Month: June 2006

Posted on

Windsor: mature study, wise and prayerful discussion

The current crisis thus constitutes a call to the whole Anglican Communion to re-evaluate the ways in which we have read, heard, studied and digested scripture. We can no longer be content to drop random texts into arguments, imagining that the point is thereby proved, or indeed to sweep away sections of the New Testament as irrelevant to today’s world, imagining that problems are thereby solved. We need mature study, wise and prayerful discussion, and a joint commitment to hearing and obeying God as he speaks in scripture, to discovering more of the Jesus Christ to whom all authority is committed, and to being open to the fresh wind of the Spirit who inspired scripture in the first place. If our present difficulties force us to read and learn together from scripture in new ways, they will not have been without profit.

Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion paragraph 61

Posted on

Crux

Dear Paul

Your Luther chapter is wonderful. It is particularly wonderful when you get out of the secondary lit and into John and the Catechism. What a star Luther is. I think there is more you could quickly pick up from Jenson on Luther speech-act approach to the theology of the Word – Jenson ST2 295 ‘According to Luther the soul becomes what it hearkens to. Luther : ‘Do not be surprised that I said we must become the Word.’ The old notion was that the mind is formed by what it sees. Luther makes the mind to be formed instead by what it hears.’

But there is something much more important to say at this juncture. You are nearly out of time. If you do not submit in time those years you spent with us in London and in Germany, and the hope and effort of Colin will have been for nothing. You may not feel this as a act of judgment – and of self-harm – now, but in the long term you will. You cant help anybody outside the immediate parish without this doctorate, so if you don’t make a great lunge for it right now, you will be confining yourself to the parish for the next thirty years, unable to help the rest of us.

You have no time for anything new. So don’t bother with a final Gunton chapter. Gunton is probably everywhere in this thesis. You must now very speedily and drastically hack everything down into a smooth product. It is great to have a sense of your authorial voice, but not your talking voice – don’t be chatty, get more terse. You must understand that you now have to produce a thesis-lite. You are writing for just two people who will give it a rushed reading on the train to your viva, have a bad conscience about it, and who only want to be confident that you are competent (not be troubled by having to judge whether you are brilliant or wayward). Safety first. Throw away everything that you cannot instantly clarify. None of it will be lost and whatever you throw away now can be re-included and developed later. You must finish this by kissing your summer goodbye, closing the door on the church and the family and accelerating away to the end of this thesis. You are good at winging it. Do so now. You should email every chapter at the end of every week between now and September – to Lincoln or Chris or me or anyone – just to give yourself the sense of urgency and progress you need. Don’t feel detached from the rest of us – we all feel this urgency in a much more hostile environment, and not having you around doesn’t make it any easier. I hope you will send me frequent new instalments, starting with conclusion and introduction.

Your server has bounced this mail back six times now, so I’ll post it here and hope you find it.

Good luck

DK

Posted on

You renew the face of the earth

Praise the LORD, O my soul.
O LORD my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
He wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent
and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.
He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.

These all look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.
May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works-
he who looks at the earth, and it trembles,
who touches the mountains, and they smoke.
I will sing to the LORD all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live

Psalm 104 Pentecost Revised Common Lectionary

Posted on

Pentecost

The Father gives the Son to the world. God presents the world with this gift of himself in the person of the Son. Then, when many ages have passed, the perfected world presents the Son to the Father, by the Spirit. The Son will present the world, in the form of the church, to the Father, to receive his inspection and approval. But the Son also continually presents the first installments of the future world, the perfected creation, to the Father. The future world is entirely present to the Father in the Son. It is created by that conversation and continuously opened by the Spirit who sustains their conversation. The future and completed world is continually given to the present world by the Spirit in the church, which is itself the body of the Son for the world. The Spirit stands in for the future act of the world. Where the world is going to be one day established in its own free and joyful activity, there the Spirit is now, representing it and preparing it for this future. The someday competent world will accompany the Spirit; it will take the action the Spirit gives it and, in the company of the Spirit, it will take what is the Spirit’s and return it via the Son to the Father. In that joint act of Spirit and world, the world will become living, active, and free.

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 bringing the world together around the Son.