Sliding scales: one last time on the parables

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Picture a sort of sliding scale, from hell to heaven. On this scale let’s place some people, from very wicked people to very good people, and let’s keep it to famous – and infamous – people from modern times. Let’s start, at the bottom, with Hitler. I mean you gotta start with Hitler, right? Then let’s move on to, say, Osama bin Laden, who is kind of the personification of evil in the 21st century (so far – long way to go yet). Okay, now let’s move on to some indisputably good characters. How about Desmond Tutu or, earlier, Martin Luther King? But I guess we should remember that King was an adulterer. Mother Theresa then – there’s a saint for sure. But then remember that, in her letters, she confessed to doubting the very existence of God. Still, I guess a little atheism doesn’t stack up to the heaps and heaps of her good works.

But enough. You can argue about your own personal sliding scale of sinners and saints over lunch, but I think you get the picture: some people further away – maybe even out of sight – from being good with God, and others closer and closer.

Now picture a pub in, say, Guildford. A minister walks in with a bag full of Christian Aid envelopes. His collection has exceeded all expectations. He’s got a bruise on his left cheek. That’s because he turned it to the right cross delivered by a householder who thinks the church is full of hypocrites and he’d rather gnaw off his right arm than give to one of their bloody charities. The minister asks for a glass of mineral water. “Ice with a slice?” asks the elderly landlord. “Yes, please,” says the minister politely. “Anything to eat?” asks the landlord. “No thank you,” says the minister politely, “I’m fasting today.” He notices a collection container on the bar – two, in fact, one for the British Heart Foundation, the other for Macmillan Cancer Support. He puts a fiver in each. Then, just before he takes a sip from his mineral water, he says a little grace, in thanksgiving for the money he’s raised – and now given – for good causes. Then he takes his bag and his drink and goes to the rear of the pub to sit down. But there – there is this guy, slumped in a lounge chair, fashionably dressed but stinking of booze. The minister has seen this young man before. Yes, he lives in that huge gated house and commutes to the City. And he’s heard him bad-mouthing the Occupy Movement on a radio programme. “Merchant bankers,” thinks the minister, “what a bunch of crooks. And there he is, dead drunk on his unmerited bonuses and dodgy investments.” Then the minister hears the banker mutter something. He leans closer to hear. “What a mess I’ve made of my life! What a mess I’ve made of the lives of others! God, look what I’ve become!” And the minister thinks, “There but for the grace of God …”

The minister goes back to the bar. “Excuse me,” he says, “there’s a drunk sitting at the back. Could you get rid of him, please?” “Sorry, no,” says the landlord. “He’s my son. You can sit somewhere else – or leave.” “Well, I never!” exclaims the minister. Then he slams down his drink and leaves.

Another sliding scale of – only two – rather ordinary people this time, but one not so moral, a white collar criminal and sot, and the other a religious man living quite ethically, if a bit bad-tempered. Sort of contemporary Pharisee and tax collector, from our parable.

To make the connections you must, first, eliminate the idea that the Pharisee, or the minister, are hypocrites. Jesus says nothing about hypocrisy in the Pharisee, nor do I in the minister. The Pharisee tithes, that is, he gives a tenth of his goods for the upkeep of the Temple. By tradition there are numerous exemptions, but this Pharisee makes no exceptions, he tithes all his income. He’s a Big Giver. And his outward rectitude is matched by a spiritual discipline: he fasts. According to the Torah, fasting is required only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Pharisees, however, chose to fast two days before, and two days after, the three major Jewish feasts, twelve days a year. But this particular Pharisee fasts two days a week, over a hundred days a year! And here, in the Temple, he gives thanks, “There but for the grace of God ...” Yes, a very religious man.

Similarly, my minister works tirelessly for Christian Aid and he gives generously to any number of charities – and I could go on to tell you about his work with the homeless and asylum seekers, and about all the church committees on which he serves, and that he’s even written a book. And his spiritual discipline is as conscientious as it gets. Here he is fasting during Christian Aid Week – in May, not during Lent. And he says a little grace even before having a drink in a pub – non-alcoholic, of course. And in the manse he’s on his knees in the study before nine, and in bed, before going to sleep, he prays for his church members and family, and for desperate situations in the world. His church adores him.

Analogously, that tax collector and my banker – they are bad dudes. Remember tax collectors in first-century Israel were Jews who worked for the Romans. They were quislings. And they were notorious big-time rip-offs, working on a franchise, owing the exchequer a flat fee while collecting from their compatriots all they can squeeze out of them. Similarly my merchant banker. He is a crook, a white-collar criminal, and he’s an alcoholic as well. Both guys are morally repugnant. But the Pharisee leaves the Temple as a son on bad terms with the God who happens to be the Father of the tax collector too, and the minister leaves the pub on bad terms with the landlord who also happens to be the father of the banker.

The Pharisee and the minister – thank God we’re not like them. “There but for the grace of God…” But oops – that’s their line! Still, modestly, humbly, we can all say that we don’t look down on people who aren’t as virtuous as we are, on a sliding scale, I mean. And we’re delighted, aren’t we, that the tax collector and the banker go home right with God? (Yeah, I know I’ve made a pub-owner a stand-in for God. In defence I’d say that that is just the kind of scandalous thing that Jesus would do.) I mean, we’re not bothered that Jesus doesn’t say anything about the tax collector repenting and turning his life around, nor I, likewise, about the banker? So imagine, if you will, going back to Temple or pub a fortnight later, and there is the tax collector again, still bleeding people dry, and there is the banker again, still wheeling and dealing and drinking 20-year-old malts, both woe-is-me-ing and trusting to mercy – and getting it. And we’re not bothered, right? Right?

Or do we not choke, morally, on the unfairness of such a scenario? Imagine it repeating itself yet again. Surely there’s got to come a time – three strikes and you’re out – when the tax collector and the banker have got to resign from their occupations, the one taking his savings to reimburse those he’s defrauded, the other sending a five-figure cheque to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. A time when the Lord and the landlord can congratulate their children for their impressive repentance and new-found civic virtue.

But then, wasn’t it precisely their virtue and achievements that the Lord and landlord ignored in the Pharisee and the minister? Do we really want to say that, after all, it would be better if the tax collector were more like the Pharisee, the banker more like the minister? That mercy is all very well, but surely not without a little reform, and if no reform, then some divine vengeance? But if we do want to say that – and I think we all probably do, at least a bit – don’t we demonstrate that we’ve missed the point of Jesus’ parable?

The thing is, once we start sliding scales, from real bad guys right down to, well, me – and while I might not be a saint, hey, I’m not that bad a guy – which the tax collector and the banker, not making comparisons, precisely do not think, but which the Pharisee and the minister do – well, then grace has left the building. Unconditional grace. Limitless forgiveness. I know it’s foolish, crazy, certifiably insane. And I could tell you, more sensibly, that the scales of divine judgement are sliding scales, that God has only so much patience, that that the time will come when he turns nasty – Pay-Back Day when the worse-than-me will finally get what they deserve. Which the church often teaches, and it really packs them in. But not, as far as I can tell, Jesus, who died preaching to a congregation of two – one of whom heckled – and lives for everyone. Everyone. God’s scales don’t slide like ours. Jesus goes down – all the way down – and Jesus takes all of us back up with him. The self-sufficiency of religion – get over it. The all-sufficiency of grace – get used to it. That is the odd, disturbing, but very good news that we are privileged to hear again today.

Bethel URC, Swansea

12 May 2013, Easter 7 (Christian Aid Week)

Will hell be empty? Rob Bell's Love Wins

Here's a piece I wrote for this week's edition of the Christian newspaper, Eternity:

Love Wins is a book about God. It raises the question: what kind of God do Christians believe in? That's an important question in a world where so many of us – both within the church and without – have been hurt by bad theology. Perhaps we were taught that God has two different personalities: God can switch back and forth between vengeance and mercy, so that we never quite know what to expect. Or perhaps we were taught to think of God as a watchful policeman, always ready to hand out infringement notices whenever we step out of line. Or maybe we grew up feeling that God is more ‘pure’ than ordinary human experience, so that parts of our lives – especially those non-spiritual, bodily parts – are disgusting and offensive to God.

There’s nothing trivial about bad theology. A diseased picture of God will inevitably produce symptoms in our thoughts and feelings, in the way we live and relate to each other, in our whole way of looking at the world. Family life, sexual life, friendship, work, leisure, creativity: all these parts of our experience are deeply shaped by the way we think about God. I often meet people who are still nursing wounds from the theology they imbibed as young children, people who are recovering from the worship of a bad god.

Rob Bell is writing for people like that. And his point is simple: Jesus shows us what God is like; Jesus shows us the triumph of God’s love for the whole human race. 

Thus Bell raises the question whether human rejection of God might finally be overcome by God’s love; whether hell might turn out to be empty; whether all, in the end, will be saved. The easy assumption that salvation is only for ‘us’, he thinks, is an evasion of the universal significance of the gospel. If Christ’s resurrection doesn’t somehow affect every single human being, then we haven’t really grasped the meaning of resurrection. You might compare it to a legal system: it applies either to everybody or to nobody – it’s not the sort of thing that applies to just some members of a society. In a similar way, Christ’s resurrection is significant either for everyone, or for no one. As Bell puts it, Jesus is ‘as narrow as himself and as wide as the universe’. He is the exclusive way to salvation, yet he includes all humanity within himself.

Some critics have questioned Bell’s orthodoxy – especially his emphasis on the universality of salvation. But the most striking thing about his approach is its deep indebtedness to Eastern Orthodox tradition. The Orthodox churches have always emphasised the universality of Christ’s work – not only his death and resurrection, but also his descent into hell. The Orthodox liturgy proclaims that hell was emptied by Christ: ‘Hell’s gatekeepers trembled before you; you raised with you the dead from every age.’ In another part of the liturgy, Orthodox Christians sing: ‘Rising from the tomb, you broke the bonds of Hades and destroyed the sentence of death, O Lord, delivering all from the snares of the enemy.’ 

The leading contemporary Russian theologian, Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, explores all this in his recent book, Christ the Conqueror of Hell (2009). He shows that, in Orthodox tradition, Christ’s descent into hell has a universal significance. Christ breaks the power of hell and releases all its captives: ‘Christ’s saving of the dead and the exodus from Hades were not one-time events that occurred in the past without significance for the present. These are events that transcend time, whose fruits were reaped not only by those who were imprisoned in hell before Christ’s descent but also by future generations.’ 

Rob Bell seems to be referring to this Orthodox tradition when he argues that ‘at the centre of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins.’ Once you see Christ’s death, descent and resurrection from an Orthodox perspective – as something universal, even cosmic in scope; as something that reaches every human being without exception – then the real question becomes: How could anyone ultimately escape the reach of God’s love? 

As Archbishop Hilarion argues, the universal scope of Christ’s work doesn’t necessarily mean that all will be saved. But it means that even hell itself is no longer a place of separation from God. Christ has penetrated into the depths of hell, flooding its darkness with the light of love. Hell has become a site of divine activity, a venue of divine love. ‘If I make my bed in Hades, you are there’ (Psalm 139:8). Thus the torment of hell can only be understood as the torment of love. Hell’s power is abolished – but someone might still reject God to such an extent that even love becomes a torment, an unbearable ‘scourge’.

This Orthodox tradition is conveniently ignored by those critics who accuse Rob Bell of heresy. As though Eastern Orthodoxy is not sufficiently ‘orthodox’! As though the Christian creed confesses anything positive about hell – except that Christ ‘descended’ there before rising again!

From the perspective of Christian tradition, I don’t think there are any grounds for questioning the orthodoxy of Love Wins. As far as I can tell, Rob Bell really just presents the gospel: he tells of God’s victorious love, a love revealed in Jesus Christ, a love that is deeper than vengeance and stronger than death. 

The hostile reaction to Bell among North American evangelicals reminds me of the way some people responded to the great Reformed theologian, Karl Barth. Barth placed so much emphasis on God’s grace that his critics called him a universalist. But in Barth's view, both universalism and its denial are errors. The important thing is to uphold the absolute freedom of grace: if grace is free, then we should neither deny nor affirm universal salvation. It’s not our decision to make – ‘salvation belongs to the Lord!’ (Psalm 3:8). Yet Barth thought the ferocious condemnation of universalism exposed something pathological in the Christian mindset. When he was accused of promoting universalism, he once replied: ‘Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free …, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might prove to be empty!’

If that is our greatest anxiety – that God might turn out to be too gracious – then perhaps we ought to heed Rob Bell’s celebration of triumphant love, universal love, a love ‘as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart that no one else knows about.’

Or to quote one of the great theologians of the Orthodox tradition, St Isaac the Syrian: ‘Like a handful of dust thrown into the sea are the sins of all humankind compared with the mercy and providence of God.’ 

If that’s true, then we can be sure of one thing: in the end, love wins.

Thy kingdom come

“What frightens and frees us simultaneously about this new and alien kingdom of God which Jesus preached and told of is the simple fact that it is God’s and not our own. That is a dark menace to the complacency and contentment of those who flourish under the kingdoms of this world; a shining vision of release and new beginnings to the victims of the present order; and perhaps also a mocking rebuke to the programs, projects, and pride of those who hope to create a new order by themselves. It is tragic, therefore, that a gospel which promises justice, love and peace only by insisting that these are God’s own gifts, which remain alien, foolish, and impossible except for grace alone, has continually been misconstrued and misappropriated as the goal and burden of human and Christian aspiration. Piously, or politically, we cripple ourselves with the need to bring about God’s righteousness on earth, failing to hear what Jesus so vividly declares: that we need not shoulder that burden because the goal itself does not need to be accomplished. The goal is a fact, God’s fact, the fact of grace and promise. No gap divides what God says from what God does.”

—Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Eerdmans 2001), 23.

Iron & Wine and Augustine: on grace and mothers

One of Augustine’s favourite biblical texts was Paul’s question to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:7): “What do you have that you did not receive?” – Quid enim habebat quod non acceperat? Against Pelagian conceptions of grace, Augustine insists on the absolute priority of God’s action towards us in Christ. Even when God rewards us for good works, God is merely “crowning his own gifts.” There is, in other words, a sheer incommensurability between God’s gift to us and the gifts that we return to God. Even the best of our gifts are always derivative and dependent on the grace that we have already received.

I think there’s a nice illustration of this concept in the Iron & Wine song, “Upward over the Mountain” (from the 2002 album, The Creek Drank the Cradle – you can hear the song in this clip).

The song is an achingly beautiful depiction of the relationship between a son and his mother. The son is united to his mother through the gift of life and through the history they have shared. He recalls that fragile, fleeting moment after birth, “the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body.” But while acknowledging this connection, he also reminds his mother of the painful distance which adulthood opens up between them. He has outgrown the faith she once gave him: “Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given.” He asks her – impossibly – to “forget me, now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to.”

And yet he remains haunted by their bond, by the fact that his entire life – with all its griefs and freedoms – remains an unfathomable gift. In one of the song’s most poignant lines, he pleads: “Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you.” This line could serve as an exquisite parable of the whole relationship between child and mother: even when he gives her a gift, there is a tragic incommensurability between what he gives her and all that he has already received from her. Any gift to the mother is at best a mere trinket, at worst a kind of theft in which the very possibility of giving is painfully wrested from her.

To sell the mother’s car in order to buy her a pair of shoes – that is the kind of half-comical scenario which Augustine describes when he speaks of the incommensurability between grace and gratitude. “What do you have that you did not receive?” It makes you wonder about the way Augustine’s own relationship with his mother might have shaped his theology of grace: perhaps the best cure for Pelagianism is the experience of the mother’s unmerited, presuppositionless giving. So that the proper way to respond to a Pelagian is still the same as it always was: “You’re a very naughty boy – your mother would be so disappointed!”

Augustine – “the son of so many tears,” as he called himself – was deeply aware that he had always already received, that behind all his actions lay a gift that could never be earned or repaid. Indeed, when Augustine mourns the death of his mother, he can only confess: “I will speak not of her gifts, but of Yours in her.”

Anyway, here are the full lyrics of that beautiful Iron & Wine song, “Upward over the Mountain”:

Mother don’t worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed
Mother don’t worry, I’ve got some money I saved for the weekend
Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me?
Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body?

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds flying upwards over the mountain

Mother I made it up from the bruise on the floor of this prison
Mother I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given
Mother forget me now that the creek drank the cradle you sang to
Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons can be birds taken broken up to the mountain

Mother don’t worry, I’ve got a coat and some friends on the corner
Mother don’t worry, she’s got a garden, we’re planting it together
Mother remember the night that the dog had her pups in the pantry?
Blood on the floor and fleas on their paws, and you cried till the morning

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten
Sons are like birds flying always over the mountain

Homosexuality and the church: a meditation on the tragic (Part Two)

A guest-series by Ray S. Anderson

The Tragic and Human Sexuality

If love is intrinsically tragic because it offers possibilities of fulfillment to human desire, hopes and needs that can never be met in even the most perfect human relationship, then sexuality itself is intrinsically tragic. The sexual nature of humanity perhaps lies nearest to the core of the self in terms of human intimacy. This is why sexuality is such a profound and yet complicated – and yes, tragic – component of the structure of humanity.

Sexuality itself is tragic because it is a component of the very structure of humanity that is woven through with the tragic. We do not understand what it is to be a human person until we understand that. And we cannot understand the struggle to integrate unfulfilled, sometimes chaotic, and often self-defeating sexual experience into authentic human personhood until we understand that.

When a man in his late 40s tells me, “I always wanted to have children, but after getting married when I was 25 I discovered that my wife could not and would never be able to conceive a child. Yes, adoption was one possibility, but my dream of having a child of my own well never be realized.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

When a single woman in her late 50s tells me, “When I was in my 20s I thought for sure that I would be married. All of my friends found someone, I never did. I have lived all these years hoping for someone to love me in a special way. It never happened.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

When a homosexual person tells me, “I knew that I was homosexual from the time I was a teenager. I tried to deny it, but finally accepted it, and though it is against what the Bible teaches, I have someone to love me and to live in a relationship that I could never have otherwise.” I respond: “Yes, I understand that, it is tragic.”

What each person in these situations has in common is an experience of the tragic as a component of their human experience. We must first understand that before considering the moral implications of their behavior. When Jesus confronted the woman at the well (John 4) he drew forth the truth that she had lived a life of promiscuity. “You have had several husbands and the man you are living with is not your husband.” Jesus perceived the tragic component of a woman’s life lived under these circumstances. The moral issue with regard to living with a man not her husband was never brought up. Jesus did not label her a sinner, but empowered her to confess that he was truly the Messiah sent from God. My point is that to label the sexual orientation and practice of a person as “sinful” fails to understand the tragic construct of that person’s life.

The Tragic and the Kingdom of God

Sin is not a condition that precedes grace. For until one is welcomed into the Kingdom of God through grace, the tragic only is a condition to be overcome, sometimes by religion, rather than by a relationship in which the tragic is brought under the promise of redemption. Until we each have discovered our own sin, always through grace, to be called a sinner by others is not only graceless, it is tragic. It breaks the common bond that makes us human. Saul of Tarsus would never have accepted the accusation that he was a sinner until he experienced the grace of God through his encounter with the risen Christ. Until the tragic nature of sin is revealed though grace, it lies untouched and unredeemed, hidden like a deadly virus that thrives on self-affirmation only to emerge in self-condemnation.

Jesus did not label persons whom he encountered as sinners, but rather offered them the power of his own person and inclusion in the Kingdom of God as an eschatological promise of redemption of the tragic. Looking over the crowd who followed him, he had compassion on them because “they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:7). Later that day he instructed his disciples to feed them and, as a result, more than 5,000 were fed. This “miraculous meal” was an eschatological sign and promise of redemption from the tragic. For a meal only lasts one day and holds back the tragic for a time; then hunger again rises up to remind humans that their existence is fragile and weak.

Redemption from sin begins with understanding, not with condemnation. Does this mean that sin is disregarded? Not at all. But then we should understand that we are bound to each other not only by virtue of the tragic, but also by sin. When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church with regard to sexual sin, he placed that particular sin in the same category as greed, worship of idols, and being abusive, a drunkard or a cheat (1 Cor 5:11). Paul only discovered that he was a sinner following his experience of grace through Jesus Christ. It is of no benefit to the Kingdom of God to call someone a sinner; instead, offer the grace of God so that they discover this for themselves.

The Kingdom and the Church

Jesus proclaimed the coming and the actual presence of the Kingdom of God in his own life and ministry. “But if I am casting out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has arrived among you” (Matt 12:28 NLT). But the Kingdom, while bringing redemption within the tragic, did not promise redemption from the tragic until the end of this temporal order and the coming of the Kingdom of God in glory. At the same time, Jesus said that his Kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36). Paul taught that the Kingdom of God is not a matter of living by religious rules and regulations, but of “living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17 NLT).

The Kingdom of God confronts the world with the reality of what God intended for humanity and the way it is supposed to be, calling what is into a redemptive relation with God as Creator and Redeemer. The church is a sign of the Kingdom and acquires its identity and role in relation to the Kingdom. As such, the church is not the Kingdom of God, but an eschatological extension of the Kingdom into the present world order. In the end, it is not the church but the Kingdom of God that is presented to the Father by the Son in its fullness and completeness (1 Cor 15:17).

The church in its teaching and life, under biblical authority, is not only a place where we can come “just as we are,” but a place where we can experience the redemptive grace of God to become and live as God intended. This is the tragic aspect of the Kingdom of God and the form of the church in the world. It embraces what is tragic in the form of the failure of humanity to be and live in accordance with what God intended. At the same time in its teaching and practice it brings the tragic under the redemptive promise of healing, hope and ultimate overcoming of the tragic. For the church to exclude its neighbor, the homosexual person, is to forsake its own relation to the Kingdom of God and its authentic mission on earth.

A bargain with God?

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Not long after I became a Christian, a friend of mine gave me a collection of sermons by Karl Barth. The collection was appropriately entitled Deliverance to the Captives; all the sermons were preached towards the end of Barth’s life in the city prison in Basel. One sermon in particular shocked and overwhelmed me. It was entitled “The Criminals with Him”, and took as its text a verse from Luke’s passion narrative: “They crucified him with the criminals, one on either side of him” (Luke 23:33). “Do you know what this implies?” asked Barth. “Don’t be too surprised if I tell you that this was the first Christian fellowship.” And Barth went on to conclude: “In reality we all are these crucified criminals. And only one thing matters now. Are we ready to be told what we are? Are we ready to hear the promise given to the condemned, [and] to ‘get in line behind’ [them]?”

“Get in line behind them?” I thought. Hang on a minute, Karl! I know you’re big on grace, but aren’t you getting carried away, isn’t this taking grace a bit too far? I mean isn’t this unjust, criminals at the front of the queue to the kingdom, evil folk ahead of the good? I was particularly miffed at what Barth preached because I myself came to Christ – or rather Christ to me – out of a rather sordid existence, having lived for a time on the streets of Amsterdam and London, homeless and broke, begging, taking drugs, shoplifting just to survive. I knew what kind of people wheeled and dealed there, the crime and the violence. And now Barth tells me that I’m going to have to get in line behind this scum? And, adding insult to injury, observe: Barth made no distinction between the penitent and the impenitent thief – both were going to precede me. And, in fact, these weren’t just thieves, they were what we would now call terrorists.

Can you sympathise with my annoyance and discomfort? I’m sure you can. For my anger and confusion are, I think, typical of Christians – indeed they are the temptation of all good people, especially all good religious people. For here is what religion, at bottom, is all about: it’s about making a bargain with God. And the bargain goes like this: Lord, I give you my faith and all that goes with it: the church-going, the praying, the giving, the rectitude, the extra mile, and so on; and you, God, in return, you’ve got to be fair. If I keep my side of the bargain, I expect you to bless me with good things – health, work, family. I don’t expect life to be all strawberries and cream, but I do expect a sense of proportion – no serious illnesses, traumatic divorce, or kids on crack. Of course if I don’t keep my side of the bargain, if I lapse and behave very badly – hey, nobody’s perfect! – fair enough, I get what’s coming to me. But, Lord, we both keep to the contract. And there is an unwritten codicil to this contract: other people – they too must get what they deserve: as the righteous must prosper, so the sinner must suffer.

This is religion. Isn’t that the way it is? Isn’t that why we get so bloody, viciously vengeful, when criminals and murderers “get off lightly”? That’s not in the contract! May they rot in hell! And isn’t that why suffering, especially seemingly undeserved suffering, especially my underserved suffering, is so faith-threatening? How can it be that my child is crippled in a car accident, or my wife gets ovarian cancer and dies in a matter of months? That’s not part of the bargain!

Well, today I am here to tell you that God doesn’t do bargains. I mean the whole idea, really, is a no-brainer. Why should God do deals with us? What do we have to offer God that he doesn’t already have? And indeed – pardon the sacrilege – why should we trust God to deliver the goods we’re expecting? I mean the deity has form, doesn’t he? Two words should suffice: Good Friday. For heaven’s sake, man, God didn’t deliver his own totally sinless and obedient Son from torture and death, he watched him get strung up between those two thieves, terrorists – so what, am I God’s gift that I am going to be exempted from fortune’s slings and arrows? What makes me a special case? The idea that God might owe me for good – or them for bad – really, folks, it is fairyland. Deserve? As outlaw William Munny (Clint Eastwood) says in that great line from Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

A bargain? Think again. But we can only think again when we abandon religion and accept revelation – which is what Christianity is: revelation. Unlike religion, revelation is not something that confirms the way we think and what we think we know. On the contrary, revelation rudely interrupts the way we go about our existential business, shaking and shattering our conventional norms and complacent assurances. Although revelation is a gift – it is good news – our first response is always recoil, resistance, outrage at such an unexpected and unasked-for invasion of our moral space. In order to be redeemed, our cover must be blown, and our worlds blown away.

Do you know Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled – succinctly – “Revelation”? It is about one Mrs Turpin from the deep South. Mrs Turpin is a hard-working, upright, church-going farmer’s wife. One day, at her doctor’s office, she is bad-mouthing the white trash and lazy blacks she has to put up with. Suddenly a mentally disturbed girl in the waiting room throws a book at her and calls her a “wart hog from hell”. Visibly shaken, Mrs Turpin returns to her farm, unable to get the girl’s offensive words out of her mind. “Wart hog” indeed! For Mrs Turpin knows that she is a good person, certainly far superior to red necks and “niggers”, and she reminds God of her rectitude, as well as of all the good work she does, especially for the church. Then she angrily asks, referring to the girl’s outrageous insult, “What did you send me a message like that for?” And then, suddenly – revelation! As she stares into the pigpen, Mrs Turpin is given a glimpse of “the very heart of mystery,” and she begins to absorb some “abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She has a vision of a parade of souls marching to heaven, with white trash, blacks, freaks, lunatics and other social outcasts up front, leading the way, and, taking up the rear, folk like herself, “marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behaviour. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is a gift. We have no rights, we are never owed, and we are never one up on the bastards and undeserving. That “scum” I thought I’d left behind – I didn’t: it was me too, and I took it with me. But no matter: God’s sun shines and his rain falls on the good and the evil without distinction. As Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity Marilyn McCord Adams puts it: “Expecting God to be interested in invidious distinctions among us would be like our judging the ladybugs to see which had paid us the appropriate honour!”

God is sheer, exuberant, overflowing, prodigal love, inside and out, from top to bottom. May God grant us the insight and wisdom that Mrs Turpin takes home with her that fateful night: “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

Tom Waits: theologian of the dysangelion

To my delight (and my wife’s dismay), my collection of Tom Waits CDs has grown nicely this Christmas. I’ve been absolutely addicted to Tom Waits all year – I can hardly bear to hear anything else.

I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to describe Tom Waits as a “theologian” – as long as we add that he’s a theologian of the dys-angelion, the “bad news.” His songs conjure up a swirling chaos of monsters and madness, devils and despair – and on the horizon of this dark world we glimpse the first faint glow of dawn, the surprising appearance of grace “de profundis” (Psalm 130:1).

God himself suddenly breaks into these songs as a strange and threatening – even monstrous – presence, as an unaccountable interruption of the world’s (dis-)order. One of Waits’ most astonishing theological pronouncements, for example, is the gleeful hiss: “Don’t you know there ain’t no devil / That’s just God when he’s drunk.” Or on another occasion he wonders: “Did the devil make the world while God was sleeping?”

In such songs, God bursts onto the stage not as a benevolent projection of our own wishes and desires, but as the one who overturns our expectations and shatters our projections of deity. God appears not as a supreme being who calmly “completes” and “perfects” nature, but as the one who interrupts nature in the apocalyptic newness of grace. Divine grace, for Waits, is thus a kind of unnatural incursion, a perversity, a disruption of the way things are. Grace interrupts, it shatters and strips things bare to the bone. And so Waits portrays grace in a way that is uncompromisingly – often shockingly – menacing and grotesque.

Even in Waits’ more “orthodox” gospel songs – and there are many of them, such as “Way Down in the Hole”, “All Stripped Down”, “Down There by the Train”, “Never Let Go”, “Make It Rain”, “Take Care of All of My Children”, “Come on Up to the House” – even here, grace appears as a perverse interruption of a world of murder and brutality and Satanic seduction. Grace breaks open this world like a nightmare or an earthquake – wholly unexpected, unconditional, presuppositionless; impossible to be tamed or assimilated. As Rowan Williams remarks in his study of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, “the actuality of grace is uncovered in the moment of excess – which may be in a deliberately intensified gracelessness” (Grace and Necessity, p. 105). A “deliberately intensified gracelessness” – that is the world of Tom Waits’ lyrical theology. And it’s in this way that Waits articulates the euangelion through a startlingly brutal and disturbing declaration of the dysangelion.

Grace shines from the abyss. It appears in the mode of the grotesque. And if grace is itself dysangelion, it is “bad news” precisely for those of us who are already complacent in our own religion and our own righteousness (our own ready-made “Chocolate Jesus”). It is “bad news” because tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of us (Matt. 21:31), because (as Waits puts it) those who “never asked forgiveness, never said a prayer” are nevertheless grasped and held by grace. It is “bad news” because God – if he is really the God of grace! – is not the God we want, not the God we think we need. He is the God who does not “fit”, but interrupts. He is the God whose Yes is hidden in a shattering No.

But this “bad news” is indeed “good news” – the best and happiest news! – for the undeserving, the criminals, those riddled and rotten with shame and doubt. As Waits puts it in one of his more conventional gospel songs: “Does life seem nasty, brutish and short? / Come on up to the house!” At the world’s dark end, all that remains is grace – grace for the ungodly, which is therefore the grace of God.

Anyway, I’ve gotten carried away with this prelude – but the real point of this post is to list some of my favourite theological lines from Tom Waits’ songs. Here are a few (you can read all his lyrics here):

“I’m close to heaven
Crushed at the gate.”

“Hell is boiling over and heaven is full
We’re chained to the world and we all gotta pull.”

“God used me as a hammer, boys
To beat his weary drum today.”

“The devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand.”

“God builds a church
The devil builds a chapel
Like the thistles that are growing round the trunk of a tree.”

“I left my Bible by the side of the road
Carved my initials in an old dead tree.”

“You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again.”

“Did the devil make the world
While God was sleeping?”

“I swang out wide with her
On hell’s iron gate.”

“Well, you say that it’s gospel, but I know
It’s only a church.”

“Well, I got to keep myself, keep myself faithful
And you know I’ve been so good
Except for drinking
But He knew that I would...”

“Goddamn there’s always such a big temptation
To be good, to be good
There’s always free Cheddar in a mousetrap, baby…”

“Well they’ve stopped trying to hold him
With mortar, stone and chain
He broke out of every prison
The boots mount the staircase
The door is flung back open
He’s not there for he has risen…”

“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil
That’s just God when he’s drunk.”

“Well, you leave me hanging by the skin of my teeth
I’ve only got one leg to stand
You can send me to hell
But I’ll never let go of your hand.”

A funeral homily on Christmas Eve

by Kim Fabricius, Christmas Eve 2007

This is the homily Kim preached on Christmas Eve at the funeral of a young woman, not yet fifty, extremely talented but deeply troubled, who died of alcohol-related illnesses. The chief mourners were her father and brother; her uncle gave the personal tribute. The woman’s name has, of course, been changed.

I’ve got two children. They are both thirty next year. One is a lawyer – to her parent’s shame, I kid her (lawyer jokes!) – the other is trying to make it as a writer. Someone recently said to me, “You did a good job there.” Did we? I’ve always subscribed to Philip Larkin’s more cynical take on child rearing: that your mum and dad are as likely to fill you with their faults as their virtues.

I also believe that, generally, parents can take neither the credit nor the blame for how their children turn out. There is nature as well as nurture, and there are so many worldly contingencies beyond our control. Children from seemingly model homes hit the skids; kids raised in dire circumstances win Booker prizes. The talented self-destruct; the ordinary achieve the exceptional. Who can fathom the souls of others? Who knows the demons with which they wrestle? Who knows their own soul? Who escapes fantasy and self-deceit? And relationships – I ache for you, yet I am always getting in your way. We are mysteries to ourselves and to each other.

The fact is that only God sees the heart, and in spite of what he sees, accepts us just as we are. Julian of Norwich went so far as to say that God does not need to forgive us, because God cannot be offended, God just gives and gives – and waits patiently for his own wayward children to return home.

That is why in the end, at a funeral, when we commend the dead – as we commend Louise – into God’s keeping, we must not despair that, despite such promise and determination, such warmth and generosity – and while poignantly remembering times of fulfilment at work and joy with family and friends – that she finally lost the plot. In fact, Jesus said that it is precisely those who seem to have life all worked out who will find it hard to enter the kingdom of heaven, while the fragile and the fraught, those whom, finally, the world breaks, because they must ultimately trust in God’s grace alone, they will find themselves part of a larger plot, a narrative that ultimately makes sense, the love story of God and his people, the divine comedy.

For what it’s worth, here is my vision of death and judgement. You find yourself sitting on God’s knee. He embraces you. And then he shows you what your life was really all about. A terrifying prospect, for sure – except for one thing: it is the Father’s lap, the Father’s arms, and the Father who looks at you with the same besotted love with which he looks at his only Son Jesus, who was born and lived and died and lives forever, for each and every one of us.

In his little book The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom writes: “This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.” It is the peace we must believe that Louise has now found.

A crematorium is hardly the place to be on Christmas Eve, but exactly the place to end with the words of the Calypso Carol:

        Trumpets sound, the angels sing,
        listen to what they say:
        that we will live forevermore
        because of Christmas Day.

Creation is grace: a sermon

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

I wonder what comes into people’s minds when they hear the word “creation”. If you’re a Christian I’m pretty sure that most folk would think of the opening chapter of Genesis, which indeed the Good News Bible entitles “The Story of Creation”. But then when you read Genesis 1, or hear it read as we did this morning, what then comes into your mind?

If you live in America, I can tell you what will come into a lot of people’s minds: the issue of evolution. “Issue”? Rather what you might call not the Revolutionary War but the Evolutionary War – the issue is that contentious, pitting Christianity against science in a life-or-death struggle. The first shot fired in this particular cultural conflict was the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, but the war soon shifted to the US, where it fizzled down over the next 75 years as the Genesis literalists – the so-called “creationists” – made public fools of themselves, not least in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 (memorably made into that great Spencer Tracy film Inherit the Wind).

However the battle has re-commenced with a vengeance, with the anti-evolution forces now having both a traditional “hard” wing, those who stubbornly cling to a 6000 year-old earth and reject entirely Darwin’s well-demonstrated mechanism of natural selection; and a new, “softer”, more science-friendly wing, those who advocate what is known as the theory of “Intelligent Design”. Needless to say, this war, like most wars, is a war that should never have been fought, and is only sustained by zealots from both sides, the notorious Oxford professor Richard Dawkins being the most belligerent commander of the anti-creationist forces that are hell-bent on a scorched earth strategy against Christianity and religion as such.

So much for creation and evolution, for I suspect that when “creation” is mentioned in the UK, folk are more likely to think of cosmology than evolution: that is to say, they are more likely to think of the origin of the entire universe rather than of just the earth and human beings. I am sure that you have all heard of Einstein and the theory of relativity, and of the physicist Stephen Hawking and ideas such as the Big Bang, black holes, and perhaps even the latest mind-boggling speculations on so-called “string theory” (which I won’t try to explain to you because it would give us all severe migraine!). Most of the warfare in cosmology, I am happy to say, seems to take place among cosmologists themselves rather than between scientists and believers. Me, when I read about the latest astronomical discoveries, see extraordinary colour photographs of stellar phenomena zillions of miles away, or get an update from a doctoral student friend about work on the new super-duper particle accelerator being built in Switzerland – which will run experiments that will take us back very close to the moment of the Big Bang – I just gawp in wonder at the world.

Many people will have yet another thought on their minds when they hear the word “creation”: they will think of the environment. Harvest festivals, of course, are a time when we rightly turn our attention to “the fruits of creation” – to sun and soil, to the crops of gardener and farmer, to their “ploughing, sowing, reaping”, as well to lorry-drivers and workers in Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s and what local shops are left. Harvest services are also a time when we remember “the hungry and despairing”, those whose crops have failed due to drought, or been overwhelmed by flood, or who in the South continue to get a scandalously raw deal by American and European bankers and financiers; time also to be disgusted with Western leaders with their broken promises of reducing or cancelling Third World debt, as well as their inaction over protectionist First World agricultural subsidies and tariffs. “Feed the World,” we sang one Christmas, in retrospect rather over-optimistically, as upbeat tears of emotion have turned to cynical cries of rage.

And now, to make matters worse, much worse, perhaps now even irrevocably worse, there is the ecological crisis, particularly the visible, tangible onset of global warming and climate change, about which some right-wing fools with interests to defend remain in denial – “It’s a liberal conspiracy!” they cry – yet the results of which were brought catastrophically home to the unsuspecting people of Yorkshire and Gloucestershire this very summer, when the UK witnessed its worst floods in modern history, yet which we are warned were a mere April shower compared to the downpours yet to come. And how terribly ironic that our Commitment for Life partner this year is Bangladesh – people used to national inundations, yet for whom the monsoons came earlier and more destructively this summer, and whose entire country threatens to disappear within just a few generations under the rising coastal tides. In this global context the word “creation” begins to look like a sick misnomer, as human beings, called to be stewards of creation, become engineers of de-creation, as we work to turn God into a liar, complacently undermining his promise that “never again will a flood destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11).

So, evolution, cosmology, the environment, harvest yields and ecological doom – we may think of any of these things when we hear the word “creation”, but – to the point – none of them, in fact, is the essential note that should sound when Christians hear the word “creation”. When Christians hear the word “creation”, the first sound that should ring, sing in our minds is grace. Creation is grace! And that is because creation, in Christian teaching, is an act of sheer divine generosity. Out of nothing, and not for any reason but only from love and for love, God, the “maker of heaven and earth” (as the creeds put it) creates a world.

God does not need a world, as if the world fills a gap in God’s being, as if God would be the less without a world, or as if God were under obligation or constraint to create. On the contrary, if God did not make a world, God would still be the same God, no less the God that God eternally is in beauty and glory as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That God creates is not a law of nature, it is a completely free and gratuitous decision and act. And, further – what creationists don’t get – “Creation isn’t a [scientific] theory of how things started” – however close we ever get to the moment of the Big Bang, it will tell us absolutely nothing about creation – rather creation is a way of seeing everything that is in relation to God, not only back then but always and forever.

“Whatever you encounter is there because God chose it should be there,” and only because God chose it should be there. “It should be a rather exhilarating thought,” writes Rowan Williams, “that the moment of creation is now – that if, by some unthinkable accident, God’s attention slipped, we wouldn’t be here. It means that within every circumstance, every object, every person, God’s action is going on, a sort of white heat at the centre of everything.” And – further still – “It means that each one of us is already in a relationship with God before we’ve ever thought about it. It means that every object or person we encounter is in a relationship with God before they’re in a relationship of any kind with us. And if that doesn’t make us approach the world with reverence and amazement, I don’t know what will.”

Finally, this. That creation is grace, that God has made a place and space for us – why? Answer: that we may live and flourish with freedom and joy. God creates a rich, intricate, green and growing world that we could never completely explore or explain were we to live a thousand years. And because creation is an act of divine generosity, an exercise in self-giving, an overflow of goodness which seeks only to bless, and in which God himself delights, so does the church teach that the appropriate response of faith is not just to acknowledge our absolute dependence on God, or even to live in gratitude to God – though that is certainly true – but, above all, to imitate God’s lavish generosity and goodness and blessing in our own relationships, so that we might not only respond to God but also correspond to God, indeed become like God, which is what it means to be created in the image of God.

That creation is grace, therefore, is not “just” doctrine, it is ethics: it is how we should live and behave as the creatures we are made and meant to be. The great church father Irenaeus was once asked to define the “glory of God”. “The glory of God,” he answered, “ are human beings fully alive.” You and me, not only the apex of creation but the very glory of God: Wow!

Religion is a bargain

In a sermon posted over at Connexions, Kim Fabricius suggests that religion is all about bargaining with God: “Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is gift.”

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

Prompted by recommendations from both Kim Fabricius and Stanley Hauerwas, I finally got around to reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (New York: Farrar, 2004), an exquisite portrayal of three (or four) generations of preachers in a decrepit little town in Iowa. (In a lecture, Hauerwas describes this as “the first Barthian novel” – a fine description, except that John Updike has been writing “Barthian novels” for decades!)

The novel is extraordinary in every way. It’s a narrative of fragile beauties, luminous insights, mysterious silences – all related in a prose as spare and understated as the dustbowl town itself. And there is plenty here for theologians to think about as well. You wouldn’t be far wrong if you said that the whole novel is an account of the power and beauty of blessing.

Our narrator, John Ames, tells us that he became a minister not for any of the usual reasons, but because it gave him the opportunity to confer blessing. When he baptised a family of kittens as a young boy, he discovered that “there is a reality in blessing”: “Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing…. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.” Ames describes this as one of the “advantages” of being a minister: “Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position. It’s a thing people expect of you” (p. 23).

To confer blessing – that is the purpose of existence, that is how we honour all those “precious things [that] have been put into our hands” (p. 246). More than that: to confer blessing is required of us; it’s an obligation placed on us as soon as we really encounter another person. Ames remarks: “there is nothing more astonishing than a human face…. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it” (p. 66).

It’s fitting, then, that John Ames’ own life should culminate in a simple moment of blessing. Sitting at a dusty old bus stop, he places his hand on Jack Boughton’s brow and blesses him. And he tells us: “I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment” (p. 242).

Gilead is itself just such a moment – the novel is a gentle intrusion of grace, a warm hand on your brow, a moment when the world stands still and blessing is conferred.

God, in many ways you meet us

A hymn by Kim Fabricius

(Tune: Servant Song)

God, in many ways you meet us,
speak to us in world and church,
in the quake and in the quiet,
when we flee and as we search.

In the splendour of the sunlight,
in the sparkle of a star,
we see something of your glory,
catch a glimpse of who you are.

On the canvas of an artist,
in composer’s sacred song,
through the verse and voice of poet,
we sense worlds for which we long.

In the otherness of stranger
and familiar face of friend,
we are entertaining angels
whom your holy love commends.

When our lives are running smoothly,
when our hopes have turned to dust,
through our joys and through our sorrows,
in your providence we trust.

God, in word and wine we meet you
in this sacramental space;
from the pulpit, on the table,
close encounters with your grace.

Miroslav Volf: The End of Memory

Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 244 pp. (review copy courtesy of Eerdmans)

It’s a piece of conventional wisdom that we should never forget the wrongs of the past. In this delightful new work of theological psychology, Miroslav Volf offers a patient and probing critique of such conventional wisdom. On the one hand, he argues that we should remember past wrongs not only for the sake of the victims, but also for the sake of the perpetrators; and on the other hand, he argues that the proper goal of such remembering is in fact non-remembrance.

Volf weaves his theological and psychological analysis around an unsettling set of memories from his own past. In the communist Yugoslavia of the early 1980s, Volf’s theological studies were interrupted by a summons to compulsory military service. As a Christian married to an American, an advocate of non-violence, and an expert on Marxist socialism, Volf was perceived to be an opponent of the Yugoslavian communist regime. He was thus forced to endure a protracted period of interrogation under the military police (his interrogator is described throughout the book as “Captain G.”).

Long after these events, Volf has remained haunted by the memories of his interrogation. Thus the central question of this book: how do we “remember rightly”? This was a question of great importance for Volf himself, since “My soul was at stake in the way I remembered Captain G.” (p. 17). So what does it mean to remember rightly? If we are followers of Jesus Christ, we must be committed to remembrance as reconciliation – to memory as “a bridge between adversaries instead of a deep and dark ravine that separates them” (p. 35).

As Christians, we have received a “framework for remembering.” The pivotal events of Israel’s exodus and Christ’s death and resurrection are “meta-memories”: they provide a broad framework which “regulates how we remember wrongs suffered in our everyday lives” (p. 94). These framing memories, moreover, are fundamentally “memories of God” (p. 101); in bringing them to mind, we are also recalling God’s promise as the reality of our own future. To remember rightly, therefore, is to remember past wrongs through the interpretive lens of these meta-memories from salvation-history. When, for instance, Volf remembers Captain G. through the lens of Christ’s passion, he is remembering a wrongdoing that is “already forgiven,” and indeed already “overcome” (p. 123).

But is such remembering a transgression against the wrongdoing itself? Does it take sin too lightly? Volf’s reply is that such remembering in fact demands the greatest possible recognition of the seriousness of wrongdoing – for to remember in this way is to perceive that the wrongdoing has been “borne by God” (p. 123). This is not, therefore, simply a matter of interpreting and integrating the past, but it also involves the “driving out” and “overcoming” and “healing” of the darkness of the past (p. 188).

Having addressed the question of how to remember, Volf turns next to the question of how long we should remember. Here, he argues against the widespread assumption that wrongdoings should be remembered forever. He is not advocating a mere “forgetting” of past wrongs; rather, he believes that the forgiveness of sins issues finally in “non-remembrance” or “not-coming-to-mind” (p. 145). The argument here draws on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud, all of whom believed that a certain kind of “forgetting” is an essential aspect of human wholeness. In Nietzsche’s words, if the past is not properly forgotten, it becomes “the gravedigger of the present” (p. 161).

While it is often said that we would lose our identities if we ceased to remember, Volf draws on Luther’s anthropology to present an alternative construal of personal identity. We receive our identity from “outside ourselves”; we are located in God, and our identity is found in him. Thus the non-remembrance of past wrongs does not violate our identity. On the contrary, “being in God” sets us free from “the tyranny [of] the unalterable past.” The God who redeems the past does not take anything away from us – “God does not take away our past; God gives it back to us” (p. 201). In this way, we are truly redeemed, truly reconciled.

Perhaps the most controversial proposal of the book is the argument that even the death of Jesus will eventually fall into the oblivion of non-remembrance. Against the view that the cross of Jesus is “an eternal event in God” (a view that he had advocated in his 1996 book on Exclusion and Embrace), Volf argues that the cross is in fact merely “a stage on the road to resurrection and exaltation” – and, as such, it is “a stage that can be left in the past even if its effects last for eternity” (p. 201). Sin-bearing does not “exhaust the identity of Christ” (pp. 190-91). My own suspicion is that this proposal fails to take seriously enough the character of Jesus’ death as an event of God’s own self-giving, and thus as an event that belongs to (or even constitutes) God’s identity; nevertheless, Volf is right to underscore the sheer eschatological triumph of God’s reconciling work.

Indeed, Volf’s greatest concern is to articulate an eschatological form of non-remembrance. If we did not believe in the Last Judgment, we would surely want to remember wrongs forever. But because we believe that the end of history belongs to God, we’re able to let go of the past, to allow memories of wrongdoings to “slip into oblivion.” Indeed, such “oblivion” will be an essential aspect of God’s new world, as both the wronged and the wrongdoers are brought together and reconciled in “a dance of love in the embrace of the Triune God” (p. 181).

Volf thus offers a major new interpretation of the concept of memory. His style is crisp and accessible, and the book is both remarkably insightful and often deeply moving. Volf’s aim, in a nutshell, is to present a new understanding of the function and significance of memory. By remembering rightly, we follow “the enemy-loving God” (p. 9) on his path of forgiveness and reconciliation. And the goal or “end” of all such remembering is love – a love that, in the end, remembers no wrongs.

Theology with Tom Waits

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to Tom Waits’ extraordinary three-disc album, Orphans (2006). It’s a magnificent album, and there are some startling theological insights as well. Here are the lyrics to Waits’ gentle but gritty gospel song, “Down There by the Train” (the song was also covered by Johnny Cash in 2002):

There’s a place I know where the train goes slow
Where sinners can be washed in the blood of the lamb
There’s a river by the trestle down by Sinner’s Grove
Down where the willow and the dogwood grow
Down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

You can hear the whistle, you can hear the bell
From the halls of heaven to the gates of hell
And there’s room for the forsaken if you’re there on time
You’ll be washed of all your sins and all of your crimes
If you’re down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

There’s a golden moon that shines up through the mist
And I know that your name will be on that list
There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth
I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth
Down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

So if you live in darkness and if you live in shame
All of the passengers will be treated the same
And old Humpty Jackson and Gyp the Blood will sing
And Charlie Whitman is holding on to Dillinger’s wings
They’re both down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

If you’ve lost all your hope, if you’ve lost all your faith
I know you will be cared for and I know you will be safe
And all the shameful, and all of the whores
Even the soldier who pierced the heart of the Lord
Is down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

Well, I’ve never asked forgiveness, I’ve never said a prayer
I’ve never given of myself and I’ve never truly cared
I’ve hurt the ones who loved me, and I’m still raising Cain
I’ve taken the low road and if you’ve done the same
Meet me down there by the train
Down there where the train goes slow

The song offers a startlingly uncompromising depiction of the universality of grace. The train’s whistle is heard equally by those in heaven and in hell. Salvation is for the most notorious criminals of history, from the school shooter Charles Whitman down to Judas Iscariot. It’s for the “shameful” ones and the “whores,” for the criminals forsaken by the world, for those who take the “low road” – and, finally, it’s for the blatantly irreligious who have never even “said a prayer.” On this train, all the lonely outcasts are finally gathered into community; all sins and crimes are finally pardoned. On this train, God’s judgment is pronounced as the judgment of “the lamb,” and thus the judgment of grace. For this reason, there is here “no eye for an eye, no tooth for a tooth.” And so the train is filled with the most unlikely characters – they are “all treated the same,” not because they are the same, but because on this train you never get what you deserve.

Should we be committed then to a thoroughgoing universalism – the apokatastasis? I don’t think so. But I think any proper account of the death and resurrection of Jesus will have to take the unconditional character of grace with full seriousness – as seriously as this song does, with its unsettling catalogue of criminals; or rather, as seriously as Jesus himself does when he feasts with outcasts and hookers, and welcomes condemned criminals to join him in his kingdom.

If we can’t finally turn the universality of grace into a system, that is not because of any deficiency in grace itself, but only because grace is always more than we can anticipate or conceptualise: Deus semper maior! And so grace is always a riddle, a disruption, an excess that defies all systematic explanation. It is utterly free and boundless, so that we can never legitimately prescribe its boundaries in any way – not even with a system of universalism.

Still, in encounters with specific individuals, no matter what their crimes or faults, we should always be able to say (not self-righteously, but as one criminal to another): “And I know that your name will be on that list / There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth….”

Failed humanity

“If salvation is for any, it is for all…. The ‘return’ to the lost, the excluded, the failed or destroyed, is not an option for the saint, but the very heart of saintliness. And we might think not only of Jesus’s parable of the shepherd, but of the great theological myth of the Descent into Hell, in which God’s presence in the world in Jesus is seen as his journey into the furthest deserts of despair and alienation. It is the supreme image of his freedom, to go where he is denied and forgotten…. He comes to his new and risen life, his universal kingship, by searching out all the forgotten and failed members of the human family.”

—Rowan Williams, The Truce of God (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 30.

Rowan Williams' Easter sermon

In this year’s Easter Day Sermon, Rowan Williams spoke of the revelation of sin and grace in the death of Jesus: God brings us healing, and so reveals our deep need for healing. Here’s an excerpt:

“If the purpose of Jesus dying was that all might be made whole, the implication is that all have been sick. So that Good Friday tells all of us, those who think they’re good and those who know they’re bad, all alike, to look inside and ask what part we would have played in the drama of the Lord’s death.… In some way, however small, we have already contributed to the death of Jesus. He is there on the cross because we are the way we are.

“But on Easter Day, this bleak recognition is turned on its head. We were all involved; yet the combined weight of every human failure and wrongness, however small or great, all of that could not extinguish the creative love of God. We share one human story in which we are all caught up in one sad tangle of selfishness and fear and so on. But God has entered that human story; he has lived a life of divine and unconditional love in a human life of flesh and blood…. The vortex of error and failure that affects everybody in the world draws Jesus into its darkness and seems to destroy him body and soul. That, says Good Friday, is the kind of world this is, and we are all part of it.

“Yet there is more than the world to think about. If that love is really what it claims to be, eternal and unconditional, it will not be destroyed. What’s more, the human embodiment of that love, the flesh and blood of Jesus, cannot be destroyed…. So: if we can accept the unwelcome picture of us and our world that Good Friday offers, we are, in the strangest way, set free to hear what Easter says.”

Herbert McCabe: Faith within Reason

Herbert McCabe, Faith within Reason, ed. Brian Davies (London: Continuum, 2007), 173 pp.

Reviewed by Kim Fabricius

Here is the latest collection of unpublished papers of the late Herbert McCabe, and what a treat it is. The combination of crystal logic, sparkling wit, and interrogative fides quaerens intellectum, deeply informed by Aquinas and richly modulated by Wittgenstein, are again on bravura display. McCabe was rather slipshod about his own work – we learn in the Forward by Denys Turner “how the first page of Herbert’s celebrated lecture on the politics of John’s gospel was eventually retrieved from his shoe where it was plugging a leaky sole” – so we must be immensely grateful to Brian Davies for his labour of retrieval.

McCabe defines theology as “thinking about what God has told us,” and, following Thomas, sees theology as a practical matter. Reason serves revelation properly (a) when it tests church doctrine to make sure that it is about God’s love and does not degenerate into a test of confessional loyalty, and (b) when it is concerned with human well-being. Wisdom is basically en-lightened common sense

“A Very Short Introduction to Aquinas” is just what it says on the tin (a mere eighteen pages), but it is packed with goodies. “Thomas Aquinas thought that theologians don’t know what they are talking about,” McCabe says. “He was, I suppose, the most agnostic theologian in the Western Christian tradition.” McCabe gives a helpful thumbnail sketch of Aquinas on virtue ethics, making clear that Aquinas believed that the foundation of Christian morality is our friendship with God. In turn, human society, when it is functioning rightly, is a community of friends. McCabe provocatively describes Aquinas as the first Whig (though, knowing McCabe, he might have said Marxist), declaring that he “would undoubtedly have welcomed the welfare state.” And how’s this for a great “Did you know?”: “Aquinas says in one place that separation from God by sin has so distorted our emotional life that we do not enjoy sex enough.”

Then there is “Forgiveness”. It must be a sermon. And, boy, does McCabe nail grace. How’s this for a winsome start: “It is very odd that people should think that when we do good God will reward us and when we do evil he will punish us. I mean it is very odd that Christians should think this, that God deals out to us what we deserve.... You could say that the main theme of the preaching of Jesus is that God isn’t like this at all.” In fact this image of a punitive God is “the view of God as seen from hell,” such that damnation “must be just being fixed in this illusion.” This is the illusion that defines the sinner. To see that this illusion is an illusion is to recognise that one is a sinner, and in this very self-knowledge one ceases to be a sinner.

This, in short, is McCabe’s take on the prodigal son as he comes to his senses. “The rest of the story is not about the father forgiving his son, it is about the father celebrating.... This is all the real God does, because God, the real God, is just helplessly and hopelessly in love with us. He is unconditionally in love with us.” So it is not that if we are contrite, God will forgive us our sin. On the contrary, “You confess your sin, recognise yourself for what you are, because you are forgiven.” Thus confession becomes a celebration, where you “come to put on the best robe and the ring on your finger and the sandals on your feet, and to get drunk out of your mind.” Could Barth himself have put the case for grace more vividly?

For a third taster, the outstanding “On Evil and Omnipotence”. McCabe says RIP to the theodicist’s free-will defence, agreeing with Antony Flew that it is “worthless”, but disagreeing why. It is not, as Flew argues, because freedom is not incompatible with determinism – it is, insists McCabe – but rather because there is a mistaken understanding of freedom at work here, namely that God’s activity and ours are in competition, as if (as I would put it) freedom were a zero-sum game. But as McCabe states: “The idea that God’s causality could interfere with my freedom can only arise from an idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful creature – a part of the world.” For the same reason “the famous ‘Argument from Design’ (commonly attributed to William Paley) is a silly one.”

McCabe is also excellent on evil as a privatio boni – and at his best with the funny example. Some people, he writes, assume that when we have described evil as a negation we are saying that evil isn’t real. “But we (or I anyway) do not mean this at all. If I have a hole in my sock, the badness of this consists in the absence of wool where there ought to be some. This does not mean that the badness is illusory or unreal. If I jump out of a plane and discover that I have not got a parachute, it is of no comfort at all to be told that the absence of the parachute is not a real thing at all.”

But McCabe concludes modestly. He hopes to have “disentangled a puzzle,” but “When all is said and done, we are left with an irrational but strong feeling that if we were God we would have acted differently. Perhaps one of his reasons for acting as he did is to warn us not to try to make him in our own image.”

Had I read McCabe two months ago, I would have written my Ten Proposition on Theodicy differently. But that’s just what a readerly tutorial with McCabe on any theme always does: sends you back to theology differently.

Ten propositions on sin

by Kim Fabricius

1. Reinhold Niebuhr famously described original sin as the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine. Niebuhr was wrong. We know whence his statement gets its intuitive purchase: the omnipresent reality of self-alienation and social disorder. But sin is a theologoumenon, and, like all theologoumena, it is a matter of faith, not disinterested observation. To be specific, sin is a matter of faith because, definitively, it is a disruption between human beings and God – and the knowledge of God is itself a matter of faith.

2. What is the nature of this disruption? The fundamental form of sin is disobedience. “The Lord God commanded…” (Genesis 2:16) – and our paradisal parents did not do as they were told – for their own good. They transgressed the “Thou shalt not,” they trespassed on the Edenic orchard. As Paul typologically interprets Genesis 2 in Romans 6, the key terms are Adam’s παράβασις and παρακοή and, in contrast, Christ’s ύπακοή. It is precisely as the obedient one that Jesus is the sinless one.

3. Do I take the story of the “fall” in Genesis 2 to be “history”? No more than I take the three-story universe of Genesis 1 to be “science”. So the story of the fall isn’t true? Don’t be silly! Only a discredited positivism would reduce truth to the “facts” of history and science, quite apart from the issues of contructivism and perspectivism. Robert Jenson disagrees. He takes Adam and Eve to be actual hominids, “the first community of our biological ancestors who disobeyed God’s command.” Jenson’s target is an idealist understanding of the fall as a “myth”, but his palaeo-anthropological alternative is, in my view, a category mistake. The fall is neither a timeless idea nor a chronological moment but a pre-historical narrative disclosure of the way it is with you and me. The fall is a foil to the history of humanity.

4. The fall-as-foil forestalls two other errors. First, “The Bible knows no ‘sinless man’ and consequently no state of innocence” (Claus Westermann, citing H. Haag); thus the fall “is not a fall in the sense that man after has become anything else than man was before” (Bruce Vawter). Brueggemann observes that there is no “pre-commandment” human being; neither is there a pre-disobedient human being. And, second, the story of the fall is not an aetiological narrative; that is, it is not an explanation of sin. Sin is sure – and sin is a surd: irrational, non-necessary, inexplicable. Kierkegaard, that great anatomist of sin, is our teacher here.

5. After disobedience, there are several contenders for the clown crown of foundational sin. Unbelief and pride feature prominently in the history of harmatology. Karl Barth, the theologian of grace, appropriately accents ingratitude. In Thomas Mann’s disturbing retelling of the Faust legend Doctor Faustus, the satanic counter-commandment is “Thou shalt not love.” And to add to the witches’ brew, consider Augustine’s take on sin as disordered desire (concupiscentia), and Luther’s take on the sinner as homo incurvatus in se.

6. A word on “total depravity”. Calvin’s doctrine develops Augustine and Luther’s insight that we are (in Alistair McFadyen’s incisive wordplay) “bound to sin”. It is both polemical and dogmatic. Polemically, it is an attack on Origen’s platonic privileging of the mind, and Erasmus’ privileging of the will, over against the “lower appetites”. Thus does Calvin correctly interpret the Pauline category of sarx. Dogmatically, total depravity “means, not that there is no capacity for good in human beings, but that no human activity is altogether blameless”; “no privileged area of the personality can be depended on for salvation” (William J. Bouwsma). As grace goes all the way down in God, so sin goes all the way through and up in humans.

7. A Pauline anatomy of sin must also observe a crucial distinction between sin and sins. Paul’s fundamental harmatological category is not sins as moral failures but sin as alien and enslaving power that foments sins. Consequently Paul almost never speaks of the forgiveness of sins, rather he speaks of sin’s defeat and conquest – by Jesus Christ. Indeed that is how we gauge just how radical and universal sin actually is: it takes the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ to break it. That is, it takes grace to reveal the human condition. As E. P. Sanders puts it: Paul “deduced the plight from the solution.”

8. You know the phrase “ugly as sin”? Whenever I think of it I picture Duccio’s “The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain” with its nightmarish figure of the devil. I also catch a whiff of Luther’s shitty Satan. But how could the utterly repulsive be so totally tempting? Consider, then, the film The Devil’s Advocate (1997), in which Al Pacino plays a Lucifer whose attractiveness contributes as much as his corporate clout to his persuasiveness. His text might come from the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”: “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.” Sin is no Ugly Betty.

9. On the other hand, the devil is a liar. He makes sin seem so exciting, both as lust and lure to power. “Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing,” C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood. In fact, sin itself always turns out to be unoriginal, recycled, predictable, dead boring – the Same Old Thing. But Satan is so streetwise that, like gullible teenagers or old folk with bad memories, we are always falling for his provocative promises. Thus W. C. Fields on original sin: “A sucker is born every minute.” By the way, one of the best antidotes to temptation is a sense of humour. Like all tyrants, the devil insists on being taken seriously, so take the piss and remove the sting.

10. Finally, a crucial pastoral point, based on an acute theological insight, which Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger puts powerfully and succinctly: “The paradox of the knowledge of human sin is that human beings can ultimately know themselves as sinners only in the light of forgiveness. Known sin as such, Barth argues, is always finally forgiven sin. We cannot fully perceive ourselves as sinners, he suggests, apart from Jesus Christ.” Which is why repentance “cannot possibly perpetuate debilitating shame”; rather, as a homecoming, it is ultimately an act of sheer joy.