Dissident Dispatches

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Dissident Dispatches Page 62

by Andrew Fraser


  [←885 ]

  Ibid., 6.

  [←886 ]

  Anthony D Baker, Diagonal Advance: Perfection in Christian Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 77.

  [←887 ]

  McKnight, New Vision, 147, 13.

  [←888 ]

  See, Elrod, Baptism and Temptation, 146.

  [←889 ]

  McKnight, New Vision, 62, 110–115.

  [←890 ]

  Ibid., 136–137, 146–147, 96.

  [←891 ]

  Mark does not identify Satan’s three temptations in 1:13, but in 14:30 (just before standing trial before the Sanhedrin) Jesus predicts, accurately, that a satanic impulse will cause Peter to “disown me three times” before the cock crows twice. Shortly afterward, the disciples fall asleep three times while on guard duty, revealing the tempter within at work again with a suite of counter-Trinitarian snares specially likely to entrap Jesus’ closest followers (Mark 14:37–41).

  [←892 ]

  This is no mere figure of speech; it goes to the heart of a fundamental issue in contemporary practical and political theology: the relationship between Christians and Jews. Is it one of friendship or of enmity? Taking the side of friendship, Pope Francis repeatedly underscores the ties of brotherhood between Christianity and Judaism. He denounces “Holocaust denial” as “madness”. He even claims that “inside every Christian is a Jew”. (National Catholic Reporter, June 16, 2014) One wonders (and perhaps should worry) whether this is the same Jew who tempted Jesus for forty days in the wilderness. Surely, on that occasion, the “inner Jew” (a.k.a. Satan) was the guileful and indefatigable enemy of both the “historical” and the “exalted” Jesus, locked in an existential struggle for the soul of national Israel.

  [←893 ]

  Ellul, Son of God, 11.

  [←894 ]

  Tom Wright, Mark for Everyone (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 6.

  [←895 ]

  Garrett, Temptations, 175–177, 181.

  [←896 ]

  G Hughes, quoted in Jane Foulcher, “Hand Dances and Waltzes: Reclaiming Common Worship for the Twenty-First Century,” in B Kaye, et.al., ‘Wonderful and Confessedly Strange’: Australian Essays in Anglican Ecclesiology (Canberra, ACT: Barton Books, 2006), 166.

  [←897 ]

  Cf., Gerard Moore, “Appreciating Worship in All its Variety,” (2006) 10 (3) Australian Journal of Liturgy 79, at 80.

  [←898 ]

  Foulcher, “Hand Dances,” 166–167.

  [←899 ]

  Ibid., 167–168.

  [←900 ]

  Cf., Paul Edward Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002).

  [←901 ]

  G Hughes quoted in Foulcher, “Hand Dances,” 168.

  [←902 ]

  Cf., Ibid., 167.

  [←903 ]

  MW Goheen, “Nourishing our Missional Identity: Worship and the Mission of God’s People,” in DJ Cohen and M Parsons, eds, In Praise of Worship: An Exploration of Text and Practice (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010) 32, at 34.

  [←904 ]

  Ibid., 34–35.

  [←905 ]

  Cf., Ted Gibboney, “What Makes Good Worship,” (2014) 29(2) Liturgy 27.

  [←906 ]

  Some might say that evangelical Anglican liturgies (in the Sydney diocese at any rate) maintain a distinctive identity in that the priesthood is limited to men. At the same time, evangelical Anglican ministers are free to abandon distinctive clerical dress. Why? The stated reason is that the construction of Christian communities requires the abolition of visible distinctions between clergy and laity. Given such an egalitarian understanding of holy orders, can female ordination be far behind? Significantly, it was the minister at St Peter’s — not his wife — who sat on the floor with his son during the kiddie’s talk.

  [←907 ]

  Foulcher, “Hand Dances,” 162.

  [←908 ]

  Jane Foulcher, “Sharing the Poetry of Grace: The Theologian as Preacher,” in Heather Thomson, ed, Embracing Grace: The Theologian’s Task (Canberra, ACT: Barton Books, 1999), 32.

  [←909 ]

  JR Seeley, “The Church as a Teacher of Morality,” in Rev WL Clay, ed, Essays in Church Policy (London: Macmillan, 1868), 278.

  [←910 ]

  Ibid., 267.

  [←911 ]

  Stephen Burns, “Liturgy and Justice,” (2009) 3 International Journal of Public Theology 371, at 378, 372.

  [←912 ]

  Yvette Clifton, “Joyfully Receiving the Aboriginal Church in Australia,” (2014) 14(1) Australian Journal of Liturgy 19, at 21–22.

  [←913 ]

  Seeley, “Church as Teacher of Morality,” 278.

  [←914 ]

  Cf., Foulcher, “Hand Dances,” 162.

  [←915 ]

  In the notes accompanying the first assignment, Dr Foulcher had advised that in describing a ritual one should pay attention to “any ‘interruptions’ to the ritual event, and the effect of those interruptions on the overall quality of the event”.

  [←916 ]

  Geoffrey Nuttall, quoted in Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power [original edition, 1972] (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1984), 23; see also, Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 273–290.

  [←917 ]

  http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/17353.htm.

  [←918 ]

  Barnett, Collapse, 22–23.

  [←919 ]

  Cf., Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political tr George Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976). According to Schmitt, the political realm is constituted precisely by the existential opposition between “friends” and “enemies”. Not only does the Canberra Confession elide that fundamental distinction, it fails to acknowledge that when Jesus urged his followers to “love your enemies [echthrous]” (Matthew 5:44–45), he was referring to private and personal, not public enemies. In English, unlike the Greek of the New Testament, the difference between the two classes of enemies is obscured. But in Matthew 10:34–36 Jesus explicitly rejects any suggestion that he came “to bring peace to the earth”. Instead, he instructs his disciples that he came not “to bring peace, but a sword”. In the coming conflict, even the most intimate personal relationships will be soured by enmity: “a man’s enemies [echthroi] will be the members of his own household”. Given such unnatural circumstances, love for one’s enemy makes perfect moral sense. Neither love nor hate is a necessary element in the existential struggle for power between public or political enemies (polemoi); see Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics [original edition, 1948] (Abergele, UK: Wermod and Wermod, 2013), 167–171.

  [←920 ]

  Barnett, Collapse, 22.

  [←921 ]

  Cf., Kerry Bolton, Babel Inc.: Multiculturalism, Globalisation and the New World Order (London: Black House Publishing, 2013).

  [←922 ]

  James Woodward and Stephen Pattison, Blackwell Reader in Pastoral and Practical Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 13.

  [←923 ]

  Terry A Veling, Practical Theology: On Earth as it is in Heaven (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), 6–7.

  [←924 ]

  Emmanuel Lartey, “Practical Theology as a Theological Form,” in Woodward and Pattison, Blackwell Reader, 131–132.

  [←925 ]

  Peter Marty, “Shaping Communities: Pastoral Leadership and Congregational Formation,” in DC Bass and C Dykstra, For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 309.

  [←926 ]

  Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (London: Collins, 1986), 24–25.

  [←927 ]

  Ibid., 32.

  [←928 ]

  Gerard V Hall, “
Australia and Oceania,” in Bonnie J Miller-McLemore, ed, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology First Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 547–548, 551.

  [←929 ]

  Glenn Morrison, “Living at the Margins of Life: Encountering the Other and Doing Theology” (2006) 6 Australian eJournal of Theology 1–3.

  [←930 ]

  Ibid., 1–4.

  [←931 ]

  Ibid., 4.

  [←932 ]

  Emmanuel Levinas, quoted in ibid., 4.

  [←933 ]

  Lawrence A Vogel, “Emmanuel Levinas and the Judaism of the Good Samaritan,” (2008) 3 Levinas Studies 193–208; also available online at: http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/philfacpub/1/.

  [←934 ]

  Martin Luther King, Jr., “On Being a Good Neighbor,” in Gary Perspece, Introduction to Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995); available online at: http://schoolsites.schoolworld.com/schools/Cheltenham/webpages/rwilman/files/king-on%20being%20a%20good%20neighbor.pdf.

  [←935 ]

  Susanna Snyder, Asylum-seeking, Migration and Church (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 163, 12–13.

  [←936 ]

  Ibid., 13.

  [←937 ]

  Martin Buber, quoted in ibid., 174.

  [←938 ]

  Ibid., 20, 164.

  [←939 ]

  Ibid., 186.

  [←940 ]

  Bruce W Longenecker, “The Story of the Samaritan and the Innkeeper (Luke 10:30–35): A Study in Character Rehabilitation,” (2009) 17 Biblical Interpretation 422, at 444.

  [←941 ]

  Ibid., 445.

  [←942 ]

  Cf., Barbara Oakley, et. al., Pathological Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  [←943 ]

  Snyder justifies a theological praxis which erodes the boundaries between strangers and the natural-born members of a community by invoking “a surprising link between the Greek word for love of one’s kinship group, phileo, and the word for hospitality to the stranger, philoxenia”. See, Snyder, Asylum-seeking, 179. She forgets that in the eyes of the ancient Greeks not all “strangers” were born equal. Aristotle for example, famously declared that non-Greek barbarians and slaves “are by nature identical”. See, Aristotle, The Politics tr TA Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 57.

  [←944 ]

  Cf., Jane N Nathanson and Gary J Patronek, “Animal Hoarding: How the Semblance of a Benevolent Mission Becomes Actualized as Egoism and Cruelty,” in Oakley, Pathological Altruism, 107–115. The “cat lady” policies promoted by both church and state in the EU towards soi-disant “refugees” are seen by critics, especially in Germany, as a criminal conspiracy to commit genocide against the German people. Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the crime of genocide against a racial, ethnic, national, or religious group as, inter alia: (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

  [←945 ]

  According to UNHCR figures, fully 75% of “refugees/migrants” arriving by sea in the Mediterranean region so far this year are adult men. Only 12% are women, and children account for the remaining 13%. http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.html (accessed on September 8, 2015).

  [←946 ]

  Cf., the uncannily prescient novel by Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints tr Norman Shapiro [original French edition, 1973] (Petoskey, MI: Social Contract Press, 1994).

  [←947 ]

  Cf., Paul Schmid-Hempel, Evolutionary Parasitology: The Integrated Study of Infections, Immunology, Ecology, and Genetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Abstract available online at: http://www.sidalc.net/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/?IsisScript=SIBE01.xis&method=post&formato=2&cantidad=1&expresion=mfn=023163.

  [←948 ]

  See, e.g., Leon J Podles, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1999).

  [←949 ]

  Robert D Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” (2007) 30(2) Scandinavian Political Studies 137.

  [←950 ]

  Kerry Bolton, Babel Inc.: Multiculturalism, Globalisation and the New World Order (London: Black House, 2013).

  [←951 ]

  See, generally, Kelly M Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

  [←952 ]

  Joanna Vechiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, “Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine [Doctoral Dissertation, 1929] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 129.

  [←953 ]

  Henry Paolucci, ed, The Political Writings of St. Augustine (Chicago: Gateway, 1962), 29.

  [←954 ]

  JGA Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 36–37.

  [←955 ]

  Tom Frame, Losing My Religion: Unbelief in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009), 64.

  [←956 ]

  David Hilliard, “Popular Religion in Australia in the 1950s: A Study of Adelaide and Brisbane,” (1988) 15(2) Journal of Religious History 219, at 222–229, 235.

  [←957 ]

  Frame, Losing My Religion, 65.

  [←958 ]

  David Hilliard, “The Religious Crisis of the 1960s: The Experience of the Australian Churches,” (1997) 21(2) Journal of Religious History 209.

  [←959 ]

  Frame, Losing My Religion, 93, 299.

  [←960 ]

  Philip J Hughes, “Types of Faith and the Decline of the Mainline Churches,” in AW Black, ed, Religion in Australia: Sociological Perspectives (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 93.

  [←961 ]

  David Hilliard, “Pluralism and New Alignments in Society and Church 1967 to the Present,” in Bruce Kaye, ed, Anglicanism in Australia: A History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 146.

  [←962 ]

  Gary Bouma, “Globalization and Recent Changes in the Demography of Australian Religious Groups: 1947 to 2001,” (2002) 10(4) People and Place 17, at 22.

  [←963 ]

  John Westlake, “The Church in the Colonies,” in WL Clay, ed, Essays on Church Policy (London: Clay and Taylor, 1868), 237.

  [←964 ]

  Governor Richard Bourke, “More Equitable Funding of Churches,” in J Woolmington, ed, Religion in Early Australia: The Problem of Church and State (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1976) 93, at 94–95.

  [←965 ]

  Westlake, “The Church in the Colonies,” 238.

  [←966 ]

  John Murray Cuddihy, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 15.

  [←967 ]

  Ibid., 12–13.

  [←968 ]

  Hilliard, “Religious Crisis,” 227.

  [←969 ]

  Cuddihy, No Offense, 17.

  [←970 ]

  On the distinction between “other-directed,” “inner-directed,” and “tradition-directed” social character types, see David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1961). Riesman suggests that the “inner-directed” social character of the entrepreneurial era depends upon a built-in mental “gyroscope” keeping individuals on a steady moral course despite competing social signals. The contemporary “other-directed” individual by contrast is an organization man embedded in a series of overlapping social networks. He or (increasingly) she needs internal “radar” sensitive to subtle, but important shifts in the social cues shaping flexible norms and behaviour.

 

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