Author: Jason Goroncy

When things fall apart in theology and church practice

‘… we have been given a perennially valid paradigm for theology in our Christ-centered trinitarian confession of faith, expressed in the classic ecumenical creeds of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon. When things seem to be falling apart in theology and church practice, then I would propose that we reclaim once again the strong name of the Trinity, because there we find a continuing framework of Christian identity, transcending the discontinuities and oscillations of history and culture’. – Carl E. Braaten, ‘The Cultural Captivity of Theology: An Evangelical Catholic Perspective’ (a paper presented at The Inaugural Margaret McKinnon Memorial Lecture on Christianity and Culture, Nepean Presbytery of the Uniting Church in Australia, Melbourne, 1997), 20.

Series – Theodicy: The Justification of God

Here’s the links to the series of studies by Trevor Faggotter based on PT Forsyth’s, The Justification of God:

Theodicy: The Justification of God – 11

THE CONQUEST OF TIME BY ETERNITY

Study 11

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

Take courage; I have conquered the world! – Jesus (John 16:33b)

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen… (Hebrews 11:1)

‘…eternity is doing far more for time than time is doing for eternity’ (P.T. Forsyth)[1]

Aware of the complexities of life, the tragedy of war on a global scale, satanic power, and the blindness of humanity among nations, faith sees Jesus! The Justification of God is written that the church might re-establish a renewed confidence in Jesus Christ, and the gospel, on a grand scale. P.T. Forsyth confidently asserts his gospel convictions:

Faith is more than an individual calm; it is the Church’s collective confidence on the scale of the world for the destiny of the world. The evil world will not win at last, because it failed to win at the only time it ever could. It is a vanquished world where men play their devilries. Christ has overcome it. It can make tribulation, but desolation it can never make.[2]

ALL THINGS ARE YOURS[3]

The writing of P.T. Forsyth continues to be a highly valuable gift to the church. Forsyth belongs to us. Our appreciation of Forsyth’s enduring theodicy, should serve us well in our ministries – bearing faithful witness to Christ, in the face of all things.

All things are ours, even that victory, that elevation over a world’s sin in us; and our very relapses cannot rob us of it. It is easy to believe with a poor sense of what the holy is, of what it makes sin to be, of what the world is, and can do, for the devil. But it needs the supernatural courage of the Cross to believe (at such an hour as this, say,) in the completeness of the Cross and its eternal victory. But there, the more horror, the more hope. The most damning light is the saving light. Therefore, the more holy fear, the more the Cross is working in us; and the sense of the Cross’s judgment is the effect of its grace.[4]

In 1 Corinthians 3:21, Paul – having warned his hearers against following party or theological factions – reminds the church that we can learn from and make good use of all things – For all things are Yours! Forsyth may not say everything well.[5] However, he belongs to us. And we can learn much from him. Forsyth himself, skillfully attributed measured praise to the negative, critical work of the German philosopher – Friedrich Nietzsche,[6] who felt as millions feel, that life culminated in its tragic experiences, and that whatever solved the tragedy of life solved all life.[7] Sadly Nietzsche, a vehement critic of Christianity, suffered debilitating mental illness towards the end of his life. Forsyth comments upon this influential man’s failure to find his answers in the cross of Christ (a salient warning, I think):

To grasp the real, deep tragedy of life is enough to unhinge any mind which does not find God’s solution of it in the central tragedy of the Cross and its redemption.[8]

Our plethora of ‘why’ questions concerning injustice and the matter of evil, are resolved in the action of Christ’s cross.  For especially here, Jesus gives active praise to the Father, for the rightness of his just and true judgments, as he personally and willingly enters the furnace of God’s holy judgment upon sin, and bears the guilt and evil of humanity. We can replicate the observations of Jesus early ministry, now applying them to his cross, and the fruit of that event for all eternity: ‘He has done everything well.‘ (Mark 7:37).

FAITH IN CHRIST FOR ALL CIRCUMSTANCES OF LIFE

In the light of:

  1. The worst evil – murdering Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and Author of Life, and
  2. The best news of all – the resurrection of Jesus as Man, which opened possibilities, and a reality, not previously dreamed of,

the early church knew that all things were working together for good for those who loved God and were called according to his purpose. They learned to give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18).  Through the cross, understood by faith, in the power of the Holy Spirit the church down through history is assured that nothing is outside of God’s control, nothing is exempt from being used for the purposes of God.[9]

Life begins as a problem, but when it ends well it ends as a faith: a great problem, therefore a great faith. Ordinary experience gives us the first half, it sets a problem; but the second half, the answer of faith to us, comes from God’s revelation of grace. As we here pass from the one to the other it should be on large lines, not that we may simply descant on life in a literary way, but that we may magnify the greatness of Christ.

FORSYTH’S CLOSING RÉSUMÉ

The final chapter is a résumé of all that Forsyth has been writing about in this book. He expands upon the following 9 essential points:

  1. ‘Life, then, is a problem. If offers a task rather than an enjoyment. The soul must be achieved. The kingdom is above all a gift, but it is also a conquest. We are here to fight the good fight rather than to have a good time. The people to whom life is only an excursion, a picnic, a stroll, or a game grow more and more outlanders in society.[10]
  2. The problem of life is tragic, and no mere riddle. It is not a war game. ‘We are in no Kriegspiel,[11] but in the real thing always. It touches the nerve.’[12] ‘Life is not a seductive puzzle; it is a tragic battle for existence, for power, for eternal life’.[13]
  3. There is a solution to the problem. Our battle is not a sport for heaven. The solution is given to us rather than won by us. Already done and not merely shown.
  4. The solution is practical, not philosophical. It is not really an answer to a riddle but a victory in a battle. A life problem cannot be thought out but lived out. Man conquers by faith and not by philosophy.[14]
  5. The practical solution of life by the soul is outside life. The destiny of experience is beyond itself. The lines of life’s moral movement and of thought’s nisus converge in a point beyond life and history.[15]
  6. This world is only complete in another; it is part and prelude of another, and runs up into it, and comes home in it as body does in soul. What is meant when we speak of another world? We do not mean only one that begins at death. We do not mean a new tract of time beyond the grave, but another order, another dimension, of things, that both haunts the precincts and fills the spaces of this life always.
  7. All the crises of His [Jesus’] life, I have been saying, had themselves a crisis in His death, where the victory and the solution was won once for all. He did not cheer the disciples with the sanguine optimism of the good time coming. It was not a sanguine optimism, but an optimism of actual faith and conquest. It was not the hope of a conquering Messiah soon. ‘He is here,’ was the Gospel.[16]
  8. The solution in the Gospel is wrought once for all because it was on a world scale, an eternal scale, because He, and He alone of all men, was on such a scale. He was on a scale, which made the New Testament writers give Him not only a human and historic influence but a cosmic, nay, an absolute. He was to command not only the race but the universe, and save not only the soul but the whole groaning and travailing creation.[17]
  9. Trust God. ‘We cannot solve life by moral thought or effort but by trust, which unites us with the invincible, eternal, moral act of God in Christ. Christianity is not the sacrifice we make, but the sacrifice we trust; not the victory we win, but the victory we inherit … Christ crucified and risen is the final, eternal answer to the riddle of life. One day, when we sit in heavenly places in Christ, we shall see the tangle of life unroll and fall into shape. We shall see death as the key of life. Our own dead could tell us so already. We shall see guilt destroyed; and, with that, death, wrong, darkness, and grief’.[18]

FAITH GREATER THAN THOUGHT

Forsyth’s profound thought rouses us to give our own thought process a solid workout. However, the relationship between thought and faith, is an important one to understand:

Thought is a mighty and precious power, but on the last things it does more to enlarge our field than to steady our feet. It gives us range, not footing; a horizon rather than a foundation. It does not establish the soul, but widens its vision. It extends our reach more than it fixes our grasp. It therefore often magnifies the problem rather than solves it. Truly, that is a great service. To greaten the problem is to prepare for a great answer. Faith is not there as an asylum for those who are too lazy or shallow to think. But, though thought may tax faith mightily, it cannot do its work. It gives it a grand challenge, but it has not faith’s final word.[19]

Rich thought can certainly expand our horizons, but faith steadies our feet, causing us to stand firm, securely, in the strength of the Lord’s power (Ephesians 6:10-18):

There is something that gives us power to live and conquer, where thought may only raise challenge and doubt. Thought opens a world ahead of us, but faith forces us back into the soul and its case. Faith must be more conservative than thought; for it is deeper. The vaster the world that thought opens, the vaster is the question it puts; and the answers, the solutions, that fitted a small world, go out of date in a large. But the solution, the secret, of the soul, is the same yesterday, today, and forever. It is Christ dead and risen that has the key of life. It is living faith in His living, giving, and saving God.[20]

It is good to finish our study book! Faith fortified. Yet, of making many books, there is no end. Much study is a weariness of the flesh (Eccl. 12:12). Jesus said: You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life (John 5:39-40).

TO THE LAST WORD – LET US COME!

We only ever say second-to-last words; God, the Word always has the last Word. So then, let us come to the Word, Jesus Christ in faith, in prayer, in praise and thanks, resting in His finished work, assured of the glorious future, glorified in Him: Thank you Lord, for your servant, P.T. Forsyth! May his writing and insight continue to be a blessing, to many! Jesus you said: be of good cheer. Jesus, you have overcome the world, triumphed over the power of evil, and secured eternal life. You are our future, and our Life. Amen.

[1] P.T. Forsyth, This Life and the Next, London Independent Press Ltd., 1918 (1948), p. 81.

[2] P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, Blackwood, 1988, p. 223.

[3] For the wide application of this short biblical phrase, I am very grateful to Geoffrey C. Bingham, All Things are Yours, NCPI, Blackwood, 1991 (1996).

[4] P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, pp. 222-223.

[5] Indeed Forsyth’s final book commends prayers for the dead, and displays a troublesome tendency towards Universalism:  See P.T. Forsyth, This Life and the Next, London Independent Press Ltd., 1918 (1948). It is worthwhile reading it. But many will have strong reservations about some of his statements. [NB. Not all of Forsyth’s readers are as dismissive and unappreciative of his insights in This Life and the Next as Faggotter is here.]

[6] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a significant influence in the establishment of an understanding of life known as Existentialism. This is a movement in philosophy that says that it is not God, bur rather individuals, that create the meaning of their own lives.

[7] P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 210.

[8] P.T. Forsyth, p. 210.

[9] P.T. Forsyth, p. 4.

[10] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, pp. 208ff.

[11] Kriegspiel: A full-scale war game between two nations.

[12] P.T. Forsyth,, p. 209.

[13] P.T. Forsyth, p. 209.

[14] P.T. Forsyth, p. 211.

[15] P.T. Forsyth, p. 212.

[16] P.T. Forsyth, p. 219.

[17] P.T. Forsyth, p. 219.

[18] P.T. Forsyth, pp. 220-221.

[19] P.T. Forsyth, p. 211.

[20] P.T. Forsyth, pp. 211-212.

Hitler on the fulfilling of universal longing

In posting a quote, rarely (if ever) does a blogger wish to endorse all that the quoted author has said. This is particularly the case here. I have been reading two books today: Jim Gordon’s brilliant biography on James Denney, and Hitler’s Mein Kamp. The two books, unsurpringly, have little in common. I hope to post on Jim’s book sometime soon. However, for now, I found this passage in Mein Kamp so revealing that it deserved posting:

Generally speaking, every action carried out on the grand style in this world is the expression of a desire that has already existed for a long time in millions of human hearts, a longing which may have been nourished in silence. Yes, it may happen that throughout centuries men may have been yearning for the solution of a definite problem, because they have been suffering under an unendurable order of affairs, without seeing on the far horizon the coming fulfilment of the universal longing. Nations which are no longer capable of finding an heroic deliverance from such a sorrowful fate may be looked upon as effete. But, on the other hand, nothing gives better proof of the vital forces of a people and the consequent guarantee of its right to exist than that one day, through a happy decree of Destiny, a man arises who is capable of liberating his people from some great oppression, or of wiping out some bitter distress, or of calming the national soul which had been tormented through its sense of insecurity, and thus fulfilling what had long been the universal yearning of the people’. – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939), 392.

It all sounds scaringly familiar, doesn’t it?

Conference: Religion, Atheism and the Community of Reason in Modernity

The University of Oxford have announced the Second Annual Postgraduate Conference in Continental Philosophy of Religion. The conference, entitled ‘Religion, Atheism and the Community of Reason in Modernity’, will take place at Regents Park College, Oxford University, on the 22nd September 2008. The confirmed keynote speakers are Prof. Raimond Gaita (KCL) and Dr Mark Wynn (Exeter). Areas of discussion include the relation of reason to religion; the role of religious beliefs, practices and forms of argumentation in philosophical discourse; and the very possibility of religious philosophy. The hope is that these topics with be discussed in respect to both contemporary philosophical debate and the history of philosophy.

They have issued a call for papers of 20-30 minutes from postgraduates and those who have recently obtained their doctorate. ‘We encourage both historical and contemporary engagements and, although we wish to provide a forum for continental philosophy (which we understand in its broadest sense as European philosophy from Descartes to Meillassoux), we welcome papers from other traditions, especially analytic philosophy. Possible topics may include:

Contemporary Issues:

  • The persistence of theological tropes in contemporary philosophy (apocalypses and utopias, for example)
  • The relation between religious and secular ethics
  • The role of emotion in philosophical accounts of the self and practical reasoning
  • Cosmopolitanism and communitarianism
  • The theological turn in recent phenomenology

Historical topics:

  • The early modern project of demystification (Spinoza, les philosophes, Hume)
  • The Spinoza controversy and the genesis of philosophy of religion in German Idealism
  • Rationalism and atheism in the reception of Hegel (Feuerbach, Strauss)
  • The critique of religion in Nietzsche, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis etc
  • Polemics against (onto-)theology in French thought in the sixties and seventies (Deleuze, Kristeva and the early Derrida)’

Please send abstracts of between 300 and 500 words to godphil@googlemail.com by the deadline of 20th July 2008. For more details, see http://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/news_and_events/RACRIM.pdf

Books, books, books

Ben, over at Faith and Theology, offers a wee review of Robert L. Short’s, The Parables of Dr. Seuss.

And while I’m mentioning books, I’ve been meaning for ages to draw attention to Amanda Craig, an author of five novels, and children’s book critic for The Times and columnist for The Sunday Times. Her site is a mine of helpful reviews and recommendations for children’s books, and anyone who loves all the Hairy Maclary books and is ‘increasingly resistant to pop-ups, and other gimmicks’ is already earning some major brownie points from me.

John Pilger on the cowardice of silence

‘When I phoned Aung San Suu Kyi’s home in Rangoon yesterday, I imagined the path to her door that looks down on Inya Lake. Through ragged palms, a trip-wire is visible, a reminder that this is the prison of a woman whose party was elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by men in ludicrous uniforms. Her phone rang and rang; I doubt if it is connected now. Once, in response to my “How are you?” she laughed about her piano’s need of tuning. She also spoke about lying awake, breathless, listening to the thumping of her heart.

Now her silence is complete. This week, the Burmese junta renewed her house arrest, beginning the 13th year. As far as I know, a doctor has not been allowed to visit her since January, and her house was badly damaged in the cyclone. And yet the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, could not bring himself to utter her name on his recent, grovelling tour of Burma. It is as if her fate and that of her courageous supporters, who on Tuesday beckoned torture and worse merely by unfurling the banners of her National League for Democracy, have become an embarrassment for those who claim to represent the “international community”. Why?

Where are the voices of those in governments and their related institutions who know how to help Burma? Where are the honest brokers who once eased the oppressed away from their shadows, the true and talented peacemakers who see societies not in terms of their usefulness to “interests” but as victims of it? Where are the Dennis Hallidays and Hans von Sponecks who rose to assistant secretary-general of the UN by the sheer moral force of their international public service?

The answer is simple. They are all but extinguished by a virus called the “war on terror”. Where once men and women of good heart and good intellect and good faith stood in parliaments and world bodies in defence of the human rights of others, there is now cowardice. Think of the parliament at Westminster, which cannot even cajole itself into holding an inquiry into the criminal invasion of Iraq, let alone to condemn it and speak up for its victims. Last year, 100 eminent British doctors pleaded with the minister for international development, then Hilary Benn, for emergency medical aid to be sent to Iraqi children’s hospitals: “Babies are dying for want of a 95 pence oxygen mask,” they wrote. The minister turned them down flat.

I mention that because medical aid for children is exactly the kind of assistance the British government now insists the Burmese junta should accept without delay. “There are people suffering in Burma,” said an indignant Gordon Brown. “There are children going without food … it is utterly unacceptable that when international aid is offered, the regime will try to prevent that getting in.” David Miliband chimed in with “malign neglect”. Say that to the children of Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza, where Britain’s role is as neglectful and malign as any. As scores of children in Shia areas of Baghdad are blown to bits by America and what the BBC calls Iraq’s “democratic government”, the British are silent, as ever. “We” say nothing while Israel torments and starves the children of Gaza, ignoring every attempt to bring a ceasefire with Hamas, all in the name of a crusade that dares not say its name. What might have been a new day for humanity in the post-cold war years, even a renewal of the spirit of the Declaration of Human Rights, of “never again” from Palestine to Burma, was cancelled by the ambitions of a sole rapacious power that has cowed all. The “war on terror” allows Australia and Israel to train Burma’s internal security thugs. It consumes both most humanitarian aid indirectly and the very internationalism capable of bringing the “clever” pressure on Burma, about which Aung San Suu Kyi once spoke.

Dismissing the idiocy of a military intervention in her country, she asked: “What about all those who trade with the generals, who give them many millions of dollars that keep them going?” She was referring to the huge oil and gas companies, Total and Chevron, which effectively hand the regime $2.7bn a year, and the Halliburton company (former chief executive Vice-President Dick Cheney) that backed the construction of the Yadana pipeline, and the British travel companies that send tourists across bridges and roads built with forced labour. Audley Travel promotes its Burma holidays in the Guardian. The BBC, in contravention of its charter, has just bought 75% of Lonely Planet travel guides, a truculent defender of “our” right to be tourists in Burma regardless of slave labour, or cyclones, or the woman beyond the trip-wire. Shame’.

[Source: The Guardian]

Kierkegaard on the conscience

‘By the aid of conscience things are so arranged that the judicial report follows at once upon every fault, and that the guilty one himself must write it. But it is written with sympathetic ink and only becomes thoroughly clear when in eternity it is held up to the light, while eternity holds audit over the consciences. Substantially everyone arrives in eternity bringing with him and delivering the most accurate account of every least insignificance which he has committed or has left undone. Therefore to hold judgment in eternity is a thing a child could manage; there is really nothing for a third person to do, everything, even to the most insignificant word is counted and in order’. – Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death (trans. Walter Lowrie; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 255.

Jürgen Moltmann – “Horizons of Hope: A critique of ‘Spe salvi'”

“In hope we were saved” (Spe salvi facti sumus). Pope Benedict’s encyclical Spe salvi, released in late 2007, begins with this quote from Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:24). Benedict goes on immediately to speak of redemption: “According to the Christian faith, “redemption” – salvation – is not simply a given. Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present.” Commenting on this encyclical is the German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who has for years pondered a theology of hope.

If we compare Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi, with Vatican II’s 1965 document on “Joy and Hope,” or Gaudium et Spes (also known as “The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”), the peculiarity of Benedict’s encyclical immediately catches our eye. Benedict’s encyclical is intended for church insiders; it is aimed spiritually and pastorally at the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church and “all Christian believers.” It limits Christian hope to the faithful and separates them from those in the world “who have no hope.”

By contrast, Gaudium et Spes begins with the church’s deep solidarity with “the entire human family.” This solidarity is described as follows: “The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts.” The Vatican II document addresses and responds to the concerns of today’s world: human dignity and human rights as well as peace and the development of an international community.

None of these concerns is discussed in Benedict’s encyclical, which begins neither with the solidarity of Christians with all people nor with the universal “God of hope.” Rather, it subjectively and ecclesially begins with “us”: “in hope we are saved.” We and not the others; the church and not the world. This is a stark distinction indeed between the believing and the unbelieving or otherwise-believing: we have hope – the others have no hope.

“Faith is hope” is the first heading following the introduction and is the encyclical’s primary expression of confidence. What is meant, however, is actually the reverse. “Hope is synonymous with faith.” With this formulation, the distinctive character of Christian hope falls away. The encyclical could also have been called “Through Faith We Are Saved.” One wonders why Paul and the entire theological tradition of faith and hope have thus been altered.

The encyclical positions itself apologetically in response to modern complaints that Christian hope is “individualistic” and in contrast calls it communal. Salvation has always been seen as a “social reality.” “While this community-oriented vision of the ‘blessed life’ is certainly directed beyond the present world, as such it also has to do with the building up of this world.” Yet the section ends with a warning: “Are we perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current history, that no positive world order can prosper where souls are overgrown?”

What is lacking in the papal writing? What is missing is the gospel of the kingdom of God, the gospel that Jesus himself proclaimed. What is missing is the message of the lordship of the risen Christ over the living and the dead and the entire cosmos that we find in the apostle Paul. What is missing is the “resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come” as it appears in the creeds. What is missing is the salvation of a groaning creation and the hope of a new earth where justice dwells. In short, what is missing is the hope of the all-encompassing promise of God who is coming: “See, I am making all things new.” By limiting hope to the blessedness of souls in eternal life, Benedict also leaves out the prophetic promises of the Old Testament. Christian hope then becomes hard to differentiate from a Gnostic religion of salvation.

The encyclical criticizes the modern world’s faith in the idea of progress and human delusions of grandeur. Because faith in progress was finished off by the catastrophes of both world wars in the 20th century, the papal critique resembles the killing of a corpse. The same applies to the critique of the modern Age of Reason and the modern bourgeois and socialist revolutions of freedom. The enthusiasm of the philosopher Immanuel Kant for the Enlightenment is discarded while feudalism and its absolutism that granted no rights is ignored. The corpse of Marxism is subsequently convicted of “fundamental errors.” Marx’s real error is materialism. “He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man’s freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil.” Late-born anti-Marxism is rarely more smoothly put!

The pope appropriates the “self-critique” of modernity that came to expression in Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s treatment of “the dialectic of enlightenment”: “Man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope.” That will not convince modern, thinking persons, however, since they have already absorbed this self-criticism, and for it they need no theology.

Supported by the Second Vatican Council, Catholic and Protestant theologians entered into Christian-Marxist dialogue in the 1960s through the Catholic Paulus–Gesellschaft. The participants tried to bring the humanistic Marxists, who were acquainted with evil and knew the power of death, near to grace and the hope of the resurrection. Milan Machovec and Roger Garaudy understood very well the deficiency of the immanent hopes of the modern age, and we theologians, for our part, took up their passion for the liberation of the oppressed and for the rights of the humiliated. The “theology of hope” and the “theology of liberation” arose from a cooperative-critical engagement with the situation of modernity. “Political theology” shaped greater frameworks for the deepest solidarity of the church “with the entire human family.”

The statement that “a world without God is a world without hope” is in its simplicity empirically misleading, for a world with God is empirically also a world with resignation and terror in the name of God. Hope depends on the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ, on the God of the resurrection of the coming kingdom on earth. Only this One is the “God of hope.” Only this God is expected to be the “One who comes.”

The encyclical does well to name “settings for learning and practicing hope.” “Prayer as a school of hope” is named first. That is certainly correct. But prayer is just as much a school of faith. What joins hope to prayer? It is watching. In the temptation of Gethsemane, Jesus asks the sleeping disciples only this: “So could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation.” Prayer is always linked with waking up to the world of God and the awakening of all the senses. In prayer we hear and speak, in watching we open our eyes and all our senses for the arrival of God in our life and in the world. Praying with Christ belongs to the spirituality of watchful senses by which we “see” Christ in the poor, sick and imprisoned. That watching is the setting for the learning of hope.

Finally, the encyclical names “judgment as a setting for learning and practicing hope.” That too is not false. But I want to direct the view of the end toward the beginning. The origin of hope is birth, not death. The birth of a new life is an occasion for hope. The rebirth of lived life is an occasion for even greater hope. And when the dead are raised, they enter into the fulfilled hope of life. The setting for learning hope in life, therefore, is the possibility of starting anew and a new beginning, the true freedom.

Benedict XVI closes with a hymn to Mary, the humble and obedient handmaiden of the Lord, who becomes the mother of all the faithful and is named “the Mother of hope.” This is in the Bible, but so too is the other Mary, the Mary who rejoiced in God her Savior: “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:51-53). She takes the song of Hannah from the book of Samuel and praises the revolutionary God of the prophets. Paul saw this God at work in the community of Christ: “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, the things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are … Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:27b-28, 31).

The God who creates justice for those who suffer violence, the God who has raised up the degraded and crucified Jesus, that is the God of hope for Mary, the prophets and the apostles.

[Source: The Christian Century]

Sixty Years Of Human Rights Failure

Amnesty International has just released its 2008 report: Sixty Years Of Human Rights Failure – Governments Must Apologize And Act Now. The report challenges world leaders to apologise for six decades of human rights failure and re-commit themselves to deliver concrete improvements.

“The human rights flashpoints in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Gaza, Iraq and Myanmar demand immediate action,” said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, launching AI Report 2008: State of the World’s Human Rights.

“Injustice, inequality and impunity are the hallmarks of our world today. Governments must act now to close the yawning gap between promise and performance.”

Amnesty International’s Report 2008, shows that sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations, people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries, face unfair trials in at least 54 countries and are not allowed to speak freely in at least 77 countries.

“2007 was characterised by the impotence of Western governments and the ambivalence or reluctance of emerging powers to tackle some of the world’s worst human rights crises, ranging from entrenched conflicts to growing inequalities which are leaving millions of people behind,” said Ms Khan.

Amnesty International cautioned that the biggest threat to the future of human rights is the absence of a shared vision and collective leadership.

“2008 presents an unprecedented opportunity for new leaders coming to power and countries emerging on the world stage to set a new direction and reject the myopic policies and practices that in recent years have made the world a more dangerous and divided place,” said Ms Khan.

Amnesty International challenged governments to set a new paradigm for collective leadership based on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“The most powerful must lead by example,” said Ms Khan.

* China must live up to the human rights promises it made around the Olympic Games and allow free speech and freedom of the press and end “re-education through labour”.

* The USA must close Guantánamo detention camp and secret detention centres, prosecute the detainees under fair trial standards or release them, and unequivocally reject the use of torture and ill-treatment.

* Russia must show greater tolerance for political dissent, and none for impunity on human rights abuses in Chechnya.

* The EU must investigate the complicity of its member states in “renditions” of terrorist suspects and set the same bar on human rights for its own members as it does for other countries.

Ms Khan warned: “World leaders are in a state of denial but their failure to act has a high cost. As Iraq and Afghanistan show, human rights problems are not isolated tragedies, but are like viruses that can infect and spread rapidly, endangering all of us.”

“Governments today must show the same degree of vision, courage and commitment that led the United Nations to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sixty years ago.”

“There is a growing demand from people for justice, freedom and equality.”

Some of the most striking images of 2007 were of monks in Myanmar, lawyers in Pakistan, and women activists in Iran.

“Restless and angry, people will not be silenced, and leaders ignore them at their own peril,” said Ms Khan.

The full report can be downloaded here.

New Zealanders to Celebrate 500th Anniversary of John Calvin’s Birth

As I’ve noted before, 2009 will be the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. To mark this occasion the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership and the Theology and Religious Studies Department of the University of Otago are organizing a two-day conference focusing on Calvin’s legacy on church and society. The conference will be held on 24-25 August 2009, and will feature two international keynote speakers – Professor Randall Zachman (from the University of Notre Dame) and Professor Elsie McKee (from Princeton Theological Seminary) – as well as local contributors. The venue will be Knox College, which is most appropriate given the fact that 2009 will also be Knox’s centennial year.

Burma Update

This just in from Burma Campaign:

Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention

Yesterday, the regime extended Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention again. No formal announcement was made, but reports say the detention is for at least another six months. She has now spent over 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest. Her current period of house arrest began in 2003. The regime is once again breaking its own laws by extending her detention for a total of more than five years. The State Protection Law 1975, under which she is held, only allows the regime to detain her for a maximum of five years. Around 20 members of the National League for Democracy were also arrested yesterday as they marched to her home to call for her release.

Even though UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was in Burma in the run-up to Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention expiring, he did not call on Burma’s generals to release her. In fact, he didn’t even mention her name. The international community is failing to put pressure on the regime because it is afraid it will affect aid deals. However, the current humanitarian crisis is being caused by a political problem, a dictatorship that refuses to allow aid to reach the people and Aung San Suu Kyi is key to solving that political problem.

Cylcone update …

More than three weeks after the devastating cyclone in Burma, at least 200,000 people are feared dead and 2.5 million people remain in urgent need of aid. Most people have still not received the aid they desperately need because the regime continues to deny aid workers free access to operate in the areas most severely affected by the cyclone. Following reports that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had secured agreement from Burma’s generals for aid workers to be allowed into the country, it was hoped that things would change. However, it is now clear that the regime is not keeping its word. We continue to receive reports that aid workers are being denied visas and unable to operate freely in the worst affected areas. The US, UK and France are still being blocked from using their resources to deliver the large scale emergency and medical assistance needed.

Redressing an ancient land

I was encouraged to read in the latest edition of The Expository Times a wee reflection on Australia’s recent apology to the stolen generations (which I have posted about here, here, and here) by William Loader (Murdoch University, Perth) on ‘Australia’s Day of Apology to the Stolen Generations of its Indigenous Peoples (13th February 2008)’. The article begins with this moving poem:

The tears touch the red dust beneath our feet
changing the colour of our land.
The cries of children forcibly removed
and mothers running behind parting cars
echo today in Australia’s parliament.
The drought of denial is broken,
the stories heard at the highest level.
Old men and women, first peoples
– and some still in their thirties –
who bear the wounds, respond to heal the nation,
embracing the bipartisan apology,
bringing a coolamon, cradle for newborns,
container of nourishment,
to the heart of government,
a symbol of new beginning.

Rejoice, peoples of the world, in our tears!
Celebrate our pain, our being born again to new hope!
Watch over our grief and our setting out afresh
to bring justice and hope,
to walk and work with the ancient peoples of this land,
to rebuild a nation with reconciliation
and engagement which brings seeds to life,
sees the deserts bloom,
and builds firm trunks and mighty trees across our land.

The tears will dry.
The pain will always remain.
No equation can right the wrongs.
No need to fear or deny memory,
but only to welcome new possibilities,
let life burst from the burning,
fresh shoots from charred remains,
and the beauty of diversity and change
redress our ancient land.

Crucible

The Australian Evangelical Alliance has launched a new online journal for theology and ministry called Crucible. The stated aim is ‘to enhance creative thinking about the relationship of biblical and theological truths to the life, ministry and mission of the church. It is a forum for scholars and practitioners to publish material, interact and resource the Christian community’. The first issue includes the following articles, reviews and poems:

Mercy comes to us through judgement

Just spent a long weekend up in the Scottish Highlands salmon fishing, watching my 2-year-old daughter ceaselessly enjoy herself, reading Denney’s brilliant commentary on 2 Corinthians, drinking great whisky, and enjoying the rich company of some special friends. Does it get any better than that! Anyway, in the spirit of sharing all good things, here’s just one (long) paragraph of Denney’s extended discussion on 5:18–21 that was too good not to share:

‘No one who has felt the power of this appeal will be very anxious to defend the Apostolic Gospel from the charges which are sometimes made against it. When he is told that it is impossible for the doom of sin to fall on the Sinless One, and that even if it were conceivable it would be frightfully immoral, he is not disquieted. He recognises in the moral contradictions of this text the surest sign that the secret of the Atonement is revealed in it: he feels that God’s work of reconciliation necessarily involves such an identification of sinlessness and sin. He knows that there is an appalling side to sin, and he is ready to believe that there is an appalling side to redemption also a side the most distant sight of which makes the proudest heart quail, and stops every mouth before God. He knows that the salvation which he needs must be one in which God’s mercy comes through, and not over. His judgment; and this is the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. But without becoming controversial on a subject on which more than on any other the temper of controversy is unseemly, reference may be made to the commonest form of objection to the apostolic doctrine, in the sincere hope that some one who has stumbled at that doctrine may see it more truly. The objection I refer to discredits propitiation in the alleged interest of the love of God. “We do not need,” the objectors say, “to propitiate an angry God. This is a piece of heathenism, of which a Christian ought to be ashamed. It is a libel on the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name is love, and who waits to be gracious.” What are we to say to such words, which are uttered as boldly as if there were no possible reply, or rather as if the Apostles had never written, or had been narrow-minded unreceptive souls, who had not only failed to understand their Master, but had taught with amazing perversity the very opposite of what He taught on the most essential of all points the nature of God and His relation to sinful men? We must say this. It is quite true that we have not to propitiate an offended God: the very fact upon which the Gospel proceeds is that we cannot do any such thing. But it is not true that no propitiation is needed. As truly as guilt is a real thing, as truly as God’s condemnation of sin is a real thing, a propitiation is needed. And it is here, I think, that those who make the objection referred to part company, not only with St. Paul, but with all the Apostles. God is love, they say, and therefore He does not require a propitiation. God is love, say the Apostles, and therefore He provides a propitiation. Which of these doctrines appeals best to the conscience? Which of them gives reality, and contents, and substance, to the love of God? Is it not the apostolic doctrine? Does not the other cut out and cast away that very thing which made the soul of God s love to Paul and John? “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us … Him that knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf” That is how they spoke in the beginning of the Gospel, and so let us speak. Nobody has any right to borrow the words “God is love” from an apostle, and then to put them in circulation after carefully emptying them of their apostolic import. Still less has any one a right to use them as an argument against the very thing in which the Apostles placed their meaning. But this is what they do who appeal to love against propitiation. To take the condemnation out of the Cross is to take the nerve out of the Gospel; it will cease to hold men s hearts with its original power when the reconciliation which is preached through it contains the mercy, but not the judgment of God. Its whole virtue, its consistency with God’s character, its aptness to man’s need, its real dimensions as a revelation of love, depend ultimately on this, that mercy comes to us in it through judgment’. (pp. 200-2)

What is Worship?

Those who have appreciated the ministry of James Torrance will be encouraged to take note of this wee reflection on worship by Worldwide Church of God minister, Dr. Joseph Tkach. Good news is always worth reading/watching/listening to … and then sharing with others. Tkach writes:

Christians around the world participate in an act of worship that is known by several names, including the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, Communion, and even the New Testament Passover.

Whatever it may be called in any given Christian tradition, the eating of bread and drinking of wine is done in remembrance of Jesus as he commanded.

In Luke 22:19-20 (NIV), we read:

And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.

As we participate in this act of worship it helps to understand what Jesus meant in his command “in remembrance.” The Greek word used in the Gospel of Luke is anamnesis, a word of rich liturgical significance. It does not refer merely to recalling a past event. It points to remembering in such a way that we understand our actual participation in that past event.

And there is a specific reason for this kind of remembrance. Our own personal past, present and future are in fact fully enmeshed in the personal experience of Jesus Christ in his life, death, resurrection and ascension. Jesus Christ became human for our sakes, in our place and on our behalf. As our Creator and our Redeemer, he took up our cause in his own being by becoming human for us.

Authentic worship, therefore, does not originate with us, but rather with Jesus in whom every human being exists and has meaning.

Therefore our emphasis in worship is not upon ourselves, but upon Christ’s action on our behalf. As Scottish theologian James Torrance explained it: “Our response in faith and obedience is a response (this is “response” with a lower case “r”) to the Response (this “Response” is with an upper case “R”)already made for us by Christ…” (Torrance, J.B. The Vicarious Humanity of Christ appearing in The Incarnation, Torrance, T.F. (ed.) (Handsel Press, Edinburgh: 1981).

Our worship of God is authentic worship only because Jesus himself, as the representative human, the perfect human, in our place and on our behalf, worships God for us and in us.

Early Christian leaders made this same point. The fourth century church father Athanasius taught that there is a two-way movement in Jesus Christ. On the one hand, Jesus is God’s saving action toward us. He is the act of God the Father reaching down to deal with our sin and guilt and shame and emptiness. Jesus ministers the things of God to all humanity.

And on the other hand, Jesus is Man representing all humanity, responding perfectly to God on behalf of every human. He is not only God coming to man. He is man going to God, on our behalf and in our place.

Jesus is our perfect and permanent mediator and high priest. He is God acting for humanity, and he is the perfect human responding to God on our behalf. He offers to God on our behalf the perfect and complete Response of everything God wants and expects of humanity.

As the perfect human representing all humans, Jesus answers the Father not with rebellion, not with indifference, not with coldness or apathy, but with zeal and passion and obedience and sincere submission and true adoration. He is human for us, standing in for us, representing all humanity as he lives in true fellowship with God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

In other words, worship is really something we do with our lives as we live in Christ. It happens in every moment as we reflect Jesus Christ who lives within us. It happens when we read a story to our children, when we hug our parents, when we show kindness to another person.

And it happens whenever we eat and drink the Lord’s Supper. All this is participating in the very life of the Trinity and feeling the joy and love shared by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.