Off the Shelf: three more types of reading

As a sequel to six types of reading, here are another three types. I had also planned to mention Secret Reading, Stolen Reading, Restless Reading, Abortive Reading, Fetishistic Reading, and Travel Reading – but I got frightfully distracted by all the little pressed flowers inside the pages of Dr Johnson. So I might discuss a few more types of reading next time.



Books mentioned in this video:

• Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets [1779]
• Anne Hunt, The Trinity: Insights from the Mystics (Liturgical Press 2010)
• Edward Morgan, Incarnation of the Word: The Theology of Language of Augustine of Hippo (T&T Clark 2010)
• Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books (Rowman & Littlefield 2006)

Off the Shelf: six types of reading

Last time, there were various comments about reading habits. So in this video I provide a typology of six types of reading.



Books mentioned in this video:

• Steven Millhauser, The Knife Thrower: And Other Stories (Vintage 1999)
• G. K. Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas [1933], in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Volume 2: The Everlasting Man, St. Francis of Assisi, St Thomas Aquinas (Ignatius Press 1987)
• Michael Jensen, Martyrdom and Identity: The Self on Trial (T&T Clark 2010)
• Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford UP 1992)
• Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford UP 1933)
• G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Belknap 1999)
• Augustine Day by Day: Minute Meditations for Every Day Taken from the Writings of Saint Augustine (Catholic Book Publishing 1999)
• James Alison, Knowing Jesus (2nd ed; SPCK 1998)

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And since I've mentioned Chesterton's book on Aquinas, here's a delightful account of how the book was written – this is an excerpt from Dale Ahlquist, G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense (Ignatius Press 2000), chapter 9:

When G. K. Chesterton was commissioned to write a book about St. Thomas Aquinas, even his strongest supporters and greatest admirers were a little worried. But they would have been a lot more worried if they had known how he actually wrote the book.

Chesterton had already written acclaimed studies of Robert Browning, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Chaucer, and St. Francis of Assisi. Nonetheless, there was a great deal of anxiety even among Chesterton's admirers when in 1933 he agreed to take on the Angelic Doctor of the Church, the author of the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Without consulting any texts whatsoever, Chesterton rapidly dictated about half the book to his secretary, Dorothy Collons. Then he suddenly said to her, “I want you to go to London and get me some books.”

“What books?” asked Dorothy.

“I don't know”, said G. K.

So Dorothy did some research and brought back a stack of books on St. Thomas. G. K. flipped through a couple of books in the stack, took a walk in his garden, and then, without ever referring to the books again, proceeded to dictate the rest of his book to Dorothy.

Many years later, when Evelyn Waugh heard this story, he quipped that Chesterton never even read the Summa Theologica, but merely ran his fingers across the binding and absorbed everything in it.

[...] And what kind of book did he write? Étienne Gilson, probably the most highly respected scholar of St. Thomas in the twentieth century, a man who devoted his whole life to studying St. Thomas, had this to say about Chesterton's book: “I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas.”

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.

Fainting with damn praise

I received three compliments in the past couple of days, each one nicer than the one before:

Compliment #1. Mike Bird pointed me to a review of The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies in the latest issue of Catholic Biblical Quarterly. The reviewer, Kim Paffenroth, liked my chapter on Barth, and described it as "the collection's most thought-provoking essay", since it tries to "resolve the dichotomy between the two readings of pistis Christou by collapsing the anthropological and christological into one action".

Compliment #2. Then Kim told me that Jane Williams mentioned F&T in a Church Times piece. In contrast to all the "completely mad" resources on the internet, "there are blogs where you can join in theological conversations and ask questions: try Faith & Theology, run by Ben Myers, or Chrisendom, run by a colleague of mine, Chris Tilling." (Speaking of Chris Tilling's blog, check out his satirical committee review of Mark Seifrid's book review of Douglas Campbell.)

Compliment #3. And then, best of all, I got an email yesterday from someone who has just started a creative writing course at university. On her first day in class, the first short story they had to analyse was one I wrote here a few weeks ago: The Dream and the Drawing. I glowed with happiness for at least three hours after I heard that! And my six-year-old daughter felt prodigiously famous and important when I told her that a story written about her had been studied at university.

Call for reviewers: Rowan Williams

Our friend Scott Stephens will be hosting a whole series of reviews on the new book by Rowan Williams and Larry Elliott, Crisis and Recovery: Ethics, Economics and Justice (Palgrave 2010). There are still three review copies to give away – so please email Scott if you're interested in receiving a copy and writing a 1500-word piece for ABC Religion & Ethics.

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.

Rebecca DeYoung: Glittering vices: a new look at the seven deadly sins

A guest-review by Don Needham (a Sydney friend who comments here as “Fat”)

As some of you may know I have been studying at UTC to become a Minister’s Wife. I have had batches of scones turn out perfect and some became rock cakes but I’m told scones can be perverse like that. Aside from that I have been privileged to sit in on some of the lectures and attend the courses as my wife studies, and I have the belief that heaven will be like that place – you have passed the weather and are into deep and meaningful conversation about God with almost everyone you meet.

I thought I would share with you some insights from Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung's new book, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Brazos 2009).

The idea dates back at least as far as the Greek philosophers. Aristotle wrote that vices and virtues are those aspects of our character which have become second nature to us. The four cardinal virtues were mentioned in the book of Wisdom 8:7, probably written as guidance to the Jews in exile some 300 years before Christ (about the same time that the Greek idea of the four virtues was prominent).

Christian thinkers have long considered that the work of Christianity is to continually die to the bad and rise to the good, and so the virtues and vices were incorporated into Christian teaching. Augustine followed on Paul's concept of love covering all the virtues, so that the Greek ideal of “self perfection” became the work of the grace of God. The desert fathers refined the lists and came up with eight demons which beset the desert hermit: gluttony, impurity (lust), avarice, sadness, anger, acedia (later called sloth), vainglory and pride.

Eventually we come to Thomas Aquinas, who looked deeply into the list of vices and virtues almost as we have it today: seven vices (why seven? because seven was a right rounded whole and religious number). And pride, rather than being the eighth, is now placed at the root of all sin. Here is his list: vainglory, envy, sloth, avarice, wrath, lust and gluttony.

Each of these vices had an opposite virtue. By way of example, Gluttony would have as its opposite not anorexia but nurture, looking after our body by eating sensibly. In one extreme, we might fast so much that we are weakened and unable to perform our duties as part of the community. The problem is that such fasting becomes an end in itself instead of the prayer and contemplation it is supposed to engender. And of course the opposite extreme is gluttony, where we live for food and nothing else. Both these extremes are deadly in two ways: first, we can die from lack of food and we also can die from eating too much; and second, by putting our habits and the feeding of them ahead of God, we lose sight of his saving grace and we lose sight of the fact that it is he who furnishes the table.

So in addition to gluttony, we have:

Vainglory. Image is everything. We love to be the beautiful people. Don't the ads and the magazines promise all the wonders of recognition and conquest if we use this toothpaste or put that deodorant in our armpits? The right shampoo, and the opposite sex will flock to sniff the ground we walk on. Thomas Aquinas says, “It seems to belong to a natural appetite that one wish one's goodness to be known.”

As the early church fathers pointed out, it seems “even – or perhaps especially – when we have virtue and good character, we are vulnerable to vainglory, for it haunts us most when our virtue goes incognito.” And vainglory strives to be seen to be superior even if we have to fake it. Tragically, we distance ourselves from others and from God even as we win the accolades, because the masks we wear become walls. “It is difficult to escape vainglory,” says Evagrius, “for what you do to rid yourself of it becomes for you a new source of vainglory.”

Avarice. Avarice puts goods and chattels into #1. It is also rooted in pride because we come to think we no longer need God. We can stand on our own two feet . We say “my house, my car, my T-bone steak, my dog, my widescreen TV, my…” and we forget that it all comes from God.

Wrath. De Young writes: “Being angry is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.”

Lust. I'm thinking Tiger Woods at present, but the media are in an orgy of their own, loudly decrying his dalliances while engaged in their totally voyeuristic pursuit of “News”. Sex itself is not a sin and neither is it salvation. It’s like nitroglycerine: it can heal hearts or blow bridges up. And lust need not be consummated in sex to be lust – it shows a problem in the heart above the belt way before it’s a problem with the heat below it.

If lust has a corresponding virtue then it has to be wholeness – the joining together of two as one flesh in marriage.

Envy. “Of all the deadly sins, envy is no fun at all.” Envy and its ugly sisters, jealousy and covetousness, go further than greed. Instead of saying “I want one like that,” they say: “I want that one – I don't want you to have it.” It could be goods, or status, or a job, success, talent, skill, or even (if you remember your fairytales) something like beauty. Envy is always looking out for the competitor, looking sideways to see no one rises too far, looking upward to see that perfection is out of the question – just so as long as I'm better than you. Envy is the enemy of love.

Finally we come to Sloth. The one sin I knew least about, but if Thomas is right and vices and virtues are acquired through practice – well, it's the one I've been working on the most and I am the best at by far.

So in order to understand sloth, let’s ask: How can sloth be rooted in pride? OK, it’s one of those mornings when it has turned cool overnight. You wake up cold and you know there’s a spare blanket just over there – yet you lie freezing and awake for an hour till the alarm calls. It isn't that you’re too lazy to get the blanket. It's that you don't want to brave that shock of cold while you get the blanket – better the devil you know.

Here's another. A husband and wife have a minor tiff, so he goes to the workshop to use the power saw and she goes to the kitchen to bang pots and pans – let her stew he says; let him stew she says. Meanwhile in front of their comfy lounge their favourite programme slides by unwatched. Both too proud to say I'm sorry – wallowing in their own juices, they don't want that little pain of making amends.

This is the original meaning of sloth: not laziness, but a willful act. If you really look at it, some of the busiest people are the most slothful, because they fill their lives sawing wood without producing anything worthwhile. Their pride keeps them there.

These are the deadly sins – not because, taken to excess, they can kill you, but because they elevate other things above God. So I want to leave you with a few short questions:

• Has it really become cool to be evil?
• Was Gordon Gekko correct in Wall Street when he said “greed is good”?
• Are we really as bulletproof as we believe?
• Are you still banging those pots and pans?

Daniel Pekarske, Abstracts of Karl Rahner's Essays

Karl Rahner was one of modern theology's most prolific and accomplished essayists. He was a consummate master of the genre, using essays to develop unsystematic sketches, suggestive hints, paths for future exploration. His great essay collection, Theological Investigations, spans 23 volumes and covers innumerable theological topics.

Unfortunately, the arrangement of these essays is often more or less arbitrary, making it difficult to track down Rahner's writing on a particular theme. So I've often made use of Daniel Pekarske's marvellous 659-page reference work, Abstracts of Karl Rahner's Theological Investigations 1-23 (Marquette University Press 2002) – a true labour of love, in which Pekarske provides a concise, informative overview of each essay, together with a detailed index.

So I was delighted to see that Pekarske has now released the sequel: Abstracts of Karl Rahner's Unserialized Essays (Marquette University Press 2009), 565 pp. In this volume, Pekarske provides abstracts of numerous essays that didn't make it into the Theological Investigations. As you'd expect, the essays here represent the extraordinary breadth of Rahner's interests – there are essays on Marxism and the economy, Concilium and renewal, prayer and silence, freedom and hominisation. As in the previous volume, Pekarske provides a very brief abstract of each essay, followed by a list of main keywords, then a list of subsidiary topics (these are often the most interesting bits), and finally a more detailed precis of the essay's argument.

Students of modern theology are indebted to Pekarske for his selfless and painstaking labours. With these unique reference works, the vast library of Rahner's essays becomes less daunting and much more accessible.

Reggae as ethics: Rastafari theology from Garvey to Marley

I've been on a Bob Marley kick lately, so this book caught my eye: Noel Leo Erskine, From Garvey to Marley: Rastafari Theology (University Press of Florida 2005). It's a fascinating and colourful exploration of the history and theology of the Rastas. In Erskine's analysis, the whole Rastafarian theology boils down to this: "God is an African" (p. 158) – so that "the central question the Rastas pose for us is where we stand in relation to Africa" (p. 5).

Erskine is himself a Jamaican-born theologian; he grew up in the village where Rastafari originated, and he later pastored a Baptist church in Jamaica. In the 1960s, he developed a close personal connection with a Rastafarian community. They discussed their views with him and allowed him to participate in their "reasonings" (informal theological discussions, accompanied by cannabis smoking) – so this book is written out of rich experience and a deep personal sympathy with the Rastafarian movement.

The Rastas see a direct relation between the Old Testament narratives and the history of the Jamaican people. "The Bible was written by black people about black people" (p. 67). Black Jamaicans are the true Israelites; "the exodus will be a return to Ethiopia, the Promised Land" (p. 38).

At the heart of this exodus-theology is the concept of Babylon. Babylon is the ultimate evil. It is that enslaving, anti-God system – the world-system that produces colonialism, capitalism, social oppression, and all manner of injustice. "Babylon" is no mere metaphor: it is experienced as a daily reality, bearing down on the Jamaican people. For the Rastas, its clearest personification is in the police: the police "were the living proof that Babylon was alive, active and waiting for any opportunity" to oppress (p. 74). Rastas also tend to avoid the church on account of its complicity with Babylon: "one steps out of the church into the state and out of the state into the church without knowing the difference" (p. 85).

This understanding of Babylon also helps to make sense of the theological significance of ganja (cannabis) smoking among Rastas. Smoking frees the mind from the "trickery" of Babylon, peeling back the veil to expose the sinister guile of the Babylonian world-system. As one Rasta puts it: "Before I start to smoke herb, the world was just good and pleasant to me.... But from I start to herb now, I start to read between the lines. Is like wool was removed from before my eyes.... The government knows from a man start smoke herb he be aware of some things. That is when he start come off the brainwash, when he start to smoke the herb. That's why them is against the herb so much" (p. 99).

Similarly, wearing dreadlocks – the single most important and dramatic identity-marker of the Rastas – signifies a rejection of the Babylonian system, a refusal to accede to the demands of Babylon. For the Rastas (p. 108), "not those who grow their hair long but those who trim it off are required to explain their actions"! In the same way, their commitment to vegetarianism and organic living finds its theological basis in this rejection of Babylon, the refusal to be assimilated into the world's oppressive system.

The power of Babylon is not, however, resisted by any Rastafarian ethic. Rather, the Rastas' whole emphasis is on escape from Babylon, sheer exodus. In the mean time, they direct "invective against the forces of oppression" (p. 81). "Babylon is evil, and the task of the Rasta is not to attempt to transform Babylon but to flee Babylon for Ethiopia" (p. 39). Indeed, for the Rastas, ethics is strictly unnecessary – they have reggae music instead!

Erskine is gently critical of the Rastas on this score, since they seem to have missed the opportunity of developing their own liberative praxis. They are stuck with "an imbalance between word and activity" (p. 43), so that they fail to seek widespread social transformation. From the perspective of liberation theology, I suppose this is a fair critique – but it fails to take seriously enough the more profound lesson of the Rastas (which is also a lesson of the Old Testament), namely, that language itself is already "action". Language is work, praxis, liberation. There is no transformation more radical than a transformation of discourse. For the people of Israel, God's very being is revealed as a liberating event of language – the divine Word-event.

Erskine rightly perceives the significance of the Rastas' linguistic innovation, their "dread talk". He observes: "With the creation of their own language, Rastas have not only protested against the education offered them through the schools ... but also have seized the power of definition" (p. 167). If we follow through on this insight, we might also ask whether Rastafari – with its tremendous attentiveness to the work of discourse – poses some critical questions to liberation theology, and indeed to any theology that allows for an easy division between the categories of theoria and praxis.

If speech is a fundamental mode of human action, then – surprisingly – it makes a good deal of sense for the Rastas to cultivate reggae in place of ethics. The more seriously we appreciate the Rastas' preoccupation with language, the more we might wonder if their project is even more ambitious than any liberation theology: they are turning the world upside down, one syllable at a time. As Erskine very aptly notes: "It may seem simplistic for Rastas to believe that the simple act of singing will threaten the system of Babylon sufficiently to effect transformation, but they observe that it was simply walking around the walls of Jericho and chanting that brought the wall down" (p. 175). It's in the song itself that Jah is alive, active, and on the move.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in New York

Over the past few days I had a delightful time reading Volume 10 of the new edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's works, Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931 (Fortress 2008), 764 pp. – a remarkable collection of letters, sermons, essays and lectures from his time as a vicar in Spain, a postdoctoral student in Berlin, and a visiting fellow at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

After working as a pastor in Barcelona (where he even acquired what may have been an original Picasso!), Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to complete his postdoctoral dissertation, Act and Being, which presented a kind of Barthian-Kantian approach to theological anthropology, grounded in the empirical reality of the church. The ensuing American period is especially fascinating: 1930-31 was a hell of a time to be in New York City!

The young Bonhoeffer was taking courses with Reinhold Niebuhr and John Baillie, going to hear sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick, studying pragmatism and American literature (he "read almost the entire philosophical works of William James, which really captivated me, then Dewey, Perry, Russell, and finally also J. B. Watson and the behaviorist literature"), worshipping in black churches, and corresponding with former teachers like Harnack and Seeberg.

His impressions of liberal American church life are generally quite scathing: "In New York, they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ.... So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that – who knows how? – claims the right to call itself 'Christian'. And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation. Anyone who has seen the weekly program of one of the large New York churches, with their daily, indeed almost hourly events, teas, lectures, concerts, charity events, opportunities for sports, games, bowling, dancing for every age group, anyone who has become acquainted with the embarrassing nervousness with which the pastor lobbies for membership – that person can well assess the character of such a church.... In order to balance out the feeling of inner emptiness that arises now and then (and partly also to refill the church's treasury), some congregations will if possible engage an evangelist for a 'revival' once a year" (pp. 313-14).

In this ecclesial ethos, "the church is really no longer the place where the congregation hears and preaches God's word, but rather the place where one acquires secondary significance as a social entity for this or that purpose" (p. 317).

Bonhoeffer was similarly dismayed by the students at Union Theological Seminary. The students "are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.... In contrast to our own [German] liberalism, which in its better representatives doubtless was a genuinely vigorous phenomenon, here all that has been frightfully sentimentalised, and with an almost naive know-it-all attitude" (pp. 265-66). Again, referring to Union Seminary: "A seminary in which numerous students openly laugh during a public lecture because they find it amusing when a passage on sin and forgiveness from Luther's de servo arbitrio is cited has obviously, despite its many advantages, forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for" (pp. 309-10).

Bonhoeffer also encountered the fundamentalist theology of J. Gresham Machen and his followers, especially in the Southern Baptist Church. This kind of theology, he remarked, revealed "a different side of the American character", namely, "an unrelenting harshness in holding on to one's possessions, possessions either of this or of the other world. I acquired this possession with trust in God, God made my success happen, so whoever infringes upon this possession is infringing upon God" (p. 317).

It was of course the black churches that won his warmest praise and admiration: "In contrast to the often lecturelike character of the 'white' sermon, the 'black Christ' is preached with captivating passion and vividness. Anyone who has heard and understood the Negro spirituals knows about [this] strange mixture of reserved melancholy and eruptive joy" (p. 315). Bonhoeffer would later introduce some of the Negro spirituals to the worship services at the illegal seminary in Finkenwalde (possibly one of the first places in Europe to introduce such songs).

The volume also contains the remarkable student papers that Bonhoeffer wrote for classes and seminars in New York – papers on William James, ethics, determinism, dogmatics. His paper on "the Christian idea of God" draws a sharp distinction between "history" and "decision": "Within the world of ideas there is no such thing as decision because I always bear already within myself the possibilities of understanding these ideas. They fit into my system but they do not challenge my whole existence" (p. 458).

A similar Kantian point is elaborated in his paper (written for Baillie) on Barth's use of neo-Kantian philosophy. Here, he argues that "the deepest antinomy" is "the antinomy between pure act and reflection"; God does not enter the realm of reflection, but "tears man out of this reflection into an actus directus toward God" (p. 474).

In sum, this is a wonderful, invigorating book, documenting an exciting and formative period of Bonhoeffer's life. We find him learning new languages, encountering new traditions and ideas, adapting to radically different ways of life – and returning again and again, with remarkable consistency, to the deep wellspring of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. As Bonhoeffer remarks in one of his letters to Seeberg: "there can be no doubt that only through active contact with other ways of thought is one led to the formation and comprehension of that which is unique to oneself" (p. 119). In the same way, even in some of his most negative assessments of American church life, one catches a glimpse of Bonhoeffer's own profound and developing ecclesiological and ethical commitments.

Who am I? Bonhoeffer's theology through his poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Barth's reception in Germany

The latest issue of Reviews in Religion and Theology includes my review of Stefan Holtmann's big study, Karl Barth als Theologe der Neuzeit: Studien zur kritischen Deutung seiner Theologie [Karl Barth as a Theologian of Modernity: Studies in the Critical Interpretation of His Theology]. The book is tremendously helpful for understanding the history of the Marburg-school interpretation of Barth. Here are the opening lines of my review:

One of the dominant trends in contemporary English-language Barth studies is to view Barth’s thought as a project that overcame the problems of modernity by returning to the roots of classical dogma; thus Barth becomes the champion of a renewed (because more deeply traditional) evangelical orthodoxy, while the problems and questions of the nineteenth century are passed over as obsolete. Coupled with this is the tendency to read Barth’s dogmatics as a kind of tour de force, a magisterial work whose authority is fundamentally beyond question, and whose thought can be apprehended without any reference to the historical context within which it was conceived. Even where Barth is criticised, Anglo-American Barth scholars will typically identify some ‘gap’, some relatively benign deficiency (usually creation or pneumatology) which requires supplementation.

Things are very different in Germany. Under the influence of Trutz Rendtorff and the so-called ‘Munich school’, several major German theologians have long pursued a stinging critique of Barth’s entire project. Here, his work is understood not as a triumph over modernity, but as one particular – and deeply problematic – product of the Enlightenment. In this impressive, meticulously researched study, Stefan Holtmann explores the history of this critical reception of Barth’s thought in Germany.

Introducing Giorgio Agamben: what is an apparatus?

I recently mentioned Leland de la Durantaye’s new critical introduction to Giorgio Agamben – a book which I’ve found extremely valuable and insightful. But if you’re not already familiar with Agamben’s works, you might find Durantaye’s 463-page volume a little intimidating. If you’re looking for the quickest, easiest, most accessible introduction to Agamben’s thought – an introduction that you can get through in a single hour – then there’s no better guide than Agamben’s own latest book (a tiny but potent 56 pages), What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford UP 2009).

This first essay, “What Is an Apparatus?”, provides a wonderfully concise snapshot of Agamben’s entire recent project, his “theological genealogy of economy” (8). In this little essay, Agamben uses Foucault’s concept of the apparatus to classify all beings in two groups: “living beings”, and “apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured”. In theological terminology, these two classes denote an ontology of creatures on the one hand, and on the other hand the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern these creatures (13). Between these two classes lies a third class: subjects. Agamben understands a subject as that which results from the relation between living beings and apparatuses.

This concept of the apparatus reflects Foucault’s understanding of the formation of subjectivity. Apparatuses are not a mere accident; they are “rooted in the very process of ‘humanization’ that made ‘humans’ out of … Homo sapiens” (16). They are not instruments of violence, but of governance and subjectification. The apparatus is thus always something that produces its own subject. But the current phase of capitalism has witnessed a proliferation of new apparatuses to capture every moment and facet of life; and these capitalist apparatuses subjectify only by desubjectifying (just as, for Foucault, the penitential subject is constituted through its own negation). In any case, our formation as subjects is always a process of interruption by which the apparatus separates us from our immediate relation to our environment.

Fundamentally, such separation is religion. Religion takes things from the domain of common use and places them in a separate sphere; religion consecrates. The situation of our time demands a new politics of profanation, where that which has been separated/consecrated is restored to common use. In this way, “profanation is the counter-apparatus” (19). Our capitalist world has become “a sort of colossal parody of theological oikonomia”, in which apparatuses “assume the legacy of the providential governance of the world” (23). These apparatuses can be resisted – we can intervene in their process of subjectification – only through profanation. It is profanation which brings to light “the Ungovernable, which is the beginning and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics” (24).

It’s a splendid little essay (the volume also includes essays on “the friend” and “the contemporary”). I’ve never come across such a concise, lucid, programmatic statement of Agamben’s project.

This essay also makes it very clear that all Agamben’s recent work on theological economy is structured at its deepest level by Foucault’s understanding of power and subjectivity (not to mention Foucauldian concepts like archaeology, genealogy, biopolitics, etc) – even though figures like Benjamin and Schmitt sometimes linger nearer the surface of Agamben’s texts. As Agamben himself remarked in a recent interview: “I see my work as closer to no one than to Foucault” (cited in Durantaye, 209).

Alister McGrath's 2009 Gifford Lectures: A Fine-Tuned Universe

If there was a prize for the year’s most efficient theology publisher, it would have to go to the hard-working people at WJK. Less than two months ago, Alister McGrath was presenting his 2009 Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen; earlier this week I was surprised to find that the published lectures had already landed on my doorstep! The lectures are published as Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (WJK 2009), 262 pp.

The material here forms a sequel to McGrath’s recent extended essay, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Blackwell 2008), where he argued that a new “natural theology” could provide not a causal explanation for the cosmos but instead an “explanatory unification” which makes sense of various (otherwise very strange) observable phenomena. Nature can thus become a bearer of transcendence – not through any inherent capacity in nature itself (after all, there is no mere uninterpreted nature, but only different constructed “readings” of nature); but when nature is seen through the lens of a Christian trinitarian ontology. This whole approach to natural theology is best summed up in C. S. Lewis’s famous remark: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

A Fine-Tuned Universe develops this approach through a particular case study: the so-called “anthropic principle”, which describes the universe’s peculiar and puzzling friendliness towards life.

McGrath’s argument is that the universe’s fine-tuning is consonant with a Christian picture of the world. At the core of the book is a scientific-theological reading of Augustine. In a series of engagements with contemporary science (the constants of the universe; the origins of life; the chemistry of water; the constraints of evolution; the teleology of evolution; and emergence), McGrath argues that Augustine’s creation theology provides resources for making theological sense of both the origins of the universe and the processes of Darwinian evolution. 

There is no notion here of “proving” the existence of God or the truth of Christian teaching; instead, McGrath’s claim is that there is a coherent “fit” between the observable world and the imaginative resources of Christian tradition. “What is observed within the natural order resonates with the core themes of the Christian vision of God” (p. 95). More than that, he also argues that Darwin’s theory of natural selection opens the way to a theological reevaluation of Augustine’s creation theology: read retrospectively in the light of biological evolution, Augustine becomes an important resource for thinking of creation in terms of “both primordial actuality and emergent possibility” (p. 216).

One of my own discomforts with “natural theology” lies in the romanticism with which it is usually undertaken: theologians reflect on an imaginary world of idealised peace and harmony and perfection, instead of taking seriously the apparent blindness and ugliness and brutality that is so easily perceived in the created order. Even a thinker as probing and sensitive as T. F. Torrance – with his immense ruminations on the order and structure and rationality of the natural world – seems far too little impressed by what Karl Barth called the “shadow side of creation,” the fact that creation’s “goodness” is a difficult and demanding article of faith rather than an observable phenomenon.

So it’s to his credit that McGrath – unlike most exponents of natural theology – underscores the fact that Christian theology must try somehow to account for these “two sides” of nature. Nature is, as Luther put it, simul bona et mala: it is marked by “beauty and ugliness, joy and pain, good and evil” (p. 80). McGrath suggests that nature should thus be interpreted within the context of the economy of salvation, so that we perceive the created world to be “decayed and ambivalent,” a “morally and aesthetically variegated entity whose goodness and beauty are often opaque and hidden, yet [is] nevertheless irradiated with the hope of transformation” (p. 82).

I’m not sure McGrath’s approach – which leans so heavily on notions of coherence, rationality and order – provides a full response to the forceful criticism (as developed, e.g. by Hauerwas and Jüngel) that natural theology tends towards a theologia gloria, leaving no place for the cross of Christ. But his remarks about creation as both bona et mala are surely a step in the right direction, and, hopefully, a step away from any mere romantic “re-enchantment” of the world. (As far as I can tell, nothing could be less “enchanting” than the idea that Christ’s bloody death on a cross discloses the true grain of the universe.)

In any case, this is a significant and very fascinating book. McGrath has been working around the theme of “nature” for several years now – but his best work is found in these two latest volumes, The Open Secret and A Fine-Tuned Universe.

The green Bible

Have you heard of The Green Bible? It’s a new green-letter edition of the Good Book in which “verses that speak to God’s care for creation are highlighted in green.” The Bible also includes essays and inspirational quotes on ecology, and it’s printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink with a cotton/linen cover. Because “caring for the earth is not only a calling, but a lifestyle.”

That last sentence is very strange and very creepy. But it’s also an uncannily precise description of the dynamics of contemporary Christian chic: the Christian life is understood not as vocation but as a particular lifestyle choice, complete with its own market of lifestyle-defining niche products. Ye shall know them by their T-shirts and their cotton/linen Bible covers.

Anyway, the latest issue of First Things includes a splendid piece by Alan Jacobs on the phenomenon of the Green Bible: “The Green Bible presents us with a curious kind of natural theology: We start with things we know to be true from trusted sources – Al Gore, perhaps? – and then we turn to Scripture to measure it against those preexisting and reliable authorities. And what a relief to discover that God is green. Because we already know that it’s good to be green – what we didn’t know is whether God measures up to that standard.”

Jacobs is right to poke fun at the project’s entire underlying methodology: “The project website tells us that ‘with over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth.’ I am not sure what to make of this argumentum ad arithmeticum, unless the point is that the earth is approximately 1.88 times more important to God than love and 2.04 times more important than heaven. Based on my own research into this topic and following the same method, I am prepared to say that the earth is 7.04 times more important to God than donkeys (which are mentioned 142 times in the Bible).”

And he is right to observe that scripture itself is a little more ecologically ambiguous than The Green Bible would have you believe. Exactly what ecological edification are we to draw from the story of Jesus cursing and blighting a fig tree? Or from a passage like Ezekiel 20: “Mortal, set your face towards the south, preach against the south, and prophesy against the forest land in the Negeb; say to the forest of the Negeb, Hear the word of the Lord: Thus says the Lord God, I will kindle a fire in you, and it shall devour every green tree in you, and every dry tree; the blazing fire shall not be quenched, and all faces from south to north shall be scorched by it.”

Perhaps (for a different niche market) we should also produce The Arsonist’s Bible, with verses highlighted orange wherever God burns, scorches, or blows shit up. “Because with 1134 references to fire and burning, and only 158 references to salvation, the Bible carries a powerful message for those who enjoy destroying things.”

Three books on global theology

William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, eds. Global Dictionary of Theology (IVP 2008), 996 pp.

Vinoth Ramachandra, Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World (IVP 2008), 296 pp.

Douglas A. Hicks and Mark Valeri, eds. Global Neighbors: Christian Faith and Moral Obligation in Today’s Economy (Eerdmans 2008), 276 pp.

For several years now, IVP has been raising the bar for theological and biblical reference works – most notably with their remarkable series of black dictionaries. Their latest offering, the Global Dictionary of Theology, is another exemplary reference work and a first-rate resource for students and teachers of theology. The book provides an up-to-date picture of how theology is being practised today on every continent and in numerous different national and ethnic contexts.

Generally speaking, the editors have avoided smaller entries, and have devoted the volume to extended, substantive articles on major themes. In many cases, there are multiple authors for a single entry, so that the volume represents some lively debate and discussion. For example, the entry on “Capitalism” (pp. 127-33) includes a critical section written by a Spanish theologian (and it’s good stuff too: “capitalism does not merely represent a structural sin, but the global and imperial configuration of the basic structures of Adamic sin…. This then means that all authentic proclamation of the gospel is always a direct challenge to capitalism”), coupled with a somewhat more sympathetic treatment written by an American. Again, the excellent entry on “Christology” (pp. 167-86) features an wide-ranging introductory section by Kärkkäinen, followed by an extended account of the new contextual christologies by J. Levison and P. Pope-Levison. And although most African nations are grouped together as “African theologies,” there are excellent separate entries on evangelical, Protestant and Catholic African theologies, as well as on traditional African religions.

In addition to the many national and ethnic entries, one also finds fascinating perspectives on themes as diverse as aesthetics, human rights, healing and deliverance, music, missionary movements, theological education, theology of work, and relief and development.

Of course, “global theology” is an unwieldy topic, and the book reflects some interesting methodological decisions about what counts as “global.” For example, the entry on “Australian theology” (written by a very promising young Pentecostal theologian) discusses the theological importance of Aboriginal history and spirituality in Australia, as well as the function of (mythical) Aussie identity-markers like “mateship” and “the fair go.” It may be true that “various scholars have sought to theologize … the broader metaphorical meanings” of such identity-markers – but such theologising would hardly represent the daily concerns of most practising Australian theologians; and this focus on the idiosyncratic features of Australian theology hardly gives the reader an impression of the broad landscape of theological work in this country, or of the main lines of division between the country’s dominant theological styles.

Don’t misunderstand me: the entry on Australia is interesting and informative, and I’m drawing attention to it only because of my own familiarity with this particular “global” context. But I think the questions raised here are important methodological questions for any account of global theology. Even if such an account is motivated by postcolonial sensitivities and by a desire to move beyond the narrow dominance of European theologies, one might also ask whether a certain (more refined) imperialism is at work in the endeavour to isolate and analyse the most exotic and idiosyncratic features of a particular theological context. 

I once heard of a Karl Barth conference that was held in Germany several years ago. The conference organisers had invited a Japanese theologian to participate, but they were somewhat dismayed to find that their Japanese scholar had no interest in theologising his own national context – he was entirely preoccupied with the questions and problems of modern German thought! Presumably the conference organisers had expected their guest to provide a more exotic “oriental” perspective.

The editors of this volume report a similar problem, where contributors had failed to provide adequately idiosyncratic accounts of their particular contexts: “A further challenge that was in some ways surprising was the number of scholars from the Global South who tended to do theology in the manner of their Northern teachers. Occasionally, entries drafted by theologians from Asia, Africa and Latin America did not differ significantly from entries that would have been written by their European or North American counterparts…. Who is going to do authentically Asian, African or Hispanic theology if not theologians from those particular locations?” (p. xi). Here, the norm of theological “authenticity” has apparently already been settled in advance; an African theologian who wants to talk about European intellectual problems is simply not African enough!

These observations are intended more as broad methodological questions than as a critique of the Global Dictionary of Theology. On the whole, the volume is in fact exemplary in this respect: the editors have tried to avoid an imperialistic tyranny of the exotic, especially by representing not only liberal/progressive voices, but also evangelical, Pentecostal and conservative Catholic perspectives. For example, the entry on Korean theology rightly emphasises the central importance of Calvinist and Reformed traditions, so that a Princeton theologian like Sang Hyan Lee should be viewed as a major representative of contemporary Korean theology.

The broader methodological questions which I’ve been raising are taken up very ably in Subverting Global Myths, by the Sri Lankan theologian Vinoth Ramachandra. The book offers a series of critical theological interventions in a range of contemporary public issues, such as terrorism, religious violence, human rights and multiculturalism. Underpinning the book is an analysis of the function of myth and idolatry in contemporary public life: “What frightens a people serves as a reliable guide to their idolatries. Idols are sustained by myths – public, large-scale narratives that engage our imaginations and shape the way we experience the world” (p. 12). The chapters on multiculturalism and postcolonialism are especially good; since it connects with my earlier remarks, let me just focus here on Ramachandra’s analysis of postcolonialism.

Ramachandra notes that, ironically, postcolonial criticism often mirrors the hermeneutical violence of colonialism: the scholar exercises theological judgment according to a set of preconceived liberal norms, and then “paradoxically wields the secularist liberal worldview of the academy (itself part of the colonial legacy) to outlaw all other theological voices” (p. 256). Further, he notes the “curious selectivity” with which “Third World theology” is represented in scholarly work – here’s an extended quote:

“Asian theologies are taken to be theologies addressing what is called, in typical Orientalist fashion, the Asian context; and the latter is reduced to poverty, women’s empowerment and the presence of ancient world religions…. Western theologians feel free to write on such ‘Asian issues,’ but Asian theologians who address other issues within their churches (e.g. healing, ethnic fragmentation, ecclesiastical politics, responding to persecution) or global issues (e.g. postmodernism, genetic technology, evolutionism, the internet) tend to be marginalized…. Moreover, only if one were to espouse the typical Western secular liberal agenda … can one acquire the status of being a ‘progressive’ theologian. Hence the huge gulf between those who profess to speak for the Third World church and the Third World church itself” (pp. 255-56).

Ramachandra’s incisive critique deserves sober reflection. His book is a serious and passionate piece of public theology, and it makes for gripping and compelling reading.

Finally, let me also point out Eerdmans’ new collection of essays, Global Neighbours. The essays here offer theological and ethical reflections on the shape of Christian life within a global economy. One of the book’s central points is
that a free-market economy is not a morally neutral system; it is itself underpinned by a cluster of moral and theological assumptions. That’s not to say that the authors provide any deep critique of capitalist economy – their aim is to contribute to public debate, so the result is a very practical and pragmatic book about the complexity of moral decisions in a global economy. 

The contributors even include business experts: this immediately raised my suspicions, but I’m happy to report that one of the book’s most interesting and engaging essays (Chapter 6, “Free Markets and the Reign of God”) is by a business expert rather than a theologian. (Unlike some theologians, this author is very honest about the moral conflicts involved in seemingly simple business decisions.)

I suppose it is the book’s “public” and pragmatic tone that leaves me finally feeling unsatisfied with its proposals. For example, I scarcely feel that the theological critique runs deep enough when an essay on U2’s activism concludes: “Bono as celebrity leader makes a notable contribution that stands as a challenge to citizens to press our political leaders into doing their part” (p. 62); or when another author remarks: “If our government is failing us, it is because we are failing as citizens to shape a government that expresses these values” (p. 247).

It seems to me that both these quotes point to a significant gap in the volume’s theological agenda: the absence of ecclesiology, of a Christian community whose own practices might open up an alternative economic space. Such a community would function not as a political lobby aiming to implement particular moral-economic “values”, but as a public witness to the economy of grace that has appeared in Jesus Christ and that is given in the eucharist.

So on that note, I should end this long and meandering review by pointing you to still one more book – William Cavanaugh’s delightful work, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Eerdmans, 2008). Although I think some of Cavanaugh’s practical suggestions are too simple, his book nevertheless models the best kind of response to our global free-market economy: not an attempt to lobby or influence existing political structures, but an exercise in theological imagination, in which the world and the church are re-imagined together under the light of the gospel.

Paul Nimmo: Being in Action

I was delighted to hear that Paul Nimmo has received the Templeton Award for Theological Promise – a prize that comes with $10,000, plus an additional $10,000 to fund a series of international lectures. Paul received the award for his excellent book on Barth, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (T&T Clark, 2007).

Drawing deeply on the work of Bruce McCormack and Eberhard Jüngel, Nimmo shows that Barth’s ethical thought is structured by an actualistic ontology. “The action of God in electing to be God for humanity in Jesus Christ is not the act of an already existing agent. Rather it is an act in the course of which God determines the very being of God.” God’s being is an act, and the human agent is likewise constituted as a being-in-action through its ethical correspondence to God’s act in Christ. Indeed, Jesus’ history is the occurrence of human being. As Eberhard Jüngel puts it, “Between the being of the man Jesus and the being of all humanity there is an ontological connection, because in the history of Jesus, God makes history for all humanity.”

For Nimmo, the ontological connection between human agency and God’s act in Jesus does not entail any deification of the human, but rather “the humanization of the ethical agent.” Nimmo thus rightly critiques George Hunsinger’s argument that Barth envisions a realistic “participation” in Christ: for Barth, “participation” is a matter of actualistic/historical correspondence, not of mystical union. Indeed, there is no divine substance in which the human could somehow share; the divine essence is nothing other than the history of God’s way with humanity, arising from God’s eternal election of the man Jesus. The human agent thus participates in Christ not through a mystical union, but through an ethical correspondence to God’s will. In this life, “participation” takes the form of witness.

Nimmo thus also responds in detail to Stanley Hauerwas’s critique of Barth’s ecclesiology: Barth is able to relativise the moral function of the church precisely because of his confidence that God is acting in the church. Since the church depends on God’s action, it “cannot arrogate to itself the role of moral teacher or former of moral character.” The church is set free to be the church only where its identity is understood in terms of act and witness – or to put it another way, the church can be the church only where God is really conceived as God.

Being in Action is a superb study of Barth’s ethics, and an important analysis of the actualistic ontology which structures the Church Dogmatics. It’s great to see the Templeton Foundation recognising this kind of high-calibre theological research – and it’s very exciting to see the new directions that are opening up in some of the current work on Barth.

Paradise Lost: parallel prose edition

Continuing our celebratory Milton theme, let me tell you about this very unusual – and quite remarkable – new book. Dennis Danielson, one of the world’s most distinguished interpreters of Milton (and a brilliant interpreter of Milton’s theology), has translated the whole of Paradise Lost into prose!

Paradise Lost: Parallel Prose Edition (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2008), 559 pp. (thanks to Regent College for a copy)

Milton’s poetry is notoriously difficult. T. S. Eliot famously remarked that Milton “invent[s] his own poetic language.” Every linguistic idiosyncrasy, Eliot said, “is a particular act of violence which Milton has been the first to commit”; his poetic style is “a perpetual sequence of original acts of lawlessness.” Milton’s verse is therefore “poetry at the farthest possible remove from prose” – thus explaining both its sheer difficulty and the extraordinary capacity of the language to captivate and beguile.

I must admit, I was at first skeptical when I heard about Danielson’s new edition. Sure, everyone admits that Paradise Lost is difficult. But conventional scholarship tries to meet this difficulty by arming students with annotations, introductions, and various other scholarly aids. In contrast, Danielson’s approach is startlingly unorthodox: he simply translates the poetry into prose. And after perusing this edition – once I had recovered from the initial shock – I have to say I’m very impressed.

Danielson’s edition contains no scholarly apparatus. You simply have the full text of the poem on one page, with a prose translation on the facing page. The translation is not a substitute for the text, then – but it’s an easy, enjoyable way for readers to interpret a given passage and to follow the larger movement of the narrative. In a poem like this, difficult interpretive decisions lurk around every corner (or behind every bush); so Danielson’s prose can also be profitably read as an extended interpretive commentary on the poem – albeit a commentary which artfully conceals its own immense learning and scholarly sophistication.

Of course, reading a prose translation like this will still introduce a regrettable distance between the reader and the poetry; but I suspect such distancing is even more pronounced where one’s reading is mediated by textual commentary and elaborate footnotes “in terrible array / Of hideous length.” A prose interpretation like Danielson’s at least encourages the reader to enjoy the poem, not merely to work at it; to become absorbed in the poem’s own peculiar world and in its strange, compelling narrative.

Let me give a few examples of Danielson’s translation. From the poem’s famous opening passage, here is Milton describing Satan’s fall from heaven:

Him the Almighty Power
Hurld headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,

Who durst defie th’ Omnipotent to Arms.

And here is Danielson’s rendering on the facing page: “But Omnipotence hurled him, flaming, from the dizzy height of heaven into the lost and fathomless depths, there, ruined and burnt out yet still on fire, to wear the unbreakable chains he earned by daring the Almighty to take up arms.”

For another example, here’s Milton describing the animals in Eden – the animals play together while Adam and Eve rest after a day’s work:

About them frisking playd
All Beasts of th’ Earth, since wilde, and of all chase
In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den;

Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw

Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards
Gambold before them, th’ unwieldy Elephant
To make them mirth us’d all his might, and wreathd
His Lithe Proboscis; close the Serpent sly
Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine

His breaded train, and of his fatal guile

Gave proof unheeded; others on the grass
Coucht, and now fild with pasture gazing sat,

Or Bedward ruminating: for the Sun

Declin’d was hasting now with prone carreer

To th’ Ocean Iles, and in th’ ascending Scale

Of Heav’n the Starrs that usher Evening rose.

And here’s Danielson: “All the animals of the earth (since become wild) and of every terrain, whether wood, wilderness, jungle or plain, frisked and played about with them. The lion reared up in sport, and in his paw he dandled a young goat as one might a small child. Bears, tigers, lynxes, and leopards frolicked in front of them. The unwieldy elephant used all his might to make them laugh and coiled his limber trunk. Nearby the sly snake, twisting and turning, wove his sinuous length into subtle knots, unheeded evidence of fateful cunning. Others reposed on the grass and, having grazed their fill, sat merely observing or sleepily chewing their cud. For the sinking sun was hastening now on its course toward the horizon and the islands of the west; and ascending the staircase of the heavens rose the stars that usher in the evening.”

Or, once more, here is Milton describing the world’s creation:

Darkness profound
Cover’d th’ Abyss: but on the watrie calme
His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspred,
And vital vertue infus’d, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid Mass, but downward purg’d

The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs
Adverse to life: then founded, then conglob’d

Like things to like, the rest to several place
Disparted, and between spun out the Air,

And Earth self ballanc’t on her Center hung.

And here is Danielson: “Profound darkness obscured the abyss; but the Spirit of God stretched out his brooding wings upon the watery stillness, infusing that fluid mass with the power and warmth of life, flushing downward the dark abysmal cold infernal dregs, life’s antithesis. Then he fused like things with like, molding them into a sphere; and to the rest he assigned separate regions. Between them he spun out the air, and in its midst he hung the earth, balanced on nothing but itself.”

You can see what I mean when I say that this prose translation may actually help readers to stay closer to the text than they would when their reading is mediated by a clutter of scholarly footnotes and interpretive comments. In spite of the inherent limitations of prose, and in spite of the ways in which Milton’s style eludes any single rendering, Danielson nevertheless succeeds remarkably in drawing your attention back to the shape of the narrative action and to the structure of Milton’s own language.

Those with an expert knowledge of Paradise Lost will find Danielson’s prose to be a fascinating and engaging interpretation of the text. And those reading the poem for the first time – or teaching it – will find this edition to be an elegant and surefooted help, an aid which is delightful in its own right, and which “timely interposes” in those moments of poetic difficulty.