In defence of the proximate.

Themes: Art and Imagination, Beauty, Hope, Philosophy, The Future, The Trinity

Defence of the Defence (2 sentences)

1. Not the ‘approximate’, although it is worthy in its way. It is an attribute of God to be proximate to all and thus (a)proximate to human understanding. There are pleasant idle hours to spend in contemplation of the alpha privative. (Particularly one as odd as the ‘a’ in approximate). I nod in friendly estimation toward the Negative Theologian. But the via negativa is hardly a road, more of a fence to keep you on the road. We must journey further on the Way who proceeds.

2. And I challenge anyone to question my commitment to the ‘farther off’. Many of the finest things are farther off, don’t you think? Mountain ranges are an obvious case. In fact a double case: fine to behold from afar, and when you’re perched on the crest, making far-off things fine.
I long for the Delectable Mountains, to be shepherded in Immanuel’s Land; for the glimpse from Mt Clear of the gates of the Celestial City. I am tortured with the thought that perhaps they will always be farther off.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?

Psalm 121:1

This, of course, is the dangerous ambivalence of the ‘farther off’. It can be constantly removing itself to the horizon. Perhaps because something in the human heart was created for visions, for anticipation and expectation, the ‘farther off’ is the most powerful of the modern techniques of power. Some things that appear farther off are not really there at all, no matter how fast you run. No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no line. The desire for the ‘farther off’ when undisciplined, when cultivated without wisdom or direction, flowers into an infinite dissatisfaction whose-not-entirely-approximate name is Hell.

The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages a double aesthetic: on the one hand, a disciplined appreciation that somethings are fine simply because they are distant; and therefore one must keep one’s proper distance to love them truly. On the other, acknowledging that there is a ‘farther off’ which beckons us come closer: its name is ‘promise’. The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages in this aesthetic discipline: cultivating joy, wonder, reverence, sublimity at the contemplation of the essentially ‘father off’; and yearning to come closer to the promised. (the cultivation of this discernment in human affairs is one of the true uses of philosophy, even of the post-modern hermeneutic of suspicion). This double aesthetic is the heart of Christian worship: it is its dynamism and transcendence; it is what makes it interesting for all eternity. It is the double aesthetic of the resurrection: the place where the true lover of the ‘farther off’ learns to cultivate discernment, to learn what it is that beckons us closer, and what demands that we remain distant. It is the double aesthetic of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is the character of God.

3. I rest my defence of the defence.

 

In defence of the proximate:

The proximate is neither approximate, nor farther off, nor promise.
It is what we must be in order to love them truly.

You and me and the friend
who draws near in faith.

“And they said one to another,
Did not our heart burn within us,
while he talked with us by the way.” (Luke 24:32 KJV)

I rest my defence.

(for Emma on her 30th Birthday)

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The Dancers

Themes: Moore College, The Trinity

The Anglican Church in Springwood last night hosted a Middle East Feast for women of the Church and any friends they might care to invite. Obviously, I didn’t get to go, so this is a second hand report, but everyone I’ve heard says the evening was fantastic. There were well over 150 people at the event with half of those not regular attendees at Springwood Church.
One of the ladies at the Church is from a Middle-Eastern background and teaches folk belly-dancing as a hobby. She (with her pixies) cooked the entire meal, and then came and taught the women some belly-dancing moves. At the end of the night, 150 women were gyrating around the middle of the room like something from Arabian Nights.

Some of the blokes from the team had arranged to come back to the Church building to help the ladies pack up and they arrived early enough to catch the end of the dancing. The sudden presence of men at what had previously been an entirely female event apparently created little ripples of disturbance. The guys reported hearing the women whispering, ‘men’ when they were noticed.
It’s interesting isn’t it?
It’s entirely understandable as well, dancing makes you feel strangely vulnerable. I used to have these weird late-night dance parties with my housemates and we certainly wouldn’t have felt quite so free to try out our wicked stylings if there had been women around. (did I just overshare?)

The awkwardness which suddenly came over some of those women last night is a reminder that we are beings who find our identity in relationships. We mark out physical and temporal regions, we are bodies, we find ourselves in what surrounds. That’s why femininity is experienced differently by a room entirely full of women and by a room not-quite-entirely full of women. Often we only notice this when there is a sudden transition.
Christians understand that this conception of human identity is rooted in something true about the God who made us. The God we worship is One and Three. Completely whole and sufficient in himself, but also within himself perpetually in fellowship and love. Christian theologians in the early period of the Church conceived of this One and Threeness using the focal image of a group of dancers. The Cappadocian Fathers (Basil, Gregory, and Gregory) sought to give an account of how God could be ‘One God’ and yet equally, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. Cappadocia is a remote part of central Turkey, if you wander into enough Turkish Kebab shops you’ll eventually find a poster depicting Cappadocia on a wall somewhere. It’s famous for odd-looking rock formations and salt pans, and Christian theologians. I think the Turkish tourism agency must have been targeting Kebab shops in Australia at some stage.

The Cappadocian Fathers obviously didn’t mind a little Middle Eastern Feasting, and could probably jiggle it with the best. They noticed that as a dancer moves around a circle, following the patterns of the dance and the rhythms of the music, she continually pours herself into the space just vacated by another dancer. The dancers are continually giving and receiving each other into their positions, and her identity as a dancer is found through the relations, the dance, which she shares with all the others. It is not a fixed identity, it is movement and action. But neither is it random, a dance celebrates the individuality of each dancer through co-ordinated and ordered movement, through a particular form of being with others. This is our God, they are infinitely more than that, but he is One and Three, giving and loving forever.
We also are ‘ones’ and ‘many’ and we find ourselves in giving and loving.
We are a room full of women dancing.
And God is a dancer.

Read the rest of my Mission Diary

image by agsaran

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Colwell’s Rule

Themes: On Knowing God, The Trinity

So we’re into the second week back at College, and my eyes are already nearly worn out from reading.
I’m continuing on with Hebrew and Greek, but now our Old Testament and New Testament classes are conducted as studies of the text in the original languages.
For Greek, that currently means reading and studying through the Gospel of John. Our year is divided into 3 classes, I’m studying under David Peterson, who has just come back to Moore from being the Principal of the Oak Hill College in England.

Here is a [ridiculously long] quote from our lecture notes today. Don’t expect it to make sense – it does, just not in normal Ingerlish.
The context is John 1:1

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.

καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ought to be translated ‘the word was God’ (not ‘a god’ or ‘divine’). One noun is the subject and one is a predicate nominative.
[Our Greek Grammar] Wallace, 42, says the subject is the known entity and is distinguished in three ways: it can be a pronoun, have an article, or be a proper name. Here the subject has the article. ‘Colwell’s Rule’, has often been applied to John 1.1 to demonstrate that the verse is teaching the divinity of Jesus. Wallace, 256-70, argues that Colwell’s rule has been misunderstood and therefore misapplied. Colwell’s rule states that ‘definite predicate nouns that precede the verb usually lack the article’ While this means that predicate nouns without an article that appear before the verb might be definite, Wallace says that this rule was understood to say that they will definitely be definite. Wallace goes on to suggest that a general rule about pre-verbal anarthrous (no article) nouns is that they are normally qualitative, sometimes definite and only rarely indefinite. Qualitative means the noun refers to the quality or ‘kind’ of thing that is being referred to. What are the implications for John 1.1? The translation could be ‘a god’ (indefinite); the God/God (definite); or divine (qualitative). He points out that if it is indefinite then it would be the only example in the Fourth Gospel. Moreover, contextually, the fact that the Word existed in the beginning makes the translation ‘a god’ unlikely. Wallace suggest that a definite understanding means that the Word = God, which is a form of Sabellianism. He suggests that a qualitative meaning is best (‘divine’), a translation that preserves the thought that the essence of the Word and God is identical (‘Jesus shared the essence of the Father, though they differed in person’, Wallace, 269). However, the translation ‘the Word was divine’ might be misleading in English because we can apply the adjective to angels. NEB ‘what God was, the word was’ captures the thought well: the Word had all the attributes and qualities that God had.
(David Peterson, Lecture Notes)

This is very cool. Particulourously, as I had a good long chat with a Jehovah’s Witness in a Cafe on Friday. It was a very civil conversation about all sorts of things, but about 40mins into it she could resist dropping this:
[JW]“You know we don’t believe in the Trinity”
[DA]“I had heard that, actually…”
[JW]“Oh”
[DA]“I think you’re wrong on that”
[JW]“…”
[DA]“…”
[JW]“…”

Well, I wasn’t going to break out Colwell’s rule on her was I? It turns out I’d have been wrong anyway.
Still, it is an absolute tragedy not to believe in the Trinity.

These are the opening words of Robert Jenson’s, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel.

It need not be argued that the Western church now little uses or understands Christianity’s heritage of trinitarian reflection and language. So long as Christianity was the established religion of the West, the Western church could just barely survive this debility. The doctrine of the Trinity comprises, as we shall see, the Christian faith’s repertoire of ways of identifying its God, to say which of the many candidates for godhead we mean when we say, for example, “God is loving” or “Dear God, please….” So long as we could suppose it obvious which putative god would truly be God if there were any, Western Christians could shut their eyes to the disuse of these means. We no longer have that luxury.

Know your God.
Get educated about the Trinity.

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