Living Wittily

Disenchanted Evangelicals 2. "How a faith and a religion mouldered away..."

Hempton's chapter on Van Gogh is an exploration of Evangelicalism and Secularisation. Like many other cultural and church historians Hempton is sceptical of the received tradition that defined secularisation along lines like these: "the decline of the social significance of religion lay in inexorable processes of urbanisation, industrialization,  and societalization, all conveniently subsumed within the catchall concept of modernization...". Explaining the origins and onset of the secular age using such an overarching theory is no longer tenable for many cultural historians and analysts.

Using three of van Gogh's paintings Hempton suggests persuasively because illuminatingly, that van Gogh depicted in image and colour the decline in influence and decay of dominant presence of the Church in Europe. The above picture, Old Church Tower at Nuenen (“The Peasants’ Churchyard”), contains the telling clues of intentional art. The windows are boarded or bricked up, the steeple (that upward pointing finger) has gone, the birds have claimed the tower as well as the air, no human figure is present. The low horizon, broken by wooden crosses that mark the graves of generations of peasants, with a dominant ruin in the foreground, speak of past glories now in ruin, and human history still present in the symbols of a faith slowly but surely in eclipse.

Van Gogh's own interpretation has obvious precedence:
"I wanted to express how those ruins show that for ages the peasants have been laid to rest in the very fields which they dug up when alive – I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf, just a bit of earth dug up – a wooden cross. […] And now those ruins tell me how a faith and a religion mouldered away – strongly founded though they were – but how the life and the death of the [people] remain forever the same, budding and withering regularly, like the grass and the flowers growing there in that churchyard. “Les religions passent, Dieu demeure” [Religions pass away, God remains]." (Letters, 411.1)

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This is Van Gogh's father's Reformed Church in Nuenen. Hempton sees here a further portrayal of secularization and the demise of Christendom. "There is no doubt that van Gogh's portrayal of his father's small Protestant church with its mainly female worshippers in a predominantly catholic village serves as an excellent symbol of late nineteenth century European religion. Religious pluralism, confessional pride, respectability...and feminization, which historians interpret as both the signs and the engines of European secularization, are all on display." (page 133)

The Bible belonged to Van Gogh's father; it is open at Isaiah 53. It lies beside a well worn copy of Emile Zola's La Joie de Vivre. The suffering servant juxtaposed with a novel in which a central figure is described as "the incarnation of renunciation, of love for others and kindly charity for erring humanity". Ancient faith embodied in a book, the Bible alongside an unlit candle, and the fiction of modernity with its own capacity to convey the realism and urgency of the present.

Three paintings, in which van Gogh uses images depicting the powerful and personal undertow pulling people of faith away from ancient religious certainties. They reflect the religious consequences in van Gogh's personal life of inexorable changes in contemporary culture, as his own faith was transmuted from evangelical Christianity to a more poignant, compassionate view of nature and the world of human affairs. In place of rejection of a fallen world, in these and the later paintings human suffering and joy, natural beauty and ordinariness, the cycle of life, growth and death, became vehicles for a view of life with reversed polarities; no longer confident that God is love, van Gogh is rather seeking ways of saying, in painting after painting, love is god. And this credo, far from being sentimental humanist piety, conferred honest mercy and deep understanding of the human condition, upon a man afflicted by personality extremes of mania and melancholia. A recurring Pauline phrase in his letters to his brother was 'sorrowful yet always rejoicing.' The courage and cost of such defiance, the compassion and creativity triggered by such oscillating anguish, are part of the mystery of the triumphant tragedy of van Gogh's life and art and religion.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "...the heartbeat of all Christian life together."

The reading from a few days ago:

"With this we have advanced to the point at which we hear the heartbeat of all Christian life together.

A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its memebrs for one another or the community will be destroyed.

I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me.

In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner...

Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day".

(Life Together (Fortress, 1966), page 90.

Disenchanted Evangelicals 1. "They have gone out from among us....."

Did you know that Vincent Van Gogh went through an intensely evangelical phase in the 1870's? That he taught Sunday School, and attended prayer meetings and preached in Richmond Wesleyan Methodist Church? It didn't last of course. But his spiritual journey is one of the fascinating stories told in David Hempton's latest book, Disenchanted Evangelicals. There are seven studies of people who moved away from an earlier enthusiastic, dogmatic and activist Evangelicalism.  Each study allows Hempton to explore important evangelical social attitudes related to the move from Evangelicalism to a more open, liberal, pluralist or secular faith position. It would be a mistake to invest those words with negative head-shaking disapproval - an attitude far too readily available to evangelicals as first response to those inner shifts in others that signal the movement of personal conviction and faith commitment in new directions.

Reading the stories of these all too human people, and Hempton's sympathetically critical study of what was going on in their inner lives and outer circumstances, it becomes clear that these were people of strong principle, thoughtful criticism, ethical passion, and open-eyed honesty about the theological limitations, social consequences, psychological costs and moral censoriousness, of Evangelicalism as they encountered it, and for varying lengths of time were enamoured with and lived it. Their disenchantment with a form of Christianity that had initially been the driving force of their lives, points to a number of perceived shortcomings in Evangelicalism as a movement and form of Christianity, which for them called in question the capacity of Evangelicalism to sustain faith in the rapidly changing world of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

The story of George Eliot's evolution away from evangelical principles to a highly moralised form of agnostic humanism provides a superb case study in moral analysis. The laser-like precision with which George Eliot homed in on hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, dogmatic bullying, culture-denying piety, masculine chauvinism and much else, made it impossible that a mind so ruthlessly honest would for long tolerate, what she increasingly pereived as a full contrary mindset. Eliot's celebrated demolition of Dr Cumming's fundamentalism in her essay in the Westminster Review is here placed in the context of her later backward looking critique. It still reads as an extended moral exposure of malign tendencies Eliot believed were endemic to Evangelical piety; this piece of irresistible polemic should be set reading for evangelicals who suffer from yet another of the afflictions Eliot lampooned - smugness.

Then there's the chapter on Van Gogh. Hempton makes no attempt to add to the varied explanations of Van Gogh's psychological and mental ill-health. He is too good a historian to be caught out in the reductionism that often underlies such analysis, diagnosis and too confident conclusions. Instead he explores Vincent's letters, the available biographical material, and some of the paintings, to trace the spiritual development that occurs within the heart and mind of one whose inner anguish and whose art, whose faith and way of coping with life's demands, embodies one of the key moments in the fortunes of Christianity in late modernity. The chapter is sub-titled Evangelicalism and Secularization. The 'hard pilgrimage' of Van Gogh, from doctrinally strident Dutch Reformed orthodoxy, through Wesleyan Methodism and evangelistic mission work, to a faith position removed to another intellectual universe, is traced by Hempton in a chapter worth the price of the whole book. he provides an analysis of three paintings which offer a different master narrative of the secularizatuion process. This section of the book is much too important to skip over. I'll include a fuller post on it as the next stage of this review.

On a different note altogether, Ian represented our College at a recent colloquium on Baptist Hermeneutics held at South Wales Baptist College in Cardiff. He's doing several posts on it over at the College Blog.

R S Thomas, "The Musician" and writing as an art form.

Not much comment needed on this poem. Just two. By juxtaposing the inspired, disciplined agony of the artist, with the creative suffering love of God, it revitalises theological imaginations smothered by the tedium of the overfamiliar. Ever since a friend read this at a Good Friday service years ago, I've never again been able to listen to solo violin music with previous innocence, or been able to separate the vision of a musician giving his all, from the God who does the same.

Secondly the copy you are reading was written by a man who attended that service, wrote out the poem and presented it to me. It is for me a literary Icon. Alistair first started doing calligraphy in an Asian POW camp, sharing accommodation with Laurens van der Post. Though he never spoke of those experiences, he knew more than a little about suffering, and that in human experience which makes "such music as lives still".

The sin of impartiality at all costs.

Impartiality in news reporting is like objectivity in history. It's an impossible ideal. Even when genuine attempts at impartiality are made, news reporting is at best an attempt at unbiased reporting of facts - but of course the reporter selects what is shown and said, and states as facts what others are likely to dispute. All reporting comes from a perspective, a specific context, and is articulated in words selected by editors and reporters that inevitably present an angle on the story, even tone of voice and facial expression influencing hearer and viewer. And that doesn't even touch on the complexities of fitting such a story as Gaza in the wider narrative of Middle East politics, national and tribal memories, and centuries old enmities.

To claim to maintain impartiality in such compexity either presupposes there is no right or wrong in any news reporting, or if there is, impartiality requires silence on the moral dimensions of a politically driven military conflict, in order to continue with impartial reporting. Which the BBC has done with enormous credit throughout this most recent episode...prefacing each news bulletin with the scrupulously impartial disclaimer that news reporters were prevented by the Israeli military from entering Gaza during the invasion. So impartial reporting was in fact partial - that is incomplete!

If all that sounds confusing I'm not surprised. But there is a moral philosophical  question here that won't go away; it's also a theological ethical and exegetical question:
Moral philosophy: is impartiality so important that it takes precedence over universally recognised human suffering, some of it likely to lead to death? Are there no situations in which other values rank higher in the decision-making process than impartiality? If not, does that mean news reporting is considered free of moral judgement and ethical responsibility?

Theological Ethics: wherever human suffering can be lessened by the actions, even costly actions, of people of goodwill, is there an imperative arising from the value of human life and the evil that is inflicted suffering, that forbids a bystander stance? If a reporter had been travelling with the Good Samaritan, would he or she be exempt from the imperatives of compassion in order not to take sides, or even be perceived as being partial to the victim? I know - the parallel can be pushed too far. But as a follower of Jesus I can't avoid thinking of impartiality as a too expensive luxury in a world of such indicriminate and partial suffering.

Exegesis: Bad enough to stand before the Judge and have to admit, 'When did we see you hungry, imprisoned, naked, and do nothing?' But to say 'Well we did see you hungry, imprisoned, naked - but we didn't broadcast the emergency appeal because we have to preserve our impartiality, and we're not sure the aid could be delivered anyway'.

I do have enormous sympathy for the BBC General Director and the Trustees. They are in a very hard place where the right decision is hard, and costly, to make. But to report with scrupulous care on the suffering of the people of Gaza, accompanied by images of immense suffering and brokenness, and refusing to broadcast an appeal that can bring help, begins to feel like exploitative voyeurism. I don't believe that about the BBC - their reporters are the best in the world. Their honesty and humanity, their skill and professionalism, their ability to report fairly, would not be diminished by broadcasting an appeal whose content they are free to edit and shape around the sensitivites they have to negotiate. But in the end - this is not simply a tactical call to ensure the BBC reputation - it is a moral call that will also affect the BBC reputation.    

Finally Comes the Poet. 1 Reducing mystery to problem.

The following from Walter Brueggemann. Finally Comes the Poet. Daring Speech for Proclamation, (Fortress, 1989), p. 1-2.

"The gospel is too readily heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no unsettling news and no unwelcome threat. What began as news in the gospel is easily assumed, slotted, and conveniently dismissed. We depart having heard, but without noticing the urge to tansformation that is not readily compatible with our comfortable believing, that asks little and receives less.

The gospel is thus a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. But more than that, our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, revises quality into quantity, and so takes the categories of biblical faith and represents them in manageable shapes

Preaching among us happens in this context in which the gospel is greatly reduced. That means the gospel may have been twisted, pressed, tailored, gerrymandered until it is comfortable with technological reason that leaves us unbothered, and with ideology that leaves us with uncriticized absolutes. When truth is mediated in such positivistic, ideological and therefore partisan ways, humaneness wavers, the prospect of humanness is at risk, and unchecked brutality makes its appearance. We shall not be the community we hope to be if our primary communications are in modes of utilitarian technology and managed, conformed values."

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Walter Brueggemann is one of those writers on the Bible who decisively shapes how we think and shakes up our cherished but unexamined assumptions. Long before he became the doyen of Old Testament scholarship at its provocative best, I've read him regularly. From his early work on the land, the prophets and a quite wonderful book on shalom since reprinted, and then over thirty years of productive writing, he has given the church a constant flow of biblical theology whose foundation pillars are plunged deep into bedrock scriptural text.

Brueggemann is a scholar not always at home in a church at times too keen to buy into the values and techniques of consumer culture and what he calls the hegemony of empire! He is a biblical theologian who deeply reveres the biblical text, a preacher who creatively and disturbingly sets ancient text and contemporary western culture on a collision course. And in his preaching and writing he warns that the church  inevitably feels the impact of that text as it allows itself to be too closely aligned with a prevailing culture under judgement.

Over the next while I'll post some further extracts from his lectures on preaching, with the characteristically enigmatic title, Finally Comes the Poet. Daring Speech for Proclamation. This book is now 20 years old, pre-dates fashionably post-modern jargon, and therefore demonstrates Brueggemann's prescience about the dis-ease of consumer driven culture, and the capacity of the biblical text to address postmodern ambiguities with "thickly textured" hopefulness. In this as in all his books, Brueggemann gets under our skin as readers and hearers, by an exegesis of the biblical text as that word from God that tears down and builds up, that breaks open in order to heal deeply, that calls us in question, in order to call us again to obedient grateful living. 

Wherever compassion rears its beautiful head.

Mark 9.38-50 is about Jesus' disciples telling others not to cast out demons in Jesus name; an attempt at a kind of exclusive exorcism franchise, a claim to ministry copyright. You only get the irony of Mark 9.38-50 if you remember what happened earlier in Chapter 9.

Here's the giveaway text at Mark 9.18 : " I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they couldn’t."

Now failure, if taken rightly to heart, is an education in humility, progress towards a more honest self understanding, an opportunity to grow. But not for the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. Having failed to exorcise an evil spirit themselves, they then become the self-appointed Regional Quality Assurance officers for Exorcisms. Not surprising, that desire to regulate others, control the boundaries,  – they’d just been having an argument about who is the greatest. Like one of those Blair Brown ambition-fests we used to be treated to, about who would be leader and who the followers. Jesus had just given the kind of answer that only works in the politics of the Kingdom of God, "Whoever wants to be first, must be last of all and servant of all." And like the self-preoccupied movers and shakers they believed themselves to be, they didn’t, as John Reid used to say, ‘get it’.

So failed exorcists with a lust for leadership, presume to disqualify others from their ministry in Jesus' name, and in doing so unwittingly disqualify themselves. John Reid (remember him now?) would say, ‘Disciples not fit for purpose’. In a world with more than its fair share of those powers that dehumanise, violate and contaminate human community, Jesus' words question the right of any of us to erect boundaries, theological or otherwise, around compassionate care for others. Maybe there's a conversion of heart needed so we can hear more clearly Jesus' reply, - generously inclusive, ministry affirming, and welcoming compassion wherever it rears its beautiful head …”whoever is not against us is for us.” These words represent Jesus' permission to celebrate compassion, to defend and support those who take on the powers and social forces that diminish human lives - wherever, whenever.

"Whoever is not against us is for us"  - That saying urges an ecumenicity of the heart, and it is only possible when being first is an irrelevance, and being servant of all a priority. "Whoever is not against us is for us", gives not only the benefit of the doubt, but the benefit of trust and fellowship. To live with such an attitude of openness to goodness, to see each act of kindness as Christ-serving, to believe each costly casting out of evil wherever it lurks collaborates with God’s Kingdom, to recognise, acknowledge and celebrate compassion wherever it radiates into human lives, is to take on the generous inclusiveness of Jesus who welcomes all the help the world needs. In fact, service in Jesus' name, inevitably becomes service to Jesus, for inasmuch as you did it to the least of these my sisters and brothers......you did it for me.

The painting above is one of my favourite pieces of Scottish art. The angels are carrying St Bride to visit Christ at the Nativity, embody in their movement and demeanour, dependable compassion and faithful carrying, but also the power of God's goodness let loose in the world. It's included in this post - because I take any excuse to celebrate this beautiful modern Celtic masterpiece by John Duncan. You can see it at the National Gallery of Scotland. Over the years I've spent an hour or three gazing at it.

"Good is... reality as a whole held in the hand of God"

Good is reality,
reality itself seen and recognised in God.
Human beings,
with their motives and their works,
with their fellow human beings,
with the creation that surrounds them,
in other words,
reality as a whole held in the hands of God -
that is what is embraced by the question of good.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, DBW 6, Ethics, page 53)

Those words written during years of moral and political darkening in Germany and Europe. I took the liberty of putting them in a format that allows slowed down reading.

Guantanamo is to close, thank God. Guantanamo, with its prisoners held behind electrified and razor wire in humiliating, and dehumanising conditions, under the absolute power of their captors; Guantanamo and its military and intelligence personnel who are no less prisoners held behind inner barriers that inevitably dehumanise those who believe their power over others is absolute. Guantanamo is to close.

It is one of the challenges of theology that to make an all inclusive statement like 'reality as a whole held in the hands of God', must therefore include Guantanamo in that reality. It takes with shocking literalness 'He's got the whole world in His hands'; yes Guantanamo too. The military and their prisoners, human beings each caught up in the rage of the wronged.

So when that theologian was himself a prisoner, held, interrogated, tortured then executed by those with totalitarian power over his life, the words quoted above become profound affirmation, radiating a view of God and the world that negates the absolute claims of those forces of darkness that dehumanise. This is theology of hope, taking on the powers of despair, fear and hate, and not being defeated. And going on believing, 'reality as a whole [is] held in the hand of God'. 

Making light bigger

Looking through the new Eerdmans catalogue I came across New Tracks, Night Falling, a new book of poems by Jeanne Murray Walker. Walker is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including A Deed to the Light and Coming into History. She is Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she has taught for thirty years. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, an Atlantic Monthly Fellowship at Bread Loaf School of English, (how good is that for the name of a school!), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and the Glenna Luschi Prairie Schooner Prize for Poetry.

There's an effective oddity about some of her homespun images, and as a connoiseur of pizza my mind and heart (and maybe stomach) immediately resonated with her use of spinning pizza dough as an image for stretching out light and hope.(See the publisher's blurb below.)

I also like the image on the book cover. Gonnae get this so I am!

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"The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other.

Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be:

In this dark time I want to make light bigger,
to toss it in the air like a pizza chef,
to stick my fists in, stretching it
till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow
and spin it above us.

Hope continually threads its way through these poems. We hear its voice as Walker writes about choices — both those we make and those beyond our making.

And we feel hope rising like bread when Walker focuses on the gifts of potential, resolution, mercy, joy — the new tracks that we can make in fresh snow, on old paths, along the roads more or less traveled. These are stays against the falling night.

With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world."

Benediction as prophetic oracle, personal story, poltical statement...and prayer

One of the longest Benedictions I've ever heard. A complex text of human experience, personal story, national history, biblical faith and political hope. A day when the world was watching and listening, Rev Joseph Lowery a veteran civil rights campaigner, offered prayer on the high balcony of Capitol Hill, America's public architecture of power, partially reconstructed in the 1850's using slave labour. It was a day when inner attitudes went through tectonic shifts. And as I listened to this long Benediction, part confession, part eulogy, part prophetic oracle, and all transparently and unembarrassedly prayed, as a citizen of the world and a human being, I sensed again the importance of hope as a moral stance. And I cried and laughed for sheer pleasure that a prayer could say so much - not only the words, but the human life of the one who spoke it, and the multi-millions of lives on whose behalf he prayed.

There's already been criticism of the comment about "white will embrace what is right". And I think I understand the sensitivities of those hurt by this singling out of one human colour for moral censure - especially the thousands of white civil rights campaigners who walked alongside Rev Lowery and others down through the decades. That's why I think it has to be read and heard as a complex text; the long and bitter experience of the man who prayed, the history of a nation, and the miracle of hoped for and long in coming change, is reflected in a prayer personal, political, prophetic, and reflecting the very tensions that made the day fraught with possibility.  

The text has been released by the Federal News Service, and I was glad to read it again - but it's nothing without the quiet defiant hopefulness of the Rev Lowery's gruff, at times breaking, but affirmative voice. So you can also see and hear it over at You Tube.

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God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand -- true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you're able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed -- the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around -- (laughter) -- when yellow will be mellow -- (laughter) -- when the red man can get ahead, man -- (laughter) -- and when white will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: Say amen --

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: -- and amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen! (Cheers, applause.)