I wish I had a suntan; I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine

• Against expository preaching
• Paul Griffiths on Christian principles concerning peace and violence
• And a response by Halden
• A post on Bart Ehrman and Stephen Colbert, and another one on parenthood, from a new(ish) Duke faculty blog
  
• A very thoughtful response to R. R. Reno's ranking of American theology programs
• No, Jesus is not likable
• Public theology before another god
• Mike Bird is planning to write a NT theology, and he has uploaded a manifesto outlining his approach
• Speaking of NT theology, I've been checking out Ben Witherington's new 850-page volume, and it looks very good
  
• A new Brill series in systematic theology
• Some nice audio theology books
• Paul Tillich on video
• A sweet video introduction to Karl Barth: Jesus loves you, and keep your pipe lit
• Speaking of which, no words can describe the awesomeness of this satirical treatise: A Theology of Pipe Smoking

Pet hate #162: quasi-legal email disclaimers

We've all seen it: the seemingly friendly and innocent email that ends with a sudden outburst of quasi-legal rhetoric – a strange and often random mix of disclaimers, requests, threats and proscriptions. I've even seen some disclaimers framed as contractual statements, as though the person receiving the email had entered (without knowing it) into a legal contract with the sender. Other disclaimers offer politically correct threats and assurances ("employees of this company must not use this email for abusive or vilifying or inappropriate purposes blah blah; any opinions expressed are not those of the company or its affiliates, blah").

We've all seen this sort of thing. We all assumed it was just a fad. But the continuing prevalence of such email disclaimers may well be one of the surest signs that the end of Western Civilisation is at hand.

But anyway, after careful legal advice, I realised that I needed my own email disclaimer – so I've gone ahead and composed one. I'll be using this from now on in all my emails, and you're also welcome to use it as a footer to your own emails. It can add an impressive sense of gravitas when you're forwarding YouTube clips or pictures of cats to your friends.

--

The message that you have just read might possibly be legally privileged and/or confidential and is intended only for the use of those to whom it is intended. We hope and insist that no recipient will ever forward, print, copy, scan, read aloud, film, choreograph, broadcast via radio or other media, podcast, vodcast, tweet, blog, translate into foreign languages, transcribe in crayon, versify in iambic pentameter, or otherwise reproduce this message in any manner that would allow any of the message to be viewed by any individual not originally intended as an intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, STOP IN THE NAME OF THE LAW. We beseech you in the name of the law: please don't ever copy, forward, disclose, speak of, print, report, joke about, or otherwise use this message or any part of it in any way whatsoever, never ever. If you received this e-mail by mistake, please read this disclaimer IMMEDIATELY, then advise the sender immediately, then delete this message, then empty the trash on your computer, then YOU MUST also use an appropriate software program to permanently erase all traces of the file from your computer's hard drive (and from any other hard drive or portable storage device where the information may be stored). Afterwards, it is strictly prohibited ever to mention, discuss, think of, or remember any of the contents of this message. If you do so, YOU MAY BE LIABLE for litigation or prosecution or indefinite detainment. If you were the intended recipient of this e-mail, you have entered into a BINDING CONTRACT with the sender, allowing you to be imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, exiled, lobotomised, forced to read Dan Brown, deprived of all human rights, and other possible measures that may be introduced from time to time. Thank you.

Who am I? Bonhoeffer's theology through his poetry

Bernd Wannenwetsch, ed., Who Am I? Bonhoeffer's Theology Through His Poetry (T&T Clark 2009), 259 pp. (thanks to T&T Clark for a copy)

I've been waiting eagerly for this book, and I wasn't disappointed. An impressive range of scholars – including Oliver O'Donovan, Stanley Hauerwas, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Hans Ulrich, Brian Brock, Philip Ziegler, and others – offer theological readings of Bonhoeffer's poetry.

The ten poems that Bonhoeffer wrote in Tegel prison in 1944 were among his last works. This book includes the text of the poems (German and English on facing pages), together with an essay on each poem. The kind of close reading modelled in these essays is unfortunately rare in contemporary theology; and the essays show that our own theological horizons can be extended through such a discipline of slow, attentive reading.

Of course, Bonhoeffer was scarcely a first-rate poet. Yet as Marilynne Robinson has observed, poetic language for Bonhoeffer "functions not as ornament but as ontology"; or as Philip Ziegler puts it, "even at its most stylized – as in the prison poems – [Bonhoeffer's] writing advances nothing less than decisive claims about reality" (p. 142). This does not mean that the poems should be regarded merely as "versified theology", as though they could be translated without remainder into prose. The contributors to the volume are aware of this, and so their aim is not so much to explain or interpret the poems as to think along with them and to see what theological possibilities they might open. Indeed, as Hauerwas very aptly remarks: "I do not, however, want to give the impression that the poem is an explanation.... For I assume that one of the tasks of poetry is to teach why 'explanations' are not all that interesting" (p. 101).

Three of the essays here really stand out. Hauerwas offers some incisive reflections on the poem "The Friend". This poem was written for Bonhoeffer's friend Eberhard Bethge; some early readers mistakenly took it to be a poem about a homosexual partnership. "Such an assumption," Hauerwas notes, betrays our own "impoverished understanding of friendship" (p. 100). For Bonhoeffer, friendship belongs not to the sphere of the orders of creation (work, marriage, government). It belongs instead to the sphere of freedom; it is grounded in nothing and has no necessity. It is not divinely mandated, nor is it a matter of ethics and obedience. But since friendship stands outside the mandates of creation, it is also able to transform these mandates, turning them from law to gospel. Marriage, for example, is divinely ordained; it requires obedience and responsibility. But marriage can be "given life by the realm of freedom in which friendship flourishes" (p. 106). It is thus friendship that "saves the mandates from their potential to be repressive" (p. 108). On this basis, Hauerwas goes on to argue that this poem evokes an alternative politics: "'The Friend' is Bonhoeffer's attempt not only to say, but to enact in a world of terror, that God's church exists making friendships possible" (p. 111).

Michael Northcott's essay explores the relation between human identity and spiritual disciplines in the poem "Who am I?" In a brilliant reading of the poem, he critiques the way Rowan Williams and Bernd Wannenwetsch (he might also have mentioned Hauerwas) have "enlisted Bonhoeffer ... in the post-liberal attempt to recover the moral self through the public worship and the politics of the body of Christ" (p. 15). In Northcott's view, Bonhoeffer is not trying to overturn the modern quest for interiority or authentic selfhood. He is comfortable using language of inwardness and individuality; but against modern narratives of the self, he argues "that moral responsibility is the mark of true personhood" (p. 17).

Another critique of postliberal ecclesiology appears in Hans Ulrich's remarkable essay on the poem "Stations on the Way to Freedom" – far and away the most powerful and compelling contribution to the book. Ulrich argues that Bonhoeffer's whole theology is pervaded by the theme of God's acting, God's presence. The poem indicates "the places of God's acting", the stations of God's presence in our lives: God is present where our lives are structured by the disciplines of discipleship; God is present where we act rightly; and God is present where we suffer because of our dedication to God. In ecclesiological terms, this means the church does not represent God's action, but is instead "the place holder for God's acting in the world". As a place holder, the church "does not become the new polis"; it is "the place of transformation, the place of change, the place of giving oneself over to God" (p. 165).

Ulrich thus argues that Bonhoeffer's political theology must be understood as a distinctively Lutheran theology of the cross: not a political theology in which the church represents God's gifts or action, but one in which "God stands in our place – and there happens our suffering because we cannot act any more" (p. 162). And it is only in this way that true freedom appears in our lives: not a freedom consisting in a plurality of options, but a kind of cruciform freedom, the suffering experience of God's presence, guidance and action.

I've highlighted just three of the essays here: but this whole collection is an exciting, creative, tightly focused exploration of Bonhoeffer's poetry and theology. It's not only an invaluable contribution to Bonhoeffer studies; it also contributes significantly to contemporary conversations about ecclesiology, ethics, politics, and human identity.

A poem by Geoffrey Hill: the minor prophets

Today's Sunday poem is from Geoffrey Hill's recent collection, A Treatise of Civil Power (Penguin 2007).

The Minor Prophets

Joel in particular; between the Porch
and the Altar – something about dancing
or not dancing. No, weeping; but in the Bible
there's so much about dance; often of ill omen;
the threats of scorched earth and someone who resembles
the Scorpion King. They should film Joel:
A fire devoureth before them; and behind
them a flame burneth.

Outside the box

A university sermon by Kim Fabricius

Reading: II Corinthians 5:11-21

At the beginning of a new academic year, I thought it would be good to begin at the beginning with – with faith: with suggesting that an essential dimension of faith, which is not foregrounded nearly as much as it should be, is that faith is an imaginative vision of reality, that faith begins with seeing, with seeing the world differently, sub specie aeternitatis – “from the perspective of the eternal” – which, for Christians, means from the perspective of the future of which the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the apocalypse now.

Or, in the jargon, faith entails thinking (and feeling and acting) “outside the box” of what has been called the contemporary “social imaginary” – of democratic liberalism, consumerist capitalism, and scientific fundamentalism – those construals of reality that purport to define reality, and amount to the default human ecology in which we all live and move and have our being. Faith is the habit of the heart and mind of Christ that re-construes, re-configures the world in the light of our new creation in Christ.

For the rest, I simply tell you a parable of “thinking outside the box”. One day Scot Ernest (Lord) Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, received a phone call. It was from a colleague who was about to fail a student in an exam but for the fact that the student himself claimed a perfect paper. The colleague and the student agreed to ask if Rutherford would be the deciding examiner.

The exam question was: “Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer.” The student had answered: “Attach a long rope to it, lower it to the street, and then pull it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building.” And the answer works. However it wasn’t the expected answer, the conventional answer: namely, that you use the barometer to measure the atmospheric pressure at the bottom and the top of the building; the pressure is less at the top, and factoring in the weight of the air, you calculate the height of the building.

So the student was offered another try. He was given six minutes to provide an answer that demonstrated some knowledge of physics. After five minutes, the student’s paper was still blank. Asked if he wished to give up, he said, “No, I’ve got several answers, I’m just thinking of the best one.”

In the next minute he dashed off the answer: “Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch. Then, using the formula for the rate of the fall of a body, calculate the height of the building.” The student was given almost full credit.

As he was leaving the room, the examiners called him back. They were curious: what were the other answers he had to the problem? “Well,” the student said, “there are many ways to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and measure the length of the building’s shadow, and the height of the barometer itself and the length of its shadow, and then by using simple proportion, you calculate the height of the building.

“Or,” he said, “there is a more direct method. Take the barometer and walk up the stairs of the building. As you climb the stairs, mark off the length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks, and this will give you the height of the building in barometer-units.

“Or,” he said, “you could take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower it to just above the street, then swing it like a pendulum. You then calculate the height of the building by the period of the swing.

“There are still other ways of solving the problem,” the student continued. “But probably the best way is to take the barometer to the basement of the building and knock on the superintendent’s door. When he answers, say, ‘My dear Mr. Superintendent, I have here an excellent barometer. If you tell me the height of your building, I will give you the barometer as a gift.’”

Well, the examiners were gobsmacked. When they recovered their composure, they asked the student if he knew the standard answer to the question. “Of course,” he replied. “But I am fed up with high school and university teachers trying to tell me how to think.”

And the name of the student of this perhaps apocryphal story? Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to quantum theory.

Finally, from a physicist to a poet. Williams Blake said: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” Yes, and a Christian sees not the same world that a non-Christian sees. We see “Easter in ordinary” (Nicholas Lash), the world transformed by grace, generously sprinkled with signs of God’s coming kingdom. It is on the basis of this imaginative vision that we are called to think differently and act differently, called to radical discipleship in which we begin to live tomorrow’s life today.

Caption contest winner

Well, the caption contest has been won by a clean sweep. The commenter identified as "Fat" received an overwhelming majority of votes for the caption: "I got it from the toilet - it's the only water I can reach." Congratulations!

For a prize, "Fat" may choose one of the following books, courtesy of IVP Academic, T&T Clark, and Brazos Press:

Douglas A. Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word: A Model of Faith and Thought (IVP 2009)

Jason E. Vickers, Wesley: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark 2009)

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Brazos 2009)