The kingdom and social ethics: a typology

Here's a rough-and-ready teaching tool from today's class. We had already done some work on the social vision of Augustine's City of God, so I used that as a basis for outlining four modern approaches to social ethics:

Reflected glory: Imitation, biography and moral formation in early Christianity

I wrote this piece for ABC Religion & Ethics, and am re-posting it here.

While some Christian writers drew freely on ancient Roman ideas of virtue and self-care, the characteristic way early Christians reflected on the moral life was through biographical stories. It was Christianity's immense investment in the idea of incarnation – the belief that God had entered the world in human flesh – that made stories of embodied life so important for the Christian moral imagination. If God's life is definitively made available in the human flesh of Jesus, then ethical principles, universal values and the like will be relatively uninteresting compared to the actual texture of moral life as one finds it in the experience of real human beings.

Nothing is more illustrative of the whole Christian attitude towards life than this preponderance of biography in the early centuries of the faith. In the first Christian biographies, stories like the Passion of Perpetua (c. 203 CE) presented the heroic death of martyrs as moral exemplars. By the time of Pontius' Passion and Life of Cyprian (259 CE), the martyr's whole conduct and way of life had also become material for study and imitation. As well as holding up Cyprian's courageous death as an example to be followed, Pontius praises the entire person of Cyprian as a sort of moral text to be read and assimilated. Cyprian's personal habits, his manner of dress, even his facial expressions are material for contemplation: "So much sanctity and grace shone from his face that he confounded the minds of those who looked upon him. His countenance was grave and joyful, neither a gloomy severity nor excessive affability" (Passion and Life, 6). The reader of the biography is meant to see Cyprian; and moral transformation occurs as this seeing ripens into imitation.

In the fourth century, once Christians could no longer be martyred, biographers turned their attention to a new kind of exemplary life: the “holy man” who achieves self-martyrdom through heroic feats of asceticism. The first and greatest biography of this variety was Athanasius' Life of Antony, written in Egypt around 356 CE. By now the moral dimensions of biography have been expanded to include even the most seemingly insignificant details about the saint's daily life – diet, dress, moods, sleeping habits, manner of speech, and so forth – culminating in a meticulous account of his death. Though Antony's death is admittedly not the death of a martyr, it is nonetheless performed by Antony as something "worthy of imitation" (Life of Antony, 89).

And in the Life of Antony we again find our biographer paying particular attention to his subject's face. The saint's face is a centre of moral and spiritual gravity. It is especially important that the face be contemplated, studied, assimilated into one's own moral and imaginative world. Here is how Athanasius describes the face of Antony: 

"His face, too, had a great and indescribable charm in it. And he had this added gift from the Saviour: if he was present in a gathering of monks and someone who had no previous acquaintance with him wished to see him, as soon as he arrived he would pass over the others and run to Antony as if drawn by his eyes. It was not his stature or figure that made him stand out from the rest, but his settled character and the purity of his soul…. The joy in his soul expressed itself in the cheerfulness of his face, and from the body's behaviour one saw and knew the state of his soul, as scripture says: 'When the heart is glad, the face is radiant'" (Life of Antony, 67). 

 The tradition of Christian iconography – the visual representation of the faces of saints as objects of veneration – has its foundations here, in what might be called a tacit theology of the face. At any rate, in the moral environment of early Christianity, the sanctified face had a peculiar moral power and a peculiar capacity to produce moral responses in others. Athanasius reports that troubled pilgrims would go away healed and helped after merely having laid eyes on Antony.

The impetus towards imitation among early Christians is nowhere more touchingly attested than in a speech delivered by Gregory of Nazianzus at the funeral of his friend Basil of Caesarea in 379 CE. Basil's saintliness was legendary in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and beyond. He had given away his family fortune to help the poor. He distributed food during times of famine. He worked to reform prostitutes and criminals. He founded monastic communities. He created what his contemporaries regarded as one of the wonders of the world: the Basiliad, a "new city" outside the city, a vast and complex community of care and support for the poor, the sick, the dying, the aged, the orphaned, and the outcast. As Gregory says in his funeral speech, "Others had their cooks and rich tables and enchanting refinements of cuisine, and elegant carriages, and soft flowing garments. Basil had his sick" (Oration 43, 63). In Greek culture down to this day, it is not Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus who brings the children their presents, but Saint Basil.

But such was the people's love for this good man that Gregory, in his funeral speech, takes a few moments to castigate what he regards as an unseemly degree of Basil-imitation among the populace of Caesarea: 

 "So great were the virtue and the surpassing reputation of this man that many of his minor traits and even his physical defects have been affected by others as means of gaining esteem. I mention, by way of example, his pallor, his beard, his manner of walking, his pensive and, in general, introspective hesitation in speaking, which, in the badly conceived imitation of many, degenerated into melancholy. Then there were his style of dress, the shape of his bed, and his manner of eating, none of which were to him deserving of attention…. So you might see many Basils as far as external appearance goes…. The incidental things in Basil's life were far more precious and notable than the serious efforts of others" (Oration, 77).

"So you might see many Basils": Gregory's report sounds uncannily like our own celebrity culture, where the hairstyle or brand of sunglasses or tone of voice of our film-star saints sets in motion wave after wave of stylised imitation. Western culture today remains, for good or ill, a culture of imitation. It remains a culture of saints. All that's missing is the virtue of the saints whose lives we imitate. It is, after all, not the clothing someone wears that makes them worthy of imitation, but the virtue – that nobility of spirit, that spark of godlike excellence – which has become enfleshed in them.

At the end of his farewell to Basil, Gregory raises the question whether in sketching the outlines of Basil's life he has provided "a common model of virtue for all time, a salutary example for all the churches and all souls, upon which we may look as on a living law and thus regulate our lives" (Oration, 80). But he concludes that such direct and deliberate imitation is less important than the simple act of seeing Basil, of becoming witnesses to the quality of redeemed life that was visible in him. The task is not primarily to mimic external behaviours, but to look intently into the face of the saint, to contemplate the spiritual life that has become available there: "eyes fixed on him," Gregory says, "as though he were seeing you, and you him, that you may be perfected by the Spirit".

The Melbourne Cup and animal ethics: just a bloody punt

Today is one of the most sacred events in the Australian liturgical year: Melbourne Cup day. Pretty much everyone in the country stops to watch the race and to have a punt. Even school children are encouraged to join in the fun of betting on the horses. Though I don't mean to come across as the cranky old Christian spoil-sport, I wrote a piece for the ABC site today, drawing on Karl Barth's animal ethics – Melbourne Cup: the race that tramples creation: "The Melbourne Cup is the climax of a cruel and bloody practice, exhibiting what Karl Barth called our 'astonishing indifference and thoughtlessness' regarding animals."

As for the question of Australia's pathological predilection for gambling, here's a great video with a couple of excellent satirical TV ads. The second ad is especially good – I think this pretty much says it all:

On joy: twelve theses

A sequel to the theses on sadness.

1. As icons are painted on gold, so the lives of saints are written on a background of light.

2. Evelyn Underhill knew a saintly man, Father Wainwright. ‘He was an indifferent – and in later years an inarticulate – preacher; people came to his sermons, not so much to listen as to look at his face.’

3. Why are the faces of holy people so important, not only in iconography but also in Christian experience and memory? Joy is the physical surfacing of the light of God. As the moon reflects the sun, so joy shines in the holy face.

4. Each thing shines with its own particularity, the irreducible strangeness of its difference. Chesterton speaks of ‘the startling wetness of water’, ‘the fieriness of fire’, ‘the unutterable muddiness of mud’. Joy is the vision of each thing’s shining, an awareness of the unbearably bright difference of every other thing.

5. A painting summons us to relish its lines and colours; a tree invites us to marvel at its roots and leafy shadows; the body of a lover beckons us to draw delight from its hidden wells; young children demand that we face them while they play, so that the miracle of their difference will not be without witnesses. Left to ourselves we shrink inwards, anaesthetised by a drowsy solipsism. Joy is waking to reality; joy is salvation from the self. It is our startled response to the call of another.

6. Joy is itinerant and can be visited in many places, but its regular venue is friendship. Friendship is the love of difference. The face of the friend is the mirror in which the joy of one's own difference shines.

7. The subjective precondition for joy is not earnestness or sentimentality (much less a posture of generic ‘openness’), but attention. Attention is the discipline of active passivity, an intense concentration on what is there. It is what Simone Weil calls ‘waiting’: ‘We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them [attendus].’ This is why Paul speaks of joy not as aesthetics but as ethics. Writing to the Philippians in the chains of Christ, he subjects them to a moral imperative: ‘Rejoice!’

8. Raw materials for a Christian ethics of joy: the distance of prayer; the patience of reading; the veneration of the meal; the delight of friendship; the tenderness of eros; the love of childhood; the obedience of learning; the speed of imagining; the superfluity of art; and the omneity of language.

9. Joy is most intimately related not to happiness but to sorrow, not to fullness but to the void of non-being. Joy is ontological vulnerability, a leap across the abyss of difference. Sorrow is a small hole in the flute through which joy breathes its tune.

10. Happiness is analogous to joy as Facebook is analogous to friendship, or as a brothel is analogous to marriage. Happiness is the gratification of desire. Joy does not fulfil desire but exceeds it so majestically as to obliterate it. Joy is ascesis, the criticism of desire. The criticism of desire is also desire’s purgation and renovation. Joy is the baptism of desire, its drowning and rising again. The fullness of joy is an ache of absence. ‘Our best havings are wantings’ (C. S. Lewis).

11. As that which breaks desire and denies all gratification, joy finds itself in a strange alliance with the tragic.

12. Joy resists articulation and control. It is always vanishing, always beckoning, inconsolable union of memory and hope. It cannot be grasped since its nature is to undo all grasping. What would it mean to possess joy fully, to hold it fast so that it did not vanish away? That would be resurrection: the shining of eternity in a body of death.

On smiling and sadness: twelve theses

1. The precursor of the human smile was the caveman’s savage grimace (Angus Trumble, A Brief History of the Smile, p. 3). The invention of dentistry is the main difference between this threatening grimace and the polite social convention of the modern smile.

2. In the Protestant West today, smiling has become a moral imperative. The smile is regarded as the objective externalisation of a well ordered life. Sadness is moral failure.

3. The motif of late-capitalist society is the stylisation of happiness, the cultivation of lifestyles from which every trace of sadness has been expunged. Peter Berger identified ‘the Protestant smile’ as part of Protestantism’s cultural heritage in the West. In a Catholic country like France, it is still considered crass to smile too often, or at strangers. Evangelical churchliness is the ritualisation of bare-toothed crassness. Our cultural obsession with health, happiness, and positive thinking is a secularisation of the evangelical church service.

4. The cultural triumph of the smile leaves behind a trail of casualties. Where evangelical churches theologise happiness and ritualise the smile, sad believers are spiritually ostracised. Sadness is the scarlet letter of the contemporary church, embroidered proof of a person's spiritual failure.

5. When the church’s theological rejection of sadness was secularised, sadness became a pathology requiring medical intervention. The medicalisation of sadness is the final cultural triumph of the Protestant smile. If Luther or Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky had lived today, we would have given them Prozac and schooled them in positive thinking. They would have grinned abortively – and written nothing. The truth of sadness is the womb of thought.

6. Somehow the appellation ‘man of sorrows’ attached itself to the church’s memory of Jesus. The sinless humanity of the Son of God was manifest not in happiness or success but in a life of sadness and affliction. Erasing sadness from our culture, we also erase Christ.

7. I know a little boy whose mother had to go away for a few days. When she came home, he cried and told her he had missed her. Touched by his infant sadness, the mother said, ‘It’s nice to be missed’ – and he replied, ‘It’s not nice to miss.’ It is nice to be missed because we learn what love means in the sadness of another. The face that always smiles is the face of a stranger. Love is written on the face of sadness.

8. I know a fellow who was interviewed for ordination in an American denomination. Asked to describe his hope for the church’s future, his eyes filled with tears and he admitted, ‘I don’t know if I have any hope for the church.’ Perplexed by this response, his ecclesiastical interviewers furrowed their brows, scribbled little notes and question-marks, conferred gravely about his fitness for ministry – though they ought to have asked for his prayers, or poured oil on his head, or sat at his feet and made him their bishop.

9. Where sadness is expunged from a culture, the cry for justice falls silent. Johnny Cash carried darkness on his back, refusing to wear bright clothes as long as the world is unredeemed. Why do we dress our priests in black? Are they not in perpetual mourning for a world that is passing away? Is not Christian joy carried out in the shadow of this sadness? In a culture of happiness, it is all the more necessary that our priests continue to wear black, refusing the cheap comfort of bright vestments and the empty promise of the rainbow.

10. At the turn of the millennium, J. G. Ballard wondered how the next generation would perceive the 20th century: ‘My grandchildren are all under the age of four, the first generation who will have no memories of the present century, and are likely to be appalled when they learn what was allowed to take place. For them, our debased entertainment culture and package-tour hedonism will be inextricably linked to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, though we would never make the connection.’ How do we explain the fact that Auschwitz and Hiroshima are immediately succeeded by the cult of happiness and the triumph of the smile? How can it be that the worst century was also the happiest? Our children will interpret our happiness as blindness and self-forgetfulness. We have drugged ourselves against history; sadness is truthful memory.

11.Why are clowns so frightening? Their demonic aura comes from the fact that they never stop smiling. Hell is the country of clowns, where tormented strangers smile at one another compulsively and forever. The devil is the name we give to the Cheshire Cat that is always vanishing just beneath the surface of our world, leaving everywhere sinister traces of a cosmic painted grin. This grin is the secret of history.

12. The Bible promises the end of history and the end of sadness: ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away’ (Rev 21:4). This can be understood as eschatological promise only on the presumption that history is catastrophe, a vale of tears. Sadness is overcome through cosmic redemption. A culture without sadness is a culture without hope. The cure for sadness is God.

Gelato ethics, part 3

This post follows Part 1 and Part 2

Here is Angelo Papini, padding lightly across the room at dawn so as not to wake his sleeping wife. Here he is shaving over the little chipped sink and bending to wash his face. His clothes are neatly pressed and hanging on the old brass hook on the bathroom door. He dries his hands on the towel and walks down the hall to the kitchen and puts the coffee on the stove. Still in his slippers, he goes outside to get the morning paper from the porch. He stands a moment while the frosty Melbourne air stings his face and he breathes deep and looks at the sky. Clusters of damp pistachio-grey clouds crowd around the edges of the day. It will be damp again and sunless, Angelo Papini sees: not a good day for selling gelato.

In the life of Angelo Papini there are three great loves: his daughter Julia, his gelato shop, and an old red faded delta kite. Seven days he works the little shop, rising at dawn to make his gelato and closing the doors long after dark. Sometimes after closing on Sunday afternoons, if the weather is right he drives two miles to Royal Park and stands on the grassy hill with his kite glancing from side to side in the sunlight and the long white tails fluttering breathlessly in the wind.

Angelo Papini returns to the kitchen with his paper. He pours the coffee and makes a thick slice of toast. He spreads the toast with his wife’s grapefruit jam and sits at the little round table with his breakfast and his paper. He notices the dirty plates and coffee cups on the kitchen bench. Julia must have been up late last night. Sometimes she stays up reading and writing. He wishes she would not work so late.

Julia is the cleverest person Angelo Papini has ever known. She is doing a PhD. She will be a doctor, a professor, she will give lectures and write books and have her own office in the university. Her name will be on the door, just think of it! Angelo Papini never finished high school, nor did any of his brothers. He never so much as dreamt that he would ever meet a person with a PhD. But Julia is startling, bright, inexplicable. She is writing a thesis, hundreds of pages, about a famous English philosopher named Isaiah Berlin.

After breakfast he reads the paper a little longer and shines his shoes. You can tell a lot about a man by his shoes, Angelo Papini has always thought so, and in twenty-six years he has never worked a day at the gelateria with dirty shoes. When they came here in 1966 his father did not have two pennies to rub together. He went out every day to look for work and came back every night looking stooped and sad. But he was never seen on the streets of Melbourne with scuffed shoes, he shined them every morning after breakfast; young Angelo Papini, the oldest son, saw all this.

Julia is finding it hard to write her thesis. At first when she talked about Isaiah Berlin her eyes would shine, big and bright like the high white windows in St Francis’ Church during a summer morning Mass. The talking made her light and beautiful, a kite dancing in sunlight: this is why Angelo Papini loves his daughter’s studies. Lately though she has stopped talking about Isaiah Berlin. She broods and locks herself away in her room. She has started smoking, though it made her mother cry. Angelo Papini used to ask about the writing – How is the writing? – and she always said it is going good, really good. One day he saw that this was a lie, so now he never asks her, never says a word about Isaiah Berlin. It must be hard to write, he can see that.

Angelo Papini pads back to the bathroom in his slippers. He dresses in his pressed clothes and combs back his hair. In the bedroom it is still dark. He takes the keys and wallet from his bedside drawer. At the back of the drawer, tucked down and safely hidden from sight, is a grey library book. The book is Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin. Apart from the morning paper, Angelo Papini has never been much of a reader.

With his wallet and keys, he walks back to the kitchen and pours a glass of orange juice. When Julia was young, she would come with him on Sundays and they would eat gelato in the park and fly the kite together. He drinks the orange juice standing in the kitchen.

A year ago, one Thursday afternoon on his way back from the markets, he drove to the library and asked to borrow a book by Isaiah Berlin. Late at night when everyone was sleeping, he propped his pillow up and read The Hedgehog and the Fox by the dim glow of the bedside lamp. He read a page or two at a time; he had to borrow the book six times in a row. He could not comprehend The Hedgehog and the Fox, and when he had finished it he borrowed Four Essays on Liberty. As long as he lives, Angelo Papini will never tell another person that he has read Isaiah Berlin.

Early yesterday morning, as he prepared the day's gelati, he found himself thinking about Isaiah Berlin. He added the sugar and thought: Does this mean we are free to go it alone, to make whatever we want of our lives? He mixed in the cream and thought: Does a person have such power over his life? He added the coffee and thought: Can a kite be free if no one holds the line? With a groan of dismay, Angelo Papini saw that he had ruined the whole batch of caffè gelato. He had not been concentrating. He chided himself. Isaiah Berlin can be left to brighter people, people like Julia: his job is to make gelato.

He sits at the small round table and pulls on his socks and shoes. He looks at his watch. There are still ten minutes before he has to leave. He takes the dishes to the sink and rinses them. Glancing towards Julia’s room, he is surprised to see her bedroom light on. She is not usually up early. He puts the coffee on again and walks to her room.

When Julia graduated from her Honours year, Angelo Papini was the proudest of all the fathers at Melbourne University. He took the whole family to dinner – all Julia’s uncles and aunts and cousins – and boasted loudly, bellowing happiness, the praises of his genius daughter. And they have invited her to do a PhD! What a life she will have! She will be a doctor, a professor! My daughter! Silently later that night, lying beside his sleeping wife, Angelo Papini wept – with pride, yes, but also something else, shapeless and big and desolate. He did not know how to name this feeling even to himself. He would think about it only one other time in his life, on that clean bright summer morning four years from now when, like a kite string in strong wind, the secret knot inside his chest pulled suddenly tight, and the steel gelato container clattered across the floor and he lay for several seconds staring at the ceiling in the stark unblinking light. During those last seconds, Angelo Papini would think about three things: the morning many years before when his wife’s neck smelled of fresh baked bread as they made love in their little kitchen; the day Julia had flown her first kite, ribbons of chestnut hair streaming behind her as she skipped and laughed and ran beneath the sun; and the way she had looked at him, seeing him stranded there amidst so great a crowd, the night she graduated.

He knocks gently at Julia’s door. She opens the door. She is still in her clothes from the night before. Her eyes are shot and tired, the colour of blood orange. The wild knot of her hair has collapsed and straggles down around her face. The bedroom floor is strewn with the wreckage of her studies, books and notes and papers and unknown crumpled things. The air is thick and stale with cigarette smoke. For a moment when she sees him she looks distant, confused. Then she rubs her eyes and says, I've been writing.

He kisses his daughter and asks if she wants coffee. She follows him out to the kitchen. Angelo Papini pours two cups of strong black coffee. They sit and drink at the little kitchen table. She tells him about Isaiah Berlin.

Choosing ice cream: the gelato girl responds

This is the gelato girl's response to my post on The Ethics of Ice Cream

So I’m just getting to the end of my shift – I don’t mean the bookstore, that’s weekends: on Thursday I help out at dad’s shop. I’m nearly finished for the night, and this guy walks in, all loud and scruffy, waving his arms and talking pell-mell with some other guy, on and on and on, while I’m standing there smiling like a dumbass waiting for them to order.

Twenty minutes till I’m out of here. I hope dad arrives early, I’m dying for a smoke. Typical Thursday: splitting headache, feet are killing me, fingers puffy and numb from six hours scooping gelato. I'm meeting my supervisor in the morning. Starting to panic. She thinks I’m losing my grip on the thesis – she doesn’t say it, but I can tell she thinks it.

Finally this guy stops talking and looks my way – he could really use a haircut; reminds me of one of my dying tomato plants at home, all dry and weedy – so I ask if he’d like to try a sample. Oh yes, he says. You should see him then: hands behind his back, leaning over, staring wide-eyed like he’s never laid eyes on a tub of ice cream in his life.

My supervisor knows I've been stalling, finding ways to avoid her. I cancelled our appointment twice in a row, told her I’m writing – always writing, yes yes, it’s really coming together – but of course I've got nothing, niente, not a single word.

Dad would flip if he found out. He’d throw his arms out like Jesus Christ Almighty and bellow “The fees!” while mum would be crying before you can say P-h-D, moaning “Every cent your father gave you – and this is how you repay us!” In dad’s eyes, every bloody vat of gelato is a down payment on my glorious future. Putting me through uni, building my career one sticky scoop at a time. Not that you can get much of a career out of a philosophy PhD. “The Ontology of Political Liberty in Isaiah Berlin.” I’ll probably still be working here – they can pin the degree up on the wall beside the coffee machine.

I can't believe this guy, he’s still examining the flavours one by one. If he had a magnifying glass, he’d look like Sherlock Holmes at the scene of a crime. God I really need a smoke. I tell him the melon is great, just to hurry him up. I offer him a sample and he says “Yes please, I’ll try the melon and the bacio.” So I tell him he’s only allowed one sample – and now he goes all serious on me, starts explaining that he can never make up his mind about anything unless he has at least two options. Jeez, get a life. I give him a nice smile, try to calm him down. I tell him I’m sure he’ll like the melon, freshly made this morning. He seems confused, mumbles something about choice, but I give him the taste.

After our last cancelled appointment, she got all cold and serious. She wants to see what I’ve written this year. “I want to see it, Julia,” she said all stiff and Sydney-like, her lips as thin and pale as lemon sorbet. I promised I’d give her the whole chapter – you know, the one I’ve been talking about all year, on Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. So here I am, Thursday night, smiling and handing out gelato and hanging for a smoke and so sick with worry that I have to pray I won’t throw up all over the rum and raisin.

Apparently Mr Tomato Plant doesn’t like the sample, now he’s begging for another one. Honestly, some people have no self-respect. He tells me it’s impossible to make a proper choice unless he has more options. I can’t give out any more samples, but I tell him I think he'll like the chocolate. Everyone likes chocolate. But no, it’s not good enough for him. I’m looking at the clock wondering when I can get the hell out of here, and he launches (I'm not making this up) into this lecture, oh so patient and superior, explaining why there’s some kind of logical inconsistency in giving out only one sample blah blah blah. Who is this guy anyway? Probably a washed-out school teacher. Does he even have any money, I’m starting to doubt it, or does he just want to stand here all night arguing about samples?

I think I’ll need a good strong coffee before I leave. If I start writing as soon as I get home, who knows, I might have something by morning. A whole chapter by tomorrow morning? Who am I kidding. What am I going to do. What am I going to tell her? I mean it’s not as if I’ve been slack. All I ever do is read read read, tucked away in the library, burying my bedroom in index cards and articles and sticky notes. My life's a merry-go-round of positive and negative liberty, individual and collective interests, value pluralism and conflicting values, self-determination and necessary conditions of non-interference...

I can’t believe this guy: he must have seen I wasn’t paying any attention to the lecture, so now he’s switched tactics. Big puppy dog eyes, little melancholy smile. Can you believe he’s actually trying to flirt with me now? For a taste of gelato? Dio caro, I feel like giving it to him just to get rid of him. How can I type tonight with these swollen fingers? “I’m sorry, I really can’t give you another sample – what if we did it for everyone?” They'll never pay off my fees if we start giving gelato away for free. I don’t even know what the chapter’s meant to be about anyway. I could start by saying that Berlin’s work is misunderstood whenever negative liberty is isolated from his analysis of values, especially situations of conflict between incommensurable values. That would be something – it would be a start. Finally! He’s gone all sour and sulky, but he’s finally chosen a flavour: wasn’t so hard now, was it. I scoop up the caffè gelato for him. Maybe two strong coffees will help get me started, after oh God a smoke. He gives me five dollars. I could start by saying that Berlin’s analysis is very pertinent today, when the idea of freedom is more and more viewed through the prism of consumer choice. The caffè flavour’s no good today – dad spoiled the batch, but there was no time to start again – but I'm not breathing a word, gimme a break it’s only gelato. He takes the cup and spoon. Oh I know, I’ll start the chapter with Quentin Skinner’s reading of the Two Concepts, that'll be a good opening. I hand him fifty cents change. Skinner, then Hayek, then right into Berlin. He turns to go, but then surprises me with a short, shy smile, almost as though – as though he’s grateful to have just one flavour instead of all the samples. He holds my eye a moment, then walks out in the night with his cup of bad gelato.

At last dad arrives to close the shop. I stand out front and smoke a cigarette. Dad brings me coffee in a paper cup, black and strong the way I like it. There's a cold wind in the street. I button my coat. It won’t be morning for another twelve hours.

The ethics of ice cream

Recently a good friend and I spent a few days together in Melbourne. One afternoon we were rambling around the city's wonderful Italian precinct, when we passed a little gelato bar. The gelati, bright and varied like so many flowers in a brilliant bouquet, glistened invitingly from behind the huge glass display. It was the wrong time of day for ice cream. The dusky Melbourne chill had started to gather, and we were already pulling our coats tight against the cold – but we found ourselves drawn irresistibly into the cheery little shop with its big bright display.

Pistacchio, lemon, chocolate orange, caffè, caramelised fig, rum raisin, green apple, bacio, blood orange... I made a quick provisional review of the range of colours and flavours, and then, determined not to waste another moment, I resolved to begin the all-important business of flavour sampling. "I'd like to try the melon and the dark chocolate," I said to the girl behind the counter, who had been waiting with benign attentiveness.

"No, I'm sorry," she replied at once. "Only one sample per customer." She pointed with tight-lipped authority to a sign on the counter that confirmed this ominous regulation, the capital letters printed in a stark juridical font.

"One sample?" I said, a little unsettled. "But how can I tell which flavour I want, if I only get one sample?"

"I'm sorry, one sample per customer."

"But don't you see?" I said, smiling generously. "Unless I try two flavours, how can I choose the one I prefer?"

She shrugged pleasantly, peering down at me like a judge from the bench, all kindliness and good intentions, but ultimately powerless before those ineluctable proceedings. "I'm really sorry, but nobody's allowed more than one sample. It's the rule."

As everybody knows, tasting different flavours is one of the chief joys of visiting a gelateria. But the samples do not merely serve an aesthetic purpose, they also have an important psychological benefit: the comparison of flavours allows you to make a final decision free of the usual burden of Menu Anxiety (together with the threatening subsequent possibility of Menu Regret). On this particular occasion, however, things were becoming difficult. Under these circumstances, the choice of a sample was itself rapidly descending into all the consternation of an actual decision.

Mustering all my inner resources, I told her I would try the melon. She handed me the tiny plastic spoon with its reluctant globule of pale green ice cream. Nervously, but hopefully, I tasted it.

And didn't like it.

Trying hard to conceal my growing sense of alarm, I said to the girl, "I'm afraid I don't like the melon. What do I do now?"

She smiled sympathetically, all innocence, and raised her eyebrows as though waiting for me to place my order. "Could I perhaps try just one more flavour?" I said feebly. "Don't you see that I can't choose any flavour if all I've tasted is something I don't like?"

"One sample per customer."

Stirred by her apparent misunderstanding, I looked at her passionately, full in the face, appealing to her not so much as the gelato girl but as a fellow human being. "But don't you see," I said warmly, "it makes no sense to provide one sample! It's just the same as providing no samples at all! I'm sure I would love many of these flavours – but at the moment, all I know is that I don't like the melon. Really, if you could just let me try one more, just the caramelised fig..."

Half smiling, she said, "Honestly, I'd love to let you try another flavour" – but then furrowed her brow and continued – "but if I let you have one more sample, I'd have to let everyone do it." Her voice rose triumphantly as she tightened the knot of this invincible Kantian logic, this gelatogorical imperative.

Believe me, I know better than to try to argue with a Kantian; I thanked her and ordered two scoops of caffè ice cream. I have no complaint at all about the caffè. (Admittedly it was not altogether what I had in mind, but that is beside the point – yes, I admit it, the cream was a little too heavy, the flavour a little too sweet; to be perfectly honest there was even a hint of coarseness, which I deplore in gelato.) But as my friend and I made our way down the darkening street, talking happily with plastic spoons in hand, I imagined my gelato girl returning dutifully to her work, quietly satisfied that once again the law had been upheld – not merely the law of ice cream, but that eternal law by which all things in heaven and on earth are held in balance and by which the threatening tides of chaos are kept at bay.

"Enjoy your caffè ice cream," I imagined her telling me. "It is for your own good. It is for the good of all creation."

See also the gelato girl's response.

Milbank, Williams, Hauerwas, Levine...

Lots of great stuff over at the new ABC Religion and Ethics site:

• John Milbank on democracy and tyranny
• Rowan Williams on the politics of human dignity
• Amy-Jill Levine on un-Christian responses to the Middle East
• Stanley Hauerwas on the death of America's god
• Abdullah Saeed on Islamic banking without interest (once upon a time, Christians also had a few reservations about usury...)
• Michael Novak on the balance between politics and economics
• Scott Stephens on why we don't need a Christian lobby

Sarah Coakley on the church's sex crisis

The new ABC Religion and Ethics site features a three-part series by Sarah Coakley on the current sex crises in the Catholic and Anglican churches: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. This sketches an argument that Coakley develops fully in her forthcoming book, The New Asceticism (T&T Clark 2011).

Call for contributors: ABC religion and ethics

This month, the ABC will be launching its new Religion and Ethics online portal, headed up by our friend Scott Stephens. Not only will this site provide a single online destination for religion news and current affairs from around the world, it will host perhaps the most significant gathering of theologians, academics, specialists and critics on the web today. Regular contributors to the site include Stanley Hauerwas, Bill Cavanaugh, Michael Novak, Paul Griffiths, Slavoj Zizek, Tariq Ramadan, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Abdullah Saeed, and many others to be announced in due course.

The portal will also host op-eds and unsolicited contributions from theologians, academics and specialists from Australia and around the world, thus making original pieces accessible to the ABC’s extraordinarily large audience. You are invited to submit pieces on theology, religions, and their intersections with culture, literature, politics and economics to the editor for review and publication. Pieces should be around 800-1200 words in length.

There are a number of up-coming features on which Scott would love to receive original contributions, such as:

• The domestication of Jesus in Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and Peter Verhoeven’s Jesus of Nazareth
• Why blasphemy matters
• Stanley Hauerwas’s memoirs, Hannah’s Child, and the relationship of biography and friendship to the practice of theology and the formation of virtue
• Bill Cavanaugh’s important new book, The Myth of Religious Violence
• Luke Bretherton’s extraordinary proposal in Christianity and Contemporary Politics
• The moral problem of state subsidies given to religious/charitable institutions
• Tariq Ramadan’s Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, and the ongoing question of theology’s integrity apropos the conceits of liberal democracy
• Environmentalism, tokenism, and the production of conservationist virtues.

If you'd like to contribute to this exciting new venture, just get in touch with Scott Stephens.

Readings in theological ethics?

Next semester I'll be teaching an undergraduate class in theological ethics. So I'd welcome your thoughts about good texts in this area.

At the moment, I'm thinking of using Richard Hays's The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) as the tutorial text. (My preferred approach is to assign a single book for the tutorial discussions; then the students also have a range of additional short readings on each weekly topic.) One of the advantages of Hays's book is that it models the whole process whereby ethical thinking springs from an immersion in the moral world of the New Testament – otherwise, class discussions could easily degenerate into free-floating expressions of opinion and sentiment.

I'm also very impressed with the new Blackwell introduction by Samuel Wells and Ben Quash, Introducing Christian Ethics (2010). Their typology of ethics (universal, subversive, ecclesial) is a remarkably elegant heuristic device, and the book's structure is perfectly geared towards this kind of undergraduate class. But at the moment, I'm just thinking of introducing some of this material in the lectures, rather than assigning the book for tutorials – I'm always worried that these ready-made textbooks are too smooth and too "objective" for class discussions. I'd prefer to get students discussing a first-rate work of theology: something that's completely partisan, committed, theologically engaged. (For this reason, I also love the Hauerwas/Wells Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics – an absurdly partisan introduction!)

So anyway, I've started developing a list of various books and essays to use for shorter readings – I'd love to hear your own suggestions. And if anyone out there has used Richard Hays in an ethics class, I'd love to know if it worked well, or if you have alternative suggestions for class discussions.

Execution: a Good Friday sermon

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

It was fifty years ago, a day in May in 1960 (May 2, to be exact) – and I’ll never forget it. I was eleven, in the sixth grade, and we were sitting in Mrs. Turner’s class. And we were all watching the clock. For the end of the lesson, or lunch-break, or the final bell of the day? No, for the striking of the hour. Because when the hour struck, some pellets containing lethal gas would drop into the chamber in which a condemned man sat strapped to a chair in San Quentin Prison on the other side of the country, and in a few minutes Caryl Chessman would be dead.

The case was a cause célèbre. Chessman was a twenty-seven year-old parolee who had spent the better part of his adult life in and out of prison, when, in 1948, he was arrested in Los Angeles, allegedly as the notorious Red-Light Bandit. The Bandit would approach women parked in isolated places, flash a red light resembling one used by the police, rob them, and then, after forcing them to another location, rape them. Chessman signed a confession – which, however, he later retracted, claiming police brutality – but the confession, along with eye witness testimony, led to Chessman’s conviction on seventeen counts, including kidnapping. Under California’s “Little Lindbergh” Law, kidnapping was a capital crime. The jury did not recommend the mercy of a life sentence.

Thus began a twelve-year struggle for Chessman to escape the gas chamber. Chessman himself wrote four books in his defence, which were translated into several languages. Pleas on his behalf came in from around the world, and from some very famous people: Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Frost, Pablo Cassals, Aldous Huxley, even Billy Graham. There were eight stays of execution. The Governor of California Edmund Brown was himself an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, but he said that the law had tied his hands. The execution finally went ahead.

And as the seconds ticked by on the clock that we all watched in Mrs. Turner’s class, I wondered what it must be like. The last night, the final meal, the ultimate good-byes, the preparations, the walk to the gas chamber – step, step, step – the sitting-down, the strapping-in, the waiting-for the pellets to fall and release their fatal fumes – stay calm, breathe easy, die with dignity – but then the poison pounds your lungs, you feel the fire, you gasp and choke, and mercifully you finally lose consciousness... At least that’s the way I pictured it.

Unable to produce a reasoned argument, but viscerally convinced of the sheer barbarity of what I had just mentally witnessed, at that moment, at the age of eleven, I became an arch opponent of capital punishment.

And yet, I confess, I have also always been fascinated by the perverse genius that imagines, creates, and deploys the engines of execution – and by these deadly engines themselves. I remember coming across a picture of a guillotine in The World Book encyclopaedia that my parents had just bought me – such an exquisitely ghoulish machine. And beside it a picture of the execution of Louis XVI, with the executioner waving the severed head before the tumultuous Parisian crowd. I remember the first time I saw the classic film The Oxbow Incident, starring Henry Fonda, with its dramatic conclusion, a lynching, in a clearing, at an oak tree, the rope thrown over the branch, the innocent yet condemned man sitting on a horse, and then hanging, kicking. And I remember coming across my first proper gallows in an old photograph of the execution of those who plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And then a photograph of “Old Sparky”, the electric chair in the New York Prison Sing-Sing. And that famous footage of the summary shooting, caught at the moment of the pistol-fire, of a Viet Cong suspect by a South Vietnamese officer. And, latterly, both clinical and eyewitness accounts of death by lethal injection. And on, and on, right up, to Michael Moore’s brilliant film Fahrenheit 9/11, where I saw my first public beheading-by-sword in a Saudi Arabian sports stadium of all places, “Dispatch of the Day”. And then the freak-show of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. And I would – do – always think what does the condemned man experience approaching his execution – calm resignation, petrifying fear, total despair? And the death itself – what does it feel like, the slice of the blade, the snap of the neck, the killer chemicals kicking in? And the onlookers – what on earth are they doing there? Are they not a more savage spectacle than the execution itself?

And then I become a Christian and – behold – I am introduced to the most exquisite method of execution ever devised by the perverse and sadistic mind of man: crucifixion. Invented by the ancient Persians, discovered and brought back to the Mediterranean world by Alexander the Great, passed on to the Carthaginians, and finally picked up by the Romans, who innovated, modified, and perfected the form. If you want to see the whole grizzly process done in lurid colour and with all the latest digital technology, I would refer you to Mel Gibson’s abattoir of a film The Passion of the Christ.

But the whole point of crucifixion is not just to kill, and certainly, in contrast to the “progress” of more modern forms of execution, not to kill quickly: the whole point is the torture, relentless, prolonged torture, exploring new vistas of pain, extracting every drop of blood, and supplementing the agony with degradation and humiliation: tied to a post, scourging by flagellum, a whip of several heavy leather thongs with two small balls of lead attached near the ends, that break the skin, attack the tissue, and finally lead to massive arterial bleeding; the crown of thorns, not tiny pricks but massive spikes, forced into the scalp, one of the most vascular areas of the body; the exhausting final journey from prison courtyard to the place aptly called The Skull, bearing the cross-piece known as the patibulum, strapped to the shoulders, weighing in at over a hundred pounds, the local folk shouting abuse along the via dolorosa; and then at the site of execution, the wrought-iron nails, stakes, two driven not into the palms but the wrists, and, feet pressed together, another driven through the arch of each; and then the raising of the cross; and then, amidst searing heat, buzzing flies, mocking soldiers, and jeering crowds, the long, slow torment of dying – nail against nerve and bone, body fixed but contorted, cramp and paralysis, the struggle for breath, the final, doleful cry – death by exhaustion and asphyxiation.

Interestingly, however, quite unlike Gibson, Mark shows little interest in the physical agony of Jesus. Nor does the second evangelist share my morbid fascination with the psychology of execution. And, of course, his passion narrative is hardly a protest against capital punishment itself. No, Mark’s interest lies neither in the agony of the violence nor in the purveying of propaganda, but in the awful enigma of the cry of dereliction – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34) – from the one who had always called God Abba, Father.

Throughout the 15th chapter of the gospel there are many allusions to Psalm 22, which begins with a pious poet crying out to God in pain, but ends with an exclamation of praise. And no doubt you have heard preachers claiming that it is in this context that we must understand Christ’s cry of dereliction: Jesus cannot really have felt abandoned by God, and a fortiori, he cannot really have been abandoned by God, rather he was citing the psalmist to cheer himself up, to bolster his confidence in a happy ending.

But, no! This is special pleading, as even Calvin recognised. Indeed it was Calvin’s deep insight into the cry of dereliction that it represents nothing less than Christ’s decent into hell itself, the place of ultimate, hopeless godlessness. Jesus does feel godforsaken, because indeed he is godforsaken. And why? Because of his complete identification and solidarity with those who themselves have forsaken God, i.e. with the godless, i.e. with his enemies and executioners. That is, Christ’s godforsakenness and human godlessness are but two sides of the same coin, as Jesus hangs in the place where the godless should be and willingly accepts godforsakenness as God’s just judgement on sin on our behalf. In other words, the utter depths of Christ’s godforsakenness are but the flipside of the sublime depths of his love for the godless, for the world, for the executed and for the executioner, for you and me. The Father loves us so much that he goes to this extreme: let my only Son die and go to hell, let a gulf, a chasm, an abyss open up in our relationship, let death itself be taken into my very being, into the very being of God.

But – to conclude – so what? The Son is dead. The Father grieves. The Spirit, the bond of their love, is broken. For us? For everyone? Do we really believe that? Perhaps we should just stick to a grim fascination with the execution, this execution of all executions, one that makes the gassing of Chessman, and the guillotining, hanging, electrocuting, shooting, injecting of countless other condemned people, guilty and innocent, seem like just another day at the office. And, of course, even a deicide has not stopped, for most of the world, the baleful work of business as usual.

So let’s stop there. Here endeth the sermon. But one thing. Humour me with a thought-experiment. For today ponder this execution in the light of all executions – and ponder all executions in the light of this execution. (And remember, Jesus was guilty as charged – sedition – and got what he deserved.) See what it does for you, see what it means to you, see if it may even change you, what you think about capital punishment, what you think about God and salvation. In any case, let Easter be not yet.

John Milbank on the economic crisis

In December, Luke Bretherton organised a conference on the church's response to the economic recession. This is part of a wider – and much needed – initiative, to mobilise the churches in an anti-usury campaign. (Incidentally, since entire Christian denominations are driven by a commitment to usury, we can hardly become a credible witness until we get our own house in order. Whether the churches worship God or Mammon is still very much an open question.)

At the conference, John Milbank's address was entitled "The Moral Market is a Freer Market". It's a very lucid analysis of the economic crisis – especially the "crisis of abstraction" – and of the way Christian theology can shape economic thinking. Here's an excerpt:

"The point about talking about a culture of trust is not some kind of moralistic wishful thinking; the point about a culture of trust is actually that an entrepreneurial culture needs trust. Even if you believe in the free market, it turns out that the model of individualist utilitarianism that goes all the way back to Adam Smith is actually the wrong model. Itʼs the wrong model for the free market itself because if you have endless checking up on people, if you donʼt have trust, that actually inhibits initiative, risk and creativity. This is why the Italian economist Stefanos Zamagni is saying we need to return to the principles of Italian political economy, not Scottish political economy, because the Italian political economists from the 18th century onwards saw sympathy as part of contract itself, not as standing outside contract.

"In the end Adam Smith subordinates sympathy to self-interest and he says that if your butcherʼs selling you meat heʼs not doing it out of the goodness of his heart. But this is untrue. In fact people do enter into economic relationships at the local level for social reasons, for personal reasons, and Zamagni argues in a really powerful way that the more we have relatively informal contracts between people, the more itʼs based on trust, the less you need the intervention of state law on the one hand, or of inner control by firms on the other hand. So this is a different way of thinking about the free market. The market would actually be freer if it was a moral market....

One of our legacies in the West is the division between self-interest on the one hand and altruism on the other. But altruism is not a Christian term. It was invented by the atheist Auguste Comte. Charity is always reciprocal, charity is never a one-way gift, itʼs always a matter of give and take. If it has sometimes to be a one-way gift thatʼs in exceptional circumstance, because the point of charity is mutual bonding."

You can download the full transcript of Milbank's address from the Faith and Public Policy Forum.

Obama and Afghanistan: the poverty of Niebuhrian ethics

by Kim Fabricius (originally printed in this month's Reform magazine, as a response to Ron Buford)

Jesus said, “Love your Niebuhr.” Or so Ron Buford would have us believe in his standing ovation for Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam – oops, I mean Afghanistan. (Sorry about that: we Americans have a lousy sense of world geography, not to mention an inexhaustible ignorance about regional cultures and histories. Which is why wherever our expeditionary forces go, even as they blow away one demon, there are always plenty more to take its place). Certainly, as Mr Buford notes, Obama loves his Niebuhr – his Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the president liberally deployed the language of the influential American theologian.

The appeal of Niebuhr’s social ethics is clear: it’s the Yankee pragmatism and “realism”. But its rich pickings for Obama cannot disguise its profound theological poverty. A loyal two-kingdoms Lutheran, Niebuhr was completely candid that the ethics of Jesus has no moral purchase in the realm of power politics.

That the gospel redefines what is “real”, and what is possible and practical; that in his life, death, and resurrection Jesus has actually inaugurated the eschatological transformation of the world; and that the Holy Spirit is now present and active in bringing God’s new creation to perfection – these facts of faith simply do not factor in the moral calculus of Niebuhr’s finally quite pagan and pessimistic reading of geopolitics. Hence the cynical reduction of the option for Christians, in the face of evil rulers, repeated by Mr Buford, to either blessing US military interventions or “doing nothing”. As if the way of non-violence were unreal, as if radical pacifists were political layabouts! On the contrary, as Niebuhr’s theological nemesis, the radical Christian pacifist John Howard Yoder, acutely observed, it is not the wielders of swords but the bearers of crosses who are ultimately “working with the grain of the universe.”

Of course even on the grounds of Niebuhrian realism the war in Afghanistan is widely, expertly contested as not only unjust but also tragically self-defeating. Obama’s Vietnam? Interestingly, Niebuhr himself, always ambivalent about President Johnson’s war in southeast Asia, ultimately confessed, in 1967, that “For the first time I fear I am ashamed of our beloved nation.” However the essential theological point for Christians is this. The central premise of Niebuhr’s social ethics is that the nation is the bearer of history. But the premise is false (a point made by Lawrence Moore in his splendid January Bible study on the “wilderness”). According to the New Testament, it is the church, the body of Christ, which transcends all national identities and loyalties; the church, however impotent it may seem, that is the true bearer of history. Unsurprisingly, Niebuhr is deafeningly silent on the subject of ecclesiology. For Mr Buford too, it would seem, the church is here, not to be a counter-political community, but, at best, to tweak the conscience of the state.

Even when Caesar is a good guy – and I take Obama to be a good guy, despite his idleness over Israel and his hyperactivity in Afghanistan – it is always a bad idea for the church to hitch its wagon to his military-industrial express, and to concede that, when push comes to shove, Christians may have to behave in ways that contradict the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And there you have the ultimate tragedy of mainstream American Christianity, liberal as well as conservative: it thinks it can serve two masters. In that respect, even Obama remains mesmerised by the heathen myth of American exceptionalism.

Reggae as ethics: Rastafari theology from Garvey to Marley

I've been on a Bob Marley kick lately, so this book caught my eye: Noel Leo Erskine, From Garvey to Marley: Rastafari Theology (University Press of Florida 2005). It's a fascinating and colourful exploration of the history and theology of the Rastas. In Erskine's analysis, the whole Rastafarian theology boils down to this: "God is an African" (p. 158) – so that "the central question the Rastas pose for us is where we stand in relation to Africa" (p. 5).

Erskine is himself a Jamaican-born theologian; he grew up in the village where Rastafari originated, and he later pastored a Baptist church in Jamaica. In the 1960s, he developed a close personal connection with a Rastafarian community. They discussed their views with him and allowed him to participate in their "reasonings" (informal theological discussions, accompanied by cannabis smoking) – so this book is written out of rich experience and a deep personal sympathy with the Rastafarian movement.

The Rastas see a direct relation between the Old Testament narratives and the history of the Jamaican people. "The Bible was written by black people about black people" (p. 67). Black Jamaicans are the true Israelites; "the exodus will be a return to Ethiopia, the Promised Land" (p. 38).

At the heart of this exodus-theology is the concept of Babylon. Babylon is the ultimate evil. It is that enslaving, anti-God system – the world-system that produces colonialism, capitalism, social oppression, and all manner of injustice. "Babylon" is no mere metaphor: it is experienced as a daily reality, bearing down on the Jamaican people. For the Rastas, its clearest personification is in the police: the police "were the living proof that Babylon was alive, active and waiting for any opportunity" to oppress (p. 74). Rastas also tend to avoid the church on account of its complicity with Babylon: "one steps out of the church into the state and out of the state into the church without knowing the difference" (p. 85).

This understanding of Babylon also helps to make sense of the theological significance of ganja (cannabis) smoking among Rastas. Smoking frees the mind from the "trickery" of Babylon, peeling back the veil to expose the sinister guile of the Babylonian world-system. As one Rasta puts it: "Before I start to smoke herb, the world was just good and pleasant to me.... But from I start to herb now, I start to read between the lines. Is like wool was removed from before my eyes.... The government knows from a man start smoke herb he be aware of some things. That is when he start come off the brainwash, when he start to smoke the herb. That's why them is against the herb so much" (p. 99).

Similarly, wearing dreadlocks – the single most important and dramatic identity-marker of the Rastas – signifies a rejection of the Babylonian system, a refusal to accede to the demands of Babylon. For the Rastas (p. 108), "not those who grow their hair long but those who trim it off are required to explain their actions"! In the same way, their commitment to vegetarianism and organic living finds its theological basis in this rejection of Babylon, the refusal to be assimilated into the world's oppressive system.

The power of Babylon is not, however, resisted by any Rastafarian ethic. Rather, the Rastas' whole emphasis is on escape from Babylon, sheer exodus. In the mean time, they direct "invective against the forces of oppression" (p. 81). "Babylon is evil, and the task of the Rasta is not to attempt to transform Babylon but to flee Babylon for Ethiopia" (p. 39). Indeed, for the Rastas, ethics is strictly unnecessary – they have reggae music instead!

Erskine is gently critical of the Rastas on this score, since they seem to have missed the opportunity of developing their own liberative praxis. They are stuck with "an imbalance between word and activity" (p. 43), so that they fail to seek widespread social transformation. From the perspective of liberation theology, I suppose this is a fair critique – but it fails to take seriously enough the more profound lesson of the Rastas (which is also a lesson of the Old Testament), namely, that language itself is already "action". Language is work, praxis, liberation. There is no transformation more radical than a transformation of discourse. For the people of Israel, God's very being is revealed as a liberating event of language – the divine Word-event.

Erskine rightly perceives the significance of the Rastas' linguistic innovation, their "dread talk". He observes: "With the creation of their own language, Rastas have not only protested against the education offered them through the schools ... but also have seized the power of definition" (p. 167). If we follow through on this insight, we might also ask whether Rastafari – with its tremendous attentiveness to the work of discourse – poses some critical questions to liberation theology, and indeed to any theology that allows for an easy division between the categories of theoria and praxis.

If speech is a fundamental mode of human action, then – surprisingly – it makes a good deal of sense for the Rastas to cultivate reggae in place of ethics. The more seriously we appreciate the Rastas' preoccupation with language, the more we might wonder if their project is even more ambitious than any liberation theology: they are turning the world upside down, one syllable at a time. As Erskine very aptly notes: "It may seem simplistic for Rastas to believe that the simple act of singing will threaten the system of Babylon sufficiently to effect transformation, but they observe that it was simply walking around the walls of Jericho and chanting that brought the wall down" (p. 175). It's in the song itself that Jah is alive, active, and on the move.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in New York

Over the past few days I had a delightful time reading Volume 10 of the new edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's works, Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931 (Fortress 2008), 764 pp. – a remarkable collection of letters, sermons, essays and lectures from his time as a vicar in Spain, a postdoctoral student in Berlin, and a visiting fellow at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

After working as a pastor in Barcelona (where he even acquired what may have been an original Picasso!), Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to complete his postdoctoral dissertation, Act and Being, which presented a kind of Barthian-Kantian approach to theological anthropology, grounded in the empirical reality of the church. The ensuing American period is especially fascinating: 1930-31 was a hell of a time to be in New York City!

The young Bonhoeffer was taking courses with Reinhold Niebuhr and John Baillie, going to hear sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick, studying pragmatism and American literature (he "read almost the entire philosophical works of William James, which really captivated me, then Dewey, Perry, Russell, and finally also J. B. Watson and the behaviorist literature"), worshipping in black churches, and corresponding with former teachers like Harnack and Seeberg.

His impressions of liberal American church life are generally quite scathing: "In New York, they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ.... So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that – who knows how? – claims the right to call itself 'Christian'. And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation. Anyone who has seen the weekly program of one of the large New York churches, with their daily, indeed almost hourly events, teas, lectures, concerts, charity events, opportunities for sports, games, bowling, dancing for every age group, anyone who has become acquainted with the embarrassing nervousness with which the pastor lobbies for membership – that person can well assess the character of such a church.... In order to balance out the feeling of inner emptiness that arises now and then (and partly also to refill the church's treasury), some congregations will if possible engage an evangelist for a 'revival' once a year" (pp. 313-14).

In this ecclesial ethos, "the church is really no longer the place where the congregation hears and preaches God's word, but rather the place where one acquires secondary significance as a social entity for this or that purpose" (p. 317).

Bonhoeffer was similarly dismayed by the students at Union Theological Seminary. The students "are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.... In contrast to our own [German] liberalism, which in its better representatives doubtless was a genuinely vigorous phenomenon, here all that has been frightfully sentimentalised, and with an almost naive know-it-all attitude" (pp. 265-66). Again, referring to Union Seminary: "A seminary in which numerous students openly laugh during a public lecture because they find it amusing when a passage on sin and forgiveness from Luther's de servo arbitrio is cited has obviously, despite its many advantages, forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for" (pp. 309-10).

Bonhoeffer also encountered the fundamentalist theology of J. Gresham Machen and his followers, especially in the Southern Baptist Church. This kind of theology, he remarked, revealed "a different side of the American character", namely, "an unrelenting harshness in holding on to one's possessions, possessions either of this or of the other world. I acquired this possession with trust in God, God made my success happen, so whoever infringes upon this possession is infringing upon God" (p. 317).

It was of course the black churches that won his warmest praise and admiration: "In contrast to the often lecturelike character of the 'white' sermon, the 'black Christ' is preached with captivating passion and vividness. Anyone who has heard and understood the Negro spirituals knows about [this] strange mixture of reserved melancholy and eruptive joy" (p. 315). Bonhoeffer would later introduce some of the Negro spirituals to the worship services at the illegal seminary in Finkenwalde (possibly one of the first places in Europe to introduce such songs).

The volume also contains the remarkable student papers that Bonhoeffer wrote for classes and seminars in New York – papers on William James, ethics, determinism, dogmatics. His paper on "the Christian idea of God" draws a sharp distinction between "history" and "decision": "Within the world of ideas there is no such thing as decision because I always bear already within myself the possibilities of understanding these ideas. They fit into my system but they do not challenge my whole existence" (p. 458).

A similar Kantian point is elaborated in his paper (written for Baillie) on Barth's use of neo-Kantian philosophy. Here, he argues that "the deepest antinomy" is "the antinomy between pure act and reflection"; God does not enter the realm of reflection, but "tears man out of this reflection into an actus directus toward God" (p. 474).

In sum, this is a wonderful, invigorating book, documenting an exciting and formative period of Bonhoeffer's life. We find him learning new languages, encountering new traditions and ideas, adapting to radically different ways of life – and returning again and again, with remarkable consistency, to the deep wellspring of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. As Bonhoeffer remarks in one of his letters to Seeberg: "there can be no doubt that only through active contact with other ways of thought is one led to the formation and comprehension of that which is unique to oneself" (p. 119). In the same way, even in some of his most negative assessments of American church life, one catches a glimpse of Bonhoeffer's own profound and developing ecclesiological and ethical commitments.

Who am I? Bonhoeffer's theology through his poetry

Bernd Wannenwetsch, ed., Who Am I? Bonhoeffer's Theology Through His Poetry (T&T Clark 2009), 259 pp. (thanks to T&T Clark for a copy)

I've been waiting eagerly for this book, and I wasn't disappointed. An impressive range of scholars – including Oliver O'Donovan, Stanley Hauerwas, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Hans Ulrich, Brian Brock, Philip Ziegler, and others – offer theological readings of Bonhoeffer's poetry.

The ten poems that Bonhoeffer wrote in Tegel prison in 1944 were among his last works. This book includes the text of the poems (German and English on facing pages), together with an essay on each poem. The kind of close reading modelled in these essays is unfortunately rare in contemporary theology; and the essays show that our own theological horizons can be extended through such a discipline of slow, attentive reading.

Of course, Bonhoeffer was scarcely a first-rate poet. Yet as Marilynne Robinson has observed, poetic language for Bonhoeffer "functions not as ornament but as ontology"; or as Philip Ziegler puts it, "even at its most stylized – as in the prison poems – [Bonhoeffer's] writing advances nothing less than decisive claims about reality" (p. 142). This does not mean that the poems should be regarded merely as "versified theology", as though they could be translated without remainder into prose. The contributors to the volume are aware of this, and so their aim is not so much to explain or interpret the poems as to think along with them and to see what theological possibilities they might open. Indeed, as Hauerwas very aptly remarks: "I do not, however, want to give the impression that the poem is an explanation.... For I assume that one of the tasks of poetry is to teach why 'explanations' are not all that interesting" (p. 101).

Three of the essays here really stand out. Hauerwas offers some incisive reflections on the poem "The Friend". This poem was written for Bonhoeffer's friend Eberhard Bethge; some early readers mistakenly took it to be a poem about a homosexual partnership. "Such an assumption," Hauerwas notes, betrays our own "impoverished understanding of friendship" (p. 100). For Bonhoeffer, friendship belongs not to the sphere of the orders of creation (work, marriage, government). It belongs instead to the sphere of freedom; it is grounded in nothing and has no necessity. It is not divinely mandated, nor is it a matter of ethics and obedience. But since friendship stands outside the mandates of creation, it is also able to transform these mandates, turning them from law to gospel. Marriage, for example, is divinely ordained; it requires obedience and responsibility. But marriage can be "given life by the realm of freedom in which friendship flourishes" (p. 106). It is thus friendship that "saves the mandates from their potential to be repressive" (p. 108). On this basis, Hauerwas goes on to argue that this poem evokes an alternative politics: "'The Friend' is Bonhoeffer's attempt not only to say, but to enact in a world of terror, that God's church exists making friendships possible" (p. 111).

Michael Northcott's essay explores the relation between human identity and spiritual disciplines in the poem "Who am I?" In a brilliant reading of the poem, he critiques the way Rowan Williams and Bernd Wannenwetsch (he might also have mentioned Hauerwas) have "enlisted Bonhoeffer ... in the post-liberal attempt to recover the moral self through the public worship and the politics of the body of Christ" (p. 15). In Northcott's view, Bonhoeffer is not trying to overturn the modern quest for interiority or authentic selfhood. He is comfortable using language of inwardness and individuality; but against modern narratives of the self, he argues "that moral responsibility is the mark of true personhood" (p. 17).

Another critique of postliberal ecclesiology appears in Hans Ulrich's remarkable essay on the poem "Stations on the Way to Freedom" – far and away the most powerful and compelling contribution to the book. Ulrich argues that Bonhoeffer's whole theology is pervaded by the theme of God's acting, God's presence. The poem indicates "the places of God's acting", the stations of God's presence in our lives: God is present where our lives are structured by the disciplines of discipleship; God is present where we act rightly; and God is present where we suffer because of our dedication to God. In ecclesiological terms, this means the church does not represent God's action, but is instead "the place holder for God's acting in the world". As a place holder, the church "does not become the new polis"; it is "the place of transformation, the place of change, the place of giving oneself over to God" (p. 165).

Ulrich thus argues that Bonhoeffer's political theology must be understood as a distinctively Lutheran theology of the cross: not a political theology in which the church represents God's gifts or action, but one in which "God stands in our place – and there happens our suffering because we cannot act any more" (p. 162). And it is only in this way that true freedom appears in our lives: not a freedom consisting in a plurality of options, but a kind of cruciform freedom, the suffering experience of God's presence, guidance and action.

I've highlighted just three of the essays here: but this whole collection is an exciting, creative, tightly focused exploration of Bonhoeffer's poetry and theology. It's not only an invaluable contribution to Bonhoeffer studies; it also contributes significantly to contemporary conversations about ecclesiology, ethics, politics, and human identity.

On assisted suicide: the problem with choice

by Kim Fabricius

Kim had an abridged form of this letter published in yesterday’s Independent. It’s a response to the case of Debbie Purdy, the British MS sufferer who has just won a landmark decision in the Law Lords; they’ve told the Director of Public Prosecutions to clarify how his department decides to prosecute in cases of those who expedite assisted suicides abroad. As a result of the ruling, pressure will inevitably mount for assisted suicide to be legalised in the UK.

Sir:

On the subject of assisted suicide, let’s bracket the theology. Atheists will only sneer, not altogether unreasonably – Christianity has form on dogmatism – even though their own claim to ethical neutrality and objectivity is itself not only hopelessly doctrinaire but downright delusional, for there is no view from nowhere.

Let’s bracket too Richard Ingram’s observation (opinion, 1 August), though it’s literally right on the money, about the tempting market advantages of assisted suicide in a late capitalist economy of alleged scarcity, not to mention in a culture of youth, health and beauty. For the sake of argument, we can even bracket the idea – perish the thought – that the relatives and friends of the ill and aged might pressure them into an early self-dug grave.

But what cannot pass unchallenged is this notion of personal autonomy, as if my own desires and wishes were not themselves largely socially determined. I am who I am only in relation to others, and the view I have of myself turns largely on how others view me. If society as a whole no longer believes and affirms – unconditionally – the value of my life, if the signal it sends (not least in legislation) is that, ultimately, I am expendable, then I too will believe myself expendable.

In short, “I choose to die” may look like an assertion of freedom when in fact it is the cry of a person in chains: the chains of choice itself.

The things that make for peace

I’ll be in Canberra tonight, launching a new book on justice and peacemaking: Heather Thomson, The Things That Make for Peace (Barton Books 2009). Here’s a brief excerpt from the talk I'll be giving about the book:

The book’s whole argument is grounded in an analogy between divine justice and transitional justice – where an unstable and turbulent political order mobilises new instruments, such as judicial mechanisms, amnesties and truth commissions, in order to move into the peace and justice of a new regime. God’s own justice is like this, Thomson argues. Divine justice establishes a new constitution and a new political order, and issues amnesties so that we may enter into the new regime with a clean slate. In this way, we are enabled to make the transition from the regimes that govern this world into the reign of God.

This vision of divine justice, Thomson observes, is something we see in Jesus, the one whose entire life was an argument – to the death – about ‘what God is like, what God requires of us, what God’s justice is like’. The atonement is not about satisfying divine justice, but about establishing a new reign that differs fundamentally from ‘the authoritarian, violent and repressive rule that belongs to this world’. The atonement ‘mediates a regime change’, so that we are led out ‘from the power and kingdoms of this world’ into the kingdom of God. As part of this transition, God forgives our sins – just as a new regime may issue amnesties so that citizens can leave behind their former political allegiances and enter guiltless into the collective project of a new common life. The death of Jesus thus opens up a space of metanoia, a change of mind in which we renounce our former allegiance to the violent powers of this world, and enter into the new reign of the Prince of Peace.