All men are primitives, and unless something else intervenes, all societies remain primitive. With us, Christianity intervened. Christianity was the event that brought the new circumstances that changed everything. But Christianity is a faith. We are free to receive it or not. It has forced nothing on us. We have not left primitivism entirely behind. We are not angels. All our old instincts are still with us. We merely look forward to what is not yet in our possession or in our control, and it is this looking forward that makes the open society, the society which we call ‘modern’. So you moderns have two gods – the Self and the State. You have the god of extreme individualism and the god of extreme Collectivism. Either you have Freedom but no community, or you have community but no freedom. I don't worship either of these myself. I was baptised into the one community in which freedom and continuing personal identity are established. I recommend it to you. Save yourself. Flee from idols

Now, again, as ever, the West is faced by the society by the society that is an inverse copy of it. It is faced by the cult and society that promotes community over freedom, and indeed which has no room for freedom at all. It is opposed to freedom, and regards freedom as a mistake. Freedom is an error. The demand for freedom is the one pathology which the cult is committed to eradicating. The eradication of freedom. The collective is supreme, the individual is nothing. This cult and society has both borrowed from Christianity and Judaism, and stood Christianity and Judaism on their head. It has who have stood out against Christianity, and made themselves an evil, and who have not been able to move forwards towards a more open society, but have remained primitives, who have not been part of the this success, who took no part in the building of the modern world and are unable to find any significant place in the modern economy. They represent a long howl of envy, of impotence and fury. They have shut themselves out of the modern world. They remain – and insist on remaining – in this closed, primitive economy, in which there is no forgiveness and no opportunity to receive what is new or open – unless it breaks in from outside.

The Roman conception reduces man to a single figure, to a unit and an atom. Man on this definition regards all others as a problem and a challenge. He assumes that he has to free himself from them. He can never finish this work, for it puts him against the whole world, gives him nothing in common with anyone else, undermines all attempts at comradeship. Kant is the idol and the god of the man who wants to be modern and so represents the modern way of being human. Hegel saw that this was what Kant had done, and that it made the problem acute. The individual could not accept any external restraint on himself, and so was at war with the whole world. The individual could not concede that the public world could offer him anything or demand anything from him. The individual could concede anything to our common life. For the individual, there could be no common well-being. Hegel’s response was to decide that the state is the same thing as the commonwealth. The state is the single thing that stands beyond the reach of the individual. The state is the whole form of our social life. It is the Collective, the Whole. Kant has dissolved the whole world of human intercourse into the individual. Hegel has dissolved the whole world of human intercourse into the state. The state is the only true individual. Between them, they have turned the state into an idol and a god. On this basis we have no defence against the unhappy people who want to draw all power into their own hands. Their only achievement is to turn our common life into a totalitarian state. They want to reduce all our freedom to the libertinism of sexual permissiveness. Our liberty is the liberty to swap partners and make every relationship interchangeable. The state does not want us to form any permanent attachments, and alternative focuses for our loyalty, except with itself. On this basis, the state is the one true individual, and we are all merely fragments of it.

Modernity is idolatry dear friends

The resurrection creates a new world. This is the world in which we live. The Christian gospel makes very great claims for the dignity of human beings. Impossibly great, some have said. The gospel commands us to regard every single human being as a person, so claiming for them a great range of godlike attributes. They are free. They are sovereign, independent and autonomous. They are rational. We may speak to them and they may speak to us. Each is available and accountable to every other. None is too mighty to be held accountable. You may address them and attempt to persuade them and expect that they will respond rationally. They speak for themselves so no one speak for them or take their voice away. But they must be treated as unique, they are not interchangeable, you cannot substitute one for another. They cannot be collectivised or conglomerated. This is a very high view of man. On this basis, man – every single human being – is like God, a true counterpart and companion of God. That is the new thing that the Christian gospel into human culture. It was there, implicit, in Jewish thought. Other than that, no human political culture had conceived such a revolution as this.

The culture created, or at least, transformed by the gospel, is evidence of the divine nature. It is evidence of God. It is of course not proof of God; the evidence that it represents may be overlooked, a pattern not recognised. Yet the pattern is there that reveals a history and causality. Western society is the product of the Church which the product of the resurrection.

So there is a divine character to West society and that is the aspiration to freedom. Freedom is a characteristic of God and is a gift – of the Spirit – to man. And where that gift is given, there the Church appears – that is the community which meets freely, in which every person is willing to associate themselves with all these others and to be counted as one of them, and is available to called upon by them and put themselves at the disposal of these others. In the Christian conception freedom is unthinkable without love. And love is unthinkable without freedom. You may love, but whoever you love is not bound to return that love, or to return in the way you give it. Your love cannot bind them, and certainly cannot confine them. It can only wait for them. So for Christians = and so we are able to share in the divine patience. The Lord waits at the door. He does not come and pull us out. He waits, for days, years, lifetimes, periods of time beyond our definition. The Lord waits, for us. He waits because he wants to, and yet we make him wait. So the love - and passion of God for us.

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, then you will live and increase and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

Yesterday (13 Feb 2011) was the sixth Sunday of Epiphany. Every Church of England, and every Roman Catholic, Christian will have heard this passage from Deuteronomy 30. It refers exclusively, to Israel, telling you that you are the people who entered this land and must possess it. But by extension it refers to you in the United States and every other place you live. This passage tells me who I am, for we Christians understand this promise for ourselves, discovering our inclusion on this entirely exclusive basis. So Christians in Britain have understood this to be our permission to form a sovereign nation under law and so to live well together. And on the basis of this faith, held by many generations over many centuries a culture has grown, and on the back of it, a law, a polity and a nation. This gospel has created a political culture that gives us the freedom of conscience, rule of law and conception of property that makes for a dynamic economy and prosperity.

I call heaven and earth to witness that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live?

Choose life ? that sounds easy. Who would choose anything else? The British and Europeans and all the societies that have devolved from them have, more or less, chosen life and prosperity. They have been able to do so because the covenant with Abraham and Israel came to us gentiles in the gospel and as a result of the long presence of Christians among them, British and Europeans have understood this promise for themselves. Our predecessors have made this choice for us, and as a result we have enjoyed this life and prosperity. We have to ask how we may continue to take that path so that we and our descendants may live and prosper. Whatever we do, we may ask one another whether we are making it more or less possible for our descendants to have that same life and prosperity. Modernity as paganism Our brief for these discussions has been Covenant, Hope and the Human Future. Hope and a human future depend on covenant, specifically the covenant of God with Abraham and so with Israel. We are interested in this covenant and this religion because we believe it enables us and our descendents to live well. I think our Jewish-Christian conversations might be more successful if we start in the right place. Religion is not that place. If we start with religion, you have yours, I have mine. You want to talk about football, but I want to talk about cookery. Our tastes are different, and don't give us any easy conversational openings. What we really want to know is how to live well together. Together, that is the hard bit. What we want is a shared political culture. The first thing to say is that the human being is an animal; we aspire to be the animal with civilisation, but we have to aspire to this, that is, we have to want to be more than simply creatures of our biology. First, we are pagans. Then we aspire to become more than our tribe can make us and so we desire to be the political animal, the animal who can be civil enough to sustain, not just a tribe but a society and a nation. Westerners are those whose paganism has been held more or less in check by Christian discipleship. It is held back, but hasn?t gone away; when that restraint is taken away, that old Gentile nature emerges again. Jews have never lived in a Christian world: Jews in Europe live in a pagan world with Christian veneer. When Christian discipleship wears thin, it is the pagan you see. Until you make this distinction between pagans and Christians, and see modernity as at least in part pagan, the Jewish conception of Christians is likely to be mistaken and our discussion is skewed from the outset. Of course our political cultures are shaped by religion because they are formed by our hope. We have attempted to conduct this conversation as though there were just Jews and Christians. But the context in which we both must live is formed by two entirely different religions that represent the contemporary pagan option. Modernity is one of these. Modernity is the way we are all pagans now. It is our default religion. Of course it takes a little effort to conceive of modernity as a religion because it offers us no convenient package of dogma to consider. But this means that it is for Jews and Christians to work out, by deduction from their own dogma, what the effective doctrine of modernity is. Let us have a go. In the peculiarly modern form, paganism regards man as a single, isolated being without intrinsic relation to his fellow man. Everything is a threat to him; we regard anyone outside the tribe as a threat. In the same way paganism assumes that ultimately there can be only one thing in existence, and so no God can ultimately tolerate anything beside himself. Modernity identified God in this way and got rid of him. God has disappeared because ?Man? has absorbed everything. But by absorbing everything, ?Man? becomes that very same monad god. If you don't worship the God of Abraham, you get this monad. If you despatch the monad God, you get the monadic modern Individual, and since the world is then full of monad individuals, the monad State must emerge to restrain them. Since it is not informed by the covenant of God, Modernity finds it difficult to concede the fundamental significance of any person or people. Like any other pagan, they believe that they are on their alone, and the world is a violent place and, as a result of their fears, the world is indeed violent. The pagans who imagine God in this way cram themselves into the small dimensions of the idol they construct, jettisoning responsibility and freedom in order to do so. Modernity is only able to conceptualise Christianity in terms similar to itself, as though it were a deism, and thus as a form of submission to fate, in which God is a unit of infinite will, or the infinite will is god; voluntarism and occasionalism determine the metaphysics. But Christianity holds out before us a destiny characterised by freedom, enabled by the covenant of God with Israel. But Western societies now assume that their freedom needs no continuing relationship to their history or to that covenant. A cultural self-abjuration, the result of a great ingratitude and self-reviling, is directing public policy against the faith that generated our inherited culture. Ideological Moderns want to cut themselves off from those relationships and achieve the universal through the reduction of particularities. The West is dominated by this ostensibly non-religious but thoroughly ideological monism which drives this great levelling and particularity-eradicating project. Christians and, I have always assumed, Jews are here to ask whether this phenomenon of will-and-power is turning into our de facto deity, and so to warn us that the claims that modernity makes on us are cultic. The modern misconception of God and consequent reduction of man becomes an offence when they attempt to push others, Jews and Christians included, into that same shape. When moderns insist that this present form is the only form that there may ever be, they set themselves against whatever they cannot control and so against any future that is not the mere continuation of the present. Idolatry is to give yourself to what, being a merely partial truth, has a present but no future. The responsibility of Israel to the world For Christians, Jews are the people who represent the question of the faithfulness of God to his promises and therefore put the question of the future. So I do not understand my colleagues when they suggest that the identity of Israel is no concern of Gentiles, or that Christian interest in it is some kind of intellectual take-over bid. Christians ask these questions about the relationship of covenant and future, and God's faithfulness and so of Israel?s vindication before the Gentiles. Don't take them as some kind of power-play. If Christians warn you that Western societies are no longer Christian, if ever they were, why not believe them? When you see the gentiles deserting the restraint of Christianity and reverting to paganism again, why not say that this is what they are doing? Is it not Israel?s vocation to warn all cultures that they will be destroyed if they let their idolatry rage out of control? So why not tell the heathen that they are sending their worship in the wrong direction and that their idolatry prevents them from discovering what it is to be human? When did you decide that the concept of the ?heathen? was anachronistic? Was it when you dropped the doctrine of election? Any Jewish discussion of the covenant that makes no reference to the contemporary actuality of idolatry seems untruthful and without compassion. The modern particularity-eradication project does not mean that modern European political culture treats Israel just like any other nation: it identifies Israel quite differently from any other nation, as you know. Israel lives in the world, and we Gentiles are that world in which Israel lives. Minimally, the state of Israel lives in the world of international politics. Every nation can notice that Israel lives well, and ask how it does so. It does not live as her neighbours do, in political cruelty and economic misery. It represents political and economic opportunity, as every nation not bent on self-destruction must see. So when the foreign policy of my government appears to hold Israel responsible for all the griefs of Arab world, you have to call this what it is ? British political culture in decay. Modern monism, which is that same old paganism re-appearing, has cast off its inherited Christian moral and intellectual capital, and as a direct result it losing the ability to engage in political encounter with those it cannot control and so it fails to recognise the one civil society in Middle East. We can talk to one another because we are part of the community of nations, and for much of the time we don't need to refer to religion at all. We can say that it is the vocation of every people to rule themselves just as far as they can. We can try to persuade our neighbours to rule themselves well, and so to be civil. We suggest that our particular way of ruling ourselves works, and sustains civil society best in this place and time. So it is the vocation of the nation of Israel to form its own state, and build up and defend its civil life, and the contemporary state of Israel can and does show that it sustains civil society here and now. It is a vibrant society, which builds the democratic institutions that enable individuals to exercise responsibility and to generate prosperity for themselves, and not only for citizens of Israel but for others too. But it is surrounded by those that seem unable to build their own civil societies. It therefore has to ask its neighbours whether it is their religious and political ideology that makes it impossible for considerations of common good to emerge and for those societies to become civil. Islam is the explicit theist form of the monism that dominates the Middle East. It is another articulation of the Gentile form of life, of man-without-God, shrunk to a unit of will, and unable to affirm creation and his fellow creature as good. It shares its metaphysics of voluntarism and occasionalism with modernity. Like modernity it is an ideological form of the God who admits no covenant and recognise no equal conversation partner. Confronted by the world he did not make and cannot love, the monist ?god?, turns his frustration against one particular people, and you have the honour of being that people. Islam is explicitly directed against Israel, and indeed regards itself as having superseded Israel. You should recognise this, but how to reply to it? Theological analysis of Islam as political culture enables us to keep the conversation civil. Since they do not acknowledge the covenant of God with Israel or the doctrine derived from it man is made in the image of God, Modernity and Islam have the utmost difficulty in allowing the dignity of the Other. Both are reluctant to concede the room in which civility and individual freedom and responsibility can emerge. They do not take up the challenge of new encounters with people from outside the tribe, in a secular sphere that cannot controlled, and so only a very stunted civil society and economy appears. You can ask questions about Islam?s ability to create nations and civil societies, ask whether it can allow a middle-class to emerge and can ever permit its adherents definitively to put civil strife behind them. Ask your Muslim neighbours to convert to Judaism. You find this thought too ludicrous? Then content yourselves with asking your Muslim neighbours why they are so politically backward. What curse are they under? Christianity free-rides on Israel and grateful. Islam free-rides on Israel and is enraged . The difference between this thanksgiving and that rage is the difference between civilisation and reversion to tribalism. Westerners have to know that their inherited, Christian, culture enables an entirely different degree of civility than has ever emerged under Islam. But the Western self-hatred articulated by ideological Modernity finds a counterpart in the resentment of the West articulated by Islam. In London these two forms of resentment and mutual incomprehension seem to have reached a deal. Islam can have the future if modernity can hold onto the present just a little longer. Pagan man is in misery. It is not kind to regard him any other way. You do that by telling the Gentiles that the monist God is a killer. Sophisticated modern atheism is no refuge from him. The only way to disengage ourselves from the monist phenomenon is to exorcise the monist God by worshipping the God who has made a covenant. Only the God of the covenant enables man to be the civil animal, only his worship sustains our more or less civil global polity. We owe our civilisation to Israel. If we do not value that civilisation about all others, and insist that it is preferable to all others, we are an enemy to ourselves and to everyone around us. For civilisation is fragile and precious. You only have to whittle away at central cultural pillars like marriage for a few decades and your society will suffer a loss of confidence that will translate quickly into economic and political collapse. It is the responsibility of the one God-worshipping assembly, Jews and Christians alike, to identify as the various ways in which the man of modernity subjects himself to the undeclared gods of modernity, and by which we return to the collectivism, totalitarianism and tribalism which are always just beneath the skin. The issue of Israel is never just about Israel but always about Westerners too. No Israel, no West. So in my outrageous, imperialistic Christian way I commend to you the doctrine of the election of Israel. This people is holy: the presence of God is there, with them, and so they are the presence of God. This is what Christology secures. Through them, we discover that the truth about man is that God is with him. God regards man as his companion and friend; God is guarantor of man?s otherness from God, and of otherness of every human being from every other as of the possibility of their communion and society. Israel points to what all mankind will be, and as this holy community, in some hidden way is already what all mankind will be. Talk about the covenant and the future requires a concept of the purpose and orientation of life ? a teleology. If you don't like the concepts of witness or mission you are going to have to come up with something very similar. You could deploy what Christians would call an ecclesiology, that is, that Israel is the holy community, drawn apart from the world, in order to point to the world to something that it doesn't yet have. In her worship Israel names the right God. Worship of the God of the covenant is the one fundamental political and civil act. Gentiles can only withhold their worship from the God of Israel by giving themselves to another divinity. If they do that, they do not flourish or become what they could become. That holy assembly of Israel, and the Church, those Gentiles added to her, is the presence here of the future, and this future-orientation is what has created Western civilisation. I don't see how you get Western civilisation without this promise that man may be more than he presently is. My sermonic form with bible and lectionary must have been a disappointment to you academic sophisticates. I mean only that worship of the God of Israel, in which each generation receives this covenant for itself, is the one fundamentally civil and political act. It is intrinsic to the public task of Israel, as of the Church, to name the idols, so to restrain the power of lawlessness which otherwise threat our societies and every society, and hold God to the promise of our deliverance from them. This is not only the best thing you can do for your society and for your descendants, but it is the best thing you can do for mine. It looks to me as though Britain and Europe are on the way to one big Ash Wednesday and one long Lent. If there is life and prosperity ahead, there is a fair amount of death and adversity to endure first. If European societies emerge from that long passion, it will be because they have been preserved by the leaven of faithful Jewish and Christian communities. God has made a covenant with a promise. I suppose that this is the one thing that makes Gentiles interested in Jews. We want to see if Israel?s God can keep his word. Everything hangs on this promise. Will humanity survive? Will God be faithful? For that we will have to wait and see.

The Gospel tells us about the unity and integrity of the human being. It reminds us that each of us is a unique being, yet we are not ourselves apart from other people. Each of us exists within a series of dualities. Each of us is either a woman or a man; none is a neuter. Each is either married or single, either a parent or not a parent. Each of us is ourselves, but also someone’s sister, brother, child, parent, friend. We are not mere units, persons without relation but we exist through these many relationships.

What is more, each of us is twofold because we are who we are today, and who we will be in ten year’s time. Each of us is not only this present but that future person. The unity of this person is not the present possession of any human being, not even of that human being himself or herself. Persons are not simply individual units, for whom it would be normal to be on our own. We are related to people other than ourselves. We do not simply create our relationships by our own say-so. Some relationships we inherit, and some we hope to pass on to those who come after us. We hope to create or pass on relationships that they will be born into, and if they are willing to recognise these relationships as good, we will have done something for them. But all that depends on thinking of ourselves as persons. Christians do so, but they may be in the minority.

Christians offer their complex account of the human being. On other accounts, persons are insidiously simplified. When we do not think of ourselves as persons, but merely as individual adults, independent units who make their own decisions from their own wills without reference to anyone else, we get a simplistic account of man and a much reduced version of our vocation as economic agents. The Christian view is that we may gain freedom by undergoing our own discipleship, that is, by subjecting ourselves to voluntary restraint of freedom.

The social sciences assume that each of us is an individual on their own, a unit without relation. The more we insist on individual freedom without such self-elected restraint the more we turn the human being into a unit who exists in on-off relationships with other units. These relationships exist only as long as both units want and no moment longer. This makes us one person against the world, for whom there turns out fortuitously, just one friend.

If we turn the person into a unit, who exists in relationship with other units who have no binding and long-term relationship with him, he is effectively in long-term relationship with just one other unit – the state. The corporations serve us as long as we have got money, or can borrow it, to buy their services. But this individual freedom of choice exists only as long as we are independent adults, who pay for ourselves, which we can do as long as we are in the job market. Of course our existence as independent agents begins to wane again as soon as we leave employment again when we retire and make our descent back down into dependency. In the middle of life, we may have many relationships, mediated by the market. By our attempts to grow in freedom without taking on any discipleship and self-restraint we surrender our powers to corporations and the market. But at the beginning of life and again at the end of life we have no money, cannot pay for ourselves, so the state has to supply these service for us.

Every attempt to increase people’s personal freedom that does not start with some form of self-imposed discipleship and self-restraint, tends to shifts responsibilities from that person to the state, and so from this person to all other persons. Every attempt to increase anyone’s freedom increase the power of the state and so increases anyone else’s unfreedom. The state is our parent, partner and sole true ally. Our life would consist is attempting to squeeze more resources out of it. Paradoxically, the more demands we make of it, the more the state is paralysed by special interest lobbies and unable to make good, sparing decisions on anyone’s behalf. On this basis, the individual and the state are mirror images. Each person is a little state and the state is a big person. The two of them are locked in this claustrophobic relationship. On this basis, the state is the true person, whereas we units are persons to the degree that we are dependents of the state.

So the Christian insistence that we are complex beings, who can enforce restraint on our present selves for the sake of our future selves, and for those who come after us, is vital to the concept of freedom. And freedom we agreed is vital to those unforced transacting that characterise economic exchange. You can't have an economy without freedom. This is why the Christian view of man, as person, the complex being who is encountered only through dualities, is essential to the existence of an open economy. The Christian input, with the complex account of man who as image of God participates in love and freedom, is not only the origin of the open economy, but is essential to its continuing flourishing.

1. There are two economies, of the Church and the world. This distinction and duality is the basis of all others. Consequently, there are two contemporary economies, that of the economy of God, announced by the Christian gospel, and the modern economy, for which we have to identify a corresponding ideology of ‘Modernity’.

2. Christianity insists a person is a covenantal concept. Man is not by himself and then later with God and with his fellow-man. A person is never single before he is one-half of a couple and a member of a family. He is not alone before he is a member of society. In acting well towards his fellow man, he acts properly and for himself.

3. A person may exclusively love and unite themselves to one other person. The exclusivity and uniqueness of the two persons who irrevocably give themselves to one another is the basis of all other covenants, relationships, and so the basis of society.

4. The marriage covenant is an exclusive relationship, and the household it creates is private. Marriages may not be dissolved by the will of one partner, nor may households be dissolved or absorbed by the public square, the market or the state.

5. There are therefore two other economies, the public economy of the market, and the private economy of the household.

6. In the Church people from all stations of society stand shoulder to shoulder. The Church is the embodiment of the reconciliation of all social and ethnic opposites and so the authentic voice of society.

7. The Church is the present anticipation of the future reconciliation of all mankind. It is the voice of the future society pining and mourning for the present society that is separated and lost.

8. The Church is the community in which all are bound to each, and so it is the community in which trust is generated. The Church is the place of self-giving without calculation of return, and so of risk-taking. The two fundamental economic principles of trust and risk-taking originate in the Church.

9. In the Church persons can confess their sins, receive forgiveness and the possibility of a new start. When we take the judgment of others as an anticipation of the judgment of God, and repent, that judgment is good.

10. The Church has to name the powers. The Church has to diagnose our crises by relating them to our concept of man and its various reductions. It has to identify them as both the judgment of society on itself, and of the judgment of God.

11. The Church that is confident in the covenant of God and the promise of redemption can identify crises without fear, and give warning of disaster to whichever society it is sent.

12. The state is the result of all our individual inclinations to refer our own responsibility away. The excessive extent to which we do this accumulates this power in the centre without control.

13. The Church will survive a collapse of any state. The British people, and the virtues they have received via the Church, will survive it, and may only survive if they go through crises and collapse. Any crisis is a correction. The more we attempt to postpone our rendezvous with reality, the more traumatic that eventual correction will be.

14. Western, modern economics insists that payment by money fulfils and terminates a contract and releases its parties from all obligation and that money establishes full payment and remittal. Non-modern economics insists that there is no form of accounting or payment by which the relationship of any two agents can be finally closed. No debt can be entirely paid off; every relationship remains open; nothing begun can easily be ended. Payment of money does not spare us future requests or release us from the obligation of meeting them.

15. Our debt to past generations may motivates us to reproduce, to bring about the continuation of society and so give a future to our past. The faith that holds together ‘was’ and ‘is’, may understand that ‘is’ as ‘ought’, and so turn that ‘is’ into ‘will be’. Non-societies understand that each generation is in debt to all previous ones, and consequently to future generations.

16. Christians witness to those fundamental sources of economic subsistence, which promote the household and the dignity of labour and service, and in which, through informal accounting and an economy of favours, social capital remains developed and the human economy remains resilient.

17. The gospel has enabled the economic development of the West. Though the contemporary economy has arisen from a culture shaped by Christianity, the modern economy takes its definition from an antipathy to that culture. But Christianity is not identical with that culture or that economic path. The Church has resources that describe other forms of economics, and Christians model alternative economies. Though the Christian faith points us towards principles, it does not commit us to any model.

18. In faith, hope and love, Christian life models the form of life that points towards flourishing that is lasting, and so is both future and properly present.

19. Christian theological economics is a series of questions that may be put to pagan economics by which it can be kept within approximate restraint.

20. No nation lasts forever. Only the Church itself has the promise of eternal life.

Let's call it the Augustine Group. Why Augustine? Because it was Augustine who said that there are two cities, that is, two societies – the Church and the world. In the ‘City of God’ Augustine says there are these two distinct communities, one is hidden in the other. There is ‘Society’, our nation or whatever other community we identify with, and within it there is that other community we call the Church. Everything that we have to say depends on the distinction between Society and the Church, or between the Church and the world, or between the Christian and non-Christian. The distinction between them and the comparison between them that it allows us to make, is the basis of any Christian contribution to economics. We simply contrast these two societies.

Our starting point is that Christian baptism is the fundamental distinction. The non-baptised non-Christian is the man of the present. The baptised, the Christian, is the man of the present and the future. He is present, here and now, but the future is also hidden within him. The non-Christian is the creature of just one time – this time, now. But the Christian is man of two times, the present and the future, and he combines the present and future. He binds this present fragmentary time into that whole and entire time, so that through him what is partial receive its renewal from the whole. He combines the short-term and the long-term, so that together they belong to the that unbroken time we call eternity.

The Church is the economy of love. It is exactly like any a single household, made of members of a family who love one another. The Church is a single family; its members treat one another as brothers and sisters, parents and children. They do not charge one another for their services because they do not regard each other as members of different households.

We can not only say that there are two societies, but also that there are two economies, the present worldly economy and the present-and-future eternal economy. The present worldly economy is one in which men compete for glory and honour, but within it there are little economies – households – in which a man and woman are bound to one another in love. The Church is that unique entity that combines these two, for it is the household united by love which extends to include all. It is the world become a single family and household. This enables us to ask what features of this economy will help it to last and so to have a future (and stretch towards eternity), and to ask what features make the future of this economy more doubtful. The contrast between the economy of the Church and the economy of the world enables us to ask about the long-term of the economy of the world, and so the contrast between them is the basis of any Christian analysis of economics and the economy.

Why is our economy in trouble?

Our economy is in trouble because our culture is in trouble. Our culture is in trouble because it has adopted a dramatically reduced account of the human person. It has adopted this reduced account of the person because it does not care to hear the Christian gospel which tells us that man is made for love and freedom in relationship with God and his fellow human beings. Because it does not care to hear about this love, our culture is no longer confident of the value and significance of human beings. Our economic crisis reflects a crisis of cultural confidence that reflects a crisis of faith. Man is not convinced that he has a future, and this loss of confidence has eroded his long-term perspective and stalling our economy. Let us take a look at some of the connections between gospel, culture and economy that are at the root of our economic situation...

Read on

The financial crisis that we are suffering represents the crisis in confidence of this society. We can no longer be taken at our word because we ourselves do not believe our ourselves. It is us who do not believe that our word is our bond or that we are good for the money. Money is a series of promises: a proportion of these promises have to be kept, and when that proportion is too low, no one believes our promises. This society’s crisis in confidence in itself is the result of its result to believe that it is indeed good for its promises. It is a blue funk. The nation that is prepared to hear that it is loved, because all mankind is loved, by God, will not suffer any final crisis of self-belief. But the nation that does not want to hear the news of the fundamental covenant of God with man will find no other comfort. The unwillingness of this country to hear about any relationship with God results in this crisis that we have described variously as ecological, moral, social and economic.

One reason for this crisis is that that the Church has not clearly told this country that man is loved by God and that this country is also founded in that love and covenant. The Church has not passed on to the comfort of God, and so the Church has been unfaithful to the nation, and the nation is suffering as a result. The Church must repent. This is what Lent is. Now the Church will suffer. It must suffer for the sake of the world, and the Church here is going to suffer for this country. This country is going to undergo a great panic because it has no hope, and it back to find out that all its hopes are delusory. The Church will suffer the rage of a panicked and anguished nation.

During Lent those who are going to be received into the Church in baptism undergo a preparation and an unburdening, and the whole Church accompanies them in this. For the Church knows the joy of repentance, of honest speech, and unburdening ourselves. The Church can repent and beg for forgiveness. The Church can repent of having failed to be the intercessor and prophetic and priestly intermediary for the country.

We can only wonder at, and try to recapture for ourselves, the insight shown by the early Christians and by Christians down to the beginning of the second millennium, who placed the Christ of the ascension in the dome of their churches. When the faithful gathered to manifest and become the body of Christ, they saw their Lord both as present and as coming. He is the head and draws his body toward the Father while giving it life through his Spirit. The iconography of the churches of both East and West during that period was as it were an extension of the mystery, of the ascension throughout the entire visible church. Christ, the Lord of all" (Pantocrator), is "the cornerstone which the builders had rejected"; (5) when he is raised up on the cross, he is in fact being raised to the Father's side and, in his life-giving humanity, becomes with the Father the wellspring of the river of life. (6)

The ascension of the Lord was thus really the new space for the liturgy of the last times, and the iconography of the church built of stone was its transparent symbol. (8) In his ascension, then, Christ did not at all disappear; on the contrary, he began to appear and to come. For this reason, the hymns we use in our churches sing of him as "the Sun of justice" that rises in the East. He who is the splendor of the Father and who once descended into the depths of our darkness is now exalted and fills all things with his light.

Our last times are located between that first ascension and the ascension that will carry him to the zenith of his glorious parousia. The Lord has not gone away to rest from his redemptive toil; his "work" (Jn 5:17) continues, but now at the Father's side, and because he is there he is now much closer to us, "very near to us," (9) in the work that is the liturgy of the last times. "He leads captives," namely, us, to the new world of his resurrection, and bestows his "gifts," his Spirit, on human beings (see Eph 4:7-10). His ascension is a progressive movement, "from beginning to beginning." (10)

Jesus is, of course, at his Father's side. If, however, we reduce this "ascent" to a particular moment in our mortal history, we simply forget that beginning with the hour of his cross and resurrection Jesus and the human race are henceforth one. He became a son of man in order that we might become children of God. The ascension is progressive "until we all ... form the perfect Man fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself" (Eph 4:13). The movement of the ascension will be complete only when all the members of his body have been drawn to the Father and brought to life by his Spirit. Is that not the meaning of the answer the angels gave to the disciples: "Why are you Galileans standing here looking into the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come back in the same way as you have seen him go to heaven" (Acts 1:11). The ascension does not show us in advance the setting of the final parousia; it is rather the activation of the paschal energy of Christ who "fills all things" (Eph 4: 1 0). It is the ever-new "moment" of his coming.

Jean Corbon The Wellspring of Worship

How central to the Christian understanding of the meaning of marriage is the sexual difference between men and women? It is this question that Christopher Roberts addresses in his Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage, and no one paying attention to the arguments about the blessing of same-sex unions in the Christian churches will want to ignore it. Roberts says he aims to raise the level of the theological conversation now dominated by questions of the justice of treating heterosexuals and homosexuals equally. Have most Christian thinkers thought sexual difference to be morally and theologically important? If so, does the contemporary discussion take account of their insights and arguments?

* *

Roberts writes with a shrewd eye for our contemporary predicament. â??We cannot imagine existing in our culture without the haven of an erotic partnership,â?? he writes, â??because our capacity to belong together in more chaste ways is so limited.â?? Here, he faults our failure to make possible â??a social life of lay celibacy.â?? He notes that it is not only advocates for same-sex unions who want to redefine marriage. â??Reclaiming the theological tradition about sexual difference would entail not only a chastening word to the revisionist theologians but also a thoroughgoing revolution for almost all Christians.â?? Would we not, for instance, have to put some daylight between the public social life of Christians and contemporary youth culture as celebrated by the media? With this book, Roberts has tried to raise the standard of theological argument about same-sex unions, and in this he succeeds admirably.

Guy Mansini reviewing Christopher Roberts' Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

Maximus views the liturgy thus: the first entrance of the bishop signifies the first coming of Christ and his saving passion; the bishop’s entering the sanctuary and mounting the throne is nothing less than Christ’s ascension into heaven and sitting on the heavenly throne; the reading of the Gospel signifies the end of this world, and the bishop’s descent from the throne his second and glorious coming; the dismissal of the catechumens is the final judgment; and all that follows belongs to the life of the future kingdom of Heaven. It is the eschaton made present: union of all with God as he is.

The ‘liturgical becoming’ reaches its fulfilment when the bishop-‘Christ’ makes the invisible future kingdom present to the faithful. He distributes, as it were, himself to the faithful in the sacrament, thus truly becoming inherent in them. The sanctuary becomes the actuality of the nave; and the future kingdom dwells in the temporal assembly of the faithful. There is, then, a ‘coinherence’, a simultaneous union and distinction of the nave and the sanctuary, of time and eternity, of man and God.

Melchisedec Törönen Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor

Every Christian doctrine is an exemplification of the Christian doctrine of God. The Christian confession of God and that God is for us, requires an account of the generous provision of God, which is what providence is, and it requires all the other doctrines that make our talk about providence meaningful. The Christian doctrine of God tells us that we are not God, and so we are discharged from the exhausting though self-imposed duty to make ourselves divine, that is to take ourselves to be everything, and also to be able to stand outside this everything and decide whether or not to affirm it. One corollary is that we can really know other people, but we cannot know them and master them utterly, because they belong not in the first place to us, but to God, who has high ambitions for them. We are not ourselves by being ‘just-human’, without God. Thus the doctrine of God gives us the truth of man, but the truth of man cannot be extracted from this doctrine and cashed out into a theory about man. Because God mystery, by which we mean he is knowable only to extent he makes himself known, and man is the creature of God, man is a mystery too. The assessment of God is that we along with rest of the world are worth waiting for, and the Church is the demonstration that this is still the good judgment – of God. The secret of being human, is hidden with God, and only in communion with him, can we be human, together, with other humans.

The Son and the Spirit in the Providence of God – John Zizioulas on time and communion

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

Teaching Christian doctrine can start from a number of places. Indeed, it must start from several places and then show the relationships between them. It can start from:

(1) the evangelical narrative - the bible (2) the set of doctrines developed from that narrative (3) the history of the development of doctrine (4) the worship of the Church – what Christians say and sing in Church (5) what Christians do – Christian ethics, ecclesiology, mission and pastoral concerns

Christian doctrine must take each of these as its own proper starting place and responsibility. It cannot simply take one as its sole proper field. Christian doctrine must link these together. It must show how all these are necessary, and how each refers to all the others. It starts by listing them and then showing their unity and their purpose. This involves translating religious concepts into commonplace non-religious language.

In preaching we give a narrative of Jesus Christ. After preaching we submit ourselves to criticism. Our colleagues must check that we are not leaving out any part of the gospel. Creeds and doctrines are propositional summaries of the many individual accounts of the gospel we give. Christian doctrines represent a check list against which to check the adequacy of our narrative accounts. Each individual doctrine must be related to all other doctrines. We have to check out narrative accounts against these check-lists to make sure we have been telling truly the whole story of Jesus, not some over-simplification that will eventually turn into a falsification of it. Christian doctrine course requires both narrative accounts and straight statements - propositions - of doctrine, and links back and forth between the two. It also requires open discussion to test the adequacy of our narrative and propositions.

Inasmuch as doctrine limits itself to (2) the set of doctrines and (3) the history of its development, it falsifies its own proper object – which is what has occurred for many generations, with the results we see. As long as these different starting points are taught as different modules, this state of affairs and resulting Christian crisis of confidence will continue.

In the De Decretis Athanasius argues against the opinion he had heard Eusebius express that the Son alone participates in the Father while we participate in the Son. If that were so, we would then be the Son's sons. Rather, we are sons of the same Father as the Son is, our sonship being granted to us in accordance with our virtue, so that some sit on the twelve thrones, while others occupy lower places. Yet in a deeper sense the Son does participate in the Father. In the Contra Arianos Athanasius equates participation in the Father with the Father's begetting. But since the essence of God cannot be divided, his begetting the Son means that he communicates himself wholly to the Son. When men partake of God, they therefore partake of the Son, 'for that which is partaken of the Father is the Son'. Thus when men are said to 'participate in the divine nature', it means that the Son communicates himself to them.

This dynamic participation in the Logos is only possible because of the Incarnation and indeed is dependent specifically upon a Logos-sarx christology. When the Logos assumed a human body, he became the subject by the communicatio idiomatum of what the body experienced. 'For what the human body of the Logos suffered, this the Logos, being united to the body, ascribed to himself in order that we might be enabled to participate in the godhead of the Logos'. By participating in the deified humanity of the Logos we participate in his impassible divinity, because the flesh has been endowed with divinity, just as the divinity has been endowed with humanity. Athanasius is silent about the soul, which in Origen plays an important part in mediating between the Logos and the flesh. In Athanasius' view, because the Incarnation has transferred our nature to the Logos, we participate in the divine nature simply by participating in the humanity of the Logos.

Our participation in the Logos is made possible by the Spirit: 'for through the Spirit we are all called partakers of God'. That is to say, we participate in the Son through baptism. The Spirit is the chrism and the seal with which the Logos anoints and seals us, making us, as it were, the fragrance of Christ. Another way of putting it is to say that the Son is life-in-itself, the Spirit is life-giving and the faithful are life-endowed. It is because the Spirit is divine that he is able to make us 'partakers of the divine nature', that is, of Christ, for the divine nature is not impersonal. Through the Spirit we become 'partakers of Christ and partakers of God'.

Norman Russell Partakers of the Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4) in the Byzantine Tradition

And have you seen Norman Russell The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition ?

The Aquinas Center for the Theological Renewal Spring Newsletter indicates that they are having a busy time at Ave Maria (FL).

There are a couple of strong book series. Out or forthcoming from Sapientia Press are:

Francis Martin’s Sacred Scripture: Disclosure of the Word

Benedict Ashley OP The Ashley Reader

Guy Mansini’s Promising and the Good

Avery Cardinal Dulles SJ Magisterium

Steven Long The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Object

William Brennan John Paul II’s Confrontation with the Language Powering the Culture of Death

John Paul II and St.Thomas Aquinas

and Aquinas the Augustinian (CUA)

David Dalin & Matthew Levering (eds) John Paul II and the Jewish People (Rowman & Littlefield)

Then there are conferences

Humanae Vitae: 40 Years Later We are pleased to announce our upcoming conference Humanae Vitae: 40 Years Later, February 1–2, 2008 at Ave Maria University, including the following distinguished speakers:

Janet Smith, Sacred Heart Paul Gondreau, Providence College Mark Johnson, Marquette University Joseph Koterski, SJ, Fordham University Fr.Antonio Lopez, John Paul II Institute Graham McAleer, Loyola College in Maryland Tracey Rowland, John Paul II Institute (Melbourne, Australia) Michael Sherwin, OP, University of Fribourg David L. Schindler, John Paul II Institute Michele Schumacher, University of Fribourg Mary Shivanandan, John Paul II Institute Michael Waldstein, International Theological Institute

So not a single UK Catholic theologian able to speak on this subject? But wait, further on in the same newsletter, there is this:

The upcoming issue of Nova et Vetera—5:2 (2007)—celebrates the work of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. Authors for the special issue include Francesca Murphy, Geoffrey Wainwright, Aidan Nichols OP...

Two are of these are international superstars, but more exciting is that one of these is British and works in a British university - Francesca Murphy of Aberdeen. Does this mean that the UK finally has one academic theologian who has noticed the documents that have been pouring out of the Vatican these last thirty years, faster now than ever, and is interested in teaching it? I hope British Catholic students are knocking her door down.

'Celebrates the work of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI?' About time. I have been dancing the streets, alone, for a while now.

The spiritual theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662), writing long before the introduction of Aristotle to the medieval West, likewise insisted that soul and body together constitute the human being. Taking as his basis the Incarnation of the divine Logos, he argued that the genesis of soul and body is strictly simultaneous. â??The soul arises at conception simultaneously with the body to form one complete human being. . . . There is no temporal hiatus (diastema) of any kind within the nature itself or among the reciprocal parts of which it is constituted.â?? This, by the way, is why it may be said that the Annunciation, not Christmas, is the chief feast of the Incarnation. If the individual human being is an integrated, composite whole, then this is how he must be from the very moment of his existence. In this conviction Maximus was more certain than the Scholastic philosophers, who held the view that an embryo becomes human only after it has attained â??a sufficiently advanced state of bodily development.â??

For Thomas, any purely philosophical judgment on whether the soul is created at the moment of conception had to conform to what could be ascertained by empirical means. Given the limits of medieval physiology, Thomas was constrained to accept the Aristotelian theory of the soulâ??s progressive generation and avoid any absolute, categorical affirmation that the soul is created at precisely the same moment as physical conception. Such reluctance was entirely in keeping with his theory concerning the limits of rationally attainable knowledge. Of course, he knew that there exists a higher form of knowledge, namely, divine revelation, by which one can affirm, specifically on the basis of the miraculous conception of the incarnate Word, that at least Christâ??s body and soul coexisted from the moment of their coming into being.

Even so, medieval philosophy left it to Maximus to draw far-reaching conclusions about the nature of every single human being on the basis of Christâ??s human constitution. But it would be wrong to conclude that his thoughts on the matter were derived exclusively from religious belief. For he asserts that even at death, when the soul and body are temporarily separated, the fundamental principle of generation (logos geneseos), by which from their inception soul and body are simultaneously constituted as parts of a whole in a permanent and natural relation (pros ti), remains intact. Here Maximus is clearly drawing on philosophical categories derived from Aristotle, most likely via the sixth century Neoplatonic commentators. On this basis, when speaking of a personâ??s body or soul in the separated state after death, he argues that neither may be referred to simply as soul or body but always as the soul or the body of this or that person: someoneâ??s body, someoneâ??s soul, each an essential part of an irreducible, personal whole. In sum, â??the relation between them is immutable.â??

Adam Cooper Redeeming Flesh (First Things subscription required)

Adam Cooper The Body in Saint Maximus: Holy Flesh Wholly Deified

According to the Pope's 'nuptial anthropology', marriage partners are not merely turned towards one another in a dualistic relationship: they are also open towards a third, towards the child which expresses the unity of both in one flesh. Angelo Scola describes the structure of this relationship as one of 'asymmetrical reciprocity'. It is precisely in this respect that marriage mirrors the relations of the Holy Trinity. The mystery of the Mass has the same root as Christian marriage. The union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride the Church is a covenant in the Holy Spirit. The liturgy enacts the marriage of the Lamb, combining the wedding banquet of the Last Supper with the redemptive act of the Passion. Furthermore the trinitarian character of the Mass makes it 'asymmetrical' in the same way that marriage is asymmetrical (cf. Ephesians 5:31-2).

The 'watermark' of the Trinity is found throughout all of creation at every level, wherever the distinct identities of two things are preserved (and deepened) by uniting them in a third. Human and divine natures are united in the Person of the Son (Chalcedon). God and humanity are united in the sacrament of the Church (Vatican II). Man and woman are united in the 'one flesh' of marriage. Reason and feeling are united in the intelligence of the heart.

The 'watermark' of the Trinity is found throughout all of creation at every level, wherever the distinct identities of two things are preserved (and deepened) by uniting them in a third. Human and divine natures are united in the Person of the Son (Chalcedon). God and humanity are united in the sacrament of the Church (Vatican II). Man and woman are united in the 'one flesh' of marriage. Reason and feeling are united in the intelligence of the heart.

One surprising conclusion from this might be that many seemingly unrelated problems in the Church have a common cause. The crisis over sexuality, brought into the open by the reaction to Humanae Vitae in 1968, stems from the mentality that fails to understand the true nature of the 'asymmetric' relationship between man and woman. This is the same mentality that fails to understand the relationship between priest and people in the liturgy. This failure may express itself either in a clerical domination of the laity, or in a reversal of that relationship that eliminates all sense of the transcendent. On the one side, we find a poisonous cocktail of clericalism, aestheticism and misogyny. On the other, we observe politically correct liturgies devoted to the themes of justice and peace: everyone sitting in a circle, passing the consecrated chalice from hand to hand, with the priest improvising parts of the eucharistic prayer in order to make it more relevant and friendly. The icy 'coldness' of clericalism is answered by the melting 'warmth' of the community-oriented Mass, and the sentimental empowerment of the laity. It is hard to say which is worse.

The post-conciliar period emphasized the horizontal dimension of the liturgy (social concern) over the vertical (the act of worship). Whole religious orders went into decline as the communitarian aspect of their mission took precedence over the liturgical, the love of neighbour over the love of God. But according to trinitarian anthropology, the human person is by its very nature other-centred. We love God, and this opens us to the life of the other; we love our neighbour, and this opens us to the love of God. The love of God sends us out to do good, because it reveals who we are, self and neighbour both. We are then not (only) imitating the love of God that we see demonstrated in the liturgy, but living the liturgy out in the world. The liturgy is not (merely) separate in a horizontal sense from what goes on outside, but separate in the sense of being 'interior', of revealing the inner meaning and purpose of what lies outside. Sacred space, sacred time and sacred art are distinctive, not (just) as belonging to a parallel world, but as defining the centre of this world: the world in which we live and work.

Stratford Caldecott Liturgy and Trinity: Towards an Anthropology of the Liturgy - Second Spring (see Mystagogy)

In a Lent talk for Radio 4 Canon Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, poured scorn on the penal substitution account of the atonement. Jeffrey John, a wonderful communicator, communicated that the Christian Church has been teaching a vicious God. Canon John identifies the appalling doctrine the whole Church has been mistakenly though uniformly teaching from the beginning until now ('Canon' means the standard approved by and for the teaching of the Church).

Tom Wright now replies on Fulcrum. He does a very interesting thing. For what seems to me to be the first time Bishop Tom argues from a document of the Church (He does of course argue from documents in the Windsor process, but that is about church order, whilst this is about doctrine). It is a not very impressive but nonetheless very useful little report of the Doctrine Commission entitled The Mystery of Salvation. There is nothing like arguing from documents which have some measure of formal assent from the Church, the doctrine of which you took vows at your ordination to uphold. Failure to uphold that doctrine is to contradict yourself, which no one hurries to do.

The Mystery of Salvation notes that substitutionary atonement is taught in the Thirty-Nine Articles, and that this enshrines ‘a vital truth’, which can best be got at through the language of ‘vicarious’ suffering (p. 212). And, while perfectly properly emphasizing that the ultimate subject of the action in the death of Jesus is God himself (presumably God the Father), the Report notes (p. 213), immediately after the passage quoted from the 1938 Report to which Dr John refers (‘the notion of propotiation as the placating by man of an angry God is definitely unChristian’), that ‘it is nevertheless true that in Paul’s thought the effect of expiation is the same as that of propitiation – to neutralise the sin that is the cause of God’s displeasure and so to avert God’s wrath (however that should be understood).’ While noting the obvious problems with a crude doctrine of propitiation (a loving Jesus placating a malevolent God), the Report goes on to point out (p. 214) that both Athanasius and Augustine, as well as Calvin, spoke in terms of God himself providing the propitiation for his own wrath. The problem of the crude formulation was, in other words, already well known in the Greek and Latin Fathers, and this did not prevent them from continuing to see Jesus’ death in terms of propitiation even while insisting that the work from start to finish was the result of God’s love. Granted, the 1995 Report does scant justice to the history of the idea of substitution, both penal and otherwise, giving the bizarre impression that the idea was merely invented by Anselm and developed by Calvin, as though it were not also to be found in several of the Fathers, a good many of the mediaeval writers, and more or less all the Reformers, not least Martin Luther. But that is only to say that the Report, like all such productions, should not be taken as a definitive account either of what Anglicans are supposed to believe or of what they believe in fact.

We might also note that the 1995 Report had also spoken, earlier, of Jesus as having ‘died our death, sharing our failure, condemnation, despair and godforsakenness’ (p. 103, italics added). Earlier again, and more fully (and answering in a measure to Jenson’s request for the story of the cross to be more biblically rooted), the Report stated:

In going to the cross, Jesus acted out his own version of the total story, according to which Israel, represented by himself, must be the people in and through whom the creator God would deal with the evil of the world and of humankind. The cross, as the execution of Israel’s Messiah outside Jerusalem at the hands of the pagans, was thus the great summation of Israel’s exile, which was itself the fulfilment and completion of the ambbiguous and tragic story of Israel as a whole. At the same time, the cross was the supreme achievement of Israel’s God, returning to Zion as he had promised, to deal with his people’s sins and their consequences.

Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham The Cross and the Caricatures - a response to Robert Jenson, Jeffrey John, and a new volume entitled Pierced for Our Transgressions

It is great to see that this very great (Anglican) biblical scholar, Tom Wright, has caught on to that very great (Lutheran) systematic theologian, Robert Jenson, even so demonstrating how wide the gulf between biblical and dogmatic theologians is.

There is one Anglican systematic theologian who examines the theology of Jenson and Wright in a long conversation about the relationship of biblical studies and doctrine and its implications for the atonement, including even penal substitution. His book is entitled The Eschatological Economy, and you can read the relevant sections on atonement, substitution, sacrifice, representation ('for us', 'in our place') in its chapters 3 and 4 here at Google Book. I'll put a copy in the post to Bishop Tom.

Why is it that we moderns are so confused about the sources of our identity? We cannot decide whether we are essentially bodies, and must obey the dictates of our biology, or whether our bodies are simply vehicles which we can use or abuse, as though nothing our body does really touched us.

The modern self is a solitary and solipsistic being. It regards itself as the only real thing, and is determined not to be interrupted and inconvenienced by anything or anyone not itself. The Christian tradition calls this attitude ‘gnosticism’. This is the belief that I am solely my mind, and that I am trapped in my body, and in this world. It asserts that my mind can know the world, and other people, entirely without their aid and begin to extract itself from the limits they represent. Gnosticism is a panicked attempt to escape my past, my present situatedness, and all the plurality and ambiguity of life. It views embodiedness as entanglement and misfortune. It is a permanent temptation to believe that we are to remove ourselves from what it regards as the entangling, disgusting materiality and complications of this world and set ourselves above them.

Modernity is not simply a new phenomenon. It is also a timeless temptation. But it is only properly identified as this by the Church disciplined by the full gospel. The whole Christian tradition is our very own corporate memory. From this bank of resources constituted of all previous Christian experience, we may select parallels to our present experience. From these parallels we can see the range of options open to us for dealing with the challenges of our situation. If we have less memory, we have fewer resources by which to understand our circumstances and fewer options for dealing with them. The grace of God provides us with these resources for the very purpose that we grow through them and are empowered by them. The Christian life and teaching is the grace of God mediated through the experience of previous generations of Christians. It allows to us grow and become a holy people, able to hold out to our society what it cannot receive from any other source.

The whole surrounding culture of modernity is a flight from embodiedness and situatedness. Without the Christian gospel mediated through the Christian life and teaching, our culture is obliged to construct for itself what it refuses to accept from God. It is under a harsh law, entirely self-imposed. Unable to receive its shaping with gratitude, it is then only able to perceive others as a threat. This appears in its belief that all previous experience is rendered redundant by time, and its insistence that we abandon our experience and we flee whatever we identify as ‘the past’.

No Lack of Love - the Fulcrum sermons of Oliver O'Donovan

The first symptom is Europe's refusal to mention its Judeo-Christian roots in the Preamble to the European Constitutional Treaty, which, following the French and Dutch referendums, has now failed. The title itself is revealing of an ambiguity. A Treaty is not a Constitution and a Constitution cannot be a Treaty. The European Constitutional Treaty is something in between, a document hanging in lim­bo with no precise form, despite its more than 400 pages, running from major principles to the most analytic norms.

Regarding Europe's cultural and spiritual origins, the Treaty adopts two slightly different formulations which were accepted after a long debate and many quarrels. One states that "the peoples of Europe...[are] conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage." The other refers to the "cultural, religious and humanistic heritage of Europe." It is patent that both statements are extremely poor and reticent, because neither of them defines exactly what heritage and what religion Europe stems from. The question then is: Can Europe unify economically, socially, and politically if it lacks the strength even to mention that Judeo-Christian religion without which it would not even exist? My answer is: No, it cannot.

The second symptom of the European crisis is the antecedent of the first. What role is played by religion in European society? After the wars of religion, Europe slowly attained the separation be­tween State and Church. This separation—which actually stems from the Gospels—is a civil achieve­ment of which we should be proud but about which we should not be confused. It refers to polit­ical institutions and their mutual relations, not to personal dimensions and their autonomy of expres­sion. In other words, the separation between State and Church, sets limits to the legislation of them both, in the sense that one is forbidden to pass norms over the domain of the other, but it does not imply that religion must be expelled from social life, or that it should be considered only a private affair. In still other words, the secularity of the state, which is a juridical regime, does not imply the sec­ularism of the society, which is an ideological phi­losophy. It is one thing to separate State and Church; it is quite a different thing to separate reli­gion from the lives of the people.

This is however what is happening in Europe. Today, religion is not allowed to express itself in public. As a consequence, religion cannot nourish our civil customs, provide a spiritual ground for our societies, or act in support of our public rules and behavior. And, of course, once the links with the religious tradition are severed, the allegiance to the very same values which are the core of our living together starts losing its strength and gets weaker and weaker.

Marcello Pera Europe, America and the Continental Drift

Just seen the bibliography of Oswald Bayer at Wiki.de and remembered what a colossus Bayer is.

He is Professor Emeritus at Tübingen, a Lutheran, but more than that, he is a Luther - really shocking evangelical power, wielded with very great intellectual sophistication and gentleness. His line is that the Reformation is much more modern than 'modernity' will ever be. He has lots in common with Jüngel, but more spiritual authority (ludicrous, to say so, but...). I'll translate some of his titles:

• Promise: Luther's Reformation Turn

• Creation as Address: Towards a Hermeneutic of creation

• Living Word: Reformation and Modernity in Conflict

• Freedom as Response: Theological Ethics

• Contemporaries in Confrontation: Johann Georg Hamann as Radical Enlightener

• God as Author: Theological Poetics

• Reason is Speech (or discourse/conversation): Hamann's demolition of Kant 'critique')

Hamann is one of Germany's least explored Christian theologians. He was a contemporary, friend yet crushing opponent of Kant, with much in common with Kierkegaard and Coleridge.

Oswald Bayer would be the perfect subject for a PhD on Christian theological hermeneutics.

WHICH AMBITIOUS PUBLISHER IS GOING TO BE THE FIRST TO TRANSLATE BAYER'S WORK?

The Thomas International is the first stage in the establishment of a new Christian/Catholic university. It is offering conferences, courses, teaching material, links - inspiration and aspiration aplenty.

So far it has set up the Ralph McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies

The purpose of the Ralph McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies is to foster a renewal of Thomistic studies in the contemporary world. Today, in a culture that has lost unity of knowledge and faces new challenges of relativism and nihilism, on the one hand, and of globalization, on the other, Thomas Aquinasâ??s life and thought set the right direction for a revival of truth in ethics and metaphysics. The Ralph McInerny Center aims at promoting a strong and accurate rereading of Aquinasâ?? philosophy and theology but, at the same time, it aims at making Aquinasâ?? thought fruitfully converse with contemporary culture, especially in the areas of bioethics, legal theory, economics, political theory, literature, science, and sociology.

Why Aquinas?

Aquinas is the cornerstone of Catholic thought, not just for his doctrine, but for his fidelity and prayer; for his constant and humble attitude of inclusion instead of exclusionâ??always open both to the truths coming from the faith and to those coming from every other thinker and tradition. He did not create a philosophical or theological systemâ??from which eventually some truth, either natural or supernatural, would have been ruled out; rather, he was always ready to welcome new philosophical insights, and to see the constant need for finding harmony between them and the depositum fidei. Thomism is not just one out of many Christian traditions of thought; it is the only safe home where every sincere Christian intellectual can find comfortable refuge and establish the constructive dialogue with other thinkers which leads to the truth.

Aquinas is the model of Catholic thinkers also because he was an authentic citizen of his time: the Medieval Renaissance. He traveled all around the XIII-century world [Europe] more than most of his contemporaries. He gave refined and remarkable answers to the most difficult political, legal and ethical issues debated in his culture. Due to his exceptional problem-solving capacity, he was asked to accomplish (or give advise for) difficult political missions and legal tasks; he was even executor of a will. Indeed, his knowledge of law and politics matched his knowledge of theology and philosophy. Today, in a culture that has lost unity of knowledge and is far from being universal; in a society that has to face the new challenges of relativism and nihilism, on the one hand, and of globalization, on the other, Aquinasâ??s life and thought set the right direction for a revival of truth in ethics and metaphysics.

After Aquinas, his spirit has lived over the centuries through other exceptional people who not only studied what he wrote, but incarnated his same love for God and for â??the world and its values;â?? people with the same â??courage of the truth,â?? â??freedom of spirit in confronting new problems,â?? and â??the intellectual honesty of those who allow Christianity to be contaminated neither by secular philosophy nor by a prejudiced rejection of it;â?? people who pass as well â??into the history of Christian thoughtâ?? as pioneers of the new paths of â??philosophy and universal cultureâ?? (Fides et Ratio, 43) and who keep Aquinas alive for the generations to come. These people connect the past to the future by leaving behind them, not just their priceless writings, but also many good students and young scholars trained in fidelity to the Church, intellectual freedom, open mindedness, and respect for diversity: â??by their fruits you will know themâ?? (Matthew 7:20). In our recent history, we can think of Cornelio Fabro, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Ralph McInerny. These â??Thomistsâ?? have always had greater love for the tradition than for themselves: they have looked to each other, respected each other, worked with each other. Thomistic tradition cannot do without these authentic Thomists, and should stick to them if it wants to go on steadily through the centuries.

McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies

Thomas International makes a substantial contribution to the list of institutions in this blog's 'Theology and the university' category. Now if we could reproduce just a fraction of this effort in London, even just a little colony of TI, CUA, Notre Dame... Anybody?

Doctrinal clarity is lost when Catholics call Protestant hereticsâ?¦ First of all, I wish to stress that I am not trying to ban the word heresy by Catholics when speaking of Protestants out of some wishy-washy ecumenical latitudinarianism, as if dogmas are merely matters of opinion without objective truth value of their own. Nor I am denying that there are genuine doctrinal disputes that have become church-dividing. I have no doubt that the prospect of eventual ecclesial unity can only be achieved when, among other milestones, consensus is reached about the dogmas that separate Christians.

When the Western Church fissiparated in the sixteen century, the Reformers took a portion of the essential patrimony of the Church with them, and they thereby left both the Roman Church and themselves the poorer for it. I wish I could come up with a term that Catholics could use when they want to speak of the church-dividing doctrines of classical Protestantism without having to be either insulting or falling to the trap of â??anything goesâ?? latitudinarianism. But I canâ??t. Canon law unfortunately only recognizes schism and heresy, the former being a refusal to recognize duly constituted church authority without any attendant doctrinal deviation (like the Donatists in Augustineâ??s time), while the latter term is applied to those who explicitly deny key doctrines of the faith, however conceived, and whether theyâ??ve abjured their membership in the Church or not.

All I can say is this: We live in strange times when I find greater doctrinal fellowship among many Protestants than I do among far too many Catholic theologians!

Edward T. Oakes, S.J. Are Protestants Heretics?, in which Oakes takes apart Roger Haight (whose 'Jesus: Symbol of God' was the doctrine textbook at one London Anglican ordination course). Oakes followed this by:

I meant my reflections merely to serve as a trial balloon in my search for a better word than heresy to describe the doctrinal differences that are still outstanding between Catholics and Protestants; and given my own confusion on the matter I am neither surprised nor dismayed that reaction was heated. At the very least, the controversy will give me a chance to try to get my own mind clear on the exact meaning of such terms as heresy, dissent, schism, ecumenical dialogue, and so forthâ?¦.

I fear that unless we get clear about what heresy is and is not, then either doctrinal rigor will be lost or the prospect of ecumenical progress will be scuppered by a too-sweeping and too-univocal application of the word heresy.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J. On Heresy: A Final Word

The secular phalanx, rather like religious fundamentalists, is blinded by a certainty which conceals anxiety. The process of modernisation in the rest of the world is not following the pattern established in NW Europe. We are the exception and we are beginning to understand for example how the ecological challenge we face is a function of a way of being in the world which is arrogant and lacks reverence and awareness; and which arises from a false estimate of ourselves as masters and possessors of the earth rather than its stewards.

Yet there is no cause for religious people to be triumphalistic and try to outdo the God-deniers in shrillness. Suddenly it has also become urgent to distinguish in our country between healthful and lethal religion and to find the way to initiate the young into the former rather than the latter.

Lethal religion is one version of the idolatry which the prophets spend so much time denouncing. It is the manufacture of gods out of our own rage and impotence. A bruised ego finds a surreptitious way to re-ascend by making a god in its own image. This is a problem for all religions. When we are so sure that we have the right idea about God and want to clone or condemn all the others, then we are like the god deniers almost certainly on the wrong track. As the poet said of God, â??You have such a quiet manner of existence that those who name you with a loud insistence show that theyâ??ve forgotten your proximity.â??

Richard Charters, Bishop of London Induction of the Revd Nicholas Papadopulos

* * * Evensong at Westminster Abbey You are invited to attend Evensong in the presence of His All-Holiness Bartholomew I Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch and of His Grace Dr Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon to celebrate the publication of:

The Church of the Triune God, the Agreed Statement of the International Commission for Anglicanâ??Orthodox Theological Dialogue, 1989â??2006.

30 January 2007, Tuesday 5 p.m. at Westminster Abbey, London

All are welcome

The Annual Conference of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology June 10-12, 2007 St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN

Freedom and Authority in the Christian Life The assumption of our culture is that authority and freedom are a zero-sum game: some decry the loss of authority in an age of freedom and others lament the persistent oppression of freedom by various authorities. For the Christian, however, this assumption cannot be so, for it is the truth, the authoritative truth of Christ's gospel, that sets us free (John 8:32). Unfortunately, how authority and freedom are realized in Christian life has been a point at which Christians and churches have sharply disagreed.

The conference will focus on how authority and freedom come together in the life of the Church and the Christian: our freedom under the authority of Scripture; the authority of holiness in the saints, the liturgy, and sacraments; the authority of the pastoral (including magisterial) office. If true freedom requires true authority (and vice versa!), what is the nature of evangelical authority and evangelical freedom? How are they fostered in our churches?

Speakers will include:

Gilbert Meilaender Margaret O'Gara Ephraim Radner Michael Root

The concept of secularity, said the Holy Father in his address to the group, originally referred to "the condition of simple faithful Christian, not belonging to the clergy or the religious state. During the Middle Ages it acquired the meaning of opposition between civil authorities and ecclesial hierarchies, and in modern times it has assumed the significance of the exclusion of religion and its symbols from public life by confining them to the private sphere and the individual conscience. In this way, the term secularity has acquired an ideological meaning quite opposite to the one it originally held."

Secularity today, then, "is understood as a total separation between State and Church, the latter not having any right to intervene in questions concerning the life and behavior of citizens. And such secularity even involves the exclusion of religious symbols from public places." In accordance with this definition, the Pope continued, "today we hear talk of secular thought, secular morals, secular science, secular politics. In fact, at the root of such a concept, is an a-religious view of life, thought and morals; that is, a view in which there is no place for God, for a Mystery that transcends pure reason, for a moral law of absolute value that is valid in all times and situations."

The Holy Father underlined the need "to create a concept of secularity that, on the one hand, grants God and His moral law, Christ and His Church, their just place in human life at both an individual and a social level, and on the other hand affirms and respects the 'legitimate autonomy of earthly affairs'."

The Church, the Pope reiterated, cannot intervene in politics, because that would "constitute undue interference." However, "'healthy secularity' means that the State does not consider religion merely as an individual sentiment that can be confined to the private sphere." Rather, it must be "recognized as a ... public presence. This means that all religious confessions (so long as they do not contrast the moral order and are not dangerous to public order) are guaranteed free exercise of their acts of worship."

Hostility against "any form of political or cultural relevance of religion," and in particular against "any kind of religious symbol in public institutions" is a degenerated form of secularity, said the Holy Father, as is "refusing the Christian community, and those who legitimately represent it, the right to pronounce on the moral problems that today appeal to the conscience of all human beings, particularly of legislators.

"This," he added, "does not constitute undue interference of the Church in legislative activity, which is the exclusive competence of the State, but the affirmation and the defense of those great values that give meaning to people's lives and safeguard their dignity. These values, even before being Christian, are human, and therefore cannot leave the Church silent and indifferent, when she has the duty firmly to proclaim the truth about man and his destiny."

The Pope concluded by highlighting the need "to bring people to understand that the moral law God gave us - and that expresses itself in us through the voice of conscience - has the aim not of oppressing us but of freeing us from evil and of making us happy. We must show that without God man is lost, and that the exclusion of religion from social life, and in particular the marginalization of Christianity, undermines the very foundations of human coexistence. Such foundations, indeed, before being of the social and political order, belong to the moral order."

Benedict to the Union of Italian Catholic Jurists, which is being held in Rome on the theme: "Secularity and secularities."

In 1997 the Bishops of England and Wales reminded us that â??the basic understanding of education [is] human development . . . at the heart of it is a human being within whom as far as human willfulness allows, the creator will perfect the image of his divine Sonâ??. At the same time we have been reminded that â??manâ??s nature calls him to seek the truth while ignorance keeps him in servitudeâ??. In the struggle to discern and make plain the truth, the theologian, as the one entrusted with the task of theology, is entrusted to the searching out of truth in a special way. If, as John Paul II has said, truth â??is the precondition for a true and sincere dialogue among men and womenâ??, he has added that in the context of this quest for truth â??the principal task of theology consists in this, to provide both an understanding of Revelation and the teaching of faithâ??.

The theologian is entrusted to the truth in a particular way, therefore, entrusted both to its discernment and the discovery of its being and causes and to its becoming and being made manifest. It is this double nature of truth that the theologian has a special calling to witness to â?? truth insofar as it is wisdom, insofar as what it is that thinking (or what is often called reason and the artes or sciences) discovers and unfolds; and truth as it is manifest in being called in the activity of the Spirit to discover through the person of Jesus the Christ an encounter with the Father. These are then the two wings â??by which the human spirit is raised up toward the contemplation of truthâ?? which, as it were, the theologian is called in a particular way to assume and become skilled in the use of, and by which the theologian both rises and draws others up to assume.

Yet the theologian, as the one so entrusted, finds himself especially at risk in this task. If â??theology has importance for the Church in every ageâ?? and if it is â??also exposed to risks since it must strive to â??abideâ?? in the truthâ?? in taking account of the new problems which confront the human spirit, it is the theologian who must often bear the anguish of this exposure to risks whilst at the same time striving to remain in the truth and pointing, both in his teaching and in his life, to where the truth remains and is yet again to be found.

Properly have the greatest amongst the theologians been declared doctors of the Church, and have been called from among all of the ranks of the People of God, from the Martyrs, the Apostles, the lay and the ordained, the secular and professed. If some have been proficient in the schools, some have rightly claimed as their first and only teacher Christ the Lord himself (this has been particularly true of those women who stand among the doctors of the Church), since those who are doctores are first doctus, ones taught, and so schooled in the Lordâ??s service, and in the service of his Church. Those among us who would teach must then be first among those who would be taught. In this, the theologian, though often experiencing his vocation as a lonely task, is never alone, since he is called always to share in the life of the Church, and to share with the Church the fruits of his learning and teaching. Called to be conjoined to the body of Christ in the sacraments, and nourished also by contemplation of the word, he manifests his vocation in a special relation to the Magisterium and in the particular or local situation, to the Bishop.

The Vocation and Formation of Theologians and the Teaching Office of the Bishop in the British Context (large PDF) â?? A Discussion Sponsored by the Society of St. Catherine of Siena (UK)

My own theory is that Modernism is divine judgment on Western Christendom for the ecumenical failures of the Reformation. Because both Rome and the Churches of the Reformation were unable to recognize the face of Christ in each other, including even Reformation churches who refused to recognize that face in each other, the divine judgment is that those churches are becoming ones in which the face of Christ is no longer able to be recognized at all.

But in that case, the last thing confessing Christians in all the churches need is once again to draw lines in the sand against one another, to refuse to recognize Christ's face in those who affirm the same Scriptures and confess the same Creeds. I can only regard the voices of those who ask me to leave Anglicanism for either Rome or Orthodoxy or some other Reformation Church as asking me to deny that the face of Christ can be seen in this Church.

I believe that a sorting out is taking place—that in fact a separation must and will take place between those in the Churches who continue to affirm historic Christian faith, and those who have exchanged Christ for the world's pottage. The struggle is against apostasy and heresy, and it is both. Those who offer the safety of Rome or Orthodoxy are right about that. But in that struggle, I think it important that those who continue to confess Christ in each Church in which the divine judgment strikes, stand firm and resist the apostasy together. We stand our ground, shoulder to shoulder, where Christ has placed us in the battle.

And, of course, one of the things that Anglicanism shares with both Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy is that, unlike many Reformation Churches, we do not stand alone, but are part of an international Communion, a Communion that has held firm to the faith.

William Witt Why not leave?

On this evening of 31 December, two different perspectives intersect: one is linked to the end of the civil year, the other to the liturgical Solemnity of Mary Most Holy, Mother of God, which concludes the Octave of Holy Christmas. The first event is common to all, the second concerns believers. Their intersection confers a special character upon this evening celebration, in a particular spiritual atmosphere that is conducive to reflection.

The first, most evocative, theme is linked to the dimension of time.

In the last hours of every solar year we participate in some worldly "rites" which in the contemporary context are mainly marked by amusement and often lived as an evasion from reality, as it were, to exorcise the negative aspects and propitiate improbable good luck. How different the attitude of the Christian Community must be!

The Church is called to live these hours, making the Virgin Mary's sentiments her own. With her, the Church is invited to keep her gaze fixed on the Infant Jesus, the new Sun rising on the horizon of humanity and, comforted by his light, to take care to present to him "the joy and the hope, the grief and the anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted" (Gaudium et Spes, n. 1).

Consequently, two different evaluations of the dimension of "time" confront each other, one quantitative and the other qualitative. On the one hand, the solar cycle with its rhythms; on the other, what St Paul called the "fullness of time" (cf. Gal 4: 4), that is, the culminating moment of the history of the universe and of the human race when the Son of God was born in the world. The time of the promises was fulfilled and, when Mary's pregnancy reached its term, "the earth", a Psalm says, "yielded its increase".…

The fundamental truth about Jesus as a divine Person who fully assumed our human nature is condensed in the phrase: "God sent forth his Son born of woman". He is the Son of God, he is generated by God and at the same time he is the son of a woman, Mary. He comes from her. He is of God and of Mary. For this reason one can and must call the Mother of Jesus the Mother of God.

Pope Benedict Thanksgiving and Vespers

Anglicans value being part of a world Communion, but successive controversies have made it increasingly unclear what it is that they have in common. The contention of this document is that Anglican ‘communion’ will be maintained and nurtured, not just by preserving existing ecclesiastical structures but through a renewal of the theological tradition which brought the Communion into being.

To speak in this way of ‘renewal’ does not mean just a reinforcement of that tradition. As will be seen as the argument progresses, Anglicanism has developed by way of faithful responses to the gospel by churches facing concrete challenges in particular circumstances. At critical moments in their history they have been inspired to draw resources from their theological and spiritual inheritance which enabled them to address seemingly new situations in new ways. Such moments of renewal were eventually judged to be consistent with the tradition from which it was drawn, and generally won recognition and support from others who shared its patrimony. It is that sort of response which is required by the Anglican Communion at the present point of its history, as it faces circumstances threatening to disrupt its life and call into question the tradition itself....

A covenant, which rehearses the theological tradition from which Anglicanism has developed, and establishes clear commitments for the way it can maintain its cohesiveness, seems the most likely way to secure its communion for the foreseeable future. The one thing that Anglicans cannot permit at this time is for disputants to refuse to allow their opinion to be submitted to theological scrutiny. Those involved in disputes must not only listen to each other, but also attend to the wisdom of the wider Christian community.

The Anglican theological tradition cannot be content with any claim to communion which separates the gospel of Christ from the reality of his Church.

Inter Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission Summary Argument from the IATD's 'Communion Study' October 2006

We cannot know other people in a full sense without love. We have want to be in relationship with them, and be recognised by them. We must look for their response, and respond to it gladly when we receive it. The highest form of recognition is mutual recognition in friendship, fellowship and love. Any other form of knowledge, may effect to keep its object just an object and no more. If it refuses to allow it its proper context and purpose, it may prevent that object from reaching its telos and becoming fully a creature.

All things become themselves as they participate in Christ. Christ draws them into this participation. What starts solely his act, and always remains his act, also becomes their act. From his life and his relatedness to all other persons and things, their life and relatedness to all others grow. They participate in his communion with the Father and in the freedom of God that this involves. In Christ knowledge and being are inseparable – God's word and act are one.

Christ’s knowledge is the giving, taking and returning again of the proper final identity of all creatures – as creatures of God. The participation of his people in the life of God means that they participate in Christ’s act of creation and reception of creation. They receive all creation, each creature, person and thing, from Christ, by giving their public acknowledgement of the origin and destiny of that creature. In giving this acknowledgement, and so in some measure returning this creature back to God, they have a relationship with this creature, but neither they nor the other creature is solely defined by it. This relationship does not become necessary to either of them, so they remain free in it and they survive when it changes.

The question of how, with whom, and to what end the Church makes decisions is not a secondary one; it gets to the core of the Gospel (not the only thing that does this, of course; but still it is an essential). Bp. Wrightâ??s vehemence is understandable, whether well or poorly expressed: he feels as if those with whom he has shared faith and ministry â?? â??my companion, my own familiar friend, with whom we took sweet counselâ?? (Ps. 55:14f.) â?? are now working to undermine the very vows of pastoral oversight to which he was asked to subject himself, and within which he has labored. He is a bishop for the whole church, after all. Something we have tried hard, with little effect, to tell TEC bishops. But that is part of his point: you canâ??t have it both ways, calling people to the accountability of the whole church, and then throwing that wholeness out when it doesnâ??t suit you.

â??Congregationalismâ?? does indeed bother many of us and deeply. There are, after all, real reasons why many of us are not â??free churchâ?? evangelicals; it is a conscious choice, in fact, since most free-church evangelicals are a lot better at hosting bible studies, mission outreach, church growth, and the rest than are evangelical Anglicans, and if those were our priorities before all else, we would certainly be in the wrong place. â??Communion orderâ??, however, is something we believe is biblical, Christ-called, and therefore a primary imperative. It is not something way down the totem pole on the list of â??nice things to do if you have the timeâ??. The call to communion â?? and the disciplines involved, which include the ordering of the Church life in common counsel, honesty, and mutual accountability, rather than simply declaring independence when things get rough â?? springs from the reality of the Body of Christ, and hence it is bound up with the essential doctrines of the Son of God. It is in this light that Paul writes what he does in Philippians 2:1-18, where â??being of the same mind, having the same love, and being in full accord and of one mindâ?? are images of the God who became the servant of those who are weak, disobedient, and dying, that we might exalt him as our Lord, and ourselves, in following His way and being transformed in His Spirit, may act as â??lightsâ?? in a perverse world. The forces pressing Anglicans into congregationalism are ones pressing Anglicans into a contradiction of the Apostleâ??s desire and command, and into a drifting away from Christ Jesus himself. So I believe, at any rate.

It continues to astonish me that so many conservative Anglicans think that their witness is so weak and so unsupported by Godâ??s promises that continued, ordered, and loving efforts at discerning and embodying â??one-mindednessâ?? in Christ with those who are in error, are leading people to hell. I suppose there is no guarantee that such engagement will not do damage; but there is just as good (better to my mind) reason to believe that the whole-scale throwing over of our common commitments to an ordered life in Communion is producing scandals that are ruining the faith of Christâ??s â??little onesâ??. I know of no conservative congregation that has scandalized the faithful by preaching, teaching, and witnessing faithfully, even within the Episcopal Church, or even more certainly, within the Church of England. There are good reasons people might give to leave TEC at this time, to be sure; but they tend either to be based on a firm conviction that Anglicanism itself (and not just TEC) is a failed ecclesial experiment, or on the personal and particular levels at which conflict can be tolerated. I do not consider â??Scriptural faithfulnessâ??, which Wright properly sees to be a wax nose in these kinds of polemics, to be such a reason, since in its substantive sense such faithfulness can be upheld even in the lionâ??s den.

Ephraim Radner - comment to Bishop Tom Wright's 'A Confused Covenant' Titus 1.9

Bishop Tom Wright responds to 'A Covenant for the Church of England', issued by Paul Perkin and Chris Sugden and others

So to 'action'. This is divided into five areas: mission, appointments, fellowship, money and oversight. I am delighted that this document begins with mission; one of the great gains of the last decade has been to shift the whole church into a mission focus. But the six points made under 'mission' seem scatty and uneven, and turn out not to be about mission as such - indeed, it has nothing creative to say about mission at all, and appears to lack any engagement with the fresh and lively thinking on the subject that has gone on in the last decade or two - but about the politics of a 'mission' which wants to clone certain types of churches at the cost, if necessary, of driving a coach and horses through normal Anglican life. The first point, quoting the 'great commission', is fine so far as it goes, though what sort of renewed force it has in our post-Christian society is not explored. If it had been, quite different things might have emerged. Instead, we are projected at once into what appears to be the real agenda of the whole document: a break away from any normal ecclesial practice and into a free-for-all. This is justified by the claim that 'as is being increasingly recognized [by whom, we might ask?], the historic focus [clergy, buildings, etc]...is now inadequate by itself...etc' - in other words, we can't do what we want in the existing structures so we shall go elsewhere. The third point, which is put in quotation marks though without a reference ('Existing ecclesiastical legal boundaries should be seen as permeable') is not, in this context, a way of saying 'we are working within the framework of Mission-Shaped Church, but is rather, in this context, a way of saying, 'we intend to plant churches wherever we like and claim that they are Anglican'. This becomes clear in the fourth point: 'there cannot be any no-go areas for gospel growth and church planting'. Here, I'm afraid - and this is not a cynical interpretation, but the reflection of a reality I have witnessed - 'gospel growth' means 'the spread of our particular type of church'. The attempt to hook this agenda back into the official parlance of the contemporary church ('we will support mission-shaped expressions of church...') is disingenuous, as becomes clear in the final clause, 'even when official permission is unreasonably withheld.' The report in question was quite clear that mission-shaped church doesn't mean 'churches which do their own thing and cock a snook at any bishop who questions them'. But that, alas, has sometimes been the reality.

But the real shocker is the next section, 'Appointments'. This begins with a breathtaking statement of congregationalism: 'The local congregation is the initial and key seed-bed for recognizing, authorizing, raising up and releasing new leaders.' Recognising, perhaps. Raising up, quite possibly. Authorizing? Not within any recognizable Anglican polity. The authors should read Article 23 once more: 'It is not lawful for any man to take upon him the office of public preaching, or ministering the Sacraments in the congregation, before he be lawfully called, and sent to execute the same. And those we ought to judge lawfully called and sent, which be chosen and called to this work by men who have public authority given unto them in the Congregation, to call and send Ministers into the Lord's vineyard.' The rest of the Articles make it clear that 'Congregation' here cannot mean 'the local church, doing its own thing'. The following sentences (points 2-6) concede that wider recognition and authorization are needed, but say, in effect, 'since we don't trust the church to select, train and ordain, we'll do it ourselves.' Fine, if that's what you want to do; don't pretend it's Anglican, and don't be surprised when Anglicans, including a great many evangelicals, regard you as radically out of line. It is no surprise, reading the seventh point ('If the local Bishop unreasonably withholds authorization, we will pay for, train and commission the ministers that are needed, and seek official Anglican recognition for them'), that the two principal authors of this report were present and supportive at the irregular ordinations - with a bishop from the 'Church of England in South Africa', a body with whom the Church of England is not in communion - which took place in the Southwark diocese a year or so ago. Basically, this section is a way of declaring UDI and must be seen as such. Is that really what the constituency of CEEC and the other relevant bodies want? Have they reflected on the consequences of such a move - not least for those of us who don't live in the affluent parts of the country where 'we will pay for this' is a cheerful, sometimes even arrogant, statement of social status?

Bishop Tom Wright A Confused 'Covenant'

* The journey begins with a preview. The lessons for the First Sunday in Advent dovetail with the theme for the last week in the liturgical year when we celebrated Christ as King. We begin our Advent journey by remembering that the Son of Man, proclaimed to be King of Kings last week will, one day in the future, return in glory (Luke 21:25-36). He is the righteous Branch (Jeremiah 33:15) sprung up from Jesse's root.

* On the Second Sunday of Advent our attentions turn to the ministry of John the Baptist (Luke 3:1-6), the forerunner to the Christ promised by the Old Testament prophets (Malachi 3:1-4). Though we meet John as an adult, we flash back to his father's song of rejoicing (Luke 1:68-79), as we remember the circumstances of his birth. Notice, in the gospel reading, that John is not a child. He is an adult, preparing for the appearance of Jesus in his adulthood.

* On the Third Sunday of Advent, we flash back to Zephaniah's descriptions of the coming Messiah, who will deal with Israel's oppressors and turn their shame into praise and renown (Zephaniah 3:19). John's powerful images of the coming Messiah's winnowing fork and unquenchable fire (Luke 3:17) help us see previews of Zephaniah's Messiah (3:17), yet to come. John the Baptist serves as a bridge between the promises of the Old Testament prophets (Zephaniah 3:14-20), and the New Testament ministry of the Christ (Luke 3:7-18). Thus far, Advent's focus has not been upon the manger but rather upon the actions of the coming Christ and of John, his forerunner.

* By the Fourth Sunday of Advent, our hearts and our ears are ready for the promises made to the city of Bethlehem (Micah 5:2a-5a), for Mary's Magnificat (Luke 1:46b-55), and for descriptions of the shared stories of pregnant Mary and pregnant Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-45).

Worship United Methodist General Board of Discipleship

With the grace of God, Your Holiness, we have been blessed to enter the joy of the Kingdom, to "see the true light and receive the heavenly Spirit." Every celebration of the Divine Liturgy is a powerful and inspiring con-celebration of heaven and of history. Every Divine Liturgy is both an anamnesis of the past and an anticipation of the Kingdom. We are convinced that during this Divine Liturgy, we have once again been transferred spiritually in three directions: toward the kingdom of heaven where the angels celebrate; toward the celebration of the liturgy through the centuries; and toward the heavenly kingdom to come.

This overwhelming continuity with heaven as well as with history means that the Orthodox liturgy is the mystical experience and profound conviction that "Christ was, is, and ever shall be in our midst!" For in Christ, there is a deep connection between past, present, and future. In this way, the liturgy is more than merely the recollection of Christ's words and acts. It is the realization of the very presence of Christ Himself, who has promised to be wherever two or three are gathered in His name....

Thus our worship coincides with the same joyous worship in heaven and throughout history. Indeed, as St. John Chrysostom himself affirms: "Those in heaven and those on earth form a single festival, a shared thanksgiving, one choir" (PG 56.97). Heaven and earth offer one prayer, one feast, and one doxology. The Divine Liturgy is at once the heavenly kingdom and our home, "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev. 21.1), the ground and center where all things find their true meaning. The Liturgy teaches us to broaden our horizon and vision, to speak the language of love and communion, but also to learn that we must be with one another in spite of our differences and even divisions. In its spacious embrace, it includes the whole world, the communion of saints, and all of God's creation. The entire universe becomes "a cosmic liturgy", to recall the teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor. This kind of Liturgy can never grow old or outdated.

The only appropriate response to this showering of divine benefits and compassionate mercy is gratitude (eucharistia). Indeed, thanksgiving and glory are the only fitting response of human beings to their Creator. For to Him belong all glory, honor, and worship: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; now and always, and to the ages of ages. Amen.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew Homily during the Divine Liturgy The Feast Day of St. Andrew at the Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George

I am always ready to talk up any theological discussion going on in the UK, so I'm keeping an eye on Statford Caldecott’s Second Spring which is offering

Theology of the Body - London day conference Give Me Sensible Reasons To Believe: the true teaching of the Catholic Church about SEX SEX and the reasons WHY

A one-day conference for young adults Saturday 24th February 2007 at Westminster Cathedral Hall Ambrosden Avenue London SW1P 1QH

'The speakers are all young committed Catholics who are living in the real world. These issues are a part of their lives as they are of yours.' - Just right for the youth group, then.

Plus - Theology of the Body Explored - lecture course 2006-7 continues into the spring at St. Patrick’s, Soho Square, London

So when we think about the processes of production, about the whole pattern of an economy, we should be asking in what sense it is intelligent production – work directed towards the maintenance of a recognisably human environment. That recognisably human environment is, for the Christian believer, one in which the habits of self-examination and the possibilities of self-knowledge are being nourished – one in which the imagination as well as the intellect is matured. Remember, when Benedict speaks about lectio, the goal he presumes is that of self-knowledge, humility and growth in holiness: the dimension of study in the monastic life is not about developing intellectual skills for their own sake, but a way of advancing in understanding of oneself as made in God’s image, as mortal and fragile, subject to temptation and struggle, and as capable by grace of maturing in service. Just as work is there in order to sustain a life in which study may be properly carried out, so study is an activity sustaining a particular kind of human maturity and self-awareness before God. And in turn this is the context in which prayer and praise emerge as the natural crown of the whole pattern of the life of the Rule. The self-aware, intelligent and imaginative disciple who is formed by labour and study knows that the purpose of his or her life is now turning outwards to acknowledge God: proper self-awareness delivers us from self-absorption, since it shows us what kind of beings we are, what we are made for – which is the enjoyment of God.

A civilised life structured around the vision of the Rule is one in which economics is not allowed to set itself up as a set of activities whose goals and norms have no connection with anything other than production and exchange...

And the Benedictine structuring of time stands as a potent reminder of the balances we risk losing in a culture obsessed with production and reluctant to locate that production in a broader picture of human activity and growth. The pressing issue is how we sustain a civilisation capable of asking itself questions about its purpose and its integrity; only a civilisation that can do this will generate people – citizens – who can turn away from individual instinct and self-protection, whether in adoration of God or in compassion for the needy, because they know what sort of beings they are, mortal, interdependent, created out of love and for love.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Benedict and the Future of Europe * * * *

My respect for this Archbishop of ours grows and grows. From now on you may regard this blog as the Papa Williams Fanclub. Do many of you have an archbishop like this? Hands Up. No, as I thought, not many of you. So then, in the Anglican front row we have Oliver O'Donovan, Tom Wright, John Webster and Rowan Williams, all with beautifully complementary gifts, but the one wearing the 'Most Evangelical' shirt at the moment... is Williams. This speech, given in Rome, is a little love missive from us Anglicans to Rome's current Benedict and affirmation of his leadership in the church catholic.

Up until a couple of years ago I was keeping a bibliography which had reached about a thousand items, representing the trails into non-theological territory which I hoped to follow once I had got The Eschatological Economy out of the way. This bibliography was in MS Access on my overworked laptop – the laptop that blew a gasket one morning when someone, who shall be nameless, switched her hairdryer on and off in the next room. In the cold fear of having lost the book I was working on, I just got the man in the repair shop to recover my Word files and forgot all about the bibliography, which was the only file held in any other application. And so it was gone, and I haven't really kept a single bibliography since. I hope you take more care of your data than I do.

Anyway I have been trying out what looks like a wonderful online bibliography service – LibraryThing. It offers a variety of ways to present your book list, including with library shelf mark/Library of Congress call mark. I haven't found a Sort function yet - I think it all has to be done with tags. And there is a fair amount of crossover of function with Amazon, though you can find people who are reading, or at least own, one particular book, so it is an online book-club too.

Seventy Church of Engand and Roman Catholic bishops were urged today to intervene to help thousands of Christian students at British universities from having the organisations representing them banned.

Among those asked to take action to save Christian Union societies were the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster.

The rise of secularism in the UK is among the issues being debated today and tomorrow at the first ever joint meeting of the Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales in Leeds.

Dr Rowan Williams and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor were to issue a joint statement later today on the importance of working together and how to surmount the differences that remain between the two churches.

The 40 Anglican and 30 Catholic bishops began their unprecedented two-day meeting at Hinsley Hall at lunchtime. The bishops prayed and worshipped together and discussed how to heal the historic rift between them.

But Christian Union leaders urged them to move away from the usual "bland platitudes" associated with ecumenical gatherings to help the beleaguered Christian student societies under threat of bans.

Ruth Gledhill The Times

You know what London really needs is a seminar in which ministers and worship leaders can re-discover the worship resources of the whole historic Church and discover a thicker, or deeper, exegesis of Scripture.

We did have such a seminar briefly a couple of years ago. It was called Deep Church. It was looking for ways to recover the practices of preaching, prayer, proper emphasis on communion and baptism, and to improving our catechism and theological teaching. I wonder what happened to it?

It produced a book The Gospel-Driven Church: Retrieving Classical Ministries for Contemporary Revivalism, billed as the first of a Deep Church Series.

New Deep Church lectures I see that Andrew Walker is giving a series of lectures at the brand new Westminster Theological Centre, under the same Deep Church title. I wonder if these two deep churches are related? Professor Walker is a charismatic evangelical member of the Russian Orthodox Church (worth going along just to ask) and well known for his work on C.S. Lewis and the Inklings.

Yet we do have our very own one-man ‘Deep Church’, right here in London, at Lambeth, and Williams is his name. The Sermons and Speeches page of the website of the Archbishop of Canterbury is a trough deep with Christian resources. You want to know more about what he says without actually reading them yourself? Shame on you. All right. Let me see what I can do.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, we speak of the impulses that move us toward any kind of sin as â??passions.â?? You shouldnâ??t think of this term as related to â??passionate.â?? Itâ??s more like â??passiveâ?? (as in â??the Passion of Christâ??; his passion is what he endured).

These impulses beat us up. They originate as thoughts, sometimes as thoughts that evade full consciousness. The roots are tangled with memories, shame, anger, fearâ??and the thoughts are also very often inaccurate.

All this mess damages our ability to see the world clearly. We go on misreading situations and other people, and venture further into confusion. The illness compounds itself, to the delight of the Evil One, who nurtures lies and has no compassion on the weak. To him, the weak are breakfast. Eastern Christianity speaks of this as the darkening of the nous, that is, of the perceptive center of a person. (Most English bibles translate nous as mind, but thatâ??s not quite it; the nous is not the rational intellect but a perceiving faculty. Thoughts and emotions are subsequent reactions to the nousâ??s perceptions.) The damaged nous is like a pair of glasses fitted with distorting lenses. It needs healing.

The Greek word represented by this kind of â??passionâ?? is pathos. It means â??suffering.â?? It is because we are helpless in our suffering that Christ came. He took on vulnerable human form and went into the realm of death and defeated the Evil One. Now we are invited to gradually return to health by fully assimilating the truth that sets us freeâ??by assimilating the presence and life of Christ himself. â??It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,â?? St. Paul said. This life fills and changes us like fire fills a piece of coal.

In the Eastern Christian understanding, sins are not â??bad deedsâ?? that must be made up in order to satisfy justice. They are instead like bad fruit, which indicates a sickness inside the tree (the analogy Jesus uses in Matthew 7:7â??8). Sin is infection, not infraction. And God not only forgives freely but also sent his Son to rescue us when we were helpless.

With Godâ??s help, we begin to heal. Like an athlete striving for the prize (I Cor. 9:24, Phil. 3:14, 2 Tim. 2:5), we resist succumbing to lying thoughts. The ancient spiritual disciplinesâ??continual prayer, fasting, and love of othersâ??are like the exercises in a time-tested workout routine. They make us stronger. When we fall, we get up. This is a life of continual repentanceâ??and you can see in that word re-pent, â??re-think.â?? Salvation is health, and health comes from knowing the truth and resisting lies. This gradually heals the nous so that it is restored to its original purpose: to perceive Godâ??s light permeating all Creation.

St. Paul writes, â??Be transformed by the renewal of your nous.â?? The biblical word for repentance, meta-noia, means literally the transformation of the nous. We are welcomed into Godâ??s kingdom in an instant, as we see in the story of the Good Thief; but full healing comes slowly and will continue every day that we live.

So it is a mistake to present Christianity the way some churches do, as if it is the haven of seamlessly well-adjusted, proper people. That results in a desperate artificial sheen. It results in treating worship as a consumer product, which must deliver better intellectual or emotional gratification than the competition. And that sends suffering people home again, still lonely, in their separate metal capsules.

What all humans have in common is our pathos. Getting honest about that binds us together. And then we begin to see how the mercy of God is pouring down on all of us all the time, just as the Good Samaritan bound the wounds of the beaten man with healing oil.... May God have mercy on all of us.

First Things Frederica Mathewes-Green

Unfortunately, I feel compelled to scorn here…

Arius was from ALEXANDRIA, not Antioch!

This guy doesn’t know his Church history.

The Antiochenes stressed the full reality of divinity and the full reality of humanity in Jesus Christ. The Alexandrians stressed that the one active and passive subject in Jesus Christ was the Logos.

At its extreme, Alexandrian theology tended either to deny the divinity of the Logos (this is what Arius did: the Logos is a creature), or to fuse divinity and humanity in their insistence upon the ‘one Incarnate nature of God the Word’ (Cyril’s phrase).

At its extreme, Antiochene theology in Nestorianism so fully stressed the divine reality and the human reality in Jesus that it developed the notion that in Christ there were two beings, one divine and one human, acting in unison.

In fact, the Church ultimately accepted neither of these positions on its own, but rather recognised the truth to lie in their synthesis, a synthesis that was definitively achieved in the Constantinoplitan Ecumenical Councils of 553 and 680. The one divine hypostasis of God the Word, fully divine by nature, assumed (enhypostasised) human nature in Incarnation, thereby divinising it entirely: it only existed in the divine hypostasis of the Logos and was fully permeated by divine energy. Thus the Cyrillene ‘one nature’ of God the Word is to be understood as the one hypostasis of God the Word (as per Trinitarian theology), and the divine and human realities in Jesus - which remain unconfused - are indivisibly united, existing in the one subject of the hypostasis of God the Word.

The author is confusing two issues: Arius the Alexandrian’s denial that Christ is divine (so that in Christ no union of divine and human takes place), and the Nestorian denial of union in the one hypostasis of God the Word (so that in Christ no union of divine and human takes place). Neither, however, denied the need for Christology.

Also, the author, I fear, remains caught in the Protestant confusion of thinking of Nicaea 325 as a terminus of dogmatic Orthodoxy, when in fact, it is the starting-point, comprehensible to us only in light of the subsequent Councils of the Church. If you take the Symbol of Nicaea out of the historical transmission (paradosis) of the one Christian faith, then you do not have ‘Nicene Orthodoxy’ - you do not have ‘Orthodoxy’ of any sort - for a symbol wrenched from the context in which it has its home can mean anything or nothing. You cannot turn to just one or two choice items which you happen to take a shine to in the history of the Church and appeal to them as ‘Orthodoxy’. Affirmation of the Nicene Creed no more ensures Orthodoxy than the Bible does. Orthodoxy exists only in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, which, incorporated into Christ and illumined by the Holy Spirit, preserves and hands over the one Orthodox faith from generation to generation. It is only through the adoption of this faith in its wholeness (kath holon) that the true meaning of the Scriptures and all in which Holy Tradition consists can be understood.

And part of this faith the adoption of whose wholeness is a precondition of Christian understanding is communion with a validly-ordained Bishop of the Orthodox faith in communion with the other Bishops of the Orthodox Church.

There is no use in Protestants playing in some half-way house of ‘Nicene Orthodoxy’ designed to assuage their bad feelings and partial recognitions that the ecclesial communities in which they have until now existed are but schisms of a schism from the Holy Orthodox Church.

Alan Brown in reponse to Harry L. Chronis Alexandria or Antioch?

Even casual observers of American Christianity, in all its ecclesial manifestations, cannot help but notice these days a common and deep division in all the old-line churches â?? Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Presbyterian, to name the most prominent of them. What divides them all in nearly identical fashion is most visibly and audibly profound disagreement about human sexuality... this deeper dispute â?? it is much deeper than a disagreement about human sexuality â?? involves a critical choice between two age-old destinations. One is Alexandria and the other is Antioch.

I have these great ancient cities in mind, not just because one, Alexandria, was home to Nicene and Athanasian orthodoxy and the other, Antioch, to Arian heterodoxy in the early trinitarian controversies. But that is a good place to start, if â?? as I suggested above â?? the ethical confusion about human sexuality is only a presenting symptom of a deeper theological illness afflicting the whole old-line. I reckon it, actually, to be an Antiochene illness, for which only a Nicene cure of 4th century proportions will do. And the whole old-line will have to go to Alexandria (as it were) to get it.

Let me support this diagnosis, first, by citing my experience in my own presbytery. There Arius himself, for whom finally it was just not credible that God could empty the fullness of his divine majesty into the merely human Jesus, would be right at home. At one of our recent meetings, for example â?? and this is by no means as bad as it can get â?? we were treated to hearing (a) one of our ordained ministers reporting cheerfully about teaching the Bible (or, more precisely, Marcus Borgâ??s slant on the Bible) in her part-time position on the staff of a Unitarian church, (b) several new members of the presbytery sharing at some length what God was doing in their lives and ministries without once mentioning the name of Jesus Christ, and (c) our worship leader eschewing use of the triune name revealed by Christ (and substituting, with what is now nauseating predictability, the economic job-description â??Creator, Redeemer, Sustainerâ??) in our closing doxology. Nor is mine the only presbytery tilting toward Antioch and the confusion that ensues once God is unyoked from Christ. More than a few â?? many of them the same presbyteries that, along with my own, routinely ride the tectonic plate opposite me in the human sexuality controversy â?? appear to be trafficking regularly in theological syncretism. A number of friends around the denomination describe coming home from meetings as amazed as I at the endless novelty, the obsession to explore and mine feminist imaginings and even other religious traditions â?? anything but Nicene orthodoxy, apparently â?? for their liturgical â??riches,â?? the preoccupation with any â??spiritualityâ?? that knows nothing of the Holy Spirit, and especially the assumption on principle that theology can and should only be done now without any vestige of patriarchy (hence the sanction against the triune name) and â?? most incredibly â?? without Christology. It reminds me of Chestertonâ??s assertion that when men give up belief in the one true God, they donâ??t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

Harry L. Chronis Alexandria or Antioch? The Hermeneutical Choice Confronting the American Old-Line

Featured Article at The Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology

Responses to A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future

Good observations all. What, one might ask, is there not to like?

Well, in the first place, there is a word that is never used in this document. It is conspicuous in its absence. I kept waiting for it to appear, and it never did. That word is authority. Yes, the Scriptures are here described as an â??authoritativeâ?? record, but that is merely sending an adjective to do a nounâ??s work.

There is no locus of authority being proposed here. This omission is especially strange in light of the documentâ??s expression of the â??pressingâ?? question: â??Who gets to narrate the word?â?? This would seem to be precisely a question of authority. The document calls on Evangelicals to â??restore the priorityâ?? of the biblical story in their lives, which the writers insist upon calling â??Godâ??s narrative.â??

But who is to do the restoring? After all, the story does not tell itself (which is, of course, precisely one of the reasons literary scholars use the verb â??narrateâ??). The history of the Church is a history of all the different, and sometimes violently conflicting, ways of telling the story. I have no doubt that both James Dobson and Stanley Hauerwas could each tell the story convincingly and faithfully. But I suspect their accounts would differ.

In short, there is no escaping from the need for structures of authority in the Church. This same aversion to authority is behind the condemnation of â??propositionsâ?? as tending to be â??reductive.â?? This is of course entirely true up to a point. But the great creeds the authors are so anxious to affirm are, in fact, more propositional than narrative in character.

One sometimes suspects that the authors are really pushing a variant on an old adage: â??doctrine divides, but narrative unites.â?? If we can concentrate on â??telling the story,â?? to the point that we completely inhabit it, the quarrels and conflicts of the past two millennia will simply evaporate. And isnâ??t it pretty to think so.

Also, what does it mean to â??take seriouslyâ?? the visible Church? Does it mean a Church that disciplines, rebukes, and even on occasion excommunicates? If not, then what? Does the talk about catechesis mean that Evangelicals will start requiring confirmands to have thoroughly learned, for example, the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism? Why are the authors so much more interested in vague appeals to the ancient Church than in their own Evangelical traditionâ??s more proximate fathers?

Of course, the very mention of the word father points to a profound problem in the whole undertaking: the problem of language. If we are to root ourselves in â??Godâ??s word as the story of the world,â?? it will make all the difference what words we use to describe what we are doing. In our choice of language we should try our very best to use Godâ??s rather than ours.

A Text Avoided

The use of concepts like â??narrativeâ?? and other such academic terms is not necessarily self-undermining, so long as it serves merely to aid and amplify. But when the concepts of â??storyâ?? and â??narrativeâ?? appear as frequently and centrally as they do in this document, one cannot help but conclude that they are being used as a way to evade questions about what is actually there, behind the storyâ??about the actual referents of the Christian faith, the things that the story is about.

Nor is the language of â??narrativeâ?? the vocabulary with which the biblical God narrates. There is no glimpse hereâ??not a oneâ??of the actual and authoritative language of Scripture as generations of Christian worshipers in North America have known it and experienced it and proclaimed it.

Arguably the single greatest strength of Evangelical Christianity is its reverence for the Word, its lively attention to the text, its loving embrace of the actual words and verses of Scripture. But we donâ??t get any of that here. Instead, we are being offered a boatload of stale seminary talk: the â??storyâ?? of â??Creation, Incarnation, and Re-creation,â?? the notion of â??Christâ??s recapitulation of history,â?? worship that â??enacts Godâ??s story,â?? and so on.

As I read the document, I found it curious that the authors repeatedly spoke with such abstractness of the â??Triuneâ?? or â??Trinitarianâ?? character of God. Then it dawned on me why. They were doing so to avoid using the inflammatory word Fatherâ??another word that never once appears in this document. Nor do they ever use the masculine personal pronoun for God.

The authors have done this self-editing skillfully, even tastefully. You might almost not even notice. But they have done it quite intentionally, and their doing so shows why they have not yet come to grips with what is entailed in appropriating the authority of the pastâ??which means the whole history of what the Church has been, and not merely what has been going on in a few North American seminaries since 1968.

If one radically edits the past before appropriating it, then it is no longer the past that one is appropriating, but a version of the present. Language matters, and the preference for academic over Scriptural language in this document is powerfully indicative of which worldview actually gets to do the trumping.

How will one utter the Nicene Creed when the word Father has been proscribed? But if one substitutes some other termâ?? Creator, or Mother, or Dominatrix, or whatever word is in fashion this weekâ??how is one doing anything other than rejecting the past, and extending the sway of the status quo? That indeed is what I would call a very serious form of â??cultural captivity.â??

Wilfred M. McClay What lies Behind Touchstone Forum Back and Forth to the Future

In every age the Holy Spirit calls the Church to examine its faithfulness to God's revelation in Jesus Christ, authoritatively recorded in Scripture and handed down through the Church. Thus, while we affirm the global strength and vitality of worldwide Evangelicalism in our day, we believe the North American expression of Evangelicalism needs to be especially sensitive to the new external and internal challenges facing God's people.

These external challenges include the current cultural milieu and the resurgence of religious and political ideologies. The internal challenges include Evangelical accommodation to civil religion, rationalism, privatism and pragmatism. In light of these challenges, we call Evangelicals to strengthen their witness through a recovery of the faith articulated by the consensus of the ancient Church and its guardians in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation and the Evangelical awakenings. Ancient Christians faced a world of paganism, Gnosticism and political domination. In the face of heresy and persecution, they understood history through Israel's story, culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of God's Kingdom.

Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is confronted by a host of master narratives that contradict and compete with the gospel. The pressing question is: who gets to narrate the world? The Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future challenges Evangelical Christians to restore the priority of the divinely inspired biblical story of God's acts in history. The narrative of God's Kingdom holds eternal implications for the mission of the Church, its theological reflection, its public ministries of worship and spirituality and its life in the world. By engaging these themes, we believe the Church will be strengthened to address the issues of our day.

1. On the Primacy of the Biblical Narrative

We call for a return to the priority of the divinely authorized canonical story of the Triune God. This story-Creation, Incarnation, and Re-creation-was effected by Christ's recapitulation of human history and summarized by the early Church in its Rules of Faith. The gospel-formed content of these Rules served as the key to the interpretation of Scripture and its critique of contemporary culture, and thus shaped the church's pastoral ministry. Today, we call Evangelicals to turn away from modern theological methods that reduce the gospel to mere propositions, and from contemporary pastoral ministries so compatible with culture that they camouflage God's story or empty it of its cosmic and redemptive meaning. In a world of competing stories, we call Evangelicals to recover the truth of God's word as the story of the world, and to make it the centerpiece of Evangelical life.

2. On the Church, the Continuation of God's Narrative

We call Evangelicals to take seriously the visible character of the Church. We call for a commitment to its mission in the world in fidelity to God's mission (Missio Dei), and for an exploration of the ecumenical implications this has for the unity, holiness catholicity, and apostolicity of the Church. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away from an individualism that makes the Church a mere addendum to God's redemptive plan. Individualistic Evangelicalism has contributed to the current problems of churchless Christianity, redefinitions of the Church according to business models, separatist ecclesiologies and judgmental attitudes toward the Church. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to recover their place in the community of the Church catholic.

3. On the Church's Theological Reflection on God's Narrative

We call for the Church's reflection to remain anchored in the Scriptures in continuity with the theological interpretation learned from the early Fathers. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away from methods that separate theological reflection from the common traditions of the Church. These modern methods compartmentalize God's story by analyzing its separate parts, while ignoring God's entire redemptive work as recapitulated in Christ. Anti-historical attitudes also disregard the common biblical and theological legacy of the ancient Church. Such disregard ignores the hermeneutical value of the Church's ecumenical creeds. This reduces God's story of the world to one of many competing theologies and impairs the unified witness of the Church to God's plan for the history of the world. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to unity in "the tradition that has been believed everywhere, always and by all," as well as to humility and charity in their various Protestant traditions.

4. On Church's Worship as Telling and Enacting God's Narrative

We call for public worship that sings, preaches and enacts God's story. We call for a renewed consideration of how God ministers to us in baptism, Eucharist, confession, the laying on of hands, marriage, healing and through the charisma of the Spirit, for these actions shape our lives and signify the meaning of the world. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away from forms of worship that focus on God as a mere object of the intellect or that assert the self as the source of worship. Such worship has resulted in lecture-oriented, music-driven, performance-centered and program-controlled models that do not adequately proclaim God's cosmic redemption. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to recover the historic substance of worship of Word and Table and to attend to the Christian year, which marks time according to God's saving acts.

5. On Spiritual Formation in the Church as Embodiment of God's Narrative

We call for a catechetical spiritual formation of the people of God that is based firmly on a Trinitarian biblical narrative. We are concerned when spirituality is separated from the story of God and baptism into the life of Christ and his Body. Spirituality, made independent from God's story, is often characterized by legalism, mere intellectual knowledge, an overly therapeutic culture, New Age Gnosticism, a dualistic rejection of this world and a narcissistic preoccupation with one's own experience. These false spiritualities are inadequate for the challenges we face in today's world. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to return to a historic spirituality like that taught and practiced in the ancient catechumenate.

6. On the Church's Embodied Life in the World

We call for a cruciform holiness and commitment to God's mission in the world. This embodied holiness affirms life, biblical morality and appropriate self-denial. It calls us to be faithful stewards of the created order and bold prophets to our contemporary culture. Thus, we call Evangelicals to intensify their prophetic voice against forms of indifference to God's gift of life, economic and political injustice, ecological insensitivity and the failure to champion the poor and marginalized. Too often we have failed to stand prophetically against the culture's captivity to racism, consumerism, political correctness, civil religion, sexism, ethical relativism, violence and the culture of death. These failures have muted the voice of Christ to the world through his Church and detract from God's story of the world, which the Church is collectively to embody. Therefore, we call the Church to recover its counter-cultural mission to the world.

Epilogue

In sum, we call Evangelicals to recover the conviction that God's story shapes the mission of the Church to bear witness to God's Kingdom and to inform the spiritual foundations of civilization. We set forth this Call as an ongoing, open-ended conversation. We are aware that we have our blind spots and weaknesses. Therefore, we encourage Evangelicals to engage this Call within educational centers, denominations and local churches through publications and conferences.

We pray that we can move with intention to proclaim a loving, transcendent, triune God who has become involved in our history. In line with Scripture, creed and tradition, it is our deepest desire to embody God's purposes in the mission of the Church through our theological reflection, our worship, our spirituality and our life in the world, all the while proclaiming that Jesus is Lord over all creation.

A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future

We are made for excellence. Developed through the four cardinal virtues prudence (practical wisdom), justice, courage, and temperance (perhaps better styled today, â??self-commandâ??) freedom is the method by which we become the kind of people our noblest instincts incline us to be: the kind of people who can, among other possibilities, build free and virtuous societies in which the rights of all are acknowledged, respected, and protected in law. Law is thus intertwined with freedom. Law can educate us in freedom. Law is not a work of heteronomous (external) imposition but a work of wisdom, and good law facilitates our achievement of the human goods that we instinctively seek because of who we are and what we are meant to be as human beings. Virtue and the virtues are crucial elements of freedom rightly understood, and the journey of a life lived in freedom is a journey of growth in virtue, growth in the ability to choose wisely and well the things that truly make for our happiness and for the common good. Itâ??s a bit like learning to play a musical instrument. Anyone can bang away on a piano; but that is to make noise, not music, and itâ??s a barbaric, not humanistic, expression of freedom. At first, learning to play the piano is a matter of some drudgery as we master exercises that seem like a constraint, a burden. But as our mastery grows, we discover a new, richer dimension of freedom: we can play the music we like, we can even create new music on our own. Freedom, in other words, is a matter of gradually acquiring the capacity to choose the good and to do what we choose with perfection.

George Weigel A better concept of freedom

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.

Months ago I promised that I would post pieces from The Apprenticeship. I haven't told you anything about the purpose or structure of the book, and without any context, passages may not make all that much sense, but let’s try anyway.

This first piece comes from a section asking ‘Which comes first – the individual or society?’

Man is a social animal. We do not live in isolation. We live our lives before others: they make up our audience. We are influenced by them and they are influenced by us, so we wield power over one another. Others observe what we do as much as we watch what we do: they copy us and we copy them. Everyone is looking out for anyone who has good idea or has find a better way of doing the things we do. Better ideas are picked up and integrated.

Man is always with his company and his audience. Each man stands before his own home crowd. He plays to them and they receive and acknowledge his acts, and his acts only have sense to the degree that they acknowledge them. Our every act makes that act first acceptable, then compelling and over the long term binding over others.

But we are not only in relationship with those we are aware of, whom we see and can name. We are also in relationship with others all across the world, who want (or no longer want) the goods and services we produce, with the result that we are making money or struggling financially. Their demand for what we do means that we have a position, in a firm, with all its security and recognition. Though they may be unaware of this, we receive our place, and in it permission to do a range of things, from them. Our identity, even perhaps our very existence, comes from them.

But we are not only in relationship with those who are alive now, our contemporaries across the globe. We are also in a different sort of relationship which those who preceded us, and who set up the institutions and infrastructure that we take for granted, and from whom who have inherited our worldview, the palette from which we select what we regard as our own personal views.

Let us imagine that we do we are observed by others, who inhabit spectator galleries far above us, and of which we are unaware. Ancient people thought of the world as a series of galleries, such that the people who come before us, who are now dead to us, continue to take an interest us while they lead lives in a parallel sphere. Between us is a screen of one-way glass, which means that they can consider us part of their world, but we are unaware of their existence. It wouldn’t matter if we thought of our invisible predecessors as living not above us, but below us, in a basement of which we have no knowledge.

The ancients placed the ancestors not only in the notional spirit of the heavens, but also deep beneath us, because they were able to regard past and present as different floors of a single building. In our modern metaphysics we regard what is past as either behind us or as nature, which in worldview expresses as beneath us, constituting the ground on which we stand. It is not just ancients who visualize different times, past and present, as different locations relative to ourselves, whether arranged vertically one above another, or in some other way.

If we indulge the ancients a moment longer however, we will see that they sometimes visualize our predecessors as a crowd of sympathizers who look down us, and who regard us as their man in the field. We are not only their DNA, but their memes, their worldview, adapted so it survives in a new climate. When we think, it is with the conceptuality they have passed on to us; though we are oblivious of them, we may still be serving their agenda. Then we can say that any man represents and personifies his predecessors and ancestors to us. We could even say that they send him to us. The living man represents and incorporates his ancestors, as though the assembly of ancestors sends out an individual, the individual we see before us in our time.

The ancient world imagined that the ancestors were either above us, or below us, but just out of sight. They want to be our audience, because in some way the outcome of their lives rests on us, on our remembering them or vindicating them by continuing to do what they did. If we have no successors, not only will there be no one to remember us, but no one to remember them, so their memory and ours will disappear and that would place a question mark over our existence. This sort of thinking may seem foreign to Westerners, but there are two points to make here. One is that it may seem much more obvious to non-Westerners. The other is that I don't think it is as far removed from our Western thinking as we assume, and even that modern Western thinking is an attempt to conceal this issues, and our anxiety, about other people and other times than our own.

Now here is the pay-off for all this cosmological speculation. The company of the ancestors are our soul. The soul is a plural thing. It does not greater matter if we call it the self, or the mind, though I will stick with ‘soul’ for now. We are plural beings, made of two (in some accounts, three) elements, soul and body. We should regard the soul as a noisy convention of ancestors arguing about how best to push forward their identity in the world in which we live, and in which they live through us. We could say that we are the body, while our soul is them. We, the body, are the message boy that the soul sends into the world in order to represent it to other bodies representing other souls. We could say that we are the body and while our soul is our ancestors. But the soul is also us, or is even more us than is our body, for the soul is our past, our agenda and our future.

It is not necessary for us to buy into any worldviews such as these. But the Christian claim is that we are in one world, and a single world-community, not only with those around us now, but with those who have been and who will be, here where we are now. I have sketched for you the beginnings of a participative ontology, or account of corporate personality. This might come in handy when talking through the Christian understanding of communion, as in the communion of saints, eschatology and the eucharist.

Genesis 1 is a polemic, in fact, against the polytheistic creation-accounts of other cultures in Canaan, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Where the Babylonians and Assyrians celebrated the gods’ creation of the universe through the slaying of the sea monster Tiamat, Genesis sets ‘the great sea monsters’ in the fifth day of creation (1.21). They are God’s playthings, not pre-existent enemies. Similarly, many of those beings who would usually make up the council are reduced in Genesis 1 to the ranks of creatures, if not objects: the sun is a ‘greater light’, and the moon a ‘lesser light’.

But if the divine council has been disbanded, it has not had all its assets seized, and its members continue in new and surprising ways. The heavenly bodies may no longer be gods but they are thoroughly personal nonetheless, ‘ruling over’ the day and the night as local administrators within the cosmic kingdom.

This personal, conscious aspect of creation is also assumed in Genesis 1.11, 20 & 24, where three times God commands one part of creation to produce another. For example, he says: ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And so, says the author, it did.

Creation itself participates in the creative process. This brings us to a dramatically new understanding of verse 26. When God says, ‘Let us make humankind,’ he is speaking to the rest of his creation – to heaven and earth and all its adornment. Thus, when he proposes that humankind be made ‘in our image and according to our likeness’ there is present the claim that men and women are made in the image and likeness both of God and of the cosmos.

This is not, it should be said, a new idea – it is familiar to Jewish mysticism. Indeed, a pre-Christian tradition spread throughout medieval Europe which held that Adam was created as a microcosm of the universe, his physiology and essential faculties each corresponding to an aspect of the created order.

We frequently hear now the complaint that (Western) Christianity and modern secular culture cuts humankind off from the natural world. On the one hand, this has allowed us free rein in plundering creation. On the other, it has given rise to an increasing sense of isolation, for both modern man and 20th-century Christianity.

Genesis 1.26 calls humankind to be both a unique bearer of God’s image and presence and a priestly representative of the material world of vegetation, animals, sun, moon and stars.

Here, too, Man is unique, for ‘in him all things are to hold together’ (Colossians 1.17). The whole created world is to be gathered up in the true man and woman. And, because humankind is God’s image, it is ultimately through us that earth, sea, sky and all that is in them are to be taken up into God’s own life.

Crispin Fletcher-Louis at Third Way Genesis 1.26 & Ephesians 1.22

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

In the disintegration of Western thought the Church has been treated as sociological entity; its human, visible aspects have become separated in idea from its mystical and divine aspects. This dichotomy lies at the root of all our Western divisions, and this appears to be reproduced in them all. Thus the conception of a single divine-human organism reaching from heaven to earth tends to be broken up into compartments between which a great gulf is fixed. In the result the proportions of truth suffer and every element of the whole gets out of focus. Whether the earthly, visible part is thought of in ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ terms the result is grievous impoverishment. Moreover ‘piety’ and ‘mysticism’ become individual and isolated, instead to being the salt of the common life which is both divine and human because it is rooted in Christ.

There is a sense in which the mystical unity of Scripture correspond to the mystical unity of the Church. These two forms of mystical unity are complementary; each is necessary presupposition for the right understanding of the other. Each embodies God’s self-communication to man in Christ; each attains its true unity only in Christ. There is an indwelling of Christ both in the people and in the Book. A return to the sources of illumination in him is inevitably a return both to the message of Scripture about the Church and to the life of the Church as set forth in Scripture. Such a return is necessarily a permanent task of the whole Church, to which each of us contributes no more than a minute fragment.

L. S. Thornton The Common Life in the Body of Christ (1941)

Yes, we do have an Anglican communion ecclesiology, and in this work by a member of the Community of the Resurrection it is in the form of a biblical theology,

Theological Education for the Anglican Communion (TEAC) has just published a set of outlines of what Christians and Christian leaders – clergy and bishops – can expect, what help they can ask for, and what is expected of them.

The outline for bishops presents a nuanced set of expectations for bishops-elect, bishops in their first year, and over the long haul.

It asks about the vocation of the bishop, clarity about the nature of ministry, about the bishop’s spirituality and faith, about leadership and collaboration, and considers the bishop as guardian of the faith and of the mind of Christ. It gives us an idea of the sort of pressures our leaders are under.

The candidate will have a thorough knowledge and understanding of the apostolic tradition that is to be guarded, passed on, and communicated, and ability to teach it effectively with grace (1 Timothy 3. 1-7; Titus 1; Irenaeus; Tertullian)

The bishop regularly and rigorously reviews the vocation of chief pastor, re-assessing how well clergy and people have been enabled, resourced and empowered, and the role of representative of the diocese in public life and for laity assessing how effective this has been

The elected candidate’s spirituality is grounded in Anglican liturgy and in classics of devotion

The incoming bishop will become an example of holiness of life appropriate to a more sensitive and exposed role in the public arena

Holiness in word and life, love for God’s people, humility and lack of self-promotion will be seen. The candidate will be secure enough to avoid becoming defensive or authoritarian

The bishop-designate or incoming bishop will devise safeguards against any temptation to self-aggrandisement or conversely to undue feelings of inadequacy

The bishop’s personal integrity has not become sacrificed to a multiplicity of expectations or role-performances

The candidate has shown ability to share responsibility, and praise or blame with co-workers; humility to share decisions with others; and also confidence to take initiatives and to lead from the front when required. The candidate practises courageous servant-leadership.

The incoming bishop will study and reflect on the meaning of ‘apostolicity’ in the New Testament, and the growth of Patristic, Reformation and particularly Anglican views of the chief roles of bishops.

The bishop will reflect on how to hold together unity and order with diversity but within acceptable limits. It will mean also critically discerning, in collaboration with trans-provincial and other colleagues, what these acceptable limits are.

The bishop continues to follow and to live out the example of Jesus as chief pastor, servant, intercessor, friend and example, when necessary accepting shame and suffering

Many glib remarks occur, but I just don't seem to be able to put them in writing. But I suppose we could say this:

Lord, give the bishops of the Church of Christ Jesus all the virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit to perform and fulfill their tasks.

Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer

The Oxford History of Christian Worship is 860 pages of wonderfully perceptive and accessible historical scholarship in the service of Christian theology. The book is sympathetic to every strand of Christian worship: there is nothing dry or patronizing here. The masterly Introduction by Geoffrey Wainwright is not only theological, it is positively evangelical: if we do not worship the true God we worship false ones.

The book starts with the apostolic tradition, the ancient oriental churches, and goes on to Orthodoxy. I was most impressed by Alexander Rentel’s fifty pages on Eastern Orthodoxy, by André Haquin on changes in Catholic worship in the twentieth century, and by Karen Westfield Tucker’s forty page chapter on North America. Other chapters deal with different ecclesiologies (Mennonite, Charismatic), territories (Africa, Asia) and themes (Music, the Spatial Setting, Women), and there are seven chapters on church and worship in the global south. The chapters lay out the theological logic of each form of worship: the content and structures of worship services are discussed, with some information laid out in boxes, and lots of illustrations.

Several chapters discuss the twentieth century, in which worship underwent rapid changes in every church. The Roman Catholic recovery of the idea that whole church is the people of God, communion ecclesiology (an unnoticed reformation?), meant that Vatican II was not simply the Catholic church ‘catching up’ with change outside it; it has also been the impetus to liturgical revision in every other (Protestant) denomination. Revision of lectionaries, service books and hymn books shows an increasing Evangelical understanding of the role of the lectionary in cementing the unity of the Church, and thus a growing Protestant realisation of the catholicity of Church. There is an intelligent discussion of Pentecostal and charismatic worship and a tentative look forward, perhaps to a church led by the charismatic churchmanship of the global south. The Oxford History of Christian Worship is a compelling read, and I was gripped even by subjects that I thought I had no interest in. It is the best purchase I have made this year.

See The Oxford History of Christian Worship at Knight's Amazon Store

Geoffrey Wainwright, an English Methodist, has been master of this field since the appearance of his systematic theology of Christian worship, ‘Doxology’. As one Amazon reviewer said – "After reading Wainwright's book, you will want to look for another one just like it - only it doesn't exist." Though it has been universally admired, ‘Doxology’ has not had enough of an impact, so much theology is still studied as though it had nothing to do with the public worship and confession of the Christian community. See Wainwright at Wikipedia and at Duke.

Fulcrum has published two papers by Oliver O'Donovan. The first shows that contemporary theological liberalism is bankrupt: ‘The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm’ is its obituary. But O'Donovan does so the more effectively because he shows that liberalism wasn’t always bankrupt, and is not bankrupt by necessity.

Contemporary liberalism shows a violent disdain for the past. ‘The present state of liberal Anglican thought [which] appears to be in deep denial: denial about the record of the past ….’. Contemporary liberalism pitches itself against any existing, time-tested formulation of the Christian faith. This is self-contradicting and so self-refuting.

O'Donovan’s faint but real praise of the liberalism of previous generations, shows the more effectively that contemporary liberalism has to be entirely cleared away before a positive way can be set out.

Old-fashioned liberalism once provided the glue that held the different theological emphases of Anglicanism together. It showed a ‘.. respectful attentiveness to the world as it is…’ .

At its best real (old-fashioned) liberalism meant – and here O'Donovan quotes Rowan Williams – ‘cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility that does not seek to close down unexpected questions too quickly’.

O'Donovan’s response for this insight, and for Williams himself is …. ‘For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful’.

In other words, O'Donovan fears we may not be thankful enough for our Archbishop. He may be a much greater gift than we appreciate, and whether he is or not, depends on us. This takes us into O'Donovan’s second paper, ‘The Care of the Churches’.

Our appreciation of Archbishop Williams will increase the extent he is able to lead us well through the present crisis. If we allow him to lead us well, the church will positively grow and flourish, not despite the present crisis, but because of it, and he will turn out to have been a great Christian leader. Williams’s old-fashioned liberalism is itself a gift to the Church. Williams never was just a liberal: he is far more complex than that, because he is deeply formed by the whole Christian tradition. liberal, catholic, evangelical instincts are all part of his make-up – as they must be of any Christian leader.

But it is a good thing that we have a liberal at the helm because this liberal is able to make this public turn to the unity of the church, its discipline and its doctrine. The unity that Williams is turning to church to is unity with truth, through discipleship. Then the truth of the gospel is not only not sacrificed, but is the basis on which the more costly unity of the church is won. Alternatively, if we stick with O'Donovan’s generous definition, Williams is restoring something of the liberalism with church discipline that once provided Anglican unity.

O'Donovan’s very under-stated line on Williams is – that Williams is a real disciple. You know that real disciples are rare as ... well, they dont come by too often, you can take it from me. So the obedience of the church and its survival through the present church-dividing crises, does not depend just on Williams. It depends on the extent to which every part of the Anglican church is able to see that this Archbishop is a real disciple, and loses its heart again to Christ – and follows him. We have am unusual Christian leader before us. O'Donovan’s question is then – will we follow him and find that more costly unity that comes with truth and discipline?

Theological Education for the Anglican Communion (TEAC) has just published a set of outlines of training in Christian life. Each outline lists the Christian competencies we can hope to learn and the teaching in discipleship that will promote these competencies.

The outline for the ‘laity’ distinguishes four categories of Christian:

candidates in baptismal catechesis (and Godparents or sponsors)

those recently baptized – and in post-baptismal nurture

adult Christians – for growth in faith

Anglican Christians – for renewal and mature life

Then it distinguishes five areas of the Christian life: commitment, discipleship and mission, biblical knowledge and doctrinal understanding, spiritual growth, worship. The following competencies are (mostly) from the ‘adult Christian’ column:

* All should understand that Christian commitment may be costly in terms of a person’s integrity, relationships and witness.

* All should be aware that Christian commitment may involve going against what others perceive to be the truth.

* All should know that commitment to Christ is sacrificial, life-long and lived out in daily life.

* All should be prepared for commitment of life in obedience to God’s will, and be open to accepting new revelation which may require changes in that commitment.

* All are taught key Bible stories: Creation, the Patriarchs, Moses and the Law, key players in Israel’s story; the life and teachings of Jesus; key incidents from Acts, and other New Testament writings.

* All are encouraged and helped to explore further basic Christian doctrines at an appropriate level (eg. Apostles’ Creed, Commandments and Lord’s Prayer).

* All should be encouraged and helped to develop a rule of life which includes a sustainable pattern of praying and listening to God daily; and also to learn to pray through reading the Bible.

* All seek to grow into the likeness of Christ

* All should be formed in a pattern of regular worship, self-examination and participation in the sacraments of the church.

THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION FOR THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION - LAITY ‘TARGET GROUP’

It seems to me the best reply to this is:

Amen. Lord, have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law. Well done, TEAC working party, that is not a bad little start.

The doctrine of the life shared in Christ is brought into relation to the doctrine of the Body of Christ. The life shared is embodied. The Church is related to Christ as his mystical complement in the one organism of the new creation.

Today men desire the integration of life upon a new basis. But the rival solutions offered cancel one another out; for none of them represents the whole which corresponds to human nature as God individualism it. More serious, however, is the fact that this situation is the counterpart of disunity amongst Christians and is closely connected with that disunity. Moreover our present dilemma is one which would seem to involve us in a vicious circle. Truth in its wholeness can be rightly apprehended only within a common order of life…the principle signifies that the broken mirror of Christendom cannot without grave distortion reflect the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

L. S. Thornton The Common Life in the Body of Christ (1941)

You can’t make sense of Christian ethics apart from Christian life. You can’t make sense of Christian 'principles' apart from the Christian community or apart from the practicalities that are the outworking of the love that holds that community together and makes it a public body that witnesses to God.

The discipline laid on Christians is not meant for other people. You may have heard the Christians talking about how to lead the Christian life, but that was meant for them to hear, not for you – unless you want to become one of them.

Christian ethics is not a sub-division of ethics: its first loyalty is to the whole Christian faith, life and people. The Christian ethic serves the unity and integrity of the Christian people. The Christian people are witnesses of God for the world. They are God’s first bystanders, to fill in all those who will become bystanders in the future on the action that they have missed. They are the community taught the skills of witness to God, and taught by God: ‘witness skills’ are not very different from ‘leadership skills’.

The Christian community is being taught the witness of God in order to lead the world out of its own self-preoccupation and to point towards the preoccupation of God with, and love of God for, the world. They are made demonstrators of the love and service of God to man. They are on display to the world, their job to be embarrassed and humiliated publicly before the world by their Lord, as an illustration of his compassionate condescension. They are something special, even unique. Of course much of the time the special thing is that they are misrepresenting God, a picture of the misery of man without God. But they are also the demonstration of the readiness of God to hear that man.

1144 ‘In the celebration of the sacraments it is thus the whole assembly that is leitourgos, each according to his function, but in the ‘unity of the Spirit’ who acts in all.

1154 The liturgy of the Word is an integral part of the sacramental celebrations.

1155 The liturgical word and action are inseparable both insofar as they are signs, and instruction insofar as they accomplish what they signify.

1187 The Liturgy is the work of the whole Christ, head and body. our high priest celebrates it unceasingly in the heavenly liturgy, with the Mother of God, the apostles, all the saints and the multitude of so who have already entered the kingdom.

1188 In a liturgical celebration the whole assume is ‘leitourgois’ each member according to his own function. The baptismal priesthood is that of the whole Body of Christ. but some of the faithful are ordained through the sacrament of Holy Orders to represent Christ as head of the Body.

1195 By keeping the memorials of the saints – first of all the holy Mother of God, then the apostles, the martyrs and other saints – on fixed days of the liturgical year, the Church on earth shows that she is united with the liturgy of heaven. She gives glory to Christ for having accomplished his salvation in his glorified members; their example encourages her on her way to the Father.

1196 The faithful who celebrate the Liturgy of the Hours are united to Christ our high priest, by the prayer of the psalms, meditation on the Word of God, and canticles and blessings, in order to be joined with his unceasing and universal prayer that gives glory to the Father and implores the gift of the Holy Spirit on the whole world.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church - Part Two, Section One, Chapter Two online at the Vatican and at Amazon

Keep The Catechism close to hand. All theological discussion improves when it refers explicitly to the documents produced by Church bodies. We can all learn from this document. We can use in discussions with Roman Catholics and it will enable us to make our disagreement with some of their positions clearer. To give the whole Church a document as strong as this is a truly charitable act.

s. 1136 Liturgy is an action of the whole Christ (Christus totus). Those who now celebrate it without signs are already in the heavenly liturgy, where celebration is wholly communion and feast.

1137 The book of Revelation of St John read in the Church’s liturgy, first reveals to us ‘A throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne’: ‘the Lord God’. it then shows the Lamb, ‘standing as though it had been slain’: Christ crucified and risen, the one high priest of the sanctuary, the same one ‘who offers and is offered, who gives and is given’.

1138 ‘Recapitulated in Christ’ these are the ones who take part in the service of the praise of God and the fulfilment of his plan: the heavenly powers, all creation (the four living beings), the servants of the Old and New Covenant (the twenty-four elders), the new People of God (the one hundred and forty-four thousand), especially the martyrs ‘slain for the word of God’, and the all holy Mother of God (the Woman), the Bride of the Lamb, and finally ‘a great multitude which no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues’.

1139 It is in this eternal liturgy that the Spirit and the Church enable us to participate whenever we celebrate the mystery of salvation in the sacraments.

1141 This ‘common priesthood’ is that of Christ the sole priest, in which all his members participate.

1142 The ordained minister is at it were an ‘icon’ of Christ the priest.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church - Part Two, Section One, Chapter One online at the Vatican and at Amazon

The Church looks conservative only because the Church is the only public place in which the issues of what is worth doing, and so of truth and goodness – which previous generations used to talk freely about – get a public hearing. Because the Church is not in as much of a panic about time as the world is, the Church has the patience to host discussion of how to be human. No particular moment seems the right moment to get into a long discussion. It is always more convenient to carry on assuming that we all already know what is worth doing, how to live well, and that we don’t need to talk it all through again.

The Christians re-enter this discussion every Sunday when they line up behind the Son of Man, who is God’s own definition of life lived well, and they sing along with him back to God.

So it is the Church which knows how to be properly worldly. It has a better idea of what the world is to be than this world does. The Church tells the world how best to be worldly – by asking its maker if it may join his conversation on this subject.

The best thing the Church can do for the world is be distinct from it, and so remind the world that it has not yet arrived. The world is not yet all in all. So the Church must hold out hope to the world – and point out that this time is not yet the fullness of time, but it is the time to live well and to talk life through in good company.

St. Cyril explicitly rejects the Apollinarian thesis, and stresses the complete humanity assumed by Christ into a real 'physical' or 'hypostatic' unity with the Word. Cyril associates Christ's High-priesthood with specifically with His humanity, and makes frequent reference to the Epistle to the Hebrews in his discussion of the human soul of Christ. Against Nestorius, he writes: Christ carried up the mind of believers into the one nature of the Godhead. Cyril describes Christian worship as 'rational', and constantly speaks of Christ as the 'High Priest of our souls'. For Cyril, Christ fulfills His priesthood both as one who receives and as one who offers prayer. Since Christ is not two but indissolubly one, our rational worship is offered to Him as well as through and in union with Him, and by Him to God the Father. In his third epistle against Nestorius, Cyril affirms clearly the vicarious and high priestly character of Christ's humanity: Christ 'offers Himself for us and us through and in himself to the Father'. He worships for he has assumed the nature that pays worship. Although the host above and the holy spirits worship him, Cyril writes, when he became as we are, he worshipped with us as a man offering as fragrant incense, himself on our behalf, and us through himself and in himself to God the Father.

Matthew Baker Logiki Latreia and the Mind of Christ

It has been one of the distinguishing marks of Western culture, from the nominalists of the late Middle Ages onward, that 'mystery' and 'reason' are continually held apart, even seen as opposed. In particular, in the development from the skepticism of the radical Enlightenment to 20th century positivism, the idea of rationality has taken on an increasingly narrowed definition, one which excludes, and is even pit against, notions of revelation, transcendence, and tradition. Yet the faith of the Apostles and Fathers is otherwise. The substance of this faith is that 'the mystery hidden for ages in God' and now revealed in Jesus Christ, is none other than the Logos, the infinite and uncreated Reason and Word of God. It is that this Logos assumed full humanity in the womb of the Virgin, uniting to Himself a human mind, with all its structures of created rationality, redeeming and sanctifying them, so that we might be transformed in the renewal of our minds (Rom. 12:2).

A positive and balanced understanding of the role of reason in the redemptive work of Christ and the life of the Church is reflected in the Pauline notion of logiki latreia, 'rational worship',which is to be found in the Orthodox liturgies themselves and in the writings of the Fathers. In Romans 12:1-2, St. Paul writes: I appeal to you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your rational worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed in the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Paul's discussion of rational worship and the transformation of the mind comes in a context in which the role of body is given place as well. This is indicative of the wholistic anthropology of St. Paul, in continuity with the Old Testament, in which body and mind are distinguished but held together in essential unity. This holistic anthropology is important for the theology of worship as it will also become important for the Fathers' defense of the full humanity of Christ against the Apollinarian denial of a human mind to the Incarnate Savior. There seems little doubt that in its original context of Romans 12, Paul's concept of logiki latreia refers not to the Church's liturgy in the narrow sense of the term, but rather to the entire 'liturgy' of the Christian life, lived as an offering of worship to God.

Matthew Baker Logiki Latreia and the Mind of Christ

So koinonia / communio is a foundational term which gained fundamental significance for the early church, and which in the eyes of many once more occupies a pre-eminent place in defining the essence of the Church today. The Church is shared participation in the life of God, therefore koinonia with God and with one another (1 Jn, 1,3).

So from the beginning the episcopal office was ‘koinonially’ or collegially embedded in the communion of all bishops; it was never perceived as an office to be understood or practised individually. In his history of the Church Eusebius describes in detail the endeavours to maintain peace, unity, love and communion during the violent conflicts of the second century regarding the correct fasting practices and the dating of Easter (Hist. eccl., v,23f; cf. vii,5). The collegial nature of the episcopal office achieves its most impressive expression in the consecration of bishops.

‘The episcopate is one, each part of which is held by each one for the whole’ (Cyprian of Carthage De ecclesiae catholicae unitate, 1,5). Such statements and admonitions recur again and again in Cyprian’s letters (Ep., 55,21; 59,14 et al.). Most familiar is the statement that the Church is the people united with the bishop and the flock devoted to its shepherd. ‘The bishop is in the church and the church is in the bishop, and if anyone is not with the bishop he is not with the church.’ But Cyprian goes even one step further: he not only emphasises the unity of the people of God with its own individual bishop, but also adds that no one should imagine that he can be in communion with just a few, for ‘the Catholic Church is not split or divided’ but ‘united and held together by the glue of the mutual cohesion of the bishops’ (Ep., 66,8).

Cardinal Walter Kasper An address given to the Church of England Bishops’ Meeting (5 June 2006)

The action of Israel that we have received in the form of scripture and liturgy topples the alternative constructions of the gentiles, and prevents the world knitting itself together into any form other than the form of Christ. It is the one action that keeps the world open, reminding us that the Messiah is not here, and that what the world presently is, is not the end. True reading produces the transformation of the readers, so hermeneutics is ethics, the reading of people into the Church.

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

In teaching the coherence of all things around the incarnate Word, Irenaeus was safeguarding not only the integrity of Jesus but the integrity of every particular. Whereas the gnostics saw in the redemptive work of the logos ‘the separation of what was unnaturally united,’ Irenaeus saw in Jesus the reunion of what was unnaturally separated.

Irenaeus placed heavy emphasis on the Christ-event as the climactic moment in a long history of God's approach to man. Only after a protracted period of preparation does the Word appear among us - not as a retort to the old covenant or its deity, but as that very deity in person.... It is under their tutelage (the prophets) that we are slowly readied to receive him, for he does not come to us unannounced. When he finally does come of course a great threshold is crossed and a new age begun; under the tutelage of the incarnate one, in the communion of the Spirit, we ourselves may now advance towards God…. But we have missed an important turning if we proceed to operate on the premise that the incarnation takes place at the point where mankind as such is truly ready for God, where sacred history can therefore broaden out at last into universal history. …As Irenaeus sees it, our evolution has actually become our devolution the Son does not appear at the middle of history, then but at the end; not somewhere near the top, but at the bottom. The Son comes to offer his summing up just where it is necessary for history to begin all over again.

Douglas Farrow Ascension and Ecclesia

God’s sovereignty transcends and stands in judgment on all worldly sovereignties. Because God is God, Caesar is not God and neither are Caesar’s successors, be they kings, presidents, prime ministers, or party general secretaries. And because Caesar and his successors aren’t God, their power is limited, not absolute; in addition to Caesar’s legitimate power, there are other legitimate powers in the world.

So the state cannot be all there is. Long before Enlightenment political theorists began challenging royal absolutism with ideas like Montesquieu’s "separation of powers," Western civilization learned the idea of "limited government" in the school of Christian reflection. When medieval Catholic thinkers insisted on a sharp distinction between "society" and the "state," they created a vaccine against absolutism in either its royal or modern (totalitarian) form. The vaccine wasn’t completely effective. But its potency may help explain why the age of absolutism was a rather short one, as these things go in history. Medieval Catholicism also helped plant in the Western mind the idea that "consent" is crucial to just governance. Government isn’t simply coercion, medieval Catholic political theory insisted; just governance requires consent. Consent would be forthcoming if governance were just. And who would judge the justice of a particular form or style of governance, or the justice of a particular act of state? The Church’s claim to be able to judge princes, and the Catholic teaching that "the people" have an inherent sense of justice within them, injected a crucial idea into the political-cultural subsoil of the West—the idea that "justice" isn’t simply what those in authority say it is. There are moral standards of justice that are independent of governments; we can know those moral standards, and they ought to be applied in public life. All of these ideas, fundamental to democracy, were nurtured in the civilization of the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church.

George Weigel Divine Sovereignty Letters to a Young Catholic

The ever-excellent Peter Leithart has been reading Aristotle Papanikolaou's new book Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, And Divine-Human Communion.

Papanikolaou is comparing the trinitarian theology of Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas. According to Papanikolaou:

Zizioulas "emphatically affirms that an energy is never apersonal. The energies of God are communicated only through the persons of the Trinity. This emphasis on the personal character of energies is indicative of the primacy of an ontology of personhood and communion in Zizioulas's thought. Second, salvation is not described for Zizioulas as an increase in participation in the divine energies, but as the transformation of being into true personhood in the person of Christ. For Zizioulas, the essence/energies distinction is 'nothing else essentially, but a device created by the Greek Fathers to safeguard the absolute transcendence of God without alienating Him from the world.' The energies are God's actions in the world and are saving events. The ultimate saving event, though not excluding the divine energies, is not simply a matter of God's action, but a relational event of communion that constitutes human personhood as true personhood in the image of Christ."

Read Leithart's summary

The resurrection of Jesus was not the general resurrection, but the provision of a longer gentler way to the general resurrection. This resurrection, that is both commenced and delayed, is the mode of God's hidden work of holding and training a people. By the resurrection, the crucifixion of Christ was lifted from Christ and placed instead on the many who had crucified him. Their act rebound to catch them. The many have been corralled by the death that his resurrection has imposed upon them. Their death is now not at all their death, but entirely his death, the death that holds, not him, but them on whom he has imposed it. Now they can be slowly supplied, by the Spirit, with the resurrection. It can be supplied by the one who has risen from them and is therefore able to be with them, without their sin and death. The resurrected one is the Lord, the Spirit, the true and faithful servant who will not waste his talents, or lose a single member of the flock he has gathered. He has worked, and his work is united with its harvest. He has paid with his labour, and he now receives the reward due to him.

Jesus was abandoned by all. He was hung on the cross to display his complete isolation and shame. All resources of support drained away from him, until he had nothing. In this visible world he was cleared out of all resources of public reputation and recognition. He descended through all intermediary levels of status and being until he reached the lowest point, left altogether without being, in total shame. But the forces of this world could not keep him down. Being unable to make their judgment stick, they have been publicly revealed to be without power. When he was raised by the Father, Jesus was set at the highest place. The Father reversed the action of mankind by overturning this public assessment of his servant. Because Jesus is raised from this total absence of status, those who shamed him are now shamed.

By his Spirit the victorious Son calls and draws out of the earth all the dispersed elements, all the bodies of the poor, hidden by wicked men, and brings them together to form one bright new body – the resurrection body, united with himself.

Jesus is handed over to the world. He is made passive. Passivity and passion become his action. Although Jesus is the circumcision, baptism and anointing, he is circumcised, baptised and anointed. Although he is the resurrection, the one who may never die, he suffers and dies. He suffers the world. If we are allowed to abuse the language a little, we could say that Jesus is worlded. He calls out from the world what is most intrinsic to it – death – and summons it together to a single point, that of the cross. When Jesus calls, death comes out of the world. He is able to break open the world and separate death from it. The indivisible Spirit drives division out. The world is Jesused. Death has no claim on him, so finds nothing in him by which it can gain purchase. Death is deathed. The Spirit makes the Son indivisible and so impregnable: the world cannot break him. God has allowed the tares to grow in the field, and though, like the kings of the earth, they grow very confident, their destruction is assured, for he has all this time prepared a place for them, a no-place. In entering the enclosure of death the Son is not enclosed, but breaks open what only he had held shut.

My wonderful Eerdmans editor asked me whether I could change some of my references to 'sons' to 'sons and daughters' to make it seem a bit more fair. On the spur of the moment I couldn't say why I didn't want to make the change. But now I have found the admirable Ken Collins deftly explaining what is at stake.

You are all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:26-28)

Paul did not write â??sons and daughters of God,â?? because he wasnâ??t thinking of sons as masculine offspring. He was thinking of sons as legal agents. If Paul had written â??sons and daughters,â?? he would have been empowering the men but not the women. By saying that women are also adopted sons of God, he is saying that women are equally Godâ??s agents in this world. Now we have a whole new idea about what it means to be a Christian.

In the household of God, we are slaves who are being adopted as sons of God through the blood of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. In our new status of sons, we are heirs, but more importantly we are Godâ??s business agents in this world. God gives us a commission to preach the gospel, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to do all the good deeds that He has set out for us to do. When Scripture says that we are adopted sons, it does not mean that we are only loved and cuddled, it means that we are the agents of Godâ??s providence, the distributors of Godâ??s blessings, the instruments of Godâ??s grace, and the ambassadors of Godâ??s love to sinners, because it is for sinners that Christ died. It is through our words and deeds that God answers other peopleâ??s prayers, because we are His agents in this world.

Ken Collins Cultural Differences - 'Son'

The one Son does not replace the many people who belong to him. He is the guarantor of their continuing manyness. He starts a community, and is its definition, but he does not represent its end. He rather grows and expands it without limit. The manyness of these witnesses to the Son, themselves provided by him, are our protection against the intensity of his otherwise unmediated presence.

Scripture prepares us. To this end it protects us, and in stages removes this protection from us. The resurrection has already raised this protection from one of our number. It is his unity with the Father, that effects the unity and efficacy of scripture. The patriarchs are presently mediated to us as one single instantiation of Israel, the co-presence of the whole company in the one person, Jesus Christ. As one and complete, he is the arrival of the many. We are being trained to perceive and receive this host in him, the one they have sent ahead.

The spiritual sons of Abraham are the ones who can tell the story of Abraham. Their narration of the action of God is witness to their paternity. God, the first actor of Scripture, creates a community, composed of patriarchs, prophets and saints, into which are to be integrated. He makes this cloud of witnesses and this diversity of speech and action shape us. God creates these many words and voices, and this crowd, for us. This crowd surrounds and accompanies us, and gives us our place. The witnesses of the old and new testaments form a single chorus that cheers, and shouts warning and encouragement. They line the road on which we now travel after the Son, willing us on, lifting us with their breath, and driving us along after him. They urge us not to give ourselves away to those other lords who prey on us, and they tell us to pass their encouragement and warning on. They are conveyors and amplifiers of prayers, who make the requests we do not yet know how to make for ourselves. The Holy Spirit utters these patriarchs, prophets and saints, and bears their voices to us. In turn they bear and utter the Son, and are made holy in the process. But these many witnesses are not replaced by the Son. The new testament does not replace or displace the old testament. These many witnesses, the old testament as much as the new, now mediate Christ to us. As he mediates them, they mediate him, and all their mediation is his work.

Scripture is the learner's articulation of the lesson she receives from her instructor. This lesson can only be read in partnership with Israel, by the baptised community given the Spirit by the obedient Son. Thus the Christian can learn only within the Christian community, and only as this community itself learns from Israel, properly recapitulated by the Son. The Son transforms our movements into those of the community re-figured by him. Scripture is the orthopaedic tool by which a new set of practices are taught. It is the set of protocols which learners must learn to internalise, so the Word of God becomes their own mind and word. The single intention of the law is to propel its students towards adulthood and to the stature of Jesus Christ. The process of the production of the holy people is not finished. The discernment of progress, and thus the exercise of judgement, is part of the process of refinement. But if the law itself has become disordered, or Scripture is no longer properly heard, it can no longer order people into the place right for each. The Law without the Spirit effects only to stall our growth. Then the law, good and necessary to us in each specific stage, would confine us within it, just when we should be released and encouraged forwards to the next stage. The law designed to build us up, itself needs be maintained, and Christian doctrine kept in good order, so it performs this purpose of building up a people. The law is effective as long as Christ is present to his community by the Spirit.

Hermeneutics is the discipline the moderns had to invent after they had rejected ecclesiology. The Christian community is the proper reader of Scripture, and Scripture builds that community. Scripture and the Church are mutually constituting. The Church, the Body of Christ, is the only hermeneutic of Scripture you’ll ever need.

There can be no ghetto mentality within Orthodox theology. Theology which contents itself with speaking to a closed group, or which happily ignores intellectual trends outside its own ambit, or, still worse, which adopts an abusive attitude to those ‘outside’ its group (especially if they are ‘western’) to that extent adopts an anti-Trinitarian mode of being. In so doing, it turns away from Christ, and so loses touch with the principle of its own theological life, thus forfeits its identity as theology, and certainly fails to be Orthodox theology. Just as truly personal, communal and kenotic prayer is for the whole world, and disregards all badges or labels, so Orthodox theology must explicitly concern itself with that which lies beyond the walls of the Orthodox academy. All Orthodox theology must have a concern for that which lies outside the Church in the world.

Nonetheless, whilst all theology must be concerned with what lies outside the Church, there can be no theology which is outside the Church. The theologian can only draw his or her life from the eschatological Christ, and theological speech is an eschatological ek-stasis and witness which attempts to stand outside all the pettiness and smallness of the world we live in at the moment and speak to that world from the vantage point of the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom which is tasted and shared in in the Church.

Alan Brown

And what is the ideal of theology in the spiritual tradition of which St. Maximos is such a leading light? In that tradition, the patristic Orthodox tradition, the word ‘theology’, as Orthodox theologian Alexander Golitsin points out in another context, is used in at least five different levels of meaning—not five different meanings, but hierarchically, five different levels, of which only the fifth and lowest is rational, academic discourse on religious doctrine. When Dionysios or Maximos and others in the Philokalic ascetic tradition use the word ‘theology’, they mean first of all God in Trinity, then secondly, the unitive experience or gnosis of God in Trinity; then, thirdly, they mean by theology the worship of God, in particular the unity of the liturgy of the angels in heaven and the liturgy of the Church on earth; and fourthly, they use theology to refer to the Holy Scriptures. In other words, to ‘do’ theology properly in the Maximian, Palamite, Philokalic sense, is in some way to participate in Divinity. It is in that sense that Evagrios of Pontos, one of Maximos’ spiritual forefathers, can declare, in his work, On Prayer: ‘If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian’ (On Prayer 61). It is in this sense also, in the most Evagrian of his writings, the Centuries on Charity, that Maximos himself can say, using the same formula, which sounds almost impossibly severe: ‘He who truly loves God prays entirely without distraction, and he who prays entirely without distraction loves God truly. But he whose intellect is fixed on any worldly thing does not pray without distraction, and consequently he does not love God’ (Char. 2:1) True theology, even on the fifth level, must be free of distraction and grounded in prayer and love for God. And this is perhaps where I failed Alan Brown and Douglas Knight.

When I think of what another of St. Maximos’ eminent spiritual forefathers, St. Diadochos of Photiki (5th Cent.) had to say about theology, I am acutely aware of how far I am from this ideal. He writes, in his ‘On Spiritual Knowledge 7’:

‘Spiritual discourse fully satisfies our intellectual perception, because it comes from God through the energy of love. It is on account of this that the intellect (nous) continues undisturbed in its concentration on theology. It does not suffer then from the emptiness which produces a state of anxiety, since in its contemplation it is filled to the degree that the energy of love desires. So it is right always to wait, with a faith energized by love, for the illumination which will enable us to speak. For nothing is so destitute as a mind philosophizing about God when it is without Him.’

The Orthodox patristic theological tradition is, above all, an energetic theology, grounded in the energy of love. I cannot say with absolute conviction that my earlier post was the fruit of something that came from God through the energy of love. And for this I must ask the forgiveness of all who have read it. And when one thinks of what Diadochos says further on in ‘On Spiritual Knowledge’, one cannot help but be even further chastened, especially as this text embraces all four of the higher levels of theology mentioned above:

‘God is not prepared to grant the gift of theology to anyone who has not first prepared himself by giving away all his possessions for the glory of the Gospel; then in godly poverty he can proclaim the riches of the divine kingdom…All God’s gifts of grace are flawless and source of everything good; but the gift which inflames our heart and moves it to the love of His goodness more than any other is theology. It is the early offering of God’s grace and bestows on the soul the greatest gifts. First of all, it leads us gladly to disregard all love of this life, since in the place of perishable desires we possess inexpressible riches, the oracles of God. Then it embraces our intellect with the light of a transforming fire, and so makes it a partner of the angels in their liturgy. Therefore, when we have been made ready, we begin to long sincerely for this gift of contemplative vision, for it is full of beauty, frees us from every worldly care, and nourishes the intellect (nous) with divine truth in the radiance of inexpressible light. In brief, it is the gift which, through the help of the holy prophets, unites the deiform soul with God in unbreakable communion. So, among men as among angels, divine theology—like one who conducts the wedding feast—brings into harmony the voices of those who praise God’s majesty’ (On Spiritual Knowledge, 66-67)

And so, my friends, if my contribution to this theological conversation has not also contributed to bringing into harmony the voices of those who praise God’s majesty, then I ask your forgiveness for that lapse.

Vincent Rossi

You can read Vicent Rossi's comment in its entirety here

Solly is reading Chapter Three of The Eschatological Economy. Here is a snippet of his commentary:

'It needs a reminder here that for Knight the idea that sacrifice means 'making holy' comes in part from the Latin roots of the English word 'sacrifice'. It is necessary to see that this is also how the practice appears in scripture of course, supplemented by such insights of the practice that anthropologists can supply us with. Sacrifice is here presented not only as the work of the Israelite, but the work of God on the Israelite, of making him a son, of making him a person.

Knight returns to the modern sensitivities to the notion of vicarious and substitutionary action, as exemplified in Kant's philosophy of religion, and how this encapsulates in nuce the economy of modernity's understanding of individuality, and resistance to the idea of relationism. You cannot do something for me, in my place, A is A, and A is not not-A.

Given, Knight explains, modern theology's appropriating this position, and the con-joined idea that we are already persons [though really only individuals] then that explains the difficulties found with the doctrine that we are God's work, our becoming is basic, not our being. Existentialism expressed that garishness and angst of this position, of man no longer in relation with man, but isolated in spheres of completeness, yet knowing it was not really so. R R Reno Redemptive Change: Atonement and the Christian Cure of the Soul has also criticised modern thought for its inability to propound a doctrine of personal and moral change when it also holds to an idea of humanity that does not need change, each individual is complete in themself.'

Solly's commentary is a model of clarity. I am beginning to wish he had intervened a bit earlier, when the book was still a-writing. Here is more of Solly's analysis of this Israel-and-Adam Christology.

This is actually quite a Christologically focussed chapter, despite the title, and brings together the idea of what it means to be a son of Israel, as well as God's Son, not only as Israel, but also as Christ. Knight also brings in an Adam Christology, a theme found in scripture but, he believes, not utilised to the maximum benefit, and proposes a new lease of life for adoptionist language in line with his thesis that 'doing makes being', 'becoming' precedes rather than flows from 'being'. The question is then asked, What the work of the Son is, and this brings in the idea of sacrifice, and discussion about theories of atonement, and the modern rejection of vicarious and substitutionary actions.

His concern in the opening of this chapter is whether his theological proposals are backed up by biblical studies; can the text support the weight put upon it. Adam Christology is the scriptural theme he uses to draw the various threads of his thought together:

Solly gives you more analysis of the relationship of this Israel-Adam Christology.

[I have shortened Alan Brownâ??s response to Vincent Rossi. You can see Alanâ??s whole reply in the comments to Vincent Rossiâ??s piece â??Participationâ??]

â??For Maximus, communion means precisely mystagogy, and mystagogy means initiation into and participation in the Great Mystery, and the Great Mystery is the Incarnation of the Logos, One of the Holy Trinity, through which, by perchoresis or reciprocal indwelling, human beings may be deified and all nature transfigured.â??

It is nice that Mr Rossi knows the meaning of Ï?εÏ?ιÏ?Ï?Ï?ηÏ?ιÏ?. However, he does not seem to be aware of the difference between μÏ?Ï?Ï?αγÏ?γία, which means the leading-into the mystery that is communion, and communion itself. (This is evident from the two occurrences of the term μÏ?Ï?Ï?αγÏ?γία in the Mystagogy, both of which occur in ch. 2 of the text.)

Mr Rossi continues: â??We have heard a lot about â??relational ontologyâ?? over the past decade or so. St. Maximosâ?? ontology is the authentic relational ontology of patristic Orthodoxyâ??.

Such talk of â??relational ontologyâ??, however, is likewise vacuous (as is of course the meaningless term â??authenticâ??). Certainly for Maximus, neither communion nor participation (which are not simply synonymous) fall within the category of relation. For participation in the Logos is constitutive of the being of things, whilst communion actualises the identity (Ï?αÏ?Ï?Ï?Ï?ηÏ?) of all things - something not true of relation. Possibly, Mr Rossi means to say this by the language of relation. However, his language â?¦ seems to betray aâ?¦ commitment to a univocal ontology of the entity, according to which different entities can only have ontological connection through the category of relation. Such is typical of Roman Catholic scholastic interpretation of St Maximus. After this, Mr Rossi commits himself (and Maximus) to belief in â??the timeless essence of beingsâ??. Again, this is â?¦ betrays a foreign ontology to that of St Maximus. For, according to our Holy Father in God, all being apart from God is temporal, so that the essence of any created being is the essence of a temporal being. As such, temporality is intrinsic to the essence of any such being - for the essence has real existence only in a temporal being. Here it seems to me that Mr Rossi betrays unthinking commitment to a modernist Neoscholastic understanding of essence.

Moreover, his equation of â??substance-languageâ?? with â??hellenismâ?? is disingenuous. Maximus has no doctrine of â??substanceâ?? at all. Î?Ï?Ï?ία means â??beingâ?? (participle) and does not possess the same meaning as â??substanceâ?? at any stage in the history of that term, from Cicero onwards. Again, it is unhelpful to assimilate Maximusâ?? thought to the conceptual structures of scholasticism. And there is nothing hellenic about the notion of being.

After this, we read Mr Rossi speaking of â??an ontology that grounds the unity, union and communion of the Uncreated and the created in the everpresent hypostatic reality of Christâ??s Godmanhood and the everpresent energetic grace of the Life-giving Holy Spirit.â??

Here we note with unease the use of Solovievâ??s term â??Godmanhoodâ??. Perhaps Mr Rossi could explain why he thinks it appropriate to correlate conceptually Maximusâ?? thought with that of nineteenth-century Russian religious philosophy? He critiques Zizioulasâ?? interpretation of Maximus by assimilating Maximusâ?? thought to that of Soloviev.

Solly is right: ‘When YHWH said to Israel 'I am your redeemer' this is not a past tense statement.’ The relationship is live and ongoing (for God is faithful) and Israel is not Israel apart from God’s faithfulness. Israel is always re-supplied with her identity by God. Here is how I introduced the subject:

The doctrine of the election of Israel, and thus of the Jewish people, returned to the centre of dogmatics in the twentieth century, in large part due to Karl Barth. He insisted that God is faithful, and worthy of trust, to the extent that he keeps his promise to this people. Barth’s recovery of typology, in the form of pairs of election-rejection, man-woman and Jew-Gentile, made possible the recovery of the whole Old Testament for christology. But Barth contrasted the pairs of types he identified in the Old Testament, one of which stands for election, the other for rejection. What will prevent these becoming static, and creating two opposing sorts of people? Only the Spirit, God himself, can make one people out of two. So Jesus Christ is the rejected and the elected man. But the power of Jesus Christ is an abstraction if it is not bound to the act of a particular community. Barth avoids an abstraction from Christ, Eugene Rogers believes, but he abstracts from the Spirit (‘Supplementing Barth on Jews and Gender’ Modern Theology 14, 1998). Though God has a particular relationship with Israel, Barth cannot say what that is, because he does not show that God's relationship to the Jewish people is ongoing. The ‘Old Testament in abstracto’ for Barth, is the ‘passing’ form of the human being. Then the people of Israel, the Jewish people, is just a shadow that gives way to the coming community, a different community. Rogers argues that Barth has allowed us to believe that the people of Israel are no longer led by the Spirit of God; the Synagogue is what human beings need to be saved from. Barth has re-established the centrality of the election of the people of Israel, while also seeming to suggest that Israel is replaced by the Christian community. Robert Jenson offers a solution to the problem . He proposes that to Barth's phrase ‘Jesus Christ is the electing God’, we add that ‘the Holy Spirit is the electing God’. Rogers agrees that we must supplement each of Barth’s contrasted types with the Spirit as their third term. It is not individuals that correspond to types, but community, this specific community, that is elect. We should then identify God not by focusing on Jesus Christ as individual, but on Jesus and the community the Holy Spirit gives to him. By doing so we refuse to abstract from God's concrete self-determination to be for Israel.

Much of this is paraphrase of Eugene Rogers. But it is Robert Jenson who has been leading the way here, but when he talks about Israel jenson is talking about God and the future of all humankind, not picking winners in the Middle East conflict. We talk about Israel in order to talk faithfully about Christ and his witnesses, the patriarchs, prophets and people. The people of Christ are first (and by the generosity of God) the people of Israel, and second (by the truly surprising generosity of God) all the others, the rest of us, the gentiles. When we talk about Christ we must do so from the resurrection, Christ vindicated and glorified, so Christ with his people added to him – the whole Christ. Christ is many and one: we do not make him many, he makes us many. Christ is not first an individual to whom the subsequent arrival of his people represents company he didnt have before: rather he is communion intrinsically, and in him (his communion) we become distinct and particular persons, a great company of us, made plural by him. To put it at it strongest – Christ is the Church before the Church is, and Christ is the people of Israel before the people of Israel are. I try to link all this to the New perspective on Paul later in this chapter. Meanwhile, Christ is risen, while we are not yet risen, but can only look forward to the completion of his resurrection, by which we will be joined to him.

Solly's phrase for all this eschatology is: God's work in Christ is the great reverse engineering of the Cosmos.

To show that persons come from God, we have to link a number of Christian doctrines. We have to show that persons come into being through other persons, and that they therefore come into being as they come into relationship with other people, making their appearance in the great assembly of all persons. We come into being as we become distinct and particular persons. Being a body – flesh, in the biblical term – is the means by which we are available to one another. Then we have to say that we become particular persons as we grow into one very particular sort of human being, that comes from exactly one human being, Jesus Christ. All human being is sourced from Jesus Christ and given its definition by him, so he is the criterion of humanity, and therefore of what it is to be a particular human, present to the rest of us as a particular body. This means that our being as persons is not given to us complete at birth, but is part of a process, caused by the Holy Spirit, which unfolds through time. As we are sanctified we become more human, more responsive and available to God, and through God to one another, and so we become real. This happens to us when we properly identify God, from whom all persons come, and praise him for them.

On this definition, becoming human is about becoming better able to concede the otherness of other people. We come to be ourselves by properly seeing people for who they are and who they will be, attributing to them the distinctiveness that God is giving them. Our ability properly to respect others, giving them neither too little nor much recognition, is itself given to us by God. The worship of God allows us to see others as his creatures, and thus to understand that they are ours only because they are first his. By this act of worship we are witnesses of the act by which they are called first into existence and then into their full future stature. We not only see them for what they are, but in the Holy Spirit we contribute to making them what they will be. Worship of the true God is decisive in letting others become freely human, and only this allows us to grow into our own full stature.

The Christian political tradition represents one side of a conversation. The gospel is in conversation and confrontation with pagan thought. In part at least, modernity is pagan, so pagan thought must be the other half of the conversation. Or rather not pagan thought, but pagan practice, the practices of captivity, sloth and compulsion must be the other half of the conversation. Pagan practice cannot be opened to us by pagan thought alone. Only the Scriptures can reveal pagan thought to us as pagan, as that which is present temptation to us, and indeed as our own present practice. The bible is the Scriptures of the Church, not of the West: the Church is not the West, but only the leaven of the West.

The pagan practices most constitutive for modernity are represented by the political philosophy of the ancient world rediscovered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which Kant formalised into the modern political-and-epistemological separation of powers. This is the effective scripture of the modern West. It has brought about the division and reduction of public discourse into the techniques of our withdrawal into ever smaller spheres of selfhood. The West attempts to lay aside the tools by which its own version of its history can be challenged. We must ask whether, in response, God has withdrawn the Scriptures from the West, with the result that the bible is quite closed to us, held closed by God.

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 making the world one, and no part of the world is able to secure itself in unfreedom, against this end. The doctrine of creation is an eschatological doctrine that sets out the future of man as the priest of creation, a future in which he is freely with God.

Over at the ever-excellent Pontifications Al Kimel is examining the Logos Asarkos, the question of the status of the Son 'before' taking flesh (sarx) in the incarnation. Al says that the idea of the ‘pre-existence’ of the Son seemed obvious until Robert Jenson put it in question. So far Al has given us excerpts from Hans Küng and Herbert McCabe, and a tell-tale one-line intervention from Jenson has appeared in the comments box.

In my view we have to rely on this concept of the pre-existent Son only if we set out our doctrine of Christ before we turn to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. If we make the Holy Spirit central to our christology we will not have to rely solely on concepts of nature (the two natures doctrine) or a contrast between eternity and time (which is another version of the same doctrine). I have found it helpful to think this through in terms of language. Imagine that divinity (or equally love, or communion, or eternity) is the language spoken by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Then imagine that the Father and Son invent another language – humanity (or perhaps better imagine that they speak the same language with a new accent). Humanity is then the language is which God is perfectly God, and God (freely) creates us by speaking us into being, and makes himself known to us by addressing us, and makes us known and reachable (incarnate) to one another, and finally makes himself known and reachable to us as Jesus.

This way of thinking about the issue is strange, of course, but as long as we insist on busting theology up into such static categories as nature, rather than allowing it a more dynamic and inter-personal logic (such as language) we will be stuck with such conundrums as the logos asarkos. Let me pursue this a little further.

The Holy Spirit supplies the whole resource of our creaturely life with God. The Father and the Son speak the Spirit. The Spirit is the language they speak. But the Spirit can speak and be many languages, without being less the language of the Son and Father. The Spirit extends their speech to create a new language, which the Father and the Son are content to speak. They speak humanity. Humanity is one of the modes in which they speak divinity to each other. Humanity does not give divinity something that it did not have before: it is not a reduction of, or addition to, their divinity. The Son is the first speaker and the native speaker. He speaks humanity perfectly, and is at home in the flesh, and in the flesh of humanity, he is perfectly at home with the Father. He is not impeded by, or disguised by, the flesh, for it is brought into existence by the speaking of the Son and the Father. The human entity and mode of being is spoken by that enfleshing word and utterance. Having spoken us into being, they also speak through us: the Son replies to the Father in the flesh. They make us speakers. Then they speak to us and so make hearers of us. They speak to us with the intention that we hear and receive one another. They speak to us one another, giving us in this speech one another as words and gifts from God. We are to learn to speak to one another and receive one another from them, with thanksgiving.

This humanity the Son receives from the Father, by the Spirit. The Spirit takes what the Father gives him, and gives it to us, in it making himself present to us (incarnation) and us to him (creation). The fleshly materiality of Jesus of Nazareth derives from, and is supplied by, the consummated materiality of the Spirit. As yet we speak humanity very badly. It is a language and a life we are scarcely acquainted with, so like any foreigner, we mangle this language, not because we are native speakers of some other language, but just because we are autistic, scarcely able to speak. But our bad performance of flesh does not make flesh problematic for God. The Father and Son speak the language of flesh perfectly, this language is sustained by their use of it, and they will enable us to be at home in it to them.

Some scholarship identifies the trinity as the concept that separates Christians from Jews. It assumes that the way to Jewish-Christian dialogue is to emphasise monotheism and play down the doctrine of the trinity. James Dunn tells us that â??Christianity is only Christianity when it is monotheistic. Only so can Christians remain true to their roots, to their heritage within the religion of Israel.â?? Francis Watson counters, â??If â??monotheismâ?? here refers to a view on which Jews and Christians agree, over against classical Christian trinitarianism, these statements would have to be reversed. Christianity is only Christianity when it is trinitarian. Only so can Christians remain true to their Jewish roots and to the Jewish scriptures within their canon. A â??Christianâ?? unitarianism is not a Christian faithfulness to Jewish roots and scripture.â?? I will argue with Watson that the trinity is the doctrine that keeps Christians in relationship with Jews.

There were many Judaisms. Some of them were inherited by Judaism, some by Christianity. It was only with regard to what it called Christianity that Judaism insisted that it was one Judaism and not many. Likewise Christianity insisted it was one only with regard to what it called Judaism. Considered apart, they make two. But apart from Israel, the Church may not confess itself one. The unity of each community is the function of the indivisible work of God. Each side played up the differences, and claimed that the other party had moved away from its origin. In actuality neither side took anything away from the other, or made it impossible for the other to make proper use of the scriptures. What in the Apologistsâ?? period became Christian theology was not a fixed quantity, but competition for the resources of scripture. Patristic and conciliar theology did not arise as part of a growing away from Jewish resources, or living from its â??ownâ?? resources, but as a continual process of the rising to expression of Israelâ??s scriptures as address to the world.

New Testament scholarship that does not allow the unity of Christ and Israel would be in continuity with the idealist or modern theology that seeks an individual. This scholarship would be looking for someone it has decided does not belong to his people, or they to him, an individual subject of narrative (Jesus), or notional individual author of narrative (Paul). It would be searching the first century for the pioneer of twentieth century man. It would be looking for the psychology of Jesus, understood as an individual, whereas it should relate this distinctly human mind, will and set of opinions, to the mind and sensus communis of the whole people of Israel. The rationale of Jesusâ?? action comes, not from a psychology, but from the mandate of Israel displayed in Scripture. If biblical exegesis cannot do this, it will be merely reproducing a modern concept of mind, a psychology of interiority, that is not publicly responsible or contestable. On this basis Jesus would be the first of many men defined without relation, the object of historical critical science who must be identified by separating him from the people he gathers around him. Such a New Testament studies would be unitarian. It would remove Jesus from Israel and refuse to take with him the manyness of the hands employed by the Word of God. This would be to impose an extrinsic criterion, and create a new time, modernity, that defines itself by contrast with the time of God for Israel. It would tend to resist the claim that Jesus is the messiah whose world-rule all Israel participates in. Instead, we must say that Jesus, with his people Israel, is the oneness and indivisibility of God in his work.

Chris asked: Who/what is the Holy Spirit? That is the kind of question I like.

The Holy Spirit is our Lord. He is God, the real, the holy, the only God. There are many masters and authorities that have power over us (the Christian tradition calls them ‘gods’), but they all want something from us because they are needy. Only the real God does not need anything from us, and this is what we mean by saying he is holy. He does not engage with us because this is in his own interests, but he is interested in us anyway, and is determined that we should know this, which involves us becoming holy too.

There is no way to know God except as the Holy Spirit. When we say he is holy we mean amongst others things that he is ungraspable, we don’t grasp or get him or know him via any route we establish without his cooperation. He makes himself known, and he does so in the (holy) Son of the (holy) Father. He provides the breath, life and words by which we come together and praise God, and say publicly that God knows us, and wants us to know that he knows us. Simply by praising him we will move a little way out of the dim half-life we presently know and will shuffle very slightly closer to reality, in which you will be holy to me, me holy to you, and thus, as his holy people, you and I will become real to each other.

As the Holy Spirit powers our praise, which is our acknowledgment and appreciation of reality, we will grow into the life that he shares with us, so we won’t ever run out of things to say about him – or to one another. It is fine to ask ‘what’ questions about the Holy Spirit (or about anyone), but the answer can only be in terms of ‘Who’. The Holy Spirit is the source of all ‘Who-ness’, even yours and mine.

That is the thing about the blooming obvious. You have to keep saying it over and over again. So…

Being and doing are one and the same thing. The work of each creature is the being of all other creatures. Their work is not only the well-being of all other creatures, but their very being. But there is more at issue even than this. It is not only the being but the freedom of other creatures that is our purpose. The freedom of all creatures is the task of all other creatures, and it is sustained only by live relationship with all other creatures. This nexus of relationship which sustains the freedom of each, is itself sustained by the ongoing relationship of Creator with the creation that he has made and now maintains. Our Creator intends not that we merely are, but that we live, that we become animate and vocal, and able to respond to one another. He intends that we participate in one another’s formation, and do so freely and willingly. An account of man must therefore include an account of the place and work into which he is to grow, and so of the ongoing co-labour of creation. The perfection of creation is dependent on the finished and perfected freedom and personhood of man. Man does not yet have freedom. His freedom depends on God's determination not to cease from his work until man has grown into that freedom. The freedom of man is the task of God, then, and very subordinately, it is the task into which God introduces man. Under God, we bring one another into being. This is a participative ontology. Obvious, isn’t it?

Three reigning misconceptions, based upon faulty scriptural and church historical premises, with incalculable fallout

1. There is no scripture until the church creates such * the flaw here is not the usual one entailing a Reformation debate over sola scriptura or disputes over the relationship between church/tradition and scripture (these are important topics in their own right) * rather, what is in error here is imprecision or an improper understanding of the character of the Scriptures as inherently a dual witness of prophets (OT) and apostles (NT) * the OT canon is sufficiently stable that it is an antecedent witness, not only to the Church but to Jesus Christ; so there is no church without scripture in the sense of the scriptures of Israel existing both prior to NT and a two-testament Canon of Christian Scripture * when the creed says that Jesus Christ died and rose again ‘in accordance with the scriptures’ the antecedent character of the scriptures of Israel is stipulated * to state it more ambitiously, one might want to speak about a proper dialectical or reciprocal understanding of the relationship between Church and NT scriptures, or between Church and an emerging collection of apostolic writings * but this discussion ought not confuse the fact that the OT scriptures preceded the church; that this precedence required careful examination was due to the authority of the Church’s Risen Lord, and the need to correlate Easter faith and the memory of Jesus’ own bearing toward the scriptural witness from the bosom of Israel, with the maintained conviction, especially strong among Gentiles outside that household, that the God of Israel, the LORD, and the Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ, were one (see Philippians 2);

2. Creedal confessions follow in a straight-forward, sequential way, from the Canonical Scriptures * we have already touched on this above * here it is important to observe that creeds emerge in the life of the Church as the formation of the NT canon is still a developing matter * A false kind of sequentiality assumes that creeds are the third in a line of canonical developments, from OT to NT to Church confession, when in reality, creeds exist in the lived life of the Church, and stipulate not just matters of belief, based upon or independent of, a scriptural witness (depending on one’s view of this), but how the scriptures—first OT and then NT and then both together—are to be heard and received, from faith to faith; * That is, creeds stipulate the ontological identity of the LORD with Christ (‘my Lord and my God’) * It is for this reason that recourse is made in apostolic writings to what is termed a ‘rule of faith’ * The rule of faith—whatever else it is—is a guide to reading the scriptures of Israel, in the light of apostolic teaching, as the Church’s received authority * The rule of faith is a doxological, threshold, affirmation that the LORD of the Old Testament and Jesus Christ are one, and that the Holy Spirit ‘spake by the prophets’

3. The post-apostolic Church is to be understood as self-evidently more connected to the NT than the OT, and so Christian Scripture leans from Old to New * on this understanding, the post-apostolic church sees the relationship between OT and NT as one chiefly of religious development * on this understanding, the concern for establishing ontological identity, in the time of the formation of the NT, between the LORD of heaven and earth and Jesus his eternal Word, becomes secondary to an understanding of religious development; * and so the OT ceases to be heard as a witness to the Father of Jesus Christ; or to Christ as central to its claims about God; or to the Holy Spirit in a dispensation before the NT * The Church finds its theological and its ecclesial rootage in a second testament which carries over and adapts what went before in the first; * The Church has a relationship to the NT which improves upon an earlier witness * This developmental understanding of Church and the two testaments of Scripture is what lies underneath the crisis of and widespread confusion over use of the Church’s Scriptures in our present neuralgic times

Chris Seitz The Anglican Crisis in Interpretation and the Two Testament Voice of Christian Scripture

Christian doctrine comes in the form of summaries. But summaries are always summaries of something, an experience, like a journey. It is the many little intangible things, and the order in which they came, that make your journey what it is, each event only interesting because it was unforeseen and surprising given the previous event. So a summary is not self-standing. We can summarise only in order the better to come back to the story. The story cannot be substituted for. It is irreplaceable because it relates to this series of unpredicted events. So Christian doctrine is a summary that relate the of a story, and in the course of doing Christian doctrine, we toggle between the story and the summary. But all the pagan part of the Western tradition is in denial about story. It wants to remove the narrative from our history. It attempt to undo all the (stochastic) little histories and chance meetings that made the whole thing what it was. This is like refusing to believe that your parents met for example, just because it was a chance meeting that brought them together. It is a form of autism. You are the evidence of the reality of that contingent event, and thus of the reality of contingency. We cannot do without the story, the narrative, and the is one of the first things we must say in any account of Christian doctrine. Of course we will be discussing sets of propositions, they do not substitute for the narrative of God's dealings with us. The manual of Christian doctrine I am winding up to is different from others in being heavy on the narrative, and it will keep the narrative of the history of the West under the control of Scripture and the evangelical narrative.

Here is a thought. The Church service is making its participants holy. More ontologically, it is bringing its participants into being, which is to say being-in-relationship with God, and through him, with one another. In that service the Christians are let in on the reality of things. Much of what we presently take to be real, may turn out not to be. In the church service we are given a glimpse of the future, in which some of what the weekday world takes to be real, turns out to be without reality. In that service we are woken from that weekday dream world, though we can only very slowly be brought round. Only when everybody is brought round, the mass hallucination will be over and gone, and we will live in reality, able to see and acknowledge everyone, all those whose reality we were in denial about. We will be able to name every other person and so to call every other person into being, and sustain them in being, and thus we will all be raised and finally become real. The resurrection and reality of each one of us depends on the resurrection into reality of the very last.

The Lord God said to Adam ‘Come with me into the world I am making and I will show you how to look after it.’ Adam went along, and watched what his Lord was doing, and began to learn the skills of cultivating the world. But after a bit he stopped working, and just watched. But after just watching he grew first bored and lazy and tired until he was overtaken by sleep. So the Lord called again. Out from the sleeping body of Adam stepped Israel. Israel answered the Lord, ‘I will learn how to work with you’. Israel went back to work in the garden. The Lord taught him how to garden, and he was content. But after a while Israel thought ‘I am the favourite son of the Lord, this work is beneath me.’ But though Israel stopped working, others didn't, and as these others cultivated, they grew stronger. Because he hadn’t worked or grown, Israel he became afraid of the other workers, who were by now bigger than he was. Rather than leading them, they led him. He did what they were doing, and was ashamed. The others made Israel join in their games of ‘who is top dog’. Israel paid their forfeits and carried their bags and burdens. Unwilling to admit this, even to himself, Israel was increasingly unwilling to keep in touch with the Lord. With embarrassment grew estrangement, while others filled the gap, effectively becoming Israel’s masters. Finally the Lord called, but Israel did not come. But from where Israel was hiding stepped one single Israelite, Jesus. And the Lord said to Jesus, ‘You have been here with me since the beginning of the day, for you were in Adam, and when all of Adam gave up and there was nothing of him left but Israel, you were in Israel, and now there is no one here from Israel except you. All day we have sown and planted and watered, and now the harvest is here. Let us go out again to harvest.’ And the Son went out with the Lord and harvested. And what he had sowed produced a crop, so as the result of his labour he has enough for the world, and so the whole world has become his world.

In this account the Son worked and the result was that the world became his, or he became lord. This is a Christology from below, adoptionist even. We need it in order to show that something changed, something happened. Between God and man an event occurred, and man was finally a real actor in that event. Man was joined to God and not afterward abandoned. Any christological account that starts from above, must show that having defeated sin, the Son does not simply return where he came from, divinity returning to God, humanity returning to us. They must show that the Son stays with us, and the incarnation is ongoing, so everything is different now. They must show that Jesus Christ brings into being what did not exist before him, and he holds in being, without limit. We must show the Son of God becomes real man and remains with us. Jesus Christ is the first man, the real man, the future criterion of man-who-is-with-God. The Son endured discipline and by perseverance and without protest, demonstrated that he was a true son of his Father. No hired hand, he regarded the work he was given not as someone else’s work, but as his Father’s, and therefore also as his. Although he was the Son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.

Catholic does not mean liberal. Catholic means comprehensive and universal, but this universality is the promise of God, which Christians look forward to (that is, it is an eschatological concept). But meanwhile Christians must say that this is not yet the world they anticipate. They live by faith and in hope, and look forward to what they don't yet have. This present world is full of false totalities which cut people out. It is not true and not kind to say that everybody is already in, or that all are saved and included. The liberal creed is that there is no ‘in’ and no ‘out’, and no distinction between Christians and non-Christians, and that it is rude to suggest that there is. It is the law of the liberals church that there may be no preaching, and that we should not try to teach anyone anything or impose our views on others. The liberal creed is that that it is rude, wrong, unacceptable to suggest that the gospel converts. Indeed the liberal creed denies that there is anything we can learn from listening to any part of the Christian or Western tradition, and thus that there is any point in studying that tradition – so no point in exploring the lives and thoughts of previous generations. There is nothing new for us to hear or learn.Philip Turner puts this better than me.

Many, if not most, of the classical themes associated with pastoral care can find no place within a theology dominated by the notion of radical inclusion. The atoning power of Christ's death, faith, justification, repentance, and holiness of life, to mention but a few, appear at best as an antique vocabulary to be either out grown or reinterpreted. So also does the notion that the church is a community elected and called out by God from the peoples of the earth for a particular purpose. That purpose is to bear witness to the saving event of Christ's life, death, and resurrection and to call people to believe, repent, and live in an entirely different manner. It is this witness that defines what many call "the great tradition", but a theology of radical inclusion must at best trim such robust belief. To be true to itself it can find room for only one sort of witness, namely, inclusion of the previously excluded. Indeed, the connection of the existence of the Church to a saving purpose makes little sense because salvation is not an issue for a theology of radical inclusion. God has already included everybody, and now we ought to do the same. Within a theology of 'radical inclusion', Christianity is no longer presented as a religion of salvation. Salvation, which normally refers to the restoration of a right relation between God and his creation, cannot rightly be the theme of Christian witness because God has accepted us all already (save perhaps those guilty of exclusionary practice).

Philip Turner on the 'theology' of the Episcopal Church in the United States

But the liberal view is wrong. One opinion is not just as good as any other. Not all views are equally valid. It is not sheer conceit that makes me think I can tell you somthing you don't know, and vice versa. I dont know everything already, so I really should go and get find someone who knows better than me when, say, my computer is playing up. I should listen to that expert and be guided by him – it is not demeaning for me to do so, for he really does have knowledge that I don't, he has the relevant craft skill, that corresponds to the reality of the functioning of my computer.

Of course this liberal creed is self-contradicting, for prohibits teaching, while it is itself a teaching. And it is contradicted by real life. You know that you don't know how to fix your broken computer. Only someone who has undergone the training to receive the knowledge that you don't have, can help you. You want him to instruct you on this, you pay him and demand that he gives his verdict. In just the same way, surely, you concede that there is a lot about life that I don't know about, but I want to know about it, and I am prepared to listen and even to undergo the discipline and training that makes me more competent, whether with my computer - or at life.

It costs effort to refute every day the liberal untruth, the falsehood of the view that all views are equally valid. it is tiresome, and Christians are doubtless tiresome when they talk about truth, and insist that truth is worth talking about and worth the unpleasantness of these daily little disagreements.