A theology of breastfeeding

Two months later, we finally have the internet in our house. Woop!

And what better way to re-start blogging than with a post about boobs? Boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs. Ah, that's better. They are, in case you hadn't noticed, political, especially when they're involved in the rearing of children. Does bottle feeding your baby mean you're a slave of capitalism? Does breastfeeding limit your ability to take equal place with men in the world of work? Or does it mean that you've been sucked into unhealthy ideals of the 'perfect mother', who is always implicitly white – might bottle feeding be a form of resistance to racist ideals of what it means to be a good mother? Whenever you read about breastfeeding though, it's almost always portrayed as a decision made by the mother as an individual. Does breast or bottle feeding make that individual woman a good or a bad mother?

Rachel Muers' article 'The Ethics of Breast Feeding' asks, what if motherhood is about a more complex set of relationships? What if the decisions mums make about how they feed their babies are about the networks of relationships to which they belong? What if the role of children within breastfeeding isn't simply passive? What if the Christian images of breastfeeding used to talk about the way that we learn from and are nourished by God or by other people gives us a more complicated model of what it means to feed and be fed?

We sometimes talk as though the role of the mother is to protect her child from every bad thing in the world. But vulnerability can be a strength: mothers pass on their acquired immunities to their children, and through the imperfect shield of their mother's body, a child slowly becomes acclimatised to their environment. But the vulnerability of mothers also means that bad things get passed on: HIV/AIDS, poor nourishment.

What, asks Muers, might a feminist theological ethics of breast-feeding or infant feeding look like? Mothers know how hard it is to ignore their babies' cries; they learn how much human beings depend on one another and feed off one another. To think theologically about breastfeeding, says Muers, is to think about what it means to apply these lessons to thinking about all of the relationships that a mother and her child are involved in: with their immediate family, with their social context, and with God.

Photo credit: Lawrence OP

A pause

Been a while, huh? By way of explanation, I recently moved house, and it turns out that even my super duper planning skills were no match for the bureaucracy of a half-arsedly privatised telecommunications system, so no wireless at home yet. Then Durham University had a little 'accident' involving severed internet cables and asbestos etc. etc., and you probably don't really care all that much about my life, but suffice it to say that my internet access is currently seriously curtailed, and so my posting is likely to be sporadic at best for a few weeks yet.

Back soon

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The New New Quest

In chapter 2 of Jesus and the Victory of God, Wright does a survey of more recent attempts to find the historical Jesus. Sadly, there's no mention of cannabis Jesus; those scholarly efforts Wright considers worthy of consideration include:

The Jesus Seminar: they get together, argue about whether half a sentence from a gospel is authentic or not, and then use different coloured balls to vote about it (there's a dirty joke in there somewhere but I haven't found it yet). I still half-believe that someone made them up as a joke about the excesses of 'historical' biblical scholarship, but apparently they really do exist, though Wright doesn't think that their scholarship is worth much.

Burton L. Mack: So, Matthew and Luke both seem to have got a lot of their material from Mark (you can tell because they use the exact same words to tell the exact same stories). But they also seem to have some other material in common which doesn't appear in Mark, so some people have suggested (logically enough) that they had a common source: Q. Less obviously, some people have argued that their shared source was a single document – contentious, but fair enough. Burton Mack thinks that not only can we recreate Q, but we can also work out which bits of Q were written first and which bits were added on later. If historical criticism generally is like building skyscrapers on jelly, this is like building the Empire State building on top of cream, which you've layered onto custard, which in turn rests upon a bed of jelly spooned lovingly over a nest of sponge fingers and raspberries. I'd eat it, but I don't buy it.

J. Dominic Crossan: Crossan talks about the system of 'patronage', common in the Greco-Roman world at the time of Jesus. It was basically a really formal system of nepotism, and unless you had friends in high places, you didn't have any power. He argues that Jesus sets out to subvert this system: he kept moving around so no one would see him as a patron and claim to mediate between him and the normal people; and by healing and eating with outcasts Jesus was trying to subvert the social ordering of things. But Wright thinks that Crossan overlooks Jesus' Jewishness, and so misses the really important points. He can't explain why Jesus got himself killed, or why the early church should have seen his death as significant.

Jesus the Cynic?: Cynics were popular philosophers in the Roman world at the time of Jesus, and they basically thought that society sucked and people should know that it sucked. They went around begging with long hair and scruffy clothes, and made sarky comments in the cinema. Some people have argued that Jesus was a Cynic: fine, says Wright, but there were loads of Cynics: why should this one have founded a new world religion?

Marcus J. Borg: Borg argues that Jesus' teachings had political, social, and theological themes; that he prophesied the destruction, by Rome, of Jerusalem and the Temple. But he doesn't think Jesus was the son of God, and doesn't think Jesus expected to found the Church, so Wright isn't satisfied by his work (though I think they're actually buddies, which is sweet).

So, all in all, Wright thinks there is lots of interesting stuff in the New New Quest, but also some major flaws: they priorities the sayings of Jesus over the stories about what Jesus did; they don't pay enough attention to Jesus' Jewishness; they don't think that Jesus expected to be crucified, and they don't think that there was really all that much relationship between Jesus life and teachings and the early church. So what's the answer? Wright thinks it lies in the Third Quest - that's the New New New Quest - and that's what he deals with in chapter 3, and what we'll deal with in the next instalment.

Jelly Jesus

NT Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God starts with an overview of the history of modern biblical scholarship. Since some guy called Reimarus wrote some book in the 18th century, huge amounts of time and energy and almost countless books have been devoted to using 'modern historical critical tools' to try to dig out the 'real' Jesus from the gospel accounts. The idea was that the biblical accounts of Jesus' life were later distortions of history written by people who had their own theological agendas to push and weren't all that concerned to give an accurate representation of Jesus. Modern biblical scholars set out to provide a neutral, scientific alternative (hah!). They used tools like comparing different ancient manuscripts to the existing gospel accounts, comparing gospel accounts too each other, and trying by various complicated and often ludicrous means to work out which bits were genuine and which bits were fake. I will always love NT Wright for arguing, essentially, that an awful lot of recent New Testament scholarship is bollocks: vast theoretical edifices built on the shakiest of foundations, like skyscrapers built on jelly.

Still, it's worth knowing a bit about the broad trends of thought within gospel scholarship, especially if you want to make more sensible arguments about the gospels. Wright thinks that the problems began with the Reformation (and I'm totally happy for us to blame Luther), where the Reformers were so obsessed with propositional truth that they lost sight of the biblical narrative, so although they thought it was super-important that Jesus died on the cross, they couldn't really give a coherent account of why he spent 33 years or whatever before that being alive.

This is where Reimarus came in. Wright says he was basically out to destroy Christianity. He thought Jesus was a Jewish reformer who got more and more politicised until he went and got himself killed, which should have been recognised as the failure it was. After that, lots of liberal theologians weighed in, offering readings of the Gospels that didn't make them uncomfortable, getting rid of anything that sounded a bit miraculous, or painting Jesus as a 'pale and timeless Galilean', teaching timeless moral truths whilst looking like a worried hippy.

Next came Albert Schweitzer, who thought that the most important thing about Jesus was his apocalypticism, warning of a terrible judgement about to fall on Israel; when the apocalypse didn't show, the early Church was able to rework his teachings into something more universal that could appeal to Gentiles as well as Jews. By the end of the 19th century, there were two main strands of biblical scholarship: the followers of Wrede, who basically thought that the gospels told us a lot about the early church but very little about Jesus; and the followers of Schweitzer, who emphasised Jesus' Jewishness and apocalypticism.

Coming soon: Jesus scholarship in the 20th century.

How Ian McEwan wrote the same book twice

Hi! I'm the narrator of an Ian McEwan novel, which I like to call “Enduring Saturday”. I'm just your typical white middle class guy who's wealthy enough to own a nice house in London. I'm married to a smart, beautiful woman who has a job (see, I'm not a sexist!) but doesn't really get much of a part in the novel other than to illustrate how virile I am and as a useful backdrop against which to depict the near-disintegration of my life (oh, maybe I am a bit sexist).

One day, a totally random occurrence brings me into contact with a poor working class white man who's either mentally ill or has a serious neurological disorder, which explains why he's so angry with me and determined to ruin my life (poor people would only be angry with rich people if they were funny in the head). They're crazy, these poor people, but it's useful to have them around to create a bit of drama in my life, which would otherwise be kind of boring, because when you're as rich as me, nothing interesting ever happens.

So anyway, the crazy poor guy starts chasing me round and trying to mess up my relationship with the women I own - oops, I mean, love - as I try to get on with my comfortable-but-meaningless-life, until eventually we have a dramatic confrontation, I nearly die, but in the end it's ok because the poor guys ends up in prison or in hospital, and I go on with life with a renewed ability to appreciate my boring bourgeois existence.

The End.

The theology of Lark Rise

I recently read Flora Thompson's Lark Rise, a chronicle of village life in Victorian Britain (that was recently turned into a BBC drama). It's based on her childhood growing up in a village very much like the one she describes, and was beautifully written, fascinating to read, and an interesting contrast to most of the other literature I've read from that period which is either about rich people or the urban poor, and Thompson takes an interesting position on the politics of it all, talking about how hard it is just to feed a family on a farm labourer's wages, but also saying a lot of things like "People were poorer and had not the comforts, amusements, or knowledge we have to-day; but they were happier." She says this about the sermons they listened to in church:

Another favourite subject was the supreme rightness of the social order as it then existed. God, in His infinite wisdom, had appointed a place for every man, woman, and child on this earth and it was their bounden duty to remain contentedly in their niches. A gentleman might seem to some of his listeners to have a pleasant, easy life, compared to theirs at field labour; but he had his duties and responsibilities, which would be far beyond their capabilities. He had to pay taxes, sit on the Bench of Magistrates, oversee his estate, and keep up his position by entertaining. Could they do these things? No. Of course they could not; and he did not suppose that a gentleman could cut as straight a furrow or mow or thatch a rick as expertly as they could. So let them be thankful and rejoice in their physical strength and the bounty of the farmer, who found them work on his land and paid them wages with his money.

Less frequently, he would preach eternal punishment for sin, and touch, more lightly, upon the bliss reserved for those who worked hard, were contented with their lot and showed proper respect to their superiors. The Holy Name was seldom mentioned, nor were human griefs or joys, or the kindly human feelings which bind man to man. It was not religion he preached, but a narrow code of ethics, imposed from above upon the lower orders, which, even in those days, was out of date.

So, you know, maybe some things about the Church have got better. Have they?

Worshipping the lizard God

Jean-Luc Marion is a French phenomenologist (that's philosophy which tries to think about the world starting with the way it appears to us), who has written both theology and philosophy (he claims the two are separate for him but, predictably, they're not really). Like Yannaras, he's a 20th century thinker who thinks that apophatic theology in general, and Dionysius the Areopagite in particular, have something to say to the contemporary world, especially in light of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies is Marion's most sustained engagement with apophatic theology, although he continues to deal with it throughout his work, and gets into some barneys with Jacques Derrida over whose reading of apophatic theology is more right.

Marion thinks that the 'death of God' doesn't mean that God has totally disappeared, but says that God's absence is 'the modern face of his eternal fidelity.' Marion thinks that the way that God the Father gives birth to God the Son is by withdrawing himself, making space for the Son to be born, and God's withdrawal from the world today is meant to make space for us to become sons of God. Marion uses his own version of the ontological argument: any god whose existence can be disproved, any god who can die, can't really be God, and so any proof that God doesn't exist doesn't destroy God but an idolatrous idea of God. God's like a lizard who always escapes our grasp, leaving only his tail behind.

At the heart of Marion's book is a distinction between the idol and the icon. An idol is a face we make for God to show up in: it's our way of controlling what sort of God we encounter, and where and how we encounter the divine. But an icon doesn't try to make God present, it just points beyond itself. The whole point of an icon is that it isn't the thing it represents. Idols can be destroyed by philosophy; icons cannot.

Marion discusses three thinkers who share an interest in distance: Nietzsche, Hölderlin and our old friend Dionysius the Areopagite. He argues that what Nietzsche's work does is to articulate the distance which appears when idolatrous ideas of God stop being plausible. But Nietzsche tries to bridge the gap with his own will to power, another form of idolatry, and so his philosophical project fails and he goes mad (take note, kids: idolatry is dangerous). Hölderlin also recognises the distance between humanity and God, but thinks that the solution is not to overcome the distance but to remain in it, which we do through poetry, which expresses the tension between union and distinction.

Finally, Dionysius offers a similar solution to the distance between humanity and God. Dionysius says that we can't speak about God in predicative language (statements about God like 'God is love', 'God is drunk' etc.), because that sort of language is all about trying to control meaning. Instead, we need to speak about God through prayer and praise, which don't name God but acknowledge our relation to God as recipients of God's gifts, as an expression of love and gratitude. But it's not enough just to praise God: we can receive God's gifts only insofar as we pass them on ("Love is something if you give it away *clap clap* you end up getting more..."). This receiving and giving of God's love maintains the distance between us and God, and mirrors the distance within God in the relations of the persons of the Trinity. The distance between God and the world is an icon of the distance between the Father and the Son. God's gift to us is expressed most fully in the incarnation of Christ, the Word, who gives us the words of Scripture which we then use to praise God. To be a Christian is to accept the words of Scripture as God's gift to us and to praise God with them. To be a Christian is to recognise that everything that exists is a gift of God, and to respond to that gift by giving to others, by generosity.