Fulcrum: forum messages posted by Clare

217 forum messages posted by
Clare

Messages (newest first):

[Sort by Oldest first]

Page 1/19 | First | Previous | Next | Last

Martin Kuhrt's article re God's Wrath

1 [16166] Posted by: Clare

Monday 3 May 2010 - 08:01pm

First point: Phil says ‘I don’t ‘pass the words and acts of God and Christ which the Bible gives me through a sieve’. Yes you do. You pass it through a sieve that says ‘I need to believe that this is a non negotiable unambiguous non contradictory transmission of propositional truth claims from God to humanity’ even though scripture doesn’t make those sort of claims for itself and an honest reading shows the bible to be a mixture of story, poetry, myth, laws, letters etc within which the kind of God described is contradictory at times. How can it be unambiguous when the original Hebrew didn’t even have vowels and relied on the reader to choose a meaning which best seemed to fit? Why did Paul say we see through a glass darkly if God beams it all to us neat? I reckon your sieve assumes a priori that the gospel revolves around the doctrine of penal substitution and various other conservative evangelical mascots. It’s a sieve that has a modernist view of truth.

That’s ok. We all have sieves. It’s just sometimes part of the conservative evangelical sieve to believe that only other people have one!

Secondly, thank you David for defending my honour, as it were. I confess, however, that I think I have probably posted stuff using the lower case when describing Phil’s theology so I can’t really complain! Phil seems to be more familiar with my own back catalogue than I am so no doubt he could tell you where and when.

Maybe Phil really does worry that I am not a Christian (whatever that non-biblical phrase means). It’s ok if you do Phil because, as I have told you before, I really worry that you aren’t either! We both have so different beliefs about what God and Christ are really like that it would be odd if we didn’t wonder whether or not we actually belong to the same religion. Maybe a sign that we both do is that both of us hold back from denying the faith of the other and we both refuse to use the category ‘not a Christian’ in a morally censorious way. Perhaps the Real Holy Spirit influences us despite our mutual slips into believing in gods rather than God.

Martin Kuhrt's article re God's Wrath

2 [16045] Posted by: Clare

Monday 12 April 2010 - 05:15pm

Thank you Blair for you cautionary reminder about point scoring. Its something I need to hear often. What follows is really not trying to win arguments, score points or claim the moral high ground, although it may come out that way.What I hope to achieve is to further discussion, witness to the truth as I see it, a truth that first of all judges me and finds me wanting. Nersen asks for a reference or verse that proves that God propitiates our wrath rather than vice versa. Well, and this sounds glib I know, how about Genesis 1.1-Revelation 22.21? I have made this point before, I know, but the later insertion into the text of the bible of a reference system of verses and chapters can distort how we read it. By codifying scripture , we impose onto it a quasi-legal structure so that it reads like something written by civil servants, full of quotable sub sections 2.3:4 viii etc. This does violence to the kinds of texts the bible mainly is, stories, letters, poems, hymns and sayings. The bible needs to be read holistically, keeping the narrative thread(s) intact. However, as the bible is vast and presents contradictory pictures of what God is really like, we need some sort of jumping in place, some sort of hermeneutical key. For some of this thread , that key appears to be belief in the inerrancy of scripture and the centrality of the doctrine of penal substitution. For Girardians (and countless non Girardians no doubt) it is the death and resurrection of Jesus. This paschal mystery was recalled liturgically in the Eucharist long before the bible as we know it came into being, a liturgy given to us my Jesus so that we would begin to understand what he was making present for us. James Alison in 'The Joy of Being Wrong' talks about how utterly revolutionary the resurrection is to our understanding of what God - and we- are like. He talks about it being like a door, a door so marvellous that rather than try and bodge the door to force it to fit into the house (the understanding of scripture) that we already have, instead we rebuild the whole house to fit this amazing new door. Walls, floors, windows, everything is partly the same as before yet because how these items relate to one another is now fundamentally linked to how they all relate to the new door, the building is also new and different. I have written before somewhere on this forum that when we read the bible through , to use JA's phrase, 'Easter eyes', the text, like us, is born again. So, texts that might seem to indicate that God inflicts violence on people are revealed through the resurrection to show us that it is our wrath and desire for vengeance and justification that put by us into God's mouth. We make God into an idol god who demands sacrifice (of others-natch) not mercy. The crucifixion and resurrection reveals this -judges this - for what it is. So no, I can't label some little portion of that complex reality that is the scripture and proof of what I believe. But I can bear witness that for me and many others when I really listen to the bible's deep meaning, when I let the eucharist interpret it for me, then this is what it reveals to be about myself, about God and about his joy in re-creating me. Honestly I was much more liberal before I encountered Girard. Before then I had all but given up on the atonement and the bible. Now both are central to me.

Martin Kuhrt's article re God's Wrath

3 [16040] Posted by: Clare

Monday 12 April 2010 - 01:14pm

NersenPaul, James Alison is not a 'fringe thinker'. He is a well known and acclaimed theologian. This is what N.T. Wright says of him James Alison has been gripped by the rich excitement of Jesus resurrection, and has had the courage to think through its meaning in ways which make most Easter sermons seem bland and dull by comparison. The lessons he draws are striking and at times controversial but its hard to see how one can disagree with him without denying the very foundation of the Christian faith. Here is what Rowan Williams says about his book 'Knowing Jesus' 'The most lucid and imaginative presentation of a theology of redemption that I have read in many years'. That does not imply that you have to agree with him, but it does mean that he shouldn't be dismissed as some outre wierdo. Indeed, JA is rather more widely known than Martin Kuhrt - not that being well known or otherwise gives or detracts credence from one's arguments.

Martin Kuhrt's article re God's Wrath

4 [15943] Posted by: Clare

Wednesday 31 March 2010 - 04:59pm

tag team Girard going on here! I am writing this at work (well I needed a coffee break) so do not have book at hand to refer to but further to Fern's surprise at the 'God propitiating us' idea - JA writes at some length -which he summarises in this article http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng11.html about sacrifice in the liturgy in first temple Judaism. Unlike the more usual 'Aztec' understanding of sacrifice that has gained emblematic status in part of western Christianity, the ancient Judaic sacrifice had God sacrificing himself to us for our sins. Read the article it explains it much better than I can in a few lines. God as a Guardian reader! That made me laugh! but better that than God as a Daily Mail reader. perhaps the Guardian being independent of the vested interests of private gain is rather better placed to dimly echo the gospel than other publications whose first priority is to please their share holders. Historically the Guardian's readership base was non conformist - so maybe the gospel shaped the Guardian rather than the Guardian shaping the gospel. I am out of the country (in rural Bangladesh) for the next week or so, so won't be reading or posting, so apologies for not responding further to any insights and challenges.

Martin Kuhrt's article re God's Wrath

5 [15911] Posted by: Clare

Saturday 27 March 2010 - 07:36pm

thanks Blair. I have tried to explain many times on this forum how I believe that the girardian/JA approach encapsulates the best of evangelical and liberal approaches. Evangelical since it absolutely believes that the bible is revelation and that the cross/resurrection is the pivot around which must be interpreted, and liberal since it rejects violence and is suspicious of anything that attributes violence with God's will. It also takes the resurrection much more seriously than either approach. Girard explains that the bible is revelation because not only does it reveal what God is really like but also at the same time it reveals what humanity is really like. What is humanity is really like is a bunch of people locked in envious rivalry with one another who self deceive themselves and deny their own violence towards one another by protecting it upwards onto God. Violence then becomes a scared duty...God told me to do it.....and I become God's good guy destroying the evil guys. The genocidal (etc) bits are truly revelation because they reveal - when read in the light of the paschal mystery -what we are really like; blasphemers and idolators who fashion a god out of our own corruption in order to justify ourselves. Christ reveals this to us as he is lynched accused of being a blasphemer, a victim of religious violence. When Muslims go on hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), one of the things they do is throw stones at a pillar, said to represent throwing stones at satan. ie, evil is external to me and I can defeat it through violence. By contrast, on Good Friday, what we will be called to recognise is that we habitually throw stones and justify ourselves through deeming others evil, and that only through Christ on the cross becoming the one we stone to death is our deadly habit revealed to us. and forgiven, as revealed in the resurrection. ie evil is internal to me and is overcome through its forgiveness, which leads me to repentance. why did Jesus give us the Eucharist rather than a book? Because the Eucharist - the re-enactment of the paschal mystery -is the hermeneutical key to understanding scripture. not theories of biblical inerrancy.

Martin Kuhrt's article re God's Wrath

6 [15815] Posted by: Clare

Saturday 20 March 2010 - 08:17pm

I'm a bit of a johnny-come-lately to this thread. I have posted endlessly on this topic on other threads so I won't go over old ground but one thing really strikes me reading Martin's article. He completely parodies the 'liberal' way of reading scripture and depicts it as an exercise in self serving justification. Sorry Martin but I find this an offensive travesty. I don't reject various nasty parts of the bible because of a lack of moral seriousness or a disregard for the truth. I don't make it up as I go along in order to pander to whatever wickedness I want to indulge in. I don't read it in ways that justify my own materialism or greed or desire for retribution. I'd love to be able to distort it so that I could justify voting for a party that would lower my taxes, or that would not condemn me when I want to feel superior to biblical conservatives, or that would permit me to surround myself with toyboys, not buy fair trade, eat fois gras......I could go on. I, like you, can't do that because I am under authority, the authority of God's truth. Where we differ is that I believe that all truth is God's truth, whether found through scientific enquiry, within the scriptures, through human reasoning reflecting on human experience or wherever else we find it. And under that truth I am compelled to stand, however uncomfortable. I would love to be able to believe that the 'I am' statements in John are verbatim Jesus, for example. Or that the nativity narratives are factual. Standing under the truth forces me to conclude that this is unlikely. I don't believe that the bible contradicts itself and has mutually unreconcilable depictions of God because that makes me feel good - on the contrary how nice it would be to be able to believe that God had given us an infallible set of instructions and an unambiguous picture of what he is really like. I cannot reject what my God-given reason compels me to because I want to God to be the kind of God who meets my craving for certainty and black and white facts. That would indeed be to believe in a sentimentalised projection of my own feelings of what God should be for us. We may want the scriptures to conform to how we think a reasonable God should communicate himself but my reason (aided by the theological reflections of countless others, of course) compels me in all honesty to reject accounts of the bible as infallible or totally trustworthy. I am not liberal because I lack the courage to believe the truth - however unpalatable. On the contrary, that is why I am a liberal. And, for the record, I believe that I stand under God's judgement. What I do not and cannot believe is that a good God would order the killing of children, genocide, rape, gang lynching etc etc. God's judgement, revealed in the incarnation, death and resurrection reveal to us that God is the one who suffers and overcomes human violence, not the one who ordains it. This is the truth under which I stand condemned and forgiven. I do not need to conflate the Word of God in Christ with the 'word of God' in scripture in order to live from that hope. (sorry I have used google chrome with its rubbish inability to use the editor controls...I always forget until its too late. If the fulcrum techies can make this text more readable post my posting, please do so)

Phil and Clare talk about God and the Bible (again)

7 [15433] Posted by: Clare

Sunday 21 February 2010 - 07:30pm

I responded May 28 2008 by way of pointing to a section in 'Raising Abel' (James Alison) which argues that the Matthean judgement parables are actually about self-judgement - casting oneself into the outer darkness because that is where one (erroneously) believes that God has placed you. Whereas the gospel touches us by revealing that it is God who is sent into the outer darkness and that it is us - and not God- who sends him there. The trouble with asking me to respond point by point to various verses as if these presented knock down arguments is that you are still assuming that I read the bible as a series of discrete pieces of factual information, rather than as a disparate collection of mainly narratives which are understood more by listening with a poets ear to the tone and shape than on a line by line basis. Whereas you seem to want to read it more like an instruction manual telling you how to defragment your hard drive. That dissonance means we are doomed to talk to each other in mutually incomprehensible language.

Methodist ready to merge with the C/E

8 [15395] Posted by: Clare

Thursday 18 February 2010 - 09:42pm

yup, I anticipate a big flouncy 'shake the dust from your shoes' moment in the not too distant future. I do try not to think of this as a good thing - honest.

Archbishop's apology to lesbian and gay Christians

9 [15393] Posted by: Clare

Thursday 18 February 2010 - 06:16pm

well of course I believe it is figurative. But the point I was making was that sometimes some of you evangelicals say things that impy that every word of the bible is literally true, and then when something really difficult comes up, say, oh no, that bit is meant to be figurative only. what about that bit about handling snales and drinking poision? that seems pretty literal - why don't we see more of that it English evangelical churches? (I know some American churches do the whole snake handling thing)

Giving up electical communication aids for Lent

10 [15392] Posted by: Clare

Thursday 18 February 2010 - 05:55pm

until I got my i-phone I had to do this everytime I visted my mother or mother in law - drove me insane! But is does remind me how dependent we have become on email and the internet. How ever did we manage without google? I couldn't do my job at all without internet/email. And as for actually having to go to a supermarket in person!!! Well, whatever next. I'd rather do Ramadan!

baffled liberal seeks honest discussion -what is the evangelical

11 [15391] Posted by: Clare

Thursday 18 February 2010 - 05:29pm

Carls’ turn.

I think a lot of what I would say to Carl I have already said to David.

Carl responds to my question ‘Why - theologically - is the bible so important to evangelicals’? thus:

‘Because without the Scripture we would know nothing about God beyond His power and glory as revealed by the general revelation of creation’

Again, like with David I would respond that this is an assertion of a belief rather than an argument and one that to my mind does not stand up to scrutiny. The general revelation of creation presumably includes our reason and our experience so already we have three ingredients in the mix in our quest to know God.

Carl continues:

‘We would know nothing about what He requires. We would know nothing about ourselves and our purpose. We would know nothing of His redemptive purpose’.

But that’s just the same as saying I believe in the bible because I believe in the bible and have decided (out of apparently nowhere) that this is the book the answers all my religious questions. But why then this book? Why not the Qu’ran which is so much more amenable to being read in straight forward literal ways and makes much much stronger claims to being The Truth? Or any other text that claims to tell us about God and his plans for us? How does one decide between the rival claims of different texts without some other frame of reference? Surely the bible isn’t true just because that happened to be the first religious text you came across?

Carl again:

‘We would know nothing of the Christ. We would know nothing of the Gospel’.

The first Christians then – being bible-less - knew nothing of Christ? Ordinary, poor, illiterate medieaval Christians were similarly challenged. The early liturgy (as least as old as some parts of the bible), the sacraments, prayer, oral tradition, their own religious experience, early Christian art can tell us nothing about Christ? This is a grand as yet unexamined claim. Jesus gave us a meal not a book. That doesn’t mean the book is unimportant. It is absolutely vital. Without it Christian life would be extremely difficult.

Back to Carl:

Without the Scripture, we would exist in a universe of perpetual darkness - a universe punctuated by the periodic cries of blind men asserting "I can see!" But they can't see. Eyes do not work in the absence of light.

Again this is an assertion, not an argument. Just try replacing the word Scripture with any other vaunted source of authority be it reason/tradition/ experience/ the Qu’ran/material dialectics/scientific method/the Book of Mormon/ the Book of Dave. Any of these make sense to those who have already decided that they do. What I am asking you Carl is why is it the bible that you have chosen to fill this role rather than the myriad of alternatives on offer? And by what criteria other than the contingent and arbitrary fact that you happen to be born into a culture strongly influenced by reformed Christianity did you come to believe that the bible was THE ANSWER. Please don’t say ‘because it says it is’ because so do many of the above (and besides, I don’t believe it does as such and even if it did we would still have the problem of selecting which book really does tell the truth about God when more than one claims to).

I also think you are committing the category error that Simon Morden mentions. The living word is Christ, not the written words in the bible. Surely the whole point of the incarnation is to enable us to encounter God in a living being, rather than confine and codify him, entomb him once again in a written text. Surely the second commandment to make no grave images should be extended in our print laden age to make no textual images – or certainly not to worship such textual images as if they were God himself.

And a little bit of discussion with David W who writes:

‘I might add, [to what Carl has just said above] without scripture we would not be Christians, the disciples, believers and followers of Christ were first called Christians at Antioch, as it says in the Bible. Certainly without the bible it would be incredibly hard and very different. But it would also be hard and different without say the Eucharist or prayer or religious experience or the tradition of the church. Maybe impossible. That does not automatically lead to the conclusion that therefore the bible has supreme authority

David W continues:

To be able to explore Christianity one has to be able to identify it.’ I don’t disagree, but to say ‘and look I’ve identified it by limiting it to what can be found in the bible’ is just avoiding the difficulties inherent in the task we’ve set ourselves. See Diarmaid MacCulloch’s excellent book on the history of Christianity – it shows who vast, pluriform and amazing the phenomenon of Christianity actually is. We may wish that God had made it all so much more obvious. If only he had given us a two sided pamphlet outlining substitutionary atonement, various rules and commandments and warnings about hell – then everything would have been so much clearer and easy to identify. But no, silly God gave us a vast and contradictory set of books. We can’t even agree upon which books exactly should be in there, nor which bits are the most important, nor which bits mean exactly what. One can only assume that God therefore meant us to do a lot of the spade work among ourselves – by writing the 5^th act, for example, using the four (or more?)chairs to do so.

I’ve just realised that I can probably whizz through the rest of the other posters to date without going on too long.

Waterangel – I don’t dispute that God the father, Son and Holy Spirit are supreme and ultimate (though pluralist will no doubt raise my consciousness about the contradictions in my saying this while also defining myself as liberal). I do dispute those terms when applied to the bible. Or anything else frankly.

Simon Morden and Roger Harding – agree with everything you say! Except to say I would say rather than sticking closer to one chair or another, we should try and let each chair have its say. To do otherwise runs the risk of making that chair into an idol which is precisely what we see with the RC church idolising its own tradition, charismatics experience, evangelicals the bible and liberals reason. Perhaps this Lent we should all undertake the discipline of standing closer to whichever chair we find the least congenial and let ourselves be challenged. That probably means for me I am going to have to read Nersen’s xxxxxx book!!! (and maybe by way of counter balance something philosophical from pluralist).

Not sure why the formatting is going bonkers here - prbably too much cutting and pasting from differnet sources - hope all can navigate with relative ease.

baffled liberal seeks honest discussion -what is the evangelical

12 [15390] Posted by: Clare

Thursday 18 February 2010 - 04:27pm

Thanks everyone – an interesting range of answers – as expected! I won’t post responses to each one on this single post because it would go on forever! This post is my response to David.

David writes:

‘The Bible is the supreme authority when compared to other sources of authority mainly tradition and reason’.

To which I reply, yes, I know that is what evangelical believe- what you imbibe with your mother’s milk- but just asserting it is so does not make it so. My whole question is why is the bible the supreme authority? Where is the theological justification for this rather than, say reason (or any of the other of Simon’s ‘chairs)? I suspect that many evangelicals assert this primarily because that it what their tradition teaches them, without actually reflecting on why the tradition teaches this, or subjecting that tradition to the critique of scripture. It is not self-evident, even if it appears to evangelicals to be so because it has become the emblem of your tribe and hence beyond criticism.

David continues: This is the principle of the Reformation. The Bible and the earliest traditions of the church gave the reformers a basis to criticise later unhealthy growth in the church.

Again I am well aware that the Reformers came to this conclusion because at the time it was the way they made sense of challenging the authority of the Church. Which of course needed challenging as lots of things were unhealthy. But is it one thing to reassert that scripture has an authority of its own which should rightly be used to challenge reason/experience etc,(I’d be happy to sign up to that) and another thing entirely to say that scripture is the supreme authority. I think what us non-evangelicals (liberal or otherwise) are keen to stress is that just as scripture should challenge reason, reason should also challenge scripture. Indeed, all four ‘chairs’ should challenge and correct one another – this is what ‘working out the fifth act’ means, to engage ones whole being, mind, soul, heart in trying to live inside God’s truth. All truth is God’s truth whether from reason, experience, the bible, or tradition or any other domain. (will that do, Pluralist, as a basis for my self definition as a liberal?)

The further point remains, that you seem to be implying that actually, the supreme authority that evangelicals in fact believe in (even if they assert something else) is the tradition of the Reformation rather than Scripture itself. So if (as Tom Wright implies) the bible contradicts or at the very least does not explicitly advocate certain reformation principles (particularly the perspicacity of scripture), why does reformation tradition trump Scripture? I would much rather cede supreme authority to Scripture than I would to Calvin, yet it seems in practice to work the other way –even the rhetoric denies this.

The plot then thickens. Luther, as we all know, decided that scripture gave him the authority to downplay the authority of James, Hebrews and Revelation. Let alone the whole thorny issues of the authority of deutero-canonical books. Is that a reformation principle which I am allowed to keep? Can I downplay the bits that clash with my preferred line of interpretation? In fact, that’s exactly what we all actually do. That’s why we need to talk with each other so that we can mutually correct one another’s distortions. That’s what I mean by when I say the church is ‘catholic’ – the proper interplay between the various constituent parts and the whole.

What is more, as Romans Catholics rightly argue, the bible itself is a product of an earlier tradition. Here’s an interesting quotation

The Scriptures were born as enduring artifacts of a pre-existing Gospel Tradition in the Church. As the most basic example, without relying on the testimony of Tradition as a voice of divine authority, how does one defend the canon of Scripture itself? If we can use Scripture as our only infallible guide, how do we know in the first place what texts make up the Scripture we use as our sole authority? Where is the infallible biblical “table of contents” if not in infallible Tradition? In a word, how does one settle any scriptural dispute without a reliable “lens” to help us read the Scriptures clearly? (from here http://veniaminov.blogspot.com/2005/09/differences-between-catholicism-and.html)

David then says: The opposite [of attributing the bible with supreme authority] is to say that the Church has authority to interpret scripture and scripture cannot be used to challenge the church.

Historically yes, they were seen as opposites, the only two alternatives. At the time of the reformation the supreme authority of the bible was grasped in order to challenge the church – which had gone seriously awry at points. But that does not mean that there are not other alternatives between the two, that the reformers at the time were not able to envisage. In fact, lots of us would assert that the over emphasis of the authority of scripture is leading the church in just as damaging directions as its under-emphasis. Indeed, in the spirit of semper reformanda, we should challenge the tyranny of some reformation traditions that have become more and more amplified over time far beyond where the first reformers expressed them. Both the chairs and the 5 acts model describe other ways beyond the scripture versus tradition dichotomy. Part of the trouble is our folk memories of the centuries of conflict between catholic and protestant that make us keep and either/or dichotomy alive well beyond its sell by date. Instead let’s agree that we were both a bit wrong and a bit right and move on!

Nor should be under-estimate the centrality of the use of the reason of the day in influencing the reformers. They were deeply imbued in the norms of Renaissance thinking. The new technology of the day (the printing press) also gave rise to culturally contingent beliefs about printed, written truth having higher status than oral, symbolic, artistic or experiential truth. But that does not mean that we too should be imprisoned within the reformation spirit of the age. (As an aside, we should also ask ourselves searching questions about how today’s novel technology aka the internet is unconsciously shaping how we understand what truth is).

David again: In a conflict with reason the evangelical is certain that there is something significant in scripture. So reason presents the evangelical with many challenges but he does not just throw his hand in.

Again, this is an assertion of a belief, not a justification for it. Sometimes all we can do is assert that we are convinced deep within our bones that such and such is the case without precisely being able to say why. But when our assertions cause collateral damage among others (eg gay people, women), then we had better do a lot of soul searching before we have the nerve to say ‘you will suffer because I what I need to believe but cannot quite justify’.

(am not implying anything personally about anyone here causing harm to gays/women, but the bible is obviously used by people who believe in its absolute authority that many gay people/women (and straight men) would see as immoral, harmful and discriminatory).

217 forum messages posted byClare

217 forum messages posted by
Clare