Instamatic Theology » books

giving and receiving

Paul — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:48:00 +0000

Yesterday’s reading in the excellent advent collection Watch for the Light was from William Willimon. Here’s an extract:

Charles Dickens’ story of Scrooge’s transformation has probably done more to form our notions of Christmas than St. Luke’s story of the manger. Whereas Luke tells us of God’s gift to us, Dickens tells us how we can give to others. A Christmas Carol is more congenial to our favorite images of ourselves. Dickens suggests that down deep, even the worst of us can become generous, giving people.

Yet I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story – the one according to Luke not Dickens – is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.

We prefer to think of ourselves as givers – powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are.

…

This strange story tells us how to be receivers. The first word of the church, a people born out of so odd a nativity, is that we are receivers before we are givers. Discipleship teaches us the art of seeing our lives as gifts. That’s tough, because I would rather see myself as a giver. I want power – to stand on my own, take charge, set things to rights, perhaps to help those who have nothing. I don’t like picturing myself as dependent, needy, empty-handed.

…

It’s tough to be on the receiving end of love, God’s or anybody else’s. It requires that we see our lives not as our possessions, but as gifts. “Nothing is more repugnant to capable, reasonable people than grace,” wrote John Wesley a long time ago.

…

This is often the way God loves us: with gifts we thought we didn’t need, which transform us into people we don’t necessarily want to be.

Todd Hunter on the goal of forgiveness

Paul — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:13:00 +0000

Thanks to Jonny for pointing out the release of Todd Hunter’s new book Christianity Beyond Belief. You can get samples on the IVP site. The following quotes stood out for me, nicely joining up the thoughts rolling around my head this week…

I believe that in responding to Jesus, people do not merely receive forgiveness of sins so they can go to heaven. Rather, they are forgiven so they can begin a different kind of life, a cooperative relationship with God, a new and eternal kind of life right now (which ultimately includes heaven).
…
Far from trying to make forgiveness less important in the Christian story, my aim is to show that understanding sin in the context of God’s story is crucial to forming a new life, a cooperative friendship with God. I want us to see forgiveness as a starting line, a threshold to a new, fully human life. In my experience, forgiveness is often viewed as a finishing line, with a “whew” and a wipe of the brow while thinking I’m in. I have no quarrel with the notion that forgiveness gets us in. But I want to emphasize that it gets us into a new life story, not merely into heaven when we die.

favourite books of 2008 (addition)

Paul — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:07:00 +0000

See, I knew when I listed favourite books that I would forget one…

9) The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts, ed. Treier, Husbands, Lundin

The main attraction of this book was the two essays by Jeremy Begbie (which were excellent), but I gradually dipped into others through the year and enjoyed the whole thing greatly. The essays nicely cover a range of arts — music, film, poetry, etc. — as well as discussions on beauty-as-apologetic and other theological thoughts.

favourite books of 2008

Paul — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:12:00 +0000

No more train rides this year, so it seems an appropriate time to list my favourite books read in 2008. It’s from memory, so in no particular order…

1) The Reason for God, Tim Keller

Generous and understanding of those who might disagree. Clear and fresh on the essentials of Christian belief. All round great.

2) Culture Making, Andy Crouch

Many good things could be said about this. Excellent on why we need to move on from analysing culture to making it. Important in relating cultural engagement to everyone, not just the elites & full-blown artists.

3) Everyday Theology, ed. Kevin Vanhoozer, Charles Anderson, Michael Sleasman

Vanhoozer’s initial chapter on ‘cultural hermeneutics’ is easily worth the price of the book. The following chapters work well as examples but are also enjoyable and interesting in their own right.

4) Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie

This book does so many things: a fresh look at theology using musical analogies, music within a Christian ‘ecology’, lessons applicable to culture more generally. Likely to return to the reading list in 2009. The only negative is the lack of accompanying CD…

5) Political Visions and Illusions, David Koyzis

A great look at politics and key ideologies from a Christain perspective. Not sure there are many other books that give this kind of overview. Very informative for an amateur like me…

6) Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, Hans Boersma

I’m going to have to read this again, but I really appreciate the way Boersma faces up to the big issues for our culture: why violence appears so prominently in Christianity and in the atonement particularly.

7) A Community Called Atonement, Scott McKnight

Welcome for his expansive view — bringing in multiple ‘atonement theories’ and expanding the atonement beyond just the cross — as well as moving onto how we should act as a result.

Eat this Book, Eugene Peterson

Taking the Bible seriously while making room for the poetry, imagination, lived-ness, etc. that is involved…

the total fabric of life

Paul — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:43:00 +0000

I’ve been enjoying David Koyzis’s book Political Visions and Illusions immensely.

Although slightly tangential to the main discussion, the following quote stuck out:

Every time a believer says that, say, religion and politics do not mix or that we should concentrate on saving souls and leave the affairs of the world alone, she is implicitly denying the cosmic scope of Christ’s redemption and thereby diminishing God’s sovereignty. Every time a follower of Jesus Christ forsakes a so-called secular occupation and claims an intention to go into “full-time Christian service,” she is in effect relegating a huge portion of the total fabric of life to something or someone other than the Savior of the world. For the biblically astute Christian, however, there are no “sacred” and “secular” occupations, only obedient and disobedient ones. The obedient farmer or carpenter is as much in full-time Christian service as the pastor or missionary.

Which I think makes the point in a particularly bracing way…

reading culture: what’s the point?

Paul — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:44:00 +0000

I was planning to write this post before reading the recently posted extract from Culture Making. Having looked at that, it’s even clearer that we must not miss this step out.

Both Andy Crouch and Kevin Vanhoozer don’t want us to read culture purely for the sake of reading. The reading has to be a springboard to being cultural agents in our own right.

I’ve quoted this from Vanhoozer before, but it’s worth repeating

The mission of the church is to witness to the truth of the gospel by participating in God’s building project, realizing the well-wrought world redeemed in Christ.

…

The church is to be a glimpse of the new world in the midst of the old, a reminder that the old order is passing away and a standing witness to the new. Accordingly, it is charged with the task of being a permanent revolution to prevailing plausibility structures.

Crouch is even clearer on the need to make culture as well as analyse. A key point for him is that

The only way to change culture is to create more of it.

His contention is that the church tends to try to change culture one of four ways: either by condemning, critiquing, copying (forming a sub-culture) or consuming. None of these work in practice, the only way to change culture is

to create something new, something that will persuade our neighbours to set aside some existing set of cultural goods for our new proposal.

For the sake of this post, I’ll focus specifically on critique/analysis. Crouch points to the example that film reviewers are rarely able to influence the general trend of film production. In fact, they rarely affect the success of an individual film. Consequently,

[w]e may produce very sophisticated analyses of the cultural goods around us. … But the depressing truth is that critique and analysis rarely change culture at all. … The academic fallacy is that once you have understood something — analysed and critiqued it — you have changed it. But academic libraries are full of brilliant analyses of every facet of human culture that have made no difference at all in the world beyond the stacks.

Although both agree on this, it is notable that Vanhoozer’s book gets very close to the problem Crouch notes (as discussed in the last post):

you would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. … But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.

While holding a clear view of the need for performance, it is not clear from Everyday Theology what comes next. But that is probably unfair, since the book is not focussed in that direction and Vanhoozer does discuss performance elsewhere. On the other hand, embodiment is the focus of Culture Making, so it will be interesting to see how practical Crouch can be…

(more) Culture Making

Paul — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:39:00 +0000

IVP have put another extract from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making on their site. I had a very enjoyable and consciousness-expanding lunchtime in Costa reading this. Came away buzzing (not simply due to the fact that they forgot to put milk in my coffee…)

The first stand-out part was the critique of the whole analysing-worldviews trend in Christianity. Not saying that it is wrong in itself, but somehow the step between gaining an comprehensive Christian view of the world and actually embodying that is not as straightforward as we make out. Somehow we get stuck at analysis and never move on to transformation.

Crouch’s argument is that we tend to believe that just understanding more acutely will automatically produce the results. He brings this out in a discussion of the introduction to Middleton and Walsh’s classic ‘The Transforming Vision‘:

“Why does the Christian world view remain so disembodied?” Wolterstorff asks. His answer is telling—it remains disembodied because it is insufficiently … perceived. Christianity has not yet reformed and remolded our culture because of a lack of “vision.” But this is a strange turn of thought from Wolterstorff’s acute statement of the core problem, namely that Christianity is “disembodied.” You would think that the solution to disembodiment would be embodiment—the living out in the flesh of the transforming vision. And indeed every Christian proponent of worldview thinking gestures enthusiastically in this direction. But the emphasis always somehow stays on perception and vision, on thinking, on analysis.

His conclusion is

The language of worldview tends to imply … that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking “worldviewishly” is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. … [We] will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. … But culture is not changed simply by thinking.

Crouch has really hit a key point here. After many great (and helpful) books on worldviews, it is not clear that we know any better what to do about it all. As we’ve observed before, there is an increasing move to see that we have to go beyond acquiring knowledge to living out. Here the issue is brought out brilliantly for our cultural interactions. In the end analysing has value, but we need to go further. And unless we begin to understand how to do that we may just end up very perceptive couch potatoes.

reading culture: consequences

Paul — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:47:00 +0000

Finally, in our comparison of cultural interpretation in Culture Making and Everyday Theology, we have consequences. Whereas Vanhoozer’s ‘cultural texts’ approach gave more depth to the content question, Crouch’s ‘cultural artefacts’ view gives more in the consequences question.

Consequences can roughly be aligned to Vanhoozer’s ‘perlocation’ — the outcome of the cultural activity. However, I wonder if the Culture Making questions are more productive, simply because they point to specific ways of thinking about this area: What is made possible by this artefact?, What is made impossible?, What new forms of culture are made in response to the artefact?

(I guess we should note that because Vanhoozer is less specific he potentially allows more consequences to be considered. For instance, he makes an interesting points around ‘culture as spiritual formation’, which doesn’t easily fit with Crouch’s questions, but I think guidelines such as those in Culture Making are a helpful start…)

The important point being that culture shapes the world around it. It isn’t just a description or picture, but is a key way that we affect the world. Andy Crouch, quoting Ken Myers:

Culture is what we make of the world.

So, we mustn’t just think of culture as simply some optional decoration that is attached to life. Culture changes and shapes our surroundings and us. And a complete reading of culture asks what the consequences are.

For instance, lets go back to cars. Possibilities opened up include rapid travel and connections to places that may have been almost cut off in the past. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to think of a slower pace to life, at least in part due to this ‘artefact’. And, of course, the cultural response includes an immense road system, petrol stations, road taxes, motor sport, etc., etc., etc.

It’s also important to realise that what the consequences of a cultural item are not necessarily related to the content or the intention of its maker. We discussed the ‘content’ of cars but at no point did we bring in the impact on the environment (nor, of course, most of the cultural responses we just listed). I guess a big part of culture making is that opens up unseen paths.

It’s worth remembering also that one of the consequences is a shaping of our imagination. Again, this may not be directly linked to the intentions of the maker. Think about westerns. Movies in this genre may not have any intention of proposing anything about fire-arms, they are simply a component of the genre. But, it may be that, unintentionally, the viewers imagination is shaped to view them as a viable are a solution to problem, etc. Something to bear in mind both when reading and creating. (See also a recent post on how we communicate what we believe).

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reading culture: content

Paul — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:48:00 +0000

Still comparing cultural interpretation in Culture Making and Everyday Theology. We’re now on content…

Content is what the cultural item is trying to communicate and/or do. Roughly we could think of this as making a proposal about how the world should be (Crouch’s third question) or about what it all means. Very likely this won’t be through propositional statements, but by showing or implying. Vanhoozer puts it this way:

cultural texts convey their propositions — their proposals about what it means to be human — not by offering explicit arguments but rather by displaying them in concrete forms.

I think Everyday Theology is the stronger of the two on this point. Remember it is concerned with interpretation, which obviously has a big content focus. Following Vanhoozer then we can say that to get a rounded view of the content we need to look at both what it is trying to do (in Vanhoozers terms I think this is roughly the illocution) and how it is doing it (the locution?).

The ‘how’ is the surface content or the medium, etc. It’s not really covered directly by Crouch’s questions; but perhaps it comes out in the questions that ask what a ‘cultural artefact’ makes possible/impossible/etc. — the ‘how’ comes out in the way that the ‘artefact’ alters the world around us. Perhaps the medium is (in some ways) the change that results.

When you are thinking in terms of ‘cultural texts’ there is room to think more widely (although, I think change-as-medium is a good thing to keep in mind). Here we can bring in narrative points, visual aspects, genre-conventions, as well as the details of the story, etc.. Again, considering the ‘how’ is an important part of listening, to ensure we truly hear what is being said. This reminds me of a quote from Bart Gavigan: “The problem with Christians is that they love theme more than story.” We must be careful not to jump too soon to the ‘message’ before hearing the story.

The ‘what’ is (eventually) the point that we might naturally run to first. What is this item trying to say? We can link this in with a number of our proposed questions/considerations. Within this we can think Vanhoozer’s questions: what is the world of the text? — what is being displayed — and what is the world in front of the text? — what is being proposed about/for your world. As we said, this is related to Crouch’s question asking what is the artefact’s assumption about how the world should be? Or alternatively, What new sense does
it seek to add to a world that often seems chaotic and senseless?

Let’s try an example to avoid getting bogged down. What is the ‘content’ of cars (to take an example off the top of my head)?

The ‘how’? Well, it’s an artefact, so it is proposes/displays/does by being a functional object, by being something that can be used in a particular way. More specifically by being a technological object. And by changing what we can do, our abilities, the parameters of our world.

The ‘what’? I guess we could start by saying it displays a world where constraints can be overcome by technology. From a specifically Christian point of view, it displays a world where we are given the ability and flexibility to alter things; a world where resources are placed at our disposal. It proposes a world where rapid travel is a virtue, where distances should not be constraining, where people should not be tied to a particular locality, and (in comparison with public transport) where individuals have only a limited reliance on others in society or societal structures, etc., etc.

Well, that’s a start. By no means a full view, but I guess that gives the idea…

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reading culture: context

Paul — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:30:00 +0000

OK, so we’re trying to synthesise Culture Making and Everyday Theology by thinking of cultural items in terms of Context, Content and Consequences; the question is where do we put the different questions/considerations of each book?

Context is really what Vanhoozer calls ‘the world behind the text’. It consists of the assumptions and worldviews of the author(s), as well as things that are happening around at the time, the characteristics of the medium and the personal experiences of the author. It is what shapes the reason and character of the item/work/artefact.

Of course, we can also pull in Crouch’s first question here, which helpfully focusses us on one particular aspect of this — What is assumed about the way the world is? Perhaps, we can also see half of the second question: What is assumed about the way the world should be? or as Crouch develops this: What vision of the future animated its creators? As a background to creating it is likely that a ‘culture agent’ will have some assumption of how things should be and this will filter through to what they create and say.

I guess it is easy to jump straight to analysing the message, but in many cases we don’t understand correctly unless we listen to the context first. We need to slow down and understand what is going on around before we decide what is being proposed.

As a really simple example, think of genre films (and, as Mark Kermode reminds us, there is nothing wrong with genre films): If you don’t understand the conventions of a genre, how are you going to understand the message? The message of a science fiction film may not be that we should expect life from other worlds to visit soon, even if that is what appears on the surface. The message comes in how the key components of the genre are handled or used.

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