I’ve got another one up at the Episcopal Cafe.
Category Archives: Theology
Jesus on Marriage
In light of the earlier discussion on Christian chastity, I was struck by Sunday’s reading and noticed something in it I’d never seen before. Here it is with emphasis:
Luke 20:27-38 27Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28and asked him a question, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30then the second 31and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32Finally the woman also died. 33In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.” 34Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 35but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”
From Oremus.org’s NRSV.
Luke has Jesus making a contrast between two ages. These ages are not temporal, rather, they are paradigms of existence. He opposes “this age” (i.e., the present age, the status quo) with “that age” (i.e., those worthy of and who will participate in the resurrection; read with Christian eyes=us).
The explicit message of Jesus on marriage, then, is that children of the resurrection don’t do it…
Musing on Sacraments and Saints
Here’s a thought I’ve been rolling around a bit recently: The higher your sacramental theology, the more necessary it becomes that you have a robust theology of the saints.
That is, if we understand Baptism as a true joining of the self into the reality of God through Jesus, then we must (or perhaps “should”?) take more seriously our mystical connection with our fellow baptized. If we understand Eucharist as the share of the one bread that joins us in the one Body (as 1 Cor speaks about it) then—again—our relation to the “communion of the Saints” is that much more important. In essence, we must posit a stronger eschatological bond between the members of the Body.
But, a thoughtful evangelical student pushed me on this when I mentioned it in a class discussion of the saints: does this mean that a sacramentally higher church has a “better” understanding of Christian community than a sacramentally lower church? Furthermore, does it necessarily have a better embodiment of Christian community?
My answer was that it is not necessarily better—it is just different. I think it can be said that a higher sacramental theology requires a less individualistic understanding of spirituality and salvation—but does it play out this way in reality? And in how we embody our theologies communally?
Christian Chastity
Christopher has posted some very helpful observations on the the current Anglican issues. No, I’m not getting into those now, rather, he makes an important point in the realm of theology and morals that bears being lifted up.
Much of the struggle is focused on what constitutes acceptable sexual morality for Christians; that is, how do we employ our human sexual urges in light of the resurrection and the call of the Gospel?
The chief battleground seems to be the “traditional” mores most often defined by saying the only acceptable context for the expression of sexuality is in a lifelong marriage between one man and one woman. The Episcopal Left has called for moving from this standard; the Episcopal Right is for maintaining it. These things are well known.
The reason why I put “traditional” in scare-quotes above is because Christopher is lifting up something in Fr. Haller’s recent writings that I have also noted in my patristic and scriptural studies. “Traditional” Christian sexual ethics are far more complicated than one man and one woman. For quite a while it was assumed that the correct Christian moral stance was celibacy. For everyone. Don’t trust tradition? That’s fine—it’s in Scripture too. Check 1st Corinthians for starters. Marriage between one man and one woman wasn’t the ideal—it was the tolerated lesser of two options.
Furthermore, Jesus never promotes marriage—he just says that divorce is a bad deal. The best the Church Fathers could do was to note that Jesus attended the wedding at Cana thus showing he didn’t actively oppose the institution. Less well known in our day, however, is their identification of the apostolic evangelist John as the bridegroom—who, upon seeing the miracle of the water turned to wine, left behind his bride in their never-consummated marriage and lived his long life as a virgin. (Ælfric refers to this quite a number of times throughout his corpus, for example, as part of his argument for clerical celibacy…)
What I see Christopher doing is something that I haven’t seen the Episcopal Left do—at least not well. They propose doing away with current standards but I have not heard them talk in a clear and compelling manner about what should take their place. Christopher’s answer is to return to the virtue ethics inhabited by both Paul and the Fathers and to ask us to consider once again the meaning of Christian chastity.
The central hallmark of Christian chastity as found again and again in both Testaments of the canon is covenant faithfulness. Time and again, Scripture uses the metaphor of God the husband and Israel the bride; time and again the problem is infidelity and promiscuity—egregious breaches of the covenant. The images in Ephesians and Revelation of the Church as the bride of Christ participate fully within this thematic trajectory. The Church must be faithful to Christ her spouse and not be as Babylon. Christian marriage is acceptable in so far as it models the relationship between Christ and his Church and thus marked by self-giving love and fidelity—constancy.
Christian chastity is yet another virtue which—to my mind—is only capable of being cultivated within classical Benedictine lines: it can only flourish in an environment marked by stability, obedience, and conversion of life.
This, friends, this is the direction in which our discussion needs to move. What are the practices that faithfully reflect Christian chastity and how do we as congregations help engender and enable Christian chastity for those within our walls and common life?
Words of Wisdom and a Reflection on the Gospel
If we want politics, we can find it elsewhere. If we want social services, we can find those elsewhere, too; likewise for social company. The Church, though, has a monopoly on God and prayer, which it is squandering at present.
–bls, from the comments
Lately, there has been a lot of institutional mystification within Anglicanism all around that wants to make the gospel something other than the unconditional promise of and in Christ.
Some identify the gospel as institutional imperatives of unity or the tensions between justice and unity
Others identify this gospel and the sharing of this gospel with our causes of justice.
Some identify the gospel with purity. Many of these sites are too much for my delicate constitution.
These may be fruits of the gospel, they may be outcomes of our hearing very God, but these are NOT, let me repeat, these are NOT, the gospel of Jesus Christ.The gospel is the promise of right relationship with God by no doing of our own, is peace and joy and fullness in Jesus Christ crucified and raised from the dead, who is present to us and for us here and now in the Word proclaimed in the reading/preaching and received in, with, and under the bread and wine. Jesus Christ himself is the Good News!
This gospel, Jesus Christ, makes the Church, not the other way around, and it is in this proclamatory sense that the Church is the books’ as proclaimed and not only that the book is the Church’s as is sometimes popularly trotted out. It may be our book, but proclaimed it is God’s Word to us and for us, and not only collectively, but to each member thereof. Because in the proclaiming of the Word, Christ is here present—the Scripture is not ours, it’s God’s. I intuited that years ago when my priest would ask me to be the lector at daily Mass on a regular basis to my fear and trembling. I used to think that was a bad thing, now I take a little nervousness in proclaiming God’s Word as a good thing. It’s not my word, it’s God’s, and in the proclaiming, Christ is present to us and for us here and now. A little nervousness is appropriate.
–Christopher, from here
I’m for the basic principles of the Millennium Development Goals. I like the idea of the portions of the world who have disproportionately been consuming the earth’s resources taking pause and assisting the basic living conditions of those who live in situations of poverty and oppression that most of us can not begin to understand.
What I really don’t like, however, is the way that the Episcopal Church as a whole has been working with and talking about the MGD’s. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, ensuring justice for the orphan, the widow, the stranger in the land, these are the outward and visible signs of the Gospel taking root in your heart and body. These things are not, however, the logical or theological beginning of the Gospel.
The Gospel begins with the Good News of what God has done for his creation through the person of Jesus Christ. That God became incarnate “both as a sacrifice for sin and a model of godly life.” That what God has revealed through the Holy Scriptures and through Jesus Christ is a whole different truth about reality than what collusive and destructive powers whisper to us so convincingly. That ultimate power resides in love. That ultimate life is found in God who constantly invites us to participate in his own life, that our life is hid with Christ in God.
Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, ensuring justice for the orphan, the widow, the stranger in the land, these are the logical and necessary consequences of the Gospel, these are the limbs’ obedience to the heart’s faith. These ways are the paths we are bound to walk if we take God’s revelation of truth seriously.
But our preaching and our teaching becomes disoriented if somehow the logical corollary becomes the focus and the central thesis from which it proceeds is obscured. The Church’s primary responsibility is the proclamation of the Good News of the Gospel, then the works of mercy that flow from this revelation. To preach the works alone, or to assume that the connection between the faith and the works is obvious and need not be said is to risk corruption of the Gospel with which we have been entrusted.
The Episcopal Church should teach about the MGD’s. But it should first preach Christ. It should first teach the simple—but difficult—truth of God’s reality. Then teach the implications, then teach the works. But first, preach the Gospel.
Eucharistic Quiz
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You scored as OrthodoxYou are Orthodox, worshiping the mystery of the Holy Trinity in the great liturgy whereby Jesus is present through the Spirit in a real yet mysterious way, a meal that is also a sacrifice.
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H/t Dean Knisely
I doubt these results come as a surprise to most who know me. Conflicts between my own understanding of the Eucharist, how I read the first generation of Lutheran Reformers, and the theology of the contemporary Lutheran church were my first signs that I needed to reconsider whether God was calling me to be a Lutheran pastor.
Liturgy and Seekers
Jim challenged us in the earlier thread to think about how liturgical worship and seekers should fit together. This line of his struck me: We can’t expect people to get out of bed on Sunday mornings to attend a service they don’t understand, or that emphasizes their non-membership, so that they can enjoy 20 minutes of fellowship at the coffee hour or catch an occasional adult ed. lecture. I had a conversation with a student this morning around just this same topic. So—I’ll think out loud around this theme for a little bit.
A few points:
First off, let’s all remember what we’re fundamentally about on Sunday morning—we’re there first and foremost for the worship of God. While we do more things than this and while we do many things for more than one purpose, this one must always be central. That means that everything done in the service is only secondarily oriented towards the people present because everything is primarily oriented towards God.
Second, if worship is primarily oriented towards God and secondarily oriented towards the people present, what does that secondary orientation look like? Forming community seems to be part of it; our communal participation seems to be part of it; reminding one another what’s going on in the larger world seems to be part of it; moral teaching, spiritual teaching, practical help for one another all seem to be part of it… If I had to tease out one strand out of all of these things going on, however, I would suggest that the key part of the secondary orientation is gaining an awareness of who we are as transcendent Body. Now let me unpack that a bit…
When Christians gather together to worship God, we’re doing something unusual, something altogether different than getting a bunch of folks together. A worship service isn’t a committee meeting or even a Bible study. It’s something deeper and more profound. Do we believe what we read in Holy Scripture? Do we believe the words of Paul: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16) and further “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own” (1 Cor 6:19)? What’s hid from our eyes by modern English is that in Paul’s Greek, all of the “you”s are plural—he speaks to us not as individuals but as a body, a community. As he hammers his point home later in the letter: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor 12:27). This is what Matthew is recording in 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Worship is when the Body of Christ comes together to be Body. This is when we join to not just symbolize but enact a promise of the eschatological Body, to realize the vision of St. John the Divine which consummates not only the Book of Revelation but the whole Scripture of which I have written elsewhere. Here the the local community participates in the mystery of the Church who is the Bride of the Lamb, joined with Christ in intimate communion. Here too, through deep meanings, Bride and Groom cleave into one flesh and we—knit into the Body by the Spirit—participate in the dialogue between Christ and the Godhead.
I’ll apologize if some of this sounds a little strange, if some of this sounds a little mystical. However, I know of no other way to talk about—it’s the nature of the reality that we’ve entered into…
Ok—so what does this little burst of mysticism have to do with seekers? Just this: the key part of the secondary orientation of the liturgy is to offer all present a taste of the transcendent reality experienced by the Church. This reality is our life day in and day out but we so conceal it from ourselves that we need reminding. For the baptized this reality is brought up to and (hopefully) breaks through the surface of our awareness as we join in holy song and holy discourse, as we fulfill our created purpose in the act of praise. Discipleship results in cultivating this awareness and facing the hard decisions and consequences that come when we start to take the reality of a life hid in God seriously. For those who are not baptized, the liturgy should invite them into this reality alive in God, should invite them to learn and discern and enter into the life-giving waters.
Brass tacks, then. How can a liturgy hope to achieve this? When “worshiping the Lord in the beauty of holiness” is more than just a tagline—rather, when it’s tangible:
- Cultivate reverence among the clergy and among the laity regarding this thing that we do together. And no, reverence is neither stuffiness nor snootiness. Rather, it’s thoughtful attentiveness to what we are doing and for Whom we do it.
- Cultivate beauty. In the music, in the flowers, in the liturgical actions. It’s one thing to be informal; it’s another entirely to be sloppy. Yes, this means practicing…
- Cultivate community. This is where we have to be what we are attempting to enact: a body. In the most basic terms, it means knowing the people around you. We humans are creatures of habit—many of us like to sit in the same place each week if at all possible. Can we give a friendly nod to the person one pew over? Can we call them by name? Do we know who “we” are so if a stranger enters in we know to invite them to be one of us as well—or at least to help with the hymnal or answer a question?
Take a second to notice that I’ve said so far absolutely nothing about how high up the candle the liturgy ought to be… Low Church, High Church, it doesn’t matter; these things transcend liturgical boundaries.
Third, hospitality is critical—and we need to be sensitive to the breadth of what hospitality can be. I think there are a very big set of assumptions in the air about who “seekers” are and what “they” want. This set of assumptions is related to the success of Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Church. Yeah, I’ve read it. Multiple times. And learned a lot from it each time—but I don’t buy it hook, line, and sinker. Warren—presumably based on research he and his team have done—emphasize that “seekers” are uncomfortable with Christian signs, symbols, and traditions. So, chuck the cross, the candles, the chant, the colored windows and the other things that warm my heart so… But his experience isn’t mine. Especially here in the South we’re not dealing with the “unchurched”—people who have no familiarity with Christianity except for negative stereotypes—rather we’re dealing with the “dechurched” who grew up in a church but left for a variety of reasons. Furthermore when they come back they’re doing so for a whole host of reasons. Many my age are returning because they have kids they want to raise in a church—they don’t expect a sterile auditorium, they expect a church! But that’s only one of many, many reasons people walk through our doors.
As far as I can tell, they bring more and more complicated reasons and expectations than we can know. We can’t hope to meet them all. So do we try and conform to what we imagine they might want, or do we present them with an honest understanding of who we are?
Another facet of hospitality involves not just we in the local community and those seekers out there; it also includes wandering Episcopalians—travelers away from their local community who stop by as they can. The sign out front offers hospitality in the promise of “common prayer.” Are we offering hospitality to the “sojourner in our midst” if our Book of Common Prayer is nowhere to be seen or experienced?
The most we can reduce it, it seems to me, is to two basic points: people who take the trouble to get up and seek us out on a Sunday morning are either looking for God or they are looking for a community. So why not be intentional about offering both? We offer God in the best way we know how with the full awareness and realization that not all will find God in the places and ways that we do. See points on both the first and the second above. Furthermore, we must realize that there is no substitute for human contact. A loaded bulletin is great—but even better is a friendly human with a sensitivity towards when a seeker needs help and when they need space. A handshake from the priest on the way out the door is great but even better is a midweek follow-up phone call from the priest reiterating what it pleasure it was to have them there and an offer to answer any questions they might have. (Present but not pushy…)
Fourth, clear teaching must be offered to all—regular attendees and newcomers alike. Liturgy is theology in kinetic form. We do what we do for a reason! But we seem to not be terrible good at sharing what that reason is… Learning Episcopal liturgy and learning Episcopal theology should be nigh inseparable because they are mutually interrelated. As I said in my comments below, so often people want to radically alter the liturgy and throw the baby out with the bathwater because they’ve never been taught that there’s a baby there in the first place!! We need clear, simple explanations of the centers of our theology and how these are both reinforced and found in the liturgy. While every seeker may not stick around for adult ed. such knowledge in the congregation will perk and offer itself to others when we least expect it–because once again this leads directly into discipleship. Learning theology, learning liturgy isn’t about learning what to think—it’s about learning what to do. It’s about learning who to be in answer to our high calling as members of the Body. But even deeper than that’s it’s learning what it means to live a life hid in God.
Liturgy at the Cafe
There’s a post up on The Lead at the Cafe on liturgy. It follows the general thesis that anything traditional must therefore be inhospitable. I disagree…
Hospitality is essential but there any many ways of embodying hospitality. I believe that it is far more hospitable to invite someone to get to know your true self than than to dissemble or disguise. Speaking liturgically, this means that traditional liturgy need not be dispensed with simply because it is unfamiliar. It sends a strong theological message if we dispense with various elements of the liturgy for the sake of convenience—and the message sent is not a positive one…
The Great Emergence
I heard Phyllis Tickle speak this weekend. It was quite a fascinating talk and it gave me a lot to think about. What I’ll be offering here and now is a condensation of a much larger post that I have neither the time nor the brain cycles to write right now. And, part of me wonders if it would be a post per se or a manifesto.
Essentially, she was arguing that every five hundred years or so the Church goes through a reformation or reinvigoration—and that we’re in the middle of one now. She talked about them primarily in terms of the organization of the church writ large. Thus at around 500 we had the Great Transition; the key point was the Council of Chalcedon and the splitting off of the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Next came the Great Schism around 1000 and the break between the Eastern and Western Churches. Then came the Reformation at about 1500 which split the Protestants from the Roman Catholics. She terms what we’re in now as the Great Emergence and points to the Network & Co. as just one of the splits that will occur as this shift gets underway.
So–what rude beast is slouching its way towards Bethlehem to be born? She cited Pannenberg and others as grouping Western Christianity into four major buckets: liturgical, social justice, conservative evangelical, and charismatic and pentecostal. Her understand of the emergence is that it is a remixing of the buckets that takes place in small group gatherings, local non-church contexts and preeminently on and around the Internet. Her description of what she considers Emerging sounded to me like an ecclesial flash mob—a church or body of believers that gathers on no real schedule, tied to no brick ‘n’ mortar institution but gathering by communication and consensus.
When it came right down to it, she was speaking to most of the people in the hall from an apologetic stance. She was speaking to them as outsiders—those who were not and most likely would not be part of this reality. Rather, she was educating them about what she saw coming and was encouraging them to support it and not push out those in the younger generations who would be pioneering it.
In a sense, therefore, I didn’t belong there. Some of what she said at various points rang very true with my experience and I could easily identify myself with just the movement she was talking about. However, other points I’m not so sure about… For me there was one great gaping hole. I have a feeling—given her other works—that she knows what it is and that it will figure in a book she’s working on now. (She didn’t mention one, but I got the strong sense that this lecture was the working out of ideas for a book…)
She’s right about the times of change, but she only alluded once to one major element about why they’re important. Your average Western church-goer in 500 or in 1000 didn’t give two hoots about Oriental Orthodoxy or a split with the Eastern Church. Instead, I see these points involving critical revolutions in a corporate understanding of what it means to live a truly intentional, truly Christian life.
- 500 begins the real growth of monasticism in the West.
- 1000 represents the reform and restoration of the primitive ideal among the new monastic movements–the Carthusians and Cistercians and others like them.
- 1500 in England takes the hours out of the monasteries and cathedrals and restores them to the people in their own tongue.
Monasticism is important because (in my grand over-simplification) it gives us two things. First, it gives us a framework for an intentional, balanced, Christian life centered around the ultimate human purpose or telos—the praise and worship of God. Second, it relentlessly demands that the Christian life is lived in community. Even when you don’t want it to be. Especially when you don’t want it to be. (Re-read the Golden Epistle and consider how the discussion of private possessions works. Possessions aren’t bad because they’re *stuff*—possessions are bad because they give the monk the illusion that if things get too hard/bad he can just pick up and leave…)
And now? Yes, Phyllis Tickle is right about the blending of the buckets. Yes, she’s right about the power of the Internet—but she didn’t express the challenge inherent in it. Like all tools, like all people, the strengths of the Internet are simultaneously its greatest weakness. A society formed by the Internet will likewise participate in its strengths and failings. The Internet offers whole new realms of instant gratification.
- You don’t like what you know? Learn something new—anything—now.
- You don’t like what you have? Buy something new—anything—now.
- You don’t like who you are? Be someone new—anyone—now.
A Christian culture shaped by the Internet will be a perversion of the Gospel unless it is grounded in balance and in simple rhythms. Stability. Obedience. Conversion of life.
The stabilizing element of this emerging thing she describes is a rediscovery of monastic principles. And, like that of the Reformation, it won’t take place behind cloistered walls. Don’t get me wrong—cloisters will and must remain for this to work imho. We in the world will always need a model to point to we just won’t all live there. Rather, it will occur in the midst of normal domestic lives but will give them a shape, a character, a rule, to enable simple intentional Christian life in an increasing driven and frenetic age.
Not everyone, not all Christians will engage in this—and that’s all right. The monastic way has always served as leaven in the lump. Not all are or need be monks or oblates, but those who are still leaven and invigorate the rest of the church. To put a finer point on it, not all need observe a rule or pray the Offices or some similar discipline, but it’s crucial that some do and will. I think that’s where we’re headed and what we’re up to.
There’s so much more I can and want to say about this—but that will have to come later.
Short Celtic Christianity Rant
The Episcopal Cafe has been running a number of things on Pelagius recently on Speaking to the Soul. I have thus far refrained from making any comments on the subject. But today’s passage made me comment.
I’m intrigued by Celtic Christianity; I think it’s a fascinating topic. But so much of the material published as “Celtic Christianity” is a shallow artifice that skims a bit from some sources and grafts it onto a model that owes more to 1970’s Earth spirituality and modern liberal protestant theology than it does anything truly and historically Celtic. Furthermore, it participates in a similar sort of project that Elaine Pagel’s did with the Gnostic Gospels—accuse Christian orthodoxy of being the repressive patriarchal bad guy, take a few isolated items from some texts and spin them off in your own direction that may or may not have any correlation to the historical movement.
One of the favorite ways to do this is to lionize those condemned by orthodoxy. But there’s a problem here easily identified as a lack of clear sources. More often than not, we don’t have the actual texts of those condemned by the Church. As a result, recovering these people and their thought can only happen by looking at what their opponents said. So, to learn about Pelagius, you read Augustine and Jerome where they criticize him. But, if you’re not being rigorous, this is where the potential for all kinds of abuse crops up. The parts that you like, you proclaim genuine; the parts you don’t, you call slander… Furthermore, you indulge in mirror reading—(If the orthodox source argues X, my guy must have taught the exact opposite [anti-X])—but that’s not always (or even often) accurate. What really comes out is little data that provides the opportunity for a great amount of personal pontification safely stuck under an historical label.
I’m saying these are trends I’ve seen–I’m not accusing Newell (the guy being excerpted at the Cafe) of this, because I don’t know him or his work. He may well not be doing this–but I’d want to see his sources and methodologies instead of blanket accusations like the first one raised at today’s post.
Saying that Pelagius was condemned for suggesting that women should read Scripture sounds fishy to me for two reasons: 1) it completely matches modern liberal expectations of the “mean patriarchal orthodox Fathers” and 2) it contradicts actual evidence that we have of those same “mean patriarchal orthodox Fathers”…
To counteract some of the stuff out there, I recommend reading some real Celtic Christianity—which tends to be quite ascetic and apocalyptic in ways that discomfits moderns—and here’s a short taster: The Confession of Patrick, Patrick’s Letter to Coroticus, The Life of St Columba, and The Fifteen Tokens of Doomsday…