Month: May 2006

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The economy of man without God versus the economy of God for man

I have one reader. But what a reader. Solly has clambered into the lumber room of my head and has started picking things up and putting them back in their proper places. Already I am beginning to feel better. I think I see what I was trying to say. What we seem to have in this book The Eschatological Economy is a very simple contrast. On one had we have the economy of modernity (â??the way we are nowâ??) and on the other the economy of God, the eschatological economy. The eschatological economy is simply reality and the arrangements God makes by which we will enter reality, join him there and so become real ourselves at last .

Here is Solly setting out what is going on in The Eschatological Economy 5.5

â??It is the concept of God’s time, of God making time for us, and the idea of debit and credit in our relationships, that stands in opposition to this â??economy of modernityâ??. This is the focus that reassembles the fractured understanding Christian theology provides at the moment: Spirit is personal and proactive, not impersonal and reflective; time represents God’s longsuffering and hospitable attitude towards us not something we must suffer and finally be ejected from; we have responsibility to one another, humans are holistic and interactive, mutually giving and receiving, not prefabricated and schizophrenic automatons feigning freedom in an unfree world. The world as it is posits ends, ends we are all assumed to have accepted, but the revealed secret of the Emperor’s new clothes is that there are no ends, merely the eternal recurrence of the same, for there is no change in this world, only fashion, no growth, only talent acquisition, no people, only personalities. We live in a moebius strip, acclaiming the return of that which was past as new and fresh or secretly ironic.. The important fact of the work of the Spirit in the world is not that it represents the sum of what has happened – the spirit of the age, etc – but that it represents the fact of something new happening from outside the closed system we have made of the world, constantly opening up that which we seek to close off from God, just as the Spirit’s work in the resurrection of Christ stopped the foreclosure of that part of history. As the writer says in Ecclesiastes, characterising the secular world, there is nothing new under the sun. But God makes things new.â??

Visit the great Solly himself

See The Eschatological Economy at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk or at Eerdmans

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Kant dictates Christian ethics

The deep difficulty in Christian ethics, as evidenced in the work of public theologians such as Thiemann, Stackhouse and Garcia, is that Kant’s answers are assumed but his profound question ignored. They do not seek to refute Kant. They do not seek to point to concrete, sensuous forms of life to show that Christian faith is reasonable. Instead they speak in general terms. They speak of a cosmopolitan social ethics, a criterion of publicity, and universal human rights. Their work contributes to the production of a generic theology that makes no particular claims on people of faith or people outside faith. The result is a refusal to challenge Kant’s designation of freedom as more basic than the goodness of God. This Christian social ethics only continues the Kantian quest. We can use the language of faith and continue to speak of God and Judeo-Christian anthropology, but the concrete material reality of Christianity (Jesus’ flesh) is rendered superfluous to the moral life.

Stephen Long The Goodness of God

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Christ and his people at St Mary's 1

The Word of God and the Eucharist are not two things, but one. Five years at St Mary’s now, and this is as far as my thinking has got. For the eucharist to be the eucharist, Scripture has to be heard and explained. Where the Scripture is not read and opened the cup of eucharist is empty, and this wine brings us no Christ. Scripture has to be opened, and that means read and expounded. First it must be read, well, slowly and loud, not gabbled or murmured, by someone who understands what they are reading. And then it must be explained. The lessons – all three of them – must be so explained, week after week so that we begin to realise who we are and what it means for us to be Christ’s people, and to be Christ’s people here, in our case in Hackney, London. If the Scripture is opened in the course of the service, then as the years go by people will be converted and become disciples, and the whole business of our sancification will begin. If Scripture is not heard and opened, this bread and cup will be precisely as eucharistic as our coffee and biscuits. Scripture is not opened by preaching alone, nor by the eucharist alone, but both together, understood as one.

It seems to me that the Christ served up in the cup is the Christ served up in the sermon. The one Lord is served up in what to us are two forms, preaching and sacrament, but of course just the one indivisible Christ. So the preaching is sacramental and eucharistic, and the eucharist is edifying because it reaches our heads as much as our heart, it feeds, teaches and unifies each of us, head and body.

The Word of God means not just the Scripture read but the Scripture preached on – explained – in the sermon. Actually we could widen that to include the congregational responses, which are also sentences from Scripture, and even further to include the hymns, for they are also our responses to the Scripture-and-bread received. In fact I think that in St Mary’s, insofar as Scripture is opened, it is by the hymns and intercessions, rather than by anything that comes from the pulpit. Well, I’ll try to make the case – you see what you think. In St Mary’s the teaching happens principally through the antiphonally sung psalm that follows the Old Testament and then through the choice of hymns. Clearly our selection of hymns follows some well-thought out schema associated with Common Worship. I approve of it. It seems to me that the great teacher in my church is the organist. By his playing he teaches that congregation to sing and so in some measure to worship. He plays with a crispness and a dedication to supporting and driving the singing of the congregation that I have never seen anywhere else. The congregation sing so confidently that some of the theological sense of what we are singing is surely absorbed.

The hymns we sing, particularly in the season of Easter, contain lines of lurid (Protestant) penal substitution and macabre (Catholic) accounts of Christ’s wounds bleeding for us. Whoever picks the hymns either cannot tell the difference or is isn’t concerned by it, and that is fine by me. But I don’t think I have ever heard the judgment and the anger of God tackled in sermons, let alone any talk of Christ’s blood. The atonement is considered too difficult or divisive to preach on, even in the run up to Easter. Though our hymns are full of it, penal substitution and almost any account of the atonement are avoided by our clergy, and when you can get the conversation onto the topic the subject is quickly changed. They avoid the atonement in sermons, except occasionally when say Genesis 22, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, comes up, and then the idea of sacrifice to God is ruled out, hard to say on what grounds – taste, maybe? Still, the atonement is there in the Scripture read, in the sentences, responses and above all in the hymns, so we are always receiving a good part of the evangelical narrative in the Sunday morning eucharist. Much of it is said or sung by the congregation, and this is crucial it seems to me. But the sermon never explains the lessons we have heard, or the responses we have made to those lessons and so never points out to us the unity of the whole, given by the evangelical narrative. None of this unity of Scripture-and-response is explained, so my question is – how eucharistic is this?

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Maximus: participation

There can be no doubt that the one Word of God is the substance of virtue in each person. For our Lord Jesus Christ himself is the substance of all the virtues, as it is written: This one God made our wisdom, our justice, our sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1.30). These things of course are said about him absolutely, since he is wisdom and righteousness and sanctification itself. They are not, as in our case, simply attributed to him, as for example in the expression, a ‘wise man’ or a ‘just man’. It is evident that every person who participates in virtue as a matter of habit unquestioningly participates in God, the substance of the virtue. Whoever by his choices cultivates the good natural seed shows the end to be the same as the beginning and the beginning to be the same as the end. Indeed the beginning and the end are one. As a result, he is in genuine harmony with God, since the goal of everything is given in its beginning and the end of the everything is given in its ultimate goal. As to the beginning, in addition to receiving being itself, one receives the natural good by participation: as to the end, one zealously traverses one’s course toward the beginning and source without deviation by means of one’s good will and choice. And through this course one becomes God, being made God by God. To the inherent goodness of the image is added the likeness (Genesis 1.26) acquired by the practice of virtue and the exercise of the will. The inclination to ascend and see one’s proper beginning was implanted in man by nature.

Maximus Ambiguum 7

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Divine Sovereignty

God’s sovereignty transcends and stands in judgment on all worldly sovereignties. Because God is God, Caesar is not God and neither are Caesar’s successors, be they kings, presidents, prime ministers, or party general secretaries. And because Caesar and his successors aren’t God, their power is limited, not absolute; in addition to Caesar’s legitimate power, there are other legitimate powers in the world.

So the state cannot be all there is. Long before Enlightenment political theorists began challenging royal absolutism with ideas like Montesquieu’s “separation of powers,” Western civilization learned the idea of “limited government” in the school of Christian reflection. When medieval Catholic thinkers insisted on a sharp distinction between “society” and the “state,” they created a vaccine against absolutism in either its royal or modern (totalitarian) form. The vaccine wasn’t completely effective. But its potency may help explain why the age of absolutism was a rather short one, as these things go in history.
Medieval Catholicism also helped plant in the Western mind the idea that “consent” is crucial to just governance. Government isn’t simply coercion, medieval Catholic political theory insisted; just governance requires consent. Consent would be forthcoming if governance were just. And who would judge the justice of a particular form or style of governance, or the justice of a particular act of state? The Church’s claim to be able to judge princes, and the Catholic teaching that “the people” have an inherent sense of justice within them, injected a crucial idea into the political-cultural subsoil of the West—the idea that “justice” isn’t simply what those in authority say it is. There are moral standards of justice that are independent of governments; we can know those moral standards, and they ought to be applied in public life. All of these ideas, fundamental to democracy, were nurtured in the civilization of the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church.

George Weigel Divine Sovereignty Letters to a Young Catholic

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Serve the Lord with gladness

… and come before his presence with a song (Psalm 100)

In the house of the Lord, slavery is free. It is free because it serves not out of necessity, but out of charity… Charity should make you a servant, just as truth has made you free… you are at once both a servant and free: a servant, because you have become such; free, because you are loved by God your Creator; indeed, you have also been enabled to love your Creator… You are a servant of the Lord and you are a freedman of the Lord. Do not go looking for a liberation which will lead you far from the house of your liberator!

Augustine Enarratio in Psalmum XCIX – Expositions of the Psalms

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Act interdependently, not independently

It is an ancient canonical principle that what touches all should be decided by all. The relational nature of communion requires each church to learn more fully what it means to be part of that communion, so that its members may be fulfilled and strengthened in and through their relations with other churches. Communion obliges each church to foster, respect and maintain all those marks of common identity, and all those instruments of unity and communion, which it shares with fellow churches, seeking a common mind in essential matters of common concern: in short, to act interdependently, not independently.

Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion paragraph 51

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O'Donovan on leadership, dialogue and practical wisdom

Oliver O’Donovan tells us that our leaders have to lead us, form us and allow us to flourish, or even postively to see to it that we flourish. They have to be brave and lead from the front, and make real decisions about what is good for us. They therefore have to have views about what is good, and they have to allow those views to be tested by dialogue with the people they lead. Leaders have to make decisions. They have to exercise practical wisdom, which O’Donovan calls judgment, in order that we are all increasingly able to exercise practical wisdom, and so become mature. Plato represents one major tradition of practical wisdom, but an even more sophisticated tradition of practical wisdom is that of Christian discipleship.

“In Hebrew the most general word for law, torah, meant simply “a decision.” It referred to the “ruling” that a priest would give when consulted. In the same way we say that the judge “declares the law” in relation to a case, meaning not that he quotes from law books, but that he announces a decision; “the law of the case” is simply the generic principle applied in the particular judgment. But since each judgment is not separate and discrete but occurs in the context of an institution, the law of each case is discerned in relation to the law of preceding cases; if it is to be justly proportioned, it cannot be wildly out of line with other decisions. No act of judgment, then, simply invents law de novo; that would defeat the purpose of judging, namely, determining what is proportionate to the law of precedent that stands over and behind the present decision and can be appealed to in support or criticism of it. But a law of precedent requires no distinct human legislator. Divine law, natural or revealed, when mediated through traditions of right innate in the society, is sufficient to allow courts to develop a law by way of their own judgments, a conception which our shared English legal tradition names the “common law.”

The English parliament began life as a court of common pleas, a means by which the governed spoke to the government about their frustrations, an organic line of communication between the two which served to legitimate government as pursuing the common good. The extension of parliament’s role to a deliberative forum, first for the authorizing of taxation and then for the formation of legislation, recognized the need for government to listen to the vox populi, to respect its deeply held convictions, and to take stock of its anxieties.

By converting parliament into a branch of government, modern constitutional theory lost the sense that the dialogue between government and the governed is at the heart of the legislative process. It became a purely intra-governmental dialogue. The sheer success of parliament in taming the willfulness of the monarchy led to an implosion of government and parliament upon each other, leaving an unhealthy mutual dependence.

When a certain dialogue fails to accompany the formation of law, its enactment simply becomes another form of executive action – it loses its distinctive lawlike character. But what we need is not a dialogue between departments of government, but a dialogue between government and people .”

Oliver O’Donovan Government as Judgment since expanded to become The Ways of Judgment.

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Communion and Anglicans

“Communion is, in fact, all about mutual relationships. It is expressed by community, equality, common life, sharing, interdependence, and mutual affection and respect. It subsists in visible unity, common confession of the apostolic faith, common belief in scripture and the creeds, common baptism and shared eucharist, and a mutually recognised common ministry. Communion means that each church recognises that the other belongs to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, and shares in the mission of the whole people of God. It involves practising a common liturgical tradition, and intending to listen, speak and act alongside one another in obedience to the gospel. In communion, each church acknowledges and respects the interdependence and autonomy of the other, putting the needs of the global fellowship before its own. Through such communion, each church is enabled to find completeness through its relations to the others, while fulfilling its own particular calling within its own cultural context.”

Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that marvellous? It is the The Windsor Report on the Anglican Communion – paragraph 49. I had no idea how exciting the Christian faith is, but this Anglican material states it loud and clear – and there is loads more where this came from. Let’s learn this off by heart, let us teach it to our children, let us bind it to our foreheads – ‘each church recognises that the other belongs to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, and shares in the mission of the whole people of God.’ Yup.