Two small books: Dr Barth and Dr Seuss

Robert L. Short, The Parables of Dr. Seuss (WJKP, 2008), 95 pp.; Karl Barth, Fifty Prayers (WJKP, 2008), 63 pp. (review copies courtesy of WJKP)

Here’s a couple of nice little books (Thing One and Thing Two), both just released from WJKP. In our first book, Robert Short offers an entertaining reading of Dr Seuss’s stories as Christian “parables.” I adore Dr Seuss – I’m always begging my kids to let me read more Dr Seuss, instead of those bland and banal Disney books that clutter their shelves. So I enjoyed this book’s playful engagement with Dr Seuss’s stories.

Admittedly, Robert Short’s analysis is not a very nuanced one; and it’s a shame he neglects both Dr Seuss’s sharp political edge and his extraordinary aesthetics (first and foremost, these books are great because they’re works of true poetry).

Ultimately, Dr Seuss’s writing can’t be turned into neat theological “parables” (although many of them are certainly political parables). So I can’t help cringing a little when Short tells me that Christ = the Cat, or that Christ’s body and blood = green eggs and ham, or indeed that Sam-I-am represents the name of God! (I’ll let you in on a secret: he’s called “Sam-I-am” because it rhymes with “eggs-and-ham”…) But all this can be taken in good fun, and Short is clearly enjoying himself with bucketloads of playful exaggeration.

In any case, there are some nice insights along the way – for example, in the chapter on I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, Short remarks: “The difference is that Christian faith has an infinitely greater appreciation of trouble than the world does” (p. 51). An excellent point!

And Short is right to observe that Dr Seuss’s stories possess a “profundity-in-simplicity” which allows them to make a real impact. These stories, he remarks, are deceptive in their simplicity. “Charming, childlike little tales suddenly become meaningful…. They sneak up on us. They become Trojan horses or sugar-coated medicine. They are the wise Cat in the otherwise empty hat” (p. 66).

On a somewhat more serious note, our second book brings together fifty of Karl Barth’s prayers, written for before and after his sermons. In the foreword (these prayers were originally published in German in 1962), Barth explains his growing discomfort with the traditional liturgical prayers, since they remained too disconnected from the language and content of his sermons. “For a while,” he says, “I sought help by replacing the petitions of the order of liturgy not with extemporaneous prayers (I have never dared to risk such a thing), but with freely bringing together biblical passages from the Psalms.” Only in his later years did he begin to write his own prayers as part of his sermon preparation. The resulting prayers are stirring, colloquial, often profound, and always blissfully concise – as Barth remarks in the foreword, “the spice for all parts of all spiritual and theological sayings should consist in brevity!”

Barth decided to publish these prayers in the hope that they would be used both in assembled worship and privately. The book thus arranges the fifty prayers according to the liturgical year, with some additional thematic sections (e.g. prayers for funerals). The prayers will certainly be of interest to researchers and students of Barth – but if we are to use the book as it was intended, our proper response should be to pray these prayers, to call upon God in weakness and humility and gratitude and joy. Here are a few short excerpts:

“Lord, our God, you know who we are: People with good and bad consciences; satisfied and dissatisfied, sure and unsure people; Christians out of convictions and Christians out of habit; believers, half-believers, and unbelievers. You know where we come from…. But now we all stand before you…” (p. 1).

“Lord our God, you wanted to live not only in heaven, but also with us, here on earth; not only to be high and great, but also to be small and lowly, as we are; not only to rule, but also to serve us; not only to be God in eternity, but also be born as a person, to live, and to die” (p. 11).

“None of us is a great Christian; rather, we are all very small Christians. But your grace is sufficient for us. Awaken us to the small joy and thankfulness that we are capable of, the timid faith that we bring, the incomplete obedience that we cannot refuse – to the hope in the greatness, wholeness, and completeness that you have prepared for us in the death of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and that you have promised us in his resurrection from the dead” (pp. 29-30).

GIVEAWAY: Anyway, I’ve got a copy of The Parables of Dr Seuss to give away. So if you’d like a copy, just name one thing that Barth and Dr Seuss have in common. The most interesting or imaginative comment wins the book.

Milbank and red Toryism: or, why it's right to be left

One of the fascinating features of the contemporary intellectual landscape is the appearance of surprising convergences between the political left and right. You can see it, for instance, in the retrieval of Carl Schmitt by contemporary leftist theorists; or you can see it in a conference like this one, where theologians and radical Marxist philosophers rally together around the Pope’s infamous Regensburg address.

In his delightful book on Paul, Jacob Taubes offers a humorous comment on this tendency in political theory. Referring to the fascist theorist Armin Mohler, he remarks (p. 99): “He was, so to speak, the right-wing extremist and I was the left extremist. Les extrèmes se touchent – in any event, we shared the same views about the middle.”

In the latest instance of “sharing the same views about the middle,” Dave Belcher refers us to John Milbank’s short piece in The Guardian. Milbank gets straight to the point, and calls for a “red Toryism”: “In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a ‘traditionalist socialism’ or a ‘red Toryism’. After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.”

Dave has some further reflections on how this new statement fits into the trajectory of Milbank’s thought; and Phillip Blond also discusses red Toryism in today’s Guardian.

Faux theological libraries

Over at the IVP blog, Dan has an exciting new proposal: faux theological libraries. “I am recommending that IVP Academic begin offering our customers a full array of faux books to adorn their dens, studies or office walls. Consider it intellectual wallpaper.” This is great news for theologians everywhere. A faux edition of the Patrologia Latina (or of the new 31-volume edition of Barth’s Dogmatics) can make you feel just as proud, but without all the associated fuss of reading.

Come to think of it, some theological books might actually be better as faux editions…

Karl Barth on sickness, health, and doctors

My poor father (who also happens to be F&T’s most devoted reader) has lately had more than his fair share of doctors, hospitals and waiting rooms. In his ethical section on “Freedom for Life” (CD III/4, §55), Karl Barth discusses God’s own opposition to sickness – so that doctors and patients are together following God’s will as they resist the demonic power of sickness:

“Sickness, like death itself, is unnatural and disorderly. It is an element in the rebellion of chaos against God’s creation. It is an act and declaration of the devil and demons. To be sure, it is no less bound to God and dependent on Him than the creature which He created. Indeed, it is impotent in a double way. For like sin and death, it is neither good nor is it willed and created by God at all, but is real, effective, powerful and menacing only in its nullity, as part of that which God has negated, as part of His kingdom on the left hand.…

“The realm of death which afflicts man in the form of sickness … is opposed to His good will as Creator and has existence and power only under His mighty No. To capitulate before it, to allow it to take its course, can never be obedience but only disobedience towards God. In harmony with the will of God, what humans ought to will in face of this whole realm on the left hand, and therefore in face of sickness, can only be final resistance.… Those who take up this struggle obediently are already healthy in the fact that they do so, and theirs is no empty desire when they will to maintain or regain their health” (pp. 366-69).

Furthermore: “When one person is ill, the whole of society is really ill in all its members. In the battle against sickness the final human word cannot be isolation but only fellowship” (p. 363).

A dialogue with George Herbert

Here’s one of my favourite George Herbert poems: “Dialogue”, from his collection The Temple (1633). If you’re having trouble following, it’s a dialogue between George Herbert and God (God’s speech is in italics). Herbert is arguing with God; he is in despair, since he feels completely undeserving of salvation, and he can’t imagine his own life having any worth to God. God replies twice, and then Herbert interrupts God’s speech in the final line.

Sweetest Saviour, if my soul
        Were but worth the having,
Quickly should I then control
        Any thought of waiving.
But when all my care and pains
Cannot give the name of gains
To thy wretch so full of stains,
What delight or hope remains?

What, child, is the balance thine,
        Thine the poise and measure?
If I say, “Thou shalt be mine,”
        Finger not my treasure.
What the gains in having thee
Do amount to, only he
Who for man was sold can see;
That transferr’d th’ accounts to me.

But as I can see no merit
        Leading to this favour,
So the way to fit me for it
        Is beyond my savour.
As the reason, then, is thine,
So the way is none of mine;
I disclaim the whole design;
Sin disclaims and I resign.

That is all, if that I could
        Get without repining;
And my clay, my creature, would
        Follow my resigning;
That as I did freely part
With my glory and desert,
Left all joys to feel all smart—
        Ah! no more: thou break’st my heart.

Transformation theology: Oliver Davies responds

A guest-post by Oliver Davies (responding to our recent discussion of his new co-authored book on Transformation Theology)

Hi everyone. Well, firstly I would really like to thank you all for picking up these themes. We really appreciate it. The first thing I have to say is how difficult it really is to communicate something new in the theological realm! We all carry around sets of idea in our heads and are open to some kind of refinement or amendment to those, but when something comes along which calls the whole lot into question, we struggle to make sense of it. The missing bit may only be very small but it can also be quite fundamental. From the point of view of those trying to communicate the problem and its answer (if that is not too reductionist a way of viewing it) our difficulty is that, since what we are working with is fundamental, we often don’t know ourselves where it is leading us. Only gradually do you get to see an overall picture. If the problem is fundamental, then it will touch everything, though it may do so in ways which simply confirm the status quo, tweak it in a new direction or radically challenge it.

The further problem with presenting this stuff is that you can go in from so many different angles – I have recently “gone in” through ascension and scriptural hermeneutics (see my recent paper, available in Italian at the Gregorian University website). So, since we are claiming that Transformation Theology is about something fundamental which has dropped out of view, let me tell you what I think it is.

Firstly, there is a small but massively influential Christological deficit. We don’t know “where the body of Jesus is”. We accordingly read the ascension as marking the absence of Christ, whereas it properly marks his presence in a new and more powerful way. Spirit and Church come to take the place of the body (as Jenson and others suggest), which just confuses a traditional Trinitarian structure of mediation (common ousia) with an innovative structure of substitution. We’ve lost the body but, hey, we still have the Spirit and the Church, so that’s okay!

There are two big problems with this. We lost the doctrinal affirmation that Christ continues to exist bodily (the “local” existence of scripture and tradition) in a mode which is fully human and fully divine – and we lost this on the grounds of changes in cosmology which were only ever expressive of the doctrine and never defining of it. Did we really want to do that? We keep the consequences of the ascension (i.e. Spirit of Pentecost and Church, universal presence of Christ) but can’t relate to the ascension itself (since it is expressed in terms of an alien cosmology).

That doesn’t seem right to me, since it shifts the axis of incarnation away from real time and space (where the living, wounded and ascended body of Christ must in some real sense be, if Christ is still fully human and fully divine) to ourselves as observers, meaning-makers, beautiful theoreticians, etc. If we have lost the reality of the continuing incarnation (contra Mt 28:20) since we lost a particular view of heaven as the place to “put” the body, then, never mind, we still have ourselves! And the human mind is a wonderful thing. If we no longer look to discover incarnational revelation in our space and time, in the actuality of our embodied lives, then we can nevertheless think it there: by the power of the creative intellect. And we have the sacraments too of course. To point to the sacraments is to point to Christ (never mind if sacramental theology was predicated in its origins on the real existence of Christ in heaven, without which we get substitution again and not the mediation which is the bedrock of classical sacramental theory). The affirmation that Christ still lives and is still embodied needs the corresponding affirmation that he is still in real relation to our space and time on his own account and not by virtue of substitution, which would imply that he has simply “gone off the radar”.

Secondly, all of this combines with the amazing work that Paul Janz has done on practical and speculative reason, and on ethics and revelation. I learned a fantastic amount from Paul, who came at the same questions from an entirely different angle. Paul has shown (largely in his forthcoming book) how thinking came to do the work of acting in Western tradition. Revelation is fundamentally about a new way of acting in the world (it is not those who “say Lord, Lord, but who do the will of the Father...”), under obedience to divine command. All that is to do with practical rather than speculative intellect; and yet, we have lost sensitivity to these distinctions. We constantly treat Christianity as though it were a philosophy or a work of literature (I am not against philosophy or literature) rather than a disclosure to practical intellect which calls us into the radical freedom of action in and for Christ in the world (i.e. the ascended, wounded and glorified Christ). Faith is faith in Christ who acts rather than thinks.

There are two fundamental problems that we are addressing therefore. The first is the Christological deficit which goes back four or five hundred years. The second is the shift in anthropology which is chiefly datable to the period immediately following the publication of Kant’s First Critique. Both changes, which were of enormous importance to Christianity, probably go back to radical developments in our understanding of what matter is, and thus of the relation between mind and matter, which is thematised both as a topic to be discussed and as a practice of thinking and living in the world. The latter is perhaps its more fundamental form.

We are not saying, however, that there is something radically wrong with Christian life today or the life of the Churches, but that the problems lie in the area of academic theology, as conceptual support for the life of faith. The faithful Christian always relates to a living Christ who lays claim to us in the fullness of our embodied actuality and in the particularity of our lives (I think this is what we mean by vocation). But theology more often than not just addresses the mind, through intellect and imagination, rather than taking its life and orientation from the world, which is both real in itself and taken up into Christ, where Christian intellect and imagination must find their home. Instead of allowing ourselves to be opened up to the revelation of Christ in the world, communicated through command at work through the senses and the particularity of space and time events (“the command of grace”, in Janz’s phrase), we focus on the mind as the place of insight, generativity and meaning. But if these things are to be properly Christian, they must also be real, which means they must be responses to the continuing incarnation or presence of Christ in the world – known not through the substitutions of Spirit, Church and sacrament, but through their mediations.

And here the third problem arises which follows from the first two: we have lost an understanding of the way we can and should access and be attentive to the presence of Christ in this way. We constantly bypass with mind the very place in which he is present for us in the here and now, which is to do with the senses and with command, since this is a place where the mind does not necessarily want to go. The Damascus Road appearance or revelation is paradigmatic for us here.

I could go on but I hope this helps! Paul and I both have books almost ready to go which develop these themes much more fully than we were able to do in the book Transformation Theology. All three of us are working on a new book, presenting this as a new Catholic Theology for Europe (which may appear first in European languages, though it should also come out in English). We continue to think and talk with people about a reformed version of TT. We have research projects gathering momentum in cosmology, law, scriptural exegesis, political theology, Pauline theology and aesthetics. We are also thinking about holding a forum at King’s where we can really enter into a good conversation with others, since once people “get it”, it quickly becomes a collaborative venture.

“Getting it” entails seeing that incarnational revelation still comes to us through the senses (“Jesus still lives, and his Lordship in the particularity of our lives is the mode for us of that life”), and that the senses cannot be absorbed without remainder into mind. Thus ascension allows that our faith in Christ can be far closer to that of the apostles than we might ordinarily admit, not on our own account, but on account of the nature of the transformation effected in Christ. Doctrinally (theologically) and anthropologically (philosophically) we have lost the tools and practices which help us to “recognise” him in his transformed state in the everyday reality of our lives where he comes to meet us.