God on Demand

I’ve seen a bit of the “God TV” channel lately, and I’m amazed that this rubbish is allowed on television – every time I’ve turned it on, there has been another charlatan demanding money in return for God’s blessings.  Just now, the guy even told pensioners that they should send in their retirement funds, to “sow a seed” and await God’s blessing.  I’m really tempted to contact Virgin TV and complain that they allow this blasphemy on the airwaves. 

How fitting that on their website – www.god.tv – they boast “God on demand”… just the way the consumers like it…

Mark’s Rhetoric of Reticence

Why does Mark appear so restrained in his presentation of Jesus?  He holds back on Messianic references, hints opaquely at divinity, constantly emphasises the failure of Jesus’ disciples, and refuses to actually show readers the resurrected Jesus, ending on a note of disappointing uncertainty.

Two recent approaches I’ve encountered to this issue are worthy of consideration:

Firstly, a few weeks ago I heard Richard Hays speak about the flow of Mark’s Gospel.  He suggested that Mark takes as his key rhetorical principle the explanation of Jesus’ use of parables in chapter 4: To those who are followers, the parables invite further understanding; to those who are proud challengers, the parables resist capture and explanation.  Similarly, Hays suggests, the Gospel of Mark itself prefers to suggest and allude, inviting the follower into the path of the cross, rather than to spell things out in bold polemical claims.

Secondly, the theological reading of Mark by Craig Hovey (which I have now finished and highly recommend) suggests that Mark is attempting to shape the church’s expectations of its Messiah with the quiet shame of the cross: A church that longs for the type of glory that is exemplified in the world’s rulers needs to be kept from justifying its own pursuit of this glory by appealing to the visible certainty of resurrection appearances – as if the resurrection simply serves to confirm that, after all, we CAN seek worldly honour and esteem and power and glory.

Indeed, the question of why Mark is so reticent in his presentation of the resurrection in ch.16 is perhaps parallel to the question of why Paul defers discussion of the resurrection to the end of 1 Corinthians: The resurrection cannot be seen or grasped in the present, without pursuing the way of the cross, which is its necessary pre-requisite.

1 Cor 3 wordle; and the main point of chs.1-4

Once again, we see that Barth’s favourite term “theou” (“from God”) is the most common word in this chapter – just as in the previous two chapters. 

This contintued empahsis illustrates the hesitancy I have about Margaret Mitchell’s very influential argument that it is the issue of ecclesial disunity that is the key to chs.1-4 (and to the letter as a whole).  I think that Mitchell’s argument that the problem of disunity is primary neglects the way that in 1 Corinthians 1-4, Paul focuses on and drives toward the more fundamental problem of human pride/boasting: Every “conclusion point” in chapters 1-4 sets confidence in that which is human against confidence in that which is divine; and the climactic opposition of Corinthian and apostolic characteristics in chapter 4 is really the endpoint of this trajectory:

A showdown between the apparent vitality of those who are proudly human and the contrasting cruciformity of those who are appointed by God as apostles.

There is, then, an important distinction in nuance to be made here: The problem is not just that boasting is a “component of the party conflicts within the Corinthian church” (Mitchell, 1991, p210); Paul’s problem rather appears to be that party conflicts within the Corinthian church are evidence of proudly autonomous, over-manifest boasting. In discerning Paul’s rhetoric here it is thus not enough to draw attention to “terms and topoi rooted in the issue of political divisiveness” (Mitchell, p111) and then conclude that the chief issue is division; it is essential to be attentive to where Paul drives his discussion. The presenting problem of political partisanship in relation to external figureheads gives way to the theological crisis of autonomous, over-manifest boasting.

Marion L. Soards (in continuity with Chrysostom and others) rightly captures the fundamentality, from Paul’s perspective, of the problem of boasting in Corinth:

“Throughout this letter Paul criticizes the particular actions of the Corinthians, but above all he denounces the will to boast. The will to be superior and to brag about it was the fundamental problem that generated the other symptomatic problems in Corinth.” (2003, p1164)

My contention is that this boasting was, in Paul’s view, (unwittingly) theological, because it implied confidence outside of God, claiming in the present the manifest wisdom and spirituality that can only really be found hidden in Christ, and which awaits manifestation at his future revelation.

Sympathy for the Corinthians

I’ve been searching for an easy way

To escape this cold light of day

I’ve been high and I’ve been low

But I’ve got nowhere else to go

Going through the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians again, now that I’m part of a Greek reading group, has evoked a certain sympathy in me for these Corinthians.  Their stance is pretty much equivalent to the disciples in the beginning of the book of Acts, who ask the risen Jesus: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”  They can’t quite cope with the fact that the one they’ve been searching and longing for has finally come, and he’s not all he was cracked up to be.  It’s like they’ve stumbled on the holy grail, only to discover that it’s just an ordinary cup.

The Corinthians expect something more – after all, the religious people at nearby Eleusis (50km East) have ecstatic experiences and secret mysteries; those loyal to Caesar have a strong and visible Lord; those loyal to the Greek gods have an impressive temple to Apollo nearby; the travelling sophists have impressive rhetoric… surely Jesus, the Lord of the world, can compete with all that??…

All the locals scattered, they were hiding in the snow
We were so far away from home, so how were we to know
There’d be nothing left to plunder
When we stumbled on the holy grail

Paul’s response is basically that, indeed, Jesus can do more than compete - he can surpass the others: In HIM the Corinthians have ‘been made rich in every way’; in HIM is found the ‘power of God’; in HIM is found the ‘wisdom of God’ – that is, ‘our righteousness, holiness, and redemption’.

The Corinthians’ problem is not that they want too much; in fact, they really are willing to settle for far too little – but they want it NOW, visibly in the present (this is what I call ‘over-manifest spirituality’); whereas in Christ they have everything in a way that is presently HIDDEN until Christ himself appears….

a matter of justice

Well I’m back in the UK after 2 and a half weeks away in Australia.  I was interested to receive this “letter to a victim” from the Sydney Department of Public Prosecutions upon my return to fair Nottingham:

Hi Matthew and Detective Sgt Sipos,

Please be advised that the 2nd offender was sentenced on Friday (after being in breach of bail and on the run from police for 16 mths).

He was sentenced to 2 years and 6 months gaol, to serve a non parole period of 15 months.

While in my view the sentence is towards the low end for offences of this kind, I do not think it is appealable.

This offender had less prior criminal convictions than the co-offender XXXX (who had served gaol sentences for similar offences). That is why XXXX was sentenced to a more severe sentence than XXXX.

Of course, I received a version with the names included.  This relates to something that happened almost exactly two years ago, when I was the victim of a violent mugging that stretched out over about an hour and a half, over a few locations, and ended with me having to escape after being threatened with death.  Receiving the letter has made me reflect on ‘justice’: Somehow, describing the situation in the letter as ‘justice’ seems like a let-down to that category… Having two people in prison enduring a dreadful existence doesn’t actually do anything to reverse what happened to me.  Is that justice?…  On the other hand, I think I would feel ripped off if the whole episode was ignored and the pair were free to go on offending.  But I can’t help feeling sorry for those two men, whose lives are basically ruined.  And I can’t help feeling annoyed that I will probably always feel real anxiety about walking alone at night – for the rest of my life.  Is all of this ‘justice’? 

Perhaps the expectation that everything will be completely and fairly sorted out in the present is one symptom of an ‘over-manifest’ theology, demanding in the present that which can only fully come when Christ returns – when he experiences the fullness of his own vindication.  Until then, we can sing with the psalmist:

Psalm 37:7: Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; don’t fret when men succeed in their ways, as they work their wicked schemes.

the lion is the lamb

Although I didn’t care for the rhetoric of the post, I was saddened to read here about the Christian pastor who loves “authoritative” Jesus but has no time for “vulnerable” Jesus: He has said in a magazine interview…

“Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity. “

He cannot worship a guy he can beat up…  I guess the Roman guards thought the same thing.

“Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him.  They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head.  They put a staff in his right hand as a scepter.  Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him.  ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ they said.  They spat on him, and took the staff and struckhim on the head again and again.  After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him.  Then they led him away to crucify him.”  Matthew 27:27-31, TNIV

crypto-theology

Here is a crucial question: Why did the ascension happen? Why was it “better” (John 14-16) for Jesus to leave the disciples with only his indirect presence – via Spirit, Word, and Sacrament?
And why did he picture the Kingdom of God as something which is hidden until the climactic harvest?
Here is a parallel question: Why was Saul of Tarsus struck with blindness as his fundamental experience of the risen Jesus?
And one more related question: Why were the Corinthians so emphatically wrong to act as though they could see clearly in the present (1 Cor 13)?

Perhaps one way to express the Corinthians’ problem is “over-manifest spirituality” – an error at home in the pre-parousia age, in which Jesus can only genuinely be known and celebrated as the Crypto-Kurios… the Lord who is hidden from the world’s esteem by the disgraceful curse of the cross. Consequently the cruciform hiddenness of the Crypto-Kurios is witnessed to by the cruciform mission of Paul, the original Crypto-Theologian.