Distorted

"Cauvin is known not only for the doctrine of predestination but also the doctrine of 'total depravity,' a phrase so forbidding one hesitates to ponder it. In Genevan French dépraver is clearly still near its Latin root, which means 'to warp' or 'to distort'. The word does not have the lurid overtones it has for us. Jérôme Bolsec was banished for, among other things, having déprave plusieurs passages de l'Éscriture pour sosutenir ceste faulse et perverse doctrine - the doctrine that predestination would make God a tyrant like Jupiter. This is Cauvin's characteristic use of the word, to refer to distortion of the meaning of a text. Corruption, in the French of the period, can mean 'exhaustion' or 'brokenness', or it can be used just as we use it now when we speak of the corruption of a text. In Cauvin's mind, the mirror is by far the dominant metaphor for perception and also for Creation, do distortion would be a natural extension of the metaphor..." - Marilynne Robinson , The Death of Adam

The Mediator of Faith

Here Marilynne Robinson talks about the role of theology in forming peoples minds and lives.

"Theology has been the mediator of the primary literature of faith since antiquity. The writers of the psalms, the prophets, the Apostle Paul all interpret core belief--that God is One, the Creator of heaven and earth, and that he has made humankind in his image. Augustine, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin each gave intellectual, social and artistic form to modes of Christian life which without them are hardly to be imagined. Lately the practice of this ancient tradition has receded into the academy and learned the idiom of specialization, leaving religion increasingly vulnerable to the charge, and the fact, of vacuousness." - Marilynne Robinson

History is Precedent and Permission

"...[L]acking curiosity and the habit of study and any general grasp of history, we have entered a period of nostalgia and reaction. We want the past back, though we have no idea what it was. Things do not go so well for us as they once did. We feel we have lost our way. Most of us know that religion was once very important to our national life, and believe, whether we ourselves are religious or not, that we were much the better for its influence. Many of us know that Calvinism was a very important tradition among us. Yet all we know about John Calvin was that he was an eighteenth-century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism. Our ignorant parody of history affirms our ignorant parody of religious or 'traditional' values. This matters, because history is precedent and permission, and in this important instance, as in many others, we have lost plain accuracy, not to speak of complexity, substance, and human inflection. We want to return to the past, and we have made our past a demonology and not a human narrative." - Marilynne Robinson, Marguerite de Navarre, The Death of Adam, p. 206.

A Model Academic

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a lot of things. A martyr. A resistance fighter. The hero of a fallen leader. He is an inspiring writer who cared about Christ and his church. Yet for all this, we rarely see Bonhoeffer as a model academic. Unless of course you are Marilynne Robinson.

Robinson's Bonhoeffer is more than this of course. But to understand Bonhoeffer you need to understand him as an academic. Earning a doctorate in theology by the age of 21, Bonhoeffer started to lecture in the University of Berlin by the time he was 22. He would go onto to teach in some of Germany's finest academic institutions of the time. And yet, unlike so many other academic contemproaries, Bonhoeffer understand the danger posed by Hitler's National Socialism. As a Christian in academia, Bonhoeffer was prepared to let his beliefs shape every part of his life, even if it lead him to the hangman's noose. Having read Robinson's homage to Bonhoeffer in The Death of Adam, I want to suggest three reasons why Bonhoeffer stands out as a model academic.

1. Christ at the Centre. The central focus point of Bonhoeffer's academic career, and indeed his life, was the Lordship of Jesus. He is the one with full authority. He is the one who is to be obeyed and trusted - in life and in death. It was his commitment to Christ at the centre that lead Bonhoeffer to shape everything around this reality. It was this reality that prevented Bonhoeffer from submitting to any other authority.
2. Religionless Christianity. I have to admit that although I've heard this phrase thrown around quite a bit, it's baffled me. Until I realized what it actually means. Often used as an excuse to stop 'stuffy, anachronistic liturgy' etc. Bonhoeffer used this phrase to challenge his culture. In a nation where everyone and everything assumed Christianity, Bonhoeffer used his place as an academic - in the university and the seminary - to call the assumed a priori of god in German society hypocrisy. His vocation as a scholar was to call Germany to denounce the Fuhrer and follow the true lord.
3. Christ at Gethsemane. These two points made Bonhoeffer an academic who was well thought-out and integrated in his faith and study, and willing to let this shape his dialogue with the world.

   "By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane...How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God's suffering through a life of this kind?"

   The scion of German aristocracy and one of the greatest minds of his generation, Bonhoeffer could have stayed quiet in the ivory tower of academia. He could of, but he didn't, because Christ went to Gethsemane. He would be an integrated scholar who would get involved in the world's mess. As a disciple of Christ, Bonhoeffer would stay true to his convictions. "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

A brilliant mind, Bonhoeffer lived and died for what he believed in. He loved the world like his master did, and was prepared to speak up and act against injustice. And he did all this without going flaky on what lay at the centre of his life. Bonhoeffer has been an inspiration to me for over seven years now. And Robinson's reading of him has only solidified this for me. I look forward to carrying on part of his legacy in the postgrad ministry at Sydney University.

The Descaralization of Humanity

"For old Adam, that near-angel whose name means Earth, Darwinists have substituted a creature who shares essental attributes with whatever beast has been recently observed behaving shabbily in the state of nature. Genesis tries to describe human exceptionalism, and Darwinism tries to discount it. Since Malthus, to go back no farther, the impulse has been vigorously present to descralise humankind by making it appropriately the prey of unmitigated struggle. This descaralization - fully as absolute with respect to predator as to prey - has required the disengagement of conscience, among other things. It has required the grand-scale disparagement of the traits that distinguish us from the animals - and the Darwinists take the darkest possible view of animals. What has been rejected is the complexity of the Genesis account, in favour of a simplicity so extreme it cannot - by design, perhaps - deal with that second term in the Biblical view of humankind, our destiny, that is, the consequences of our actions. It is an impressive insight, in a narrative so very ancient as the Genesis account of the Fall, that the fate of Adam is presented as the fate of the whole living world. I have heard people comfort themselves with the thought of the perdurability of cockroaches, a fact which does not confute the general truth of the view that our species is very apt to put an end to life on this planet." - Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam

Does this make us distinct, exceptional? We who were created a little lower than the angels are able to end all life on earth.

Socioeconomic Snake Handling

I've started reading Marilynne Robinson's The Death of Adam. Robinson, who is a brilliant writer, has produced this collection of essays as a lament over decline in humanism and history. what is particularly concerning to her is the way history is taught now, such that we can throw round words like Calvinism or Darwinism without ever looking at a word Calvin or Darwin wrote. In response, Robinson takes us back to the original texts - texts which she claims to have foundational documents to contemporary American identity. I've read the first chapter, on Darwinism, and particularly appreciated Robinson's approach. She doesn't take issue with the science of evolution, but offers a sustained critique of the philosophy or ideology of Darwinism.

'What magic is there about the word "modern" that makes us assume what we think has no effect on what we do? Bryan wrote, "Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future." This being true, how could a cult of war recruit many thousands of intelligent people? And how can we now, when the fragility of the planet is every day more obvious, be giving ourselves over to an ethic of competition and self-seeking, a sort of socioeconomic snake handling, where faith in a theory makes us contemptuous of very obvious perils? And where does this theory get its seemingly unlimited power over our moral imaginations, when it can rationalize stealing candy from babies - or, a more contemporary illustration, stealing medical care or schooling from babies - as readily as any bolder act? Why does it have the stature of science and the chic of iconoclasm and the vigor of novelty when it is, pace Nietzsche, only mythified, respectablized resentment, with a long, dark history behind it?'

Robinson understands Darwinism as part of the larger picture. It's part of the enlightenment project of progress. It is a dehumanising idea, which, when taken and applied to politics or economics is destructive. It has enslaved to humanity to economic selfishness and ecological tragedy as we seek to exploit and take advantage of the world and each other. How much of the world has been destroyed in the name of progress?