The bus caption winner

The people have spoken! And Andrew is the winner of our bus sign contest. His caption won a decisive victory, with 29% of the votes. Here’s the winning bus sign:


And I think Dan deserves a runner-up prize for his wonderful sign (which came in second, with 15% of the votes):


The prizes come courtesy of the kind folks at IVP Academic – so Andrew and Dan can each email me to choose one of the following books:

• Larry R. Helyer, The Witness of Jesus, Paul and John: An Exploration in Biblical Theology (IVP 2008) – an introduction to NT theology
  
• Sandra L. Richter, The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament (IVP 2008) – an introduction to OT theology
  
• Davis Young and Ralph Stearley, The Bible, Rocks and Time: Geological Evidence for the Age of the Earth (IVP 2008) – a massive evidence-based response to young-earth creationism
  
• Gordon Smith, ed., The Lord's Supper: Five Views (IVP 2008) – a dialogue between five theologians: Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist and Pentecostal
  

The best bus sign: cast your vote

Well, it’s hard to pick a winner – there were so many great entries in the bus sign caption contest. So I’ve chosen seven finalists, and you can now vote for your favourite in the poll at the top of the sidebar.

Meanwhile, here’s one that didn’t quite make it into the list of finalists – but it did give me a great laugh:

Atheist bus signs: a caption contest

Over in the UK, the atheist bus campaign has been attracting a lot of media interest. Some Christian groups have chimed in with their own (predictably humourless) rival ads, and there have been various theological responses as well.

So anyway, I reckon it’s time to settle this dispute once and for all – and what better way to resolve age-old metaphysical questions than with a caption contest? I’ll send a free book to the person who invents the best bus sign. (You get bonus points if your sign persuades someone to change their deepest beliefs.)

Leonard Cohen in Brisbane 2009

It’s 1.30 in the morning, and I’ve just arrived home from Leonard Cohen’s concert here in Brisbane – a breathtaking four-hour extravaganza (with a wonderful opening set by the Aussie singer-songwriter Paul Kelly). Cohen was accompanied by some extraordinary singers and musicians – it would have been worth going just to see Javier Mas play his heart out on that bandurria.

The concert was a revelation. I laughed and I cried; I roared and thundered; I leapt to my feet; I sat wrapped in silence. It was the greatest show I’ve ever seen. Filled with heartbreak and humour, desolation and hope, sex and seduction and light and darkness and prayer. Cohen is often described as a depressing singer; but the real core of his poetic vision is a fragile yet all-pervasive hope, a hope that springs – unexpectedly, miraculously – from the ruins of a shattered world. “There is a crack, a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets in.”

There may not be many prophets left in our churches. But from time to time, at a show like this, you might get lucky enough to see a true prophet, to hear words of truth from the lips of another human being. Ours is a world of lies and falsehoods – and of what Harry Frankfurt calls “bullshit”, mere nonsense-talk in which questions of truth and falsehood are irrelevant. Indeed, we are terrified of the truth (this was one of Freud’s great insights); we shrink from it, we spend our lives concealing it and evading it and shielding our eyes from its piercing glare. From ancient times, we have stoned and imprisoned and crucified those who told us the truth.

So when Leonard Cohen takes to the stage and sings “Anthem” or “The Future” or “Everybody Knows” or “First We Take Manhattan,” it is an astonishing thing to be confronted suddenly by words of truth – words that are “as bare as knives and forks on a white tablecloth” (to borrow a phrase from Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda). Words like this:

       Everybody knows the deal is rotten
       Old black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
       For your ribbons and bows
       Everybody knows.

Or this:

       Give me back the Berlin wall
       Give me Stalin and St Paul
       Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima
       Destroy another foetus now
       We don’t like children anyhow
       I’ve seen the future, baby:
       It is murder.

All day long we lie to ourselves, we lie to each other: but here, amidst a crowd of ten thousand, one lonely man stands beneath the lights and tells us the truth.

In a humorous moment, 74-year-old Cohen offered this autobiographical remark: “It’s been 15 years since I was on stage – I was 60 then, just a young kid with a crazy dream. Then I took a lot of Prozac. And Zoloft. And Wellbutrin, Ritalin, Effexor… I studied all the religions and philosophies of the world too – but somehow, cheerfulness just kept breaking through.”

Anyway, I’ll leave you with this clip. This was one of the concert’s greatest highlights – an exquisitely beautiful performance of “If It Be Your Will” by the Webb sisters (the clip is actually from an earlier concert, but it’s the same arrangement):



       If it be your will that I speak no more
       And my voice be still as it was before
       I will speak no more, I shall abide until
       I am spoken for
       If it be your will

       If it be your will that a voice be true
       From this broken hill I will sing to you
       From this broken hill all your praises they shall ring
       If it be your will
       To let me sing

       If it be your will, if there is a choice
       Let the rivers fill, let the hills rejoice
       Let your mercy spill on all these burning hearts in hell
       If it be your will
       To make us well

       And draw us near and bind us tight
       All your children here in their rags of light
       In our rags of light, all dressed to kill
       And end this night
       If it be your will

Ten virtues for theological students

The ancients understood education as inculturation (παιδεια) into a life of virtue (αρετη). The main point of my recent satirical post was to suggest that theological education should similarly be understood as formation in virtue, rather than (as is too often the case) an inculturation into the vices of academia. In that post, I highlighted ten vices of theological education. And due to the number of emails I’ve received in response (partly from students who felt a little chastened or disillusioned, or that I was being too cynical), I’ve tried here to sketch out a contrasting list of ten virtues. Obviously this isn’t meant as a complete list (much less an autobiographical list!) – it’s just a parallel which makes explicit what was implicit in the earlier post:

1. Patience: In theological education, the process of learning is more important than the specific opinions you might acquire as a result. You can’t learn everything at once; just relax and enjoy the ride.

2. Breadth: In theological education, the connections between disciplines are often more important than the content of any single discipline in isolation. The development of wide-ranging interests – and the capacity to engage in wide-ranging discussions – is more valuable than the selection of any narrow specialisation.

3. Curiosity: One of the goals of theological education is to cultivate a lively sense of curiosity; the student who sticks only to the curriculum will not learn much. So resist the temptation to become too disciplined – and be sure to “waste” plenty of time reading novels, listening to music, and aimlessly enjoying the company of friends.

4. Clarity: In theological discourse, a single lapidary statement is better (and more difficult to achieve) than twenty pages of jargon.

5. Attentiveness: In theological education, even the most brash and opinionated among us are given the opportunity to cultivate a childlike fascination with the views of other people. Without attentive fascination, one’s capacity for surprise is diminished; and the essence of theology is surprise.

6. Love: Theological formation should be driven by a love for truth, not by animosity towards untruth. Truthful theology always involves polemics – but since truth takes form as love, it can never be used as a weapon to wound another person. Where this occurs, truth becomes a falsehood.

7. Friendship: Education is always competitive to some extent; but your peers should be viewed as friends and companions rather than competitors. In theological education, friends are your best unofficial teachers: one often learns more from them than from any of the curricular activities, or any of the professors.

8. Simplicity: The goal of theological education is Christian proclamation. Students sweat and labour for years through difficult texts and languages and ideas – only so that their preaching can one day seem easy and effortless and spontaneous. Preaching is not like mathematics: you do not “show your steps.”

9. Truth: Ambition for the comfort and respectability of a career is a deadly temptation which the theological student must resist. One can serve the idol of career only by compromising the call to speak the truth – that is, by sacrificing one’s entire theological vocation. Theological education is not about garnering academic favour, nor about treading the eggshells of correctness and respectability; it is about loving the truth and speaking the truth faithfully, while “taking no thought for tomorrow” (Matt. 6:34).

10. Prayer: Prayer is the theologian’s most fitting and most distinctive activity. A theologian who does not pray is a grotesque aberration – like a literary scholar who doesn’t read, or a music teacher who cannot play an instrument. Above all else, “the theologian is the one who prays” (St Evagrius).

Two conferences and a journal

Aberdeen will be hosting another great conference this year, on Theology and the Humanities. Speakers include John Webster, Gavin D’Costa, Laurence Hemming and David Jasper. And the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology is hosting a conference on Vatican II: Its Continuing Challenge
 to All Churches. Speakers include George Lindbeck, Nicholas Healy, Michael Root and Amy Laura Hall.

On another note, the latest issue of American Theological Inquiry is available now, with articles on Augustine, Lutheran orthodoxy, cinema, and much more. Their next issue will be coming out later in the year – so you might like to think about submitting a manuscript.

Update: I’ve also just been reminded that Alister McGrath is presenting his Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen this week.