Tuesday, July 26, 2005

In Praise of Clear Speech

The following is a quote from N.T. Wright in The Guardian:

There is a lot about postmodernism I like, but when it comes to the law of the land, I want words that say what they mean and mean what they say.

This is necessary in order to build a society - or, indeed, a church - of trust, the precondition of genuine debate. You have to trust your opponents to say what they mean and mean what they say, and you have to earn their trust by doing the same.

Here again, contemporary culture lets us down. The hermeneutic of suspicion has become our default mode, encouraging us to lump issues into bundles and people into camps. It is much easier that way: it stops you having to think, or engage in real debate.

The Church desperately needs to learn once more the gentle art of reasoned discourse, of respectful engagement, of real debate. It is a better way to be Christian; it is a better way to be human.

Click on the title for the whole article.

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Friday, July 22, 2005

Violence, Hospitality and Complex Adaptive Systems

In an article on TheOoze, Emergence and the Divine Order: What Lies at the Heart of Emergence?, Fr. Matthew Mirabile muses about the transition between modernity and postmodernity and its effect on the church. His musings focus on Complex Adaptive Systems theory, and postulates that in embracing the key features of modernity, the church abandoned some of the complexity needed to survive. The recovery of mystery and symbol may well be the emergence of a adaptive entity with the complexity needed to progress towards God's eschatological goal.

It was an interesting thought, juxtaposed as it was in my mind with the writings of Hans Boersma in Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition. Boersma's thesis is that in reducing our understanding of the atonement to only the metaphor of juridical penal substitution, we have lost too much. In particular, we have lost the capacity to see in the atonement, God's invitation into divine hospitality.

This is particularly important in our current culture, where religion of all sorts, and Christianity in particular are seen by many as being the source of violence rather than the source of hospitality. A recovery of a more multi-faceted, and hence complex, understanding of the atonement is necessary if we are to credibly extend to our culture God's invitation into divine eschatalogical hospitality in the face of this world's inescapable participation in violence.

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