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Hauerwas 12 – embarrassing triviality or what?

Matthew 17 contains the perplexing miracle of Peter being told by Jesus to catch a fish, find a coin in its mouth and pay the temple tax. It sounds for all the world like one of those childish miracle stories where Jesus does the odd trick with divine power. Various approaches to this story try to reduce its oddity, or its embarrassing triviality – was it a round about way of saying Peter was playfully asked by Jesus to go and do what he knew best, catch fish, and with the proceeds pay the tax. Hardly.

Hauerwas doesn’t flinch from seeing this story as an embarrassing, demanding, paradigm-shifting story. It reveals the required mindset to live in the Kingdom of God. If you can’t believe such a story of the providence of God, how will you believe the harder story of the meek inheriting the earth, or peacemakers as the true children of God. here is Hauerwas:

Christians rightly desire to do great things in service to God and in service to the world. But too often Christians think such service must insure the desired outcome. We simply do not believe that we can risk fishing for a fish with a coin in its mouth. Yet no account of the Christian desire to live at peace with our neighbour, who may be also our enemy, is intelligible if Christians no longer trust that God can and will help us catch fish with coins in their mouths. No account of Christian nonviolence is intelligible that does not require, as well as depend on, miracle. Christian discipleship entails our trusting that God has given and will continue to give all that we need to be faithful. (Page 159)

A good friend with a combative approach to most discussions, often finishes her putting of her case with an affectionately pugnacious question, "So what do you think of that then?"

Hmmmmm?

13 February 2007
Hymns, hmmmmm……

Went to a service on Sunday night to celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of Charles Wesley. All the music was Wesleyan – and the organist had just gained his M.Phil on the theology of James Denney. A night of sound theology and responsible hymn singing guaranteed!

Several observations though:-

"And can it be" should never, ever, be sung to any other tune than Sagina. The confluence of evangelical theology at its most attractive and musical dynamic at its most singable should be declared sacrosanct.

"O Thou who camest from above" remains one of the finest hymns in our langauge. The clearly expressed longing and aspiration of the human heart open to the coming of the Holy Spirit is simply sublime.

"Lo he comes with clouds descending" is an awe-full hymn. Heavy theology informs sombre reflection on the end times – but the hymn is redolent of transcendent glory and coming majesty. Sung by a full church supported by a 60 voice choir – this was hair raising praise – even for bald worshippers such as me!

This all took place in Aberdeen Methodist Church, within sight of Wesley’s chair, gifted to the Society in Aberdeen because it was a gift from someone in Huntly and he had no room in his coach to take it south. Ive sat on it, and while not being too enthusiastic about evangelical relics, this was different!

Later this year I am going to blog on Wesley’s hymns – and why it will be liturgically unacceptable, spiritually diminishing, theologically impoverishing, and pastorally irresponsible to lose such hymns through the default mechanism of what C S Lewis called chronological snobbery. Few hymn writers come close to articulating the Evangelical experience with more precision and passion, than Charles Wesley at his best.

12 February 2007
Scandalous Presence

In a very fine essay, ‘Scandalous Presence’, almost a mini systematic theology organised around the relational community of the Triune God, Cynthia Rigby gives honourable mention to the late Catherine Lacugna. (Pictured below)

Lacugna’s book, God With Us, was commended by one of our students as one of the more readable and persuasive contemporary accounts of the Trinity. I agree – she’s one of my favourite theologians, and her early death deprived us of what would have been a substantial and innovative work on the Holy Spirit. Her trinitarian thought has been praised widely and criticised extensively – but it will remain (for me at any rate) a passionately engaged expression of what it means to take the relational nature of God with theological and pastoral seriousness.

Rigby says, "[Lacugna’s] attention to the primacy of community and relationality in the life of the Godhead has been helpful in challenging us to rethink what impact God’s scandalous presence should have on the way we live. To confess that God is triune is to know that God is for us in God’s very being. To reflect God’s triune image in relationship to one another, then, is not to lord it over one another. To be God-like, when God is understood to be a community, is not to be self-sufficient but to live in relation".

Lacugna’s point is this. To understand God as a community of self-giving love, and to believe that love at its highest implies mutuality, reciprocal service, uncalculating self-expense and consistent faithfulness, will have major implications for how human life, politics and society are organised. The interdependent and mutual exchange of love within the life of God may not be easily replicated in human community, but it does provide a model which seriously calls in question the societal structures of power and self-sufficiency that drive much of social and political activity.

Just as in a previous post I argued that the imago Dei was an important diagnostic theological insight, so too is the view of God as an eternal threefold relation of mutual loving exchange. I think both these theological realities have serious consequences for how we think about and do those activities we call missional. They also stand as potent critique of any ecclesiology fuelled by self-concern, or immured to the demanding presence of the ‘other’.

11 February 2007
Hauerwas 11:faithful following to Calvary

When Jesus said Peter was the rock on which he would build his church, what did he mean? Hauerwas has no doubt –

‘Peter stands within the church, charged with keeping the church true to its witness to Jesus….Peter was not called to "keep the peace", but rather to insure that the church has the countless conflicts necessary for its holiness.’

Hauerwas’ take on Peter’s ability to see and state who Jesus is, is sympathetic. What Jesus says about who he is, how he must die, and what it means to follow him, isn’t an invitation to a more satisfying life. Discipleship isn’t about self-fulfillment, but about faithful following to calvary if need be.

Jesus therefore, tells his disciples that if they are to follow him they must take up their cross. If they seek to save their lives using the means the world offers to insure their existence, then their lives will be lost. Rather, they must be willing to lose their lives "for my sake" if they are to find life. Jesus is not telling his disciples that if the learn to live unselfishly they will live more satisfying lives. Rather, he says that any sacrifices they make must be done for his sake. The crosses they bear must be ones determined by his cross.(Page 152-3)

The ethicist in Hauerwas is deeply ambivalent about the self-fulfilment motive for following Jesus. The cross isn’t an alternative way to self fulfilment – but an alternative way to live in a violent world, which requires the sacrifice of self as a witness to the self-giving love of God in Christ.

Over at faith and Theology there is a fascinating post on ‘Ten Propositions on Self Love’, which has attracted an avalanche of comments. It is a good corrective to the self-centering tendency of much contemporary spirituality, theology and ethics. Click on Ben Myers name on the sidebar.

10 February 2007
Lead-free bullets……

A friend has paid a gift subscription for me, for the Reader’s Digest, for over 20 years. The late Murdo Ewan MacDonald, pioneer in securing practical theology a place at the academic round table at Glasgow University, once referred to it as "that saboteur of the modern intellect". But now and again, by accident or intent, it gets it right. One of its snippets illustrates the ethical ambiguity, rational dexterity, logical inconsistency, dubious ecology, theological illiteracy, philosophical stupidity, social irresponsibility, technological rapacity….och I’ve ranted long enough – just read it…………. and laugh………., or weep.

A pressure group poured scorn on BAE Systems after it emerged that the defence company was developing "environmentally friendly" munitions – including lead-free bullets.

The Campaign Against Arms Trade called the move "laughable". But BAE Systems said it was not embarrassed about its efforts or by a statement on its website that "lead used in ammunition can harm the environment and pose a risk to people".

9 February 2007
Snow big deal

Yesterday my son returned after over a year on Thailand where the temperature was never below 15 C. He flew into Heathrow to what is now rotuinely caused travelling CHAOS. There’s an excuse for him complaining of the cold, and weary after a trip via Cairo, just wanting to get home.

But two or three inches of snow seems to be a national crisis that threatens to close and disrupt airports, compromise rail lines, render roads so risky drivers are told to journey only if absolutely necessary. What happens in countries where snow is the norm in winter? Why does non-extreme weather for a temperate region cause such CHAOS in parts of Britain? It isn’t as if our traffic system is so finely tuned, so hyper-efficient, that travellers are totally traumatised by delays and timetable anomalies. Or is snow so rare that it isn’t worth tying up money and resources being prepared for it, with sufficient road salt, runway clearing equipment, experienced staff?

Don’t know. I’m just bemused by the headline grabbing importance of a snowfall. Some of my most joyful childhood memories were of feet of snow in Ayrshire and central Lanarkshire, the kind that makes it hard to walk out the door without a spade. When I was 10, four feet of snow was way over my head. Snow is one form of creation’s poetry. The fragile beauty, infinite diversity, iced diamond delicacy of each snowflake, the cumulative purity of fresh-fallen snow, the way snowfall softens hard edges, fills in and covers, till the landscape is made more gentle. Here’s one of my favourite snow poems by Jared Carter, from here: http://jaredcarter.com/poems/12/

Snow

At every hand there are moments we
cannot quite grasp or understand. Free

to decide, to interpret, we watch rain
streaking down the window, the drain

emptying, leaves blown by a cold wind.
At least we sense a continuity in

such falling away. But not with snow.
It is forgetfulness, what does not know,

has nothing to remember in the first place.
Its purpose is to cover, to leave no trace

of anything. Whatever was there before—
the worn broom leaned against the door

and almost buried now, the pile of brick,
the bushel basket filling up with thick,

gathering whiteness, half sunk in a drift—
all these things are lost in the slow sift

of the snow’s falling. Now someone asks
if you can remember—such a simple task—

the time before you were born. Of course
you cannot, nor can I. Snow is the horse

that would never dream of running away,
that plods on, pulling the empty sleigh

while the tracks behind it fill, and soon
everything is smooth again. No moon,

no stars, to guide your way. No light.
Climb up, get in. Be drawn into the night.

9 February 2007
Kathleen O’Connor’s commentary, Lamentations and the Tears of the World is beautifully written. The exegesis is at the service of hearing the text and overhearing its message to a broken world. She doesn’t mimic Brueggemann’s style, but she writes with that same gift of opening the text by allowing text, theology, political realities and human yearning to share in the hermeneutic of our experience.

Joan Chittister is a Benedictine whose writing on the Rule of Benedict I have read for years. Her commentary on Ruth is a deep reflection on twelve defining moments in the experience of women – loss, change, friendship and so on. It is a series of essays, each one so soaked in Ruth that they are Ruth flavoured! And that’s another way of reading a text. Chittister is a consummate essayist, who turns the theme she is writing about like wood in the lathe, and shapes it to bring out the contours of the grain.

The New Interpreter’s Bible has several commentaries by women – Renita Weems is one of them and it is an education to read her commentary on the Song of Songs alongside Robert Jenson’s one in the Interpretation series. Weems is an African American Woman, who writes as a professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt, out of her experience of growing up in Tennessee, and as one deeply ambivalent about the treatment of women and the use of female imagery in the hebrew Bible. For that reason her commentary is unabashedly about God’s gift of human love, which is to be celebrated as of the essence of the human. Her book Battered Love is an exploration of women and violence in the Hebrew prophets, and it is the lack of violence, and the celebration of mutuality in the Song, that gives her commentary a radical freshness.

Jenson is an elder statesman in the parliament of Systematic theologians – one of the most creative and demanding writers in the field, who admits to stepping outside his academic bailliwick in writing this commentary. He takes it as a story of the human love for God, and offers an interpetation of love that is theological, and of God that takes full cognizance of divine affectivity. Reading the two together I didn’t want to decide who was "right" – I found both had listened intently to the text, to their own theological and human experience, and had written out of who they are.

All of which leads up to the question I want to ask. Who are the other prominent female voices in biblical commentary writing? Margaret Thrall’s Second Corinthians, 2 volumes in the academic benchmark series International Critical Commentary; Morna Hooker on Mark, and Philippians. But who else? Have you read, or do you know of, biblical commentary written by women? I’d like to post on this later – I have a feeling some of the most creative biblical interpretation is to be found here.

8 February 2007
Hauerwas 10: The church is the ark….

Back to eisegesis – maybe even a little spiritualising – but once again Hauerwas has my attention. His use of Matthew’s account of the calming of the storm, as an analogy for a fearful church which like an ark is tossed and threatened by storms, gives the story a dramatic twist that depicts both the missional context and inevitable anxieties of life in the world. If I were going on retreat soon, I’d save the rest of this book for then – Hauerwas is good conversational company, and he does get to the heart of the text, if not always by the recognised paths. In the absence of such a treat, I’ll carry on reading him in the wee spaces of reading time salvaged from life as it is at present.

The church is the ark of the kingdom, but often the church finds herself far from shore and threatened by strong winds and waves. Those in the boat often fail to understand that they are meant to be far from the shore and that to be threatened by a storm is not unusual If the church is faithful she will always be far from the shore. Some, moreover, will be commanded to leave even the safety of the boat to walk on water.

A church that challenges the powers of this world is not a church that will need to explain Jesus. Such a church needs only to worship Jesus. To worship Jesus means that the fear we experience from being so far from land in a trackless sea, buffetted by winds and waves, will not dominate our lives. Fear dominates our lives when we assume that our task is to survive death or to save the church. Our task, however, is not survive, but to be faithful witnesses. Fear cannot dominate our lives if we have good work to do. Good work to do is but another name for worship.

7 February 2007
the politics of gentleness….

Teachers, carers, theologians, medical professionals and others, meeting together to explore a spirituality of community based on friendship, hospitality and conversation – it was a remarkable conference. Sponsored last autumn by the Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability, at Aberdeen University, orgainsed by Professor John Swinton, the day featured two very different keynote speakers.

Jean Vanier is founder of L’Arche communities, an international network of local communities. Within L’Arche communities ‘people with learning disabilities and people who do not share that life experience, live together, not as carer and cared for, but as fellow human beings, who share a mutuality of care and need.’ In a world comfortable with hard edged distinctions, sold on efficiency, idolising individual rational choice, dissolving differences into a community of human supportiveness and mutual recognition of need – is both remarkable and prophetic.

Prophetic in the sense of providing a corrective to the self-concerned, often fearful, anxious and grasping way life is now lived in our culture; and prophetic in the sense of gentle critique, an invitation to consider alternative models of human relations. Vanier spoke of fundamental fear, the wound of loneliness, the preciousness of each human being – and did so with tenderness and gentleness, informed by a life experience remarkable in its influence for good in thousands of lives.

By contrast Stanley Hauerwas is one of America ’s leading theologians and ethicists. He disowns any claim to gentleness, is a combative outspoken Texan, eloquent but downright confrontational when he encounters injustice, exclusion and any process or system that diminishes the value and dignity of human life. In a telling contrast he quipped, ‘Where I see an enemy to be defeated, Jean sees a wound to be healed.’ This sharp tongued thinker identified and explored the phrase ‘the politics of gentleness’. He wasn’t always easy to follow, original thinkers seldom are, but as he might say at home, ‘we got the drift.’

Now neither of these men claim that their view of human life and community is the only way to go. And in a climate of party political in-fighting and warmongering, when backs have been stabbed, egos bruised, reputations and track records defended, and payback time gets closer, the phrase ‘politics of gentleness’, has an other-worldly sound. Gentleness is not our preferred way of doing business, nor of interacting socially, nor does gentle human responsiveness deeply inform our most vital relationships; we aren’t even gentle with ourselves.

What was being argued was a change of worldview – a way of looking at others that was not exploitative nor dismissive, that assumed worth and conferred dignity, that sought to understand rather than criticise. Hauerwas described Vanier and his work with a wistfulness that seemed to indicate his own failings in the matter, ‘He exemplifies a way of being which contradicts distrust, and dispels our loneliness of being a fearful human being’. Hauerwas’ own definition of being human is also worth pondering: ‘You are stuck with being born; our creature-hood is not chosen; accept life as a gift without regret.’

Yes, and maybe through the politics of gentleness, lived out in our own local communities, informed and sustained by communities practising the love of Christ, we will be able, eventually, to accept every life as God’s gift – without regret.

7 February 2007
imago Dei

In 1955, James H Robinson was the first African American to deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures, the most prestgious lecturship on preaching in the United States. He spoke about the dangerous complacency of a nation ‘ flushed with a succession of victories and satiated with economic prosperity, at the height of vaunted achievements and technological ascendancy in the arts and sciences’. And he demanded that those who dare talk of transformative grace must wrestle with such questions as:

What must I do with my life – with the power, the knowledge, the wealth and the leisure which modern adbvancement puts at my disposal? And when life tumbles in how do I keep my equilibrium and reinstate my life without going to pieces.(Page 148)

This from the essay ‘Transformative Grace’, in the edited collection of Essays I am currently reading. (See picture in this post and sidebar). Written by an African American woman theologian, a Reformed view of grace is repristinated to take account of African Presbyterian experience and history over 200 years in the United States. Refusing the role of Reformed theological parrott she embraces the ministry of reformed theological prophet. This is a superbly astringent essay. On the imago Dei she praises the contributors to an anthology, Black Preaching

The preachers keep themselves and their congregations rooted in the message that every person is a reflection of the divinity. Their exposition of the sacredness and inherent worth of every human being is uncompromising.; the status of imago Dei has no superior. God’s grace comes to humanity touching each of us directly, so that assured of our intrinsic dignity, we can each live into our highest and most noble self.(Page 149)

A quotation like that has disruptive and constructive consequences if such a view of each human being were to inform political and social goals. I am deeply interested in the critical edge the doctrine of the imago Dei provides for a Christian theology and practice of justice, and as a doctrine with diagnostic properties for probing the economic values and human costs of social policies. Imago dei and asylum seeking people; imago Dei and homeless people; imago Dei, globalisation and company restructuring; imago Dei and inter-faith dialogue.

Of course imago Dei is a doctrine decisively shaped by the attributes of the God in whose image it is believed we are made. ‘God is love…in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself….God commends his love towards us in that while we were still enemies, Christ died for us.’ Imago Dei – transformative grace.

5 February 2007