Category: theology

[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