some confessions sometimes

I submitted my last essay at this university. Its printed copy (with the bibliography) ends with Kenneth Waltz's 1959 masterpiece:

In fact, the essay title was "Levels of Mimesis", as a spin-off from Waltz's "levels of analysis" and his reference to the levels as "images", and alluding to Plato — “Everything we say must surely be mimesis and image making.” (Critias 107b, Halliwell translation.)

***

And I just learnt that Kenneth Waltz passed away today. (Sources here and here.)

Kenneth N. Waltz, 1924-2013

exactly today two months ago, I "re-blogged" Ben Myers' dream of Derrida.

I spent a day in bed today again, but this time because I'm sick.

I actually tried reading Derrida today — as I have a couple of seminars on him this coming week — but could only get through half a page.

LORD, from the depths I call to you;  Lord, hear me from on high  And give attention to my voice  When I for mercy cry.  LORD, in your presence who can stand,  If you our sins record?  But yet forgiveness is with you,  That we may fear you, LORD.  I wait - my soul waits - for the LORD; My hope is in his word.  More than watchmen wait for dawn  My soul waits for the Lord.  O Isr'el put your hope in God,  For mercy is with him  And full redemption. From their sins  His people he'll redeem. 

I 

             Jesus 'dead' or 'died'?

The Apostle's Creed in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer goes:

was crucified, dead, and buried

I am personally brought up saying,

was crucified, died, and was buried;

as in my school hymnbook (and the 2000 Common Worship).

— Does the 1662 "(was) dead" as an adjective mean more passive death than "died" as a verb?

II

             What happened between death and resurrection?

The Gospels just mainly speaks of Jesus' burial — Matthew 27.57-61, Mark 15.42-47, Luke 23.50-56, and John 19.38-42.

And the fact of Jesus beingburied considered significant enough to be included in the Creed alongside the crucifixion, death, and resurrection.

— Is the burial important by itself, or is it to emphasis how dead was Jesus and the miracle of the resurrection?

III

              Where did Jesus go between death and resurrection?

We sometimes sing at church a worship song called (You're) the Lion of Judah, which I don't really like, mainly because of the 90s tune/style. But also because of this line:

 descended to hell yet was raised up

Like section I, the two version of the Creeds yet again differ on their wording on this matter of where did Jesus go:

The 1662 translation:

was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell;

And 2000:

was crucified, died, and was buried; He descended to the dead.

Although Wikipedia has an answer, it is still something that bugs me every now and then.

— What does hell or hades mean here? Did Jesus go to hell? Does that entail that hell is ongoing, present — before the final judgment?

So we were reading 3 John at Bible study last night, verse 11 of which —

Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.

— provoked the following questions:

What is good? What is evil? What do we mean by truth? (referring to earlier verses)

As I listened, all I could hear in my head was:

Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche... 

Thinking of his title Beyond Good and Evil, which I haven't read.

Again, maybe I’ve been reading too much existentialism lately.

I have found myself in moments of thinking like an existentialist, I guess — of the Nietzschean sort.

Facing anxieties over future and that kind of hardships in life, sometimes I feel that my devotional times, finding hope and strength in God — feels somewhat escapist.

Or, as I read recently, what Beauvoir might call an aesthetic attitude:

We may call this attitude aesthetic because the one who adopts it claims to have no other relation with the world than that of detached contemplation; outside of time, and far from men, he faces history, which he thinks he does not belong to... ...we note at once that such an attitude appears in moments of discouragement and confusion; in fact, it is a position of withdrawal, a way of fleeing the truth of the present... ...to put oneself “outside” is still a way of living the inescapable fact that one is inside;                                   (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 74-76)

I guess I feel especially so over Lent, with more of a self-awareness for penitential prayers and self-reflection — what Beauvoir would probably see as detached contemplation.

And Nietzsche — for whom

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.

 — I'm sure would have much more to say on this, most famously, that:

God is dead

I wouldn't normally say I agreed with Nietzsche.

But perhaps, just perhaps, I guess, I somewhat share some aspects of his feelings this Good Friday.

That finds "God on the cross" a "ghastly paradox": an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man — that:

God himself sacrifices himself for the guilt of mankind, God himself makes payment to himself, God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man himself — the creditor sacrifices himself for his debtor, out of love.

God died for me, out of love, a love I don't deserve.

And yet I look at Christ as though seeking escape from this world, praying for things as if I ought to deserve better; forgetting that I don't deserve my very existence in the first place — that God created me, not to mention the very truth that God died for me.

And yet I take it for granted, forgetting what a "ghastly paradox" that God died for me.

God died, for me, a sinner. I guess, in this respect, I believe in the death of God.

… morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning.

                                ~ Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (133)

I finished reading The Ethics of Ambiguity last week.

Maybe I've been reading too much existentialism lately. Lately/sometimes, I feel like I am having some "existential problems" of some sort, just at a time where my future lies rather full of ambiguity — and the same for how I feel about myself: ambiguity, if not ambivalence

I

I'm still waiting to here back from places about my "future". And I feel awful when I feel others proclaim the good news of their acceptance to places to study next year. I feel their massive ego crushes my own.

And I struggle with envy, with jealousy.

Yet when thinking about my own "crushed" ego, about how I feel I ought to deserve better, I came to realise that I am not as humble as I'd like to think of myself.

So I somewhat feel overly proud and humiliated at the same time.

II

Somewhat related to the first one.

Supposedly someone once asked Reinhold Niebuhr,

… you mean that original sin is pride?

And he answered,

Did you think it was something else?

According to Oswald Chambers, Augustine prayed

“O Lord, deliver me from this lust of always vindicating myself.”

I very much feel this way these days. Although in Henry Chadwick's translation of the Confessions, Augustine actually prays 

You cured me in the first place of my lust for self-justification to show yourself propitious to all my other iniquities; [...] you repressed my pride                                                                (X. xxxvi. 58)

Yet the Psalmist prays:

O God, save me by your name, and vindicate me by your might. O God, hear my prayer; give ear to the words of my mouth.      (51.1-2)

It is probably bad interpretation of Scripture, but I feel somewhat these two prayers would be contradictory?

Whilst I pray to God to humble me, yet I also pray for his blessing... some kind of "vindication" for my future.

I don't know, just feeling very "ambiguous" whilst being ambitious these days.

I guess I just need to patient and wait, as Beauvoir concluded her book:

There is a very old saying which goes: “Do what you must, come what may.” That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.

That is, without all the existentialist stuff.

***

All of this probably doesn't make sense.

…the Church’s holiness is visible as it confesses its sin in penitence and faith.

                          ~ John Webster, Holiness (Eerdmans, 2003) 73.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post Giving up “Assurance” for Lent, referring to struggles I have with a particular form of evangelicalism. In this post, I want to reflect on two similar things/experiences, in terms of holiness and penitence given up to make way for "assurance".

    1. Giving up "Holiness" for "Assurance"

So I went to a Christian Union evening meeting this week. The talk was given by a Brethren, and was supposed on the topic "Holiness" — to quote Darby himself,

Holiness, then, is separation to God, if it be real, as well as from evil; for thus alone we are in the light, for God is light. 

But, I felt, there was none of this in the talk. There was no mention of Holiness as "separation" — or as I prefer to put it, to be "set apart".

He briefly talked about Isaiah 6 (passage which he was assigned), and briefly about the Temple's "Holy of Holies". The speaker made a leap and talked about pornography.

But what he drew from pornography, was that one shouldn't feel that they are any more inferior to their fellow believers. That God would love them no less than others.

Well. Yes, fair enough — justification by faith not works, you can't make God love you any more or less than He already does, etc etc.

But is this not supposed to be a talk on holiness? How did it become another talk on assurance? It always seems to go back to assurance it seems.

Furthermore, is there some kind of what I call pseudo-Lutheran "sin-boldy, anti-temptation-to-works-righteousness" in his comments on sinning?

    2. Giving up "Penitence" for "Assurance"

This actually reminds me of a conversation with a visiting preacher I had at church a few weeks ago.

He was wearing a purple shirt, and I made a comment about it in reference to Lent. He was surprised by the fact that protestants were keeping Lent — his wife then walked over, and simply didn't seem to understand the concept of Lent.

So I mentioned the idea of a penitential season.

She was bemused by the idea of being "penitential", quoting Stuart Townend's lyric.

No guilt in life, no fear in death.

and laughed — seemingly at the stupidity of having a penitential season.

And this was from the wife of someone who supposedly teaches pastors theology for a living.

—— I was, quite literally, speechless.

Is this another variation of the pseudo-Lutheran "sin-boldy" mentality? That because Jesus died for our sins, that grace is freely given to us, and indeed — justification by faith not works, you can't make God love you any more or less than He already does, etc etc.

Does this mean we do not need to be penitential? — or even, for that matter, be holy? Is "assurance" so important that we should just forget about penitence and holiness?  

I want to give a more detailed response and reflection on this.

Not wanting to face the snow and cold, and considering/celebrating the fact that my class was cancelled, I stayed in bed all day.

Did some reading, but still, it was in bed.

Made me feel somewhat rather like Zizek...

I even found a video of him philosophising in bed:

You mean neo-platonism?

Said a friend to me in the pub last night.

I scribbled a bit about the "New Perspective(s) on Plato", efforts to rediscover the "historical Socrates" and reading Plato in historical context rather than by "tradition" — some may say, for instance, via Plotinus.

I drew some simplistic parallels of this investigation into "what Plato really thinks" with the New Perspective(s) on Paul. I think this comparison, and the remark of me reading Plato following the neo-platonist tradition, actually draw out some thoughts I've had about the New Perspective on Paul.