“the true interpretation of history” (thought for Easter)

"Because of his resurrection faith, the Christian will expect and will find that defeat is turned into victory; that even in the midst of the triumph of human blindness and wickedness, evidences will be continually forthcoming – manifest to eyes of faith – of the victory of God. ‘Manifest to eyes of faith.’ Like the resurrection itself, these evidences of God’s victory in the life of the world will be – not ‘facts’ which could be demonstrated irresistibly to any person irrespective of his personal judgment – but confirmations of that judgment of faith which recognizes in the resurrection of Jesus the decisive act of God. The claim that Jesus is final is the claim that at the end of the story this judgment will be seen to be the true judgment, the true interpretation of history, and the action arising out of commitment to that judgment to be the ultimately significant action."

(Lesslie Newbigin, The Finality of Christ (1969). Extract quoted from Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader, introduced and compiled by Paul Weston (London: SPCK, 2006), p. 65)

“The arms of the crucified are open”

A thought for Good Friday from Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian teaching at Yale, much of whose work has been on the theological basis for forgiveness and reconciliation:

At the heart of the cross is Christ’s stance of not letting the other remain an enemy and of creating space in himself for the offender to come in. Read as the culmination of the larger narrative of God’s dealing with humanity, the cross says that despite its manifest enmity toward God humanity belongs to God. “While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son,” writes the Apostle Paul (Romans 5:10). The cross is the giving up of God’s self in order not to give up on humanity: it is the consequence of God’s desire to break the power of human enmity without violence and receive human beings into divine communion. The goal of the cross is the dwelling of human beings “in the Spirit,” “in Christ,” and “in God.” Forgiveness is therefore not the culmination of Christ’s relation to the offending other; it is a passage leading to embrace. The arms of the crucified are open - a sign of a space in God’s self and an invitation for the enemy to come in.

(Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), p. 126)

‘Yes We Can!’: Rhetoric on TV

Another plug for the contemporary relevance of rhetoric studies:

Until this coming Sunday, you can watch on BBC iplayer the programme
‘Yes We Can! The Lost Art of Oratory’

This programme explores political oratory, starting with Obama but also considering Cicero, Churchill, Thatcher, Hitler and many others. Classical rhetoric gets a look in, including an interview with Charlotte Higgins, the author of the article I linked to earlier.

Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark

Here is an incident that amused me from the childhood of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Victorian man of letters and colonial administrator in India:

“He was a highly precocious and sensitive child. He was reading by the age of three, and even as a small boy he astonished adults with his odd learning and recondite vocabulary. He very early showed the two salient features of his published work, a love of rhetoric and a highly retentive memory. The Bible in King James’s version was the earliest and probably the greatest influence. When as a little child he found a maid had thrown away the oyster shells with which he had marked out a plot in the garden, he came into his mother’s drawing-room and declared, ‘Cursed be Sally: for it is written, Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.’ This childish outburst illustrates the pattern of Macaulay’s more mature controversies. His reading was so insatiable, his head so filled with eloquent phrases that his response was often quite unsuited to the occasion. Interior conviction was always more important to him than its social effects.”

(William Thomas, ‘Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron Macaulay (1800–1859)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)