Category Archives: Theology

Significant Books

Fr. Chris was posting on books that had been particularly formative in his faith journey and, turning it into a meme, tagged me for it.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I find it a very difficult one to answer. There have been so very many books that have influenced me in many ways. But—fitting in my turn away from true protestantism—when I think about my faith journey people have been more formative for me than books. Or—to mix it up, what certain mentors taught me with certain books has been incredibly formative…

None of that answers Fr. Chris’s question which is partly about recommending really good books to other people. I’ll morph it a little bit too–I’ll list what I currently think to be the seven most important books for my faith formation and theology. There are, of course, three that should go without saying so I’ll just stick them here at the top for the sake of form and make it a round ten:

  1. The Bible
  2. The 1979 American Book of Common Prayer
  3. The ’82 Hymnal
  4. The Book of Concord: Ok—here’s the first book that I’ll explain, and that needs some explanation. For those who don’t know it, the Book of Concord is that official collection of theological writings that Lutherans accept. I don’t accept it all (one of the reasons why I’m not currently a Lutheran pastor), But I find myself very frequently going back to Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms, the Augsburg Confession and its Apology. The Small Catechism in particular is a key work for me.
  5. The Rule of Benedict/John Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences: Three books for the price of one… Benedict’s work is fairly widely known in Christian and Episcopal circles and is justly honored for its wisdom, structure, and humanity. Cassian’s works are still fairly obscure—and that’s to our detriment. The early church didn’t write systematic theologies. However, Cassian’s work is the closest that you’ll come to a systematic spirituality. Filled with theological and psychological insight, Cassian focuses less on doctrines and more on practices, on communicating a path for cultivating disciples. I find myself at a place in my spiritual and intellectual life where I can’t see these three works as truly distinct from one another. The Rule is in many respects a distillation of Cassian and yet the Rule becomes a lens for reading Cassian as well.
  6. Monastic Practices: This is a supremely practical book written for Cistercian novices. It introduces them to the basics of the monastic spiritual practices. Ever since I first encountered it in a theology library in Tokyo during undergrad this book has been having on me.
  7. On Christian Doctrine: This is Augustine’s main work on hermeneutics–how to read Scripture and get stuff out of it. The center of his argument is caritas: If you are reading and you find something other than love, read it again because you missed it. Of course, love is not a gooey do-whatever-you-like; it’s love with depth and integrity. Like the Rule & Cassian, this one has been very influential in my spiritual and intellectual lives.
  8. The Soul in Paraphrase: This was a very important book for me because it introduced me to the notion of the religious affections. It gave me a vocabulary for thinking about a range of human experience I didn’t know how to describe. In many ways this book laid the groundwork for me to appreciate what Stoicism is really about and therefore monastic spirituality which is fundamentally a kind of Christian Stoicism. 
  9. The Temple: For a sacramental Anglican who loves poetry, this is simply a no-brainer. Herbert’s verse sings. He soars up to great heights but—just as important—he plumbs great depths too. His poetry of misery in relation to God is second only to the Psalms in my opinion.
  10. The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters: This work begins by affirming that the creed is not an easy thing for modern people to affirm. Then, rather than making excuses for it or weaseling out of it, affirms the importance of a literal reading of the Creed and ties each article into classic Christian theology and spirituality, explain why each one is important and the broader ramifications of it.

What are your picks?

Earth Day (and Open Source) Thoughts

The Elizaphanian has a post up collecting his theological responses to the environmental issue of peak oil. (h/t Dean Knisely)

Too, one of his recent posts deals with switching away from Windows.

This is pretty high on my list. My Linux machine is down at the moment but its a result of age finally catching up with it. The hardware was at least ten years old—if not older. Nevertheless, it ran Xubuntu just fine with no serious time lags. So (here’s the Earth Day tie-in—tenuous though it be…) I could get away with using hardware from the previous century without having to constantly junk and consume to keep up with ever-voracious demands from the Windows OS.

No, Xubuntu/Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Firefox, Eclipse are my new core suite. Since I do corporate computing I can’t entirely wash my hands of Windows and Office, but I can at home.

As much as I hope Open Source will catch on, however, I fear it will continue to find a home in a niche population than the true mainstream. M, for instance, will still retain a Windows machine. She’s not a computer person and hates when I tinker with things or when everything doesn’t work just as it ought. Many of the Open stuff still isn’t terribly user friendly—and some of it deliberately so, I think… Until that changes she’ll probably stick with Windows.

Liturgy is Not Enough

As my readers know, I love the liturgy a great deal. I believe, in fact, that the liturgical cycle as it came to fruition by the end of the early medieval period is the greatest tool for Christian formation that the Western Church has ever produced. Much of the great writings of the medieval monks, mystics, and others could have only been produced in relationship to this cycle. It is a great and powerful engine for the formation of disciples.

But it is an engine that has largely gone untuned.

At the time of its creation, it was only accessible to a small number—namely those who lived within intentional liturgical communities, had the capacity to become fluent in a language other than their mother tongue, and had the temperament to turn their wonder, creativity, and intellect to its majesties rather than to other arenas.

At the time of the Reformation, the English Church was the only dissenting group that preserved the key elements of the cycle—the Mass and the Office—but even these were severely pared back, breaking, obscuring, and eliminating many of the connections that had bound the cycle into a harmonious whole.

For most of its history, the Episcopal Church has been an either/or body: either Office or Mass. With the coming of the ’79 BCP and Eucharist becoming the normative Sunday celebration, two hundred years of Office supremacy came to an end—but balance has yet to be achieved. Too, the ’79 book has recovered more of the classical links with its inclusion of seasonal material than any other BCP with the possible exception of the failed English ’28 text.

And yet the discipling inherent in, promised by, the liturgy has not appeared.

And it will not appear.

The experience of the liturgy is not enough.

Certainly there will be some who will start to see and make connections. Who will discover a hunger and turn to earlier and other sources to learn of the connections, to recover or recapture the mystery and the power they feel near its surface—but this is not “most”. Nor necessarily even “many”.

If the liturgy were enough, the discipling would be happening.
If it were enough, there would not be people in our churches who have stood, sat, and knelt through decades of liturgies and not been formed by them. If it were enough, there would not be clergy in our churches who have
stood, sat, and knelt through decades of liturgies and not been formed
by them.

The liturgy is not enough. And yet it is an engine of great power. It does not choose to sit idle; we allow it to do so.

What the liturgy needs from us are three things:

  1. We must be open to it. This is the first and greatest step. We must open our hearts to its leading in confidence that the Holy Spirit speaks through its ways and its means.
  2. We must recognize the treasure that we have before us. The liturgy is many things. It is a path, a discipline, a place where aesthetics, intellect, the affections and emotions are all engaged. We must recognize its value and allow it to have its own authority over us. That is, we must live in it before presuming to change it. And I don’t mean existing alongside of it—I mean living in it. Opening ourselves to it and following where it leads. Because this isn’t really about the liturgy. The liturgy is a path and discipline that leads us into the mind of Christ. And that’s what this is really about.
  3. We must share its riches. Specifically, this means we must testify to its power and capability to transform, and we must educate. The liturgy is not self-evident. You must be open to it—but it also must be opened to you. Preeminently, this means communicating that the liturgy is an embodiment of essential Christian theology. We don’t do a solemn high mass or evensong just because we like it (though we do, of course…) but because of what it communicates about who and what God is and who we are in light of that reality. Liturgy is theology made kinetic and aesthetic. Even when we succeed in our first two tasks, this is where we have failed in the past and are continuing to fail today. The Episcopal Church is moving towards a new prayer book; protesting at its arrival is too little, too late. If we hope to see a prayer book whose liturgies stand in continuity with our Anglican, our catholic, our Benedictine roots, then we need to start learning, talking, and teaching now while it is yet on the horizon and not yet here at our doorsteps.  

All of us who love the liturgy must be intentional about these things if we wish it to exercise even a quarter of its full power within us and within our communities. Through the centuries, I believe the Holy Spirit has crafted this great work as a faithful and true means of guiding humanity into the mysteries of God. But we have to be faithful and true to it as well.

Weekend Update (aka Big Rant on the RCL)

Here are two things not to be missed from the weekend…

First is the Lutheran Zephyr’s commentary on two postcards he received from local churches inviting him to Easter services. It seems Jesus is going 0 for 2… I understand not wanting to scare people off, but if we don’t seem to take our faith seriously, why would that inspire someone else to join us?

Second, bls points us to the fresh-out version of the RCL made suitable for your local copy of the BCP. This depresses me…

I’m not a huge fan of the RCL. In fact, I’m of the opinion that all of the “new” lectionaries since Vatican II have missed the mark because they’ve lost sight of—or chosen to ignore—the key issue of function in Mass lectionaries. Yes, it’s good that our congregants are getting more Scriptures on Sunday morning (but huge swaths are still missed—especially the more troubling, complicated, and thought-provoking sections). Yes, it’s good that denominations can share resources across traditions (but we don’t necessarily share theology across denominations and, sad to say, many clergy don’t have a strong enough sense of their own traditions to know when an otherwise good resource contradicts it).

The Mass lectionary is not supposed to be the only place where Christian people encounter Scripture. As I’ve ranted before, the Mass lectionary developed in conversation with the Office lectionary; the Office lectionary worked through the entire Bible every year while the Mass lectionary made selective engagement with the Scriptures to highlight the themes and theologies of the mysteries of redemption embodied in the Temporal cycle. We’ve lost that sense that the Mass lectionary is a pointed return to material that we already know and are re-examining from a different perspective…

The RCL is an attempt to meld the continuous reading strategy of the Office lectionaries with the selected reading strategy of the former Mass lectionaruies. It tries to be too many things and ends up—in my eyes at least—not accomplishing its goals.

One of my biggest frustrations with the scheme Church Publishing has put out is that it keeps both first lesson courses of ordinary time. I think this was a big mistake—they needed to choose one or the other. Either go with the typological set that reinforces the whole point of the Mass lectionary or go with the marginally continuous schema that tries to do what the Office does, but worse. (My prejudice isn’t showing through much, is it?)

Insights with M

M and I were having a discussion last night about my situation that wandered into the territory of theodicy–how we explain the presence of evil in a world created good by a good God. In particular she was going off on those who believe that if you pray enough, or are good, enough, faithful enough, or a “good enough Christian” that bad things won’t happen to you.

We came to the conclusion that this whole line of thought is fundamentally at odds with traditional Christian theology. We live in a faith that was founded on the blood of the martyrs. To say that God will keep all “real” Christians from physical harm is clearly and thoroughly refuted by the very facts of our beginnings. The promise we’ve received is not that everything’s going to be ok—rather, it’s that in whatever we face, we will never be alone.

Mission and the Mainlines

There’s been some interesting talk recently that I’ve only half been able to follow: Christopher had something on the Daily Office as the core of a new way of doing Church, and on what mission could look like in his area which was a riff on what LutherPunk was talking about here in a look at the practical issues of growing a community.

Add into the mix Andrew Gern’s piece yesterday at the Cafe on the Mainlines and the recent Pew Report…

It’s clear we’ve got a problem. And by “we” I mean people in churches, people who call themselves Christians, people who care about encountering God and helping others find the same God.

I like the notion in Gerns’s piece that we have to have a sense of who we are and that we have to be open at the same time. I certainly have a vision for what that should look like—and I doubt it will be a surprise to anyone. I also get a liitle nervous when we start using marketing language because of its connotations of manipulation. Our marketing vision has to match with what others see when they encounter us; if the marketing vision doesn’t have integrity and authenticity, it will be obvious and all the work in the world won’t fix the credibility gap.

Who do I see the Episcopal Church being? I see us as a community that understands the search for God as pre-eminently rooted in the corporate liturgical cycles of Mass and Office and in the theologies of those texts.

Furthermore, I see us not just holding those boundaries but encouraging play within them. That is, we are a people who accept the scientific study of Scripture as well as the scientific study of the universe in all its splendor. We firmly believe that we need not be afraid of the answers and new questions we find, knowing that faith seeking understanding is a better path than either understanding seeking faith or faith hiding from understanding.

In many ways I think we fail on both counts. We don’t do full justice to our heritage of worshiping God in the beauty of holiness nor—as was taken up after the rant yesterday—are our clergy and people as rooted in the traditions, liturgies, and Scriptures of our church as I would wish them to be. These are the groundings that making the second part possible and fruitful. Faith must be our starting place—only then does the understanding have a framework within which to fit. Recognizing the proper place of understanding is one of our current problems–personified by Spong and his approach which is to say if there is any potential conflict between a scientific worldview and a traditional Christian worldview, the scientific wins. That’s not right either.

There’s a lot to be said for recognizing that all of our worldviews are just that—models that we use to function constructively on a day-by-day basis. What some seem to find so hard to understand is that a scientific worldview is not scientific fact, rather it is a construct based on a host of facts, theories, and assumptions that proceed from a scientific understanding of the universe. As such, I suggest we wear our models lightly and recognize that we live in the midst of several, and not require that we force resolution between them.

(I might add that when we talk about worldviews, Scripture itself contains not one but several, some that are compatible with one another and some that conflict more or less violently. Ditto for Christianity throughout the centuries…)

So that’s my vision for us. We need to be the church that worships God in the beauty of holiness and that encourages dialogue between the worlds of faith, science, and technology. To get there we need to work on our beauty, and our holiness, and our groundedness.

More on Gendering God

This started as a comment on this post but ballooned out of control.

Yes, bls, you’re right—we started gendering God quite a long time ago; now the question is what to do about it and why. The last is probably the place to start…

The Scriptures and the Tradition have shown a repeated preference for metaphors that are male (Father and Son). I also think there’s no debate that the Scriptures and Tradition were produced by patriarchal cultures and that the theological authorities were overwhelmingly males and, for much of the Christian era, celibates to boot. (I think the last point is significant; in some—though certainly not all—monastic/hagiographical literature there’s an inclination to see women as the enemy out to destroy the man’s purity… The stories of Aquinas’s early days come to mind.) Furthermore, one Person of the Trinity does have physical gender—by all accounts Jesus became incarnate as a man, thus increasing the potential for literalization of the metaphors of Father and Son.

But what’s our goal–to fix metaphor or to transcend metaphor?

I’m speaking in very broad strokes now…

Mother Laura’s approach moves towards fixing the metaphors by balancing them, male and female and neutral.

Fr. John-Julian’s approach seeks to transcend metaphor by cutting through human language to spiritual realities.

I see Doug trying both to fix metaphor and transcend metaphor through a re-energizing of the metaphor. Yes, bls, Doug’s connection of mother language with Jesus rather than with the First Person of the Trinity is a contradiction and that’s the point… Using female language of the one Person who may legitimately be called gendered and male serves as a paradox—hopefully as a Zen-like koan, even—that assists us to retain the metaphors of both “Son” and “Mother” yet points to transcendence in the gap between the two.

As much as I’d like to transcend metaphor (a la my “trial shot“) I don’t think most congregations will reach that point en masse. So—some kind of fix has to occur. I’m just not sure what, but I dislike an unreflective knee-jerk changing of metaphors (which is not at all what I see you doing, Mother Laura).

Now, I fully recognize that I’m classic “oppressor” material–a straight white male from the educated class upholding, on the surface at least, the way of speaking and think that has kept me and mine on top. I’m conscious of all that—and yet… I do feel that re-energizing the traditional language is still spiritually and theologically useful; I’ll give two quick examples without all the nuancing and hedging that I’d normally prefer for lack of time:

1) I worry that sometimes (though certainly not all) when “Mother” is used for God it is used because it is the word for a female parent and not because it is engaging the metaphor of “Mother”. That is, “Father” as a root metaphor means something different from “Parent” and “Mother”. All three carry different social, cultural, and emotional freight. Yes, I realize I’m splitting hairs here—but I keep sensing that they’re important hairs for the discussion.

2) As I tell my students, theology is an integrated science; we can’t change one part without affecting (and effecting) other things. “Father” as a metaphor for God cannot—to my mind—be abstracted from a host of meanings that tie deeply to our sacramental theology among other things. A professor in college once told me that God was not male in Scripture since he lacked the primary marker for male gods in the Ancient Near East—a consort: there’s no Mrs. YWHW. But upon study and reflection, I believe this dear mentor was wrong. Mrs. YHWH is the pilgrim people of God, Israel and the Church. The Church is the bride of Christ and the Blessed Virgin is the pre-eminent sign and type of the Church. (Yes, there’s an oedipal thing there we won’t go into now…) And this matters deeply when we talk about our Eucharistic and Baptismal theology and therefore also ties into our doctrines of salvation. Changing the metaphor profoundly changes the relationship (in ways I’d never really thought through before—interesting…)

I think this topic is an important one because of its many implications both pastoral and theological. Mother Laura and Doug are thinking through these issues but so many I’ve seen in seminaries aren’t—they’re appropriating the dominant model (whether patriarchal or not)—without applying thought and sussing out the implications and that bothers me.

On Liturgical Language and the Gender of God

Interesting thoughts from Metacatholic.

I agree with him. All gendered language about God is metaphor. “Father” and “Son” are important root metaphors that the Scriptures and tradition have returned to again and again but we lose a lot if we collapse the metaphors–or dispense with them.

As I’ve suggested in this trial shot on the Trinity,we should “[t]hink not, however, of two men and a breeze; think, rather, of the mystery that lies at the heart of life.”

Ecclesial Infallibility

There was an interesting discussion involving the Young Fogey and bls somewhere recently that focused on the issue of whether a church–the Church–is infallible or not and the consequences that result from it.

As I recall (and I know you’ll correct me if I get it wrong), YF was arguing that if the Church—whether in the person of the Pope or in its councils as with the Eastern churches—is infallible, then all efforts to change its doctrine and/or discipline outside these channels are not only misguided but morally and theologically wrong.

bls was arguing that if the Church—in whatever local instantiation—is not infallible, then its doctrine and discipline can and should be reviewed and changed if necessary.

Needless to say, the 39 Articles and its thoughts on the fallibility of churches and councils were put into play suggesting that a core part of Anglican identity depends on the notion that neither churches nor the Church are infallible.

To my mind, this question and its implications are definitely worth discussing and pursuing. As YF noted, the way we answer this issue has a great deal to do with current theological dispute and how—or if—they can be settled. If the Church is infallible, current attempts to reinterpret, say, traditional teachings on human sexuality are wrong, full stop. If it is not infallible, then not only are such attempts not wrong but are even helpful. If people holding opposing positions talk they will be able to come to an understanding but not an agreement.

My own understanding is, following Vincent’s Commonitory, that doctrine is more or less fixed. Development in doctrine should not be change but rather an unfolding of the implications of what has been thought and taught and practiced from the beginning. Discipline, however, is a different story and is culturally shaped and conditioned. (And where the line is drawn is a debated issue as well—I see women’s ordination as a matter of discipline, not doctrine, though I know that some disagree.)

What follows from that stance is that I believe the Church and its various local instantiations is not infallible. Rather, reading Matthew’s parable of the wheat and the tares—as the Fathers did—pertaining to the current state of Christ’s church, it is not pure but has wheat and tares intermingled. Further, I think it’s clear that some of the tares have made it to the top in various times and places (like, say, the Borgia popes…).

Too, how we answer the question has implications for both our pneumatology and our christology. If it is not fallible, then how do we understand the presence of the Holyu Spirit in the Church and the Church as the Body of Christ? If the Church can err does that mean Jesus can err as well? And that, of course, heads down a road I’d rather not travel…

I’ll add one further thought on the matter which is to say that I think the question of fallibility/infallibility is properly framed at the level of the Church/churches, not at the level of the Scriptures. To proclaim the Scriptures infallible seems to me a an easy out because what is being proclaimed infallible is not really the Scriptures but a certain interpretation thereof.

(Too, if we deemed the Scriptures infallible I would see it requiring us to say that they are infallible in their purpose as well as their content—and thus everyone who reads them will necessarily, infallibly, become Christian. And that’s patently not the case…)