Month: July 2006

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Traditional positions are normative

Dear I.B.Tauris publishers

You have sent me your catalogue, offering amongst many things, ‘A Modern Introduction to Theology: New Questions for Old Beliefs’. Your blurb says:

Most existing undergraduate textbooks begin from basically traditional positions on the bible, doctrine, authority, interpretation, and God. It is very difficult to find a satisfactory survey of what theology is about, and how it has developed historically, unless one shares the assumption that these traditional positions are normative. It is hardly surprising that people many people from outside the theological guild, or the Church, dismiss theology as anachronistic and self-absorbed discipline of little relevance to modern life. What makes this book singularly important and uniquely different is that it has a completely new starting point. The author contends that traditional Christian theology must extensively overhaul many of its theses because of a multitude of modern social, historical, and intellectual revolutions. … A Modern Introduction to Theology moves a tired and increasing incoherent discipline in genuinely fresh and exciting directions.

Incoherent? There is certainly something incoherent here, most obviously your surprise that theology textbooks talk about God. Your blurb is surprised that ‘most existing undergraduate textbooks begin from basically traditional positions on the bible, doctrine, authority, interpretation, and God.’ If textbooks begin from basically new positions, they simply cannot be textbooks. If you find theology ‘anachronistic’ – we hear your hostility – do not read it or publish it. Publish something else that you do enjoy instead.

These traditional positions are normative – Thanks be to God. That means that they are binding on us, so you and I cannot change them. That is what is meant by dogma, the summaries of the teaching of the Church, repeated in the creeds. To be surprised that traditional positions are normative is as vain at protesting that we are ‘still’ playing football according to the old dogma of two teams, two goals, one football.

If you find it unacceptable that Christian dogma does not change, you are free to give up your interest in Christianity. Why not find another religion? Can’t find one to your taste? Make one up. But when you do, don’t call it Christianity.

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O'Donovan – Freedom and its loss

Oliver O'Donovan

It is all the more important to appreciate the liberal insight at this juncture of our civilisation, when our appreciation is inevitably tinged with a sense of loss. A de-natured late-liberalism, shaping itself ideologically even to the point of religious persecution, and indistinguishable in some ways from the Marxism it once combatted, parts company from classical liberalism precisely here. The liberal tradition used to defer to a point of transcendence within the individual, something which social identity could not account for, something which gave the individual an independent view upon society. This was not in fact a view “from nowhere”; it was precisely a view from “the conscience”. By instructing the individual that conscience had precedence over every social demand, the liberal tradition did not throw him back upon the chances of an untutored imagination. It presumed that conscience had a source beyond both society and individual, that it was more than an echo of social claims, more than a projection of individual dreams. It presumed this because of its monotheistic faith, which lay at the heart of its logic. Until the early years of the twentieth century Augustine’s now controversial thesis, that there can be no “right” in a society which does not acknowledge the right of God, appeared to be the uncontrovertible bedrock of a liberal society. A polytheistic society negotiates multiple claims with no cohesion but what it imposes on them, so that, in effect, it enforces its own sovereignty. Late-liberalism, one may say, in taking up the banner of “pluralism”, has made itself self-consciously polytheistic again.

Oliver O’Donovan Freedom and its Loss The Westminster Abbey Gore lecture 2002

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Logiki latreia – rational worship

St. Cyril explicitly rejects the Apollinarian thesis, and stresses the complete humanity assumed by Christ into a real ‘physical’ or ‘hypostatic’ unity with the Word. Cyril associates Christ’s High-priesthood with specifically with His humanity, and makes frequent reference to the Epistle to the Hebrews in his discussion of the human soul of Christ. Against Nestorius, he writes: Christ carried up the mind of believers into the one nature of the Godhead. Cyril describes Christian worship as ‘rational’, and constantly speaks of Christ as the ‘High Priest of our souls’. For Cyril, Christ fulfills His priesthood both as one who receives and as one who offers prayer. Since Christ is not two but indissolubly one, our rational worship is offered to Him as well as through and in union with Him, and by Him to God the Father. In his third epistle against Nestorius, Cyril affirms clearly the vicarious and high priestly character of Christ’s humanity: Christ ‘offers Himself for us and us through and in himself to the Father’. He worships for he has assumed the nature that pays worship. Although the host above and the holy spirits worship him, Cyril writes, when he became as we are, he worshipped with us as a man offering as fragrant incense, himself on our behalf, and us through himself and in himself to God the Father.

Matthew Baker Logiki Latreia and the Mind of Christ

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Groom and bride

It is an odd thing not to ordain women, but it is precisely this sort of odd decision that is intrinsic to the Christian form of life. But it is not unfair. It is not unfair because the whole Church is given by an act of love, and makes possible love, which is to say, subordinating ourselves and deferring to others. Since the whole community of God is premised on an act of love, we cannot say that any particular station in it is unfair – it is all for free in the first place. The whole Church is made up of beggars who are surprised and relieved to find themselves in it at all. No one has to be in the Church, and if you really want to get on in the world, dont hang around in the Church, get out there in the world.

It is no more unfair on women that they are not ordained than it is unfair that, in the UK at least, women make up the majority in many congregations. If the Christians all wore a ribbon in their hair or stood on one leg, that would be just another of those odd things, like meeting on Sunday morning or eating fish on Fridays, that marks Christians out and makes them identifiable to the rest of the world. The Christian faith and life is full of things that seem odd at first. It takes long Christian life to discover the reason behind some of them, but that reason usually becomes plain when the Christian community really comes under pressure.

What is the reason for this odd ruling about who is ordained? The church has understood that Christ is our husband and we are his bride, and that this is played out publicly in every church service. Each gathering is a microcosm of the relationship of Christ and his Church, the groom at the head the bride before him. We are that bride. He is the male in this analogy, we the female. If you put a female at the front of the congregation that analogy and microcosm is lost, and with it a large part of the Christian teaching that the Lord is groom to our bride – which you can find summarized in Ephesians 5.

A great part of the Christian gospel is communicated tacitly by the arrangement in which the Christian people stand when they are in church together. In every church service the very form in which each congregation assembles is a big corporate analogy, a microcosm. The arrangement of the congregation of one standing before the many is the public playing out of a microcosm of the relationship of God to his creation, and to his people.

Jesus Christ is the husband of this crowd, the provider and protector of this people. The congregation plays the provided for and the protected – his bride. This analogy works if you have a male at the front and regard the rest of the congregation as his bride. Putting a male at the front says that this particular person, Jesus Christ, who became one of the two sexes for us, is our provider and protector. We are those he protects and provides for. This microcosm played out by the whole congregation is an act of anticipation (prolepsis). It is not yet the reality, but it is the beginning and in-breaking of the reality. If you put a female at the head of the congregation this long-running analogy disappears. Of course all this depends on the news that Christ is our husband is actually being preached and taught, and that the congregation is converted and baptised into this event, that Jesus Christ is the husband of the Church.

But it is not simply an equation of husband with male (for lots of males never become husbands), but of husband with an act of unlooked for love. Being a husband is an act of love, even of compassion. It is entirely God’s act of compassion, and all our acts of being husbands, parents, neighbours… are extensions of God’s act of love. It is an extension of being a generous neighbour to anyone who is without a neighbour, and who needs you to be generous to them. Your ability to be that neighbour is given to you, just so you have something to give to others, by God. God is their neighbour, and he makes you participate in this office, so you become their neighbour, and in this act, become God-like to them and for them. In the same way somebody, one person, in the congregation, is required to play out publicly the role of Christ as groom so the whole congregation can more easily understand itself as God’ s bride. It is neither unfair nor fair, but it is God’s love, unlooked for, but given anyway.

Well, I am not utterly convinced by all this myself, but at least I have had a go at putting it in writing.

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Zizioulas Communion and Otherness

John Zizioulas Metropolitan of Pergamon

Here at at last is the first notice from the publishers Continuum – T & T Clark of the second volume (or third, if you count Eucharist, Bishop, Church, translated into English forty years after its first publcation in Greek) from Professor John Zizoulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon (Jean de Pergame). Here is the blurb from T & T Clark

Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church

‘Communion and otherness: how can these be reconciled?’ In this wide-ranging study, the distinguished Orthodox theologian, Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, seeks to answer that question. In his celebrated book, Being as Communion (1985), he emphasised the importance of communion for life and for unity. In this important companion volume he now explores the complementary fact that communion is the basis for true otherness and identity.

With a constant awareness of the deepest existential questions of today, Metropolitan John probes the Christian tradition and highlights the existential concerns that already underlay the writings of the Greek fathers and the definitions of the early ecumenical councils. In a vigorous and challenging way, he defends the freedom to be other as an intrinsic characteristic of personhood, fulfilled only in communion.

After a major opening chapter on the ontology of otherness, written specially for this volume, the theme is systematically developed with reference to the Trinity, Christology, anthropology and ecclesiology. Another new chapter defends the idea that the Father is cause of the Trinity, as taught by the Cappadocian fathers, and replies to criticisms of this view. The final chapter responds to the customary separation of ecclesiology from mysticism and strongly favours a mystical understanding of the body of Christ as a whole. Other papers, previously published but some not easily obtainable, are all revised for their inclusion here.

This is a further contribution to dialogue on some of the most vital issues for theology and the Church from one of the leading figures in modern ecumenism.

A draft of its contents page fell into my hands a while back:

Introduction: ‘Communion and Otherness’, St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly 38(1994), pp.347-61.

1. On Being Other: Towards an Ontology of Otherness
(New)

2. On Being a Person: Towards an Ontology of Personhood
(In Christoph Schwöbel & Colin E Gunton (eds.), Persons, Divine and Human (T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1991), pp.33-46.)

3. The Trinity and Personhood: Appreciating the Cappadocian Contribution
(In Colin E Gunton (ed.), Trinitarian Theology Today (T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1995), pp.44-60.)

4. The Father as Cause: Personhood Generating Otherness
(New)

5. Pneumatology and the Importance of the Person: A Commentary on the Second Ecumenical Council
(Credo in Spiritum Sanctum (1983), vol.1, pp.29-54.)

6. ‘Created’ and ‘Uncreated’: The Existential Significance of Chalcedonian Christology
(Contacts 36(1984), pp.154-172; 37(1985), pp.60-72; correspondence with Philip Sherrard.)

7. Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood
(Scottish Journal of Theology 28(1975), pp.401-448.)

8. The Spirit and Christ’s Human Nature: In Search of Authentic Humanity
(Unpublished (1995)).

9. Christ, The Spirit and the Church: Two Types of Pneumatology and their Ecclesiological Significance
(Communio Sanctorum (1981), pp.141-154.

10. The Church as the ‘Mystical’ Body of Christ:Towards an Ecclesial Mysticism
(Unpublished (1985))

Apparently there’s some other book on the Metropolitan on the way. I hope Ashgate will promote the book as readily as they have promoted its editor.

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You are becoming visible to me for the first time

When I look at you I see people I am not inclined to like. In the same way I did not think much of Christ. I thought Christ was irrelevant, impotent, a matter for others. I did not recognise him for who he is.

Just as I did not recognise Christ, so I do not recognise you. I thought you were incompetent and so I avoided you. But now I understand that you are given to me and set before me by Christ. You are the people he has chosen, for me now. In order to receive him I have to receive you and I cannot have him without taking you – you are him to me. There is no way to Christ for me except through the people I want to avoid. Now, teeth still gritted, I have to open up to you, pass on to you the things given to me, love and trust you, even though I know that that trust will be betrayed many times before it is vindicated. But for the first time you are becoming visible to me as you will be.

This love also obliges me to tell you what a way you have to go. If I love you, I have to correct you, and I have to put with the dislike, bafflement and hurt that that brings, understanding that this is the very opprobrium that Christ carries for me. So let us no longer look at the Church and see only a corrupt, despicable institution, or a hierarchy, separable from Jesus. When we do not see that is our sin, made visible there on the cross, it remains our sin. When we do see that it is our sin that he is carrying there, then it is no longer our sin, for he has really taken it away from us. Jesus is Christ – anointed – with his whole people, among them the people in church and classroom whom we may no longer regard as inadequate, but in reconciliation and union with whom we are being made perfect.

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Collegiality means overwhelming consensus

Walter Casper

Collegiality was not understood simply in terms of an ultimately non-binding collegial frame of mind; collegiality is rather a reality ontologically grounded in the sacrament of episcopal consecration, the shared participation in the one episcopal office… This collegiality is of course not limited to the horizontal and synchronic relationship with contemporary episcopal colleagues; since the Church is one and the same in all centuries, the present-day church must also maintain diachronic consensus with the episcopate of the centuries before us, and above all with the testimony of the apostles. This is the more profound significance of the apostolic succession in episcopal office.

The episcopal office is thus an office of unity in a two-fold sense. Bishops are the sign and the instrument of unity within the individual local church, just as they are between both the contemporary local churches and those of all times within the universal Church.

Should we not therefore also be in a position to say together: the decision for the ordination of women to the episcopal office can only be made with an overwhelming consensus, and must not in any way involve a conflict between the majority and the minority. It would be desirable that this decision would be made with the consensus of the ancient churches of the East and West. If on the contrary the consecration of a bishop becomes the cause of a schism or blocks the way to full unity, then what occurs is something intrinsically contradictory. It should then not take place, or should be postponed until a broader consensus can be reached.

‘ Grex unus, qui unianima consensione pascitur’, that is the aim of ecumenical dialogue; it can only succeed if the unianima consensio of every single one of the separated churches is preserved and is then constituted step by step between those separated ecclesial bodies. May this, in spite of all the difficulties and resistance, be granted to us one day by the grace of God.

Cardinal Walter Kasper An address given to the Church of England Bishops’ Meeting (5 June 2006)

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St Mary Stoke Newington Third Sunday of Trinity Evensong

I Jeremiah 11 & Romans 13

Do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them…

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities…Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect….Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another…

First Jeremiah: The Lord said to me: Do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them.

God has spoken to Israel. But Israel has not replied. Or rather Israel has replied to every god of every one of the surrounding foreign powers. Israel likes to give itself away to every conceivable nonsense. Israel sells itself very cheap – changes gods with the season, always rolling out an improved model, a tragic fashion victim – that’s what we heard from Jeremiah last week. Who knows perhaps the people of Israel are secretly convinced that, once they had thoroughly wasted themselves and one another, the real God will still be there to come home to.

Jeremiah is God’s pray-er for Israel and to Israel, who has to point out that if we don’t talk to God we address our petitions, hopes and prayers to the latest re-launched updated contemporary God-image. Now the Lord makes Jeremiah tease and provoke Israel into reclaiming its pride and joy in being God’s beloved, in returning respect for respect and love for love. If we peek ahead to next week we find Jeremiah admitting that he cant not pray ‘If I say ‘I will not mention him or speak his name any more in his name, his word is in my heart like a fire, too strong I cant hold it in…..’.

Well, I cant think that that is like our society at all. We’d never do that. We wouldn’t waste the inheritance given to us, or wouldn’t exchange the love of God for us, and the truth of this love, for a series of lesser products just because we told that these other divinities are more exciting or contemporary.

But it was for us that this was written, Saint Paul tells us. Israel went through all distress this so we can see how huge and demanding is the life with God in order to make us want this life and ask for it. It is for us that Israel is different, has suffered all these indignities, recorded them and passed this record to us – out of love.

And it is for the world that we are different. We are the pray-ers and intercessors, and witnesses of God for this society of ours. We gather here to receive the love and truth of the God who let Jeremiah go through the mill for our sake, who sent us gentiles Paul the apostle, who taught the English to pray to the right God, who heard the prayers of the church that wrote the collects in this Prayer Book and built and re-built this building.

II Spirituality in the City

I have been asked to say something about Spirituality in the City – the book the theological discussion group has been reading, and to set out some questions. Let me just remind you of what is in the book, so two broad questions to kick off:

What do we mean by spirituality and what do we mean by city? Spirituality first.
In his chapter Rowan Williams tells us that:

1. ‘We need to rescue spirituality from some of the ways in which it has been domesticated,. …. It becomes only a code for techniques of making people feel a bit better about themselves… where the Spirit makes people ‘uncomfortable about themselves and their environment, critical and creative. (p. 24)

When the New Testament speaks of the life of ‘spirit’ it speaks about the virtues gifts of life together. It assumes that to grow in the spiritual life is to become free to give others what has been given to you

Spirituality cannot be treated as a separate issue, it is about the life with Christ and so discipleship as whole. No spirituality without the Spirit of the Son sent into our hearts whereby we call God Father. And the Spirit is engaged in the business of making us human, which of course means being in relationship with God.

2. The Church might open a way to the story of that city whose founder is God, and to citizenship in that community,… ready to explore their own ‘citizenship of heaven’ and to open it up to others in such a way as to transform the citizenship and the cities of this earth. (p.26)

The archbishop says what several contributors say –

3. The church is obliged just to be there speaking a certain language, telling a certain story, witnessing to certain non-negotiable things about humanity.

The contributors point out that spirituality does not mean escaping our grotty urban reality, and that even when polite society has given up and left it, the church does not leave the bad bits of town. Archbishop Williams is concerned by the poverty of imagination of the generation growing up in front of Play Station. He wants a Church to know it has something distinct from the surrounding culture of consumerism and endless re-validated ‘choice’. To be this distinct thing, in which other criteria, those of discipleship, operate. Then we have something distinct to offer this society.

The chapter I chose was ‘Spirituality in Everyday Life, by Andrew Davey. He tells us:

4. ‘The call to enter the new Jerusalem is one to participate in its maintenance, and to practise human formation in the presence of God… it enables us to celebrate and engage with, the life of the city in our quest for the ‘new ordering of God’ on earth as it is in heaven.’ (p. 106)

I think ‘practise human formation in the presence of God’ means that God’s presence, here amongst us in the worship, forms us human beings, on God’s definition, and that in all our worship and life together we practice being human together. Is that right?

What do we mean by City? Every contributor to this book refers to London then points out the inadequacy of this definition of city, for by city we also mean our Society. Our identity is not given only by our location in London, but also by the calendar..

According to Andrew Davey the calendar of the Church year gives us an alternative identity. We are located by the Scripture set out through the church year. Each reading, of Old testament, psalm, epistle and gospel, adds something and by a process of triangulation the sermon tells the result of all these readings of Scripture for who we are, where we are, which way we are facing and what is coming up.

5. Through the offering of the Eucharist, the offices, prayer and the sharing of Scriptures, Christians have a collection of tactics through which they can begin to reimagine and reshape the communities and context of which they are a part.

6. Liturgy in the city becomes a counter-cultural activity … the means through which Christians stake their interest in a place by creating events, new histories – concrete, historicized acts that proclaim God’s new order’.

7. In realising an urban spirituality those strategies come together as the Christian community becomes more aware of a memory that heals, redeems and transforms, of a narrative that, when told and prayed in community, allows the integrating principle to take root. (p. 111).

Finally Andrew Davey quotes Stephen Sykes:

8. ‘Would it not be consistent with the Anglican tradition to see our churches offering praise on behalf of a specific part of the world which God loves, the praise of which it has forgotten to express.’

In other words we have to pray for those who cannot pray for themselves. That is what we doing here. So when Andrew Davey talk about spirituality in everyday life, he says that this is about Christians worshipping God together in public. He says they speak for the whole city when they do.

A couple of questions – fair and unfair – about the book as a whole. Its editor Andrew Walker ‘is developing The London Centre for Spirituality at St Edmund the King’. Now wait a minute, we must say, this is the London Centre for Spirituality, here and now where we confess God, when humbled we ask almighty God if we may approach him with our petitions, meekly on our knees. This happens here and in the Sunday morning eucharist when we are all gathered together in one congregation. Just as that eucharistic loaf is lifted up high, so we are lifted up by the Son and just so in our prayers we lift up the whole world to God.

Isn’t St Mary’s Stoke Newington is the London centre for petitioning God, since it is God who petitions us? We do this when the whole congregation is present – made up as it is of all the unlikely and most contrary elements, the young, old, this and that class and ethnicity, this and that churchmanship, gathered and animated by the Spirit we pray and call on God and so become members of his Son. When the whole congregation is present we are the Spirit-filled, catholic people. Spirituality is not an add-on: it is our main and only business.

So there is plenty for us to extract from Spirituality in the City. But I think the best response to it comes from another little book. Actually it is the most immodest little book. It is the St Mary’s Church order of service for Eucharist and Holy Baptism. To read just one snippet:

‘For thou only art holy; thou only art the Lord; thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Spirit, art most High in the Glory of God the Father…’

You sing this without flinching. I am just amazed that the ideology police haven’t impounded this little book of ours, or don’t come running down the aisles blowing whistles and announcing that we can no longer make such claims in public. The most exciting book, the most controversial, is the very book we sing from, and it should be our next choice as book for the theology discussion group. We sing it – what do we mean by it? A Church that gave good answers to this would be doing its city a big favour.

III A catholic people

The most significant statement in this book is the quote from Sykes: We pray for those who do not pray for themselves. In two senses – we pray to God on their behalf. And we ask the leaders of society for what they should ask for themselves – chiefly some hope, aspiration and leadership.


‘Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities.’ This doesn’t just mean civil authorities. We are here under authority of Christ, who has given us the more gentle practices of his people the Church, of its worship, which we sing on behalf of London, but also to make London curious and envious. If do not follow this liturgy we will by default follow the liturgy of the many other counterfeit gods of the global marketplace and media.

‘Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities.’ The authority of Christ is made available to the whole Christian church, and the authority of the whole church is made available to us in the approachable figure of our own church leaders. They authority is good – let us tell them so until they become more convinced of it themselves. They authority is given by God for us, and it is good for us, and bad for us if we don’t receive it. Our priests and bishops are under the authority of the whole Christian church and tradition, the experience of many centuries. We must pray for them and encourage them to dispense that largesse to us. It is not only teaching, but it is discipline. By our praying to God for them and making requests to them we have to so change the climate that it is possible for the clergy to lead and give us the correction we need. But by the insistence of our prayers and petitions for them and to them, we have to give them the authority to speak to us in a new way.

I think we should illustrate the catholicity of the church in the eucharist is the hope of this city of ours. I have three suggestions:

1. We have to show that our congregation is not autonomous – not the whole Church – even in stoke Newington. So how would it be if we sent some (pre-sanctified) bread to every other little shop-front church in Hackney, and ask them to give us some word of encouragement, and perhaps even send us some bread back?

2. The economy of London is not autonomous, and the Church in London is not autonomous. So why don’t we send some (pre-sanctified) bread to one or two other cities in the world and ask them to give us some word of encouragement, and even send us some bread back that we can break in our eucharist? We are not a self-sufficient people: for example, in other cities all over the world people sew the clothes we wear in London, and I doubt we in London pay enough for them. How would it be if we sent bread, and whatever other tokens of encouragement we can think of, to whatever churches we can contact in one or two of those cities in the Philippines or South China where our clothes come from?

3. It is the job of this church to pray. I think the intercessions in the Sunday eucharist are one of the great things about this congregation. Here perhaps we could really hope to teach others. We should collect our intercessions and package them so we produce our own Lent course and discussion books in the hope that we can offer something distinct to our diocese and this city.

Every congregation worldwide and through out history is united by God with every other, and each prays for its part of the world, and speaks back to God in thankfulness. St Mary’s is the city on the hill, placed here so the rest of London can see our life together and say this is the people we want to become. This congregation is a city, a new society, inaugurated here. It speaks for those who do not know how to speak for themselves, and the poor and the voiceless can come and find their voice here. It does this because it itself is the product of the love and labour of the Holy Spirit who has placed us here before the world, gathered around Christ, in earshot of the Father so we can pray Lord hear us, Lord graciously hear us.

In the name of Father the Son and Holy Spirit Amen

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Ephraim Radner: Unity and Truth

Hope among the Fragments

The question briefly put it this: in what sense is there or ought there to be communion between Christians whose beliefs seem to differ profoundly on a number of significant topics, from scriptural interpretation to creedal exposition to moral teaching to the church’s political orderings? Does it make sense to speak of communion at all within such circumstances? Any right answer to this question cannot escape the historical reality that the Church’s story must embody the story of a divine union whose only possibility lay in the suffering of its divine inappropriateness. The hopelessness given in ecclesial contention and division is overcome only by the divine victory givenness the body of Christ: it is act coincident with the life of the Church, however, and thus its historical form for the Church can be observed only within the scriptural realm of ecclesial conformity itself – truth and unity joined in the divine suffering of the body’s fractured life itself.

Certainly, unity and truth have struck many Christians as potentially incompatible characteristics at a given time, ranged against one another in a zero-sum game made necessary by the travails of the moment: sometimes unity at the cost of truth, or sometimes truth at the cost of unity…

But while we can note this long history of attempts to play off unity and truth against each other or to relate them to same form of resolved tension… We do not tend to see gentleness and patience as ever being in tension; we do not ever place kindness and self-control over and against each other as two elements whose individual consummation may require their subordination to one another in time…

On the matter of unity, then, we can conclude that if the church is one, its unity will involve a participation in the historical form of the Father’s sending of his Son in time, an act synonymous with the incarnation’s narrative.

Ephraim Radner ‘The Figure of Truth and Unity’ in Hope Among the Fragments: The Broken Church and its Engagement of Scripture

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Logiki latreia – rational worship

It has been one of the distinguishing marks of Western culture, from the nominalists of the late Middle Ages onward, that ‘mystery’ and ‘reason’ are continually held apart, even seen as opposed. In particular, in the development from the skepticism of the radical Enlightenment to 20th century positivism, the idea of rationality has taken on an increasingly narrowed definition, one which excludes, and is even pit against, notions of revelation, transcendence, and tradition. Yet the faith of the Apostles and Fathers is otherwise. The substance of this faith is that ‘the mystery hidden for ages in God’ and now revealed in Jesus Christ, is none other than the Logos, the infinite and uncreated Reason and Word of God. It is that this Logos assumed full humanity in the womb of the Virgin, uniting to Himself a human mind, with all its structures of created rationality, redeeming and sanctifying them, so that we might be transformed in the renewal of our minds (Rom. 12:2).

A positive and balanced understanding of the role of reason in the redemptive work of Christ and the life of the Church is reflected in the Pauline notion of logiki latreia, ‘rational worship’,which is to be found in the Orthodox liturgies themselves and in the writings of the Fathers. In Romans 12:1-2, St. Paul writes: I appeal to you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your rational worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed in the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Paul’s discussion of rational worship and the transformation of the mind comes in a context in which the role of body is given place as well. This is indicative of the wholistic anthropology of St. Paul, in continuity with the Old Testament, in which body and mind are distinguished but held together in essential unity. This holistic anthropology is important for the theology of worship as it will also become important for the Fathers’ defense of the full humanity of Christ against the Apollinarian denial of a human mind to the Incarnate Savior. There seems little doubt that in its original context of Romans 12, Paul’s concept of logiki latreia refers not to the Church’s liturgy in the narrow sense of the term, but rather to the entire ‘liturgy’ of the Christian life, lived as an offering of worship to God.

Matthew Baker Logiki Latreia and the Mind of Christ