Douglas Knight

When we celebrate the eucharist we must start sending some eucharistic bread round to every other church in the area. We should send our bishop to knock on the door of every congregation in the borough, ask to be admitted and allowed to bring them some bread, wine (not consecrated, but blessed) and a little encouragement from us. Yes, that’s right, he must go to every denomination, which means other denominations, those which do not recognise his authority. If they admit him they admit us, and so start to recognise the catholicity of the church – which means that we cannot be Church without them, and they cannot be Church without us, and that we represent a proper discipline on each other. Of course he must walk, all right, take the bus, and of course he must wear his robes and take his crozier, and stand outside each Church and knock. He must offer himself to those who did not ask for him. He must beg to be received and heard by them, and to be encouraged and taught by them, and he must bring back to us what he has learned from them. He has to beg their forgiveness for our separation and aloofness, and in our name he has to forgive them for separating themselves from us. He has to teach and correct them, warn them of the results of their separation, and he has to receive their teaching and correction, and together with them look forward to the day when we can celebrate together at last. Every eucharist looks forward to this and every exchange of the peace anticipates this. Obvious, isn’t it?

Thank God for friends. They are always trying to get my education started again, particularly Alan, who mailed yesterday:

‘Have you read Maximus' Mystagogia (ET in Berthold's Classics of Western Spirituality edn.) - absolutely superb, esp. ch 24 which is the ecclesiastical exterminator of all Thomist-Aristotelian understandings of communion.’

When he comes I will ask Alan what ‘the ecclesiastical exterminator of all Thomist-Aristotelian understandings of communion’ means. But meanwhile, here is Maximus, summing up what he has said in The Church’s Mystagogy. The first paragraph is not easy to take, but the second is just extraordinary. Just hang onto this little phrase: ‘by grace and participation’:

The holy Church, we said, is the figure and image of God, inasmuch as through it, he effects in his infinite power and wisdom an unconfused unity from the various essence of beings, attaching them to himself as a Creator at their highest point, and this operates according to the grace of faith for the faithful, joining them all to each other in one form according to a single grace and calling of faith, the active and virtuous ones in a single identity of will, the contemplative and gnostic ones in an unbroken and undivided concord as well. It is figure of both the spiritual and sensible world, with the sanctuary as symbol of the intelligible world and the nave as symbol of the world of sense. Sons are the ones who out of neither fear of threat nor desire of promised things but rather out of character and habit of the voluntary inclination and disposition of the soul towards the good never become separated from God, as that son to whom it was said ‘Son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.’

For if the Word has shown that the one who is in need of having good done to him is God – for as long, he tells as, as you did it for one of these least ones, you did it for me – on God's very word, then, he will much more show that the one who can do good and who does it is truly God by grace and participation because he has taken on in happy imitation the energy and characteristics of God's own doing good. And if the poor man is God, it is because of God's condescension in becoming poor for us and taking upon himself by his own suffering the sufferings of each one and ‘until the end of time’, always suffering mystically out of goodness in proportion to each one’s suffering. All the more reason then will that one be God who by loving men in imitation of God heals by himself in divine fashion the hurts of those who suffer and shows that he has in his disposition, safeguarding all proportion, the same power and of saving Providence that God has.

Zizioulas learned everything he knows from Maximus, so it looks as though it is time to school with Maximus (humbling, this theology lark) and see what we can learn from him.

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.

I have that weird feeling you get when you put yourselves in the hands of a doctor or barber and are then under their control, not your own. I have got an interpreter and I am being interpreted to within an inch of my life. Solly is reading The Eschatological Economy and giving a running commentary on his blog, Solly Gratia. He summarises what I am saying, find labels for the positions I take, and puts everything that I say in the context of our evangelical hopes and hang-ups - and he has made me remember how I got started on the great adventure of Christian theology. As a reader he is fast, he has stamina, and above all he has insight. I went to university to do a PhD, and paid a lot of fees, for the sort of feedback and criticism I am getting from Solly. But I am getting real analysis now, into Chapter two already, and I am taking notes on Solly’s notes.

Here is how it happened. I offered a PDF of The Eschatological Economy to whoever asked. Solly asked. If you would like to see a PDF of The Eschatological Economy, just ask in the comment box here or in ‘Pages’. Your email will appear to me (though it will not appear with your comment) and I will send The Eschatological Economy for you to read – and then you can comment on Solly, and tell him he is too charitable a reader.

Lent is a recapitulation of our understanding of creation and fall, and of regeneration and sanctification.

Because Lent was seen as a season preliminary to Easter, in some older interpretations Lent was predominantly or even exclusively about the suffering and death of Jesus. Lent was the season of the cross. Period. But those serious about the pursuit of Christian history had to wrestle with the fact that Lent began as a time of final instruction and intensive preparation for baptism. Ancient lectionaries (or at least portions of them) were reconstructed and found to contain Lenten readings such as the story of the man born blind (John 9), for in the early centuries baptism with likened to the recovery of sight. This Lectionary inclusion, grounded in a very old understanding of Lent as preparation for baptism, helped to reestablish Lent in the church as a season for the consideration of the meaning of baptism as related to the new life we have in Christ, the Crucified and Risen One.

Lawrence Hall Stookey Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church

The disciplining necessity of work foreshadows the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. It is not the case that worship is optional. As Paul teaches in his genealogy of morals (Romans 1), the question is not whether we shall worship, but only what. Promethean fantasies of a purely human-centered existence are as difficult to realise as fantasies of aristocratic indolence. We are propelled by an inner need to bow down, and, as a consequence, unless true worship is always before us, there is always the danger that we will work feverishly in order to propitiate Baal, whether in his bloody martial form or in the bloodless image of lucre.

Fantasizing that worship will ‘just happen’. Running a Church is hard work, and illusions to the contrary feed clerical sloth, anger and despair. The same holds for lay people. I have often heard friends complain that their involvement in the Church is just ‘too much like work’. Or they complain about the regular routine of regular worship. They want the Church to be a form of leisure or entertainment, something fresh and new that will be a deliverance from the all-too-human limitations of the working day. Yet, this is not the meaning of Sabbath. The ‘rest’ of Christian worship occurs in, and not in spite of, the world and sin and death. The joy of worship addresses the bitter cup of sin.

Russell Reno 'Working towards Worship'

Advocacy of this kind certainly begins in worship, where people learn to lend their mouths to other people in principle, unasked. Advocacy does not consist primarily of spectacular actions which in general peter out quite quickly; it means speaking up ‘perseveringly’ on behalf of others, as is to be the case in intercession (Ephesians 6.18) Advocacy of this kind is not a natural ability – ‘we do not know how to pray as we ought’; it must be learnt. And the Spirit as the Parakletos, the advocate per se, represents believers (Romans 8.26) and teaches them as it does so. Advocacy must be learnt in the intercessory practice of the community, but it can also be a guide to mediation, to ‘good offices’ apart from prayer. Anyone who before God opens his mouth for the dumb can also raise his voice before the world and the powerful on behalf of the people who have no voice of their own, or whose voices are not listened to.

Bernd Wannenwetsch Political Worship

[This continues from the posting 'NT Wright - where to begin?', my response to the FD Maurice lectures, given by Tom Wright Feb-March 2006 - see below]

The Bishop of Durham:

Well, so it’s one sort of power-play (disclosing that my reading is in service of my tradition) or another sort of power-play (not disclosing it and thus being cunning). Welcome to the wonderful world of Nietzsche! The readings I am proposing are in fact often very critical of my own traditions, and I live with that tension much of the time. I think what you have your finger on is the fact that these are the FD Maurice Lectures at a half- (but not fully-)secularized department, in an increasingly (but not utterly) secularized university. In that setting, the problem of a private Christian language is very real, and I have spent my entire adult life trying to avoid such a thing (speaking only within the in-house world, rather than across the wall to the world outside)...

Knight:

Dear Bishop Tom,

...I began to think about you in more Church terms as a result of reading the impressive piece you addressed to your clergy on the state of play after the Windsor report. There you were talking like a Church-man and bishop. It seems to me that one can also do that to a degree in the university. I do not think that there is a simple contrast to be made between Church and secular audiences, or that well-argued Christian theology is simply a private language. When a law lecturer or medic talks in public, he or she talks like a lawyer or medic, from the assumptions, and using the conceptuality of their profession, but this does not make theirs a private language. We do not insist that they find some value-free domain and neutral language in which everything they say is instantly comprehensible to every member of the public. We are all aware of the appropriateness of the vocabulary and conceptuality of each distinct area of expertise. These two vocations require long apprenticeships: not everything can be immediately seen by the public or comprehended by those only at the beginning of that apprenticeship.

The same is true for Christian discipleship, another form of expertise. In this life, lived by faith, not everything is comprehensible all at once (Christians can point out that this is not only true of the Christian life, but of any life and lifestyle – again, demonstrating that the Christian hermeneutic is more sophisticated than the modern, not less). We argue for the truth of what we say, by demonstrating the plausibility of the Christian faith – that it is productive of real insight. This does not mean that we cannot point out that it requires an apprenticeship (indeed is an apprenticeship). We can freely concede that what Christianity is, is not entirely clear from the outset – it is an adventure.

The Christian tradition is a good tradition, and we can say this in public, and it is good for the public forum that we do so. My musings on this point are owed to the remarkable Reinhard Hütter (at Duke, ‘Suffering Divine Things, and more recently ‘Bound to be Free’) and to Bernd Wannenwetsch, who after the departure of O'Donovan and Webster is now Oxford’s finest (‘Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens’ OUP 2004).

Hütter and Wannenwetsch insist that we learn through tradition (this is the point that modernity is in denial about) and that the right tradition (relating to the distinct Christian citizenship and form of life) makes us free, mature and human, reconciled by God to one another. The Christian tradition doesn't do this all at once, but it does embark us on a long hard course of paideia, in which baptism is an important milestone.

On the secular v. religious issue, one aspect of O'Donovan’s argument is crucial: the secularizing impulse is not opposed to Christian theology only, but is rubbishing the Western tradition as a whole. It not only finds Christianity problematic, it is no willing to see any part of the Western intellectual tradition (Plato, Aristotle – founders of the Academy) as a living tradition, which we have to remain in conversation with in order to flourish. This is the sort of secularizing that we are now seeing in universities. Only the Christians can point out that moderns equally talk their own in-house, private language, that by flattering us, encourages us to think of ourselves as consumers, accountable to no one. The issue is that Christians (I at least) are so well absorbed by that language of modernity that we don't forget that it is a merely sectional language, that excludes those whom God does not exclude.

Why should a bishop be reluctant to speak from the Church in the university? I only ask you this because you are a powerful advocate of the plausibility of the Christian gospel – and precisely so a (God-given) assert to the university, as much as the Church. Few enough of your colleagues can make any contribution within the university. But every bishop can remind the university that it can only aspire to be a real public square if it properly considers the claim of the Christian tradition, understood as a demanding apprenticeship.

In all this, I am not getting at you at all, but musing appreciatively, grateful for the opportunity to think these things through with you. Despite all my understatement I hope you feel my real gratitude for your life's work

Many thanks DK

[I hadn't realised what a lot of splendid teaching material there is on the NT Wright Page - see the 'Wrightsaid' pieces, for instance]

Solly at Solly Gratia is reading a really tough book at the moment. He is riffing on its opening lines, just saying what occurs to him as he goes along and thereby asking all the hard questions about the context and audience, not only of this theology book, but of theology. Who is it for, and how can they hear it? I'm hoping Solly doesn't give up - because it is for him, and not for him only but for anyone who asks.

Dear Bishop Tom,

I have enjoyed the Maurice lectures immensely. In your first lecture you told us about postmodernity, apocalyptic and time, and talked about the tension between the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’, and about true and false expectation. Your second lecture, about art, suggested that good art tells us about this tension between present and future, so we understand two things about the glory of God – that it does already fill, and that it does not yet fill the earth.

Often you introduced what you had to say with the phrase ‘the New Testament narrative shows …’, or ‘the Scriptural tradition shows…’, and at other times with the phrase ‘Art shows…’. Can I ask some questions about this?

Does the bible show us…, and how does it do so? Does art show us…, and how does it do so? Isn’t there is endless wonderful disagreement and controversy about what either the bible or art shows us? How should we assess what you say they say? What criteria do you commend to us?

Isn't bible just another text, or artwork or commodity, about which everyone’s opinion is equally valid, until we, its readers, come under some control? If your view of the bible is right, isn’t that because you have found the right control? The right control enables you, and us, to read the bible as a key to some of the other subjects you have explored …. art, culture and politics. Is there any reading of the bible that is useful until it is under some control and is honest about what that control is? The particular control that you and I advocate is that given by the Christian Church and tradition. Why be reticent about saying so? If we are not up front about this, we will be concealing our control. All other discourses – art, politics and above all, the market – conceal their hermeneutics because they want to conceal what communities, and elites, they serve. If we do not say straight out that our control is the Church and its tradition, what we have to say about art, or politics, or the bible, is just another ‘discourse’, a piece of rhetoric and power-play.

We agree, I suppose, that the bible and the Church belong to each other, each being the source and control of each other (both sourced in the kindness of God)? The bible makes Christian doctrine. The bible creates the Christian community, its form of life and the account it gives of that form of life through time, that tradition of teaching that has learned from the encounters of the bible with different cultures. Christian doctrine is the accumulated experience of the Christian community at reading (1) the bible and (2) the world. This community of the Church reads the world through the bible. Any other community or hermeneutics will read the bible through the world, and so get as many readings of the bible as there are views of the world. Have I got this right?

Why don’t we say that there is no useful interpretation of modern culture or of art that is not formed by the discipline of the Christian tradition, itself controlled by the bible (both functions of the generosity of God)? Only when we are under this control does the bible give us a distinctive Christian hermeneutic and way of approaching the world – in faith, in hope and in love, for example. Aren’t you offering the distinct Christian view without saying where it comes from and how you got to it? You are giving us your answer to the sum without giving us your workings, that is, without giving us the means by which we can follow you and come to the same conclusion.

Is there any useful interpretation of modern culture or of art that we Christians can give that is not formed by the discipline of the Christian tradition (itself controlled by the bible and by God)? Of course each of us can give our own opinions, without sourcing any of them from Christian teaching, but then the question is, what is distinct about the views we offer? Only when we are offering what the Church knows, which is different from what everybody already ‘knows’, are we doing something really useful. Are we giving what we have received (in faith, hope and love), from the Church, and which the Church has received from God? Or are we offering what derives from ourselves as individuals, so is ultimately just rhetoric and power-play?

It is good thing to be a Christian – Church-formed – reader of the bible, because such a reader of the bible may be a well-formed interpreter of art or commentator on global politics. The mind formed by the long experience of the Church shaped by the bible is a good mind, and even the secular university can concede that.

It is unfair to make this charge against you of all people because, far more than most scholars, you do display your workings. You show us the politics that drive the New Testament exegesis and hermeneutics in The New Testament and the People of God, for instance, so you offer your argument in a generously-drawn context. But, because you are a bishop (discipled by, and discipling us with, the authority of the Church) you are big enough to take this question: Have you done the same in these university lectures? In your talks so far you have not said that your views are anchored in what the whole Christian community declares publicly to the world in every act of Christian worship.

So when, in your first lecture, you took us through the doctrine of hope (eschatology), why did you not tell us that you were offering us what the whole Church offers, and teaching us what the whole tradition teaches? Why did you not once say ‘the experience of the Church on this point is….’ or ‘Christian doctrine alerts us to…’? Why not quote the teachers of the Church – Irenaeus, Augustine, Gerald Manley Hopkins – so we can look them up and begin our own acquaintance with them? Don't tell us that Hopkins is a poet – tell us that he is a theologian, found edifying and approved by the Church. It is intellectually robust and generous to wear your colours on your sleeve. It dares other discourses to do the same. Christian faith is intellectually respectable and may be argued from at the outset. It does not require that we argue to it from some other, notionally wider, more acceptable because ostensibly more liberal, position. It is not the case that if you talk from within the Church, only the Church hears you. The world will hear too the moment the Church says anything distinctly its own.

Many thanks