Dissident doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

The pope tweets – and then retires. You think that’s a coincidence?

The 2013 Super Bowl was the eschatological full Monty: two weeks of purgatorial tack, including Bible-bashing bullshit; the heavenly butted Beyoncé at halftime; two teams elegantly beating the hell out of each other; even a power blackout, surely God’s judgement (Katrina-lite) on the Big Easy’s hookers, gamblers, and gays.

Let’s get this, er, straight: God does not hate fags. God not only loves gays, he likes, enjoys gays, delights in their company (cf. James Alison). God does not hate fag-haters either, God loves homophobes too. Maybe (with Alisonian generosity, though it’s a stretch) God even likes them. It would be nice if they would return the favour.

Any reservations I had about gay marriage – ever since I gave it any thought, I have always supported the blessing gay unions – have finally dissipated after observing the way it has divided the Tories and undermined their chances of winning the next general election. I mean, that’s got to be providential, right?

An NRA national convention is not a pretty sight: a spectacle of mass mensicide.

Initially horrified to hear that there are American churches where you can bear firearms at worship, I now think, hey, at least there’s always a chance that someone will shoot the preacher.

Responding to an excerpt from an interview with N.T. Wright in which the British scholar speaks of the incredulity with which the developed world regards the religious right’s opposition to a national healthcare system, one blogger commented: “Yes, of course American conservatives want more sick and dead people. That’s it exactly.” He thought he was being ironic.

In the early 70s I settled in the UK as an expat. Today I’d be an asylum seeker. A recurring nightmare is that I am in a holding cell at Heathrow awaiting rendition.

Know your Bible, keep the commandments, exercise self-control, choose a righteous lifestyle (for sin is a matter of choice and you’re responsible), keep yourself pure (for the world is corrupt), grow up (don’t be a baby), suffer in silence, be a good citizen, fear hell, keep it simple. Recognise your kind of Christianity in these ten, er, propositions? Don’t let it worry you that a Pelagian could tick all the boxes.

A Pelagian is an Augustinian who has never grown up.

It figures that Marilynne Robinson is a Calvinist: her writing is irresistibly graceful.

I really like Anne Lamott, I do. I sense a soul-mate (getting wrecked and reading recklessly opened her mind). But now that I have read three of her many books – well, you should read it too.

Imagine having a “personal relationship with Jesus”. Exactly.

For some complementarians, it’s wasn’t Adam and Eve, it was Adam and Jeeves.

The Bible, of course, is a library, not a book. Still, you may read it from cover to cover – though the wisest theological and literary strategy is to start at the end and work backwards, for that’s the only way the Bible really makes sense. 

It embraces the intellectual, the somatic, and the improvisatory – the restlessly probing mind, the desiring body, the spirit in pilgrimage – and the full range of the affections – praise and joy, anguish and lament, acceptance and protest. That is why, for me, jazz is the epitome of (dreadful term, I know) Christian music.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Of course: the political and electoral systems of liberal democracies are a game, a game that’s fixed, a game of two haves.

The only good argument for Establishment I know is that Rowan Williams now sits in the House of Lords (as [the Red?] Baron Williams of Oystermouth) – admittedly beside the atrocious argument of George Carey.

If the living dead are zombies, then the dead living are …? Fundies, I guess (cf. Jaroslav Pelikan on the “dead faith of living people”). Call them pistiscides.

The question is not WWJD but WIJD.

On the kingdom of God belonging to children, after he had finished the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Now let’s play pretend …”

The good news is that grandchildren are the most wonderful creatures in the world. The bad news is that you’ve got to have children to get them.

Favourite word-play of all time: Obit anus, abit onus. – Schopenhauer, on the death of a woman to whom he had been paying disability allowance for 26 years after physically throwing her out of his apartment.

Speaking of Schopenhauer, I’ve just been re-perusing a collection of his works – for light relief after finishing Robert Martin’s biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Opening Day for the Mets this year is April 1. You couldn’t make it up. Mind, it’s also the day after Easter, and the day my wife had a quadruple bypass four years ago. Hope springs eternal!

A letter to Pope Benedict XVI

Your Holiness,

I hope you will forgive me the impertinence of writing to you – I who am not only young and a layperson but also one of those "separated brethren" of the protestant churches. The only claim I can make on your attention is that I have prayed for you sometimes, and so have come to feel that curious bond of affection that grows up between lives otherwise so widely separated but joined, as if under one roof, in prayer.

So you are stepping down, handing the job over to a younger man. You explain that you are tired and old, that you want to retire to the cloister and eke out your last days in lonely prayer. When your predecessor, Blessed John Paul II, noticed that he was no longer young, he turned even his age and illness, even his dying, into a visible sign of God's presence in frail flesh. But you've taken another road. The silence of the cloister, and beyond that the silence of the grave and the deeper silence of the living Word, have been calling to you, and you have answered that call. 

And who could blame you? You haven't exactly presided over the brightest hour of the church's history, have you? But none of us gets to choose our time. We are here, now, and we have to make the best of it, even if at times we seem to spend our lives paying off the debts of former generations, or suffering for their mistakes. Leading the church must feel sometimes like trying to keep a ship on course when someone else has been there before you putting holes in the hull. And then you get to the end of it all and wonder whether you did a decent job or whether you just created more holes for the next person to deal with.

But forgive me, Holy Father, I am forgetting myself. It is, after all, the church we're talking about (I will even use the Catholic capital for once: the Church), not just some troublesome institution. And the church has no leaders, only servants. Or rather it has one leader, always the same, he who loved us and washed us from our sins by his own blood. How easy to forget that the church today – with all its troubles, its sins, its sadness, its calamitous attempts to manage its PR – is the very same church that was planted in the testimony of apostles, watered by the blood of martyrs, nourished by the prayers of holy saints. How easy to forget that the church is not ours but God's, and that God leads and sustains the church by secret means of which no tongue can tell. You never forgot this, Holy Father, that is why you had the freedom to take this step, to lay aside your office and creep unburdened into the mystery of prayer.

I don't know what your legacy will be, Holy Father, and none of us can guess where the church's future lies. Except to say that the church's life today is hidden in the same place it was always hidden, in Christ who is in God.

Today, Holy Father, when the ash of last year's burned palm branches is smeared across my face, I will pray for you. I will pray for your successor – brave fellow, whoever he is! – and for all those poor courageous souls who hand their lives over into the service of God's church, living by trust when they cannot see the way, living by hope when their hearts are heavy, living by love because love is at the bottom of it all – for God is love.

Yours respectfully in Christ, &c.

A great difference

Last night I dreamt of Jacques Derrida. Not Derrida himself exactly, but his books, I dreamt of his books. I dreamt that he had written a new book and that someone had given me a copy as a gift. In the dream I unwrapped the paper, I held the book, and my joy was palpable. I took the new book to my shelf. It was a special shelf in my house, very precious to me because it contained in chronological order all the works of Jacques Derrida, my favourite author. 

I woke stricken, distraught, sick with confusion and remorse. Has the self no integrity? Is nothing true? Can one person become another in a dream? 

St Augustine was right: "The moment when I pass from wakefulness to sleep, or return again from sleep to wakefulness, marks a great difference in me."

The weird pedigree of biblical inspiration: Marcion, Origen, and the problem of the Old Testament

As far as I can tell it is Marcion who comes up with the first full-blown "Christian" theory of biblical inspiration. It is fundamental to Marcion's system that the Hebrew scriptures are divinely inspired. They are a perfect, utterly reliable revelation, word for word and letter for letter. But there's a sinister twist in this doctrine of inspiration. For these Hebrew scriptures are inspired not by a good God but by the Demiurge, the wicked god of the Jews. In Israel's scriptural writings this god has given us a completely reliable revelation of his (monstrous) deeds and character. Corresponding to Marcion's theory of inspiration is a commitment to literal interpretation. Read literally, the Hebrew scriptures plainly show the Jewish god to be a god of violence, wrath, jealousy, injustice, ineptitude, and petty legalism. 

So the function of divine inspiration in Marcion's system is clear: it's a way of forcing the problems of the Hebrew Bible out into the open. If every word is inspired then there's no way to escape the problematic texts. And when it comes to interpretation, there's no allegorical wiggle-room. In Marcion, biblical inspiration – with its correlate, literal interpretation – is an anchor for the all-important doctrine of the badness of the Jewish God (and, by implication, the badness of the Jewish people).

Writing a century later, Origen attacks the Marcionite system at its roots. He speaks of scripture as "One Testament" of Hebrew and Christian writings. He develops a science of textual criticism and produces the first Christian commentaries on entire books of Hebrew and Christian scripture, incorporating immense philological, archeological, and historical learning. Crucially, his exegesis aims to demonstrate that beneath the letter of scripture is a pervasive spiritual sense. Not just select passages but the whole of scripture invites christological interpretation. 

And this is where the theory of biblical inspiration comes into play. In authoring scripture, Origen argues, God has deliberately planted all sorts of interpretive obstacles: problems, difficulties, mistakes, morally objectionable stories, and so forth. These manifold obstacles lead us to press beneath the surface of the text and to search more deeply for its spiritual meaning. Such spiritual exegesis isn't just a scholarly technique. It requires ascetic purification, the spiritual transformation of the reader. So the problems in scripture – the same problems which Marcion takes as proof of divine wickedness – are planted there by God to lead us into the depths of spiritual life, just as a wise teacher might plant mistakes in a class discussion in order to lead the class, gently and unobtrusively, towards the truth. 

Origen's exegesis lays the foundations for all later Christian interpretation of scripture. His conclusions are as far removed from Marcion's as the east is from the west. But what's interesting is how much he takes over from Marcion. Like Marcion, Origen sees the scriptural text as divinely inspired. And like Marcion, he sees biblical inspiration not as a way of avoiding difficulties (à la some modern evangelicals!), but as a way of radicalising the problematic aspects of scripture.

But it is part of Origen's genius to assimilate the Marcionite theory of inspiration, to absorb it into his own system so completely and so systematically that the Marcionite reading of scripture seems not only exegetically superficial (in as much as Marcion sticks to the surface of the text) but also lacking in ascetic seriousness. When you recall that the whole appeal of the Marcionites was their commitment to asceticism, Origen's deployment of the theory of inspiration must be judged a tactical tour de force in the campaign against heresy.

Demented doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

Most hilarious Christmas holiday moment: Vincent Nichols, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, accoutred in camp Christmas vestments, declaiming with the authority of vast ecclesial experience that the Government’s plans for gay marriage are “undemocratic” and “Orwellian”. 

Sure, prayer in schools would prevent gun crime. Look at the UK. Here a daily act of worship in schools is a legal requirement. And gun crime is rare. Admittedly, so too are guns. Oh, and belief in God. However, with the apocalyptic advent of gay marriage, the imminent collapse of the family, and the inevitable ensuing moral chaos, we will no doubt be renaming our local elementary educational establishment “OK Corral Primary School”.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. However, if it also thinks like a duck, it’s probably Mike DHuckabee.

Bread and circuses: twofers now available at Mars Hill Communion services.

Barak Obama, 

Building barns of bad karma,

Will reap what he has sown – 

With the drone.

They’re Muslim, foreign, far away; and, of course, they constitute collateral rather than targeted damage (thank God for the principle of double effect, right?). Perish the thought, then, that there might be a connection (not, to be sure, of lament) between the gunned-down children of Sandy Hook and the drone-dispatched children of Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan: that is, between our domestic and international culture of killing kids. Same principality/power: Arma.

A Shiite once started a war against Saddam Hussein. You could take out an i and the e.

Breaking news: Michael Bird reports on an “emerging consensus” that “women can share in the didactic ministry of the church” (January 22). I think he means may share. Still, there’s progress on Dr. Johnson’s mal mot that “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

I asked God, “What is the one thing needful?” She replied, “Multitasking.”

Suggested title for a short apologetic theology on the motherhood of God: Mère Christianity.

The greatest preacher and sermon I’ve ever heard? That’s easy: John Coltrane, A Love Supreme.

A lot of people, some big names included, are leaving Protestant churches and joining Rome. I understand the lure, I do. It’s like you’re on one of thousands of crappy little craft lost at sea when – “Ahoy!” – you spy this immense ship which promises stability, durability, and direction. Like an oil tanker.

How would I describe the way we, as a culture, treat people with dementia? Nazi-lite.

Someone says of someone with dementia, “If I get like that, shoot me.” And I think, “If I get like that, shoot me.”

I wish I could paint. I have two canvases in my mind’s eye. The first, The Crucified with Dementia at the moment of the “cry of non-recognition”. Then the prequel, set in Gethsemane at the moment of Mark 14:50: Christ with Dementia Forsaken by His Friends.

As Augustine (almost) said, love God and will what you do.

If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the love of contingency comes a close second (cf. Father Zosima).

Some say Judas lost his soul when he betrayed Jesus, others when he took his own life. Actually, it was when he became Secretary of (US) to (UK) the Treasury of the Twelve.

Alas, I fear that even an anti-theodicist turns out to be a theodicist.

The distinction between natural evil (otherwise known as Shit Happens) and moral evil may (or may not) be moot when it comes to theodicies, but it is absolutely crucial when it comes to the despicable scapegoating of pundits of the religious right in the aftermath of disasters. 

It’s not only that our God is far too small, it’s that our faith is much too big, fat.

One should regularly go on retreat. Think of it as “downsizing”.

When I’ve got to make a snap decision in a family crisis, I couldn’t care less about WWJD, but I pray for enlightenment about WWAD. (Angie is my wife.)

Remember, the journey of a thousand miles begins with an “Ah shit, I forgot my …”

Books, chapters, even paragraphs are beyond him. An aphorist is a person who spends a lifetime failing to write even one perfect sentence.

Audio sermon: Today this scripture is fulfilled..

On Sunday morning I preached at St Alban's Anglican Church on Luke 4:21, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing". It's available in audio.