postmodernbible

Once upon a time there was a preacher, an author and a bible scholar…

Thanks Yaz and Lou for making the presence of God more apparent in Curious Thing...interesting it was you two who responded...

There isn’t much humour here…time for some reflection on the reality of truth and see whether anyone wants to take it up in conversation. First of all, the preacher: at church this morning (I was tired and irritable), Jonathan said in his sermon that it only takes a little but of truth for something to seem plausible. The crazies we can cope with. But those things which seem to contain truth, which seem to be rational, which have the right backing from the right sources, these things are more easily accepted to be true. The statement came in a bit about Peter’s declaration – he didn’t know the full truth and so ended up objecting to Jesus and being rebuked. He only had a bit of the truth. It seemed to be OK…but in fact it wasn’t.

Then the author: Dan Brown’s popularist Grail Quest (the Da Vinci Code) has a little bit of the truth. OK so there are lots of conspiracy theories out there. But there are also plenty of rational explanations. There is no need to tie up the Templars with the Rosicrucians with the Masons, with Da Vinci, Newton and Victor Hugo, (and with Swiss Banking???) and those who believe that behind it all is a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and about their offspring. And why, o why, o why did it have to be an American scholar who saves the day while the nasty eccentric Brit is the bad guy all along? (Oops, sorry if you haven’t read it yet!) A bit of the truth and it seems so tantalizingly acceptable. Isn’t it rationale that that horrible pyramid outside the Louvre is another attempt by the illuminati to publicise their idolatrous spirituality?

And the Bible scholar? Raf sent me a paper to read in which he makes a reference to batman at Buckingham Palace. Raf wants this, in the essay, to be a real reference to a real event – the Fathers 4 Justice protest the other week. But I said that even this real reference to a real event could only be interpreted. I mean, Batman wasn’t there. There was a man dressed up as batman. The pictures showed that he was protesting on the balcony outside the palace. But was Batman at Buckingham Palace? What is the truth? What is reality. How do you actually work out what is part of your own meaning circle, your own hermeneutic and what is actually part of reality.

Of course, everything is reality. My perception of reality is real. And as the Manics said – tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine. But all of our realities cannot be consonant with one another. Someone has to be wrong. We cannot simply accept that everyone’s reality is as real (true?) as everyone else’s. Dan Brown’s grasp of reality is either completely flawed or mine is. And in this contested zone of truth, who wins out in the end?

I think what I want to say is that our conflicted personalities are never wholly real until they become one with Truth – Christ. Now, that sounds kind of Buddhist. But what I mean is that since Jesus is the truth, our pilgrimage towards Jesus is a pilgrimage towards truth. In the words of the hymn – less of me, more of Jesus…less of unreality, more of Jesus. Our relationship with Jesus, our focus on him, our exploration of the Jesus tradition through bible studies, research, and our witness to the tradition of the last two thousand years (and behind that the whole Jewish witness to Yahweh’s grace), our retelling of the story of God’s gracious dealing with humanity. All of that is a pilgrimage towards Truth. Until then, we see only through a glass darkly, on then will we see face to face.

Pete

grenz on community

Allelon Ministries have a great article they have put up by Stanley Grenz on various aspects of the Church and community...I particularly enjoyed this literary/postmodern slant - very reminiscent of Brueggeman and Haurwas...

How do relationships within the community of God differ in reality from relationships within any other shared interest group? Are we fooling ourselves if we think we are in any way different from the numerous tribes‚ that seem to be all around us in our pluralist society?

SG: I would suggest that we can best see the difference, when we introduce several key insights into the nature of communities offered by contemporary communitarian thinkers, coupled with aspects of the narrative understanding of identity formation. In the quest to make sense of our personal lives and the world around us, we are dependent on narratives that provide the “plot” by means of which we tell the story of our lives. The overarching narrative is mediated to the individual person by the community that embodies it. To be a Christian means to tell one's personal story and hence to find one's identity in accordance with a particular narrative, the story that is passed from generation to generation through the Christian community, but which is ultimately found in the Bible, the book of this community. And this story, of course, centers on the narrative of Jesus. This description suggests that we are both similar to and decisively different from the tribes that inhabit the post-modern world. We are similar in that each group, including the Christian church, functions as a community to its adherents. We are different, however, in that we find ourselves we make sense out of our lives and our world by means of our participation in the life of Jesus Christ, who is Immanuel, God with us, and the Word made flesh.

The whole article lacks a bit of a postmodern, emergent twang, but Stanley has some important things to say about the focus of emergent church as past present and future. Community memory is also in there...an absolutely crucial aspect of any postmodern ecclesiology.

Try it and see what you think...a bit longer than some of the Allelon articles!

Pete

Da Vinci Thing!

Call me a reactionary, authoritarian, conservative evangelical ostrich if you like (what a daft picture that conjures up - all feathery and black and white and completely un-fundamentalist!), but I am reading through the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. My first reaction was that it was a dumbed down Foucault's Pendulum. Now I am two thirds of the way through the book I realise what an insult that is to Eco's masterpiece. I mean, doesn't it annoy you when you can second guess the plot chapters inb advance. Brown does not go in for Dostoyevskian descriptions (thank God!) so when you get a bit more detail than you expect you are immediately made aware that that detail is going to feature in the novel some time up ahead. Look at the random mention of lorries queuing at lights below the toilet window...low and behold a couple of chapters later, they throw the GPS tracking device (or is it Langdon...ooohhh narrative suspense!) out onto a lorry! Oh, what a shock.

And as for the historiographical side. I was bemused by the frontispiece which lists two facts (honest!) - one about the completion of Opus Dei's New York HQ and the other about the existence of a secret society called the Priory of Sion. I am not sure why both of these are listed as fact. Is it a bit of narratorial deciet - they aren't facts? Is it an attempt by the implied author to hint at some accuracy behind the book? Is it just meant to wind up suspicious gits like me?

If it is to suggest that the book is well researched and has some credibility, then the chapters where Brown explores the development of Christology up to Nicaea has a little bit more re-writing to be done. I have never read such drivel in all my life. If one of my students handed that in as a level 1 assignment it would get a straight fail. I don't mind people suggesting Mary was married to Jesus. I don't mind the whole Schussler-Fiorenza female prophets idea, but what Brown expounds is a travesty...and to suggest that the Dead Sea Scrolls are Christian (even Gnostic Christian) texts is an insult of immense proportions to Second Temple Judaism. And if he thinks Jesus was venerated as a mortal prophet up to Constantine and only then turned into a divine figure...hasn't this guy read any theology - not even Unity and Diversity, not even Christology in the Making, how about Larry Hurtado's One Lord? I agree that a lot of what Langdon argues is actually up for grabs - but he so belittles the argument, trivialises the argument as to make it stupid. It actually cements the Catholic Church's reading as the most rational and undermines the academic credibility of hermetic/gnostic faiths. Eco would not have done that...Foucault's Pendulum does not do that.

I'm sorry for the rant. It really has got under my skin because I was told it was great...oh well. Perhaps the last third will help!

Pete

Book Comments #1

I promised some book reviews of what I read while away.

First of all a book I read sometime ago but which other family members read in France – The Curious Incident book. Read it yet?

It’s a good read...definetely on a par with Life of Pi but that was so annoying...

So far three of our family have read it – me and Theresa and our son Sam who is 9. Sam thought it was very strange and couldn’t get his head round it. When he did get it, he loved it and finished it in no time. Theresa and I enjoyed it…but I am not sure it is something I will go back to – nor seek out the author’s other works - I mean he is a children's author after all!

For me, it still bears some hallmarks of voyeurism. I wonder whether the guy’s strangeness is a bit too Freakshow-like – does the book ridicule him for not wanting to eat yellow and brown food or food that touches other food? Does it sneer at him for groaning or for asking too many questions. Are you supposed to pity him at the end, or be sick of him (like his mum?), or what? Clearly, disability means pressures both for the individual and carers. But I still feel a bit uneasy at whether I actually met the real person here…

Where is God in it? Of course, the hero (see, I can’t even remember his name!) thinks that heaven cannot exist and so nor can God. His special issues mean that he cannot be convinced of the existence of something that is rationally unsound – in his construction of rationality. I actually found the book to be quite a godless place. As I think back about it there was no sense of God’s presence, of beauty, of love. Everything seems so harsh and edgy – it’s like a modernist/cubist building. Part of that is the world which the author is trying to project – someone with this worldview is angular and harsh and black and white.

But does it have to be so? Think of some of Doug Coupland’s books – like Microserfs
or Girlfriend in a Coma – dealing with issues which are miles away from theology but still there is such an overwhelming presence of God.

If you haven’t read Girlfriend in a Coma you must – but not alone!!!

More to come…including the Da Vinci Code which I am trudging my way through....first impressions - a dumbed down Foucault's Pendulum?

Pete

AKMA's Angels

Hi,

I haven't been doing much blogging because ever since I got back from France I have been awash with admin and everything else to do with the arrival of the new students. However, today I just had to respond to a blog I read on AKMA's page about Angels...here is my response...

AKMA said:
(This is partly why angels don’t, can’t have a sense of humor; the perfection of their existence in truth makes “incongruity” an empty category for them.)
Umm...what is truth? I take it humour then comes from the sense of lack, a break in the perfection of reason, a rupture in order which the comic can tease into laughter. But there is too much modernisation of angels here. Are angels a recreation of the modernist ideal or are they antediluvian monstra, the bene adonai? And if they are the sons of God (i.e. in character, in form, in source) does this mean that God too cannot have a sense of humour because he is divine - the perfection of His existence makes incongruity an empty category.

But God does have a sense of humour (witness the Bible in both Testaments, Jesus', John 9 and American politics), and our sense of humour could be seen as a sign of our Godlikeness. So, if anges are bene adonai, then they too must have a sense of humour. What does it mean not to have a sense of humour. Have you seen the film Equilibrium (over here on satellite TV at the moment) where the future Tetragrammaton government makes people take emotion suppressent medication - it removes all feeling from humanity in order to eradicate war and violence. It don't work. It is godless - the Tetragrammaton (!) destroys humanity and humanity rises up to destroy the Tetragrammaton instead. Interestng post-liberal death of God stuff in the background..but I wonder whether this says something else about humourless angels. God forbid!

Talking of Sky - I watched the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood the other day while doing the ironing. Personally I found it a bit insulting. For people who have gone through hell in childhood because of their parents disorders (don't we all to some extent? My poor kids!), it's just not good enough to say "look at it from their perspective - they couldn't help it". It wasn't her mother's fault that she belted them until they bled - she was under a lot pressure - would you do any better? No, of course we wouldn't. But this simply heaps the guilt upon the child - it was my fault she was under pressure - rather than be the perpetrator the mother becomes the victim while the real victim, the child, becomes the perpetrator. By the end of the film mother and daughter are united again and the daughter joins her in the Priestesshood - she too has become complicit in the act of brutality, she has realised that she is little different from her mother, does this mean that she absolves her mother's brutality or is she preparing for her own role in brutalising a child? What a load of rubbish. Child brutality is always awful and can never ever ever be explained away. It is not justified by any pressure or stress which a parent is going through. It is never justified by anything. It happens and I do not deny that. I don't want to demonise parents who fall into the trap of (verbally) letting rip at their kids...I am as guilty as anybody...perhaps more so...but nor do I want to brutalise kids by giving the apologetic that it is stress that does it. I do it. It's something I have to deal with.

Theologically it is all part of the fallenness of our world but do I then want to blame God for letting us fall, or Eve for eating the apple, or Adam for being such a prat or what? Nope. I want to deal with it myself. I want to be filled with the Holy spirit and with his fruit - that is the only way I can be a better parent, the only way I can deal with my past - my own childhood experiences, to bring myself to God and find wholeness in him...and where better.

Pete

Back at last!

Back from France

We had a great time in France! We spent three weeks at the new Spring Harvest Holidays campsite near St Gilles Croix de Vie. We had booked in to go on holiday there and then suddenly they asked me to do some speaking for the first week. It was great fun – some devotional stuff early on, followed by a bible study on Galatians each day and then an evening celebration at which I just had some great fun with everyone. I really enjoyed this time of teaching. I love seeing people enthused to read the New Testament and the Galatians studies were just awesome...

{It seems quite funny writing about Spring Harvest stuff, and being a Methodist minister going to a Connections based house church kind of thing, but an evangelical none the less, but writing and exploring the New Testament with a postmodern dimension, but exploring emerging church and Christianity in culture and the spirituality of that culture and yet also pushing forward into a research career in NT studies! What a jumble of oxymora (?) my life is becoming - oxymora or paradoxes or plurality or multitasking or what?}

We then stayed on at the site for our proper holiday – two weeks of mixed weather, lovely France, good food, good company and lots of reading time. I read three books (only!) – and I will post a brief review of each over the coming days – Richard Bauckham’s Bible and Mission, Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality and Anna de Pretis’ Epistolarity in the First Book of Horace’s Episltes (Maggie Dawn’s fault!!!).

Some of the highlights:

Cycling on the Ile d’Yeu – the Vieux Chateau is amazing
The Cafe de la Terrasse in St Gilles – so funny
Apremont...rain, rock, chateau, tower, family
The cheap inflatable boat we bought at Hyper U and played with on the beach – it died and was risen!!! On the last day, we ended up ‘burying’ it (throwing it away!) before returning – used, worn out, punctured, but so much loved and cherished!
Noirmoutier...on both visits
Laughing with a tent of mad holidaymakers enjoying the stupidity of the gospel
Swimming at Plage des Granges
Listening to a vicar tell me how watching me use an inflatable boat to retell John 5 had rekindled his passion for ministry (actually, how did you do that, God?)
Sitting by the pool reading under an umbrella during a rainstorm while the kids were still swimming...reading, reading, reading
Hilary...God does love you, I’m glad you felt the truth of that that evening when you put your hands into the bowl of water
Praying with My Spoon...good friends, good fellowship
The truly awful smells in the tannery in Commequiers
Watching the French play Petanque anywhere and everywhere
Velo Rail – the squirrel, pheasants and lizards (everywhere!)
The lizards on the pile of stones at Commequiers Chateau
Passage du Gois...l’Herbaudiere...The windows of Nantes Cathedral ablaze for God
The chat me and Em had on the beach...her anger and tears, her gracious reaction to my request for family time rather than time with new friends...her laughter as we picnicked together and played tennis and swam and her adult choice to be that way.
The little brown beetle things that kept appearing all over the place!
The statue of the saint in Martinet with his finger stuck in the air – showing the finger? showing a bogey the boys said? So funny...
Vitre Chateau stumbled across on the way back

In week 2 and 3 of the holiday there were other speakers on site and a few of SH leadership who I/we kind of know...some who I know, I thought, quite well. But I/we weren’t part of it...distance...separation...and I probably need to blog sometime about my reaction to groups which I am not part of...my feelings of exclusion and insecurity just flow the top at times like that. I tried to be one of the guests...well, I was...and went to the studies and worship and sat uncomfortable in the difference and tried really hard to listen and receive. Not part of it...why not God? Why aren’t I with them? Holy like them? Why not in that group, any group, who am I?

One day, God spoke really clear through what the speaker said – not even sure of the context now...sow to the seed that God has given you. Don’t crave someone else’s seed. Don’t crave someone else’s ministry. Cherish the ministry God has given you. I am me. God has called me. He has a role for me to fulfil that is not them, but me. Get on with your own stuff Pete, seek the kingdom and then these other things will be added. It was a great lesson to begin to learn. Although, I can still feel the sense of wanting too much to be part of the team and not content to be left on the sidelines...that’s just part of who I am.

Back to the fun of Cliff... So privileged to be here. Just been on two days of retreat where God spoke to us so clearly. A College, a faith, a community in which to make sense of what it means to be human today. A community in which God can teach me to be me.

Il n’y a personne comme Jesus!

Pete