Christ and the Possibility of Feminine Identity

Posted on November 7, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

OK, the subject of masculinity and femininity has been a subject of discussion following one of yesterday’s posts. I thought that I would post this as somewhat relevant to the questions at issue. It is certainly not the best thing that I have ever written and I decided not to post it when I first wrote it over a year ago. I would probably want to add a lot, lot more to it if I had written it today. However, I will post it now, more or less in its original form, as I do not have the time or energy to write anything much new on the subject. Someone like Dennis should post on this subject, as it would be far more insightful than the following thoughts. Continue reading →

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Barbaric and Civilized Worship

Posted on November 6, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

Peter Leithart writes about the development of a split in worship styles on the First Things blog:—

Elias’s account not only provides what he calls a “sociogenesis” of mannered, civilized behavior, but also describes a social form of what T. S. Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility.” As court society became more refined, more controlled, more Apollonian, court and its associated institutions became the locus of high art and intellect, separated from sensuous perception and the body. “Civilized” standards of behavior, and refinement of thought and conversation, became badges of inclusion in court society. Dionysian vigor, the body, energy, and life became associated with barbaric, uncivilized behavior. The formation of courtly society through the civilizing process created not only the early modern form of social hierarchy in the West; it produced a rift in the Western imagination.

A similar rift is evident in the history of Christian worship. Medieval liturgies were of course highly structured, but there are regular accounts of a surprising liturgical playfulness. A priest of Auxerre writing in the early Middle Ages recorded that during the Easter celebration, the dean or some other cathedral office would chant the Easter antiphon holding a leather ball, then dance through a maze as the ball was passed from hand to hand: “There was sport, and the meter of the dance was set by the organ. Following the dance, the singing of the sequence and the jumping having concluded, the chorus proceeded to a meal.” Dancers costumed as angels danced in Corpus Christi processions in Spain, and by the late fourteenth century in England, the Corpus Christi festival had taken on some of the atmosphere of a popular carnival, complete with edifying but also amusing theater.

For several centuries, the Church has been divided between those who worship in a “courtly” manner and those who worship “barbarously,” a distinction that cuts across Protestant-Catholic boundaries and is as fundamental as doctrinal differences. Liturgical jumping, if the tradition continues at all, would be confined to the “low church” worship of charismatics. High-church lectionaries often discretely skip the appalling sexual imagery of Ezekiel 16, while Leviticus with its blood and flesh and bodily fluids is barely read at all. Effete, passionless, orotund sermons echo through cathedrals, while the Baptist minister on the other side of town preaches himself into a lather in a clapboard pillbox. The jazzy rhythms of Reformation hymnody were smoothed by the Reformers’ heirs, and only charismatics clapped or swayed as they sang. As Elias would lead us to expect, this liturgical divide has often also been a class division, as the upper classes gravitate to the civilized Episcopalian Church, while working stiffs find spiritual solace in a raucous Pentecostal atmosphere.

There is some hope. Free-church evangelicals are rediscovering the riches of historic liturgies, and the grassroots ecumenism spreading through the American church puts courtly and barbaric Christians face-to-face in a way they have not been for some time. In the southern hemisphere, Anglicanism combines a biblicist traditionalism and respect for the Anglican liturgical with a visceral vitality unknown in English and American Anglicanism. These are hopeful signs for the future of Christian worship. They are equally signs that there is yet hope to mend a breach in the western soul.

Much food for thought here.

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Worship and the Cartesian Man

Posted on November 6, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

James K.A. Smith writes:—

I had the opportunity to “experience” a version of one of these services in Geneva (Service 10, “Queer”). This was going to be my first “emerging” worship experience, so I came with much anticipation. And I was not disappointed (I still have the shard of broken tile I took from the service). However, I was struck by one thing: the service was remarkably Protestant. By that I don’t just mean to toss out an epithet or a label. I mean it as a shorthand. By describing the service as “Protestant,” I only mean to say that I was surprised at how “heady” the service was, and how text-driven and text-centered the worship was. (Granted, we were just a few yards from John Calvin’s church, so maybe the sermon-centric vibes of the Reformation had wafted over.) While the service included key affective elements (the man’s body being marked by epithets, the very tangible pieces of broken rocks and tiles we could touch), this was happening around a very textual, cognitive, rather sermonic center. Granted, this wasn’t your grandpa’s “three point” sermon or anything, but it still required the sorts of cognitive processing that characterizes text-centered Protestant worship.

Now, why does this matter? Why focus on this point? Well, I think one of the key paradigm shifts that took place in modernity (particularly after Descartes) was the adoption of a new model of the human person that considered the human to be primarily and essentially a “thinking thing”—primarily a cognitive mind that, regrettably and contingently, inhabits a meaty body. As a result, the primary and most important activity that thinking things can undertake is, you guessed it, thinking. This shift manifests itself in the life of the church with the Reformation, which displaced the centrality of the Eucharist (a very tactile, affective, sensual mode of worship) and put the sermon (the Word) at the center. The heart of worship becomes “teaching,” and the shape of worship becomes driven by very cognitive, basically rationalist tendencies. This develops to the point of caricature in the evangelical worship service centered around bullet points on the PowerPoint presentation.

Despite the “postmodern” critiques of religion offered by Derrida, Caputo, et. al., I find that they continue to exhibit this modernist paradigm insofar as they still think that religion comes down to a matter of knowledge (or rather, not knowing). And I wonder if we don’t see the lingering effects of this in the liturgies sketched in Part 2 of How (Not) to Speak of God. Granted, this isn’t a pure rationalism—there are aspects of affective embodiment, and they are ‘liturgies,’ after all; but I do wonder whether they’re still not primarily “driven” by quite heady, cognitive, didactic concerns. In this way, they tend to reflect the kinds of wrestlings and wranglings of a certain class who have had the opportunity to get to have such doubts.

Perhaps I can put a point on this: for me, one of the tests of whether worship is properly “holistic” (and thus animated by a holistic, non-rationalist model of the human person) is the extent to which my children can enter in to worship. (Because of a certain worshiping community I’ve been a part of, I’m also attentive to the degree to which mentally-challenged adults can participate in worship as a criterion.) In the “Queer” service, my kids—who are, I think, pretty sharp—would have had a hard time ‘keeping up,’ had a hard time understanding what was going on. They would have been intrigued by the curiosities of the “marked man,” etc., but there was ALOT of words to process and they would have been lost in a sea of ideas.

I would contrast this to the affective simplicity of a traditional Tenebrae service on Good Friday (a “service of shadows”). While the service is organized by Christ’s seven sayings from the cross, there is not much else text or commentary. Instead, there is the simple amalgam of words, candles being gradually snuffed, sounds and silence. My children, from when they were little, sit enraptured by this service. Its affective simplicity testifies, I think, to a pre-modern understanding of the person as an affective, embodied creature—rational, sure, but not primarily rational.

This is why I wonder whether, for the future of the church, we really need to invent something new, or rather creatively retrieve premodern sources. While some are trying to imagine a new future for the church “after” modernity, I’m betting that the future is Catholic.

I am not sure that I would go quite as far as Smith does here, but I think that he makes some important points. In particular, I think that he is right in observing a connection between a particular — and rather questionable — understanding of the human being and the manner of worship. Protestant worship (and Reformed and Puritan worship in particular) often operates on the assumption that man is primarily a thinker. The rationalism that underlies many Protestant conceptions of worship has been observed by James Jordan and others like him a number of times in the past. The irrationalism that characterizes much contemporary evangelical worship is also largely a reaction to the rationalism that is seen to be the alternative.

Operating with a rationalistic definition of the human being, the worship service must downplay the body and focus on addressing itself to the mind. Candles, incense, clerical vestments, kneeling, processions, silence (except as a time for thinking), fine church buildings, and even in some cases music itself, are seen as distractions from rational worship, which should be removed. Elements of worship such as the Eucharist become increasingly treated as affairs of the mind. The Eucharist is reduced to a sign to be verbally explained, mentally interpreted and reflected upon.

Significant changes in my anthropology and in my view of worship over the last few years are by no means unrelated. Study of the Scriptures, self-reflection and engagement with others have progressively disabused me of any belief that I once held that we are primarily rational creatures. God addresses us at levels far deeper than our rational consciousness. I also believe that the idea that Scripture chiefly addresses us at a rational level should be questioned. The idea that Scripture always speaks first to our minds just seems wrong to me. This does not mean that the Scripture bypasses our minds altogether. However, it means that when the Scripture commands, exhorts, rebukes, comforts or encourages us, our minds are not the primary part of our make-up that God wants to engage with what is being said. God’s Word often addresses itself to our chests, before it ever speaks to our minds (or even to our hearts).

The narratives of Scripture are not primarily there to be picked at by our intellects, but to reform our imaginations. Intellectual reflection on the typology of biblical narratives, such as that which often takes place on this blog, is always a secondary activity, an articulation of something that should be grasped by the trained instinct of the person whose imagination is steeped in Scripture. There is always the danger that people will presume that the mind can substitute for the imagination. Reading a lot of books on biblical typology and symbolism will not reform your imagination in the manner in which attentive and receptive reading of Scripture can (although books on biblical typology can help you learn to be more attentive and receptive).

This is one reason why I like when passages of Scripture are read in Church services without being expounded in any way. Preaching is undoubtedly important, but if God’s Word is only encountered in the form of the preacher’s text — or as something to be rationally expounded — we can miss the point. The reading of passages apart from a preached explanation can encourage us to engage with the Scripture with our imaginations, just as we engage with other narratives and stories.

In my own personal reading of Scripture I often read and reread the same passage half a dozen times or even more. I try to practice listening attentively to the text and try to resist the urge to immediately explain it. I have found such an engagement with Scripture to be of great help in enabling me to imaginatively engage with the text. I begin to pick up things that I would have missed had I adopted a more scientific approach to the study of the text. I might later try to articulate these things in a more ‘scientific’ form, but they were not arrived at by a regular scientific method. It is precisely through holding my rationality back from immediate engagement with the text that I begin to understand it at a deeper level.

In understanding the fact that man is not primarily a rational being, it is helpful to remember that most human communication is non-verbal. This is why liturgical training of the human body in posture, gesture and vesture is so important. As human beings we were designed to communicate with the entirety of our bodies and to receive communication with every part of our make-up. Much of the communication that we give is pre-conscious, as is the manner in which we receive much that is communicated to us. Often the most significant truths that we communicate or receive are the ones that we communicate or receive without even knowing that we are doing so, or without even thinking about it. Good liturgy can train us to communicate in Christian ways subconsciously, not just consciously. It can also communicate powerfully to the youngest person present in a way that a rationalistic service cannot.

There is a common polarization between the heart and the body in much popular Protestantism. It is presumed that if worship is primarily a matter of the heart then the body is relatively unimportant. The problem with this view is that it is quite unscriptural. The Scriptures frequently teach us what we need to do with our bodies. The separation between heart and body is one that exists because of sin and hypocrisy. The Scripture calls us to an integrated loyalty of heart and body. It calls us to a ‘hearty’ performance of bodily actions.

As I argue in the post that I linked to at the start of the previous paragraph, in the Scriptures heart and body are bound together to the extent that the heart cannot truly communicate itself apart from the body. To the extent that rationalistic Protestantism resists ‘body language’ in prayer (kneeling, arms up-raised, prostration, etc.), for example, we must ask to what extent it is failing to pray as truly as it ought.

Posted in Quotations, The Blogosphere, The Emergent Church, Theological, Worship | 9 Comments

Where Have All the Good Atheists Gone? — On the Loss of Important Conversations.

Posted on November 6, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

Richard Dawkins
Prosthesis links to this post by Thomas Adams at Without Authority:

The intellectual laziness of modern atheism is a shame because, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Christianity needs smart atheists to keep it honest. In my estimation, the best example of a “purifying atheist” is Friedrich Nietzsche (for a wonderful synopsis of Nietzsche’s contributions to Christian thought, please check out Byron Smith’s post here). The son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche had a deeper understanding of Christianity than the vast majority of theologians, past and present. And unlike modern atheists, he took the idea of God very seriously. He may have reached some of the same conclusions about religion as modern atheists, but he took a very different route. His writings bear witness, not to a simple-minded dismissal of God, but to a profound confrontation with his religious heritage. In the end, his struggle may have yielded a purer and more faithful account of the Christian faith. Thus, Eberhard Jungel could say that “[Nietzsche’s] thoughts come very close to the Christian truth which he was opposing. They merit special attention.” A hundred years from now, I doubt that anyone will be saying the same thing about Harris’ recent book.

A few days I picked up Theology After Wittgenstein and skim-read some sections of it, as I hadn’t done so for some time. Fergus Kerr comments somewhere that Wittgenstein was one of the last of the great philosophers to have his work so permeated by theological questions. Wittgenstein may not have agreed with the Christian tradition, but he believed that it was deserving of intellectual respect and serious engagement. With the lack of such engagement in the thought of most non-Christian intellectuals today and the gradual abandonment of a conversation between non-Christians with a genuine and sympathetic appreciation of the riches of the Christian tradition and thoughtful churchmen we are all poorer off.

Sometimes I wonder why Christians get distinctly second-rate critics like Richard Dawkins. Sometimes I wonder whether such critics are all that we deserve. Perhaps the world has lost interest in serious intellectual engagement with us because we are no longer prepared to listen; we are too interested in ourselves and how we are right to think that we might be able to learn from others, whether within the world or within different theological or ecclesiastical traditions. We want the world to listen to our voices, to read our books and to watch our films, because we think that we are right and the world is wrong (yet another manifestation of the narcissism that so often afflicts us). I am not so convinced that our voices are the ones that are most worth listening to, nor do I believe that Christians are always right and the world always wrong where we disagree.

In my recent post on theology and the life of prayer, I concluded by pointing out the important role that theology can play within the context of the academy, sustaining a conversation between the world and the Church, through which the Church can arrive at a deeper knowledge of the truth, and be delivered from certain errors. Lesslie Newbigin has a wonderful statement on this, which I find exceedingly helpful:

The church, therefore, as it is in via, does not face the world as the exclusive possessor of salvation, nor as the fullness of what others have in part, the answer to the questions they ask, or the open revelation of what they are anonymously. The church faces the world, rather, as arrabon of that salvation — as sign, firstfruit, token, witness of that salvation which God purposes for the whole. It can do so only because it lives by the Word and sacraments of the gospel by which it is again and again brought to judgment at the foot of the cross. And the bearer of that judgment may well be and often is a man or woman of another faith (cf. Luke 11:31-32). The church is in the world as the place where Jesus, in whom the fullness of the godhead dwells, is present, but it is not itself that fullness. It is the place where the filling is taking place (Eph. 1:23). It must therefore live always in dialogue with the world, bearing its witness to Christ but always in such a way that it is open to receive the riches of God that belong properly to Christ but have to be brought to him. This dialogue, this life of continuous exchange with the world, means that the church itself is changing. It must change if “all that the Father has” is to be given to it as Christ’s own possession (John 16:14-15). It does change. Very obviously the church of the Hellenic world in the fourth century was different from the church that met in the upper room in Jerusalem. It will continue to change as it meets ever new cultures and lives in faithful dialogue with them. — The Open Secret, p.180

If there is one thing that I have come to appreciate over the last few years, it is critics. We all need them. When there is a lack of genuine criticism, a lack of a party of considered dissent, we can become complacent and be content to live with half-truths. I have learnt more from interacting with people who disagree with me than I have from those who agree with me. One of the things that most distresses me in the current Church climate is the loss of genuine conversations about issues that we disagree over to the extent that all sides begin to preach only to the converted. The debates surrounding the work of N.T. Wright and the ‘FV movement’ are good examples here. With few exceptions, real critical engagement with the thought of Wright and the FV has been non-existent. For example, Wright has been dismissed by many without a serious attempt to understand him. The current Reformed climate is not able to support serious conversation between differing viewpoints, without an attempt to impose groupthink.

On this blog I have often been critical of certain tendencies of modern Reformed and evangelical churches. I write as someone who, if pushed, will admit to having a lot of ‘evangelical’ in him and as one who feels a deep affinity with and appreciation of many aspects of the Reformed tradition. My criticisms have often been harsh (often far too harsh), but these criticisms have been given, not as a means of dismissing evangelicalism and the Reformed faith, but as a means of calling people to greater intellectual honesty. I like to believe that the best movements are able to continue the tradition that we see in the Scriptures of prophetic critique from within and engagement with the thought of those without. I have been saddened to see that many are unhappy with the existence of such conversations, or are not prepared to take the effort that is involved in engaging with them. I have also been encouraged to find a number of exceptions to the rule.

Posted in Controversies, Quotations, The Blogosphere, Theological | 6 Comments

Confusing Signals

Posted on November 5, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

Does anyone know anything more about this Evangelical Alliance report?

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Jesus Not Coming Anytime Soon

Posted on November 5, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

Peter Leithart writes:

…[I]t would seem odd if the Lord gave Adam a commission to rule and subdue the earth, sent His Son to die and rise again as the Last Adam to restore humanity to that task, and then ended the whole process after a couple thousand years, just when we were beginning to make a few meager advances in achieving dominion over creation. Humanity – I say it with reverence – would feel more than a little cheated, like a teenager never given a chance to grow up.

Most editions of the Book of Common Prayer has a table for calculating the dates for feast days, and the table can be used up to about the year 6000 AD. I’m with those guys.

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Evangelical Narcissism

Posted on November 4, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

Ted Haggard
Writing on the subject of the whole Ted Haggard mess, Doug Wilson observes:

The second sign of trouble (evident long before the recent revelations) was the prevalent evangelical marketing of narcissism and celebrity as though it were a reasonable approximation of humility and ministerial service. What’s wrong with this picture? I remember, many years ago, long before the Jimmy Swaggart meltdown, talking to my wife about his record albums in a Christian bookstore. Album after album showed a close-up photo of his face, and nothing was more apparent than that something was seriously disordered about the whole operation. But that disorder was something that the evangelical market was more than willing to support and praise with their dollars. After it happens, the response among Christians was “how could this happen?” Are you serious? The real question should have been “how could it not?” Contemporary evangelicalism is nothing more than institutionalized narcissicism, and if the tree is rotten, it will continue to produce this kind of fruit.

Contemporary evangelicalism as ‘institutionalized narcissism’ is perhaps as good a description of the current state of affairs as any. It is something that I have drawn attention to in the past. For example,

Salvation opens us up to the Other. Only a Trinitarian and ecclesial understanding of salvation can do justice to this. The salvation paradigm of many within evangelicalism is akin to the romantic love paradigm of our society. It has little to say about the manner in which the Church is brought into a Trinitarian fellowship of love, focusing more upon the individual’s relationship with a god who is considered in largely Unitarian terms. You end up having two polarized parties and a love that closes in on itself.

Evangelicalism has little to say about our meeting of God in the commonality of our love for others. The Church as the community of the Spirit is that which frees to enjoy a non-narcissistic relationship with God. Evangelicalism’s failure to really recognize all of this has led, I believe, to its increasing self-obsession and introspectionism. Worship has become about self-stimulation rather than self-gift. There is also a tendency to project a domesticated god created in our own image, a god who reinforces our sense of self and never challenges us by His Otherness. When we worship such a god we are really worshipping ourselves. It should not surprise us that many contemporary worship songs focus more upon our act of worship than upon the object of our worship. The worship wars that rage through evangelicalism are not unrelated to this.

The collective narcissism of much modern evangelicalism (expressed in countless different ways) is perhaps, more than anything else, the thing that makes me want to get as far away from such forms of evangelicalism as I can. The soul of evangelicalism is afflicted by a disordered desire that will destroy it.

This disordered desire has innumerable manifestations. It can be seen in the way in which so many evangelical ministries operate without a regard to the rest of the Church, and particularly to the non-evangelical parts of the Church. It can be seen in the lack of interest in Church history. It can be seen in the insistence on singing modern hymns and choruses that conform to our personal tastes in music. In can be seen in the way that many evangelical churches are populated by clones.

It can also be seen in evangelicalism’s twisted aesthetics. It should be recognized that disordered desire will lead to a disordered aesthetic. It is not an accident that the narcissism and disordered desire of homosexuality is often expressed in a disordered aesthetic (camp, kitsch, self-glorification, etc.). Narcissistic aesthetics can take many different forms. They can consist in a purely ironic posture towards reality, in a playfulness that has no desire for costly engagement in reality, in the production and obsession with art that seeks nothing more than self-expression, in sentimentalism and sickly nostalgia (which almost invariably involves a narcissistic projection onto the past, rather than a genuine reckoning with the alterity of the past), among other things. Narcissistic aesthetics are the aesthetics of decadence and stem from a failure to engage properly with otherness, and from a weakening of faith.

Our aesthetic sensibilities are not morally neutral; they are as depraved and as needful of redemption as any other aspect of our human make-up. The scandal of the evangelical mind is well-known; it is high time that the scandals of the evangelical imagination and of evangelical aesthetics received equal notoriety.

The problem of evangelical narcissism is so huge that I am surprised that it has such a low profile.

Posted in In the News, Quotations, The Blogosphere, The Church, Theological | 10 Comments

Why Devotion to a Life of Prayer is Essential for the Practice of Theology

Posted on November 4, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

Over the last couple of days I wrote an essay for one of my modules. It was very much a rushed job and I am far from satisfied with it, for a number of reasons. It would have benefited from far more rigorous research (in the end the essay was more or less written from my memory of the sources that I used, rather than from much new reading) and the quality of the writing could have been vastly improved if I had properly gone back over it. Nevertheless, I have decided to reformat the essay slightly and post it as it is relevant to the dilettante debate that took place on this and other blogs (see under the ‘Book Reviews/Miscellaneous’ section of the linked post) and to certain other issues that are raised from time to time on my blog. This is also the nearest that I can get to an intelligent thing to post at the moment.

The essay is written in response to the question of whether devotion to a life of prayer is necessary for the practice of theology. Continue reading →

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Qumran Isaiah Scroll Online

Posted on November 3, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

You can virtually scroll through it here. [HT: Matthew Johnson of BHT]

Posted in On the web, OT Theology | 1 Comment

Chris Tilling on 2 Corinthians 5:21

Posted on November 3, 2006 by Alastair Roberts

Chris Tilling defends NTW’s reading of 2 Corinthians 5:21. I, like Chris, have arrived at the conviction that Wright’s reading is the most natural one for a variety of reasons. Wright’s reading of the passage can be found here. I am not sure exactly when Wright arrived at this position, he still held a more traditional reading of the text in this article on justification from the beginning of the 1980s (see the context of footnote 6). The argument against limiting the reference to Paul and his ministry is made by such as Richard Hays, who is otherwise sympathetic to Wright’s reading (see footnote 5 of this article).

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