Is something rotten in the state of theology?

Themes: 4th Yr Project

I’m currently doing some thinking about decline in the importance of theology within the our churches. I reckon that the fact that people happily go ‘church shopping’ across a range of denominational ‘brands’, is a sign that the theological differences between churches are regarded as only relatively important and might be outweighed by other considerations (how close to the beach, for example).

Contrast the contemporary situation, where people have very little theological passion with that of 4th century Constantinople as described by Gregory of Nyssa:

“The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask “Is my bath ready?” the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing.” Gregory of Nyssa, On the Deity of the Son [De Deitate] 121.7-12, quoted in Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, The Orthodox Church, (London: Penguin Books), 1993, 12.

Clearly the doctrine of the divinity and eternal generation of the Son deeply divided the city and the theological debate had filtered into popular discourse.

A more recent example, slightly closer to home, is the oath administered to Lachlan Macquarie by Judge-Advocate Ellis Bent on Macquarie’s appointment to the Governorship of New South Wales. Rather bizarrely to modern sensibilities, Macquarie was required to swear that he did not subscribe to the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation. The oath was required of all Crown appointments under the settlement reached during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and was only abolished by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Throughout this period, and well into the 20th century, most members of British society would have an opinion regarding the doctrine of transubstantiation (with highly varying degrees of sophistication) and the doctrine functioned as a clear demarcation of identity.

Ronald Knox, the brilliant Roman Catholic apologist of the first half of the 20th century offered his own particular account of the decline of doctrine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his interest in highlighting Catholic successes in the face of what he perceived as a steady Anglican demise, Knox highlights the loss of dogmatic authority as a factor in the popular perception of theology. He writes:

“It is the common assumption of all these modem prophets, whatever their school, that religious truth is something not yet determined, something which is being gradually established by a slow process of testing and research. They boast of their indecisions; they parade their dissensions; it shows (they say) a healthy spirit of fearless inquiry, this freedom from the incubus of tradition. Such sentiments evoke, I believe, no echo of applause outside their own immediate circles. The uneasy impression is left on the average citizen that “the parsons do not know their own business”; that disagreements between sect and sect are more, not less disedifying when either side hastens to explain that the disagreement is over externals, rather than essentials; that if Christianity is still in process of formulation after twenty centuries, it must be an uncommonly elusive affair.” (Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927)

Knox draws upon the unstated understanding that theology has a role to play in guarding and guiding the core beliefs and identity of the Church. If modern academic theology is incapable of fulfilling this function and instead offers to ‘raise questions’ and engage in ‘dialogue’, then the church will suffer and theology will wither.

What d’you reckon?

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The Purpose Driven Space

Themes: 4th Yr Project, Philosophy

The spatiality of created beings is not an accident. Much of the attention given to the explaining spatiality in our philosophical tradition has focussed on the necessity of space. Space is ‘necessary’ in the sense I was talking about last post: we find it impossible to think of objects in the world without thinking or relying upon a concept of spatiality at the same time.
Philosophical reasoning first entered on this path by trying to tease out the relationship between being, and non-being, and multiple ‘beings’. This might appear to be a hopelessly abstract question, but for the ancient Greeks it was intimately bound up with the fundamentals of life. I’d like to come back and tell the story in more detail sometime. Let me just give you the conclusion: for the Greek philosophical tradition (which is still deeply influential) spatiality was necessary as a logical feature of what it means for the cosmos to be rather than not be. For a very important reason, however, this answer was completely unacceptable to Christians.

If spatiality is a logical deduction from the concept of being, then it is a property shared equally by all beings, whether God or the cosmos. Greeks had no problem with this, their concept of God as ‘Perfect Being’, meant that the being of God was both the foundation and totality of all other beings: in a sense, God was co-extensive with the cosmos, and embraced the cosmos as part of his own being. For the Greeks, God was perfectly spatial.

The Christian God would have no truck with this. We approach our God, not from the understanding that he is Supreme Being, but as the Author of Being – The Creator. God is not the foundation or pinnacle of a chain of being that leads from greatest to least. God is not part of the chain. Of course, we believe that God is, and therefore is a Being, but his Being and our being cannot be related by forms of logical deduction or degrees of quality/quantity. This leads Christians claim two things about God that Greek philosophy has a real problem with: he is transcendent, and he is infinite. At their root, these are claims that features of created being do not apply unproblematically to God, we speak of him analogically.

This means that, in an intellectual world shaped by knowledge of the Christian God, we cannot rest the necessity of space on a necessity of being qua being. The non-negotiable nature of spatiality for our explanations of experience must rest upon features of created being, the created order. Space is necessary in that it is a fixed property of the created order spoken into existence by God. But Christians do not believe that this universal order is itself a fixed, logical, eternal property of being. Rather, in its fundamental aspect as created, it is radically contingent (i.e., it could have been otherwise or not at all). God created spatiality in freedom, just as he freely called all the other aspects of created being into existence.

Contingency opens up the question of meaning. Necessary Beings are fundamentally uninteresting from the perspective of meaning because they are impervious to the question ‘why?’ When you ask a necessary Being, ‘why?’, it just stares back at you, ’til you either blink and go away or your head explodes. But if spatiality is a created necessity, resting upon an act of freedom, then we can legitimately investigate the possibility that God created spatiality with a purpose: that in its fundamental enactment as a law of created being, space carries an intention. So here’s a thesis: Space is meaningful all the way down, it shares in the basic rationality of all creation as a work of the Spirit. Space communicates just by being the being it is. It endlessly echoes with the words that called it out of nothing. Because:

all things have been created through Him and for Him. (Colossians 1:16 HCSB)

This is a tangent, but isn’t it interesting that it is precisely this excess of signal, the sheer overwhelming amount of communication that occurs in, through, by space that makes it necessary for our brains to have sophisticated filters which constantly screen away irrelevant communication and allow us to focus on matters of interest. It’s one of my favourite non-conscious features of my brain (It’s nice to just sit back and enjoy your brain occasionally). I’m enjoying it right now while I write this in the busy atmosphere of a cafe. However, in a world whose order is distorted by the wrenching entropy of sin, our feverish minds not only filter out the particular communications occurring in space around us, we harden ourselves against the meaning of space itself.

He demonstrated |this power| in the Messiah by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand in the heavens— far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and every title given, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And He put everything under His feet and appointed Him as head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of the One who fills all things in every way. (Ephesians 1:20–23 HCSB)

image by kevindooley

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What makes you tiptoe?

Themes: 4th Yr Project

What makes you tiptoe? I don’t mean when you want to spring unpleasant surprises on the unwary, none of my readers would be involved in that sort of thing. No, I mean, what makes you tiptoe involuntarily, like when you are exploring an old church and wander into the chancel (the bit behind the rail down the front, the bit where God lives)?

I have a bit of a thing for wandering around old country graveyards, the kind of place that consists of a tiny stone church, a name on a map, a clutch of elm trees, and nothing else but rolling hills. The Australian countryside is washed with such places, witness to the failed dream of a genuine Australian engagement with living in our place, high-water marks of the human tide that has now retreated to our coastal cities. In such places, it can seem as though everyone who ever lived there was buried there as well. I’m attracted to the stillness and solemnity, they have both a rootedness and a wistfulness that reinforces my sense of being a traveller. All this paragraph is a bit of a digression…

One of the more uncomfortable problems of old graveyards is the fact that often age has removed the clear boundaries between grave plots. Sometimes you don’t realise until too late that you’ve just trampled upon someone’s dear departed. When I do realise, I actually get a sensation in my feet, a podiatrical blush, and I quickly tiptoe to the safe piece of grass that runs between the headstones. Weird, isn’t it? In a small country graveyard, where even the living have passed on, and the dead are probably grateful for the attention, I’m conscious that I must not place my feet in an invisible 6×2 rectangle in an otherwise indistinguishable paddock.

Here’s a step toward a thesis: my moment of recognition in the graveyard should be taken seriously in constructing a theory of space.

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The Space Between

Themes: 4th Yr Project

This year I’m planning to write 15,000 words (give or take) on the topic of Space. Well, that’s what I think it’s going to be about… hmmm, the final frontier.
Although I am genuinely fascinated by extra-terrestrial exploration (I have a deeply cherished ambition to be appointed as a chaplain to the first lunar colony), this project isn’t about that kind of space. Nor is it about alien life, whether heaven is in the nth dimension, or where Jesus’ body is right now (although I do have ideas about all these questions).
It’s about the space between you and me.

What is it? why is it? why should I care?
For most people, the third question is the hardest to answer. I get it. Life doesn’t need to be pulled apart and examined in order to be lived well, with joy and thankfulness. The Kingdom of heaven belongs to children, not philosophers. To those who have ears to hear, not those who have penetrating sight and highly developed critical faculties.
Perhaps all you need to know is this:
“For He is our peace, who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility.” (Ephesians 2:14 HCSB)
Whatever else we might discover about the space between us, we are confident of this: Jesus has transformed it.

Strange as it may seem, the healing work of God’s Spirit, renovating our humanity into the image of Christ, does not remove our individual differences but redeems them. And for a redeemed philosopher, this means being cured of his pride, the aspiration to be a philosopher-king, and being restored to his true vocation: to be a curator of that part of God’s garden in which ideas grow; to care for thoughts.

The space between you and me is a thought that needs care. The nature of that space is changing. I don’t know where you are reading this, but my (somewhat) unguarded thoughts are available to you whether you are in a prison or in the next room, around the corner or on the other side of the globe, sympathetic or hostile. We have a form of proximity that was completely unavailable to the vast majority of humans 20 years ago. How are we to think about and act within the new possibilities that this form of proximity enables? What sort of human communities will grow up in response to this transformation of space?

These sorts of questions have been with us for a long time. In the 1950′s, when the middle class moved out of the cities into suburbia, enabled by new roads, cars, cheap fossil fuels, this transformation of spatial relations generated a new form of community: the suburb; the ‘next-door’ neighbour; work colleagues who were not also members of the same home neighbourhood. New kinds of barriers and new kinds of proximity.

What does it mean to belong to a ‘Kingdom’, to have a share in a space that transects all these others? Is our thinking about what it means to belong to this Kingdom affected at all by these other transformations in our thinking about social space? More importantly, is there a basic line of thought, generated by the dawning of this kingdom, which teaches us how to think about our spaces and places? That gives us something to say about barriers, barbed wire, clasped hands, the world wide web, crossing over, and shared passage?

Image from National Library of Scotland

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