Month: October 2006

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Comments

As my hope of becoming an intellectual slips away I have begun to hope – much more ambitiously – that I could one day become a disciple.

So I don’t know why those who leave comments on this site believe that their comments have to be so fantastically learned. This isnâ??t Pontifications you know. If I can post statements of the blooming obvious on this blog, so can you.

But I have got to show you two comments which seem to hope that intellect yet may serve discipleship.

From Brian Hamilton:

Could it be, I wonder, that the while Christian community is rightfully and graciously ordered, it never be ordered in a way that is structurally final except to reflect the dependence of all on the guiding presence of Christ? The church is ordered and re-ordered in each moment, always participating in Godâ??s work through the lives of all its members, but with the profound knowledge that this as often throws us on back on the lives of our children as it does on our trained theologians and pastors. It is the mark of our humility that there are no â??professionalâ?? or â??expertâ?? disciples, only all of us together pilgrims on a journey. And yet this does not imply a naive and disembodied â??equality,â?? or else it would also imply a rejection a rejection that the Spirit gives gifts of authority to all its members. And so it does not imply the rejection of a regular order that the church must rely on for regular guidance and strength. It only refuses to institutionalize and absolutize a particular order that God may at any moment interrupt, since all Godâ??s people are charged with the task of leading the faithful through in those moments for which they have been prepared. And this cannot be only an abstract point, since it is also an ecclesiological one about the multiplicity of the gifts of the Spirit.

Iâ??m not sure if this way of putting it quite works; Iâ??m aware of the tension in the trajectories Iâ??m trying to hold together. That may well be, however, a good picture of the (Anabaptist-Mennonite) tradition Iâ??m trying to represent, who at the same time rejects the absolute and untouchable ordering of a church that is fundamentally hierarchical, and still wants to speak in deep appreciation of the necessity of shepherds for guiding the church through the world. Or to illustrate the same thing in a different way: mine is a tradition that has at once maintained that all Godâ??s faithful are saints in the truest sense of the word, yet has insisted on telling stories of the memorably faithful. I find it an incredibly pressing project to articulate an ecclesiology that does not forsake the sort of ordering you are insisting on, but neither absolutizes particular structures of particular people that prohibit structurally the churchâ??s right dependence on, for example, its newly baptized.

And A. Steward says:

I appreciate your comment that,

â??Christianity stands for that order and reason that, by Godâ??s grace, will make us happy to share one anotherâ??s experience without wanting it exclusively for ourselves, and to participate in one another without trying to absorb or replace one another.â??

It might be the case that poor listening skills are predicated by this sort of failure to recognize the uniqueness of other people. We assume that anotherâ??s experience of life fits with our idea of â??timeless truthâ?? as we have experienced it, and so we end up hearing not them, but ourselves. I think your ideas here are particularly relevant to our American racial myth of the â??melting pot.â?? Perhaps Lutherâ??s doctrine of the Word might be helpful for redressing this, particularly where he talks about the need for the Word to be spoken, and this not by our own mouth, but by another, addressed to us. I always liked Bonhoefferâ??s line, â??The Word of God is always stronger in the mouth of our brother.â??

Yes, the Word of God is stronger in the mouth of our brother. Could it be that you are that brother? And all Godâ??s people are charged with the task of leading the faithful through in those moments for which they have been prepared. So speak up and say it plainly. Perhaps some aspect of our education in this faith is in your hands.

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Thomas Aquinas on a better concept of freedom 1

The monumental achievement of Thomas Aquinas was to marry the wisdom of a millennium of Christian philosophy and theology to the new philosophy of Aristotle that had been rediscovered in Europe (largely through the mediation of Arabic philosophers) in the early thirteenth century. This intellectual marriage yielded a rich, complex, and (to use the precisely right word a few centuries before its time) deeply humanistic vision of the human person, human goods, and human destiny. Embedded in that vision of the human person was a powerful concept of freedom.

Freedom, for St. Thomas, is a means to human excellence, to human happiness, to the fulfillment of human destiny. Freedom is the capacity to choose wisely and to act well as a matter of habit or, to use the old-fashioned term, as an outgrowth of virtue. Freedom is the means by which, exercising both our reason and our will, we act on the natural longing for truth, for goodness, and for happiness that is built into us as human beings. Freedom is something that grows in us, and the habit of living freedom wisely must be developed through education, which among many other things involves the experience of emulating others who live wisely and well. On St. Thomas’ view, freedom is in fact the great organizing principle of the moral life and since the very possibility of a moral life (the capacity to think and choose) is what distinguishes the human person from the rest of the natural world, freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way. That is, freedom is the human capacity that unifies all our other capacities into an orderly whole, and directs our actions toward the pursuit of happiness and goodness understood in the noblest sense: the union of the human person with the absolute good, who is God.

George Weigel A Better Concept of Freedom

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A real desire for unity

By popular demand, and at the insistence of Matthew Baker, it is time for more from the wonderful Fr Thomas Hopko. What goes for the Orthodox goes for the rest of us. I have taken some liberties with Fr Hopko’s paragraphs.

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If you are in Eucharistic communion, you are one church. That’s what makes the Church one. It’s the unity in the body broken,
the blood shed of Jesus before the face of God. That’s where the Church is actualized on earth in the celebration of the mysteries: baptism, chrism, Eucharist. That’s what makes us one. That is where the unity of our doctrine is shown, our unity of worship, our unity of morals, our ethics, the unity of spiritual life.

We claim to belong to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church of Christ, the church that teaches the gospel truly, fully, that prays properly, that acts and teaches the right way to behave according to Christ, according to God Almighty, according to the Holy Scriptures, the canons, the saints, the fathers, etc.

So what is really required… all above everything, is a real desire for unity…to want to be one, to suffer over the division, to weep over it, to carry it around like a sword in your soul that we who claim Christ and praise God in Christ (especially in this world which is getting less and less Christian as the clock ticks) are divided…

Father Thomas Hopko What would the Orthodox have to do to have unity?

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Equality, inclusivity and confusion

The liberal gospel is that we are all the same and that we should all be the same. It demands the equalization of access and experience. This is a gospel of natural rights that says that no experience should be denied any of us, and that we should all be able to experience everything directly for ourselves. We should not have to experience anything at second hand through the mediation of other people.

But Christians can afford to be more relaxed than this about what we are able to experience. We can admit that it is fine to enjoy most things at second hand, and we say that enjoying experiences through other people, rather than first hand, is real and valid enough. We can say this because we insist that other people cannot be substituted for. We cannot replace other people, we cannot be them. We live through other people, and they live through us, and this of course requires that we are properly ordered one to another. This ordering by which we can be with other people is given to us – it is not a work of our own. Our Lord hosts us, provides us with these other people and orders us one to another. By giving his order to us, even imposing it on us, he makes it possible for us to be together and to participate in one another’s experience.

The Christian faith says that good order makes for a good life, which means a life lived together with others. For the sake of this good order, the Christian life is ordered and can even admit to being hierarchical. The Christian faith identifies what is good, it searches for those skills, capabilities and virtues that enable us to identify with increasing accuracy what is good. It promotes what it calls discernment, or judgment (or insight, taste, sensibility). It praises excellence, and it gives recognition to those who are best, and who are best able to lead the rest of towards what is good. So the Christian faith is intrinsically about excellence. Excellence is a nice word for it, while is elitism a less pretty word for it – but the same thing is meant. Christianity is intrinsically elitist – it confesses a Lord and it involves us in following those apostles and disciples who can pass to us the order and authority of this Lord.

Yet the greater part of the leadership of my (Anglican) church does not believe in leadership. It is elite that declares that all elitism is wrong (though elitism is intrinisic to excellence) and denies that it is itself an elite. It holds its authority in order to stop anyone else (those it calls conservatives or fundamentalists) from doing so.

Our church leadership, the liberal clergy, is in a state of confusion about what it wants. It decides that the gospel is too complex for its hearers and sets about simplifying it down to inclusivity and equality of opportunity. But the simplification and falsification of the gospel represented by the agenda of inclusivity brings unending confusion. There is no way of answering the question of how we shall make everyone equal without taking the powers of an elite.

There is also no way of answering the question ‘equal to….what’? What is the criterion and measure to which we are going to equalize everything?

They dislike the thought that one is better than another (better taught and discipled in the Christian life, for instance). But there is no way around this, and confusion will reign until the leaders of our civilisation are prepared to re-admit the idea that not everything is the same as everything else, and that the differences between people are themselves gifts.

Christianity theology now stands alone in the Humanities for the case that difference and otherness means order and hierarchy, and for the truth that there is no particularity or uniqueness without difference, and there is no difference without order. Christianity stands for that order and reason that, by God’s grace, will make us happy to share one another’s experience without wanting it exclusively for ourselves, and to participate in one another without trying to absorb or replace one another. The grace of God will make humans of us yet.

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Catholicity 6

The whole Christian community is under a discipline imposed upon it by an external authority. It is formed and disciplined, as it is redeemed, by Christ who comes to it from outside. But Christ is no absentee landlord who exercises only a distant or theoretical authority. The authority of Christ is exercised by Christ, made present to us in his whole people the Church, and carried out by the office-holders of the Church. The lordship of Christ presently makes itself felt as these specific overseers.

No community of Christians is under its own authority, and so no individual community can ordain its own leaders. This must be done for it by the rest of the church, by all other congregations, as it were. Such overseers are sent by the whole Church to each local church, which must receive this overseer and his discipline willingly, as a gift received from the whole Church. Because these overseers must be trained in the full deposit of faith, we need a trained and ordained clergy. Christ makes himself present to us in the form of these disciplinarians, who are responsible for connecting us to all the people of Christ, mediating to us the whole Church, and passing on to us all the characteristics of the servanthood of Christ. Obedience to the God who is really God is freedom, and obedience to his word and then, to those he made his apostles, is the form Christ takes for us now.

Our overseers are the love and discipline of Christ for us as they pass on what they have received from Christ and enable us to receive it in full and thankfully. We have to help these overseers to be good transmitters of the faith, and we do this by encouraging them to instruct us, and by taking our complaints to them and to God when they fail to do so. So discussion of the office of the bishop is no defence of clerical interests, but an essential part of the living witness of the contemporary Church.

Next we must relate the bishop to the assembly and to the plurality-and-unity of the whole Christ.

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Fletcher-Louis on the temple and the cosmos

The key…lies in the fact that the Temple was understood to be not only the centre of the world but also a microcosm of the whole creation. To speak of heaven and earth passing away quite naturally evoked the image of its destruction. Conversely, to destroy the Temple was to destroy the universe.

That a temple could represent the entire cosmos was taken for granted in the ancient Near East, as any modern visitor to the temple at Karnak in Egypt knows. Solomon’s Temple was similarly constructed, albeit with its own distinctive Israelite features (notably, the bronze basin of 1 Kings 7.23-26, which was actually called ‘the Sea’). Like the Tabernacle, it was dedicated in the New Year festival which celebrated God’s creation of the universe.

According to Psalm 78.69, the sanctuary was built ‘like the high heavens, like the earth, which he has founded forever’. A careful examination of the account of creation in Genesis 1 alongside the description of the Tabernacle in Exodus 25-40 finds many points of correspondence between the structure and symbolism of the latter and the order of the former. These connections were not esoteric secrets hidden in scripture. They were very well known to Jews in Jesus’ day and were described in detail by such writers as Josephus and Philo in the first century AD.

This cosmic symbolism had a very specific purpose: it meant that everything that went on in the Temple gave a structure, order and stability to the whole world. Through its sacrifices, prayers and liturgy, the Temple was believed to integrate within itself the life not only of humankind but of all creation. For Jesus the Jew, Israel’s coming catastrophe meant the destruction of the old order. This had truly cosmological implications, as the Temple’s function of holding things together was about to come to an end.

Rather than longing for a cosmic meltdown, we must hear the groans of creation as the birth-pangs of the new age and pray, in the words of Romans 8.21, that it ‘will be set free from its bondage to decay [so that it may] obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’.

Crispin Fletcher-Louis at Third Way on Mark 13.24ff & 30f

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