Radio One and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I still haven't mastered the snappy post title. Please forgive the above as its entirely functional. No doubt snappy post titles are the kind of things that would turn someone like Tom from Myspace into a huge fan of my blog, but still I can't get manage to get my head round them. Actually, having just had the thought that someone like Tom from myspace could in fact like my blog if I had clever post titles, I am now thinking that maybe I'll spend some spare time and thought constructing them. Hmmm, thinking about this new thought in turn, I am even thinking that in the future I will think of clever post titles first and then pursue activities that fall in line with them, rather than the other way round. This will make the whole task easier and will fuck Tom from myspace right up. Yes, Fuck you Tom from Myspace, fuck you.

As it is, however, I have no snappy title and so can only cover the two topics that I have outlined above. Here we are then:

So firstly I played a radio one live session yesterday with my band 'Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit'. It was a really great day. Thanks to everyone who came down to support us, and especially to Tom, Luis, Johnny and Laura for their out-of-place whoops and over-zealous shouts of "Wolfson". The BBC is an amazing place. It smells like any other institution but has loads of hidden extras. While we were there the BBC orchestra, about 100 players in total, were recording in an adjacent room. An amazing sight. Our session, though smaller, wasn't bad itself. We played some of the older stuff - Cold Bread, Brown Trout Blues, Leftovers, Tickle Me Pink and Eyless in Holloway - and it all went down pretty well, even if we were a bit ropey at the start. Part of the whole experience was that we drove down to Maida Vale in our tour bus with our brand new tour manager for the very first time. It was all just pretty exciting basically, even though I had to clear away my drum kit at the end of the day and had a poor tuna sandwich for my lunch.

Secondly, though I will say more on this in a later post, I should briefly mention that I am really enjoying Bonhoeffer's 'Letters and Papers from Prison' at the moment. His critique of Bultmann-led Liberal theology, essentially my own position, is incredibly incisive, radical too. Bonhoeffer's basic objection is the obsession with boundaries that has marked the secularity debate for generations and is still the central concern of theological liberalism. Liberals give ground to the popular philosophical conceptions of the world, says Bonhoeffer, but this very enterprise rises from a mistake in how Christians should speak of God. God is not the answer to a cognitive problem, whether cosmological or existential. If this is the case then liberalism will always be a self-defeating enterprise, he says, an almost continual erosion of God as an increasingly unnecessary explanation corresponding to the rise of human knowledge. Rather, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is not about that which is beyond us, but about that which is in and around us. The significance of the Christ event, central and not on the boundaries, is to be found in human solutions and questions and not in possible resolutions or answers. This is the paradigm shift that is needed, says Bonhoeffer, and not the unnecessary trade off that exists between Christian liberals and secularists - a trade off between where to draw the boundary between the Christian narrative and popular materialism.

I'll blog more about this extraordinary critique as well as Bonhoeffer's ideas of the harmony of man's love for his God and his family, and his understanding of truth as more and less than mere brutal honesty, in the near future. It'll have to wait for at least a week though as I'm off to Italy for a well earned break with my lovely girlfriend on Saturday. Can't wait...

Hope you are all well, oh and Tom from Myspace, I've not forgotten about you....