Month: August 2006

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Sacrifice in the Old Testament 2

In The Eschatological Economy I argued that the community of Israel brings animals to the temple for their God to inspect and pronounce good (or not), and thus publicly to assess and agree on the progress of this sanctification. It is not that animals are made holy, but that the whole people is being made holy. Its animal gifts are shown as samples for the public inspection of the progress towards this promised transformation. So then it is this transformation, which makes sense of this public demonstration-and-inspection process. God is forming and teaching his people. Within this process God insists that his people report back to him at intervals with demonstrations of their progress, by bringing him samples of their husbandry.

Israel’s action – sacrifice – is also a public parody and demythologisation of the nations. Israel is demonstrating to other nations that their worship is all about propitiation and killing because their gods are needy and tyrannical, and thus not gods at all.

You can find out more about The Eschatological Economy at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk or at Eerdmans

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Liturgy is an action of the whole Christ 2

1144 ‘In the celebration of the sacraments it is thus the whole assembly that is leitourgos, each according to his function, but in the ‘unity of the Spirit’ who acts in all.

1154 The liturgy of the Word is an integral part of the sacramental celebrations.

1155 The liturgical word and action are inseparable both insofar as they are signs, and instruction insofar as they accomplish what they signify.

1187 The Liturgy is the work of the whole Christ, head and body. our high priest celebrates it unceasingly in the heavenly liturgy, with the Mother of God, the apostles, all the saints and the multitude of so who have already entered the kingdom.

1188 In a liturgical celebration the whole assume is ‘leitourgois’ each member according to his own function. The baptismal priesthood is that of the whole Body of Christ. but some of the faithful are ordained through the sacrament of Holy Orders to represent Christ as head of the Body.

1195 By keeping the memorials of the saints – first of all the holy Mother of God, then the apostles, the martyrs and other saints – on fixed days of the liturgical year, the Church on earth shows that she is united with the liturgy of heaven. She gives glory to Christ for having accomplished his salvation in his glorified members; their example encourages her on her way to the Father.

1196 The faithful who celebrate the Liturgy of the Hours are united to Christ our high priest, by the prayer of the psalms, meditation on the Word of God, and canticles and blessings, in order to be joined with his unceasing and universal prayer that gives glory to the Father and implores the gift of the Holy Spirit on the whole world.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church – Part Two, Section One, Chapter Two online at the Vatican and at Amazon

Keep The Catechism close to hand. All theological discussion improves when it refers explicitly to the documents produced by Church bodies. We can all learn from this document. We can use in discussions with Roman Catholics and it will enable us to make our disagreement with some of their positions clearer. To give the whole Church a document as strong as this is a truly charitable act.

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O'Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm 3

A series of conflicts over sectional emancipations and inclusions [meant that] there were some very good stories of emancipation to be told, testimonies to the liberating implications of the Gospel and the pastoral involvement of the church, the enormously influential struggle for civil rights in the USA, for instance, and the Latin American base ecclesial communities that gave new energy to Catholic witness in the face of poverty and economic injustice. These threw a lifeline to a floundering liberal imagination, offering a matrix by which the present could be presented as standing in perpetual judgment on the past, allowing the Western hegemonic tradition of modernity to re-brand its anti-conservative appeal.

In grasping the lifeline, however, Western liberalism paid its price. From that point on, it became identified with one kind of moral cause to the exclusion of others. It became a church-party proper, a specific agenda to pit against other agendas.

The whole storehouse of what gay Christians have felt and thought about their lives should become a matter of wider reflection, reflected on by those who are called to live this experience, by those who are called to accompany them in their living, by all who share their understanding of living as something they owe an account of to God.

The St Andrews Day Statement addressed questions quite specifically to gay Christians, not to liberals, and about the essentials of Christian faith. Its authors thought there was an exploration to be had, which, if undertaken in good faith, might yield a common discussion over what it could mean to be both homosexual and Christian. …Is the gay Christian movement still attached to the wheels of the liberal chariot, content with the victim-mentality that the liberal programme prescribes for it? Or can it present itself as the bearer of an experience of the human that is, at the very least, of irreplaceable importance for our understanding of our own times?

Oliver O’Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm

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Metropolitan John

Douglas Knight John Zizoulas Alan Brown

Alan Brown (right) and I met Metropolitan John Zizioulas in London at Heythrop last Friday. It was wonderful to see the Metropolitan again. We have both got older, but I was more polite about this than he was. We talked about Rome and Constantinople, and then relieved to get off these vexed questions, we talked about books.

Apparently Archbishop Rowan Williams has written an embarrassingly fulsome preface to the Metropolitan’s book Otherness and Communion. The Metropolitan wishes he hadn’t been rushed into this book, though I suspect the rest of us think that the twenty-two years between 1985 and 2007 is a decent enough interval and doesn’t look like a rush into print. Its publishers T&T Clark have been hoping to launch this book at the AAR in November, but the Metropolitan has other things on then.

We talked about Aristotle Papanikolaou’s new book Being with God, which is a wonderful comparison of the theology of Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas, the two giants of twentieth century Orthodox theology. Papanikolaou is scrupulously fair, but Zizioulas clearly has the best of it, though Papanikolaou suggests that Zizioulas himself has been too severe on Lossky. It is thorough, meticulous, and works well as an introduction to Orthodox theology, and since it very ably discusses some major issues of systematic theology, it is a gift to the Church as a whole. I have been meaning to review this, but now Liviu Barbu has borrowed my copy – but then that is a commendation.

The Metropolitan told us a bit about his three writing projects. The first of them is on his favourite theme of ecology and man as priest of creation. Secondly, he wants to continue to develop his work on an eschatological ontology, and finally there is his Dogmatics. The Metropolitan gave his Dogmatics lecture notes to the people of the Orthodox Outlet for Dogmatic Enquiries, who have been working hard to make these lectures available on the internet, and we must be very grateful to them, in particular to A.N. who has been doing the translating. They appear to be half way through this important work, so we hope they persevere.

Then we also talked about The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church, and at the insistence of Liviu, gave him a typescript of book and talked through its individual chapters. The Metropolitan was pleased, and I am relieved, that the book has got to this point at least. I gave him a copy of The Eschatological Economy, and we took some photos (but I am no photographer – sorry) and we all promised to stay more in touch from now on.

In person, there is a gentle but really evangelical authority about Zizioulas. I agree with Liviu that he is one of our contemporary ‘spiritual fathers’. I have always been very lucky in the teachers I have had, I don’t know why. Many thanks to Liviu for hosting the meeting.

Douglas Knight, Metropolitan John Zizoulas, Liviu Barbu

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Rowan Williams The truth of Christ

I have found these three dicta from our Archbishop in from a speech on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They are not trite.

1. Christ equips us to say no to those falsehoods which allow us to ignore the places where he is to be found.

2. The Bible is not interested in resolving personal dramas of choice. What matters is that what we say or do or choose points to the truth of Christ.

3. Christ will find us as and when we are ready to be found by him, and not when we are certain that we can make him speak for our party or our programme.

Here are the paragraphs in which they appear:

The temptation is that we borrow Bonhoeffer’s language to give dignity and seriousness to some of our current controversies, when the truth is that it is only in the face of a real anti-church that these matters come fully into focus, when there is an active programme aimed at destroying the Church’s integrity and expelling or silencing those who hold to that integrity. And Bonhoeffer himself warns us about being too ready in advance to spell out what would constitute an anti-church. What is essential is the work that prepares us for discernment: the common life of adoration and confession, the struggle to bring acts and policies to the judgement of Scripture, the freedom, above all, to stand against what actively seeks, inside or outside the Church, to prohibit the proclamation of the Gospel, confident in what God has irrevocably given to the community of faith.

In October 1938, Bonhoeffer addressed a conference of younger pastors associated with the Confessing Church and serving in illegal pastorates; his subject was the question of what obedience to Scripture meant. He warns against using Scripture to demonstrate the rightness of an action or policy, making Scripture serve a programme of our own, a conception of our righteousness. It is not that we can solve the dramatic personal question, ‘What shall I do?’ by a simple appeal to the Bible, so that we are relieved of the burden of human ambiguity and even human sinfulness and error. The Bible, says Bonhoeffer, is not interested in resolving personal dramas of choice. What matters is that what we say or do or choose points to the truth of Christ. In itself it is always going to be in some degree in need of forgiveness; but it is ‘right’ to the extent that it displays the truth of Christ. ‘It is our way to let Jesus Christ find us in this way. Christ is the truth. The sole truth of our way is that we should be found in this truth’ (The Way to Freedom, 176).

As a programme, as a set of solutions, this is not going to be the answer to our divisions and quarrels as churches today. But if this is the language in which we are prepared to think about and pray about our struggles, we shall have learned from Bonhoeffer what above all he has to teach us: Christ equips us to say no to those falsehoods which allow us to ignore the places where he is to be found. Christ can lead us through culture and piety and ecumenism to a place where we must say no to any aspects of them that make falsehoods easier. Christ will find us as and when we are ready to be found by him, and not when we are certain that we can make him speak for our party or our programme, left or right. Inexorably, we are led to that twofold commendation of prayer and justice with which the Prison Letters leave us – a commendation not of abstract spirituality and busy activism, but of immersion in Christ through Scripture and the struggle to act so that God’s act will be visible. It is a legacy that will not easily let us be satisfied with ourselves; which is why it is a gift from Bonhoeffer’s Lord and ours.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Speech at the opening of the International Bonhoeffer Congress, University of Wroclaw, Poland

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O'Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm 2

Liberalism fails to bring a critical practical reason to bear on the present world. In its pursuit of doctrinal reconstruction it treats the moral questions of the age as moral certainties, it views the indeterminate shapes of the present as sharp outlines. It may even imagine that in the present it can find some kind of speculative counterweight to correct a bias in past and transcendent reality. Instead of looking to the world as a frame within which to serve God and neighbour, it looks to it for a demonstration that in the past reality was misunderstood. Thus is crystallised the “modern world”, an artificial entity with no existence in real time, achieving its dominion over thought only as we allow the world of action, for which we should have our loins girded ready for adventure, to be permafrosted into a world of pseudo-fact.

The tragic fault of liberal Christianity was to have no critical purchase on moral intuitions comparable to that which it had on doctrinal judgments. Precisely for that reason liberalism proved vulnerable when twentieth-century society began to be riven through with deep moral fissures. In affirming the world, liberal theology condemned itself to shipwreck on the same rocks where a unified modern civilisation broke up.

Oliver O’Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm

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Affluence is not the same as happiness shock

Offer book

In the Oxford University Press Economics catalogue I found Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence. His opening sentence: ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.’ Offer ‘critiques’ the ‘assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being.’ Here is OUP’s blurb for the book:

Since the 1940s Americans and Britons have come to enjoy an era of rising material abundance. Yet this has been accompanied by a range of social and personal disorders, including family breakdown, addiction, mental instability, crime, obesity, inequality, economic insecurity, and declining trust.

Avner Offer argues that well-being has lagged behind affluence in these societies, because they present an environment in which consistent choices are difficult to achieve over different time ranges and in which the capacity for personal and social commitment is undermined by the flow of novelty. His approach draws on economics and social science, makes use of the latest cognitive research, and provides a detailed and reasoned critique of modern consumer society, especially the assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being.

Consistent choices are difficult to achieve, eh? Freedom of choice does not maximise individual and social well-being, eh? The entire conceptual basis of the last two hundred years of this ‘science’ of economics turns out to be faulty, eh?

Economics is a blessed naivety. It is as though Aquinas and a long tradition of Christian political and ethical thought had never been, as though before utilitarianism and the marginal revolution there was… just nothing at all. Social scientists are people without memory or historical awareness. I thought I would share my amazement with you.

I am so sure that Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence is well worth a read that I have put it on my Amazon wish list. (But remember, this is just a wish list, and the self control that keeps my wishes just wishes makes me at least as happy as acquisition of these titles).

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ECUSA’s Relationship to the Anglican Communion

The Anglican Communion Institute has done a detailed compare-and-contrast job to analyse whether the resolutions of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States (ECUSA-TEC) meet the demands of the Windsor Report. Here is the ACI’s conclusion:

‘It cannot be disputed that many people, especially those on the Special Commission and the General Convention Committee, worked hard to frame a response to Windsor from ECUSA. Many of them aware of the importance of a clear and faithful answer to Windsor’s carefully worded analysis and recommendations. Although the three general resolutions from GC clearly express a desire to be committed to the Communion and to Windsor, the responses to the three specific questions asked of ECUSA (along with the treatment of other resolutions by GC) make clear that such a commitment is being made only on ECUSA’s own terms and these fall significantly short of those sought by the Communion as a whole. Astonishingly, the answers given in the resolutions passed at GC 2006 at no point explicitly refer to any of the specific actions which violated Communion teaching, led to the Lambeth Commission, and were explicitly addressed in the Windsor Report and its requests to ECUSA.

Archbishop Rowan Williams in his recent reflection spoke of the fact that ‘no member Church can make significant decisions unilaterally and still expect this to make no difference to how it is regarded in the fellowship; this would be uncomfortably like saying that every member could redefine the terms of belonging as and when it suited them’. Having undertaken such unilateral action in 2003, GC 2006 appears now to wish to redefine the terms of walking together which the Communion has articulated and commended in the Windsor Report as a remedy for the earlier unilateralism.

Despite the claims and wishful thinking on the part of some, there is therefore only one conclusion that can be drawn: ECUSA has ‘walked apart’, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates must say so and likely will say so early in 2007, if not before. The Instruments of Communion must also take the consequent actions, however difficult, which will enable those within ECUSA who wish to remain loyal to Windsor , and hence to the Communion, to be recognised as full constituent members of the Communion. In preparation for that response it is important that those bishops and parishes loyal to Windsor clearly declare their allegiance and commit themselves to the disciplines of life together in communion with one another and with Anglicans around the globe.’

The Anglican Communion Institute General Convention, The Windsor Report and ECUSA’s Relationship to the Anglican Communion

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What Christianity gave the West

George Weigel on Michael Burleigh

Christianity gave the West cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism, for it recognized â??neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor freeâ?? as relevant social categories â?? and thus blazed a path beyond tribalism and toward the end of slavery, that ubiquitous human institution. Modern feminism notwithstanding, Christianity also gave the world … feminism, for St. Paul completed his instruction on Christian egalitarianism by reminding the Galatians that, in Christ Jesus, neither â??male nor femaleâ?? had a superior dignity â?? which, in that context and in much of the world today, means that Christianity is the great liberator of women.

Christianity, as Pope Benedict reminded us recently, gave the West the idea of charity as a personal and social obligation; think of the world of cruelty graphically captured in Gladiator and youâ??ll see the point. Christianity also gave the world a politically viable concept of peace, the peace that St. Augustine first defined in the fifth century as the â??tranquility of order.â??

Christianity taught that rulers were responsible, not to themselves alone (as so many rulers liked to think, then and now), but to transcendent moral norms. Would the concepts of the rule of law, and of rulers responsible to the law, have evolved in the West if, as Professor Burleigh reminds us, â??the redoubtable Ambrose, archbishop of Milan … [had not] tamed the Emperor Theodosius?â?? Or, to cite the more familiar example, if Gregory VII had not confronted Henry II and forced him to recognize the freedom of the Church â?? a freedom that implies limits on state power? It seems unlikely, not least because these ideas didnâ??t gain currency in the rest of the world until they were brought to the rest of the world by Christians.

Why was this insistence on the Churchâ??s liberty so socially, and ultimately politically, important? Because the freedom of the Church meant that the state (or some other form of concentrated political power) would not occupy every available social space â?? that there would be room in society for other institutions and other loyalties. And that, in turn, made both civil society and the limited, constitutional state possible…

Christianityâ??s contributions to the civilization of the West have been ignored or caricatured as â??divisive, fraudulent, or oppressiveâ?? … This caricature of a vibrant public Christianity as inherently dangerous for democracy is a caricature in service to the idea that secularism is the only possible â??neutralâ?? ground on which a democratic political community can conduct its life.

George Weigel What Christianity gave the West