Sam Norton has written an excellent post on approaches to reading and understanding the Bible. His starting point is that:
"One of the most important things to understand about the Bible is that it is a
library of Holy Scripture – that is, there are many different voices within the
Bible (even within particular books of the Bible) – and this is of God. That is,
it is in recognising both what different books have in common, and where they
disagree, that an individual Christian is enabled to come to a mature
understanding of the text."
He sets out why the Bible can't be assumed to have one single unequivocal thing to say about
a topic and explains historically how the idea that it does appeared within Christianity. With astute illustrations of the issues he raises, this is an excellent post which lays the ground for some examination of particular texts in future.
See here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for my take on this in a series of posts entitled Divine dialogues.
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Iona ~ Edge of the World.
Friday, 11 May 2012
Thursday, 10 May 2012
Self-sacrifice and distinctive Christianity
I’ve read Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time immediately after Sam Norton’s Let us be human and have been fascinated to find that both have been addressing the same issue; that only by becoming more distinctively Christian can we engage constructively with the crises of our times.
For Tarkovsky, writing in the 1980s, the crisis is that of competing ideologies where the “assertion of class or group interests, accompanied by the invocation of the good of humanity and the ‘general welfare’, result in flagrant violations of the rights of the individual, who is fatally estranged from society.” The individual either “becomes the instrument of other people’s ideas and ambitions” or else becomes “a boss who shapes and uses other people’s energies with no regard for the rights of the individual.” He argues that “the laws of a materialistic worldview” are that “selfish interests ... make up a ‘normal’ rationale for action.” Modern man, he suggests, “is not prepared to deny himself and his interests for the sake of other people or in the name of what is Creator.” As a result, “many of the misfortunes besetting humanity are the result of our having become unforgivably, culpably, hopelessly materialistic.” This is particularly dangerous because “we seem to have a fatal incapacity for mastering our material achievements in order to use them for our own good” and “have created a civilization which threatens to annihilate mankind.”
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Olga Sergeeva - Kumushki.
For Tarkovsky, writing in the 1980s, the crisis is that of competing ideologies where the “assertion of class or group interests, accompanied by the invocation of the good of humanity and the ‘general welfare’, result in flagrant violations of the rights of the individual, who is fatally estranged from society.” The individual either “becomes the instrument of other people’s ideas and ambitions” or else becomes “a boss who shapes and uses other people’s energies with no regard for the rights of the individual.” He argues that “the laws of a materialistic worldview” are that “selfish interests ... make up a ‘normal’ rationale for action.” Modern man, he suggests, “is not prepared to deny himself and his interests for the sake of other people or in the name of what is Creator.” As a result, “many of the misfortunes besetting humanity are the result of our having become unforgivably, culpably, hopelessly materialistic.” This is particularly dangerous because “we seem to have a fatal incapacity for mastering our material achievements in order to use them for our own good” and “have created a civilization which threatens to annihilate mankind.”
For Norton, the contemporary presenting issue is that of peak oil; limits or a peak to the volume of fossil fuels which can be produced leading to a decline in production. Because our “contemporary way of life in the affluent West is built around the easy availability of cheap liquid fuel,” peak oil inevitably means significant change and challenge for our culture. However, it also exposes an underlying predicament, “that exponential growth cannot continue within a finite environment.” Exponential growth – “the continued doubling of a quantity over time” – has been worshipped as an idol within Western society because such growth in water use, food production, steel production, and our economies generally “has led to great abundance in the rich countries, and a much higher quality of life for those who live in industrialised countries.” Our “way of life has been built around the maintenance of exponential growth – and as that way of life crashes into ecological limits, so too will that way of life.” Norton writes that for this way of life to come to an end will be a blessing, because “our present way of life is a terrible, terrible pestilence on creation.”
So, the presenting issues which they address differ but the underlying issue or predicament which they identify is broadly similar. Both also criticise the place that science has come to assume within our society.
Norton argues that the “origin of our frenetically anti-phronetic society” – phronesis is practical judgement - “lies in the political assertion of science at the expense of Christianity.” This has taken two forms; first, “to say that scientific truth is the only truth” and second, that what we gain from processes of scientific investigation is more important than anything else. To make these two assertions downplays “the knowledge and awareness that can come through understanding poetry or art or great fables and stories” and also the passing on of wisdom which “is conducted through the rites and practices of religious faith, the telling of stories and sharing of rituals that embody and express a particular way of viewing the world and asserting a particular pattern of value.”
Tarkovsky uses a more poetic and ambiguous image to again say something broadly similar:
“Seeing ourselves as protagonists of science, and in order to make our scientific objectivity the more convincing, we have split the one, indivisible human process down the middle, thereby revealing a solitary, but clearly visible, spring, which we declare to be the prime cause of everything, and use it not only to explain the mistakes of the past but also to draw up our blueprint for the future.”
Tarkovsky argues that “the individual today stands at a crossroads, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the existence of a blind consumer, subject to the implacable march of new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, to turn to God.”
Similarly, Norton, after saying that our “way of living – the western way of life, with its excess consumerism and mindless destruction of creation – this way of life destroys life,” then writes that the “vision of Christian life, of full humanity, is that there is a way of life shown to us by Christ which allows us to be all that God intends us to be.”
Their different vocations – of film-maker and priest – then lead them to develop slightly different emphases in the working out of the way that leads to wisdom and spiritual responsibility.
The key for Tarkovsky is to rediscover “the Christian sense of self-sacrifice,” “the Christian ideal of love of neighbour”:
“Concerned for the interests of the many, nobody thought of his own in the sense preached by Christ: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ That is, love yourself so much that you respect in yourself the supra-personal, divine principle, which forbids you to pursue your acquisitive, selfish interests and tells you to give yourself, without reasoning or talking about it; to love others. This requires a true sense of your own dignity: an acceptance of the objective value and significance of the ‘I’ at the centre of your life on earth, as it grows in spiritual stature, advancing towards the perfection in which there can be no egocentricity.”
Tarkovsky’s can be seen as a slightly individualistic conception of the spiritual way. It is one which sees little value in the contemporary Church:
“Not even the Church can quench man’s thirst for the Absolute, for unfortunately it exists as a kind of appendage, copying or even caricaturing the social institutions by which our everyday life is organised. Certainly in today’s world which leans so heavily towards the material and the technological, the Church shows no sign of being able to redress the balance with a call to spiritual awakening.”
Tarkovsky’s alternative to the Church is art:
“In this situation it seems to me that art is called to express the absolute freedom of man’s spiritual potential. I think that art was always man’s weapon against the material things which threatened to devour his spirit. It is no accident that in the course of nearly two thousand years of Christianity, art developed for a very long time i the context of religious ideas and goals. Its very existence kept alive in discordant humanity the idea of harmony.
Art embodied an ideal; it was an example of perfect balance between moral and material principles, a demonstration of the fact that such a balance is not a myth existing oly in the realm of ideology, but something which can be realised within the dimensions of the phenomenal world. Art expressed man’s need of harmony and his readiness to do battle with himself, within his own personality, for the sake of achieving the equilibrium for which he longed ...
Art affirms all that is best in man – hope, faith, love, beauty, prayer ... What he dreams of and what he hopes for ...
In a sense art is an image of the completed process, of the culmination; an imitation of the possession of absolute truth (albeit only in the form of an image) obviating the long – perhaps, indeed endless – path of history ...
Finally, I would enjoin the reader – confiding in him utterly – to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God.”
Norton, by contrast, sees a much more significant role for the Church:
“The heart of what the Church is about is worship, because worship is where we learn to be different. Worship is the primary means of making disciples. This is why worship and getting worship right is so important, because worship is where we come into the presence of God formatively, and we are formed differently. We hear the word, we share the sacrament and that changes us ... Spiritually, this is the answer to the predicament which our civilisation faces. This is where we learn the wisdom that is the antidote to the poisonous asophism which afflicts our culture. The Church Fathers said ‘The Eucharist makes the Church’. I want to add ‘The Eucharist heals the world’.”
This focus though does not in any sense mean that he thinks that the church has perfectly fulfilled this role. Instead he writes:
“For all the things that are going wrong in our world the church must confess its own responsibility. It is because the people who have custody of the knowledge of God and whose duty it is to teach that knowledge of God have failed in their task that our civilisation has come to be in the predicament we now have to endure.”
Tarkovsky might well agree. While the Church, not the Arts, are Norton’s main focus, we have already noted his valuing of the Arts. He also writes that “the common recognition that science has too important a place in our cultural life has only been able to be voiced at the margins of society, amongst poets and playwright – those whose scientific credibility is not strong.”
He calls us to “get on with the task of building our cathedrals of justice, forgiveness and kindness in our communities, and walking humbly alongside the Lord, who is with us, letting Him teach us what it means to be human”:
“All of which is saying that the practice, the actual living out of Christian faith comes before the proclamation. The living out of the faith is foundational because that is what gives the words their weight. The practice is something which changes us on the inside and radiates out into our wider lives.”
It would seem possible that Tarkovsky had not encountered a contemporary church practising the faith in the way Norton describes and it would be interesting to know whether such an encounter would have changed his view of the Church. His injunction to “love yourself so much that you respect in yourself the supra-personal, divine principle, which forbids you to pursue your acquisitive, selfish interests and tells you to give yourself, without reasoning or talking about it; to love others” is a focus on “the practice, the actual living out of Christian faith” about which Norton writes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Olga Sergeeva - Kumushki.
William Congdon - The Sabbath of History
This comes from the latest ImageUpdate:
"If you are going to be anywhere in the vicinity of New Haven, Connecticut between now and September 16, you owe it to yourself to get to the Knights of Columbus Museum. The goal of your visit is an art exhibition of paintings by William Congdon, accompanied by excerpts from "Meditations on Holy Week" written many years ago by Joseph Ratzinger (now known as Benedict XVI).
There is an utterly fascinating story behind this show. Though he is all but forgotten now, Congdon was one of the rising stars of the art world in the mid-twentieth century, associated with Abstract Expressionism and the action painting of Jackson Pollock. To quote the exhibition materials: "His first one-man show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949, was lauded by reigning art critic Clement Greenberg who credited his paintings with having 'real painterly emotion.' In 1951, he was profiled in LIFE magazine and heralded as 'A Remarkable New U.S. Painter.'" Then he more or less disappeared from the art scene.
What happened? Among other things, Congdon moved to Italy, converted to Catholicism, and joined the Catholic lay movement, Communion and Liberation. Though he abandoned the art world, Congdon continued to paint—and his conversion did not induce him to abandon his cutting-edge style. His semi-abstract paintings were often crafted with an impasto knife, a method that created dramatic gestures and incised expressive lines within the work. His early subjects were largely urban and conveyed a sense of modern alienation and isolation, but after his conversion he turned increasingly to landscapes and religious subjects.
Congdon's rendering of traditional biblical scenes was always probing and creative, never falling back on cliché or sentimentality. The pairing of his works with texts by Ratzinger makes sense for a number of reasons, including Ratzinger's close friendship with the founder of Communion and Liberation, Luigi Giussani.
IMAGE published an essay on Congdon's work by art critic Peter Selz way back in issue 14, which we've put in its entirety on our website. This is an artist whose reputation deserves to be much greater than it is, so please spread the word.
"If you are going to be anywhere in the vicinity of New Haven, Connecticut between now and September 16, you owe it to yourself to get to the Knights of Columbus Museum. The goal of your visit is an art exhibition of paintings by William Congdon, accompanied by excerpts from "Meditations on Holy Week" written many years ago by Joseph Ratzinger (now known as Benedict XVI).
There is an utterly fascinating story behind this show. Though he is all but forgotten now, Congdon was one of the rising stars of the art world in the mid-twentieth century, associated with Abstract Expressionism and the action painting of Jackson Pollock. To quote the exhibition materials: "His first one-man show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949, was lauded by reigning art critic Clement Greenberg who credited his paintings with having 'real painterly emotion.' In 1951, he was profiled in LIFE magazine and heralded as 'A Remarkable New U.S. Painter.'" Then he more or less disappeared from the art scene.
What happened? Among other things, Congdon moved to Italy, converted to Catholicism, and joined the Catholic lay movement, Communion and Liberation. Though he abandoned the art world, Congdon continued to paint—and his conversion did not induce him to abandon his cutting-edge style. His semi-abstract paintings were often crafted with an impasto knife, a method that created dramatic gestures and incised expressive lines within the work. His early subjects were largely urban and conveyed a sense of modern alienation and isolation, but after his conversion he turned increasingly to landscapes and religious subjects.
Congdon's rendering of traditional biblical scenes was always probing and creative, never falling back on cliché or sentimentality. The pairing of his works with texts by Ratzinger makes sense for a number of reasons, including Ratzinger's close friendship with the founder of Communion and Liberation, Luigi Giussani.
IMAGE published an essay on Congdon's work by art critic Peter Selz way back in issue 14, which we've put in its entirety on our website. This is an artist whose reputation deserves to be much greater than it is, so please spread the word.
Learn more about the exhibition here. Read Peter Selz's essay from IMAGE issue 14 here. Visit the Congdon Foundation website here."
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Jan Gaberak and the Hilliard Ensemble - Parce Mihi Domine.
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
Windows on the world (195)
Canning Town, 2012
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M. Ward - There's A Key.
The vine and the branches
Stephen Verney begins his commentary on John 15. 1 - 8 with a great evocation of the way in which vines are grown:
“On a stony hillside above his house, where the thyme grows and the prickly pear, and a wild fig tree fights for its existence in a pocket of shallow soil, a farmer decides to plant a vine. In the autumn he clears a terrace, and brings top soil. He sets a post for the vine to climb, and fixes horizontal supports for its branches. Then in the spring he plants it and fences it against the goats; as it grows he trains it, and in the following autumn he prunes it back.
The vine depends for its life on the farmer, but equally the farmer depends on the vine. For the vine can do what the farmer cannot; it can take the rain that falls on the hillside and convert it into grapes, which the farmer can harvest and tread out in his wine-press, and pour the juice into his vat to ferment and bubble. The farmer and the vine are dependent on each other, and the purpose for which they work together is that water should be turned into wine.”
Jesus is the vine, his Father is the farmer. They are dependent one on the other although their roles are different. Their shared purpose is that water is turned into wine; that the vine is fruitful and that its fruit becomes wine shared with others as the sign and symbol of Jesus’ blood. The process for achieving this can itself be painful; involving pruning and crushing.
We are part of this picture because there is one vine but many branches. Each one of us as we become Christians is grafted into the vine to become part of the vine itself. Verney writes:
“I AM the vine, and you are the branches. Dwell in me, and I in you. Here is teaching both simple and profound, to move the human heart. If the branch dwells in the vine, then the life of the vine dwells in the branch. If the branch grows out of the stem, and out of the roots which are drawing up the goodness of the soil and the rain, then the sap of the vine flows into the branch, and the pattern of the vine’s life unfolds itself through each branch to produce bunches of grapes. So it will be, says Jesus, between you and me. If you do not dwell in me you cannot bear fruit …”
How do we dwell in Jesus? To keep our life dwelling in Christ’s, we must continually renew our decision that “what has been done once for all on the cross by Jesus shall the basis, the starting point, the context of all my thinking and deciding and doing,” writes Lesslie Newbigin. We feed this decision by protecting time for prayer, bible study and worship in our busy lives and schedules.
As we do so, the sap of the vine, the life of Christ, flows into us and we produce fruit. The fruit of the vine is, as Newbigin again writes, “the life of Jesus reproduced in the midst of the life of the world, the pure love and obedience by which people will recognise the disciples of Jesus, the branches of the real vine.”
This fruit, the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives, is the real test of whether or not we are actually dwelling in the vine, in Jesus. In recent years, we have come to know much more about the spiritual life of Mother Teresa, someone whose face shone with the all-encompassing joy of one for whom “to live is Christ.” Everyone who knew her assumed that she was supported in her ministry through a deep and abiding sense of Christ’s presence with her.
Yet the opposite was true. Mother Teresa lived feeling as if she did not believe:
“I have no faith” – “They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God … in my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss – of God not being God – of God not really existing.”
Her sense of feeling that there was no God has been revealed in letters that she wrote to her spiritual confidantes. Yet, as Sister Wendy Beckett has written, “this woman who felt that there was no God and lived in emotional anguish was also profoundly aware, intellectually, that God was her total life and that she lived only to love him.” This was what was apparent in her life and ministry and this fruit showed that whatever she felt about the absence of God in her life, she was still a live branch in the vine.
Ultimately, the fruit of our lives - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives – is the sign of whether we are healthy branches dwelling in the vine. Prayer, bible study and worship are channels for the life of Christ to flow into our lives rather than the sign than his life is flowing into our own.
As we are grafted into the vine, into Jesus, we receive his life flowing through us and take on his characteristics – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. These characteristics result in acts of love because love must act, as we saw in the life of Mother Teresa. While hate could be indifference or inaction, love is always active and must respond practically to the needs we see around us.
Several years ago, Nadia Kabula’s father died and her family became desperately poor. She lives in Kinshasa Kinshasa
Nadia is trusting God as she struggles towards this vision. A talented singer, she encourages others with songs of worship. She say, “Music is an important part of life here … When I sing I feel good – it is like food. My favourite song is ‘Lord I Lift Your Name On High’.” Nadia is also displaying extraordinary determination and selflessness as she sacrifices her time to care for her four younger siblings, and helps teach other young women to sew. Her life of love is an example to us all.
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Gungor - Brother Moon.
Sunday, 6 May 2012
Written on the Heart
I'm looking forward to seeing Written on the Heart at the Duchess Theatre later this month.
"Across an 80 year divide, two men translate the word of God into the English tongue. For one, it means death at the stake [Tyndale]. For the other, it could mean an archbishop's mitre [Andrewes]. After almost a century of unrest, the King James Bible was intended to end the violent upheavals of the English reformation. But deep-seated conflicts force a leading translator to confront the betrayal of his youthful religious ideals, for the sake of social peace. Written by David Edgar, whose extensive work for the Company includes Destiny, Pentecost and Nicholas Nickleby, and marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Written on the Heart is directed by RSC Artistic Director Designate Gregory Doran."
Edgar is drawn to writing about the process of negotiation, about middle-aged men in conference, balancing principle with expediency:
“I’m interested by the way in which people with political beliefs come to make compromises in the way that Andrewes compromises. There are individuals, radicals in their youth, who decide that a certain amount of what they fought for has been achieved. We didn’t get everything we wanted, they say, but we’re satisfied with how far we have come. It’s this far - but no further. Yet there’s a younger, more radical generation who refuse to agree to this. You can’t have the franchise on this, they tell their elders. Don’t think that the battle has been won, just because you say so. Andrewes is somebody who believes in this far but no further and in the play he is confronted by Tyndale, the heroic Protestant martyr who stuck to his guns.”
Michael Billington, in his review of the play, states:
"Edgar stages a dream-like encounter between Andrewes and Tyndale that gets to the heart of the drama. Andrewes, guilt-haunted over his persecution of schismatics, emerges as a trimming traditionalist; Tyndale is a radical appalled to find a church that still relies on chalices and altar rails, and a new version of the Bible that sacrifices meaning to music. You don't have to be a scholar to follow the argument, since Edgar gives us plenty of textual evidence and, even if his play requires an interest in history, it exposes the divisions that today still rend the Anglican church."
Similarly, Rachel Boulding in the Church Times writes that Edgar:
"embodies the conflict in the character of Andrewes.
So he fashions an excellent history lesson, fleshing out how and why these debates are not just academic concerns, but why they matter, then and now. Thus the debate crackles into life, and Andrewes incarnates the two sides in his inner turmoil, struggling between guilt over his supposed betrayal of puritan colleagues, and personal ambition (there being much amused speculation about who will be the next Archbishop of Canterbury in 1610)."
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Gerry Rafferty - Whatever's Written On Your Heart.
"Across an 80 year divide, two men translate the word of God into the English tongue. For one, it means death at the stake [Tyndale]. For the other, it could mean an archbishop's mitre [Andrewes]. After almost a century of unrest, the King James Bible was intended to end the violent upheavals of the English reformation. But deep-seated conflicts force a leading translator to confront the betrayal of his youthful religious ideals, for the sake of social peace. Written by David Edgar, whose extensive work for the Company includes Destiny, Pentecost and Nicholas Nickleby, and marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Written on the Heart is directed by RSC Artistic Director Designate Gregory Doran."
Edgar is drawn to writing about the process of negotiation, about middle-aged men in conference, balancing principle with expediency:
“I’m interested by the way in which people with political beliefs come to make compromises in the way that Andrewes compromises. There are individuals, radicals in their youth, who decide that a certain amount of what they fought for has been achieved. We didn’t get everything we wanted, they say, but we’re satisfied with how far we have come. It’s this far - but no further. Yet there’s a younger, more radical generation who refuse to agree to this. You can’t have the franchise on this, they tell their elders. Don’t think that the battle has been won, just because you say so. Andrewes is somebody who believes in this far but no further and in the play he is confronted by Tyndale, the heroic Protestant martyr who stuck to his guns.”
Michael Billington, in his review of the play, states:
"Edgar stages a dream-like encounter between Andrewes and Tyndale that gets to the heart of the drama. Andrewes, guilt-haunted over his persecution of schismatics, emerges as a trimming traditionalist; Tyndale is a radical appalled to find a church that still relies on chalices and altar rails, and a new version of the Bible that sacrifices meaning to music. You don't have to be a scholar to follow the argument, since Edgar gives us plenty of textual evidence and, even if his play requires an interest in history, it exposes the divisions that today still rend the Anglican church."
Similarly, Rachel Boulding in the Church Times writes that Edgar:
"embodies the conflict in the character of Andrewes.
So he fashions an excellent history lesson, fleshing out how and why these debates are not just academic concerns, but why they matter, then and now. Thus the debate crackles into life, and Andrewes incarnates the two sides in his inner turmoil, struggling between guilt over his supposed betrayal of puritan colleagues, and personal ambition (there being much amused speculation about who will be the next Archbishop of Canterbury in 1610)."
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Gerry Rafferty - Whatever's Written On Your Heart.
Seed Ministries International
In the main morning service at St John's Seven Kings today we heard about Seed Ministries International, an inter-denominational organization that was established with an objective to take God’s Word in various languages to rural India.
In 2011, ten thousand people worldwide took the Live below the Line challenge raising over £1million and finding out more about what it’s like for the 1.4 billion people who have to live on £1 everyday for everything.
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Beverley Knight - Come As You Are.
The work of Seed Ministries International includes:
- Bible distribution & Literature promotion - They distribute bibles at highly discounted prices. In
Bangalore - Training programmes and seminars - They are also involved in various training programmes and seminars on leadership, relationship management, art of successful living, etc in churches, schools and colleges.
- Clothes distribution - They distribute clothes to the slum dwellers in and around
Bangalore
In 2011, ten thousand people worldwide took the Live below the Line challenge raising over £1million and finding out more about what it’s like for the 1.4 billion people who have to live on £1 everyday for everything.
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Beverley Knight - Come As You Are.
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