Month: March 2006

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Pester power

You know what a shirker I am when it comes to prayer. But thanks to the persistence of mates who tell me to pray – and to give thanks – I think I am beginning to get it. After all, we always have to ask people for whatever we want, and ask them many times. I pester people for things. And so it is with those God has set over us. We have to ask them for what we want, and we have to persist, and not to change our minds. Our leaders need that constant drip, drip of our requests for more of everything – and most of all, for more Christ. We have to nag them to teach us and to act like they are responsible for us.

I get nagged too, though I am not set over anybody. Wai Luen sends me his papers to read, and once a month he emails me a single line, saying something like, ‘Well, you lazy Englishman, have you read my paper yet and are you going to respond to it at last?’ Wai Luen is smart. He gave us a little yellow blanket, very soft, that lines Michael’s buggy. I look at that blanket every time I take Michael out for a walk so I think of Wai Luen three times daily. That blanket is a kind of intercessory flag, that intercedes for its giver and it accuses me to God for my neglect of Wai Luen, and oh, well, a list of others, who came to London to study but who have been abandoned here without teaching, supervision or support. All their voices go to God. Will the English and the deaf theology departments of their irresponsible universities crack under this pressure?

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The Church is the leaven of the West

The Christian political tradition represents one side of a conversation. The gospel is in conversation and confrontation with pagan thought. In part at least, modernity is pagan, so pagan thought must be the other half of the conversation. Or rather not pagan thought, but pagan practice, the practices of captivity, sloth and compulsion must be the other half of the conversation. Pagan practice cannot be opened to us by pagan thought alone. Only the Scriptures can reveal pagan thought to us as pagan, as that which is present temptation to us, and indeed as our own present practice. The bible is the Scriptures of the Church, not of the West: the Church is not the West, but only the leaven of the West.
The pagan practices most constitutive for modernity are represented by the political philosophy of the ancient world rediscovered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which Kant formalised into the modern political-and-epistemological separation of powers. This is the effective scripture of the modern West. It has brought about the division and reduction of public discourse into the techniques of our withdrawal into ever smaller spheres of selfhood. The West attempts to lay aside the tools by which its own version of its history can be challenged. We must ask whether, in response, God has withdrawn the Scriptures from the West, with the result that the bible is quite closed to us, held closed by God.

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Petre Tutea

Petre Tutea

You know I never read books (from idleness, not principle), but if I ever did I would take a peek inside this one:

Alexandru Popescu Petre Tutea Between Sacrifice and Suicide

Here is Ashgate’s description of the book

Petre Tutea (1902-91) was one of the outstanding Christian dissident intellectuals of the Communist era in Eastern Europe. Revered as a saint by some, he spent thirteen years as a prisoner of conscience and twenty-eight years under house arrest at the hands of the Securitate. This book explores his unique response to the horrors of torture and ‘re-education’ and reveals the experience of a whole generation detained in the political prisons. Tutea’s understanding of human needs and how they can be fulfilled even amidst extreme adversity not only reflects huge learning and great brilliance of mind, but also offers a spiritual vision grounded in personal experience of the Romanian Gulag. Following the fall of the Ceausescus, he has begun to emerge as a significant contributor to ecumenical Christian discourse and to understanding of wider issues of truth and reconciliation in the contemporary world.
As Tutea’s pupil and scribe for twelve years, as a psychiatrist, and as a theologian, Alexandru Popescu is uniquely placed to present the work of this twentieth-century Confessor of the faith. Drawing on bibliographical sources which include unpublished or censored manuscripts and personal conversations with Tutea and with other prisoners of conscience in Romania, Popescu presents extensive translations of Tutea, which make his thought accessible to the English-speaking reader for the first time.
Through his stature as a human being and his authority as a thinker, Petre Tutea challenges us to question many of our assumptions. The choice he presents between ‘sacrifice’ and ‘moral suicide’ focuses us on the very essence of religion and human personhood. Resisting any ultimate separation of theology and spirituality, his work affirms hope and love as the sole ground upon which truth can be based. At the same time, hope and love are not mere ideal emotions, but are known and lived in engagement with the real world – in politics, economics, science, ecology, and the arts, and in participation in the Divine Liturgy that is at once the traditional offering of the Church and the cosmic drama of the incarnate Word.

Ashgate also quotes some powerful commendations

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Participation

Here is a wonderful response to the ‘By grace and participation’ post (below) from Vincent Rossi:

As a student of St. Maximos the Confessor for 20 years, and particularly of the Mystagogia, I would say that it is precisely the first paragraph quoted of Chapter 24, which you say is â??hard to takeâ??, that is absolutely essential for an understanding of the work, focus, theological method, metaphysical depth and spiritual vision of the Confessor. Without understanding what he is doing theologically in that first paragraph of Chapter 24, which sums up what he articulates in Chapters 1 through 7 of the Mystagogia, one can have only the vaguest and most superficial understanding of what Maximos means by that all important word â??participationâ?? (Gr: methexis, metousia). For Maximos, communion means precisely mystagogy, and mystagogy means initiation into and participation in the Great Mystery, and the Great Mystery is the Incarnation of the Logos, One of the Holy Trinity, through which, by perchoresis or reciprocal indwelling, human beings may be deified and all nature transfigured. We have heard a lot about â??relational ontologyâ?? over the past decade or so. St. Maximosâ?? ontology is the authentic relational ontology of patristic Orthodoxy, but more precisely it is a Trinitarian, liturgical, doxological, perichoretic ontology, one that is neither Hellenic nor Hebraic, that is, neither downplaying the timeless essence of beings because of the supposed â??hellenismâ?? of substance-language, nor overly privileging the eschatological dimension because of its hebraic scriptural basis, an ontology that grounds the unity, union and communion of the Uncreated and the created in the everpresent hypostatic reality of Christâ??s Godmanhood and the everpresent energetic grace of the Life-giving Holy Spirit.
It may well be true that Zizioulas learned everything he knows from Maximos, but it does not necessarily follow that everything Zizioulas says about Maximos is true. Anyone who seeks truly to learn in St. Maximosâ?? school had better wear his presuppositions lightly and, yes, be prepared to be humbled.

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The bishop looks forward for us

When we celebrate the eucharist we must start sending some eucharistic bread round to every other church in the area. We should send our bishop to knock on the door of every congregation in the borough, ask to be admitted and allowed to bring them some bread, wine (not consecrated, but blessed) and a little encouragement from us. Yes, that’s right, he must go to every denomination, which means other denominations, those which do not recognise his authority. If they admit him they admit us, and so start to recognise the catholicity of the church – which means that we cannot be Church without them, and they cannot be Church without us, and that we represent a proper discipline on each other. Of course he must walk, all right, take the bus, and of course he must wear his robes and take his crozier, and stand outside each Church and knock. He must offer himself to those who did not ask for him. He must beg to be received and heard by them, and to be encouraged and taught by them, and he must bring back to us what he has learned from them. He has to beg their forgiveness for our separation and aloofness, and in our name he has to forgive them for separating themselves from us. He has to teach and correct them, warn them of the results of their separation, and he has to receive their teaching and correction, and together with them look forward to the day when we can celebrate together at last. Every eucharist looks forward to this and every exchange of the peace anticipates this. Obvious, isn’t it?

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By grace and participation

Thank God for friends. They are always trying to get my education started again, particularly Alan, who mailed yesterday:

‘Have you read Maximus’ Mystagogia (ET in Berthold’s Classics of
Western Spirituality edn.) – absolutely superb, esp. ch 24 which is
the ecclesiastical exterminator of all Thomist-Aristotelian
understandings of communion.’

When he comes I will ask Alan what ‘the ecclesiastical exterminator of all Thomist-Aristotelian understandings of communion’ means. But meanwhile, here is Maximus, summing up what he has said in The Church’s Mystagogy. The first paragraph is not easy to take, but the second is just extraordinary. Just hang onto this little phrase: ‘by grace and participation’:

Maximus

The holy Church, we said, is the figure and image of God, inasmuch as through it, he effects in his infinite power and wisdom an unconfused unity from the various essence of beings, attaching them to himself as a Creator at their highest point, and this operates according to the grace of faith for the faithful, joining them all to each other in one form according to a single grace and calling of faith, the active and virtuous ones in a single identity of will, the contemplative and gnostic ones in an unbroken and undivided concord as well. It is figure of both the spiritual and sensible world, with the sanctuary as symbol of the intelligible world and the nave as symbol of the world of sense. Sons are the ones who out of neither fear of threat nor desire of promised things but rather out of character and habit of the voluntary inclination and disposition of the soul towards the good never become separated from God, as that son to whom it was said ‘Son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.’

For if the Word has shown that the one who is in need of having good done to him is God – for as long, he tells as, as you did it for one of these least ones, you did it for me – on God’s very word, then, he will much more show that the one who can do good and who does it is truly God by grace and participation because he has taken on in happy imitation the energy and characteristics of God’s own doing good. And if the poor man is God, it is because of God’s condescension in becoming poor for us and taking upon himself by his own suffering the sufferings of each one and ‘until the end of time’, always suffering mystically out of goodness in proportion to each one’s suffering. All the more reason then will that one be God who by loving men in imitation of God heals by himself in divine fashion the hurts of those who suffer and shows that he has in his disposition, safeguarding all proportion, the same power and of saving Providence that God has.

Zizioulas learned everything he knows from Maximus, so it looks as though it is time to school with Maximus (humbling, this theology lark) and see what we can learn from him.

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The Church is the company of heaven made visible for us

The Church is the visible tip of the not yet visible company of heaven. This company is held together by God, and made visible by him to us on earth. The Church understood on this eschatological definition, holds together what would otherwise drift apart. The Church sustains the world, which has no unity of its own, and so the Church represents that future in which the world will be spacious and free. In raising Jesus Christ, and calling out the Church, God has elected the human race. He has made the Church to be the body that embodies and guarantees both plurality and unity for the world. As the Church is itself the work of the Spirit, it works this priestly task of making the world one, and no part of the world is able to secure itself in unfreedom, against this end. The doctrine of creation is an eschatological doctrine that sets out the future of man as the priest of creation, a future in which he is freely with God.

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Help ! I'm being interpreted!

I have that weird feeling you get when you put yourselves in the hands of a doctor or barber and are then under their control, not your own. I have got an interpreter and I am being interpreted to within an inch of my life. Solly is reading The Eschatological Economy and giving a running commentary on his blog, Solly Gratia. He summarises what I am saying, find labels for the positions I take, and puts everything that I say in the context of our evangelical hopes and hang-ups – and he has made me remember how I got started on the great adventure of Christian theology. As a reader he is fast, he has stamina, and above all he has insight. I went to university to do a PhD, and paid a lot of fees, for the sort of feedback and criticism I am getting from Solly. But I am getting real analysis now, into Chapter two already, and I am taking notes on Solly’s notes.

Here is how it happened. I offered a PDF of The Eschatological Economy to whoever asked. Solly asked. If you would like to see a PDF of The Eschatological Economy, just ask in the comment box here or in ‘Pages’. Your email will appear to me (though it will not appear with your comment) and I will send The Eschatological Economy for you to read – and then you can comment on Solly, and tell him he is too charitable a reader.

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Lent as recapitulation

Lent is a recapitulation of our understanding of creation and fall, and of regeneration and sanctification.

Because Lent was seen as a season preliminary to Easter, in some older interpretations Lent was predominantly or even exclusively about the suffering and death of Jesus. Lent was the season of the cross. Period.
But those serious about the pursuit of Christian history had to wrestle with the fact that Lent began as a time of final instruction and intensive preparation for baptism. Ancient lectionaries (or at least portions of them) were reconstructed and found to contain Lenten readings such as the story of the man born blind (John 9), for in the early centuries baptism with likened to the recovery of sight. This Lectionary inclusion, grounded in a very old understanding of Lent as preparation for baptism, helped to reestablish Lent in the church as a season for the consideration of the meaning of baptism as related to the new life we have in Christ, the Crucified and Risen One.

Lawrence Hall Stookey Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church

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Worship

The disciplining necessity of work foreshadows the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. It is not the case that worship is optional. As Paul teaches in his genealogy of morals (Romans 1), the question is not whether we shall worship, but only what. Promethean fantasies of a purely human-centered existence are as difficult to realise as fantasies of aristocratic indolence. We are propelled by an inner need to bow down, and, as a consequence, unless true worship is always before us, there is always the danger that we will work feverishly in order to propitiate Baal, whether in his bloody martial form or in the bloodless image of lucre.

Fantasizing that worship will ‘just happen’.
Running a Church is hard work, and illusions to the contrary feed clerical sloth, anger and despair. The same holds for lay people. I have often heard friends complain that their involvement in the Church is just ‘too much like work’. Or they complain about the regular routine of regular worship. They want the Church to be a form of leisure or entertainment, something fresh and new that will be a deliverance from the all-too-human limitations of the working day. Yet, this is not the meaning of Sabbath. The ‘rest’ of Christian worship occurs in, and not in spite of, the world and sin and death. The joy of worship addresses the bitter cup of sin.

Russell Reno ‘Working towards Worship’