In the twenty-first century, the problem left unresolved by the English Reformation is no longer the abstract question of whether ethno-nationalism is compatible with Christianity as such. Rather we need to determine whether Anglicanism, in particular, can and should return to its ancient roots as a church of and for the Anglo-Saxon peoples, in England and throughout the Diaspora. God willing, it is up to those who are or who become members of the Anglican church to make that determination.
10: Postscript on Micro-political Theology
Dr Gladwin awarded my paper on the English Reformation a grade of DI 83. Soon after I received his email announcing that grade, the grade-book on the subject website listed my grades for all three assignments in THL132. Significantly, the grade for the second Luther essay remained a CR 65. It was interesting to note as well that the numerical mark of 83 on the third essay not only left me two marks shy of an HD grade but also just managed to get me across the line to a DI grade of 75.8. It was hard not to interpret that result as a micro-political move which rendered moot the basis of my objection to the grade for the Luther essay. Not even an up-grade for the assessment item to DI or even an HD would carry enough numerical weight to alter my DI grade for the course as a whole.
Now, on one level, the dispute over the grade in that one essay is about a wounded ego. But if I were a younger man my career prospects might turn on my results in this and other courses. Indeed, the CR grade turned out to be a blessing in disguise, prompting me to uncover interesting and important material confirming my original intuition that Luther’s 1520 trilogy laid (however imperfectly) the foundation for a German Christian ethno-theology. But, once again, I wasn’t carrying the full course load of a younger student too pressed for time to dig deeper into the relationship between German ethno-patriotism and Luther’s theology. Not many students would have been able to produce (if I do say so myself), two thoughtful and academically sophisticated submissions critiquing the stated grounds for the grade awarded by Dr Gladwin. One might have thought my critique deserved a considered response from a teacher committed to act in a fair and reasonable manner. Certainly, my discovery of Dickens’ work on The German Nation and Martin Luther effectively called into question Dr Gladwin’s premise: not all senior church historians agree that Luther’s theology was all about a transcendental kingdom of God in which the spirit of German ethno-nationalism was of secondary significance.
I can say honestly that in thirty years of experience teaching in universities I have never encountered a grade appeal equally interesting and challenging. Had I done so, I am confident that I would have seized the opportunity to debate the issues with a similarly aggrieved student with both hands. Dr Gladwin chose not to debate the issues raised by my critique of his assessment standards. That choice was political, not academic, in character. Not for the first time, I offended against the politically correct standards of academic theological discourse enforced by Charles Sturt University.
The micro-politics of grading is an important disciplinary mechanism in the culture war waged by “progressive” academics determined to preserve their intellectual, indeed spiritual, hegemony within the educational establishment of the managerial therapeutic state. But the outright refusal of disingenuous white liberals to engage in free and open debate on matters touching the fundamental articles of their faith is a sign of weakness not of strength. Faced with serious intellectual opposition liberal “anti-racists” often opt for flight in preference to a fair fight. The result is that even the work of such established scholarly giants such as AG Dickens is marginalized or forgotten lest it confer theological legitimacy upon the forbidden fruits of historical phenomena such as German ethno-nationalism.
By all accounts, AG Dickens (1910–2001) was anything but a typically disingenuous white liberal. Indeed, he was a manly figure who made no secret of his life-long love affair with the German nation even in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in which he served in the Royal Artillery. According to his obituary in the Daily Telegraph, at the end of the war Dickens “was stationed as British Press Officer in Lübeck — a Hanseatic town which reminded him of Hull,” the English city where he was born and raised (and where he became head of the Hull University history department after leaving Oxford in 1949). Representing the British occupation forces in Lübeck, he supervised and edited the local newspaper; his experiences there formed the basis for his first book, Lübeck Diary (1947).
Dickens’ work is of obvious importance to anyone hoping to rehabilitate the German Christian ethno-theology pioneered by Martin Luther. Conversely, mainstream Christian academics and clergymen determined to sever the historic bond between faith and blood in every European nation have a clear incentive to neglect, when they do not simply forget, the ethno-theological significance of Dickens’ insights into the spiritual significance of German ethno-patriotism. The culture war continues: whether they realize it or not every white Christian theology student is called upon by God conscientiously to consider which side he will take in that conflict.
Where does one find God — in the still-beating heart of one’s own people or in the bloodless abstraction known as humanity? Disingenuous white liberals such as Dr Gladwin routinely invoke Galatians 3:28 to portray the kingdom of God as a sort of heavenly acid bath dissolving the earthly differences between Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free. The cosmic unity of that transcendental realm somehow deprives otherwise intractable bio-cultural differences between human groups of their historic, traditional, and normative force.
Accordingly, Christianity has become a neo-gnostic religion of humanity in which white people find a surrogate Jesus in the putatively pristine, uncorrupted souls of black folks allegedly oppressed by their European ancestors. Similarly, the work of the Holy Spirit is now visible only in the perpetual growth and expansion of the debt-fuelled divine economy which has driven historic Christendom to the brink of destruction under the global auspices of the transnational corporate welfare state. Hence Dr Gladwin’s Anglican congregation in suburban Canberra proudly plays host to a vibrant band of Sudanese refugees. Meanwhile, Anglican WASPs generally, having long since abandoned the ancestral ambition to become the national church of a white, predominantly British Australia, simply acquiesce in — when they do not celebrate — the free flow of capital, technology, and labour around the world.
While acknowledging “the first and great commandment” to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” disingenuous white Christians drain the second commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself” of its obvious ethnocentric significance. Speaking to the Pharisees in Jerusalem, Jesus reminded them that “all the Law and the Prophets” literally “hang upon” the kindred connection between the love of God and the brotherly love they owed to (as went without saying, their fellow Judean) neighbours (Matthew 22:37–40). Nowadays, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, in particular, need to understand that scripture defines their neighbours not as the people next door but as the children of their own people: “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 19:18).
Any white person entering a divinity school or joining a bible study group should embrace the divine commandment to love your neighbour, not least of all because it validates the bio-cultural norms of in-group solidarity. Such an insight comes as no surprise to the myriad ranks of Aboriginal, Asian, Hispanic, Negro, and, above all, Jewish theologians ready, willing, and able to act as advocates for their respective peoples. Unfortunately the invisible race of WASPs is disinclined to acknowledge that obligations owed to our neighbours (i.e. the extended family of British-descended co-ethnics). Grounded in shared blood and an ancestral faith, the claims of ethno-patriotism legitimately outweigh any abstract civic connections to strangers and aliens, either “at home” in England or globally in the old white dominions settled by the Ang
lo-Saxon diaspora. Love of neighbour must become nothing less than the foundation principle of a sorely-needed Anglo-Saxon Christian ethno-theology.
Speaking personally, the primary lesson I have drawn from my experience of the ubiquitous “anti-racist” (i.e. anti-white but punctiliously philo-semitic) rhetoric endemic among disingenuous white liberals in the theological academy can be distilled into one pithy precept: It is not a sin when white Christians notice differences between themselves and other racial groups or when they distinguish between neighbours and sojourners, strangers and aliens, friends and enemies. This maxim applies even — or perhaps especially — to divinity students in their micro-political interactions with teachers and fellow students. It is a sin, however, to elevate love of strangers and aliens above the divinely-ordained, fraternal love for neighbours. Those of our own neighbours prone to such pathological altruism should be treated in accordance with biblically-approved techniques of tough love: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbour and not bear sin because of him” (Leviticus 19:17).
2015: Learning to Preach the Word in a Womanist’s World
THL 208 / Synoptic Gospels / HD
THL 115 / Liturgical Theology / CR
THL 120 / Practical Theology / DI
THL 231 / Christianity in Australian History / CR
1: Sermon Outline
Mark 1:12–13 (The Temptation of Jesus)
I. Introduction
The New International Version (NIV) rendition of Mark 1:12–13 couples this passage with 1:9–11 under the heading “The Baptism and Temptation of Jesus”. Because these two pericopes are fused into a single narrative, the NIV does not leave its readers with the mistaken impression “the Markan story of Jesus’ wilderness temptation contains no information whatsoever concerning either the nature or the content of this temptation or its outcome”.836 Certainly, many leading scholars have taken that view. In his commentary on 1:12–13, Robert A Guelich asserts that the “outcome remains implicit to the account” of the confrontation between Jesus and Satan.837
Standing against that academic consensus, Jeffrey B Gibson maintains that by regarding the two passages “not as separate and unrelated pericopes, but as complementary and necessary narrative elements of a single story,” it becomes “abundantly clear that in the wilderness Jesus successfully resisted the efforts of Satan to sway him from his divinely appointed path”. As the suffering servant of God, Jesus successfully resists the hostile forces represented by Satan and the wild beasts of the wilderness. In doing so, he proves “himself loyal and obedient to the commission he received at his baptism”. Gibson’s exegesis of the story in Mark 1:9–13, rests upon the premise that “the mission predicated of Jesus…is, what is defined more precisely later in the Gospel as ‘taking up the cross’”.838 But Gibson never makes clear the point and purpose of the suffering endured by Jesus first in the wilderness and finally upon the cross.
II. Proposition Statement
The Markan story of the baptism and temptation of Jesus evokes the subliminal, scriptural image of Jesus as a second Adam empowered by the Spirit of God to transform the wilderness into a garden where, attended by angels, he lives in harmony with the wild beasts, thereby foreshadowing the new creation inaugurated later in the Gospel by the resurrection of the crucified Son of God.839
III. Organizational Sentence
The proposition that Mark 1:9–13 is a condensed Paradiesegeschichte outfitted with a happy ending rests upon the premise that gardens in the bible — most notably the original Garden of Eden in Genesis — are better understood as “sacred spaces” created in and through the presence of God than as “green spaces” located in the mundane world of physical geography.840
IV. Major Points
1. In Genesis 13 Lot chooses to settle in Sodom because he “saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well-watered, like the garden of the Lord”. Like the other inhabitants of Sodom, Lot soon discovered that physical appearances can be deceiving. When the Lord destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot discovers and Jesus demonstrates — in the wilderness and later through his death and resurrection — that the most important gardens, the ones containing the tree of life, are to be found in covenant fellowship with God.
2. The baptism and temptation of Jesus in the wilderness derive their significance from the covenant fellowship between God and the nation of Israel. It is the Spirit that drives Jesus into the wilderness for a period of forty days, a number that recurs regularly in times of trial and testing during the covenantal history of Israel.841
3. Israel’s covenantal history was encapsulated in Adam, the first son of God, who was driven out of the sacred space of the garden where God dwells when he succumbed to the temptation held out by Satan.
4. Mark captures the telos of national Israel’s covenantal history in a brief but powerful narrative in which Jesus rises out of the waters of the Jordan only to be propelled immediately into the wilderness by the Spirit of God where he is with wild animals and attended by angels while being tempted by Satan. As Guelich puts it, “[t]aken together, Jesus’s temptation by Satan, his peaceable existence with wild animals, and his sustenance by the angels form an impressive counterpoint to Adam and bear witness to the coming of the second Adam and the new creation”.842
V. Conclusion
In the minds of many Christians, the Garden of Eden actually existed as a green space somewhere of the surface of planet earth. Similarly, the wildernesses mentioned in the bible are “brown spaces” on a physical map of the old heaven and earth created in Genesis 1. It follows that the new creation promised by Jesus and the prophets of Israel entails the physical destruction of planet earth.
Mark 1:9–13 suggests that we already live in the new heaven and new earth inaugurated by the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Like ancient Israel, all nations can and should return to the sacred space of the Garden of Eden by entering into covenant fellowship with God.
The Markan story of the baptism and temptation of Jesus shows us that the strength to resist the temptations held out by Satan and his followers depends upon the life-giving fusion of Spirit, water, and blood incarnate in the Son of Man (1 John 5:7–8).
2: Synoptic Analysis
The Temptation of Jesus as a Synoptic Problem
Similarities and Differences
The story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness appears in all three of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13) sandwiched between their respective accounts of Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his ministry. The differences between the Gospels give rise to one example of what is known to biblical scholars as the “synoptic problem”.843 The broad outlines of the temptation story are common to all three Gospels: Jesus is “led” or “driven” into the wilderness for forty days (“and nights” in Matthew) to face temptations by the devil (also identified as Satan or “the tempter”). Then the accounts diverge. In Mark’s version the outcome of the confrontation between Jesus and Satan is often said to be no more than implicit844 while the other two stories state explicitly that Jesus defeated “the devil’s attempts to lure Jesus away from his redemptive messianic mission”.845
But Jeffrey Gibson argues that if the brief Markan account of the temptation proper is read “as the continuation of the narrative line begun in Mark 1.9–12, the result is a narrative that…is well-rounded and complete”. In his view, in Mark, no less than in the parallel accounts in Matthew and Luke, it becomes “abundantly clear that in the wilderness Jesus successfully resisted the efforts of Satan to sway him from his divinely-appointed path and had proved himself loyal and obedient to the commission he received at his baptism”.846 There ends, however, the formal correspondence between all of the Synoptic Gospels’ accounts of the temptation of Jesus.
Eugene Boring remarks that modern readers “who know Matthew and Luke” find it difficult “not to read their stories between the lines of Mark’
s spare narrative”. As a corrective, he points to “what is not there: No initiative from Jesus, who is not the subject of any active verb; no movement from the wilderness to temple or mountain; no fasting, no dialogue, saying of Jesus, or citation of Scripture; no ‘temptation’ in the moral sense at all; no example for believers in their ‘temptations’”.847
By contrast, only Matthew and Luke identify the three temptations offered by the devil: (a) in the wilderness; (b) on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem; and (c) on a high mountaintop. They also provide the three Scriptural quotations invoked by Jesus in response to the devil’s enticements as well as the devil’s own appeal to Psalm 91 when urging Jesus to leap from the pinnacle of the temple. In both of these accounts, Jesus begins his citations from Deuteronomy with γéγραπται, “it is written”. Similarly, neither Matthew nor Luke includes Mark’s “reference to Jesus’ being with the wild beasts”. But, while agreement between Matthew and Luke “is very close,” Hagner identifies “four exceptions. The first, of course” is “that Luke’s order of the temptations, compared to Matthew’s is a, c, b”. Second, “in segment c Luke has the devil say that the kingdoms of the world are in his power to give to whomever he wants,” which Matthew omits, “probably because he regarded it as objectionable. Third, Jesus’ quotation of Scripture in segment a [where, in Luke, the devil invites Jesus to turn ‘this stone’ and, in Matthew, ‘these stones’ into bread] is longer in Matthew than in Luke”. The former includes “the words ‘but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God’. Fourth the actual wording of segment c is quite different throughout in Matthew and Luke”. Hagner notes, as well, that Matthew appears to “show the influence of Mark in his concluding reference to angels ministering to Jesus”.848 Luke omits any mention of angels and closes, instead, with the suggestion that the devil, having been thwarted on this occasion, will await a more opportune time to tempt Jesus again.
Dissident Dispatches Page 45