Contrary to popular belief and nefarious rumour, Kim Fabricius is not an alter ego or pseudonym of Ben Myers. Even I myself have occasionally doubted this – but we now have photographic evidence! Here’s Kim and me hanging out in Princeton:
And here he is expounding a few propositions…
... while some Princeton bloggers listen, and my daughter has a good laugh:
The American church historian George Marsden is currently delivering the Stone Lectures here in Princeton. (The lectures are being blogged – see the series of links here.) Marsden, author of the great biography on Jonathan Edwards, is creating 
a dialogue between Edwards’ thought and contemporary theological issues.
Although I admire Marsden’s work on American church history, I was very disappointed by the methodological framework which he set up in the opening lecture. He asked how we can learn from someone like Edwards, whose views are obviously outdated and offensive in many ways. Marsden’s answer was that we can access Edwards’ lasting insights by distinguishing between his great “perennial ideas” (e.g. his doctrine of the Trinity) and his outdated nonessential ideas (e.g. his biblical literalism, his millennialism, and so on).
I realise that Marsden was only sketching some brief remarks on historical method, but I think this represents a deeply flawed approach to the question of how we can learn from the Christian past. If we learn from the past by distinguishing the timeless “perennial core” from the nonessential (i.e. flawed) elements, then we’re acting as though our own commitments are the final arbiter of history — we’re assuming that history has found its goal in us. And one of the unfortunate side-effects of this approach is that we’re no longer in a position to be critiqued by history. This would explain the strange fact that Marsden didn’t find any contemporary critical significance in Edwards’ millennialism, his doctrine of progress, or his theology of the election of nations. (Seriously, isn’t all this just a little relevant to American identity and to US foreign policy?)
In contrast, the point of historical study (as Rowan Williams has compellingly argued in Why Study the Past?) is to encounter the past in all its irreducible strangeness — and yet to perceive this strangeness itself (not some timeless “core”) as something that was actually possible for the Christian church. In other words, we need to recognise even Edwards’ most unpalatable ideas as things that it was possible for a Christian to think and say. If we can do this, then we’re placed in a position where Edwards can challenge and question our own most basic assumptions about what counts as “Christian”.
As Karl Barth remarks in his work on 19th-century theology: “I have to count all these people as members of the Christian Church and, remembering that I and my theological work are in the Christian Church only on the ground of forgiveness, I have neither to dispute nor even to doubt that they, like me, were ultimately concerned with the Christian faith” (p. 28).
Once we perceive that a thinker like Jonathan Edwards was “ultimately concerned with the Christian faith,” it becomes impossible to distinguish between any timeless “core” and the mere “husk” of culturally-bound ineptitudes. Instead, by encountering the strangeness and offensiveness of Edwards’ ideas, we are encountering something new and unexpected about the nature of Christian identity itself. And this means that our own assumptions about Christian identity have also become less certain and less secure. Edwards is now not merely a curiosity or the source of a few timeless verities; now, he becomes a question to us.
The next issue of the Princeton Theological Review will be devoted to the analogy of being and questions of natural theology, with special reference to the dialogue between Przywara, Barth and Balthasar. They’ve issued a call for papers for articles, reflections or book reviews – more details here.
I’ve always been intrigued by artistic forms in which the very possibility of art becomes an open question. The most striking example is the work of Samuel Beckett: his plays posit 
the absolute impossibility of drama; his work is hugely preoccupied with the urge to tell the truth, yet all his writing foregrounds the impossibility of truthful speech. In his late plays and fiction, Beckett stages and enacts the end of literature – its paralysing “endgame” – and yet in precisely this way, Beckett breaks open the possibilities of literary aesthetics, generating new forms of speech and writing.
Or, for a more recent example, take the music of Nirvana, the great “grunge” band of the 1990s. The band’s music emerged as a violent protest against the possibility of music itself. Just think of Kurt Cobain’s trademark harrowing shriek; the way his lyrics suddenly implode into tortured incoherence; the way the songs tend to collapse spontaneously under the weight of their own impossible demands. Witness the exhausted aggression of the band’s stage performances – performances that routinely culminated in the destruction of stage, amps and instruments. Nirvana didn’t merely represent another drug-induced cry for social disengagement (although obviously that’s one side of the story) – above all, the band was raging against music itself. On stage they were enacting the end of music: the final shriek of the wrecked and wasted human voice, the metallic howl of dismembered guitars, the dying moan and hiss of gutted audio speakers.
Nirvana’s protest against the possibility of music became even more pronounced after the massive commercial success of their 1991 album, Nevermind. With this album, the band had achieved international fame as the centre of the new Seattle “grunge scene” – and so the band turned all its fury on grunge music itself, and on the fans who had become consumers of this new sound. As one of their early songs, “Aero Zeppelin”, rather brutally put it: “You could shit upon the stage, they’ll be fans…”
And so Nirvana’s next (and final) studio album, In Utero (1993), represented an 
astonishingly aggressive attempt to alienate the band’s own devoted fans. (The gesture of this album was rather like the celebrated incident in Bob Dylan’s 1966 electric concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. In response to the angry cries of his erstwhile folk fans, Dylan turned to his band and growled – surely the greatest single moment in the history of rock – “Play fucking loud,” before launching into a devastatingly vehement electric performance of “Like a Rolling Stone.”) Nirvana’s In Utero opens with its most difficult and most confronting songs. The chorus of “Scentless Apprentice”, for instance, consists of nothing but the repeated scream, “Go away, get away,” before the song dissolves finally into the heavy hiss and oblivion of electric distortion.
Like Beckett’s great play Endgame, Nirvana here enacts the impossibility of its own artistic form – In Utero is not only the greatest album of its decade; it is the end of music itself, the collapse of any possible harmony into the undifferentiated violence and anarchy of mere noise. As Kurt Cobain had put it in the 1991 song, “On a Plain”: “It is now time to make it unclear…”
Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch – but I wonder whether this can provide some help in understanding that most difficult and most confronting work of modern theology, Karl 
Barth’s commentary on Romans (1922). This was a sustained piece of theological writing which announced the impossibility of theology. Indeed, Barth’s prose was itself an enactment of God’s shattering apocalyptic judgment on all theological speech. If the miracle of modern literature is that writing still proved to be possible after Beckett, and if the miracle of contemporary music is that music did not cease entirely with In Utero, then the miracle of modern theology is simply that Barth’s commentary on Romans was not the last work of theology ever written.
In Barth’s commentary, theology uttered it final dying word – and yet against all odds, this proved also to be a word of resurrection, a word that both shattered and reinvigorated the possibilities of speech about God. Reading Barth’s commentary is, perhaps, rather like attending a Nirvana concert: the spectacle of sheer destruction, the violent conflagration of an entire tradition – and yet, amidst the ashes, a sudden surprising glimpse of something new.
A sermon by Kim Fabricius
Isaiah 5:1-7. It’s known as “The Song of the Vineyard”. The prophet Isaiah, who lived and ministered in Jerusalem during the latter half of the 8th century B.C., stands at the city gates, playing the part of a minstrel who sings a ballad to the joyful crowds who are dancing their way to the Temple to celebrate the autumn vintage, that is, their Harvest Festival. He sings of a “friend” who had a vineyard. With tender loving care he did all he could to ensure a bountiful crop and an excellent wine – digging, clearing, planting the finest vines; putting a hedge around it and watching from a tower for crows and thieves; and, finally, digging a pit, a vat, all ready to tread the grapes. Alas, the grapes are withered and puny, the Beaujolais will be sour. “What’s gone wrong?” Isaiah’s friend plaintively cries. “What more could I have done?” So he vents his frustration on the vineyard itself: “I’ll turn it back into a wasteland – no hedge, no wall, no tower for protection; no hoeing, no pruning, and” – who is this guy? – “I shall make sure that next year the rains don’t come.” Now the pilgrims are edgy: has Isaiah’s mate gone mad? Like he can command the clouds! And then Isaiah delivers the punch line: his friend turns out to be God, and the vineyard is Israel itself. The song is a love song – but the love is unrequited. The Lord expected his people to yield a harvest of justice; instead, while the rich revel in conspicuous consumption – “bank robbers”, if you like, idolising the free, deregulated market, stripping assets, short-selling, whatever makes a profit – the streets are full of people begging, scrounging for food, searching for shelter – and ultimately carrying the can for the irresponsibility of the greedy. Harvest: a time of divine judgement on the affluent and powerful.
Matthew 21:33-46. We’re still in Jerusalem, but fast-forward eight centuries. Another prophet – and more than a prophet – is in the precincts of the new, re-built Temple, not singing a song, but telling a story. “There was once a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, built a tower, dug a pit …” And the people listening are thinking, “We’ve heard this one before!” Well, yes and no. For like all good storytellers, bringing a traditional tale up to date, Jesus re-imagines the plot and the characters. This landowner lets his vineyard to tenant farmers and heads off to the Costa del Sol. The crowd boo and hiss: absentee landlords, often outsiders, buying up the countryside, turfing out small farmers – they were not popular in first-century Palestine. But hang on – in the original story, doesn’t the landowner represent God? So are the tenants the good guys? And hang on again – when the landowner sends his rent-collectors, the tenants murder them; when he sends more, the tenants murder them too; and when he finally sends his own son – surely they won’t kill him too! – but they do. Who are these tenants? Well, whom is Jesus specifically addressing? Not the common folk but the chief priests and Pharisees – they are the tenants, the leaders the Lord has put in charge of his vineyard, his people Israel. It turns out that this landlord wasn’t trying to exploit the tenants, he was entrusting them with land that might produce fruit for all those whom Roman economic policy had made homeless and broke. And those rent-collectors – they are code for prophets. And the son – he, it turns out, is the storyteller himself. And chief priests and Pharisees – they get the message all right, that they will pay for their faithlessness and wickedness with their lives. They would have Jesus arrested but for fear of the crowds, the peasant-poor whose champion Jesus is. Harvest: a time of judgement on the affluent and powerful.
I don’t like Harvest Services. But it’s not because – as I know it is with some colleagues – because the worship can be nostalgic, sentimental, or simply, for city slickers, quite out of touch. I mean, what do most of us know about a contemporary harvest? How much of what we eat is local? And where do we get most of it? From Sainsbury’s or Tesco, now often bought on-line and delivered to our door. But, no, the reason I don’t like Harvest Services is because of the biblical image of the harvest – it’s an image of judgement, and judgement makes me nervous. Because – note well – in Isaiah and Matthew judgement falls on Israel, not pagans but believers, and for “Israel” read “Church”; and indeed not just on believers but on the leaders of believers, on their “chief priests”, that is, their ministers – and that means me! That’s why I don’t like Harvest Services: they tell me that God is not happy with my life and my leadership – and with good reason:
Carl Schmitt’s 1936 book on Hobbes is now available in English: The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Chicago, 2008). I read it just last night, and it’s an astonishing work (published here with a very fine introductory essay by Tracy 
Strong). Chapter 4 may well be the most brilliant – and most “contemporary” – analysis you’ll ever read on war, the power of the state, and the state’s demand for obedience. Here are a few excerpts:
“With the incredible development of the technical means of disseminating communication, information, and weaponry, the power of the state’s command mechanism grew in a manner that was astonishing. One can thus believe that the power of a modern state in comparison with that of ancient communities is proportionately much greater and more intensive, as, for example, is the range and piercing power of modern artillery in comparison with the effectiveness of a crossbow or a siege machine.” (p. 42)
“The state machine either functions or does not function. In the first instance, it guarantees me the security of my physical existence; in return it demands unconditional obedience to the laws by which it functions…. Resistance as a ‘right’ is in Hobbes’ absolute state … factually and legally nonsensical and absurd. The endeavor to resist the leviathan, the all powerful, resistance-destroying, and technically perfect mechanism of command, is practically impossible…. [Resistance] has no place whatsoever in the space governed by the irresistible and overpowering huge machine of the state.” (pp. 45-46)
In international law, “wars become pure state wars, that is, they cease to be religious, civil, or factional…. From this follows the question of the just war, for such an interstate war is just as incommensurable as the question of just resistance within the state. In contrast to religious, civil, and factional wars, wars between states cannot be measured with the yardsticks of truth and justice. War between states is neither just nor unjust…. The state has its order in, not outside, itself…. The state absorbs all rationality and all legality. Everything outside of the state is therefore a ‘state of nature’. The thoroughly rationalized mechanisms of state command confront one another ‘irrationally’…. There is no state between states, and for that reason there can be no legal war and no legal peace.” (pp. 47-49)
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