It being rather warm, i’ve switched from my daily cycle of pots of tea to something cooler, and am instead keeping a pot of water infused with hibiscus flowers to hand. I highly recommend it. Wikipedia has details, though I should note that I’ve grown to like it as something without sugar in.
I didn’t bring my camera with me so here are a few quick photos taken from my phone. The sound set up was luxurious - not only did I not have to share my monitor channel but I had stereo keyboard outputs, and we had an on-stage monitors engineer so I could point at the person I needed more of during the service and more would appear in my foldback. It was very nice.
I’m not sure that I’ve posted on Christology before. It’s an area where I’m always rather uncomfortable, the reason being that it seems to be a place where everything collides. To talk of Christology you raise questions not only of the incarnation, but of the Trinity, of the atonement, of death, what it means to be human creation, the fall, sin, judgement - everything comes together at this point.
I find it interesting that one of the things I want to say about the incarnation is one that doesn’t really seem to have been explored much, or even denounced in the literature. I want to say that in the son becoming incarnate perhaps something happened to the father and the spirit. Is that heresy? Well I haven’t yet said that the father became incarnate, so perhaps I’m safe. In a radically relational view of the Trinity it is hard to find any action of one Trinitarian member apart from the actions of the others, indeed Jesus apparently did nothing but what he saw the father doing. I can’t conceive of an atonement in which one member of the godhead bears the suffering, shame and humiliation and the others aren’t somehow drawn into that. In any case it seems to be something that’s left as a bit of a mystery so perhaps I shouldn’t speculate too hard. Of course, how the participation occurs is very much up for grabs, we certainly don’t see the father crucified, but as the father of the son there are no doubt staggering implications in terms of his identity and being.
Now, what about Christology itself, generally taken to mean “what’s going on when you’ve got a man wandering round who thinks he’s God”. Pretty much any direction you stray in here there is heresy awaiting you, there is very little that can be said of a positive nature. We are all, no doubt, aware of the errors which the church says we must avoid - no co-mingling of the substances, nor confusion, yet no division etc. etc. It’s all about the two natures in one person. Perhaps I’m alone in having a mental image of a human Christ wandering round with some vast ghostly ethereal field attached to him which he can’t access as he is but is somehow attached to his person.
So, what of Kenosis? Jesus emptied himself, taking the form of a bondservant. What does it mean? what does it mean? To be honest, the language of two natures doesn’t immediately resonate with me, it’s not a way of speaking of things which I can take to and say it feels to me like the way the world works. I’m not saying there are not important truths in it, but that it’s not really my language. John Sanders in The God Who Risks talks about Divine self-restraint, and this is a language I can begin to understand, restraint is something which we exercise daily. Unfortunately he doesn’t develop much of a Christology out of the language, but I think it carries important weight. What else do I like? Some theologians talk of kenosis by addition - in other words Christ becomes less by adding something to himself, like the way mud on a car detracts from its appearance. This seems like it could work in the same direction. How about someone else… in googling I come to a reference to someone called Morris “Morris claims that certain “conditions or requisites of divinity, the properties ingredient in or constitutive of deity, are not simply the divine attributes such as omniscient or omnipresence (as standardly analyzed), but rather are properties composed of these attributes qualified by kenotic limitation properties.”12 For example, omniscience would be qualified as the “property of being omniscient unless-freely-and-temporarily-choosing-to-be-otherwise.”" Again - I like it.
I want to add one further biblical analogy, which is that of sleep. Sleep is used in the Bible as a metaphor for death, and I believe it’s an important one which can also be applied to the incarnation. Sleep is a state in which our conscious existence becomes latent - it becomes something we’re capable of rather than something we’re engaged in. We don’t cease to exist as persons with a first-person perspective, but we cease to be active as that. As a metaphor for death, then, this suggests that death isn’t the cessation of our existence, but it is more like sleep in the way it works. It’s about emptying not, cessation. Kinda important if you think of Jesus dying on the cross - ‘oops, God stopped existing for a moment there’ is not a good way to go about things. Perhaps it can also function as a metaphor for the incarnation, perhaps an even better one if we consider the idea of a general anaesthetic in which something is introduced to the body so that it enters this state.
Where does this get us? Well I have to say that in a modernist discourse it gets us nowhere in particular, there’s no unified theory here, no ‘this is how it works’ rather these are postmodern facets to an issue and ways in which I think it might be useful to begin thinking.
“I should be a musicologist, I’d probably make more money”
Now that’s a phrase I never thought I’d hear - commentary on the Stardust DVD
It seems I have a full batch of essay themes now, so here’s a status report on my MMus portfolio:
Unit: Dissertation
Supervisor: Daniel Chua
Pretentious title/theme: Contemplating Violence: Portrayals of Confilct and Suffering in the Music of James MacMillan
Reading/resources: Basic reading on sacred violence done, some scores and CDs obtained, more on their way from BBC and WNO
Wordcount: 1,634/10,000
Unit: Gender
Supervisor: Matthew Head
Pretentious title/theme: Misandry and Musicology or Whatever became of the Straight Man
Reading/resources: Basic reading on misandry done, points of reference available (McClary/van den Toorn/Solie sequence as key)
Wordcount: 523/5,000
Unit: Jazz
Supervisor: Andy Fry
Pretentious title/theme: Jazz and the BBC, looking at attitudes to jazz in Britain and the early BBC
Reading/resources: Some reading done on Jazz in Britain, bits and pieces on the BBC, hoping a trip to the BBC Written Archives Centre in late May will provide useful resources to examine
Wordcount: 0/5,000
Unit: Schubert Song on Record
Supervisor: Daniel Leech Wilkinson
Pretentious title/theme: David Daniels/countertenor recordings of Schubert song/gender/meaning
Reading/resources: A few bits of reading done, probably need more core material
Wordcount: 2,514 (class presentation)/5,000
Unit: Beethoven and Adorno
Supervisor: Daniel Chua
Pretentious title/theme: Adorno, hope and op. 132
Reading/resources: Basically done
Wordcount: 4,006/5,000
Unit: Issues
Supervisor: Roger Parker
Pretentious title/theme: Critique of Hepokowski/Darcy’s Sonata Theory
Reading/resources: Probably inadequate, mainly seems to be a book review
Wordcount: 4,013/5,000
Unit: 20th century music
Supervisor: Arnold Whittall
Pretentious title/theme: Analysis of In Memorium Dylan Thomas
Reading/resources: Mainly analysis, other bits and pieces though
Wordcount: 3,037/5,000
Total Progress (words): 15,727/40,000
We, not the British, established democracy, based on one person, one vote
President Robert Mugabe
Why is it that I can’t help be reminded of Terry Pratchett and the Ankh Morpork system of democracy in which the patrician is the one man with the one vote.
I added a countdown timer to the sidebar - it tells me that I have 4 months, 24 days, 18 hours, 0 minutes until I have to have 40,000 words on the desk of someone at King’s.
Scary huh?
Interested in the work I do? check out http://www.globalwaterintel.com/GWM2008/index.html and have a look at the global report and the china report - I’ve been doing most of the production work on both of them.
M
http://webkit.org/blog/175/introducing-css-gradients/ - I love webkit
