Month: February 2006

Thomas at Without Authority has a bit of a downer post about the future of the ELCA. We are, he says, divided into various factions (liberals, evangelical catholics, etc.) and he’s none too optimistic that any recognizably Lutheran center can hold.

Though I came to the ELCA only recently (within the last six years) I can’t really say that I disagree with his analysis. I’ve been a member of three different congregations in that time, and it’s difficult to say what the connecting “Lutheran” thread was. I certainly don’t recall any great emphasis on the distinctive Lutheran themes – justification by faith alone (maybe we hit that once a year on “Reformation Sunday”), human beings as simul justus et peccator, the theology of the cross, ethics in the context of our various callings, the two kingdoms, etc.

In my thinking about Lutheranism I was influenced by James Nuechterlein’s notion of “‘sectarian’ catholicity,” that is, of a church that is catholic in that it holds to the apostolic faith, but thinks that the Reformers got important things right:

We remain evangelical catholics because we have what we consider good reasons not to be Roman Catholics. (To most of us in the West, Orthodoxy is not, for cultural reasons, a live option.) We have no desire to reignite the passions of the sixteenth century, but we think that in the quarrels of the Reformation era the reformers were more right than Rome. Many of those quarrels have been resolved in recent years, but on certain critical issues-such as the relation between justification and sanctification or between Scripture and tradition-differences remain that, however subtle, are not insignificant.

There are, moreover, a number of post-Reformation issues that separate many evangelical catholics from Rome: papal infallibility, the Marian dogmas, ordination of women, contraception. Orthodox Catholics rightly complain of a cafeteria approach to church doctrine in which presumably loyal members of the church do indeed exercise private judgment as to which teachings they will or will not accept as binding on them. It would be a dishonorable act and a grave violation of conscience to seek communion in the Roman Catholic Church while harboring a host of mental reservations as to the Church’s dogma. As I regularly explain to those who ask about my own situation, better a good Lutheran than a bad Catholic.

This is a much more positive assessment of the legacy of the Reformation than one gets from at least some evangelical catholics. He distinguishes it from “sentimental Protestant evangelicalism and desiccated Protestant liberalism-as well as from a form of confessionalism that still engages the struggle for orthodox Christianity in sixteenth-century categories.” The question, though, is to what extent the ELCA is committed to this kind of vision, or, for that matter, any kind of vision.

For some reason the whole “crunchy con” thing is generating a lot of interesting thinking out there in blog-land (well, at least among the blogs I read). See, to wit, Russell Arben Fox (again), Kim at Crossroads, Eve Tushnet, and Three Hierarchies.

I’d like to draw some larger lesson here about the bankruptcy of the current liberal-conservative divide and the dawning of new political paradigms, but a handful of blog entries hardly seems like it could sustain such grand generalizations.

William F. Buckley says “One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” Now, I appreciate the willingness of the elder statesmen of conservatism – Buckley, George Will, etc. – to voice their skepticism on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy rather than just toeing the party line. But where were these guys before the war? Did they think then that installing liberal democracy in Iraq would work? If not, why didn’t they say something when it might possibly have made a difference?

Ever find yourself wondering “Just what is the difference between thrash metal and speed metal?” Turns out it’s mainly in the punk-influenced sound of the former. Good to know.

Camassia on heaven. This paragraph’s a gem:

For another thing, saying, “You’ll be rewarded for being good by going to heaven after you die,” is only a recipe for complacency if you subscribe to a certain idea of “being good.” Certainly the Mennonite concept of what it means to follow Jesus in this life is not simply to approve of the status quo. That’s why I don’t like the sort of either/or option that Hugo offered: either you believe kingdom is something we create here, or you believe it’s totally unrelated to anything going on here. This dichotomy does not make sense to me. All those Jesus parables about the kingdom being something that starts small and grows into magnificence suggest that regarding the kingdom as either fully here, or fully not here, is missing the point.

I think it’s a handy rule of thumb that when we start to see two very important things as being in a kind of zero-sum relationship (life beyond death vs. justice here on earth, faith vs. works, justification vs. sanctification, etc.) there’s a good chance our theology’s gone off the rails somewhere.

The wisdom of Polycarp and Calvin on the Magnificat at Siris.

Lutherpunk has an appreciation of Johnny Cash. I agree with LP that “Big River” is one of the best Cash songs.

Melancthon (the blogging version) on natural theology.

Russell Arben Fox on crunchy cons.

Millinerd on inter- and intra-religious conflict.

Via the “Crunchy Con” blog I see that idiosyncratic paleo/libertarian/localist Bill Kauffman has a new book coming out in May: Look Homeward, AmericaIn Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists (excerpt here). Here’s the publisher’s description:

In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman introduces us to the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life. Blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman provides fresh portaiture of such American originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other Americans who can’t—or shouldn’t—be filed away in the usual boxes labeled “liberal” and “conservative.” Ranging from Millard Fillmore to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.

Here’s an interesting account of Kauffman’s own ideological sojourn from the introduction:

I cannot think of the libertarians without laughing, and yet, on the great issue of the day, they were dead right. They diagnosed the twentieth century’s homicidal malady: the all-powerful state, which in the name of the workers of the world, the master race, and even making the world safe for democracy had slaughtered tens, nay hundreds, of millions of human beings whose misfortune it had been to run afoul of ideologues wielding state power.

I next fell into queer company with the “paleoconservatives,” that intoxicating (and often intoxicated) mishmash of libertarians, traditionalist conservatives, and reactionary hippies whose flagship magazine, Chronicles, became, for perhaps a lustrum, the most galvanizing, infuriating, brilliantly written political journal in America. For a moment, the old boundaries seemed to have fallen away; bizarrely apt alliances formed: Jewish Confederates, Latin Mass Catholics, Ed Abbeyesque tree-hugging beer-can throwers, radical businessmen who admired Jerry Brown, and gay Quakers who campaigned for Pat Buchanan. Mix it all together and you get Ross Perot. To whom—despite . . . you know—I will ever tip my cap.

The paleos excited more lurid portraits and sputtering denunciations than any political movement since the New Left. As a sojourner on their left fringe, I agreed with certain of the criticisms while bemoaning the modern practice of demonizing all dissenters as furtively creepy thought criminals. For what a glorious hodgepodge these people were! The guru of the libertarian paleos, the combative economist and joyful iconoclast Murray Rothbard, was a gnomic 5’3” nonbelieving Jew who adored cathedrals; championed the Black Panthers while also boasting that he had been founder, president, and pretty much the only member of Columbia University Students for Strom Thurmond in the 1948 presidential election; and once woke his wife JoAnn out of a sound sleep to declare, in his gleeful squawk, “That bastard Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin!”

The paleos ranged all over the political lot, from Port Huron New Leftists to John Birchers, and American politics staggered from the shock when a former Nixon polemicist and fierce Cold Warrior, Pat Buchanan, adopted isolationist paleo themes in his presidential campaigns and shocked the GOP in that redoubt of flintiness, New Hampshire. It couldn’t last. The paleos dissolved—or rather, they erupted—in bile and drunken haymakers. Yet the anti-globalist, Little American tendency to which they gave voice and shape is likely to grow (perhaps even burgeon) as the most intellectually rigorous and sentimentally appealing electoral alternative to our two-for-the-price-of-one parties. At its best, it embraces the gentle, amusedly tolerant and neighborly anarchism that makes small-town America so sweet.

My wanderings had taken me from the populist flank of liberalism to the agrarian wing of Don’t Tread on Me libertarianism to the peaceand-love left wing of paleoconservatism, which is to say that I had been always on the outside—an outsider even among outsiders—attracted to the spirit of these movements but never really comfortable within them, never willing even to call myself by their names. When asked, I was simply an Independent. A Jeffersonian. An anarchist. A (cheerful!) enemy of the state, a reactionary Friend of the Library, a peace-loving football fan. And here, as Gerry and the Pacemakers once sang, is where I’ll stay.

Certainly some overlapping themes with the “crunchy con” idea. Whether they’re good ideas is another matter naturally.

I just started reading German “evangelical” (i.e. Lutheran) theologian Oswald Bayer’s little book Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification, published in the Lutheran Quarterly Series. In the first chapter Bayer makes a very interesting move by using “justification” as a kind of all-encompassing principle for understanding personal and social life, and even a kind of cosmological principle.

He says that, far from being an esoteric theological doctrine with no relation to life, the issue of “justification” is always a pressing concern. We are constantly being called upon to “justify” our actions, our character, even our very existence in the eyes of other people and ourselves. Likewise, social life can be seen as an ongoing struggle for recognition – even the struggles between nations and cultures. We can even think of the world of non-human nature as engaged in a struggle for justification, each thing striving to “justify” itself by persisting in existence (this reminds me somewhat of Spinoza’s “conatus” principle that “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in being”).

This leads Bayer to suggest that “person is a ‘forensic term’” (p. 4). That is, the questions about who I am at the deepest level are inextricably bound up with the judgments that others make and that I make:

Questions such as these relate to my inner being, not just to something external. They affect the core, not the shell. It is not true that judgment is an addition to being. What I am, I am in my judgment about myself, intertwined with the judgment of me made by others. (p. 4)

One can see straight away how this could have significant implications for understanding justification as God’s “imputation” to us of innocence and righteousness. I’m looking forward to seeing how Bayer spins out these implications.

From Oremus:

Polycarp [A.D. 69-155] was Bishop of Smyrna (today known as Izmir), a city on the west coast of Turkey. The letters to the “seven churches in Asia” at the beginning of the book of Revelation include a letter to the church in Smyrna, identifying it as a church undergoing persecution.

Polycarp is said to have known the Apostle John, and to have been instructed by him in the Christian faith. Polycarp, in his turn, was known to Irenaeus, who later became Bishop of Lyons in what is now France. We have (1) Irenaeus’s brief memoir of Polycarp; (2) a letter to Polycarp from Ignatius of Antioch, written around 115 AD when Ignatius was passing through Turkey, being sent in chains to Rome to be put to death; (3) a letter from Polycarp to the church at Philippi, written at the same time; and (4) an account of the arrest, trial, conviction, and martyrdom of Polycarp, written after his death by one or more members of his congregation.

Polycarp was denounced to the government, arrested, and tried on the charge of being a Christian. When the proconsul urged him to save his life by cursing Christ, he replied: “Eighty-six years I have served him, and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” The magistrate was reluctant to kill a a gentle old man, but he had no choice.
Polycarp was sentenced to be burned. As he waited for the fire to be lighted, he prayed:

Lord God Almighty, Father of your blessed and beloved child Jesus Christ, through whom we have received knowledge of you, God of angels and hosts and all creation, and of the whole race of the upright who live in your presence: I bless you that you have thought me worthy of this day and hour, to be numbered among the martyrs and share in the cup of Christ, for resurrection to eternal life, for soul and body in the incorruptibility of the Holy Spirit. Among them may I be accepted before you today, as a rich and acceptable sacrifice, just as you, the faithful and true God, have prepared and foreshown and brought about. For this reason and for all things I praise you, I bless you, I glorify you, through the eternal heavenly high priest Jesus Christ, your beloved child, through whom be glory to you, with him and the Holy Spirit, now and for the ages to come. Amen.

The fire was then lit and shortly thereafter a soldier stabbed Polycarp to death by order of the magistrate. His friends gave his remains honorable burial, and wrote an account of his death to other churches.

Read Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians and The Letter Concerning the Martyrdom of St. Polycarp.

In his essay “The Presence of Mary in the Mystery of the Church” (found in the book Mary: Mother of God, edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson), Lutheran theologian David Yeago argues for a re-appropriation by Protestants of Mary’s role as both paradigm or prototype in the life of faith and discipleship and as an active agent in the formation of our faith.

Mary, Yeago says, is the “paradigm of the existence-in-faith of the people of God”:

It is, of course, in the dying and rising of Jesus Christ that this form is redemptively constituted; it is to his image, not Mary’s, that we are to be conformed in our salvation. Mary’s paradigmatic role is different in kind from that of her Son: she is not the Redeemer but the prototype of the redeemed; she is not the one in whom we participate but the paradigm of that participation. Jesus the Messiah in his dying and rising is alone the forma formans, the form-giving form, the one in whom all things hang together (Col. 1:17) and around whose crucified and risen person the whole creation is to be blessedly configured. Mary by contrast ist he forma formata, the form taht has received formation, the prototype precisely of those who are not the Savior, but cling to him by faith, and on the way of faith’s pilgrimage endure the protracted inscription of his image on their being. (pp. 72-3)

And then in a footnote to this passage:

This suggest that it is not an adequate account of Christ’s redemptive work to view him as a sort of productive prototype of our own authentic existence in faith, as many modernist theologies have done. An adequate doctrine of atonement requires recognition that Christ has acted and suffered in our place in such a way that he does and endures pro nobis [for us] what we could not do or endure for ourselves.

As Yeago says, many Protestants will go this far, cheerfully agreeing with St. Luke’s characterization of Mary as “she who believed” (cf. Lk. 1:45). More disconcerting to Protestants is the notion that Mary is an “active agent of the formation of the church and the believer” (p. 74). The way to think about this is that Mary speaks to us, addresses us with her word.

How does she do this? Preeminently in her great song the Magnificat (Lk. 1:46-55):

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,

For he has looked with favour on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessèd:

The Almighty has done great things for me
and holy is his name.

He has mercy on those who fear him,
in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones
and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things
and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of his servant, Israel,
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,

The promise he made to our forebears,
to Abraham and his children for ever.

This song, Yeago says, is both thanksgiving and proclamation, and constitutes Mary’s word to us within the word of the scriptural witness. He points to Martin Luther’s designation of Mary as the church’s “teacher of praise and thanksgiving.” He quotes Luther:

The dear Virgin is occupied with no insignificant thoughts; they come from the first commandment, “You should fear and love God,” and she sums up the way God rules in one short text, a joyful song for all the lowly. She is a good painter and singer; she sketches God well and sings of him better than anyone, for she names God the one who helps the lowly and crushes all that is great and proud. This song lacks nothing; it is well sung, and needs only people who can say yes to it and wait. But such people are few.

Yeago continues:

Understood in these terms, Mary’s “motherhood” of the church consists in the speaking of a word for the church and all the faithful to hear. Mary’s word in the Magnificat opens the chorus of Christian praise, and provides the church and all the faithful with the essential words for praise. At the same time, her words of praise are necessarily also words of instruction: she teaches us to see in the coming of her Son the mercy and might of the God of Israel. Just as a mother teaches her children by precept and example the ways of the family, and prepares them to live well in the surrounding human community, so Mary teaches the church and all the faithful the ways of God’s household and forms them so that they may live well in the environment of his inbreaking reign in Jesus Christ. (p. 78)

He ends with some suggestions for how contemporary Protestants might recover an awareness of Mary’s presence in the church’s life. First, we should celebrate those feasts where Mary has a specific role such as the Annunciation, the Visitation andd the Presentation (obviously most Protestants are not prepared to celebrate the Assumption or the Immaculate Conception). Secondly, we should sing and pray the Magnificat. It’s the NT canticle which is traditionally used at Evening Prayer, so this would be a matter of course for those who pray some form of the Daily Office. And lastly, when we do sing the Magnificat, we should’t “de-gender” it; he suggests the Greek doule might be rendered “slave-woman” rather than “servant,” so as not to lose its identification with “the specific Jewish woman Mary, whom God’s election and promise have set in the midst of the church as the prototype of the church’s faith and prophecy — and therefore as the archsinger of the praise of God’s mercy in Christ” (p. 79).

Edward Schroeder of the Crossings Community reviews the book Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus by Stephen Patterson. Patterson’s argument seems to be the familiar one that the important thing about Jesus was not his death and resurrection, but his vision of a just society that challenged the hegemony of the Roman Empire (and, by implication, the currently regnant American “empire”). The resurrection appearances were “really” visions the disciples had of the enduring power and significance of the just society (the “Empire of God”) as preached by Jesus.

Schroeder persuasively argues that this view of the gospel is too is just too small:

[Patterson] doesn’t need a resurrected Jesus because his salvation agenda is so small. Therefore his gospel–Jesus as victim, martyr, sacrifice, but not risen–is so small. Way too small. So he can put Socrates and Jesus side-by-side, finally mirroring each other in dying for a new moral vision. But it’s all small potatoes alongside the real salvation agenda which is cosmic: sin, death, the law. … At the core Christians do not believe in a Christic vision. Instead, they trust a Christus victor. That’s what God’s empire in Christ is all about. That’s the salvation offer of the Christian Gospel. Apart from that salvation there IS no Christian ethic.

Even if it was possible to create a perfectly just and loving community in this life (I don’t think it is, but let’s suppose it for the sake of argument), guilt, suffering, disease, decay, anxiety, depression, fear, error, ignorance, natural disasters, pain, and death, the “last enemy,” would continue to exist. Christians limit the scope of the gospel when they put all the emphasis on justice. Certainly it’s desirable for Christians and others to work to create a more just world, but the Christian gospel encompasses much more than that.