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.

Bibliography, October 2011

Read: 9
BOTM: S. Graubard, The Presidents

Anon (ed. J. Wilkinson), Egeria's travels
J. Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters
M. Dobbs, To Play the King 
G.M. Fraser, Flashman at the Charge
Optatus,  Against the Donatists
O. Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
H. Sachs, The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824
P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves 


This is late, and I don't have much to say about it, as it and much of the next month's reading was derailed by Bleak House, which I've only just finished. Anyway, nothing was standout brilliant, and some were weaker than I expected (the passing of time has not been kind to Mr Dobbs' political thrillers). The most interesting, though I hesitate to say best as my knowledge is low, was a monumental book on twentieth century presidents which nicely filled some material gaps in my knowledge. I can see how it could be genuinely interesting to study as a period, but why would you study it, when you could do medieval heresy instead is slightly beyond me - the detail of and convention machinations and electoral college politics aside of course. That's almost as interesting as the ancient world; in fact sometimes it even looks like it (someone's probably done that book).

What do we want? Er...

I popped over to St Paul's yesterday, on the way back from actual church. I thought I'd go see the protests before I passed judgement. It's rather better than I thought: there is no aggravation, it's quite tidy (with refuse separation that would make any council glad), it doesn't really affect the church at all - more on that in another post - and everyone seems very good natured. They have put up a lot of posters, but it's impossible to be angry with them. It's like a picturesque cross between a student protest* and a festival, with a few crusty hippies and a lot of nice youths taking things very seriously indeed. Many of them have beards, which every ex-student knows is a sign that you are very serious about politics (this only works on the left).

Not that I am any clearer about what they want. For the last week, I've been asking that question of those who might be in sympathy with them and they don't know. I'm thinking of adding it to my list of fun games to play to bait the left (current favourite: which of BP, BA and BT should the government own? Hint: till 1997, the Labour party thought the answer was all three). Going there doesn't help either. Their posters are the usual ragbag of radical socialism, anti-capitalist hoo ha, along with an amusing placard against usury.

'Helpfully,' they've posted their statement up online. It's not entirely clear this is a good idea for them. Of the nine points, three aren't debatable or are meaningless (2,5,8) and four are just poorly thought through left of centre posturing (3,4,6,7) - I don't believe for a second that they have thought through global justice and equality issues. However, it's the remaining two points that are most irritating.

It's because they think that they have arrived at some profound critique of the system: 'this is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!.' This strikes me as a depressing and deep failure to understand the world and a childish refusal to accept that it's more complicated than they think. This approach is widespread and I would categorise the Tory rebellion on Europe in exactly the same way. In this case though, it's why they can't put forward a coherent position forward - they simply haven't done the work, and they're not equipped to. They have diagnosed that something has gone wrong, and they think that having a lot of meetings will help. It won't.

By itself, this wouldn't be an issue. They're not important, real politics gets done elsewhere. But it adds to a public debate that will not consider trade-offs, only propositions, and that's a disaster. Take the banks for example, the line that we should not pay for bank's losses is seductive, but obviously nonsense. There's an oddity anyway about taking tax from bankers to pay for the state and then declaring you want nothing to do with them. In making this argument, the protests ironically are making the same antisocial transactional calculation they would accuse the bankers of. However, the obvious real issue is that that's the wrong question; the right one is to ask what would be the best way to minimise pain for everyone, given we are in this situation. Governments can stop the bankers making money, but will it help? In this case therefore we are really debating between flavours of how best to regulate the financial system. That's not very seductive, but it's very important, and it's hard. We aren't going to navigate that or any other problem by sitting in tents and having daily discussions without decisions. Such an approach is at best self-indulgent, and at worst outright dangerous. It doesn't matter that I can't point to specific demands coming out of the St Paul's camp, it does that people in general don't seen have any, because it means they can't discriminate between options in anyway. To govern is to choose, not to express your dislike about things.

So, I hope they enjoy their protest; and I really hope no-one listens.

 *As an aside, my favourite student protest story ever is when Oxford's left occupied some university buildings, and about an hour before they were evicted, the leadership told all the lawyers to leave as it might affect their careers if legal proceedings were taken against. And they all left. I wonder if the same spirit pervades the St Paul's protest.

BIbliography, September 2011

Read: 11
BOTM: E. Ladurie, Montaillou


C. Bourret, Un Royaume transpyreneean? La tentative de la Maison Foix-Bearn-Albret
E. Brockes, What would Babra do?
M. Dobbs, House of Cards
W. Fotheringham, The passion of Fausto Coppi
E. Ladurie,  Histoire du Languedoc
H. Mount, A lust for windowsills
E. Waugh, Brideshead revisited
P.G. Wodehouse, Something fresh
P.G. Wodehouse, Leave it to Psmith
[the name isn't important, what is is that it was in comic book format], Henri IV

Something of an inevitability in the BOTM this time. Ladurie's Montaillou is a classic of medieval history, concerned with the complex networks of individual relationships in a heretical town - what is not to like? It's a pioneering work that really uses the almost unique source material to really reconstruct a fascinating account of medieval life in Occitania. I wish I had read it as a undergraduate, and everybody should. If ever there was an antidote to 'olden days' thinking, this is it. It's not perfect, and could have been a bit shorter, perhaps with some diagrammatic representations of the relationships in the village, but otherwise ace.

Elsewhere, don't read Harry Mount's book on architecture - it's patronising and annoying, and reads it a bit like he's typed up the notes from his Masters in the subject, and added some silly conversational asides. On reflection, one suspects that is exactly what he has done. Lazy.

Anarchy, State and Utopia

On holiday the other week, the scientist I was with mentioned in passing the essential importance of science in civilisation. He didn't exactly say it was the greatest of all human endeavours, but he meant to. And he's got a point - as he put it (I'm paraphrasing) without science and engineering we wouldn't be able to do anything - in this case, build the nice cathedrals. Now, this kind of argument is overblown, and reductionist (try doing anything without language), but the point is a good one.

And I was still thinking about the most important of human endeavours when I read this article. It's not a very good article, attributing here to capitalism what my friend was keen to do to science, namely a wide ranging power independent of other important aspects of human life. However, it did make me think about another of the great  human endeavours - Government, or rather the state.


The state gets a bad press a lot of the time, especially from the right, though even the modern left can be a little grudging in its praise. Rhetoric of the last few decades has been about how to modernise or roll  it back. This language is unhelpful, and inaccurate. Apart from a few extremists, most of the right don't even want to roll back the state. They think they do, but actually they just want to change its shape. While the shorthand is convenient, it's not accurate - the right of the state to engage in an area tends not to be disputed, merely it's efficacy. And the objectors tend to forget that they want the state to guarantee all the freedoms they want. For example, a libertarian may claim they want the state to refrain from criminalising drug taking, but actually they want it to do that and to stop other people from interfering too: it's simplistic and wrong to simply talk about rolling things back. In this case we're debating how it acts with regards to drugs, not whether it can or should. 


Because the state is amazing. The modern state is an extraordinary feat of complexity that has incomparably improved the lot of humanity, against anything that has gone before (note: it's also capable of being the most powerful agent of death as well - a testament to its power). However, it's the principle that I'd like to concentrate on.* The development of the state has a real claim to be the bedrock of human achievement. Without it, there can be no real co-ordination of human activity, no mechanism to secure anything and build upon it, no mechanism to either create wealth or redistribute it. For that, we should be grateful. Hobbes put it best: without a state (or as he put it, in the state of nature), the lot of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Precisely because it is so important, one must take the government to task for policy failures or rank incompetence, and we have to alert to structural failures - which I think it where we are now. As the current phase of the economic crisis unfolds, there's a lot of chat about whether we have transposed a banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis. There's obviously truth in that, but I don't think the maths add up. America, the Eurozone and even the UK can pay their debts, though it will hurt. Yet both the US and Europe seem to lack the political machinery to make that happen. Civilisation isn't going to end, but it's going to be worse (a lot worse than it needs to be) because of ignorant populism in the states and Germany, and a misguided mis-match of political and economic union across Europe. The politics and the failure of the political dialogue poses a greater threat to the outcome than the raw economics.

I'd normally make a point here about the need to limit the role of the people in any constitutional settlement, but I'll save that for later. Really, the point is that governing is hard, but failure of government is far far worse. Nozick's classic and complex book is now famous for preaching close to the reverse, but ironically, I can use his title to points in the right way . I don't think we can get to utopia (remember: no place), I'm much too much of a Hobbesian Conservative pessimist for that, but it's a lot closer to the state than it is to its absence. We should be arguing about the nature of what the state does, but we should be very grateful for what we have, and terrified of the prospect of its failure.


* There is certainly a long anthropological literature here about definition which I will have glossed over / go wrong . I don't care: the principle stands

Bibliography, August 2011

Read: 7
BOTM: T. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569 - 1999

J. Gleick, The Information
P. Leigh Fermor, The Traveller's Tree
A. Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz
S. Nicholls, Bodyguard of Lightening
S. Nicholls, Legion of Thunder
S. Nicholls, Warriors of the tempest

I went to Lithuania at the start of the month, and so read some Lithuanian (maybe Polish really) books. Now, I don't know very much about Lithuanian (or Polish) history, so I cannot comment on the relative standing of Snyder's book, but it was a belter. Engrossing, well told and well constructed, it was one of the most gripping and illuminating books I have read for a long time. Everybody should read it. His conclusions on the impact (ultimately, horribly, almost positive) of Soviet ethnic cleansing and the counter-cultural restraint of Polish leaders in 1990 is astounding, and in some cases uplifting (though coming out of some fairly bleak reading). While his presentation of the role of the medieval in determining the national myth and policy of the post--Soviet states is persuasive, and a warning to those who think that none of this matters any more. It's also really shows why the Lithuanians don't like the Poles, though they have the same national epic.