theology, philosophy, mysticism
Having been shockingly mistreated for years, intersex people are now being treated much better by the NHS. Brilliant.
Completely unrelated to this, my article ‘a short note towards the theology of abiding in John’s Gospel’ will appear in the Journal of Theological Interpretation next year (probably in the Fall issue), and Didsbury Press will be publishing my MA thesis, ‘On the theology of John Zizioulas.’
If this isn’t good, what is?
1 Corinthians seems like the anti-natural theology text par excellence, whereas Romans 1-2 has been read as a natural theology and natural law passage since very early in the church’s history. Was Paul dishonest? Contradicting himself? Did he change his mind? I don’t think it’s plausible to suggest he wasn’t bright and he probably had the Torah memorised so its unlikely he forgot what he wrote in one letter when he wrote the other. How then, if at all, can they be reconciled?
The ever-interesting Andy Thomas’ thesis is now available online. Its about holy fools and its fascinating.
Why is the Christian tradition of meditation (on texts) and contemplative prayer (a form of imageless presence to God) ignored so much? Adam Miller does it here. Often when people talk about the ‘present moment’, ‘being present’, or meditation, they leap instinctively to Buddhism. There’s nothing wrong with Buddhism or Buddhist meditation, but why ignore the Christian forms?
Stephen Cottrell recently held a harvest service in Asda. I don’t think that’s a good idea as, whatever benefits might seem to accrue, it would seem to suggest that the church has no problem with Asda or supermarkets. This should not be the case. Supermarkets treat their suppliers abominably, are damaging our food chains, livestock and food culture. The church should be more vocally critical of them. People should read Joanna Blythman’s Shopped.
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOLIERS
Early on in Gilead we discover that Jack Boughton was named John Ames Boughton in honour of John Ames, Boughton’s best friend. Ames didn’t know this until the moment he was about to baptise the boy (he’d be told a different name) and so the shock distracted him from feeling the blessing he normally does feel when baptising and which is one of the most important parts of the ministry to him. Boughton seems to be offering his son as son to Ames, a kind of surrogate son, since Ames has no wife (or rather, did, and had a daughter, but they both died shortly after childbirth). Ames does not really want this gesture, and Jack is more of the prodigal son, always in mischief, often alone, and especially playing tricks on Ames, often with a streak of meanness. It is that meanness that renders him a mystery to Ames, who realises he cannot understand Jack, and so tries not to judge him, but finds this difficult, knowing all the bad he’s gotten up to.
Chief among these bad deeds is fathering a child with a poor and uneducated young woman and then abandoning them both to a terrible home. He leaves his car (how can he afford it? His father can’t afford one) with his father and tells him about the child. Ames even wonders if that’s because he knew his family would take care of the child somewhat and thereby prevent him from some of the trouble he might have encountered from the family of the aggrieved young woman.
Yet Jack is his families most beloved, especially his father’s. If Boughton consistently acts as the father figure in the prodigal son – prodigious in love and forgiveness – Jack is Ames’ occasion to struggles at the limits of his ability to love, to refrain from judgement. He does not take the figure of the elder brother, or at least, most of the time. There are feelings of resentment and condemnation, but never given free reign.
Imagine then Ames’ fear as he witnesses the way in which his normally taciturn wife speaks freely with Jack and the way they seem at ease with each other when they seldom are with others. This is part of their shared background in vice about which we are never directly told. She has changed, he, it seems, has not. Only very gradually does Ames realise that he fears Jack will take his place as husband and father when he dies. And at this point Boughton comes over to his house (to underline the point since he can barely walk to his porch) to indirectly warn him that he thinks Jack may have precisely that in mind.
What follows as Ames wrestles with himself is the most phenomenal, almost immoral, act of grace and renunciation. Later in the novel Ames recalls that ‘salvation’ includes the notions of health and healing and restoration, so it is with echoes of Paul’s and Moses’ willingness to renounce their salvation for the sake of the people of God that Ames decides that if his wife comes to love Jack in the way Ames loves his wife then he is happy for them both, for who knows what good may come from such an experience of grace. This is rendered all the more powerful because to explain it Ames recounts how he fell in love with his wife, the way it nearly undid him, the way in which he now sees an ineffable beauty in his wife and child though this is hidden from peoples’ ordinary eyes. In expressing just how much his wife and child mean to him, we see just how much he is renouncing in being willing to hand them over to a disreputable man if his wife is falling in love with Jack.
After this resolution Jack tells Ames he has a wife and child, but she is ‘coloured’, and this has caused them great difficulty in St. Louis where they live because marriage or co-habitation of mixed colours are prohibited and socially scorned. So Jack was not after all preying on Ames’ wife, but simply at ease with her as with so few other people, and perhaps she with him. And Jack is back in Gilead because he thinks perhaps he can get work and bring his family there. Here we see the relevance of the story of Ames’ grandfather, who fought against slavery in the civil war, and of Gilead’s history as being created as a way-station precisely for anti-slavery fighters. Jack wants to know if Boughton could know about his wife and child without dying. Ames can, but he’s not sure if Boughton could, though he suspects so. This ties in with two other themes. First, Ames is more progressive due to his knowledge of the town’s history. His brother and father leave and urge him to leave the town as being parochial and unworthy of effort, but by knowing why the town was created and what happened (for instance, that there used to be a coloured church there though no longer, though before leaving they gave their (peace?) lilies to Ames), Ames can see the value of the town and its people, as well as being less racist. Only with knowledge of the past can the future be hopefully constructed.
The second theme is Ames’ claim that his wild, and wildly holy, grandfather’s holiness has rubbed off on him. Again history is powerfully present, the more so for being acknowledged. And though earlier in the narrative Ames seems uncomfortable with his grandfather, near the end he begins to realise that his grandfather’s message was true. The town is perishing because it hasn’t recognised its purpose (of racial reconciliation). Or, in the theological language of his grandfather, the town is being punished for not seeing and obeying the purposes of the Lord.
The father of Jack’s wife, Della, also a minister, mistakenly thinks Jack descended from Ames’ grandfather because of the name sharing. Jack doesn’t disabuse him of this idea, thinking it will redound to his credit. So Jack in fact claims sonship to Ames, confirming his real father’s original desire and intention. Jack recounts this to Ames, as part of his ‘confession’ of his story to the old minister. In understanding Jack’s plight, Ames finally comes to love and forgive and understand Jack, and to accept him as a son. Then, shortly after, just before Jack leaves, Ames expresses his wish to bless Jack. And so Ames finally blesses him in the way he so loves, in the way that is near the core of his conception of the ministerial vocation, feeling the grace of God in the one he is touching. This has echoes of Irenaeus’ doctrine of recapitulation, as Ames utters not only the standard benediction from Numbers (standard does not mean inappropriate or unfeeling) but also adds his own personal prayer, summing up Jack’s life as ‘beloved son and brother and husband and father.’ It is as if Ames wants to heal his life so far, restore him from his weariness, strengthen him for the journey ahead. Jack leaves on the bus and we have no idea whether the blessing makes any difference to his life, as we cannot know whether his baptism did.
So at the end of the novel there is no easy resolution, no cheap grace. Jack has left his father just as he is dying and the family converging on the house. Only Ames knows that he has finally heard from his wife after waiting for months, only Ames knows how difficult it would be to be in the house full of families but not be able to share his own. So Jack, for good reasons, is committing what seems his worst act so far. Yet perhaps in doing so he can finally live with his wife and child. Gilead has forgotten its roots and cannot be the home Jack hoped for; it costs Jack a great deal to relinquish that hope. Ames has the knowledge to resolve him but not the permission to tell. Ames finally loves Jack as Boughton meant him to, but Boughton is no longer conscious and so will never know the kinship finally established between his most beloved friend and son. Such resolution as is found is a small and fragmentary grace.
‘Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?’
Isa 25.6-9; Psa 24.1-6; Rev 21.1-6a; John 11.32-44
I believe it was the famous Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, ‘if humanity was put on this earth for a reason, it certainly was not to enjoy itself.’ I’d ask you all to bear that in mind for the next ten minutes.
The early church had a regular practice of celebrating the example of the life and death of a martyr at the place where they had died on the anniversary of their death. They’d troupe up there and say prayers and so on. They also used their relics in churches to do the same thing, sometimes sharing relics between churches. If you go to Durham Cathedral you can visit the graves and relics of St. Cuthbert for instance. Eventually, there were so many martyrs, the church couldn’t celebrate them separately, so one day was instituted for all the saints. That day is today: the feast of All Saints.
This practice was combined with a belief within Second Temple Judaism that worship took place in concert with all the beings in heaven; that earth and heaven were more closely connected (or at least more obviously) during worship than at other times. But the early church took over and transformed this Jewish belief because of its own beliefs in the incarnation and resurrection. The resurrection meant the church could read Isaiah 25 – ‘he will swallow up death forever’ – as a real event. So, for instance, we find Paul in Romans claiming that nothing can separate us from God’s love, not even death, precisely because death has been overcome. The belief that death does not separate us from God was combined with the belief that there is ultimately only one church, against the background of combined heavenly and earthly worship, to provide an explanation both for the church’s practice of honouring the bodies of dead saints, and for the church’s experience of miracles and visions associated with those bodies. (You’ve got to explain the weird stuff somehow). This is not to downplay the reality of death (it’s not that such experiences are frequent) but it is to say that though the saints are dead, they are not ultimately separated from God or from us, even though it feels like it. Death and ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’: this is our great hope. But it is not easy to believe and we need All Saints is to help us inhabit it.
The idea that God is strongly present through certain places or objects, such as the relics of saints or their graves, seems strange in a disenchanted world, but is deeply fitting for a religion that believes in the incarnation. The incarnation is partly about God’s presence coming through one body, with the aim of enabling all bodies to be carriers and transmitters of the divine. And this doesn’t just mean human bodies but all physical bodies; and that is why the pre-Reformation church was so insistent on the reality of Christ’s presence in the eucharist. The eucharist is like a mini-incarnation, as, once again, the material becomes saturated with the divine, the physical becomes the very means of God’s arrival in our midst. This idea is also, incidentally, why we as a church must continue to take our responsibilities to asylum seekers seriously: God arrives with and through them.
So now we can see why the saints are so important to the church, why we would celebrate their lives, remember them, pray at their relics, ask them to pray for us, and so on. If most of us here don’t do that, at least we can see the deep connection between those practices and the events and meanings so central to and generative of our faith. The saints ‘enrich the common life on which we all draw’ (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 216). And this common life is one of the channels through which we received God’s grace, which is to say, God.
Well, some time ago we read some biblical texts so I suppose we’d better talk about them in the time remaining to us. ‘Well-matured wines…well-matured wines strained clear.’ Isaiah proclaims God’s message of salvation as an abundant feast with all the good creation has to offer. Revelation goes even further, picking up our Isaiah passage about the end of death, but also Lev 26.11-12 – ‘I will place my dwelling in your midst…And I will walk among you and will be your god and you shall be my people’ – as well as similar passages like Jer 7.23 and 11.4 and others. What this passage from Revelation is deliberately doing is picking up so many of the most audacious and beautiful promises from the Hebrew Scriptures in order to say, ‘yes, they will come to pass and they have already begun to come to pass.’ And it’s all based on the resurrection. ‘What we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands…’ So we see Jesus ‘dwelling’ with us already, as a foretaste of how God will dwell with us in the future: the verb for God’s dwelling in Rev 21.3 is the same as in John 1.14, ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ What does it look like when Jesus dwells with us? Well, we see Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, we see Jesus himself being not being simply raised from the dead but resurrected to life beyond death. And we have this – the gathering and the eucharist – as a taste of our future hope.
It is Jesus’ bodily resurrection that confirms Isaiah’s hope that salvation will consist of all the material good of creation. Creation and redemption are, from one point of view, the same thing, a single divine action. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, two of the main characters are old ministers who have been friends all their lives, Ames and Boughton. Neither of them is too far from death. Ames says:
We know nothing about heaven, or very little, and I think Calvin is right to discourage curious speculations on things the Lord has not seen fit to reveal to us…Not that Paradise could disappoint, but I believe Boughton is right to enjoy the imagination of heaven as the best pleasure of this world…Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, ‘Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I’d multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes.’ So he’s just sitting there multiplying the feel of the wind by two, multiplying the smell of the grass by two.
And so at last we return to Wittgenstein: humanity is not here to enjoy itself. In one way he is correct. Christianity does not teach an irresponsible hedonism (though I believe the Puritans have sometimes been accused of this). Whilst we are alive we are to work with God to perfect the creation and extend the unbounded communion of God. It is precisely this that the saints do and witness to: God’s love and forgiveness as massively anterior to any of our responses. And as Jesus’ example makes clear, such a life and witness can be difficult, painful, full of conflict and misunderstanding, even politically dangerous. But the grief in this labour is temporary. We are in fact created for joy, happiness, jouissance. “Before” we came along, God’s life was one big unending bliss, and we were created precisely to share in the eternal bliss of the triune life. There is a theme of joy in the NT, a feeling of a happy surprise, a shock that people were trying to assimilate after Christ’s death and resurrection. And that feeling of being ‘surprised by joy’ is a foretaste of what’s to come. Those moments of being captivated by beauty, of the joy of new birth or discovery, of re-uniting with old friends, those are not fortunate exceptions to a meaningless void or a world fundamentally filled with pain and antagonism, they are our access to the way things really are and will be, the most fundamental reality of all: the joy and friendship of the triune life.
‘Exclusivism and Embrace’
Torrance started by suggesting that one way we construct idols, or fit the gospel into a procrustean bed, is through language. He called this ‘semantic immanentism’, a failure to ‘re-schematise’ our language in the reality of the divine, a failure in the ‘direction of pressure of interpretation.’ He offered three examples of Hebrew terms that, through translation are totally transformed, leading to radically different conceptions of the divine and our relation to it.
1) berith (covenant) > diatheke in NT > foedus (contract) (Latin has no word for covenant). So rather than unilateral and unconditional acceptance and covenant, we end up with a contractual and conditional relation to God.
2) Tsedaqah (righteousness) > dikaiosune in NT > iustitia (justice). Latin/Western Christian tradition ends up with an impersonal and retributive sense of justice, rather than God’s righteousness as not breaking a bruised reed (Is 42).
3) Torah > nomosin NT > lex (law) – takes on Stoic connotations as legal demands to be met before we are accepted by God, rather than the demands put on us precisely through being accepted already by God.
Torrance was frequently critical of the Western ordo salutis for failing on each of these regards. Instead of a God of unconditional loving faithfulness to Israel we end up with a legalistic, contractual religion, with a God who must be cajoled into forgiving us. The legal replaces the filial. He suggests this is so common because a) the freeness of grace offends human pride and control; b) the continuing appeal of the desire for understanding of the divine to be universally and immanently available (not mediate through particular historical events); c) desire to see sinners as culpable; d) fear of antinomianism.
As to the latter, Torrance evidenced the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Winnie Mandela refused, in the face of massive evidence to admit any wrongdoing. Tutu stood up, approached her with open arms and said, ‘I speak to you as one who loves you deeply. Can you not admit that mistakes have been made?’ She then admitted that things had gone horribly wrong.
He then moved on to talk about the political ramifications of forgiveness, citing Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace. He rejected the idea that retributive justice could ever make things right (Arendt’s ‘predicament of irreversability’: the wrong cannot ever be undone). He also rejected the idea of the scales of justice, that wrong done to the offender restores some sort of universal harmony. This was not true to the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
He addressed the problem of who could forgive, is it possible to forgive on behalf of others? He pointed out that this was a problem for atonement theory: can God only forgive sin that is done directly against God? His response was to suggest that the incarnation was on behalf of all and was of the one in whom all participate. So a wrong against a person is a wrong against God who is ‘one being with’ the victim; and it is the same wrong against both.. This means that human forgiveness can participate in God’s forgiveness of others, so that we can forgive on behalf of others.
It was an excellent, very moving lecture, full of personal and political examples to illustrate his argument. The book wherein he works all this out more fully than he had time for in his lectures should be great.
‘The Triune God and the ‘Re-schematised Mind.’
‘Christians neither should nor can ground their belief in the triune God on abstract arguments for theism in general. The recognition of where and how God speaks is intrinsic to the Self-communication of God…It is precisely in and through God’s Self-disclosure that we recognise that God speaks here and in this way and not there and in that way.’
Torrance thinks this point is not fully appreciated in theological circles. Partly because people fear it is circular. He thinks it is but not viciously so, since any knowledge of a person involves us depending on their free self-disclosure to us. Partly because it seems to undermine human freedom. Again, he thinks it does, since if God reveals Godself to a person it does reduce their freedom not to believe in God. Partly because it compromises objectivity. Yet if there is a God proper objectivity would involve knowing this God.
Torrance thinks the more serious criticism is that he’s advocating esoteric and individualistic knowledge of God. So the main question of the lecture is: what are the criteria for theological claims? Torrance used Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments to produce an answer.
For K, if we say the criteria for recognising Christian truth are immanent within us, then we repudiate God’s Self-disclosure by collapsing it into Socratic self-knowledge (from the Meno problem and its midwife solution).
K proposes a different scheme (neither Plato nor K are proposing general epistemologies, but asking about knowledge of the divine). The teacher and the moment in time are and remain decisive for our relation to the truth (the opposite of Plato’s model). Prior to this decisive help from the teacher we are in ‘untruth’. But to recognise the truth is not an irrational leap, it is not to abandon reason nor have something added to reason; it is rather a paradigm shift, a new perception on the world.
Torrance thought this should be conceived christologically not rather than individually. What I think he meant by this is that through coming to faith we participate in a person, Christ, through the Spirit, and thereby in God, in contrast to a platonic conception of participation in the forms. But when he publishes the book you can check out the details.
I had dinner with him last night; he’s a remarkably nice man.
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