N.T. Wright in St Andrews
So, as I type, Tom Wright is giving a lecture down in town entitled ‘Can a Scientist believe in the Resurrection?’ This is the first of the Gregory lectures on Science and Religion, an excellent venture which my colleague Prof. Alan Torrance has organised. Me? I’m ferrying children to and from a primary school Christmas disco. I’ve been trying to think of some pious comment about the importance of children in the Kingdom, (or even some sarcastic Baptist comment about bishops), but actually, I’d much rather be listening to Tom. Oh well. Ben Witherington is with us for three lectures next month, and I should be able to make at least two of those.
Read MoreA less than devotional thought that crossed my mind whilst celebrating the Eucharist in a medieval chapel in NE Scotland in December
Say what you like about Baptist architecture; at least we have central heating…
Read MoreSt Samthann
No, I hadn’t heard of her either. We have a weekly college eucharist here in St Mary’s, organised by our student society, and I was celebrating this week. Although it was the last of term, I did not want a Christmas theme, so I glanced at a couple of lectionaries I had handy for readings. One of them noted it was the feast of St Samthann yesterday, although other resources place her today. She was the adopted daughter of an Irish king, and like so many of the female Irish saints was delivered from an arranged marriage by a miracle and then devoted herself to serving God as a nun. Various miracles are recorded in later years, but she was known mainly for her wisdom: she gave guidance and advice to many, including the teacher Dairchellach and Maelruin, the leader of the Ceile De, one of the most significant reform/renewal movements of Irish Christianity. The hagiographies do not mention it, but one other point I noticed: in more than half the stories I found recorded about her, she was laughing (‘giggling’ at one point, although I haven’t checked the Latin!). She died in 739. A woman who taught the leading churchmen of her day, and whose holy wisdom repeatedly broke into laughter. I wish I had heard of her...
Read MoreLearning to preach from Graham Norton
The preacher left me cold, although I could tell the, mostly elderly, people around me were enjoying it. I began to analyse what was going on. He was an able preacher, in a style I recognised, the message carried by good-humoured anecdotes. Then it struck me—it was like listening to Ned Sherrin (a comedian and raconteur who formed his style in the 1960s, although he was active in broadcasting until his death in October). I pursued the thought: the preachers we admired fifteen years ago when I was at college could be compared to Ben Elton doing stand-up—the style was loud, brash, fast, and political, just like ‘motormouth’ had been. So, I have a prescription for good preaching (in Britain) today: be like Graham Norton. This is only half a joke. Preachers need to communicate in a culturally-aware and up-to-date way. If we sound like we’re two generations out of touch, then we reinforce the stereotype that church, and with it Christ, is irrelevant to modern life. What comedians witness to is the sense that cultural models of good communication change very rapidly. (I could write something very pretentious about hypermodernity here, but actually I think this happens from time to time in every culture—look at the shifts in poetic diction from Pope to Byron, or the development of dramatic voice during Shakespeare’s lifetime. If I were better educated, I’m sure I could find some examples from non-English speaking cultures…) Norton, & with him other mainstream current comedians, cultivates a style that is self-deprecating and self-mocking (Sherrin exuded quiet confidence; Elton in-your-face brashness). The humour comes much less from stand-alone jokes as from comic themes that are developed and continuously re-appear later in the discourse; there is an assumption of cultural literacy, which allows allusive references or un-narrated visuals to become a part of the humour. A homiletic style modelled on Graham Norton (or Jonathan Ross, or Ricky Gervais, or Linda Smith, or Sean Lock, who all exhibit the same style, more-or-less) would be relaxed and understated, refusing to take itself seriously, it would build in moments of mockery of its own shortcomings and mistakes. Illustrations would be themes developed early in the sermon and referred to several times in the course of the development. There would be an identification with the hearers by means of an easy assumption of shared cultural reference frames. And in five years time it will be completely out of...
Read MoreBruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (2)
Bruce McCormack’s second lecture, ‘Passibility in Mutability: The Failure of the Older Kenoticism,’ focused on the nineteenth-century kenotic Christologies of Thomasius and Gess, and on Dorner’s critique. The British kenoticists (Forsyth and Mackintosh), and Baillie’s objections, were there, but the treatment was slightly more cursory, I think because Bruce thinks that Herrmann’s critique of metaphysics should have been found decisive, and so no-one should have developed a kenotic Christology after it. ‘Kenotic Christology,’ for those who don’t know, takes its cue from the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2, which affirms that Christ ’emptied himself’ (heauton ekenosen, hence ‘kenosis’ and ‘kenotic’). A kenotic Christology understands what happened at the incarnation in terms of this self-emptying: God became human by giving something up or laying something down. As Bruce showed, the idea is very consistent with certain traditional themes of Lutheran Christology, and was developed at some length by a school of nineteenth-century German Lutherans, headed by the great Thomasius. (It later made its way into Britain, being embraced by, amongst others, P.T. Forsyth and H.R. Mackintosh,until D.M. Baillie’s God was in Christ put an end to it. The thesis of this lecture was, essentially, that the positions of Thomasius, Forsyth, and indeed any other kenoticism in the nineteenth-century pattern, will inevitably collapse into the radical kenoticism of Gess. Very crudely, Gess suggested that in the incarnation the divine Son simply chooses to stop being divine. This is obviously unacceptable, but the question is how you have any kenotic Christology which does not eventually affirm the same thing. If the divine Son voluntarily chooses to give up being omniscient, say, then either omniscience is not an essential property of divinity, in which case God is not omniscient at all (because there are no accidental properties in God; all that He is, He must be), or it is, and so the Son becomes something less than God in the act of self-emptying. Any account of kenotic Christology falls to such logic. First comment on this lecture: the historical narrative was simply stunning. It’s not really my period, but I have taught modern Christology at postgrad level, supervised on Forsyth, & recently examined a doctoral thesis on Dorner, and I do think I know my way around this stuff. Bruce’s knowledge of the detail of the texts, and insight into the grand sweep of the arguments, was nothing less than inspiring. Second comment: as Bruce indicated, the problem repeatedly in the nineteenth century was the assumption that the patristic hypostasis and prosopon could be translated into the English ‘person’ (or German ‘Person’), with all the connotations of those words in a post-Romantic age. Strauss, for instance (a quotation Bruce used): ‘to speak of two natures in one person is to speak of a single self-consciousness, for what else could a single person mean?’ However, it is clear that in the patristic construction of Trinity and Christology such ‘personal’ characteristics as ‘self-consciousness’, if considered at all, were attached to natures not persons—this was, for instance, the whole point of the orthodox solutions to the monoenergist and monothelite controversies. (This is why Barth preferred ‘mode of being’ to ‘person’ for the three hypostases of the Trinity; in post-Romantic terms, all that is ‘personal’ in God is one.) Bruce’s whole lecture was constructed on the suggestion that nineteenth-century German Christology, at least, was endlessly struggling with how to hold together the confession that the human nature is anhypostatic (it does not exist apart from in union with the divine Son) and that there is a genuinely human will alongside the divine will in the incarnate One (‘dithelitism’). I think this is an extraordinarily perceptive reading of the history, but I also think that, with a clearer understanding that the word ‘hypostasis’ does not mean ‘person’ in a Romantic sense, we can cut through the problem very easily. Footnote: anyone know how to enter Greek on a wordpress...
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