debating performance
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Apologies for being overly obvious and repetitive, but I wanted to link together two previous posts: not to interpret the text, but to perform it and hermeneutics and, umm, hermeneutics (and probably also interpretation and living and living proof — see what I mean about repetitive?)
The on-going thought is how we display the truth through the way we act when disagreeing. We noted that the modern view point focussed primarily on knowledge. If you take that as the key to everything, then there are limited constraints in the way you treat those who disagree with you. You primary goal is to ensure that they, and your listeners, end up with the correct knowledge in the heads at the end of the debate. So, the approach is not as important as the end result and there is no inherent need to take care and be respectful along the way. (I know, this is exaggerating and there are other constraints, but you get the point.)
On the other hand, if performance of the truth also matters, then the way we argue is as important as getting the information across. I guess we’re saying ‘the medium is the message’ in a conversational way as well as in a purely media sense. We need to be sure that our performance in the face of disagreement is honouring the the truth we follow.
An obliquely related point that has intrigued me for a long time: both Francis Schaeffer and Richard Dawkins(*) abandoned debates as a vehicle for their respective apologetics. For both, it seems that the problem with debates is the possibility of winning the argument, while losing, or having no impact on, the person…
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(*) I realised after writing this that Dawkins has done debating of some sort recently. I was thinking of the story — I think in the introduction to ‘The Blink Watchmaker’ — where he debated someone on creationism, then found out that they didn’t believe in the position that they were defending. This apparently made him disillusioned with the whole debating process. My understanding is that he found he wasn’t really in a position to persuade others of his position, but was simply taking part in a sophisticated game. Possibly now that he is debating genuine opponents in a way that spreads his message, his view has altered.
Tags: apologetics, church, hermeneutics, provocations
Resuscitation vs Resurrection
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
OK, let’s try riffing off this quote from Jeremy Begbie (from ‘Created Beauty’, an essay in the book ‘The Beauty of God’ ed. Treier, Husbands and Lundin)
… a theological account of created beauty will return repreatedly to the Holy Spirit as the one who realizes now in our midst what has been achieved in he Son, thus anticipating the future. … A Christian account of created beauty is thus charged with promise. It is not chiefy determined by a sense of a paradise lost but of a glory still to appear, the old beauty remade and transfigured, the beauty of the future that has already been embodied in Christ … Here there is much to be said for the ancient wisdom of Basil the Great … for whom the Holy Spirit “perfects” creation, enabling it to flourish in anticipation of the final future.
The key component I want to play with is that the prime model for Christians is not reversion to a past paradise or resuscitation of what we think has been lost, but new creation and resurrection.
So, in our interaction with our surrounding culture and society, our principal goal should not be to to recover the ‘good old days’, or to stop the rot by taking it back to its roots, but to push forward to new things. The new may have continuity with the old, but we are not aiming to go back in time.
For me this meshes with Hauerwas and Willimon’s point in Resident Aliens — they suggest we should act as an alternative community because playing by the wider rules of society compromises our message. I think what I’m saying is a time-orientation equivalent — we mustn’t become so associated with our culture that we want to go back to its glory days; instead we are to looking to a alternative future — redeemed and transformed.
This doesn’t mean we dump things that are important, but that we think about them in fresh ways. So, perhaps as an example we could say that we don’t promote marriage/family because it has been the stable basis for our great society (which is sometimes the impression given), but because the freedom of commitment is true liberation, etc. and this can be an agent of liberating transformation toward a new future. (This is off the top of my head, so it’s not exactly thought out completely…)
Another application for the general theme is worldviews — typically descriptions of a Christian worldview will focus on creation. But we must be cautious that we don’t just look back. We know that the future is a transformed creation not simply a reversion. God is not acting simply to take things back to ‘how they were meant to be’, but on to ‘how He intends them to be’. (Although the past may give indications for the future.) Revelation gives a picture of new creation as something more than that described in Genesis 1-2. Our worldview must reflect this reality.
[Footnote: I am wary that this matches my personal inclination, so I could be reading what I prefer into things. But then, if you don't like it maybe you are doing the same thing?]
Tags: culture, provocations, Resident Aliens, worldview
Powerpoint theology
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
While on holiday recently, my thoughts turned to propositional truth. As they do…
It’s not always clear to me what people mean by this term — it seems to expand and contract depending on the individual’s views. I’m going to take it roughly to mean things that could be expressed in a Powerpoint bullet.
The existence, importance, etc. of propositional truth seems to be lurking a lot in post-modern/emergent discussions. I think you have to start by saying that of course propositional truth has value. Even the oft-quoted Uncertainty Principle and Godel’s incompleteness theorems are expressed propositionally and in a very precise way. So, we have to take propositions seriously.
On the other had, I wonder if, in many cases, propositions just doesn’t get us as far as we think they do. Let’s take an example: the statement ‘God exists’. Seems like a simple proposition, either true or not. But immediately we are lead to the question ‘What do you mean by God?’ OK, that’s not the end of the world — we could start to flesh things out with other propositions, like ‘God is love’. But, then I have to ask how good a grasp I, as a less-than-perfect human, have on love. And so on. And so on. Before you know it, I think I’m going to end up at ‘In the beginning …’ and find myself having to tell the whole story.
I think we have to be careful thinking that we can abstract propositions out of the Bible, without retaining the whole of the story. Otherwise, you have the danger of ending up with something that doesn’t match the source any longer, if not in our minds, then in the minds of those listening. And we have to realise that you can’t pick up a phrase or two on their own without the entire text coming with them. Like a bowl of spaghetti — you might try to pick out one piece, but you soon find that you have no choice but to go for the entire tangled mass.
I guess it was easier when we lived in a society that had an essentially common background. When you said ‘God exists’, etc. you could be reasonably sure that the people listen had something approximately similar in mind. But when the culture starts to fracture, it becomes less easy. Suddenly, you can’t rely on the assumed common ground and the propositions have to give way to other expressions, like re-telling stories.
You also have to be sure you listen carefully to make sure you have the common ground right. But that is a post for another day…
Tags: apologetics, postmodernism, provocations, story, theology
disruptive grace/distructive debt
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
When reading Irresistible Revolution and Resident Aliens (see previous post), I got to thinking about ways that the church can act in ways that deal with problems in radical ways; ways that are based on the belief that Jesus came, rather than simply fitting in with the surrounding culture; ways that exhibit ‘disruptive grace’. I don’t think we’re all called to live in community in poor areas, but we are called to step outside the mainstream to take part in an alternative community. The question is, what does this look like in real terms?
I started pondering about the problem of personal debt, so lets use that as a thought experiment. If we are in any way touching a cross-section of society, we have to expect that people are going to come into the with substantial personal debt. What do we do about this?
Well, we can go for debt counceling. This is important and I have nothing to say against it. (I have friends who do a great job in this area.) But… is it really radical? Does it show the disruptive approach of the gospel? In the view of Resident Aliens — is it an approach that depends on people believing that Jesus has come and changed everything? I don’t think it goes that far.
Perhaps a step in the right direction is this — if you are debt-ridden in our church, we will provide interest-free loans to enable to you to be free.
Perhaps a further step is this — if you are debt-ridden in our church then we will pay off your debts.
After all, don’t we follow someone who proclaimed freedom for captives – in a culture where many captives are their due to debt. Don’t we follow a book that instituted the startling concept of a Jubilee year, where all debts are written off? Can we think in smaller terms?
I know, ‘risk’, ‘taken advantage of’, ‘doesn’t make sense in our culture’. But isn’t that the point? Again, following the gist of Resident Aliens — if we only do ‘sensible things’ (from the perspective of our culture), then what difference is our belief making?
Tags: church, provocations
incarnation again…
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
A spin-off thought from the previous post. Well more of an embryonic thought,really. I wonder if incarnation is a key concept for our point in history. The neo-Calvanist focus on creation, with the emphasis on creation ordinances, etc. makes good connections in a world dominated by modernism. Perhaps emphasising incarnation can take us on in the right direction to go beyond modernism (I know, I’ve said something like this before…)
A number of things prompt me in this direction: Michael Ramsden gives an ever-facinating quote from Derrida (or Foucault? I forget): ‘Our only hope is if the word became flesh and lived among us.’
The Reason (in many senses) behind the universe arrives and becomes part of it. As I said before, how can that not change everything?
Also, for a post-modern world, the idea that the author of everything might enter his story and submit to to his characters has many resonances — the meta-narrative does something totally unexpected and unambiguously non-oppressive.
And finally, it seems to me that incarnation starts to blur the line between objectivity and subjectivity in a way that can make sense in a beyond-modernism worldview.
I don’t know. Only a hunch, but I have a feeling that something might fit here…
Tags: culture, provocations, worldview
Not forgetting the incarnation…
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve had a question floating around in the back of my mind and reading Voicing Creation’s Praise by Jeremy Begbie a while ago caused it to crystalise. I’ve been meaning to write about it every since. It is this…
When considering how Christianity should impact all areas of life (art, science, technology, etc, etc, etc) does the fact that Jesus has come really make a difference to our discussions? Not should it — does it really? Does it make a deep difference to our view when we look at thinking christianly ? Obviously as I am writing this, I have a suspicion that the difference may be pretty small. Of course, this is mainly my problem, but given that I have read a number of books on this area I don’t think it is just me.
Discussions of the christian worldview generally focus on Creation – Fall – Redemption (and sometimes ‘glorification’). I’m not saying that we miss the importance of redemption completely, but that many of our cultural analyses wouldn’t change significantly if Jesus didn’t exist. As an example, I was flicking through ‘Discipleship of the Mind’ by James Sire earlier. (Don’t take any of the following as criticism of Sire or the book, I have a lot of respect for both.) He includes a discussion of technology from a Christian perspective. (To emphasise my respect: how many books get anywhere near that?) The entire discussion is based on Genesis 1, with hints of the fall. All good things — stewardship, serving, aesthetic norms, justice, etc. — but there appears to be no significant use of the ‘redemption’ component of the worldview in the discussion. It seems often that creation and fall are the primary drivers for cultural analysis, with redemption treated as an add on that just fixes us personally.
In Begbie’s book he discusses the Dutch Neo-Calvanists (i.e Kuyper and co.) and their approach to cultural analysis. He questions a number of distinctions they implicitly set up, but primarily a ‘dualism’ between creation and redemption, as if these come from separate (almost contradictory) parts of God’s character. So, we have such distinctions as ‘common grace’ and ‘special grace’; the first mainly related to creation, the second to redemption. Given that most of the good cultural analysis seems to be based on aneo-Calvanist approach this came as a real eye-opener for me. If in the roots of our worldview we separate creation and redemption too firmly, then we are going to find it hard to bring the two equally into our cultural analysis. Consequently, we end up discussing God’s norms for creation, culture, etc. and assume that redemption adds little further light on the matter. Hence, my nagging thoughts…
Begbie also widened my conception of the problem — not only is redemption under-emphasised, but incarnation is hardly there to begin with. If Jesus is the one ‘through whom and for whom all things were created’, if Jesus is God’s ultimate self-revelation then surely the incarnation should change everything about the way we view the world/life/culture? We can’t just base things on Creation and Fall; Incarnation and Redemption should be allowed to completely re-fashion the way we look at things. The fact that they take send place in our discussions suggest they haven’t. (And, consider the often-used term ‘Judeo-Christian worldview’; is it really the case that the incarnation does so little that the pre- and post- perspectives are interchangable?)
Here’s an interesting test: a while ago I came across an article called Technology As If the Incarnation Actually Happened. For me the title provoked a ‘does not compute’ feeling. Now I wonder if that response just exemplifies the problem.
No answers, I’m afraid, just a provocation to think this through further. (Maybe when I’ve finished Begbie’s book… 
Perhaps we will conclude that (for example) the incarnation should impact our view of technology, but we should consider why…
Having listened to Tom Wright talking about New Creation today, I have to add one further comment: surely that also should impact our cultural engagement significantly, too? If we are agents of the new creation, then to stick to Creation-Fall-and-maybe-Redemption as our guidelines could lead to us do all the wrong things. Couldn’t it?
Tags: books, culture, provocations, Voicing Creation\'s Praise, worldview
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...