Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 76

Charismatic renewal and politics

Thirty years ago a group of leaders of the charismatic renewal in the Anglican Church in South Africa met in a consultation at the KwaNzimela Conference Centre in Zululand to discuss the relationship between the charismatic renewal movement and the political situation at the time.

As I'm engaged in a research project on the charismatic renewal in southern  Africa, I thought it might ber worth posting something about the consultation here, partly to try to get it straight in my own mind, and partly to invite others who were present, or at least aware of the issues involved, to share their reminiscences, and what it looks like with hindsight.

I was, in a way, the convener of the event, partly at the request of the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Bill Burnett, and of others who were concerned about what was happening or what was not happening.

The political situation was that P.W. Botha had been prime minister for three years, and it was becoming clear that South Africa was making the transition from the police state established by the previous prime minister, B.J. Vorster, to rule by a military junta. It was, in effect, a military coup, though a rather slow one.

It seemed to be a tradition in South Africa under National Party rule that the concerns of the person who became prime minister became dominant when they became prime minister. So Dr Verwoerd was the Minister of Native Affairs under Malan and Strijdom, and when he became prime minister in 1958, his "homelands" policy went into top gear, with the concomitant ethnic cleansing. When Vorster became Minister of Justice (including police and prisons) in 1961, be began to lay the foundations for a police state, increasing the powers of the police, introducing detention without trial, and putting the police beyond the scrutiny of the courts. When he became prime minister in 1966, he already had this machine at his disposal to control the country and suppress any more than token opposition. P.W. Botha was Minister of Defence, and on his watch South African troops invaded Angola. When he became prime minister in 1978, supreme power began to be transferred from the police to the military, and the army began to play an increasing role in  suppressing internal dissent, something that had previously been the job of the police. In line with this, there was increasing use of the total strategy/total onslaught rhetoric.

By 1981 the charismatic renewal had been around in the Anglican Church in South Africa for some 25 years, since the mid-1950s, but it only became widespread in the 1970s, when several bishops became actively involved in it, one of the most active of whom was Archbishop Bill Burnett himself.

The charismatic renewal was also an international phenomenon. In the 1950s it had been largely home-grown and isolated, more or less confined to the Anglican diocese of Zululand, where it had started in the movement called the IViyo loFakazi bakaKristu (Legion of Christ's Witnesses or V/F for short). In the 1970s it became much more widespread, and affected many Christian denominations, when non-Pentecostal denominations began experiencing phenomena that had previously been more or less confined to the Pentecostal Churches, like speaking in tongues, healing etc. The 1970s were also the era of the cassette tape recorder and car cassette players, and so the teachings of speakers at international charismatic conferences were circulated widely and discussed in hundreds of prayer and Bible study groups, denominational and interdenominational, thoughout South Africa (and indeed throughout the world).

Some academics came up with theories that the charismatic renewal in South Africa was a manifestation of white escapism. It was something that attracted white people and enabled them to cope with their fear and insecurity in the political situation. This, however, overlooked the fact that the charismatic renewal was a worldwide phenomenon, and was not confined to South Africa, and also that in South Africa it had started among black Christians, and specifically among black Anglicans. Many Anglicans who were not involved in the charismatic renewal, and who were opposed to it, tended to take this view.There was, however, also a certain amount of truth in it. Some Anglicans who were involved in the charismatic renewal did tend to ignore the political situation, or expressed the rather naively optimistic view that if everyone in South Africa got baptised in the Holy Spirit everything would come right.

This is the background to some of the concerns that were aired, or meant to be aired, at the consultation.

I think that the main concern was that there was a disconnect between the Christian faith and the Christian response to the political situation. Those involved in the charismatic renewal movement tended to ignore the political situation and regard it as too much of a worldly concern. Those Christians who were concerned about the political situation tended to analyse it in purely secular terms, and did not try to understand it theologically. And most of those who attended the consultation felt somehow caught in the middle.

To put it in a nutshell, there was charismatic theology and there was liberation theology, and what was lacking was charismatic liberation theology.

As far as I can recall, the following people attended the consultation

Bill Burnett (Archbishop of Cape Town)
Peter Beukes (priest, Diocese of Zululand)
Richard Hughes (priest, Diocese of Natal)
George Bush (overseas volunteer working at KwaNzimela)
Ivan Weiss (Archbishop's chaplain)
Stanley Syson (priest, not sure where from)
Errol (Pepsi) Narain (priest, Diocese of Natal)
Vernon Lund (priest, Diocese of Natal, later left to form a Neopentecostal denomination)
Henry Naidoo (priest, Diocese of Natal)
Colin Peattie (priest, Diocese of Natal)
Hamilton Mbatha (priest, Diocese of Zululand)
Niall Cooper
Tim Bravington (priest, Diocese of Natal)
Richard Martin (priest, Diocese of Port Elizabeth)
Ross Cuthbertson (priest, Diocese of Natal)
Sr Gertrude Jabulisiwe CHN
Sr Audrey Clare CHN
Sr Veronica Mary CHN
Sr Claudia CHN

We met from 10-13 November. We prayed, we studied the Bible, we discussed the political situation and responses to it. And then we all went home.

I'm not sure that the consultation made any significant difference, though afterwards Bill Burnett seemed to think that the main danger came from secular liberation theologies rather than from the apartheid system itself.

I'd be interested in knowing what others who were present at the consultation think happened there, and if it accomplished anything, and for those who weren't there, what they think of the issues.

Some of my concerns at the time were well expressed in a book by Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway, called Up to our steeples in politics, so that I photocopies the introduction and gave copies to the other participants.

KATALLAGETE

In one of his letters to the Christian in Corinth, St Paul uses

the imperative, katallagete: In Christ's name, we implore you to

be reconciled (katallagete) to God!" (2 Cor 5, 20). This word,

directed to Christians and the Christian communities, is of

interest to "the world" only if the world find it interesting, or

if God should, in his own purposes, decide to interest the world

in it. This book is primarily an effort to understand the

implications of Paul's imperative, katallagete, for Christians at

the end of the 20th century.

We agree with those who have reminded us in recent years that the

Christian faith is indicative (the fact that God reconciles the

world in Christ), not imperative (Go to church! Do not drink

bourbon! Feed the hungry! Search and destroy!). But we believe

that St Paul's use of "reconcile" calls attention to a special

kind of behavior by the Christian toward the world. Behavior

which "does" by being, "acts" by living – that is, being and

living as God made us in Christ.

This book is a series of statements about our understanding of

why St. Paul uses the imperative form of "to reconcile" and how

that "why" speaks clearly and unmistakably to what the world

defines today as social issues and political problems. It is, for

that reason, a discussion of our conviction that the Christian

communities have failed in their calling, their ministry, because

(at their liberal best) they sought to do for the world what God

has already done for the world in Christ: the work of recon-

ciliation.

This book talks about our conviction that "already the axe is

laid to the root of the trees" (Lk 3, 9) because the Church is

trying to share shirts and food with the poor as imperative

programs of social action, programs the Church apparently

believes are required by a law of God. We are trying to argue in

these pages that St Paul's imperative – Be reconciled to God! -

mans that God wants not doing, but being, not welfare, but wit-

ness. Sharing? Yes! Not as a program, but as a parable, a

thanksgiving for what God has done for us in Christ.

In our day, we in the Church have tried to do God's job, while at

the same time rejecting the only job God puts before us. We have

tried to reconcile people and groups of people by using every

gimmick and technique that culture uses to sell its automobiles,

deodorants, civil repression and international warfare. We have

tried surveys, group dynamics, T-groups, political activism,

sociological and psychological processing, and all the well-known

foolishness of church socials, retreats, picnics, bowling alleys,

swimming pools, skating rinks, gymnasiums, counselling centers,

marriage-and-the-family instruction, relevant ministries and

updated theological schools – all pleasant, on occasion even con-

troversial, but having nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the

mission of Christians as ambassadors of, witnesses to, what God

has done for all men in Christ.

But we in the Church persist: we are still hopeful that though

all these means we can build a kingdom in which all things will

be set right between man and man (and occasionally between man

and God), refusing to recognize that these means are an attempt

to build a kingdom by our guidelines and blueprints, by our

sociology and politics, not by what God's reconciliation has

already done for the world in Christ. In this book we are trying

to confess that the goals of the contemporary Church – that is to

say, the Church of St John's by the Gas Station, the Christian

College, the denominational and interdenominational seminary -

the goals of these Christian communities are blasphemous. The

reconciliation the Church is seeking to accomplish today by these

subterfuges has already been wrought. The brotherhood – the "one

blood" of Acts 17, 26 – that the Church makes its goal today is

already a fact. And because this is so, that very fact judges our

goals and our efforts to achieve brotherhood by social action as

blasphemous, as trying to be God. Instead of witnessing to

Christ, the social action of the Church lends support to the

totalitarianism of the wars and political systems of the 20th

century. By its social action, the Church permits and encourages

the State and culture to define all issues and rules and fields

of battle. The Church then tries to do what the State, without

the Church's support, has already decided to do: to "solve" all

human problems by politics. And this is specifically the

political messianism of contemporary totalitarianism and of

Revelation 13. "Politics" by definition can only "adjust" and

"rearrange." It cannot – as politics – "solve" anything. But the

Church's social action encourages the very movements in the con-

temporary political processes which are moving us straightaway

into 20th-century totalitarianism.

And, in another place,

The alternative would seem to be that the Church either once again serve as chaplain to the status quo — 'too bad about the methods but they did get violent, you know" — or else equate the revolution with the kingdom of God and join it uncritically and with abandon. Much of the "white church" is apt to do the first. Some of the "black church" is apt to do the latter. And if we are confronted with one or the other as the Church's grand strategy, where does it lead us except to where we are now? Is either the mission of the Church? If the status quo had more to be said for it, or if the consummation of past revolutions had a better record, the answer might be simpler. (And we must be careful now, lest we say "a plague on both your heads" and thereby side, in pious neutrality, with the stronger.) If there is a mission for us, it is one that God has provided, and not we ourselves.

And the problem is that many whites involved in the charismatic renewal tended, at best, to say "a plague on both your heads" and thus sided, in pious neutrality, with the stronger. And, at worst, they would gather in their prayer meetings and pray for "the boys on the border" without stopping to ask what "the boys" were doing there in the first place, or where "the border" actually was. In some cases "the border" was inn the middle of a foreign country, like Angola. In other cases it was deep in the heart of South Africa, between white-owned industries and the black residential townships where the workers, on whom the prosperity of those industries depended, lived.

(Sorry if this seems somewhat garbled – WordPress logged me off while I was writing it and lost some of the text, and I keep seeing new bits that I thought were there but aren't)

Rag and bone men

Rag and bone men in Brixton, Johannesburg

Someone said in some online forum that you don't see rag and bone men any more, but you just have to be in the right plasce at the right time. One of those places is outside St Nicholas Church in Brixcton, Johannesburg, and about 5:30 am. On major saints' days (today is St Michael & All Angels, or Michaelmas, as they call it in the west). So we have a service at 6:00 am so people can get to work.

In winter it's dark when the rag and bone men pass, pulling their flattened supermarket trolleys, and you can hear them from a long way away. There are about 7-8 of them passing the Brixton Cemetery, but they split up, and so by the time they get to the church there are only four.And since summer's on its way, this time they passed just after the sun had risen, so I was able to take a picture of them.

Corruption

Here in South Africa we like to complain about corruption, and there's certainly a lot of it about.

A few weeks ago a guy in our parish was arrested outside the block of flats where he lived. The police said that they were going to charge him with being an illegal immigrant, but they'd drop the charge for R500. He said his papers were in his flat in that building, and asked to be allowed to go and get them, but of course they would not allow him to do that as then there would be no "grounds" for the bribe.  Eventually the parish priest had to pay a bribe of R1500 to get him out. That's as bad as the old apartheid era, with the pass laws and all.

In some ways there seems to be a lot more corruption about than there was in the past, but I suspect that that is because we now have a free press. It's not necessarily that there's more corruption, its just that more of it gets reported since we had constitutional freedom of the press since 1994.

But when you look at thing internationally, it seems that we're not so badly off.

According to Transparency International – the global coalition against corruption, South Africa has a corruption index of 4,5 on a scale of 0 (very bad) to 10 (very good).

One of the things that is rather disturbing about it, though, is how badly Orthodox countries fare on the list. Altogether 178 countries are on the list, with Denmark (9,3) being the best, and Somalia (1,1) being the worst.

Here's how some of the Orthodox countries fare, with South Africa included for comparison:

28

Cyprus
6.3

54

South Africa
4.5

68

Georgia
3.8

69

Romania
3.7

73

Bulgaria
3.6

78

Greece
3.5

78

Serbia
3.5

127

Belarus
2.5

134

Ukraine
2.4

154

Russia
2.1

You can see the full list here.

In South Africa there was quite a lot of talk about the need for moral regeneration, at least before Jacob Zuma became president, Since then it has been far less prominent. But I think that the apparent failure of the Orthodox Church to influence the moral climate in societies were Orthodox Christians are at least nominally in the majority must be cause for concern. Of course the Christian faith is not moralism, and we are to preach Christ, not morality. And of course the Church itself is a hospital for sinners. The problem is that the rate of cures doesn't seem to be very high.

Christian communitarian anarchists

In an earlier post, on Christian Anarchism meets Occupy Wall Street, Carl Brook asked in a comment if there were any communitarian empressions of Christian anarchy that I was aware of, and I replied, like Pogo and the cowbirds, "Just me." Carl then asked if I was serious, and this post is my answer.

The reference to Pogo and the cowbirds is from The Jack Acid Society Black Book, which was published by Simon and Schuster in the USA in the 1960s. It is a satire on the John Birch Society, a right-wing group that was founded in the USA about the mid-1960s.

In the book two dwellers in the Okefenokee Swamp, Deacon Mushrat and Molester Mole, form the Jack Acid Society, one of whose aims is to compile a black list of  those they suspect of being anywhere left of the far right.

Here Deacon Mushrat meets Pogo Possom, and they discuss the state of the media.

Deacon Mushrat then asks Pogo if he knows anyone who ought to be on the black list:

So when Carl asks if I was aware of any Christian communtarian anarchists who were around in the old apartheid era, I have to answer like Pogo: the only one I'm sure of was me. And I wasn't even that sure of me.

On 13 May 1963 I received in the post a newspaper called The Catholic Worker. It was sent to me by Brother Roger, an Anglican monk of the Community of the Resurrection. He had been in South Africa for several years, and was one of my gurus. At the beginning of 1963 he was recalled to the UK by his order, and was at the mother house at Mirfield in Yorkshire. He had found a copy of the Catholic Worker, thought it might interest me, and sent it to me. I read it with growing excitement. Here were some people who were actually doing what I was only talking about.

The next day I wrote a letter to Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, and sent it off with a year's subscription to the paper. During that year I and a friend, John Aitchison, edited the magazine of the Anglican Society of the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, the Anglican Witness. We nicked quite a lot of articles from the Catholic Worker, and republished them locally in the Anglican Witness. But there was no one, not even John Aitchison, who shared my enthusiasm for the anarcho-communitarian ideas espoused by the Catholic Worker.

And I never did find anyone who shared that enthusiasm, not even to humour me and be willing at least to talk about it. They all thought it was impractical visionary dreaming and a waste off time. Even when I was living in a sort of Christian commune, trying to express some kind of community (what is nowadays called "the new monasticism"), no one was willing to take those kinds of ideas seriously or thought them worth discussing.

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Murder of the Cathedral

There's been a major tizzwozz in the Church of England blogosphere over the closure of St Paul's Cathedral in London because of the "threat" posed by Occupy London protesters, and the subsequent resignation of several of the Cathedral staff, including the Dean.

I didn't see any reason to blog about it from South Africa, until it became clear that there were certain parallels and contrasts with past events here. It seems that the reason that St Paul's was closed (by the cathedral staff, on their own initiative) was "health and safety" concerns, about people who were camping outside the cathedral buildings.

Compare and contrast this with the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg, where a thouand or more homeless refugees were living inside the building itself, and many people outside the church, including the Health Department of Gauteng Province, wanted them out for "health and safety" reasons, and the church staff continued to give them shelter and said they would go on doing so until the central goverment or Gauteng provincial government provided some better accommodation for the refugees.

Here's one account of what happened at St Paul's Cathedral in London Murdering St Paul's Cathedral – Telegraph

First, the story. When the camp was originally pitched, over a fortnight ago, concerns were expressed about apparently critical issues of health and safety for staff and visitors to St Paul's. The cathedral was precipitately closed for the first time since the Second World War. Mistake number one. When the health and safety report arrived after the first weekend, the Dean realised the issues were trivial and easily remedied with co-operative protesters.

Why the knee-jerk reaction? There was no one around the chapter table, other than the estimable Canon Giles Fraser, who would shortly fall on his sword, warning of the liabilities of embarking on particular policies. This would never happen in any other commercial or institutional organisation. So, mistake number two.

Mistake number three was down to naivety rather than indolence: St Paul's allowed the City of London Corporation to call the shots. It moved into the common consciousness that to talk to the protesters would be to compromise the cathedral's position. There was an unaired alternative view and it is this: no, it wouldn't. The evidence for that is clear. Since those early days, the Church's senior command has spoken regularly and publicly with the protesters, to productive effect.

Now the case of the Methodist Church in Johannesburg didn't have to do with protesters, but rather with homeless refugees.

But there was a South African case involving protesters as well, back in 1972, when the police attacked protesters on the steps of St George's Cathedral in Cape Town with batons and teargas, and the protesters took refuge in the Cathedral, though the police followed them in and beat them up inside the cathedral itself. But, unlike the St Paul's case, the protesters did have the support of the Dean, who tried to protect them from what had turned into a full-scale police riot.

At the time I thought that perhaps the cathedral ought to be exorcised after there had been bloodshed inside, and wrote for a copy of the Anglican service of exorcism (I was an Anglican at that time) to see what should be done in such cases, since it seemed quite possible that there would be more such events. I was told that, since there was no demand for the Anglican service of exorcism, I could have the whole lot, as they were just taking up space in the store room, and they sent them to me, about 100 copies. When they arrived, however, they appeared to be concerned solely with the exorcism of demonised persons, and there was no form of service at all for the exorcism of demonised places, like haunted houses, or churches that had been desecrated by blood being shed in them.

Ironically enough, within a couple of months, exorcisms of persons became a relatively common occurrence in Anglican churches affected by the charismatic renewal.

But it seems t6hat St Paul's Cathedral in London has been self-demonised.

But it's not all doom and gloom.

It's Synchroblog time again, and this month's theme is "calling us out of numbness".

Closing St Paul's Cathedral was a pretty numb (not to mention dumb) thing to do.

You've heard of flashmobs, perhaps?

Well it seems that when St Paul's was closed by the Dean and Chapter, a flash mob organised a Flash Evensong on the steps outside.  You can follow them on Twitter @FlashEvensong.

The FlashEvensong seems to have been a calling out of numbness. It also seems to have been a pretty missional thing to do. If I'm ever called out of retirement to lecture on missiology again, I might mention it as an example.

_____

This post is part of a Synchroblog, where different bloggers blog on the same general theme at roughly the same time. This months theme is "calling us out of numbness" and the other synchroblog contributions are here:

Joy Wilson at Solacetree- The Blessing of Losing Your Faith
Jeremy Myers at Till He Comes – I Have a Dream
Glenn Hager at Breathe – Uncomfortably Numb
Linda at Kingdom Grace – On Earth as it is in Heaven (link not up yet)
Sally at Eternal Echoes – Where are the True Prophets?
Tammy Carter at Blessing the Beloved – No Compromise
Alan Knox at The Assembling of Church – My Word of Prophecy:  Quit Listening to Prophetic Voices (link not up yet)
Liz at Gracerules – Listen
Christine Sine at Godspace – Surrounded by Prophetic Voices: Clouds of Witnesses That Call Us Out of Numbness
Amy Martin – The Window of Suffering, the Beginning of Hope 
Kathy Escobar at The Carnival in My Head- Rising Up From Below 
K.W. Leslie at More Christ – What is God Challenging You to Do?

 

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Christian anarchism meets occupy Wall Street

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, would have rejoiced to see the Occupy Wall Street protesters, according to this interesting article In The East Village, Christian Anarchy Meets Occupy Wall Street – The Local East Village Blog – NYTimes.com:

Soon after legendary folk singer Loudon Wainwright III finished performing for cheering protesters in Zuccotti Park yesterday afternoon, telling them that the Occupy Wall Street encampment reminded him of the 1968 "Summer of Love," a Catholic Worker band called the Filthy Rotten System showed up.

Bud Courtney, who plays banjo in the group, said its decidedly unholy name came from the late Dorothy Day, who started the Christian-anarchist Catholic Worker Movement 78 years ago with Peter Maurin during the Great Depression. She is now being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church.

The full article is certainly worth reading, and it ends up with In The East Village, Christian Anarchy Meets Occupy Wall Street – The Local East Village Blog – NYTimes.com:

Last Friday night, Ms. Sammon greeted a much larger gathering of people who had come to Maryhouse to hear a talk by peace activist Jim Forest, who in 1968 was imprisoned for more than a year after burning draft files along with thirteen others (mostly Catholic clergy members). He once served as managing editor of the Catholic Worker newspaper and has published a new biography of Dorothy Day, whom he knew personally. When Mr. Forest, 70, concluded his reminiscences, a woman in the auditorium asked how he felt Ms. Day might respond to the goings-on in Zuccotti Park if she were alive today.

Mr. Forest didn't hesitate in his reply: "Dorothy would be thrilled," he said. "But she wouldn't here," he added, referring to Maryhouse. "She'd be down there [in Zuccotti Park]."

Last year I wrote a review of Love Is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day by Jim Forest. I'm looking forward to reading his revised and updated version, as soon as it becomes available locally in South Africa. Jim Forest, who recently retired as the editor of In Communion, the journal of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship writes about his journalistic experience: A Letter from the (Retiring) Editor | In Communion: "The first publication of real consequence that I worked with was The Catholic Worker. Its monthly print run was about 90,000 copies and its circulation was international. Encouraged by Dorothy Day, I acquired enough experience eventually to be appointed managing editor. Later on I was assistant editor of a monthly magazine called Liberation, whose focus at the time was on civil rights and whose authors included James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King."

All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day by Jim Forest should be an even more interesting read than the original one, whether one is in occupation of Wall Street or not, or just thinking about it.

View all my reviews

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Remember Ochi Day

Today is Ochi Day.

Ochi is the Greek word for "No".

Seventy-one years ago today, the Greeks said "No".

Gregory C. Pappas: Greeks Need to Start Acting Like Greeks Again:

October 28th marks the 71st anniversary of a little known event that changed the course of world history. If you don't believe me, read on.

Backwater, forlorn, near-bankrupt Greece — with a handful of rickety airplanes, a navy that was barely afloat and a hodgepodge military that hadn't yet recovered from a decimating defeat in a war with Turkey — was faced with an ultimatum by Benito Mussolini to surrender to the Axis Powers. It was October 28, 1940….

The Greeks — in what would become the single defining moment in the nation's modern history — said no to Mussolini. The Italians invaded — with the military might second only to that of Nazi Germany. Hundreds of invading aircraft attacked and thousands of Italian troops poured across the border within moments of the telegram reaching the Italian formations. "The Greeks said no!"

The outcome — Greece pushed the Italians back, defending their homeland from the Axis Powers. It was a time in Europe when one nation after another had fallen. The mood in Europe was one of doom. The sentiment in the United States was the same. The Nazi epidemic was spreading.

[image error]Today is also, in the Western Church, the Feast of the Apostles St Simon and St Jude (In the Orthodox Church St Simon is commemorated on 10 May, and St Jude on 19 June). Also, in the Western Church, St Jude is known as the patron saint of lost causes and desperate situations. And if ever there was a desperate situation and a lost cause, it was that of the Greeks facing the Fascist army.

The Fascists said, "Surrender!"

And the Greeks said "No!"

Kontakion – Tone 2

You were chosen as a disciple for your firmness of mind:

An unshakable pillar of the Church of Christ,

You proclaimed His word to the Gentiles,

Telling them to believe in one Godhead.

You were glorified by Him, receiving the grace of healing,

Healing the ills of all who came to you,

O most praised Apostle Jude!

Interestingly enough, today is also, in the Greek Church, the Feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God (in the Russian use it is on 1 October).  Part of the story of this feast is as follows:

The Primary Chronicle of St Nestor reflects that the protective intercession of the Mother of God was needed because an attack of a large pagan Russian fleet under the leadership of Askole and Dir. The feast celebrates the divine destruction of the fleet which threatened Constantinople itself, sometime in the years 864-867 or according to the Russian historian Vasiliev, on June 18, 860. Ironically, this Feast is considered important by the Slavic Churches but not by the Greeks.

And that too seems appropriate for Ochi Day.

The Protecting Veil of the Theotokos

Troparion – Tone 4

Today the faithful celebrate the feast with joy

illumined by your coming, O Mother of God.

Beholding your pure image we fervently cry to you:

"Encompass us beneath the precious veil of your protection;

deliver us from every form of evil by entreating Christ,

your Son and our God that He may save our souls."

Kontakion – Tone 3

Today the Virgin stands in the midst of the Church

and with choirs of saints she invisibly prays to God for us.

Angels and bishops worship,

apostles and prophets rejoice together,

since for our sake she prays to the pre-eternal God.

 

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New Atheist oddities

I'm not much into debates about the existence or non-existence of God, and so I don't pay much attention to the New Atheists, though it was mainly the trad atheists who debated the existence or non-existence of God. Their case was usually well argued, and they tried to be logical. But as Bishop Nick Baines points out, Nick Baines's Blog: "The New Atheists give atheism a bad name by substituting assertion for argument."

It's the strange inconsistencies in their arguments that puzzle me.

For example I can understand it when Richard Dawkins says this: Positive Atheism's Big List of Richard Dawkins Quotations:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

– Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility Function," published in Scientific American (November, 1995), p. 85

He is speaking from his field of expertise, biology, and, if I weren't a Christian, I'd probably share his view.

But if that's what he thinks of life, the universe and everything, why, when challenged by a Christian theologian to a debate, does he refuse to do so on the grounds that Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig | Richard Dawkins:

But Craig is not just a figure of fun. He has a dark side, and that is putting it kindly. Most churchmen these days wisely disown the horrific genocides ordered by the God of the Old Testament. Anyone who criticises the divine bloodlust is loudly accused of unfairly ignoring the historical context, and of naive literalism towards what was never more than metaphor or myth. You would search far to find a modern preacher willing to defend God's commandment, in Deuteronomy 20: 13-15, to kill all the men in a conquered city and to seize the women, children and livestock as plunder. And verses 16 and 17 are even worse:

"But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them"

Why does Dawkins care?

Shouldn't he rather regard it with a blind pitiless indifference?

If there is no justice in the universe, as he asserts, why does he then get on his moral high horse about debating with someone who, he says, defends genocide? Surely that should be a matter of complete indifference to him?

If there is no god and no evil, why should he refuse to debate somkeone because he regards him as "evil", as having a "dark side". Why should it matter if, as Dawkins asserts, there is no "dark side"?

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Nato backs ethnic cleansing again

Back in February this year, when Colonel Gaddafi used the military to crush peaceful protesters in Libya, some people, including some fellow-bloggers in South Africa who ought to have known better, were urging us all to support petitions to "the West" to enforce a "no-fly zone" in Libya to "prevent civilian deaths."

I wonder if they realise their folly when they read stories like these: Lynching Black Africans in Libya | Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

The lynching of Africans in Libya has been so bad that African leaders across the continent have been forced to raise their voices in protest. When the President of Nigeria, the USA's unofficial enforcer in West Africa leads an African wide outcry against the lynching of his citizens in Libya one would assume that it was heard in the Obama White House.

With the murder or expulsion of most of Libya's African migrant population well on its way came the massacre and ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Black Libyans.

It's not as though it hasn't happened before. The book I reviewed in the previous post notes that

The actions of politicians are crucial in a moral and ethical sense. It may well be that the "Ghandhian" [sic] approach of the Kosovo Albanian leader Ibraham Rugova was instrumental in maintaining an uneasy peace in Kosovo before 1998 and the violent actions of the KLA and subsequently NATO as well as the response of the Milosevic regime to the KLA and NATO campaigns effectively militarized and radicalized a situation that might have been solved slowly and peacefully if there had been any concerted will on the part of the international community before 1998.

The "international community" (ie "the West") however, did not want a peaceful solution. And so Nato, the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization, acted as the air force of the most violent party in Kosovo — the KLA (UCK).

With that kind of record, why should anyone expect Nato to do anything better in Libya?

And while the rhetoric of the American Democratic Party may sound less crazy to non-Americans than that of the Republican Party, their actions are no less crazy and warlike. Madeleine Albright (Democrat) was just as determined to have a war in Kosovo as George W. Bush (Republican) was to have one in Iraq, and concerning Iraq,  she said that she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi kids (caused by Western sanctions) was "worth it" to maintain American hegemony. And Obama/Clinton in 2011 is no better than Clinton/Albright in 1999, or George W. Bush in between.

So why should we expect anything different from Nato in Libya?

As a result, the people now running Libya are very different from the peaceful protesters of last February. As Anglican Bishop Nick Baines of Bradford says Gaddafi's corpse and the rule of law | Nick Baines's Blog

Muammar Gaddafi was an execrable tyrant who caused misery to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. But, using that fact to justify summary execution, physical torture, desecration of a body bodes ill for when we want to argue that bodies are to be honoured, torture to be rejected, murder to be abhorred. We can't pick and choose when the rule of law is to apply.

The behavior of those now ruling Libya shows that they are in fact no better than Gaddafi, and Libya has gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.

It bears out what the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire once said:

During the initial stage of the struggle the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or 'sub-oppressors.' The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men, but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity…

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom misacquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man, nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion (Freire Pedagogy of the oppressed 1998:27,29).

And this is precisely what Nato "support" has achieved wherever it has been given. It has tried to give "freedom" as conquest, and thereby simply replaced one set of oppressors by another.

Freire also says (1998:26):

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is to create it) become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs fromm the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.

Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans – book review

Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition by Cathie Carmichael

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I largely agree with the author's conclusion when she says:

The main thesis that has been pursued in the book is the one that the Balkans suffered ethnic quakes, largely because of the impact of European ideas (initially nationalism, then fascism and communism) was so profound and clashed so indelibly with older 'autochtonous' ideas found in religious practice and traditional culture. Although the forms that violence took during ethnic cleansing were often 'traditional' in the sense that they had a large symbolic content and involved the honour of the individuals involved, the ideas that inspired this violence were modern and European in their origins.

While I largely agree with both the thesis and the conclusion (of which that paragraph forms part), I think the author has failed to support the conclusion with evidence in the body of the book.

There is plenty of evidence of ethnic cleansing in the body of the book. Horror stories abound, both of the ethnic cleansing, and the violence and cruelty that often accompanied it. It tends to leave one feeling depressed about the depths to which human nature can sink, and to want to conclude that the Calvinist theory of total depravity is the most apt description of the human race.

The author does manage to link the actions of ethnic cleansing with nationalist rhetoric fairly well, but the rest of the evidence for the conclusion, where it is present at all, is not coherently argued in such a way as to support the thesis.

There is virtually nothing about "the older 'autochtonous' ideas found in religious practice and traditional culture." They are occasionally mentioned in passing, not in such a way as to show how they clashed with the theory and practice of ethnic cleansing. I expected at least a paragraph or two in the introduction on the main religious and cultural ideas in the introduction, and on their relation to the nationalist ideas. But where they are present at all, they are scrappy and disconnected.

To give just one example (not mentioned at all in the book) there is the oft-repeated saying that "Hellenism is Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy is Hellenism" and in view of the main thesis of the book this deserves at least some analysis, and some estimate of how widely it is accepted.

At the end there is a rather telling paragraph that that shows the result of this kind of thinking. The author points out that until 1945 Salonika (now Thessaloniki) was a polyglot multiethnic community, of which the largest component was Sephardic Jews. They author goes on to say:

In July 1992, the ethnological museum in Salonika had no exhibit to commemorate the Sephardic Jewish element in the city's population, which was annihilated during the Nazi occupation. When the anthropologist Jonathan Schwartz 'asked a member of staff about this absence… they could not understand what the question was about. It was taken for granted that the Museum is Greek. Ethnology is apparently a scientific euphemism for Nationalism.'

Those who lived through the apartheid era in South Africa would understand the last sentence only too well.

When I was working on my doctoral thesis on "Orthodox mission methods" I had to pay quite a lot of attention to the question of religion and nationalism, especially as it manifested itself in the Balkans. It is closely related to mission, because, as one woman said at a church social gathering, "The Orthodox Church is not missionary, because its purpose is to preserve Greek culture."

One of the things that struck me was just how the ideas of nationalism affected the Balkans, and the uneasy relationship they had with Orthodox theology. There was a tendency for them to mingle (as in "Orthodoxy is Hellenism and Hellenism is Orthodoxy"), but there was also an awareness that they were separate, and not altogether compatible. Some spoke of "Romanity" in distinction to "Hellenism", harking back to a pre-Ottoman multiethnic empire. For more on this see Nationalism, violence and reconciliation

Carmichael's conclusion that the ideas that inspired the violence were modern and European in their origins, is very important, but again, she fails to draw the lines clearly enough. She occasionally refers to them as "Herderian", but that is about all.

One reason that I think it is important is that people of Western Europe and their offshoots often speak disparagingly of Africa and Africans as if Africans were somehow genetically predisposed to violence. They point to such things as the genocide in Rwanda in 1994-95 as if this were something

peculiarly African, yet in that very period, similar events were taking place in Europe, in the Balkans.

Again, many Western Europeans tried to distance themselves from the Balkans, and tended to retard the region as not really European. Carmichael speaks of "a tendency to burden a large region with almost insurmountable legacies and an overarching reputation for pathological violence", but fails to note, except in passing, that Western Europe not only generated the nationalist ideas that led to the violence, but that the West by its own intervention, and for its own self-interest was just

as much a participant in the violence. The Nato bombing of Yugoslavia was no less "pathological" than the violence of any of the parties fighting on the ground. Western Europe cannot disown the Balkans as something intrinsically "other" and non-European.

And the violence in the Balkans in the 1990s was little different from violence in Africa in the same period.

Generally, the case the author makes is a good one; it's just a pity that it wasn't better argued.

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