative, Jenson contends, is that texts float free in a void of indifference. Reality and language meet only in God. This relates not only to Scriptural texts but to any texts. The Church has confidence to do hermeneutics only because the Church knows God personally, because the Church lives in a shared history with God.
From here, Jenson posed and proceeded to answer the question ‘What is creedal-critical exegesis?’ His answer: it is ‘christological common sense’, by which Jenson meant that Christ is God’s agenda in Scripture, not as allegory or figure, but ‘plainly’ (except when the genre of the text demands an allegorical or figurative reading). So, for example, Jenson contended that when Israel went into exile, the Shekhinah (who is Jesus of Nazareth) when went them. One implication of this is that when Israel is redeemed the Shekhinah will be redeemed with them. Jenson was completely unapologetic in his insistence that Old Testament references to ‘the angel of the Lord’ and ‘son of God’ are references to the second triune identity – Jesus of Nazareth. He proffered that to read the OT like this is to take seriously its ‘plain meaning’, and also that a legitimate rendering of John 1 might be, ‘In the beginning was the Shekhinah, and the Shekhinah was with God …’ etc. This, at least to my mind, was not the clearest section of the lecture series.
Jenson concluded his lecture by suggesting that the historical-critical exegetes are not critical enough (particularly of their own agenda), and reminding us that the Church’s theological tradition is always an ongoing conversation rather than the passing on of a fully-defined body of knowledge. In light of the latter, he suggested that if Paul, James and Peter were not involved in genuine dispute with one another then they can be of little use to us.
One of the questions that Jenson responded to during the question time that followed concerned the notion of God as a God of war. This had come up in previous lectures too. Again, Jenson was nothing if not clear in outlining his basic position: If we don’t want God involved in the violence of history then this equates, Jenson contends, to the confession that we don’t want God involved with us. The implications of this position – the questions it raises – would undoubtedly require a second series of lectures, or at least a few more nights at the pub with friends, to unpack.
Past Lectures:
1. Creed, Scripture, and Their Modern Alienation
2. The Tanakh as Christian Scripture
3. The New Testament and the Regula Fidei
Next Lecture:
6. Genesis 1:1 and Luke 1:26-38
Notes by Bruce Hamill and Jason Goroncy
jasongoroncy.com 