nostalgia and productive chat

We had Tim Keller from Redeemer Presbyterian in Cambridge last week to speak at Great St Mary's the Corn Exchange for "Passion for Life". Saturday (which I didn't hear) was the Reason for God; Sunday (which I did) was Counterfeit Gods. Each evening was loosely based on key ideas from his two best-selling books. By all accounts the Sunday one was better - I certainly found it stimulating, and it contributed greatly to the conversation started between Dave and Dave months ago, which I joined in the Panton Arms shortly before we wandered up to hear Keller.

What a great chat that was - stimulating and intimate, the history of philosophy, the perspective of faith, music, searching, questioning, formulating, reformulating, just what our brains were made for. Looking forward to continuing. Probably have to read some Schopenhauer, now...

It really took me back to the panelled rooms of Downing College at the end ofthe last century, staying up all night with green tea and my agnostic best friend and best man, whiling away the hours on everything - not to mention back to the studying itself, a historical whip-round political thought and ethics from Plato to Nietzsche (in amongst more prosaic [and poetic for that matter] stuff on medieval social history or Renaissance literature).

And that got me thinking about another friend who stayed up all night patiently trying to explain chemistry to me (in those days I was still under the impression that A-level chemistry was "true" and was pleased with myself for having done some science as well as all the arty-farty business), while writing beautiful fractals on the computer. We managed to discuss Reformed theology and the Christian life quite a bit, too, and it was great to see him again at my 30th in the summer after a gap of many years.

Praise the Lord for such wonderful experiences, and for keeping me following him since then. What a wonderful world, what wonderful creatures, what a wonderful Creator.

 O LORD, our Lord, 
  how majestic is your name in all the earth! 
  You have set your glory 
  above the heavens. 

 From the lips of children and infants 
  you have ordained praise
  because of your enemies, 
  to silence the foe and the avenger. 

 When I consider your heavens, 
  the work of your fingers, 
  the moon and the stars, 
  which you have set in place, 

 what is man that you are mindful of him, 
  the son of man that you care for him? 

 You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings [c] 
  and crowned him with glory and honor. 

 You made him ruler over the works of your hands; 
  you put everything under his feet: 

 all flocks and herds, 
  and the beasts of the field, 

 the birds of the air, 
  and the fish of the sea, 
  all that swim the paths of the seas. 

 O LORD, our Lord, 
  how majestic is your name in all the earth!

bring back the Luddites!

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I used to think I could understand most modern English prose. I also used to think that the University of Cambridge was immune to the excesses of garbled postmodern opacity. Alas, not. Here is the abstract of a paper delivered to the Literary Theory Seminar yesterday evening. My provisional verdict on it is "complete twaddle". It's not just a pointless piece of abstract musing or antiquarian interest (I found plenty of examples of those as a student, and might even have been responsible for some), it's truly, madly, deeply incomprehensible.

This essay explores how to find a way of being in the world at a time when
common meanings become scarcer and the gauntness of unmediated objective
existence starker. A recent study of the poetics of place in modern French
writing (by Steven Winspur) stresses the irreducibility of ontic presence
as itself revelatory. I argue that the way humans encounter objects and
places is more problematic, not because "absolute contingency" (Curry 1999)
is not a given but because the "way" along which it is given offers a
threshold of relation which is hyperbolic. The conditions for
re-enchantment do exist, but as part of a poverty of dependent response
making itself "less" in order to "greet" the object as sacrally given, but
in a way which does not disperse the enigmatic commonality of that
givenness.

The mute presence of the non-modernist spear-grass in Wordsworth's Ruined
Cottage is at once chastened and in excess of the naturalistic. What
exceeds the naturalistic is a givenness not reducible to the conditions of
description of the object. Here a plenitude of existence is already
diminished but retains its role as gift amid the scarcity of its own
reception. This section involves some debate with Paul H Fry's radically
ontic reading of Wordsworth's poetics.

The second part of the essay reflects on some fragmentary remarks in
Merleau Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, Jean Luc Marion's notion of
the "adonné" and the themes of call and response in Jean Louis Chretien,
before adducing William Desmond's sense of the "between" further developed
in John Milbank's writing on diagonals. The between is not a mediation but
the sheerly disjunctive porosity of being, whereby nothingness is itself
open to divine invitation.

Any ethics of responsiveness (Wheeler, 2008) should include a response to
the inaffordance of origin, not as a negative idealism, but as the apex of
what it is to live in relation to existence under the radical poverty of
gift. My argument concludes that the scarcity of origin finds itself rooted
in the hyperbolic, ie in an earth offered sacral horizons, not just
frugally from within but as an active (festive) poverty before, which
generates ritual and art.

I then began to read the paper itself, just in case it got any clearer...

part of a Frame

A Review of John Frame, The Doctrine of God (P&R, 2002)

Under the wider umbrella of a ‘Theology of Lordship’, Frame sets out his doctrine of God. This work is a sequel to The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (1987), or perhaps that work was merely the introduction to this one. Major books on the Word of God (in progress) and the Christian Life (P&R, 2008) also come under this umbrella, and are part of the multi-perspectival approach to doctrine advocated by Frame and Vern Poythress. So in fact it is inappropriate to speak of any work as ultimately ‘prior’ to the others, whatever the heuristic or pedagogical value in starting with the volume on epistempology, for example.  

So Frame says of metaphysics, ethics and epistemology that each presupposes and even determines the other two, and thus none is prior to the others (pp.196, and passim). Thus there is great validity in approaching a subject from various directions, each of which is admitted to be incomplete

The Doctrine of God (DG) is a mere 806 pages, including Frame’s helpful appendices, which review contemporary discussions of theology proper and respond to some incompetent attacks on his earlier works. This review pertains only to the first 18 of the 29 chapters, since I have not yet got through the rest of the book. This is simply a question of time, not any weakness in the presentation of DG – Frame’s writing is lucid and a real pleasure to engage with. It is hard to imagine how one might communicate the subtleties of his discussion any more helpfully for the educated layman.

Frame has already presented a detailed outline of the work (xi-xx) so I won’t summarise here. Basically, I agree with everything I have read so far. DG is steeped in Scripture, extremely reasonable and careful in tone, confident in all the right places and generally amazing. Regarding reasonableness, the section on 6-day creation (pp.302-12) is a prime example of Frame’s humility and alertness to the variety of positions that are permitted by the text of Scripture, while still making clear which position he tends towards. His overall confident approach, the theology of lordship, beginning with analysis of how the OT in particular presents God as Lord/LORD is a useful fresh take on the subject. When he speaks of covenant lordship he does not use the adjective as a banner as some might, but he actually discusses what that means, such as the aspect of ‘covenant presence’ – God is near/here to bless/judge (pp.95-101). Rather than enthuse too much more, I will spend the rest of this review on interesting questions thrown up by DG and on a few places where Frame has been slightly less careful than usual.

Natural Reason.

In his (probably correct) critique of Aquinas on natural reason (as prior to revelation; pp.224-5) Frame almost ends up as an unwitting critic of his own position (as expressed in his discussion of ethics, pp.195-6) that that situational (sensory, factual) knowledge is necessary for us to be able to hold normative (Scriptural) knowledge. For Frame, these different types of knowledge are arranged in an equal triad, but sometimes he comes close to saying that ‘situational knowledge’ is mere fodder. This undermines the internal equality of the triad’s perspectives.

Transcendence.

Frame convincingly argues that transcendence/immanence language in Scripture is not primarily spatial, but is about lordship and authority. But this does not in itself remove the ‘problem’ of how to conceive of ‘spatial’ transcendence/immanence. A footnote (p.105, fn.4) refers the reader on to chapters 24 and 25 so maybe my question will be answered there…!

Theodicy.

DG contains a superb account of the greater-good defence of a sovereign God in the face of evil. Frame disagrees with the privation theory of evil because it posits degrees of being (unwarranted from Scripture, and tending towards pantheism) and because it doesn’t actually absolve God, since in the universe posited by the privation theory an omnipotent God is still responsible for ‘non-being’ as much as for ‘being’. Of course, Frame’s second point there does not tell us whether or not the privation theory is true, only that it is insufficient to defend God. To me, there does seem to be something more real about the triune God than anything in his creation, and thus something is left of the privation theory if used as a support to the greater-good defence. I was pleased to see that a little later on Frame agrees (p.180, fn.41)! But he is not completely consistent in his formulations. The main text continues to maintain equivalence between God’s being and our being (e.g. p.217, ‘there are no degrees of reality… God is real, and we are real’) while also saying that there is a difference, too – ‘ours at its very best, even perfected by grace, is the goodness of creatures’(p.218). He notes a distinction between uncreated being and created being, and thus implies that evil as a species of the latter may indeed be ontologically different from the (uncreated) goodness of God. There’s hope for modified privation after all.

He briefly returns to theodicy in a neat discussion of concurrence (pp.287-88). All good, but driven by his (plausible) rejection of any ‘laws of nature’ and the corresponding definiton of a miracle as simply an unusual event brought about by God for various purposes (see esp. pp.258-61) Frame is reluctant to identify any events that have ‘no secondary cause at all’ beyond Creation, Incarnation and the regeneration of the believer. What about the return of Christ!? And I’m sure we could think of some miracles that involved the addition of matter to the universe at a particular point in history after the 6 days of creation…

Guidance.

On the question of the drawing of lots Frame is rather hesitant (p.52) but this is because he has moemntarily forgotten to be careful over the use of the phrase ‘God’s will’. Sure, we never use lots to decipher God’s moral will (it is revealed in Scripture), but why not to reveal or precipitate (as it were) his permisive will for our particular futures? On questions where there is no right or wrong choice, that is. Of course there is plenty of biblical precedent for a thorough scripturalist like Frame to take more comfort in flipping a coin over his choice of burger relish or house purchase, or whatever.

Gender.

A great many authors and speakers intimate, imply or even state that individual believers are the bride(s) of Christ. But I am surprised that Frame is one of them! ‘It is important for both male and female Christians to know, and to meditate deeply on the fact, that in relation to God they are female – wives called to submit in love to their gracious husband’. (p.385) Notice the plural wives there. I’m really sure about this. I think God relates to each believer as Father, Brother, Helper (and much more besides) but not as husband. That is his relationship to the church/Israel.

Simplicity.

Frame on the ‘simplicity’ of God (pp.225-30) brings to mind the Islamic discussion of the attributes of Allah, and early medieval Christian critique of said discussions as compromising Allah’s supposed unity. There is more to think about here when my head is clearer!

More please!

Sometimes Frame refers to controversial issues only in passing. This is not necessarily a problem – in a book on the doctrine of God, a paragraph and a list of useful secondary literature are adequate for the subject of human gender relations – but there were a couple of places where the brevity was more unfortunate. First, soteric pluralism gets only a couple of biblical quotes without any interaction with the exegesis of those passages by proper pluralists or woolly liberal Anglicans (pp.92-3). This ought to be a significant topic in the context of a theology based around revelation, covenant, etc. Second, Frame twice speaks of ‘the rejection of Israel’ without grounding his discussion. Once it’s a passing reference (p.86, fn.10) concerning the faith of the centurion, whose faith – greater than any Jesus had seen in Israel – is ‘a sign of the Gentiles election and Israel’s rejection’. The other occasion is in the midst of a discussion of election without the full benefits of salvation. Frame gives two examples – Judas, an individal, so raising no conceptual problems, ‘and national Israel, which, because of unbelief, lost its special status as God’s elect nation’ (p.49, fn.3). I’d want more clarity here. Maybe en masse they were “elected without the full benefits”, but if so, in what sense does particular “rejection” need to follow, if the election was never unto full (numerical or depth across the board) salvation anyway? After all, we already know of plenty of apostate and judged Jews in the OT. Hmm.

Duchamp, Dutch Calvinists, crime fiction

In his crime novel The Brutal Art, Jesse Kellerman (son of thriller-writing duo Jonathan and Faye) gives us this intriguing passage (among many).

Watching him [an expert draughts player] I felt a thrill similar to what I felt the first time I saw Victor's drawings. That might sound strange, so let me explain. Genius takes many forms, and in our century we have (slowly) come to appreciate that the transcendence given by Picasso is potentially found in other, less obvious places. It was that old reliable provocateur, Marcel Duchamp, who showed this when he abandoned object-making, moved to Buenos Aires, and took up chess full-time. The game, he remarked, 'has all the beauty of art, and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer.' At first glance Duchamp seems to be lamenting the corrupting power of money. Really, though, he's being much more subversive than that. He is in fact destroying the conventional boundaries of art, arguing that all forms of expression - all of them - are potentially equal. Painting is the same as chess, which is the same as rollerskating, which is the same as standing at your kitchen stove, making soup. In fact, any one of those plain old everyday activities is better than conventional art, better than painting, because it is done without the sanctimony of anointing oneself 'an artist'. There is no surer route to mediocrity; as Borges wrote, the desire to be a genius is 'the basest of art's temptations'. (pp.280-1)

So, Duchamp was only a couple of centuries behind the Calvinists, and only 1850 years behind the apostle Paul.

Still, can't expect even a decent crime novelist to know everything about intellectual history!

What he then says about genius is less true, in my opinion, because I don't accept the ethic of the pure act, but it gets one thinking...

According to this understanding, then , true genius has no self-awareness. A genius must by definition be someone who does not stop to consider what he is doing, how it will be received, or how it will affect him and his future; he simply acts. He pursues his activity with a single-mindedness that is inherently unhealthy and frequently self-destructive. (p.281)

That is probably, sadly, historically accurate for many people, but genius doesn't have to be like that...

More millennial and hermeneutical thoughts

inspired by Linda Munk's The Devil's Mousetrap, a dense whirlwind of a monograph that is frustrating and illuminating in equal measure.

Puritan poet and pastor Edward Taylor was strongly against celebrating Christmas in December. That was apparently a device of the enemy, introduced to bring heathenism into the church and various other nasty things! From a 21st century perspective such debates about time, calendars, liturgy and so on seem rather antiquated. But perhaps that's because in our bondage to commercial clock time we have lost something important?

Fellow colonial pastor Increase Mather thought that popish idolatry was the stumbling block to Jewish conversions (p.66), which he thought would usher in the last period before Christ's return. Certainly it's a stumbling block to all sorts of things, but as Catholicism is unfortunately still going strong (at least in terms of numbers who self-identify in a nominal sort of way) let's hope that Mather was wrong and that thousands, indeed millions, of Jews will continue to acknowledge that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah and find eternal life in his name. These folk at Jews for Jesus are doing sterling work in that regard.

After all, other candidates for the Messiah tend to look distinctly shaky. Simon Bar Kochba in AD132-5 didn't manage to topple Rome, though he really ticked off Emperor Hadrian who did his best to extirpate Jewishness from the province of Judea (even to the extent of renaming the land and its capital city). Another effort came in the seventeenth century, as noted by Munk (pp.94, 135). In Jan 1668 when Mather preached his sermon "Figure or Types", thousands of Jews were indeed passing through Europe toward Palestine to greet Sabbatai Zevi, the false Messiah, who soon after converted to Islam! Whoops.

And Munk also argues that typology is distinctively Christian, such that Jewish Scriptural exegesis, when it looks superficially similar, is actually a mode of deferral. Deferral, this waiting, the fact that the Messiah has not yet come, this shape of history, is actually a rival to Christian typology (p.100), which derives from the conviction that the Messiah has come (the conviction of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of first century Jews of course) and that his coming provides the interpretive key not just to the Scriptures but to the whole of history.

Structured procrastination really works!

I’ve managed to clear loads of blog posts that were building up in a wretched Word document. These last few days have been great for that (and for laundry, washing up, minor plumbing work, church admin and piano practice) – while I really should have been spending more time on my management essay for NTI and writing a sermon for Hope on Sunday…!

See here for philosophical background (= feeling good about putting things off in fancy language by a clever guy).

Christmas stable as a generative symbol

How can I possibly connect that staple of advent calendars and popular piety with a famous philosopher? Linda Munk has done it for me…

Before the porrige spoils, I shall leave this chapter on Taylor and the Feast of Tabernacles, but not without citing the distinguished twentieth-century philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who, in The Star of Redemption, makes a connection other scholars have not made (as far as I can tell) between the sukkah of the Feast of Tabernacles and “the manger in the strange stable in which the redeemer comes into the world.” What is “noteworthy” about the festival of Christmas, Rosenzweig writes, is that it “did not conform to a holiday of the Jewish calendar like Easter and Pentecost”. Yet in the past centuries

the festival has… undergone a development… which has brought it into a degree of proximity to the Jewish festivals of redemption. The house opens up to admit free nature. The hospitality of a warm room is extended to the snow-covered Christmas tree, and this opening up of the house to admit nature, and the manger in the strange stable in which the redemer comes into the world, have their exact couterpart in the open sky admitted by the rook in the tabernacle-hut in memory of the tent of meeting which grnted rest to the eternal people during its wanderings through the desert. (Munk, 94)

Sounds juicy and clever, warm-feelings and imaginative philosophy are no bad thing. However, I hate to spoil your fun, but there was no stable. [And Father Christmas isn’t real either, sorry.] Professor Ken Bailey makes a compelling case that there weren’t many stables in rural Palestine, and that families kept their animals in their one-room houses, on the ground floor beside the raised terrace of the family zone. The word translated ‘inn’ in Luke’s infancy narrative should be rendered ‘guest room’ – indicating that Jesus was born in a private house that had a second room (the guest room) that was full of other relatives at the time. After all, why would Joseph, a native of Bethlehem, have to go to an ‘inn’ rather than to the many houses of his extended family in the area!?

What does that do to Rosenzweig’s elaboration of the stable in relation to the Feast of Tabernacles?

I think that the first thing it shows is the limits of typology-allegory in biblical interpretation. Let’s not get too excited about every detail, every putative pattern, etc. Tempting though it is, it’s probably more of a shame to promulgate silly ‘pre-critical’ exegesis than it is to do without it. Silly stuff undermines respect for decent pre-critical exegesis, which the church and her theology need.

Purpose-Driven Aphorism of the Day

While there are illegitimate parents, there are no illegitimate children.

Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life: what on earth am I here for? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), p.23.

is the Left on the run?

intellectually speaking, that is - I'm not talking about Hugo Chavez or Ken Livingstone. Over the last year, partly through having remained on some University e-mail lists related to literary theory seminars, partly through my general reading, I've noticed a lot of left-wing intellectuals sounding very plaintive. Over the next few weeks I'll post some thoughts and responses, and will try not to sound smug. In literary-critical terms, solid Marxism or neo-Marxism never had the zing of the (old-school) New Critics (now passe, of course) or of the more recent New Historicists. But a certain amount of respect was afforded to it due to the standing of British and Irish academics such as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton. Now, I hardly have my finger on the pulse, but the sampling of articles that have come my way - by avowedly at least quasi-Marxist critics themselves - does seem to suggest a certain bankruptcy.

Later.

a difficult task

Writing a short piece on moral intuitions is not easy. And it's likely that Peter Singer was not responsible for the silly strapline of his piece in today's Guardian, which didn't really reflect what he was trying to say ('Would you kill one person to save five others? Your intuition is probably wrong').

As I went to find the web version of the piece I began to read the responses posted below - many of which are very sane, exposing the weaknesses of this type of 'moral' thought-experiment (FLYSWATTER at 2:39pm is sweeeet) - though few of them mention one of the largest problems with the article, namely the recourse to a just-so story (otherwise known as 'our evolutionary history'). [The poster TerenceUSA, 12:19pm, did note this in passing in his excellent analysis of the examples cited by Singer from the research by Greene.]

Basically, Singer has to try to explain why we would generally find it harder to push someone off a bridge to save five lives, than we would to flick a switch to save five lives at the cost of one. (And he also wants to suggest that this preference is dubious, and that arithmetic is best in these situations.) Based on fMRI data collected from those considering these particular moral problems ('increased activity in areas of the brain associated with emotions' in the pushing example - gosh, there's a surprise) he resortrs to the just-so story.

Apparently to deal with such [difficult/easy?] situations as must have been common for most of our evolutionary history (up-close and personal violence) 'we developed immediate, emotionally-based intuitive responses to the infliction of violence on others'. And this guy is a professor! How did these responses develop? There is no mechanism given, or even suggested. Why did we develop emotional responses? Oh, because we have them now, so we must have developed them (anyone else see a circle here...?) But the nature of the response over the last few hundred thousand years is not stated or explored at all.

Those lacuna are perfectly typical of the way the evolution is referred to in the media (and, sadly, in textbooks) - a cheap assertion of facticity without a shred of evidence or a moment of genuinely critical thought! But, to be quite specific, why is the particular 'immediate, emotionally-based intuitive response' that we have now more selectively preferable than the response exhibited or 'developed' (magically, of course) by an intelligent being with no compunction about killing a threatening person up close. Emotional responses to this sort of trauma and surprise are surely a selective disadvantage! It would seem that if the fittest are to survive they need to able to kill the slightly less fit, who might attack them or use up their resources...

GavP at 1:21pm points out that Singer's rather fatuous closing line, '...we should think for ourselves, not just listen to our intuitions', implies that modern weaponry is a good thing because it liberates us from having to confront [bad/inadequate] emotional reactions to killing and enables reason ('cold-hearted rationalism') to reign (and have full rein - and just how many times have those phrases been muddled!?). Quite so, and since Singer has already told us the correct, liberated answer, he is not encouraging us to think for ourselves, but to swallow a half-baked utilitarianism. A healthy and intelligent conversations did open up on the Guardian site following this opinion piece, but the article itself is all too ready to rush into the space recently vacated by vanquished moral intuitions...