Ward on religion

Religious studies itself may be inseparable from these logics. It is not only the child of modernity, it is the heir to the aspirations of modernity for systematizing knowledge. It is heir to the Faustian dreams and desires for total knowledge: that all practices of belief can be catalogued, and that in and through this cataloguing they become many aspects of the one religion, varieties of human spirituality.

Graham Ward, ”Review Essay: Religionists and Theologians: Toward a Politics of Difference”, Modern Theology 16, num 4 (2000): 545.

Graham Ward om ondska

Let’s talk about evil in a Christian context. After all, it’s part of the Lord’s Prayer: “Deliver us from evil.” Most liturgies begin with an act of contrition, an act of confession. There is a sense in which confession actually aligns us with the will of God, which is the will of the good. And in that sense, confession turns us away from all those things that have a tendency toward what is evil. 

From a classical theological context—and here I’m going back to Aquinas and Augustine—there is no substantive thing called evil. Evil doesn’t have any ontological weight at all. God gives existence to all things and all things in the existence that God has given are good. And so evil is not any thing at all. But when we turn away from that which sustains us and maintains us in our being, we are moving toward that which is the negation of what we were created for. And so what we see as turning toward evil is a turning toward nonexistence, toward that which is denigrating to our creaturely status as creations of God, who is Good. Within that context, then, prayer is a confession of reorientation toward that which is good. It is a confession that we have been involved in acts that are counter to the honoring and worship of God and a recognition that we are created beings who are dependent on God. 

And so prayer is a reorientation toward the Good. And that’s what we mean in the Christian tradition when we speak of sanctification. Our reorientation toward God brings about a change, a transformation, a metanoia, that in fact turns us away from the disobedient misuse of those goods God has given us. It’s not that there is a substance called “evil.” When we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil,” we’re not asking God to deliver us from some substantial, evil thing that is out there, because that would make us dualists rather than monotheists, that would suggest a divine good fighting a divine bad. There’s no good fighting the bad in the Christian tradition because the bad just doesn’t exist in that way. There is only God’s goodness, and God’s goodness will win out in the end.

Graham Ward intervjuad i The Other Journal

Söndagsgodis

• Den som surfar runt på jakt efter intressanta mp3-föreläsningar att fylla podden med kommer sannolikt att uppskatta detta lilla bibliotek.

• The Immanent Frame gör en grymt intressant intervju med Terry Eagleton:
  

  "The scandal of the New Testament—the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois—all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version. I’m presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries. Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way."

• Zizek på norska om ideologi och tolerans:
  

  "Problemet er at ideologi i dag framstår som ikke-ideologi. Det alt handler om, er å avdekke ideologien vi alle tilhører, og som vi alle er del av og underbygger med våre handlinger, uttalte han."

• ... och till sist ett Graham Ward-citat på samma tema:
  

  "The politics of Christian discipleship is about first unmasking the theolgical and metaphysical sources of current mythologies and revealing the distortions and perversions of their current secularized forms. Then we need to reread and rewrite the Christian tradition back into contemporary culture."
  - Ur Politics of Discipleship. s.165

Graham Ward om sociologi och religion

" ... although 82 percent of humankind espouses religious convictions, anthropology and psychology, following in the wake of Enlightenment sociology, can view such people only as immature, primitive, irrational, neurotic, or insecure.

For these social sciences, religion can be understood only negatively in terms of human progress toward some flatline of secularization - some enlightenment utopia in which all human beings are mature, civilized, rational, psychologically stable, and emotionally secure and recognize that their need for religion is a pathological or existential condition.

The assumption is that such sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists themselves are free from such immaturities, irrationalities, and emotional instabilities."

Graham Ward. The Politics of Discipleship. s.122

Den som ser bortom allt ser ingenting ...

"But, we are also beyond pluralism. Pluralism, that is, that recognized different faiths as species of the one generic religion or even different symbolic world-views that were all ultimately grounded in and expressive of the one simply, existential reality.

We have moved beyond pluralism because there is no view from no where, no objective knowledge; the view from no where is itself a cultural ideology - often Western, white and male."

Ur Cities of God av Graham Ward