An esteemed Anglican scholar and ecumenist passes. The obituary by Rowan Williams is here (via Derek).
For what it’s worth: I highly recommend his history of the early church and Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition. Highly readable works that wear their (ample) scholarship lightly.
Marvin has a review of Diana Butler Bass’ Christianity for the Rest of Us, which tries to identify characteristics of thriving mainline congreations (often believed to be a contradiction in terms).
Based on Marvin’s post, Bass confirms something that I’ve long thought: that you need to integrate both the “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions of religion to have a thriving church. Which isn’t really surprising when you think about it.
Austin Farrer was, among other things, a renowned Anglican theologian and a friend of C.S. Lewis. I’ve been reading his book Saving Belief – a kind of primer of sorts Christian theology originally delivered as a series of lectures to undergraduates. In his chapter on “Heaven and Hell” he has this to say about Christians who want to downplay or remain agnostic about the resurrection and the world to come:
Christ in glory is the heart of heaven, and it is difficult to see how those Christians who leave the life to come an open question can be Christians at all. If Christ is not now in glory, then this is a Christless world and God is a Christless God and we are Christless men. Those who say heaven is nothing to us now but an optional hope, may say the same of Christ; unless, that is, they have received a revelation not imparted to the rest of us, making heaven to be a place for one glorified man, and for no more. (p. 146)
I’ve always thought it odd when devotees of a religion founded on the resurrection of a dead man shove discussion of heaven off to one side. While some of the reasons for doing it might be laudable– to encourage a focus on creating a better world here and now, say–the end result is to drain Christianity of any lasting hope. After all, even if (per impossible) we succeeded in creating a perfectly just society, there would still be millions and millions of creatures who never lived to see it. Should people be deprived of the hope in heaven for the sake of a far off worldly utopia that may never arrive (and, even if it did, wouldn’t last)?
I’d like to register my protest at the now-widespread tendency to refer to the President as “the commander-in-chief” or worse “our commander-in-chief,” full stop. To my ear, the connotations are perilously close to those of the Roman title imperator and it makes the President sound like some kind of warrior-king.
As the Constitution makes clear, the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the rest of us haven’t been drafted yet.
I came across this during a Google search:
One of the primary tasks of any prayer is ‘How do I let God be God? How do I empty my mind and heart – not so as to confront a kind of void, but so that the personal presence of God can come in?’
If all prayer is trying to listen to God we have to remember that the God that we are seeking to meet is a person, and we come into a personal presence. And that means of course, that praying is about a great deal more than words in the same way that personal presence is about a great deal more than words. The Word of God – the way God communicates – is by being God, by being himself; so one of the primary tasks of any kind of prayer is ‘How do I let God be God?’ ‘How do I empty my mind and heart, not so as to confront a kind of void but so that the personal presence of God can come in? And words are part of that but only a very small part.
More here.
From James Alison’s Faith Beyond Resentment:
The whole of my previous life had been marked by an absolute refusal to die. The absolute refusal to take on my baptismal commitment. Of course, because I was unable to imagine that my ‘self’, the ‘I’ who will live for ever, is hidden with Christ in God. And that was why I had to fight all those battles. The ‘I’ who was present in all those battles was the old Adam, or Cain, a ‘self’ incapable of understanding that it is not necessary to seek to shore up for itself a place on this earth, to found a safe space, to protect itself violently against violence. (pp. 40-41)
Alison is reflecting specifically on his experience as a gay man and how he fought to find a place of acceptance within the institutional church. This struggle, however, created in him a zeal that “was of a prodigiously violent force, powered by a deep resentment”:
In my violent zeal I was fighting so that the ecclesiastical structure might speak to me a ‘Yes’, a ‘Flourish, son’, precisely because I feared that, should I stand alone before God, God himself would be part of the ‘do not be’. Thus I was absolutely dependent on the same mechanism against which I was fighting. (p. 39)
It was only, Alison says, when he began to see that God’s love was not to be identified with ecclesiastical violence that he could start to “die” to his resentment – to the old Adam – and move toward forgiveness and love. A dead man has nothing to fear since “the moment he dies, he’s completely free of that whole game of power and victimisation of which he was a part, no longer is he struggling with those powers: he doesn’t have to, for they have no dominion over him, they no longer affect him in any way at all” (p. 43).
I find this very profound and an excellent precis of the gospel – the notion that being inescapably loved by God frees us to die to ourselves and to love without fear. I’ve become increasingly convinced that being set free from fear is a crucially important part of the Christian message.
It’s also an insight that I see at the heart of the Lutheran-evangelical re-casting of the gospel message: because we are loved by God in a way that is absolutely unconditional upon what we do, we can learn to love without fear. If God sustains our being and bestows our worth, then we don’t need to struggle agonistically in this world to secure those things.
How far short we fall of this understanding is obvious in our personal, ecclesiastical, and political lives, it seems to me. After all, how much of what we do, of the violence we inflict on others, is rooted in fear for our own selves, their existence and their value? And how much of our politics – both “sacred” and “secular” – are driven by a fear and resentment of some “other”?
This is why I think that – as Luther would have it – we need to “drown” the old Adam daily through repentance, through remembrance of our baptism, and through meditation on God’s promises. Church leaders sometimes seem to want to move “beyond” the preaching of the gospel; they think that once we’ve “gotten” forgiveness we can move on to “discipleship” and morality – the really important stuff. But I think this misses the tight connectino between our discipleship and the unconditional love of God in which it’s rooted. If the Christian diagnosis of the human condition is correct, only when we know that our lives are securely “hid with Christ” can we begin to love without fear. And really learning that truth – in the sense of truly internalizing it – requires constant reminders.
A Thinking Reed 