The church participates in the death of Christ

the life of the church lived in constant participation of the death of Christ produces a martyr-church.  It shares in the death of Christ through baptism and renews this when it breaks bread.  It admits the paradoxes of its own existence: its life is death-made, the bread it breaks is infinitely creative.  It affirms that Jesus cannot be the first Chrstian martyr, since there are no Christian martyrs except those who die the death of Christ. (p79)

I’m currently halfway through a really thought-provoking book: To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church, by Craig Hovey (2008).  It’s a theological reading of the gospel of Mark, showing how this piece of Christian scripture calls the church to a life of cruciformity.

My own thinking is that this is precisely what Paul is doing in 1 Corinthians: Calling the Corinthians to inhabit the cross in the present, as they look ahead to participating fully in the future resurrection.  This means an orientation of dependence upon God, which will be expressed ethically in (at least) surrendering my own defiant sense of bodily ownership, and forgoing the exploitative exercise of my own rights in relation to others within the body of Christ.

In other words, the knowledge that our identity is tied up with Christ means that we can have confidence that when HE is revealed, WE too will finally share in the fullness of his glory.  This frees us up to pursue the pattern of the cross in the present: Thoughtfully, creatively, utterly giving ourselves up in the service of God and others… labouring to transform this world, knowing that “in the Lord, our labour is not in vain” – because God raises the dead (1 Cor 15:58).

Anyway, the book by Hovey is short, well-written, provocative, and worth a read.  I’ll finish with one more quote:

To identify with Christ in his death and resurrection is to identify with the church.  But this also makes sense only if the church is a martyr-church.  What does this mean?  It means that the church is characterized by the life of the resurrection only insofar as it undergoes the pain of the cross.  (p27)

Forgiveness, gruesome evil, and friendship

Today we had a postgraduate study day focused on the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation.  There were some really interesting issues that came up – and I just want to mention those raised by Stuart Jesson’s paper on ‘Forgiveness and its Reason’…

Stuart began with the position of Trudy Govier, which focuses on the intrinsic worth of the perpetrator rather than on the deeds themselves:

“The explanation permits us to move from the acts themselves to a sense of the human being who was their agent….  In the process of forgiving another, we come to understand him to be a person who is more than his evil deeds, a moral agent capable of more than just wrongdoing.  Understanding circumstantial factors, some of which amount to mitigating excuses, makes it easier to distinguish the agent from the acts and in this way makes forgiveness easier.” (Trudy Gover, Forgiveness & Revenge, p57)

As Stuart rightly pointed out, a problem with this approach to forgiveness is that it seems to discount the “evil” that actually occurred, essentially saying that it doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, when you take into account the whole of a person’s being.  Furthermore, it may actually be the case that coming to understand a person better (eg acknowledging their love for their family) may in fact make their acts of evil all the more grotesque and harder to forgive.

He went on to look at the perspective of Vladimir Jankelevitch, for whom evil cannot be mitigated or justified – and forgiveness is therefore not a matter of excusing, but of facing that which is senseless, accepting its reality, and offering to absorb its pain:

“Above all, forgiveness obeys neither the causality of the loveable, nor the causality of the detestable; it is unleashed neither by a pre-existent value, nor by a countervalue; it trails behind nothing.  Not only is it not because the accused is innocent that forgiveness forgives him (innocence, on the contrary, rendering forgiveness superfluous), rather it is much more because forgiveness forgives that the guilty person is innocent.” (Jankelevitch, Forgiveness, p145

I think this is a really worthwhile perspective: Forgiveness doesn’t say “well it doesn’t really matter – you didn’t really mean it…” – it insists, “it does matter, and was senseless – but I will absorb its pain for your sake.”

But (as Stuart & I chatted about afterwards), I think it’s possible to re-instate Govier’s idea of trying to understand the personhood of the perpetrator; not in order to necessarily undo the “evilness” of the crime, but at least to stop myself from becoming self-righteous: I need to recognise that the “senselessness” that drove their crime is a characteristic that I share with them in this age.

Let me give a personal example: In Perth, Australia, just under two years ago, two 18yo girls were arrested for a gruesome crime: They had set upon a 16yo girl who was in their home, overpowered her, bashed her to death, and filmed themselves kissing at the scene.  They then stuffed the body into a bin, put it in the shed, and got on with their lives.  They were found sunbathing outside when the police came to visit a few days later.  At their first court appearance, the judge was outraged that they couldn’t stop giggling.  Now all of this is a pretty sure contender for the category of “evil”.

But I have an added perspective – I know one of those two girls who committed the crime.  She worked alongside me in the charity arm of my church, doing work experience.  And I knew her as a funny, sweet, sad girl, who had been sexually abused all of her life, was experiencing the break up of her parents, and was just aching to be loved.  She thought she had found love with her co-accused, and the 16yo girl came onto the scene as an apparent threat to the one instance of love she had ever encountered.  She became desperate, and murdered.

Now, does any of this excuse the evil of her crime?  No, I don’t think it does: She committed a gruesome, senseless evil.  But knowing and understanding her does help me, for my small part, to consider forgiveness - because I’m reminded that she is just like me: Both of us are trying to cope with life and cling to what we cherish, both of us long to experience love, and both of us have areas of our lives that just defy sense and explanation.

Just War & Pacifism

The Nigel Biggar/Richard Hays debate about non-violence in the New Testament was okay.  Richard Hays was more rhetorically polished; Nigel Biggar was slightly more perceptive about the nature of their disagreement; but to some degree the debate itself seemed to dance around the periphery of this fundamental disagreement, I think. 

Hays (probably rightly) felt that Biggar was simply responding to individual exegetical particularities rather than appreciating his whole approach to Christian ethics, seeing the cross as shaping the life of an alternative community.  Biggar (probably rightly) felt that Hays wasn’t appreciating the task of the moral theologian, who is free to take issues & distinctions outside of the text, and bring them to the text to see if they might find validity.

One question I would have been interested to hear Hays address is: Given that (unlike Paul) I have been born into a situation in which the government who wields the sword is chosen by and representative of ME, how am I to approach this situation of “secondarily” wielding the sword – whether I like it or not?

Pacifism in the New Testament

I’ve just finished reading a paper by Nigel Biggar (Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology at Oxford) which aims to refute the argument for pacifism given by Richard Hays in his book ‘The Moral Vision of the New Testament’.

It’s a relatively concise (10,000 words) argument for the doctrine of just war, and responds to Hays’ pacifistic reading of the New Testament with three main parts:

First, that Hays’ reading of the New Testament stories about god-fearing soldiers, who persist in their profession, is not compelling; second, that he fails to specify sufficiently the meaning of Jesus’ teaching and conduct in terms of Jesus’ own context (particularly the option of armed violence in the service of religiously inspired nationalism); and third, that Hays’ normative moral concepts are often too crude, suffering from a failure to employ valid moral distinctions.

I have found the paper a thought-provoking read.  Some parts seem to persuasively counter Hays; other parts I’m not so comfortable with. 

For example, he argues (and backs it with ‘empirical’ evidence) that soldiers’ use of violence is not necessarily driven by hatred or anger; but can be driven by loyalty etc….  But one question that then arises for me is: What about at a national level?  What if soldiers loyally and impassively participate in a war that is effectively a product of the emperor’s hatred or anger?

Anyway, Biggar and Hays will be debating this issue on Thursday at Oxford, and I will be attending.  It should be interesting.  Here’s how I envisage it beginning:

Biggar: “Richard, I disagree with your pacifist reading of the New Testament”

Hays: “Them’s fightin’ words…”

Big Sin Meme

I’ve been tagged with a rather bold meme from Roger Mugs, asking about ’sins that could take you down’…

I find myself in agreement with the view that ‘evil’ has no inherent substance, but is rather the corruption of good.  This seems to make sense, and fits with the biblical account, in which God’s subjection of creation to frustration takes the shape of the withdrawal of previously-given blessings.  Similarly, then, I wonder if it’s fruitful to think of much ’sin’ as the tragic corruption of virtue: Hatred is the corruption of discernment; lust is the corruption of desire; greed is the corruption of enjoyment; rage is the corruption of a desire for justice, etc etc…

I think that out of those things, I’m most inclined toward desire and enjoyment, so it’s a danger for those things, which can be good, to be twisted and corrupted into the ugliness of lust and greed.  But perhaps even worse than any of these – because it’s so unassuming – is apathy… that all-too-acceptable condition in which I just can’t be bothered changing my life or changing the world.

…oh, and I’m way not brave enough to pass this meme on!!  (or am I just apathetic?)

Ethics… A question of nature???

Over the last couple of days, our TV and internet at home have not been working – they still aren’t…  so we’ve been reduced to going back to the dark ages and reading newspapers and the like.  So today, I read an interesting article in the Sunday Times: Minette Marrin comments on the situation of Gary Glitter, the child abuser who has “done his time” and is now being rejected from country after country.  Her article points to something of a crisis in modern morality/ethics…

Scientific evidence seems to be growing by the month to suggest that people are not equally responsible for what they do.  Individual biology has a large part to play in destiny, as do environment and the complex symbiosis of the two.  Some people’s brain structure and brain chemistry may make them less able to control their impulses, more inclined to aggression, less able to understand their own motives or less able to understand the feelings or even the objective reality of other people.  This may be compounded by bad childhood experiences with damaged parents which themselves alter brain pathways.

If so, the foundation stone of western morality – the idea that we are all equally responsible for what we do and all equally culpable for our crimes – is being eroded by biology.  This process of erosion has begun fairly recently and is gathering speed.  It is profoundly alarming….

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) lists paedophilia as a mental disorder and the US Sypreme Court has upheld the idea of paedophilia as a mental abnormality.  However, there are those – both respectable experts and paedophile apologists – who argue that paedophilia should be removed from this list of mental disorders, hust as homosexuality was removed in the 1970s.  There is, apparently, some evidence that between 20-25% of the supposedly normal male population feel sexually attracted to children, according at least to a discussion in the US Archives of Sexual Behaviour of 2002, and react to “paedophilic” stimuli.  This might suggest that there is nothing so very abnormal about paedophile desires, just as other fantasies of violence and revenge are common….

Some studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain suggest that paedophilic men tend to have several differences in brain structure from other men and have one or more neurological characteristics at birth that could increase the likelihood of paedophilia.  However, for every one of these studies there is a crowd of experts to desagree with it….

Whether [Glitter] can’t or won’t control his taste for children, others will have to control it for him.  But it is wrong, given how little we understand about personal responsibility, to treat him harshly and to vilify him, just because we are anxious about that very lack of understanding.

 This raises a bunch of interesting questions for consideration/disagreement/reflection etc… and I’ll just cut to two issues that I think are worth considering:

1) I think some Christians are far too confident when they argue that something is ‘unnatural’ or ‘against nature’.  Whether homosexuality or anything else, I don’t think we adequately understand the post-fall mix that we find ourselves in, in order to be very clear here.  The only place I can think of where Paul talks about something being contrary to nature, it’s the issue of which sex should have which hair-length… and that hardly seems to be an argument that we can comprehend in scientific terms! 

2) The other side of the coin: I don’t think the possibility that something is ‘innate’ means it is excusable.  Again, whether homosexual desire, heterosexual desire, paedophilic desire, polygamy, or whatever else, I don’t think we can confidently say that because I have a ‘leaning’ in that direction, I should have a license to exercise that leaning.

Any thoughts?

Oh… another thought: Paul does, of course, talk in Romans 1 about humans ‘giving up’ natural use of their bodies… but I see this as a theological statement rather than a ’scientific’ observation…

Paul and Politics: From Right to Left?

The political right is well known as having conservative moral concerns.  The political left is well known as having social/welfare concerns.  My rather unsophisticated philosophy has been that if one should be given preference over the other when voting, it’s the latter: Somehow it seems more pressing to care for the poor than to attempt to ensure the conservation of “family values”.

However, my examination of Pauline ethics has got me wondering what Paul would think…

My work on Paul’s ethics involves the contention that the ethical sections of the Pauline literature (including extended sections as well as short vice/virtue lists) often share a certain rhythm: To put it simply, Pauline ethics seems to move from “right” to “left”…

1) Firstly, Paul calls the church to sanctification in terms of issues of sexual immorality, greed, and impurity of bodies.

2) Secondly, Paul calls the church to sanctification in terms of issues of inter-relational issues, calling them to self-sacrificing love within the body of Christ.

If you want to see examples of this, look at Romans 1:24-32; Romans 12:1-8; 1 Corinthians 5-14; 2 Corinthians 12:20-21 (in which the order is reversed, but still the “impurity, sexual sin and debauchery” are said to have occurred “earlier”); Galatians 5:19-26; Ephesians 2; Ephesians 4-5 (in which there is an alternation between the two themes, without the normal order); Colossians 3:5-17ff; 1 Thessalonians 4:1-12… those will do to give an idea…

It seems that Paul thinks that idolatry/godlessness is fundamentally expressed in the moral abuse of human bodies… and Christians are called rather to offer their bodies to God, in his service.  But although this movement – from impurity to devotion – is the beginning, it is not the end-point.  The end goal is that Christians will cohere lovingly in the one body of Christ – giving themselves up for one another, caring for one another, pursuing peace with one another.

Of course, Paul’s summons is to the church… but it does make me wonder whether I should re-think my unsophisticated philosophy that we can effectively pursue care for the poor (which I believe is the glory of any nation) while acting as though people’s personal bodily practices are irrelevant.

Paul’s Ethics

One of the main areas I’m working on at the moment is Pauline ethics: For many months now I’ve been wrestling with the question: How does Paul think Christians should live – and on what basis does he think this?  So I’ve been going through Paul’s letters, reading up on OT ethics, Greco-Roman ethics, early Jewish ethics, Jesus’ ethics, apocryphal ethics… I’ve been reading books on New Testament ethics (Furnish, Horrell, Hays, Burridge, Rosner, Countryman…), and trying to be as attentive as possible to Paul’s thought.

I haven’t yet finished my current paper (I’m up to 50 pages) but I hope to give it to my supervisor in a week.  One thing that has intrigued me is that Paul often seems to use very similar imagery to deal with very similar issues, in a very similar order.  Here is a little snippet from the paper that I’m currently working on:

It would seem that for Paul, fundamental ethical godlessness or idolatry may be encapsulated both with the attitude of bold self-assertion (in terms of greed or passionate desire) and with the bodily practice of impurity/sexual immorality.  Thus the movement that can be described judicially by Paul as being from boastful works to divine justification; and which can be described relationally by Paul as being from heart-hardened enmity to reconciliation, can also be described ethically by Paul as being from passionate covetous impurity to surrendered loving incorporation.

 

The church comes to the Christ of the bodily resurrection, and, being bound to him by faith, crucifies sexual immorality, impurity and greed.  The members of the personal body are offered to God as risen instruments of righteousness, and each individual finds themself to be a member of Christ’s own body, in which mutual love reigns.