don furnaloni

Thanks to my good aussie friend Adam, I got my hands on a copy of Bishop Tom Wright’s latest book After You Believe (UK Title: Virtue Reborn).

I’m only into the first chapter, but I’ve already been prompted to share a bit here to whet your appetite.

In the opening chapter, Bishop Tom talks about “James” knocking on his door and saying that:

“he wasn’t satisfied with the answers he’d been getting from his friends and from people in the church he was attending. All they could say was that God called some people to particular spheres of Christian service–into full-time pastoral ministry, for instance, or to be teachers or doctors or missionaries or some combination of these and other similar tasks. But James had no sense that any of that was for him. He was finishing his doctorate in computer science and had all sorts of career options opening up before him. Was all that knowledge and opportunity simply irrelevant to the ’spiritual’ issues? Was he basically going to be hanging around for a few decades, waiting to die and go to heaven, and in the meantime using some of his spare time to persuade other people to do the same? Was that really it? Isn’t there anything else that happens after you believe and before you finally die and go to heaven?”

In this last contribution, which is preceded by Simply Christian & Surprised by Hope, Bishop Tom brings New Testament studies into conversation with wider, philosophical discussions about virtue. Wright mentions being influenced by a number of important works like MacIntyre’s After Virtue, although he doesn’t explicitly engage it. All in all, I’m looking forward to reading this book as I have thoroughly enjoyed his others in this series.

Make sure and pick up a copy!

Have you ever heard your own voice on tape? There’s usually an uncomfortable feeling that accompanies this experience as you try and place what you hear between your ears with what comes out of your mouth. What normally happens is that you decide that it doesn’t sound like you—but it is. What may be even weirder is hearing your own voice on tape from when you were just a toddler learning to speak. It’s even harder to place the high-pitched voice on the tape with your own matured one. But what if a crazy thing happened like both tapes, the toddler version and the mature, recorded you saying the same exact thing? That would be eerie, wouldn’t it?

I couldn’t get this out of my mind as I watched Gina Welch talk about her new book that came out last month called, In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church. What struck me about this book is that Welch went for two years undercover as a Christian to get this story. Not as a Christian undercover, but an undercover Christian. For TWO YEARS! In the book, she respectfully lets the reader into the personal world of Jerry Fallwell’s church.

In this video, Gina reads two excerpts from her book. One is about enduring an evangelism class, the other is about a mission trip to Alaska. As the audience asks her about the ethical ramifications of deceit, Welch shares about how it affected her and how she eventually returned to the church to tell them the truth. What drew me into this video was how she explained “Evangelical-speak” to her secular audience. She did this respectfully, and this is why I think there is an immense value to this book. I think it’s safe to say that most Evangelicals don’t find themselves in secular audiences very often. In fact, these kinds of audiences are seen as hostile and sometimes this is true. But what Evangelical Christians don’t normally have the benefit of is hearing how they sound when they speak from an outsider’s perspective. Welch’s book is a kind of tape recorder that lets the faith community hear what their message sounds like to the world. Being self-critical isn’t always easy, but I’m inclined to think that if more Evangelicals were to listen to people like Welch, some would have that eerie feeling of unease that is needed to improve their speaking.

St. Deiniol’s Library

Friday 23rd – Sunday 25th April

The 12th annual Film and Theology weekend explores the complex relationships that exist between film, religion, theology and the Bible. In a relaxed and convivial atmosphere, participants will reflect upon the ways in which film represents belief and religious traditions. This year, the films that will be viewed and discussed are:

A Serious Man (The Coen Brothers, 2009)

Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1993)

Blackboards (Maysam Makhmalbaf, 2000)

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)

Anti-Christ (Lars von Trier, 2009)

Month Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)

The cost of attending this course is just £133 on an all-inclusive basis. This includes course fees, two nights accommodation on a dinner, bed and breakfast basis, lunches as well as teas or coffee. The non-residential cost is just £89.

To book or for more details please visit the website or email us at: enquiries (at) st-deiniols.org

Yesterday, April and I walked from our doorstep to Durham Cathedral (in about 45 min!) just in time for the 11am easter service. Once we got inside, we had to stand at the back by the baptismal font with a huge group of people. The service had already started and just about finished! Bishop Tom was up front finishing up the liturgy and then it was over. I was so bummed because I thought we had missed out on easter!

It turned out that we had just missed Matins and the group we were waiting with was the right group, but they just hadn’t let people in yet. So they finally let us in and we got to sit way up in the front. I leaned over and told April that the past two Easters have been really special to me. Last year, we celebrated midnight mass at Montefano with the friars who conducted a hybrid liturgy of the Catholic and Orthodox celebration. This year, we get to celebrate easter with N.T. Wright.

During his homily, he told a story about a taxi driver that he spoke with who said, “If Jesus is raised, then the rest is just rock n’ roll.” Bishop Tom laughed and took this statement to heart. He talked about how Paul said something like this, but in the negative: If Christ is not raised, our faith is in vain.” But the taxi driver flipped this into a positive statement, which Bishop Tom explained how it creatively describes what the Bible refers to as “New Creation.”

Hearing Bishop Tom yesterday made me want to pick up his latest book entitled, Virtue Reborn (US title: After you believe).

The past few days have been filled with rushing to get my essays done for class. I was recently asked if I listen to music while I write/study and if so, “what gets you through” it?

Well, this question is tough to answer because sometimes it’s classical music, other times jazz, but recently, I’ve been listening to Nathanael Mehrens’ album For The Conscious.

I can’t stop listening to the track that the album was named after, “For The Conscious”. Look him up on PureVolume and if you like it as much as I do, then you can buy it.

Sometimes you just need a good tune to get you through the day. What I like about Nathanael’s music is that its goodness endures upon further listening…

Last night, April & I ate at an amazing restaurant in Newcastle called The Big Mussel. Afterwards, we walked down to the Sage to see a tribute concert to Nick Drake.

Now, normally, I wouldn’t go to a tribute concert and pay money for it, but there was a private screening of a documentary about Nick Drake that made me think it was worth it. When it came time for the concert two guys came out on stage, one with an upright bass, and the other had about four acoustic guitars. They played the music really well, but the guy’s voice was mismatched for the lyrics. The guy’s voice was suited better for a Michael McDonald cover band. Well, after watching Michael McDonald on YouTube, I realise that this is not a fair comparison either.

Anyway, what this concert did do for me, was make me appreciate even more the source of this music.

If you only have a chance to buy three albums this year, please consider the following:

Five Leaves Left (1969)

Bryter Layter (1970)

Pink Moon (1972)

In the most recent issue of The Christian Century, Will Willimon expresses regret over his co-authored book Resident Aliens (1989) which he wrote with Stanley Hauerwas. This was a hugely influential book for me and my friends when we were in undergrad. I hadn’t thought about why it was appealing to us as undergrads until I read Willimon’s comments in this article:

“Few things are more humbling for a professor than to hear your classroom assertions parroted back to you. In the student’s puerile response you hear an echo of your own pronouncement—but on undergraduate lips the thought sounds unbearably stupid.”

Willimon’s regret about the book is not that it was watered down and easily slogan-ready. He has a more theological reason for his regret:

“For some time Hauerwas has engaged in a polemic against “practices based on atheism.” I worry that our infatuation with practices could be but the latest phase of atheism. Since God is now mute and absent, we try to locate a set of habits that will make us feel better about our situation.”

Willimon shows his cards in this article and demonstrates the flip-side of populism. While you want what you write to be easily accessible and clearly understood, what you don’t want is it to be trivialised in the process. If Kierkegaard were alive, perhaps he would have these same regrets about theologians doing this very thing with his writings. MacIntyre is still alive, perhaps he regrets the portrayal of his work in the writings of theologians like Hauerwas and Willimon.

Regardless of these regrets, Willimon says “I still believe just about everything Stanley Hauerwas and I said in that book.”

What are the ramifications of a confession like this? Are there any? Perhaps not. Perhaps this is just part of growing older and looking back twenty years later and seeing where you overstepped your boundaries. Or maybe it might be a word of warning to us about how we ingest philosophy and baptise it without attending to what the philosopher is saying. Perhaps it shows us the stretch marks of age where we’ve tried to make philosophy, theology.

Thanks to Halden for linking to this.

Seeing this picture and reading a recent article by a Princeton trained theologian prompted me to reflect…

If one stops to think about the past 50 years of theological scholarship, a lot has happened over the years. Just to list a few things that have impacted the scope of modern theology: Karl Barth passes away, the Second Vatican Council, and the Civil Rights Movement, etc. I’m sure the list could go on and on.

In the article, Dr. Cottrell gives a very telling portrayal of what he’s learned in the past 50 years of being a theologian. So it was with eagerness that I sat down to read this article by a veteran evangelical theologian to see how he sees the landscape. However, as I read, I became more and more disappointed. Basically, after receiving a PhD from Princeton and teaching theology for nearly 50 years, Dr. Cottrell says he has learned two things: 1) to distinguish what is a fad from what is fundamental and 2) the difference between right doctrine and wrong doctrine. More explicitly, Cottrell says,

“Both in my writing and in the classroom, I have never hesitated to take a position on any crucial issue, to defend it from Scripture, to declare opposing views to be false, and to identify those who teach falsely. But one thing I have learned in 50 years of “doing theology” in this way is that it makes one very unpopular in certain circles! It puts me in conflict with what some regard as a more sophisticated and scholarly teaching methodology, namely, that a teacher should simply present the various major views on any issue without stating and defending his own personal view. To do the latter is regarded as “spoon-feeding” the students, and is characterized as a sign of anti-intellectual fundamentalism.

I will not attempt to defend my methodology here. I will simply affirm that my teaching and writing will continue to be based on the presuppositions that truth is real and that it can be known. I cannot do otherwise without going against what I believe Scripture teaches about God, about itself, about the nature of human beings, about truth, about sound doctrine, and about false doctrine.”

He then goes on to list 13 of those “sound doctrines” with a “(to be continued)” tacked on at the end. How many more could he add? The list could go on forever…

But the list, as problematic as it is, was not what bothered me. What bothered me about his article was that after 50 years of teaching, the major thing he took away from this experience is that basically, he’s right and everyone else is wrong. I don’t think you can call this “theology”. I think it’s more appropriately labelled “ideology”.

I think that when someone studies theology, there are certain virtues that are fostered in the process. Thomas Aquinas was pretty big on this. He names the theological virtues as being faith, hope, and love. Before him, Augustine talked about how humility is such a key facet of moving towards God and understanding.

What was bothering me about Cottrell’s article was that after I finished reading it, he did not convey to me that these kinds of virtues were valued or fostered at the end of 50 years. Now, folks who may know this guy personally, may stick up for him and say he is a man of virtue. I’ll grant this and give Jack the benefit of the doubt.

However, I don’t think that the churches that mimic his stance can survive another 50 years in his footsteps. To be clear, if a church produces theologians that insulate themselves off from self-criticism, then that said church is in real trouble. It’s in trouble because it will continue to become more difficult to discern self-deception and self-absorption.

Michael Pollan talks about his new book Food Rules: an Eater’s Manual. Take about four minutes to watch how food marketers respond to his criticism here

Also, make sure and check out the second episode of BBC’s program, Our Man in the Vatican. At about the 6 minute mark, the BBC comes to Durham and you might see some familiar faces. The rumour is still unconfirmed as to whether or not the Pope will make his way up here to Durham for a visit.

In a recent issue of The Christian Century, Amy Frykholm interviews Rick Steves. Here are some interesting excerpts:

“Frankly, many Christians are embarrassingly ethnocentric. They wear their Christianity on their sleeves and think everybody should be like them. I wish I could be their tour guide. I’d put them in a lousy hotel, make them talk to people who don’t speak their language, give them some history to read and hope they can recognize that other people have dreams other than theirs. They might have the Bulgarian dream or the Sri Lankan dream or the Pakistani dream. Many Americans think that everybody should have the American dream.”

“If I were planning a mission trip, I would make a point of tackling people’s ethnocentrism. There are a few books that can be helpful. Reading the Bible Through Third World Eyes is one I would recommend. War Against the Poor is another that I have purchased by the hundreds. We’ve got to acknowledge that we in the First World downplay Jesus’ preferential option for the poor. We play up the notion that we should be industrious; we think, “Blessed are those who invest smartly.” When you venture to the developing world you are challenged to interpret the Bible from other people’s perspectives.

Too often, when Christians visit a place where the people are poor, they bring along quilts that members of their congregation have sewn to help the poor stay warm, but they don’t ask, “Why are these people in such squalor?” Mother Teresa was a loving person motivated by her Christian faith, but I think she was so beloved in part because she never asked “why?” When you ask why, that’s when things get really interesting.

Archbishop Oscar Romero saw structural poverty and economic injustice in El Salvador and asked why. And he was assassinated. Thirty years after his death, the power of Romero in El Salvador is just mind-blowing.

Our goal as thoughtful travelers is to see things from an economic-justice point of view. Economic justice is the hard issue. You can travel and then come home and consume with impunity in a way that keeps poor people poor. Or you can travel as a political act and come home inspired to live your life in empathy and solidarity with all of God’s people.

Recently I was one of the judges for a video contest sponsored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “God’s Work, Our Hands” was the theme. All the videos showing mission efforts were commendable, but they were mostly about acts of charity, with not much edginess. Nobody was willing to ask about economic justice. Poverty is structural. It is a matter of people’s buying power.”