doxology

biblical narrative and true theological statements

2010-04-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finished reading Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God went wrong and began reading Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. This brief reflection stems from my trying to connect the end of the former and the beginning of the latter.

I was quite taken by Placher's description of "how modern thinking about God went wrong," perhaps because he is right, or because I was already pretty sure that modern thinking about God has, as a whole, gone wrong, and Placher gave an articulate, logical argument from Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and a handful of modern thinkers that I know even less well than these medieval and Reformation theologians. One of my strongest hopes is that, as I continue reading Thomas, I will still be convinced of Placher's (minority) reading of him: that Thomas's rigorous logical arguments took place within the context of his denial that humans can, in our current state, understand how the claims that we make about God are true. We know what "good" is, and we, by faith, claim "God is good", but we do not fully understand what we mean when we say this. God's goodness is beyond all created goodness, not in the sense of having the greatest amount of goodness but of goodness on a different plain. God is still good--this is a true statement--but we know it to be true only by faith. This is the most important thing I learned from Placher, and I hope that he is right that this is what Thomas meant.

In the last two chapters of the book, Placher moves into suggestions for contemporary retrieval. In this process, he discusses biblical narratives as mode of revelation in a section worth quoting at length:
To say that the biblical narratives constitute revelation, then, is to say (1) that they claim to be defining of all reality, and (2) that their internal sense of things is in turn defined by the identity of the character they call "God," about whom they claim to provide trustworthy language to use, even as the divine nature remains utterly mysterious. If God's identity has this defining role in the stories, and the stories claim a defining role for all things, then to read these stories is to be addressed by a claim on one's life from this God. This is how things are, they say; this is the context in which your life, or anyone's life, has whatever meaning it possesses--in the context shaped by the character called "God" whose identity is herein narrated and who is the transcendent, sustaining beginning and end of all things. Scripture constitutes revelation from a subject both because it presents God as an agent acting in its stories and [...] because the personal agency of the Holy Spirit shapes our acceptance of them. To accept scripture as revelation of God, however, is not to think that we have grasped the divine nature, but to trust that, in ways we cannot understand, we will be speaking rightly of God if we tell the stories these texts recount and cautiously note, in creed and theology, some of the character traits we perceive of this God, without ever letting the results of such reflection take the primary place of the stories themselves (189).

I'll make a really shocking move here and say that his points would be better served if he actually read some texts and demonstrated how this is true. I think, in the process, he would find not only that there are a variety of genres that might confuse exclusive reference to "narrative" (which he recognizes but concludes that narrative seems to be the one form of writing that can, in a way, absorb the others), but also that a challenge of not "domesticating the transcendent" in modern exegesis is that the character Yahweh really does walk around and talk and act like one character among many in the narrative. While statements like "Yahweh is good" appear in scripture on the level of derivation from claims like "Yahweh brought us out of the land of Egypt, the house of slavery," Placher seems to leave our knowledge of the latter without qualification. He asks that we cannot trust that we know the divine nature fully from this act, but he doesn't seem to say that we don't really know even how it is that Yahweh acts in this instance. What do we imagine when we read, "God sent Moses to Pharoah"? Do we not imagine something similar to when a mother sends a child to the neighbor with a message? It seems that we shouldn't, if we want to avoid presuming that God acts as one agent among many. But how do we avoid such reduction in our reading of "God sent Moses to Pharoah," and does "narrative as revelation" finally help us accomplish this?

In biblical theology, widespread observation that Yahweh moves and acts like an agent among many is often contrasted with the so-called "Greek" understand of God as immutable or impassible. As Gavrilyuk rightly notes in his Introduction, this has led modern scholars to denounce the immutable God "of Greek philosophy" in the name of the impassioned Yahweh who loves, repents (nahams), and becomes angry. Gavrilyuk suggests that the binary of biblical-God-who-is-passionate vs. Greek-static-God is not true to the church fathers, who believed that divine impassibility was consonant with biblical narratives. Moreover, Placher would suggestion that this modern contrast is inconsistent with how pre-seventeenth century theologians viewed theological language. In Placher's terms, I might suggest that it is precisely at the point of divine impassibility that the church fathers were the most clear: the word "impassibly" in "God suffers impassibly" functions precisely to say that what we declare to be true of God is not true by way of a comprehensible analogy to other things. "God suffers, but God does not suffer as we do" seems very similar to "God is good, but we do not now understand what 'good' means with respect to God." If I'm right that these statements are extremely similar, then an appropriate question is, "Why did the church insist upon being so precisely clear on this point rather than another point?" To that question, I don't yet have an answer.

I was going to write more here, but I'm beat! It's been far too long since I've written thoughts that aren't meant to be lecture notes or grading comments.

Classes--background

2010-01-29T15:48:00.000-08:00

I've decided to resuscitate the old blog, and it's been suggested that I try posting about my various experiments in teaching this semester. As I'm now teaching my fourth and fifth classes, I've accepted my strengths and weaknesses at the job and am not too embarrassed to admit what goes well and what doesn't.

As an introductory post, I should give some background about my two courses this semester. I'm teaching an upper-level Bible class called "Jesus and the Gospels," which is populated by 44 sophomores, juniors, and seniors of a variety of majors, including a handful of Bible majors. I have one student in this course who is doing an additional credit hour of independent study research... on the Gospel of Thomas, about which I know absolutely nothing, as I told him. The course is a combination of Bible and theology; we're studying the gospels and also their reception history. My second course is an upper-level philosophy course in ethics. I have thirteen bright students in this class, and a few of them are exceptionally brilliant. Moral philosophy is not my field, and I'm not always sure what I have to teach them.

In the former course, I'm trying to learn how to lecture in a way that is memorable and meaningful to students. In the latter, I'm trying to learn how to facilitate discussion that engages everyone and that allows the students to help me supply course content, because I know they can.

An opening comment about what didn't work: near the beginning of the semester, I tried to emphasize to my students in Jesus and the Gospels that the "Gospel" is the one, good news of Jesus Christ, and that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all accounts of the Gospel. Thus, I have tried to prefer "the Gospel According to Luke" to "the gospel of Luke" or even "Luke's gospel." This is exceptionally tricky to be consistent about. My hope for them is that they will appreciate the diversity in these accounts but not feel a need to choose between them or to be overly specific about harmonizing them, so I want to stress their unity. Perhaps I need to relax and hope that my students will know, if I say "Luke's gospel," that there is a lowercase "g"; I don't know.

just like riding a bike

2009-03-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

I awoke on Thursday to 43 degrees, cloudy but lovely and rode to Goshen for class without much difficulty, despite some considerable headwind. (Why does it always feel like there's headwind both ways?) What a relief to find that bicycle commuting is an extremely reasonable activity. Also, the Millrace path provided me with the company of a large flock of ducks for the final two miles of my ride.

story, prophecy, and discernment

2009-03-07T08:11:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Prophecy and Discernment, by RWL Moberly. The book begins with a revealing of modern tendencies to believe that prophecy is the expression of a subjective reality whose truth it is impossible to discern. Moberly then constructs an argument on Jeremiah, John, and Paul, that discernment requires transformation on the part of the one discerning as well as on the part of the prophet, and that words from God necessarily include a call to justice-and-righteousness/love, and that the coming of Christ is definitive for this process of transformation.

A question arising within the Institute of Mennonite Studies at AMBS (where I am a "student assistant" who takes minutes, sends book orders, and performs other blah tasks), is, how can we decide which stories will influence us, which stories we will tell and re-tell? Moberly is right that the biblical material casts the question in terms of speech on behalf of God (prophecy) and discernment between those who speak truly on behalf of God, and those who speak falsely on behalf of God.

Perhaps my first question about these "stories" is what we presume their function to be. I am afraid that we understand human stories as things which must be weighed against claims of scripture or other theoogical claims. In Christ, God became flesh, and therefore, we must mediate between, integrate, or at least stand in the tension between various theological claims and the claims of our friends and neighbors. We reinterpret traditional theological statements and canonical texts on the basis of our friends' stories. The stories we tell and retell are stories that either affirm, in some sort of exemplary way, claims of scripture, perhaps claims that our own stories do not affirm, or they challenge our previous understanding or canon in some particular way that is transformative for us. Either way, stories are seen as valid in and of themselves (there are no false stories), and whether or not we tell and re-tell them is based on personal preference or usefulness.

Finally, I'm not convinced that the decision-making process I described above, which depended on a particular description of the theological function of "stories," can be considered "discernment." It doesn't adjudicate between stories, so much Discernment requires that we identify stories as more or less true and false, where "true" and "false" are defined according to being of God or not of God. The Christian criteria for determining whether or not and how they are true or false are still scripture, still theological and ethical.

Alternatively, stories may be conceived as the relationship between our lives and the biblical text. God is doing something in the world, and we know what this is by story; what God has done in scripture, God continues to do in particular communities which are formed and sustained according to a particular history and particular experiences. If conceived this way, stories are discerned according to membership; if one is a member of a community, then his or her story is valid, and vice versa (if his/her story is valid, then one may be a member of a community). Only our community is able to fully know us, to weigh the theological and ethical content or our stories according to scripture. Does story, so defined, allow us to engage in discernment? Does membership provide the appropriate context for discernment, or does it make discernment a surface formality, lacking the substance that membership has monopolized?

bicycle commuting

2009-03-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

The snow has melted and the days are getting longer. Tonight may be the eve of the first bicycle-commute of the season between Elkhart and Goshen, IN. In the fall, teaching one day a week in Goshen, I made it riding until mid-November. Now it is time to start again. The thought is mostly exciting; slow afternoon rides after class under the warm sun and in the cool breeze... but until I'm thoroughly in some sort of routine, my being revolts such shifts. Will I ride down in the morning and back in the afternoon on my first day? Should I take the trolley with my bike in the morning and ride back when it's warmer and the wind is at my back? Will a friend need to borrow my car in the afternoon, and if so, should I ride down and spend the evening in Goshen and watch The Office before driving back to... I hate hate hate lack of routine.

I'm also a little nervous that the ride might be tougher than I remember. It's only ten miles, but at 32 degrees with a decent headwind, it sure can feel longer. A year ago, when there were ten extra pounds of me in the world, I recall the ride taking an awful long time. There was a 15-20 mph headwind that day as well. It absolutely must feel better this time...

settling in discipline

2009-02-24T16:32:00.001-08:00

A few factors this spring have caused me to settle a bit, regarding an over-arching question of theological discipline that has occupied my mind for the last year: am I a theologian or a biblical scholar? The tricky part of the question is that the answer is simply, "yes." Of course I am both. Unfortunately, I have felt the need to choose one, for the purposes of further graduate study as well as future employment. Ideally, I would not have to choose, but realistically...

Well, I haven't chosen, not between biblical studies and theology as distinct but related fields of research and knowledge. However, lately I have been settling into the idea of a particular discipline--not a field of research and knowledge, but a very simple task: reading the Bible. There are reasons for this:

1. My Students. When I committed to teaching peace studies at Goshen College this year, I knew that it would be good for me, in a this-will-look-good-on-a-resume, and a I-should-get-teaching-experience, sort of way. What I have discovered is that my students challenge me in more ways than I could have imagined. One significant challenge they pose is the zeitgeist phenomenon of what I like to call "biblical illiteracy." By "biblical illiteracy," I do not mean that students do not know passages of scripture, or that they are unable to read the text in original languages. I mean that students don't know what texts mean, once they do read them. They have no sense for how texts fit together, where they overlap, how they are disconnected. They don't understand the significance of texts for faith. They read the words, but they don't understand them. Case in point: We are talking about Isa 11, the lion lying down with the lamb, in explicit eschatological perspective. A student interjects, "But the lion can't lie down with the lamb. The lion will eat the lamb, and if it doesn't eat the lamb, then it will starve." The student read the words of the text, but had no idea what they meant, or to what they referred--biblical illiteracy. My students are the products of this--my own--generation. If they are biblically illiterate... than it is the challenge of theology now and for the text 10 years at least to be disciplined by the reading of biblical texts.

2. The Bible, Theology, and Faith, by RWL Moberly. This year, I have read this, which might be the best book I have ever read. Moberly writes a profound and persuasive defense of theological exegesis, if by "defense" I can mean a defense by example rather than a pure apology or explanation. The brillance of his work is that his theological and ethical remarks are so wonderfully disciplined by careful reading of scripture. It is beautiful, brilliant, and attractive. He moves between Emmaus, the adekah, and Jesus as the Son of God in Matthew's Gospel with ease as well as depth of insight. I don't want to do a formal book review here, but only to say that I was smitten, and convinced that what makes this work so immensely valuable is its careful attention to the details of the biblical texts. If I am going to be a good scholar, I need this sort of discipline.

PhD Programs, part II: The Short List

2008-09-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

Today's agenda: a short list--a draft, anyway--of schools I will consider applying to.

UVA: Friends have told me of their consideration of UVA, so I've moved it out of the "definitely not" category. I am somewhat drawn to their Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity option, because I could combine interests in Scripture with Patristics, but it doesn't appear to be a very theologically-centered program. The website description of the "historical theology" option is extremely brief and lame, which is both disappointing and curious. I want to be doing historical theology, even if I would choose to focus on Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity--is such an approach possible (or to what degree is it encouraged)? For the Theology, Ethics, and Culture option, none of these quite fit what I'd be interested in doing, I don't think... except for maybe the "religious, theological, and philosophical"... how interested am I in the history of "culture and thought"? I am more interested in the relationship between Scripture and theological tradition through the ages than in the relationship between theological tradition and culture or philosophy through the ages... if those are distinct... The examination process appears more extensive than I would expect.

Fordham: The next school on the Council for Graduate Schools in Religion list. Reno writes that Jesuit schools are stuck in the 1970s, but if there's a feminist theologian anywhere in the world that I would be interested in taking a course from, it's got to be Elizabeth Johnson. I'm also encouraged that there is opportunity to cross-enroll at other NYC schools, including St. Vladimir's. I'm impressed with the number of young-looking people on faculty. Are things changing here? Michael Lee, Judith Kubicki, George Demacopoulos, and Harry Nasuti all intrigue me, for very different reasons. (Where is Brian Daley?)

Catholic University of America: On Reno's list, but not on the Council list. The website is lacking, and I'm not particularly intrigued. At the moment, it's not making the short list.

McGill: too small.

Southern Methodist University: has their share of folks doing "biblical theology." Charles Wood (systematics), Richard Nelson (OT hermeneutics), and Bruce Marshall (historical) might interest me. But--eek!--who wants to live in Dallas?

Marquette: Falls under Reno's critique of Jesuit schools. William Kurz and Rodrigo Morales are interesting theological hermeneutics and biblical theology folks. Michel Barnes and Mickey Mattox look interesting on the historical end (Mattox is a Luther scholar interested in exegesis?). Wanda Zemler-Cizewski is also interested in medieval exegesis. How exciting! The protestant research interests of faculty in historical theology appeal to whatever principles make me nervous about ND, and Lutheran-Catholic dialogue appears strong there. Systematics: D. Stephen Long, Del Colle, Susan Wood... and WI is very eco-friendly. Ladies and gentlemen, we might have a winner.

Vanderbilt: No historical folks.

It is now time for the drum roll....

And The Short List North America goes to:

Marquette
Princeton Seminary
Toronto
Notre Dame
UVA
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Southern Methodist
Fordham

The list is a bit longer than I intended, but I'll consider the Mission accomplished. Marquette is a surprising, and very exciting, thought, and that alone makes the day a success.

PhD Programs and my Problems with them, part I

2008-09-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

Today was my second "PhD day" of the semester: a complete day when all I do is read whatever the hell I want, compare programs, stress about personal statements, struggle through "le petit Nicolas" over coffee, etc. I wasn't very focused on reading today, so I decided to look at every PhD in theology (or Christian religious studies) program of the Members of the Council on Graduate Studies in Religion.

Before I did that, I glanced through the site of the University of Aberdeen again. One of the problems with Aberdeen is that I want to study multiple foci of the faculty there: Christology, Barth, theological hermeneutics. How would I pick a dissertation topic? I would want to study everything. There are, of course, real problems with Aberdeen: 1) I'm not sure I've had enough coursework for the rest of my life; 2) $$$$ (I should type a pound sign, indicative of another problem); 3) my mother.

Also before hitting-up the CGS in Religion list, I read Reno's 2006 article in First Things on choosing schools for theology. I think I would find the man, and his article, completely obnoxious if I didn't think I probably agreed with him, and would only agree with him more if I knew more. (For example, I love David Bentley Hart, because I've read parts of the Beauty of the Infinite, which I don't understand at all. That he is unavailable is good for him and his students, but terribly annoying to the rest of us.)

Problems with Reno's list: 1) I probably can't get into Duke, whose PhD students last year all had perfect GRE scores (not to mention my lack of desire in giving adulation to Hauerwas, even in something as showy as a personal statement). 2) The Notre Dame theology department is so large that it's intimidating. Even though some of the names are familiar, I don't know what to do with the rest of them. ("Krieg" is an unfortunate one.) It feels... very Catholic, and thus, very foreign. Notre Dame goes on the "I don't know what to think about this school" list.

This is the part that I start cursing myself for going to AMBS, where PhD study is not a matter of incessant conversation. I forget that, had I completed a Master degree anywhere else, I probably wouldn't have the confidence to care.

The other school on the "I don't know what to think about this school list" is Princeton (TS). If folks there really know and care about Reformed theology, especially Barth, then great, but it doesn't seem like a place where action happens. Reno says they " don't seem to be pushing theological questions forward in interesting ways." Either theology there is good, but quiet, or old and stale. In my case, Princeton has certain practical considerations going for it, namely proximity to aging grandmother, college roommates, and custom bicycle builder.

Back to the CGS.

University of Chicago comments:
Susan Schreiner looks interesting, if I were thinking Reformation.
I would like to have William Schweiker as a lecturer, but not as a dissertation advisor. Non-biblical hermeneutics is fascinating, but I suspect, not very useful to me.
I still don't know what to do with David Tracy.

Claremont Graduate University, School of Religion website comments:
I can click on "Theology, Ethics, and Culture," but that final term makes me want to look for a better option. I see "Philosophy of Religion and Theology," which I almost click on because I like the final term. New Testament. Hebrew Bible. History of Christianity. "Women's Studies in Religion"? Like, "the sacred Feminine"? Next.

Have I mentioned that Aberdeen is appealing?

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School could be a back-up. I still prefer Evangelicals to scholars of comparative religion. It made Reno's list. Vanhoozer seems alright.

Two fingernails later, reading sounds appealing again. The CGS Religion D-Y will have to wait until next week. Here are the results of today's thoughts:

Still Tempting: Aberdeen
Intimidating, and maybe a little blah: Duke
I Don't Understand: Notre Dame, Princeton TS
Maybe Plan B: Trinity Evangelical
Not interesting: Boston, Brown, UCSB, Chicago, Claremont, Columbia, McMaster, UVA.

Hamburg didn't make the agenda today, but I'm sure it will be back.

why pacifists need to learn how to speak "just war"

2008-08-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been some months now. I note a change of direction: though theology remains my primary discipline, I've been asked to teach two courses in Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies at Goshen College this year. Thus, there may be some subsequent posts that only secondarily relate to doxology. I hope this only clarifies the particularly of Christian confession.

War is hell, writes Michael Walzer. This we (pacifists) know, and affirm. But, Walzer continues, that war is hell is not a reason not to discuss rules of engagement, rules that make war a matter of hell's degrees. Walzer walks a fine line between justifying a kind of war that is not hell at all, and describing norms that could make war less-hellish.

Nevertheless, if pacifists are willing to go with Walzer only so far as "war is hell," then he has every right to critique us. "War is hell" can, and will, be used as an excuse for "anything goes" in war. Repulsion, though the emotion of pacifists, is also the emotion of a first step toward paralysis: War is hell, we can do nothing about it but let it be so.

So pacifists need to take up the speech of just war, to ensure that their own pacifist stance not be taken as its opposite, and not accommodate horror upon horror. In no way does this new language de-legitimate a Christian pacifist's primary language. The language of just war remains secondary, and in fact clarifies the Christian's revulsion of war: Christian revulsion of war requires that we attempt to limit it, while waiting for the day when Christ Himself will eradicate war completely.

And with our primary, eschatological language, we avoid the temptation of just war thinking that leads to war that is justified: war is never justified, never justifiable. It is always morally wrong. The killing of human beings in war is, in fact, murder--this is the Christian pacifist's primary claim. BUT this does not mean that "anything goes" in war. So, the killing of combatants, for example, is not murder in the same sense that killing civilians is murder.

First, war is hell, absolutely opposed to Christ. Second, war is hell in degrees, let us sanction it, limit it as best we can.

Hermes and Christ--bridging the divide

2008-02-07T10:08:00.000-08:00

Recently the myth of Hermes and its relationship to the ever-popular discipline/practice "Hermeneutics" has caught my attention. Hermes, aided by his winged sandals, took on the task of carrying messages between divine beings and human beings--he was the one who traversed the divide. "Without such a messenger how would these two realms communicate with each other, and how would the gap in the understanding between the gods and humankind be overcome?" (D. Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics, 3. I assume that we moderns are preoccupied with method to our own detriment, as well as to the detriment of theology as a discipline. Few images demonstrate the idolatry of this preoccupation so well as the image of the message-carrier Hermes--our method on winged sandals, bearing to us divine thoughts. For nowhere in this image is Christ, fully God and fully human, the Incarnate Word of God who brings heaven and earth together in Himself.

Is my pitting of Hermes and Christ against each other reductionistic? Or is the question--Can Hermes be converted?--appropriate?

thesis remixed

2008-01-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

Pilgram Marpeck’s incarnational ecclesiology constitutes a fusion of mystical and sacramental theology that combines the immediacy of the presence of God, the cooperation-via-resignation of the individual in salvation, and the ontology of unity in Trinitarian love of the mystical tradition, while maintaining the particularity of outward form, the church’s role as Mother of the children of God, and the epistemological value of the senses present in sacramental theology. Put differently, if mystical and sacramental theology constitute two different types of defense of right experience of the presence of God—in the case of the former, an individual, often ecstatic, direct and unmediated experience; and in the case of the latter, a corporate, routine, and mediated experience—then Marpeck’s ecclesiology includes elements of both of these theological traditions. Marpeck defends the experience and practice of the true church whereby the grace of God is both mediated and unmediated to individuals in a corporate context in which they actively participate. This fusion of tradition affords Marpeck a unique stance in ecumenical dialogue whereby he can critique other gatherings of believers and communicate an alternate vision for churches both historically and spiritually bound to the Church of all ages.

acknowledging the giver: why denying ourselves is not denying life

2008-01-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

If anyone is liberated from sin, claims the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica, she must cease acting out of self-will. If anyone wants to be saved, he must first suffer. "For anyone who wants to save his life..." Self-denial is not life-denial because life does not come from ourselves but from God. Denying ourselves is denying what of us rejects God; it is aligning ourselves with Life and Love and Peace, Itself.

Therefore, denying ourselves is not denying ourselves. It is not accepting that God is everything that we are not, and not everything that we are--it is not God against us. Rather, self-denial is God for us. It is submitting ourselves to God as Giver. It is accepting, in each moment, who we truly are: recipients of grace.

exhaustion, retrospect, prospect

2007-12-19T07:54:00.000-08:00

I am exhausted. It is not an "I haven't gotten enough sleep"-type exhaustion, but a sense of being fully spent. This semester required more of me--required me more fully--than other semesters. "Greek Exegesis: Mark" with Loren Johns difficult to engage; it was a trying fly through the Greek text, reading much narrative criticism and not much else. I've been accused of not taking seriously enough the text of Mark, and I wonder if what is meant by that is narrative criticism. "Historical Theology II: 1517-1950" with John Rempel was another breeze, in the sense of speed, and a crash course in a bunch of modern theologians that I'd never read before, and a couple I had. I learned much there, more than most classes I've had at AMBS, but trying to wrap my mind around Schleiermacher, Edwards, Rahner, in one class session each (or, in Schleiermacher's case, 1/2 a class session) took its toll. "MA Colloquium II" was the place of vocational preparation, yes, but also sparked deep vocational doubts that have lingered even into the present. "Christian Attitudes toward War, Peace, and Revolution" was my only non-exhausting class. And my thesis? Very Behind. Next year? Save a revised CV, I haven't made any progress since October.

In retrospect, the two primary questions I need to face are: what has kept me from engaging the text of Mark? and which of my vocational doubts are well-grounded, and should they point me in a new direction?

In retrospect, I've done well this semester. I've kept the Sabbath better than other semesters. I've slept more than in other semesters, and I've eaten better. I've begun spiritual direction. I've made a household with my housemate, and we live in a significant level of "intentional community."

The next six weeks will be some serious thesis work, and hopefully, some progress in German. I'm taking January "off," except for the thesis and beginning a Teaching Practicum with Jo-Ann Brant at Goshen College, which will have me lecturing on the prophets in February. (Incidentally, I learned today that there is a new book on the prophets out by Christopher Seitz, and I'm trying to get my hands on it...)

Next semester, in addition to the Teaching Practicum, I'll be taking Hermeneutics--a course on the theology of biblical interpretation--at AMBS with Ben Ollenburger. Also, I'm doing an independent study with Steven Schweitzer in biblical interpretation and exegesis of the Massoretic Text of the OT, the LXX, and the Greek NT, because, as Steve claims, the much-overlooked LXX--the early church's canon--is the "missing link" between the OT and the NT. For employment, I'll be TA-ing Beginning Hebrew at AMBS. Steve (the prof of the class) will also let me lead class reading and lecture on a few points of Hebrew grammar. It's sure to be an exciting spring, full of thesis work as well as much biblical study.

Now, a break, Christ's coming, and our celebration.

natural theology and church proclamation

2007-11-03T16:36:00.000-07:00

"This one Word means Jesus Christ from eternity to eternity. In this form it is attested in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. In this form it has founded the church; and upholds and renews and rules, and continually saves the church. In this form it is comfort and direction in life and in death. In this form and not in any other! It is of the 'not in any other' that the concluding critical article [of the Barmen Declaration] speaks. We may notice that it does not deny the existence of other events and powers, forms and truths alongside the one Word of God, and that therefore throughout it does not deny the possibility of a natural theology as such. On the contrary, it presupposes that there are such things. But it does deny and designate as false doctrine the assertion that all these things can be the source of church proclamation, a second source alongside and apart from the one Word of God. It excludes natural theology from church proclamation. Its intention is not to destroy it in itself and as such, but to affirm that, when it comes to saying whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death, it can have no sense and existence alongside and apart from the Word of God. Whatever else they may be and mean, the entities to which natural theology is accustomed to relate itself cannot come into consideration as God's revelation, as the norm and content of the message delivered in the name of God. When the church proclaims God's revelation, it does not speak on the basis of a view of the reality of the world and of man, however deep and believing; it does not give an exegesis of these events and powers, forms and truths, but bound to its commission, and made free by the promise received with it, it reads and explains the Word which is called Jesus Christ and therefore the book which bears witness to him. It is, and remains, grateful for the knowledge of God in which he has given himself to us by giving up his Son." -- K. Barth, CD: II/1, 178.

schism

2007-10-25T17:11:00.000-07:00

"But few persons, nowadays, can correctly appreciate the force of the word 'schism' in the apostolic age, because but a very few experimentally know the intimacies, the oneness of heart and soul, that obtained and prevailed in the Christian profession while all was genuine and uncorrupt. A union formed on Christian principles--a union with Christ and with his people, in views, sentiments, feelings, aims, and pursuits--a real copartnery for eternity--almost annihilated individuality itself, and inseparably cemented into one spirit all the genuine members of Christ's body. Kindred drops do not more readily mingle into one mass, than flowed the souls of primitive Christians together in all their aspirations, loves, delights, and interests. hence arose that jealousy in the Apostle Paul when first he learned that particular persons in Corinth began to attract to themselves notice and attachment for mere personal, individual, and fleshly considerations, as leaders or chiefs in the Christian family. In these indications he already saw the dissolution of the church. Although yet but one visible community, having one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one table, one ostensible supreme and all-controlling interest; still, in these attachments to particular persons he not only saw a real division or breach in the hearts of the people, but foresaw that it would issue in positive, actual, and visible disunion or heresy." --Alexander Campbell, "The Christian System," Ch. XXVIII, "Heresy"

orthopathy

2007-10-17T17:43:00.001-07:00

The AMBS Theological Center Guest of 2007, Cheryl Bridges Johns, spoke this evening about orthopathy, right pathos, as distinct from orthodoxy (right praise) and orthopraxy (right practice). She began with the typical (modern) history of Christian doctrine on pathos: the Greek fathers heralded Stoic apatheia, furthered by Scholastic rationalism and God Who is First Cause, all of which of course now we no longer believe. She willingly acknowledged the fault of the type of "theology from below" that makes God in our own image, as well as a faulty rationalism which results in all kinds of evils (e.g. the Holocaust). Yet, the conversation nevertheless turned to a advocation of space in worship whereby "chaotic" emotions could be brought into the presence of God. We spent much time discussing "negative" emotions, and expressing our anxiety about the presence of unstructured space in worship.

I left with the sense that the "rightness" of orthopathy was even fuzzier than it was before. If chaos is in need of ordering in the process of redemption (which she said), then chaos can be equated with sin. In that case, she's asking to bring sin into worship for reordering. This makes sense, but if that was her case, then she did not state it clearly enough. Sometimes, it seemed like she was trying to say that God works outside of order (here understood as structure or reason), and therefore that God has a particular presence in chaos that is different than God's presence in order. Thus, choas is neutral, not sinful, and it ought to have a place in worship because it is inherently good.

It could be that what she meant to say was that the truth of affection is in their direction--right pathos consists in pathos directed toward God, whether negative (How long, O Lord?) or positive (thanksgiving). I suppose that could be right. What I was wanting her to say was that God is first love--that right affection consists in our participation in God's affection; that ordering of the affections is not a rationalization of emotion but affection that takes on the form of the light of Christ rather than darkness, same as reason which takes on the same form. Perhaps this is nothing more than a silly methodological difference between a theology "from below" (pointing upwards) and a theology "from above" (Self-giving downwards), which I should get over as soon as possible...

Here I posit my ramblings.

2007-10-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

"It is possible logically to condemn a given action in principle, and yet to continue to consider those who persist in that action as Christians, albeit misguided ones, and thereby to continue conversing with them. Thus to say 'A faithful Christian cannot consistently wield the sword' is not the same as to say 'Anyone who wields the sword is not a Christian,' even though the critics of the Anabaptists have often refused to send that difference. It is a difference that lies at the heart of binding ecumenical dialogue. It may be expressed in one sense of the verb 'to suffer' or 'to tolerate', which designates the readiness ot submitto the continuation of what really should not be. [...] There begins to surface at this point something new in the history of ideas. Between the simple condemnation, 'it must not be done', issuing in withdrawal, and the simple acceptance, 'it cannot be hlped', which justifies compromise, there arises the 'it should not be' which refuses either to destroy the adversary or to withdraw from the struggle." --JH Yoder, " 'Anabaptism and the Sword' Revisited

Abraham, Jesus, and the Tragic Hero

2007-10-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

Abraham, put off on your son.
Take instead the ram
until Jesus comes-–Sufjan Stevens, “Abraham”

I've spent over an hour trying to articulate the tension I'm experiencing between Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling" and a fairly typical contemporary pacifist reading of the Gospel of Mark, complete with long, eloquent quotes from the former, and vivid cometemporary stories from an example of the latter. This is my best, briefest, attempt to try to articulate the tension. There are relatively simple answers, I presume, involving a reflexive definition of what it means to be "for ourselves," "for God," and "for others." But, for now, here's the rub:

To Kierkegaard, the awesome faith of Abraham this paradoxical triumph of the personal over the universal, but in utter resignation of the same personal interest. But in Kierkegaard's framework, a reading of the Gospel of Mark such as David Rhoades--"Jesus' whole life, his faithfulness in death, and his resurrection liberate hearers from the self-oriented fear of death and empower them to live faithfully for others, resulting in humane communities of mutual service."--appears on the same par as that of the tragic hero: the hero sacrifices his love or himself for the sake of the people/nation, and Jesus likewise sacrifices himself for the sake of the world.

"Jesus is the opposite of self-oriented. He is God-centered for others" (Rhoads). When for God equals for others without remainder or contradiction, then God can be substituted for others, or for the universal, and suddenly Jesus was an honorable utilitarian; he makes secular ethical sense. If this is how we understand Jesus, I'm afraid we've lost something significant. Though the early Anabaptists kept community "religiously," the blood of the martyrs was spilled for the sake of Christ, not for any practical or useful reason. The cup, which the Son asks the Father to take, is none other than the Father's; if all God's children reap its benefits, it is only because of the vast love of the Father.

Yoder on Just War

2007-09-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

Quotes from J H Yoder, "the Logic of the Just War Tradition," from "Christian Attitudes Toward War, Peace, and Revolution," edited by Ted Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker:

"The place of hindsight, describing important changes, and differing with the actors in the story about which changes were important, is puzzling, even if all we think we are doing is description. However, the description is also evaluation. Some think of the changes as progress, as clarification of truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Others think of those changes as degeneration or deviation or just plain apostasy. Is there not something patronizing about saying, “Martin Luther thought he was conservative, thought that he was calling the church back to a faithfulness the existed before the Middle Ages, but as a matter of fact he was moving things forward into modernity”? Or about saying, “Augustine thought he was just moving on, reading the same Bible in his age that others had read before, whereas in fact he was importing Neo-Platonism into Christian thought?”
Certainly it would be improper and patronizing if we were to do this only with those with whom we differ, and if in doing so we were making a judgment on their intelligence or sincerity. But the reading of history cannot avoid observing the difference between what people were conscious of arguing about and other dimensions of its meaning. Some of those dimensions are dictated by factors in the situation, which people in the moment are not self-critical about. Some of them are decided only later, by how the switches of history were set. Thus, options we think we are choosing among may turn out not to be the ones we help bring about."

"Next, more importantly, we assume that the good guys should win. We assume we have a mandate to take charge of the historical process, to help God’s will triumph. We feel we have a duty to make history come out right—to use power to assure that the historical process at large, or our segment of it, takes right turns instead of wrong turns. We have a moral obligation to take charge of historical process from the top. Responsibility has become the word for that duty."

"A more precise phrasing would label it justifiable war rather than just war: war is not good or righteous in itself; it is a regrettable evil, justifiable only under certain circumstances. Just war theory is a concession, not an approval, not an obligation, and not a mandate. It gives permission only to the prince, who has a unique place in God’s purposes and in the society. The doctrine intends to make no change in the ethics of non-sovereigns."

"The next observation about the kind of approval medieval theologians gave to war is more foreign to our ways of thinking about ethics: the doctrine had more to do with penance than with decision making. We have to step back and ask historical and cultural-anthropological questions about where moral language was located in the social process. Modern people think of moral principles as coming at the front end of a decision process. Medieval culture did not reason this way. Before anyone could come to the holy ceremonies of the Eucharist, they had to do penance for their sins. The one who comes to confession asks, “What are my sins?” The priest responds, “What have you done? Here is an inventory of possible sins. One of them is, ’Have you killed anybody?’ If so, ‘Was it in a just war?’” Even killing in a just war called for penance, though less than the penance required for other kinds of killing. So the place where moral insight came to bear on the decision process in early medieval culture was not in advance deliberation on questions such as, “Shall we go to war?” or “In this war, shall we kill civilians?” After the fact, after involvement in bloodshed, then the clergy could determine how bad it had been, and how long the disciplinary process should be until those who had fought would again be in the state of grace, so that they could be restored to the sacraments."

beginnings

2007-09-26T10:58:00.001-07:00

I've been asked again, recently, from where I created? devised? imagined? that the quintessential practice of the Church is doxology. Two stories that I've been reflecting on with reference to this:

Yesterday in Greek Exegesis: Mark, someone shared his experience of forced childhood naivite at the juncture of faith and critical questions, turned to a question: would he be honest (honest with what, I'm not sure - honest with the biblical text? honest about his observation of the world?) or would he be a Christian? He chose honesty, and rejected "his" faith for several years. He didn't finish the story, but we imagine that at some point his honesty called him back to faith. He is now a reasoned, practical, and pastoral disciple of Christ and leader in the Mennonite Church - clearly a person worth emulating in various ways, and one for whom I have much respect. Still, I find we do not entirely agree on various theological questions, and the difference between us, from my perspective, is that, forced, we begin at different places.

When I was in college, and my world exploded with critical questions and answers I didn't expect, I discovered that the evidence was quite possibly against any existence of any good and loving God. About a week into my rejection of God, I sat on the deck behind South Complex staring into the woods with tears in my eyes and a philosophy book in my hand, when I realized that, for all of my best intentions not to believe and all of my seas of doubt, I could not stop praying. In that moment, I began with the only thing I did know - prayer.

When I say that all of theology, all of Christian ethics, all of the Church's life is doxology, I'm trying to get back to the beginning. For me, that beginning is not "love your neighbor" - though for some, undoubtedly, it is, and I venture to say it is a good, worthy, admirable beginning - but is not my beginning. Would I do the world more justice, generate greater compassion, if it were? Maybe. "Prayer" itself, as a beginning, is problematic. To Whom are we praying? What is the content of that prayer? "Doxology" is an attempt to take the stance of prayer while addressing some of these questions: the One to Whom we pray is none other than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God and Mother of us all; and the content of our prayer is first thanksgiving/gratitude, which informs the rest of our prayer.

I've been challenged, by this person from Greek class, that my grand-scheme theologies, by broad view doxology, is not really helpful. It's elitist language that has nothing to do with the down-to-earth love of Jesus for sinners and tax collectors. It confuses the church and pulls it away from the task at hand: being Christ in the world. I admit that I'm afraid he's right; I'm afraid what matters most is how we treat each other. I'm afraid because then I will have to change, and I'm afraid because I don't find much hope there.* I can argue that doxology is the beginning of ethics, and that it produces a good ethic. But I don't know how to argue for the beginning - how to convince someone that my beginning is better.

Then I remember that the goal is not to convince other people of beginnings, but to point to God - to pray with thankgiving. In gratitude, I ask for the mercy to follow the Jesus who loved sinners and tax collectors.

*If I am blind to my own white, upper-middle-class, straight, US oppressive acts, I have been well-trained in the ill-logic (the logic that makes me ill) of Israeli racist policy toward Palestinians. I dare speak what I feel well: there is no earthy hope for Palestinians. If the beginning is a fight for liberation that is bound to fail, then why start?

all things quickened and sustained

2007-09-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

"And this was the wonderful thing that He was at once walking as man, and as the Word was quickening all things, and as the Son was dwelling with His Father. So that not even when the Virgin bore Him did He suffer any change, nor by being in the body was [His glory] dulled: but, on the contrary, He sanctified the body also. For not even by being in the universe does He share in its nature, but all things, on the contrary, are quickened and sustained by Him. For if the sun too, which was made by Him, and which we see, as it revolves in the heaven, is not defiled by touching the bodies upon earth, nor is it put out by darkness, but on the contrary itself illuminates and cleanses them also, much less was the all-holy Word of God, Maker and Lord also of the sun, defiled by being made known in the body; on the contrary, being incorruptible, He quickened and cleansed the boyd also, which was in itself mortal." - Athanasius, "On the Incarnation of the Word" 17:5-7.

learning confession from Luther (?)

2007-09-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling with confession lately. I thought perhaps the problem was too much reading of Luther - too much human depravity, too much imaginative angst and spiritual warfare. But learning confession with Luther is a process, and this was only the first stage.

I'm sure I butcher Luther by mentioning the film, but there is a turning point at which his spiritual father comes to Luther, who is in one of his self-hating screaming matches with the devil, and says, "Look to Christ. Say, 'I am yours, save me.' [Psalm 119:94]" I've noted that in Luther, that the two prongs of the believer as "simultaneously justified and a sinner" depends on one's -gaze-: if one looks to Christ, we are none other than perfect; but if one looks to ourselves, we are fumbling at every turn. Tired of losing myself in the seas of inward doubt, darkness and self-hatred, I'm trying confession while "looking to Christ." Directing my gaze toward the Savior and speaking the words of confession: "Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought word and deed..." instead of wallowing in the chaos of sin, I release with joy that which does not conform to the Image set before me, and I run with thanksgiving toward the Light that shines in the darkness. "I am Yours, save me."

Calvin on the Church

2007-09-21T06:23:00.000-07:00

"[...] that it is the society of all the saints, a society which, spread over the whole world, and existing in all ages, yet bound together by the one doctrine and the one Spirit of Christ, cultivates and observes unity of faith and brotherly concord. With this Church we deny that we have any diagreement. Nay, rather, as we rever her as our mother, so we desire to remain in her bosom." - "Calvin's Reply to Sadoleto

Am I a Scholar?

2007-09-16T15:56:00.000-07:00

In MA Colloquium II, we're embarking on a semester of professional formation. The prospect of thinking about how to be a scholar - what journals to read, what conversations to be a part of, what conferences to attend - as part of a class rather than as extraneous to it, is incredibly exciting. It is nice to think that no one expects us already to know these things.

Still, it seems there is a type of person that innately becomes a good scholar - something that cannot be formed. This type of person is, first and foremost, a reader - a gatherer and remember-er of all kinds of books and all kinds of arguments. A scholar opens an article as bedtime reading and finishes it before falling asleep. (Whereas I open a book for bedtime reading and can't get passed the first page.)

A scholar is a linear thinker, with a knack for binding thoughts to the names of people who have thought them. A scholar is detached - objective, critical - but engaged in every conversation. I am detached - disengaged - and endlessly personally, emotionally attached - perhaps -because- I'm personally attached. An example: at Sunday School, or its FOH approximation, today, I was asked if there are questions dealing with the church's use of Scripture that I would like to explore in the class. One would think that, given how much time I've spent in the last 6 years thinking about these questions, that I would be able to say -something-. But no, not really; there were, in fact, too many questions, and having already asked many of them, I wasn't sure how this room full of faithful congregants could help me deal with my current pursuit of the place of Scripture in the "economy of salvation." They want story; I want presence. Now, looking back, I wish I would have just voiced that: I want you to help me figure out where Scripture fits into our salvation. Maybe they wouldn't have understood what I meant by "salvation," but at least I would have tried to engage. The first task of the scholar is to engage.

Also, there are personal things that I want in a way that is more ingrained in me than my desire to be a scholar - I want them like I want air or water. I want to love. I want to live in community. I want to make art - music, dance. I want to have emotional rants.

There are some moments, sitting in Ben Ollenburger's or John Rempel's office, when I think to myself, "There is no place I would rather be; I love this so much!" But there are at least as many moments when I think, "Man, I cannot do this; I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, and more importantly, I don't know what the hell he's talking about!" This week, I actually imagined myself like Luther, yelling at the voices in my head that tell me to give up like they're the devil. Maybe they're the devil. Maybe they're realism.

If I were a scholar, I would have a list of blogs I read and on which I comment intelligently regularly. If I were a scholar, I wouldn't be changing the language of my thesis the day before I turn in the prospectus, and I wouldn't be handing in the prospectus 3 weeks late. If I were a scholar, I would care more about theology's use for the Church than for its beauty (though I admit, I don't know how to distinguish the two.) If I were a scholar, this entry would be linear instead of rambling.

But most importantly, if I were a scholar, I would speak.

(As an aside, I want to write a sequel to Francesca Aran Murphy's "God is not a Story" entitled, "I am not a Story: Meeting God in Scripture".)

a fun exercise

2007-09-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

Compare the use of theological language and contemporary phenomena in the following:

1) a sign outside of Grace Brethren Church: "Is your world crashing? Download Jesus!"
2) the title of John Caputo's new book (with a foreward by Brian McLaren): "What would Jesus Deconstruct?"

Real Presence: -Only- in the Gathered Community?

2007-09-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

“Even as, in Luther’s view, the body of Christ is in the bread and the blood in the chalice, his faithful ones and disciples are transformed into the nature and essence of Christ. For everything a person eats changes from its natural essence into something else; even so, should not their natures be changed into the nature and essence of Christ? As the teaching is, so also is the fruit.” - Marpeck, "Expose of the Babylonian Whore"

Marpeck supports his claim for the presence of Christ in the community of believers celebrating the Eucharist WITH Luther's declaration that the body and blood of Christ is in the bread and wine, not OPPOSED to the same. Moreover, the changed natures of the body of believers do not create the changed nature/significance of the bread and the wine, but rather, the changed bread and wine determine the changed nature of the body. As the teaching is of the bread and the wine, so also the fruit present in the lives of believers. Marpeck hints here (though perhaps only here) that the church receives her Christological identity in the Lord's Supper.

jumping with Peter

2007-08-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

"Now we are to reflect upon Him spiritually, upon what kind of a mind, spirit, and disposition He ahd, and how He lived; the more we reflect upon His physical words, works, deeds, and life, the better God allows us to know His mind, and the better He teaches and insturcts us (John 6). Whoever does not think of Him, reflect upon Him, pray, or seek Him will not receive from Him (Mt. 7; Luke 11, 13; 1 Chron. 29). The more one now learns to know Him and see Him spiritually (Jn 6, 17; Heb 12), the more one learns to love Him, to become friendly and pleasant toward Him and, through such knowledge receives Him into the heart and grows therein (2 Pet 1,2). Finally, one jumps with Peter himself, freely and voluntarily (Jn 21), into the sea of tribulations and, concentrating on Christ, casts aside the mantle or the old garment. Through such a knowledge of Christ, man also comes to the knowledge of God (Jn 8, 14; 2 Cor 4) and partakes of divine nature, but only if he is willing to flee from the lusts of this world, under God's rule. In this manner, through instruction and knowledge of Christ's mind, God places His law into our mind and writes it into our hearts (Heb 8)." - P. Marpeck, "A Clear Refutation"

Defending the Incarnation

2007-08-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

In response to Steven Siebert's Jan 2004 MQR article, "Reading Marpeck for the First Time."

Siebert, a computer programmer by day and a philosopher and theologian by night, intimates that he has something in common with Marpeck: theology is not his primary vocation either. Siebert defends his quick read of Marpeck with the claim that “In [Marpeck's] hands theology is an instrument wielded, in urgency, in the hour of decision, only in defense of the Gospel: theology is nothing other than the confessing church’s articulation of its faith in the context of its obedience to, and following of, Christ.” Marpeck's theologizing is primarily occasional rather than systematic, and that as a result, we needn't treat it as a careful system which must be mined carefully over time. However, we discover, as with most first impressions, that this quick read of Marpeck has primarily uncovered Siebert's philosophical biases, and only secondarily told us anything about Marpeck's theology.

Siebert's lengthy article comes in three sections: "The Theology of the Incarnation" contains Siebert's commendation of Marpeck; "Marpeck in Crisis", his critique; and "Marpeck in the Moment of Our Crisis", his suggestions on what we ought to do with Marpeck.

In "the Theology of the Incarnation," Siebert acclaims Marpeck's insistence that we only experience the Living Christ and Holy Spirit through the mediation of language (Scripture) and action:

“Marpeck’s insistence that human understanding is always mediated through language, and, as we shall see, through concrete action and symbolic, ritualized behavior – that there is, in short, no abstract disembodied rationality – constitutes a radical break from what in many ways became, in variations on the Cartesian cognito, the dominant cultural underpinnings of emerging modernity [...] “Marpeck understand that the kind of identity of the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ he is at pains to defend is not an ontological identity, but one that is brought into being through action.”

However, in this quote, we find a clue as to where Siebert goes wrong in his interpretation of Marpeck. Marpeck is not primarily setting out on an epistemological mission, but a doctrinal one; the significance is not that human understanding requires language/action mediation, but that God has revealed in Christ that In the same way, the reason Marpeck prefers action over being (if he does so at all) is because the Spirit enlivens us to action. Marpeck is more concerned with the Spirit's active work than with a philosophy of ritual. Siebert puts words in Marpeck's mouth when he says, "Jesus -is- his story."; Marpeck may have been more likely to say, "The humanity of Christ is Jesus' story."

So, Siebert's critiques Marpeck for continuing the ontological and epistemological dualisms he seeks to subvert, especially in Marpeck's consistant use of "essence," supposed lack of attention to biblical narrative, and use of doctrinal categories. Providing a telling of the life, death and resurrection of Christ according to the synoptic gospels, Siebert claims, “While attempting to defend a more embodied, active form of sacramental and reflective practice, Marpeck ends up giving coherence to theological concepts by abstracting them from the concrete depictions of them in the biblical narrative.” While Marpeck's exegesis may be somewhat lacking (admittedly, his discussion of the "ancients" is rather troubling, and Siebert critiques him well on this point), I wonder whether Siebert has noticed Marpeck's consistant and extravagent use of John. For finally, what seems to bother Siebert the most is that Marpeck refuses the sociological reductionism that (post?)modernism so greatly enjoys. While Siebert can say, “For at heart, far from leading us to despair, to have only ‘pictures, figures, signs, and images’ rather than direct access to ‘essences,’ forces us to encounter the Christ inscripted in the biblical texts, rather than the Christ of our imagination." - Marpeck would assert that this is a grave reduction of the Gospel. The significance of the "figures, signs, and images" lies in their likeness to the humanity of Christ, which, when enlivened by the Spirit, forms a new reality, which is either disembodied essence nor flat sign. Thus, the importance of the word and actions is that they are -not- merely actions, but rather, incarnate in the power of the Spirit.*

In forcing Marpeck's hand and accusing him of adhering to the same ontological dualism he seeks to refute, Siebert:
1) misperceives the focus of Marpeck's argument, which is defense of the incarnation and not an epistemological or sociological theory;
2) forgets that the doctrine of the incarnation itself is not "disembodied concept" but language and the active confession of the Church;
3) flattens the dynamic of Marpeck's theology, by which humans and God can be said to meet at all.

There's more to say, but this is already too long. If following Jesus requires that we affirm Siebert's criticisms, then I agree: we should leave Marpeck behind. But if the Incarnation and doxology encourage us to hear him, then I pray we do.

* What I mean is that I'm afraid Siebert's insistence that "we have nothing more than signs" is a conflation of the divine and human natures of Christ. I mean to defend the Definition of Chalcedon and the "one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, wihtout confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinciton of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming toether to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ."

Mannermaa's Luther and Blough's Marpeck

2007-08-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

Blough's interpretation of Luther on justification is traditional, or common, in the sense that he defines the difference btw the magisterial and the radical reformers on the anthropological optimism or lack thereof. Luther followed Augustine and anthropological/moral pessimism, while the radicals, Erasmus and much medieval theology, to optimism.

“For Luther, justification was forensic, i.e., God declares righteous those who are really not so. But this 'declaration' does not make them capable of doing the will of God. In contrast Marpeck affirmed that humans can become 'truly' righteous or just, i.e., they can now please God by their actions.” (Blough, 64)

In light of recent Finnish Luther scholarship (of which Mannermaa is a leader), we might rephrase: “This 'declaration' does not make [the flesh] capable of doing the will of God, [though Christ present in faith to the believer does the will of God in and through the believer.]” Mannermaa seems to suggest that the glance toward the divine is the truest; that Christ doing rightly is more "real" than the flesh not doing rightly. This is what Luther means when he says that: “If I look at my own person or that of my neighbor, the church will never be holy. But if I look at Christ, who is the Propitiator and Cleanser of the church, then it is completely holy; for He bore the sins of the entire world. Therefore, where sins are noticed and felt, there they really are not present.” (Mannermaa, 17-18). God's righteousness actually defeats, overcomes, and does away with sin (slowly, through the believer's experience of a battle between the flesh and the Spirit), but at the same time, God's righteousness is more "real" than sin.

The difference between (Mannermaa's) Luther and Marpeck can be seen most easily in their concept of love. To Luther (as Mannermaa mediates him), love, without Christ, can only be the love of the law, which will get us nowhere. With Christ comes love. Christ is the form of faith, and therefore the form of love; love itself is not the form of faith, apart from Christ.

To Marpeck, suffering love as the Christ-revealed way to God is not a positive achievement on our part but a surrender (-gelassenheit?-) to the Spirit, a mystical -via negativa-. We do not earn union with Christ through love, but rather this is the means by which the Spirit makes Christ present to us. This love is both divine and human; God is love, but ours are the hands by which God's love is made known to the world.

Though Mannermaa suggests that there is ontological value to Christ's imputation of righteous - that this imputation is not "mere" declaration or rhetoric - he has not yet suggested that in Luther, humanity participates in God. For example, Christ does not redeem the law, but reveals its incapacity; it is not human love but the love of Christ which Christ makes possible in the believer. Marpeck claims that because Christ was both divine and human, the human acts of the Church (the humanity of Christ) actually participate in this new -wesen-; they are unified with the divine as in the person of Christ. Thus the Church is the Body of Christ, and the prolongation of the incarnation.

Marion and the Enneagram: a Ridiculous Juxtaposition and Reflection on a Weekend

2007-08-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

Friday evening I said, “Hello” to two friends I see more or less extremely rarely and who know me more or less extremely well, who happened to be in Mansfield, OH extremely briefly. After a fruitful visit, Saturday afternoon I said, “Goodbye” to the same, I arrived home feeling fairly nihilistic. (It is not that the 4 hour drive wasn't worth it, so much as one wishes they weren't – that one's life would be so full of intimate connections, wherever one is, that one wouldn't look to seemingly random moments of distinct effort to find some kind of meaningful relationship.)

Pursuing my bookshelf for something to confirm and satisfy my nihilism: Telford Work was too truthful and David Bentley Hart too beautiful. I chose Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, assured I would not be disappointed.

But disappointed, I might be. A few days later, I'm struck by point of depth within myself that Marion's distinction between idol and icon has reached – or, at least, the number of times I have come back to the undoubtedly-overly-simplified version of Marion's distinction which I have absorbed: an idol is an invisible mirror, which makes visible our own intention, in that it dazzles and freezes our gaze and reflects back to us the same. The idol is the first visible thing – our first visible – so that it exhausts our desire for it.

If the idol is a mirror, than the icon is a window, the face of one looking back at us, drawing us into greater depth. The idol makes visible that which is invisible – namely, our intention and our own gaze – whereas in the icon, the invisible Other advents in a face that draws us ever farther into itself. The icon sees us, and we experience ourselves as seen, while we ourselves see the idol.

My summer blog silence has been filled with two things: German (ugh) and the Enneagram. Fours (like myself) set out to fill their lives with meaning. They are dramatic; everything is, as Father Richard Rohr claims, “tragedy or orgasm.” In pursuing meaning, they may also be prone to fixations – they long for the one who will come and finally know them and fill the emptiness of their “ordinary” experience. Ordinariness is precisely their enemy, which makes relationships with (necessarily ordinary) people rather difficult. But back to the fixation – maybe Marion is helpful here – Fours long for icons, windows of invisible-making-itself-visible advent. In the absence of icons, fours create idols – visions or conceptions of people, beautiful images of themselves, of far away places or situations. Inevitably, these idols fail the four – the reality of people and places never match the vision that the four has imagined – which leads her to find a new fixation, a new vision, a new idol. The four learns to be disappointed, but nevertheless creates the situations that disappoint her (and thus is something of a walking nihilist, in the garb of the most hopeful optimist.)

I may have beauified the four some here. Is in the icon that the four longs for, or the idol? Is it that the four longs for deeper meaning, or that the four is so in love with herself that she is addicted to the image? Regardless, the obvious goal would be for the four to turn away from the idols that image herself toward icons which look at her; to let herself be seen rather than to look at her own image. (I'm sure I've lost Marion long ago, but I'm even more sure that I'll lose him here:) the four will find that it is ordinary experience itself in which God makes herself visible; that all the while she's been creating idols to see herself, that salvation lies in looking into the face of the One gazing back at her in every ordinary moment of every ordinary day. This is the joy of the incarnation – that God has gazed at us in human form – and the joy of the Eucharist – that Christ is God embodied in the bread and wine, and that as this bread and wine has been changed from ordinary bread and wine to icons drawing us ever closer to the One who gazes at us in them, so God may transfigure all kinds of substances which our bodies touch and smell and eat each day.

Mystagogy

2007-07-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

If in the waters of baptism, I belong solely to God, drawn into the death and resurrection of Christ,

martyrdom is not a story of my ancestors, now obsolete. Nor is being killed for following Christ a call of the select few, who must uniquely "prepare" for this possibility apart from the rest of us.

No, baptism means that -I have already died.- There is no more preparation than living into this Pascal mystery.

Tom Fox suffered for Christ's sake, but so do the Catholic Workers in South Bend, New York, Harrisburg: death to self is death to self is death to self.

I have died, I am dying, I will die. I have been raised, I am being raised, I will be raised. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Fire

2007-07-03T19:06:00.000-07:00

Fire, the source of being: we cling so tenaciously to the illusion that fire comes forth from the depths of the earth and that its flames grow progressively brighter as it pours along the radiant furrows of life's tillage. Lord, in your mercy you gave me to see that this idea is false, and that I must overthrow it if I were to have sight of you.

In the beginning was -Power-, intelligent, loving, energizing. In the beginning was the -Word-, supremely capable of mastering and moulding whatever might come into being in the world of matter. In the beginning there were not coldness and darkness: there was the -Fire-. This is the truth.

So, far from light emerging gradually out of the womb of our darkness, it is the Light, existing before all else was made which, patiently, surely, eliminates our darkness. As for us creatures, of ourselves we are but emptiness and obscurity. But you, my God, are the inmost depths, the stability of that eternal -milieu-, without duration or space, in which our cosmos emerges gradually into being and grows gradually to its final completeness, as it loses those boundaries which to our eyes seem so immense. Everything is being; everywhere is being and nothing but being, save in the fragmentation of creatures and the clash of their atoms.

Blazing Spirit, Fire, personal, super-substantial, the consummation of a union so immeasurably more lovely and more desirable than that destructive fusion of which all the pantheists dream: be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day that world is to be freshly clothed.

I know we cannot forestall, still less dictate to you, even the smallest of your actions; from you alone comes all initiative -- and this applies in the first place to my prayer.

Radiant Word, blazing Power, you who mould the manifold so as to breathe your life into it; I pray you, lay on us those your hands -- powerful, considerate, omnipresent, those hands which do not (like our human hands) touch now here, now there, but which plunge into the depths and the totality, recent and past, of things so as to reach us simultaneously through all that is most immense and most inward within us and around us.

Do you now therefore, speaking through my lips, pronounce over this earthly travail your twofold efficacious word: the word without which all that our wisdom and our experience have built up must totter and crumble --the word through which all our most far-reaching speculations and our encounter with the universe are come together into a unity. Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the word: This is my Body. And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: This is my blood.

Now, Lord, through the consecration of the world the luminosity and fragrance which suffuse the universe take on for me the lineaments of a body and a face -- in you. What my mind glimpsed through its hesitant explorations, what my heart craved with so little expectation of fulfilment, you now magnificently unfold for me: the fact that your creatures are not merely so linked together in solidarity that none can exist unless all the rest surround it, but that all are so dependent on a single central reality that a true life, borne in common by them all, gives them ultimately their consistence and their unity.

Shatter, my God, through the daring of your revelation the childishly timid outlook that can conceive of nothing greater or more vital in the world than the pitiable perfection of our human organism. On the road to a bolder comprehension of the universe the children of this world day by day outdistance the masters of Israel; but do you, Lord Jesus, 'in whom all things subsist', show yourself to thsoe who love you as teh higher Soul and the physical centre of your creation. Are you not well aware that for us this is a question of life or death? As for me, if I could not belive that your real Presence animates and makes tractable and enkindles even the very least of the energies which invade me or brush past me, would I not die of cold?

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

doctrine without tyranny

2007-06-26T20:37:00.000-07:00

Claiming the authority of the Bible as a result of its "demonstratable factual truthfulness" is "damning": "This apologetic project seeks to justify tha authority of the Bible by showing that the Bible somehow conforms to other previously recognized canons of truth. To make this move, however, is to concede tacitly that these other fundamental canons of truth (historical factuality or wahtever) are in principle more authoritative than the Bible: if the Bible fails to answer to these higher authorities, its own claim to narmative status must be denied." (R. Hays, "Forward" in T. Work, -Living and Active-). Others want to claim that any reading of Scripture that acknowledges the significance of traditional doctrinal theological categories - and undoubtedly also that Work's own project, that of using Systematic Theology to articulate a doctrine of the authority of Scripture - is tragically misled.

But can we really compare factual historical apologeticists and systematic theologians? For no doctrine of doctrine worth asserting claims that doctrine finds it source apart from Scripture. Whereas scientific historicism does not, as a discipline, arise from Scripture but from a modernist, secular philosophy, doctrine's relationship to Scripture is much closer. What the biblical theologian has to work with, then, are specific, pecular texts and the task of reading them in light of how the Church has continued to read them; doctrine is not an imposed tyranny to which we subject the text, but its own child. Ignoring doctrine will not help us understand the text, though ignoring the peculiarity of the text will not help us either. Still, doctrine is not opposed to the text but integrally connected to it. Reading the text theologically would seem to assume some level of consistancy with historical and systematic categories. Reading the text theologically is how the Church has always read it, and its why the Church has doctrine at all.

The surest way to rid ourselves of a people...

2007-06-13T18:21:00.001-07:00

...is to make them self-destruct.

That's my word of wisdom on a day of mourning 67 deaths since Sunday in the Gaza Strip due to Hamas-Fatah fighting.

"If you have two brothers, put them in a cage and deprive them of basic and essential needs for life, they will fight, I don't think we should put the blame on the victim." - Ziad Abu Amr, Palestinian Foreign Minster at news conference in Tokyo

(With Hamas in control of Gaza, and with Israel wiping its hands of any responsibility in the matter, there's no telling what the only sovereign state in the "Holy Land" will do now: cut off fuel and electricity to the Strip? Close borders permanently? Re-occupy? Talk of a Gazan "Hamastan" and a West Bank "Fatah-stan" are surely ill-founded; will Hamas-supporting regions give up power in the West Bank so quickly? Though I fear the power of admitting it, the chances of the spread of a civil war are much more likely.)

Yet, this situation is not reserved for the Holy Land, as the Oglala Lakota people in South Dakota suffer astronomic suicide rates. Again, the colonizer-indiginous people connection is only too apparent...

(Incidently, not enough is made of the "suicide" in "suicide bombing." While the "brainwashing of youth by religious leaders" explanation is all too pervasive, a more accurate description would undoubtedly explain the phenomenon as young adults seeking to attach meaning to the ultimate expression of the meaninglessness they suffer.)

Ya allah, ya rabb, taal bissouraa!

the Feast of Corpus Christi

2007-06-06T14:28:00.000-07:00

The Feast of Corpus Christi was instituted in the 13th century on the first Thursday following Trinity Sunday in celebration of the sacrament of the Eucharist, by which the body of Christ (Corpus Christi) is uniquely present in the Church. The medieval Church paraded the accidents of the bread and wine (and the substance of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ) around the streets of cities so that all could venerate it. Incidently, in the 16th century, this was the perfect day for the authorities to arrest my Anabaptist foremothers and forefathers, because they would not bow.

Nevertheless, I think that there is value in celebrating this feast day, in recognition of the tremendous gift God gives us in this practice of the Church. In the Lord's Supper, Christ is present to us as Host, inviting us to participate in the feast. The Gift which Christ offers is none other than Christ Himself, which we receive by the power of the Holy Spirit, who enables us to respond in faith, offering ourselves to Christ, and offering Christ to one another. In this act, we are nourished by Christ, who enables us to be His Body on Earth. The Lord's Supper is a gift, which we have been given and which we share. So we have a day to celebrate its gifted-ness.

Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us;
therefore, let us keep the feast. Alleluia!

God our Father, whose Son our Lord Jesus Christ in a wonderful Sacrament has left us a memorial of his passion: Grant us so to venerate the sacred mysteries of his Body and Blood, that we may ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of his redemption; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Rain

2007-06-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

**** sitting on the Kreider's couch, listening to "Rain" by Patty Griffin, with rumbling thunder and drenching rain in the background, on the 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and Golan Heights and Sinai Penninsula) ****

Lord,

When Your Spirit was brooding
over the waters of deep chaos,

life sprang up

green vegetation
and creeping things
(the ones that creep along the ground)

You set the dome of the sky
(keeping out the waters above)
and formed dry land
(out of the waters below).

Maybe the seals broke,
a crack in the dome,
waters pouring down,
pooling in streams beneath our feet.

Waters above us
waters below us
waters beside us and all around us
so near to us,
drops on our glasses
between the frizzing of our hair
sliding down our forehead.
We taste it,
glands constricting,
waters mingling.

Lord,

You tell us
where there are deep waters,
chaos and violence,
there is Your Spirit
hovering
brooding
caring
creating
making all things new.

As the waters flood us,
above us,
beneath us,
between us,
even inside us,
Send us Your Spirit,
create us again,
for You are our life.

Amen.

feeding on Christ

2007-06-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

The Eucharist is the most important meal I have ever eaten, and it is the most important meal I will eat until I may be, by the grace and invitation of God, seated at the eschatological banquet, face-to-face with Christ our Host. Moreover, when I have weekly celebrated the Eucharist, I have known it to be the most important act of my week -- an act which, consciously or unconsciously, feeds all other acts. When I have celebrated the Eucharist regularly, I have grown in the sense that I could not possibly get along without it.

"I maintain that it is only after we obtain Christ himself, that we come to share in the benefits of Christ. And I further maintain that he is obtained, not just when we believe that he was sacrificed for us, but when he dwells in us, when he is one with us, when we are members of his flesh, when, in short, we become united in one life and substance (if I may say so) with him for Christ does not offer us only the benefit of his death and resurrection, but the self-same body in which he suffered and rose again. The body of Christ is really, to use the usual word, i.e., truly, given to us in the supper, so that it may be health-giving food for our souls." - John Calvin (!)

If Christ's body is the food of our spiritual well-being, then if we do not eat it, do we not starve? An off-handed comment today - that "I cannot understand how I get through a day without celebrating the Eucharist" - surprised me more in that I was willing to speak this truth that sounds as if it depends on some kind of soul-body dualism, or spiritual literalism, or - more significantly - a sharply different theology of the Lord's Supper than the "sign of the unity of the congregation" which the Mennonite Church seems to be trying to teach me. How could I possibly enter into a process of preparation for the Supper on a daily basis? I couldn't - we couldn't - and when I say that I think I would be significantly better off feeding on Christ daily, I mean it in a way that has more to do with its effect on me rather than my worthy partaking in it. I mean that I am hungry, starving nearly, to feed on Christ in this particular way. Perhaps there are other, less particular ways, which I could be feeding on Christ which I am not. Perhaps I am selfish, wanting only to receive and not to give. But what is there to give but Christ, and how may I give Christ if I have not received Christ?

John 6, feeding miracles and eucharistic references

2007-05-31T22:32:00.000-07:00

The text of John 6 presents several short episodes with potential eucharistic import. First, the relationship between the narrative of the “Feeding of the 5000” (vv. 1-14), and the “Bread of Life” and “flesh and blood” dialogues (vv. 22-51b and 51c-58, respectively) suggests an interpretive clue for addressing the relationship between thematically related meals lacking ritual character and accounts of explicitly eucharistic practices: such meals are signs of the provision of God, but not the Lord's Supper, per se, until we can say theologically that the presence of Christ is the object of consumption. Second, eucharistic texts have a very distinctive Christological focus: Christ is not merely a miracle-worker or a messenger of God, but one who is present as the very substance of eternal life.

The text of John 6 begins with the “Feeding of the 5000.” The details of the story are familiar, so I will make only two comments. First, Jesus “gives thanks” (eucharisteisas) for the loaves before feeding them to the people; John's gospel is the only to use this word. Second, the result of this act is that the people say to one another, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” Thus, the reader knows Jesus to be a miracle-working prophet. Jesus continues in his miracle-working role when Jesus both calms a stormy sea and walks on water in vv. 16-21.3

Jesus exposes the false views of the crowd, which continues following Jesus, though not because of its sign of the kingdom, but for what they will receive from it, full stomachs. Jesus admonishes them,
Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.

Here, following v. 25, the “Son of Man” Christology begins, as does a differentiation between types of food. While the “feeding of the 5000” was a sign of the kingdom, it either was not “food that endures for eternal life.” Put differently, the crowd did not receive eternal life through the loaves.

The disciples want to be like the Son of Man; they also want to be approved of by the Father. However, Jesus identifies his role as unique, telling them that their role is to believe in him, the one whom God has sent. The disciples desire another sign, that they may believe in Jesus. They provide the example of Moses, whom their ancestors trusted because he fed them bread in the wilderness. However, Jesus corrects the disciples interpretation of torah, saying: “it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who give you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes comes from heaven and gives life to the world.”

Believing what Jesus said before, that the bread of eternal life would come from the Father through him, the disciples ask Jesus to give the bread to them always. At this point in the narrative, Jesus' voice changes the Christological framework yet again: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Jesus is no longer the bearer of the bread, but he asserts that he is the bread itself. From here, the dialogue continues in the direction of greater detail as to how Jesus is the bread that is unlike normal bread:
Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down form heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. However eats of this bread will live forever.

Jesus' self-identification as not the giver of the bread, nor the messenger of the bread, but the bread itself is preliminary to the more explicitly eucharistic discusson of vv. 51c-58. Upon Jesus' association of himself as the bread of life, the Jews take center stage in their questioning of Jesus. In the course of this dialogue, Jesus more crudely puts his bodily presence in the food and drink. However, in moving from the “feeding of the 5000” to the explicit eucharistic discussion, the narrative needed to pass through the themes of vv. 22-51a. What connects these two episodes is Jesus' identification of himself as the bread of life.

In what way can Jesus' identity as the bread of life function as a hermeneutical key in understanding the relationship between loosely eucharistic meals and more explicitly ritualistic celebrations? The daily or agape meal type narrative tends toward human subjects in the action; believers share in a real meal together, most likely food they prepared and brought to the gathering with them. In the absence of such food, the disciples still want to assert the humanity of Jesus as the actor in providing the food for the feeding of the 5000, as parallel to how they interpret the role of Moses in the feeding of their ancestors in the desert. Yet, in asserting that God, not Moses, fed their ancestors, Jesus insinuates that God also provided the food for the 5000. Jesus, whom the disciples understood as final subject, reinterprets himself as messenger, bringing the food from God to the people. However, one cannot speak of the Eucharist as such without noting that God is not only the Giver but the Gift, the One from Whom we receive as well as the One we receive.

A meal whereby humans offer gifts to others is a sign of the kingdom, but its fulfillment is found in the presence of Christ of which we partake in the course of the meal. In other words, a eucharistic meal is not only one in which thanksgiving is present, but one in which Christ is present, and in which we feed on Christ, if not physically in the bread and wine, then spiritually in other ways it can be said that we receive Christ. Insofar as God acts provisionally in common meals, and insofar as we experience them as boundary-broadening social acts, these really participate in the kingdom of God. However, Christ's presence received by believers is the mark of a truly eucharistic meal.

Koenig wants to affirm the thematic overtones of common meals with more explicitly eucharistic meals in the New Testament. Yet, he has no means of adjudicating the difference between these different types of stories. Anderson's study of John 6 affirms the text's multiple Christologies in the context of some narrative continuity. These Christological disunities parallel the differences between the miraculous feeding narrative and the eucharistic references, so demonstrating that these two types of narratives employ different Christologies. I suggest that we use these disunities as a way to speak more clearly about texts that are explicitly eucharistic: those which affirm the (“real”) presence of Christ as the One whom believers receive unto eternal life.

Happy Ascension Day!

2007-05-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’ - Acts 1:6-11

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’

‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.’ Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.

‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe. I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me; but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. - John 14: 1-7, 18-31

How Palestine Made Me Conservative

2007-05-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

The occupied Palestinian territories have a strange effect on "political conservatives" -- they become activists. Perhaps overstating my point, I offer a simple example. My mother, an average white suburban American woman in her 50s, has always been a Republican and probably always will be one. She doesn't watch the news, she doesn't like war, and she doesn't like to involve herself in political affairs. She generally trusts the government (especially when they're Republican, and perhaps, especially when they're "Christian," though she's never said that explicitly). My mother came to East Jerusalem to visit me; were I not there, she never would have come. 10 days later she can't stop watching the news; she's arguing with her husband (who, incidently, still thinks that the book of Revelation is about an war in the Middle East at the end of the world) and writing to her Congresspeople about the atrocities she saw. My mother turned political dissenter and Arab-lover by Palestine.

I, on the other hand, am constantly shocked by the "conservativism" of my theological arguments this year. In my latter years of college I was reading Rosemary Radford Ruether and Sue Monk Kidd, at least partially open to Feminist theologizing outside of the realm of the Christian tradiion. But at AMBS, first I was defending liturgy and the sacraments, next a "personal God," the councils of Nicea and Constantinople, and finally apatheia (immutability) and theosis (divinization), and I'm dreaming up how I can do an independent study in Patristics as soon as possible. What happened?

A Palestinian shock out of present naivite. Not the need to dissent, argue and protest so much as present realism turned apathy, hopelessness. I don't usually say this when I'm sober, but I'm sorry friends: the fight for Palestine is over. Pack up your bags and try something else. There will be violence. There will be targeted assassinations. But mostly, there will be economic distress and emigration. There will be Palestinian transfer and Israeli hegemony. The loss of confidence turned into a loss of hope turned into a need to claim hope beyond hope - a need to look to the generations upon generations of Palestinians in centuries to come. Perhaps there will be a return and new life for this nation.

Taking the long view is the only way I can cope with Palestine. And I think taking the long view is exactly why i'm interested in Patristics and defending the creeds: at some point, we have to look beyond what sounds trendy in our current environment to what will remain true long-term. Richard Kearney states that an historical hermeneutic

"is one capable of imagining what things might be like after postmodernism. And also, of course, what things were like before it. As such, the ethical imagination explodes the paralysis of a timeless present, cultivated by our contemporary culture, and informs us that humanity has a duty, if it wishes to survive its threatened ending, to remember the past and to project a future. We cannot even begin to know what the postmodern present is unless we are first repared to imagine what it has been and what it may become. To abandon this imaginative potential for historical depth is to surrender to a new positivism which declares that things are the wya they are and cannot be altered; it is tantamount to embracing the postmodern cult of 'euphoric surfaces' which dissolves the critical notions of authenticity, alienation, and anxiety in a dazzling rain of 'discontinuous, orgasmic instances.'"

The real future is not about the present but about the past, about the ebbs and flows of a history that stretches infinitely farther than the fields of Indiana. People who are dispossessed find a home again, oppressive reigns cease, and walls come down, fifty or sixty generations from now. This is the hope I find when I read our early Christian ancestors, and this is the hope I need to cope with Palestine.

Israeli "forgetting"

2007-05-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

In a discussion on Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, a sharp colleague asked: how is it that, coming out of the experience of the Holocaust, Israeli Jews could embark on this serious program of racial oppression, violence and transfer against their new Palestinian-Arab neighbors? I mumbled something about "forgetting," only to meet the follow-up question: how could they forget, when next to no time had past?

One way of answering this question is to affirm David Hirst's (The Gun and the Olive Branch) suggestion that the Zionist program of transferring Palestinian-Arabs out of eretz Yisrael
began long before the Holocaust. Israeli Jews fleeing the Holocaust entered a program that had already started, and thus their experiences were integrated into an already functioning society, enabling them to take on the role of aggressive victim, rather than a compassionate one.

Regardless of whether one places the beginning of the Israeli program of racial oppression, violence and transfer in 1898, 1948, or 1998, the question is not about "forgetting" the Holocaust over time so much as a question of (dare I say it) cross-cultural socialization. What it meant to be a Jew in early 20th century Europe -- or Iraq, or Morocco -- was, literally, a world away from Jewish socialization in Tel Aviv, Ein Karem, and Jerusalem. If, in parts of Europe, the relationship between "Jew" and "Gentile" was one of minority-to-majority, in a single society which the Gentiles largely controlled, in Palestine, the situation was as different as those to whom Israeli Jews found themselves "other" - a society of rural, agricultural Palestinian-Arabs. European cities, cultural and intellectual life traded for rocky, desert hills and a sandy Mediterranean beach (not to mention the "Jerusalem syndrome", its own beast). The "world" of Europe and the familiar routine of the ghetto far behind them, who is to say what those experiences should mean in the context of new institutions and their legitimations?

apatheia continued

2007-05-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

John Meyendorff describes an Eastern Orthodox understanding of the state of human fallenness:

It is Satan who controls human beings by imposing death upon them but also by pushing them to constant struggle for existence and temporary survival - a struggle that is, necessarily, at the expense of the neighbor: a struggle for my property, my security, and my interests. The struggle is, in fact, the very substance of sin... Fallen humanity is enslaved to the fear of death, to the struggle for survival, to the determinism of physical needs (or "passions"). Only the Spirit of God bestows freedom, by reestablishing human beings in their former dignity of 'image of God' and making them able to overcome the determinism of the "passions."

Apatheia, then, is not the negation of the material so much as the negation of selfishness - desires pointing inward - freeing us toward "other," God and neighbor.

"Look with your eyes, not with your hands,"

2007-05-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

my mother always told me when we walked into stores with nice, pretty knick-knacks, because if you touch something, you might break it. And broken pretty things really aren't that pretty anymore.

Must beauty, and therefore love, always include attraction? Must we be drawn to the beautiful thing, to touch it? On one hand, if we weren't somehow drawn, how would we know we thought it was beautiful? To love something is to appreciate it as it is, but to be attracted to something, to touch it, is to change it. But if I love the thing as it is, why would I want to change it? How do I know I will still love it after I've changed it by drawing near to it? If I only look and don't touch, do I still change it? If I sense its beauty but neither look nor touch, have I yet still changed it? In loving that which is infinite, have I infinite freedom, to never change it?

"Beauty evokes desire. [...] It is genuinely desire, and not some ideally disinterested and dispirited state of contemplation, that beauty both calls for and answers to: though not a coarse, impoverished desire to consume and dispose, but a desire made full at a distance, dwelling alongside what is loved and possessed in the intimacy of dispossession. [...] It is the pleasingness of the other's otherness, the goodness that God sees in creation, that wakes desire to what it must affirm and what it must not violate, and shows love the measure of charitable detachment that must temper its elations; it is only in desire that the beautiful is known and its invitation heard." - DB Hart

Why the Silence

2007-04-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

1) Even when one loves one's job, it does not always come easy. What is "writer's block" for vocational theologians?
2) Spring is here, and that means there is a garden to plant.
3) In the garden today, I noticed that I didn't make enough walking paths. I do not have enough margins in my life.
4) I am a 4w5, and I'm having trouble living in the present.

Will resume posting next week.

Marpeck, "Concerning the Love of God in Christ"

2007-04-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

Pilgram Marpeck seems to employ the Patristic sense of immutability, apatheia, as Trinitarian love, which "is not primordially a reaction, but the possibility of every action, the transcendent act that makes all else actual; it is purely positive, sufficient in itself, without the need of any galvanism of the negative to be fully active, vital, and creative" (D.B. Hart, "No Shadow of Turning"):

For whoever abides in love abides in God and God in [whomever]. [Whoever] is and remains eternally with God. For God Himself is the eternal in [whomever], about [whomever], and with [whomever]. He* cannot pass away or diminish; [whoever] cannot come to an end or be changed, for He is self-subsistent forever.

Love is all power, authority, strength, might, wisdom, reason, skill, understanding, truth, righteousness, mercy, forbearance, patience, meekness in all humility and lowliness. She is fully God in all, in, with, and through her summation of Jesus Christ our Healer. He is the complete, whole, eternally coming true love of the Father, and the Father Himself is the true love of the Son, one Spirit, God, and Lord forever, not mixed but One from eternity to eternity, not separated into two or three but three in One eternally.

* Klassen and Klaassen's translation reads "him" where I've placed [who(m)ever], which I've done not to be annoying or politically correct but more clear - the antecedent of these pronouns is clearly "whoever abides in love," because pronouns referring to God are capitalized. However, this first instance in the final sentence is unclear - is "he" God or the person abiding? Still, the point is understood: as the person abiding gains eternality from God, the person also gains immutability. In this, Marpeck's thoughts seem to border theosis(?):

Rather, the blissful eternity occurs when the creaturely exists in the creaturely love in which she was created in dependence upon the Creator and is taken unperverted into God, Word and Spirit, who is blissful and everlasting love.

Thus the creatures of the divine nature are taken into and come into everlastingness (understand: "taken into" is grace and more grace, "coming into is guilt and more guilt, evil and more evil, agony for sin) into which they come through their fault. Those who are taken in, however, through grace and more grace, in love and more love remain in everlasting love and glory with Christ Jesus, for whose sake all things are, for through Him and to Him and in Him are all things and everything exists in Him. It is not that they are absorbed in God or will no longer be what they were before creation, as some erring spirits desire, and that God should remain alone and everything be absorbed in Him. Such error be far from us!

immutability and divine suffering, on modern perspectives

2007-04-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

Immutability, impassibility, timelessness - surely, many argue, these relics of an obsolete metaphysics lingered on in Christian theology just as false belief and sinful inclinations linger on in a soul after baptism; and surely they always were fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a God of election and love, who proves himself God through fidelity to his own promises against the horizon of history, who became flesh for us (was this not a change, after all, in God?) and endured the passion of the cross out of pity for us. Have we not seen the wounded heart of God, wounded by our sin in his eternal life, and wounded by it again, even unto death, in the life of the flesh? This is why so much modern theology keenly desires a God who suffers, not simply with us and in our nature, but in his own nature as well; such a God, it is believed, is the living God of Scripture, not the cold abstraction of a God of the philosophers; only such a God would die for us. At its most culpable, the modern appetite for a passible God can reflect simply a sort of self-indulgence and apologetical plaintiveness, a sense that, before God, though we are sinners, we also have a valid perspective, one he must learn to share with us so that he can sympathize with our lot rather than simply judge us; he must be absolved of his transcendence, so to speak, before we can consent to submit to his verdict (and, after all, in this age we are all rather bourgeois about such things and very jealous of our "rights"). At its most commendable, though, this appetite testifies to our capacity for moral rage and perplexity, our inability to believe in a God of perfect power and imperturbable bliss in the wake of the century of death camps, gulags, killing fields, and the fire of nuclear detonations. We long for a companion in pain, a fellow sufferer; we know we have one in Christ; and we refuse to allow any ambiguity - metaphysical, moral, or theological - to rob us of his company.

First, as valid as all such concerns are in their way, they entirely miss the point: the Christian doctrine of divine apatheia, in its developed patristic and medieval form, never concerned an abstract deity ontologically incapable of knowing and loving us; far from representing an irreconcilable contradiction or logical tension within Christian discourse, the juxtaposition of the language of divine apatheia with the story of crucified love is precisely what makes the entire narrative of salvation in Christ intelligible. And second, it is an almost agonizing irony that, in our attempts to revise trinitarian doctrine in such a way as to make God comprehensible in the 'light' of Auschwitz, invariably we end up describing a God who - it turns out - is actually simply the metaphysical ground of Auschwitz.

- David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 159-160.

Surely I am guilty of modern self-indulgence, but I want to believe (perhaps because of Brueggemann) that life in relation to God is (as life in relation to anyone) about complete submission and utter self-assertion, back and forth. Somehow in that context, I am empowered to go before God, not with my rights but with God's righteousness, if I sense, like Abraham and the psalmists before me, that God is not fulfilling God's end of the bargain. Perhaps the difference between my rights and God's righteousness is enough to absolve me from Hart's accusations. (But where does one end and another begin?) Regardless, his framework makes the back and forth sound insanely ridiculous; perhaps necessarily so, for it is insanely ridiculous.

A strange reflection for Good Friday. Surely God is suffering! Right?
--------------------------------

Later addition:

The collapse of the analogical interval between the immanent and economic Trinity, between timeless eternity and the time in which eternity shows itself, has not made God our companion in pain, but simply the truth of our pain and our only pathetic hope of rescue; his intimacy with us has not been affirmed at all: only a truly transcendent and ‘passionless’ God can be the fullness of love dwelling within our very being, nearer to us than our inmost parts, but a dialectical Trinity is not transcendent – truly infinite – in this way at all, but only sublime, a metaphysical whole that can comprise us or change us extrinsically, but not transform us within our very being. - DBH

2007-04-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

And Thou, Jesus, sweet Lord,
Art Thou not also a mother?
Truly, Thou art a mother,
The mother of all mothers,
Who tasted death,
In Thy desire to give life to Thy children.
- St. Anselm

beauty of holiness

2007-04-05T13:56:00.000-07:00

Since my slow but constant ethical awakening of college, it has been difficult for me to know what to do with large, extravagent worship spaces. Neo-gothic and other forms of "religious" architecture say "oppression!" to me more than "holiness!" or "awe and gratitude!" By contrast, the blank white walls of the Grantham Church or the simple brick of AMBS's Chapel of the Sermon on the Mount say "what we look like doesn't matter"; I'm not comfortable with that either.

But rehashing some of Brueggemann's Theology of the OT today helped me articulate what I amount to be a bad interpretation of "holiness" that I think is prevalent in Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. This may be relevant for my issues with aesthetics and worship space.

Brueggemann describes beautifully the way that Israel's dual covenantal obligations of justice and holiness follow directly from both the character of Yahweh as well as from a partnership relationship which Yahweh both initiates and restores out of Yahweh's passionate love for Israel: “this relationship, marked by awe and gratitude for its inexplicable generosity, brings with it the expectations and requirements of the sovereign who initiates it.”[1] “Awe and gratitude” commence Israel’s covenantal obligation to obedience.

Out of this “awe and gratitude,” Yahweh calls Israel to two tasks: justice and holiness. Justice mainly concerns caring for each member of society, especially the vulnerable.[2] Israel’s command to do justice equates loving God and loving neighbor, so that this command cannot be removed from the partnership of Yahweh’s loving initiative. In its command to remain in communion with Yahweh, “Israel is invited to gaze on a vision of Yahweh’s presence, holiness, and beauty.”[3] It is necessary for Israel to order its life in a particular way so that it may be separated from other nations for the purpose of communion with Yahweh. This order includes following a meticulous plan for the aesthetics of the tabernacle, and later the temple, as well as following the particulars of the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus.

While Anabaptist-Mennonites may be all about "doing justice," I realize that careful aesthetic preparation and maintenance of worship spaces and the disciplines of Levitical purity codes are not exactly the substance of their discipleship. However, like the command to do justice, the command to holiness follows the character of Yahweh-in-relation. While justice deals with the tendency of Yahweh-in-relation to act in risky solidarity with Yahweh’s partners, the holiness command mimics the holiness of Yahweh who, at other times, acts in sovereign self-regard. Often in Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, the call for holy differentiation from the world is subsumed under the command to do justice; we are a radical, counter-cultural community because we are called to be more just toward our neighbors and care for the well-being of the world. However, this Anabaptist-Mennonite interpretive move fails to note the tension Brueggemann articulates between justice and holiness in the Old Testament and between self-regard and solidarity in the life of Yahweh.

I've been seduced by a theology that (I think) defines the distinction between church and world according to justice-ethics: love of God and love of neighbor. But in the Old Testament, a very different understanding of holiness prevails. Given the seemingly superstitious and exclusive overtones of the holiness tradition, we are tempted to ignore it altogether by redefining holiness as better justice. I don't want to say that the people who worship in spaces that look oppressive to me really have something right that my tradition is missing altogether; I don't want to say that there's room for another type of obedience to precede justice. But given Old Testament theology through the eyes of Brueggemann, I have no other choice.

[1] Brueggemann, Theology of the OT, 417.
[2] However, the command to do justice “is not charity, nor is it romantic do-goodism. It is rather a mandate to order public policy, public practice, and public institutions for the common good and in resistance to the kind of greedy initiative that damages the community.” Ibid., 423.
[3] Ibid., 425.

on practices

2007-04-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

Apology: I realize I shouldn't post things after 11 pm nor before I've seriously edited them.

“Thus the question of mediation is not a question of right theology (as in orthodoxy), a great and pervasive theological temptation, but it is a question of characteristic social practice that generates, constitutes, and mediates Yahweh in the midst of life.” - W. Brueggemann

Uninteresting, or at least, unsurprising. And what caught me was equally (uninteresting?) unsurprising: the distinction between orthodoxy and “social practice.” I’m wondering if finally my unsettledness with Yoder in the fall (Body Politics on “the breaking of bread”) is related to the unsettledness I felt in Brueggemann’s sidelining “orthodoxy” for “social practice.” Is it a similar instinct, only at a different degree, to the instinct of those who want to sideline claims of the divinity of Jesus Christ for ethical norms?

I think that, pressed, most of us would refuse that “orthodoxy” makes sense without some kind of social practice, and that social practice without some sort of faith claim isn’t really Christ-ian anyway. The problem is that by trying to justify “social practice” against “orthodoxy”-without-social-effects, we’re reiterating the same distinction that we want to make null and void. We may believe that the Lordship of Christ makes the difference between the church’s practices and those of the world, but the term “practice” doesn’t actually make that clear. “Practice” is as much Eucharist as feeding the homeless; it’s loving one’s family as much as loving one’s enemies. To say “the church’s practices are different” doesn’t really get us anywhere; it doesn’t say why Yahweh is mediated in these particular social practices.

I wonder if this is partly why people who love Yoder and Hauerwas can end up spouting off a bunch of great stuff about life in community but can’t make the same faith claims that Yoder and Hauerwas might themselves confess: “Practice” might be more specific to these theologians than their followers…???

Perhaps we need is a new paradigm that is more faith-specific than “social practice” but that still means social practice – that can’t be construed as “pie-in-the-sky” Christianity or whatever. I wonder if worship can be helpful here. A good worship theology is both orthodoxy and social practice – it is a communal practice of the church that praises the Triune God. It begins with God and ends with God, and it constitutes something we can touch and feel and by which we can be energized (or exhausted). It is a telling of the story of God; it is an act in concrete history. It is the presence of God in the present; it challenges worldly powers…

involved (or non-secluded) nonresistance

2007-03-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

Is there such a thing? The phrase comes to me in response to some reading of Pilgram Marpeck, who strikes me as absurdly consistant in his conviction that new life in Christ cannot be coerced, and that Christians cannot coerce others into doing what they find in accordance with the gospel or (justice or whatever). On the subject of worldly authority, Marpeck says all the things we would expect him to: "Christians will not rule or dominate anyone with force"; "Christ was subject to all Authority and never responsed in violence. Even so today we must not resist"; and "The Word of the Lord is the only judge and sword of Christians" (Expose of the Babylonian Whore). Marpeck also uses this argument against infant baptism, as well as against other groups of Anabaptists who wanted to legislate particulars of obedience which Marpeck did not find explicitly in Scripture.

While we can't expect Marpeck to take up the present concept of "nonviolent resistance," I suggest that, to the extent that "nonviolent resistance" is "nonviolent coercion," he wouldn't be in favor of it. In reading his argument against the Swiss Brethren who, among other things, made mandatory the sharing of all possessions upon entrance to the community, we see that he stood firmly against Christians nonviolently coercing other Christians toward (supposed) adherence to the gospel. Might he, by extension, also resist the efforts of nonviolent activists who go out of their way to (nonviolently) force the power dynamics of situations in their favor so that they can control what happens. For the real folly of temporal authority is that within its grasp, individuals are constantly seizing control, whereas in the church, there is only service and mutual subjection to the reign of Christ, its leader. Rather than parading nonviolent resistance, I think Marpeck would admonish us to be long-suffering and gracious, in humility using only the Word of God (whatever sense that would make in a secular society).

When I think of nonresisters, I think of people more or less entirely separated from society. However, Marpeck does not even remotely fit into this category. He himself worked for cities, and those whom he led were significantly more integrated into society than the Hutterites and others. I'm not sure what this means, nor what "nonresistance" means at all for the daily life of individuals in a democracy, but the observation causes me to wonder if there's a new definition of "nonresistance" to be had.

on killing animals

2007-03-24T15:09:00.000-07:00

The concern of the AMBS community for living with ethical integrity is one of the things I love most about it. Where else would one have an extended discussion about the peaceful-ness (or lack thereof) of eating animals in the US in the 21st century?

Still, after today's "Peaceful Eating" discussion, I'm left with some fairly significant theological questions. Brianne Donaldson suggested that arguing against the killing of non-human animals does not require a principle of the equality of human and non-human animals. More so, she is happy to acknowledge the power differentiation between human and non-human animals, because of the number of NT resources dictating how relationships with strong power differentials are to be handled. The role of the higher power is to serve (and service may even be a key difference between humans and other species). The only problem with harkening back to the NT on this is that power-defined relationships in the NT only ever point in the direction of compassion, grace. A person can make the argument that animals raised and killed in knowing relationships with humans are treated with compassion, if they live happy, free lives and are killed without pain. However, the difference between the human and the non-human may not rule-out "compassion" included killing. Masters, treat your slaves well, does not necessarily mean, Masters, don't have slaves. The power distinction remains the same, only the powerful party is admonished in the direction of mercy, generosity. From this point, it is very hard to get to an ethical principle as such; the text assumes that certain interactions will follow power-imbalanced relationships and then pushes those interactions toward mercy.

Moreover, the relationship between human and non-human animals only parallels that of husbands and wives, masters and slaves, the community and the alien/orphan/widow; the explicit anthropocentrism of the call to care for the weaker party is clear. I can think of no case in which this weaker party consideration is given to non-human animals.

What about not killing animals as an extension of Christian pacifism? Let us remember that Christian pacifism does not being with some kind of statement about alievating suffering or about not killing things. Christian pacifism begins with Christ offering us a model of self-sacrifical love, which we are to follow. If Christ died for the salvation of humanity, then we prefer to die for our neighbors rather than kill them. (We are so far from a state of being killed by animals rather than killing them that this line of argument seems ludicrous.) Though we affirm that Christ's death and resurrection have cosmic implications, it seems fairly clear that salvation means something particular for humanity, if for no other reason than our response and transformation into redemption here and now. Perhaps St. Francis would have different ideas about how non-human animals and plants respond to the gospel, but as far as I can tell, it's pretty difficult to say that Jesus died for groundhogs in the same way that Jesus died for me and you. Therefore, I think its difficult to get from Christian pacifism to not killing animals.

Our God is a gracious and loving God who pushes the limits of what our society and any society, anywhere, is willing to include in the realm of possible acts of compassion (though these acts of compassion are usually done on behalf of humans). Our eschatological vision is one in which all of creation is redeemed and humans live in harmony with God and all of creation, including non-human animals. But I just don't see a clear Christian ethic against the killing of animals.

disagreeing graciously

2007-03-23T17:34:00.000-07:00

"My dear ones, constrained by the love in Jesus Christ, I wrote this letter because of the schism which, until now, has existed between us, because we have never recognized in our hearts and consciences the acknowledgment and understanding of Christ Jesus in each other, nor have we ever been able to meet. Nevertheless, in my heart, I have always, and even now, consider you to be zealous lovers of God and His Christ, although you lack knowledge and understanding of Christ. Every hour and every moment, I am also concerned about this lack in myself, and I have to be, for eternal life depends on knowing..." - Pilgram Marpeck, "Judgment and Decision"

the theologian as minister

2007-03-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

-- excerpts from an essay entitled, "Leading the Church in Embodied Doxology: Toward a Personal Theology of Theological Reflection as Ministry and Church Leadership"

I suggest that according to a model of church life as communally embodied doxology (praise) and of church leadership as modeling truthful embodied doxology, sustained theological reflection is not only a legitimate task of certain church leaders, but it is a necessary for the life of the church that some be called to this task.

The church is the gathered community of believers insomuch as it 1) gathers for communal worship of God; 2) loves “one another as God loves, in sharing material and spiritual resources, in exercising mutual care and discipline, and in showing hospitality to all”;[1] and 3) “shows the world a sample of life under the lordship of Christ.”[2] Yet each of these practices of the church – formal worship services, communal love, and witness in the world – hinges on a statement of faith made by believers at baptism, that Jesus Christ is Lord and that by the power of the Holy Spirit, a believer pledges to follow in the way of Christ. Even non-speech practices of the church, such as mutual love and service, take root in doxological confession that Jesus is Lord! If not for this claim, a community of people sharing goods could not be said to be a church at all. On the other hand, a gathering of people professing Jesus’ Lordship only lies apart from commitment to follow Christ in life. I mean for “embodied doxology” to reference corporate praise of the Trinity in all of speech and life. As such, embodied doxology is the complete task of the church.

What then is the relationship between the embodied doxology of the entire church and the sustained theological reflection of some church leaders? [...] Inasmuch as speech about God is integral to the embodied doxology of the church – and has been integral to the embodied doxology of the church throughout history – contemporary church members are all part of the theological conversation. Still, something must account for the difference in speech between vocational theologians and most church members. Believers in contemporary North American context observe that the language of academic theology differs from their own theological language and tend toward believing that the specialized language of the academy is not only irrelevant to their own doxology but that it is completely unnecessary, possibly even damaging, to the life of the church. However, I suggest that just because the doxological language of the academy is specialized does not mean it is not necessary for the church’s life.

For vocational theologians, doxology is comprised of a more specialized language, one which the church need not utilize for the majority of its life, but which is nevertheless crucial for the church’s embodied praise. Take, for example, the language of systematic theology, which explicitly uses resources from scripture and tradition’s explication of scripture to piece together elements of Christian theology. In the day-to-day life of the church, believers might not need to employ the specific language of Trinitarian doctrine. Yet, these and other doctrines of the church keep the doxology of the church Christian – adhering to a particular tradition of the way that God has manifest Godself to particular communities of people throughout history. Were not a branch of the church committed to sustained reflection on how exactly it is that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be said to be one God, the church would lose the particular nature of its Christian doxology. In this instance, the specialized speech of academic theologians guards against teachings throughout history that would have made doxology less true. This and other doctrines of the church keep the church’s doxology Christian in that they make sure that the doxology remains true to the confession of the church throughout history. Similarly, the task of the historical theologian is to carry the voices of gathered believing communities of the past into the present conversation, to learn from them and to assure the church that its doxology remains Christian. The church, as a whole, need not be entirely aware of all the details of these conversations when their daily doxology adheres to the truth of Scripture as the church, including vocational theologians, understands it. The specialized language of vocational theologians is often for the church only when her truthful doxology appears tenuous.

Theology that is not itself embodied doxology is like a the management of a pastor who prescribes the life of the church but ultimately stands outside of it. Surely a theologian would find it far easier to either give the church the kind of theology it wants or bitterly admonish the church to be better, both without assuming any common responsibility to the task of the church or commitment to the Subject of the doxology. On the other hand, sustained theological reflection that is itself embodied doxology takes on a modeling style of leadership. The doxological task of theologians is a conversation to which all are invited, even if the specialized language of those given to this vocation differs from the common language of the rest of the church. The church and its leaders, including vocational theologians, are all given to one task: embodied doxology.

[1] “Article 9: The Church of Jesus Christ,” Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1995), 40.
[2] “Article 10: The Church in Mission,” Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, 42.

regeneration treatise (draft)

2007-03-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

This is my understanding of regeneration, Christian community, ethics, and the sacraments:

That Jesus announced that the kingdom had come means we really are supposed to live kingdom ethics: that is, the Spirit of God transforms believers in Christian community (before, during and post-baptism) in such a way that the kingdom really is present on earth through us. So, “sanctification” as such happens fully at conversion; it is not a constant process in that it is not progressive. Sanctification is, however, a constant process in that we are always a part of it; while we are constantly reaching points of sanctification, we are also constantly in need of sustenance or support in order to maintain/retain/re-attain that point of complete regeneration.

Through and by the practices of the church, we maintain/retain/re-attain complete regeneration in Christ. That is, the practices of the church are the tasks which the regenerated body does, and they both flow out of and develop the inner state and attitude of regeneration. Therefore, a practice of the church is economic sharing – this is both an act of new life in itself, springing from the motivation of the Holy Spirit, and an act which cultivates outward and inward new life. In the same way, the Lord’s Supper is both what the community needs to be doing in order to be the kingdom, and what will continue to feed the community spiritually so that it can continue to be the kingdom.

I realize I have conflated maintain new life, retain new life, and re-attain new life. I think what I mean by this conflation is that individuals and communities, because they live in the world, are constantly subjected to temptations to stray from the perfect way of Jesus. People do, actually, sin, and will continue to do so. But sin does not mean that complete new life is not always a present possibility; no, it is always a present possibility and even a present reality, thanks be to God. By the grace of God, the practices of the church are supposed to make regenerated life possible.

the doxological conversation of academic theological reflection

2007-03-19T19:18:00.000-07:00

I.

There are moments when the gospel sounds. In a argument, a puzzle resolves, or in the farthest, darkest carrell, a light. Whole days when you forget to eat, in love you think, "I can think of no place I'd rather be than right here, right now." The call is sure, and your response easy, obvious; you fling yourself, everything, into it.

But not so are all days. The stack of books looms high; the nuances are simply too small. Question: is this really the language I learned from my birth? The words are anywhere but in your mind, on the page. You are silenced, muted, blinded, paralyzed.

II.

I have a strange recurring dream. I'm standing in a room, packed full of people, extending farther than I can see. I don't know how long I've been there. I vaguely glimpse the top part of the pope's headdress in the distance. In my corner of the room are AMBS students, friends from college, professors. Closer to me, Walter Brueggemann, Pilgram Marpeck, Elizabeth Johnson. Everyone is talking, and listening. They're all speaking at once, all listening at once, but the sound of all their voices together is shockingly beautiful. Suddenly, the sounds converge in exceedingly beautiful chorus:

"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and will be."

2007-03-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

Wake up
little baby God
thousands of children
have been born
just like you
without a roof
without bread
without protection.
- Chilean Christmas card

history and transcendence

2007-03-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

"History and transcendence are the second couple of aspects under which God's self-communication comes, if it wishes to reach the whole of [humanity], since in it God as origin of [humanity] gives [God]self wholly and immediately unto salvation. It cannot be our task to develop here the meaning of these two concepts with philosophical precision and thoroughness. But even so we may understand that there belongs to [people] essentially the following open difference which we indicate with these two words: the difference (in knowledge and in action) between the concrete object and the "horizon" within which this object comes to stand, between the apriori and the aposteriori of knowledge and freedom, between the way in which knowledge and activity reach the well-determined concrete here and now (so and not otherwise) and the open range which knowledge and action anticipate, from whose vantage point, by limiting themselves, they establish the 'object,' while ever again discovering its contingency. This distinction does not imply that only the horizon, the unlimited whereunto of transcendence and transcendence itself, are what count, whereas the object would only be that which mediates the experience of transcendence, something which must disappear at the end. Transcendence and its whereunto have their history in the object itself. And it is the unity of these two elements, as it brings about distinction, which refers to God. Neither of the two moments alone should be made God's substitute. We maintain, against any kind of 'imageless' mysticism of an experience of transcendence in the mere anonymity of the mystery, that transcendence is seen and found in the object itself. [...] At any rate we may say: if there occurs a self-communication of God to historical [humans], who [are] still becoming, it can occur only in this unifying duality of history and transcendence which [humanity] is."
- Karl Rahner, The Trinity, 91-92.

relational god

2007-03-06T19:39:00.000-08:00

"Yahweh, as known in its text, simply does not qualify as omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, and so Israel does not seek to locate Yahweh in such speech that is fundamentally incongruent with who Yahweh is. The Old Testament, in its discernment of Yahweh, is relentlessly committed to the recognition that all of reality, including the reality of Yahweh, is relational, relative to the life and destiny of Israel." - W. Brueggemann, Theology of the OT, 225-226.

Really? Were "omnipotent," "omniscient," and "omnipresent" meant to be static? Or were they meant to say, "God is stronger than anyone else"; "God knows all things, us included"; and "God is always with us"? Other doctrines, such as the incarnation and Trinity, are profoundly relational, even to their core, though they extend the text in ways not all biblical theologians like.

on the relationship between biblical, historical, and systematic theology

2007-03-04T12:40:00.000-08:00

A friend's gracious reponse to an unarticulate question I posed him on the relationship between biblical, historical, and systematic theology can be found here. His summarizing point, that historical and systematic theologies are biblical theologies, seems true. Particularly, his statement on doctrine is helpful: doctrine is only a reading of the biblical text that’s been ‘settled’—a point of reference that the church decided was necessary to properly understand the texts. Its origin is not alien to the biblical text but precisely rooted there." So, rather than a sub-theology that merely provides resources for systematic theologians to use, biblical theology is a theology that stands alongside historical theology and systematic theology, an equally critical and constructive task of the church.

Still, the extent to which we allow others' "settled" readings of the text influence our theologizing - and which readings we explicitly refer to - differs between the disciplines. There is, after all, a reason why we call these things "biblical," "systematic" and "historical". I want to say that difference is the degree to which we allow the "settled" readings of scripture to govern our theologizing, and which "settled" readings we let govern us. While in biblical theology, even Old Testament theology, I may expect to find hints of a Trinitarian God, I do not attempt to systematize these or settle them according to a doctrine of the Trinity. Regardless of whether or not, withholding the guides of doctrine, we would in four hundred years draw the same conclusions, the church must continue to read the text with less than explicit reference to the guides; we must read the text as the text itself. This is biblical theology, in its purest sense. Systematic theology works with biblical text and guides more explicitly. Regardless of how appropriately aware systematic theology is that the practice of theology is never exhaustive or complete, it is nevertheless more concerned with conclusions than biblical theology is. Historical theology, I'm still trying to figure out... though I suppose the role of history as a discipline may play a similar role of limitation in historical theology as literary criticism does in biblical theology. So perhaps historical theology, like biblical theology, must also resist coherence in a way that systematic theology does not?

Also, in response to Brian's post, I'd like to press the point that if we started with only the Bible, eventually we would end up with the same doctrines, it might just take a few hundred years. Perhaps what I want is clarification as to what "the same conclusions will win out" means exactly. Without Greek philosophy context, would we really use the language of nature and substance? Would we argue about whether Jesus Christ was of the "same substance" or of a "similar substance" to the Godhead? I believe these discussions and their "settled" outcomes are absolutely crucial to our understanding of theology. Even though we're not working out of a Greek philosophical context, these conversations and the doctrines that arose from them are useful to us in that they communicate something that would take us years to figure out: a way of piecing together the humanity and divinity of Christ, and the Godhead, Christ, and Holy Spirit. I press this point because Mennonites require much persuasion as to what 4th century Athens has to do with Jerusalem, or Elkhart, and because I would like to work on persuading them.

truth conditions

2007-03-01T20:29:00.000-08:00

"So, the illocutionary speech-act in someone's mouth and life of 'Jesus Christ died for our sins' is true,
if and only if Jesus Christ died for our sins, and
if and only if the speaker means it faithfully, and
if and only if it goes with a whole way of life."
- Joe R. Jones, A Grammar of Christian Faith Vol. 1, 106.

"Baptism (the external immersion or sprinkling) is a co-witness of the inner essence, namely of the covenant of a good conscience with God and whatever Scripture testifies to in addition to this. The essence must coincide with the witness. And, as in all other matters, the essence must be there before the witnessing in order that the symbol may be correctly understood or given; otherwise, the symbol would be false and would be a vain mockery. When the essence is there and is given testimony to, then the symbol is true and useful, and the symbol is what it claims to be."
- Pilgram Marpeck, "Admonition of 1542" in The Writings of Pilgram Marpeck, 197.

Our theological speech is not the essence (truth, revelation and presence of God) unless it is found in the context of, is witness to, a covenant between ourselves and God, in the hope that we will be faithful in life, even to death. It might not be a sacrament, but in this way, it may be imbued with the power of God.