FuriousThinking

Introduction

I’ve learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side.

In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.

In 1964, Bob Dylan released the epoch defining album “The Times They Are A Changin’”. Track 3 is the now, justifiably legendary “With God On Our Side”. But the poetry that Dylan set to music does not do justice to today’s geo-political landscape. The United States of America is engaged in two wars that God has not yet stopped but the topic of this discussion is the War they have no declared, the War on Terror and the tools with which they fight: namely Guantanamo Bay.

Guantanamo Bay is a territory of south-eastern Cuba that passed into the hands of the USA in 1902 on a perpetual lease. It has become infamous due to the siting there of Camp X-Ray, which was developed into Camp Delta and Camp Echo to detain “enemy combatants” captured during War on Terror offensives.

It seems to be a good time to consider the theological implications of Guantanamo Bay as the world responds with excitement to the election of Barack Obama as President of the USA. Perhaps this might be a starting point by which we might lay out some beginnings of a framework of political theology for Western Christians in this day and age.

Why Just War Theory Doesn’t Apply

Since Augustine, Christian ethical reflection has tended to approach questions of war and conflict through the framework of Just War theory. But Just War theory doesn’t apply in the case of the War on Terror and Guantanamo because war has never been declared, America’s actions there have been predicted and justified on the premise that this is “a different type of conflict”.

Rhetoric of Democracy

In case this sounds like an Anti-American rant, let me point out that theological critique is the natural by-product of our respect for the goals and intentions that drive the United States. To honour them, means at times to hold them to account.

In his astounding acceptance speech two weeks ago, President-elect Obama said:

“This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.”

While many of us hope that this new moment of ours will bring change, this statement of intent is of a part with those made in the past by George W. Bush. In 2000 he said:

“This is a remarkable moment in the life of our nation. Never has the promise of prosperity been so vivid. But times of plenty like times of crises are tests of American character. Prosperity can be a tool in our hands used to build and better our country, or it can be a drug in our system dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty. Our opportunities are too great, our lives too short to waste this moment. So tonight, we vow to our nation we will seize this moment of American promise. We will use these good times for great goals.”

Such lofty rhetoric is understandable for a nation that so often has been willing to change and to adapt and to painfully deal with the problems that it has met or created. But the high minded speech and pristine philosophies of liberty that drive America forward also present themselves today with a very nasty under-side. The justification for the War on Terror and the brutal torture involved in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib is the protection of freedom. Democracy is considered an all-defeating good.

This has been a common refrain in the rhetoric of Bush; that democracy is God-given. Obama echoed this view by beginning his acceptance with a challenge to anyone who “still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy”. They are answered in his election.

At times, one can’t help but think that democracy takes on the shape of an eschatological hope in the American mind. The idolatry betrayed by this election is not that Barack is Messiah, but that America is. America becomes the turning-point of history through the power of its collective will. Thus we heard John McCain say:

“… believe, always, in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.”

Obama challenged people in his acceptance speech:

“to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”

The dual theological error that besets the United States is the belief that democracy is a God-given right and that they have been charged with the task of bringing the euangelion of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to bear in the world.

But Obama could listen well to the French sociologist Jacques Ellul before taking office:

“The right of national self-determination does not exist in the Bible. Before God nations have neither a right to exist nor a right to liberty. They have no assurance of perpetuity. On the contrary, the lesson of the Bible seems to be that nations are swept away like dead leaves and that occasionally, almost by accident, one might endure rather longer.”

If democracy is the missio America, then this heterodoxy leads as it inevitably will to the heteropraxy of Guantanamo. For, the very protection of democracy and liberty results in the inalienable rights of individuals (in this case detainees/enemy combatants) being withdrawn, discarded and ignored.

In America’s effort to protect its Good News of liberty and democracy for all corners of the Earth, it must act in the must il-liberal way possible. The dual mission of America (under God) to spread democracy to the entire world and protect democracy in all its forms gives them a license to act like tyrants and feel like saints.

The Empire Dimension

In their earnest efforts to fight the “axis of evil”, the USA has taken to stripping citizens of other nations of their rights. Even EU citizens are subject to such assaults. Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, who was kidnapped off the streets of Milan in February 2003 is one such case.

The New Testament enshrines the role of government as God-ordained. In Romans 13 we read “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities… The authorities that exist have been established by God”. But ultimately “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to” Jesus. At the end, when Christ will hand the kingdom to the Father, he will have “destroyed every ruler and every authority and power.” (1 Corinthians 15.24) Until then, legitimate governments have authority. They are not called to “heal this nation” and “repair this world”. Instead they exist to create justice, to be “agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer”.

When the United States begins to take citizens that are not their own and hold them to account by their own standards of justice (or sadly in the case of Gitmo, no standard of justice at all), they are straying into the territory of Empire. They are making a claim not just over the citizens they are directly accountable to, but to whosoever they may wish. This democracy begins to look like an Empire.

Strictly defined in historical terms, the United States is not an Empire. But in Biblical terms, this imperialistic intention to assert their culture and political system across the whole known world is reminiscent of historical Empires that came across the Israelites; the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians and Romans.

Subverting The Empire

Where Rome had paterfamilias patronage we now have multinational corporations. Like Rome, America is secured by both socio-economic forces and overwhelming military power, is legitimated by religious myths (Pax Americana replacing Pax Romana) and sustained by proliferation of empire images and axioms (through the global media). It is the locus point of the principalities and the powers.

The Empire philosophy is what permits America to strip the prisoners of Abu Ghraib and cover them in excrement, or have them humiliate themselves in homoerotic poses before a camera, or stand them on top of boxes, warning them that if they fall, they will be electrocuted. The State is the supreme power. One nation above God, as the giver, securer and taker of human rights. This stripping of rights goes far beyond liberties that the State afforded in the first place and even stretches to people in lands outside the control of the State. The philosophy of Guantanamo Bay is a philosophy of Empire. And the New Testament, for example in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, calls on Christians to bear the image of Christ in shaping an alternative to the Empire and its Emperor.

Obama’s forebear Martin Luther King preached from the prophets and recalled Exodus when bringing America to account over its civil rights abuses. It was under the oppression of the Phaoroah’s Empire that God heard the cries of the slaves in Egypt. It was against the military of that Empire that he went to battle with on Passover. “Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea”. And the prophets spoke of the day when God would overthrow all Empires and all the pseudo-gods and idols of the world so that, in words that come to our minds in the accent of Martin Luther King, justice would roll like a mighty river.

If Gitmo is the product of a philosophy of Empire, then the theological conviction upon Christians must be to tear it down.

The Shape of Subversion: Theology of the Body

The early church depicted Caesar and Christ as rival monarchs. As NT Wright puts it, Christians “regarded it as fundamental that their allegiance to Christ cut across any allegiance to Caesar”. When any of our governments falls into the territory that America has landed with Gitmo, with the Empire connotations that elicits, with the spiting of God that it involves, then our resolve should be just as firm as Polycarp’s.

The dehumanization, scientifically ritualized in the torture of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo should be abhorrent, instinctively to the Christian. Miroslav Volf describes what we might call a pneumatic intolerance of dehumanization,

“The distance from my own culture that results from being born by the Spirit creates a fissure in me through which others can come in. The Spirit unlatches the doors of my heart saying: “You are not only you; others belong to you too.”

Psychology will have much work to do in the aftermath of these camps to untangle how soldiers, often from Christian backgrounds, were compelled to treat other human beings in such a fashion. An allegiance to the nation and a despising of the “Other” seems to be at the heart of it. Christianity has no space for such despising.

Humiliation and dehumanization is the start of the torturing process, but not the end. The torture process turns the whole world of the victim into a weapon. God’s Creation, which he deems “Good”, is narrowed and then warped so that everything around the victim becomes a painful tool deployed against them. Elaine Scarry writes, “The room . . . is converted into a weapon . . . made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed.” The torture process makes every action a punishment. Standing, sitting, swallowing. Your own body becomes a traitor. The torture process turns language into a weapon. America doesn’t speak of torture but enhanced interrogation methods. Truth and beauty are sacrificed so that truth (the reason we are interrogating in the first place) can be discovered and beauty (the liberty of democracy) protected.

Human beings are sacred. The words roll off our tongues so easily. But for Christians, human bodies are sacred too. Humans bear the Imago Dei, which is a non-corporeal thing. But it is contained in the body. Vicious treatment of the body is vicious treatment, destruction, of the work of God. For a nation that applauds itself for its justice and promulgates its good news of liberty for all to implement such treatment of people in any circumstances is dreadful. To do so without trial or declaration of war is dreadful beyond description.

In “Where God Happens”, Rowan Williams captures the importance of the body for Christians.

“Only the body saves the soul. It sounds rather shocking put like that, but the point is that the soul left to itself, the inner life or whatever you want to call it, is not capable of transforming itself.”

Dehumanization is a crime we are able to wrap our heads around easily. To strip a man of his Self, to pretend he has no soul is an insult to God. But torture as an attack on the body is no less permissible. John Paul the Great did more than anyone else to restore the body to its proper place of importance in the mind and practice of the church. Of torture he said,

“That techniques of torture are being perfected to weaken the resistance of prisoners, and that people sometimes do not hesitate to inflict on them irreversible injuries, humiliating for the body and for the spirit. How can one fail to be troubled when one knows that many tormented families send supplications in vain in favour of their dear ones, and that even requests for information pile up without receiving an answer?”

His words in 1978 seem prophetic for our situation in 2008. If the philosophy driving Guantanamo Bay is one of of imperialism and of Empire, the heretical theology of Manifest Destiny and the exceptionalism of the United States of America then our theological response must be one of outrage, protest and subversion.

Conclusion

The world is a more complex place than it was for Dylan in 1964. We no longer know who our enemy is, where they are or what they stand for. How much more important it is that we remember who we are and what we stand for. Ultimately, torture strikes at the heart of the Church’s conscience because we are the people who are gathered together and around, the tortured God. Christ is the one who stood before false courts, was stripped of his clothes, ritually humiliated, cruelly mocked, brutally beaten and ultimately hung on a cross. In the victims of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib we see a portrait of our Lord as he was in his final hours, cornered by an Empire who through their soldiers sought to dehumanize and destroy him. We as the church are gathered by the Spirit to bear testimony to the fact that he was not dehumanized and he was not defeated. No one has ever been more human and no greater victory can ever be won than was won on that Cross.

But in the light of the Crucifixion and certain in the sovereignty and right judgment of God, we can confidently oppose all inhumane treatment, especially done in our name, by our governments and our allies. It is by our sure and certain knowledge that God is setting the world to rights and will come in judgment for the innocent and the dispossessed that we do not need to bear the weight ourselves of bringing justice to the land, of healing the world or of spreading democracy. Our response to the War on Terror, our theology of Guantanamo must be a return to a political theology grounded in the worship of our Lord, tortured and crucified for us. As Stanley Hauerwas put its:

“Christians’ first political responsibility is to be the church, and by being the church they should understand that their first political loyalty is to God, and the God we worship as Christians, in a manner that understands that we are not first and foremost about making democracy work, but about the truthful worship of the true God.”

Your Correspondent, Entered this paper in the college Aquinas Awards last night

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I saw this classic Romanian movie yesterday. Set at the end of Communism in Bucharest, it tells the story of two college students in their early 20s as they try to procure an illegal abortion. It’s an Iron Curtain movie about abortion. This is not first-date material people.

It is appropriately dismal however, because it draws out the dark corners that we get caught in. If you are feeling especially robust some day, you should track it down.

The movie has emboldened me to raise the issue of abortion on this blog. Usually I like my controversy to be stupid and pointless (evangelical theology bitch fights). And the last thing I want to do is be insensitive about this most fraught of issues.

It probably won’t surprise anyone that I am convinced that abortion is wrong. I can try and secularize my views to make them easier to understand and say that everything with human DNA is human. But basically I am convinced that every single human is of countless worth because they bear the image of God.

Perhaps some other day I’ll be vulnerable enough to tell how I moved from my pro-choice to pro-life position but the first time I talk about things, I like to keep it all abstract and distant and bloodless. So here goes.

If the Christian pro-life position locates selfhood in the body, as it does (the foetus is a biological human, therefore has human rights) then it is by far the less “superstitious” of the options available.

If a human being is characterised as a being marked by Homo Sapien DNA and therefore the brain-dead and the disabled, the foetal and the virile mature adult human are all equally free to live, then the Christian position (which is not to be read as equivalent to the “Pro-life” position) is grounded in the material reality of humanity. Their assessment of “humanity” cannot be disputed.

If you side with the Pro-choice movements, be they abortion rights advocates like Ivana Bacik or euthanasia advocates like the great Peter Singer, you are driven to groun personhood in reason or utility or some other immaterial, contestable and inherently metaphysical quality.

As a Christian I believe that all of humanity bears the imago Dei. But this “superstition” of Christianity actually maps to reality with a tight fit that makes a sweet harmony. But the materialism of the modern world is driven to the metaphysical whenever it has to make a serious decision; such as abortion rights.

Your Correspondent, Believes in reality

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Michael Lewis explains:

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

An astonishing article.

Your Correspondent, Deposited monopoly money, loo roll and roubles into his savings account

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Maybe Irish citizens can help me understand something that I have wondered about for four years.

Below is a road sign from the N4 at Corboy in Co. Longford. What does the “0625″ mean?

Your Correspondent, Plans to holiday in your basement, very quietly

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So Clairebo and I went to see dubyah last night and that is one very strange film. The two hours flew by- it is very entertaining. And it was annoying to have to listen to the idiots in the cinema who obviously learned everything they know about geopolitics from a poster they saw for sale in the Arts block one time as they laughed at inappropriate times, loudly. But it was entertaining.

So what is the problem? Well it is a compassionate depiction of the outgoing President, which is a good thing because it would be so easy to make an attack pic that it wouldn’t be fun to watch. But the on-the-surface empathy that depicts Bush as a confused but good-intentioned man who mistakenly believes he is the manipulator and not the manipulated hides something more malicious.

Maybe.

Since there are no accounts of the inside of the Bush presidency, the film is composed almost entirely of a serious of assumptions that are nothing but conjecture. The personalities that are drawn are as broad as you can imagine; Rumsfeld as a early onset Alzheimers victim, Powell as a saint and Cheney as the Satan. But the dialogue is all imagined. And it is driven along by this idea that Bush suffers from this appalling case of Freudian daddy-hating. For Stone’s film, that explains why he has made so many very serious mistakes. But that’s imagined. And it isn’t very profound. It leaves me unsettled about the movie.

What do you guys think? I feel like he tried to depict war as an absurd obscenity but ended up back in Charlie Wilson’s War chirpy territory. Stone draws out the irony of leaders discussing sacrifice while sleeping in their silk sheets and weighing up threats in their underground bunkers but the Freudian conceit at the heart of the film leaves me thinking Stone has missed the mark here.

Your Correspondent, Dumped a girl once for buying ugly stamps

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Stranger still is that, whereas these older figures, and latterly Sarah Palin, were perceived by the liberal-secular world as appealing to something called the religious right, the hope that draws us to Obama and Clinton has also been rooted in an essentially Christian view of the world. Cultural memory tells us that Jesus lived and died a young, handsome man, and still, in spite of liberal-secular protestations, we scan the horizon for someone resembling Him.

Leaving aside the self-imposed caricatures of the campaign, Barack Obama emerges as the latest embodiment of this indispensable idea: that it is natural to hope and that this hope is underwritten by the infinitely greater hope we would deny. As Pope Benedict XVI put it in Spe Salvi, the distinguishing mark of Christians is that they know they have a future: they may not know the detail of what awaits them, “but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness”.

This, astonishing though it may seem to much of the culture that embraces him, is what elected Barack Obama.

- John Waters

Your Correspondent, Sunday morning newspapers rock

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A Friday night left at home as my wife dines in the second fanciest restaurant in town (we’re Christians, you know) and I study greek. Why did I choose this life? Oh yeah, the chicks. I always forget that one.

Instead of Greek I am listening to TV On The Radio’s superb new album and reading very fascinating things. You want in?

Spain has got to get itself together. I irrationally and ignorantly don’t like the Spanish government. I think its right-on policies cause me to suspect they are the self righteous tits wearing berets at the party that is the EU.

People who kill abortion doctors take up a disproportionate space in our collective psyche. They are preposterously rare but the image of it is so contradictory and jarring that we jump to it easily. Get inside their heads with this cool article from New York Magazine.

And if you are tired of hearing rhetoric about change and “Yes we can!” and Americans mis-using the word “historical” then this long but great article about the shifting structure that is the American government will be a welcome antidote of fact in a week of bluster.

Or you could just read Mimi.

I’ll leave you with a quote that is politically inspired. It is a very damn fine thing that John Mc-More-Of-The-Same is not President of the USA. But Barack is just a better version. I shall be unconvinced. He has never mentioned the word “Gitmo” or “Abu Ghraib” and so all the change-talk won’t affect the fundamental belief driving America: violence is our vocation. Jacques Ellul, as he always does, re-centres us:

The right of national self-determination does not exist in the Bible. Before God nations have neither a right to exist nor a right to liberty. They have no assurance of perpetuity. On the contrary, the lesson of the Bible seems to be that nations are swept away like dead leaves and that occasionally, almost by accident, one might endure rather longer.

Your Correspondent, Balding, greying, but he still has lungs

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A county famous for nothing finally attracts our attention because next Monday, November 10th, N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham visits Carlow Cathedral to speak on Paul - Faith and Hope for Tomorrow’s World. It starts at 7.30pm and it is open to everyone. A chance to hear the greatest living theologian speak in a Catholic Church in hour of the “Pauline year”.

See you there!

Your Correspondent, Wrightomania victim

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Over at Zoommatics, my blog where I am slowly, oh-so-slowly working through Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics in the most gloriously anachronistic way possible I got a series of very interesting comments about the role that the Bible has in questions of authority.

If the Bible is not authoratative in and of itself but has authority only in that it points towards the “Something” that is ultimate, then TROUSERS asks:

What then is authoritative? and … what makes you able to say you are going to the centre?

I can only see at the moment that without an authority, you become the authority

Barth doesn’t say that there is no authority. Barth merely cuts through the crap and says the real authority always lies with God. The Bible is “infallible” or “inerrant” or “inspired” or whatever i-word your tradition prefers only because it reliably reveals the action of God over the last 4000 years. The book in and of itself is not Koranic. It isn’t holy in and of itself. It isn’t some self-defining text.

My boss is a great guy and he was trying to teach the kids in our church how to puncture through the self-serving rhetoric of the political machine at church on Sunday. (We aim to raise a generation of revolutionary subversive suburban kids with Biblical names.) He showed them all photos of Messiah Obama and John McMoreofthesame and their running mates, Mr. Qualified-but-boring and Ms Unqualified-but-interesting and asked them who would God vote for. Whose side is God on?

Of course the answer is simple. God is on neither side. God is on his own side. God doesn’t join our team. He invented the game, he owns the pitch, it’s his ball and he’s the best player. What we should be busy doing is getting on his team because he is the one with authority. His portrait in the Bible, his love-letter to humanity that is Scripture has a secondary (but crucial authority) because it is the only portrait ever painted. But the painting is not the Something.

So we re-centre by getting back on board the Master’s team.

I’m off to Brussels tomorrow for a flying visit to Belgium. Anyone have any recommendations?

Your Correspondent, Unlikely to win an Emmy

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Paul Schaefer was a NAZI veteran who lost his job as a youth pastor with the Free Evangelical church in Germany due to accusations over the way he treated boys in his care. He set out on his own with an acoustic guitar and a pair of lederhosen and somehow managed to convince hundreds of people to follow him.

After further accusations of abuse he ended up in Chile where he founded Colonia Dignidad, his strange 32000 acre colony of German immigrants a few hundred miles south of Santiago in Chile. Over the next four decades he terrorized people who had voluntarily put themselves in his care and it now seems he supported Pinochet’s fascist regime in Chile by murdering political dissidents. American Scholar has a depressing and compelling article on him.

No one inspired greater love and admiration among the children of the Colonia than Santa Claus. It is said that in the days shortly before Christmas one year in the mid-1970s, Schaefer gathered the Colonia’s children, loaded them onto a bus, and drove them out to a nearby river, where, he told them, Santa was coming to visit. The boys and girls stood excitedly along the riverbank, while an older colono in a fake beard and a red and white suit floated towards them on a raft. Schaefer pulled a pistol from his belt and fired, seeming to wound Santa, who tumbled into the water, where he thrashed about before disappearing below the surface. It was a charade, but Schaefer turned to the children assembled before him and said that Santa was dead. From that day forward, Schaefer’s birthday was the only holiday celebrated inside Colonia Dignidad.

It is a bizarre and saddening tale of a Messiah-figure. I have a great old lecturer, Fr. Tom Norris, who often says you can tell the psuedo-Messiahs from the real one because he dies in our place while they kill from theirs.

Your Correspondent, Leaving church-leader off his resumé

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Last Saturday I drank my morning coffee and answered questions from the commentator “Can’t Find My Trousers” about whether Martin Luther was a nominalist. Whatever that is. Now here I am with coffee in hand and laundry in process and there are more nominalist-related comments from Trousers.

So to recap, luther wasnt influenced by the nominalists cause the people who are supposed to nominalists arnt actually that. and the schools of thinking that where around at the time- luther told em to feck off …so he was all augustiney- who was au uber prod… yeah?

Yeah, sure. Trousers sums up my view on the nominalist question well here. But Luther was an Augustinian monk and a scholar of Augustine of Hippo. Augustine is not an uber prod however, but a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church and alongside Thomas Aquinas their greatest theologian. He was an early church father who converted to Christianity in his late 20s after a pretty wild life and proceeded to write the most amazing theology you will ever read. He was a demon with the ladies in his day and felt very guilty about that though so his theology of sex is reactive and therefore, not good theology.

What are universals. and did luther like em?

Nominalism is a philosophical belief. It came to prominence in the late-Scholastic era (right before the Reformation). As I understand it, it is a scepticism towards universals. They viewed reality as a a collection of individual objects without any universal sets to bind them together. So they oppose the kind of generalisations that we take for granted today. Our obsession with getting the “essence” of things, the humanness of humanity or the shediness that makes a shed a shed would be viewed with serious doubt by them. So nominalists didn’t like universal categories. They would never have gotten around to inventing calculus.

The school is still out on Luther’s nominalism and I certainly can’t offer an opinion on where the ball lands on such a precise historical question. But in the sense that Luther is Augustinian, he is a realist and therefore not a nominalist. But he did study under and was influenced by nominalist scholars so there are echoes of it to be found. I hope you can see how this is seriously marginal stuff for it to have arisen in an introduction to Romans in a Bible.

one more question…lets see the priests read your anwser to this.
the next paragraph in the introduction is this
“When Paul spoke of justification - a word that at that time had a large and imprecise meaning- he meant that God re-establishes in us an order which is the true one; they understood instead that if we believe, God will accept us even if nothing has changed in us. The great perspectives of humankind and history as a battlefield of sin and grace, were reduced to a personal problem:am i really free or am I enslaved to sin or grace. Taking literally Paul’s images of and comparisons, a doctrine of original sin was developed in which we all pay now and forever for the sin of our first ancestors.”
what makes you of that?

Load of bollix to be honest, in fairness, at the end of the day. Know what I mean?

If you asked me to define justification I would of course get around to citing Luther, who is one of the greatest theologians to have ever committed thought to paper but why oh why would a Bible need to be so ideological that we start with Luther?

Justification, as I see it, is as follows (comment criticisms are welcome). Justification is God’s declaration that someone is in the right. In Romans 2, Paul suggests that this declaration will be made on the last day on the basis of our lives but that it happens now through Jesus’ death and resurrection. (To cite NT Wright, at Easter, God’s future breaks into our present.) So today, in the present, you, me and everyone else can claim justification through faith. In the process of faith, which is trusting in the way of Jesus and walking in that way, by the time we get to that final day, that day of reckoning, through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, the declaration of being “in the right” will actually be true.

Now in the sense that human beings started out “in the right”, then Paul does understand justification to be part of the process where by “God re-establishes in us an order which is the true one”. But in defence of Luther, Jesus saw justification as a personal problem. How often does he tell individuals that they have to be made right with God through faith? Many times. More than 4!

Also, Luther did not believe that “we all pay now and forever for the sin of our first ancestors.” This is a silly crazy claim. Luther is the theologian of the Cross. If Luther is reductionist, it is in this way- he sees everything through a cross-shaped lens. Thus, we don’t pay at all for our sins, the sins of our ancestors or the sins of anyone because Jesus on the cross paid the prices of the sin of everyone.

Tom Wright’s Romans For Everyone is a deadly little companion if you want to read the book with a bit of help, although altogether too-argumentative Christians often get very annoyed with Tom Wright because he is a historian by training and insists on letting his knowledge of the Graeco-Roman world influence how he reads the Bible- the soundrel!

Your Correspondent, Cursive writing does not mean what he thinks it does

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Inspired by Anna, the three best things that have happened in the last few days are:

Realising that Stig will be home in 15 days! Boo to mission far away. Yay to coming home to live in salubrious comfort.

Dinner in the Wylie household which was delicious but also included the joy of seeing Sharn lose all her golden curls. It was like when those French women who collaborated with the NAZIs had their hair cut off without the crimes against humanity, the humiliation and with a whole lot more burp-related joking. Less French NAZIs too of course.

And finally, seeing Jenny Lewis live with five tremendous friends. Five of my friends that is. Those people in the video are not friends of Jenny Lewis but sub-contracted employees of her record company. Good at singing and playing instruments though so well done to them for a wage packet well earned! Unlike the last time Ms. Lewis was in Ireland I did not stick the tickets in the postbox while walking to the gig. Her songs about love and sex and God and all the stuff that really matters are a delight without compare. When she sings, “I quit them both but man was it rough… it just made me tired…” well, the pathos is legendary at that moment.

Your Correspondent, You’ll have to speak up, he’s wearing a towel.

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Jansenism is a Catholic heresy that seems strangely like Calvinism to my eyes. It says that in the Fall human beings lost clarity in reason to the extent that it ought not to be trusted, that salvation is by faith through grace and it is irresistible. It was for this reason that it was deemed heretical since the Catholic Church holds that salvation comes by the free action of God answered by the free choice of man.

When we were discussing it in class last week I felt instinctively that my lecturer, (a brilliant teacher), was being a bit unfair on these boys who included Blaise Pascal in their number. But I didn’t want to bring it up. Also, it turns out they loved to whip themselves so I dodged a bullet there.

I realise now why. I didn’t bring it up because of a lack of conviction in much of what Calvin taught but by true conviction. I really do agree that the Fall has had catastrophic effects on human reason. Everything we think we know ought to be held with a loose hand because we keep finding out how our objective knowledge turns out to be fatally subjective.

If I truly agree with Calvin that human reason is too easily led astray, then the appropriate response to those who are too optimistic about our ability to work things out for ourselves is humble agnosticism.

So why have Calvin-ists ended up being known as the most dogmatic and arrogant of groups in Christianity?

Your Correspondent, Bids you, “Godspeed”

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Considering my moral theology course I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on this quote from Richard Gula:

Is recourse to the Bible in the moral life possible? Yes. But it is very difficult.
Is it necessary? Absolutely.

In what ways (if at all) do you see the Bible as a moral guide?

Your Correspondent, Borrowed 3 people from the library

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Spend the first 9 watching this amazing, beautiful rotorscope animation by an ordinary decent Irishman named Eoin Ryan. It is stunning.

Then read this article which shows again why The Atlantic is the best magazine in the world. Bruce Schneier has always been clear that post-9/11 security protocols are just theatre. If that was ever in doubt, Jeffrey Goldberg has closed the case. A　fascinating piece of investigative journalism.

Your Correspondent, Sings a song for you

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In a previous post a commentator asked me to share an opinion on a preface to Paul’s Letter to the Romans that he found in his Christian Community Bible. It had argued that Romans was read by Luther through a nominalist lens, which argues that “nothing is good or bad in itself but only if God declares it so”．　

I began by pointing out that as I see it, the preface to books in the Bible is not the best place to start a conversation about Luther’s intellectual influences. Surely the point is to give you a handle on Paul’s thought, not Luthers’?

But what is nominalism? Like Santa Claus and Boy George, it is largely a myth. In the middle 20th Century (mostly Catholic) scholars understood Luther’s Reformation movement as being deeply influenced by the writings of giants of the medieval era like William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel. Historians of this era called these men “nominalists”. These men were meant to have doubted that human beings could discern much by natural reason.

But when scholars actually went back to read Ockham (the proto-scientist who gave us Occam’s Razor) and Biel they discovered that this depiction was a caricature. These men were (obviously in the case of Ockham) quite optimistic about human reason and human abilities.

Other thinkers like Gregory of Rimini may have come closer to the portrait painted by this anti-nominalist school but the discovery had blown a huge hole in the theory. So folk started to talk about “diversity” between nominalists until eventually and increasingly in the last decade, the whole idea has been discarded.

The only thing that the so-called Nominalists shared in common was, according to Alister McGrath, a scepticism about how much our senses can be trusted. Nominalism is a philosophy and as such has no inherent theological content. To quote McGrath:

Thus, both schools rejected the necessity of universals- but thereafter could agree on virtually nothing.

To address the problems with this earlier narrative of the Reformation’s birth, the actual school that took hold of many of the European universities, including Erfurt where Luther studied, is now referred to as the via Moderna, not Nominalism.

Alongside its scepticism of universals, this school was often branded as Pelagian, after an early Christian heretic (Pelagius) who said that salvation was to be earned by obedience to moral law, not Grace. This is stuff I am touching on in my degree at the moment but this school believed that answering your conscience was an essential aspect of salvation. Literally, they wrote that “God will not deny grace to anyone who does what lies within them”.

Rather than embrace these ideas, Luther strongly and consistently attacked them. He sides exclusively with the historical foe of Pelagius- Augustine.

So while the preface to a letter in the New Testament is not the place to leave an un-argued attack on Luther, I think a strong argument that the editors of the Christian Community Bible, if only in this case, are talking out of their arses and are in the Latin, dorkai malorkai.

Your Correspondent, Can find no logical reason why planes can fly

So a commentator on Zoomtard asks me to interpret this introduction to Romans.

“ we have said however that this letter had its roots in Paul’s experience as a Jew, a Pharisee and an apostle called directly by Christ. It is from that point that Paul spoke of sin and justification, of call, of salvation through faith. For their part Luther and his contemporaries read this letter against the background of their own problems – or rather- their anguish.
They magnified the perspective of sin and eternal condemnation, victims of a philosophy (nominalism) in which nothing good or bad in itself but only if God declares it so. Because of that everything Paul said about predestination of the Jewish people was interpreted by them as a personal predestination to heaven or hell”

This particular challenge goes way beyond my pay-grade. To deal with such subtle issues it might be helpful to actually consult a real theologist, not just someone who has some smart friends and access to JStor.

But I’ll have a go since this is the internet and it isn’t like my future employment might be jeporadised by the crazy crap I write today, right? So the first comment to make is that the art of writing an introduction to a book or letter in the Bible is one that should be pursued with the utmost care. The author should introduce the book free from over-bearing bias so that the reader can at least try to approach the text from a range of perspectives. It seems to me that the authors of this Bible, by needlessly and briefly broad-siding one of the greatest theologians and church leaders in history have failed here.

So the first way to interpret this passage that I would have to take is to compare it to other editions of the Bible that come with such editorial prefaces and show how it seems bizarre to throw such serious historical theology questions into an introduction meant to clarify the writing of Paul.

In the Bible I use for college work, a New Revised Standard Version published by the Catholic Liturgical Press the Romans introduction reads:

Romans was written to pave the way for Paul’s visit to a church he had never seen, but whose help he needed as he began to preach the Gospel in the western Mediterranean world. Romans is one of the fullest statements of Paul’s faith. He tries to show how Christianity is rooted in Judaism, but is a faith for all humanity. Roman is a book full of the power and grace of God and has been a source of inspiration and renewal in the church from earliest times to the present.

In the Bible that I read for fun, The Message, the Romans introduction is longer but reads in part:

The event that split history into “before” and “after” and changed the world took place about thirty years before Paul wrote this letter. The event- the life, death and resurrection of Jesus- took place in a remote corner of the extensive Roman Empire: the province of Judea in Palestine. Hardly anyone noticed, certainly not one in busy and powerful Rome.

And when this letter arrived in Rome, hardly anyone read it, certainly no one of influence. There was much to read in Rome- imperial decrees, exquisite poetry, finely crafted moral philosophy- and much of it was world-class. And yet in no time, as such things go, this letter left all those other writings in the dust. Paul’s letter to the Romans has had a far larger impact on its readers than the volumes of all those Roman writers put together.

The quick rise of this letter to a peak of influence in extraordinary, written as it was by an obscure Roman citizen without connections. But when we read it for ourselves, we begin to realize that it is the letter itself that is truly extraordinary, and that no obscurity in writer or readers could have kept it obscure for long.

The letter to the Romans is a piece of exuberant and passionate thinking. This is the glorious life of the mind enlisted in the service of God. Paul takes the well-witnessed and devoutly believed fact of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and thinks through its implications. How does it happen that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, world history took a new direction, and at the same moment the life of every man, woman and child on the planet was eternally affected? What is God up to? What does it mean that Jesus “saves”? What’s behind all this, and where is it going?

These are the questions that drive Paul’s thinking. Paul’s mind is supple and capacious. He takes logic and argument, poetry and imagination, Scripture and prayer, creation and history and experience, and weaves them into this letter that has become the premier document of Christian theology.

Personally though, I like the introduction offered in the first ever Bible I owned. It skips preface comments and gets right down to the text.

I dare say that when the editors of this Bible wrote their preface to Romans citing how Luther had a bee in his bonnet because of his subjective place in time and space, they reveal all to clearly that they suffer from the same dilemma. You can’t critique Luther’s reading for Romans as being too heavily influenced by the historical Roman Catholic Church by reading Romans through a lens pre-occuped with the historic Lutheran church.

More about nominalism later…

Your Correspondent, Replaced the Pope in Rome with a Pope for every steaming dunghill in Germany

In the midst of holding down the old church job and keeping my woman happy and learning Greek, I have little time to blog. Apologies. Someone step up to the plate and fill in the gap. So in the absence of content (I have ideas up the ying yang but no time!), here are some links:

Go stare at the sun.

I look forward to the bursting of the music industry dream.

Maybe we should do our part by becoming pirates?

Gladwell has a new article up on genius and how it comes late for some people.

Or you could just go and read Zoomatics…

Your Correspondent, Applying what he likes to call the “Compliment Sandwich”

My dear friend Wylie commented on a recent post:

…and i do not know who daniel dennet is (although i guess i could google it right now!) are you saying that trying to form arguments that God exists is a waste of time because knowledge of God is innate? Why were the classical arguments forged? who were the other christians and why did they need to hear that their thinking was rational? Also are you’re saying that athisim was born out of non-christians encountering arguments for proof of GOd that were intended to encourage believers? if so i think that is quite funny.

Daniel Dennett is a handsome looking oldish kind of man. The type of fellow who keeps bees. He is a contemporary philosopher who has sold a lot of books by claiming to be one of the self-styled “four horsemen of the Apocolypse”, or nu-atheists. He is like a slightly more respectable version of Dawkins (but not nearly so good at writing). My dear wife is writing a thesis in philosophy doing business with one of Dennett’s books, Breaking The Spell, which argues that religion is a natural phenomenon.

Neuro’s response can basically be summed up as: “Big swing of your mickey. So what?”. Monty Python and not-yet-dead John Cleese explains her argument in a fashion that “brights” (that is what Dennett wants atheists to call themselves) might call genetico-hilariousous because they are bad at latin and think every piece of human behaviour can be explained away mechanically:

The classic medieval arguments for God’s existence were not born out of a desire to convince people that denied God that He in fact exists. There weren’t really many people at all who thought that God didn’t exist. Instead, there were lots of thoughtful Christians who were working very hard to figure out the rationale of certain issues all around the edges of faith.

One group, a strong group even if they don’t have much influence on our evangelical corner of the Christian world today, argued that knowledge of God is innate in human beings. In a slightly softer form, this is the position that the Roman Catholic Church holds today. St. Paul seems to hold it too. Hate when he doesn’t side with us “Bible believers”.

Anyway, St. Thomas Aquinas came along full of knowledge from the recently rediscovered works of Aristotle (translated by Arabic scholars by the way) and argued against folk like John Damascene (who was as far from Aquinas as Calvin is from us) that we should give new converts to the faith some philosophical reasons for believing so that they can grow in their discipleship.

People then, as today, didn’t choose worldviews based on some abstract chin stroking that they did on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Instead, just like you, me and any monkey you care to mention, we come to the point where we believe what we believe based on a complex network of factors like experience, upbringing, education and even sometimes a little bit of thought. But Aquinas’ 5 proofs for God were not meant to move you from agnosticism into faith but to give the recent convert language and reason to understand the rationality of their faith for themselves.

This is why the classical arguments were forged.

After Descartes, philosophy was turned a little bit askew. Still is, according to some people. And the life of the mind became very important again, even at the expense of the more physical experiences of human life (Decartes was really worried about how our senses deceived us, you see). In this new environment, which was like the pregnancy period before the Enlightenment (which Daniel Dennett and co hopes to resurrect), it was all the rage to give “reasoned proof” for things.

So some Christians, most notably William Paley started crafting their own arguments to move sceptics into faith. His ill-fated argument is called the Watchmaker analogy.

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (…) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (…) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

Therefore God. QED.

Surprisingly, some people called “Shenanigans!” and it actually drove them away from Christianity, finding such sophistry intellectually repugnant. In a very real sense, historically, atheism as we know it today was actually born out of the reaction to shoddy argumentation like this. It’s is almost like the Comedian God is urging us once again to actually follow through on that faith we keep battering on about and not just let it slide into abstract ideas….

Hope that answers all your questions.

Your Correspondent, Someday she’ll make a man out of him

Read this.

Your Correspondent, Butchering others’ ideas.

Because of a strange and as yet undiagnosed problem with Zoomtard, I have not been able to access my own website for the last week. Thanks to Dr. Margaret for fixing it. On her wedding anniversary, no less. The romantic old fool has grown senile with motherhood.

So the image that is October’s banner comes from Flickr user Seb Przd. Thanks sir! It is a modification of a photo of a stained glass window from the famous Passy cemetry in Paris. But what is important for me (beside its beauty) is that it works well with our slogan. We build concrete infinity is a mission statement of sorts inspired by my Systematic theology lecturer Fr. Tom Norris; who is an astoundingly cool teacher and an altogether decent sort of chap.

There has been a lot of bad news while I was gone. I think my cyber absence has caused the 1000s of voters to be stricken from the register in America (oh that is dismal!), the bankruptcy of Iceland and the Nobel Prize was awarded to some chap I have never heard of never mind read and his name is not Sue Townsend. When will the Swedes learn!

On the plus side, today the postman brought me my first ever book in latin, the new Ben Folds CD and a bottle of port (Thanks JURGENBERRY!). So before you commit suicide by drinking sports cream, go watch a silly video. Do you know what is frightfully funny? When a man dresses as a woman!

Your Correspondent, Wishes he lived in a land where olive oil was free…

When I became a believer in Jesus I spent a fair amount of time reading the classical theistic arguments. Unbeknownst to me, I was using them the way they were intended. When for example, Aquinas forumalated his five arguments he didn’t have that many atheist buddies hassling him about the irrationality of faith. Hassling Aquinas about irrationality is well, self-defeating at best, right?

Historically, the arguments for God’s existence were formulated to re-assure the new believer that their faith was rational in the face of counter-arguments from other Christians. St. John Damascene and other big name hitters in medieval theology argued that knowledge of God was innate; it was so obvious you didn’t need to prove it at all. The classical arguments were forged in this context, not against some bearded medieval version of Daniel Dennett. Wait, Dennett looks like he would fit right into the 13th Century.

It was only after Descartes in the 1600s that people began to use the arguments for God as active apologetics amongst non-believers. Ironically, the Jesuit Michael Buckley argues that atheism arose in response to this mis-guided attempt by orthodox Catholics to convince the atheists who existed in their imaginations! In response to the flaws in the new forms of the Teleological and Cosmological arguments that were proposed, Atheism sprung up as a small group surrounding Baron Paul d’Holbach.

I will leave it to a more talented man than I to illustrate this for us so that we can learn the dangers of evangelism becoming a theoretical thing and apologetics being conducted with our imaginary friends.

Your Correspondent, Jesus was the only imaginary friend he ever had

In The Phaedo, Socrates is reported to have said on the day he dies:

Give but little thought to Socrates but much more to the truth. If you think that what I say is true, agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument.

With no variation at all, Christians can argue that to be the best followers of Socrates means to follow Jesus. When he says, “I am the Truth”, surely he is claiming to be the subject of Socrates’ plea. Worry not about personalities but give much thought to the truth and follow it. That which is not true, oppose it with every argument for the sake of that which you pursue. It just so happens that in Jesus we discover the Truth is a person, and knowledge is to be found in relationship.

Your Correspondent, Would dearly love to see Irish Christian philosophers rise up

Now that I am a real theology student I am launching the first major sub-site of Zoomtard ever. It’s called Zoommatics and over the next five years it will see a constant stream of short posts.

As a “real theology student”, I am aiming to do something I have wanted to do for years and read Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. As I understand it, if you read five pages a day it takes five years to read. My degree will take five years. Wah-lah! Dogmatics will be read.

So every week I will take a slice from my Dogmatics reading and compress it into 100 words and post it at Zoommatics. See what I did there? Clever, eh?

This will only be of interest to me. If it is of interest to you, then you shall be single forever and constantly mocked as a big nerd and a God-botherer. But I am always glad to help fellow dimwits grow duller and more boring.

Your Correspondent, That last sentence is basically his life’s ambition

With Rob Bell (towards whom I am deeply sympathetic) producing a DVD called The Gods Are Not Angry and Transfarmer (with whom I am truly in love [C.S. Lewis style]) questioning the wrath of God, I was reminded of the words of Miroslav Volf (of whom I aspire to be like) by Halden over at Inhabitatio Dei (of whom I know nothing…).

In Exclusion and Embrace (the single most important book of theology *I* have yet read) Volf argues that Christian pacifism must be grounded in a belief in the vengeance of God (I am a pacifist by nature, if not yet theologically convinced).

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologian in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.

God is love (but his love needs to be expressed as anger in some cases).

Then over at another great theology blog from a book editor, Dan Reid’s Addenda & Errata (his company used to send me bags of books every quarter- oh the good old days) we read of Karl Barth’s partial pessimism in the face of an intransigent church. Barth never really expected the church to listen to a theologian’s answer as to why we baptise babies (and earlier this week I had that debate once again with church leaders who were unwilling to even listen to my assumptions):

Enough of this tiresome matter! Theology can and should do no more than advise the Church. It would be as well for the Church, of course, if it would occasionally ask seriously for the advice of theologians, and if it would then listen to it no less seriously. In this matter of infant baptism, our advice has not been sought, and there is only the faintest hope that it will be heeded.

I love how Barth grounds his calling to theology in terms of the church, not as some stupid “free” intellectual exercise (that takes place in a lecture theatre) but obviously still perceives the role of the theologian as someone who can upset and disrupt the church’s thinking (and maybe even cause them to have heart-attacks).

Your Correspondent, Makes the speed of light seem slow

Now that I am officially a student of the Pontifical University, I thought it appropriate, contrary to what Nelly thinks, to remind people about how preposterous the historical roots of the Protestant churches really are. Here to help me is the unsurpassable Eddie Izzard:

Your Correspondent, Would have succeeded if it wasn’t for the pesky internet

The Jewish Rabbis would tell a story about the night before Abram answered the call of God and became the father of Israel. Remember that the Scriptures say that when God came to the Iraqi pagan called Abram he told him to leave his father’s household. This didn’t mean move out to a bedsit in Rathmines. Abram’s father was the one who taught him everything, especially how to appease the gods that ruled the world. Leaving his household is a much greater existential break. It is a rebellion against the old order in a society so patriarchal, it makes the Playboy Mansion look enlightened.

The Rabbis tell the story of how the night before he left, Abram sneaked into his father’s private sanctuary with an axe and devastated all the idols in there but one. With only one god left standing, he carefully placed the axe inside the hands of the last remaining god and went on his way.

The next morning, Abram’s father gets up to pray and finds his altar desecrated. As the story goes, he calls Abram in and asks him to help explain how such a tragedy could happen. Abram says, “Well I think it’s pretty obvious. This one god here has gotten jealous and destroyed all the others”. His father looks no less confused. “How can this be?” he asks, “for I have carved each of these idols with my own hands. They are but things, inanimate objects I have fashioned!”

And in his parting words to his father’s household, Abrahm asks, “Why then do you bow down to them?”

This story helps me again to understand why the work of Nietzsche is so important to Christians. As Rob Bell puts it, this was the first “Zing!” recorded in history. De-constructing the pretension of religion is a task that we are called to do (graciously). Subverting the norms that nod towards God but pay allegiance to the principalities and powers of this world is a part of what it means to do mission. Stepping into the Biblical narrative simply sometimes means leaving behind the household of our fathers.

Your Correspondent, When the angel came, he had raised his arm

As of today I am a student at the Pontifical University of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. I am studying for the Baccalaureate in Theology. I will over the course of the next few years learn all about dogma, moral reasoning, liturgy, ecclesial history, koine Greek, ancient Hebrew, a little Latin and an awful lot about sacred Scripture. I hope. None of those subjects get the same names if you go to some stupid Protestant school.

So there are two things I need from you, avid reader. One: understanding because I simply will not be posting every day anymore. The internet will lose its lustre. The web will seem drab and dreary. Zoomtard will go back, inevitably, to its initial state of occasional huge brain vomits.

Two: who wants to offer me advice on how to make the most of my 2nd under-grad experience? Any mature students able to give me tips on not scaring the children who occupy many of the seats around me in class? Any Arts students want to help your noble scientist here as he shits himself over having to write essays in exams?

Your Correspondent, Gave up the chance to be Pope

Firstly, a joke:

What’s the difference between a child in the 3rd world and abstinence-only sex education?

One works.

Ross Douthat writes a great blog if you want to see why being Conservative need not be the same as being brain damaged. In The Atlantic this month he has a great article exploring the ethical implications of porn inside relationships.

I can’t help but think Prof. Reiss has made a mistake when he advocates the teaching of Creationism inside science class.

Stephen Colbert is a brilliant satirist and this is one of the best Anti-Bush monologues I have seen in years.

Kim Jong Il may be dead, which is one more evil axis down, but this list of 11 true things will make you wonder if anything can be true. These photos from inside North Korea are astonishing. I love the motorway one especially.

Via Scotteriology, the Jacksonville Jaguars football team suffer a crippling bout of existential angst.

Three more typically brilliant gems from Babette. You must go read them now.

Finally, it might take you a long long long time but Jimlad has written not one but two huge and mammoth but very thought provoking posts, for the first time in 11 months.

Your Correspondent, Ate potatoes and got sick. A cautionary tale.

Additions:
REM lead singer Michael Stipe explains his lyrics and Google founder Sergei Brin starts a blog.

I had to watch the Dark Knight a second time to make sure I was right. We saw it all together, me and the Triple Entente in a beautiful room in Seattle during the summer. Wife-unit, afflicted with jetlag stayed at home and slept until I burst into the hotel room exhilarated.

Yesterday I took her to see it and am convinced that contrary to what tall idiots may say, this is a masterpiece.

Let me tell you why:

- It’s really exciting.

- It’s got lots of really cool cityscapes.

- Heath Ledger is amazing.

- It is awfully exciting.

- It’s a great artistic statement of philosophy.

The last claim is the one I am going to quickly as possibly flesh out for you now so that you can seem really clever next time you and your friends get together for a pint. I thought I might be on to something by wife-unit confirmed it. She rocks at the philosophy after all so you have to listen to her.

As I begin my critique you have to remember that I agree with Pete Rollins postulation that in his capitalism, Bruce Wayne/Batman is a profoundly troublesome character. Slavoj Zizek has already said that this movie veers into a fascist propaganda and I think that I can maintain that claim. Come, let us think too much about a cartoon turned into a silly summer blockbuster!

Post-modernism is best understood as the collapse of shared value systems. Humans need value systems. You have one. The Pope has one. Richard Dawkins has one. It’s just these days each individual feels no obligation to have their worldview line up with anyone else’s. This is one of the impacts of post-modernism.

Post-modernism is a social phenomenon that finds its roots in philosophy. Namely, in Friedrich Nietzsche, the great moustachioed German. Nietzsche grew up in the midst of German liberal Protestantism, a society that pretended to be formed by the narrative of the Scriptures and the resurrection of Jesus but in reality was obsessed with the myth of human progress. Germany was now a global power through the advances in science and the belief that actually drove society on was that reason would liberate humanity.

Nietzsche punctured this hubris with a series of works that simultaneously tore shreds off 19th Century Christianity and the emerging secularism that was increasingly dominant. The famous passage in Nietzsche that you have surely heard mis-quoted if you have ever hung around arrogant first year philosophers is as follows, about the death of God:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?”

The madman is the Joker. Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent represent the two faces (see what they did there?) of secular post-Christendom society, society that lives in the vacuum that was once occupied in the West by the church. As humans that live in society, they require a moral framework to function. Hence, the plot of all Batman stories is driven by the ethical wasteland that is Gotham. But in the absence of any firm foundation upon which to lay the stones of an ethical society, individuals are driven to take up the burden themselves.

Bruce Wayne/Batman is driven to take it on in terms that as Zizek has outlined elsewhere, is profoundly troubling. The role of the violent agent of justice without bounds or limits is delineated in the plot by Rachel Dawes’ comment about how Caesar came to rule Rome.

In the case of Dent, in a society where individuals are the sole source of ethical truth, he too feels a need to take the burden of building a just society entirely upon himself. In both these cases, the unacknowledged death of god in the city of Gotham leads to the men lifting weights they cannot carry. The Joker is simply the madman who comes amongst them to hold up a mirror to their futile and ultimately self-serving leadership. The ethical universe of Gotham is arbitrary. The Joker is the anti-hero willing to stretch the self-shaped Messiahs of Dent and Wayne to break them.

I feel pretty strongly that upon this reading alone (and I could stretch this out to a Jimlad-length post if I cared to annoy you), one should consider seeing the Dark Knight. Again, if you are Fergal. The Nolan brothers are showing serious skill here.

I also think that unintentionally the movie ends up being a powerful argument pointing towards the Gospel. Maybe in the sense that the Gospel is the source of beauty, all beautiful things end up reflecting its glory. In the absence of the saviour, human beings are driven to be their own saviours. But whether as political messiahs or scapegoats who bear the burden of our iniquities, humans fall short and their noble if wrong-headed attempts to set things to right flounder.

[Potential spoiler alert]
Thus, at the end of the film the “lonely”, solitary good man that is Commissioner Gordon ends up concocting elaborate lies to protect the city’s hope in humanity. Humans need a saviour. We need someone to lift us out of our systemic corruption and our personal hopelessness. But without that saviour, the human who tries to fill the gap ends up only feeding the systemic corruption and the dark personal hopelessness that makes the Batman mythos so compelling.

Your Correspondent, Off to drink with Babette