Donald doodlings

“Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”
– Donald Trump [oops, sorry – Hazel Motes, in Wise Blood]

Of course Trump does not need to confess his sins. Or haven’t you heard of the Immaculate Deception? My wife – he makes her want to have a shower.

If you want to understand the phenomenon, go with the fact that Trump is not running a campaign but building a church. The ugly rhetoric and half-assed policy proposals are primarily a means to the end of selling himself as a charismatic Saviour. The traction of his teaching lies precisely in its apocalyptic promise to resentful and credulous marginalised and patronised white males, as well as to an assortment of chauvinists and bigots. Trump is the fearless frontier Übermensch who shouts “Fuck you!” to the establishment and “Trust me!” to the hoi polloi. What makes him so toxic is the combination of faux authenticity and can-do nihilism.

Trump has got it all wrong about asylum seekers. He should welcome them, while encouraging violence against them. “It’s good Yankee hospitality,” he could claim: “we’re making them feel right at home.”

Spot the homophonic error in Trump’s “Making America Great Again”.

I hear that 86-year-old Hal Lindsey is working on a new edition of The Late, Great Planet Earth. November 8th 2016 looks to be a key date in the End-Times scenario. Otherwise we can only be sure that the Last Trump will follow the first.

Three characteristics of the anal expulsive character are overweening self-belief, emotional dysregulation, and casual cruelty. And in his Assholes: A Theory (2012), Aaron James observes that the asshole is characterised by his failure “to recognize others in a fundamental, morally important way.” To coin a phrase, one might speak of the “anality of evil”.

Meanwhile, back at the Temple …“We thank you, God, that we are real Christians, living the Beatitudes, welcoming migrants, supporting ‘Black Lives Matter’, and not hypocrites, xenophobes, and racists like those (Re)publican Trumpvangelicals. Enlighten them, O Lord. Amen.”

The answer to an America full of lapsed Christians is a Christianity full of lapsed Americans.

Here in the UK, we are preparing for a wave of penitent prodigals, sick of presidential pig shit, returning from the far colonies later this year.

Three books being written about the Republican campaign for the presidency: From Ronald to Donald: The Decline and Fall of the GOP; Cruz Control; and O Rubio, Rubio, Wherefore Art Thou, Rubio?

The problem with Twitter is that it’s easier to hate than to love in 140 characters.

The doctrine by which the contemporary Church of Health and Beauty stands or falls is justification by face.

Everyone becomes a sacrifice. The only question is whether you are a self-offering or the immolation of someone else.

Love or certainty? You can’t have both.

Great novelists start by observing their characters and end by being observed by them.

It is said that belief in God begins with wonder. It ends there too.

Blessed are those who read and travel widely, for theirs is the kingdom of Odd.

The dead don’t haunt the living, but the living torment the dead.

We must handle our secrets with care and discernment, because some are to be cherished, while others are half way to being lies.

We are always trying to get away with something. Jesus never tried to get away with anything. I think that’s one way to parse his sinlessness.

Be a guitarist, not a guitar.

The reality of evil and suffering makes some people lose their faith in God. For me, it has the opposite effect.

I used to hate weeding, working with impatience. Now that I’m a drain on society, however, I identify with dock and dandelions, and I dispatch them reluctantly.

I once was lost, but now am found. Otherwise, I’m as screwed up as the next guy.

Another thing about Wheaton: do Christians and Jews worship the same God?

Larycia Hawkins is losing her job at Wheaton over her claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Bruce McCormack has written a terrific piece on the controversy. He sketches out what he takes to be the strongest argument for each view. To summarise:

Not the Same God
The strongest case that Christians and Muslims don’t worship the same God is, McCormack says, a Barthian trinitarian argument. God’s identity is essentially triune. This means God cannot be identified by any non-trinitarian monotheism. To believe simply in “one God” is not a precursor to belief in God. God’s oneness is triune and can be known in no other way.

The Same God
But he suggests that the strongest counter-argument is connected to the slow historical development of the doctrine of the trinity. Christianity began as a branch of Jewish monotheism. It took some time for Christianity to develop into a full-blown distinctive religion, and centuries longer for Christians to articulate a coherent and clearly defined doctrine of the trinity.

McCormack’s point is that the second view is the main classic Christian view. It is the first view, that Christians and Muslims don't worship the same God, that requires novel metaphysical arguments. So the burden of proof is not with Larycia Hawkins but with the college administrators who are taking steps to fire her on theological grounds.

Another implication of this debate is that arguments about Islam tend to have implications for how Christians think about Judaism. If one argues that Christians and Muslims don't worship the same God, it can quickly become tricky to justify how Jewish monotheism can be viewed as a true religion, or as a right response to divine revelation.

You can see this problem in the earliest Christian writings on Islam. From the 8th century on, Christian teachers tried to account for the new dominant religion and for the changed situation of Christians in an Arab world. The questions whether Islam is a true religion, and whether Muslims have a true knowledge of God, seem to have been answered in two main ways:

Not the Same God: John of Damascus (c. 675–749)
The Arabic-speaking monastic teacher John of Damascus advanced the strongest and most uncompromising argument that Christians and Muslims do not know the same God. In a catalogue of a hundred heresies, John includes an extended discussion of “the heresy of the Ishmaelites.” He says that the Arab people were pagan idolaters before a false prophet came to them and brought them a bad and superstitious form of monotheism: they exchanged one false religion for another. He accuses Muhammad of inventing his prophecies based on a synthesis of the Old and New Testaments and of Arian teaching. Thus John sees Muslims as followers of a derivative heresy. He ridicules their scriptures, maligns the morality of their prophet, and calls them “mutilators of God” and “forerunners of the Antichrist” (On Heresies 101).

What’s interesting though is that John has, if anything, an even more damning assessment of Judaism. He presents Judaism not merely as one heresy among others but as one of the “archetypes” of heresy from which the others derive. He doesn’t present the religion of Israel as a precursor to the gospel but as an error that the gospel has abolished. The three other archetypal heresies are “barbarism” (where people live according to the state of nature), “Scythianism” (the religious cult of primitive social orders), and “Hellenism” (the more sophisticated polytheism of the Greek world). This makes it clear that John is using the word “heresies” not only in the strict sense of deviations from Christian teaching. He lumps together as “heretical” all false religions and all distortions of Christianity. He seems to see Islam as a synthesis between a false monotheism (Judaism) and a false form of Christianity (Arianism).

At any rate, Judaism and Islam are closely connected in John’s denunciation. For him, monotheism as such has no claim to truth.

Later Christians in the Arab world sometimes reiterated this view. The Arabic-speaking theologian Theodore Abu Qurra (early 9th century) lumps Judaism and Islam together as false monotheisms. At the end of his treatise, after developing arguments that clearly condemn Judaism along with Islam, he anticipates the question whether Judaism is completely false. His answer is very telling. Yes, he says, Christians would regard Judaism as a false religion, except that Christ affirms Moses as a true prophet. Solely on the basis of Christ’s authority, therefore, Christians accept the truth of the Jewish religion.

“If not for the Gospel, we would not believe that Moses is from God. Indeed, on the basis of reason, we would reject him most earnestly” (The Orthodox Church in the Arab World: An Anthology of Sources, 88). 

Theodore’s strategy is to condemn all non-Christian monotheisms, but then to give Judaism a last-minute exemption by divine fiat, thus leaving Islam alone as the only false monotheism. The close connection between Judaism and Islam is clear: that is why, once he has condemned Islam, Theodore cannot think of any way to rescue Judaism except by arbitrary fiat.

The Same God: Paul of Antioch (12th century)
A very different view is put forward by the monastic writer Paul of Antioch in his Letter to a Muslim Friend. Writing in Arabic, Paul addresses the Muslim as his “dear friend and genuine brother.” He explores the question whether Christians ought to convert to Islam. His argument is that Muhammad was a prophet to the pagan people of the Arab world, not to Christians. The Jews and Christians had already received divine revelation, but God had never previously sent a messenger to the Arab people. They were completely in the dark before the time of Muhammad.

“We [Christians] are not bound to follow him [Muhammad], because messengers had already come to us before him, addressing us in our own languages. They warned us and they handed over to us the Torah and the Gospel in our own vernacular languages. It is clear from the Qur’an that he [Muhammad] was sent only to the pagan Arabs” (The Orthodox Church in the Arab World: An Anthology of Sources, 221). 

All the warnings and admonitions in the Qur’an should be understood to apply exclusively to the Arab people. Through the prophecies of Muhammad, the Arabs were delivered from pagan gods and were set on a path towards the true God. 

So while John of Damascus had condemned Islam and Judaism together, Paul of Antioch sets Christianity and Judaism together in order to protect both from Islam's claim to superiority. Later in the same letter, he presents Judaism and Christianity as the two types of true religion. Judaism is the archetypal religion of justice, based on God’s self-revelation as the God of justice, and Christianity is the archetypal religion of mercy based on God’s self-revelation as the merciful one.

Based on this schema, Paul can now advance a (relatively gentle) criticism of Islam. He observes that, after the Jewish and Christian revelation, there is nothing more to be known of God: what more could be added to the revelation of the one God as just and merciful? For that reason, “no further [religion] remains to be instituted consequent upon this perfection”, i.e., the perfection of the two true religions as a single harmonious revelation of the one God. Any subsequent religion could not possibly improve on this twofold revelation of justice and mercy. At best it could only be a derivative religion – “and the derivative is a kind of grace for which there is no need” (The Orthodox Church in the Arab World: An Anthology of Sources, 233).

Even here, Paul's point is not that Islam is false. As a “derivative” of the truth, Islam may be (and, in his view, has been) a means of revelation and a powerful force for good in the Arab world. But for Christians and Jews, conversion to Islam would be irrelevant since their own religions are already closer to the source.


So, back to the Wheaton Question: do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? However you answer will have implications for how you answer a more basic (and, theologically, more important) question, whether Jews and Christians worship the same God, i.e., whether the God of Jewish monotheism is the same as the one God revealed in Christ.

A letter from a church to local mosques

Here is a letter I drafted for the church I attend in Swansea (UK), Uniting Church Sketty (a Local Ecumenical Partnership, born in May, of the former Bethel United Reformed Church and Sketty Methodist Church). Signed by our minister the Revd. Leslie Noon on behalf of the church and sent to the imams of the three mosques in Swansea – Sunni, Shia, and the University mosque – it is the kind of letter that I pray you might bring to the attention of your own church if you live in a Muslim-Christian context. In the aftermath of the Paris massacre, in Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, no one is more at risk than Muslims themselves, from local xenophobic abuse and assault as well as from the pseudo-Islamic apocalyptic death cult known as IS, which is, after all, an equal-opportunity destroyer.

In the name of the One God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, we greet you on behalf of Uniting Church Sketty. In the wake of the horrific events in Paris, we write to express our concern about their impact in the UK, particularly on the Muslim community.

The BBC has recently reported that hate crimes against Muslims in London have risen by 70% in the past year. Since the terrorist attacks, there have been disturbing reports of verbal and physical abuse against Muslims around Britain, and such incidents will no doubt increase in the weeks ahead. The toxic combination of panic and fear, religious ignorance, and xenophobic scapegoating suggests that we should not be complacent about Islamophobic violence occurring in Swansea.

In this ominous context we, as a church, reaffirm our solidarity with Islam in the fundamental principles of love of God and neighbour, and in our common search for peace and justice. We also express an especial concern for the safety and wellbeing of Muslims in Swansea during these troubled times. We will, of course, remember you in our prayers, but if there is any practical support that we can give you, please let us know. Both the Qur’an and the Bible say that God is able, and we are ready to work with you opposing what is evil and defending what is good.

May God unite us in purpose and peace.

In friendship, &c.

And now for a bit of Reinhold Niebuhr

At the risk of pleasing nobody, I've written a piece for the ABC discussing Christian reactions to a recent speech by Australia's former prime minister Tony Abbott. It's called Love your neighbour: why Tony Abbott is (partly) right and his critics are (partly) wrong. Here's an excerpt:

But nothing is gained when Christian commentators respond to Abbott’s one-sided cynicism with an equally one-sided sentimentality. It’s not enough merely to assert that we must love our neighbours, or to insist that our policies should embody the compassion of Christ’s teaching. Such assertions only confirm the impression that religion has no relevance to the sphere of practical politics.

If Christian commentators want to contribute to political life (and not simply to condemn it), then they will need to say something about how one form of neighbour-love is to be balanced against others. They will need to account for the trade-offs involved in any attempt to create compassionate policies. They will need to explain how imperfect approximations to love can still be worthwhile in spite of their unavoidable costs and failings.

We can avoid cynicism by recognising that neighbour-love is always relevant to politics, even though it cannot directly be translated into policy. For Christians, matters of law and practical politics are always measured against the transcendent standard of Christ's commandment to love.

We can avoid sentimentality by recognising that love is never perfectly achievable in this life. Love is a standard of judgment, a perfect criterion against which every law and policy is measured. The best policies are those that approximate more closely to this transcendent standard. There will always be room for reform and improvement. There will never be occasion for self-righteous posturing, as if we had ever perfectly fulfilled our obligation to love in any given situation.

Prayer for Newtown, Connecticut, December 14

“But wherefore could I not pronounce Amen?” 
—Macbeth

God of liberty, we give you thanks for the many freedoms that we enjoy by your blessing.

For the freedom to express ourselves, we give you thanks! 

For the freedom to satisfy our urges and impulses, we give you thanks!

For freedom of trade, especially the freedom to buy and sell weapons and ammunition at competitive prices, we give you thanks!

For the freedom to bear arms, we give you thanks!

Save us, O God, from those who would threaten our rights;

Save us from legislators who would take away our freedoms;

Save us from those who would constrain the free expression of our feelings;
Save us from those who would compromise our free commerce in guns, weapons, and all instruments of self-protection.

Increase our freedoms more and more:

freedom to do as we please,
freedom to buy and sell,

freedom to possess handguns, semi-automatic assault rifles, automatic machine guns, stockpiles of ammunition, holsters, slings, scopes, and other accessories,

freedom against neighbours,
freedom against strangers,
freedom against children,
freedom against the unborn, 

freedom with our bodies and the bodies of others,
freedom to pursue our own interests,

freedom to gratify ourselves at any cost.
May the firstlings of our hearts be the firstlings of our hands,

and may we bring this freedom, O God, to those who lack it.

Fulfil us, O God!
Gratify our desires!
Validate our feelings!
Let us be free, though the world perish!

We ask it in the name of Jesus, your beloved son,
whose birth and infancy we venerate,
who came among us harmless as any child –

Sarah Coakley on women bishops and the collapse of Anglican theology

Sarah Coakley has a terrific piece on the ABC site about the Church of England's vote this week – a vote against women bishops and for theological incoherency:

So what we have created in the past twenty years is a theological anomaly which has insidiously been made to seem normal: a whole cadre of priests – a third of our priesthood now – who are supposedly intrinsically disabled from exercising the charisms of spiritual unity and authority historically associated with the episcopate. It is here that the main theological scandal still lies: the implicit creation and normalization of second-class priesthood. The terrible danger is that this may now be extended into second-class episcopacy.

Coakley situates this theological disaster within the wider story of the church's growing bureaucratisation in recent years, and the evacuation of theological seriousness from church polity:

In our supposedly "secular" culture, the Church of England seems to have succumbed to the idea that theological ideas do not matter very much, and this may bespeak a deeper malaise even than the current crisis itself. Young people are turning back to the Church, longing for spiritual and intellectual bread; by and large stones await them, even despite a most promising new generation of young priest-scholars (women and men) who are beginning to rise through the ecclesial ranks. Perhaps in a generation things will be different. But for the moment the Church has in effect signed its own theological death warrant.

And she points out that our bureaucratic ecclesial culture comes with a cost. It displaces the culture of prayer that is indigenous to the church's life, and on which the church's spiritual vitality will always ultimately depend:

Along with the notable turn in priestly life in general to the secular bureaucratic models of "leadership," "efficiency" and "mission-efficacy" has gone an almost unnoticed capitulation – as I see it – to the idolatry of busyness.... The costliness of this pressure merely to "cope" in a whirlwind of ever-consuming administrative demands and inevitably eroded prayer is a problem that goes well beyond the particular matter of women bishops. But I dare to raise it because it says something about the culture in which a merely pragmatic or political, rather than a truly theological, solution to an ecclesiastical impasse [is sought]. Is our creeping ecclesial bureaucratization indeed the way forward for the Church in all its ministries? Is it here – rather than in any inappropriate commitment to worldly feminism and egalitarianism, as is often claimed – that the issue of women bishops is stalled and hiddenly entangled with secular mores?

 This is an excellent piece of public theology: a serious-minded, prophetic call for a recovery of Anglican faithfulness.

As long as they spell your name right: Rowan Williams and the Observer

After last week's posts, the Observer added an apology to the end of their piece on Rowan Williams, and removed the offending paragraph. An acknowledgement also appeared at the end of Theo Hobson's piece in The Guardian. The Islamophobia Watch website summed up the whole debacle in an extended post, rightly concluding: "It turns out that the Observer report is in fact misleading in almost every respect." Though to give them their due, they did manage to spell Rowan's name correctly.

No doubt the Archbishop of Canterbury was shocked and surprised to see his views misrepresented in the British press. But it's all water under the bridge. And let the one who has never misunderstood Rowan Williams cast the first stone. (I don't understand him, and I wrote a whole book about it!)

Anyway, it wasn't journalism's finest hour. But for a more positive and hopeful portrayal of the journalistic arts, and the capacity of the news media to "speak truth to stupid", be sure to check out the new HBO series The Newsroom. It's the latest creation of Aaron Sorkin, whom you'll remember from The Social Network, A Few Good Men, and greatest-show-of-all-time The West Wing.

Once more on Rowan Williams, Islam, and loyalty

Well, I contacted the author of yesterday's Observer piece on Rowan Williams. I explained that the potentially inflammatory quotations about Islam had been lifted out of context, and that they were actually statements of a position that Williams rejects. The Observer writer flatly denied that he had taken the quotes out of context. Maybe that's my fault; maybe my post yesterday wasn't explicit enough. So let me try this again.

Here are some excerpts from the original 2004 lecture which forms part of Williams' new book, Faith in the Public Square. The lecture is titled "Convictions, Loyalties, and the Secular State" – this is the section of the book from which the quotes on Islam were taken in yesterday's Observer. The sentences quoted in the Observer are in bold:

... the person's religious commitment involves both an additional level of social belonging, a membership in some other nexus of relations than that of the state, and a formation in critical questioning of the state's decisions, a reluctance to take for granted the legitimacy of these decisions without some further scrutiny.

This whole cluster of issues has become more immediate and practical with the current complexities over the modern state's relation to Muslim identity. Liberal commentators properly concerned to combat anti-Muslim prejudice ... persist in assuming that Islam is a set of convictions in the mode of much modern Christianity. To suggest that the Muslim owes an overriding loyalty to the international Muslim community, the Umma, is worrying; it is a factor in Muslim identity (say the liberal commentators) that intensifies suspicion towards the Muslim community in a quite unnecessary way. What is desirable is thus for Muslims to make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state, unaffected by the private convictions that individual Muslim believers happen to hold in common.

...Maleiha Malik, a professional jurist of Muslim allegiance, has recently written at length on this conflict....

What this implies is in fact a subtle reframing of the issue of loyalty. Loyalty to a sovereign authority is replaced by or recast as identification with a public process or set of public processes; the simple question about loyalty, 'Are you with us or against us?' becomes a question about adequate and confident participation in a law-governed social complex. We are taken beyond a polarised picture of exclusive loyalty to the state menaced by mysterious fifth column-ish affiliations elsewhere. Loyalty to the Umma is not necessarily in competition with dependable citizenship in the state if the state's practices of consultation and acknowledgement of communal identities remove the threat of a total and terminal privatising of religious conviction.

This particular discussion ought to sharpen the agenda of Christian theologians, and to send them back to some foundational texts. Early Christianity, as we have seen, is a communal phenomenon proclaiming an allegiance that is deeply threatening to the unitary and sacred identity of the ancient city and the ancient empire. I have argued elsewhere that what we find in some of the records of the martyrs is in fact a surprisingly novel account of political loyalty: the accused refuse to treat the emperor as divine, but they accept the duty of paying taxes and praying for the public good. Thus they see themselves as participating in a public process, not as rebels against existing order; but they will not regard their loyalty to the state as a matter of exclusive and absolute obligation, religious obligation. They are, it seems, trying to clarify the sense in which political loyalty and religious loyalty are not in direct competition.

... While not a simple rival to the secular state, [the Church] will inevitably raise questions about how the secular state thinks of loyalty and indeed of social unity or cohesion. To this degree, it is not in a different case from the Muslim Umma.

As if by magic, this account of loyalty in Christianity and Islam becomes, in the Observer:

[Williams] also calls for greater integration of Muslims living in Britain and insists they make their loyalty to "the nation state" rather than "the international Muslim community". "To suggest that the Muslim owes an overriding loyalty to the International Muslim Community [the Umma] is extremely worrying," he writes. "Muslims must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state."

I'm sure this was an honest mistake – we've all misquoted things under the pressure of deadlines. But after Rowan Williams has spent so much of the past decade trying to build bridges between the church and Muslim communities in Britain, it was dismaying to see how quickly this paragraph was quoted across the web as evidence that Williams is, after all, a reactionary Islamophobe. By the time it got to the American papers, the headline had become: "Archbishop of Canterbury Ridicules Muslims..."

That's why I think the Observer ought to publish an apology.

Rowan Williams in the Observer: Muslim loyalty and the nation state

So a piece in today's Observer discusses Rowan Williams' forthcoming book, Faith in the Public Square, in which the Archbishop attacks David Cameron's 'big society' rhetoric. Excitingly, the article claims to be quoting from leaked passages of the book. Including the following, on Islam:

[Williams] also calls for greater integration of Muslims living in Britain and insists they make their loyalty to 'the nation state' rather than 'the international Muslim community'. 'To suggest that the Muslim owes an overriding loyalty to the International Muslim Community [the Umma] is extremely worrying,' he writes. 'Muslims must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state.'

That sounds pretty dismaying, and naturally it has drawn the ire of bloggers (e.g. here and here). But is it really possible to believe that these are Williams' own thoughts about Islam? 

He has written and lectured extensively on Islam in recent years. (If you search his website for 'Islam', you'll start to get the general idea.) He has discussed this issue of loyalty in other settings, and his views on the subject are no secret. He thinks that loyalty to the international Muslim community, the Umma, “is very close to what a Christian would say about loyalty to the church”. He notes that “the kind of comprehensive loyalty we associate with the nation state is a very modern and local phenomenon.” He stresses that, for Muslims and Christians alike, loyalty to one’s country is not a matter of “foolish” patriotism, but is “fundamentally a moral and religious loyalty, the kind of loyalty which holds you accountable to God.” Those quotes are from his published Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture on Islam, Christianity and Pluralism, pp. 6-7. 

Williams has written so much on Islam in recent years, all along similar lines, that I find it impossible to believe that his new book will argue the proposition that “Muslims must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state.” Disregarding the question of Muslims, Williams doesn't believe that anyone ought to have a “straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state”!

So what's the explanation for this sensational report in the Observer? I'd be willing to bet you five dollars that the passage quoted is, in fact, just the summary of someone else's view – a view of religion and national loyalty that Williams is critiquing. The line has been lifted out of context for journalistic purposes: it's the oldest trick/mistake in the book.

[UPDATE: A commenter at AUFS has identified the full 2004 lecture in which this passage appears – you can read it here. Williams is indeed merely summarising the way 'liberal commentators' talk about Islam, and his whole lecture is an attempt to explain why their view is inadequate. Interestingly, while Williams notes that such commentators view Muslim loyalty to the Umma as 'worrying', the Observer writer appears to have slipped in an additional adverb: 'extremely worrying'!]

This reminds me of a front-page newspaper article many years ago, back in ancient Israel. While the Psalmist was still hard at work on his latest song, an eager journalist got his hands on some leaked passages. Next morning, the headlines were printed: PSALMIST SAYS: THERE IS NO GOD. If only he'd waited for the published version – it was Psalm 14 – he would have seen the line in its proper context: 'The fool hath said, There is no God.'

The problem with Rowan Williams

I wrote a short piece about Rowan Williams' resignation for this week's Times Higher Education – you can see it here, and reposted by the ABC here. "Williams believes in the Church more than he believes in his own opinions. All his troubles as Archbishop of Canterbury have stemmed from this fact."

Speaking of Rowan, I'm told the first print run of Christ the Stranger has already sold out – thanks to everyone who bought a copy! There are a couple more blog posts about the book by Rod Green and Mike Bird.

Job opportunity: Archbishop of Canterbury

So it's official: Rowan Williams is stepping down from the office of Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the year, and will take up a position as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Her Majesty the Queen is now accepting CVs from interested applicants for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. Though no prior experience is necessary, applicants should be strongly motivated, with a proven ability to lead a worldwide communion, work with dangerous animals (including evangelicals and tabloid journalists), reform British society, and generally please everyone at all times. Experience in performing royal weddings and presiding over Lambeth Conferences is also highly desirable. The successful applicant may be required to relocate.

For full details of the salary package, including travel allowance, health benefits, superannuation, and lodgings in a medieval palace, please contact royal.highness@buckingham.co.uk.

The Church of England is an equal opportunity employer. Druids and other minorities are especially encouraged to apply. (Women need not apply at this time.)

The St Paul's Cathedral hornet's nest

At the ABC site, Scott has run a triptych of pieces on the St Paul's Cathedral crisis:

• Rowan Williams: "The Church of England and the Church Universal have a proper interest in the ethics of the financial world and in the question of whether our financial practices serve those who need to be served - or have simply become idols that themselves demand uncritical service." 
• John Milbank: "And while very many London clerics over the years have made an honourable social witness, the fact is that the higher echelons of the London diocese have tended to be complicit with just this flummery and too much in love with a power that they can only touch through its trappings. Indeed, it is this sham ritual that has frequently blinded them to genuine symbolic resonance. And now this inherited blindness is exposed for the world to see – a most spectacular blindness. 
• Luke Bretherton: "For what is a Cathedral meant to be but a place where people can come and experience a different time and space, and can live, if only for a moment, in a vision of a different future, and thereby have reality re-framed?"

The Melbourne Cup and animal ethics: just a bloody punt

Today is one of the most sacred events in the Australian liturgical year: Melbourne Cup day. Pretty much everyone in the country stops to watch the race and to have a punt. Even school children are encouraged to join in the fun of betting on the horses. Though I don't mean to come across as the cranky old Christian spoil-sport, I wrote a piece for the ABC site today, drawing on Karl Barth's animal ethics – Melbourne Cup: the race that tramples creation: "The Melbourne Cup is the climax of a cruel and bloody practice, exhibiting what Karl Barth called our 'astonishing indifference and thoughtlessness' regarding animals."

As for the question of Australia's pathological predilection for gambling, here's a great video with a couple of excellent satirical TV ads. The second ad is especially good – I think this pretty much says it all:

The Chosen People: a sermon for 9/11

by Kim Fabricius

Once upon a time there was a nation that considered itself special, so special that it called itself “The Chosen People”. They lived in a country that had rich soil and abundant natural resources – “a land flowing with milk and honey”. They had not always lived in this land. They travelled to it from another country where they had suffered from oppression. It was a long and arduous journey, and when they arrived in this “Promised Land”, they found that it was already inhabited. Nevertheless, because they felt that they had a special relationship with God – a “Covenant” they called it – and a special mission from God – to be a blessing to the world – they drove out the local tribes by force of arms and set about building a society regulated by a collection of God-given laws, enshrining principles of justice and freedom, which gave their nation a shape and a sense of identity. They believed that as long as they obeyed these laws, their tenure in the land was guaranteed, and that their children, and their children’s children, would also enjoy its safety and bounty.

From time to time social critics came along who criticised the leadership of the nation for not living up to its ideals, and warned of catastrophe if they didn’t repent, but they were either ignored as madmen or persecuted as traitors. But these “prophets” turned out to be right, for one day something terrible did happen, something of such monumental, catastrophic significance that it cast doubt on all the nation’s assumptions about itself and its special relationship with God – its impregnability, its goodness, its sense of vocation and mission – and forced its people to re-examine their beliefs. And this nation was, of course – Israel.

Of course! Who else? It all fits: the exodus from oppression in Egypt and the gruelling journey to the Promised Land; the righteous slaughter of the indigenous Canaanites and the occupation of the land; the establishment of the Covenant and the giving of the Law; God’s promise of homeland security “to a thousand generations”, and the people’s pledge of allegiance; the failure of kings to keep the pledge, and the futile critiques and admonitions of the prophets; and, finally, the terrible calamity of war and defeat at the hands of the Babylonians – the sacking of Jerusalem, the razing of the Temple, and the ensuing exile.

Yes, of course, who else but Israel? You don’t think your resident New Yorker might have a hidden agenda, do you? But as a thought experiment, for Israel let’s substitute the United States and check out our national mythology. To escape religious and political persecution in Britain, we sailed the dangerous waters of the Atlantic to America the beautiful, the Promised Land, lush and fertile, only to find it already inhabited by indigenous peoples. You know what we did to them – systematic pillage and plunder – but that was okay because we had a “manifest destiny” to claim the land as our own “from sea to shining sea”. Besides, we had enlightened laws, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with which we would civilise the local heathen (the ones we didn’t kill or confine to reservations), and, for that matter, the foreign heathen we imported from Africa and the West Indies to work our fields of gold. Indeed, America would be “a city set on a hill” for the whole world to see, admire, envy, and imitate. Occasionally our own prophets have arisen, pointed out our Original Sins of genocide and slavery, and exposed the moral iniquity of the myth of redemptive violence which has always been the reigning paradigm of American domestic and foreign policy; in return, however, they have been ignored or persecuted as unpatriotic, “un-American”. And even when they have proved to be right in their warnings about the tragedies that ensue from the arrogance of power – the Philippine-American War, the War in Vietnam, for example – they have been airbrushed out of the picture by our court historians. And, finally, the American version of the Babylonians and their assault on our iconic institutions which we had assumed were invulnerable – al-Qaeda and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It’s a nice fit, don’t you think? But then the shoe begins to pinch, the analogy to break down. Because the experience of defeat and exile induced Israel to revisit its national script, to re-examine its history, to reimagine its future, and, crucially, to think the unthinkable about God. Indeed, the question “Where is God in all this?” propelled Israel into one of its most theologically creative periods ever, with old traditions collected and edited, and new works written and discussed. Against the lies of establishment cover-up, Jeremiah urged Israel to become a “community of honest grief” (Walter Brueggemann); and against the civic religion that presumes that “God is on our side”, Ezekiel proclaimed a God who cannot be nationalised, who is holy and free. After the exile and return to the land, there were other innovative and radical thinkers: the authors of the books of Jonah and Ruth, for example, who concluded that Israel wasn’t so special as to preclude the God of Israel from being the God of all people and all history; and the author of Job, who had the astonishing insight that even in suffering, death, and grief God might yet be encountered.

But what has the experience of 9/11 done for America? At the time, among the neo-conservative clique in Washington, nothing whatsoever in terms of pausing, reflecting, and achieving moral clarity; only the rush of blood, the pursuit of payback, and the reassertion of the pathologies of angelic innocence, zealous patriotism, and righteous vengeance, exploited with a religious discourse deployed for a geo-political agenda. In contrast to the intellectual fertility in exilic and post-exilic Israel, we had a lethal mixture of sentiment, denial, mendacity, and violence. And Obama? Compared to the burning Bush, there is character and intelligence, a change of style and rhetoric, and a make-over of America’s image. In fact, however, there have been few major changes in foreign policy at all. Ten years squandered in unconscionable military conflagrations inextricably connected to the recent economic meltdown. Yet to most American themselves, the US remains, in former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s modest phrase, “the indispensable nation”.

“The Chosen People”. It would appear to be a concept that, to say the least, is open to abuse. From its origin in Israel to its commandeering by the United States, a nation’s self-understanding as called and blessed by God has resulted in arrogance, complacency, the abuse of power, and an imperviousness to criticism. Is the concept salvageable and still serviceable? Only on three conditions.

First, The Chosen People can in no way be taken to refer to a specific nation-state. To suggest that the United States, or England – or even Wales! – is The Chosen People is sheer hubris based on distorted theology. Even the nation-state of Israel cannot claim the title. No nation-state can. Because after Christ the term no longer refers to a geographical or cultural entity. Because, on the one hand, “being in Christ” has replaced “being in the land”, and, on the other hand, the land has expanded to encompass the whole world. In Christ, all people are Chosen People.

Second, we must carefully define exactly what being chosen means. It means being chosen by God for a purpose. But this purpose has nothing to do with privilege, protection, wealth, power, and defence: it’s got to do with service, self-sacrifice, dispossession, vulnerability, and nonviolence. It’s got to do with the way of Jesus, which is the way of the cross.

And third, for the church, insofar as we may think of ourselves as “a chosen race, … a royal nation” (I Peter 2:9), it cannot mean that we are a club for the nice and the virtuous, a group that likes to do “religious” things, a Starbucks for consumers of the “spiritual”, a haven for the world-weary, or a safe-house where we can stay out of trouble; rather it will be a community of radical welcome, hands-on commitment, indiscriminate compassion, political critique, and unconquerable hope.

In short, a church that refuses to allow its own story to be absorbed into pseudo-sacred national narratives and manipulated by the selective remembering of state liturgies and patriotic commemorations: a church that knows that only one event has ever truly changed the world, an event that happened not on a late summer Tuesday in 2001, but on an early spring weekend around 33 A.D. An apocalyptic event for sure, but an apocalypse of peace.

Scott Stephens on Catholic sexual abuse

Scott Stephens' piece over at the ABC is one of the most important things I've read in some time. Scott discusses the findings of a major new empirical study on The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010 – a report that has been widely ignored by the media, since it doesn't fit with the media's favourite grand narrative about the sexual deviance of Catholic priests.

The study, Scott says, shows "a sudden and disturbing increase in instances of sexual abuse from 1960, reaching its hellish pinnacle in 1975, followed by a sharp and sustained decline from 1985 to the present". By 2001, there were 5 reported cases of sexual abuse per 100,000 children (compared to 134 cases of abuse for every 100,000 children in American society as a whole in the same year). By 2010, there were just 7 reported cases across the entire Catholic Church in the United States. The report thus describes "the 'crisis' of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests" as really a "historical problem."

Scott discusses many other aspects of the report's findings. Most interesting, I thought, is his suggestion that "the foetid cultural soil of the 60s and 70s proved uncommonly conducive to the commission of sexual abuse" – and that the Church's reinstatement of a "punitive approach" to sexual deviance (as opposed to its earlier adoption of fashionable "therapeutic" approaches – counselling, treatment, relocation), together with "John Paul II's radical reform of seminary life and the spiritual formation of priests".

Thus Scott offers his own blistering conclusion: "Those who incessantly call for an end to sexual abuse in the Church are effectively trying to break down an open door." The deepest problem, he thinks, was the cultural milieu of the 1960s, with its vociferous opposition to all taboos, and its sinister promotion of unchecked sexual experimentation. (Sinister if you happened to be a child at the time.)

Speaking of Scott – if you're in Sydney, don't forget to come and join us tonight for a lively wine-and-cheese discussion with Tomáš Halik.

Rapture: news update

Breaking news: Across America yesterday, ferocious packs of sharp-clawed bipedal dinosaurs were seen entering churches, prayer meetings, ladies' baking groups, and other hotbeds of evangelical piety. Many of the country's most outspoken Christian leaders, including Family Radio broadcaster Harold Camping, have been taken by the grisly predators. It is believed that the prehistoric visitors were the result of a small but significant spelling error in the heavenly Diary. According to sources close to heaven's Department of Future Woes, the entry for 21 May reads: "Unleash the raptor on the saints."

The mistake is thought to be the most serious blunder in the heavenly Diary since the mass outbreak of appendicitis in Jerusalem in 1994 – an incident that was later found to be the result of a scribal error in the Diary: "6 September 1994: Now beginneth the Abdomination of Desolation."

Shusaku Endo: Christ and Japan

The Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo – described by Graham Greene as one of the century's greatest writers – was always wrestling with the relation between Christianity and Japan. In an interview, he said:

"But after all it seems to me that Catholicism is not a solo, but a symphony. It fits, of course, man's sinless side, but unless a religion can find a place for man's sinful side in the ensemble, it is a false religion. If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness; they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony. And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan's mud swamp, it cannot be a true religion. What exactly this part is – that is what I want to find out" (cited in Emi Mase-Hasegawa, Christ in Japanese Culture: Theological Themes in Shusaku Endo's Literary Works, 72).

Endo's 1966 novel Silence portrays the visit of a Portuguese Jesuit priest to Japan in the 17th century. In one scene, the priest looks out over a ruined village, and prays: "The village had been burnt to the ground; and its inhabitants had been completely dispersed. The sea and the land were silent as death; only the dull sound of the waves lapping against the boat broke the silence of the night. Why have you abandoned us so completely? he prayed in a weak voice. Even the village was constructed for you; and have you abandoned it in its ashes? ... Have you just remained silent like the darkness that surrounds me? Why? At least tell me why. We are not strong men like Job who was afflicted with leprosy as a trial. There is a limit to our endurance. Give us no more suffering. So he prayed. But the sea remained cold, and the darkness maintained its stubborn silence."

Milbank, Egypt, Cyclone Yasi, and the Latin American labyrinth

John Milbank's second Stanton lecture, on Immanence and Life, is available now. He's also written a more popular piece for the ABC on Recovering Trust in a Labyrinth of Solitude. To my surprise, I discovered from this piece that Milbank and I have been reading all the same books lately: he discusses Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and Roberto Bolaño. To be honest though, I don't think he's right about any of them: who would describe One Hundred Years of Solitude as a document of "meaningless secularism"? You might as well call The Arabian Nights a nihilistic book. The reference to Octavio Paz is dubious too, since Paz's labyrinth of solitude isn't a denial of love, but an account of the conditions which make love possible. In fact, Paz's The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism is one of the most striking and beautiful things you could read in defence of erotic love.

Speaking of literature, the new issue of Literature and Theology is devoted to the theme of poetry and belief, with articles on Blake, Shelley, Hopkins, Stevens, Auden, and others.

And while you're over at the ABC, see also Waleed Aly's piece on the uprising in Egypt. And if you've been following the news of the Cyclone Yasi this week, here's a great slideshow with some photos of the aftermath. (Why do we find it so soothing to see photographs of natural disasters? As a boy, I always loved cyclones – they're a regular source of excitement for children growing up in the tropics. Each time, we waited eagerly for the news that our school had been blown away.) Anyway, I especially like this photo – thank God the books weren't damaged!

Sarah Coakley on the church's sex crisis

The new ABC Religion and Ethics site features a three-part series by Sarah Coakley on the current sex crises in the Catholic and Anglican churches: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. This sketches an argument that Coakley develops fully in her forthcoming book, The New Asceticism (T&T Clark 2011).

Call for contributors: ABC religion and ethics

This month, the ABC will be launching its new Religion and Ethics online portal, headed up by our friend Scott Stephens. Not only will this site provide a single online destination for religion news and current affairs from around the world, it will host perhaps the most significant gathering of theologians, academics, specialists and critics on the web today. Regular contributors to the site include Stanley Hauerwas, Bill Cavanaugh, Michael Novak, Paul Griffiths, Slavoj Zizek, Tariq Ramadan, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Abdullah Saeed, and many others to be announced in due course.

The portal will also host op-eds and unsolicited contributions from theologians, academics and specialists from Australia and around the world, thus making original pieces accessible to the ABC’s extraordinarily large audience. You are invited to submit pieces on theology, religions, and their intersections with culture, literature, politics and economics to the editor for review and publication. Pieces should be around 800-1200 words in length.

There are a number of up-coming features on which Scott would love to receive original contributions, such as:

• The domestication of Jesus in Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and Peter Verhoeven’s Jesus of Nazareth
• Why blasphemy matters
• Stanley Hauerwas’s memoirs, Hannah’s Child, and the relationship of biography and friendship to the practice of theology and the formation of virtue
• Bill Cavanaugh’s important new book, The Myth of Religious Violence
• Luke Bretherton’s extraordinary proposal in Christianity and Contemporary Politics
• The moral problem of state subsidies given to religious/charitable institutions
• Tariq Ramadan’s Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, and the ongoing question of theology’s integrity apropos the conceits of liberal democracy
• Environmentalism, tokenism, and the production of conservationist virtues.

If you'd like to contribute to this exciting new venture, just get in touch with Scott Stephens.