Pogonotrophers ahoy

despite my positive thoughts about Rowan Williams below, this is a great opening comment from his fellow pogonotropher, David Bentley Hart:

In a bracingly venomous Spectator article on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent remarks about sharia law in Britain, the journalist Rod Liddle opined that it must be Rowan Williams’s beard that has won him the reputation of an intellectual. Certainly, Liddle remarked, “it cannot be anything he has ever said or written”. I have to confess my doubts that Liddle has really read much of Williams’s oeuvre. No one who had – whatever reservations he or she might harbour as to the Archbishop’s wisdom, prudence or pogonotrophy – could possibly dismiss the man as a featherweight or a fraud.

read the full article here

Ricoeur on Evil

i'm still reading through Paul Ricoeur's Figuring the Sacred (Augsburg Fortress, 1995), but i really liked this on evil in the introduction:

While the Bible does offer a theodicy of retribution in which the victims, because of their faithlessness, are held responsible for the violence inflicted upon them, Ricoeur argues instead for a wisdom theodicy of lamentation and anger where the perennial cries of Why me? and How long? are seen as the most adequate responses to unmitigated evil.
Mark I. Wallace, introduction, Figuring the Sacred, p32.

having read David Bentley Hart on evil (the doors of the sea) and Miroslav Volf on forgiveness (exclusion and embrace), this is close to where Hart ends up (for whom God is always opposed to evil) - and quite different to Volf (who emphasises the responsibility of both the perpetrator and victim in seeking reconciliation).

i like the way he's not systematising, but using the bible's language we see in the context of suffering in evil.

praxis vs theology

chatting about evil again. reading david bentley hart's doors of the sea again.

but this time it's with others, including mark and steve, who have been interviewing christian counsellors for their pilgrims podcast.

the reason i mention this is not to promote them (they do enough self-promotion as it is), but to raise the question of how what we say to people relates to what we think - and particularly in the context of suffering.

if we believe evil is evil, an affront to God, an absurdity, then let us say this.

however, if we believe in a divine, universal harmony, where nothing happens but by the hand of God, and we are talking to someone suffering - why can we not say this? is this not the gospel of comfort to the suffering, the poor, the bound? but we realise that saying 'it's all a part of God's plan' is no comfort, and not pastorally appropriate.

my question is, if what we believe does not match with what we are willing and comfortable to say, are we too weak to say the truth that might hurt, or is our theology profoundly impersonal and thus leaving us in a schizophrenic state as we try to comfort the suffering?

what do counsellors do? what do you do?

can we in a clear conscience preach one thing from the pulpit and say another in the hospital room?

if evil is evil, it is evil. let us proclaim the goodness of God despite that evil.

love, providence & Doors of the Sea

love is not:

a reaction. in God, who is its transcendent origin and end, it is the one infinite and changeless act of being that makes all else actual, and so is purely positive, sufficient in itself, and without any need of contrariety to be fully vital and creative. As trinity, God [...] has not need of any external pathos to waken or fecundate his love. We are not necessary to him: he is not nourished by or sacrifices or ennobled by our virtues, any more than he is diminished by our sins and sufferings. [...] though he had no need of us, still he loved us when we were not. And this is why love, in its divine depth, is apatheia.

David Bentley Hart, Doors of the Sea 2005: p77

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

1 John 4:10



providence is not:
a small town in the midwest. well, it might be. in fact it probably is. i need to go to bed so can't be bothered checking.
but the point is, i never really considered what providence meant until quite near to the end of the Doors of the Sea.
to paraphrase Hart, Providence is the idea that God will not allow evil to subvert the bringing about of his Kingdom. it is not to say that he must use evil to bring it about, for that would be to grant evil a place it does not deserve. nor does providence collapse the transendence of God, and the rest of the created order, into one homogeneous amalgam, where God is not only sovereign over, but also one with, the evil deeds.
i think this is starting to make sense of what i've been struggling with for a while; this book along with conversations with friends, has been really helpful in trying to nut some of this stuff out.

scroll down to look for other posts about my thoughts on this book. there should be one more soon - the last.

Doors of the Sea - Pt IIa

Just starting part two of David Bentley Hart's the Doors of the Sea, and it was interesting to think about the way our culture views nature.

paganism worshipped nature, believed that it was self-aware, tried placating it with sacrifices and other rites, there were rights of passage to show you were able to live in nature as an equal, not afraid, but watchfully aware.

in this scientistic age, however, we see nature as nothing but cause-and-effect. pressure builds up, tectonic plates move. earthquake, tsunami, 100,000 homo erecti die. there is no emotional involvement - it just is. how could we get upset?


and this is the bind of the world today, in a post-pagan epoch. how are we then to think of nature? benign, simply following the laws by which it was created and continues to exist - or a vengeful, dangerous, awful (in the true sense of the word) force to be greatly feared, never underestimated. we see the debate played out in Australia with the shark-nets, to protect the swimmers at popular beaches - do we fear nature, stay away, let these fearful creatures of the sea alone, or rather do we put up nets to catch them, send out hunting parties with space-age sonar and weaponry to take back our beaches?

can we have to find a middle path, a third way? what is the Christian way of understanding the untameable nature, and at once the omnipotent creator God?

hopefully either you, dear reader, or at the very least DBH will tell me the answer within the last 50 pages!


check out related posts here, and here

i don't think i've used this photo before. if you can guess the location, i'm sure either Byron will grant you a couple of points, or possibly even Dave will give you a warm fuzzy or two.

Doors of the Sea - Pt I

i must say, i'm loving this book.
starting to read it, it felt like the 1874 Australian classic, For the Term of His Natural Life, by Marcus Clarke, as he describes the scenery of tasmania as he begins his life as a convict.

with the breath-taking descriptions of the geography of the surrounding region, as well as his descriptions of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, then the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 from Voltaire's perspective. His deep interaction with this profound poem is very honest, trying to comprehend the horror of that day when so many died on All Saints day when their churches collapsed, and then many more died from the resulting tidal waves from the rivers, and then the fires, and then from the seas.
How are we to comprehend this God who brings such disaster on his creation, asks Voltaire.

Hart then moves to the Christian Dostoyevsky, specifically with his play, the Brothers Karamazov, as Ivan, trying to comprehend the horrendous deeds done to one man by another - not by an impersonal deist God as Voltaire decries, but by one creature to another. the callousness of man is incomprehensible, and as a non-Christian workmate confided to me, how can anyone say that acts of such bestiality are "In God's Plan"?

that is why Hart concludes this first half with the sentence,

Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoyevsky sees [...] that is would be far more terrible if it were.

quite.

bring on part ii!

Doors of the Sea - David Bentley Hart

with a greek half-yearly in 2 days, a sermon to write, and countless hours of reading and hebrew paradigms to do, i thought i'd buy and read this book. it's based on a newspaper article he wrote a couple of days after the asian tsunami, and in light of reading the beauty of the infinite, i wanted to see the way an eastern orthodox theologian dealt with the complex question of suffering in the midst of a sovereign God. i read the first couple of chapters last night.

i'm not going to get much work done this week...


UPDATE (22/5/08): i forgot to mention that you can read a fair portion of this book on google books, here
happy procrastinating!

Words David Bentley Hart Uses (with reckless abandon)

monad
3. Philosophy.
a. (in the metaphysics of Leibniz) an unextended, indivisible, and indestructible entity that is the basic or ultimate constituent of the universe and a microcosm of it.
b. (in the philosophy of Giordano Bruno) a basic and irreducible metaphysical unit that is spatially and psychically individuated.
c. any basic metaphysical entity, esp. having an autonomous life.

plenitude
1. fullness or adequacy in quantity, measure, or degree; abundance: a plenitude of food, air, and sunlight.
2. state of being full or complete.

Sobornost
3. Russian, Religion. Kireevsky asserted that "the sum total of all Christians of all ages, past and present, comprise one indivisible, eternal living assembly of the faithful, held together just as much by the unity of consciousness as through the communion of prayer". The term in general means the unity that is the church, based on individual like minded interest.

dégringolade
French. a quick deterioration or breakdown, as of a situation or circumstance.

i assume i'll have to look up a dictionary for the untranslated greek and latin (latin includes vinculum caritatis and causa in fieri)

i do thank God for dictionary.com (where all these references are sourced)

we're now up to page 187 of Hart's the Beauty of the Infinite, through but a fraction of his breathtaking, brain-exploding section on the trinity.

He summarises point 2. as

"The Christian understanding of difference and distance is shaped by the doctrine of the Trinity, where theology finds that the true form of difference is peace, of distance beauty" (p187)

i most enjoyed this section, where difference is shown to be peace and not threat, and distance is indeed beautiful. a hard read, but well worth it.