The One whom our fear fears
May 4th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
“We call the name of the One before whom the evil in us cringes, before whom fear and anxiety must themselves be afraid, before whom they shake and take flight; the name of the One who alone conquered fear, captured it and led it away in a victory parade, nailed to the cross and banished it to nothingness; the name of the One who is the victory cry of the humanity that is redeemed from the fear of death–Jesus Christ, the one who was crucified and lives. He alone is the Lord of fear; it knows him as its Lord and yields to him alone. Therefore, look to him in your fear. Think about him, place him before your eyes, and call him. Pray to him and believe that he is now with you and helps you. The fear will yield and fade, and you will become free through faith in the strong and living Savior Jesus Christ (Matt. 8:23-27). “
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Radical Orthodoxy
April 9th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
A nice summary of Radical Orthodoxy and the main elements of its theological program.
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The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond
April 9th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. This is an excerpt from his article as published in Philosophy Now.
“… In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism (following postmodernism) one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980. Those born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem elitist, dull, a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them. Those born before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity. Hence the name ‘pseudo-modernism’ also connotes the tension between the sophistication of the technological means, and the vapidity or ignorance of the content conveyed by it – a cultural moment summed up by the fatuity of the mobile phone user’s “I’m on the bus”.
Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.
Along with this new view of reality, it is clear that the dominant intellectual framework has changed. While postmodernism’s cultural products have been consigned to the same historicised status as modernism and romanticism, its intellectual tendencies (feminism, postcolonialism etc) find themselves isolated in the new philosophical environment. The academy, perhaps especially in Britain, is today so swamped by the assumptions and practices of market economics that it is deeply implausible for academics to tell their students they inhabit a postmodern world where a multiplicity of ideologies, world-views and voices can be heard. Their every step hounded by market economics, academics cannot preach multiplicity when their lives are dominated by what amounts in practice to consumer fanaticism. The world has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity – monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold…”
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J. Moltmann, “Prisoner of Hope”
March 30th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
An excerpt from J. Moltmann’s The Power of the Powerless
The night before the Romans arrested him, Jesus went into the garden of Gethsemane, taking only three of his friends with him, and “began to be greatly distressed and troubled,” as Mark writes. “He began to be sorrowful and afraid,” Matthew reports. In fact, “He despaired.” “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death,” he said, and begged his friends to stay awake with him.
Earlier, too, Christ had often withdrawn at night in order to be united in prayer with the God whom he always called so intimately “my Father.” Here, for the first time, he does not want to be alone with God. He seeks protection among his friends. Protection from whom? And then comes the prayer that sounds like a demand: “Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me” (Mark 14:36) – spare me this suffering. What suffering? In Matthew and Luke the prayer sounds somewhat more modest: “If it be possible…” and “If thou art willing,” remove this cup from me.
Christ’s request was not granted. God, his Father, rejected it. Elsewhere we are always told “I and the Father are one.” But here Christ’s communion with God seems to break down. Christ’s true passion begins with the prayer in Gethsemane which was not heard, which was rejected through the divine silence; for his true passion was his suffering from God.
Of course there was also the simple human fear of pain. But I believe that it was quite a different fear which laid hold of Christ here and lacerated his soul. It was the fear that he, the only begotten Son, who loved the Father as no one had ever loved before, could be “forsaken,” “rejected,” even “cursed” by that Father. He is not afraid for his life. He is afraid for God. He is afraid for the Father’s kingdom, whose joy he had proclaimed to the poor.
This suffering from God himself is the real torment in Christ’s passion. This godforsakenness is the cup which he is not spared. God’s terrible silence in response to Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane is more than a deathly stillness. It is echoed in the dark night of the soul, in which everything that makes life something living withers away, and in which hope vanishes. Martin Buber called it the eclipse of God.
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Capitalism, postmodern apocalypse, and the love of God
March 23rd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Here is an excerpt from a blog post by Carl Raschke “Hunger and Love – The Logic of ‘Late Capitalism’ Unwinds into the Postmodern Apocalypse.” Please visit the link to read the whole post. It has some good stuff on Freud, the hyperreal, commodity capitalism, and the love of God as the only true center speaking to our over-signfied lives.
“… Like (Slavoj) Žižek, who rose to notoriety during the decade immediately after the book’s publication (Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism: The Logic of Late Capitalism), Jameson did not see “postmodernism” as some new, emancipatory phase in the development of politics and culture. He saw it as a form of worn-out modernism, at least in the cultural sphere. In the economic realm he regarded it as the final stage of the world-historical process Marx had analyzed in Capital. The “crisis” Marx predicted, which actually did not come ironically until the early twenty-first century after communism itself had crashed and burned, would be a result, Jameson implied, not so much of the complete “immiseration” of the working class through capitalist expropriation of the value of their labor, but the transmogrification of labor itself into aesthetic trivialities and human consciousness itself into a whirl of frivolous enjoyments (think mall shopping or cable television), the endless production of new commodified intensities propelled by insatiable sexual appetites (think contemporary art and internet porn), the raising of compulsive triviality and narcissistic emptiness to the level of the pseudo-sublime (think Facebook).
Jameson wrote in 1991: “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods.” The “occupy” movement that has gained so much attention lately, like the Wall Street bankers themselves, therefore is simply one more node in the vast global net of signifying differentia, as Ferdinand de Saussure, who along with Nietzsche birthed postmodern thinking, would have put it. Saussure in many ways sketched out the theory of the hyperreal in his Course in General Linguistics given at the University of Geneva on the eve of World War I. Jacques Lacan, who influenced a whole generation of French postmodern philosophers, put it into practice with his analysis of how what he called the “symbolic order” – the order of linguistic and conceptual sign interactions – not only dominates, but absorbs all our desires and imaginings.
In postmodern culture the endless thirst for the “latest and newest” French thinker – the proverbial haut couture splashy intellectual “fashion model” with the trendiest, most recent, most outrageous position, or proposition, to come down the publishers’ runway – is but one manifestation of such developments. In pop Christianity it is the rage for an ever sexier way of making Jesus seem cool and relevant. Jesus, the historical singularity that fused the infinite Lord of time with the finite depravity of humanity, is now just an inexhaustibly mobile Lacanian “sliding signifier” in the global marketplace of commodified Christianities…” (Continue reading here).
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“Who killed Walter Benjamin?”
March 22nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
A fascinating documentary on the Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, one of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century. I’ve been much intrigued by his writings lately as I am working on a project that deals with his philosophy of history and the notion of “messianic time” as modulated through thinkers such as Jacob Taubes and Giorgio Agamben. The movie explores the standard account that Benjamin committed suicide after his failed escape to Spain in 1940. The movie can be rented here.
Synopsis
In September 1940, after seven years of exile, Walter Benjamin crosses the Pyrenees in a desperate attempt to escape the Nazis. According to the official version, Walter Benjamin did make it across the French –Spanish border successfully. But when he 
arrives in the Catalan town of Portbou, a sudden change in legislation impeded his entry into Spain and he was obliged to spend the night at a local hotel under the close vigilance of three guards, whose orders were to deport him the following morning. In utter despair, Benjamin took his own life, swallowing and overdose of morphine. The local doctor, however, declared it a natural death and Benjamin was given a Catholic burial in the municipal cemetery, under a wrong name. Did the doctor conceal some hidden cause of Benjamin’s death? Was there really a change of legislation? Was Walter Benjamin aware that Portbou was a pro-Franco town virtually occupied by the Nazis? WHO KILLED WALTER BENJAMIN…reaches for answers among the suspicious circumstances of his death. Giving at the same time, a portrait of a frontier town anchored between two fronts, constant witness of evasion, persecution and false hopes. WHO KILLED WALTER BENJAMIN…not just a reconstruction of a death, but the living portrait of the scene of the crime.
W. Benjamin on passageways to people
March 22nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Photo credit: http://jewishcurrents.org
R. Girard on the Antichrist and Neo-pagan subversion of Christianity
March 11th, 2012 § 4 Comments
After just having finished Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning my head is spinning into all sorts of directions. This is truly an amazing book which takes a while to digest. With that in mind, I thought to insert a section from the last chapter titled “The Twofold Nietzschean Heritage.”
The attempt by Nietzsche and Hitler to make humankind forget the concern for victims has ended in a failure that seems definitive, at least for the moment. But it is 
not Christianity that profits from the victory of the concern for victims in our world. It is rather what I think must be called the other totalitarianism, the most cunning and malicious of the two, the one with the greatest future, by all evidence. At present it does not oppose Judeo-Christian aspirations but claims them as its own and questions the concern for victims on the part of Christians (not without a certain semblance of reason at the level of concrete action, given the deficiencies of historical Christianity). The other totalitarianism does not openly oppose Christianity but outflanks it on its left wing.
All through the twentieth century, the most powerful mimetic force was never Nazism and related ideologies, all those that openly opposed the concern for victims and that readily acknowledged its Judeo-Christian origin. The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and “radicalizes” the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.
This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.
In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. Satan imitates Christ better and better and pretends to surpass him. This imitation by the usurper has long been present in the Christianized world, but it has increased enormously in our time. The New Testament evokes this process in the language of the Antichrist. To understand this title, we should de-dramatize it, for it expresses something banal and prosaic.
The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.
Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious. Since the Christian denominations have become only tardily aware of their failings in charity, their connivance with established political orders in the past and present world that are always “sacrificial,” they are particularly vulnerable to the ongoing blackmail of contemporary neo-paganism.
Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.
Miroslav Volf, “Something New”
March 2nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Miroslav Volf on his father, Job, suffering, and the love of God. The opening question to Volf, “What breaks your heart?”
Jonn Perkins, “Go Down Moses”
March 2nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
John Perkins on love and emancipation
Dionysius vs. the Crucified: On wine
December 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
“Verily, I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mark 14:25)—wine clearly appears here as the perfect and concrete emblem of the beauty of creation and the joy of dwelling at peace in the midst of others: not the wine of Dionysus, which makes fellowship impossible, promising only intoxication,… anonymity, and violence, but the wine of the wedding feast of Cana, or of the wedding feast of the Lamb. The wine of Dionysus is no doubt the coarsest vintage, intended to blind with drunkenness…the wine repeatedly associated with madness, anthropophagy (cannibalism), slaughter, warfare, and rapine. The wine of Scripture on the other hand, is first and foremost a divine blessing and image of God’s bounty (Gen. 27:28; Duet. 7:13) and an appropriate thank offering by which to declare Israel’s love for God (Ex. 29.40); it is the wine that cheers the hearts of men (Ps. 104.15); the sign of God’s renewed covenant with his people (Is. 55:1-3); the drink of lovers (Song 5.1) and the very symbol of love (7.2, 9), whose absence is the eventide of all joy (Isaiah 24:11); it is moreover the wine of agape and the feast of fellowship, in which Christ first vouchsafed a sign of his divinity, in a place of rejoicing, at Cana—a wine of the highest quality—when the kingdom showed itself “out of season” (John 2:3-10).
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 107-108
The god of nation-state
December 18th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Shaped by (the nationalistic mold), conformed to the ways of our self-serving world, Christians respond defensively to the notion that the church should challenge the judgments of the nation-state. Ironically, of course, it is not pacifism alone that would require Christians to question the nation-state. The just-war tradition itself requires that the Christian church challenge and weight the judgments of the authorities that call Christians to arms. Yet little to nothing is done to inculcate such moral responsibility. Instead, reflexive nationalism rears its thoughtless head: ‘if you don’t love it, leave it!’
This is the great irony of American Christianity: exalting the nation that affords us ‘freedom of religion,’ we set aside the way of Christ in order to preserve the religion we supposedly are free to practice. We kill our alleged enemies in order to ‘worship’ the God who teaches us to love enemies. The most important question about our pledge of allegiance is not whether we pledge allegiance to a flag under ‘one God,’ but to what god we are pledging our allegiance. Perhaps it is, after all, not the God revealed in Jesus Christ we are worshiping, but the god of the nation-state, the god of power and might and wealth.
Lee Camp, Mere Discipleship, 140
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Stringfellow on the solidarity of Jesus
December 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
To become and to be a Christian is not at all an escape from the world as it is, nor is it a wistful longing for a “better” world, nor a commitment to generous charity, nor fondness for “moral and spiritual values” (whatever that may mean), nor self-serving positive thoughts, nor persuasion to splendid abstractions about God. It is, instead, the knowledge that there is no pain or privation, no humiliation or disaster, no scourge or distress or destitution or hunger, no striving or temptation, no wile or sickness or suffering or poverty which God has not known and borne for [humanity] in Jesus Christ. He has borne death itself on behalf of [humanity], and in that event he has broken the power of death once and for all.
+William Stringfellow, My People is the Enemy, 32.
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Jacoby on violence
December 13th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Here Russell Jacoby explains the main thesis of his book Bloodllust:
On violence and fratricide
December 12th, 2011 § 1 Comment
In his Bloodlust Russell Jacoby takes an interesting angle on the issue of violence, one that is quite illuminative and pertinent. Rather than focusing on the different ways in which we exclude and attack the “other,” that which is foreign and different, Jacoby contends that most acts of violence can be traced back to different”narcissisms of minor differences.” It is the small divergences and disparities, Jacoby suggests, that “provoke greater hatred than do the large ones” (xiii), and it is in that sense that fratricide is to be seen as the true archetype of human violence. One only needs to look at different forms of ethnic strife , civil wars, church feuds, and instances of domestic violence to find at least some corroboration of that thesis. Jacoby writes:
“The killing of Abel by Cain has been called the first genocide. Half of mankind slays the other half. Several millennia later, not much has changed. Despite an ocean of words about violence – its origins, course, and prevention – something has gone virtually unrecognized: its primal form is fratricide. This observation contradicts both common sense and the collective wisdom of teachers and preachers, who declaim that we fear – and sometimes should fear – the ‘other,’ the dangerous stranger… The truth is more unsettling. It is not so much the unknown that threatens us but the known.”
+Russell Jacoby, Bloodlust, ix.
Hart on existence as excess
December 9th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
David Bentley Hart on the irreducibility of reality and the “sheer fortuity of existence.”
In purely theoretical terms, the question of the transcendent source of reality is an ontological—not a causal—question: not how things have come to be what they are, but how it is that things exist at all. And none of the customary post-Christian attempts to make the question of being disappear can possibly succeed: even if physics can trace all of time and space back to a single self-sufficient set of laws, that those laws exist at all must remain an imponderable problem for materialist thought (for possibility, no less than actuality, must first of all be); all the brave efforts of analytic philosophy to conjure the ontological question away as a fallacy of grammar have failed and always will; continental philosophy’s attempts at a non-metaphysical ontology are notable chiefly for their lack of explanatory power. In the terms of Thomas Aquinas, there is simply an obvious incommensurability between the essence and the existence of things, and hence finite reality cannot account for its own being. And if this incommensurability is considered with adequate probity and clarity, it cannot fail but lead reflection towards something like what Thomas calls the actus essendi subsistens—the subsistent act of being—which is one of his most beautiful names for God.
Of course, very few persons ever have an occasion to think of reality in terms so abstract. But I suspect that this recognition of the sheer fortuity of existence—the sheer impossibility of anything’s essence ever being adequate to its existence—is what a certain sort of phenomenologist would call a “primordial intuition.” Though we may not all have concepts available to us to understand it, all of us experience from time to time that kind of wonder that for Plato and Aristotle is the beginning of all philosophy, that sudden immediate knowledge that existence is something in excess of everything that is, something not intrinsic to it, something strange in its familiarity and transcendent in its immanence. This is an awareness so obvious that there may never be a theoretical language sufficiently limpid and innocent to express it properly, but in it is a wisdom basic to all reflective thought. To fail to see it requires either an irredeemably brutish mind or a willful obtuseness of the sort that only years of education can induce. And this, I venture to say, is why atheism cannot win out in the end: it requires a moral and intellectual coarseness—a blindness to the obvious—too immense for the majority of mankind.
Non-ideological gospel (Stringfellow)
December 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
My esteem for the biblical witness and my approach to the Bible should be enough to disclose my skepticism about current efforts to construct political theology according to some ideological model… [B]iblical politics never implies a particular, elaborated political theology, whether it be one echoing the status quo or one which aspires to overthrow and displace the status quo. The gospel is not ideology and, categorically, the gospel cannot be ideologized. Biblical politics always has a posture in tension and opposition to the prevalent system, and to any prospective or incipient status quo, and to the ideologies of either regime or revolution. Biblical politics are alienated from the politics of this age.
+William Stringfellow, Conscience and Obedience, 11, 13.
Makoto Fujimura on beauty, spirtuality, and brokeness
December 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Excerpt from Refractions, by Makoto Fujimura
In my studio, I use ground minerals such as malachite and azurite, layering them to create prismatic refractions, or “visual jazz.” Via my art I hope to create a mediated reality of beauty, hope, and reconciled relationships and cultures. As a founding elder of the Village Church, I have found that mediation of any kind is never black-and-white but prismatic and complex, too. In order to find hope, even in the midst of the broken and torn fragments of relationships, in order to begin to journey into the heart of the divide, we must first wrestle with the deeper issues of faith. We must be willing to be broken ourselves into prismatic shards by the Master Artist, God, so that Christ’s light can be refracted in us.
Three months prior to September 11, 2001, I wrote the following for a Santa Fe art exhibit called Beauty Without Regret:
“Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to literally close our eyes to that beauty of the dying sun setting all around us. Every beauty also suffers. Death spreads all over our lives and therefore faith must be given to see through the darkness, to see through the beauty of “the valley of the shadow of death.”
Prayers are given, too, in the layers of broken, pulverized pigments. Beauty is in the brokenness, not in what we can conceive as the perfections, not in the “finished” images but in the incomplete gestures. Now, I await for my paintings to reveal themselves. Perhaps I will find myself rising through the ashes, through the beauty of such broken limitations.
Outside my window I see the young sycamores, once covered in the ashes of September 11, now turning to autumn hues casting their golden shadows on those passing by. Those who walk beneath the sycamore trees are of diverse cultures and backgrounds. Similarly, the culture at-large is neither “Christian” nor “secular” but fantastically pluralistic, defying conventional categorizations. In each culture we will no doubt find evidences of trauma, like the ashes of Ground Zero, as we all find ourselves building upon our pulverized and fragmented past. We can choose to disengage from such intractable reality, as our hearts will struggle to find rest in such exilic ground as Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Darfur, Afghanistan, and so on. Or we can accept the splintered condition of culture as a kaleidoscope of common struggles, a reality that only the golden rays of God can restore and recreate via broken humanity. The latter is my starting promise in writing this book. As you journey with me in this refracted light, I pray the Spirit will indeed reveal God’s presence in the undiscovered recesses of our creative journeys.
Makoto Fujimura is a Wedgwood Sector Liaison for Fine Arts and Founder of the International Arts Movement.
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The greatest theologian?
December 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
“With horror I read [a] statement that I was the greatest theologian of the century. That really terrified me…. What does the term ‘greatest theologian’ actually mean? … As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one’s own way…. Let me again remind you of the donkey I referred to [earlier]. A real donkey is mentioned in the Bible, or more specifically an ass…. It was permitted to carry Jesus to Jerusalem. If I have done anything in this life of mine, I have done it as a relative of the donkey that went its way carrying an important burden. The disciples had said to its owner: ‘The Lord has need of it.’ And so it seems to have pleased God to have used me at this time, just as I was, in spite of all the things, the disagreeable things, that quite rightly are and will be said about me. Thus I was used…. I just happened to be on the spot. A theology somewhat different from the current theology was apparently needed in our time, and I was permitted to be the donkey that carried this better theology for part of the way, or tried to carry it as best I could.”
+Karl Barth, “Karl Barth’s Speech on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday Celebrations,” in Fragments Grave and Gay, 112-117.
William Stringfellow on powers
December 5th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
William Stringfellow’s An Ethics for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land offers some of the most detailed delineation of “principalities and powers” – in the biblical sense of the term – and their influence on daily existence that I have ever encountered. While not as well-known as Walter Wink’s work, the book offers some eye-opening insights on this topic. Here is Marva Dawn summarizing Stringfellow’s description of the squalid and destructive tactics employed by these powers in their inter-subjective and institutional manifestations: “Denial of truth, doublespeak and overtalk, secrecy and boasts of expertise, surveillance and harassment, exaggeration and deception, cursing and conjuring, usurpation and absorption, diversion and demoralization, and the violence of babel (including verbal inflation, libel, rhetorical wantonness, sophistry, jargon, incoherence, falsehood, and blasphemy)” (Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God, 6). Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Rowan Williams Lecture
December 4th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Listen to Rowan Williams’ delightful and informative lecture titled “Faith, Hope & Charity in Tomorrow’s World”:
Here is the transcipt of the lecture:
To be able to be part of a celebration of the legacy of Bishop King is a very particular privilege for me, having first encountered the memory of Bishop King when I was a teenager and having read his biography when I was a student I feel that he continues to set a benchmark for all those who seek to serve as teachers and pastors in the Church and very specially in the Church of England.
I’ve been given and have accepted one of those titles which can happily mean almost anything you want it to mean. And I’m going to cheat very slightly in the way I approach my title.
Faith, hope and charity are generally agreed to be good things. And to get any particular kind of grip on the subject is not easy just because they’re generally agreed to be good things. And so I’m going to come at this in a slightly roundabout way by approaching them as they are dealt with by one of the great mystics of Christian history, the sixteenth-century Spanish friar St John of the Cross. And I’ve decided to approach faith, hope and charity by way of St John’s writing because of one very distinctive insight which he has about them.
St John — like everybody else in his generation of Catholic theologians — takes for granted a picture of the human mind which sees it as working in three basic ways: the human mind understands, it remembers and it wants. Or, in more abstract terms, the human mind is made up of the interaction of understanding, memory and will. And the distinctive and fresh insight that St John of the Cross offers, is that if you put together understanding, memory and will with faith, hope and charity you have a perfect picture of where we start and where we finish. In the Christian life, faith (he says) is what happens to our understanding; hope is what happens to our remembering; and love is what happens to our wanting. To grow up as a Christian is to take that journey from understanding, into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love.
