Today's Times has an obituary of Henry Chadwick - 'Formidably erudite historian of early Christianity who served Oxford and Cambridge colleges with humane distinction', who died this Tuesday, 17th June, aged 87. Every word of the title is correct. He was avuncular, benign, warm, instructive, and though he (!) 'erroneously believed himself incapable of preaching an intelligible sermon to an ordinary congregation', he served generations of students with his Pelican history of The Early Church and a headful of knowledge. His translation of Augustine's Confessions is beautiful, all his scholarship was measured and wise, he was a fine musician and organist, and he maintained an generous orthodox Christian faith while the tides of radicalism raged around him.
See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2153316/The-Very-Rev-Professor-Henry-Chadwick.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/religion
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4166998.ece
(Incidentally, and in large parentheses, I think Henry might have been quite amused that his obituary was on the same page in The Daily Telegraph as, and preceded in The Times by, that of Cyd Charisse, she whose 'simply fabulous legs', the 'longest legs in film', which 'went on for ever', dominated MGM in the 1950s, and were reputed to have been insured for $10 (or $1) million, and photos of whom (or which) have not surprisingly been filling the obituary pages of the last two days...).
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2286137,00.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/cyd-charisse-dynamite-dancing-star-in-the-golden-era-of-hollywood-musicals-849945.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4163507.ece
Last week, the death was also announced of Kwame Bediako, a Presbyterian African theologian of great breadth of mind and surpassing scholarship with doctorates in French and English. A Ghanaian by birth, his first and major contribution was his (big) book Theology and Identity. The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and Modern Africa (1992), in which he painted a magisterial picture of the way in which early Christian thought 'overcame the world' in its engagement with and resistance to Hellenistic thought, so providing a model for Christianity's engagement with the African world-view. He did not hold the negative picture that so many do of a second-century 'Hellenisation of Christianity'. His scholarship and life has been a major inspiration to hosts of African theologians and Christians, let alone Europeans. I have not been able to find his d.o.b., but he was not old.
See http://zondervan.typepad.com/zondervan/2008/06/kwame-bediako.html
On 29 April, The Daily Telegraph and The Times announced the death of The Rt Revd Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the Anglican Bishop in Iran from 1961-1990, who had had to leave after the Revolution in 1979 and live in exile in England, where he became an Assistant Bishop in Winchester. 'Many considered that...he was one of the 20th century's saints...he seemed incapable of thinking evil of anyone.' 'He was entirely without guile.' At the time of the revolution he and his wife Margaret were shot at in their beds, and his son Bahram was murdered the following year. Bishop Hassan wrote a most moving 'A Father's Prayer upon the Murder of his Son'. He died at the age of 78.
See some beautiful obituaries:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1918728/The-Rt-Rev-Hassan-Dehqani-Tafti.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/21/anglicanism.iran
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3918778.ece
Philip S
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Eugene Peterson and Czeslaw Milosz
Eugene Peterson is well known in the Christian world as a prolific author, but more importantly as a sensitive, orthodox, socially-aware Evangelical Presbyterian American, now Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver. The Jesus Way. A Conversation in Following Jesus now completes his trilogy on Spiritual Theology , which began with Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. A Conversation in Spiritual Theology , followed by Eat This Book. The Art of Spiritual Reading. All are very accessible, readable and nourishing books.
More interesting is the fact that this final volume - The Jesus Way - contains studies on key Old Testament figures such as Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, (I & II) Isaiah. No false splits, then, between Old and New Testament here! Rather, a discerning of continuities. The final three chapters have the interesting titles of The Way(s) of Herod, Caiaphas and Josephus. Hm!
Most interesting of all, almost, is the final recommendation in his Appendix on Some Writers on Discerning the Way: Czeslaw Milosz, A Treatise on Poetry. A 1980 Nobel Prize winner, but hardly known in England (?), I need to read him. Peterson writes: 'The bottomless pit of evil in which he began and the subsequent exilic conditions of his maturity galvanized his art in discerning God's truth and beauty in the particularity of his life and times.' He concludes his recommendation with the lines that 'One clear stanza can take more weight/ Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose'.
Elsewhere, Seamus Heaney speaks of how Milosz has gone from 'emigre writer to world visionary'. He writes: 'Milosz's poetry, even in translation, fulfils the ancient expectation that poetry will delight as well as instruct. It has a magnificent balance...Milosz dwells in the middle, at times tragically, at times deliciously, for he will renege neither on his glimpses of heaven upon earth nor on his knowledge that the world is a vale of tears.'
An Amazon review of his The Captive Mind (Penguin Modern Classics) says: 'At the risk of overstatement, this is one the handful of books from the twentieth century that genuinely deserves the title "great". It is about the use of coercive power by clear minds in the cause of absurd lies...It serves...as an analysis of... the processes which force, cajole and woo thinking men and women to believe self-eivident lies...This book is a wonder." I need to read it. Recent reports on the terrorist tactics of Ms Harriet Harman in the abortion debate in Parliament indicate that lobbying and threats easily achieve what no rational or irrational argument can.
Eat These Books!
More interesting is the fact that this final volume - The Jesus Way - contains studies on key Old Testament figures such as Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, (I & II) Isaiah. No false splits, then, between Old and New Testament here! Rather, a discerning of continuities. The final three chapters have the interesting titles of The Way(s) of Herod, Caiaphas and Josephus. Hm!
Most interesting of all, almost, is the final recommendation in his Appendix on Some Writers on Discerning the Way: Czeslaw Milosz, A Treatise on Poetry. A 1980 Nobel Prize winner, but hardly known in England (?), I need to read him. Peterson writes: 'The bottomless pit of evil in which he began and the subsequent exilic conditions of his maturity galvanized his art in discerning God's truth and beauty in the particularity of his life and times.' He concludes his recommendation with the lines that 'One clear stanza can take more weight/ Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose'.
Elsewhere, Seamus Heaney speaks of how Milosz has gone from 'emigre writer to world visionary'. He writes: 'Milosz's poetry, even in translation, fulfils the ancient expectation that poetry will delight as well as instruct. It has a magnificent balance...Milosz dwells in the middle, at times tragically, at times deliciously, for he will renege neither on his glimpses of heaven upon earth nor on his knowledge that the world is a vale of tears.'
An Amazon review of his The Captive Mind (Penguin Modern Classics) says: 'At the risk of overstatement, this is one the handful of books from the twentieth century that genuinely deserves the title "great". It is about the use of coercive power by clear minds in the cause of absurd lies...It serves...as an analysis of... the processes which force, cajole and woo thinking men and women to believe self-eivident lies...This book is a wonder." I need to read it. Recent reports on the terrorist tactics of Ms Harriet Harman in the abortion debate in Parliament indicate that lobbying and threats easily achieve what no rational or irrational argument can.
Eat These Books!
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Mangrove swamps
In the wake of the Burmese cyclone, the BBC web-site has published a report with a sickeningly familiar tone
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7385315.stm).
The ASEAN (Association of South-East Nations) Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuwan, suggests that it was the destruction of the mangrove swamps of the vast Irrawaddy delta for the sake of sprawling coastal developments which enabled the cyclone to have such destructive power. This is desperately sad, but no surprise: it was exactly the widespread process in many areas of South-East Asia that enabled the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 to wreak such havoc, and which conversely reduced fatalities where mangrove swamps were still to be found in profusion.
Debbie and I saw these enormous mangrove swamps in southern Nigeria in the 1970s, and they occur all around the world. They are fascinating natural 'bio-guards' for coastal settlements, in that their complex intertwining root-systems have been shown to dissipate wave energy (see the BBC article). The article also reports that 3.6 million hectares of mangrove forest have disappeared since the 1980s. They seem(ed) to be useless and unproductive; now we know how important the 'useless' was, and how much 'use' they are. (But the local people always knew.)
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. It is clear that many such events are nothing to do with spectacular 'acts of God'; rather, the globalisation of the mad modernist myth of progress (and foreign holidays to countries ruled by dictators) has enabled people everywhere to treat creation as dispensable, to be re-ordered according to our own whims. Disaster follows. cf. floods in England: plant (build) on flood-plains, reap the floods.
What adds two further sour notes is that predictions were given but not broadcast in Burma (do. prior to the Boxing Day tsunami). Secondly, the Burmese government has acquired vast financial resources from mining over the past 20 years, which it has largely spent on building a new capital inland (far away from the sea), funding the army, genocidally destroying the Christian population in the East Karen and Kachin tribes; cf. Sudan)
(See http://dynamic.csw.org.uk/country.asp?s=id&urn=Burma; www.cswusa.com/countries/burma.htm),
and most recently committing atrocities against thousands of Burmese monks.
For further reading, see James Maudsley, The Heart Must Break (2002: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Must-Break-Burma-Democracy/dp/0099426943)
Benedict Rogers, A Land without Evil (2004: http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Land-Without-Evil/dp/082546059X)
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7385315.stm).
The ASEAN (Association of South-East Nations) Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuwan, suggests that it was the destruction of the mangrove swamps of the vast Irrawaddy delta for the sake of sprawling coastal developments which enabled the cyclone to have such destructive power. This is desperately sad, but no surprise: it was exactly the widespread process in many areas of South-East Asia that enabled the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 to wreak such havoc, and which conversely reduced fatalities where mangrove swamps were still to be found in profusion.
Debbie and I saw these enormous mangrove swamps in southern Nigeria in the 1970s, and they occur all around the world. They are fascinating natural 'bio-guards' for coastal settlements, in that their complex intertwining root-systems have been shown to dissipate wave energy (see the BBC article). The article also reports that 3.6 million hectares of mangrove forest have disappeared since the 1980s. They seem(ed) to be useless and unproductive; now we know how important the 'useless' was, and how much 'use' they are. (But the local people always knew.)
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. It is clear that many such events are nothing to do with spectacular 'acts of God'; rather, the globalisation of the mad modernist myth of progress (and foreign holidays to countries ruled by dictators) has enabled people everywhere to treat creation as dispensable, to be re-ordered according to our own whims. Disaster follows. cf. floods in England: plant (build) on flood-plains, reap the floods.
What adds two further sour notes is that predictions were given but not broadcast in Burma (do. prior to the Boxing Day tsunami). Secondly, the Burmese government has acquired vast financial resources from mining over the past 20 years, which it has largely spent on building a new capital inland (far away from the sea), funding the army, genocidally destroying the Christian population in the East Karen and Kachin tribes; cf. Sudan)
(See http://dynamic.csw.org.uk/country.asp?s=id&urn=Burma; www.cswusa.com/countries/burma.htm),
and most recently committing atrocities against thousands of Burmese monks.
For further reading, see James Maudsley, The Heart Must Break (2002: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Must-Break-Burma-Democracy/dp/0099426943)
Benedict Rogers, A Land without Evil (2004: http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Land-Without-Evil/dp/082546059X)
Friday, 25 April 2008
T F Torrance 1913-2007
I have sadly only just discovered from 'An Appreciation' by Peter Forster, the present Bishop of Chester, in the current issue of Anvil (Vol. 25 No. 1 2008) that Tom Torrance died on 2 December last year (2007). I am always sad when someone I have respected, enjoyed or known of dies without my knowing, and, as it were, being able to participate in their death.
I also always regret never having written - as I had often planned to do - to the Prime Minister's Office to urge that he be awarded a Knighthood, for Services to Theology.
He was for me a giant among theologians, someone who almost defined orthodoxy, with massive knowledge of the Patristic and Reformation periods, and with an equally clear sense of their resonances in the modern world. Combined with his conviction that theology was a science on a par with, and able to debate with, natural science, his grasp of the mutual benefits of classical theology and modern quantum physics made him a fascinating explorer of God and God's universe(s). Apart from referring readers to the Anvil article (above), I can note three reasons for regarding him so highly, and why (like Peter Forster) I am puzzled that he was not estimated more highly.
Having requested a copy of his Theological Science (1969) from some friends for my deacon-ing in 1970, I recall spending weeks, much later, in the summer of 1978 or 1979, struggling with this thought-defying tome, trying to understand it, and not knowing whether I had or had not properly comprehended his argument, but knowing that he had changed and expanded my mind for ever. Lines of thought can also ingrain themselves subconsciously on your mind, in any case. This was some of the most demanding and rewarding theology I have ever encountered.
But his two 'smaller' books - Space, Time and Incarnation (1969) and Space, Time and Resurrection (1976) - have remained more foundationally seminal. Besides wonderfully limpid phrases (!) such as 'a fatal deistic disjunction between God and the world', 'obsolete phenomenalist and positivistic assumptions', 'Q fundamentalism' and 'an obsolete Cartesian-Kantian dualism' in his introduction to SPR, Torrance stressed that only an undivided theological engagement with the biblical text will do it justice, for while theological questions yield theological answers, historical questions only yield historical answers (e.g. question of authorship, etc.). i.e. he absolutely countered the split between 'history' and 'theology' in modern study. The breadth and depth of his theological engagement with contemporary science was breath-taking, and the consequences of that thinking vital for all theological study.
As his theological debt to Barth, Polanyi and the Gregorys was great, and his scientific debt to Einstein, von Weizsaecker and Goedel equally so, nonetheless some of his most fruitful conversations were between ancient and modern Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and depleted forms of Western Christianity on the other. But all these streams flowed into, and out of, one mind of exceptional ability. He was a colossus: too orthodox and traditional in general for some Evangelicals, and too evangelical for others of a more liberal persuasion; but the strength of his writings very significantly contributed to the extraordinary rapprochement in theology between East and West which we sense going on all around us. His subsequent work on (e.g.) Divine and Contingent Order (1981) and The Trinitarian Faith (1988; sub-titled: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church') shows him engaging deeply in his chosen fields.
A couple of examples of typically precise wording conclude this small tribute, to indicate that he wrote no sloppy English:
'We must not think of the Incarnation as an intrusion of the Son of God into the determinations and conditions of space and time...Rather is the Incarnation (NB: in both cases, capital I) to be understood as the chosen path of God's rationality in which He interacts with the world and established such a relation betwen creaturely being and Himself that He will not allow it to slip away from Him into futility or nothingness, but upholds and confirms it as that which He has made and come to redeem' (STI, 67).
'[The resurrection] is the only historical event that does not suffer from decay and is not threatened by annihilation and illusion' (STR, 95).
I thank God for the memory of a life filled with, and witnessing to, the mind of Christ.
Article cited: Peter Forster, 'T. F. Torrance (1913-2007): An Appreciation', Anvil Volume 25 No 1 2008, pp. 21-31.
I also always regret never having written - as I had often planned to do - to the Prime Minister's Office to urge that he be awarded a Knighthood, for Services to Theology.
He was for me a giant among theologians, someone who almost defined orthodoxy, with massive knowledge of the Patristic and Reformation periods, and with an equally clear sense of their resonances in the modern world. Combined with his conviction that theology was a science on a par with, and able to debate with, natural science, his grasp of the mutual benefits of classical theology and modern quantum physics made him a fascinating explorer of God and God's universe(s). Apart from referring readers to the Anvil article (above), I can note three reasons for regarding him so highly, and why (like Peter Forster) I am puzzled that he was not estimated more highly.
Having requested a copy of his Theological Science (1969) from some friends for my deacon-ing in 1970, I recall spending weeks, much later, in the summer of 1978 or 1979, struggling with this thought-defying tome, trying to understand it, and not knowing whether I had or had not properly comprehended his argument, but knowing that he had changed and expanded my mind for ever. Lines of thought can also ingrain themselves subconsciously on your mind, in any case. This was some of the most demanding and rewarding theology I have ever encountered.
But his two 'smaller' books - Space, Time and Incarnation (1969) and Space, Time and Resurrection (1976) - have remained more foundationally seminal. Besides wonderfully limpid phrases (!) such as 'a fatal deistic disjunction between God and the world', 'obsolete phenomenalist and positivistic assumptions', 'Q fundamentalism' and 'an obsolete Cartesian-Kantian dualism' in his introduction to SPR, Torrance stressed that only an undivided theological engagement with the biblical text will do it justice, for while theological questions yield theological answers, historical questions only yield historical answers (e.g. question of authorship, etc.). i.e. he absolutely countered the split between 'history' and 'theology' in modern study. The breadth and depth of his theological engagement with contemporary science was breath-taking, and the consequences of that thinking vital for all theological study.
As his theological debt to Barth, Polanyi and the Gregorys was great, and his scientific debt to Einstein, von Weizsaecker and Goedel equally so, nonetheless some of his most fruitful conversations were between ancient and modern Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and depleted forms of Western Christianity on the other. But all these streams flowed into, and out of, one mind of exceptional ability. He was a colossus: too orthodox and traditional in general for some Evangelicals, and too evangelical for others of a more liberal persuasion; but the strength of his writings very significantly contributed to the extraordinary rapprochement in theology between East and West which we sense going on all around us. His subsequent work on (e.g.) Divine and Contingent Order (1981) and The Trinitarian Faith (1988; sub-titled: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church') shows him engaging deeply in his chosen fields.
A couple of examples of typically precise wording conclude this small tribute, to indicate that he wrote no sloppy English:
'We must not think of the Incarnation as an intrusion of the Son of God into the determinations and conditions of space and time...Rather is the Incarnation (NB: in both cases, capital I) to be understood as the chosen path of God's rationality in which He interacts with the world and established such a relation betwen creaturely being and Himself that He will not allow it to slip away from Him into futility or nothingness, but upholds and confirms it as that which He has made and come to redeem' (STI, 67).
'[The resurrection] is the only historical event that does not suffer from decay and is not threatened by annihilation and illusion' (STR, 95).
I thank God for the memory of a life filled with, and witnessing to, the mind of Christ.
Article cited: Peter Forster, 'T. F. Torrance (1913-2007): An Appreciation', Anvil Volume 25 No 1 2008, pp. 21-31.
Sunday, 6 January 2008
Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali
It is not surprising if Michael Nazir-Ali has been, or will be, pilloried for speaking out about the place of Christian faith in a so-called multi-faith society. If Trevor Phillips warns about Britain sleep-walking its way towards apartheid, he is a wise man issuing a necessary note of alarm. If the wisest and most informed Bishop in the country speaks out, he is told to shut up and sit down. A prophet is not welcome in his own country.
Of course, my 'prophet' may be your 'alarmist'; your 'prophet' may be my 'heretic'. But prophets do not simply warn about the future; they expose the present. Jeremiah - and Jesus - was asking the people of his time to face what was staring them in the eye, but they could not - or would not - see. Or: prophets are allowed on certain themes; but not on others. That is where thought, fact and argument are required, not knee-jerk reactions.
Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali knows Islam inside out, from life in Pakistan and the UK, from personal history and theological research. Of course, there are plenty of critics who have vested interests in viewpoints such as his not being expressed publicly. For instance, the request for permission to introduce the Islamic call to prayer in major cities in the UK expresses a literal claim on that territory for Islam, with strictly legal consequences in terms of Sharia' law.
Advent traditionally begins with the cry to 'Wake up!' Bishop Michael is sounding that cry again now in one specific area of life in Britain. What he is saying is neither surprising nor new: but where ostrich heads have been buried in the sands for years, it does sound shocking. But, as St Paul says, it is time to wake up from sleep. Merely speaking out does not constitute prophecy; but when a wise man, a serious theologian and a believing Christian speaks out, we should listen.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam206.xml (Why extremism has flourished)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=5SWCYNJWFOFLVQFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam106.xml (Bishops warns of no-go zones)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam306.xml (Oxford Muslims want call to prayer)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/09/nmuslim109.xml (Muslim apostates threatened over Christianity)
Of course, my 'prophet' may be your 'alarmist'; your 'prophet' may be my 'heretic'. But prophets do not simply warn about the future; they expose the present. Jeremiah - and Jesus - was asking the people of his time to face what was staring them in the eye, but they could not - or would not - see. Or: prophets are allowed on certain themes; but not on others. That is where thought, fact and argument are required, not knee-jerk reactions.
Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali knows Islam inside out, from life in Pakistan and the UK, from personal history and theological research. Of course, there are plenty of critics who have vested interests in viewpoints such as his not being expressed publicly. For instance, the request for permission to introduce the Islamic call to prayer in major cities in the UK expresses a literal claim on that territory for Islam, with strictly legal consequences in terms of Sharia' law.
Advent traditionally begins with the cry to 'Wake up!' Bishop Michael is sounding that cry again now in one specific area of life in Britain. What he is saying is neither surprising nor new: but where ostrich heads have been buried in the sands for years, it does sound shocking. But, as St Paul says, it is time to wake up from sleep. Merely speaking out does not constitute prophecy; but when a wise man, a serious theologian and a believing Christian speaks out, we should listen.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam206.xml (Why extremism has flourished)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=5SWCYNJWFOFLVQFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam106.xml (Bishops warns of no-go zones)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam306.xml (Oxford Muslims want call to prayer)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SEJIOZRWAANTLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/09/nmuslim109.xml (Muslim apostates threatened over Christianity)
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