Friday, October 29, 2004

Ruminations

In today's Dominion Post several things caught my attention.

1. Apparently there lived in Indonesia, only about 12,000 years ago ET (evolutionary time), a species of hobbit-like people - about 1 metre tall and with a brain capacity approximately one-third of modern humans. There are local legends about 'little people' suggesting these creatures were known to exist - which may, tantalisingly, provide the background for our tales of such things as elves.

2. The European Union's executive body, known as the European Commission, is appointed by member states. For the first time in 50 years, just as the signing of the European constitution draws near, the body has been vetoed by the European Parliament. The reason is that one of the Commissioners is a conservative Italian Catholic, who has told the Parliament that he considers homosexuality a sin.

There will be no competition to the reign of the new gods.

3. In a similar vein, Chris Trotter in his From the Left column suggests that defending free speech can go too far. Some opinions, he argues, are not worth the cost of their being expressed. He gives two examples: a National Front rally in London 25 years ago, which ended in riots and the life of a young NZ man, and Hitler. But for the intervention of Erhard Auer on free-speech grounds, Hitler would have been exiled to Austria in 1922. Auer was a principled man; his defence of Hitler's rights came shortly after he survived an assination attempt by Hitler's brownshirts.

See the post below for more commentary on this.

4. Two Muslim women wish to wear their burqua in court, on the grounds of faith and culture. I thought I agreed that they should not be allowed, but now I am not sure. My reason was that our common way-of-being doesn't include the resources to cater to such wishes. Our court system requires the reading of body language, for instance. The women chose to live here; it is encumbant upon them to make the accomodations necessary to do so.

Of Free Speech and the character of Christian witness (Commentary on the post immediately above)

I have always thought it a mistake to stand on the idea of free speech. Is it a neutral religious principle? It is not. Free speech enshrines the pluralistic voices of many gods.

Yet even that is in some ways a facade, a veneer over a much deeper reality. For, the gods must conform to an order above any of them, if there is not to be outright war between their subjects. "Let us exchange ideas instead of bullets; and cast votes rather than spears" is therefore the overarching framework of democratic liberalism, within which the gods must all operate.

This framework operates with many prior basic assumptions. For instance, the nature of knowledge and who has the right to it: who says that knowledge (the right to declare and explain things, to construct reality) is a public artifact, to be considered by all? Our ideas of knowledge have been transformed by the philosophical rationalism of science and the political thrust of egalitarianism; in the days when knowledge was delivered by priest-kings, knowledge was administered and kept as a means of power and control, a means of constructing and directing the group identity and mission. The point is that these things with whcih we are so familiar - bedrocks of our thinking and actions - are not static, eternal and simply "the way things are"; they are constructed and contestable.

Less abstractly, there is the question of who is eligible to exchange ideas and cast votes. This is what knowledge looks like when it is exercised in public: I say this, you say that. So let us vote in the sacrament of the Pantheon. I know life this way, you know it that way. So let us vote.

The right to vote only happens when knowledge is democratised and made, as a matter of principle, accessible and constructable by all. Thus, far from being a right and power vested solely in the priest-king, it is the right and power of all: and therefore, who has the right to express his view is either a god, or the representative of one. Liberal democracies are politico-religious-philosophical teachers. They embed a world-view.

"Free speech" is therefore never atheistic, or even agnostic. It is the conversation of the Pantheon, shaped and presided over by the chief god, demos. And demos creates the framework for discussion: which involves questions of eligibility, questions of who may represent (or be) a participating god.

And thus Chris Trotter is simply being honest. Some gods may - or must, for the sake of the rest - be excluded. Some forms of knowledge threaten the whole system. The ones that are the most threatening are those which question the eligibility of participants. The larger the number of those whose eligibility is questioned, the greater the threat posed by the question. That is why, politically, we hate religious fundamentalistists. They threaten the voices of other gods.

And so we get to the European Parliament. YHWH is to be excluded from the Pantheon of debate, because sexual choice has become the other sacrament (apart from the self-determining vote), the ultimate symbol, of democratized, individualistic knowledge. It is the expression of individuals freed from the priest-king, freed to represent other gods, freed to proclaim their status through their sexual behaviour. Deny that - call homosexuality a sin - and you have set yourself against autonomous knowledge itself.

As for how I, as a Christian, should respond to this: well, that's hard. My reading of scripture and reflections on Christ's life suggests to me that it the church must embody, or incarnate, a redemptive kind of knowledge. We must set forth the truth, the trustworthiness, of God. We do this as a form-of-life (I cannot stress that enough): and so we must oursleves repent of the idea that knoweldge is an intellectual thing, that the mind and body are opposed. We must stop thinking, for instance, of doctrine as a matter of propositions for assent, of faith as a commitment to a system of thought. Faith is knowledge; knowledge is action. Only when I act do I truly know. Anything else is just a movement of chemicals in the brain.

We (not I, we) must challenge demos in ways that mimic Christ's willingness to die for the sake of resurrection: for the sake of restoration. Only as the Christ-embodying (the Christ-incarnating) community in whom the Spirit dwells will we offer a real challenge to the status quo. In one sense, who cares what parliament does; the fight is not at that level. How do I respond to homosexuality, or to Islam? Maybe not with law, but with the evangelism of an embodied redemption. With the light that will be attractive and compelling to all who seek restoration.

Clearly, there is so much to be said about so much of this. A whole-of-life redemption does not exclude law, nor does it exclude philosophy, nor does it exclude propositions. Of course not. But these are aspects, components, pieces, of the full picture, and it is a picture that, at its heart, is personal: not in the sense of yours and not mine, but in the sense of manifesting human life, of having a corporate (and corporeal) body in which the true meaning of these things is seen and confronted.

That is true knowledge. Neither that of the priest-king, nor of the autonomous god-self, but that of redemptive confrontation with YHWH.

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Church 101

"Explain why the contrast between communities of descent and assent, respectively, is inadequate to explain the characteristics of the church, as discussed by the apostles."

Friday, October 22, 2004

Walking Small

There's a way of holding oneself responsible, of walking small so that your imprint on the world doesn't hurt others.

It's about the insignificant things we do: cleaning up after oneself, not presuming to take things without asking, being considerate in giving space or perhaps just a kind word. It's about not littering, about being polite and not rude, about not assuming that the world has to put up with your impulses and your ego.

In short, it is putting others first, considering their interests before your own.

God said love your neighbour; Christ said that the greatest commandment was to love God and then your neighbour - and that men would know he was from God if his disciples loved one another; John said that the new command he was giving was to love one another.

It constantly amazes and disappoints me how Christians think that they can insist on this or that abstract point, or that religious duty, and just as easily show absolutely no consideration in all the small things that show a genuine attitude of care for others.

I really really really hope that when I do such things, you, gentle reader, will bring them to my attention.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

To the life-goblin

Bring out your dragons
And let the boy slay them

Bring out your bogey-men
And let the boy face them

Bring out your years
And let the man laugh

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

On the deployment of internet technology and infrastructure:
I'm not arguing that we haven't done anything significant. We are in the process of deploying another package of technology, which is just as significant as the railroads, the telephone, the telegraph, electricity, and so on - all of which were terribly significant. I just don't think it alters the fundamentals of supply and demand, the fundamentals that determine pricing, that determine economic growth. I don't like to mystify what we are doing.
- Andy Grove, Chairman of Intel, in Wired

I reckon it's pretty much useless sharing opinions about anything until you've done something with them that's useful and/or admirable. Then people want to know what it is that makes you tick - they imagine that you have wisdom.

This is dawning on me more and more. I always thought that ideas themselves were what drove people, but that's not really true. Ideas aren't the bedrock of what makes people commit to patterns of action or attitudes. And in that sense, blogging is such a waste of time - as Tim is wont to point out. Sometimes I think I ought to shut up, on general principle, until I'm at least 40.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

A question of Kingship

There is a primary drama in the inscripturated story of Israel. It begins when Adam, the first head of mankind and of creation, proved treacherous. He and his administration were therefore cast out of the family household; estranged from God the Father. The major question posed as a result is this: who will lead the way back to the Garden? Who will heal the divorce? Who will replace the fallen king and lead the way back from exile?

The drama quickly devolves upon Israel, given a new land and a new identity as God’s people under a national charter of laws called Torah. It seems there is hope in her, that she will be the light to the world, salt of the nations. But, in the manner of great epics, Israel is plagued by failure. She is unfaithful and unfaithful again.

By the time of the second temple, under Herod’s reign, Israel’s land was occupied by the gentile Romans. Subject to the principalities and powers of estrangement no less than any other exilic nation, she used Torah as merely another weapon of nationalistic struggle. Yet in her midst, without any sense of what it might mean to be the light of the world, nonetheless the light of creation was born.

Extraordinarily, this child - after being crucified by her occupying powers - was declared to be the King. His apostles proclaimed him to Jew and Gentile, declaring that YHWH had appointed him Kyrios, the Lord, explicit rival to Ceasar and the great replacement for Adam.

The drama thus begins to revolve around Israel’s fate. As the appointed light of the Adamic world, she represented Adam’s line and held the first claim to Kingship status. But she had failed at her task; suffering foreign occupation, she was clearly under public judgment. Furthermore, one had been born of her line, crucified, and resurrected. With power this one was therefore declared to be the true Israel, the one in whom Adam’s expulsion from the Garden and subsequent descent to the dust was definitely undone. In the Christ, the new king, exile was over.

Thus, the apostles called Israel to repent. But she would not. While Gentiles came streaming in, the salt of their nations, Israel as the proud representative of Adam’s age (having Moses, of course) continued in exile, ignoring the newness of the renewal in Christ. When he therefore destroyed her, razing Jerusalem and Temple with the Roman armies, all of creation knew the true King, and was transferred from orginal Adam’s dominion to that of the Christ. The primary question had been answered: Jesus came to lead humanity back from exile and renew all creation in its relationship to God.

I do not think our ways of speaking about and dealing with our age take this past event into sufficient consideration. In part this is because, being individualised me-and-my-personal-destiny-in-heaven Christians, we do not recognise the primary drama of scripture: a truly cosmic affair.

So, it is not wrong to say that the major eschatalogical event has already occurred, even as we acknowledge that its working-out is still incomplete. Why are we so often oriented wholly to the future, as if the major part of God’s work is yet to happen: as if the cross, ascension and removal of exile’s representative in Israel is of no real effect?

On the contrary, the entire scriptural drama, the proclamation of the gospel, and renewal of creation rests on what has already happened. And thank God this is so. Through the faithfulness and Kingship of Christ God has proved Himself trustworthy. Worthy of our allegiance, a sure foundation for our hope, and the compassionate and loving ruler of this world: Himself dying to lead us back from exile. And we are called to be His images.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Negotiating Visions

Beautiful washed-out blue eyes
But then there’s the fact
That he’s a mirage

Of something, (but)

I’m not sure what.
Beautiful washed-out blue eyes
Pools in the desert

Of vapour,

I’m mostly sure.
Beautiful washed-out blue eyes
Like alcohol at night

Intoxicating, yet

I know
Beautiful washed-out blue eyes
A trick of the light.

Friday, October 08, 2004

In a number of posts recently, I have argued that there is no such thing as 'no religion' in the State; there is no such thing as 'neutrality'. Secular is the name of a god, not of nothing. Thus, all of life and every area of it must give allegiance to some god or other, some fundamental principle of order, some basic call to conform.

And so Jared Miller makes the point in Credenda that French secularism is finally revealing what it truly is: a religion as fundamental as any other, and the self-proclaimined posessor and regulator of the public sphere. As such, it has defined the fences around "social harmony and social cohesion" in the first of what will surely be a series of thou shalt nots: in this case, thou public school students shalt not wear the identifying marks of other gods.

No competition will be allowed.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Gmail

I have 5 accounts to give away. Contact me if you'd like one.