Celestial foulis in the air,
Sing with your nottis upon hicht,
In firthis and in forrestis fair
Be myrthful now at all your mycht;
For passit is your dully nicht,
Aurora has the cloudis perst,
The Sone is risen with glaidsum licht,
Et nobis Puer natus est.
- William Dunbar (1465–1520?), "On the Nativity of Christ"
Michael reflects on the use of "false teachers" in the New Testament and today.
"It is increasingly the case that this term is used to describe any Christian or putative Christian whose teaching differs from mine. [...] I am inclined to say that if I encounter a person who subscribes to the creeds in good faith and holds Scripture as finally authoritative for Christians (they don't have to have my doctrine of Scripture) and I see no evidence of corruption, lust and greed in their lives, then I am certainly cautious about applying the 'false teacher' label, even if I disagree strongly with what they teach."
I have just heard that Gavin Wilcox died of cancer last Thursday morning. Gavin was rector of All Saints' Anglican, Nowra from 2002 until retiring earlier this year due to his declining health. Between 1997 and 2002 he had been an assistant minister at St Barnabas', Broadway, which is where Jessica and I met him when we joined the church in 2000. The funeral will be held at 1pm at All Saints’, Nowra on Tuesday, December 23. He will be much missed.
I thank God for the ways he blessed me and many others through Gavin. One more reason to look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
A while ago, I posted the classic "Baby Jesus prayer" clip from Talladega Nights. Greg Clarke (director of the Centre for Public Christianity) has now used it as the basis of an opinion piece published on the ABC website. Go and have a look. His article is an invitation to go and have a look at the Jesus of history, of ethics, of politics, of theology, not just of popular culture.
And if you'd like a glimpse into many of the popular (mis)conceptions of Christianity, read a few of the comments. Dan Brown has a lot to answer for.
O come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of Peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Thou Root of Jesse’s tree,
An ensign of Thy people be;
Before Thee rulers silent fall;
All peoples on Thy mercy call.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
Reading is the act which opens us to the voice of Jesus’s witnesses, and so to history, to the world, and to the empty tomb at the world’s centre. Reading should be the core moment in all our liturgy, the heartbeat that gives life to the sacraments, the preaching and the prayers. Reading should be at the focal point of our church buildings, so that what we see first is not an altar, not a pulpit, but a lectern. Reading should be the lifeblood of our preaching, so that every new sermon we compose springs from a study of the Scripture that is for us as though for the first time, new, vital, surprising. Reading must be the rhythm of our life, the daily beat of the Gospel which gives order to the flurry of undertakings all around it. Reading schools us in self-denial and flexibility, emptying out the imaginations of self-generated visions and filling us with the thoughts of others. Reading accepts the divine violence upon the world that has given us life, but offers no violence back to the messengers through whom the news of that life comes to us.
Oliver O'Donovan, "Saint Mark, violence, and the discipline of reading: a sermon"
I am astonished when church services are confined to a single short reading to make more time for preaching (or singing, or coffee). This usually means the congregation rarely hears the Old Testament and what it does receive frequently lacks much context. Worse is when a "reading" from an extra-scriptural source is regularly substituted for the Bible. I am all for introducing congregations to the riches of Christian thought through the ages, but not as a substitute for Scripture. Using a lectionary makes more and more sense to me as a liturgical discipline of regular, systematic, extended engagement with the actual words of Scripture."To us things are normal when they are going well. Health, affluence, peace - these are normal, so convinced are we of our own righteousness, of what is our due. But Scripture teaches the very opposite. Unfortunately what is normal now that man is separated from God is war and murder, famine and pollution, accident and disruption. When there is a momentary break in the course of these disasters, when abundance is known, when peace timidly establishes itself, when justice reigns for a span, then it is fitting, unless we are men of too little faith, that we should marvel and give thanks for so great a miracle, realizing that no less than the love and faithfulness of the Lord has been needed in order that there might be this privileged instant. We should tremble for joy as before the new and fragile life of a little child."
- Jacques Ellul, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man
(trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Eerdmans, 1972 [1966]), 178-79.
What is more normal: health or sickness; peace or violence; prosperity or adversity? Ellul is right to highlight the way we can complacently assume the world owes us a living. Every moment of sunshine is a gift to be thankfully received, not a birthright to be demanded. We are not the makers of our own reality; our survival and flourishing are contingent upon so many factors beyond our control, often even beyond our influence. And where we do exert our influence, it is so often ambivalent. Even our best intentioned acts often cause unforeseen harm. Seeking to tread lightly on our path, we trail destruction and confusion behind us. Any good we manage to briefly enjoy is always threatened by dissolution or contamination. It is normal to experience frustration and guilt, disappointment and pain. We live broken lives in a world out of joint.
O come, O come, great Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes on Sinai’s height
In ancient times once gave the law
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
"The miracle of Christ's resurrection makes nonsense of that idolization of death which is prevalent among us today. Where death is the last thing, fear of death is combined with defiance. Where death is the last thing, earthly life is all or nothing. Boastful reliance on earthly eternities goes side by side with a frivolous playing with life. A convulsive acceptance and seizing hold of life stands cheek by jowl with indifference and contempt for life. There is no clearer indication of the idolization of death than when a period claims to be building for eternity and yet life has no value in this period, or when big words are spoken of a new man, of a new world and of a new society which is to be ushered in, and yet all that is new is the destruction of life as we have it. The drastic acceptance or rejection of earthly life reveals that only death has any value here. To clutch at everything or to cast away everything is the reaction of one who believes fanatically in death.
"But wherever it is recognised that the power of death has been broken, wherever the world of death is illumined by the miracle of the resurrection and of the new life, there no eternities are demanded of life but one takes of life what it offers, not all or nothing but good and evil, the important and the unimportant, joy and sorrow; one neither clings convulsively to life nor casts it frivolously away. One is content with the allotted span and one does not invest earthly things with the title of eternity; one allows to death the limited rights which it still possesses. It is from beyond death that one expects the coming of the new man and of the new world, from the power by which death has been vanquished."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 16.
Our society is obsessed with death, as can be seen in our frantic suppression of it. Graveyards are too disturbing for the centre of town; old people are hidden in "homes"; hospitals will save us. Nazi Germany was not the only society to make an idol of death. The resurrection relativises death, revealing it as humanity's unnatural enemy, but a defeated enemy.
O come, Thou Wisdom from on high,
Who orderest all things mightily;
To us the path of knowledge show,
And teach us in her ways to go.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
Michael Jensen, fresh from the success of YOU: An Introduction (a great Christmas present, BTW), has now recommenced work on the sequel HIM: An Introduction. If you missed the last one, this is your chance for your blog quotes and jokes to become immortalised in the archaic medium of ink and paper. Head on over and join the discussion. So far, Michael has been talking about the puzzling invisibility of God, the startling claim that God is love and the controversial and often misunderstood belief that God chooses.
Five points to everyone who makes at least one semi-relevant comment over on HIM and then comes back here to say you have done so (with a link to where you made the comment).
O come, O come, Emmanuel,Ten points for the Sydney location.
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
Today is the first day of Advent, the period leading up to Christmas, and the start of the Christian calendar. It is a period of waiting, waiting with Israel for the Messiah, reading the prophecies of his arrival, waiting with the world for Messiah's return, watching and praying.
This is a period for those who follow the coming Christ to stand out by sitting down, by not joining in the rush and hurry and endless activity. This is the time when we remember that we are not the ones we have been waiting for, that our hope is in God, that our night is dark but dawn is coming.
How quickly we adjust our expectations. Take some time to wonder.
I thought this was an interesting article. Though brief, it highlights a number of the problems any discussion of "morality" faces in the public square these days.
We pretend that it was only the ungodly who were offended at Christ. What a misunderstanding! No, the best and most kindly man, humanly speaking, who has ever lived, must be offended at him, must misunderstand him; for what love is, divinely understood, this the best of men could learn only from Him. The love Christ, humanly understood, was not self-sacrificing - anything but that; he did not make himself unhappy, in order, humanly understood, to make his disciples happy. No, he made himself and his disciples, humanly speaking, as unhappy as possible. And he who had had it in his power to establish the Kingdom of Israel and make everything so pleasant for himself and his followers, as every contemporary could see clearly enough! [...] No, humanly speaking, it was indeed madness: he sacrifices himself - in order to make the beloved equally unhappy with himself! [...] Was this really love: to gather some poor, simpleminded men about him, to win their devotion and love, as no other had ever won it, to pretend for a moment to look out for them, as now the prospect of the fulfillment of their proudest dream is revealed to them - in order suddenly to reconsider and change the plans; in order without being moved by their prayers, without paying the least attention to them, to plunge them down from this seductive height into the abyss of all dangers; in order, without resistant, to give his enemies power; in order, under mockery and insult while the world rejoiced, to be nailed to the cross as a criminal; was this really love?
- Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946), 90-91.
Did Jesus really love his disciples? He demanded everything of them and then abandoned them, leaving them vulnerable and liable to persecution. He lead them along a path that involved loss of property, freedom, friends, community-standing and ultimately, life. Was he really of any help to them? Kierkegaard's point is that Jesus' claim to love is incomprehensible without reference to God. Do you agree?Anthony (of the 600 points and nearly 200 comments - though I'm sure he also has a life) is going to Shoalhaven.
...you'd better not cry. But someone is coming to town and while he's very jolly, I don't think he's into red suits with ermine trimming.
Yes, I recognise that from my present perspective he is going, but you can take the boy out of Sydney...
...if you want to sleep tonight.
Very appropriate for the season. H/T Frank.
Faced with ecological threats of various kinds, many people would rather not think about them. They retreat into denial, or a security based in the possibility of technological advances or the allegedly inevitable forces of the free market. The broad popularity of reaching for hope in the market or technological fixes can be seen in the frequency with which politicians draw upon these themes. We are comfortable and our inertia draws us to answers that require little thought and less change. We trust that the explosive economic growth of the last few hundred years is now the normal trajectory, able to be extrapolated into the foreseeable future.
Wendell Berry has written an excellent article titled "Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits" reflecting upon our collective obsession with the myth of infinite growth. He argues that the pursuit of limitless consumption, unbounded knowledge and endless control is not only a dangerous illusion destroying our planet, but an attack on our very humanity. We will ultimately lose not just the planet, but also our soul. He rediscovers a life-giving alternative (though he doesn't say so explicitly) in a Christian conception of creatureliness. Here is a taste of the essay's opening:
"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such 'biofuels' as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that 'science will find an answer.' The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.The full article is not short (approx. 4,000 words), but well worth reading and re-reading. H/T Roberto.
"This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)"
• Why we must wear neck ties - reflections on fashion, colonialism and pointlessness from Boxologies.
• A picture is worth a thousand words, or $233.95 - an amusing email correspondence. H/T Celia.
• Water and whisky - "And so we must drink water in the way we drink single-malt scotch, and we must drink single-malt scotch in the way we drink water."
• How to prevent any political progress - a cartoon.
• Agriculture as sustained catastrophe - a short history of western civilisation based on the assumption that where we went wrong was putting seeds in the ground.
For those who may be interested, Wipf and Stock have recently published a new volume of essays titled On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays, edited by the irrepressible Dr Matheson Russell from the University of Auckland. The collection includes nine contributions from young Australian Anglicans, such as Ben Myers (Faith and Theology), Michael Jensen (The Blogging Parson), Andrew Cameron, Greg Clarke and more. There is a foreword by Oliver O'Donovan and a twenty-eight page bibliography of all Williams' published works. Here is the blurb from the publisher's site:
Theologian, poet, public intellectual, and clergyman, Rowan Williams is one of the leading lights of contemporary British theology. He has published over twenty books and one hundred scholarly essays in a distinguished career as an academic theologian that culminated in his appointment as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. Williams left this post to serve in the Anglican Church, first as Bishop of Monmouth, then Archbishop of Wales, before finally being enthroned in 2003 as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury.Here is what you get:
In this collection of essays, a talented younger generation of Australian theologians critically analyzes the themes that bind together Williams's theology. These sympathetic yet probing essays traverse the full breadth of Williams's work, from his studies on Arius, the Desert Fathers, Hegel, and Trinitarian theology to his more pastoral writings on spirituality, sexuality, politics, and the Anglican Church.
Foreword: Australia on Rowan Williams • Oliver O’DonovanThe price is a mere US$29.00, or $23.20 from the Wipf and Stock website. Unfortunately, if you happen to live outside the US, then you'll need to contact the publisher to ask for a special order form (and pay approx US$13 in P&H). I have no idea why any non-US resident would consider buying a book about a Brit by a bunch of Aussies.
Introduction • Matheson Russell
1. The Ecclesiology of Rowan Williams • Rhys Bezzant
2. The Hidden Center: Trinity and incarnation in the Negative (and Positive) Theology of Rowan Williams • Andrew Moody
3. Disruptive History: Rowan Williams on Heresy and Orthodoxy • Benjamin Myers
4. Krisis? Kritik?: Judgment and Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams • Michael Jensen
5. Dispossession and Negotiation: Rowan Williams on Hegel and Political Theology • Matheson Russell
6. The Humanity of Godliness: Spirituality and Creatureliness in Rowan Williams • Byron Smith
7. Desire and Grace: Rowan Williams and the Search for Bodily Wholeness • Andrew Cameron
8. Rowan Williams on War and Peace • Tom Frame
9. The Beauty of God in Cairo and Islamabad: Rowan Williams as Apologist • Greg Clarke
The Centre for Public Christianity (CPX) are soon to release a new documentary called The Life of Jesus, a follow up to The Christ Files. Looks like it will be more quality work from Greg Clarke and John Dickson. Here is a short teaser:
H/T Matt.
A guest post by Donna
Donna is a Bible translator working in South Asia
Have you ever heard someone talking about a particular English Bible translation and saying it's the best? I've heard that said about the ESV, the NIV, the NRSV, the NLT and The Message. Can they all be the best?
I was sitting in a Translation Priciples lecture recently and started to think about the different English translations and what their relative strengths are. Before I get there, let me outline the three different kinds of translation.
1. Some translations are literal or "word for word" translations. This means that they try to translate each word as closely as possible to the word that was used in the original Greek (or Hebrew/Aramaic in the Old Testatment). The ESV is a good example of this. This means that you will be able to see the language structure and word choice of the original language more clealy (though you are still reading it all in English).
2. Some translations are "meaning based" translations, which means that they first take a whole idea (might be a sentence or a clause) in the original language and translate the meaning of that idea into English. So the sentence structure will be more different to the original language than in a more literal translation, but it will also use more natural English. The NLT is a good representative of this approach, which is also sometimes called "dynamic equivalence".
3. Some translations are "paraphrases". These go further than the "meaning based translations" and apply the point of what was said in the original to today's situation and might even change what is being talked about to make the same point. The Message is usually placed in this category. Some people say that The Message, though it might be very helpful, is not a translation at all because it changes the meaning too much.
The risk with using a too literal translation is that the language might be too unnatual English to be understood properly (I have heard some people say that the ESV is too difficult for their children, even teenage children, to understand). The risk with a meaning based translation, and especially a paraphrase, is that you may not have understood the meaning correctly, and therefore what you translate might be wrong.
In summary literal translations run the risk of being unintelligible, other types of translations run the risk of being wrong!
These are not three discrete categories, they're a continuum, so the NIV and NRSV are placed somewhere in between the literal and meaning based translations.
To repesent the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, I came up with this little table:
Before explaining my table I should say that I'm talking about good translations here. There can also be very bad, literal and meaning based translations and bad paraphrases, but I'm not including those in my analysis.
Ideational Meaning is what people usually mean when they say "meaning". When we say "John walked out the door" the ideational meaning refers to this person called John and that he moved, putting his feet in front of one another to go out the door.
I think that meaning based translations do ideational meaning best. Literal translations don't convey the ideational meaning quite as well, because the meaning can be obscured when it uses foreign idioms or phrases. Paraphrases don't attempt to accurately convey the ideational meaning.
Textual meaning refers to how what is read relates to the rest of the text. For example in Mark chapter 2 Jesus refers to himself as "the son of man". The ideational meaning of this phrase is "I", people used this phrase to refer to themselves often. But on a textual level we can see that Jesus might have used this phrase to remind people of something else - in this case maybe the passage from Daniel 7.
Since they use a "word for word" translation strategy, links between texts can be most easily seen in literal translations. (From the introduction: "The ESV is an "essentially literal" translation that seeks as far as possible to capture the precise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer.") This is not always as clear in meaning based translations - though footnotes can help - and it is not clear at all in paraphrases.
Affectual meaning relates to how reading the passage affects readers' emotions [ed. how it effects affects]. How are we to feel when, for example, Jesus is betrayed, or when he dies, or when he is transfigured, or when he feeds the five thousand? The original readers might have felt a certain way about something, but because we are so far removed from their culture we might miss some things and not be affected the same way.
Affectual meaning is best conveyed by paraphrases (as long as you belong to their target audience, if not the meaning can be lost on you, or misunderstood). Their aim is to affect the emotions of the readers and motivate the reader. In paraphrases there is no question of the original language affecting the grammar structure used, thus they are best at conveying affectual meaning, meaning based translations are next, and literal translations come in last in terms of affectual meaning because the English used is the least natural, and therefore affects our emotions the least.
In summary, meaning based translations (like the NLT) convey the ideational meaning the best. Literal, or word for word translations (like ESV) convey the textual meaning the best. And paraphrases (like The Message) convey the affectual meaning the best.
So when people say that the ESV is the best translation I would say:
• Yes it is! If you're studying the original text and want help understanding the Greek, or if you want to know what the original language says, but can't study the original language.If people say that the NLT is the best translation I would say:
• But no it's not! If you want to read the bible in natural English, nor if you want your heart, as well as your head, to easily understand what you're reading.
If people say that The Message is the best translation I would say:
• Yes! Because it is written in very nice English, which speaks to my heart well, and it also clearly shows the meaning. I especially like reading the Old Testament prophets in the NLT because I find I need it written in natural English to really understand what's happening since their situation and culture and also the genre is very removed from what I'm used to.
• And No! Because it isn't so easy to see how one passage relates to others, and also some of the ambiguities in the original language are lost. For example 1 Timothy 2:15 where the NLT has "women" the Greek word would be more accurately translated "he" or "she".
• Yes! Because it speaks to my heart well and applies the message to my own culture, which gives me encouragement very directly, and means that I am affected strongly by each encouragement and each rebuke.Want to share any thoughts about this with me? What did you think of my graph? Which translation do you like best and why?
• But also No! In some ways The Message changes the meaning a little too much, and I'm never quite sure when biblical author's writings end and the interpretation of the translator begins. The Message is really more like good preaching. It is powerful and it hits home. But the message of The Message must also be tested against a translation which sticks more closely to the original text.
An oxymoron? A tautology? A necessary evil? An expression of God's kingdom? Michael Jensen posts eight points on church politics.
As the world sees it, action which is faithful to God will always fail, just as Jesus Christ necessarily went to the cross. Such action always leads to a dead end. It is always a fiasco from the standpoint of worldly power. But this should not worry us. It does not mean that our action is in truth ineffectual. Efficacy measured in terms of faithfulness cannot be compared at any point with efficacy measured in terms of success. [...] The action we attempt will always be regarded by the world as a failure, and the more so the more it is authentically faithful. We cannot be successful or show the church to be effective in the world unless we adopt the world's criterion of efficacy, which means adopting its means as well."
- Jacques Ellul, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man
(trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Eerdmans, 1972 [1966]), 140.
Ethics is often seen as an afterthought, a tidying up, an appendix to the good news of Jesus' life, death and resurrection for us. Oh, by the way, now that you've heard and accepted all the great gifts of God to us in Christ, he also wants you to live a certain way, to stop doing certain things, to start doing other things, to think and feel particular things. It can feel as though, having started with grace, with God's free gift, we then shift gears and have to start making our contribution. Perhaps we have to show how thankful we are for what God has done. Perhaps we need to make sure that having been welcomed into God's family by grace, we manage to not stuff things up. He's given you a second chance, so make sure he doesn't have to give you a third.
No, all these approaches are disastrous. God has saved us not only out of love, but into love. That is, his love is not only the motivation for his redemptive work, it is also the content of its goal. The goal of salvation is that we become God's children, not only as the objects of his love, but as those who share in it, who imitate their father's perfection, who love because and as he first loved us.
"[A]ll Christian action is a privilege, not an obligation, since we are God's children."
- Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Nine Propositions on Christian Ethics"
in Principles of Christian Morality (trans. Graham Harrison;
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986 [1975]), 77.
"A belief in Christian ethics is a belief that certain ethical and moral judgements belong to the gospel itself; a belief, in other words, that the church can be committed to ethics without moderating the tone of its voice as a bearer of glad tidings."
- Oliver O'Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order
(second edition; Leicester, England: Eerdmans, 1994 [1986]), 12.
Both the American and Australian governments are spending a lot of time at the moment talking about spending a lot of money to prop up struggling automobile industries. While I understand that there are tens of thousands of jobs at stake, the longer term future of the industry must also be considered. If the future of petrol is expensive (despite recent drops - don't expect oil to stay low for too long!), then the future of transport will not lie in ever increasing government support for increasingly unpopular gas-guzzlers. Perhaps some of that money could be better spent on developing public transport?
And here is a thought from the Australia Institute's Between the Lines, 13th November 2008:
Government assistance is not coming back into fashion—it never left. The Howard Government gave billions away to the childcare industry, the agriculture industry and the mining industry, to name a select few. The Bush administration was never serious about free markets and small government; it gave hundreds of billions away to its friends in agriculture, oil and defence.
Hopefully, what is coming back into fashion is the creation of a coherent set of criteria for awarding such assistance, along with some transparency about the likely benefits and some evidence on the actual outcomes. The car industry is now required to spend its money on making cars green; similar obligations must be placed on the electricity industry.
On being a Christian fanatic
"The Christian who lives by faith has the right to justify his moral actions on the basis of his faith."
- Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Nine Propositions on Christian Ethics"
in Principles of Christian Morality (trans. Graham Harrison;
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986 [1975]), 77.
1. Make a list of the top 10 ways to amuse a geek.
10. Use binary.
1. Those who index their arrays starting at 1.H/T Brandon. This was a blast from a past spent amongst calculators and calculus. Now I am a geek of a different kind.
1. Those who index their arrays starting at 0.
Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chainwhich would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you
- e. e. cummings
... I found this story about Christians praying for the US economy by placing their hands on the Wall Street bull jaw-droppingly ironic. (H/T Neil)
The election of Obama is a good thing for many reasons. On average and compared with the alternative, I think it reduces the chance of new wars (though there will still be wars); it increases the chance of an international agreement on a response to climate change (though such a response will still probably be too little, too late); it helps to undermine racial stereotypes and mistrust (though violence and prejudice will survive); it is a little less likely to lead towards unbridled consumerism (but don't hold your breath); it is less likely to continue to undermine civil liberties and the rule of law (though Obama did vote to extend the Patriot act); it will almost certainly improve the quality of metaphors in political discourse ("war on terror"?); it may well improve access to healthcare for some of America's poor (though it will not erase poverty); and could even make this foreign nation a little less alien to some of the rest of the world (though one election doesn't undo the myriad sins of empire, even if Kenya has declared a national holiday).
But the speeches and discussion also left me worried. Not so much at the extreme partisanship of some commentators, who were unable to be gracious in victory or defeat. Not even so much at the Obamamania that thinks the election of one man has banished the politics of fear and ushered in a new era of honesty. After all, emotional attachment to political representatives is generally a good thing and this moment is a moving one for many people.
No, my anxiety is less that people might think Obama is the messiah (we will be surely disabused of that notion quickly enough) and more that Americans think their nation is messianic. American exceptionalism is alive and well. It was referenced repeatedly by both candidates in their speeches (full texts: McCain and Obama) and was an assumption deeply ingrained in most of the American commentators I saw interviewed last night (remaining politely unchallenged by the BBC coverage, apart from one or two significant pauses at (in)appropriate moments).
From its foundation, the United States has believed itself to be a unique nation, with a God-given role to be a light on a hill. This belief is the most ironic - yet also most frequent - theological error in a country obsessed with a "separation" between church and state: the confusion of the two.
Governments do indeed have a genuine role to play in God's plan, but the exaltation of Christ ("All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" - Matthew 28.18) has revealed this role to be temporary and passing. At the end, when Christ will hand the kingdom to the Father, he will have "destroyed every ruler and every authority and power." (1 Corinthians 15.24) But what of now? Christ has been granted all authority but hasn't yet destroyed all competing authorities. Where are states left after the exaltation of Christ and before the final consummation? They do indeed still hold authority from God (Romans 13.1-7), but of a limited and strictly provisional kind. Crucially, this authority is not redemptive, but focused on, and limited to, the prosecution of justice: punishing the wrongdoer and commending those who do right. Governments are not the messiah, they simply restrain the very naughty boys (and girls). American political aspirations have often gone well beyond this mandate, hoping to "heal this nation" and "repair this world", in the words of another Obama speech.
For this argument in full, see O'Donovan's The Desire of the Nations.
But increasingly, it seems, US political rhetoric has become less about having a divinely-appointed role as it is a self-made one. God's gift or summons of the American people to a manifest destiny (confusing America with biblical Israel) has turned into a works gospel of an international pre-eminence earned through hard-work and self-belief. "We are the ones we have been waiting for." America is exceptional because it is the most fervent in believing itself to be so; it is the self-made nation that has pulled itself up by its bootstraps, conquering the world through will-power.
To illustrate these claims, let us turn briefly to the two speeches last night. The graciousness and eloquence of both candidates was evident in their respective speeches. Throughout the campaign, it had become clear that neither were going to be as rich a source for comic gaffes as Bush, but both speeches were highlights of public discourse. Yet both included strident claims to American exceptionalism.
McCain (emphasis added):
"And I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties, but to believe, always, in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history."The greatness of America consists in its escape from historical necessity through sheer willpower.
"[Tonight's election result] is the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day."Once more history is to be grasped and manipulated and determined by those who are self-determined, who believe it to be possible to do so.
"And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you. And to all those who have wondered if Americas beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.This was finally an acknowledgement (so rare in this campaign) that America is not the extent of the world and finally a hint that more people were watching this election (and are likely to be affected by its outcome) outside the States than inside them. Even the claim to leadership need not itself be problematic, as long as the manner of leadership is moral, through ideals - that is, through persuasion and example, rather than merely military might or brute wealth.
"For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."
However, it is the content of these ideals that forms the basis of a contemporary destructive idolatry. According to Obama, the genius of America is its transcendence of the past and the perfectibility of its union. Notice first how clever politically this is, to identify the genius of the nation with a progressivist mindset. Notice also the irony of this claim to many non-American ears, who usually see the American political spectrum balanced further to the conservative end of scale than elsewhere."The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there."The expectation and demand for moral (or social) perfection outside of God's gracious calling, Christ's atoning sacrifice and the Spirit's indwelling is destructively impossible. Yet Obama offered this possibility based on little more than grit and determination: "So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other." Or rather, he offered it on the basis of a messianic promise: the promise of a nation where grit and determination, willpower and a belief that America is different can overcome all obstacles.
America is the leader of the world because it is special. It is special because of its ideals. Its ideals include the idea that America is perfectible. It is perfectible through willpower. Thus, America believes itself to be the desire of the nations largely because it desires this very fact to be true with such zeal. It is a self-made messiah with a mission to perfect itself, thus demonstrating to the world its own perfectibility.Elsewhere in the theoblogosphere, Jason reminds us of O'Donovan's claim that democracy is not an absolute good, but merely a contingent good for (some) societies. Halden reflects on an Ellul quote I posted a month or so ago and encourages Christians to avoid idolatrous overstatement of the historical significance of this election. Both important points. I will take them up and offer some of my own reflections soon.
Jingoistic as it may seem, I really do think that Australia gets many things right when it comes to elections. Having observed the two-year circus of the US elections and had various discussions with a range of international students about their home systems, I think there are at least three slightly unusual elements to the Australian system that are worth preserving (and imitating!):
1. An independent electoral commissionUPDATE: Neil has kindly given a further explanation and defence of my three claims. Thanks!
In some countries (most notably the US), electoral boundaries are determined by the government, or a government-appointed board, leading to a phenomenon known as "Gerrymandering", in which electoral boundaries are manipulated for political advantage.
2. Compulsory voting
Jury duty is compulsory, though in certain extenuating circumstances, one may be excused. Voting, as another exercise in civic deliberation, ought to be the same. Compulsory voting removes the huge efforts both sides have to go to in order to "get out the vote" and so frees up more energy for discussion of the issues, since there are not two choices ("Should I vote?"; "For whom should I vote?") but only the latter. Non-compulsory voting disadvantages those with least power over their work situation and can lead to a self-fulfilling feeling of disenfranchisement and political apathy. This is magnified through weekday elections. Australia's elections seem to always happen on a Saturday, which to my mind, makes much more sense.
3. Preferential voting
While people I discuss these issues with are generally hesitant about compulsory voting (until the benefits are explained) and sometimes sceptical about the neutrality of any electoral commission, I am yet to meet someone who is not in favour of preferential voting once it has been explained to them. For those unfamiliar with it, preferential voting means that rather than simply selecting one candidate or party as the recipient of your vote, you are able (or even obliged, in Australian Federal elections, though I think this is a mistake) to rank the candidates according to your preference. When counting votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and his/her votes are redistributed on the basis of their second preferences. This process is repeated (using third, fourth, etc preferences if necessary) until one candidate has a majority. This has the enormous advantage of avoiding the "Ralph Nader" effect, in which a third-party candidate splits the vote of a major party candidate, who ends up losing, even though a majority of the population might have preferred him to the winning candidate. With preferential voting, it is possible to vote for a minor candidate without thereby "wasting" your vote. When combined with compulsory voting, it also ensures that the eventual winner will have been preferred by an absolute majority of eligible voters in the electorate over any other candidate. The only drawback to my mind is that this system is a little more complex and may confuse some voters. I understand that Canada recently tried to introduce preferential voting but the reform was rejected due to fear of it becoming too complex to understand.
I have spoken in the past about my serious reservations concerning Senator Obama's campaign (which have not dissipated) and of points of sympathy with Senator McCain, but at no point have I actually changed my mind. I am still hoping that the polls are correct and that Obama wins a decisive victory tomorrow.
I wanted to write something a little more substantial outlining my thinking on this matter but time has got away from me. And so I don't think I can do better than this editorial from The New Yorker (H/T Matt). I agree with about 95% of it and find it briefly expresses why this election matters and why on a wide range of key issues Obama is the better candidate for a job in which failure is inevitable but in which there are still greater and lesser disasters. He is not the messiah; but neither is he likely to be a very naughty boy.
Research in Edinburgh (of all places) has linked childhood IQ to voting patterns and the results may surprise you. Or not.
The inestimable Michael Jensen, a.k.a. the blogging parson, has just had his first book published. I mentioned that he was working on it back here and here. It's called YOU: An introduction and can be ordered here (or here if you are in the US) for the bargain price of AUS$16.95. You can even download the cover, contents, introduction and first chapter here.
The book was originally posted (in small sections) on a blog (now closed, I guess the publishers want people to buy the book!), and the comments made on the posts (and Michael's replies) have been included in the book, sometimes taking the discussion in unexpected directions. Since I made one or two of the comments, if you buy it, you are also getting my first published book (well, I can pretend)!
Oh, you want to know what it's about? Details, details. Besides, I would have thought the title sufficient. If not, here is the blurb from the publisher's website:
Who are You really? What are You supposed to be like? What—or whose—purpose do You serve? It's never been more complicated—or more confusing—to be a human, and it's never been harder to answer the question of who You are. But in You: An introduction, Michael Jensen sets about doing just that. In his exploration of some of the different facets of the human condition (You are alive; You are free; You are a child), we soon discover that the question of who we are is essentially bound up with the question of who Jesus is ...Great to read and even better to give away!
We are living beyond our means, running up a debt of up to US$4,500,000,000,000 every year. The parallels between the credit crisis and the ecological crises are not accidental. Both are symptoms of the myth of infinite growth.
The differences, however, are crucial. The financial crisis is primarily (as far as I understand it) a crisis of trust: financial institutions who are no longer sure from whom it is safe to borrow. The responses by governments have been to act as a kind of credit backstop, stopping (or slowing) the corrosive effects of cycles of mistrust.
The ecological crises are a crisis of life: of too many human lives living lifestyles that undermine the stability of all living things. This helps give some idea why governments have not responded with a similar urgency and zeal as they have done in relation to the credit crisis. Not because the problem is smaller or less pressing, but because it is far larger and more difficult. How do millions and millions of people radically change their assumptions and consumptions?
H/T Box the Jack. Make sure you also read this post on his blog boxologies: GDP is a speedometer, the question is "where are we headed?".
Photo by ALS.
You may know that biodiversity loss, while difficult to measure, is thought by a significant majority of biologists to be occurring at an alarming rate, possibly somewhere between 100 and 1000 times the "background" rate of extinction (taking a very long term view of such things). The causes are many, but almost exclusively anthropogenic (i.e. we're to blame): habitat destruction, hunting and poaching, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change. You may also have heard even more startling predictions such as this century being witness to the extinction of between a quarter and a half of all currently living species (how such estimates are calculated).
With this in mind, compare and contrast these two quotes:
"But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the response, "Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy useless little fish or weed, like the snail darter or Furbish lousewort?" This response misses the point that the entire natural world is made up of wild species providing us for free with services that can be very expensive, and in many cases impossible, for us to supply ourselves. Elimination of lots of lousy little species regularly causes big harmful consequences for humans, just as does randomly knocking out many of the lousy little rivets holding together an airplane."
- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, 488-89.
"The sadness which overcomes us when we hear about the extinction of hundreds of kinds of butterflies on a faraway continent has nothing to do with a loss of something useful. It doesn't even have anything to do with a reduction of aesthetic pleasure, since, more than likely, we would never have had a chance to see this type of butterfly. Nevertheless, we are poorer through its disappearance, since our own being is fulfilled in reference to every reality which we ourselves are not. Delectatio in felicitate alterius [delight in the happiness of others] - this formula of Leibniz overcomes the opposition between anthropocentrism and love of nature "for its own sake". To love something for its own sake is the specific form of human realisation.
- Robert Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence, 118.
How do they each make you feel? Which strikes closer to home for you? Why?
"To ask why we suffer makes the questioner appear either terribly foolish or extremely arrogant. It seems foolish to ask, since in fact we do suffer and no sufficient reason can be given to explain that fact. Indeed, if it were explained, suffering would be denied some of its power. The question seems arrogant because it seeks to put us in the position of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only God knows the answer to such questions."
- Stanley Hauerwas, "Should Suffering Be Eliminated?" in The Hauerwas Reader, 565.
Hauerwas goes on to say that it is also a question that can't be avoided and ought to be asked. Yet it seems to me that some accounts of providence may illegitimately remove the sting of this question by attempting to give just such an answer. When a sufferer asks the "why" question and our answer seeks a response along the lines of "Oh, I see now why this and all suffering is justified and necessary", then we have removed all room for the strong scriptural theme (and healthy, indeed necessary, human practice) of lament. If we become so content with the present that we are not groaning for a healed world, then perhaps we have silenced the Spirit who groans with us.
"The common good is not a good that can be isolated from the different goods and elements that constitute the city. Nor is it a sort of common denominator, unlike the good of self-preservation which for the modern philosophers will be the foundation of human rights. It is both the supreme good and the good which binds the different goods together that can have no direct rapport without which the other goods could not coexist, that is, could not be present at all in the human world."
- Pierre Manent, The City of Man
(trans. Marc A. LePain; Princeton University Press, 1998 [1994]), 168.
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