Bibliography, 2011

My summary of the year in books:

January - H. Lee, To kill a Mockingbird
February - U.Eco, The Name of the Rose*
March - J. Steinbeck, East of Eden*
April - C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary
May - H. Mantel, Wolf Hall 
June- P. Leigh Fermor, Mani*
July - K. Fox, Watching the English
August - T. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569 - 1999 (K)
September - E. Ladurie, Montaillou
October - S. Graubard, The Presidents
November - M. Bowden, The Best Game ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL
December - A. Agassi, Open

I can't help but notice the first half was a lot better than the second.  The overall stats show much less reading this year. Only 124, and absolutely dominated by fiction - 60%, higher than ever before. Interestingly that doesn't show in the BOTM which is 4:3:5 (fiction : history : other non-fiction). And two of those those fiction were rereads. Which essentially means I've read a lot of low grade fiction. Actually, I'm not sure that's true - part of the problem is Wodehouse, who I started to read this year and possibly overegged it a bit. 14 of my books, over 10% were Wodehouse: all were wonderful, but none could snatch a BOTM. 

Anyway, for the vanishingly small  number of people who care, it's book of the year time.

Fiction was remarkably easy.  I hesitated over East of Eden, because it is the most sustained piece of brilliant writing I read this year, but a) it's a reread, and b) it's not To kill a Mockingbird, which was just better. It's shorter, and I think the talent to make something so evocative and powerful is greater without the grand canvas that Steinbeck uses.  But it's also better, and more important.

Non-fiction was much harder. James, Leigh Fermor and Fox were all excellent. However, the one I found myself repeating in conversation most has been Snyder, The reconstruction of Nations. There's an unfamiliarity bias here, as it's a fascinating topic, even more so as the Euro collapses. The westerner and the medievalist in me needs to be reminded that nationhood is still in flux in most of world, and it requires work. That book did it exceptionally well. It's a challenge to make an essentially unfamiliar topic accessible and interesting without becoming a bit patronising and dull, so additional plaudits for that.

Bibliography, December 2011

Read: 10
BOTM - A. Agassi, Open

A. Leslie, Killing my own snakes
N. Lewis, Naples '44
J. Le Carre, The Spy who came in from the cold
J. Morris, Venice
A. Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
F.Scott Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby*
J. Williamson, Darker than you think
J. Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit
J. Winterson, Why by happy when you could be normal?


Thanks heaven for Christmas. On the 20th, I'd only read four things, but a very relaxing in-law Christmas took me well beyond that. I spent almost all of the month thinking BOTM of the month would be Cry, the beloved country - it deserves its classic status, and prefigures some of the more famous apartheid literature by a good few decades. But I finished Agassi this morning. Now, this clearly won't be a classic in fifty years: it's a bit hammed up, you really need to know who the people are (Pete Sampras' dullness only gets mentioned a few times, as a reader you need to fill in the blanks a bit), and it's a memoir, so there's a bit of post-rationalisation about the past. But for now, it's a classic. The voice is compelling and engaging (much like the man), and the emotions are no less real for being a bit two dimensional. It's a great book in a genre that all to often fails to deliver them.

A Christian country

I was rather hoping for a bigger explosion from the Prime Minister's Christian country speech. True, there was the odd mad overstatement from some elements, but by and large everyone seems to have shrugged, said 'probably' and moved on. Of course, even the diehard atheist struggles to say convincingly 'we're not Christian at all' on the way to buy some presents for Christmas, before the public holidays for the incarnation and the feast day of the first martyr. And it was for a celebration of the bible, so not entirely a surprise. 

However, I also suspect it's because once they'd read the speech, it was a bit incoherent. Cameron made three points:

• Firstly that the King James bible is one of the monuments of the English language that reverberates through history and literature to the benefit of mankind. As this is obviously true, it is hardly likely to cause a storm of protest. 
• Secondly, that 'biblical,' by which he means 'Christian' thinking has shaped our morals. I'm surprised this hasn't been attacked, but one for later.
• Thirdly, that Britain is a Christian country. Britain isn't a country, England might be, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is. Sadly, no-one cared about that, but they did debate the adjective - badly.

Cameron started it of course, by being vapid. His definition of distinctively Christian characteristics went as follows: 'responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities.' I'm not claiming there is anything unchristian about the list, but they don't seem very distinctive. Promoters of social obligation for example might look to that other excellent institution of the early years of the Christian Era, the Roman Empire and their system of civic society. 

But the opposite is wrong too: Christian values are not universal ones dressed up in vestments; there are things that are pretty distinctive to the Christian heritage. There aren't really any specific universal truths across humanity, only platitudes. For example, let's take the individual: Christianity at its core is a individual religion. Christ is uncompromising about that - he comes 'to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother' (Mt. 10.34). Confucius wants to talk about ancestors (BTW, I discovered while googling for this that the lineal descendant of Confucius is known to the 83rd generation - i.e., now. It's the longest family tree ever); and Buddhism - ever helpful - thinks the self doesn't exist, it's an illusion. This approach becomes fairly critical when one starts debating, say, sexuality or democracy. We could also go outside religion for this, for example, private property: jolly important in the west; made  no sense at all to the native Americans (see Locke).

In the west, there are three big candidates as roots for these values - the Greeks, the Romans, and Christianity (plus the Jews, maybe a half). I'm not sure it's very productive, though quite interesting, to try to identify which caused what. What we have is a amalgam of ancient Graeco-Roman classical civilisation and Christian values, fused together in the fourth century (ish) and cooked up over the following sixteen centuries, with  a smattering of other influences as we go. For most of its life, well into the twentieth century, our heritage has thus been shaped by the church, more or less. It is Christian ideology that has shaped how we think for most of two millennia. It's a great birthright. It's not universal, though it should be (oh yes, another distinctively Christian ideology - ask a Hindu what he thinks of the lands outside India) and we should not pretend it's generated ex nihilo, though if it helps, call it western liberalism, or secularism.

I think we should be calling it Christian and thus we should call the country Christian, because I think we are. I don't think we're very coherent about it; I certainly don't think we're very devout, and there are a lot of things I'd change if I could. But we do look to Christianity to lead on a lot of these things: that's why the country was unimpressed with the conduct of the chapter of St Paul's - they felt their church had failed. We wouldn't have got so bothered about a mosque. Of course a subset of highly educated metropolitan people don't think this, but they're abnormal. And I don't think they realise how abnormal people they (we) are. Here's Dawkins, arguing I think for disestablishment and the abolition of faith schools (slightly oddly, he seems to think we'll be a secular country if we have a separation of church and state - just like America and Turkey). I don't actually mind the abolition of faith schools. What kind of followers of a great God worry about the control of schools in an benign rich society shaped in the image of their faith? However, he doesn't seem to get the cultural point. I mean, he claims to: in that same editorial he says he doesn't want to abolish Christmas and he likes the King James bible, but it all seems a bit tactical. Then he says the correct analogy for Christianity is whether anyone would call a child a monetarist just as they do a Catholic. But the thing it,  it just isn't. One is an intellectual proposition (how do changes in the money supply work?); the other is cultural, and people think about culture without taking a razor to the logic. I suspect he might know this. He doesn't mention nationalism in his list of things that cause problems, because it also takes his argument away. People don't think logically about the country they belong to, they just do: there are English children, there are even British children. People care about their countrymen and their heritage not because they've looked at it logically, but because of the cultural heritage they take from their parents and society. And then they look to certain exemplars to represent it. This means much of the country cares about men kicking or throwing balls around. I'm pretty certain they think very similar things about morality and the church  in England.  

And that, to my mind, makes the UK is a Christian country. The church is looked to for morals by the overwhelming majority of people, even if they don't go or even say they are Christian. It's still the lodestone for that kind of thing. It may not be in the future. The UK may not be a Christian country forever. I very much hope it will be; I'd like it to be more of one now. However, it will always (used in a poetic not logical sense) be one of Christian descent. And every western atheist should applaud that.

A joyous incarnationtide to one and all.

Against Marcion

I was allowed to give another sermon today (11th December) for Advent 3. Readings here (though we seemed to use a bowlderised version - I was annoyed by they) Here is the text - ish :

Today is a day of rejoicing. It is why the clergy should be in pink, though they have failed me today, with the exception of Fr James. It's why we light a pink candle. In the church’s calendar it is gaudete Sunday. And gaudete simply means rejoice. Traditionally, advent is a season where the four last things are preached. You have come through death and judgement. It’s hell next week, but heaven today. Well done, you’ve chosen the right Sunday, where we rejoice in the anticipation of salvation and of heaven. 

Now heaven itself is pretty difficult to preach on. We don’t know much about it. Writers have struggled to say anything that isn’t a bit mad (think of the book of revelation) or a bit dull - there is a reason why they say the devil has all the best tunes. 

Salvation though is different: it is central to the gospel, where Jesus continually proclaims the coming of the Kingdom of God. It is the abiding pre-occupation of the church. So you’d expect a tight definition to have emerged in the last two thousand years, easy for me to package up for you now. You’d be wrong. The church has been reluctant to define salvation. For example, in a few minutes you’ll say the creed. There’s a long section on God, and a very long section on Jesus. And then buried in the middle, a line about salvation: ‘and for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.’ 

I’m not going to cover all of salvation in a short sermon, even if I could, but I want to cover the promise of it, made in the Old Testament, fulfilled in the New. For it is an old promise that it is made by God to Abraham. At this time of year it is more important than ever that we remember the enduring promise of God. For it is that fulfilment what we rejoice in. 

So let’s start with Isaiah. After all, everyone else seems to have done so. 

This part of Isaiah was probably written in the sixth century BC, at a time when the Israelites had returned from their exile in Babylon, and were rebuilding their lives in Palestine. They were in Jerusalem, but a fairly run down version, it was a fairly bleak time. This final part of Isaiah is a set of prophecies about the world to come, about salvation. And it is uplifting stuff. 

From the chapter before our reading: 'all from Sheba shall come bearing gold and shall bring incense, and they shall publish the salvation of the Lord .... For the nations and the kingdoms that shall not serve thee shall perish (Is 60.6, 12). And this is followed by the opening lines from this morning, to proclaim liberty to the captives, freedom to the prisoner and - although this is omitted from the reading today, but should be in if we used the right lectionary - the day of vengeance of our God. 

That seems pretty clear. God’s people shall triumph, their enemies be crushed. The only flaw is it didn’t happen. The next few centuries saw a series of Empires vie for control over Palestine, culminating in the Roman Empire about the time of Christ. There is a distinct lack of enemies being crushed and of gold being delivered to the people of Israel. 

And it’s in this context that we should read the gospel. When the crowd pester John, asking are you the messiah? They’ve read Isaiah. They are expecting a messiah to come and bring them overlordship of the gentiles. They have been promised gold, cedarwood, tribute and authority. And they have waited a long time. So, every time you read about the messiah in the gospels, remember this. They’re not asking for someone who does a few parables and then inconveniently goes and dies, but for a warlord, who will restore Israel to power over the nations, give them perfect justice and a good supply of gold. They’re going to be disappointed. 

John has also read Isaiah: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness he says, just as we heard last week from Isaiah. I am preparing the way for the messiah to come. He does not mention (if he knew) that the messiah might not be quite what they were expecting. 

Jesus has also read Isaiah. In fact, very specifically, we know he reads this bit of Isaiah. Luke’s gospel tells us he reads the opening lines of our reading on the Sabbath in a synagogue. But he does two important things. Firstly, he misses the bit out about vengeance, just as we did today. He repeats the promise of good news to the poor and of liberty, but not of violence. Secondly, he then says to them, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. The gospel then says they were amazed. I think here there is some poetic licence going on. I think a more accurate description may have been horrified and angry. We’ve read Isaiah, where is the gold they may ask. 

And it gets worse. A generation later, after Jesus has died, proving conclusively that he wouldn’t be the messiah at the head of an army, any hope the Israelites had was snuffed out. In AD70, the Roman legions of Vespasian destroyed Jerusalem, tore down the temple, expelled the Jews. 

Was the promise of the Old Testament wrong? 

Many people have thought so. Marcion, a second century churchman, whose followers converted much of the middle east to Christianity, rejected it entirely. Modern agnostics, who are willing to the give the new testament the benefit of the doubt, can’t face the Old Testament. And the church itself can be a little too prone to talking about Jesus in a flat and simplistic manner, as if everything can be reduced to asking what would Jesus do and a few selective quotations from the New testament. Because the Old is long, and difficult and we don’t like some of the messages. It's noticeable in the compilers of today's lectionary, who have tried to smooth out the difficulties of the Old Testament by omitting some of the difficulties of the text as if it didn't matter.

But Jesus didn’t think like this, nor did Paul. And if we reject the Old Testament, then we are on very shaky ground indeed. C.S. Lewis in a famous aphorism attacked those who claimed to follow the moral teachings of Jesus but not the religious. He pointed out that if Jesus was not the son of God, then he was a madman; if he is not the messiah that the prophets spoke of, what is he? And what kind of God is God? The Old Testament contains (albeit sometimes obscurely) our best description of God and of salvation. It needs careful interpretation, it does not need rejection.

Fortunately, just like all our protagonists, we can read Isaiah too. And towards the of our reading, God makes clear his promise: 'I will rejoice in the Lord, says the prophet, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness.' A few lines later, in the next chapter, the same language is used, but this time, it ends not with the prophet rejoicing in the Lord, but the reverse, saying 'so will the Lord rejoice over you.' (Is. 62.5) 

That is the promise of the Old Testament, that God rejoices over us all. He covers us with salvation. And this is a promise, not an offer. There is no ‘if’ or ‘provided that’ in Isaiah. God will cover all people with salvation. And the time is coming when he will show his hand. 

Just as the rhetoric in Revelation isn’t a literal view of heaven, so the rhetoric of war in Isaiah isn’t the essential part of the message. The promise won’t be fulfilled as was expected, but it is fulfilled in a more potent way than the Israelites ever imagined. The coming of Christ does not defeat the enemies of Israel, but death itself. 

The Marcionites and the moderns are wrong. It is God’s promise to Abraham and through him the world that will be fulfilled at the end of Advent. In our epistle this morning, Paul adds a coda to a longer letter to the church in Thessalonica. After the specific advice he gives, he asks them to hold fast and reminds them once again, that 'the one who calls you is faithful.' 

God’s promise of salvation is one that has endured. The Old testament is the witness to the promise of God, the coming (the advent) of Christ is its fulfilment, for the one who calls us is faithful. 

Rejoice, rejoice!

Amen

Bibliography, November 2011

Read: 10


BOTM: M. Bowden, The Best Game ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL

M. Bradbury, The History Man
M. Bulgakov, Master and Margarita*
J. le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy
G. Dexter, Why not Catch 21?
C. Dickens, Bleak House
A. Huxley, Crome Yellow
J. Morris, Hong Kong
D.L. Sayers, The Nine tailors
P.G. Wodehouse, Carry on, Jeeves  

This month's BOTM is not the best book on the list. I'm not sure it's even second. There are at least three classics on this list (four if you include Dickens, but I've never gotten on with him and this was no exception).  Bowden's account of breakthrough game of American football, that launched the sport onto the American public is neither as well written nor as famous. But it's the book I enjoyed the most. Partly because it was  different, but it was also fascinating, both about American Football and especially about how it emerged from relative obscurity to become massive. And it was a great story.