Mihail and Emanuela will be married on 5 November 2006 in the Orthodox Cathedral of Arad, Romania
The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friends who attend the bridegroom wait and listen for him, and are full of joy when they hear the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is ours and it is now complete.
My tireless webmaster James Knight has put the whole content of Resources for Christian Theology into WordPress. It doesn’t look pretty, but at least it is all available again. One day we will find a better website management system – suggestions are very welcome.
I have added more links to this blog – to the Ecumenical Patriarch, two Barth sites, Generous Orthodoxy, and Alan Brown’s new Glaswegian Orthodoxy.
Meanwhile in London, a rare event of public theology:
Canon Andrew Walker Professor in Theology and Education at Kings College London is giving
The Deep Church Lectures: Series 1
Every Thursday evening
2nd November – 7th December 2006 7.15 – 9.30pm
The communion that Anglicans share is a precious gift. The present crisis in the Anglican Communion constitutes an opportunity to re-commit ourselves to one another in renewed obedience to God’s call. A covenant which expressed that commitment would not be something entirely de novo but rather a development of the ‘bonds of affection’ which bind us to one another. In making such a covenant at the present time we would be acknowledging that in specific situations, especially situations of conflict, threat or opportunity, God calls his people to discern his will afresh and to re-commit themselves to him and to one another. There is much we can learn here from the annual Methodist Covenant Service as it has been incorporated into the Church of North India.
In a situation of conflict the discernment of God’s will for his people is not an easy task. It demands fresh study of scripture, the careful presentation of arguments, patient listening to one another and preparedness to wait in uncertainty and hope until a clearer understanding of the truth emerges. All of this will, for God’s people, be grounded in love for one another, trust that we are together committed to seeking God’s way, and hope that the Holy Spirit will indeed lead us into all truth (John 16.13). This need for patience with some person, or with an entire body, that expresses contrary views is expressed very clearly by Augustine, when he says,
Let him, again, who says, when he reads my book, ‘Certainly I understand what is said, but it is not true’, assert, if he pleases, his own opinion, and refute mine if he is able. And if he do this with charity and truth, and take the pains to make it known to me (if I am still alive), I shall then receive the most abundant fruit of this my labour. … Yet, for my part, ‘I meditate in the law of the Lord’ (Psalm 1:2) … hoping by the mercy of God that he will make me hold steadfastly all truths of which I feel certain; ‘but if in anything I be otherwise minded, that he will himself reveal even this to me’ (Philippians 3:15), whether through secret inspiration and admonition, or through his own plain utterances, or through the reasonings of my brethren. This I pray for … (De Trinitate 1.1.5).
Augustine speaks of a commitment to truth that entails dialogue with the other – who is my sister or my brother in Christ. He speaks of an increasing understanding of truth within the Body of Christ and of the human grasp on truth as corporate and fallible. Within the communion of the Church he looks to the other as someone through whom he may grow in knowledge of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In the same Spirit, Anglicans, bound together in communion, need each other in order to grow in faith, knowledge and love (cf. 2 Peter 1.5-7). We are committed to encouraging one another and to learning from one another’s experience of discipleship in particular situations. Since we are weak, fallible and living in a fallen world, there is always the need for humility and mutual forgiveness. Anglicans, like all Christians, have to face honestly the ways in which hurt has been given within the Body of Christ, for example, through colonialism, patriarchy and other mechanisms of exclusion. We know that truly to discover the mind of Christ we have to go by the way of self-emptying, humility and obedience which is also the way of the cross (Philippians 2.5-11). A re-affirmation of our commitment to one another in covenant would thereby become a re-commitment in hope of the reconciliation of all things in Christ, who has established our peace by the blood of his cross (Colossians 1.20).
Inter Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission Responding to a proposal of a covenant October 2006
What should be the distinctive calling of the American Catholic university or college here and now? It should be to challenge its secular counterparts by recovering both for them and for itself a less fragmented conception of what an education beyond high school should be, by identifying what has gone badly wrong with even the best of secular universities. From a Catholic point of view the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it is not Catholic. It is at fault insofar as it is not a university….
The question of how these bits and pieces might be related to one another, of whether they are or are not parts that contribute to some whole, of what, if anything, it all adds up to, not merely commonly goes unanswered, it almost always goes unasked. And how indeed could it be otherwise when every course, even when introductory, is a course in a specialized discipline taught by a teacher who may be vastly ignorant of everything outside her or his own discipline? Each part of the curriculum is someone’s responsibility, but no one has a responsibility for making the connections between the parts. To whom should this matter?
It should matter to anyone who thinks it important what conception of human nature and the human condition students have arrived at by the time they enter the adult workplace – and therefore to any Catholic. For each of the academic disciplines teaches us something significant about some aspect of human nature and the human condition. Physics tells us which particles and forces compose the body as a material object, while chemistry and biochemistry examine it as the site of various exchanges and reactions. What the functioning structures of complex living organisms, such as ourselves, are and how they have evolved we learn from biology, while sociology, anthropology, economics, and history make human beings intelligible in and through their changing cultural and social relationships. Philosophy – together with the history of inquiry – shows us how and why we are able to move toward a more and more adequate understanding of ourselves and our environments, from time to time transcending the limitations of previous modes of understanding. That human beings are also in key part what they imagine themselves to be, and how, without works of imagination, human life is diminished, we can only learn from literary and other aesthetic studies. Yet, when we have learned what all these different types of discipline have to teach – and the catalogue is far from complete – we confront questions that have so far gone unasked, just because they are not questions answerable from within any one discipline.
Alasdair MacIntyre The End of Education The Fragmentation of the American University
The ‘product’ of the university, then, is not simply the person who has acquired skills – technical skills, even research skills; it is the person who has acquired the habit and virtue of learning, and who sees the social world as a place not primarily of struggle and conflict over control but as a context where conversation may be pursued with patience.
And this is a deeply political matter, in the fullest sense of the much abused word ‘political’. It alters what we think we can expect of each other; it challenges any assumption that conflict is the natural position for human beings; when there are clashes of interest, it tells us how to question what we have taken for granted about our own best interests and encourages us to seek for something new that is not just the property of one individual or faction. The university nourishes ‘civility’ – in the narrow sense of patience and courtesy in dispute, and in the much larger sense of concern for proper and open public life in the civitas, the city, the community of citizens.
Archbishop Rowan Williams What is a university? Speech given in Wuhan, China
