Without the holy night, there is no theology. ‘God is revealed in flesh,’ the God-human Jesus Christ—that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve. How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God’s mystery precisely as mystery. This and nothing else, therefore, is what the early church meant when, with never flagging zeal, it dealt with the mystery of the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ … . If Christmas time cannot ignite within us again something like a love for holy theology, so that we—captured and compelled by the wonder of the manger of the Son of God—must reverently reflect on the mysteries of God, then it must be that the glow of the divine mysteries has also been extinguished in our heart and has died out.
metadata and our discontents
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Makoto Fujimura’s Four Holy Gospels
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“Is this a resort? Is this a hotel for foreigners?” “No, this is for you.”
Underwater sculptures by Jason deCaires Taylor. Please look at all the photographs — they’re stunning. (Via here, originally via Tim Maly.)
Putnam and Campbell are quantitative, liberal, and upbeat; Hunter is qualitative, conservative and conflicted. But both books come around to a similar argument: this month’s ubiquitous carols and crèches notwithstanding, believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé. Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.
Most of the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures see the divine realm as quite heavily populated with gods, often having different interests and colourful personalities. The world is usually seen as coming into being through violence, either between squabbling deities or between the gods and a primeval chaos monster, whose slain body forms the stuff of the world. The relationships between human beings and gods are not generally very friendly: either human beings are created to be slaves for the gods, or they may be on good terms with some gods and not with others.The contrast with Genesis is striking. In Genesis, God is alone, and the measured, ordered creation comes into existence by the sheer benevolent power of God. Sun, moon and stars, often seen in ancient cultures as powerful deities, requiring worship and propitiation, are merely among the things that God creates in Genesis, and God decides their proper role and sphere (1.14-19). In Genesis, God creates human beings with the deliberate intention of sharing the ordering of creation with them (1.26). Over and over again, Genesis emphasises the peaceful origins of the world, and its innate goodness. So the story of degeneration that follows does not reflect an eternal dualism in the cosmos between good and evil, and it does not suggest that there is anything more powerful than God at work.
So it reads as though Genesis is a deliberate challenge to the accepted understanding of the origins of the universe. Genesis is looking at what the culture around it believes about the nature and purpose of the material world, and disagreeing with it profoundly.
All of the disciplines are increasingly identifiable as professionalisms, which are increasingly conformable to the aims and standards of industrialism. All of the disciplines are failing the test of propriety because they are failing the test of locality. The professionals of the disciplines don’t care where they are. Though they are inescapably in context, they assume or pretend that they think and work without context. They subscribe to the preeminence of the mind and (logically from that) of the career. The questions of propriety, calling as they must for local answers, call necessarily for small answers. But small local answers are now as far beneath the notice of professionalism as of commercialism.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook — even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages — by a great mass of common assumptions… .None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.
Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.