Good Friday sermon: lose your faith

A sermon by Kim Fabricius (reposted from Holy Week 2008)

There is a lot of twaddle and guff talked during Holy Week. A few years ago I heard a Good Friday sermon – some of you heard it too – in which it was suggested that Jesus, being a carpenter, in order to distract his attention and ease his pain on the cross, may well have admired the quality of its wood. As if our Lord was thinking, “Nice bit of teak this. It’d make a great desk for the study.” It was positively Pythonesque.

No guff and twaddle today. Today I’m going to try to speak shocking, scandalous, scalding truth, say outrageous, even sacrilegious things. You will probably be too polite to heckle or jeer me, but if you walk out on me I shall consider it the highest compliment. I thought of having the elders hand out eggs for to you to throw at me, but pitied the poor cleaners. But eggs are nothing compared to the darts I’m going to fire at you. It’s time to attack your faith, wound it, leave it bleeding, dying, dead – just like the guy on the cross.

Let’s start with some cherished beliefs. For example: that our redemption was achieved by Jesus suffering more horribly than anyone else. But how could we possibly know that? Crucifixion? Yes, a terrible, terrible form of torture and execution. But Jesus’ was only one among thousands and thousands of crucifixions carried out under the so-called Pax Romana – the Roman Peace – when gibbets would stretch for miles down the Apian Way. And the death of Jesus – mercifully swift it was, he expired by mid-afternoon, most usually languished for days. Besides, after the Inquisition, after Auschwitz and the Gulags, after the killing fields in southeast Asia, the tribal slaughter in Rwanda, the mass graves in the Balkans, how can anyone possibly presume to compare national atrocities and personal tragedies, let alone grade them according to some calculus of pain?

For example: that our redemption was achieved by Jesus facing his death more courageously than anyone else. But clearly this is special pleading. And didn’t the first Christians know it – which is why they were hesitant about sensationalising the death of Jesus in terms of martyrdom. As pagans were quick to point out, rather smugly, Jesus sweating blood in Gethsemane, and crying out in agony on Calvary, compares rather unfavourably with the great philosopher Socrates on death row, calmly drinking the hemlock as he reminds a friend – his last words – to remember to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of heath. For Socrates death was the moment of release, for Jesus a time of despair.

And for example: that our redemption was achieved by Jesus dying at the hands of evil men, particularly “the Jews”. What self-serving propaganda! And what a perverse fillip to the church’s long and shameful history of anti-semitism. No, it was not the bestial but the best that killed Jesus. The state in all its glory and religion at its most awesome killed Jesus: not the mob but the upholders of public order, not the wicked but the standard-bearers of morality. Yes, the trial was conducted with unseemly haste and the evidence was selectively marshalled, but the defendant incriminated himself, confessed even, so (if you like) there were no grounds for appeal. For Jesus did undermine a religious system based on law and cult, and Jesus did threaten a political regime based on violence and retribution. Jesus acted with freedom and broke the rules, embracing the dirty, the deviant, and the dangerous. And Jesus prophetically unmasked the mighty pretensions of the local procurator and publicly subverted Caesar’s claim to lordship. Jesus really did force the hands of Caiaphas and Pilate and leave them no choice but to get rid of him. Better that one man die than that the entire social order be at risk – the tried and trusted scapegoat principle. No doubt about it, this peasant troublemaker from up north profoundly threatened the status quo. He had to go.

So: for one Holy Week forget about the suffering of Jesus, the courage of Jesus, the wickedness of it all. Forget even about the dying of Jesus: it is not to the crucifix, or even to the deposition, that I would direct you – no! Rather look at the man – dead – gaze upon the corpse of Christ, fix your eyes on his cold and rigid body, laid out on a slab, already showing signs of decomposition. I am thinking of Hans Holbein’s painting “Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”. The Russian author Dostoevsky saw the painting, in a museum in Basel, stopping on his way to Geneva, and forever after it haunted him like a nightmare. He describes it in his great novel The Idiot. The character Prince Myshkin says: “Why some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!”

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

No one puts it more starkly – or more honestly and truthfully – than Bonhoeffer. We must recognize, he wrote from prison, “that we have to learn to live in the world ‘as if God were not here’. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! God himself compels us to recognize it… God would have us know that we must live as men and women who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us… Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross” – and then down from the cross and into the grave. “He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.” God a Super-Power? That god is a demon, the Devil. If that god is your Lord, this week is a call for “regime change” (Walter Brueggemann).

So, yes, lose your faith! For as with life, so with faith: only those who lose it will find it. Or rather may find it. Faith is a risk, and discipleship demands that we learn to live with insecurity and uncertainty, setting out on a journey without a map, with companions who are as lost as we are, following a leader who is always way ahead of us, beckoning mysteriously, “Follow me!”, and then vanishing just as we arrive. God is mystery, ineffable mystery, naming a reality that we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to un-know and rethink everything we thought we knew.

But hang on, Kim, frankly you’ve lost us. We don’t know what you’re talking about, but whatever it is, it sounds crazy, foolish. You’ve accomplished the remarkable achievement of making someone like Rowan Williams sound lucid, simple, straightforward. And you’re supposed to be a preacher, and isn’t the whole point of the sermon to make it easier to understand God, to increase our faith, so that we can go back to the world feeling edified, uplifted, and ready to share the Good News? Not today it’s not. Today I can’t help you. This week no one can help you. Come Friday, not even God – especially not God – can help you. And come Saturday, God himself is lying in a tomb. Emptiness. Zero. Nothing. But might it be a pregnant emptiness, a significant zero, a silent nothing that yet says everything? (after Alan E. Lewis). We shall have to wait till Easter. Only then shall we learn that this Week is Holy, and its Friday Good. Only then may we just find a new faith rising from the old faith that I pray you will lose today.

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

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 Kindle

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

More doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

How did Jesus overcome Satan in the wilderness? By proof-texting a proof-texter. That always drives them nuts.

Right-wing Christians are fond of quoting Matthew 26:11a: “you will always have the poor with you.” Thus they turn prophecy into principle – and confirm the truth of Matthew 26:11b: “but you will not always have me.”

Here is a curious thing. Liberal Christians find it hard to believe that God raised the dead Jesus, yet accept without difficulty that God created the world. After the latter, you’d think the former would be a piece of cake.

The New Atheists have come to their senses. Having finally realised that hurling abuse at believers is strategically incompetent, they are now trying flattery. For example, last year Christopher Hitchens called Rowan Williams a “sheep-faced loon”.

I would like to help Christians in the UK who say they suffer from persecution substantiate their case – by feeding them to the lions.

WWJD? Ask Oprah.

Love wins. Fundamentalists in Florida are demanding a recount.

If due to deforestation bears no longer shit in the woods, will the pope still be Catholic?

Finally finishing Douglas Campbell’s massive The Deliverance of God is rather like completing a marathon: you’re deliriously glad you did it – and fucking relieved it’s over.

My wife once threw an ashtray at me. It whizzed by my head and took a chunk out of a brick wall. That is what grace is like – except God doesn’t miss.

A good reader may be a bad writer, but a bad reader will be a bad writer.

Losing your faith is part of the pilgrimage of faith.

Fencing the table works: it keeps out Jesus.

Were we ever to reach unanimous agreement on issues of faith and order, the age of ecumenism would come to an end. So would the church.

If Christians start saying that God is love all the down, where the hell will it end?

Are people who pray happier and healthier than those who don’t? Only if they are not doing it right.

Suggested title for a biography of Herbert McCabe: One for the Road to Emmaus.

Liars exploit truth, bullshitters exploit lies.

Bartimaeus said to Jesus, “Take it from me, Lord, blind people actually walk along together quite safely. It’s when twenty-twenty twits try to help us that ditches become dangerous.” And Jesus said, “Oh.”

Recently a minister in the United Reformed Church wrote an article in which he admitted that while he didn’t understand Paul’s theology, he was quite sure that the apostle was an entrepreneur. Well, he was half right.

God never punishes the successful. He doesn’t need to.

Koan: choosing a vocation.

The first sermon of every preacher has the same title: the Summa Theologica.

Experience may be the best teacher, but it’s a lousy learner.

I used to think that Christians who put the fish symbol on their cars were prats. Now I think they are simply being considerate – by letting people know that there is a crap driver at the wheel.

Blessed are the homeless

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Have you ever been homeless, spent time without a roof over your head? I have. In the autumn of 1971, in Amsterdam, no money, my best mate and I slept in a derelict building for a couple of weeks. Not a pleasant experience. Fear of intruders, fear of the police, but, above all, it’s the cold I remember most – we had only our Moroccan burnooses for cover – the interminable sleepless wait for sunrise and warmth. That was for only a fortnight. But for some people it’s a way of life – and death.

That’s one kind of homelessness – the “homeless and broke” kind. Here is another kind. Remember ET, Steven Spielberg’s 1982 sci-fi film? ET is an extra-terrestrial who, stranded on earth, befriends a lonely little boy who lives in a fatherless household, whose name is Elliott (observe that Elliott’s name begins with “e” and ends with “t”). ET begins to learn the local language – English – by listening to words that Elliott’s little sister repeats as she watches Sesame Street. And the first word he picks up – home; and with Elliott’s help he builds a device to “phone home” (a phrase BT was quick to deploy in a famous advertising campaign). The rest of the film is all about how ET finally heads for home – and also about how Elliott himself gets home, in the sense that he ceases to feel “alien-ated”. Why was ET at the time the most financially successful film ever? Because, I think, it tapped into deep feelings of rootlessness (the Emmy Award-winning TV mini-series Roots ran five years before ET) and a longing for home – wherever that is.

Here is a third, historical take on homelessness: the Palestinian people. In 1915, during the First World War, Britain made a deal with the Sharif of Mecca: in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally, the promise of British support for an independent Arab kingdom when the war was over. But then, in 1917, Britain reneged on the deal and issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to support the establishment of a Jewish state – in Palestine. Here, as Arthur Koestler put it, was one nation promising another nation the land of a third nation. It was a formula for a catastrophe. Fast-forward to 1947-48, the UN partition plan, and the blessing of the establishment of the state of Israel for the Jewish people becomes a curse for the Palestinian people – 700,000 uprooted, evicted. Palestinians themselves call this massive dislocation the Nakba, which is Arabic for – “Catastrophe”. Over sixty years later and one generation of homeless, refugee people has become three. There is no reason to be optimistic that it will not become four.

Do these varied experiences of homelessness have anything in common? I think they do. A sense of isolation and vulnerability for one thing, and, conversely, a yearning for safety and peace: a roof over your head and an electric fire, the return to a world from which you’ve been separated, or a land from which you’ve been forcibly expelled. You Welsh will understand: hiraeth – a connection with the land, the valleys and the hills, a sense of “belonging” (the title of a rather good Welsh soap), and if you have the misfortune to live beyond Offa’s Dyke, chronic homesickness.

And yet, without belittling in the least all these feelings, or the terrible life of the homeless or the landless, indeed praying for their rectification, I wonder: for Christians, is not homelessness a metaphor for the way of life that we sign up to at baptism? How interesting, and noteworthy, that Peter addresses his first letter to “God’s chosen peoples who live as refugees [NRSV: exiles]” (1:1). And later on in the letter (2:11), he appeals to his readers as “strangers and refugees” (NRSV: exiles). And in the Epistle of Diognetus, a second century Christian writing, the author says that while “Christians are indistinguishable from other people by nationality, language, or customs,” nevertheless “there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through… Any country,” the author declares, “can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country.” On this reading of discipleship, the church is an outpost for pioneers colonising an alien territory in which we can never be at home, because, as Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians (3:20), “we are citizens of heaven.”

There has been a lot of talk over the past decade or so about the church at the end of Christendom being a church in exile, often rather glib talk, in my view, because it has neglected to acknowledge the Old Testament significance of exile, and the traumatic experience of exile, namely, God’s judgement on Israel, God’s punishment of Israel by their dispersal to Babylon. Without this recognition, it is easy for Christians to slip into a victim mentality, in which we blame church decline on secularism or atheism. Without this recognition, we rather too quickly start “re-imagining the future” (as the process of renewal was called in the URC in Wales) without confessing and repenting the sins of our past – sins mainly of taking too much for granted, sins of apathy and lethargy, the sins of civic religion.

And then there are the three dangers of living in exile. The first is nostalgia, pining for the good old days and trying to re-inscribe them in the reality of today. But – remember King Canute – you can’t command the tides of time to withdraw. The second danger is withdrawal, disengaging from the big bad world of today altogether and circling the wagons. This is the sectarian option and it is not only cowardly and faithless, it is also a recipe for further decline and ultimate disappearance. And then there is the third danger, assimilation, whereby we think we can save the church by aping the ways of the world, as if all we’ve got to do is to market and manage the church more strategically and effectively to be “successful”. But then the customer, not the gospel, becomes sovereign, and though the church gain the whole world, it loses its soul.

What then do I suggest? I suggest what I suggest that Jesus himself and the New Testament suggest: that it is by living in exile that Christians find their true home, that living in exile, which begins as a judgement, actually turns out to be a blessing, turns out to be our vocation. Remember Jesus himself was homeless, permanently homeless, itinerant, from his time as a child with his refugee family in Egypt, to his vagabond ministry when he says: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lie down and rest” (Luke 9:58).

And what do we do as a church in exile, a church of permanent dispersion, diaspora? Exactly what the exilic prophet Jeremiah, in a letter, told the Israelites to do in Babylon. While false prophets were engaged in a cover-up and calling for a return to the land (preaching old-time religious revival, if you like), Jeremiah modestly, but radically and bravely, advised: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7 NRSV). Which is not to romanticise exile – far from it: Jeremiah recognised that a deracinated, decentred life is lonely and hard; that swimming against the stream takes determination and energy; that being mocked and mistreated erodes your self-esteem and confidence. Nevertheless, exile is just the right place to prune and refine, to explore and experiment, to make tactical critiques of prevailing cultural norms, and to practice that peculiar counter-cultural way of being human called “discipleship” which is embodied in the Sermon on the Mount. Freed from the compulsion to be in charge, and from the delusion that we control our own destiny, we can get on with being faithful, being Christian, being church, being mission.

Many in the church are still in denial about exile, or we grieve our losses, yes, but don’t repent our failures. I think it’s about time we lose the self-pity and move on – and out: to embrace our homelessness, and travel on with the fearless conviction and hope of a people called and sent to do just one thing: to bear witness to the new humanity, the new creation, disclosed in the eruption of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “Blessed are the homeless” is a beatitude truly in keeping with the teaching of our Lord.

Densil Morgan, Barth Reception in Britain

A review by Kim Fabricius

D. Densil Morgan, Barth Reception in Britain (T&T Clark 2010)

This is a learned book, informed by wide and deep reading of both Barth and those who received him – and those who received him not. But it is not just a history of ideas: the theology is concisely socially and culturally located.

This is an important book, a kind of exercise in reader-response criticism, perhaps not unique in tracing the history of what later or modern theologians have made of an earlier one – Fergus Kerr’s excellent After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (2002) comes to mind – but it is nevertheless rare in the thickness and colour of its thread. Indeed I hope it may serve as a paradigm and inspiration for others to do the research and writing on, say, Bonhoeffer reception in the UK and US.

This is an exciting book. Morgan cites Hans Frei’s observation that “reading ‘Barthians’, unlike Barth himself, can often be painfully boring.” This book is not boring. It reads like a road movie, moving in two tracks as it follows both Barth’s own Porsche of theological development, as well as the ensuing vehicles in the inside lane, upmarket and second-rate, that keep up, break down, or turn into cul-de-sacs. And if it starts off slowly, that’s because the reception was slow – Adolf Keller, the Swiss ecumenist and conveyor of continental theology to Britain and America, was the herald of coming good – but it quickly speeds up until by the Second World War, you are watching a thrilling, exhilarating chase.

This is also a fair book. Morgan is a theologian who clearly holds Barth in esteem and affection, but although he is not averse to the odd swipe (as he puts it in one instance) at the “spectacularly wrongheaded” response to his mentor, his criticisms are always judicious and often delivered with wry Welsh wit. Indeed the author is clever enough to provide sufficient quotation to let the good run free while the ugly are hoisted by their own petard.

The major disciples are all here, from Edwin Hoskyns and Daniel Jenkins, to T. F. Torrance and Colin Gunton. So too are theologians and church leaders who may and should be known in Britain but about whom the response “Who?” may be forgiven among non-Brits: the Scot John McConnachie, the Englishman Nathanial Micklem, and the Welshman John Edward Daniel, for example. And then there are the “minor” figures that turn out to be not so minor at all, not least the contingent of Welshmen who were as fired by Barth as the phalanx of Scots, but who thought, taught, and preached in the language of angels.

The usual suspicions are all here too: in the post-Römerbrief years, concerns about human agency in Barth’s ethics, about the impact of his rediscovery of eschatology and the divine transcendence on history and experience, about his rejection of natural theology and alleged cultural pessimism; in the post-war years, Nieburhian dismissals of Barth’s neo-orthodoxy and Cold War politics, and evangelical distrust of his soteriology and even the state of his soul (the famous Welsh fundamentalist Martyn Lloyd-Jones virtually asking, “But has he been saved?”); and during the sixties, the patronising liberal banalities about his datedness and irrelevance in a “world come of age”.

And there are surprises, like the indolence of the English Presbyterians in contrast to Congregationalists, and the enthusiasm of certain Anglo-Catholics rather than evangelical Anglicans, during the initial stages of Barth reception in the 1920s. There is drama, like the eyewitness account of the Welsh student Ivor Oswy Davies on the public dismissal of Barth from his teaching post in Bonn in December 1934: “there, in that ritual of darkness, I witnessed the University of Bonn losing its very soul.” And there is hope that the tide-turning resurgence of British Barth studies in the late twentieth century might continue to follow the trajectory on which we find it in the second decade of the second millennium.

Are there no flaws? None as far as I can see in the execution of what Morgan set out to do, what he calls “an exercise in Bangor theology”, a descriptive history of British Barth reception (though I wish he himself had followed the trajectory beyond the nine-page “Postlude: Barth in Britain 1968-86”). Morgan is a fly on the wall, and only occasionally a mosquito. If you want a Barthian bee making honey, you will have to go to Morgan’s delightful The Humble God: The Basics of Christian Belief (2005). But I do have one huge complaint: Barth was a great admirer of Bonhoeffers’ The Cost of Discipleship, but I don’t think he had in mind paying £65 for a book. (So diolch yn fawr for the review copy!)

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Note: This review will also be published later this year in the Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society.

Doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

Experience has taught me that prayer is often a way to be narcissistic with both a good conscience and public approval.

Koan: a minister who has no time for theology.

There are Christians who reject universalism not because it is unbiblical but because, were it true, it would disappoint them.

Gehenna eternal hellfire? What a load of rubbish!

“What would Jesus do?” He’d say that’s a dumb question.

Show me a happy Christian mourner and I’ll show you a Christian who reads a crappy translation of the Beatitudes.

Before Constantine the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church; after Constantine the seed of the martyrs was the blood of the church.

It is urgent that the sacraments and church order remain atop the ecumenical agenda; killing each other, however, may remain AOB.

What Christians who repeat the mantra that they “hate the sin but love the sinner” really mean is that they hate the sinner but love the sin.

Logos asarkos: Cheshire Cat Christology.

Arminianism: standing on the plate and thinking you’ve hit a homerun.

Christian Zionism: Philosemitic anti-Semitism.

If the eucharist makes the church, perhaps we need a different vintage.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush – except at Horeb.

Is theology the queen of the sciences? Only if it’s queer.

Of course Oscar Romero should be canonised. It’s a post-mortem miracle that he hasn’t been anathematised.

Why do I believe in God? Why do I love my children?

If a politician talked sense, we would not understand him.

Discombobulate a good preacher: compliment him.

Advice to a young minister: learn to yes without bitterness and no without guilt.

If your faith doesn’t make you both kinder and angrier, you’ve lost it.

What is the opposite of love? Some say hate. Some say indifference. Some say fear. Love does not have an opposite. What is the opposite of God?

Prosperity Gospel Jesus: “I am the Alpha and the Romeo.”

Young people want to be “famous”. Instead of vocation, an adjective.

Chimpanzees can learn sign language; humans can study theology.

Christmas sermon: A PowerlessPoint Presentation

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Okay, let’s put an end to any puzzlement, though I suspect you’ve already got the point: this is my visual aid for Christmas – me! Not my usual Sunday best – the nice suit, silk tie, polished shoes, and distinguished Genevan preaching gown. No, today, you get me dressing down – you get a jumper, jeans, and a pair of trainers. Sorry it’s not PowerPoint, but I’m suspicious of any technology that uses “bullets” to preach the Prince of Peace. So you’ll have to do with me – and my thesis that Christmas itself is a PowerlessPoint presentation of God dressing down – which is the way he dresses up.

The birth of a baby is, after all, a commonplace, not a spectacular. And with Jesus himself we celebrate the birth of a human, not a superhuman. Indeed that, precisely, is the message of Christmas: God is human. And not just partly, or contingently, or temporarily human, as if somewhere behind the God we see revealed at Christmas there is a god who is not human, some kind of divine essence or absolute, or even an inhuman deity, though there are plenty of such pop idols about, like Mammon the god of the banks and the market, or Mars the god of war and terror, or Venus the goddess of health and beauty. No, the humanity of God not only expresses, it actually defines, constitutes, the very being of God all the way down and from eternity to eternity. God is not only human, there is no non-human in God.

Now that’s the point, but it’s not the whole point. God is human, but what kind of human is God? That’s where Jesus comes in. God is not only human, God is this human. God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, has a name, his name is Jesus, and Jesus is the kind of person God is, Jesus is the person God is, here as a baby born in a stable, later as a man killed on a cross. (As John Donne said, Christmas and Good Friday are morning and evening of the same day.) Which is not the way a God who is omnipotent is supposed to behave. A PowerlessPoint presentation of divine dressing down indeed! A God, you might say, with no sense of occasion. Check it out.

At his baptism Jesus shows up to be baptised by John – and John exclaims, “No way! I need to be baptised by you!” Jesus appears not as a holy big shot, no, he identifies himself with the usual suspects and sinners. No sense of occasion.

Yes, his baptism turns out to be a royal occasion: Jesus is anointed by the Holy Spirit, as the Messiah. But what’s the next thing this messiah does? Go to a royal banquet of an inaugural ceremony with the great and the good? No, he heads for the desert, to sweat and starve for forty days – and keep company with the devil. No sense of occasion.

Then Jesus returns to civilization and begins to preach. He takes a service in Nazareth, his hometown. Preaches his socks off, to a rapturous reception. Not! No, he antagonises the congregation by reminding his neighbours of Bible stories where God plays away, ministering to foreigners, even enemies, rather than to local, patriotic folk. The Cohens, the Goldbergs, and the Finkelsteins are not pleased with the lad. They run him out of town. No feeling for his audience. No sense of occasion.

Then Jesus broadens his appeal. He preaches on a hillside to a crowd. What do crowds want to hear from a messiah? Promises of wealth, strength, happiness, and national security, of course. What does Jesus tell them? Blessed are the poor, the meek, the mournful, and the nonviolent. And, in this programmatic PowerlessPoint presentation, no big screen for those at the back. No sense of occasion.

Then there are the healings. Now that’s the way to impress the punters and get the word around – perform some sensational miracles. Except that Jesus is always telling his patients to keep schtum, and refusing to perform for the professionals who come to check him out for quality control. No stage presence. No sense of occasion.

Oh, and how do messiahs succeed? Keep your friends in the loop; make strategic alliances. Instead, Jesus dumbfounds his disciples – they constantly misunderstand him and even object to his teaching – and he alienates the clergy with his confrontational style. No sense of occasion … after occasion … after occasion.

Finally, the climax of his ministry, Jesus goes to Jerusalem, the capital city. Here he will finally convince his friends and defeat his foes. So he goes to work. At the last supper he demonstrates what lordship is like. How? – like a slave he washes the disciples’ feet. And before the high priest and the Roman governor he vindicates his cause. How? – he is silent before the one and lippy before the other. No sense of occasion. This time, big time. Caiaphas, however, has a sense of occasion: he dramatically rends his garment. And Pilate has a sense of occasion: he publicly washes his hands. And the people have a sense of occasion (like Herod, they know what to do when love incarnate appears): “Kill him!” they cry. But Jesus has no sense of occasion: his idea of a grand exit is hanging from a gibbet beside a rubbish tip.

But then what else from a God whose idea of a grand entry is a Nappy Christmas (Godfrey Rust), pulled from the womb of a peasant in the palace of a stable, surrounded by an entourage of cattle and yokels, and sleeping in the four-poster bed of a feeding trough? People think they have an idea of what God is like, and they would recognise him when he appears – awesome, stunning, prodigious (a kind of cross between the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the four judges on X Factor). They don’t. They didn’t. He isn’t.

Christmas: God’s PowerlessPoint presentation, God’s dressing down, God’s self-demonstration that he has no sense of occasion, that God is God in a messy birth (and, later, in a messier death). And there, I think, is the true wonder of Christmas: the miraculous not in some supernatural phenomenon but in the striking ordinariness of the neonatal (and the finally fatal). And there also is the real hope of Christmas: things are not as they seem; and, more, things are not as they have to be, they can be altogether otherwise. Is a new world possible? Absolutely, because a new world came. And because a new world came, a new world is coming.

An evening with Cardinal Milbank

Last Monday evening, John Milbank gave a lecture at Swansea University on “The New Atheism and the Return of Religion”. Here is the vote of thanks by Kim Fabricius.

I read the email Nigel sent me in August announcing this lecture while I was eating, aptly, a jalapeno salad. And I wondered: which hot-stuff Professor Milbank were we going to get? The student of Rowan Williams who burst on the scene twenty years ago as the bête noire of theological liberals and apologists of the secular – (joke: Professor Milbank is standing on a cliff with a liberal and a fundamentalist. Who does he push first? The liberal: business before pleasure) – the radical young theologian who said, now famously, “Once, there was no ‘secular’”, and who plotted a declension narrative in the history of ideas that made Duns Scotus the fall guy in the plot? [With a wink to Milbank] Mind, the medievalist Marilyn McCord Adams, when she was here last year, said she was less than impressed by this reading of Duns!

Or perhaps we would get the friend of the cussed American apostle of nonviolence Stanley Hauerwas (three weeks ago the two shared a stage in London), the Milbank who proclaimed “the ontological priority of peace over conflict” – though who, when he became a father, began to reconsider the value of coercion, and who just over a week ago criticised Hauerwas’ Mennonite-inspired pacifism, arguing for the crucial contribution of Gandalf’s military campaign, as well Frodo’s self-sacrifice, for the salvation of Middle-earth. [“Of course Lord of the Rings is fiction”, I was tempted to add, but given the genre of my speech, I felt that I was already being – and was going to be – cheeky enough.]

Or were we going to get the robust churchman who, with no false humility, takes ecclesiology rigorously seriously, though Christology, many say, not nearly seriously enough? Or perhaps the oxymoronic Red Tory (or, as he prefers, Blue Socialist), whose colleague Philip Blond has been called the court theologian of David Cameron? Or the formidable public intellectual who goes head to head with the irrepressible atheist cultural theorist and Marxist media star Slavoj Žižek? Or perhaps the endorser of the pope’s vision of a muscular new European Christianity, not to say Christendom, to counter an aggressive irrational Islam, tacking far too closely, cry his horrified critics, to the winds of Western colonialism?

But what did it matter? Whatever the persona, we were sure to get a force of nature, or, better, super-nature.

As it has turned out, we got something different – but not completely different, because Professor Milbank’s project is nothing if not synoptic and comprehensive. After the cultural, scientific, and theological counter-attacks on the militant New Atheists by Terry Eagleton, Alister McGrath, and John Lennox respectively, some might have thought that Professor Milbank would be beating a rather battered army.

But this army continues to cause mischief, so Professor Milbank has brought his own considerable range of weaponry to the fight, pounding positions often unnoticed in the conventional mappings of the intellectual terrain: the cultural logic of the New Atheism; its politics too, the way the New Atheism would insidiously inform public policy; the relation of the New Atheism to the nihilism of neo-liberalism, the mirror image of the older atheism’s relation to the nihilism of communism; and, finally, the return of the repressed – religion – to fill the vacuum left by the intellectual exhaustion of secular ideologies, and, he argues, the rich potential of a sacramental Christianity, which remarries faith and reason after their modernist divorce, for a constructive and hopeful social agenda that eschews the pathology of fundamentalisms and transcends the reduction of human relations to assertions of power.

Professor Milbank, it is said by fans as well as foes, writes “difficult” prose (as Geoffrey Hill, he approvingly observes, writes difficult poetry). But whether in shock or awe, I think we all understood his lucid lecture tonight. Rumour has it that the prolific professor has written over a thousand pages for the sequel to his seminal Theology and Social Theory. Which might mean he’s just getting started. But whenever he finishes, I think we’d all relish a return visit (by air, I’d suggest) of the Sheriff of Nottingham to this humble, hospitable and once socialist Christian colony of Swansea.

THE PREQUEL

The lecture almost wasn’t. Milbank went to the wrong station in Nottingham, and the train he finally caught was doomed by delays. He finally disembarked at Port Talbot, where, taxi-less, he was driven the final few miles to Swansea by a kindly Welsh woman. Milbank deployed this special providence as a pointer to the existence of God in a nicely improvised overture to his noteless lecture, which began over an hour late. Most of the punters, well over a hundred, stayed (some retiring to the campus bars to kill time). After the announcement of the delay, I encouraged the audience to be patient with the following recycled joke:

On heading to Heathrow at the conclusion of his recent visit to the UK, the pope’s limousine hit a traffic jam, which turned to gridlock. It was imperative that the pope catch his plane, so he said to his driver, “My son, I cannot be late. Could you not drive on the hard shoulder to get me to the airport on time?”

“I’m sorry, your holiness,” said the driver, “but if I am stopped and get a ticket, my boss will sack me, and I have a large family to support. Forgive me, but we must be patient and wait for the traffic to ease.”

Undeterred, the pope said, “Let me drive then.”

The driver reluctantly agreed, and the two changed seats. The pope sped towards Heathrow on the hard shoulder – and sure enough, he was stopped by the police. The officer looked in the window. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, and went back to his car to call his superior.

“I’ve got a problem,” he said. “I’ve just pulled over a limousine speeding along the hard shoulder, and, well, there is a very important person in the car.”

“How important?” replied the superior. “An MP?”

“More important than that, sir.”

“Front bench?”

“More important than that, sir.”

“Not the prime minister!”

“No, even more important than that, sir.”

“Please don’t tell me it’s one of the younger princes – or even Prince Charles.”

“No, sir, I’m afraid even more important than that.”

“Are you telling me it’s the Queen?”

“Sir, even more important than the Queen.”

“Good God, man, who is it?”

“I don’t know, sir. All I can tell you is that the pope is his driver.”

Some of the audience asked me to tell some more jokes, but I couldn’t think of any clean ones.

THE SEQUEL

After the lecture, seven of us went for a meal at a posh restaurant where I was strategically seated next to Milbank. The table-talk ranged from Rowan Williams, particularly his recent political interventions, to J. Kameron Carter and David Bentley Hart (I didn’t want Milbank to throw up on me, so I didn’t mention Adam Kotsko); from (I suggested) his wildly sanguine hopes for the Tory-led government, to the Tea Party and (he suggested, persuasively) the US as a failed state; from Virgil (via a classics professor) to Virginia; from the earthly sports of cricket and rugby to the game of heaven. I would like to have drawn the famous metaphysical Platonist on the New Apocalyptics, and pressed him on his exiguous expository appeal to Jesus and the Bible, but in mixed company – hey, I’m not such a prat! Suffice to say that it was a terrifically enjoyable evening, and that Milbank was a congenial dining companion whose comments, even when quite opinionated, were as agreeably measured as the wine.

Following Milbank’s recent (I too thought, ridiculously impoverishedly Niebuhrian) ABC critique of Hauerwas’ pacifism, one blogger tetchily asked how Stanley could hang out with such an hombre. Perhaps it’s because Hauerwas is somewhat in awe of Milbank’s capacious and resourceful intellect. Perhaps it’s because he can better hone his own views against such a formidable and influential advocatus diaboli. However I suspect it’s simply because Milbank is a good friend.

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In other Milbank-related news, see his latest ABC piece on Stephen Fry, sex, and homosexuality – and the lively dialogical response over at the new Women in Theology blog (see also their follow-up post). The recent King's College discussion between Hauerwas, Milbank, and Luke Bretherton is also now available in audio.

Twelve point guide for ripostes to militant atheists

by Kim Fabricius

—Your faith is unreasonable.
—Your reason is unreasonable – and you have such faith in your scepticism.

—So, you’ve had a religious experience?
—What’s that? And what’s it got to do with God?

—The Gospels contain inconsistencies A, B, and C.
—You forgot X, Y, and Z.

—Darwin made the argument from design completely untenable.
—Er, Hume beat him to it.

—Creationists are morons.
—That smart?

—Theodicies are invariably unconvincing.
—Worse than that, they are inherently evil.

—Prayer plainly doesn’t work.
—Thank God!

—Religion is the opium of the people; it’s a crutch.
—Yeah, but science and technology are the crack cocaine; and you don’t limp?

—Who can believe in a God who sends his Son to die to appease his anger?
—Only the seriously disturbed.

—Religion is inherently violent.
—You mean violence is inherently religious.

—Give me one good reason to believe in the existence of God.
—The existence of atheists: the protest kind because they take God seriously, the petulant kind because God doesn’t take them seriously at all. Oh, and more conclusively: cats and baseball.

—You’re a fucking fool!
—Alas, you’re half right.

Poetic Graffiti: clerihews on ten modern Christian poets

by Kim Fabricius

Well folks, it's been too long since our last series of clerihews. So for those of you who have trouble reading poetry (or would like to be able to talk about poets without reading them), Kim has now produced a convenient abridged version. Here are ten clerihews on modern Christian poets (five of them dead, five living):

W. H. Auden
Sure liked his Gordon’s;
Of course the intoxicated sod
Was also drunk on God.

Wendell Berry
Is very, very
Farmy.
And some would say barmy.

T. S. Eliot,
Just for the hell of it,
Paraded his Latin and Greek
(The pompous High Anglican geek).

Kevin Hart
Is exceedingly smart;
Writes on God, deconstruction, and sex –
With his ex.

Geoffrey Hill,
Dense and difficult; still,
His poems on our malady
Are such fun to parody.

Elizabeth Jennings
Prayerfully wrote about sinning
And shadows and terror –
Unlike the pope, without error.

D. Gwenallt Jones
Is likely unknown
To those who know little of Wales.
That’s a lot of Theology Fails.

R. S. Thomas
Was furiously famous
As a Welsh priest and poet.
But “God is love”? You wouldn’t know it.

Archbishop Rowan,
With R. S. and Euros Bowen,
Another Welsh poet and priest,
Alas now sings with Dylan “I Shall Be Released.”

Franz Wright
Sees the light
In the dark in his verse:
The headlights of a hearse.

Repenting about repenting

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

In Matthew’s Greek the word is metanoeite (3:2). The traditional translation is “repent”. The GNB paraphrases: “Turn away from your sins.” Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message cuts to the chase: “Change your life” (today we might say, “Get a life!”).

But let’s pause for a moment and take a step back. The Greek means, literally, “change your mind” – and that’s where I want to start this morning, with where we are, with the fact that, actually, not only are we not very good at changing our minds, but indeed changing your mind is considered a weakness, and in public life a grave weakness, indeed a form of political suicide. There is even a new term for it, “flip-flopping”, though Margaret Thatcher put it best when she said, “The Lady is not for turning.” Isn’t that what politicians fear the most, the accusation of the U-turn?

Of course politicians do change their minds. But you never admit to changing your mind because, it is feared, to admit to it would make you look irresolute and weak. Which is immoral, because it is hypocritical, but even if it weren’t a deceit, it would still be an idiocy. Integrity is one thing, inflexibility quite another. Inflexibility is just plain dumb. Where would civilisation itself be without what are called “paradigm shifts”, radical, fundamental changes in the way that we think about the world? In a splendid editorial for the Independent, Boyd Tonkin once observed that “Changes of mind lie at the core of almost every breakthrough in science, art and thought. From Copernicus to Einstein, Leonardo to Picasso, James Joyce to Bob Dylan, lasting innovations rest on a rupture with the principles of the past… Ludwig Wittgenstein created one revolution in philosophy with his [first major work the] Tractatus. Later he decided it was fundamentally misconceived and created another [revolution] with the Philosophical Investigations. And if Alan Turing had never revised his view about the practicality of his highly abstract research on ‘computable numbers’, then the machine on which [I wrote this sermon] would not exist.”

Only a fool makes up his mind about something and, in principle, never changes it. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes was once accused of altering his views on monetary policy. He confronted the charge head-on: “When the facts change,” he declared, “I change my mind. What, sir, do you do?”

So that’s the first thing: repentance involves changing your mind, thinking differently about things. Why? Because you see something you hadn’t seen before. What did John the Baptist see? That the rupture of all ruptures – the kingdom of God! – is seismically shifting the plates of the universe.

This transformation of our imaginations – this seeing, by faith, the transformation of the world into the kingdom – is crucial, but because the Bible talks about repentance in connection with sin, we are talking about a moral transformation as well. Cue the classic conversion story: Once I was a thug, or a thief, or a drug-dealer – in short, I was a sinner – but now I’ve got religion, I’ve been born again, I’ve been saved, and I don’t do those terrible things anymore. Isn’t that the conventional understanding of “repentance”? And then, of course, most of us, very conveniently, are let off the hook, because most of us don’t do those terrible things, and indeed the people who did do those terrible things are also let off the hook too as long as they don't return to their wicked ways.

This is a big mistake. And the mistake is this: we presume that we know what sin is, what sins are, and that we can check our lives against the list and see how much, or how little, repenting we’ve got to do. My claim this morning, however, is this: we’ve got to re-think what sin is, sins are. To put it bluntly, we’ve got to change our minds about just what it is we need to change our minds about, we’ve got to repent about repenting.

I am referring to the mistaken idea that sin is basically about individual wrongdoing and guilt. It is not. At least it is not in the sense in which the Bible understands it. In biblical thought sin transcends the personal and includes the communal and the national, and it is fundamentally about injustice. This is quite clear from the fact that Jesus links repentance with the Jubilee, with Good News to the poor and oppressed, with human well-being and flourishing. And it is equally clear from the fact that it is precisely those who run the religious establishment, who live ostensibly righteous lives, who obey the law and keep the traditions, who thank God that they are not like the criminals and whores who are ruining the moral fabric of Israel – that it is precisely these good folk who reject the Lord’s call to repentance because, after all, what do they have to repent about?

Am I saying that Jesus calls people to accept responsibility not only for their own actions but also for the actions of others, for humanity’s acts, indeed for history’s acts? That is exactly what I am saying. On Question Time three years ago, at the time we were commemorating the ending of the slave trade in Britain, the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey criticised the present Archbishop Rowan Williams for his public apology for the church’s complicity in the buying and selling of black human flesh. That was then, he said, and now is now, that was them and this is us. Er, no, Lord Carey. For not only do white people continue to benefit today from the evils of slavery, and not only are there a lot of racists about, stoking up fear and hatred over immigration, but racism remains socially systemic. And I – I myself – as Archbishop Rowan says, “I am, willy-nilly, involved in [this] ‘structural violence’, in economic, political, religious and private systems of relationship which diminish the other”; and, moreover, “My involvement in [this] violence is most destructive when least self-aware.”

“In each the sin of all, in all the sin of each” (Schleiermacher) – that is the fact of the matter. And to deny this fact, to fail to compute it, to change our mind about changing our mind, to repent about repenting – it is quite morally corrosive. For where will it end? If I do not take responsibility for the sins of humanity, will I not also refuse to take responsibility for the sins of my nation? And if I do not take responsibility for the sins of my nation, will I not also refuse to take responsibility for the sins of my church? And then of my community? And then of my family? And then, thus isolated from the entire social network, past and present, what is left of the “me” for whom I am responsible? Thus Dietrich Bonhoeffer, offered a prestigious academic post in New York on the eve of World War II, declined it, to return to Germany, to face the coming catastrophe, for he knew that the price of acting responsibly as a Christian included solidarity with his fellow countrymen in their nation’s sin and guilt.

And what was Bonhoeffer doing – what are we all called to do – but to model ourselves on Jesus of Nazareth? At the very outset of his ministry, even before – indeed as a precondition of – his preaching repentance (Matthew 4:17), what does Jesus do but submit to John’s baptism of – what? – of repentance. And why? Why else but to show his solidarity with sinners by becoming (as Martin Luther powerfully put it) peccator pessimus, the chief of sinners.

And so, finally, paradoxically, this solidarity of sin is hopeful. For as Karl Barth said: “Precisely when we recognise that we are sinners do we perceive that we are brothers [and sisters].” For as I acknowledge my complicity in the world’s wrongs, I become part of what has been called the “solidarity of the shaken” (Jan Patocka), those who recognise the delusion of innocence, and those who refuse to scapegoat in order to maintain it; and, further, as I become sensitive to the suffering we inflict on each other, I open myself to a fellowship of compassion. Moreover, I find that I can make choices, saying Yes to this and No to that, and act in ways that make a difference: I can contribute to micro-transformations in personal relationships, and I can engage in public dissent and resistance, and thus in signs and parables of grace and goodness, I can bear witness to the coming of the kingdom of shalom.

In the very first of his revolutionary Ninety-Five Theses, Luther wrote: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when he said ‘Repent’, willed that the whole life of believers should be one of repentance.” Repenting about repenting too. Because – look! – the kingdom of God is breaking in, now.

Welcome to my world: a baptismal sermon

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

I’d like your opinion about a couple I know, about something they did, did to their child. Of course they loved their baby to bits and surrounded him with all the care in the world, cooing and cuddling, bathing and bonding, taking tender care about all his needs and his feeds and his smelly little deeds. They were good parents. But then one day they made a decision: they decided they didn’t want to keep their baby to themselves, or even to their own kin; they decided they wanted to share their child with other people, indeed to raise their child as part of another family, a genetically unrelated family, where their child would have not only other brothers and sisters, but also other mothers and fathers too. In fact, this new family would, in principle, supersede their own family as the child’s true and ultimate home. Tell me, what would you think of parents who would do such a thing with their child?

And another thing. To mark this transition from the biological family to this new family, this couple arranged for a special occasion – but what an odd occasion it was. For one thing, it took place on a Sunday morning, when most other folk were still in bed, and in a rather odd building. For another thing, there was no booze (fancy a special occasion without any booze!). And then there were the guests: many of the people at this occasion the parents didn’t even know, or didn’t know very well. In fact, it was precisely these people, many of them quite old, and a few even a bit doddery, who turned out to be their child’s new parents and siblings. Again, what would you think of such parents?

And a final thing, perhaps the most outrageous thing of all. At this occasion there was a man wearing a sombre black gown, as if he were taking a funeral. In fact, that is precisely what the man said was happening: that his parents were bringing their child to this occasion to mark his death, his death to the world from which he was brought, but which (so the man in the black gown declared) is a world that is itself passing away, yet a world that spends most of its time and energy pretending it will go on forever, thereby entangling itself all the more inescapably in the cords of its own extinction. For is that not the nature of the world we live in? Do we not live in fear and denial of death, compulsively seeking longevity, security, the ultimate risk-free environment, which, however, a moment’s clarity exposes as the sheerest fantasy? On this occasion, however, (so the man in the black gown declared) we get real and deny this denial of death, as the child, in the ritual of the occasion, dies and is buried, with everyone present acting as celebrants of his funeral.

Again, for the last time, what would you think of such parents? Let’s be honest: bringing their child to be handed over for shared parenting is outrageous enough, but bringing the child to his own funeral, what kind of parents would do such a macabre thing? You might think that, at best, they were being irresponsible, at worst, abusive, and that they should be reported to the police and social services. In fact, if you are not a Christian, you are bound to think this way. In fact, many Christians themselves think this way. Which just goes to show how domesticated and sentimentalised baptism – because, of course, that is what we are talking about here, baptism – it just goes to show how domesticated and sentimentalised baptism has become, and how the church itself has colluded in “watering-down” the meaning of its sacrament of initiation. Indeed it goes to show how close the church is coming to losing its identity, and in losing its identity, losing its very soul.

Hear again Paul’s words in his letter to the church in Rome, which go straight to the point: “Surely you know that when were baptised into union with Christ Jesus, we were baptised into union with his death. By our baptism, then, we were buried with him and shared his death …” (Rom 6:3-4a).

There it is in the Bible (I’m not making it up!): to be baptised is to die – but it is a certain kind of death: it is to die with Christ. And it is a certain kind of funeral: it is to be buried with Christ. But if that is so, it means that, appearances notwithstanding, in baptism our deaths are now behind us. Which, in turn, means, that we are released from our obsession with death, our fear of death, our denial of death, all of which speaks of our enslavement to death – from which baptism frees us. For not only is death now behind us, above all life is now ahead of us. But again, a very specific kind of life: it is life in Christ. For as Paul continues: “By our baptism, then, we were buried with him and shared his death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from death by the glorious power of the Father, so also we might live a new life” (6:4).

We are all gong to die. One day Adam is going to die too. But today we proclaim that, in fact, Adam’s death is now behind him and that life, the life of Christ – a new life of love, joy, and peace – is Adam’s future, and indeed is there now for the taking – or rather the receiving – through his union with Christ.

And that’s where we come to Adam’s “new family”. For in being baptised into union with Christ, Adam becomes a son and brother of everyone else who has been baptised into union with Christ. He has been born anew, of water and Spirit (John 3:5), born, that is, into a new family, with new siblings and new parents (including the doddery ones!). Fellow Christians are now, in fact, Adam’s closest relations. “Blood is thicker than water,” people say. Not so, Christians say: “Water is thicker than blood.”

I am under no illusions of just how mind-blowing all this is. And not only because baptism is, ultimately, supernatural, but also because (as I have tried to suggest) it is quite unnatural, and a quite unnatural way of life follows from it, a way of life that contradicts the way the world and his wife go about their business. For if we are introducing Adam to the new way of life of Jesus, we will try to teach him not to become an earning, shopping, and consuming machine, ever agitated and restless, or someone who wants to be “famous”, but a human being who is happy in his own skin and, above all, grateful just to be. We will also try to teach him not to become a cunning climber and schemer, ever out for Number One, but a human being whose Yes is Yes and No is No, who doesn’t deceive or discard other people but puts them first. And, finally, we will also try to teach him not to become an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy but a turn-the-cheek kind of geek, who is kind to everyone, who takes a punch rather than gives one, who prays for those who wish him ill, who lives at peace even with his enemies.

Yes, all this is so radically counter-cultural, for it clearly involves living an exposed and vulnerable life, a life at considerable risk, a life on which the “health and safety” bureaucrats might like to slap a restraining order, a life that might incur suffering in some contexts, even if only ridicule, for its eccentricity, in our own.

That’s why bringing your child for baptism – some may think it’s sweet; in fact, it is quite heroic. If you want a life of ease, pleasure, and success, a gated and protected life among your own, then the last thing you want to be is baptised. If, however, you want a life full of real meaning and lasting purpose, the kind of life God wants us to live, the kind of life, in Jesus, God shows us how to live; if you want a life that is not ephemeral but eternal, a life not just for now but forever, life as it is going to be when God completes his work in progress, life that begins even now, in the sacrament of baptism that proclaims the old world going and a new world coming, and calls us to live tomorrow’s life today – then you’ve come to just the right pace, you’re taking part in just the right occasion, you’re watching a sneak preview of the end of time as we know it, and the beginning of time as you couldn’t imagine it in your wildest dreams.

Today, the Lord says, “Adam, welcome to my world!” Indeed God’s invitation is always open to everyone to enter this strange new household of the church, and this strange new world of being a Christian.

Maggi Dawn, Writing on the Wall

Maggi Dawn, The Writing on the Wall: High Art, Popular Culture and the Bible (Hodder & Stoughton 2010), 272 pp.

A review by Kim Fabricius

James Smart once spoke of “the strange silence of the Bible in the church”. Forty years later – cause and effect? – the smart will speak of the all-too-familiar silence of the Bible in society. The unchurched don’t know their Palm Sunday ass from their elbow, and a vox pop opining that Easter celebrates the near-death experience of a bunny wouldn’t surprise me in the least. It gets worse. Students who arrive at university to read English are often surprised to learn that Paradise Lost isn’t a study of the environmental depredation of Tahiti.

Okay, I exaggerate. But not much. Biblical illiteracy in the UK is pandemic in popular and high culture alike. Enter Maggi Dawn, Cambridge college chaplain and star blog babe, to give us an education in this fabulous and fluent book, which takes what used to be well-known Bible stories, re-narrates them, and then shows what the arts have made of them down the ages.

Maggi takes nothing for granted, so the texts she explores, with a teacher’s eye for the panoramic picture, are printed in full – and, yes, she even explains what Palm Sunday and Easter are! So this is a book for the beginner. But the cognoscenti too will learn a lot from it, while preachers and Bible study leaders will find it a valuable resource for illustration and illumination.

There are scores of references. The main art-form on which Maggi draws is painting, so it’s a shame that there are no reproductions, but this lacuna is no doubt for reasons of cost. Poetry and classical music are also well represented; however fiction less so, which surprises me. As Ben and I well know from our Culture for Theologians series, you can always count on a smartass to point out your omissions, so I cannot resist mentioning a few deserving-a-mention contemporary novels: Timothy Findley’s postmodern fantasy about the Noah family, Not Wanted on the Voyage; Joseph Heller’s wry take on David, God Knows; and Jim Crace’s disturbing retelling of Christ in the wilderness, Quarantine. (By the way, does anyone know James Morrow’s hilarious satire on the death of God, Towing Jehovah?) And Maggi misses a trick when, discussing Caravaggio’s two versions of Supper at Emmaus, she doesn’t link them with a contemporary novel in which the National Gallery version plays a crucial role, Salley Vickers’ The Other Side of You (though in discussing the Magi, she does mention Miss Garnet’s Angel). Still, my smartassery aside, Maggi should count herself lucky that she doesn’t get a Theology Fail for her typically English – and dare I say womanly? – neglect of Moby-Dick!

Of course I’m talking high culture here. The thing is, so is Maggi, mainly. Which in a book addressed to Jack and Jill is the single criticism of the book I would make. The important exception is modern popular music, where the talented Maggi is really in her element. The dearth of films is especially puzzling, but perhaps the explanation lies in the numerous books already out there on reel issues. And anticipating that the learned might knock the book’s theological oversimplifications, I would simply insist on its single and important objective: namely, to get the unwitting to see how steeped in the Bible is Western culture, and to encourage them to return to the source which, far from being a stagnant pool, is an ever-rich reservoir. And once there, who knows, they may find that from the pages of this reportedly boring collection of books, the living God still speaks and excites.

The jacket of Writing on the Wall – an allusion, of course, to the ominous scene in Daniel 5 – depicts the title, in a clever double-entendre, as part of a street-scene of graffiti. Which prompts me to reiterate some “theological graffiti” I wrote for F&T last month –

Maggi Dawn,
This isn’t a come-on,
But at her winsome blog I’ve lingered,
Musing if she’s rosy-fingered –

and, mindful of another Homeric epithet, the “wine-dark sea”, to conclude by inviting you to open a bottle of South African Shiraz and enjoy this winsome book.

Who are we called to be?

A hymn by Kim Fabricius
(Tune: Moscow)

Who are we called to be?
The Father’s family –
greatest is least.
Sisters and brothers, pray
for bread and peace today,
and for the poor that they
share in the feast.

Who are we called to be?
The Son’s community –
song, salt and light.
Become what Christ became,
witness to Yahweh’s reign,
go set the world aflame –
God’s dynamite!

Who are we called to be?
The Spirit’s colony –
exiles and clowns.
Live as the dispossessed,
free of the fear of death,
heal hate with tenderness –
world upside-down!

Precious five the senses are

A hymn by Kim Fabricius

Tune: Humility – without refrain (any suggestions on alternative tunes would be welcome)

Precious five* the senses are,
how we find our way around
God’s creation, near and far,
lengthways, sideways, up and down.

And we, using hearts and minds,
sounding depths and scaling heights,
logic-bound or unconfined,
navigate our way through life.

Conscience too directs our ways,
outer law and inner voice,
through the endless moral maze
with its agony of choice.

Yet with all these human skills,
sense and sensibility,
still we can’t do what we will –
impotent ability.

Is there no way to release
old creation from its vice?
Look at what the Lord, by grace,
now has done in Jesus Christ!

God in peace invades the earth –
free at last from Satan’s grip! –
triggers new creation’s birth:
cruciform apocalypse!

* The title of a poem by W. H. Auden

The Bible for Smartasses

by Kim Fabricius

Genesis: A Good Start?
Exodus: Free at Last?
Leviticus: Filthy!
Numbers: Old (Jewish) Wives Tales
Deuteronomy: The Same Old Same Old
Joshua: America: The Prequel
Judges: The Genealogy of Judy
Ruth: Pretty Woman
I and II Samuel: No, Prime Minister!
I and II Kings / I and II Chronicles: No, No, A Thousand Times No, Prime Minister!
Ezra and Nehemiah: Mending Wall
Esther: The Bitch
Job: The Three Douchebags
The Psalms: Mood Music
Proverbs: On Not Being Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde
Ecclesiastes: Angst Made Easy
Song of Songs: Hot!
Isaiah: The (Thrice) Split Personality
Jeremiah: The Whistleblower
Lamentations: The Crybaby
Ezekiel: The Electric Kool-Aid Kid
Daniel: The Empire Strikes Out
Hosea: My Girl
Joel: Shitstorm
Amos: It’s the Economy, Stupid!
Obadiah: Edom Cheese
Jonah: Don’t Call Me Ishmael!
Micah: The Requirements
Nahum: Contra Jonah
Habakkuk: Mr. KKK
Zephaniah: Shitstorm: The Sequel
Haggai: If You Build It
Zechariah: He Will Come
Malachi: Fast Train Coming

Mark: The Badass
Matthew: The Schlemiel Returns
Luke: Mr. Nice Guy
John: Wine, Women, and Long-Winded Speeches
Acts: The Boys Are Back in Town
Romans: Theology for Smartasses
I and II Corinthians: The Guide to Crap Churches
Galatians: On Pricks
Ephesians and Colossians: Globalisation and Its Contents
Philippians: Who Loves Yah, Baby?
I Thessalonians: Rupture Ready?
II Thessalonians: On Mr. Naughty and Mr. Lazy Bastard
I and II Timothy and Titus: Sheep Droppings
Philemon: A Wretch Like Him
Hebrews: The High Priest of Soul
James: The Gospel According to Kotsko
I and II Peter: Scatterings
I, II, and III John: All You Need Is Love (and Excommunication)
Jude: Postcard from the Edge
Revelation: The Lamb That Roared

Theological Graffiti: bloggers edition

by Kim Fabricius

In response to a suggestion by Halden, here's a final series of clerihews by Kim on theological bloggers:

An und für sich
All say brilliant, some say pricks,
And especially savage
With those who dis Slavoj.

Maggie Dawn,
This isn’t a come-on,
But at her winsome blog I’ve lingered,
Musing if she’s rosy-fingered.

Brad East
Blogs from the Beast –
He’s from Austin –
But at least posts good news to lost liberals from Boston.

Halden Doerge
Has meteorically emerged
As a star of the blog aperçu.
Some say it’s his brains, others the microbrew.

Jason Goroncy
Is keen on oenology as well as theology:
Which explains his supporting the Blues –
It’s the booze.

Richard Hall
Does it all
At Connexions, from matters Methodistic
To driving a fundy called DH ballistic.

David Horstkoetter,
Influenced by Metz and Bonhoeffer,
On theopolitics top-notch,
Flies high on frisbees, flying farther on scotch.

Cynthia Nielsen
Is so smart it’s a sin,
And she’s impeccably orthodox:
Also a fox.

Byron Smith
Thinks green, turns red, gets pissed
At escapist’s eschatologies –
And at misplaced apostrophes.

Jim West,
On a Swiss roll, never gives it a rest.
Typing away at a thousand computers,
He’s also a one-man theological Reuters.

Michael Westmoreland-White,
Hyphenated, like Baptist-Mennonite,
Southern as comfort, big as a barrel,
Conscientious at picking a nonviolent quarrel.

More theological graffiti

by Kim Fabricius and Ben Myers

Here's a sequel to our recent batch of theological graffiti. This brings it to a total of 75 modern theologians. Phew, I think we need a break (for goodness sake!) from rhyming.

Marilyn McCord Adams:
Her book about Ockham
Was simply stupendous;
Her next book, horrendous.

Ray S. Anderson,
Scholarly parson,
Sent me letters and books from LA.
When he died, I was silent all day.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
Really raised the bar,
From descensus, to drama, to logic – higher and higher –
With a leg-up from Adrienne von Speyr.

G. C. Berkouwer
Spent many an hour
With Calvin; but even more, I think,
With Bavinck.

Leonardo Boff
Attacked capitalist toffs
And proposed the preferential option.
“Denied!” cried the pope, as a Marxist concoction.

Emil Brunner
Would sooner
Die than admit his celebrity status was just part and parcel
Of receiving a Nein postmarked Basel.

George Carey,
Rowan’s snide sniper of an adversary –
Oops! – a mistake:
A theologian? Give me a break!

D. A. Carson,
The evangelical’s evangelical bar none,
Is unflagging in nagging and nagging
About God’s postmodernist gagging.

James Cone
Rose from the valley of dry, black bones
To become a theology professor –
And blaspheme the God of the oppressor.

Peter Enns
Was told by his friends
At Westminster: “It’s not personal, Pete, we love you and all –
Just put on this blindfold and stand by the wall.”

Billy Graham
Was a bit of a ham,
And on hellfire and empire he went way awry.
But he was such a nice guy.

Adolf von Harnack
Rather liked the fact
That all of Europe revered him. Except for one impudent
Student.

John Hick
Is a bit of a ...
Hmm, this one time
I can’t think of a rhyme.

George Hunsinger
Ordered a burger.
The girl at the counter replied:
“Would you like any Frei?”

Nate Kerr
Has caused quite a stir
With his book on apocalyptic.
Tim LaHaye, however, is apopleptic.

George Lindbeck,
Seeing doctrine all in a wreck,
Rebuilt, not wielding a Nietzschean hammer,
But a Wittgensteinian grammar.

Alister McGrath
Writes so very fast,
Making colleagues look word-shy and shiftless,
With his output so prodigious it’s ridiculous.

Brian McLaren,
Not to be mistaken for Rick Warren,
Is thankfully not purpose-driven,
But likewise, theologically, needs to be generously forgiven.

Jean-Luc Marion
Phenomenally continues to carry on
Semester after semester after semester
About Dieu sans l’être.

Thomas Merton
Peacefully put a healing hurt on
The church and the world as sociopaths.
Then he took a bath.

Bishop Lesslie Newbigin,
His likes unlikely soon to be seen again,
Could say in perfect Tamil,
“The postmodern West has the grace of a camel.”

Rudolf Otto
Got perfectly blotto
And saw – how delightful, how luminous! –
That the whole world is smiling and numinous.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Opened a can
Of Worms when he divorced Luther
And moved in with Byzantine (who was older, but cuter).

Clark Pinnock
Had his third glass of arrack,
Then made his friends a bet:
He’d dream up a doctrine even God doesn’t know yet.

John Polkinghorne
Dawkins wishes had never been born.
“Science too takes tacit faith,” the physicist bookishly barks.
“Or don’t you believe in quarks?”

James K. A. Smith –
Is he giving or taking the pith
With his je ne sais quoi
Of Calvin and Milbank and Jacques Derrida?

Dorothy Sölle:
Prophetic, poetic, mystical, holy.
McFague and Moltmann: Frau Wow.
Gollwitzer and Barth: Frau Cow.

George Steiner,
Not exactly a whiner:
But occasionally given to dark ruminations
On how paperback printing destroyed civilisation.

John Stott
Writes a helluva lot
As the pope of the world’s evangelicals,
But his Shine-Jesus-shine’s not electrical.

Kathryn Tanner
Shouted, “Hosanna!”,
Prayed the Agnus Dei,
Then wrote Christ the Key.

Ernst Troeltsch
Happened to belch.
He said, “Pardon me, sirs, this whole situation
Has a sociologically sound explanation.”

Kevin Vanhoozer
Went with some friends to a boozer
In Boston.
He promised to say not a word about Austin.

Miroslav Volf
Played a round of golf.
His game that day was frankly rotten:
He lost count of his strokes, even God had forgotten.

Will Willimon
Recants and moves on
From a book he once did with Stanley.
He would leave Wesley too, were he manly.