Month: March 2008

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Bucharest

Back now from an extraordinary and wonderful weekend in Bucharest for the ‘Christian Faith and Metaphysical Reason’ Colloquium hosted by Mihail Neamtu at the New Europe College.

David Bradshaw and Russell Reno were the hired hands, both impressive and delightful, curious about everything and everyone they met. There was a fair cast of young local talent mostly from the Philosophy faculty of Bucharest University. In the evenings as we were being feasted there was lots of conversation about Church and State, about relations between the Orthodox and other much smaller churches in Romania. We agreed that there was a certain schizophrenia of public secular and private Christian intellectual lives – always easier to identify in other people of course.

Most wonderful was walking through the hectic streets of Bucharest, with other delegates after the conference, past the first floor flat of the twentieth century Father of the Romanian Church Dimitru Staniloae (and video) and then on to the streets on which a thousand people died in the last days of 1989 – nearly twenty years ago already.

But best, and beyond my ability to describe it, was Vespers and Liturgy at Stavropoleus. Here is the interior and iconostasis from the Stauropoleus Flickr group. The liturgy came down from heaven. The Stavropoleus site may give you some idea.

The trip was an extraordinary privilege: there is a very great deal to learn about the Christian life from these folk, obviously, particularly the habits of that long-term discipleship which has carried them through the hard years. You have got to know your psalms off by heart. I am looking forward to going back.

As instructed, I gave a paper on Oliver O’Donovan – who was in London last week (here’s a picture). Christoph Schneider and I wondered about the possibility of setting up a conference on Maximus at the Cambridge Orthodox Institute and getting David Bradshaw (Aristotle East and West) over to the UK.

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Tyndale House summer conference

The Tyndale Fellowship groups – OT, NT, Biblical Theology, Doctrine and more – meet in Cambridge in July.

‘Political Theology’ is the theme for the Ethics and Social Theology group. Papers include

Jonathan Chaplin The Bible, the State and Religious Diversity: Theological Foundations for ‘Principled Pluralism’

David McIlroy The Right Reason for Caesar to Confess Christ as Lord: O’Donovan and Arguments for a Christian State

Douglas Knight The Church, the State and the Archbishop: the Fretful Audiences of Rowan Williams

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Human Fertisation and Embryology Bill

We believe the issues raised in this Bill are among the most important we will confront politically in our lifetime.

Catholic cabinet ministers, such as Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, Defence Secretary Des Browne and Welsh Secretary Paul Murphy, are finding themselves in a difficult position over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Their religious beliefs mean they would have conscience problems voting in support of parts of this Government Bill, such as the creation of animal-human hybrids, removal of the need for a father, and further experimentation on embryos.

Christian Concern for our Nation has produced a briefing paper on the Bill and there’s a Time to Draw the Line video

MPs have expressed “dismay” that the fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, granted licences to researchers to create animal-human hybrid embryos before the House of Commons has voted on whether the creation of these embryos is legal. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, the MPs said the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authorityâ??s decision â??makes a mockery of Parliamentâ??.

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On the way to Easter – Lent 5

In our journey towards Easter we have seen that Christ is anointed and made king by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit has brought us into the communion and body of Christ, so that we are anointed with him and he with us. We have seen that Christ is our universal human-to-human mediator. He is the one who can hear and receive all other humans. The question to us is whether we are ready to receive through him the whole human race and created order as the gifts of God. Christ makes himself present only in this disguised form, so that our freedom to receive this life from him, or not to receive it, is entirely ours.

Consequently man is a mystery that cannot be controlled. It is not just man’s present, defined by the limits of our imagination, but his future that God has at heart here. God is guardian of our freedom: he does not let us give it away. We have seen man wrestle with the question of his own identity. We have seen this wrestling spelled out to us in terms of the accuser wrestling in the wilderness with Christ, Israel wrestling with Moses, Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well wrangling with Christ about where life can be accessed. Through these are many different encounters, we have seen man wrestling with the dark figure of his own future. This future is life with God. This week Lazarus anticipates Israel – All Israel will be raised and the Church will be raised.

On the Way to Easter – Lent 5

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Nation of Bastards

Douglas Farrow Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage

“Erudite and impassioned – an act of faith and of resistance to the insidious claims of the post-Christian and post-liberal state.” F. C. Decoste, Professor of Law, University of Alberta

A brilliant exposé of the implications of same-sex marriage – and a compelling analysis of what it will take for society to reclaim the birthright of freedom it has lost in a reckless social experiment.

To some, same-sex marriage is evidence that society has finally come of age. To others, it is yesterday’s issue, posing no danger to traditional marriage. To still others – McGill University’s Douglas Farrow among them – it has turned civil society on its ear, creating a new political situation in which several things are no longer clear:

Is the state the property of the citizenry? Or are citizens, with their cherished personal associations, including marriage, now the property of the state?

Who “owns” the children, now that natural parenthood had been replaced by legal parenthood?

Is the family still “the natural and fundamental group unit of society,” as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights claims? Or is the concept of the “natural” moribund?

See McGill’s Pluralism, Religion and Public Policy. Farrow’s first and colossal book was Ascension and Ecclesia. Ten years on I am still living out of it.

And an equally wonderful work that takes a long look at the theological history of marriage is

Christopher C Roberts Creation and Covenant:The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

R. R. Reno, Creighton University
“Sexual ethics and gay marriage — Creation and Covenant is essential reading for anyone who wants to think about these issues in light of the Western Christian tradition. Roberts helps us see and resist the Gnostic temptation that so dominates the moral imagination of modern culture….A very fine book – just the sort of patient survey of the classical tradition we need, and absolutely on target as far as the core theological issue is concerned. It’s the sort of book that will be very helpful for teaching a seminar on sexual ethics.”

-Timothy Radcliffe, OP
“The question of the significance of sexual difference is at the heart of many divisions within contemporary society. …Roberts’ contribution to the debate is forceful and scholarly, while always charitable. This powerfully argued case for the abiding importance of our sexual identity shows how rich can be the contribution of the Christian tradition to our society’s present search to understand the meaning of our lives. …It will help us all in our journey towards understanding who we are in Christ.”

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First time

This is the first time that church-going has been adduced as a reason for declaring a couple to be unsuitable for fostering.

Cranmer

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India's two plagues

Cardinal Telesphore Toppo, archbishop of Ranchi, after a visit to the stricken zones, described what he had seen to the agency “Asia News” in this way:

“An expanse of ashes is what remains in the areas stricken by anti-Christian violence at Christmas in Orissa. It was diabolical; churches desecrated and houses burned. The villages upon which the extremist Hindu violence fell are today a vast cremation ground.”

Raphael Cheenath, the archbishop of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, the diocese hardest hit, in an assessment of the attacks released at the end of January numbered the victims at 6 dead and 5,000 homeless, and the destruction at 70 churches, 600 houses, 6 convents, and 3 seminaries. The Indian bishops’ conference gave the same report in a memorandum delivered to the national commission for human rights.

In his report, archbishop Cheenath points the finger at those whom he maintains are the promoters of aggression against Christians: the ideologues of intolerant Hinduism, ensconced in the group Vishva Hindu Parishad, and the members of the high castes, who are unfavorable toward the social advancement of the Dalits, the poorest, the outcast and “impure,” many of whom are converts to Christianity.

Sandro Magister India’s Two Plagues: The “Missing Women” and Violence Against Christians

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On the way to Easter – Lent 4

At Easter God completes his act of creation by raising one of us to the full definition of humankind. In Christ the whole work of creation has been successful, and that success is opened to all of us. Through the Holy Spirit Christ has attached us to himself, so that the resurrection of the first man is the beginning of the resurrection of all humanity. Easter is a preview of the consequences of this for us: Christ’s resurrection is a rehearsal for ours.

In Christ, each of us joined to every other. The Church is the companionship of God making itself tangible and corporal here. The distinctiveness of the Church from the world is the great gift that God gives the world: the world is anointed with the Church. But what the Church knows is not obvious outside the Church – it has to be confessed. The Church has to pray and to speak up for the world. The world relies on us to do this.

On the way to Easter – Lent 4