Faith & Theology is open again

I have had a long and rather intimate relationship with Ben Myers. For example: I have lived in his house, slept in his bed, mowed his lawn (or not), driven his car, drank his whisky, and helped raise his dog. In light of all this, I suppose it's not entirely unsurprising that I'm now taking over his blog.

It's not that there was ever anything untoward between Ben and me. It's just that he's one of the most generous people around. I first encountered Ben, not by reading Faith & Theology, but when he read and commented on something I had written online when I was still an undergraduate in California. Then I started to follow him here and on social media, enjoying the open-handed verve with which he pursued theological learning. I noticed that Ben's engagement with texts and ideas was always top-notch, but also that everyone was welcome at his table.

Several years later I started looking into Ph.D. programs in theology. I had my heart set on a big name school in either the U.S. or the U.K. The only thing was, I had no viable way to pay for one of these programs. Desperate, I started praying that Providence would make a way for me. During this period I reached out to Ben Myers on a whim, just to ask if he supervised Ph.D. research. The very next day, we spoke on Skype. Within months I was applying for a doctoral program at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Not only was I accepted, but Ben worked his charm and secured a full tuition waiver for this foreign student.

I arrived in Australia in 2012 when Ben and his family were on sabbatical in Germany. My wife and I spent our first couple of months living in Ben's home and caring for his legendary dog, Kola (R.I.P.). For the next several years Ben's generosity continued. He shared his life with me, taught me how to write, allowed me to teach alongside him, and saw me through to the end of my Ph.D. thesis in 2017. For my wife and me Ben's help was the key that opened the door to one of the most meaningful periods of our lives. We made many friends, we became Australian citizens, and we found our ecclesial home in the Anglican church. Perhaps most importantly, in emulation of Ben we acquired a goofy black Labrador Retriever.

I now live in Washington, D.C. where I minister at a church on Capitol Hill. I love my life here, but I've come to miss the rich theological community Ben creates around him wherever he goes. I want to find my way back into what I saw with Ben by going forward in my own way. Because of this I recently tweeted that I was thinking of starting a blog. Within hours I had a predictably generous message from Ben, offering me Faith & Theology. Everything came full circle today when I once again met with Ben through Skype and he handed me the reins. Like Elisha to Elijah, I requested from Ben a double portion of his spirit.  He said that, unfortunately, he had given away .6 of his spirit, and therefore that he could give me only a 1.4 portion.

Faith & Theology is open again. Stay tuned for posts on theology, philosophy, and culture, as well as reflections on scripture and book reviews. I can't fill Ben's shoes. I know this to be true because I've actually worn them before and they don't fit me.

Faith & Theology is closed

 Fourteen years and 2600 posts later, this blog is now closed. It's been a lot of fun. But I don't quite have the heart to keep the blog going after the death of Kim Fabricius. I won't delete the site, but there will be no further posts. Feel free to browse the archives – and thanks to all our loyal readers over the years.

Kim’s last doodlings

by Kim Fabricius, 1948-2018

Kim’s family sent me through his final batch of doodlings, posted posthumously here. (Kim, your last doodling is incorrect. But I won’t hold it against you.)

Two keys to self-knowledge: acknowledging that you are ashamed of yourself, and being able to make fun of yourself.

The superficial explanation for why some people don’t like tragedy is that it’s depressing; the deeper reason is that in tragedy there is no one to blame.

Most people couldn’t care less about why bad things happen to good people, they are only concerned with why bad things happen to me. Like Job, they think they’re the centre of the universe: theodicy reduced to cosmic egotism.

Title for a book on the doctrine of election in Calvin and Barth: Will and Grace.

The term “speaking in tongues” always makes me smile: it’s the irrepressible suggestion of oral sex.

The root of all misogyny (Girardianly speaking) is boys showing off.

“Don’t tell lies.” But the most insidious mendacity is mute.

Bible verse on a plaque in the birthing unit of a maternity ward: “Jesus said, ‘Come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you an epidural.”

In Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, the sage and shrewd Dr Oreshchenkov observes that “it’s the truest of all tests for a doctor to suffer from the disease he specializes in.” So too for the clergy. A self-righteous minister is bad, a righteous minister worse.

Evangelical Americans: so understandably concerned about whether an unborn child has feelings, so indefensibly indifferent that a grown-up child – their president – doesn’t.

Combining funny-peculiar and funny-ha-ha, the Church of England seems to think that the Divine Comedy is a Punch and Judy pantomime.

Augustine is said to have remarked, “The Church is a whore, but she’s my mother.” Well, better a whore than a harridan.

On Luke 10:25-37: In order to be a good Samaritan, one must first become a half-dead Jew: lest you succumb to pride, he is your focal identification. 

“The widow? Easy pussy – go for it. The orphan? Little shits of color – normalize motherlessness (Herod, btw, was a classy guy, smart, tough). And the stranger? Keep the vermin out; otherwise, concentration camps.” —Trump’s exegesis of  Exodus 22:22-24 and Deuteronomy 10:18.

“Make America Great Again.” Again? Better make America British again. 

Having an American accent abroad during Trump’s Reign of Terror is like having a tattoo you had done when you were young and stupid but is now impossible to remove. The best you can do is to cover it up, e.g., by insisting, “No, I’m a Canadian.”

When The Complete Tweets of Donald Trump is published, in what section of American bookstores should it squat? Juvenile Fiction? Fantasy? Women’s Studies? Performing Arts? For cultural accuracy, I’d go for “Christianity.”

Death kills, but not for the hell of it. No, for death omnicide is an anti-ontological vocation: Deleo, ergo sum.

Since Cain slew Abel, you could call every homicide a copycat crime.

Christus solus, ergo Islamophilia.

My default facial expression in coffee houses has become the Smirk. Observing the washed having a flat white as a side with their iPhones – uninvited it floods my features. It’s only a matter of time (you’ll be pleased to know) before someone punches me in the face.

One of the pathologies of senescence is verbosity. You can still take off and cruise, but you can’t land the damn plane. You even forget that you are in the air – until you run out of fuel and crash.

“What do people think of me?” The question is both begged and vain: very few people bother to think about me at all. Why would they?

RIP Kim Fabricius, 1948-2018

My friend Kim Fabricius has died. On the weekend I received an email from his family. He was at his local coffee shop when he died, suddenly and unexpectedly. I didn’t realise a person like that could die. I had assumed that a light as bright as Kim’s would never go out.

He used to sit at that coffee shop scribbling his prolific “doodlings” – jokes and aphorisms and insults – on the paper napkins, before sending them to me.

We became friends 12 years ago when Kim started writing with me on the Faith & Theology blog. I loved the guy. He was so funny, so sharp, so widely read, so cultured in an utterly irreverent and self-deprecating way, so over-the-top, so New York. He got his Christianity straight from Karl Barth and Dostoevsky and the Book of Job, which might explain why he didn’t have much patience for cultural Christianity or the platitudes of a feel-good therapeutic faith.

He had become a Christian while reading Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans: at the start of the book he was an unbeliever, and by the end of it he had decided to become a minister of the gospel. (Later, when he had a son, he named him Karl.)

Kim spent a long ministry in a little Reformed congregation in Swansea in the south of Wales. He was a pastor to those people, as you’ll know if you have read any of the innumerable sermons, hymns, and liturgies that he made available online. Not to mention his seemingly endless supply of down-to-earth wisdom about the ministry: “When I prepare couples for marriage and come to the vow ‘till death us do part’, I always tell them to cheer up – it could be longer.” Or this: “It may be easier to negotiate with a terrorist than with a church organist, but it is easier to negotiate with a church organist than with a cat.” Or this: “A minister is something of a jack-of-all-trades – without the skills.”

In some ways Kim was a pastor to me too. We wrote to each other hundreds (or was it thousands?) of times. When I suffered personal griefs and defeats, I would turn to him for counsel. He was a pastoral realist, he liked to face things squarely just as they are, and there was great understanding and great kindness in the way he could talk to you about the challenges of living with ordinary human brokenness. He was one of those people who makes you wonder if there might be a point to having Christian ministers around after all.

Kim was a person with few illusions and much love. “What’s the difference between optimism and hope?” he once asked, and answered: “Hope is for pessimists.”

He wrote once that “God invented the church to give atheists a fighting chance” – yet he devoted his life to serving the church. He railed against America – yet he was proud to be a New Yorker, and he was always contemplating the theological advantages of American sports. In a very characteristic remark, he wrote: “Karl Barth said that when he gets to heaven he will seek out Mozart before Calvin. Quite right – and presumably he spoke to Calvin only to compare errors. Me – I’ll be heading for the choir of angels, to find Sandy Koufax, to see how he made the baseball sing.” (But the pitcher has outlived the pastor. I hope Sandy Koufax will seek out Kim one day and bestow the longed-for benediction.)

Kim and I had formed a strong friendship over the internet before we ever met in person. We met one day in the United States – it was during one of his annual trips to New York to visit his mother – and I was stunned to realise that he was thirty years older than me. His heart and mind were so young, I had assumed that perhaps I was the elder brother. He was old enough to be my father, yet Kim Fabricius was one of the youngest people I have ever known. In his mind there was nothing stagnant or stale. He was still curious, still supple, still exploring the possibilities, still seeing life as an adventure of faith, hope, and love. At the age of 69 he died; and he was only getting started.

Dicey doodlings

 You think you know someone, but of course you don’t know them too. What might you not know about Jesus of Nazareth?

It is not the gift- and skill-sets – the intelligence and imagination, the range of reading, the elegance and wit – that separate the great theologian from the good one. The difference lies not in the brilliance but the defects. It takes a magnificent flaw to make a great theologian.

Ask me who I am and I will tell you my story. The genre, of course, is fiction.

Am I my own best interpreter? What a dumb and diabolical notion. Only God can truly interpret me, which he will do definitively on Judgement Day – deploying, I am confident, post-kritical theory.

What was the takeaway message for the great and the good after listening to that sermon at the royal wedding? The gospel according to John and Paul: “All you need is love (all together now) / All you need is love (everybody) / All you need is love, love / Love is all you need”. An uncomfortable reminder that what a preacher says and what a congregation hears may be two very different things.

A newspaper headline I quite like: “Kim’s a Seoul Man”.

BBC Breaking News (May 22nd): “Brief [Michael Cohen?] to moon Trump on handling Kim”. Oops, sorry: that should be “Moon to Brief Trump on handling Kim”.

Trump’s annotation of Titus 3:2 in his bedside Bible: “Against everything our country stands for. Most over-rated apostle in history. A total loser. Very sad.”

Might Trump win the Nobel Peace Prize? Why not? Though ISIS will present some stiff competition. North Korea, Iran, Israel/Palestine: better the Orwell Peace Prize.

Information is power. Alas, so too is misinformation.

God and I have an admirable arrangement: I need someone to love me and God wants someone to love. We’re the perfect odd couple.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor.” “Absolutely,” agreed the first four disciples: “you cannot worship both Cod and Mammon.”

Following the trajectory, expect praise music to trend as liturgical karaoke.

Revenge is a dish best served with either apomorphine or xylazine.

What’s the difference between parental abuse and neglect? The difference, respectively, between knowing and not knowing whether your children are spending most of their free time on-line.

AI may be the future but another AI is already an everyday reality. I mean Artificial Imbecility: you see it in people whose iPhone is a prosthesis.

Everything passes; nothing lasts. But there are some moments – you know those moments, all but forgotten but suddenly adventitiously triggered – that are with you all your life. Unless you stop and take a picture of them with your goddamn iPhone.

Why do I write – doodlings, propositions, sermons, hymns, whatever? Answer: authorial itch. Of course scratching only makes the pruritus worse, and can lead to all kinds of existential and spiritual lesions.

Waiters – even if the service is terrible, always be kind to them. Not because of WWJD, but because you don’t want your entrée heavily seasoned with gob.

That life can unravel so quickly, uncontrollably, and irreparably – that is the tragic. And faith? Faith does not alleviate, on the contrary, it intensifies tragic affliction. Over the abyss, faith hangs by the thread of hope alone.

The Christian is indeed simul iustus et peccator. He is also simul laetus et miser.

I may or may not be a “real Christian”, but a Christian who tells me I’m not is definitely not.

Who, in Adam, is more likely to understand me better than anyone else? My mother or father, sister or brother, spouse, partner, friend – or perhaps my enemy? No, someone who does not know me: a great novelist.

The best that I can say about me is that I am a placeholder for what I will become.

What is the basis of both Christian ethics and vocation? “What can I do for you?” (Bob Dylan).

Delphic doodlings

Breaking News: “Hell abolishes pope” (source: John Piper).

Their Lord was a loser, his ministry a failure, his death a shambles, so just what did Christians expect when pastors became celebrities?

Peter’s advice to Christians who would boast about their faith: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

If it could be demonstrated that God does not exist, I would, of course, become an atheist. And if it could be demonstrated that God does exist, I would, of course, become an atheist.

“It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” But hey, why not do both?

There is nothing so uninteresting as certainty. Hence our puzzling preoccupation with the most certain thing of all, and therefore the ultimate in boring: death.

The problem with many sermons is that they continue after they conclude.

Good “spiritual directors” aren’t. They are spiritual indirectors.

(After Augustine) If you understand prayer, it’s not prayer you understand. Also: you will never pray if you try, you will only pray if you pray, but you will never know whether or not you have prayed.

So studies show that prayer is good for you. It makes you healthier, happier, more stable. Well, if it’s so beneficial, the hell with it!

Thank God for sorrow. Without sorrow, we would all be such insufferable pricks.

The NRA has more congregants than Episcopalians and not many less than Lutherans and Methodists. Well, Jesus did say, “On LaPierre I will build my church.”

According to a recent poll, the historical event of which the British are proudest is the creation of the NHS (1948), with standing alone against the Nazis (1940) coming a distant second (68%-49%). Imagine that, my fellow Americans. No, I didn’t think you could.

A good teacher is not someone who can give a good answer but someone who can detect a bad question.

Ironic at least, tragic at worst, our neighbour is more likely to be our enemy than the stranger we so fear.

It’s not rocket psychology: we are afraid of strangers because we are afraid of ourselves, my inner others who are split, repressed, denied, or, less pathologically, simply fugitive, obscure, opaque. Xenophobia is misdirected egophobia.

If you want to catch the essence of humanity, observe the faces of the sleeping. We look like imbeciles, don’t we? Or, better still, passport photos. Serial killers, right?

While physicists frantically search for a Theory of Everything, Christians blithely explore a Theory of Everyone: it’s called Christology.

Jeez, the way some Christians are responding to life in a post-Christian culture you’d think that Chicken Licken was a prophet and whinging and sulking fruits of the Spirit.

I’m thinking of taking the Benedict Option. Benedict Arnold, that is. Under the current administration treason seems a conscientious calling.

Why can’t I get my head around Trump, why can’t I feel him? Wittgenstein is helpful. He said, “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.” Well, the same goes for a hyena. Similarly, Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” So of a different life-form we might ask, “What is it like to be The Donald?”

Trumpvangelicals – aka Christian Nihilists.

In the Age of Twitter, Warhol’s “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” has become “everyone will be fatuous in 140 characters.”

Back in the day, I moved in a circle of junkies. I still do, but the addiction du jour is now Facebook, a drug equally toxic, harder to kick, and easier to justify.

To update E. M. Forster’s sigh: “poor little key-pad tapping Christianity”.