Author: Douglas Knight

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Who sets the production goals for all those cultural factories of meaning?

Does the Harvard-educated manager of cultures function too much as a Nietzschean Ã?bermensch, operating upon the raw material of humanity from the supposed heights of critical understanding rather than leading from within the ranks? Will a person in a position of power who â??readsâ?? his fellow man, rather than listening to what he actually says, end up manipulating rather than serving? And toward what will the Harvard graduate manage culture? Who sets the production goals for all those cultural factories of meaning? Am I too cynical when I suspect that it will be the naked self-interest of those who have convinced themselves that culture makes no real claim of truth upon the human soul? In other words, is the new vision for general education at Harvard alarmingly illiberal?

R. R. Reno Harvard’s Postmodern Curriculum

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Providence

The Providence conference at Aberdeen was just as wonderful as anticipated. Though there were seventeen speakers, it was a comparatively small affair, and thanks to Francesca Murphy’s amazing powers of organisation and hospitality it was all most relaxed and convivial. Champions of wildly contrasting approaches chuntered happily away at every interval and supper.

Trouble is, I suppose, that it was wonderful because it was small, and it was small because so few folk from other British universities appeared, presumably because they had decided that Aberdeen was too far to go. But as Stephen Webb pointed out, only Brits would think that the journey to Aberdeen was long: Americans would consider that just a local journey .

Of the speakers, I was impressed by Charles Matthews, Stephen Webb and Philip Ziegler for extremely articulate accounts of the doctrine of providence in public theology. I particularly enjoyed talking to Matthew Levering, Hans Reinders, David Hart, Don Wood, Andy McGowan, Scott Prather, James Merrick and as ever Brian Brock.

I got drafted in to do a paper at the last minute. Here it is.

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New professorship in theology & ministry

Chair in Theology, Ministry and Education at King’s College London

The Dept of Education and Professional Studies (DEPS) invites applications from scholars to join one of its most successful and expanding research cohorts – the Centre for Theology Religion and Culture. (CTRC).

Founded by Professor Andrew Walker in 1995 CTRC is a research and teaching centre dedicated to excellence in the fields of Theological Education, Professional Development in Church ministry and Religious Education in schools. The Centre is committed to a multi-disciplinary approach to religion and culture with particular emphasis on Christian theology, social science, and philosophy. The Centre continues to oversee a large and successful MPhil/PhD programme.

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A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer’s own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries isâ??in its origins and aimsâ??a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested.

Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of powerâ??whatever beguiling ideological mask it adoptsâ??will cease to dominate the world.

This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a â??longing for the totally Otherâ?? that remains inaccessibleâ??a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any â??imageâ?? of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this â??negativeâ?? dialectic and asserted that justice â??true justiceâ??would require a world â??where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone.â??

This, would mean, howeverâ??to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbolsâ??that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead.

Benedict XVI Spe Salvi (42)

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The personhood and love of God

+?ARTHOLOMEW

By the grace of God
Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome
And Ecumenical Patriarch

To the Plenitude of the Church
Grace, mercy and peace
From the savior Christ born in Bethlehem

Christ is born, glorify Him;
Christ comes from heaven, meet Him.

Beloved brothers and children in the Lord,

It is with great joy that our Church calls us to glorify God for His loving and personal presence on earth of Christ in divino-human hypostasis, being one of the three persons of the Holy Trinity.

We must, therefore, examine very carefully the true and life-giving significance of the incarnation of the Son and Word of God. For, first, it reveals to humanity that God is personal and is made manifest to us as personal, just as He has also created us as persons; second, it reveals to us that God embraces us with His love. These two events, the personhood and love of God, express fundamental truths of our faith, which of course we have heard about many times. Nevertheless, their impact upon our lives is not as great as it should be, inasmuch as many of us do neither experience Christ’s brotherhood and His boundless love for us in a personal way, nor do we in turn return our love to Christ in order that, by sharing in His love, we may also share by grace in His other properties.

If others – who have not known Christ and, as a result, drown in their search for an impersonal being that they perceive as divine – are somewhat justified, we Orthodox Christians are not at all justified in pursuing such ways that lead to an impasse. For, instead of seeking God as person and approaching Him in the one who approach us, namely Jesus Christ, these deceived people desperately strive to become divine through their own powers, like Adam thought he could achieve by obeying the evil spirit. However, the true and personal God, who is known only through Jesus Christ – the one born in a manger out of love for us – promised us adoption and return to the bosom of the Father, as well as deification by grace through Christ. It is only through Christ that one may fulfill the universal human desire to transcend the corruption and isolation of an existence without love and the cultivation of communion among divine and human persons in love, which leads to eternity and incorruption.

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Basil

Through the Holy Spirit comes our restoration to paradise, our ascension into the kingdom of heaven, our return to the adoption of sons, our liberty to call God our Father, our being made partakers of the grace of Christ, our being called children of light, our sharing in eternal glory, and, in a word, our being brought into a state of all “fullness of blessing,” both in this world and in the world to come, of all the good gifts that are in store for us, by promise, through faith, seeing their reflection as though they were already present, we await the full enjoyment.

Sins against the Holy Spirit and against God are the same; and thus you might learn that in every operation the Spirit is closely conjoined with, and inseparable from, the Father and the Son. God works the differences of operations, and the Lord the diversities of administrations, but all the while the Holy Spirit is present too of His own will, dispensing distribution of the gifts according to each recipient’s readiness

Saint Basil On the Holy Spirit

See also Saints – Anglican, Orthodox

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Love

It is perhaps our usual assumption that we exist first, and then that we love. But let us imagine that our existence depends on our relationship with those we love. The more we love, or the more we are loved, the more existence or reality we acquire. Our being derives from the company of those who love us, and if they begin to love us less, we begin to disappear. Love is not a passion or emotion. Love is communion, made up of those relationships that give us our existence. Only love can continue to sustain us when all the material threads of life are broken and we are without any other support. If these threads are not reconnected we cease to exist; death is the snapping of the last thread. Love, or communion with other persons, is stronger than death and is the source of our existence. That ‘God is love‘ means that God is the communion of this holy trinity. God the Father would lose his identity and being if he did not have the Son. If we took away the communion of the trinity to make God a unit, God would not be communion and therefore would not be love.

John Zizioulas Lectures in Christian Dogmatics

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The rule of Christ

When we refer to the remembering of the future we part ways with the whole Western intellectual tradition. The Church confesses that Holy Spirit brings the future breaking in to history. Our kingdoms are founded on opposition to one another, each kingdom is in competition with every other. The peace of God, sustained by the rule of God, breaks into the conflict of all partial kingdoms. The Holy Spirit invades the territory we hold against all others, and brings us into the rule and the peace of God. ‘In these last days, I shall pour forth from My Spirit, upon every flesh.’ The Spirit brings all other rules and kingdoms, under the rule of Christ which brings the peace of Christ by which all things are reconciled and made peaceful. Christ brings the rule and peace of God into history. Pentecost is the fulfilment of all times.

Though many Christians assume that Pentecost and the Holy Spirit illuminate them personally, enabling them to grasp the events of history and so grow in knowledge of Christ, but this is only a partial understanding. The Spirit carries us into a new and much larger dimension, in which we are freed of all the various confinements that hold us within our individual histories or the histories of our nation or social group. The Spirit draws us into the vastly larger dimensions given by the future, in which we are free to be fully present to one another, each of us to all others without limit. The life the Holy Spirit gives us is not divided, but all at once, so for the first time we may live simultaneous to one another, in communion not delimited by space or time.

John Zizioulas Lectures in Christian Dogmatics