Audio lecture: the aesthetics of Christian mission

Last night I had a wonderful time giving a lecture to the Uniting Church's Queensland Synod on "The Aesthetics of Christian Mission". There's an audio recording here (the lecture starts at about 7 minutes – it goes for about 45 minutes, followed by a brief response and some Q&A). The video clip halfway through the lecture is this one:



And here are some suitably deranged snaps from the Synod website:

Job: New Testament lecturer

My college in Sydney is advertising for a Lecturer in New Testament Studies.

Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, and Christian discernment

The new issue of Uniting Church Studies 16:1 (2010) is devoted to theological debate about the church's proposed constitutional preamble on indigenous Australians (which I've blogged about before). It includes my essay, "'In his own strange way': Indigenous Australians and the Church's Confession" – if you'd like a copy, just send me an email. I've posted a few excerpts on earlier occasions – here's one more small excerpt, where I discuss Bonhoeffer's relation to Gandhi (a topic I hope to explore in detail one of these days):

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This exercise of discernment once more involves the question of the church’s posture or position. Discernment is not an exercise of ecclesiastical power; it is not an expression of the church’s superior vantage point. Rather discernment opens the church to judgment. [...] It is an act of humiliating obedience; it is a dangerous and necessary enactment of the church’s confession—the confession that the church has nothing of itself, and everything from Jesus Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer [...] provides an instructive example of this practice of Christian discernment. In the early 1930s, amidst intense struggle with the Deutsche Christen, Bonhoeffer felt increasingly drawn to India. He wrote to Gandhi, asking if he could spend several months sitting at his feet and sharing in his pattern of daily life. Bonhoeffer wanted to form a monastic community in Germany—he believed the future of the German church depended on it—and he planned to use Gandhi as his model, including Gandhi’s commitment to ‘life together’, ascetic practices, nonviolent resistance, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. In a letter of 1934, Bonhoeffer describes his eagerness to learn from Gandhi:

It sometimes seems to me that there’s more Christianity in [India’s] ‘heathenism’ than in the whole of our Reich Church. Christianity did in fact come from the East originally, but it has become so westernised and so permeated by civilised thought that, as we can now see, it is almost lost to us. (Bonhoeffer, London, 1933-1935, 152)

In this surprising place, Bonhoeffer discerns the work of Christ. And this discernment is simultaneously an experience of judgment. The authentic ‘Christianity’ of a Hindu community becomes a mirror in which the western church perceives its own profligacy and degradation. Bonhoeffer does not wish to become a Hindu, nor is he interested in anything resembling interfaith dialogue. It is rather his exclusive commitment to Christ that drives him to Gandhi. He discerns Christ’s way in Gandhi; while the church crumbles to ruins all around him, Bonhoeffer perceives Jesus Christ living and active in India, and so he resolves to seek Christ there, to learn from the ‘heathens’ what it means to become a disciple of Christ.

As the church exercises discernment, it is thus judged and questioned from outside itself. It perceives surprising signs of Christ’s free and unprincipled activity in the world, and it finds its own life subjected to Christ’s searching and commanding Word. From this position—not a position of superior knowledge about God, but a position of judgment—the church hears Christ’s call and confesses. From this position, the church refuses to regard itself as the exclusive arena of God’s activity; it looks not to itself but to Jesus Christ.

A theology of scholarship

I've started working on a paper titled "Discerning Christ in Contemporary Thought: The Christological Basis of Christian Scholarship", for a conference in Melbourne next month. I'm trying to develop a christological understanding of the nature of Christian scholarship, followed by a brief discussion of contemporary philosophical readings of St Paul as an example of this approach to scholarship. Here's an excerpt from my first draft of the paper:

Contact with contemporary thought has nothing to do with generic sentiments about difference, tolerance and open-mindedness. It is rather – to put it as starkly as possible – a matter of obedience. The risen Christ is not internal to the church’s life; he is not ‘in’ the church, but is always on his way into the world. He judges, addresses and leads the church from without. For this reason, the church cannot rest content with its own traditions and internal resources, as though the church already possessed Christ. Rather the church must remain alert and attentive, looking into the world for traces of Christ’s life and activity.

It is here that scholarship proves indispensable to the church’s mission. The vocation of Christian scholarship is to cultivate a continuing alertness to the voice of Christ, knowing full well that Christ – because he is risen – is ‘not a dead friend but a living stranger’ (Rowan Williams). He speaks to the church in ‘strange ways’ from strange places; scholars have no privileged access to Christ’s voice, but their job is to help the church to discern this voice so that the whole church can respond in obedient faith. The church will at times discover ‘its own nature and mission’ only as it listens carefully to the voice of Christ in contemporary thought or in wider social discourses and practices.

Christian scholars must labour with the complexities of contemporary thought, not in pursuit of mere novelty or a colourless open-mindedness, but out of a disciplined attentiveness to Christ’s own voice. It is the risen Christ who draws the church out of itself and into a history of promise; because Christ is not ‘in’ the church, there is no way of anticipating in advance where he will be found, or the places from which he will speak. As Karl Barth famously remarked: "God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog…. God may speak to us through a pagan or an atheist, and thus give us to understand that the boundary between the church and the secular world can take at any time a different course from that which we think we discern."

Just as the church’s vocation is to remain poised and attentive to Christ, so the vocation of Christian scholarship is to cultivate the asceticism of discernment, to steel the church for future opportunities – strange and unpredictable – to respond faithfully to the voice of Christ.[...]

This account might go some way towards dissolving the old debate about whether theology is primarily oriented towards the church or the university. Christian scholarship will naturally be practised within these (and other) diverse institutional environments. Fundamentally though, the vocation of Christian scholarship is neither ecclesial nor academic, but christological. Its most basic orientation is neither to the academy nor the church, but to the risen Christ.

Stations of the cross in Sydney

Yesterday I went to see the Stations of the Cross exhibition at St Ives Uniting Church in Sydney. It features 15 commissioned works (the 14 traditional stations, plus the resurrection) by some of Australia's leading visual artists. If you're in Sydney, you might like to go along and check it out – Easter Sunday is the last day of the exhibition.

My favourites (click to enlarge) include this triptych by Kevin McKay – this is the 13th station, where Jesus is taken down from the cross. The middle canvas is torn open:

After we viewed the exhibition yesterday, I gave a short impromptu reflection on this work. The outstretched hand of God has become the lifeless hand of Adam. A little ladder leans against the cross. The ladder, like the cross – and like the painting itself – is our own handiwork. Silent and bereft, we wait to receive the dead god into our arms. And at the heart of all things is a gaping wound. As the spear rends Christ's side, the very fabric of creation is torn open. This wound is the world's healing. It is the opening through which God's glory shines into the world. As Leonard Cohen sings: "There is a crack, a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in."

Here's another triptych from the exhibition. This is Euan McLeod's depiction of the 9th station, where Jesus falls:

Indigenous Australians and the church's confession

OK, here's a final excerpt from my paper on the Uniting Church's proposed preamble. This is from the paper's conclusion, where I try to illustrate what it might look like to make a confession about what it means to be the church in Australia.

I am deeply sympathetic with the theological intentions of the new preamble to the Constitution, and I am convinced that the church in Australia needs to find creative ways to rethink and redefine its own identity in relation to the country’s indigenous peoples, those traditional custodians of the very land on which the church gathers. Chris Budden's question is in my view fundamental for the Australian church: ‘Can the church be the church in Australia if it does not properly honour the place of the Indigenous people in its life?’ And more than that, are we not denying the gospel itself—the message of Christ’s universal lordship—if we give the impression ‘that God was brought to Australia by the churches’?

[...] Nevertheless, the whole voice of the document would need to be different, spoken from a different standpoint, if the preamble was to become an exercise of Christian confession and Christian discernment.

The following points then are intended as an illustration of how the language of a preamble could form part of the church’s confession. Here, the church speaks not from a position of privileged insight into God’s ways, but from a vulnerable position of pilgrimage within history. The church does not occupy an elevated ‘view from nowhere’, so that it could survey the whole arc of human history at a single glance. Standing within history, the church sees another world to which it humbly bears witness. Listening to the voices of indigenous believers, the church hears Christ’s own voice calling, and so is compelled to confess:

• Guided by Jesus Christ, the church’s Second Peoples listen attentively to the voices of our indigenous brothers and sisters, knowing that we cannot be the church without them, and that we cannot have Christ except together with them;

• we rejoice in their witness to the Creator God who was already at work in this land, through Christ and the Spirit, long before the arrival of the colonisers;

• in this witness, the church hears and recognises the word of Christ—a word that judges us for our cultural imperialism, our spiritual paternalism, and our hardness of heart; and that graciously liberates us to become together the people of God;

• together with the First Peoples of this land, our brothers and sisters in Christ, we confess that there is one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Together we entrust ourselves to this God, pledging to journey together as Christ’s disciples: to speak the truth in love, to bear one another’s burdens, and to seek and find Christ in one another along the way.

Jesus was already in this land: discerning Christ in indigenous cultures

Here's another excerpt from my paper on the Uniting Church's proposed preamble. This is from a section entitled “‘Jesus was already in this land’: The Logic of Discernment”. I'll post another brief excerpt tomorrow, from the paper's final section where I offer an alternative formulation to the new preamble.

I have been arguing that a confessing church should look for signs of Christ’s work in the world, while at the same time resisting the temptation to assimilate these signs of God’s free activity into a universally applicable doctrinal schema. [...]

Where indigenous Christians in Australia look back on their own cultural traditions and perceive clear lines of continuity—‘Jesus was already walking around in this land’, as one indigenous Christian put it to me in conversation—that is a proper exercise of Christian discernment. It is not part of a larger theory about God’s self-revealing activity among all indigenous peoples, nor is it a doctrinal insight into the structural relationship between the God of the gospel and indigenous law, custom and ceremony.

The theological discussions of the Rainbow Spirit Elders reflect this logic of discernment. The elders affirm that the Creator Spirit has been present from beginning within Aboriginal culture. This is a treasure that lay hidden, but is now disclosed to the eyes of faith; only now, in light of the gospel, can such treasures be uncovered. The elders thus look attentively to their own cultural heritage in an attempt to discern continuities of Christ’s work in this land: ‘As we search our culture in the light of the Gospel …, we must ascertain those things which are alien, as well as those things which are true to the Gospel.’ It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that ‘gives us our Christian Aboriginal theological bearings’, uncovering the hidden treasures of the past and revealing surprising lines of continuity between indigenous traditions and Christ’s work in the gospel. It is because indigenous Christians have already come to know God in Christ that they are led subsequently to perceive that God was already ‘leading us to know that Christ is ... an Aboriginal person camping among us, giving life to our people and our stories’.

As Vincent Donovan has argued in reference to African traditions, it is in this way that the gospel creates its own surprising ‘recapitulation’ of all the riches of a culture. This recapitulation in turn generates a thoroughgoing reassessment of a people’s cultural heritage. For some Aboriginal elders, the Rainbow Spirit is now perceived ‘as a life-giving God of love, and not as an awesome power that frightens us’. This is not a neutral historical assessment of the relation between the Rainbow Spirit and the God of Jesus Christ. It is not something that could be read off the face of indigenous traditions. It is an act of Christian discernment in which the riches of the culture are ‘sublated’—both preserved and transfigured—into the world of the gospel.

If we understand this logic of discernment, we can avoid perpetrating the subtle theological imperialism which colonises indigenous traditions, swallowing them up without remainder into a romanticised anonymous Christianity. The proposed text of the preamble contains more than a hint of such imperialism: God’s Spirit was already at work revealing God through law, custom and ceremony; ‘the same love and grace’ that was fully revealed in Christ was also sustaining the first peoples and giving them knowledge of God. Such statements fail to distinguish between a quasi-historical account of indigenous heritage, and the recapitulation of that heritage as seen through the eyes of faith in the moment of Christian discernment.

God and indigenous Australians: recognising or confessing?

I've been writing a paper on the Uniting Church's proposed new preamble to its constitution. I'm actually very sympathetic to the intentions of this preamble (and I'll post a more sympathetic excerpt tomorrow, on the importance of discerning God's work among indigenous peoples "outside the church"). But my main criticism is that the document speaks from a non-confessional standpoint – here's an excerpt:

This is not so much a confession of the church’s faith in Christ as an authoritative pronouncement about the specific mode of God’s self-revelation. God was at work among (presumably all) indigenous peoples ‘through law, custom and ceremony’.

The crucial question to put to this document is that of the church’s fundamental posture or position. Where does the church stand? Where is the church positioned in order to formulate such a fixed definition of the divine action in human history? Can a confessing church make such authoritative pronouncements? Or does the church first need to relinquish its confessing stance, its posture of vulnerable openness before Jesus Christ, in order to define God’s activity in this way? Can such doctrinal pronouncements really remain open to the free and surprising work of Christ in the world? Or has the eschatological untidiness of the Basis of Union been relinquished in favour of a highly determinate decision about the precise nature of divine action in history? In short, can a confessing church adopt a position of privileged insight into the mysteries of the divine will – a theological bird’s-eye view?

The language of the preamble betrays the fact that this document is indeed an authoritative, objective pronouncement rather than a confession of the church. It is spoken not from the position of obedient confession, but from a superior viewpoint. God’s activity in the world is not so much confessed as grasped and assimilated within an all-encompassing doctrinal schema.

Thus the preamble’s ten statements are said to be ‘recognised’ by the church. What does it mean for the church to ‘recognise’ the fact that God’s self-revelation in Australia has taken place through law, custom and ceremony? Surely it indicates that the church occupies a privileged position. Specific information about God’s activity – information not available in scripture – is somehow at the church’s disposal. Although the church knows God only in Christ, it now also commands knowledge of God’s action extra Christum. Instead of confessing, instead of remaining open and expectant to God’s surprising work in the world, the church is said to ‘recognise’ these facts. Not content to bear witness, the church speaks (in all ten paragraphs) with the voice of an anonymous historian, informing the world about the precise location of God – and of the Uniting Church! – in Australia’s history. Instead of standing ‘between the times’ and confessing from a position of weakness and vulnerability, the church has mastered history. It occupies a theological ‘view from nowhere’, an objective position from which even God is viewed as though from high above.

Doing theology on Aboriginal land

Here in Australia, the Uniting Church is proposing a new preamble to its Constitution. The preamble attempts to define the church's identity in relation to Australia's indigenous peoples; but the document raises all sorts of theological questions. Here's an excerpt:

When the churches that formed the Uniting Church arrived in Australia as part of the process of colonisation they entered a land that had been created and sustained by the Triune God they knew in Jesus Christ.... The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in the land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.

The next issue of Uniting Church Studies is exploring the theology of this document. I'm writing an article entitled “‘In his own strange way’: Confessing Jesus Christ in the Preamble”, focusing on the question, What does it mean for the church to confess? I'll be presenting a draft later this week at a systematic theology seminar in Sydney, and I'll post some excerpts here as well. In the mean time, here's a list of some of the things I've been reading for this paper:

• The Uniting Church's Basis of Union – a remarkable confessional statement on the nature of the church
  
• Rob Bos and Geoff Thompson, ed., Theology for Pilgrims: Selected Theological Documents of the Uniting Church in Australia (Uniting Church Press 2008) – includes the theological texts that underpin the Basis of Union
  
• Pope John Paul II's address to Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Alice Springs, 1986
• The Rainbow Spirit Elders, Rainbow Spirit Theology: Toward an Australian Aboriginal Theology (ATF 2008) – probably Australia's most sustained and insightful experiment in indigenous Christian theology
• Chris Budden, Following Jesus in Invaded Space: Doing Theology on Aboriginal Land (Pickwick 2009) – a problematic but important study of the colonial context of Australian theology; the book's central claim is that "the primary defining context for those who live in Australia is invasion" (p. 17)
  
• Rowan Williams' essay on Trinity and pluralism in On Christian Theology (Blackwell 2000)
• Rowan Williams' address earlier this month on "The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World"
• Frank Macchia and Paul S. Chung, ed., Theology between East and West: A Radical Heritage (Cascade 2002) – a predominantly Barthian collection, including several essays relating to other (mainly Asian) religious traditions

The lowest common denomination: a lament

by Scott Stephens (Scott is a pastor and theological educator in the Uniting Church in Australia, one of the country’s largest mainline denominations. In this piece, Scott discusses the Church’s founding confessional document, the Basis of Union. A shorter version of this piece was published in the denominational magazine, Journey.)

Over thirty years ago, the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) embarked on what could have been a remarkable journey, but it deviated from its original course with devastating consequences. It is now a shell of its former self, like so much Liberal Protestantism throughout the West, having gone whoring after the strange gods of impotent theology, liturgical gimmickry, inert bureaucracy and social respectability.

The past decade in particular has seen the UCA relinquish any prophetic vocation it might once have had — along with a considerable portion of its ecclesial and evangelistic vitality — and instead assume the inoffensive role of the religious division of a non-government provider of community and health services.

And so, in an extraordinary apostasy from its original calling, the UCA has decided to represent the ‘middle way’, the path of least resistance, a facile alternative to fundamentalism, evangelicalism and pentecostalism. In short, it has become the lowest common denomination. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine that, if God sees fit to grant it another thirty years, all that will be left of the Uniting Church itself is the logo on hospitals and Blue Care letterhead — and that for purely historical reasons.

But perhaps most troubling is that the fledgling church was warned against this very apostasy by Davis McCaughey, inaugural President of the Uniting Church. In his incendiary address to the 1979 Assembly of the UCA, McCaughey expressed his fear that the Church would be hijacked by bureaucrats and pedants, and that its clergy would be reduced to careerists and panderers:

“We no longer seem to expect our ministers to spend hours (literally hours) every week, thinking, reading, praying: so that when the hungry sheep look up they may be fed.... And I am not wholly convinced that our Constitution, Regulations and Procedures are sufficiently and rigorously controlled by [our eschatological hope]. I am not persuaded that they are not in danger ... of becoming ends in themselves.”

He warned just as passionately against the tendency he perceived to adopt a form of incestuous Church patriotism, which would obscure and ultimately destroy the Church’s vocation to carry on the mission of Christ:

“At all events the cry for a sense of identity in the Uniting Church cannot be answered by the offer of a new kind of Church patriotism. In an important sense, we in the Uniting Church in Australia have no identity, no distinctive marks — other than belonging with the people of God brought into being by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on their way to the consummation of all things in him.… We have embarked on a course in which we ask men and women to forget who they are, and chiefly to remember whose they are.”

Throughout his address, McCaughey pleaded for a return to the Basis of Union as a source of correction and renewal of the already deteriorating Church — a renewal, he emphasized, that must begin with the congregations themselves. Hence, for McCaughey, any suggestion that the Basis is merely an aspirational document or some transitional text that brought the uniting churches together (a ‘vanishing mediator’, as Max Weber would have put it) must be rejected out of hand.

The Basis is a liturgical document, shaped by the logic of Christian worship (“the rhythm of the gospel,” as McCaughey called it ); as such, it lends itself fully as much to communal prayer as it does to confession. Just notice the prominence and deliberate usage of prayer-language and doxology in the Basis.

In the opening paragraph, the uniting churches “pray that this act [of union] may be to the glory of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Having thus placed their past divisions under the sign of the strong name of the Trinity, they engage in a kind of corporate repentance for the disobedience of times past by pledging their “sole loyalty to Christ the living Head of the Church” and vowing “to remain open to constant reform under his Word.”

Following the proclamation of the gospel (paragraphs 2-8) and affirmation of the Faith of the Church (paragraph 9), the Basis “prays that she may be ready when occasion demands to confess her Lord in fresh words and deeds” (paragraph 11).

In paragraph 15, after describing the ordering of the church so shaped by the gospel, those already existing agencies within the uniting churches are invited to place themselves under the gracious judgment of God’s Word, and thereby “consider afresh their common commitment to the Church’s mission and demonstration of her unity.” The paragraph concludes with the prayer “that God will enable them to order their lives for these purposes.”

Finally, paragraph 18 gathers everything together into a concluding supplication: “She prays God that, through the gift of the Spirit, he will constantly correct that which is erroneous in her life, will bring her into deeper unity with other Churches, and will use her worship, witness and service to his eternal glory through Jesus Christ the Lord. Amen.”

This liturgical approach highlights those defining prayers which have been given to the Church, but which have been scorned and neglected to its peril: the prayer for continual repentance (that God “will constantly correct that which is erroneous in her life”) and for strident witness (that the Church would be ready “to confess her Lord in fresh words and deeds”).

At present, having traded its sacred birthright for a slop of quasi-pagan sentimentality and soft-left political correctness, the Uniting Church in Australia seems to have made up its mind to follow the rest of the Liberal Protestant herd in its head-long rush into oblivion. And yet, as I write this, I can’t help up think that there is another explanation for the UCA’s almost assured disappearance. What if God is killing the Uniting Church? Here is what Stanley Hauerwas told the congregation of Broadway United Methodist Church in South Bend, Indiana, in 1993:

“The plain truth is that Broadway survives as part of a larger church that is dying. Mainstream Protestantism in America is dying. Actually I prefer to put the matter in more positive terms: God is killing Protestantism and perhaps Christianity in America and we deserve it.”

Is God is killing the Uniting Church? Perhaps. Either way, its only alternatives are to continue indulging in the gratuitous “Church patriotism” that has blinded it to its plight thus far, and go on erecting stop-gap measures to stave off the inevitable; or it can embrace the fact that the Basis of Union has already placed the Church under the judgment of the Word of God with joyful repentance.

For is this not the hope that the prophets extended to those ‘pilgrim people’ in exile: repent, and return, for who knows what God may yet do?

Moving to Sydney

A couple of months from now, I’ll be moving to Sydney to take up a position as Lecturer in Systematic Theology at United Theological College (a university-based seminary in Parramatta: it’s both a seminary of the Uniting Church and part of the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University). So I’ll be teaching undergraduate and Masters students, as well as supervising doctoral research. Needless to say, I’d be glad to talk to any of you Sydneysiders who might be considering doctoral work in theology.

I’m told that my great, great, great (etc) grandfather was Governor of the Parramatta jail, way back in the 19th century – and he was such a despicable tyrant that the inmates rioted and killed him. I trust my own time in Parramatta will be just as memorable.

The most un-Anglican things

My friend Aaron is leaving his pastoral job in the Anglican Church to take up a new position in another denomination (the Uniting Church). So in order to celebrate properly, he needs your advice – he asks: “What is the most un-Anglican thing I can do this Monday?” Okay, here are four suggestions to start with:

• Don’t drink any alcohol.
• Express an uncompromising opinion about something.
• Try talking about church and ministry without using the word “incarnational.”
• Express unqualified admiration for the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Anyone want to add to the list? Or, if you’re not an Anglican, you might like to suggest your own most un-Catholic, un-Presbyterian, un-Whatever activities.