Back to the Garden

Academic reading can be a chore. For some reason, experts often engage in a sort of linguistic torture that leaves readers bored, confused, and emotionally drained. But every so often, one encounters a piece of academic writing that makes the soul sing. This was the treat that awaited me today as I read Toril Moi's 2009 essay, " They practice their trades in different worlds": Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy ." Over the past year I wrote a thesis on Stanley Hauerwas that featured a chapter on his indebtedness to Ordinary Language Philosophy. I was frustrated by the constant criticisms of the "linguistic turn" in Hauerwas' work that often came from a group known as the "Biola School." Their criticisms seemed to me to be off-base somehow, but I could never quite articulate a satisfactory account of what these folks got wrong. I supposed that they simply had not undergone the Wittgensteinian therapy necessary to r...

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. In my third year in college, I took a class from Prof. Cameron McKenzie on the Latter Prophets. It was a seminar style class that involved a crash course in Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern prophecy as well as a series of student paper-presentations on the book of Ezekiel. As this paper was worth the majority of our grade, we were all required to consult with Cameron on what we would be writing. It was in one of these meetings that Cameron introduced me to this philosopher who would go on to radically change how I read the whole bible. Eliade, a philosopher of religion, argues that across the ancient world there was generally a much more robust participatory ontology operating in the social imaginary than there is today. His discussion of types and archetypes was essential reading for me as preparation to engage the neo-platonism that underwrites Christian sacramentalism and Patristic exegesis. For anyone struggling to enter into the...

Kurt Wimmer's 2002 film, Equilibrium  gives us an interesting lens through which to view the Russian revolution of 1917 on this, its centennial. Set in the latter half of the 21st century, the world has passed through World War III and has attempted to construct a society in which war is no more (Woodrow Wilson is surely smiling up from the grave). To do so, the political elites have located the problem of war in the facts of human nature, specifically in our capacity to feel. It is our passions, in a passing homage to Girard, that are the root of the violence that manifests itself so devastatingly in war. The decision is made that to suppress our more base desires and passions, we must also sacrifice the heights of human emotion; joy, love, etc. Thus, a drug is created to produce an emotional equilibrium in the populace. Under the effects of this new opiate, peace is declared; a peace that is maintained by a para-military order of pistol wielding monks. On the surface, the movie...

As we commemorate the 500th anniversary of the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, I must admit, I am deeply grieved. I resonate with the story Archbishop Justin Welby shared in the Evening Standard  as he recounted the tears that streamed from both his and his Catholic counterpart's faces at a recent celebration of the Eucharist wherein they could not share table fellowship. The disunity and shattered state of modern Protestantism is a grave sin, and one that should not be lightly overlooked. Appeals to the original intent or goals of the Reformers do little to mitigate the disaster which is the fractured and broken church today. Yet it is not all bad news. The spirit of the Reformation has positively affected the world in many ways, through music, art, literature, science, good government, ecological protections, etc. Most significantly, the Reformation spirit even managed to bring about many of the reforms within the Roman Catholic Church that were called for in the 16...

As part of the requirements for my MA, I had to write a paper on theological method. What follows is a portion from that paper as I attempt to articulate how I currently understand the work of theology. Many people have asked me how theology has effected my relationship with God - I hope that this short piece can serve as a gentle correction of the form of that question and show that theology is an inextricable part of the Christian relationship with the God who chose to reveal Godself as Father, Son, and Spirit. I take theology to be the task of helping the Church say no more or less than must be said about God and our relationship to God. The second part of that task, articulating “our relationship to God,” is the easier of the two, as it is simply the exercise of working out how all of human knowledge inheres in Christ. Theology is the great “Queen of the Sciences” insofar as it is, far from being its own unique sectioned off form of discourse, a master discourse that attempts ...

Hauerwas has often insisted that if we need a theory of truth to know Jesus, we should worship that theory. Jonathan Tran, a follower of Hauerwas' approach to theology, here provides us with a theory of truth that is at once both a "theory" and yet not - it is but an observation arising out of our ordinary forms of life: "The contexts which grant meaning to what we say go before us, necessitating “I mean what we all mean when I say something we all understand,” making speech at once an act of agency  and  participation. Yet agreement also incurs estrangement because while I  must  mean what we all mean when I say something, I sometimes  don't mean what we all mean by it. The same facts of language that gather us, that norm us, can also estrange us from one another, make us abnormal to one another. In the second sense, conventions are not unnatural intrusions on human life but rather indicative of and appropriate to what it is to be human, to be able to carry o...

What is the Bible? Obviously the question cannot be answered adequately in a blog post, but as I continue reading on the subject it seems to me that there are some distinctions that are often ignored that should be observed. Allow me to take the time to make these distinctions in order to perhaps provide some clarity of language around this question. First, the Bible is a public document. This is an important observation because it acknowledges the formative influence this book has had on Western Civilization and thus opens up the door to audiences that have vested interests in this book beyond its function as Holy Scripture. To acknowledge the Bible's public character is also to affirm that it is a book written in human languages that can be translated into any other human languages and is thus open to be read, as a text, by any literate person. The public nature of the Bible opens up the possibility of many ways to read the text. As a historical document, it can be read both ...

This past weekend I graduated from Providence Theological Seminary with an MA in Systematic Theology. I had the great honour of delivering the valedictory address at the convocation. Thanks to all my friends and family who were in attendance and who have supported me along this long journey. Below is a copy of the speech I delivered on Saturday: Dr. Johnson, chairman of the board, honored guests, faculty, staff, friends, family, students and graduates. Greetings. It is fitting that our graduation from seminary should be in the season of Easter. Graduation, as you well know, is a time for celebrating, giving thanks, and listening to vain platitudes from those who are appointed to give speeches. I’m afraid I do not have those things on offer for you today. But what I do have is an Easter vision of hope that makes certain the future that graduation promises but cannot deliver. St. Paul begins his epistle to the Romans in the most inflammatory way possible: Paul, a servant of Je...

Allow me to begin with a bold claim. There are, it seems to me, two general ways to make an argument. One way, the way of the polemicist, is to make grand, totalizing assertions, dismissing contrary positions as out-of-hand or ignorant. The second, the way of the academic, is to qualify claims by nuancing a position so that it can nimbly avoid most obvious objections. Of course, many academics are polemical, and some folks who make bold claims have done the hard work to nuance them properly. But it seems as though, in an intellectual climate where all claims are met with a hermeneutic of suspicion, assuming, of course, that all assertions are merely veiled power-plays, even the most nuanced of position is open to misunderstanding or death by virtue of the failings of whatever rational system makes the claim intelligible.  Now, don't get me wrong, there is an important place for careful argumentation and close analysis of evidences in order to find conceptual clarity. There ...

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend Mennonite Church Manitoba's annual general meeting. Our church conference has been having an ongoing disagreement over how we understand marriage and have been through a long process of discernment, argumentation, and study on the issue. This meeting was a huge encouragement as I witnessed church leaders who deeply disagree with each other on a host of issues surrounding the issue of marriage and sexuality extend deep grace and hope for continued peaceful worship together. My congregation issued a statement that attempted to be as gracious in its assertions as it could be and was responded to by leaders from other congregations with open hands and open hearts in spite of our deep disagreements. This image of peace-through-disagreement is exactly the kind institution the church has always and will always be. Our unity in Christ is not based on uniformity, but on our willingness to keep Christ at the center, even as we have deep d...

The wild ass is a recurring theme throughout the Old Testament. It is impossible to know for sure, but it is likely that this refers to the now-extinct Wild Syrian Ass. This specimen was once ubiquitous across the Arabian peninsula and, while being the smallest member of the equidae family, was compared to the thoroughbred in strength and beauty - though it was impossible to domesticate. In Genesis 16, the angel of the Lord proclaims in an oracle that Ishmael will be a 'wild ass of a man' after Sarah had forced Hagar and the child into the wilderness. Job frequently cites the wild ass in his lamentations and is pointed to the wild ass by God as an example of one of the many creatures that God has established and sustained even in the harsh conditions of the wilderness (cf. Job 39). The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Hosea also reference the wild ass - predominately in the context of other judgment, wilderness, and desolation oracles and metaphors. (cf. Hosea 8:9, Dani...

( Readers may be aware that I began this blog to help me think through my graduate thesis on the work of Stanley Hauerwas. I handed it in tonight, here is the conclusion which may serve as a brief overview for anybody who is interested in what I've been writing about these past months. ) Stanley Hauerwas always claims that he neither has a position to defend nor is he intelligent enough to come up with a position to defend. [1] Yet, there are characteristic ways in which Hauerwas does theology and it is my hope that I have at least been able to describe the particular imagination that Hauerwas displays in trying to show the difference that Jesus makes to how the church is to live and think. That Jesus matters for Christian theology and ethics should be part of the definition of these practices, yet so often this has failed to be the case. In attempts to be ‘relevant’ or ‘rational’ in modernity, theology, especially in North America, has often abandoned the particular claims of ...