Catholicity means we do not make our own rules. Our Anglican readiness to make new rules about who may be ordained a bishop shows that we have lost touch with the church in any part of the world. Our lack of concern for the rest of the world is a lack of love. Is it really all the same to us if we do kiss goodbye to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church? For Rome, Cardinal Walter Kasper is saying that Anglicans and Episcopalians have put the movement we were making towards the unity of the Church into reverse because the started making new rules for Church order. We think we can make new rules, just for ourselves. But we may not make unilateral decisions for our corner of the worldwide church. The Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA) is only the Church when it is connected, not just to the United States, but to all the rest of the Church catholic – worldwide, historic and eschatological. In England, the Church of England is only the Church when it is connected to the rest of the Church not in England, and the Anglican church is only the Church by being connected to the non-Anglican Church. Our salvation is our being tied together, our connection, to these others, so that with them we make the whole universal body of Christ. If we loosen our connections to the rest of the Church, it is not just that we float away from the rest of body, but that the whole body starts to break up, and ceases to be that universal community of witness to God. By leaving we threaten the life even of those we leave, never mind what this does to our own life.
DiNoia on Christian humanism 1
We are not talking about revealing arcane truths in talking about the Trinity, we are talking about love, pouring itself out so that love will be returned. That is what the theology of the Trinity is about. Love will be returned in a way that is mutual, that is, it’s not a matter of simply us loving God, it’s a matter of us, altogether loving God and loving each other in God. This is the divine wisdom we have to proclaim: God wants to share the communion of the Trinitarian life with persons who are not God in Christ and the Holy Spirit.
From the perspective of the Church, this completely defines what it means to be human. That is, in view of that destiny we now understand how immense and magnificent a thing it is to be a human being. Commenting on Vatican II, the message John Paul II has affirmed over and over again to the world stresses that only Christ knows what is in man. We find the vision of what it means to be human only when we take a God’s eye view.
Short of the God’s eye view, we have nothing of the truth of the human person. I’m exaggerating, but we have only a very small core of the truth of what it means to be human. Only when we know that it is possible for human beings to share communion of the Trinitarian life, do we understand what being human is.
Augustine DiNoia Divine Wisdom and Christian Humanism
Windsor: mature study, wise and prayerful discussion
The current crisis thus constitutes a call to the whole Anglican Communion to re-evaluate the ways in which we have read, heard, studied and digested scripture. We can no longer be content to drop random texts into arguments, imagining that the point is thereby proved, or indeed to sweep away sections of the New Testament as irrelevant to today’s world, imagining that problems are thereby solved. We need mature study, wise and prayerful discussion, and a joint commitment to hearing and obeying God as he speaks in scripture, to discovering more of the Jesus Christ to whom all authority is committed, and to being open to the fresh wind of the Spirit who inspired scripture in the first place. If our present difficulties force us to read and learn together from scripture in new ways, they will not have been without profit.
Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion paragraph 61
Crux
Dear Paul
Your Luther chapter is wonderful. It is particularly wonderful when you get out of the secondary lit and into John and the Catechism. What a star Luther is. I think there is more you could quickly pick up from Jenson on Luther speech-act approach to the theology of the Word – Jenson ST2 295 ‘According to Luther the soul becomes what it hearkens to. Luther : ‘Do not be surprised that I said we must become the Word.’ The old notion was that the mind is formed by what it sees. Luther makes the mind to be formed instead by what it hears.’
But there is something much more important to say at this juncture. You are nearly out of time. If you do not submit in time those years you spent with us in London and in Germany, and the hope and effort of Colin will have been for nothing. You may not feel this as a act of judgment – and of self-harm – now, but in the long term you will. You cant help anybody outside the immediate parish without this doctorate, so if you don’t make a great lunge for it right now, you will be confining yourself to the parish for the next thirty years, unable to help the rest of us.
You have no time for anything new. So don’t bother with a final Gunton chapter. Gunton is probably everywhere in this thesis. You must now very speedily and drastically hack everything down into a smooth product. It is great to have a sense of your authorial voice, but not your talking voice – don’t be chatty, get more terse. You must understand that you now have to produce a thesis-lite. You are writing for just two people who will give it a rushed reading on the train to your viva, have a bad conscience about it, and who only want to be confident that you are competent (not be troubled by having to judge whether you are brilliant or wayward). Safety first. Throw away everything that you cannot instantly clarify. None of it will be lost and whatever you throw away now can be re-included and developed later. You must finish this by kissing your summer goodbye, closing the door on the church and the family and accelerating away to the end of this thesis. You are good at winging it. Do so now. You should email every chapter at the end of every week between now and September – to Lincoln or Chris or me or anyone – just to give yourself the sense of urgency and progress you need. Don’t feel detached from the rest of us – we all feel this urgency in a much more hostile environment, and not having you around doesn’t make it any easier. I hope you will send me frequent new instalments, starting with conclusion and introduction.
Your server has bounced this mail back six times now, so I’ll post it here and hope you find it.
Good luck
DK
You renew the face of the earth
Praise the LORD, O my soul.
O LORD my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
He wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent
and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.
He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.
These all look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.
May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works-
he who looks at the earth, and it trembles,
who touches the mountains, and they smoke.
I will sing to the LORD all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live
Psalm 104 Pentecost Revised Common Lectionary
Pentecost
The Father gives the Son to the world. God presents the world with this gift of himself in the person of the Son. Then, when many ages have passed, the perfected world presents the Son to the Father, by the Spirit. The Son will present the world, in the form of the church, to the Father, to receive his inspection and approval. But the Son also continually presents the first installments of the future world, the perfected creation, to the Father. The future world is entirely present to the Father in the Son. It is created by that conversation and continuously opened by the Spirit who sustains their conversation. The future and completed world is continually given to the present world by the Spirit in the church, which is itself the body of the Son for the world. The Spirit stands in for the future act of the world. Where the world is going to be one day established in its own free and joyful activity, there the Spirit is now, representing it and preparing it for this future. The someday competent world will accompany the Spirit; it will take the action the Spirit gives it and, in the company of the Spirit, it will take what is the Spirit’s and return it via the Son to the Father. In that joint act of Spirit and world, the world will become living, active, and free.
The church is the visible tip of the not yet visible company of heaven. This company is held together by God, and made visible by him to us on earth. The church understood on this eschatological definition, holds together what would otherwise drift apart. The church sustains the world, which has no unity of its own, and so the church represents that future in which the world will be spacious and free. In raising Jesus Christ, and calling out the church, God has elected the human race. He has made the church to be the body that embodies and guarantees both plurality and unity for the world. As the church is itself the work of the Spirit, it works this priestly task of bringing the world together around the Son.
McCabe's theological social-linguistic anthropology
The Oxford Dominicans have been enjoying more publishing success as they have cleared out the desk of the great Herbert McCabe O.P. (that’s Order of Preachers, Thomas Aquinas’s Dominican teaching order). Herbert McCabe taught without bothering too much about publication, but a crucial work that he did send to the publishers is ‘Law, Love and Language’.
Here Herbert McCabe shows us that ethics is about all human action and interaction, and that we are intrinsically in conversation, all our action is response to others, and this economy of response determines our environment too. There is no split here between nature and culture (between ‘is’ and ‘ought’). There is no particular need to attribute anything here to Aquinas or Wittgenstein, for McCabe is simply saying that we are not disembodied beings isolated from another in an inert or neutral or hostile world. McCabe’s argument is simply good Christian theology, so he shows that we are not only embodied, but social and linguistic beings too. McCabe’s version of ethics as all human action is therefore very much bigger than the usual accounts of morality investigated through a small number of difficult moral problems. Herbert McCabe replaces our modern dualist account of language and life (for every thing, a word timelessly exists, so language is simply the correspondence of word to thing) with a more supple dynamic (‘aristotelian’) account which allows that what we do really alters who we are, what there is and how we relate to it. What we think of things and how we name them is not just the (post-)modern power game of the individual. We inherit and inhabit our social world along with how we think of it, as we live and interact in interlocking sets of language-speakers and communities. This deflates the (post-) modern Cartesian view which makes naming an act of power by the individual who is above all relationship and responsibility. The effect of his book is to show how in hock we are to the disembodying pull of Cartesian thought, for which turns we are essentially a demonic eye that hovers above the world. In other words, McCabe has recovered important aspects of theological anthropology and the doctrine of creation.
I’ll post some snippets from Law, Love and Language. You’ll thank me.
Maximus: participation 2
In such a person the apostolic word is fulfilled. In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17.28). For whoever does not violate the logos of his own existence that pre-existed in God is in God through diligence; and he moves in God according to the logos of his well-being that pre-existed in God when he lives virtuously; and he lives in God according to the logos of his eternal being that pre-existed in God… In this Way he becomes a ‘portion of God’ insofar as he exists through the logos of his being which is in God and insofar as he is good through the logos of his well-being which is in God; and insofar as he is God through the logos of his eternal being which is in God, he prizes the logoi and acts according to them. Through them he places himself wholly in God alone, wholly imprinting and forming God alone in himself, so that by grace he himself ‘is God and is called God’. By his gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man, and by exchanging his condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of his love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominisation. For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.
Maximus Ambiguum 7
Why I wrote 'The Eschatological Economy' 2 – Sacrifice
In The Eschatological Economy I wanted to show that there are interesting reasons why modern society wants to believe that the concept of sacrifice is vicious and outmoded. Modernity is not only mistaken about this, it is concealing something about itself. Christians certainly need to rediscover a clearer and more trinitarian account, because the concept of sacrifice is central to the gospel and cannot be removed without loss. Jesus Christ is ‘the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world’. My own professor, Colin Gunton, wanted to show that the concept of sacrifice makes sense, but he found it hard to show how. Many other theologians, like the New Testament and patristic scholar Frances Young in her ‘Sacrifice and the Death of Christ’, were saying that ancient people sacrificed, we don’t, so it difficult or even impossible for us to make sense of Christian doctrine, in terms of sacrifice at least. I was amazed to find Karl Barth saying the same thing (Church Dogmatics volume IV.1 p.275). Frances Young and Karl Barth were puzzled because they understood sacrifice as propitiation (placating a fierce judge), which seems to suggest that pain must be experienced, which is very close to saying that God demands the pain. The problem was that the concept of sacrifice had become linked in Augustinian theology to a doctrine of God that was more pagan (Stoic) than Christian.
It is part of the creed of modernity that we have left all our earlier violence and superstition behind. Just as Christianity surpassed paganism, the modern worldview believes that modernity has now surpassed Christianity. The belief that one system and one age gives way to another that is superior, is itself a ‘replacement theology’, or supersessionism. It believes that we used to be religious, but now we are not. It is up to the Christians to pop this balloon, and point out that one religion (Christianity) has been swapped for another (modernity) but it is still an open question which religion is better. Christians have to say that if a society, like ours, gives up Christianity it has not gone beyond Christianity, but simply gone back to the default position and become pagan again.
See The Eschatological Economy at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk or at Eerdmans
Windsor: prayerful teaching ministry
The place of Christian leaders â?? chiefly within the Anglican tradition, of bishops â?? as teachers of scripture can hardly be over-emphasised. The â??authorityâ?? of bishops cannot reside solely or primarily in legal structures, but, as in Acts 6.4, in their ministry of â??prayer and the word of Godâ??. If this is ignored, the model of â??the authority of scriptureâ?? which scripture itself offers is failing to function as it should. The authoritative teaching of scripture cannot be left to academic researchers, vital though they are. The accredited leaders of the Church â?? within the diocese, the bishop(s); within the Communion, the primates â?? must be people through whose prayerful teaching ministry the authority of God vested in scripture is brought to bear – in mission within the world and in wise teaching to build up the Church.
Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion paragraph 58
