Category: theology

fish net

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One of the books I forgot to mention in my list of partially read books was Jonathan Rosen’s The Talmud and The Internet.  The title is the best of it, I’m afraid, but as I trawled for ideas for an assembly, I stumbled on this:

The promise of the Talmud, I suppose, is that it isn’t a book– it’s a sort of drift net for catching God, stretching out through time and space in ever-widening spools.  The fact that just about everything else swims into the net — legal questions and sartorial questions and culimary questions and agricultural questions and calendrical questions and apistemological question, the Talmudic equivalent of porpoises and turtles and old boots — becomes part of the lesson the Talmud teaches.  It is the humble interruptions as well as the lofty aspirations that matter.  In that regard, the Talmud is a net for catching God, but it ensnares men and women in the process.

This is the Judaism I grew up with and encountered through classmates, neigbours, friends.  What happens in Gaza and the West Bank is as far removed from this — from the best of Judaism–  as the proposed bill in Nigeria is removed from common decency and any semblence of Christian love.

(oh dear, an innocent and lovely quotation seems to have turned into an excuse for buzzy bees.  still…)

cry out

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With the baking day cancelled, today’s schedule eased enough for me to engage with the suggestion I’d posted on Hermione’s Heaven this week — to read the (whole of?) the book of Psalms.

I chose to pick up The Message, which has sat ignored on my shelf since I bought it with a Wesley Owen token someone had foolishly given me.   I don’t expect to like The Message, but lots of people are reading it, so…

I began at the beginning — never the easiest place to start with the Psalms.   I read:

How well God must like you —
you don’t hang out at Sin Saloon,
you don’t slink along Dead-End Road,
you don’t go to Smart-Mouth college.  (Ps 1.1, The Message)

Now, I knew it was a paraphrase,  but how did we get there from:

How blessed is anyone who rejects the advice of the wicked
and does not take a stand in the path that sinners tread,
nor a seat in company with cynics…   (Ps 1.1, NJB)

Still, I perservered.

Ps 2.1 —
Why the big noise, nations?
Why the mean plots, peoples?  (oh how I wish that were ‘people’)

Ps 4.2-3 —
You rabble — how long do I put up with you scorn
…
Look at this: look
Who got picked by God!
He listens the split second I call to him.

Ps 5.1, 4-7 —
Listen, God! Please, pay attention!
…
You don’t socialize with Wicked,
or invite Evil over as your houseguest.
Hot-Air-Boaster collapses in front of you;
you shake your head over Mischief-Maker.
God destroys Lie-Speaker;
Blood-Thirsty and Truth-Bender disgust you.
And here I am, your invited guest–
it’s incredible

then

Ps 6.1-2 —
Please, God, no more yelling,
no more trips to the woodshed.
Treat me nice for a change;
I’m so starved for affection.
Can’t you see I’m black and blue,
beat up badly in bones and soul?
God how long will it take you to let up?

I almost had to stop reading there.  Have we really just implied that God is an abusive parent?

So by psalm seven, when I read

Ps 7.1 —
God! God! I am running to you for dear life;
the chase is wild.
If they catch me, I’m finished

…  I knew I was rooting for the other guy.

I am all for modern language in scripture and in worship.  I am all for finding  ways to tell the bible story that will speak more readily to those for whom it is unfamiliar.

But this just made me want to run screaming ‘no, no, that is not the God I believe in.’

I know the psalms can be hard in any version.  There are psalms of great beauty, but there are also psalms that  are petty and vindictive, projecting all our hopes for vengeance onto God.   Most translations of the psalms do not hide their foreignness.   The images and structures are ancient, and we are free  to hope we have moved on — as a culture and as people of faith — from some of what we find there.

Peterson’s paraphrase  does away with all that.  There is no distance, and I (wrongly?) get the sense that I’m supposed to be right there with the narrator, saying ‘na-na-na-na-na’ every time the wicked get punished or I experience the blessing of God.   I don’t want to be there; I cannot overcome the feeling of disgust.

So, I’m going to start over again, with something safe like the New Jerusalem Bible (always good for poetry). Then perhaps later, I will  summon the courage to read another bit of The Message (Gospels?  Epistles?) in the hope that my first impressions will be proven wrong.

growth of an idea

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Yesterday, we met for the weekly ‘No Small Talk’ pub lunch.  The topic was ‘what makes a good book for you’ — something easy to get us going again after the holidays.  My mental list read along the lines of:

  1. quality of writing
  2. quality of writing
  3. creativity
  4. quality of writing

But as I read last night, I realised I’d forgotten the one thing for which I will forgive a certain lack of verbal sparkle:  the ability of a book to generate and refine a thought stream.

It can be vague, of course:  half-thoughts that intrigue, but aren’t fully resolved.  And if the truth be told, I prefer the game when played not with written text, but in counterpoint with a good lecturer; but that is a more costly endeavour.  What I love is that moment when someone else’s idea leads you into something, a hunch, a glimmer — and then as you’re musing, and reading or listening to something which is their thought and not yours, they suddenly say something that gives you the next piece of the puzzle, that sets you off on a tangent again.

So, last night as I was reading Christopher Irvine’s The Art of God,  the thought stream went like this:

Picasso once said, ‘I don’t seek, I find’; the world is gratuitous, it is simply there, and there to be discovered and delighted in.’

interesting.  I would say I believe that.  It is an incarnational statement — the ability to God in our midst, to respond to what’s there, respectful of the other as other rather than as someone/ thing in relation to me.  But for all that it feels wrong.  I have a theology of incarnation, of givenness, but a seeker’s restlessness.  Not ‘as is’ but ‘becoming’ … more likely to seek than to find.  So how does that fit?

On and on it went, musing, pondering, following different themes and arguments being presented in the book, till 20 pages later, he said this:

The New Testament bears witness not only to the figure of Jesus Christ as the image of the invisible God, but also to how the Christian might grow into the likeness of Christ by being conformed to the pattern of Christ’s death and resurrection.

And there it is.  That’s why I spend half my days trying to offer the reassurance that God is already here, that we are already loved, that there is glory in our midst; and the other half trying to disturb the balance, to stir the cognitive dissonance needed for growth, to nudge people out of their comfort zone (and myself too) into the scary place where we are changed and changed again.

It’s not the best book ever — it feels a bit too much like a master’s thesis, covering old ground.   The writing is competent but not elegant.  It was stimulating without  being so captivating that my own lines of thought were overwhelmed; but sometimes ‘good enough’ is all you need.

[never what we hope for, but sometimes all we need]

mind games

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The anatomy of singing certain carols:

God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay

oh good, I like this one, but never think to use it.  Why don’t I use it?

Remember Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day

da dum de dum de da dun dun — yes, it’s lovely isn’t it?  So colourful.  I love those long skirts, and that green velvet bonnet.  See there, the one with the white muff?  and her little dog.  Oh look, there’s Bob Cratchet…

To save us all from Satan’s power,
when we were gone astray.
Oh tidings of —

It was a beautiful film, so much a part of… Hold on.  To save us all from what??

comfort and joy, comfort and joy.

Satan… at Christmas?  No.

And so it goes. It really doesn’t bother me at all to sing ‘ye merry gentlemen’.  It’s a helpful locator:  it puts me immediately in a time and place far away.  And for a while, I can enjoy that.  In fact, the time/place locators in this are so strong (helped along by visions of Dickens) that I can even sing merrily about Satan without at first noticing what I am saying.  And that’s where it gets dangerous.

Uncritical use of language.  Uncritical use of imagery, all for a bit of nostalgia and a good tune.

I don’t’ really worry about this in a group of committed Christians.  I assume we can all sift our experience and differentiate what we enjoy for memory’s sake from how we would choose to speak of God today.  I trust that that process will happen because we will have heard other words, other stories that offer critique of the biases of one generation.  We need old hymns and new, to show for us different threads of our theology.

But what happens to the person who is there for the first time?  … who is just beginning to wonder what sort of God this is?

Well, we have just taught them that this world is held in Satan’s power, and that Christ comes to free us.  If they then stick around long enough to sing Child in a Manger (a carol all about redemption, but without a redeeming feature), they will get to refine this by singing:

…child who inherits all our transgression,
all our demerits on him will fall

One the most holy child of salvation
gently and lowly lived below;
now as our glorious mighty Redeemer,
see him victorious over each foe.

Lovely, isn’t it?  You’ve come to church at Christmas to see if you can catch a glimpse of God, and you’ve gone away having sung that the world is in Satan’s power, that God heaps all our faults and punishment on Christ, and that that’s OK, but Jesus does battle with all who oppose God and Jesus wins.

God help us.

There is not a single concept there that should be excised from Christianity.  They all have their place, their biblical precedents, and a mature faith needs to grapple with why the early church chose the language it did to speak of salvation.  But the Christmas Liturgy (or worse, the carol service) is not the time and place for it.   People remember the things they have sung better than the things that were said.  These are the images of God they will carry away, and the better the tune, the more damaging the effect.

None of this is about ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ — changing a word here, and a word there to aim at inclusion.

There are times, there are prayers and hymns in which it is easy to slip in ‘people’ or ‘humankind’ or ‘all’.  And sometimes that is the right thing to do.  But changing a word here and a word there can be worse than singing ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen’ if it suggests that we welcome this hymn and all its theology apart from that one little word.