To The Nations

"Jesus told his apostles to disciple all the nations. The way his words are often translated, “to make disciples of all nations”, allows for a misconception to arise. It is the nations that are to be discipled, baptized and taught, not merely individuals out of the nations. The gospel will heal the nations and in the book of Revelation the nations shall walk in the light of the glory of God and bring their treasures to the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 21:24, 26; 22:2). This glorious result of the exaltation of the Messiah had been prophesied in the Old Testament (Isa 11:10, 12; 25:7; 49:6, 7; 52:15). All the nations, that is the peoples and their cultures, are to be Christianized by the knowledge of the triune God. Christ’s commission to his followers is to baptize the nations, to bring them under his leadership, as their Lord and their teacher." - D B Knox, D.Broughton Knox Selected Works Volume II - Church and Ministry; ed. K. Birkett p.277-282. h/t Michael

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.

At the Margins of Morality

"The Church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief."
- Hauerwas & Willimon, Resident Aliens, 1989, p. 49.

"The church in the West may have to get used to the idea that its own centre in God, from which it goes out to others in proclamation and compassion, is actually a position of social and cultural marginality. This may improve its witness to the Christ who was himself usually also found at the margins." - Bauckham, Mission as Hermeneutic, 2010, p. 7.

Chris recently blogged about Christianity being at the margins of society. As western society continues to sojourn further and further away from Christendom, the Church is decreasingly at the centre of society. The Church's social and political powerless position not only mirrors the first three centuries of Christian history; it also may help the Church be faithful to it's life and mission.

This is not an easy process for the Church. Not that it should be - we do follow a crucified Messiah. But of interest to me recently has been the way public perception has shifted when it comes to the Church and morality. Whereas once the Church was seen as a moral guardian of society (and it's members were mock for being wowsers and holy), it is now seen as an immoral, corrupting force on society. The Church - and Christians more generally - are seen to have started wars, indoctrinated children, thwarted intellectual progress and destroyed cultures the world over. The Church has constantly been on the back foot for at least the past 50 years over issues of sexuality; in debates in Australia and around the world, it is the Christians are portrayed as immoral and out of touch.

For the early church it was their refusal to observe their civic duties that landed them in hot water (sometimes literally). Like our brothers and sisters 2000 years ago, we find ourselves at the margins of morality. And like them, we are disciples of the same crucified and resurrected Lord. But what will it look like for us to cling to him in our own position of "social and cultural marginality"?

Photo: Alison Moffitt

Why Karl Barth?

So my box set of Church Dogmatics arrived this week - appropriately on my birthday.

There is a lot to admire about Karl Barth and his massive, unfinished project. I recently had the joyful experience of explaining who Barth was to someone in Manning Bar who had never heard of him. He was a theologian who called his readers to focus on Jesus. His opposition to liberalism, Nazism, and Cold War's partianship was because of what Barth knew God had done in and through Jesus Christ. When asked by a reporter how he would summarise his work after all his years of study, Barth replied "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

Maybe I should have shown them this video:

The impact of Barth's scholarship during and after his life time has been far reaching. Yet far more influential than the volumes of his writing was his commitment to the gospel. After Barth died in 1968, the translators of Church Dogmatics into English - TF Torrance and GW Bromiley - made reference to this in their preface to CD IV.4:

"When the proofs of this book were still in our hands, new came in that Karl Barth was dead. God took him to his rest in the early hours of December 10, 1968, the great Church Father of Evangelical Christendom, the one genuine Doctor of the universal Church the modern era has known. It is in the Church Dogmatics above all that we must look for the grandeur of this humble servant of Jesus Christ, for the work he was given to accomplish in it will endure to bless the word for many centuries to come. Only Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin have performed comparable service in the past, in the search for a unified and comprehensive basis for all theology in the grace of God.

The Church Dogmatics represents an immense struggle for the understanding of the eternal Word of God and its rational articulation in the modern world in which the thought-forms of man are obediently and pliantly yielded to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ according to the Holy Scriptures."

If this has whet your appetite, you might like to check out the highlight package of Church Dogmatics at Faith and Theology: Church Dogmatics in a Week. And remember to love God and keep your pipe lit.

The Brain Drain?

In case you missed it, Southern Cross (the Sydney Anglican mag) ran a two page feature this month on higher education and the Wesley Institute. Bryan Cowling argued that the newly envisioned Wesley Institute might help fill the gap of "well-informed Christian educators in the university". What Cowling imagines for the university is very similar to what I've come to see this year as I've served alongside Christian academics at Sydney University:

"We need lots of intelligent, mature articulate Christian philosophers of education who are equally skilled and knowledgeable in their academic discipline as in applied biblical doctrine and theology. We need hundreds of these academics in our public universities and colleges to nurture the next generation of visionary educational leaders (you could say the same about about each of the gatekeeping, public-policy shaping professions)." - Bryan Cowling, The Hole in Higher Education, Southern Cross: November 2010, pp 28-29.

As I've argued elsewhere, the university offers a unique opportunity to affect the world. I do have some misgivings about Cowling's conclusion (which you might like to ask me about in the comments), but I'm genuinely glad that I'm not alone in praying that the hearts and minds of academics would be shaped by Christ.

However, there is one sentiment in particular that I do find concerning. After calling for a hundred of thought-out academics in the university, Cowling goes on to argue:

"There needs to be career paths in public universities and colleges in this country if we are to avoid losing our best Christian minds to leadership positions in other countries."

Lose our best Christian minds to other countries? I find this to be unbelievably short-sighted and parochial. Instead of worrying about a brain drain, we should be encouraging our best Christian minds to use their opportunity in the academy to leave. For eu postgrads and staff, our vision is that when Christian academics finish at Sydney University, they'll go to other universities in less reached and less resourced parts of Australia in the world. Our vision is that they'll be people who - with all the energy that God powerfully works within them (Col 1.29) - will be shaping peoples lives in Christ. They'll be academics who can engage and speak the gospel into public policy and discourse. They'll be academics who know how to support campus ministry. And if they find themselves in a university where there is none, then they'll know how to start it.

Hording our academic minds is not the right response to the "marginalising of respectable Christian thinking in Australian society."* Taking every thought captive to obey Christ can't stop at the Australian coastline.

__*Is marginalisation the problem? For more thoughts on marginalisation see this from Chris.

Guest Post: High Culture

By Alison Moffitt. Also available here.

Within the last week, Matt and I have done three particularly cultured things:

1. We saw Bell Shakespeare's performance of Twelfth Night at the Opera House.
2. We visited Sculpture by the Sea.
3. We went to the Opera House again to see the Australian Ballet's Edge of Night.

Sculpture by the sea was alright, but the events at the Opera House really took the cake. Twelfth Night made me laugh until I cried, multiple times. And, amazingly, so did the ballet! The final piece, Molto Vivace, was a hilarious parody of traditional ballet set to some of Handel's most beautiful and upbeat string music. I was in stitches as an extremely tall ballerina entered the stage in the middle of the piece (obviously sitting on another person's shoulders, who was hidden under her enormous skirt) and demanded to be romanced by her male partner. I nearly fell off my chair laughing when she slipped away leaving her partner dancing with her torso-less skirt.

What a great week it was, but it has also got Matt and I thinking a lot about how consumerist high culture is. It's a hidden thing - when I think of consumerism, I think of things like Coke and Barbie dolls and ipods. But Shakespeare plays, ballet and other arts are products for consumption too, especially when they are marketed as an essential experience for the upper middle class.

I find great pleasure in these kinds of performances - dance and music performances especially. I love watching and interpreting and I love being moved by it all. I love crying when things are beautiful. I have cried at the beauty of a live performance of Handel's Zadok the Priest and I have bawled my eyes out watching the Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet. But sometimes I feel almost guilty that I experience these kinds of moments so frequently. Seeing a beautiful performance is one thing, but it's never that alone. It's a night out in a glittering city - lit by thousands of fossil fuel burning lights. It's an overpriced meal beforehand, served up by underpaid kitchen hands and waitstaff. We eat food that has travelled thousands of kilometres to sit on my plate. Are the farmers who produced this food in foreign countries getting paid enough to take their family to see Shakespeare? Is this foreign food depriving local farmers of a decent income? Can local farmers take their families to the Opera House? The curtain goes up and the stage lights turn on. Who says that this form of dancing is the highest form of dancing? What about dancing from other cultures? Would this many people pay this much money to see dancing from a different culture?

These high culture nights always seem to go the same way for me: the indulgence of a good meal, the elation of an indescribable performance and then the gnawing sensation as I leave the theatre: how sustainable is this thing that I have just done?

Even with these sobering thoughts, I don't think I want to stop going and enjoying these things. But I definitely don't want to stop thinking of the bigger ethical picture behind it all. At the moment, feeling the weight of each performance I see makes me appreciate these moments as a blessing. Maybe for now it is just a case of being thankful that I get to enjoy these things now, to acknowledge that they are not essential experiences to be a human (not even an upper-middle class human!) and to remember that they are not to be taken for granted.

Twelfth Night photo from Bell Shakespeare, Molto Vivace photo from the Australian Ballet.

Christians Flee Iraq

From ABC News.

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.

Peter Adam: When Sorry Isn't Sorry

Here a short interview calling Melbourne Anglicans to be a prophetic voice to Australia and why sorry isn't sorry without restitution. H/T Stephen Gardner.

Jeremy Begbie on Theology and the Arts

He's a flipping genius!

Book Review: Worldviews

CMS-NSW recently released the second edition of their e-journal, Landscape. This edition includes some fascinating articles, including this video that I've mentioned earlier. There's also a review that I've written of Paul Hiebert's Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change. You'll find it here.

Barth IV.1: The Scenic Tour

I've been in a reading group for the past few months. We're reading the thoroughly beautiful Church Dogmatics IV.1 by uber theologian Karl Barth. Despite the patchiness of my attendance and the density of ideas that Barth manages to fit onto one page, it's been quite enjoyable. Here are some highlights:

“The subject-matter, origin and content of the message received and proclaimed by the Christian community is at its heart the free act of the faithfulness of God in which He takes the lost cause of man, who has denied Him as Creator and in so doing ruined himself as creature, and makes it His own in Jesus Christ, carrying it through to its goal and in that way maintaining and manifesting His own glory in the world”. - Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1, p. 3.

"In His Godhead, as the eternal Son of the Father, as the eternal Word, Jesus Christ never ceased to be transcendent, free, and sovereign. He did not stand in need of exaltation, nor was He capable of it. But He did as man – it is here again that we come up against that which is not self-evident in Jesus Christ. The special thing, the new thing about the exaltation of Jesus Christ is that One who is bound as we are is free, who is tempted as we are is without sin, who is a sufferer as we are is able to minister to Himself and others, who is a victim to death is alive even though He was dead, who is a servant (the servant of all servants) is the Lord. This is the secret of His humanity which is revealed in His resurrection and ascension and therefore shown retrospectively by the Evangelists to be the secret of His whole life and death. It is not simply that He is the Son of God at the right hand of the Father, the Kyrios, the Lord of His community and the Lord of the cosmos, the bearer and executor of divine authority in the Church and the world, but that He is all this as a man – as a man like we are, but a man exalted in the power of His deity. This is what makes Him the Mediator between God and man, and the One who fulfils the covenant. - Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1, p. 135.

Story Telling: An Exercise

"Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching."

This will require at least 8 people. From then you you will need multiples of 4.

Number people off 1, 2, 3, 4. Then break up Mark 1.1-34 amongst the four groups this way:

1. Mark 1.1-8
2. Mark 1.9-15
3. Mark 1.16-28
4. Mark 29-34

Each person will need a pen and an A4 piece of paper - divide the paper into eight even boxes. Then each group needs to draw their section of Mark 1 (story board style) in no more than the eight boxes. Once you've done this, start telling your group's part of Mark 1 within the group (using your pictures if needed). Do this a couple of times, helping each other tell the story that is:

• clear (i.e. finding more suitable words/phrases for words/phrases the average person in your culture wouldn't understand; summarise names and places if needed, etc.)
• accurate (you can't guess the meaning to embellish the story)
• interesting (make use of body language, etc.)

OK, you're no ready to tell the story without looking at your pictures or your bible. Swap the groups around so that there is now someone from groups 1, 2, 3 and 4 in each group. Go ahead and tell the story to each other with pausing or stopping.

_________
How did you feel about hearing the bible this way? According to one set of figures, two thirds of the world are aural learners. Is this going to be an effective way to teach them the Bible? There are a basic set of of discussion questions you can use with this method (which are discussed in pairs before being shared with the whole), e.g. What did you like about the story/first impressions from the story? What questions does the story raise for you? What does the story tell us about God? What does the story tell us about humans? What are you going to change next week because of this story?

h/t To the SMBC graduate (who I can't name for security reasons) who taught this method of Bible teaching at staff equip yesterday.

Christian Academia: Books

Working alongside the eu postgrads this year, I've read a couple of books to help me understand the challenges and opportunities of Christian academia. What I've found is that they has been several books published in the last 20 years about the place of Christian academics. But for the most past they seem to be largely isolated from each other. Furthermore, most of the books are American and are written for the American context (i.e. having secular and faith-based universities). Here are some of the books I've found helpful:

• The Two Tasks of The Christian Scholar, ed. William Lane Craig & Paul M. Gould, 2007. Published as a festschrift to Charles Malik, The Two Tasks has some interesting papers by Lane Craig and others. But the cash value in this book is Malik's The Two Tasks, an address he gave in 1980. It was this address which reignited a vision for university in the American evangelical scene.

• Finding God at Harvard, ed. Kelly Monroe Kullberg, 2007. A celebration of the ministry of the Veritas Forum at Harvard, FG@H is a collection of short essays and testimonies from Christians in the Harvard community. Contributors include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles Malik and others. A great insight into one of the most interesting ministries to post grads and staff in the US.

• The State of the University, Stanley Hauerwas, 2006. A collection of Hauerwas' thoughts on the university and Christianity. Although the essay's become repetitive in the middle, Hauerwas has some gold in this book, and I appreciate the way he pushes back against the usual American angst about the university. There are also some beautiful chapters about tradition and institutions, and Rowan Williams.

• Shining Like Stars, Lindsay Brown, 2006. Although not specifically about Christian academics, Brown has some inspiring stories about the Christians working in the university.

• Until Justice & Peace Embrace, Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1983. This book is also not specifically about academia. However Wolterstorff has some insightful things to say to Christian post grads and scholars, and I know some people who have found him helpful.

• Christian Academia? Matheson Russell, 2010. Originally a talk given at the Post Grad day at AnCon this year, it was later republished in VERITAS. This article lays out what the university is and how it fits into the Christian worldview.

• 10 Things We Wish Someone Had Told Us When We Started Graduate School, Anna Blanch, Goanna Tree, updated 2010. Helpful advice from a Christian academic.

There is also several American and British websites with some resources on them. And Kelly Monroe Kullberg has another book, Finding God Beyond Harvard, which I'd like to read at some point. Oh, there are also some theologians like O'Donovan and McGrath who have things to say about academia in several places.

Know of any other books which have something to say about the university? I'd love to know. And at some point I should share some ideas I've had about university and the doctrine of creation...

The Periphery of Intellectual Existence

Is there such a theology of the university? Or does the university fit into the Christian worldview? One of the things I've found myself doing this year as I work alongside the EU's Post Grad faculty is to read books that try to answer these questions. As I've prayed and dreamed about where this growing ministry might go in the future, there have been a number of books I've found helpful in imagining the vocation of Christian academia.

Admittedly, most of these books are American. They appear to be written out of some American angst in solving the dilemma of having both Christian and secular universities.

One name has repeatedly popped up this year: Charles Habib Malik. A former President of the UN General Assembly, Malik was himself a giant in the mid to late 20th's public forum. Malik was a brilliant thinker who studied under Heidegger and Whitehead; he also possessed a generous orthodoxy in loving and welcoming Catholics and Protestants as well as other Orthodox Christians. Amongst contemporary Christians he perhaps most famous for this quote:

"The University is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. The problem
here is for the church to realize that no greater service can it render both
itself and the cause of the gospel than to try to recapture the universities for
Christ, on whom they were all originally founded. More potently than by any
other means, change the university and you change the world."

I've recently been reading Malik. Like most of what I've read about Christian scholarly witness, what I've found in Malik is a love for the God and Father of Christ Jesus that is displayed in part through a love for the university, and more generally for knowledge and learning. He had a great vision for the university as a place that is captured for Christ. He prayed for a university that would use it's wisdom that would serve Jesus. Malik believed that it would be Evangelicals who had the most opportunity to make this happen. Here is his charge to them:

The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the
whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover that you have
not won the world. Indeed it may turn out that you have actually lost the
world.In order to create and excel intellectually, must you sacrifice or neglect
Jesus? In order to give your life to Jesus, must you sacrifice or neglect
learning and research? Is your self-giving to scholarship and learning
essentially incompatible with your self-giving to the scholarship and learning
essentially incompatible with your self-giving to Jesus Christ? These are the
ultimate questions, and I beg you to beware of thinking that they admit of glib
answers. I warn you: the right answer could be the most disturbing
....
People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money
or serving the church or preaching the gospel. They have no idea of the infinite
value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and
souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their
powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is
abdicated and vacated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the
great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of
scholarship and research? Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a
normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or
psychology or sociology or politics? ...For the sake of greater effectiveness in
witnessing to Jesus Christ himself, as well as for their own sakes, the
evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible
intellectual existence.

Malik offers a caution against the anti-intellectualism that had the potential to characterise evangelicalism in the 20th century. And if we truly believe in lives transformed by Christ, we need to seek not just the conversion of souls, but the conversion minds, hearts and hands (on which see here). As I reflect on what this might look like for EU's Post Grads, my hope is that they will bring every part of their lives under the Lordship of Christ. In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. My hope is that they will be the best post grads in the university, because they're using their intellect to serve Jesus and his church and his world; because they're engaging with other academics from across the university; because they want take every thought captive to obey Christ.