View From The Basement

Pastoring in a media age

“In an earlier age the pulpit has, as one Victorian preacher expressed it, been ‘newspaper, schoolmaster, theological treatise, a stimulant to good works, historical lecture, metaphysics etc. all in one’. But no longer was this so” John Briggs, "From Christendom to Pluralism" in Wright, David, Essays in Evangelical Social Ethics, 1978.

The above quote chimed with me as I'd been thinking a little about how people who go to church are formed and informed in their Christian experience. It seems that - as is so often the case - 'Christian' media is following the 'world' in that there is a growing diversity of information streams/media outlets (of which blogs are a part of) and which inform and shape the average Christian punter. Add to this mix of different media streams 'God Tourism' and one has to conclude that the local pulpit is one voice among many.

Pastor's therefore need to wake up to the fact that their sermon is probably not the only sermon many of 'their people' will listen to. They may have listened to a podcast, watched a DVD like the Nooma series, turned on the God Channel (personally I have a problem with the name never mind the content, but there again I am developing into a grumpy old man), watched clips of church services on YouTube, read a Christian blog or two, and bombarded their ears with CCM. Some of this will be good, some of it poor and some of it bad.

So how are pastors to respond to this? I'm not too sure... but have a few tentative thoughts.

Shepard's not gate keepers. I don't think and authoritarian stance whereby Pastors act as gate keepers barring peoples way is an appropriate response. Pastors need to be Shepard's both helping lead people through the new Christian media age and also equipers helping people grow in discernment.

Respect diversity. Pastors need to respect diversity - there are people in your congregation who every week like to swing from the chandeliers, but they also need moments of quite and thus during the week listen to Taise.

People also need to think about what they are listening to and experiencing. Too much rich food can give you gout, likewise junk food well it tastes great but destroys you from the inside out. A balanced diet is needed.

Portraits of Jesus

I passed by the gallery in the Gallowgate area of Glasgow last night that keeps Peter Howson's works.

I find his images of Christ compelling and stopped to look and took a picture of one with my phone.

Howson states that "as an artist, one should always be communicating". His pictures of Christ and the stations of the Cross certainly communicate - the question is what?

If you've ever seen a photo of Howson himself then you will recognize that the above picture of Christ is something of a self portrait. Is this wrong, is this blasphemous? Today reactions to such a question, even from those theologically trained would be shallow, at least compared to the deep theology that the Eastern Church has in connection with icons. Given we live in a visual culture and increasingly use visuals in church, perhaps we need to connect with and learn from this tradition and the Iconoclastic controversies of the 8th and 9th Cents?

Suggested reading;

St. John of Damascus, On the Divine Images

Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei. The Byzantine Apologia for Icons

Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons

Ouspensky "The Meaning and Content of the Icon" in Clendenin (ed.) Eastern Orthodox Theology (2nd ed.), 

Valuing Theology

Went across to New College yesterday to get some stuff from the library, meet some friends for lunch and go to a seminar by Dr Janet Soskice called "faith, hope and loveliness (which was very good) and the Gifford Lecture by Prof. Robert Veatch. It was a good day.

At lunch the old chestnut of finding funding came up. Funding is hard to come by for post graduate theological study. Most funding bodies make awards on a competitive basis, and many have restrictive criteria (e.g. will only consider you if from a particular denomination). For me this raises the question of who values theology?

The lack of scholarships etc. for theology would suggest that the answer is a rather negative one, i.e. not many people value it (or those that do have no money to invest in the next generation of theologians!)

Citizens, Consumers and Producers

Jason wrote a rather good post the other week there on the theme of the loss of Church as Public. Much of this thinking was shaped by Wannenwetsch's book Political Worship : Ethics for Christian Citizens. I doubt this book will ever be a top seller, if for no other reason than it's hard to buy a copy for under £95! It is also, to quote Hans Boersma a "daunting book". That said I think its an important book and one that those who have been influenced say by Yoder or Hauerwas would find much that they could agree on and something of a challenge as well.

However my point here is not to review this book, I'll perhaps do that when I've more time but to pick up on the idea of Citizenship.

This has become something of a political buzz word in recent years here in the UK, and we now have citizenship classes both in the schools in England and Wales (don't think we have them here in Scotland but I could be wrong about this) and for those who immigrate to this country. I think however that there is a deep problem with trying to recover the concept of citizenship by teaching it in a classroom. Citizenship is something that is not so much taught but formed and therefore key to forming any positive sense of Citizenship are formative practices that embody a concern for the common good.

Now here's the rub - in our liberal individualistic late capitalist society the two main formative practices that shape us are our roles as consumers and producers. This is not only true at an economic level but as Zygmunt Bauman points out we have now become consumers and producers of identity. A consequence of this autopoiesis of identity is that we no longer know who we are (given our identity is constantly changing to meet the requirements of the situation) and there has been a loss of any conception of the public good. One therefore has to ask, "are there any Citizens, is there a public" or is there merely an aggregation of self's who cannot connect as they are coated with the impenetrable barrier of individualization?

Kingdom Values @ Work?

Big Stuart came to the Church I go to on Sunday night to be part of a service taken by the guys on our year out discipleship course.

He talked on a Theology of Work and in particular, using the example of how Zaccheus' encounter with Jesus transformed his work, got us all thinking about how we live out kingdom values at our work.

Studying theology in an academic setting is work, but how do kingdom values apply in how we do academic theology?

I'd welcome others thoughts. I few things I've been trying to practice to try and live this out are;

(1) Being fair - its easy to quote a source out of context and twist it to suit our argument. But we need to be fair to the person we are quoting.

(2) In a similar vain one of the things the Prof's at New College are big in is showing respect to those you engage with in an essay. Sure you can strongly disagree with someone but this should be done respectfully, gracefully and skilfully.

(3) Share - it's easy to either be competitive or get stuck in your own we tack of what your looking at. One of the advantages of studying theology in a college or uni setting is that your part of a learning community that should seek to support each member. So its good to take an interest in other peoples work. If you find a good book, tell other and don't keep it to yourself. I've really appreciated the suggestions of things to read from a couple of guys in particular who are in their first year of doctoral studies.

From last year

This is a post from near this day last year.

  Jason Clark has been thinking about how Church, God and the World intersect and the implications for us with regards to mission and church.

I commented on his post saying the following;

"I found this diagram (the one to the right) helpful when reading the shape of things to come, and I hear your concern / observation that position 4, which I think is where we should be aiming for, can lead to a post-church response. I can’t help but feel that this is due in part to Frost & Hirsch’s insistence that mission drives ecclesiology. For me this is too simplistic, there needs to be an interplay between the two rather than the domination of one by the other".

Jason responded in the comments asking how I say the interplay working out.

I think in order to articulate how this interplay might work out I need to take a step back and place mission and church in some context. The diagram below is my attempt to formulate this context.

The diagram is a bit messy - but perhaps that points to what I think is obvious, i.e. theology is messy and trying to describe how our theology flows into our practices is messy.

What I'm trying to show here is that our christology, ecclesiology, missiology and eschatology "swim" in our understanding of who God is. They are not however located in our knowledge of God in a static way but that there is a dialectical relationship between  our understanding of God and these other doctrines. I my opinion there is no simple liner progression from one to the other, but there is a interpenetration, a circularity a shaping of one by the other.

So from my Trinitarian understanding of God things like mutuality, non-hierarchy, community, generosity, a going out of oneself to embrace the other come to the fore and inform my view / understanding of ecclesiology, christology, missiology and eschatology. 

Locating missiology within this understanding rather than defining it in some liner fashion by christology for me expands what mission is. Mission its then transformed from just being about "saving souls" to participation in God's redemption and transformation of all of creation. I think that this is the position that Frosh and Hirsch want us to reach in their number 4, yet I'm struck that we can often arrive at the "right" praxis while holding onto a theology that slowly erodes it. Thus like a cliff being eroded at it's base if fear that if we have a thinking and a praxis that are not mutually compatible then in the medium to long term our practice will collapse as over time our theology fails to sustain it.

I feel it's important to have eschatology in this mix as this gives us a sense of direction,a telos, and also that our shaping then is not solely driven but history past but by the yet to come of the kingdom. Eschatology needs the pressures of Christology and missiology upon it otherwise it becomes about creating an enclave of the kingdom rather than a subversive yeast that undermines the structures of our society that are antithetical to the gospel.

Missiology needs ecclesiology otherwise we become like chickens with our heads cut off. We run around create a stir and then fall flat. Our mission needs to be located in community (well that's MHO), yet without the force of mission acting upon this community this too can become insular. It would be my hope that ecclesiology's dialog with missiology prevents us from a post-church approach. Here again I find the concept of Trinity helpful, for there we see a diversity and yet unity - so I theologically and in practice want to affirm the unity of the catholic church and it's diversity. Yes we need new forms or expressions of church, but this need not mean a doing away with church.

Christology, the incarnation when read with a Trinitarian hermeneutic becomes not the mission itself, but the decisive act in that mission for the mission. Christology alone cannot adequately define the mission for if it did in what sense would it then be the missio dei? I recently read (it's inappropriate to name who) a leader of an important Christian organization say. "while caring for the environment is good it's not what it's really about, after all where do we see Jesus care for the environment". For me this is a truncated version of our mission and of the Gospel itself - yet is was driven by this guys christology. You might want to argue that he needs a better christology and I'd have some sympathy for that, but I would say that the route for this "better" christology is in a Trinitarian understanding of God.

There's much more that could and probably should be said on this but this would seem like enough to be getting on with for just now. Jason I trust this starts to tease this out?

Hope and Progress

I handed an essay in on Monday and now have three others to work on, hence the lack of blogging! That said I had to edit my essay down and was left with the following (rather preliminary thoughts ) and thought I'd post it here.

There is a danger which I believe we must avoid when talking of Christian hope in that we must avoid the temptation to collapse a theology of Christian hope into modernity’s idea of the unlimited progress of humanity. In other words a Christian theology of hope must not simply be a sanctified version of the modernist fallacy of progress. To collapse Christian hope into modernity’s idea of progress would be to build a new tower of Babel, believing we were doing God’s will, or it would be to yield to the temptation that Jesus did not and with the kingdoms of this world on offer before us bow to Satan. This latter Biblical link may seem extreem and needs some explanation. As Zymunt Bauman points out in nineteenth century Britain, and indeed thought Europe progress was exemplified by the watchword 'Forward' and the Latin maxim, ‘Labor omnia vincit’. In short progress and the process of industrialisation, which is primarily responsible both historically and in the present for the environmental crisis we are now in, went hand in hand.

The death of Modernity has been greatly exaggerated by the post-modernist movement, indeed post modernity is a movement within the modernity project from ‘heavy’ modernity to ‘light’or ‘liquid’ modernity. Even given this change, the ethos of modernity whereby humankind rules, conquers and uses nature for it’s own end - progress in history, is still predominant. Postmodernity may have disabused us of political utopian ideals and yet we run ever faster after our dream, our own vision of utopia. It would seem that all that has changed is the meta Utopia of the past have been exchange for individualist conceptions of Utopia. Thus the modernist concept of progress is alive and well in post-industrial Europe in the from of globalization. If the industrial revolution was the seedbed of our present environmental crisis then late-Capitalism is, to continue with the metaphor, the fertiliser which sustains and feeds the structures which continue to pollute, extract and destroy the world in which we live.

On my desk

My desk is overflowing with books and paper at the moment as I read for essay's that are due all too soon.

I have four essay's due over the next few weeks.

23rd Nov I have an essay due where I'm exploring the relationship between Evangelicals, Environmentalism and Eschatology. In particular I am looking at evangelical non-involvement in environmentalism steming from the view of "why bother if God's going to destroy it all anyway, or fix it all up". I'm reading a lot of Moltmann for this essay and will use his theology of hope as a way of answering the above question.

I've two essay's due on the 7th Dec. In one I'm looking at Cyril of Alexandria's and Nestorius's view of salvation. Many of the books I wanted to use for this were out in Edinburgh but I managed to pick them up from ICC. The joys of beelining to two libraries!

In the second essay due on the 7th I'm looking at von Balthasar's propositions in Principles of Christian Morality, especially his opening line, "The Christian who lives by faith has the right to justify his moral actions on the basis of his faith". As this is a radical departure in Roman Catholic moral theology I'm looking at this in the context of the Natural Law tradition and basically asking the question of the relation between revelation (or faith) and the Natural Law. My main text on the Natural Law is Jean Porter's "Nature as Reason".

My last essay is a book report and is due on the 10th. Given I'm working a lot with Porter for the other essay I'm going to review her book for this one. It will be a bit of a challenge given "Nature as Reason" is 400pp and I've only 2000 words for this one.

Ah well, break over...back to reading Conscience in Barth's Ethics which we will be discussing in class on Friday.

Dechristianized or Post-Christian?

I've been reading Veritatis Splendor by the late John-Paul II. There is much that could be said about this interesting document, but one of the many things that caught my eye was his use of the word "dechristianized".

What does he mean by this an is it the same as fashionable talk of being Post-Christian? I don't think it is. I would hazard a guess that we might say that 'France is dechristianized, but the UK is post-Christian'. For a society to be post-Christian means that something of it's Christian heritage remains active, albeit perhaps at the margins. Thus the ethos of the UK is still significantly shaped by Christian presuppositions. This I think is in contrast with what the late Pope means by dechristianized. I think this term speaks not of a "moving on" from Christianity that is implicit in the term post-Christian, but a catharsis of what is Christian from a society. Dechristianized does not push Christianity to the margins of society from where it can still speak, it negates Christianity and expunges it from public life.

So will the UK move from being post-Christian to being dechristianized? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section.

MacIntyre on Moral Dilemmas

Last week I'd to do a five minute presentation on Alisdair MacIntyre and moral dilemmas. You can read his writing on this here.

What I said is as follows;

MacIntyre opens this essay by noting that moral dilemmas seem to be particularly prevalent in contemporary society and that the volume of writing on this issue in the last thirty years has exceeded the “entire preceding philosophical literature dealing with this topic”. He thus asks how instructive these contemporary writing are to those who find themselves in moral dilemmas. While not answering his own question directly, the fact that he ends with a consideration of Aquinas and how he can guide us in moral dilemmas suggests MacIntyre thinks there is little help to be sought from these contemporary writings.

MacIntyre sketches three situations which seem dilemmatic. The first involves the conflict in discharging competing responsibilities, the second in keeping a promise to confidentiality when this information could do good and the third over sacrificing either virtue for excellence in some activity or virtues required for being a good friend.

MacIntyre argues that these examples are different from mere choices as a genuine dilemma involves “genuine wrongdoing”. Thus the choice to save two drowning people when only one can be save is not a dilemma, we must save one and not none!

MacIntyre then moves to consider whether there are indeed moral dilemmas or wither these dilemmas merely arise from our lack of moral reasoning or lack of information. If we learned to reason better or had a better grasp of the facts there may indeed be no dilemma. As part of this discussion he cites apparent intractable contradictions which have arisen in the field of natural sciences. Approvingly he notes that contradictions produced by the conjunction of different discoveries accompanied, “a conviction that there was a right and consistent theory to be discovered”. Thus the scientist’s dilemma was a perplexity secundum quid (according to something). MacIntyre believes this theoretical perplexity among natural scientists to be analogous to moral agents in dilemmatic situations.

This allows MacIntyre to introduce the idea of penultimate and ultimate facts. Dilemmatic situations arise when we wrongly understand the relationship between penultimate and ultimate facts. To aid us in understanding this relationship MacIntyre introduces the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas. MacIntyre proposes that on Aquinas’s view “no one is ever genuinely perplexus simpliciter”. Aquinas in MacIntyre’s view teaches us that we may be perplexed “but only relative to some factor, identification of which will be key to resolving the dilemma”. Thus dilemmas are penultimate facts of moral life, but not ultimate facts of the moral life, thus by means of right reasoning, deontic logic (?), we can escape the dilemma.

Returning to his opening examples of dilemmas MacIntyre suggests how this Thomistic understanding illuminates the right action to perform.

Questions –

(1)    Does MacIntyre’s account of dilemmas and their resolution take sufficient account of the complexities of actual life, thus does his argument about theory and fact hold?

(2)    MacIntyre says nothing about how we learn to reason rightly only that we should. Is this a fatal flaw?

(3)    Given the reliance on deontic reasoning how does this proposal work for those with learning difficulties?

(4)    How does MacIntyre’s account of resolving moral dilemmas fit with what we know from our previous weeks reading of Augustine and Luther? Would Luther accuse him of a works righteousness approach to ethics?