Karl Barth's comic theology

Blogging here is a bit light at the moment. So instead of reading F&T, head over and check out the wonderful essay by Jessica DeCou of Chicago Divinity School: "'Too Dogmatic For Words'? Karl Barth's Comic Theology", Religion and Culture Web Forum February 2011. She argues that Barth's legendary combativeness and his legendary humour are two sides of the same coin: a "comic" theology. I think Eberhard Jüngel once described Barth as "the happiest theologian of our age" – and this essay shows that laughter and comedy are important for understanding Barth's thought.

And while you're at it, here's another interesting piece on Barth: John Parratta, "Barth and Buddhism in the Theology of Katsume Takizawa", SJT 64:2 (2011).

Doodlings done

by Kim Fabricius

I am currently repenting of propositions. Jesus wrote no propositions, but he once fingered a doodle (John 8:6b). David Tracy suggests that the fragment is the appropriate form for the spiritual in a postmodern world, and Kevin Hart, commenting on the writing of Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil, says: “the fragment is the vehicle of the infinite and the hope of redemption.” I’ll settle for a smile.

What do I think of the Chicago Statement? Misappropriating Derrida’s famous declaration on deconstruction, I would say, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”

My father was an architect who worked in Manhattan. He used to take clients to two-martini lunches and then work into the evening. His practice helps me to make sense of the argument from design.

A thought on chaos theory: the mass extinction of butterflies in Brazil would be an ecological eucatastrophe for people living in tornado zones in Texas.

If Sarah Palin is elected president, on the following Sunday my text will be longer than my sermon, which will also be a text: the former Proverbs 9:13-18, the latter Luke 4:21.

The composition of the Twelve should tell us what Jesus thinks about PhD students.

A blogger recently tried to insult me by remarking that I was a 60+-year-old acting like a truculent teenager. It’s the only time since I turned 50 that I wished I were 10 years older.

The tragic irony of the doctrine of predestination is that it originates in affliction and culminates in torment.

Will Christ come again? Yes – for the third time.

The main disadvantage of ministerial celibacy is that there is no one at home to remind you, at least occasionally, that you are a shit, not God’s gift.

In the archetypal conversion story, the cry is “Once I was blind, but now I see!” Funny, Saul’s experience was just the opposite.

Apart from him being a whole lot smarter than me, Stanley Hauerwas and I are similar in several ways. He loves cats and baseball, and he goes running. And there is another thing that the asshole and I have in common …

Once my synod had an Education Officer. Then the title was changed to Training Officer. I suppose next it will be The Facilitator. Followed by the Terminator.

I am beginning to change my mind about the ethics of assisted suicide. I mean with respect to the church. Except that soon assistance will be superfluous.

Matthew, Luke, and John, after reading Mark, were dissing the second evangelist. One of them sniggered, “He’s a few verses short of a gospel.”

Did you hear about the guy who went to a public lecture on penal substitution thinking that he was going to hear about state-of-the-art cosmetic surgery?

At American football games there is always some guy standing in the crowd holding a large placard with “John 3:16” written on it. The Mets are offering him a summer job at Citi Field – with the scripture “John 11:35”.

If you are a Roman Catholic or a Lutheran and find yourself on trial for being a conscientious objector, take the Fifth – Commandment.

Where would advocates of modern Just War theory be without Adolf Hitler?

The best explanation of John Milbank is that he is a Puritan. Disagree with J. Edgar Hoover and you were a communist. Disagree with John Milbank and you are a nihilist. As Mark Twain said, “To the pure, all things are unpure.”

Theological illiteracy is getting so bad in our churches that soon we will be referring to Jesus as “Whatshisname” and the Trinity as the “Threesome”.

A proposal for the translation of ekklesia: “kindergarten”.

If a lion could talk, I still wouldn’t have him to dinner.

Ben asks, “Why do we close our eyes when praying?” And he is right to object that praying is “not a withdrawal into the silent recesses of the self.” But we also close our eyes when we kiss, when we melt into the silent recesses of the other.

Suggested title for a brief introduction to theology by Ben Myers: A Short Story on Christian Doctrine.

Twelve common abbreviations in Paul’s emails

Salutation: MTFBWU
Praise: ^5!
Advice (modest): WAG
Advice (forthright): IMNSHO
After answering a question: HTH
Impatience: AWGTHTGTTA?
Mocking incomprehension: WTF?
me genoito: NFW
Reference to Judaizers: FUBAR
Response to boasters: BFD
On apostleship: GR&D
Valediction: TAFN

Great first sentences

Let me be honest with you for once. Almost nothing in the world gives me greater joy than a book with a good first sentence. I was discussing this with my eight-year-old daughter tonight, and we started rummaging among our bookshelves, looking for our favourite first sentences. For my money, the best first sentence ever written is the opening of Melville’s Moby-Dick. ‘Call me Ishmael.’

Here are some of my other favourites from fiction:

• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield: ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’
• J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye: ‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.’
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’
• Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’
• Peter Carey, Bliss: ‘Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness.’
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….’
• James Joyce, ‘A Painful Case’ (in Dubliners): ‘He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.’ (OK, I’m cheating: that is actually from the second paragraph of the story – but it’s one my favourite sentences of all time, so I couldn’t help including it.)
• Jorge Luis Borges is a great first-sentence writer. His story ‘The Library of Babel’ starts like this: ‘The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries.’ And another story, ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, begins: ‘Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.’
• Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away: ‘Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.’
• Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories: ‘There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.’
• Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: ‘Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and reach other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.’ (I know, it's two sentences – but it's damn good!)
• David Lodge, Changing Places: ‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.’
• Anita Brookner, The Debut: ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.’

Scholars are not usually very good at giving their books a delightful first sentence (since most scholars believe boredom is a sign of intellectual seriousness). But there are some notable exceptions – for instance, C. S. Lewis begins his great book A Preface to Paradise Lost with these words: ‘The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used.’ And another literary critic, James Wood, begins The Broken Estate: ‘The real is the atlas of fiction, over which all novelists thirst.’

As a rule, theologians are hopeless at this sort of thing (as James K. A. Smith observes in a recent post). But again there are, thank God, some exceptions. I’m thinking for instance of John Milbank, who has some artful and memorable opening sentences. Theology and Social Theory famously begins: ‘Once, there was no secular.’ And The Word Made Strange: ‘Today, theology is tragically too important.’ Stanley Hauerwas also has a good opening line to his recent memoir, Hannah's Child – evoking the tradition of the novel, he begins: ‘I did not intend to be “Stanley Hauerwas”.’

Karl Barth is of course legendary for his artful prefaces (he is, as a matter of fact, one of the real masters of the preface genre). His finest moments always come later in the prefaces, but he still has some cracking good first lines:

• CD I/2: 'It is not we who can sustain the Church, nor was it our forefathers, nor will it be our descendants.'
• CD IV/2: 'I am sorry to have disappointed those (perhaps not a few) who had counted on taking this continuation of the Church Dogmatics with them on their summer or autumn holidays.'

And then there is the incomparable G. K. Chesterton, who begins his autobiography with this marvellous sentence: ‘Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.’ (OK, technically that was two sentences: but who’s counting?)

Anyway, my daughter also chose her own favourites from various children’s novels:

• J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan: ‘All children, except one, grow up.’
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol: ‘Marley was dead: to begin with.’
• Kate Forsyth, The Puzzle Ring: ‘Hannah Rose Brown was not quite thirteen years old when she discovered her family was cursed.’
• Tony Davis, Roland Wright, Future Knight: ‘These days it is considered rude to chop a man’s arm off with a battleaxe, even when you don’t like him.’
• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’
• C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: ‘There was a boy called Eustance Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.’

Which makes me think that we theologians could learn quite a lot from children's fiction.

Yet more doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

Yesterday, séances; today, NDEs.

Hell’s Bell – a double-predestinarian responds to Love Wins.

Double or Nothing – an annihilationist responds to Love Wins.

Sign at the entrance to Hell: “Due to global warming, we have relocated to Pittsburgh.”

Man Well Drest: the Versace Guide to Prayer.

Have you ever noticed how some people pray freely by rote?

Some Christians, at prayer meetings, say they justwanna praise Jesus for this, and justwanna thank Jesus for that, and justwanna ask Jesus for the other thing. For Christ’s sake, I think, just go ahead and do it!

Of course God answers prayer. I have seen it happen. Once, indeed, at a prayer meeting of local evangelical church leaders. One pastor prayed and prayed and prayed to the Lord that we be delivered from cruelty, torture, and oppression. Then the meeting ended.

The shema of the postmodern church: “Hear, O Israel, get into tribes and share your stories.”

Every morning I look in the mirror to shave and feel immense self-loathing at the human being I have become. This Lent I finally decided to do something radical about it: I am growing a beard.

Augustine said that most sins were committed by people crying and groaning. That would explain the bishop of Hippo’s identification of sex with sin.

Whenever you hear a preacher preach on “unconditional” grace, make sure you can see both his hands.

A preacher once told me that he always times his sermons. I felt like telling him that he should try using a watch instead of a calendar.

In Britain Christians don’t believe in the fall, they believe in the autumn.

Imagine the crisis in American Christianity over the liturgical year if it were discovered that Jesus rose on Super Bowl Sunday.

The trinitarian theology of penal substitution: two people and a missing person.

Some people read the Sermon on the Mount as if Jesus were looking for their opinion.

Why have American right wing televangelists not been shouting that the earthquake and tsunami are God’s judgement on Japan? It’s the economy, stupid.

An elderly woman, recently widowed, once anxiously asked me how, when she died, she would find her husband in heaven amidst the multitude. I gently pulled her leg. “The problem,” I said, “won’t be locating but identifying him. Just remember, don’t go looking for an old bald guy with dentures.”

Silliness is the most neglected of virtues. Silliness is next to godliness.

What was God doing before he created the world? I suspect he was doing some forward planning and thinking about Holy Saturday.

The United Reformed Church will soon be launching a new evangelistic campaign based on the premise that “advertising is the language of our time”, and created to “cut through the platitudes and clichés that have so often characterised church communications.” That cemeterial sound is George Orwell turning in his grave.

The question isn’t WWJD but what would Peter do. Then just do the opposite.

If a Catholic priest drops the host, does he pick it up or help it up?

If the authors of an inerrant Bible took an exam on their subject, I guess an extra credit question would be rather pointless, wouldn’t it?

Ninety percent of the university consists of dark matter. That is not a misprint.

On prayer: fourteen theses

I’ve been staying all weekend at a Catholic monastery, which prompted some theses on prayer:

1. What is prayer? It is the eyes of the world looking back at God (Pavel Florensky).

2. Can theology penetrate into the mystery of prayer? Yes: theology burrows into prayer as the ant makes its tiny tunnels in the earth’s immense dark turning orb.

3. Once when I was sleeping, the sound of rain on the roof became, in my dream, the hammer of war drums beating in a jungle: a real sound, vibrating in my ears, echoed in the chamber of my dreams. In the same way, the vibration of eternity echoes in the chamber of our world when people pray.

4. Prayer is restlessness and silence and sadness. It is jubilation and a cup running over and the sound of all the gum trees clapping hands.

5. ‘We do not know how to pray’ (Rom 8:26). The whole uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth lies in this: that he knows how to pray, because he knows to whom he is speaking. His greatest miracle was not healing or walking on water or driving out devils, but teaching his followers to say, ‘Our Father’ (Luke 11).

6. Why do we close our eyes when praying? Prayer is not a turning inwards, not a withdrawal into the silent recesses of the self. Prayer is open-eyed attention. It is waiting all day on the shore for the glimpse of a rare bird. ‘You must wear your eyes out, as others their knees’ (R. S. Thomas).

7. Nothing could be further from the truth than the notion of prayer as a spontaneous inner glow or an uncontrollable gush of sentiment. Prayer is discipline, order, hardship, habit, obedience: whatever it is that makes up a life, that is what prayer requires.

8. Prayer and obedience are one. The monastery – that momentous institutionalisation of prayer – is founded on this truth. In order to pray, I bind myself to a rule, bend my will to another, submit to a grievous curtailment of the self. The vow of celibacy in many religious orders signifies this curtailment. There is some part of what it means to be human that is crushed in prayer. For the person bound to prayer, it would not be right to represent life as fruition, satisfaction, fulfilment.

9. At the same time, there is no greater freedom than the freedom to pray. Does God command us to pray? Yes – just as you might give water to a thirsty man, and command him to drink. God gives us permission to speak to God: that is the whole liberty of the gospel.

10. ‘There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in’ (Leonard Cohen). The life that prays is an ontological fissure, a crack in being. In prayer, shards of light break through, and the creatures that dwell in darkness rub their dazzled eyes.

11. What is it that really sustains the church’s life and witness? Our sacramental hierarchy? Our teachers and clerics? Our projects and resources? Our thick books of doctrine and law? Or is the whole church perhaps upheld by one old woman who shuts herself away all day to cry to God with sighs too deep for words?

12. God is colour-blind. All that is powerful and wise and impressive, all those things blur together as a single colour – God can hardly make out the difference between them. Only the small, secret things are clear and distinct to God’s poor eyesight. The secrecy of prayer makes us visible to God: ‘your Father sees what is done in secret’ (Matt 6:6).

13. We often complain about unanswered prayer. But if sometimes God doesn’t listen, or doesn’t hear, or doesn’t answer, we ought to be relieved. The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind – and Job was lucky to survive the ordeal. Nothing is more terrifying than the prospect of an answered prayer. ‘For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return’ (Annie Dillard).

14. Sometimes I think prayer is all that matters. Sometimes I hardly dare to pray.

On Kindle

Speaking of Kim Fabricius, you can now get him on Kindle: