Month: September 2006

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Europeans and debate

I have to say I am stunned by the way some sectors of the European left appear to be reacting. I had heard they were rallying to Benedict’s defense, which may be true generally, but not in two stories from The Guardian. Both are bitter, bitter attacks on Benedict, who they say is the bigot in profound need of repentance.

Never mind that they quite obviously haven’t understood the speech, that Catholics aren’t blowing up mosques this week or burning anybody in effigy, and that Benedict’s remarks were mild compared to the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish stuff that is routine amongst Muslims.

I am really shocked. I would have thought that the defense of Benedict – at least along the lines that free debate is necessary & isn’t helped by violent temper tantrums when somebody critiques you, and that the spread of Islam by violence is a legitimate talking point – was a no-brainer for liberals, but apparently not.

I hope what I’m reading isn’t a general trend. Perhaps I’ve been naive, but it frightens me about European Enlightenment rationality; what I think we see here are pundits who are more interested in venting pre-existing anti-Catholic prejudice than in taking the case on its merits, and that worries me about their intellectual capacity for the work that needs to be done in the next few decades.

Chris Roberts

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Christology from London

Person of christ

The Person of Christ is a product of King’s College London – before the glory departed. Here is what T & T Clark says about it:

Understanding the Person of Christ affects our understanding of all Christian theology. All ten contributors to this volume share a commitment to the orthodox theological tradition in Christology as expressed in the creedal heritage of the Christian church, and seek to explicate the continuing coherence and importance of that theological tradition. The book’s ten essays cover such topics as prolegomena to Christology, the incarnation, the person and nature of Christ, the communicatio idiomatum, the baptism of Christ, the redemptive work of Christ, the ascended Christ, and New Testament Christology, and offers critical engagements with such diverse theologians as John Calvin, Charles Williams and John Zizioulas. The contributors, all leading academics, include: John Webster, Richard Burridge, Robert Jenson, Stephen Holmes, Douglas Farrow, Brian Horne, Murray, Douglas Knight, Sandra Fach, Christoph Schwoebel.

More great work from Kings is appearing in November and spring of next year, five volumes that I know of, among them Colin Gunton’s Lectures on Karl Barth, so the old place is enjoying a great afterlife. Friends will find advance notice of Alan Spence’s The Promise of Peace: A Unified Theory of Atonement at T & T Clark, but for the rest of you I am saving Alan for my ‘theology in London’ series (for which I’d welcome suggestions for candidates).

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Benedict – talking to Muslims

Richard Neuhaus at First Things (On the Square 18th September) offers a variety of views on what Pope Benedict said last week at Regensburg. Neuhaus himself says this:

â??Pope Benedict â?¦ is a man of great gentleness and deliberation and extremely careful to say what he means. What he said at Regensburg he has said many times before. Contrary to many reports, he has not apologized or retracted his argument. He has indicated sincere regret that many Muslims have reacted to his statement as they have. The response of those who are properly called jihadists is, â??If you donâ??t stop saying weâ??re violent, weâ??re going to bomb more churches, kill more nuns and priests, and get the pope too.â?? In short, the reaction has powerfully confirmed the problem to which Benedict called our attention.â??

The very reverse of inflammatory or careless, Benedict appeals with very great courtesy and encouragement to beleaguered moderate Muslim, anxious to help them win the argument against extremists. There is no great difference between Benedict and John Paul II here.

And here is part of a longer excerpt from Benedict himself speaking to Muslims:

It is in this spirit that I turn to you, dear and esteemed Muslim friends, to share my hopes with you and to let you know of my concerns at these particularly difficult times in our history.
I know that many of you have firmly rejected, also publicly, in particular any connection between your faith and terrorism and have condemned it. I am grateful to you for this, for it contributes to the climate of trust that we need.
Terrorist activity is continually recurring in various parts of the world, plunging people into grief and despair. Those who instigate and plan these attacks evidently wish to poison our relations and destroy trust, making use of all means, including religion, to oppose every attempt to build a peaceful and serene life together.

Dear friends, I am profoundly convinced that we must not yield to the negative pressures in our midst, but must affirm the values of mutual respect, solidarity and peace. The life of every human being is sacred, both for Christians and for Muslims.
There is plenty of scope for us to act together in the service of fundamental moral values.

You, my esteemed friends, represent some Muslim communities from this Country where I was born, where I studied and where I lived for a good part of my life. That is why I wanted to meet you. You guide Muslim believers and train them in the Islamic faith.

Teaching is the vehicle through which ideas and convictions are transmitted. Words are highly influential in the education of the mind. You, therefore, have a great responsibility for the formation of the younger generation. I learn with gratitude of the spirit in which you assume responsibility.

Christians and Muslims, we must face together the many challenges of our time. There is no room for apathy and disengagement, and even less for partiality and sectarianism. We must not yield to fear or pessimism. Rather, we must cultivate optimism and hope.

I donâ??t see how you can get more gracious or encouraging than that. “I learn with gratitude of the spirit in which you assume responsibility.” That is certainly how I feel about Benedict, and only wish he could say it to me and my lot.

For more good sense on this issue, see Amy Welborn and Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post.

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Catholicity 3

Jesus does not come to the individual believer alone, but to his whole community. And he is not merely present to us, but brings us into this community and incorporates us in this body. It is Jesus Christ who comes to me, anointed (christed) with his whole people. As members of that people, we are part of that christ-ing.

We exist, you and I, purely because Christ holds us in his regard. He never loses concentration, and his regard is our whole life-supply. Though we may be hidden from all other people, dead to them, yet we are sustained in life by Christ. He will bring us to them, and them to us, so that as we are increasingly united to one another we become alive with the complete life of our Lord. We will live, and flourish, and enable one another to flourish without limit and gloriously, as his regard brings us into connection with one another. In his regard we will participate in one another, and live to and from one another.

Now Christ calls us to receive from him all whom he calls together in his eucharist. Like Jacob sending his flocks ahead to Esau, Christ sends us all these people ahead of him to us. To receive him we have to receive them, all of them, refusing none. They are all of them part of the loaf he intends for us. As we take them from him, as his members, they become part of us and we become part of them. We will receive our name and identity from them, and cannot attempt to be ourselves without them. We may not define ourselves by any more exclusive definition or smaller group. The identity that we will receive from this vast company will make us universal beings, for Christâ??s is the true and universal eucharist.

In the eucharist we pray and ask God for the whole of future body of Christ. We look forward to all those who are to come, and who will make that body complete, and we wait, and mourn, for those who are not yet present. Their absence means that we are not yet present as we want to be. The whole Christ, and our own very being, is waiting for them.

For us now the eucharist is exclusive, partial and anticipatory, for this kingdom has not yet come. Our way into this communion is through the exclusive path of the cross of Christ, in which the many exclusive groups and false universals (â??catholicitiesâ??) are stripped off us.

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Benedict at the university of Regensburg

There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a “dies academicus” (open debate/general studies day?) when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of “universitas”: The reality that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason — this reality became a lived experience.

The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the “whole” of the “universitas scientiarum,” even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: It had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: This, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

Pope Benedict Faith Reason and the University

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The Pope is concerned by the threat of fideism and radical scepticism to the university, to rationality, and to our aspiration to know reality. (Even the way web-names are assigned makes it clearer in Germany that there is really just one university – one universe of knowledge – not ultimately divided by its many campuses.) It is a speech on faith and reason. Benedict regards Christianity, Judaism and Islam as three traditions of faith and reason. He tells us that ‘science’ and social science are also traditions of faith and reason. All these traditions (‘scientific’ as well as ‘religious’) are tempted by fideism (which leads eventually to irrationalism and even violence). But although these traditions are all sometimes tempted to avoid the public examination of rationality within which they can remain truly reasonable and rational, they all have the resources to resist that temptation, and they should all do so, and do so together in the university. If the modern university does not allow the intellellectual exploration of the Christian gospel, the university will operate on a greatly reduced concept of reason and science, and more than that, on a greatly reduced concept of man, which would be impoverishing for that society and for all mankind.

Any attempt to maintain theology’s claim to be “scientific” would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: It is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science” …

In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.

Benedict says that God has made himself known, so we do not need to despair of knowing anything about him or about the creation he has set us in. This makes our knowledge of this physical world, his creation, also basically reliable and reasonable. The Christians (often along with Jews and Muslims) can point out that they are the guardians of reason against what Benedict calls ‘de-hellenisation’, modern irrationalism’s retreat from the Logos, and so from the assumption that the world is an ordered and reliable place. The university needs Christianity, and any other tradition that reasons about faith, in order to allow full exploration of the creation and of man, the creature of God.

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Fletcher-Louis on the image of God 2

Genesis 1 is a polemic, in fact, against the polytheistic creation-accounts of other cultures in Canaan, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Where the Babylonians and Assyrians celebrated the gods’ creation of the universe through the slaying of the sea monster Tiamat, Genesis sets ‘the great sea monsters’ in the fifth day of creation (1.21). They are God’s playthings, not pre-existent enemies. Similarly, many of those beings who would usually make up the council are reduced in Genesis 1 to the ranks of creatures, if not objects: the sun is a ‘greater light’, and the moon a ‘lesser light’.

But if the divine council has been disbanded, it has not had all its assets seized, and its members continue in new and surprising ways. The heavenly bodies may no longer be gods but they are thoroughly personal nonetheless, ‘ruling over’ the day and the night as local administrators within the cosmic kingdom.

This personal, conscious aspect of creation is also assumed in Genesis 1.11, 20 & 24, where three times God commands one part of creation to produce another. For example, he says: ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And so, says the author, it did.

Creation itself participates in the creative process. This brings us to a dramatically new understanding of verse 26. When God says, ‘Let us make humankind,’ he is speaking to the rest of his creation – to heaven and earth and all its adornment. Thus, when he proposes that humankind be made ‘in our image and according to our likeness’ there is present the claim that men and women are made in the image and likeness both of God and of the cosmos.

This is not, it should be said, a new idea – it is familiar to Jewish mysticism. Indeed, a pre-Christian tradition spread throughout medieval Europe which held that Adam was created as a microcosm of the universe, his physiology and essential faculties each corresponding to an aspect of the created order.

We frequently hear now the complaint that (Western) Christianity and modern secular culture cuts humankind off from the natural world. On the one hand, this has allowed us free rein in plundering creation. On the other, it has given rise to an increasing sense of isolation, for both modern man and 20th-century Christianity.

Genesis 1.26 calls humankind to be both a unique bearer of God’s image and presence and a priestly representative of the material world of vegetation, animals, sun, moon and stars.

Here, too, Man is unique, for ‘in him all things are to hold together’ (Colossians 1.17). The whole created world is to be gathered up in the true man and woman. And, because humankind is God’s image, it is ultimately through us that earth, sea, sky and all that is in them are to be taken up into God’s own life.

Crispin Fletcher-Louis at Third Way Genesis 1.26 & Ephesians 1.22

Try Greg Beale The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Temple for an accessible summary of Israel’s theological cosmology.

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An implosion of the powers of practical reason

…Pluralism is difficult to argue for successfully.

To assert the right of plural moral judgment requires a careful account of the systemic social differences that make that right intelligible. So explanation of difference is the essence of a policy of mutual forbearance. It risks adding insult to injury to demand forbearance while at the same time refusing explanations. The sharp response to the innovations of Western Anglican churches from the churches of the ex-colonial territories owed much to the fact that the innovating churches had no programme of mutual explanation in view. And here, perhaps, the churches of the South and East made a mistake. They attributed the North American uncommunicativeness to racism. It is, on the whole, more likely that the North American churches merely acted, in default of a thorough deliberative process of their own, under the force of strong cultural pressure, the reasons for which they never explained even to themselves, since an ill-conceived doctrine of pluralism persuaded them that thinking was an unnecessary labour. They may have suffered something worse than a bout of racism, if such a thing can be imagined; they may have suffered an implosion of their powers of practical reason, the result of long habits of irresponsibility. And since theology is nothing if not a discipline of common reasoning about God and our life together, unless they recover it, their days of being churches of any kind are numbered.

Oliver O’Donovan Ethics and Agreement – the third Fulcrum web sermon

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The mystical unity of Scripture and the Church

In the disintegration of Western thought the Church has been treated as sociological entity; its human, visible aspects have become separated in idea from its mystical and divine aspects. This dichotomy lies at the root of all our Western divisions, and this appears to be reproduced in them all. Thus the conception of a single divine-human organism reaching from heaven to earth tends to be broken up into compartments between which a great gulf is fixed. In the result the proportions of truth suffer and every element of the whole gets out of focus. Whether the earthly, visible part is thought of in ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ terms the result is grievous impoverishment. Moreover ‘piety’ and ‘mysticism’ become individual and isolated, instead to being the salt of the common life which is both divine and human because it is rooted in Christ.

There is a sense in which the mystical unity of Scripture correspond to the mystical unity of the Church. These two forms of mystical unity are complementary; each is necessary presupposition for the right understanding of the other. Each embodies God’s self-communication to man in Christ; each attains its true unity only in Christ. There is an indwelling of Christ both in the people and in the Book. A return to the sources of illumination in him is inevitably a return both to the message of Scripture about the Church and to the life of the Church as set forth in Scripture. Such a return is necessarily a permanent task of the whole Church, to which each of us contributes no more than a minute fragment.

L. S. Thornton The Common Life in the Body of Christ (1941)

Yes, we do have an Anglican communion ecclesiology, and in this work by a member of the Community of the Resurrection it is in the form of a biblical theology,

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Catholicity 2

My caricature continues:

Catholic and Protestant deliberations on the eucharist tend to focus on the encounter of two individuals, Jesus Christ and the believer. In this encounter Christ makes himself present in the form of the wafer consecrated before us. In the eucharist Jesus comes to me in an event of transformation in which ordinary bread is made extraordinary. But it is not the bread which is being transformed here, but the Christian. The Christian is being made holy, transformed from one degree of Christlikeness to another, from partial to whole and perfect.

The loaf does not represent Christ individualised and therefore without us. The loaf represents Christ – and us with him. That loaf is him and us together. It represents us in part as we are (broken) and in part as we shall be (whole). Thus the loaf represents all humanity recapitulated in Christ, who together make the one. It is the Christ-and-his-people loaf, the Christ-in-his-kingdom loaf.

The resurrection does not just mean that one day my little body will be made to stand upright again. It is that I will be raised to you, and you will be raised to me, so that the relationship we once had will be restored, and the relationship that we never had will now begin. I will be alive because you will supply me with this life: you will be my source of life and I will be your source of life. This will be so because we will both be connected to Christ, who is the source for all of us, and he will give and receive us back from one another again, authenticating our reception of one another.

I have been running away from people my whole life long. But in the event of the resurrection I am turned around so that I run slap into those very people I have been fleeing. Our collision and sudden encounter is what the resurrection is, for me and for them. In this encounter we are brought into relationship with all others, and so transformed.

We are being brought into relationship with those who are (presently) living and with those who are (to us) dead. They are dead to us and to each other, but they are not dead to Christ. Even separated by death from all other persons, they are alive, because Christ does not end the relationship he has with them; as long as Christ does not let them go, they are sustained and cannot finally die. Christ does not believe in death; he does not give it an inch, and he will not allow its individualizing and isolating to prevail over us.

It is not that I am being transformed as a merely individual entity. Rather I am being turned outwards so that I can no longer be thought of as someone cut off and isolated from others. I am being adapted to fit each other living person. We are all of us being fitted to one another. Resurrection means that I am brought into living relationship with, and so made alive to, every other person, and they to me. The (future) body of Christ will be made of every living person. We are being broken out of our present partial and sectarian community and brought into a much bigger one, indeed into the universal community. Our small local sectarian loaf is being re-dissolved and baked into a much bigger loaf – one that is made of all.

[cont.]

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Freedom detached from moral truth

John Paul II decoded the new threats to the “mystery of the human person” in the post–Cold War world, and he spent much of the decade of the 1990s trying to explain that freedom detached from moral truth—the “freedom of indifference” that dominated the high culture of the triumphant West—was, inevitably, self–cannibalizing.

Freedom untethered from truth is freedom’s worst enemy. For if there is only your truth and my truth, and neither one of us recognizes a transcendent moral standard (call it “the truth”) by which to adjudicate our differences, then the only way to settle the argument is for you to impose your power on me, or for me to impose my power on you. Freedom untethered from truth leads to chaos; chaos leads to anarchy; and since human beings cannot tolerate anarchy, tyranny as the answer to the human imperative of order is just around the corner. The false humanism of the freedom of indifference leads first to freedom’s decay, and then to freedom’s demise.

George Weigel John Paul II and the Crisis of Humanism

Gresham College in London has a day conference on John Paul II as Philosopher in November