Sunday 26 February 2017

Join in the Karl Barth seminar via Facebook

My postgrad seminar on Barth's early theology starts this week. If anyone would like to join in the weekly readings and to be part of the discussion, I've created a Facebook group. Anyone is welcome to join. The first short reading is Barth's early lecture, "The New World of the Bible". The 12 weekly readings are listed here.

Wednesday 22 February 2017

#PresidentPrayer and #PresidentLove

Old Nobodaddy –
who lives in Manhattan, parties in Atlantic City, and holidays in Florida –
let your name be up in lights!
Do what it takes to make America great again [repeat].
Turn it into the New Jerusalem –
replete with casinos, golf courses, and precious stones by Melania;
surrounded by a great wall and, of course, Arabless.
Give me today – make it a Big Mac, Lay’s Potato Chips, and a Diet Coke.
Forgive me … – cancel that: WTF do I have to be sorry about? –
and forget about me forgiving losers!
Don’t bring me to trial – you’d be wasting your time (I’ve got an army of lawyers);
and deliver me from “so-called” judges (goddam enemies of the people).
For mine – sorry, I mean yours – well, ours –
is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for as long as it takes.
We’re done here.

If I speak eloquently and coherently, I’m not speaking like Trump: Trump-speak is a cacophony of bullshit. If I don’t know my ass from my elbow, and if I have the fantasy of draining a huge swamp, and if I have access to state secrets that can be used to destroy the world – that’s Trump. And if I give all my money to the poor, disclose my tax returns, pay the ultimate price for goods and services, and permanently delete my Twitter account – now that would be the Antitrump.

“Trump is patient; Trump is kind; Trump does not want what others have; he is not full-of-himself or high-and-mighty or in-your-face. Trump is not an ego maniac; he never flies off the handle or bears a grudge; he does not gloat when others fail; he relishes only what is actually the case.  Trump is a paragon of virtue” (Kellyanne Conway).

Trump will be as everlasting as a mayfly, as ephemeral as fart.  He will never give up, but he will finally self-destruct.  One day (Inshallah) he will look in a mirror, point his little foredigit at the caricature before him, and shout, “You’re fired!”

“When I was a child, I thought, felt, and acted like a child.  When I grew up, I continued to think, feel, and act like a child – no, make that a big cry-baby.  I’ve got the self-control of a dingo on acid. I don’t see things clearly yet, but one day I never will” (Trump, after being subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques).

Meanwhile, there are three things that will sustain us in our overwhelming perplexity and despair: faith, hope, and whatsit. And the greatest of these is Trump.

Thursday 16 February 2017

Do Dum Dum Dum, De Do Dum Dum Doodlings

What an immaculately conceived picture of Queen B as Madonna del Parto in the Instagram icon. I hear that Gabriel has told Beyoncé to name the twin boy after his father: Jay-Zeus.

The Trinity is like pornography: you can’t put it into words but, as Justice Potter Stewart famously declared, “I know it when I see it.”

Praying the other day, I was suddenly interrupted. “Why do you keep calling me ‘Jesus’?” he asked. “Because that’s your name,” I replied. “In Latin,” he said. “For God’s sake, speak English: call me ‘Jack’.”

God gives us the bread of life on the table lest we starve on the scraps from the pulpit.

What is “closure” but the therapeutic ploy of putting putty in the cracks so the light can’t get in?

The profundity of Leonard Cohen’s poetry is that it doesn’t dispel the darkness but illuminates its different shades.

To riff on Hopkins: stars star and planets planet, continents continent and oceans ocean, trees tree and tigers tiger. And humans? Alas, humans inhuman.

Power disempowers; absolute power disempowers absolutely.

I would never have believed it, but it’s actually happening: Trump is uniting the American people in a common cause and achievable project – national self-hatred and suicide.

To paraphrase Erasmus, “In a nation of the blind, the one-eyed man is president.” In this case, he happens to be Cyclops, with the same temperament and appetites.

Just a few weeks into his presidency and Donald Trump is already posing the serious threat of a paradigm shift over Godwin’s Law.

I hear that henceforth all US editions of 1984 will be retitled 2017.

Sunday January 29th: in church. The Gospel is the Beatitudes. No need to preach it today. The text comes alive by simple juxtaposition with the anti-sermon, the anti-Beatitudes, of Trump’s execrable executive actions demonising Muslims.

Sunday January 29th: at home. After seeing the chilling, ugly game of xenophobia that Trump is playing, felt filthy. After watching the thrilling, beautiful tennis match between a Swiss and a Spaniard, felt cleansed.

Forget a coherent opposition, mass demonstrations, or the power of prayer, what we now need is a first-class White House asshole whisperer.

According to the British daily the i, scientists are suggesting that our earliest ancestor was a small creature with thin skin, a large mouth, and no anus, which means that “waste material would simply have been taken out back through the mouth.” Yikes, the missing link is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!

“No matter how many body-politic-parts there are, you are still only one body-politic. If the heart-valves were to say, ‘Because we’re not the anus, this is not who we are,’ that wouldn’t keep them from being part of the body. Or if the brain-lobes were to say, ‘Because we’re not the penis, this is not who we are,’ that wouldn’t keep them from being part of the body. If one part of the body acts like an asshole or a prick, all the other parts share in the shite and the piss” (I Americans 11:14ff.)

Of course Trump doesn’t get the fundamental constitutional principle of “checks and balances”. He thinks it’s the discourse of banking, not government. You sign checks and you balance the books – or rather you bounce checks and cook the books.

I’ll tell you what makes me want to knock a thousand heads together: American evangelicals, in sackcloth and ashes, wailing that Thank-you-Jesus-for-President-Trump Christians are the last straw. Earth to American evangelicals: evangelical Americans have been building a haystack of alternative theology (as in “alternative facts”) for my entire adult life, a rick so enormous that by the Reagan presidency astronauts could have seen it from the moon. The trajectory is hardly a quelle-surprise: what began with “The Apostasy of Billy Graham” (the working title of a book on Nixon’s Hananiah that William Stringfellow had planned to write) reaches its nadir in the religious nihilism of Trump’s court toady Franklin.

Would someone please tell Christians who police the boundaries of their communities that faith is supposed to be the trigger of ecclesial fusion, not fission?

Doing theology takes time. Some of the time is for research and writing, of course. Most of the time, however, is for prayer. At least it is if you’re doing it right.

Prosperity Gospel market update on Revelation 1:8a: “‘I am the Alpha but not the Omega; rather I am the 1942 Rolex Chronograph,’ says the Lord God Almighty.”

And Pilate said, “How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” The cuffed Christ replied, “Er, both.” “Ah,” the procurator smirked, “the old PS defence.”

“Whose side is God on?” we are tempted to ask in all kinds of conflicts, but his answer is always the same: “Not yours.”

Grief cuts us adrift. The tides of time take most people back to shore. Lifeboats may retrieve others. But some continue to drift, drift, drift out to a bleak and pitiless sea.

Friday 3 February 2017

Karl Barth postgraduate seminar

I promised you an update on what we'll be reading for my Barth seminar this semester. Thanks for all the great suggestions, both here and on Facebook. After much reflection and dialectical hesitation and whatnot, I decided to head off in a slightly different direction, and that is to make Barth's concept of religion a focal point for the seminar. I think this helps to cover a lot of bases. It allows us to read both the Romans commentary and an important section of Church Dogmatics, while keeping strong thematic links across the semester. And it opens up some of the most important areas of Barth's thought (e.g. revelation, election, grace, the task of theology, the critique of protestant liberalism on the one side and Roman Catholicism on the other, etc). In a perfect world we would also have time to read Barth's "doctrine of the lights" from later in the Church Dogmatics. But, ladies and gentlemen, last time I looked out the window it was not a perfect world.

Anyway these are the texts that we'll be reading:
  • "The New World in the Bible" and "The Word of God as the Task of Theology", from The Word of God and Theology, translated by Amy Marga
  • Barth, Epistle to the Romans, translated by E. C. Hoskyns
  • Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, translated by Garrett Green (this is a section of Church Dogmatics that was newly translated and published separately as a funky little paperback)
And here are the twelve weekly readings that we'll be discussing:

1 Revelation: "The New World in the Bible"

2 Dialectical theology: "The Word of God as the Task of Theology"

3 A new approach to scripture: Epistle to the Romans, prefaces (all of them!)

4 The night of sin: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 1

5 God's faithfulness: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 3

6 The new human being: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 5

7 Judgment on religion: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 7

8 Judgment on the church: Epistle to the Romans, chapter 10

9 Revelation and religion: On Religion, chapter 1

10 The sin of religion: On Religion, chapter 2

11 The justification of religion: On Religion, chapter 3a (pp. 111-44)

12 Christ and the Christian religion: On Religion, chapter 3b (pp. 144-66)

Students will be required to write a first paper exploring one particular chapter from the Romans commentary, and a second paper that explores one of the larger themes in these texts.

If anybody from the Sydney area would like to come along and join us, the seminar will be on Tuesday afternoons, commencing early March. Non-fee-paying audit participants are always welcome!

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