And don't come back

This is the day that the LORD has made;
    Let us rejoice and be glad in it!

- Psalm 118.24.

This time five years ago, I was receiving weekly doses of poison and daily radiation burns to my chest after being diagnosed with a rapidly growing malignant tumour just above my heart and invading my left bronchial tube. Today, I went into an oncologist's office and was told not to return, as five years of follow up is enough.

Although it is still possible for me to experience relapse, the chances are that any cancer now found in my body is more likely to be a new growth than a renewal of the one that was well on its way to killing me in 2006/07. I am obviously delighted to reach this milestone and continue to receive each day as a gift. I did not deserve to live, did not earn my reprieve, did not qualify for healing through the quality of my faith. Faced with a very rare form of cancer (numerous specialists have given me the impression that I'm one in a million), medical science took its best (highly educated) guess as to treatment and it worked beyond all expectations.

And so praise God for life, for health, for wonderful support from family, friends and even strangers, for medical specialists and all the care I have received over five years from dozens of healthcare professionals both in Oz and the UK and for public healthcare that has meant my total out of pocket expenses have been AUD $0 + GBP £0 for treatments that probably cost tens of thousands (thanks fellow tax-payers!).

Yet the experience continues to have its shadows. Given that the first side-effect mentioned on the consent forms I signed for both chemotherapy and radiotherapy is that those treatments are themselves carcinogenic, cancer is still quite likely to be part of my future, as is reduced life-expectancy. I am also aware of the costs the illness and treatment have brought to my health in other ways; being poisoned and burned are not generally conducive to good health (I've always thought that Nietzsche's boast that whatever did not kill him could only make him stronger was one of his sillier ones).

And I am not the same man I was. Being gravely sick has reconfigured my emotional and spiritual life, not to mention shaping my academic interests. For much of this I am grateful (and this is undoubtedly the true referent of Nietzsche's comment), especially for the reminder of my own frail mortality and the liberating realisation that survival is not our highest priority. These are important lessons that I hope always to keep close to hand. Has the experience also made me more pessimistic about our future prospects? Given that being ill significantly overlapped with the period during which I began investigating ecological and resources predicaments in greater depth, it is hard to tell whether the chicken or the egg came first.

The significance of my reaching this milestone was brought home powerfully to me a day or two ago when I came across the story of Kristian Anderson, a Sydney Christian man in his 30s with a wife and young kids, and who died from cancer two days ago. Kristian recorded more than two years of his physical, emotional and spiritual journey since diagnosis on a blog called How the Light Gets In (H/t Andrew Paterson). I ran out of tissues while reading it. I never met him, but I thank God for his life and witness, even amidst great darkness, and I pray for his widow and little boys.

Life is a precious gift. Let us rejoice in each day we receive.

Dubbing Jesus

When people see the lives of Christians, is this what they assume Jesus was probably saying?

Friedrich Nietzsche said, "I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed."

Jesus said, "By this will everyone know that you are my disciples: if you love one another."
H/T Chris.

Atheist theologians

"Is not every unbeliever who has a reason for his atheism and his decision not to believe a theologian too? Atheists who have something against God and against faith in God usually know very well whom and what they are rejecting, and have their reasons. Nietzsche’s book The Antichrist has a lot to teach us about true Christianity, and the modern criticism of religion put forward by Feuerbach, Marx and Freud is still theological in its antitheology.

Beyond that, moreover, there is a protest atheism which wrestles with God as Job did, and for the sake of the suffering of created beings which cries out to high heaven denies that there is a just God who rules the world in love. This atheism is profoundly theological, for the theodicy question -- "If there is a good God, why all this evil?" -- is also the fundamental question of every Christian theology which takes seriously the dying Christ’s question to God: "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

- Jürgen Moltmann, "Godless theology".

Not all atheism is the same. There are atheists who are closer to the kingdom than they realise when their very repudiation of God is on moral grounds. They refuse to believe in God not primarily because such an idea of illogical or unnecessary, but because doing so would be immoral in a world so filled with suffering. Such people are often asking the right questions to which the gospel is such good news.

God is dead

The madman.-- Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" --As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? --Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us--for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars--and yet they have done it themselves."

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science:
with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs, §125.

On talking with atheists

Rev Sam has started a series (here, here and here) reflecting on his extensive experiences talking with atheists about the Christian faith. He distinguishes between two kinds of athesist: (a) humourless atheists and (b) sophisticated atheists. The former are "humourless" in the sense that they just don't get the "joke" of theology, they think it entirely a waste of time and simply nonsense. They have a kind of aspect blindness. They often base their criticisms on stereotypes, populist or fundamentalist understandings of Christianity (which often deserve to be criticised!), but have little or not familiarity with the more significant, rigorous and creative figures in the Christian theological tradition. The latter "get" it much more, and probably feel the attractiveness of Christ, but are perhaps unconvinced by some point: the resurrection, the problem of evil, or something else. I think this is a useful distinction and the series has sparked some very interesting responses, with many of Sam's points being illustrated within the discussion of them.

This double classification of atheisms reminds me of a somewhat similar one by Merold Westphal in his excellent little book on Nietzsche, Marx and Freud called Suspicion and Faith: the religious uses of modern atheism. He very usefully distinguishes between an atheism of scepticism (à la Hume), which finds the claims of Christianity to be untrue, and an atheism of suspicion (as in Nietzsche and co.), in which Christian belief is found to be immoral.

Ethics test

I just took this ethics test. H/T Frank.

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. St. Augustine (95%)
3. Aristotle (73%)
4. Plato (63%)
5. Ockham (62%)
6. Spinoza (55%)
7. Ayn Rand (52%)
8. Cynics (45%)
9. Epicureans (44%)
10. John Stuart Mill (42%)
11. Jeremy Bentham (39%)
12. Jean-Paul Sartre (36%)
13. Nietzsche (35%)
14. Stoics (34%)
15. David Hume (32%)
16. Kant (30%)
17. Thomas Hobbes (22%)
18. Nel Noddings (16%)
19. Prescriptivism (13%)

The irony which this selector failed to note: the assumption that ethics is about the selection of personal preferences or the expression of personal values would not score highly in my understanding of how to live. This belief, that ethics is based on what I choose or prefer, is known as voluntarism and is briefly critiqued by O'Donovan here.

...And another!

More books arrived today! Two of the Williams, the Hart and the Jenson (see here for details). There was also a second package containing another lovely suprise (see here and here) from yet another friend whom I am yet to meet. Thank you, Tracy!

Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida & Marion on Modern Idolatry by Bruce Ellis Benson (IVP: 2002)
How can we talk about God without just projecting our own wishes and fears? Might not a lot of what passes for theology really just be anthropology writ large, as Feuerbach claimed? Perhaps surprisingly for some, Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion are three philosophers with a lot to say to theology on this matter. Benson explores these three thinkers against the background of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Husserl and Heidegger in order to expose our idolatrous tendency to make God in our own image.

This book sounds reminiscent of Faith and Suspicion: the religious uses of modern atheism by Merold Westphal and comes with high praise from Drew. I'm looking forward to it - how I will decide on a reading order for all these new books, I'm not sure. At the moment, I'm still plugging through Bleak House while I dip into each and try to decide...

Top 20 books that have influenced me theologically

Ben Myers over at Faith and Theology has put together a list of his top twenty books that have influenced him theologically. Although these top twenty things are always somewhat arbitrary (especially the order!), and my most powerful theological influences have been personal relationships with mentors, teachers and lecturers, I've still tried taking up his challenge in the following list. Following Ben's lead, the list excludes books from other disciplines (more or less, though such lines can be hazy; I've included a Nietzsche) and is limited to one volume per author.

20. Karl Rahner, The Trinity
19. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-theology
18. Irenaeus, Against Heresies
17. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
16. T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith
15. Richard Bauckham, God Crucified
14. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace
13. Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
11. Athanasius, On the Incarnation
10. Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God
10. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
9. John Stott, The Cross of Christ
8. Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator
7. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God
6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1
5. Augustine, The City of God
4. Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian
3. J. Calvin, Institutes
2. Thomas Cranmer, Book of Common Prayer
1. Holy Scriptures

Have I forgotten something obvious? I'd love to hear which books or people have influenced you. And before I sound too pretentious (or heterodox!), a number of these books have influenced me as I've reacted against them and many remain as yet unfinished but have still been important.

Why I love Nietzsche

Ben Myers over at Faith and Theology has been conducting a series of guests posts called For the love of God: why I love... in which a variety of his friends and enemies have been sharing autobiographically about formative theological influences: theologians who float one's boat. Ben very kindly invited me to post on Augustine, since I'm working on a project on his eschatology and politics (at least in theory: the lack of work indicated by lack of posts on the wonderful bishop of Hippo). Said lack of progress prompted me to reach back a little to an earlier theological influence: Friedrich Nietzsche, aka 'The Antichrist'. Here is my attenpt...

‘Is not every unbeliever who has a reason for his atheism and his decision not to believe a theologian too? Atheists who have something against God and against faith in God usually know very well whom and what they are rejecting, and have their reasons. Nietzsche’s book The Antichrist has a lot to teach us about true Christianity.’
-Jürgen Moltmann, Godless Theology.

My early years as a Christian were spent in a fairly dualistic Christian culture. Creation and redemption were frequently opposed: salvation meant redemption from the world, from worldliness, from distractions and secondary things. Explicitly and implicitly I received the message that anything not a gospel-matter didn’t matter.

Friedrich Nietzsche awoke me from my Platonic slumber. I began with Beyond Good and Evil: ‘Christianity is Platonism for “the people”’. Nietzsche’s humorous, vigorous, irreverent and megalomanic take on Western culture and thought helped me to see the world-denying resentment behind much that passed for Christian thought. Reading Zarathustra and the Bible, I rediscovered a world-affirming faith. Not a naïve optimism, nor Nietzsche’s heroic Übermensch, but a realisation that the author of salvation is none other than the creator who declared everything ‘good, very good’. The God who raises the dead brings not redemption from the world, but the redemption of the world.

Nietzsche seeks to vanquish the shadows of god that linger on in Western culture after it has rejected Christianity. The god he banishes is one to whom I’d also like to bid good-riddance. Nieztsche, a self-styled anti-Christ(ian), does Christians a great service through his iconoclasm. Although usually pegged as a philosopher (he briefly held a university position as a philologist), he is also able to ‘theologize with a hammer’, sounding out the hollow idols and ideals of the Western tradition. This task is integral to any Christian theology worthy of the name.

‘I beseech you my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.’

- Nieztsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3.

Image in public domain.

And the poets lie too much

'God is a thought that makes crooked all that is straight, and makes turn whatever stands. How? Should time be gone, and all that is impermanent a mere lie? To think this is a dizzy whirl for human bones, and a vomit for the stomach; verily, I call it the turning sickness to conjecture thus. Evil I call it, and misanthropic - all this teaching of the One and the Plenum and the Unmoved and the Sated and the Permanent. All the permanent - that is only a parable. And the poets lie too much.'

- Zarathustra, Upon the Blessed Isles

Palingenesia and futility

I have usually arranged my eschatological thought under three headings: (i) the return of Christ, (ii) the resurrection of the dead, and (iii) the last judgement. However, I'm becoming more convinced that there is a fourth heading: (iv) the renewal of all things, or palingenesia (Matt 19.28). I used to consider this as a sub-point under resurrection (since the revelation of the children of God is the condition for the creation's own liberation in Rom 8), or perhaps as a consequence of the judgement in which that which is evil is finally repudiated and brought to an end, while that which is good is affirmed and released and revealed and vindicated. But illustrating intersecting themes does not itself justify their conflation.

Corresponding to this hope for universal restoration is a fourth fundamental aspect of our present situation. Not only is (i) divine presence hidden or absent, not only do (ii) all the living die, not only does (iii) evil infect every good thing, but (iv) the entire created order is subject to futility. In each case, the solution is found in the inbreaking of the kingdom of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and in his pouring out his Spirit upon all flesh. The solution is Christ and the Spirit: (i) God with us, (ii) new life to the dying, (iii) forgiveness and vindication - and (iv) liberation. These have each begun, but the problems remain until the end. This is often called 'inaugurated eschatology'. Neither side of this dialectic can be safely neglected. The kingdom is geniunely at hand, but not yet established beyond dispute. It appears as the mustard seed, the field shot through with weeds (seedy and weedy): holding out the promise of great things and purity, but presently small and ambiguous.

So 'now and not yet': perhaps nothing particularly new here. But my point is that futility must also be placed within this dynamic. Christians too continue to find life frustrating and thwarted. The good gifts of the earth are filled with - vanity. Even as we give thanks for them we groan and yearn for what they are yet to be (just as we give thanks for health even as we waste away, just as we give thanks for forgiveness even as find ourselves once again sinning, just as we grasp the promise of Emmanuel in Word and Spirit even as we await the coming of God). Without this, Christian interaction with our physical context becomes either a gnostic hostily (in both active and apathetic varieties) or a triumphalist presumption. The former is found in endless world denying dualisms that justify the marginalisation of environmental considerations; the latter in prosperity gospels (found in both pentecostal and bourgeois comfortably complacent varieties). Admitting futility doesn't come easily.

Biblically, this theme, apparent in the 'thorns and thistles' of Genesis 3, is also evident in the life of Cain, marked as a wanderer (as suggested by Andrew Shead in a sermon today). Futility and exile belong together. For the rootless existence of the wanderer is also fruitless. It is the child of Cain who first builds a city, an attempt at civilisation, at a lasting legacy. But the mark that lasts is the one that God inscribed upon Cain. The very soil recoils from his touch. Adam, taken from the ground, given to it as its servant (Gen 2.15), begets a son to whom the ground no longer yields. The ground cries out with his brother's blood. This chthonic cry remains (Heb 12.24); the earth groans at being thwarted (Rom 8.18ff).

But the blood of Christ speaks a better word, a word of hope for spilled blood, untilled earth, fruitless labour.

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

- Friedrich Nieztsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue §3

Ruminant Ruminations

Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness. For he wishes only to live like the beast, neither weary nor amid pains, and he wants it in vain, because he does not will it as the animal does. One day the man demands of the beast: "Why do you not talk to me about your happiness and only gaze at me?" The beast wants to answer, too, and say: "That comes about because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say." But by then the beast has already forgotten this reply and remains silent, so that the man wonders on once more.

- Nietzsche, On the use and abuse of history, I

Ten points for naming this Sydney location.