The end of the semester is (somewhat) in sight. I handed one of my bigger papers in last Friday, and over the weekend I've been finishing the reading and note-taking for the study I've been making of Maximus the Confessor, a sixth century Byzantine theologian. I'm going to hand that work in today, and then tomorrow I will write my constructive summary essay on the relationship between theology, ethics, and spirituality. That's when the fun starts - as an STM student I have to nominate one of my papers from either semester to be an extended paper; 40 pages, or about 12,000 words. I've been doing a study on major approaches to religous language, and whether and how we can say anything of God, and over the Christmas break I'll be writing 2 pages a day for 20 days, and hopefully that will get me to 40 pages well enough!
In the meantime I'm starting to read something for personal interest. I've been thinking alot about Christology, and the way we elaborate the divine nature of Jesus. One of the issues here is that many of the titles Jesus used of himself were common stock in his time and didn't ever denote anything like the divine nature that we now attribute to Jesus - so how do we get from the biblical text, to something like a Trinitarian view? A landmark work on Christology is Wolfhart Pannenberg's book "Jesus - God and Man", a 400-page tour de force. I'll be reading through this over Christmas break, maybe 20 pages a day in the evening, and I'll put up regular blog posts (promise!) and quotations from the book to chew over.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
evangelicals and Obama
For my course on 'Dogmatics and Politics', I'm writing a paper on evangelical support for the Obama and the Democrat party in the 2008 election. As a case study I looked at the Matthew 25 Network, a PAC (political action committee) that was run by evangelicals in explicit support of Obama, and below is a section I wrote about the way they designed and worded their campaign.
"What distinguishes the Matthew 25 Network from other examples of the evangelical shift to the left, is that because it is aligned to a specific party and claims the alignment as the direct conclusion of their theological beliefs, they need to give a theological rationale for Obama’s policies. Regarding life with dignity, they quote Obama saying that “As children of God, we believe in the worth and dignity of every human person.” On the necessity of arranging health cover for every America, Obama claims it is a “moral commitment.” About poverty, Obama says “we need to heed the biblical call to care for `the least of these' and lift the poor out of despair” a direct reference to Matthew 25. And again, with regard to environmental policy, Obama is quoted as saying that what he “draw[s] from the Genesis story is the importance of us being good stewards of the land.” The prominence of this selection of quotations is made to encourage evangelicals to see a direct link between the bible, their personal faith, and Obama’s policies. Further, the overarching theme of judgement in Matthew 25, that those who do not care for the ‘least of these’ are condemned, carries with it a psychological force amongst evangelicals as people concerned with their salvation. The allusion is weakly and implicitly, yet persistently, making the claim that to not vote for Obama would be to not care for the least of these, and land oneself on the side of the goats. The ultimate point the Matthew 25 campaign is driving toward is the conviction that if one is a biblical, committed and honest Christian, one must acknowledge that Obama’s policies best represent the political application of the gospel message, and therefore if one is to be faithful to the gospel message, only a vote for Obama is consistent with evangelical faith."
I later critique this method as follows:
"For this reason the Barmen Declaration denies that the Church “could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.” In light of this dogmatic statement, a critique of the work of the Matthew 25 Network presents itself forcefully. It was seen from the analysis of the language from the campaign website that more than congruency was drawn between faithfulness to the gospel and voting for Obama; rather, it implied that faithfulness to the gospel necessitated a vote for Obama, and the reversal that seems to have taken place is that biblical phrases and imagery are being employed ‘in the service of arbitrarily chosen plans’ (which a secular Democrat platform must be) – and this is the very thing that Barmen rejects. The positive endorsement of Obama by an explicitly evangelical group seeks to so identify his agenda with the gospel message, that the gospel message is for practical purposes exhausted in Obama’s political policies, and thus no space is left for the gospel to critique and call to account the Obama administration. If that is this situation, then a dogmatic criticism of the Matthew 25 Network would be that it has put limitations and restrictions on the gospel that prevent complete faithfulness to the task of proclamation that the Church has been given."
"What distinguishes the Matthew 25 Network from other examples of the evangelical shift to the left, is that because it is aligned to a specific party and claims the alignment as the direct conclusion of their theological beliefs, they need to give a theological rationale for Obama’s policies. Regarding life with dignity, they quote Obama saying that “As children of God, we believe in the worth and dignity of every human person.” On the necessity of arranging health cover for every America, Obama claims it is a “moral commitment.” About poverty, Obama says “we need to heed the biblical call to care for `the least of these' and lift the poor out of despair” a direct reference to Matthew 25. And again, with regard to environmental policy, Obama is quoted as saying that what he “draw[s] from the Genesis story is the importance of us being good stewards of the land.” The prominence of this selection of quotations is made to encourage evangelicals to see a direct link between the bible, their personal faith, and Obama’s policies. Further, the overarching theme of judgement in Matthew 25, that those who do not care for the ‘least of these’ are condemned, carries with it a psychological force amongst evangelicals as people concerned with their salvation. The allusion is weakly and implicitly, yet persistently, making the claim that to not vote for Obama would be to not care for the least of these, and land oneself on the side of the goats. The ultimate point the Matthew 25 campaign is driving toward is the conviction that if one is a biblical, committed and honest Christian, one must acknowledge that Obama’s policies best represent the political application of the gospel message, and therefore if one is to be faithful to the gospel message, only a vote for Obama is consistent with evangelical faith."
I later critique this method as follows:
"For this reason the Barmen Declaration denies that the Church “could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.” In light of this dogmatic statement, a critique of the work of the Matthew 25 Network presents itself forcefully. It was seen from the analysis of the language from the campaign website that more than congruency was drawn between faithfulness to the gospel and voting for Obama; rather, it implied that faithfulness to the gospel necessitated a vote for Obama, and the reversal that seems to have taken place is that biblical phrases and imagery are being employed ‘in the service of arbitrarily chosen plans’ (which a secular Democrat platform must be) – and this is the very thing that Barmen rejects. The positive endorsement of Obama by an explicitly evangelical group seeks to so identify his agenda with the gospel message, that the gospel message is for practical purposes exhausted in Obama’s political policies, and thus no space is left for the gospel to critique and call to account the Obama administration. If that is this situation, then a dogmatic criticism of the Matthew 25 Network would be that it has put limitations and restrictions on the gospel that prevent complete faithfulness to the task of proclamation that the Church has been given."
Sunday, December 07, 2008
the coming winter
One of the most appealing features of New York is that it actually gets all four seasons, and genuine seasons. One can rather accurately guess the month simply by the weather, whereas in England one would be completely at a loss. And so, appropriately, the creeping coldness of the coming winter warmed just enough yesterday to bless our chilly cheeks and faces with the cold yet soft kiss of snow flakes gently descending down upon us.
Nate, Preston and I had begun walking down Broadway avenue in search of a cinema and some visual escapist entertainment. We came to several cinemas but none were showing anything we wanted to see, and so we kept walking - all the way to Times Square, which is on 42nd street. The quicker ones amongst you will, recalling I live on 122nd, calculate we walked 80 blocks!! We eventually found a cinema, bought tickets for 'Nobel Son' and in the hour-long wait, we took a walk to the Rockefeller Centre which has the famous ice-skating rink in front of the building and a giant Christmas tree. We arrived there, guided by the incandescent trees wrapped in fairy lights that lined the sidewalk. Did I mention I love lights?! So we got there, looked at it for a while, soaked up the atmosphere, made small-talk with fellow Rockerfeller pilgrims, and then just as we were leaving, the drift passed over and enveloped us in a cloud of white night-time surprise. We gazed up, crooked-necked, agape in childlike wonder as the flakes softly floated down, illuminated by the city lights, and rested on us.
And so I'm resting. It has been a very busy week, and my head was getting foggy. I had planned to work over the weekend, but that night I decided not to do anything til Monday. I'm going to head down to Borders now, listen to the new Jon Foreman album, relax with a coffee, and be good to myself and my soul. When was the last time you did the same?
Nate, Preston and I had begun walking down Broadway avenue in search of a cinema and some visual escapist entertainment. We came to several cinemas but none were showing anything we wanted to see, and so we kept walking - all the way to Times Square, which is on 42nd street. The quicker ones amongst you will, recalling I live on 122nd, calculate we walked 80 blocks!! We eventually found a cinema, bought tickets for 'Nobel Son' and in the hour-long wait, we took a walk to the Rockefeller Centre which has the famous ice-skating rink in front of the building and a giant Christmas tree. We arrived there, guided by the incandescent trees wrapped in fairy lights that lined the sidewalk. Did I mention I love lights?! So we got there, looked at it for a while, soaked up the atmosphere, made small-talk with fellow Rockerfeller pilgrims, and then just as we were leaving, the drift passed over and enveloped us in a cloud of white night-time surprise. We gazed up, crooked-necked, agape in childlike wonder as the flakes softly floated down, illuminated by the city lights, and rested on us.
And so I'm resting. It has been a very busy week, and my head was getting foggy. I had planned to work over the weekend, but that night I decided not to do anything til Monday. I'm going to head down to Borders now, listen to the new Jon Foreman album, relax with a coffee, and be good to myself and my soul. When was the last time you did the same?
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