Confessing Evangelical

My blog is way behind the times. I scored only 4 out of 25 on the Web 2.0 Validator.

Mind you, given that I run Linux on my home PC, in true open-source style I ought really to say that this blog is not even Web 1.0. It's Web 0.79.3-rc4 at best... </geek 'humour'>

For those wondering what Web 2.0 actually is, see this article from a recent edition of the Guardian. Key quote, from Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software:

"It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day."

From the archives of The Onion: Kennedy Slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons: President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles.

I've not been totally idle during this blog's recent quiescent period: as reported on the IP Kat blog, I've had an article published in this month's Copyright World, on digital rights management and anti-circumvention technology.

The article includes an attempt to undermine the system from the inside, comrades, by devoting a fair proportion of the article to the objections to DRM and the draconian legal protections that have been given to it, particularly in the US. Sadly, the copy deadline came too soon for me to include a reference to the Sony rootkit debacle, which has vindicated many of the concerns outlined in the article.

This included a name-check for the fine folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose explanation of why the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is t4h suxx0r (I paraphrase) proved very useful in writing that part of the article. The EFF's DRM page also has some good material.

The site is subscription only, but you should be able to access the article (entitled "Chipping away"; clever wording, I know - cheers ;-)) by signing up for a free two-week trial. The copyright in the article has been assigned to Copyright World, and belonged to my employer in the first place, so sadly it is quite out of the question for me to email a copy to anyone who requests a copy in the comments to this post, quite out of the question...

Great Luther quote from Jeremy at Living Among Mysteries:

God is invisible, inscrutable, incomprehensible, and so on. ... Give up all such speculating, which is utterly unrelated to the word of God anyhow. God is saying to you, From the unrevealed God I shall become your own revealed God: I shall incarnate my own beloved Son ... "This is my beloved Son. Hear you him." Behold his death, his cross, his Passion. See him hanging on his mother’s breast, and hanging on the cross. What Christ says and does, you may be sure of. "No man cometh to the Father but by me." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." What God is saying to you is this: "Here in Christ you have me, here in Christ you will see me."

If you want to escape from despair and hatred of God let speculation go. Begin with God from the bottom upwards, not from the top downwards. In other words, begin with Christ incarnate, and with your own terrible original sin. There is no other way. Otherwise, you will remain a doubter for the rest of your life.

At all costs cling to the revealed God. Allow no one to take the child Jesus from you. Hold fast to Christ, and you will never be lost. God the Father longs for you. God the Son wishes to be your Savior, your Liberator. In this kind and lovely manner has God freed us from these terrible assaults and trials.

I seem to recall NT Wright making the point in the opening chapter of The New Testament and the People of God (that would be - ahem - the only chapter I actually finished of the good bishop's (very) magnum opus) about the way in which people tend to assume we all know what the word "God" refers to - who God "basically" is - and then this skews the way we understand Jesus, because we look at Jesus through the lens of our prior understanding of God, rather than letting God's self-revelation in Jesus come first and determine our understanding of God.

As Luther points out, all the things that "everyone" agrees on about God - even atheists, when constructing a God which they then choose not to believe in; I speak from personal experience - are meaningless speculation: the "attributes", the abstract qualities, the in-that-ableness and im-this-ableness. As Luther puts it somewhere else, "I know of no God other than the one called Jesus Christ".

Even the concept of "revelation" can be misleading when we turn it into an abstract concept of which Jesus is merely an example (even if the best example). Jesus isn't only the revealed God, or the God who reveals - he also defines what revelation is (a point made very effectively by the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, in his book The Revelation of God).

Away with abstraction! The gospel is about concrete things: not an abstract God, but a God who lies in a manger, walks around a particular country at a particular time, dies on a cross, rises on the third day, ascends to heaven forty days later and will return in glory at a particular time.

And the gospel itself is not an abstraction, but something that confronts us in a concrete manner: here is a man proclaiming the forgiveness of sins and the gospel of Jesus Christ in this church - do you believe, here, now? Here is water, poured out in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins - do you believe, here, now? Here is the very body and blood of Christ, under the forms of bread and wine - do you believe, here, now?

That in turn is why it is so important that we go to church, and that (when we get there) each church is doing its job properly of proclaiming that message of forgiveness in word and sacrament. We can't sit around waiting till we believe in a set of principles and then go to church. What we're looking for isn't to be found merely in a set of principles and concepts, but in the place where God has promised to be found.

Things have been pretty quiet round here lately, I know. Combination of busyness at work and sorting stuff out on my PC at home.

In the meantime, though, some other quiet corners of the blogosphere have sprung into life over the past few days: Daniel "Wyclif" Stoddart has revived his blog, and Chrises Jones and Williams have posted some interesting stuff.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must return to the urgent business I have to attend to. [Tilts hat over eyes, leans back on easy chair, picks up banjo...]

"It's tragedy, tragedy,
when you lose control
and you got no soul,
it's tragedy." Discuss.

- Cambridge University English examination question, 2001.

Say what you like about British national decline over the past century, but we still know how to give our political scandals that Shakespearean élan.

A man blind from birth, overcoming the further barriers of poverty and the death of his father in a ghastly industrial accident, battling his way first to regional power and then to one of the highest offices in the land, brought down by his love of another man's wife, a love that curdled into an obsessive desire to prove himself the father of her children; then, after a brief time in the wilderness, restored to power, only to be brought down again, finally, by his arrogance and desire for riches - with, in a further irony, his final fall having come about through his involvement in a company that carries out... DNA paternity testing. And the whole affair only serving to highlight the fading power of an aging king from whom power is inexorably draining away.

And you Americans have, what? A guy called "Scooter" who says too much to a journalist?

Anyway, as for David Blunkett, tragedy really is the word. I can still remember the summary given in our GCSE English Literature classes of what constitutes "tragedy": a tragic hero, with a tragic flaw, who makes a tragic error, leading to a tragic realisation (Blunkett yesterday: "When you have been in politics as long as I have, you can smell and feel when it is time to step away...") that comes too late to prevent a tragic end. Well, there you go.

I was going to do a post about All Souls' Day, in particular whether Lutherans "do" All Souls' Day and if not whether it is in any way redeemable for (Augsburg) evangelical Christianity.

But then work intervened (and is still intervening even now, at 10 pm - he said, angling for sympathy), so all I can offer you is NT Wright's entertainingly waspish assessment of the All Souls' state of play in the Church of England:

"The sort of hymn you are likely to find sung at All Souls' commemorations these days is probably a piece of woolly Victoriana, hinting at purgatory without really coming out and saying it - which is what the entire commemoration, in its current Anglican mode, does at every point."

- NT Wright, For All The Saints?

Those familiar with contemporary Anglican liturgy and worship will certainly recognise this picture of "studied ambiguity" - the need for language that is satisfactory for both "evangelicals" and "catholics", even though interpreted differently by each group.

One particular irony in the Church of England is that the most famous All Souls in the C of E would be more likely to start sacrificing goats than celebrating All Souls' Day, so that if you want All Souls you need to go down the road to All Saints. You follow?

Theresa K has moved her blog to a new address and a new name: Katie's Beer.

Another recent addition to the blogroll is Jeremy Abel's Living Among Mysteries, which currently features a very attractive icon for All Saints' Day (a big improvement on the previous day's Worst Evangelical Goatee In The World...).

I particularly enjoyed Jeremy's recent post on the "bright sadness" of Arvo Pärt, in particular Pärt's "Litany" - a setting of St John Chrystostom's 24 prayers for each hour of the day and night. It's worth buying the whole CD just for Pärt's setting of the final petition:

O Lord, Thou knowest that Thou dost as Thou willest,
let then Thy will be done in me, sinner,
for blessed art Thou unto the ages. Amen.

Jeremy's post then got Rick Ritchie scurrying off to his local record shop to buy a copy of Pärt's "Beatitudes" (to read Rick's post, you'll need to scroll down to the second item on the linked page. Rick, I'll say it again: permalinks!!!).

The structure of Pärt's piece - in which "the first half of each Beatitude ... gets across the difficulty of each thing being blessed, and the second half [is] in a happier manner that suggests blessedness" - led to the following insight from Rick into the Beatitudes:

While all the other beatitudes offers a virtue and then a reward, the last one offers the promise of an unnamed reward, and then a reason (you are like the prophets when you are mistreated by men).

Coming in the second half like this, there is half a hint that being like the prophets is a reward in itself. The prophet's reward is ahead, but you may find it easier to bear up under this treatment if you know that it is a sign of greatness.