Forty years ago

On August 16, 1975 Prime Minister Gough Whitlam gave the following speech when handing over freehold title of the Gurindji lands to Vincent Lingiari. The speech was written by Dr HC 'Nugget' Coombs.
_______________________

On this great day, I, Prime Minister of Australia, speak to you on behalf of all Australians who honour and love this land we live in. For them, I want: first, to congratulate you and those who have shared your struggle on the victory you have won in that fight for justice begun nine years ago when, in protest, you walked off Wave Hill station;

Second, to acknowledge we have still much to do to redress the injustice and oppression that has for so long been the lot of black Australians; third, to promise you that this act of restitution we perform today will not stand alone. Your fight was not for yourselves alone, and we are determined that Aboriginal Australians everywhere will be helped by it; fourth, to promise that, through their government, the people of Australia will help you in your plans to use this land fruitfully for the Gurindji;

Finally, to give back to you formally, in Aboriginal and Australian law, ownership of this land of your fathers.

Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people, and I put into your hands this piece of the earth itself as a sign that we restore them to you and your children forever.

The history of the universe in under 18 minutes

Yes, 13,700,000,000 years in 1060 seconds. And worth every one.

Is catastrophe inevitable?

"[I]f we are to confront adequately the threat of (social or environmental) catastrophe, we need to break out of this "historical" notion of temporality: we have to introduce a new notion of time. Dupuy calls this the "time of a project", of a closed circuit between the past and the future: the future is causally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation:

The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident: it could not have taken place, even if, in futur antérieur [looking back from the future], it appears as necessary. ... if an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event's actualization - the fact that it takes place - which retroactively creates its necessity."

"If - accidentally - an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: this, and not commonplaces on how underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectic of contingency and necessity. In this sense, although we are determined by destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny. According to Dupuy, this is also how we should approach the ecological crisis: not to appraise "realistically" the possibilities of catastrophe, but to accept it as Destiny in the precise Hegelian sense - if the catastrophe happens, one can say that its occurrence was decided even before it took place. Destiny and free action (to block the "if") thus go hand in hand: at its most radical, freedom is the freedom to change one's Destiny.

"This, then, is how Dupuy proposes to confront the disaster: we should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities ("If we had done this and that, the calamity we are now experiencing would not have occurred!") upon which we then act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny - and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past. Paradoxically, the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable. For Badiou too, the time of the fidelity to an event is the futur antérieur: overtaking oneself vis-à-vis the future, one acts now as if the future one wants to bring about were already here.

"What this means is that one should fearlessly rehabilitate the idea of preventative action (the "pre-emptive strike"), much abused in the "war on terror": if we postpone our action until we have full knowledge of the catastrophe, we will have acquired that knowledge only when it is too late. That is to say, the certainty on which an act relies is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of belief: a true act is never a strategic intervention in a transparent situation of which we have full knowledge; on the contrary, the true act fills in the gap in our knowledge."

- Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 150-52.
Internal quote from Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite metaphysique des tsunami (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 19.

This somewhat dense passage is either nonsense, or very profound. It can be difficult to tell, and perhaps only hindsight will let us know for sure. But this is precisely Žižek's point: that we act (largely) in the dark, and certainly in the dark about whether future events are inevitable or not. A terminal diagnosis could prove to be wrong. But this doesn't mean we just write off such a diagnosis, no, we embrace it and feel the full weight of living under a death sentence, and then live as those who will be resurrected.
Images by HCS. The eagle-eyed may have notice that the young man attempting to prevent the apparently inevitable collapse in the second image is your truly, age 11.

The fossil fuel roller coaster: a brief history

A presentation this brief is of necessity something of a caricature, but it gives a decent overall picture in five minutes.
H/T Milan.

Pilate: brutal tyrant or vacillating weakling?

"We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, [...]
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate."

- Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

Was Pontius Pilate a ruthless dictator who would execute a potential Jewish troublemaker at the drop of a hat or a spineless pushover terrified of the Jews? Over Easter, Dick Gross has written an article in the Sydney Morning Herald claiming that the portrayal of Pilate in the canonical Gospels is not credible when compared with other historic accounts of this figure.

Murray Smith (my brother) has written an excellent reply also published in the SMH over the weekend.

History matters to Christianity. If the Gospels are no more than inspiring fables, then Jesus may entertain, stimulate or even illuminate us, but he cannot save us.

New book(let): Can we trust what the Gospels say about Jesus?

Christians place great weight on the stories about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. There are four accounts of his life that are universally accepted by the church across the ages, named after the four figures traditionally considered to be the authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are known as the Gospels, since they present the "good news" (gospel) about Jesus.

However, a spate of recent popular documentaries and publications have thrown up all kinds of questions about these writings and others like them which are much less well known. For many people, the appearance of contradictory viewpoints is enough to provide an excuse to avoid the whole deal, since what can we really know anyway? Can we trust what the gospels say about Jesus?

Andrew Errington thinks that we can. He has written a very useful little introduction to the historical issues around the Gospels. At 32 pages long, it is very readable for the non-expert and yet avoids gross oversimplification. You can order it here.

Why we must wear neck ties and other links

• 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.

New(-ish) evidence of early Jesus worship

It seems that it was unearthed back in 2003-05, but I've only just heard about the discovery of a third-century Christian prayer hall in Megiddo, a town in Israel. The remarkable thing about the site (apart from being discovered under a high-security prison still in use) is that it contains well-preserved mosaics complete with inscriptions. In one, a benefactor, Gaianus, is described as a centurion and in another a woman called Akeptous is said to have "offered this table in memorial of the God Jesus Christ".

This is remarkable physical evidence of the beliefs and social composition of early Christian communities in Palestine (more discussion here). In particular, it is yet another refutation of the ludicrous idea (made popular through The Da Vinci Code) that Jesus' divinity was a novel idea pushed on the church by Constantine at Nicea.

This find was brought to my attention by the work of John Dickson and Greg Clarke from the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX), who are putting together a documentary called The Life of Jesus, looking at evidence for the historical Jesus and early Christianity and filmed on location in the Middle East. They are posting short pieces about their experiences on the road here.
Image by N. Davidov, IAA, taken from here. H/T Moffitt for pointing out the SydAng article.

Studying Jesus

A shameless plug
I try to keep ads here to a minimum, but since this one is for my brother, I couldn't resist.

Google ‘Jesus’ and you get 152 million results. He may have cultivated more discussion, interest and controversy than any other person in world history. Who was he? What were his ethics, his teachings, his motivations? In the MCSI subject, Jesus: Person, Politics & Ethics, you’ll look in-depth at Jesus’ life and words, what we know about him and what difference he made (and is still making) to the world.

Curious about Jesus? Want to find out how historians think about him, rather than ministers, sports stars and journalists? The Macquarie Christian Studies Institute is offering a second semester course called Jesus: Person, Politics and Ethics at both Macquarie University and UNSW that is open to everyone, though most Australian university students will be able to take it for credit.

The unit convenors are Ian Packer, Director of Public Theology at the Australian Evangelical Alliance, and Murray Smith, PhD candidate in Ancient History at Macquarie University working on early Christian second coming expectations (Murray is a hero and mentor of mine - and also my brother).

Enroll online before July 31. Here is the course outline:

Week 1: Faith, History and Worldview
Week 2: Gospels - Canonical and Apocryphal
Week 3: The Quests for the ‘Historical Jesus'
Week 4: The Social and Political World of First Century Palestine
Week 5: Jesus in First Century Judaism
Week 6: Jesus, Eschatology and the ‘Kingdom of God'
Week 7: Jesus, Ethics and the Law
Week 8: The ‘Sermon on the Mount'
Week 9: Messianic Ethics for Today?
Week 10: Resurrection?; Counter-cultural community
Week 11: Wealth and Poverty
Week 12: Violence, War and Peace
Week 13: Resistance, Assimilation and Protest

I think this will be a great course with excellent teachers (even if I am biased...).

PS Murray is also teaching an online course in second semester with John Dickson comparing five major world religions.

Food fight

I hate it when blogs become a list of links to favourite videos, but I'm going to indulge myself one more time. Watch this. Stay with it until it starts to make sense, then watch it all again and enjoy the "aha!" moments.

Or if you're still really confused, try the character cheat sheet, or the scene breakdown.
WARNING: Comments contain spoilers.

Moltmann on the end of the world

"Some people think that the Bible has to do with the terrors of the apocalypse, and that the apocalypse is 'the end of the world'. The end, they believe, will see the divine 'final solution' of all the unsolved problems in personal life, in world history, and in the cosmos. Apocalyptic fantasy has always painted God's great final Judgement on the Last Day with flaming passion: the good people will go to heaven, the wicked will go to hell, and the world will be annihilated in a storm of fire. We are all familiar, too, with images of the final struggle between God and Satan, Christ and the Antichrist, Good and Evil in the valley of Armageddon - images which can be employed so usefully in political friend-enemy thinking.

"These images are apocalyptic, but are they also Christian? No, they are not; for Christian expectation of the future has nothing whatsoever to do with the end, whether it be the end of life, the end of history, or the end of the world. Christian expectation is about the beginning: the beginning of true life, the beginning of God's kingdom, and the beginning of the new creation of all things into their enduring form. The ancient wisdom of hope says: 'The last things are as the first.' So God's great promise in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, is: 'Behold, I make all things new' (21.5). In the light of this ultimate horizon we read the Bible as the book of God's promises and the hopes of men and women - indeed the hopes of everything created; and from the remembrances of their future we find energies for the new beginning. [...] If the last is not the end but the new beginning, we have no need to stare fascinated at the end of life."

- Jürgen Moltmann, In the end - the beginning: the life of hope
(Fortress, 2004), ix-x.

I will be very interested to read the rest of this little book. Moltmann can be so inspiring, though sometimes his language is a little over the top. "Christian hope has nothing whatsoever to do with the end"? What about the end of death? The end of crying and mourning and pain? The end of endings?

"If only Jesus were an ecosystem"

With all the local media attention given to Bishop Spong's current visit to Sydney, today's Sydney Morning Herald includes a nicely titled article by Sydney historian John Dickson comparing the media treatment of extreme views in climate change and Jesus studies. His basic argument: if Jesus were an ecosystem, we'd have less patience with voices (such as Spong) so out of touch with contemporary scholarship. But since the field of Jesus-studies is generally perceived to have no consequences, the media are happy to publish anything sensational.

What does hang on the outcomes of the historical study of Jesus?

Hurtado on early devotion to Jesus

How did Jesus become a god?
Last night I went to Macquarie University with some friends from church to hear Professor Larry Hurtado from the University of Edinburgh offer a one-off seminar on Early devotion to Jesus. It was an excellent summary of reams of material from his enormous Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (2003) and his more recent popularisation How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus.

The key claim put forward during the evening was that astonishing devotion to Jesus started almost immediately amongst Jewish believers in Jerusalem, rather than being a later development of more Hellenized Gentile converts from, say, Antioch. Hurtado claimed that more christological innovations occurred within the first handful of years after Jesus' death than in the subsequent seven centuries of theological debate during which orthodoxy was hammered out. Saul of Tarsus, for instance, was already persecuting followers of the Way for their deviant devotion to Jesus by the mid-30s.

Such devotion was not restricted to theological affirmations holding Jesus to be Israel's Messiah (and more), but was also expressed in a range of devotional practices unique amongst the Judaism of the time, such as singing hymns about Jesus, the invocation and confession of his name, prayer through and in the name of Jesus (and even occasionally to Jesus), the ritual use of his name in baptism, the sacred common meal at which Jesus was believed to preside ('the Lord's table') and prophecy in the name of Jesus (cf. Deuteronomy 13 and 17 on what to do with prophets who speak in the name anyone other than YHWH). The inclusion of Jesus with God in such corporate devotional practices was the largest discontinuity with contemporary Jewish worship for the nascent Messianic fellowship. Examples abound of second temple texts in which angelic beings eschew worship (including, for example, Revelation 19.10), so the fact that the Lamb receives it (Revelation 5.13) distinguished him from all other divine agents for the early Christians.

Yet this was no Greco-Roman apotheiosis of an outstanding individual, no addition to a pantheon of gods, since Jesus was worshipped by monotheists who continued to claim the label. Jesus was not to be worshipped apart from the Father, he had no special times or places, no separate altars or cultus, and his titles place him in reference to the Father: Son, Word, Image. Indeed, the claim of early Christians was that offering worship to Jesus was the new divinely-mandated way of worshipping aright the one God (cf. John 5.23).

At the same time, the form and focus of the canonical Gospels emphase that the one receiving the worship is the same human figure who was put to death by Pilate. This is in contrast with, for example, the Gospel of Thomas, which shows almost no interest in Jesus' historical setting and experience.

After some discussion of the social and political implications of devotion to Jesus for the early Christians (a topic overlooked in his 2003 tome, but which the shorter book treats briefly), Professor Hurtado finished his presentation with an extended discussion of Christian iconography in the second and early third century. This was both the most novel and most speculative aspect of the seminar, being only distantly related chronologically and thematically to the rest of his material. I might post more on it later.
Five points for the name of the building in the top image and its (tenuous) link to 'early' Christian devotion. Second photo by HCS.

Can we trust what the Gospels say about Jesus?

Andrew Errington, a previous guest-poster turned blogger has put together an excellent short resource for those interested in a brief introduction to the historicity of the four accounts of Jesus found in the pages of the New Testament. It can be downloaded for free. In twelve pages Andrew answers 'Where did the Gospels come from?', 'What are the Gospels?' and 'What evidence is there?'. An appendix looks at the non-canonical Gospels.
These ruins are just outside an important NT town. Eight points for guessing which one. Photo by HCS.

Benjamin on progress

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

- Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the philosophy of history' in Illuminations.

Image: Klee's Angelus Novus.

Rubble is the future

"Rubble is the future. Because everything that is, passes. There is a wonderful chapter in Isaiah that says: grass will grow over your cities. This sentence has always fascinated me, even as a child. This poetry the fact that you see both things at the same time. Isaiah sees the city and the different layers over it, the grass, and then another city, the grass and then another city again."

- Anselm Kiefer, 2005

Ghosts at cockcrow

"The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more, and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them . . . The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow."

- G. M. Trevelyan

In the end: the beginning

Moltmann on "the end"
In the end is the beginning: Eschatology is generally held to be the doctrine of ‘the Last Things’, or of ‘the end of all things’. To think this is to think in good apocalyptic terms, but it is not understanding eschatology in the Christian sense. To think apocalyptically means thinking things through to their end: the ambiguities of history must sometime become unambiguous; the time of transience must sometime pass away; the unanswerable questions of existence must sometimes cease. The question about the end bursts out of the torment of history and the intolerableness of historical existence. To echo a German proverb: better a terrifying end than this endless terror.

Eschatology seems to search for the ‘final solution’ of all the insoluble problems, as Isaiah Berlin indignantly remarked, playing on the phrase used at the Wannsee conference in 1942, where the SS decided for a ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question in the camps of mass annihilation. Theological eschatology seems to present the ‘Endgame’ of the theodrama World History. This was Hans Urs von Balthasar’s view, when he took over this title as a legacy from Samuel Beckett. If we look back to the history of eschatology, we see it pictorially represented as God’s great final judgement of the good and the wicked, with heaven for the one and hell for the other. Is the Last Judgement God’s final solution for human history? Other people have dreamed about Armageddon, the final duel in the struggle between Christ and Antichrist, or God and the Devil – whether the duel be fought out with divine fire or modern nuclear armaments.

Eschatology is always thought to deal with the end, the last day, the last word, the last act: God has the last word. But if eschatology were that and only that, it would be better to turn one’s back on it altogether; for ‘the last things’ spoil one’s taste for the penultimate ones, and the dreamed of, or hoped for, end of history robs us of our freedom among history’s many possibilities, and our tolerance for all the things in history that are unfinished and provisional. We can no longer put up with earthly, limited and vulnerable life, and in our eschatological finality we destroy life’s fragile beauty. The person who presses forward to the end of life misses life itself. If eschatology were no more than religion’s ‘final solution’ to all the questions, a solution allowing it to have the last word, it would undoubtedly be a particularly unpleasant form of theological dogmatism, if not psychological terrorism. And it has in fact been used in just this way by a number of apocalyptic arm-twisters among our contemporaries.

But Christian eschatology has nothing to do with apocalyptic ‘final solutions’ of this kind, for its subject is not ‘the end’ at all. On the contrary, what it is about is the new creation of all things. Christian eschatology is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end. ‘The end of Christ – after all that was his true beginning’, said Ernst Bloch. Christian eschatology follows this christological pattern in all its personal, historical and cosmic dimensions: in the end is the beginning.

That is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer took leave of his fellow prisoner, Payne Best, in Flossenbürg concentration camp, as he went to his execution: ‘This is the end – for me the beginning of life.’ That is how John on Patmos saw the Last Judgment of the world – not as annihilation, a universal conflagration, or death in a cosmic winter. He saw it as the first day of the new creation of all things: ‘See, I am making all things new’ (Rev 21.5). If we perceive it in remembrance of the hope of Christ, what is called the end of history is also simply the end of temporal history and the beginning of the eternal history of life. Christ can only be called ‘the end of history’ in the sense that he is the pioneer and leader of the life that lives eternally. Wherever life is perceived and lived in community and fellowship with Christ, a new beginning is discovered hidden in every end. What it is I do not know, but I have confidence that the new beginning will find me and raise me up.

Because of this, I have deliberately avoided calling this book about Christian eschatology ‘The Last Things’ or ‘The End of All Things’, but have given it the title: The Coming of God. In God’s creative future, the end will become the beginning, and the true creation is still to come and ahead of us.

- Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, Preface.

How can anyone speak of the future?

"But how can anyone speak of the future, which is not yet here, and of coming events in which he has not as yet had any part? Are these not dreams, speculations, longings and fears, which must all remain vague and indefinite because no one can verify them? The term 'eschato-logy' is wrong. There can be no 'doctrine' of the last things, if by 'doctrine' we mean a collection of theses which can be understood on the basis of experiences that constantly recur and are open to anyone. ... But how, then, can Christian eschatology give expression to the future? Christian eschatology does not speak of the future as such. It sets out from a definite reality in history and announces the future of that reality, its future possibilities and its power over the future. Christian eschatology speaks of Jesus Christ and his future. The recognizes the reality of the raising of Jesus and proclaims the future of the risen Lord. ... Death is real death, and decay is petrefying decay. Guilt remains guilt and suffering remains, even for the believer, a cry to which there is no ready-made answer. Faith does not overstep these realities into a heavenly utopia, does not dream itself into a reality of a different kind. It can overstep the bounds of life, with their closed wall of suffering, guilt and death, only at the point where they have in actual fact been broken through. It is only in following the Christ who was raised from suffering, from a god-forsaken death and from the grave that it gains an open prospect in which there is nothing more to oppress us, a view of the realm of freedom and of joy. Where the bounds that mark the end of all human hopes are broken through in the raising of the crucified one, there faith can and must expand into hope."

- Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 2-5.

History's happy end

‘Eschatology is not a doctrine about history’s happy end…. No one can assure us that the worst will not happen. According to all the laws of experience: it will. We can only trust that even the end of the world hides a new beginning if we trust the God who calls into being the things that are not, and out of death creates new life.’

- Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God , 234.

Eight points for naming the artist. Twelve if you can say where and why he signed this work.