Category: theology

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.
Continue reading “Salvation is health”

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.