From the Lectionary for 30 April 2023 (Easter 4A)

1 Peter 2:24-25 (NRSV Updated Edition)

He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

John 10:1-10 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

~

"The text says, “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice.” In Jerusalem the gate through which the sheep were driven when they were to be sacrificed was the Sheep Gate and it had a gatekeeper. When the priests were ready for more sheep the gatekeeper would open the gate and the sheep would be driven in.

"In the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And here it seems the figure of speech suggests the gatekeeper opens the gate for the Lamb of God to go into the sacrificial chambers. Suddenly the metaphor has changed and for a moment the shepherd becomes the lamb. Could this be how we know his voice?  He is the one willing to die as an act of communication and forgiveness that shows us what we do to each other in our distorted quest for peace.

"This is the gentle voice; forgiving, merciful, long suffering and self-sacrificial that is like the perfect mother we all wish for in the recesses of our hearts. We will follow this voice. It has no harsh overtones. This voice will save us from our own destructive quest for an inner peace at the expense of our neighbor and in its place shows us a love so deep and complete that no one is forsaken."

- Thomas L. Truby, from sermon delivered on May 11th, 2014 (http://girardianlectionary.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Easter4-2014-Mothers-Day-This-Abundant-Life.doc)

~

"There are several rather extraordinary features of John’s Good Shepherd text, which I suspect can only be brought to life by the eucharistic Christ. Jesus says that he is the door — and of course it is the purpose of the door that it defines what is in and what is out. But he is a very special sort of door, because it is by entering through him, which means following him through a certain sort of death, that the sheep will be able to go in and out and find pasture. Now what is extraordinary about this is the freedom involved. The Good Shepherd enables people to go in and out and find pasture — it is a strange sort of door which does not seek to define people, but gives access to a temporary shelter which exists for the benefit of the sheep without wishing to confine the sheep therein.

"There is no definitive inside and outside for the Good Shepherd, there are places of shelter and of feeding, different places to which the door gives access, and which presuppose movement, non-fixity, and confidence in being neither in nor out. It is assumed that the best feeding place might not be one that seems to be “in,” yet the good shepherd is able to make that place available to his sheep.

...

"The sheep hear the voice of the good shepherd, and he calls them by name and leads them out. The sheep are ones who have entered by the door. That is, they have learned that it is only by undergoing a certain sort of death, which we celebrate in baptism, that they are able to become part of the fold. ... Those who have died can hear the voice of the one who died, because they are able to recognise the true voice of God, who knows not death, and who calls into being, and loves. Other voices are not to be followed, because they show themselves not to be of God since they are scandalised by death.

...

"The sheep who have learned not to be scandalised by death can go in and out, and in their very doing so, have become themselves shepherds, leaders in tranquil imitation of other sheep, co-creators of a great rejoicing. We can hear the voice of such shepherds if we are on our way to becoming such shepherds ourselves. For the one who went before us did so not so as to be superior to and apart from us, but so as to be himself in each of us, each one called by name."

- James Alison, from "The Good Shepherd", lecture delivered in Santiago de Chile, October 1999 (http://girardianlectionary.net/learn/alison-good-shepherd/)

~

"[H]e calls us by name. In his calling us we discover who we are and we can walk freely and without fear. This I think is part of the continuation of the message we've been getting over these Easter weeks - of the oddness of the voice of the One who speaks to us, the oddness of the one who spoke to Mary Magdalene, who spoke to Thomas, who spoke to the disciples at Emmaus. And now rather than speaking to us from a position of great haughtiness or great apparent leadership, he's speaking to us as one who has been through death, is not frightened by it, is not scandalized by it, and knows that as we are able to relax into hearing his voice, so we will be able to live abundantly."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Fourth Sunday of Easter 2020 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHkEqYwK91Y)

[Source of links to Thomas L. Truby sermon and James Alison lecture: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter4a]

From the Lectionary for Easter Sunday 2023 (Easter A)

Acts 10:34-43 (NRSV Updated Edition*)

Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Colossians 3:1-4 (NRSV Updated Edition*)

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

~

"New Creation offers a hope which can guide us into an even greater payoff for the challenging days ahead. Yes, resurrection brings comfort in the face of enormous loss and grief. But it also brings us the healing Spirit whose work can move us forward in the new Way of being human. ... We are bold to follow our Risen Lord who in his earthly life “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” Through the Spirit of Easter which looses a virus of love, God is with us through this valley of shadows."

- Paul Nuechterlein, from "Opening Comments" on the Girardian Lectionary page for Easter A (http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter-a/)

~

"So ... we come to the moral details of the life of Resurrection. Already we have see them; the faith, hope, and love of the Christian ecstasies are the moral demands of our faith, but now we see clearly that before they are demands they are gifts. What need we to add? Only this: Christ rose not as a Jew nor a Gentile, not as a man nor a woman, not as a free citizen nor as a slave, not as an intellectual nor as a nincompoop; Christ rose as a human being, and the transformation he wrought takes all the human race into a new world of simple, shared humanity.

"This simple, shared humanity is what we all crave because it brings everything we ever thought or knew we wanted or needed: peace, justice, joy, respect, healing, and helping; beauty, delight, fullness of being and a good death. We see in the rising Jesus that that there really is a power of creative life to do all this for us. Why then should we let the limits of our minds, the paucity of our expectations, the cowardice of our ambition, the fear of our peers, cause us to deprive ourselves of the life that flows like clear, cool water from the transformed body of Jesus? Why should we not call upon him in faith and draw near to him in love, and enter there the house of hope.

"As a planet we are approaching a point of “singularity;” there are three conceivable kinds of singularity, a bad one, an ambiguous one and a good one, and each one is already underway. The bad one is the triumph of the decay already underway in the environment, melting icecaps, choking cities, poisoned water. The ambiguous one is the Kurzweilian transformation by human ingenuity bringing forth machines that are more human and more devious that our humanity ever could be... and displacing us.

"The good moment is the moment of the Resurrection of Jesus, when the power that created the universe recreated it from within, from its most precious point, the point of perfect humanity, and is abroad in the world as faith hope and love. If you wish to save the environment, to enhance the human future this is the power you need. It is the “good singularity” where the miracle of new creation occurs.

"So, you are concerned about the human future, you care about the planet? Worship Jesus in faith hope and love! Only then will you become an effective conduit of transforming creativity; without this power of life to battle the death star you will go down railing and regretting; with it you will see the triumph of our God who did not create this world for death but for life, to fail but to succeed, to mourn but to rejoice."

- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, from a sermon titled "The Good Singularity", March 23, 2008 (source no longer available)

* Source of Bible quotes: https://www.biblegateway.com/

surprised by hope

i recently finished reading surprised by hope by british (anglican) new testament scholar n.t. wright, and thought i'd write a bit of a review...

the overall subject of the book is the resurrection of jesus and what that event means for us now and for the future. a lot of the book is dedicated to eschatology, where wright's primary motivation is to address the muddled and vague thinking of many christians concerning what will happen to us after we die. one of his main bug-bears is the ubiquitous phrase "going to heaven when you die," both because it is a slogan that everybody just seems to accept without thinking very much about it, as well because of it's implication that our eternity will be spent in some dis-embodied spirit form floating around a totally "spiritual" heaven. he rightly calls this latter idea gnostic dualistic clap-trap (my paraphrase). while he does believe in some kind of "interim" existence in "heaven" (which i personally am not convinced about), he asserts that the resurrection of jesus points to a final destiny for all of us of a physical (though transformed) body in a physical (though transformed) universe.

wright belongs in the "earth renewal" camp, in other words he doesn't believe the present "heavens and earth" will be destroyed and new ones made, but that god will renew and transform the earth and the whole universe in an act of re-creation which is presaged in and promised by the resurrection of jesus. while he doesn't really address the counter-argument to this in verses such as 2 peter 3:10 and 12, he believes that the resurrection of jesus into a physical body which "belongs" to this universe (visible to the disciples, able to eat), though obviously with extra dimensions (able to travel through walls, able to disappear, able to fly?!?), is an affirmation from god that this present universe will not be done away with entirely. with the possibly problematic exception of the 2 peter 3 verses, a good argument can be made that the nt passages referring to the end times can be interpreted this way, eg. the metaphor of creation "groaning as if in childbirth" (romans 8:22) suggests that something new will come out of what is already here, not that all will be destroyed and a completely new thing created from scratch. wright's belief is that at the end of the present age, "heaven" will be revealed and will come down and be united with the earth, and that god's children with jesus as king will go about setting all things to right (you'll have to read the book for more detail on what he thinks this will look like).

the primary strength of the book, however, in my opinion, is in the last part, where wright elucidates on how the resurrection of jesus and the future which is promised by the resurrection should impact on and guide what we as christians do in this present life. i totally agree with him that a lot, if not most, of the theology and eschatology that is taught in protestant churches around the world have the effect (inadvertent or not) of basically nullifying any significance for the christian life, because the only really important thing is that you are "saved", and when you die you will be "perfected" anyway so why make much of an effort now. so discipleship is reduced to fitting into the behavioural norms of whatever group you happen to be a part of, with or without the extra pressure (often conveyed by guilt-tripping) of doing what you can to "save the lost". while wright states clearly that nothing we do can enhance our salvation, he highlights the verses (eg. 1 cor 15:58 "...knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain") which suggest that there is a lasting significance to what we do now (though he admits he "has no idea" exactly how this works). for me this makes more sense within an "earth renewal" framework, because there is some continuity between this world and the future perfected world. wright classifies this work of "building the kingdom" which we are to be participating in under the headings Justice, Beauty and Evangelism. i appreciate his inclusion in this of efforts for sustaining and enhancing the natural world, as well as artistic endeavours of every kind, as long as they are positive - pointers to beauty, hope and joy, not to ugliness, destruction and despair.

my main criticism of the book is wright's vague and unsatisfying description of the atonement, the necessary pre-cursor to the resurrection of jesus, which actually gives shape to what we have been saved from and saved to. he seems unwilling to commit fully to the "penal substitution" model and hints at leaning towards "christus victor", but is equally unwilling to disavow penal substitution, perhaps in fear of losing the large american market (yes, cynical I know), or maybe because he rightly perceives that christus victor does not tell the whole story and he thinks penal substitution is the only other option. In my view, if it was coupled with a girardian account of the atonement, and thus a more satisfying and meaningful understanding of what is wrong with the world and what god has and is doing about it in jesus, wright's description of the resurrection and it's meaning for our present life and the mission we have in the world would gain magnitudes of impact and power.

overall, i would recommend the book, as it does a good job of clearing up the muddled thinking of many/most christians about what lies ahead for us and for the world. more significantly, though, the book provides motivation and inspiration to seek active and positive endeavours for furthering the kingdom of god right here and now, each with our individual talents. To see god's mission for the world as making it the best it can be in justice and beauty, though this will never be fully realised in the present age, allows us to locate ourselves as being part of the latest chapter of the story of the bible. this gives a purpose and meaning to our lives that is hard to find with the old cliched slogans and formulations. the resurrection of jesus is a sure promise from god that he will accomplish His purpose, giving us a hope for the future that is indeed surprising.

fundamental re-thinking

my parents were moving house last year and a book on the 'take or throw?' pile caught my eye so I claimed it and just finished reading it recently.

the book is Protestant Christianity: Interpreted Through It's Development by John Dillenberger and Claude Welch (Charles Scripner & Sons, New York, originally published 1954).  i found it a very good read, especially because I knew very little about the details of the reformation and the subsequent theological, doctrinal and denominational developments and changes in protestantism.

what caught my eye especially was how similar previous centuries have been to our own in regards to (self-appointed) doctrinal purists (aka fundamentalists) going toe-to-toe with what would now be called 'liberal christians'.  i suppose it's inevitable for there to be a pendulum-swing aspect to any long-lasting 'movement' involving human beings, and i acknowledge the sincerity and even appropriateness of many of the pushes for change through the history of protestantism, but at the same time i'm discouraged at how little the thinking of protestant (especially evangelical) christianity has progressed, especially in the last 100 - 150 years.  consider the contemporary appropriateness of dillenberger and welch's summation of the fundamentalist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century:

"... fundamentalism was from the beginning a lost cause, theologically speaking.  It was an intellectual rearguard action.  It was not simply an attempt to be faithful to the Christian tradition; it was an effort, in the face of the perplexities and shifting currents of a changing world, to fix Christianity in the mold of a particular doctrinal complex and world view.  The doctrinal complex to which fundamentalism clung so tenaciously was not that of a the ancient church, nor of the Reformation, nor of the Protestant development in general.  It was essentially akin to the hardened framework of Lutheran and especially Calvinistic scholasticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Only in the scholasticism had the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture been carried to such extremes; and in such doctrines as the atonement and the deity of Christ, fundamentalism (often unconsciously) assumed that the Protestant scholastics spoke for the entire tradition.  Moreover, in it's insistence that doctrine is irreformable, fundamentalism took over the seventeenth-century view of the relation of Christian faith to science and philosophy.  In it's own day, that view represented a significant attempt to bring religious, philosophical and scientific thought into harmony; but the effort to perpetuate that adjustment in the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not only hopeless but violated the intent of scholasticism itself.

"At root, fundamentalism has been seeking to preserve a kind of certainty in a world of apparent confusion and flux - a kind of certainty which was simply no longer possible.  The movement was part of a general resistance to social change.  This was particularly evident in fundamentalism's commitment to legalistic views of personal morality (mostly of the nineteenth-century pattern) and it's hostility to the "social gospel." ... the extreme social conservatism was often paralleled by a suspicion of modern education because of it's "scientific, sceptical and secular influences."  Here, too, was an attempt to hold on to the familiar, the simple and safe patterns, in the face of new and bewildering problems which the old patterns were not designed to meet.

"Insofar as fundamentalism has been committed to this sort of program, it is hard to see how the movement can claim the allegiance of thoughtful persons."  (pg 230-231)

do the contemporary fundamentalist movements (neo-calvinism, et al) "claim the allegiance of thoughtful persons"?  the answer would have to be affirmative, but it seems to me that those people are only thoughtful within a tightly constrained and pre-determined system.  it is this general assumption that the inherited formulation of the fundamentals of the christian faith are set in stone that is the most discouraging thing of all to me, since it is exactly the intellectual weaknesses and inconsistencies of these doctrinal formulations which are repelling thoughtful people from the faith throughout the world.

but there are trickles of hope, especially, in my view, in the growing interest, even among protestants, in the ideas of rene girard and those who have expanded on girard's work such as james alison.  just yesterday i came across a conversation on religion, violence and (girard's) mimetic theory between james alison and american emerging church leader brian mclaren.  in his personal introduction at the beginning of the conversation, mclaren tells this anecdote:

"I would hesitate to mention this person’s name except that he recently passed away and so I don’t think he’d mind me mentioning his name. But a very respected Evangelical leader and scholar. I know there are a lot of almost cartoonish figures in the Evangelical world, but this was a sagely gentleman named Dallas Willard. Some of you may know his name. And Dallas and I became friends, and we were at an event together – in fact, we were kind of in a panel, something like this – and one of the questions to Dallas was, “What parts of our theology do you think we need to rethink as Evangelicals?” And Dallas, without a split second hesitation said, “Doctrine of scripture, doctrine of heaven and hell, and doctrine of atonement.” Well, I was not surprised that he said doctrine of scripture. That was one that I knew we needed to rethink. Doctrine of heaven and hell, I was not surprised he said that. I was very surprised he said doctrine of atonement because I hadn’t really thought about that doctrine yet. In Evangelical Christianity atonement is a very central and somewhat complicated formula that is very deeply involved with violence."

there is not much more fundamental than the "doctrine of scripture, doctrine of heaven and hell, and doctrine of atonement."  if even evangelical leaders such as dallas willard are calling for re-thinking of these things, there is indeed hope...

the rainbow spectrum

a while ago my wife and i were talking with a friend about the dsm v and the fact we can all find ourselves in it without too much searching.  i think its pretty well accepted these days that almost all the so-called pathologies or mental disorders are not binary phenomena but spectra.  in other words, its not a case of having the condition/disorder/whatever or not, but of a progressive line or spectrum, from mild to severe, along which we all sit somewhere, and along which we no doubt move one way or the other during the course of our lives.  so you could perhaps say that each person's personality is the intersection point of his or her position on all the different spectra.  i happen to be more towards the 'severe' end of both the obsessive compulsive spectrum and the autism spectrum (the two are probably related) than the 'average' person, but i'm able to function relatively successfully in society and am fairly confident i would be considered by most to be within the 'normal' range (though tending towards the fringes).

all well and good and non-controversial, but it got me to thinking about another phenomenon which we tend to think of as binary but which i wonder might actually be a spectrum: sexual orientation.  in other words, i wonder if people aren't either absolutely heterosexual or homosexual, but are all somewhere along a line between the two.

no doubt this idea will not be greeted with much enthusiasm, especially by those who identify as heterosexual, because to accept it is to agree that you are at least a little bit homosexual (similarly, those who identify as gay may not like the idea that they are to some degree heterosexual).  but i think it makes some sense, and provides a solution for a number of questions around sexual orientation.  for example, the spectrum idea would account for those who identify as bi-sexual as being near the middle of the 'sexual orientation' spectrum.  similarly, people who identify as heterosexual but are comfortable with engaging in threesomes involving another of their own gender would be closer to the middle of the spectrum than those who can't abide the thought of being naked in bed with anyone sharing the same kind of genitals as themselves.

more importantly, however, i think this 'sexual orientation spectrum' idea provides an explanation for the phenomenon of homophobia.  this is of course the psychological term for those who exhibit fear of or anger towards homosexuals.  but what exactly is the fear?  it can't be a sense of any physical threat posed by homosexuals, since they are very small in number compared to society at large, and have, for the most part, far less tendency towards violence.  so it must be some kind of internal threat that is being felt, a fear maybe that if you gets too close to a gay person the 'gayness' will somehow rub off, or that if you were propositioned by a gay person, somehow you wouldn't be able to refuse (similar to the fear of heights, which is not so much a fear of being far above the ground but of not being able to stop oneself from falling/jumping).  but why would a person have this fear if they didn't subconsciously (or even consciously) suspect that they have some tendency towards homosexuality - in other words, that they are somewhere towards the homosexual side of the sexual orientation spectrum (though of course never thought of in those terms).  to suspect that you have some level of homosexual attraction would quite naturally cause a great deal of insecurity as to your whole identity, based on the assumption that sexual orientation is a binary thing.  however, if sexuality was understood as a spectrum along which everyone has a naturally different place, it stands to reason that having some level of same sex attraction would no longer cause anxiety, but would even be expected.

i'm very aware that relating same-sex orientation to what many consider to be psychological 'defects' raises a host of issues, and probably will not be greeted kindly by either 'side'.  the first answer i would give is that i don't consider the kind of psychological spectra i'm talking about (eg. autism or ocd), as defects in any objective or fundamental sense.  people at the more extreme ends of these spectra do find life in 'normal' society more difficult, but that's not because they are 'defective' but because society isn't structured to make life easy for them.  in the same way, society historically, and still now in many parts of the world, has not been structured to make life easy for homosexuals, but has by and large considered them defective, and worthy of judgement and exclusion if not worse.

the other main issue, as i see it, raised by relating sexual orientation to psychological conditions, is the question of what determines a person's sexual orientation.  i think it's fairly well established that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to some people being further towards the extremes of psychological spectra such as autism than others.  so is it also true that where one sits on the 'sexual orientation' spectrum is determined by both nature and nurture?  obviously sexual orientation isn't a physical of physiological characteristic such as a measurable difference in a particular gland or organ in the body, or even of macro-level brain structure.  nor is it a chromosomal abnormality such as down syndrome.  the only other credible option is that it arises from a combination of the neural wiring and chemical composition of part, or connected parts, of the brain.  as such it must necessarily have a genetic basis but also be susceptible to environmental influences in the same way as psychological conditions such as autism.

i suppose what I'm trying to get at is that i don't think the 'sexuality spectrum' idea, or relating sexual orientation to certain psychological conditions that appear as spectra, should be an offense to either those who identify as homosexual or those who have some degree of autism (or ocd or whatever).  there just happens to be natural variability in the human make-up, due in large part to the enormous complexity of the human brain.  and so it is simply wrong to consider one's own make-up to be superior in a moral sense to anybody else's, or to judge others for what they are, or to try to 'normalise' them.

in conclusion, i must say that i am encouraged by the general lessening of the heat surrounding discussion of gay issues that seems to be happening (in australia at least).  the sexual revolution that in a significant way enabled the acceptance of gay people as equal and normal human beings has had a mixed impact to this point overall, as it seems all steps towards freedom must.  the battle of the sexes is still raging, men still need to protect their fragile egos by dominating and objectifying women, women still seek control by alternately hiding and showing off their bodies.  but the growing acceptance of homosexuality may be an indication that we are inching towards greater security as individuals in our own sexuality, which may (or may not) include an acceptance of a degree of homo-/hetero-sexual tendencies in ourselves (depending on our primary orientation), and i believe this can only be a positive thing for society and the world as a whole.

rhythm of conversation

i've just spent a bit of time going through some old un-published drafts, and found these excellent quotes about paul's conception of christian life from mark strom's great book Reframing Paul: Conversations in Grace and Community:

"The coherence Paul saw in Christ did not single out any one exegetical procedure for using the Old Testament. Nor did it predispose him to any one way of dealing with Graeco-Roman cultures. Nor again did it imply any single path of Christian experience. The imitation of the dying and rising of Christ was not an alternative moral code. Imitation required new wisdom about one's actions and choices. There was no single formula for working out the implications of weakness-strength, foolishness-wisdom, poor-rich, slave-free and suffering-joy in any new context. Paul framed each pair to provoke conversations about what it might mean to imitate Christ. They were not a means of securing conformity to new ideals for behavior.

"This point is crucial to understanding the rhythm of Paul's conversation. He was not interested in uniformity of behavior. Paul's own life embodied the dynamic transformations that he believed the Spirit sought to bring about within the ekklesiai. His teaching was provocative, not legislative. It avoided the pettiness of religious and legal controversies (cf. 2 Tim 2:14-26; Tit 3:9). Nor did he prescribe any single pattern for the gathering. His advice left room for spontaneity and diversity (1 Cor 14:26-33). Clearly, Paul did not proceed from the coherence of Christ to reduce experience, relationship and learning to intellectual abstractions and formulas. There remained an open-endedness about 'walking worthy of one's calling' (Gal 5:13,16; Eph 4:1; Phil 1:27; Col 1:10; 3:1-5,17; 1 Thess 4:1; 2 Thess 1:11-12; 2:15). His message offered no formula to settle in advance which way to respond to contemporary intellectual and social patterns.

"New understanding for new circumstances emerged within the communities through conversation. Indeed, the power of the story of Christ only came to its fullness in the contingencies of social life. Paul, his colleagues, and the communities were each working out the message as they went. Yet even as his thought matured, Paul continued to show no interest in formulating final statements in the sense of the doctrinal debates and creeds of subsequent generations. He remained focused on specific people and contexts. New contexts continued to prompt new responses as Paul sought to remain open to the Spirit and to his own experiences and relationships to guide his thought." (pp.195-196)

and

"Paul's conversations bore the marks of his personality: pleading, strident, exasperated, affectionate, urgent, reflective, passionate and at times impatient. They bore the marks of his close knowledge of the popular intellectualism of his day and of the social systems of status and honor. If Paul had had his way, his ekklesiai would have remained creatively messy. But his opponents wanted neatness -- and they won. Twenty centuries later, we may look back amazed that we have drifted so far. Then again, perhaps we still don't get it. It remains profoundly difficult for leaders to let go of their need to control people. It is easier to impose order and conformity through prescribing belief and practice than to acknowledge the dignity and gifting of Christ's people. It is easier to disallow the conversation than to hear the hard questions. For many, it is easier to disallow the conversation than to join it." (p.197)

i don't think i can add anything to that, except to say i wholeheartedly agree and long for such an experience of christianity in conversation with others and the world around us. why is it so hard to find?

going catholic?

i recently read james alison's Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-In, which is a brilliant and profound book.  one of its effects on me was to start to think seriously about 'changing sides'.

my most excellent friend paul wrote to me that he "can't see how it is possible to stay protestant after a thorough reading of JA" (JA being james alison of course).  i tend to agree, though i would put it in slightly different terms, that reading JA makes it almost impossible to not want to be catholic.

i wouldn't necessarily call myself a protestant (or anything really), but that would be the default christian label for me since i more-or-less attend a presbyterian church and all my previous church attendance has also been on the protestant side.  but i've started to think, "why are we still protesting?"  after 500 years, is a 'Protestant' movement still relevant?

it seems that, to a large extent at least, the protestant reformation arose out of a dispute over right doctrine and teaching, as exemplified by luther's 95 theses.  no doubt there was ample justification for it at the time with the institutional corruption in the catholic church, but the legacy of this focus on 'rightness', which became evident very quickly in the schism between lutheranism and calvinism, is a never ending, increasingly pedantic disagreement about just who is most right.

so now there are thousands of protestant denominations, not to mention all the independent non-denominational churches out there, because every tom, dick and harry (and of course it's almost always a man) thinks he has the true knowledge and only his way is the right way.  and you have sydney anglicanism and similar movements which have made right doctrine into fundamentalist legalism.

enough already!  it's just the blind arguing with the blind.

neither orthodoxy (right doctrine) nor even orthopraxis (right actions) are really the point.  it's ultimately about belonging.  the apostle paul wrote frequently about being 'in christ', such as in romans 8:1 ("there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" - niv).  jesus talked about being attached the vine (himself), saying "if you remain in me, and I in you, you will bear much fruit" (john 15:5, niv).  i don't think protestants really understand this, with their fixation on justification by faith, which is really just a subtler form of legalism.

of course, from god's point of view it doesn't matter what label you wear or what church you go to (or none).  but i do think it matters for us, for christians because we need to get beyond our childish arguments and to start actually loving each other as fellow stumblers trying to figure out what it means to be in this big, incredibly diverse family formed around the gratuitous love and forgiveness of god; and for non-christians because jesus was actually telling the truth when he said, "by this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another."

as i hinted above, i don't like labels, and maybe even more i don't like commitment.  i like to keep my options open, to dip my toes in but not to immerse.  so it's a very hard thing for me to consider 'converting' or even identifying myself as catholic.  not to mention the incomprehension (if not outrage) such a move would produce in my most definitely protestant family.

i really don't know how this will all end up, but i'd like to start moving in the direction of joining james and paul in the big old family...

the anthropology and theology of bladerunner

(with acknowledgement to IMDb).

it is the year 2019.  the setting is los angeles.  despite the advances in technology (including flying cars), the images are dystopian.  the landscape is heavily industrialized.  rain falls incessantly and people wear thick coats against the apparent cold.  the streets are dark and filled with rubbish.  the commercial areas are crowded with people, but a sense of isolation and loneliness pervades.  most people seem to live in very old and decrepit apartment buildings with few if any fellow residents.

genetic engineering technology has made huge advances, to the point of creating synthetic beings called replicants, sophisticated androids that are virtually identical to humans.  replicants are designed and built by the tyrell corporation, a giant conglomerate headquartered in two pyramid-like towers.  replicant technology has entered a new phase with the nexus 6 model.  they are at least equal to humans in physical ability and strength, but more significantly they now have human emotions.  some have also been implanted with childhood memories despite being created as fully formed “adults”.  however, a 4 year life span has been encoded into their genes.

replicants are mostly used as manual labourers, soldiers and entertainers in the "off world" colonies out in space.  because of their advanced nature and possible instability and tendency towards violence, replicants have been outlawed on earth. specialized police units, called "bladerunners", are charged with the difficult task of detecting replicants who come to earth and executing, or "retiring" them.

rick deckard, played by harrison ford, is a retired bladerunner who is brought back to hunt a group of nexus 6 replicants who have made it to los angeles to seek out a way to extend their life span.  the leader of the group, roy, played by rutger hauer, uses a tyrell employee, jf sebastian, whose speciality is genetically engineered eyes, to trick his way into tyrell’s penthouse apartment in one of the company’s pyramid shaped towers.  roy confronts his maker, demanding an extension of lifespan.  tyrell explains that artificial beings like roy have been permanently designed not to live longer than their lifespan and that no known biological process has yet been able to change that.  he patronizes roy, saying that he has accomplished great things, but roy responds by killing him.

roy discovers that he is the only one left from the replicant group, and there is a final battle between him and deckard in which roy has the decided upper hand.  the fight ends up on an apartment building rooftop, and deckard is finally left hanging off the edge by one hand, two fingers of which roy had purposely broken earlier in the fight in revenge for the killing of his companions.  but roy has been showing signs of his impending expiry, which he knows he is helpless to prevent.

what ensues is one of my all time favourite movie scenes.

whatever the entertainment value of the movie, the subject matter and story have quite obvious theological allusions.  the role of god is clearly represented by tyrell, the genius inventor, though his ‘divinity’ is supported by the corporation that he heads, as well as the government and economic system that have enabled his corporation to become so powerful (this is not alluded to in the movie, but it could be interpreted as a picture of religious systems/institutions which ‘support’ the ‘idea of god’ in order to maintain their own power).  tyrell, as the creator god, has developed a technology for artificially manufacturing living creatures, and at the summit of this “creation” are the replicants, artificial humans.  the pinnacle of replicant technology is the nexus 6 model, and is it a just co-incidence that the model number matches the day on which humans were created in genesis 1?

nexus 6 replicants are a wonderful creation, strong and capable even beyond their human creator, who is rightly proud of them.  but though they are physically very good, almost perfect, they can be mentally unstable and have a tendency to violence.

the image of human beings portrayed here has much truth to it.  we are amazing and wonderful creatures, but just like the replicants we are prone to emotional instability and have more than a passing tendency to violence - not just physical violence, but also emotional, psychological and social violence, which are no less harmful.

note that violence of any kind is always an issue of control.  we hurt others to try to control them, or because we can’t control them and they do things we don’t want them to, or sometimes because we can control them and we despise them for it.  a clear implication of this is that there is no violence in god, since god is utterly free of the need to control.  this can to be a hard thing to grasp, because for human beings the will to power is inextricably tied to the need to control our lives and our surroundings, so we can only imagine absolute power being used to exert complete control.  but god’s power is entirely ‘other’ (ie. non-human), and god is completely unthreatened by anything that happens, so to speak of god in terms of wanting or needing to exert or maintain control is not just wrong but nonsensical.  the true biblical picture is of god holding creation “in the palm of his hand”, imparting life and love, wooing and drawing, not controlling and manipulating.

getting back to the story… because of their strength but tendency to violence, the replicants are perceived as a threat to human beings, maybe even to tyrell/god himself, so they are outlawed from earth, allowed to only live and work “off-world”.  not just that, but they are genetically encoded with a fixed 4 year lifespan.  this appears to be a clear allusion to the biblical story of the banishment of adam and eve from the garden of eden and the removal of their access to the tree of life, hence condemning them to live apart from their creator in servitude and then to die, much too soon.

in many ways, this treatment of the replicants seems very straightforward and natural, even as it should be.  after all, people need to be protected from potential threats.  but something more is going on behind the scenes.  there is a clear though unspoken rivalry between human beings and replicants, arising on the human side from envy, mixed with fear, of the strength and ability of the replicants.  the rivalry is resolved by banishing the replicants, who are made the scapegoats of the potential or actual (we are not told which) conflict with humans – despite (or maybe because of) the fact that humans are at least as prone to instability and violence as replicants.

how true a representation is this of the story of “the fall” in genesis 3?  from a human point of view, it could be argued that god initiated rivalry with humans by placing a tree in the garden from which the man and woman were forbidden to eat (as if to say, “this tree will remind you that i’m the one with the knowledge and power, and you better not forget it!”).  the serpent played on this theme, stoking the pride and envy of the man and woman, telling them god was lying to them and they really could have the same knowledge and power as god if they ate from the forbidden tree.  after they took the fruit, god confirmed the rivalrous nature of the events by reacting angrily, cursing the man and woman and casting them out of the garden.  thus all human beings are banished from the presence of God because we are unavoidably tainted by sin, and we are condemned to lives of endless striving and strife, ending all too soon in inescapable death.

though it might never be narrated in exactly this way, it’s my experience that elements of this storyline form a significant part of the beliefs of many christians concerning god’s relationship with human beings.  but the true story is close to the complete opposite.  unique to ancient accounts of creation, the first few chapters of Genesis are devoid of divine rivalry and violence.  the first man and woman were put in a beautiful garden – pure paradise – where they could relax and trust in the love and presence of god, not knowing why god put a forbidden tree in the garden, but content to know that god’s purpose towards them was entirely benign and entirely loving.  but they believed the serpent’s accusations that god was keeping something good from them, and thus set god up as a rival (not the other way around) and decided to take what they decided god was unfairly keeping from them.

and what was god’s response?  in the genesis narrative, god came “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (genesis 3:8, niv).  knowing what adam and eve had done, god didn’t pronounce judgement from afar, refusing to be tainted by proximity with these now sinful creatures.  it was the man and woman who hid from god, not god who withdrew from them.  and they proved their now rivalrous, non-trusting nature by answering god’s questions defensively, and by extending their rivalry towards each other by accusing rather than confessing, ultimately trying to put the blame back on god.  i’d like to think that they still had a chance at this point to return to full faith and trust in god by admitting their wrong, and it may be that by going to them god also held out hope for this.  but…

so god saw that the relationship was broken, but the next part of the story is perhaps the most misunderstood of all.  we are so used to thinking of god’s response in terms of wrath and punishment, but in fact there is no anger in god’s reaction, no desire to punish the guilty or demand appeasement.  such would be the reaction of “one of the gods”.  instead, the one true god responds with incredible love and mercy, beginning immediately to sow the seeds of redemption.  far from being arbitrary curses or punishments, god’s pronouncements of toil and strife are just descriptions of the inevitable consequences of adam & eve’s sin, because the world of trust and love in the garden had been replaced by a new social order defined by rivalry, envy, hate and violence.  but despite the pain of our sinful lives, and god’s sadness to see the suffering we bring on ourselves and each other, to not save us from the consequences of our sin is truly a mercy, because we need to take responsibility for our actions, and unless we experience the consequences we would never learn and grow, but would continue in our destructive ways unchecked and without remorse.

it is pertinent to note here that whenever “the wrath of god” is mentioned in the bible, what it means is “god not saving us from the consequences of our sins.”  the common misunderstanding that it refers to ‘god being angry with us’ arises first of all because the consequences of our sin are always painful (though not always immediately) and so it seems very much like punishment, which we only understand in the context of anger.  we also tend to demand that god intervenes and eliminates (or at least limits) the damage, and when that doesn’t happen (at least to our satisfaction) it is easy to believe it is because god is angry with us.  the problem is that anger is an emotion, which is a human response to a situation.  god is not human and is thus not subject to emotions, so to interpret god’s actions in terms of an emotional response is to falsely attribute a human characteristic to god.  furthermore, we get angry when something happens that we don’t want to happen, something over which we have no control and which gets in the way of a goal or purpose we have (conscious or otherwise).  and our almost inevitable response is to use violence (of some kind) to get back in control.  but god is never surprised, fazed or threatened by anything that happens, is never out of control, and nothing that happens can ultimately block god’s purposes.  so it really makes no sense to speak of god being angry.  of course, it is absolutely true that god wants things to be different for us, but the energy behind the desire for us to change is love, not anger, and the hope that we also learn to love, not the determination that we are punished for our disobedience.

to use an analogy, saying that god is angry with the things we do is like saying the amazon river is angry about little rocks it encounters in its path.  the rocks may in some tiny way impede the progress of the river, but slowly and inexorably the river will have its way with those rocks, moulding them to its purpose.  in the same way, the tiny resistance we make does not deflect the inexorable purpose of god’s love, which is always calling to us to become a part of the huge, benign, creative flow of life divine, and will ultimately have its way with us regardless of our resistance.

getting back to the genesis story, the second act of mercy god enacts after adam and eve’s sin is to grant us mortality.  just as for the replicants, this is perhaps the greatest grievance we have against god, but it is a mercy in at least two important ways: firstly, it puts a limit on our wickedness and its impact on others (just imagine an immortal hitler, pol pot or idi amin); secondly, I believe that our mortality is the beginning of our fellow-creaturely empathy and compassion.  this latter point is wonderfully exemplified by the “death scene” in the movie, where roy, knowing his time is expiring, reaches out and saves decker’s life.  as roy is running out of life, it becomes enormously precious to him, and I think in the same way, our common predicament of being destined to die enables us to see each other as precious, having value to each other because of the enormous gift of life we share.

well, what ensues in the movie is the outworking of the rivalry arising from the humans’ envy and fear.  a group of replicants decide they are not content with their lot and “storm the ramparts of heaven.”  they manage to get to earth, and roy finds a way to get into tyrell corporation to confront his maker, killing him when he can’t satisfy roy’s demands.  but that doesn’t solve any problems, and before long roy’s life expires.

this is where humanity finds itself at the beginning of the 21st century: we have proved our amazing ability to shape the earth and to improve our lives in incredible ways, but we are still banished from paradise and bound to die.  so we demand more time, pouring our efforts and energies into trying to increase the length of our lives.  we rage at god, metaphorically storming heaven in our minds and by our words and actions, and finally ‘kill’ god by declaring our independence, convincing ourselves that god is of no further use to us.  but it hasn’t made any difference.  despite amazing advances in computer and medical technology, we are stuck with our mortality, and our inescapable death casts its long shadow, defining and controlling the choices we make and ultimately the meaning we give to our lives.

such is the story of bladerunner, and there is no real glimmer of hope for humans or replicants in the movie, despite the killing of god/tyrell (and notwithstanding the incongruously ‘happy’ ending of the original cinema release version).  and such would be the hopeless state of humanity, inescapably controlled by rivalry, violence and death, if the scandalously gratuitous love of god, in whom is no rivalry, violence or death, had not broken into our doomed world in the person of jesus christ, in and by whom was inaugurated a new creation, a new way of being and living based on love, mercy and forgiveness.

but that is another story…

universalism and all that

or, dave comes out of the closet...

to put it bluntly, i just can't believe that sending sinners to eternal torment in hell amounts to justice, no matter what the crime. it defies every principle of justice and punishment fitting the crime that we hold to as humans, and, as george macdonald says, if we don't think something is fair or right, it's tantamount to blasphemy to attribute it to god. god's sense of fairness must be at least as strong as ours, or else he's not the holy and just god we believe he is. on the other side of the coin, we also need to beware of attributing to god our human sense of revenge and wanting to get even. god's righteousness would mean nothing to us without his infinite capacity to forgive.

compounding the issue is the fact that we sin in ignorance: no child knows or understands before they start sinning that they will be forever damned for their actions. still further, even if we did understand the consequences, it wouldn't make a difference because of the innate sinful nature we inherit as descendents of adam. so we are in a catch-22 situation: we cannot help sinning but we are forever damned for it. how is that just?

this of course is an argument that has been made many times. i do not deny that we have been gifted (or burdened?) with free will, so we must take responsibility for our actions, but at the same time i do not believe god looks at us with a demanding, legalistic attitude, just waiting for us to slip up so he can get the rod out. i do not do this with my daughter, who i love more than my life, but instead expect her to be independent and (increasingly) rebellious, wanting to go her own way and do what she wants. in the same way, i believe god understands our rebellious natures and treats us with immeasurable forbearance, going so far as to give his son to provide a way out of our bondage to sin and into a new life of true freedom.

george macdonald put forward another argument against the eternal punishment doctrine which i find, if anything, even more compelling. if even one soul is separated from god for eternity, with no possible means of return, it means that satan has won a victory against god, and that is unthinkable. god must have the final, complete victory, but it would not be, could not be, an absolute victory if satan has succeeded in capturing any souls forever. when he died, jesus descended to hell and opened the gates, rendering it no longer an inescapable prison. if anyone chooses, they may simply walk out, and the eternal father is forever on the lookout to welcome each one with great celebration. since jesus' death, it is only our will that keeps us from god, but the way back will never be closed off. never ever.

obviously the implications of a universalist stance are many, going right to the heart of how we are to live as believers in this world. most importantly, i think, it puts a big question over many missionary and proselytising efforts. to my mind, that's not such a bad thing, because these kinds of endeavours have often had disturbing overtones of manipulation and coercion, if not downright convert-buying. at the more mundane level, i've always been at least a little uncomfortable with exhortations to befriend people in the hope of 'winning them to christ', because it smacks of false pretenses. don't we befriend people because they are fellow human beings who we can share our lives with and whose outlook and experience can teach and inform our own lives?

so why tell anyone about the good news of jesus, and why bother believing it and living it ourselves if it doesn't really make a difference for whether or not we go to heaven? after all, it's a lot easier and a lot more fun to ignore god and do our own thing...

well, no doubt it'd be easier, but since when was that the point? since adam and eve ate the forbidden fruit it's always been easier to follow our own desires, but that doesn't mean it's the better way to live. on the contrary, the bible makes it abundantly clear that the best way to live is according to god's law. as michael casey says in his book toward god:

"The ultimate truth of human life is that all our searching leads to God. In Saint Augustine's timeless words, 'You have made us for yourself [O God] and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.' This is something we know about every human being. He or she is made for God; there will always be an incompleteness until a person arrives at God.

...

"We were created with an orientation toward God, and so actions that direct us toward God accord with the imperatives of our nature. When we try to live moral lives after the example of Christ, and open our minds and hearts to prayer, we are not simply doing something 'religious'; we are fulfilling the most fundamental requirement of our humanity. By God's gift we can turn away from the intangible and immediate, transcend the attractions of sense and image, and stretch forth into the infinite sea of eternity. We can add a new dimension to our human experience." (p.3)

just before he slipped away, jesus gave his disciples 'the great commission':

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." (matthew 28: 18-20, niv)

jesus knew what people need, how their lives can be lived to the full, and he taught this to his disciples, then told them to go tell it to the ends of the earth. there is nothing here about telling people that if they don't believe they'll go to hell for eternity, and neither was such a message part of the "everything I have commanded you" he told the disciples to pass on. it's true, especially towards the end of his ministry, jesus said a lot about the consequences of not following his teachings, but those words were all directed at the believers. in the parable of the sheep and goats, it is to the ones who claim to know jesus, who call out, "lord, lord," that he says, "depart from me, i never knew you." the others, who put their faith into practice, didn't even realise they were doing it for jesus, and he welcomes them into his rest.

which brings me to the second reason we should be following jesus and encouraging others to do the same: what we do has consequences, both here and after we die. i don't subscribe to the view that we'll all just stroll into heaven the minute we leave this mortal coil. such a view makes a mockery of god, and isn't in any way consistent with the bible's teaching. god is holy, and demands holiness from us. but while purity is a state (that disappears quickly!), holiness is a life. we cannot be declared holy, we can only learn to be holy through repentance. even jesus needed to be proved holy by his life, as it says in hebrews 5:8-9:

"Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him." (niv)

this doesn't mean jesus wasn't perfect through his life, but his perfection, his holiness, wasn't complete until he'd finished his work. we tend, i think, not to apply this to ourselves, but it doesn't make sense to me how i can be, for example, hateful to my neighbor one minute and holy the next, just because i died in between. being holy means learning how to love my neighbor, and i won't be holy until i've done that. and we will never enter the holy city of god, our final destination where all our desires will be completely fulfilled, until we are holy, until all unholiness has been purged from our lives, which can only be achieved by a long process of repentance, turning from our pride and selfishness and choosing to love.

george macdonald frequently made the point that jesus saves us from our sin, but not the consequences of our sin. i don't fully understand what he meant by this, but one of the obvious examples is our inevitable human death. the promise to adam and eve was that if they ate of the tree they would die, and as children of adam we inherit that promise, and hence we will all die as a consequence of our sin. but that's not the end of the story, as romans 6:23 says:

"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (niv)

this verse has most popularly been used to support the eternal punishment doctrine, but it doesn't seem inherent to me that the second part cancels out the first. instead, i think it makes sense to see it as saying that, yes, we die, but then god gives us eternal life as a gift, completely gratuitous and unearned. and this gift, this act of grace on god's part, is meaningless unless it is also universal, given freely and in equal measure to all.

finally (and maybe ironically having spent so much time on the subject), i don't actually get the impression from reading the bible that what happens to us after we die is an issue god wants us to be concerned about to a great extent. i believe that saving is god's work, and our task is to live as true followers of christ. the commandment of jesus was for us to love each other as he taught and modelled, and thus the world will know we are his disciples. to me this means that the primary mode of evangelism is believers living in community, demonstrating to the world the kingdom life which is love and service to each other. of course, this doesn't mean we ignore non-believers and stay in our holy huddles, but that we go and live the life of following jesus out in the open, in the view of all, and especially where there is no witness of this kind. and by being salt and light in the dark places, we will be used by god to draw all people to himself.

the good war?

there's a great piece in today's smh by richard drayton, senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, called War's moral compass is flawed and points in all directions (originally published in the guardian as An ethical blank cheque).

drayton mentions taken by force, a book by robert lilly which is a study of the rapes committed by american soldiers in europe between 1942 and 1945. lilly suggests a minimum of 10,000 rapes (which is probably a conservative estimate). elsewhere in the essay, drayton talks of crimes committed by allied soldiers in the pacific against japanese captives, quoting edgar james, an 'embedded' pacific war correspondent:

"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments."

the point of bringing these things up is primarily because they are never mentioned or talked about, and thus largely unknown by the general population. we very readily remember the atrocities committed by the 'enemy' but sweep our own shameful actions under the carpet. once again marx's adage that history is written by the victors is proved correct. it's not just an issue of good guys and bad guys, needing to believe your side is right in order to sustain the will to win the war. as drayton says, the effect is much farther reaching:

"All this seems innocent fun, but patriotic myths have sharp edges. The 'good war' against Hitler has underwritten 60 years of warmaking. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and US power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism.

When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam we rebrand them as 'Hitler'. In the 'good war' against them, all bad things become forgettable 'collateral damage'. The devastation of civilian targets in Serbia or Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the war crime of collective punishment in Falluja, fade to oblivion as the 'price of democracy'."

i find this all very interesting, and i'm not just trying to wack the purpetrators and supporters of the iraq war over the head once again (no matter how much i enjoy it :^). at the least i think we need to keep being reminded that, especially with issues of war, there is no black and white, right and wrong. not for the first time, bruce cockburn puts it perfectly:

God, damn the hands of glory
That hold the bloody firebrand high
Close the book and end the story
Of how so many men have died
Let the world retain in memory
That mighty tongues tell mighty lies
And if mankind must have an enemy
Let it be his warlike pride
Let it be his warlike pride

(from It's Going Down Slow, Bruce Cockburn, 1971)

more committed?

thanks to backyard missionary andrew hamilton for the link to this excellent article, It's No Longer About Commitment.

i especially agree that real, 'deep', discipleship must start with the those in leadership (not just pastors, but including elders, deacons and those who may not hold any 'office' but who are effectively leaders because of their maturity in the faith). As the author, stephen hinks, says:

"The starting place for sacrifice to re-enter our parlance and practice is with leadership. Leaders need to lead the way with deep personal change. Leaders need to model what sacrifice is, how choices are made, how costs are weighed and how fruits are enjoyed. When the language of sacrifice is recaptured by individual Christians we can put depth into our disciple-making."

bunch of scheming swindlers

i know this is lazy blogging, but i came across this excellent quote by soren kierkegaard at emergingsideways (picked up originally from mike at waving or drowing?) and wanted to pass it on:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

framing and families

thanks to rowen at sailing close to the wind for the link to don't think of an elephant from a few weeks back. the link contains a review of, and extract from, george lakoff's book Don’t Think of an Elephant – Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (scribe publications, melbourne, 2005).

the idea of 'framing' is thought-provoking and provides a plausible explanation for the hold the bush and howard (aus) governments seem to have over the minds of their electorates at the conceptual level. what piqued my interest most, though, was the depiction of the conservative/progressive divide in terms of two different models of the family: "a strict father family and a nurturant parent family." the description of the 'strict father' model is made with reference to conservative christian author dr. james dobson, who's book dare to discipline has been the bible of child-rearing for conservative/evangelical christians for 30 years. lakoff summarises the set of assumptions behind this paradigm as follows:

The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good.

What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can:

• Protect the family in the dangerous world,

• Support the family in the difficult world, and

• Teach his children right from wrong.

What is required of the child is obedience, because the strict father is a moral authority who knows right from wrong. It is further assumed that the only way to teach kids obedience—that is, right from wrong— is through punishment, painful punishment, when they do wrong. This includes hitting them, and some authors on conservative child rearing recommend sticks, belts, and wooden paddles on the bare bottom. Some authors suggest this start at birth, but Dobson is more liberal. “There is no excuse for spanking babies younger than fifteen or eighteen months of age” (Dobson, The New Dare to Discipline, 65).

The rationale behind physical punishment is this: When children do something wrong, if they are physically disciplined they learn not to do it again. That means that they will develop internal discipline to keep themselves from doing wrong, so that in the future they will be obedient and act morally. Without such punishment, the world will go to hell. There will be no morality.

from what i know, this is a fairly accurate summary of the conservative attitude to child-rearing (as well as to social policy, as lakoff goes on to explain). it has particular personal resonance for me because it is more or less the model with which i was raised (as i expect most children of conservative christians have been from the 1950s to this day). based on my experience, and extensive subsequent reflection, i think that the assumptions and conclusions of this model are fundamentally flawed, and often have very harmful consequences. while it may produce a semblance of obedience and discipline, fear of punishment never by itself engenders true maturity. on the contrary, what it teaches is passive-aggressive conformity while the authority figure is present, and undisciplined free-for-all when it is believed there is little chance of 'being found out'. this is a far cry from the goal of producing adults who make the right choice because they believe it to be the best action, not because they are afraid of the consequences of doing the 'wrong' thing.

this whole subject is especially pertinent for me now that i have a child of my own. as with all children, she needs to learn that she can't do whatever she wants whenever she wants, but she often doesn't understand the boundaries we set for her or why we tell her not to do something, so she screams and resists or defiantly does what we've told her not to. i find it quite hard sometimes to resist dishing out some sort of physical punishment such as a slap, and occasionally i cross the boundary and immediately regret it. on the one hand i'm aware that my reaction is often more to do with what's going on for me than for her (for instance, i'm frustrated that she doesn't obey me, or she has done something that will require me to clean up - she's not of an age to clean up after herself yet). my greatest fear, though, is that she grows up in fear of me. i desperately want her to feel protected by my strength, for it to be a refuge for her, not a threat - no matter what she does.

if freya knows that our love for her is unconditional, that to the best of our knowledge and abilities we have her interest and well-being at heart, then i believe she'll be less likely to question and resist the things we ask her to do, even if she doesn't understand the reason behind it. at the same time, feeling secure in our love will allow her to explore and expand her boundaries, knowing that if she fails or does something wrong, we'll be there for her. then, as she grows up, she'll learn to seek and trust our advice and guidance, eventually becoming an adult who can trust herself to make good decisions based on a good understanding of the consequences.

at least that's the ideal. problem is, we're far from perfect parents and who knows what life will throw at us. boundaries and unconditional love is the principle, but i know we're still going to stuff things up big time. thank god for the resilience he's built into us as human beings. and most of all for his amazing grace to cover over our failures and make all things work for good.

pick of the pics

if you haven't had a look at the world press photo site, i highly recommend it. the winners gallery for 2005 gives a great retrospective of the events of 2004, both high profile and low, ordinary and historic. excuse the pun, but i think this collection of photos (if it is preserved in any way, which i assume it will be) will be a fascinating snapshot for future generations of the world as it was circa 2004, providing as it does the occasionally intentional but often incidental glimpses of technology, fashion, living conditions, sports, and just about everything else that was part of life as we knew it in the last year.

i especially like these from the nature category:

the weirdest photo must be the headless gymnast:

my favourite, though, is the swimmer who left his legs behind:

also superb (as you'd expect) is the gallery of winners of the last 50 years. for the most part it is a chronicle of tragedy and suffering, but in many ways that is the exactly the history of the last 50 years. after how many millenia of living together in this world, the cruelty and indifference of human beings to others is absolutely shocking, and it continues seemingly unabated.

viewing these pictures, it is easy to believe the assertions of rene girard, that all human societies are structured around the making of victims, killing and excluding in order to define and assert the identity of the group. in knowing jesus, james alison brilliantly turns this idea to the dealings of god with humankind as told in the bible, reframing the gospel as the story of jesus, the gratuitously given, forgiving victim, who willingly suffered the ultimate exclusion and became the ultimate sacrifice, in order to provide the way and means for us to have true life in ultimate freedom. this freedom is only found in escaping the tyranny of reactionary and reciprocating violence, moving from the endless cycle of victimhood and victimising to relationships of free and joyful giving of oneself to others, and, in so doing, joining the new society of forgiving victims which is the kingdom of god founded in jesus.

well, i didn't really intend to get all heavy, but these things are on my mind, and i am increasingly sickened by the violence and cruelty in the world and the wilful, repugnant indifference of the privileged (myself included) to the suffering of others. may we grow each day closer to the life god requires of us, in the words of the prophet, "to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (micah 6:8, NIV).

victim mentality

i'm just over a quarter of the way through james alison's knowing jesus, but from the first pages i knew it was going to be a significant experience, similar to my first encounters with henri nouwen and george macdonald. alison has an amazing way of presenting multifaceted truth in wonderfully simple language, and to make it feel revolutionary yet entirely traditional at the same time. this is the best kind of theological writing, drawing and stimulating and inspiring.

the foreward to the book is by archbishop of canterbury rowan williams, and is excellent in its own right. i'd like to quote it at length, because it does a great job of introducing and setting the tone for the book:

[We] do not meet Jesus simply as another human individual; but neither is he just the subject of inspiring stories. We meet Jesus as the resurrected one - the one who, after those closest to him have betrayed him and left him to die alone, returns as the source of grace and hope to those treacherous and fearful friends. What this means is that Jesus 'appears' now as the agency of a completely gratuitous love, right outside the calculations, rewards and punishments of human relationships, outside the complicated negotiations for living space that dominate the 'ordinary' human world, with its underlying assumption that we all live at each other's expense. And this makes clear to us as never before just how deep that assumption goes, and forces us to look afresh at those at whose expense we live - our victims. The resurrection of Jesus makes it impossible to take for granted that the world is nothing but a system of oppressors and victims, [an] endless cycle of reactive violence. We are free to understand ourselves and each other in a new way, as living in mutual gift not mutual threat. We can collaborate in the relations that the resurrection sets in motion, relations of forgiveness, equality and care. And if we recognise our habitual bondage to reactive relations, passing on or returning the wounds we have received, and feel in our lives together the solid reality of relationships that transcend this, then we 'know Jesus'.

...

James Alison is - among other things - restating what some of his Dominican ancestors meant by 'knowledge through participation', and indeed what the whole early and medieval Christian tradition understood as becoming 'divine' in communion with Christ - growing into freedom, beyond the prison of self-absorbed, self-referential feelings, beyond the reactive and repetitive world sustained by sin. But this recovery of older wisdom is given a profoundly contemporary slant in its concern with violence and victimage. As a culture, we have become more alert to the depth and breadth of historical and personal violence, to just how many victims our 'normative' culture creates. But if we are to believe in the hope of something more than just reparation or settling scores, we need the concrete presence of relations that transcend reaction, jostling for space, rivalry; we need Christ and the Church.

...

[True] theology, truthful reflection on what God is and does, can't be done without conversion to a new perspective on yourself and the world. God is not to be known unless we grasp the depth of our freedom and our unfreedom, unless we give up fictions about our purity or our innocence and become committed to searching out those we exclude and suppress, creating with them the promised community of mutual gift. This is the community that depends on the resurrection of Jesus; to belong wholeheartedly to it is to know Jesus - and the God whom Jesus called 'Father'.

Rowan Williams, Foreward to Knowing Jesus, pp vii - ix

there is so much here, and it certainly doesn't need me to add anything to it. the whole topic of "our freedom and our unfreedom" is in itself a huge one. the real gem in this for me, though, is that in bringing to light the victim mentality which is so strong in us. especially in our closest relationships, but to some extent with everyone we come in contact with, we are so quick to "[pass] on or [return] the wounds we have received". it is a natural and automatic response, which we feel is completely justified - after all, isn't it proper and just to punish the wrongdoer? but it is through the resurrection of jesus that we can gain access to "the solid reality of relationships that transcend this," and we can "collaborate in ... relations of forgiveness, equality and care." the resurrection of jesus breaks "endless cycle of reactive violence," and sets us free to live together in "mutual gift not mutual threat."

what a world that will be!

glimpsing the mystery

this quote jumped out at me as i was reading on the train on the way home from work on friday evening:

The paradox of faith and of nature is this: the knowledge we gain will bring with it an overwhelming amount of mystery. One escalates in proportion to the other.

Cindy Crosby, The Reconstruction of a Prairie and a Faith, Mars Hill Review Issue 23, pg 130.

i think it's brilliant. the more we know about the world and in our faith, the more we become aware of how much we don't know. but it's not just about us, an awareness of our own ignorance. if we turn our eyes outside ourselves we catch a glimpse of the staggering depth of mystery out there, that we are part of something huge which for now is beyond our ability to see and understand. it's at once awesome and incredibly exciting.