Acts 2:1-11
Romans 8:8-17
John 14:15-16,23-26
Where do you live? On the face of it, if you’re fortunate enough to have a home, that’s easy to answer. You can say, for example, that you live at 13 Acacia Avenue.
And that’s fine if you’re trying to find your way from A to B, or in this case Acacia Avenue. The answer is correct, but superficial. It doesn’t give away anything of ourselves. Although the question is, “where do you live”, it doesn’t really say anything about what it means to live.
Let’s try rephrasing the question. Not, “Where do you live”, but, “Where is your life?” Where does your heart abide? Where are you truly alive? What makes you shout for joy? What makes you angry?
That’s much more challenging. It’s asking about the depths, about the real secret “me” deep inside. I can’t answer that question without giving something of myself. It’s a risky, costly question to answer.
At the beginning of John’s Gospel, when Jesus calls his first disciples, they ask him this question, “where are you staying”, “where do you live?”. And Jesus says, “come and see”. Now the disciples do see, on the superficial level, the address where Jesus happens to be staying, but they see far more than that.
The rest of John’s Gospel is the real answer. It tells us where Jesus truly abides, where his life is. For Jesus dwells with the Father. He is one with God from all eternity. In his teaching and in his presence with them Jesus gives to the disciples the secret of his life, that he and the Father are one.
That in itself is more wonderful than we can ever comprehend. God, who created us out of nothing, has come so close to us, to reveal to us the secret of his life in Jesus. But he is not content with simply showing us his life. God does not want to be worshipped from a distance. He wants to catch us and the whole of creation in his loving embrace.
So in today’s Gospel reading Jesus goes further. If you keep my word, he says, I will send you the Advocate, the Holy Spirit. And the Father and I will love you and come and make our home with you. What a gift! What a promise! I love you, says God, I will make my home with you. Your life will be my life. Where we live will be in God.
But how can we love God in return for the love he has given us? Sinners that we are, finite creatures. Specks of dust that float in the rays of God’s light. How can we ever reciprocate such love? I will send you the Holy Spirit, says Jesus. The Holy Spirit who is the love of God himself. God has given us his own love to dwell in our hearts. We love God with the same love with which he loves us.
And this is the gift which is poured out on the disciples today, the feast of Pentecost, in that upper room in Jerusalem.
Has it ever occurred to you to wonder where the walls went on the day of Pentecost? The disciples were in the same upper room in which Jesus had celebrated the last supper just before his death. That was a private, secluded room where the Master and his disciples could gather undisturbed by the police who were hunting for him. The same room where the disciples had met after the death of Jesus with the doors locked because they were afraid.
Today the Holy Spirit blasts into that room in wind and fire. The disciples begin to praise God in every language under heaven. And the crowds come running to see what is going on. Thousands see and hear and believe. Suddenly everything is public and out in the open. The little secret church in that closed room has been launched into the world and it’s as though the walls have disappeared.
The Orthodox icon for the feast of Pentecost tries to convey something of that. It’s a marvel of inverted perspective. The upper room has become an infinite space with no walls or horizon, it just goes on without limit into golden light. The disciples and Mary are sitting in arc which is part of an expanding circle like ripples on a pond. Down below, in a small cramped dark space, is a little figure representing the world, with its power structures and self-obsessed ways of thinking. The world is robed like a king, but he looks on without comprehension. He doesn’t see the glorious new universe, the Kingdom of God in the Holy Spirit, which is unfolding in front of him.
The Holy Spirit is given to us today so that we might love God with the same love with which he loves us. But we are also sent out into the world. The Church is not to remain in a little safe upper room. God sends us, who have been caught by his love, to widen the circle of that love, to embrace the whole world.
And the Holy Spirit gives us gifts, of ministry and discipleship, to enable us to do that. Wonderful gifts, of wisdom, understanding, patience, love. The Spirit gives to some the gifts to be pastors, evangelists or teachers. To others gifts of prayer, counselling, nurture, leadership. Some gifts are more obvious, some are quieter and more hidden. But every one of us has different gifts and we all need each other. The gifts the Holy Spirit distributes are to work together to build up the Church and to extend God’s Kingdom.
So let us today give thanks for the gifts God has given us, and pray that we may use those gifts, together, to build up one another and to carry on the mission that God has given to us.
The whole world is invited to enter the new universe that began in the upper room, the universe filled with light and love, the Kingdom of God in the Holy Spirit. And God has given us the Spirit of his love that we may bring others into that love too.
Today our heavenly Father speaks to us through the gift of the Holy Spirit. “I love you. I will make my home with you. Go, and bring home all my other children, too.”
Friday, 28 May 2010
Saturday, 13 March 2010
Sermon at Parish Mass 7 March 2010, Third Sunday of Lent
Ex 3:1-8a, 13-15
Ps 103: 1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 8, 11
Lk 13:1-9
Two cars were driving in opposite directions along a winding country lane. They were fast approaching one another. It was impossible for either driver to see round the corners. The driver of one car was a woman and the other a man.
They came to the final bend between them, and for the first time saw each other’s cars coming head-on. They slammed on their brakes and swerved and just managed to avoid hitting each other. As she went past, the woman driver leaned out of her window and shouted: “Pig!” The man, provoked by this, replied with a similar compliment. And round the next corner he crashed into a pig.
We don’t always respond well to friendly warnings. We can mistake the intention of the person warning us; we can feel a bit threatened because, after all, they are trying to tell us that we are in danger.
In today’s Gospel reading Jesus is given a friendly warning. He and his disciples are heading towards Jerusalem, and they’re Galileans. And some people warn Jesus about another group of Galileans who have just been massacred by Pontius Pilate while they were offering sacrifices in the Temple. The message is clear: go to Jerusalem, and you will be in danger.
But Jesus replies with a warning of his own – “if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!”. And then he adds another story of a tower which collapsed and killed eighteen people, with the same warning attached. These tragedies are typical of terrible things that happen in the world as we know it. People are killed as a result of accidents, disasters and human violence.
At the time of Jesus there was a widespread view that if bad things happened it was because you were a sinner and God was punishing you. As soon as you take that view of course you’re setting up two different groups: those people over there who are bad, and God is punishing them; and us here, we’re alright. We’re different.
But Jesus challenges that view. He says that these tragedies did not happen to their victims because they deserved it. They were not worse sinners than anyone else. But he still says, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”. It seems contradictory.
To make sense of this we need to understand what repentance is all about. Part of repentance is owning up to our sinful acts, saying sorry, and asking God for forgiveness and for help to live a new life. But repentance has a much bigger meaning than this. The Greek word for repentance means changing your mind, not in the sense of deciding to have tea instead of coffee, but in the sense of replacing your mind, your former way of thinking, with a new understanding.
Repentance points to a complete re-orientation of the person. It’s turning around, taking a new direction. Because when you turn around, you see things differently, and get a new perspective. We turn away from our personal sins and turn to the new mind that Jesus offers us.
This is what the people talking to Jesus don’t get. Both these tragic events happen in Jerusalem, a city under Roman occupation, and the focus of various violent resistance movements. Of course, the Romans always retaliated to any uprising with more violence, and the slaughter of the Galileans in the temple may be just such an episode.
Then there’s the tower that fell down at Siloam. Siloam was on the edge of Jerusalem and the tower Jesus refers to would have been part of the city walls, its military defences.
So when Jesus says, “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”, he’s suggesting something quite specific: Romans massacring Jews, and the walls of Jerusalem tumbling down around its defenders. And this did happen. In AD 70, the Jews rose up in revolt against Roman rule, and the rebellion was brutally crushed. After a long and terrible siege, Jerusalem was completely destroyed and the walls flattened.
Jesus’ call to repentance is therefore a call to his hearers to renounce the cycle of violence and retaliation which they simply assume as part of their world view. Jesus can see all too well where that will end up. But tragically they can only conceive of the world in terms of adversaries and enemies, them against us. The problem was that the Romans saw it in exactly the same way, but the other way round. As Gandhi once said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. The vicious circle of violence escalates, and it’s always someone else who started it.
So this is not about God making bad things happen to evildoers. Jesus warns his hearers to repent not because he wants to punish them but because he wants to save them and so many innocent bystanders from the consequences of their distorted world-view. They need a change of mind, a new understanding.
We too need to hear this call to repent. And this is bound up with the world in which we live. There is so much violence in the world, the environment is in danger, people are living in abject poverty here in London, in this great capitalist hub of the world. Collectively, we fail to see that all human beings are God’s children, and within God’s creation we all depend on each other. Our personal repentance is where we begin to help the world to repent.
By repentance, by turning to Christ, we are freed from the old world-view, bound up with violence and the fear of death. We can receive the new life Christ offers which liberates us from these things. Of course this is a process. Repentance is life-long struggle. But every time we fail, we make a new beginning, and by God’s grace even if by slow degrees we are being transformed and renewed in Christ.
The Rabbi Eliezer was once asked how late in life a person could repent. He replied that there was no hurry. You didn’t need to repent until the day before you died. Well, none of us knows when that will be. Christ’s hearers in today’s gospel had another 40 years before the destruction of Jerusalem. The fig tree in the parable that Jesus tells has still another season of grace to see if it will bear fruit.
And Christ still calls us to repentance. Every year the Church gives us this holy and joyful season of Lent as a fresh opportunity to turn once again to Christ. This is a season of liberation, of leaving behind the old order of sin and death. It offers hope for ourselves and for the world. Today, once more, in this Eucharist and through the scriptures, we are offered the opportunity to turn to Christ and receive the new life he offers, the only life that is ultimately real.
Monday, 8 February 2010
UCL One World Week
Reflections on Culture and Conversation at London's Global University
I'm pleased to see that UCL One World Week is coming back again. Posted below is a slightly edited version of a paper written about last year's One World Week as part of the final year of my BA in Contextual Theology.
UCL One World Week, 2 February to 8 February 2009
UCL One World Week[1] is a joint initiative of UCL and UCL Union (the students’ union), and is part of UCL’s Global Citizenship Agenda[2]. It first ran in 2008, has been repeated this year and looks set to become an annual event. It is billed as “an exciting and thought provoking series of events celebrating diversity and enhancing the sense of community on campus at UCL… based around the key themes of gender, sexuality, culture, religion, our environment and our unique abilities”.
One World Week this year featured 52 separate events including an international market with a difference (products entirely from the developing world); music, drama and films from around the world; lectures; a charities and NGOs careers fair and volunteers showcase; fitness events; fairtrade stalls; events hosted by Muslims, Sikhs and Christians; events focussing on women’s issues; gay and lesbian events; events focussing on conservation, biodiversity and global citizenship; and a “One World Fayre” with stalls offering regional food and information about culture, faith and diversity. The Anglican chaplaincy was one of the participants.
The aims of One World Week offer something of a contrast to the Global Citizenship Agenda itself, which is described on UCL’s website as:
A process which aims to produce graduates who are:
• Critical and creative thinkers
• Ambitious – but also idealistic and committed to ethical behaviour
• Aware of the intellectual and social value of culture difference
• Entrepreneurs with the ability to innovate
• Willing to assume leadership roles: in the family, the community and the workplace
• Highly employable and ready to embrace professional mobility.[3]
This does not immediately look very promising in terms of community: here the person seems reduced to product, and it is assumed that everyone will be winners, high-flyers and leaders. It could, to employ some hyperbole, be the aims of a finishing school for benign dictators. To be fair, it is of course the corporate statement of a highly selective institution which aims at excellence, and doubtless there is funding coming in somewhere that depends on producing statements of this kind. But is turning out a successful product really the most important human thing that happens in the lives of young people in a university? The agenda of One World Week in fact suggests something quite different, and more hopeful, which this study will seek to explore.
The week’s activities were aimed at both encountering and celebrating diversity, and in particular the diverse cultures and communities represented in London and within UCL. Many of the events therefore took the form of, or encouraged, story-telling and conversation. Films, music, debates, dance, all were about expressing what it is like to be a person who belongs to a particular community, in a way that was intelligible to someone identifying with a different community. It was about enabling recognition across the boundaries of difference.
This is in many ways a risky activity; difference makes for anxiety; to dare to speak is to risk being misunderstood; to dare to listen is to risk being changed. When (for instance) a Pakistani Muslim stall finds itself next to a Gay and Lesbian students’ stall many kinds of conversations become possible that might not otherwise have happened, and possibilities of transformation open up. For example, the assumptions and prejudices of either party may be brought into an arena of dialogue where they may be challenged and undermined; more than this, they may find that each has an experience of being strangers in the strange land of a dominant culture which does not share their aspirations and ideals, experiences that may, perhaps, be translatable into a kind of commonality and recognition through which the “One World” of the week’s title may become known in a new way. Alternatively, the mutual engagement may uncover rivalry, reinforce prejudice and engender hostility. Any of this may happen. Whether any of it does cannot be determined in the abstract but only by making the attempt at conversation and taking its risks.
There is much here that connects with the Christian understanding of transformation: human identity, relationality, charity, and the quest for the “self”, are all implicit in the kinds of dialogue that might arise. Firstly, the kinds of conversation that might happen in One World Week may be more than usually open to the possibility of finding their purpose in themselves rather than in some object external to the conversation. Their point is encountering the other, not getting something done. Students and staff are invited to speak with one another in ways which, for once, do not have to do with teaching programmes, research, or other outcome-oriented activities.
This is the kind of conversation that Ursula le Guin calls the “mother tongue”, and distinguishes from the “father tongue” in which dialogue is a means to an end other than itself, such as seeking empirical knowledge or issuing instructions[4]. The “father tongue” aspires to objectivity, and tends to require no response other than assent. The “mother tongue” is intrinsically conversational, subjective, and even “pointless”; saying “good morning” is neither an objective observation of what the morning is like, nor an instruction; it is a social ritual which expresses recognition, bonding and cohesion.
Rowan Williams, in Lost Icons, discusses the implications of le Guin’s distinction for what he calls the “social miracle” (borrowing a phrase from historian John Bossy[5]). The “social miracle” is the manifestation or achievement of charity, understood in the ancient sense of the state of Christian love and affection lived socially, which is at the same time the love of God received in society. Daily social rituals, greeting and so on, as well as those times when productive work gives way to festivity, are essential to this embodiment of charity[6]. It is “accessible only by the suspension of rivalry and the equalising of honour or status”[7]. This recalls Josef Pieper’s definition of festivity as “an act that has meaning in itself”; according to Pieper, work and labour are directed to ends outside themselves, to production, but if they are not to be entirely utilitarian and meaningless then times of festivity, which interrupt work, are necessary to give work both its boundary and its social meaning[8]. In both Pieper and Williams, society, festivity and meaning are intertwined. This is rooted in the doctrine of creation, or more precisely of the Creator: the meaning of productive acts such as work is conditional and contingent, depending always on something else; an act cannot be “meaningful in itself” unless it has a reference that lies outside contingency altogether.
When the “social miracle” fails to happen then rivalry goes unchecked, exclusion becomes embedded, and resentment festers. This has an impact beyond the purely social or festive, and corrupts the world of production and political involvement, the discourses of the “father tongue”, as well. As Williams puts it:
More people are excluded from negotiating important decisions and are left with no stake in their social environment – and no language about where they unproblematically and non-negotiably belong, no system of charitable symbols. For the losers in the conflict, there is a stark choice between a… practically unrelieved alienation, and the adoption of some sort of charity-oriented project to take the place of the missing political dimension.[9]
It should be noted that the “charity-oriented project” here is not the “charity” of the social miracle; it is, at best, activities aimed at doing good rather than belonging.
The consequences of its alternative, alienation, can be terrible indeed. UCL has direct experience of this in the terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005, which took place close by and claimed the life of a staff member[10]. The theologian Oliver Davies was in the area at the time and reflected on its possible meaning in the context of global conflicts and similar events such as 9/11[11]. Davies refers to a “semiotic darkness”, a subversion of signs and meaning which spreads from the event or act itself and engulfs and disorients the society in which it takes place: the attacks were “a performative denial of communication” and “the denial of the possibility of progress within the social: a denial of the view that the world can be made a better place”[12]. Alienation, in the end, seeks to destroy the possibility of the social miracle from which it is excluded. Its power to do so, the power which has undermined so much of our Western self-confidence in social cohesion since 9/11, comes precisely from the impact that the bombings had in the here and now, something which forced attention on the fact that the society which is thereby imperilled exists also in the same here and now. It shattered the illusion of society as some kind of abstraction whose identity could survive by itself when the wreckage of the bombs had been cleared away. “It was a revolutionary act in the world, without purpose, without proposing an alternative, putting the human project itself, or what we know in Islam and Christianity as God’s creation, putting that at risk.”[13]
Davies argues from this a need to engage with theology in a new way, one which is rooted in the world, and has launched with other theologians a new project of “transformation theology” in which incarnation and ascension, Christology and cosmology, are woven together in the Church’s experience and interpretation of the here and now[14].
The concept of “one world”, as Davies notes, is a way of engaging with the concept of “world” in terms of “the community of peoples, who are more closely linked through global networks, gaining in knowledge of each other and interacting more with each other as communications increase in quality and extent”[15]. But this, like other uses of “world” (environment, political and financial organisation, or even “creation”) is paradoxical: it objectifies something which is, first of all, too big to be conceived, and which, secondly, can only be known in any case subjectively. Our own subjectivity is part of the “world” we seek to objectify. Nevertheless, Christian theology is committed to the concept of the world, the totality of everything that is or was or might be, as something created ex nihilo by God[16].
The doctrine of creation is fundamental to Christian epistemology, and implies that what we know is both mediated through our senses and, nonetheless, objectively real. Everything, from the cat on the mat to black holes, has its existence as gratuitous gift founded on the will of God. At the same time, it is as created beings that we perceive and know both ourselves and all other things. A viewpoint outside creation, which is necessarily that either of God or of nothing, is not accessible to us. Intersubjectivity, limitation and contingency are part of our way of knowing. This is the classical epistemology of Christian tradition, as expounded for example by Thomas Aquinas[17]. It differs of course from the stance adopted by René Descartes and his philosophical heirs, whose famous “I think therefore I am” established the ego as both the sole objective viewpoint and the only thing that it can objectively know. The consequences of the Cartesian “turn to the subject” have been extensive throughout the West; assumptions that the world “external” to the observer may be illusory and can only be taken on trust, if at all, pervade philosophy, theology[18] and science[19]. In post-modern Cartesian philosophy the objective ego itself is called into question, dissolving the possibility of true knowledge about anything. However, the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein on language and epistemology has provided a counteraction to the Cartesian project. Wittgenstein’s contention that knowledge and language are bound up together, so that knowing is something essentially relational, taking place in a process, has informed the work of many philosophers, as well as theologians who have sought to restate a traditional Christian view of knowledge and the “self”. How I know what “I” am, what my “self” is, is bound up with the process of coming to know what everything is, and who we are as persons in community. It presupposes language and speech as the means by which knowledge is explored. In other words, knowing about creation, about the “one world”, including whatever “I” might be within this world, requires telling stories.
George Steiner, in Real Presences, notes that “human history is the history of meaning”, but that this presupposes an act of trust in the meaning of discourse itself, in logic rooted in Logos, a trust “between word and world” which is the “entrance of man into the city of man”. “Only in the light of that confiding can there be a history of meaning which is, by exact counterpart, a meaning of history.”[20] Nicholas Lash develops this argument: human beings are the speaking part of the world, that is, responsible (able to respond) for and to the world. It is human responsibility to speak the truth, to tell the story, within the world as it is, even “in an almost unbearably dark and complex, almost (it seems, at times) painfully illegible, and hence unutterable, world”[21]. Moreover, the foundational trust required to tell the story, to speak for and of and to the world, is grounded in that which is beyond the story itself, outside the limits of contingency in which we must necessarily speak, and to which, however hesitantly, and at however much risk of being misunderstood, we ascribe the name “God”. As Lash points out, this is indeed far too easily misunderstood, and the holy mystery called “God” substituted by some thing or being spoken of as though it were a contingency within the discourse, an explanation of things (increasingly, an explanation seen as unnecessary) instead of the ground of existence[22]. But, we must speak, we must tell the story anyway, even if we know it can never adequately address what we stumblingly seek to speak about.
This is precisely how the scriptural revelation unfolds: always as story; never as unmediated uninterpreted truths pronounced in abstraction. Even where Jesus speaks, or where prophets deliver “the word of Yahweh”, they do so to others within history in a narrative which itself contains and conditions the message. This pattern of revelation is reflected in the incarnation of the Word, the entering of God into particularity, the knowledge of God revealed through Divine self-emptying and limitation. God as the Absolute and Unconditioned is unknowable; it is not the Word as abstraction, but the Word made flesh, that we know. Of this Romano Guardini says:
What could be more confining than the incarnation? If the Son of God, as St John says, was from all eternity ‘at the bosom of the Father’ but in time ‘became flesh and dwelt among us’, then He certainly confined Himself thereby. If He was staying in Jerusalem He could not say that He was in Nazareth. If He did something on the first day of the week He could not say that it was done on the first day. If He was eating, truth forbade Him to assert that He was sleeping.[23]
These are simple and obvious things to state, yet their implication is profound. This is entirely how revelation happens. We know nothing of God qua God; revelation is mediated through the particularities and limitations of human lives enacted in history, through which the scriptures were formed, and ultimately in one particular historical life which Christians believe to be God’s fullest revelation of God’s self[24]. The Church is the “body of Christ” and so shares in the historicity and limitation of the incarnate Word; the church in fact, is history, is a story, Christ’s presence in the here and now as well as in eternity, the story of salvation being realised in particularity, of persons entering the kingdom of God[25].
It seems that at the heart of the story humans tell is the quest for the “soul”, the “self” known through its own engagement in conversation, through encountering the other. It is necessarily something known in time. As Rowan Williams says:
The self lives and moves in, only in, acts of telling – in the time taken to set out and articulate a memory, the time that is a kind of representation (always partial, always skewed) of the time my material and mental life has taken, the time that has brought me here.[26]
The encounter with the other in which the story can be told requires that the other be, precisely, “other”: different; risky; questioning; “the gap between desire and reality”[27] in which I discover that “I cannot fail to be involved in incompletion… no thing completes me”[28]. Instead, the Other which may complete me lies beyond the circles of contingent and self-referential dialogue, beyond rivalry or threat or violence, so wholly Other that it could never be a competitor for the space I might occupy or the story I might tell. “The self that is present to itself and to others without violence or anxiety, the self that might possibly be called a soul, exists in the expectation of grace.”[29] The story in which the soul is engaged invites one, through the process of discovering that nothing else will do, to receive one’s being as unconditional gift. Again, we return to creation, to the necessity in the end of finding some way to speak about God.
The soul, according to Aquinas, is the “form of the body”[30] and “the principle of the acts of life”[31], that which, in substantial union with the body, constitutes a human being[32]. There is no Platonic body/soul dualism here, nor any reduction of the “self” to an insubstantial Cartesian wisp inhabiting the body like a shell[33]. In the light of what has been said above, and without exhausting Aquinas’s meaning, one way of describing the soul might be to say that it is the story of the person. And St Bernard taught that God is the form of the soul[34]: “In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself”[35]. The story of the person is grounded in God.
The Christ of the Apocalypse says, “I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it”[36]. The new name is a word pronounced by the Word which is the summation of the story of the person, the name of a person’s unique and irreplaceable existence, of their soul. This name we cannot devise ourselves; it is entirely gift, a word from the Word through whom all things were made, and which does not return fruitless. Fundamentally, the soul, the story of the person, is something called into being, spoken from beyond the circles of merely contingent dialogue[37]. The Christian commentary on all human speaking is that this, in the end, is the transformation we seek: a word rooted in the Word of creation without which all existence is unintelligible.
[1] UCL One World Week 2009
[2] UCL Global Citizenship
[3] UCL: Education for Global Citizenship
[4] U le Guin, “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address”, in Dancing at the Edge of the World, Victor Gollancz, 1989, pp 147-160
[5] J Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400-1700, OUP 1985, pp 57-75.
[6] RD Williams, “Charity”, in Lost Icons – Refelections on Cultural Bereavement, T & T Clark, 2000, pp 53-94.
[7] RD Williams, Op. Cit., p 58
[8] J Pieper (R & C Winston, translators), In Tune With the World – a theory of Festivity, St Augustine’s Press, 1999 (but first published 1965), pp 3-21.
[9] RD Williams, Op. Cit., p 71
[10] More recently, a UCL student was convicted of planning terrorist attacks abroad, illustrating that July 7 was not an isolated incident but part of a phenomenon we ignore at our peril
[11] O Davies, “Violence in Bloomsbury: A Theological Challenge”, in International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 8 Number 3 July 2006 252-265
[12] O Davies, “Violence in Bloomsbury: A Theological Challenge”, in International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 8 Number 3 July 2006, 261
[13] O Davies, “Violence in Bloomsbury: A Theological Challenge”, in International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 8 Number 3 July 2006, 263-264
[14] O Davies, PJ Janz & C Sedmak, Transformation Theology – Church in the World, T & T Clark International, 2007. Davies explores something of the same ground as Henri de Lubac’s monumental section on Christianity and History in Catholicism, but not perhaps as convincingly. H de Lubac (LC Sheppard & E Englung OCD, translators), Catholicism – Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, Ignatius Press 1988 (first published Burns & Oates 1950), pp 137-304; see also HU Von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac, Communio/Ignatius Press, 1991, pp 35-43
[15] O Davies, “Lost Heaven”, in O Davies, PJ Janz & C Sedmak, Transformation Theology – Church in the World, T & T Clark International, 2007, p 12
[16] Ibid.
[17] “It was his special spiritual thesis that there really are things; and not only the Thing; that the Many existed as well as the One” – GK Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas, 1933
[18] Fergus Kerr has an enjoyable run through the main culprits in “The Modern Philosophy of the Self”; F Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp 3-27
[19] The appearance of the Cartesian view in the scientific community is particularly perverse, given that the whole foundation of science rests on the premiss that facts can be objectively known and talked about. Andrew Brown notes just such a view expressed by the neuroscientist Colin Blakemore, “Increasingly, those who study the human brain see our experiences, even of our own intentions, as being an illusory commentary on what our brains have already decided to do… Perhaps we humans come with a false model of ourselves, which works well as a means of predicting the behaviour of other people – a belief that actions are the result of conscious intentions.” As Brown comments, “This really is the abolition of man… What I don’t follow, though, is the assumption that at the end of this process you have, in fact, got rid of the messy and troublesome illusion of humanity. All Blakemore has done – if his programme succeeds – is to show that we believe other people exist because this allows us to predict their behaviours. But those are the same grounds on which most scientists believe that anything exists, from atoms to gravity.” (A Brown, Press Column in Church Times, 27 February 2009, p 26).
[20] G Steiner, Real Presences – is there Anything in What We Say?, Faber & Faber, 1989, p 89
[21] N Lash, Holiness, Speech and Silence – Reflections on the Question of God, Ashgate, 2004, p 57
[22] N Lash, Op. Cit., pp 1-22
[23] R Guardini (S Lange, translator), The Church of the Lord, Henry Regnery Company, 1966, pp 91-92
[24] See, e.g., H McCabe, “Nobody comes to the Father but by Me”, in God Still Matters, Continuum, 2002, pp 102-106
[25] See, e.g., H de Lubac, “Christianity and History”, in Catholicism (Op. Cit.), pp 137-164. De Lubac argues that Christianity is unique among world religions in offering not escape from contingency and historical limitation but transformation in and through precisely this contingency. God has entered history to redeem history, by virtue of which history “has a certain ontological density and a fecundity” (p 141). Oliver Davies (Transformation Theology, Op. Cit.) emphasises the historical dimension of the economy of salvation, which is indeed a necessary correction to a tendency towards abstraction and dislocation of salvation to past events and/or the eschaton. It is however also important not to lose sight of the transcendent and the necessity of inhabiting paradox and tension when talking about any of this. As de Lubac notes, Christianity asserts both “the transcendent destiny of man and the common destiny of mankind” (p 140, my emphasis)
[26] RD Williams, “Lost Souls”, in Lost Icons, p 144
[27] RD Williams, Op. Cit., p 145
[28] RD Williams, Op. Cit., p 151
[29] RD Williams, Op. Cit., p 175
[30] T Aquinas, St., Summa Theologica, Ia 76
[31] R McInerny, Op. Cit., pp 61-62
[32] See also PJ Glenn, A Tour of the Summa, Tan Books, 1960, pp 60-62
[33] R Pouivet (MS Sherwin, OP, translator), After Wittgenstein, St Thomas, St Augustine’s Press, 2006, p 30
[34] Thomas Merton discusses this doctrine, but does not give his sources: T Merton, The Sign of Jonas, Harvest Edition, 1981 (first published 1953), p 276
[35] Bernard, St., cited in A Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Chatto & Windus, 1946, online text:
[36] Revelation 2:17 NRSV
[37] “Does not to be a person, if we take the old meaning of the word in a spiritual sense, always mean to have a part to play? Is it not fundamentally to enter upon a relationship with others so as to converge upon a Whole? The summons to personal life is a vocation, that is, a summons to play an eternal role” – H de Lubac, Catholicism (Op. Cit.), p 331, citing St Augustine, “in every creature is inscribed ‘the very perfect prescription of his destiny’, which is ‘not to remain apart from the universal order’”
The escalation to extremes
The BBC news site carries a story on the "unrepentant" views of two young British Muslim extremists who have served prison sentences for "possessing material likely to be useful to terrorists" (that is, information downloaded from the Internet, not explosives).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8500782.stm
An extract:
Ditta claims: "You can go to any [Muslim] youth on the street and say, 'Do you believe in Jihad?' and he'll say 'Yes'. 'Do you believe that al-Qaeda is a terrorist movement?' He'll say, 'No'."
Bilal says: "The Western world is not letting anyone live in peace. It's the West who are at war with everyone."
And a quotation from Girard:
This also contains a major discovery in anthropology: aggression does not exist. Among animals, there is predation, and there is doubtless genetic rivalry for females. However, among humans, the fact that no one ever feels they are the aggressor is because everything is always reciprocal. The slightest little difference, in one direction or another, can trigger the escalation to extremes. The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack, that they are never the ones who begin, though in a way they are always the ones. Individualism is a formidable lie. (Girard, Battling to the End, p 18)
I'm making my way through Battling to the End at the moment. You can read the chapter cited above here.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Additional note on Luke 5 1-11
The theme of prophecy is one of the strands that runs through Luke’s gospel. John the Baptist, Mary and the Apostles stand in continuity with the message of the Old Testament prophets. The call of Simon Peter is described explicitly as though it was a prophetic calling. Jesus, too, has a prophetic role par excellence. But the role Jesus is more complex. Firstly, he is described as being like a prophet, and Luke draws many parallels between Jesus and Moses (LT Johnson, Sacra Pagina – Luke, pp 17-21). But Jesus also acts like God acted in the Old Testament: he himself chooses and appoints prophets, calling the disciples who are going to carry his message to the world.
Simon Peter is, in Luke, the first to be so called. But there is a strange ambivalent dynamic in this encounter. I was struck by how closely it resembles the beginning of mimetic rivalry as described by Girard:
I call this stage ‘double mediation’, where each rival becomes a model/obstacle for the other. The rivals increasingly resemble one another; rivalry produces twins. One of them may win out over the other and regain his illusion of autonomy; the other will then be humiliated to the point of seeing his adversary as sacred. This attraction-repulsion is at the base of all pathologies of resentment: my worship of the model/obstacle and my metaphysical desire for his very being can lead me to murder. The model that I worship and before whom I humiliate myself, in the hope of being able to acquire his supposed power, turns back into an insufferable stranger whom I have to eliminate. (Girard, Battling to the End, p 31)
Simon Peter in fact responds to Jesus with both attraction and repulsion as though he were his model/obstacle, his skandalon. It is not it all surprising that he should behave this way. This is how human beings naturally respond to one another. What Simon Peter misses is that Jesus is not behaving like this, that there is nothing mimetic in Jesus’ actions. Simon Peter cannot see this because he himself is trapped in mimesis. So he becomes Jesus’ rival, even though Jesus is no rival to him. Simon Peter responds as though this were a case of double mediation, even though in fact it is entirely one way.
The drama of Simon Peter’s mimetic rivalry of Jesus is enacted through the gospel and comes to its natural conclusion at the passion, when attraction and repulsion progress to extremes, Peter both promises to die with Jesus and denies that he knows him, until Jesus ends, inevitably, as the “insufferable stranger” who is finally eliminated.
It is only when Peter encounters the risen Christ after his climactic death that he can finally move beyond the skandalon. This encounter reveals to Peter both the innocence of the Victim and the truth that he was never a rival in the first place. Peter’s imagination of the model/obstacle finally gives way in radical repentance and forgiveness. Only then does the stumbling block become the corner stone.
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