A Thinking Reed

Category: Anglicanism

  • Disappearing act

    Apparently there was some controversy about the remains of John Henry Newman. The Catholic Church wanted to exhume the remains of the soon-to-be-sainted cardinal (and famous convert from Anglicanism) and display them for veneration. But Newman had explicitly requested burial next to his longtime friend Father Ambrose St John, which is further complicated by the fact that many people think that Newman was gay and that he and Fr. Ambrose were in love (though probably celibate).

    Whatever the truth, Cardinal Newman seems to have taken matters into his own hands by disappearing from the grave altogether!

  • Things I miss about being a (fellow traveling) Anglo-Catholic

    Marian feast days!

    We do have a small icon of the BVM and Christ child in the side chapel at our current (Lutheran) church, and our recent Vicar had a closet devotion to her, I suspect. (She agreed when I once mentioned my fondness for the doctrine of the Assumption.) But that’s about as far as things Marian go around there.

  • Lutherans to repeat Anglican follies?

    Oh great. Is the Lutheran World Federation about to go the way of the Anglican Communion?

    In my experience, Lutherans are less keen on centralized ecclesiology than (some) Anglicans, so maybe we can avoid an analogous meltdown and keep cooperating, like with the good work of Lutheran World Relief, under the loose confederation that seems to have served us well.

  • Dogma and prayer

    I think I mentioned a week or so ago that I’d been reading Anglican theologian Austin Farrer’s Saving Belief. Well, I just finished another work of his called Lord I Belive: Suggestions for Turning the Creed Into Prayer, and it’s another great read.

    Farrer argues that “prayer and dogma are inseparable” (p. 9). To be a Christian is not just to coolly consider the truths of the faith, but to incorporate them into one’s innermost self. And the best way to do this is to incorporate the dogmas of the church into one’s prayer. The creed, as a summary of Christian belief, is the ideal guide for this, because it gives us an image of God and his dealings with us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:

    Though God be in me, yet without the creed to guide me I should know neither how to call upon God, nor on what God to call. God may be the very sap of my growth and substance of my action; but the tree has grown so crooked and is so deformed and cankered in its parts, that I should be at a loss to distinguish the divine power among the misuses of the power given. Were I to worship God as the principle of my life, I should merely worship myself under another name, with all my good and evil. So I take refuge in that image of God which we have described as branded from outside upon the bark. Here is a token I can trust, for he branded it there himself; he branded it on the stock of man when he stretched out his hands and feet and shed his precious blood. The pattern of the brand was traced on me by those who gave the creed to me; God will deepen it and burn it into me, as I submit my thoughts to him in meditation. (p. 14)

    This strikes me as very Lutheran with its emphasis on the word that comes from outside ourselves, and in its emphasis on the importance of meditating on the creed. Luther, of course, commended this as one of the main parts of his Small Catechism.

    Farrer’s remaining chapters provide expositions/meditations of the various parts of the creed, each one culminating in a prayer. They show the mark of the same generous orthodoxy that characterized Saving Belief. Finally, there is a chapter on the Rosary called “The Heaven-Sent Aid,” where Farrer commends it as one of the best ways to meditate on the mysteries of our faith:

    If I had been asked two dozen years ago for an example of what Christ forbade when he said “Use not vain repetitions,” I should very likely have referred to the fingering of beads. But now if I wished to name a special sort of private devotion most likely to be of general profit, prayer on the beads is what I should name. Since my previous opinion was based on ignorance and my present opinion is based on experience, I am not ashamed of changing my mind. Christ did not, in fact, prohibit repitition in prayer, the translation is false; he prohibited gabbling, whether we repeat or whether we do not. Rosaries, like any other prayers, can be gabbled, and if they are gabbled, they will certainly not be profitable. Devout persons who take to the beads as a way of meditating are not likely to gabble, for their object is to meditate. (p. 80)

    Farrer’s book is a good illustration of what I was trying to get at in emphasizing the importance of dogma in yesterday’s post. The soul needs something concrete to feed on, and to lead it to God. Yes, if we’re honest, we’ll admit that our dogma and doctrine provide a blurred and incomplete picture of the divine nature. But we also trust that they’re reliable pointers that will lead us deeper into that inexhaustible Truth.

  • CofE RIP?

    Though I often think of myself as a closeted Episcopalian, I don’t usually comment on Anglican matters. But I thought this piece from the always-interesting Theo Hobson was worth pointing out. Hobson argues that, in trying to hold the Anglican Communion together come hell or high water, Rowan Williams has unwittingly doomed the Church of England.

    Obviously, I’m in sympathy with the “revisionists” here, but it’s worth pointing out that, at least as far as I can tell, the “conservatives” have been proposing a radical revision of their own in the understanding of the Anglican Communion itself. They’ve sought to change it from a loose confederation of autonomous national churches held together by “bonds of affection” into a much more centralized institution with quasi-universalist pretensions. That alone would be enough to get my localist/libertarian hackles up.

  • In defense of C.S. Lewis

    Via Catholic blogger Mark Shea I came across this article arguing that J.R.R. Tolkien’s lukewarm response to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series is rooted in something deeper than aesthetic preference. The author, Eric Seddon, contends that Tolkien’s intense dislike of Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm (which Tolkien called “a distressing and in parts horrifying work”) indicates deeper theological differences between the two men, which may account for Tolkien’s lack of enthusiasm for Narnia.

    I’m far from being of the “C.S. Lewis is infallible” school of thought, but I think Seddon levels some inaccurate and unfair criticisms against Lewis in the course of comparing Lewis’ and Tolkien’s theological views. The heart of Seddon’s argument is that Malcolm is, in several places, a thinly disguised anti-Catholic polemic and that this same theological vision lies at the heart of the Narnia books, which explains Tolkien’s evaluation of them.

    Seddon scores some points, I think, when he says that Malcolm‘s form as one side of a fictional correspondence allows Lewis to bring up his differences with Catholicism while appearing to be doing so only under pressure from his correspondent. Seddon correctly notes that this form can disguise the fact that it’s Lewis who decides which topics are brought up for discussion (since there is no Malcolm). So, for instance, when “Malcolm” criticizes Lewis’ views on devotion to saints Lewis is able to offer a criticism of the “Roman” view in the course of defending his own views on the matter.

    In this carefully balanced literary structure, which is a monologue cast as one side of a dialogue, we find Lewis’s most overtly Anglican work. It is filled with theological barbs–most of them aimed at Roman Catholicism. As such it provides us with the very clearest contrast between his and Tolkien’s beliefs. Reading the book from the Roman Catholic perspective of Tolkien, it is not difficult to glean what aspects of it might have distressed and even horrified him. When investigated, they shed light on Tolkien’s permanent rejection of Narnia[.]

    This is all fair enough, it seems to me. However, Seddon goes further in attributing to Lewis positions which, if one examines his entire corpus, are not faithful representations of his thoughts. I’ll identify just three of these, though there are more.

    “Subjectivism” vs. “Objectivism”

    Seddon admits that Lewis allows for the permissibility of devotion to the saints. Indeed Lewis writes that there “is clearly a theological defence for it; if you can ask for the prayers of the living, why should you not ask for the prayers of the dead?” (Malcolm, p. 15). He admits that this can lead to excesses and misunderstandings, but doesn’t reject it wholesale. He does say that he doesn’t intend to adopt the practice himself, but “who am I to judge the practices of others?” (ibid.)

    This strikes me as in keeping with the Anglican tradition on these matters. Seddon, however, takes this to be indicative of “Lewis’s subjectivism in spiritual matters, conflicting with Tolkien’s objectivism”:

    Thus Lewis, in a perfectly typical, Anglican manner, states that devotions to the saints are optional, depending upon the opinion of the individual–the final arbiter on the matter being a Protestant, relativistic conception of the Self. Tolkien would not have shared this belief, instead understanding such devotions to be an absolute good–the final arbiter on theological matters being not the Self alone, but the greater Christian community of the ages working in conjunction with personal consent–a typically Catholic understanding. The implications of this difference between them was perhaps more radical than either of them realized at the time of their closest friendship.

    I’m frankly a bit baffled by this passage because I find it very difficult to understand how someone who was familiar with Lewis’ work as a whole could possibly regard him as someone who believed that the “final arbiter on theological matters” is “the Self alone.” This is a straw-man version of Protestantism that one sometimes hears from Catholic apologists and, however much it might characterize some dessicated versions of liberal Protestantism, it’s hardly true of Protestantism more generally, or Lewis in particular. As he says in Mere Christianity:

    [T]he one really adequate instrument for learning about God, is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science–the laboratory outfit. That is why all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out to put all the real astronomers right. (Mere Christianity, p. 144)

    The dichotomy between subjective, relativistic Protestantism and objective, tradition-bound Catholicism simply doesn’t hold water. I’m no expert on Catholic theology, but I’m not even sure that devotion to the saints is regarded as mandatory for Catholics. There is inevitably an element of personal preference in the selection of a devotional practice, with various devotions being perhaps suited to different temperaments, but this in no way implies a generalized subjectivism about theological truth.

    Transubstantiation and the Eucharist

    Another Catholic “hot-button” that Seddon accuses Lewis of pushing is the doctrine of transubstantiation. He quotes Lewis as saying that

    I find “substance” (in Aristotle’s sense), when stripped of its own accidents and endowed with the accidents of some other substance, an object I cannot think. My efforts to do so produces mere nursery-thinking […]. (Malcolm 102)

    “For Tolkien,” Seddon writes, “the condescension would have been palpable.” Seddon sees Lewis here as leveling an accusation of childishness at the Catholic doctrine, something Tolkien would’ve regarded as a slap in the face. But I think the passage as a whole gives a very different picture of what Lewis is up to.

    What Lewis is discussing here is his inability to accept a “theory” of the Eucharist, whether it’s the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation or the “memorialist” views associated with some Protestant churches:

    Some people seem able to discuss different theories of this act as if they understood them all and needed only evidence as to which was best. This light has been withheld from me. I do not know and can’t imagine what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood. I can find within the forms of my human understanding no connection between eating a man–and it is as Man that the Lord has flesh–and entering into any kind of spiritual oneness or community or koinonia with him. And I find “substance” (in Aristotle’s sense), when stripped of its own accidents and endowed with the accidents of some other substance, an object I cannot think. My effort to do so produces mere nursery-thinking–a picture of something like very rarefied plasticine. On the other hand, I get on no better with those who tell me that the elements are mere bread and mere wine, used symbolically to remind me of the death of Christ. They are, on the natural level, such a very odd symbol of that. But it would be profane to suppose that they are as arbitrary as they seem to me. I well believe there is in reality an appropriateness, even a necessity, in their selection. But it remains, for me, hidden. Again, if they are, if the whole act is, simply memorial, it would seem to follow that its value must be purely psychological, and dependent on the recipient’s sensibility at the moment of reception. And I cannot see why this particular reminder–a hundred other things may, psychologically, remind me of Christ’s death, equally, or perhaps more–should be so uniquely important as all Christendom (and my own heart) unhesitatingly declare. (Malcolm, 102)

    Seddon reads this as little more than anti-Catholic polemic, but on a more charitable reading it seems clear that Lewis is grappling with the same issue that the magisterial Protestants grappled with: finding a middle way between transubstantiation and sheerly subjective or memorialist views of the Eucharist. Luther and Calvin both had “high” views of the Eucharist, even though they rejected the Catholic doctrine as it was formulated in their time. Lewis himself writes that the Eucharist (along with baptism) is the very means by which the new life of Christ is transmitted to us (see, e.g. the discussion in Mere Christianity) and that the Blessed Sacrament is the most holy object ever presented to our senses in this life (in the Weight of Glory). Nowhere that I’m aware of does he deny the Real Presence and he is probably best characterized as a High Church Anglican in his view of the sacraments.

    “Gnosticism”

    Finally, I want to address the accusation that Lewis is a kind of “crypto-gnostic,” a criticism not unique to Seddon. Seddon thinks that Lewis’ views on matter and on the nature of the resurrection body are “impossible to reconcile to Catholic theology and doctrine […] while hinting at (or hedging closer to) the Gnostic and Manichaean notion of matter as evil.” In order to adjudicate this claim it’s necessary to get clear on exactly what Lewis is claiming and where this might collide with Catholic doctrine (or orthodox Christian belief more generally).

    Seddon cites a passage near the end of Malcolm where Lewis speculates a bit about the nature of the resurrection body:

    About the resurrection of the body. I agree with you that the old picture of the soul re-assuming the corpse–perhaps blown to bits or long since usefully dissipated through nature–is absurd. Nor is is what St. Paul’s words imply. And I admit that if you ask me what I substitute for this, I have only speculations to offer.

    The principle behind these speculations is this. We are not, in this doctrine, concerned with matter as such at all; with waves and atoms and all that. What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations.

    Now we already have some feeble and intermittent power of raising dead sensations from their graves. I mean, of course, memory.

    You see the way my thought is moving. But don’t run away with the idea that when I speak of the resurrection of the body I mean merely that the blessed dead will have excellent memories of their sensuous experience on earth. I mean it the other way round: that memory as we now know it is a dim foretaste, a mirage even, of a power which the soul, or rather Christ in the soul (He went to “prepare a place” for us), will exercise hereafter. It need no longer be intermittent. Above all, it need no longer be private to the soul in which it occurs. I can now communicate to you the fields of my boyhood–they are building-estates today–only imperfectly, by words. Perhaps the day is coming when I can take you for a walk through them.

    At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow “inside” the body. But the glorified body of the resurrection as I conceive it–the sensuous life raised from its death–will be inside the soul. As God is not in space but space is in God. (Malcolm, pp. 121-122)

    According to Seddon, Lewis’ view conflicts with orthodox Catholic theology (and Seddon tends to use “orthodox” and “Catholic” nearly interchangeably) at two points. Catholic theology teaches, he says, that the resurrected dead will rise with the very same bodies they had on earth, and Catholic theology affirms the inherent goodness of matter, whereas, for Lewis, matter’s goodness is “ultimately contingent upon its potential for being transformed into something non-material.”

    Thus Lewis’s theology is something of a semi-Gnosticism; perhaps containing some hidden reservations about the goodness of the body, or even the material universe. Tolkien would undoubtedly have recognized this as incompatible with his own understanding and that of the Catholic Church: “[Man] is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God created it and will raise it up on the last day” (Catechism 93). (Note that Catholic theology stresses the goodness of the body in relation to God’s having created it–not as contingent upon what the body will become after death.)

    Again, I have to protest that this is hardly a fair characterization of Lewis’ views taken as a whole. “God likes matter,” Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, “He invented it.” Lewis, as is well known, had a keen appreciation for the earthy pleasures of the material world and held the material creation in high esteem. Indeed, theism, Lewis thought, was the guardian of a proper reverence for nature:

    [O]nly Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, and then you will see…this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch. But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The “vanity” to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence. She will be cured, but cured in character: not tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilised. We shall still be able to recognise our old enemy, friend, play-fellow and foster-mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting. (Miracles, pp. 66-67)

    This strikes me as a perfectly orthodox position: nature is good, but fallen. And nature will, along with us, be redeemed in ways beyond our imagining.

    Which brings us to the question about the resurrection of the body. Lewis rejects the position, which Seddon attributes to Catholicism, that we will rise after death with the very same body that we had on earth. The problem with this view is that it’s difficult to specify what “same” is supposed to mean exactly. It can’t, for the reasons Lewis mentions, mean that the resurrection body will be composed of the same physical particles as the earthly body. For starters, none of us, we’re told, posses any of the same physical particles that we had as children: our bodies are more like flowing streams than blocks of marble. Furthermore, the particles that currently constitute my body have previously been parts, no doubt, of countless other physical objects.

    So, it’s far from clear what it would mean to say that we rise with the same body. What some contemporary theologians have suggested instead is that we will have new bodies which are fitted to the new environment that we will inhabit in the resurrection life, while enjoying a suitable continuity with our earthly bodies. And, as Lewis suggests, these bodies will act as vehicles for perfect expression of the soul and communication between the redeemed in heaven.

    There is some (in my view) needless opposition between the idea that are destination is “heaven” and the idea that God will create “a new heaven and earth.” Whichever image you favor, everyone agrees that the resurrection world will be one which is different from the present world in dramatic ways. Death, pain, suffering, sin, predation, and decay will not be present, which suggests a world which is transformed in ways we can scarcely imagine.

    Seddon criticizes Lewis for holding that the value of matter is “entirely dependant upon its ultimately becoming something else,” but this is misplaced. To say that the physical world (including our bodies) will be transformed in the course of being redeemed is not to deny that they lack present value. In fact, it’s simply the traditional Christian position that the present world is destined to be transformed in the process of being released from its bondage to sin and death. Lewis’ (admittedly speculative) account of what the resurrection life might consist in may be off-base, but it’s neither “gnostic” nor heretical as far as I can tell.

    “Gnosticism” has become a kind of catch-all epithet to hurl at any theology that is the least bit “otherworldly.” But Christianity is otherworldly in many ways: it contains a holy impatience with the world as it is and longs for a radically transformed state of things. Lewis was certainly a sort of Christian Platonist, but, depending on how you define “Platonism,” it is an integral part of historic Christianity.

    All of this is not to dispute that there may be something to Seddon’s historical argument that Tolkien’s dislike of the Narnia series is attributable to some theological differences. But Seddon tries to hard to create a dichotomy between a “subjectivist,” “anti-materialist,” “heterodox,” “semi-gnostic” Protestant Lewis and an “objectivist,” “sacramental,” “orthodox” Catholic Tolkien. This dichotomy is unsustainable in my view. Whatever theological differences the two men may have had, Lewis’ thought is essentially that of a traditional orthodox Anglican Protestant Christian.

  • More on +Rowan’s lecture

    Via Fr. Chris, an in-depth analysis and defense of the now-infamous Rowan Williams “sharia lecture” by Mike Higton, a theologian and scholar of Williams’ work. As Higton says in his brief summary:

    Despite everything you’ve heard and read, the most striking thing about Rowan Williams’ lecture is that he mounts a serious and impassioned defence of ‘Enlightenment values’.

    Fr. Chris also makes the following point that’s well worth considering:

    It is always interesting — frustrating, too — to observe how Muslims are criticized illegitimately for doing things that Christians seem to be called to in some ways as well. 1 Cor 6 seems to suggest that we Christians should also avoid bringing our legal disputes into the secular realm, solving them within the Church wherever possible. The Muslim system goes further than this, so the situations are not identical. But on the face of it, I don’t see the desire to adjudicate some claims within one’s faith community — especially where there are safeguards so no one is coerced to give up their basic human rights, an important caveat in Williams’ proposal — is illegitimate.

    P.S. See also Ross Douthat and Alan Jacobs for somewhat more critical, but still intelligent takes.

  • Items of interest from the JLE

    From this month’s Journal of Lutheran Ethics:

    First, an article on the neglect of spiritual practices in the ELCA and how, if the church doesn’t offer pathways to intimacy with God, people will seek them elsewhere. I can definitely sympathize with this. As someone who (re)turned to Christian faith as a young(ish) adult I was expecting to be drilled in spiritual practices and other ways of deepening my faith. Alas, most of the ELCA congregations I’ve been associated with have scarcely mentioned, much less inculcated, intentional pracitces of prayer, fasting, spiritual reading and so on.

    That’s one of the reasons I’ll always be grateful for my year attending the Church of the Advent, an Anglo-Catholic parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. I was exposed to a very sacramental form of worship, the daily office, the rosary, and other spiritual practices that I’ve gotten a lot of nourishment from. Maybe as part of our full communion agreement with the Episcopal Church Lutherans will learn to be freer with borrowing form our Episcopal brothers and sisters, who seem to have preserved more of our shared heritage in this area from the undivided Western church.

    Second, a response from the former chaplain of Gustavus Adolphus College to Carl Braaten’s article from a couple of months ago (which I blogged on at some length here). This piece seeks to go beyond natural law and understand marriage, not as something that exists for purposes extrinsic to itself, but as a community that exists for its own sake as a union of two selves. I’m not sure I’d go all the way with this: doesn’t marriage, in Christian perspective, exist at least in part for the upbuilding of the community? But this in no way excludes same-sex couples, who manifestly do contribute to the upbuilding of communities of which they’re a part. If Christian marriage is partly a “school of sanctification,” then it seems to me that a Christian marriage should have an inherently “ecstatic” direction – the partners should be drawn out of themselves and give life to others. And this can have a variety of manifestations, including (but not limited to) the begetting and rearing of children.

  • Paul Zahl’s theology of grace

    Another newish book that I picked up almost on a whim is Paul Zahl’s Grace In Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life. Zahl was until recently dean of Trinity Episcopal Seminary, is a determined low-church evangelical and vocal opponent of revisionist moves on same-sex relationships. Despite some disagreement there, I’d read his Short Systematic Theology (and he means short – it’s less that 100 pages) and was intrigued enough to want to read more.

    I’d describe Zahl as a kind of Episcopal version of Gerhard Forde. He is proudly “long on grace and short on law.” This book is an expostion of Zahl’s theology and its application to daily living that is rigorously grace-centered. He defines grace simply as “one-way love,” the love of God for human beings who have done nothing to deserve it.

    Zahl unabashedly embraces the Law-Gospel hermenuetic in his approach to scripture. The law is the perfect picture of what human life should be, but it is unable to produce the obedience it demands. If anything, its demands incite rebellion. Consequently, the law takes the form of accusation: an accusation we experience in all the pressures and stresses of life as demands press down upon us:

    What the law requires is exactly what men and women need in order to be wise, happy, and secure. But the law cannot pull this off. The problem with the law is not its substance. The problem with the law is its instrumentality. The law is not up to the task it sets for itself. If the law says, “Jump,” I sit. If it says, “Run,” I walk. If it says, “Honor your father and mother,” I move…to Portland. If it say, “Do not covet” (Romans 7:7-8), I spend all day on the Home Shopping Channel. (p. 35)

    Only grace, God’s one-way love, can get us out of this jam. God’s unilateral forgiveness takes away our guilt and anxiety about not being able to measure up. And, as a bonus, grace produces the “fruits” of love that the law couldn’t. “The one-way love of grace is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience” (p. 36).

    One of the interesting things Zahl does is attempt to rehabilitate the theory of substitutionary atonement in a way that speaks a graceful word rather than a judgmental one. He has, he says repeatedly, a very low anthropology and a very high soteriology. Human beings are bound, curved in on ourselves, and unable to do anything to release the load of guilt and judgment from our shoulders. Only Jesus’ substitutionary death on the cross releases us from this curse:

    The atonement of Christ on the cross is the mechanism by which God’s grace can be offered freely and without condition to strugglers in the battle of life. Grace is not offered by God as a fiat. We all wish that the innocent had not had to die for the guilty. We wish that a different road, a road less traveled in scars, had been taken. But we have been told that this was the necessary way by which God’s law and God’s grace would be resolved. It had to be resolved through a guilt-transfer, making it “possible” — the idea is almost beyond maintaining — for God to give the full scholarship to the candidate least qualified to receive it. (pp. 117-18)

    Not eveyone will be convinced by Zahl’s defense of penal substitution (I’m not sure I was), but it does preserve something that I think other atonement theories often miss. Too often, especially in liberal theology, the atonement is reduced to an example, or a way of life, which deprives it of its once-for-all efficacy that lifts the burden of guilt off the shoulders of poor sinners. Zahl’s surprisingly convincing defense of the un-free will and total depravity are the counterpoint to the all-sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. If the cross of Christ is just one more demand (“Live a life of radical justice and self-sacrifice!”), then it does nothing to free me from my sins and self-will.

    The more original part of Zahl’s book may be his application of the idea of grace to relationships, in family, society and church. One-way love, not law and its threats and demands is the natural “fruit” of our justification. The image of fruits is particularly important in understanding the dynamic here. You don’t get a plant to produce fruit by pulling on its branches. You have to nourish its roots, in this case with the living water of grace.

    In families the theology of grace takes the form of loving acceptance, not heaping demands on each other. Zahl applies this to relationships between spouses, between parents and children, and between siblings. He argues that many of the troubles that plague family life, from resentment, to control, to competition, are outgrowths of a legalistic approach to life together. Paradoxically, he says, the relativization of the nuclear family by Jesus actually constitutes its salvation:

    The end of the absolute claim of the nuclear family, for which grace strictly calls, emancipates the nuclear family from the very nerve of neurosis, which is the projection upon human beings of what belongs only to God. The grace of God releases the possibility of non-demanding love among men and women who are united by human blood. This is the salvation of the famous nuclear family. (p. 186)

    Zahl applies his theology of grace in particularly striking ways to social ethics. Zahl, a student of both Moltmann and Kasemann, jettisons the “two kingdom” ethics identified with traditional Lutheranism and comes to some surprising conclusions for someone identified with the “conservative” wing of Anglicanism:

    “What is grace in relation to war and peace? It is to support no war ever under any conceivable circumstances, and it is peace in all things, the passive peace of Christ-like nonreactivity, bound ot the never-passive operation of the Holy Spirit” (p. 203).

    “Total mercy, complete exoneration, and unconditional release: those are the marks of grace in relation to criminal justice” (p. 211).

    “A theology of grace invites a non-romanticized preferential option for the poor. The picture of this is probably soemthing like a moderate, non-ideological, and non-utopian form of socialism” (p. 217).

    “Just as this theology opposes the use of war in every case, it opposes the construction of malls in every case. One can imagine the construction of a “mall” that buys and sells in a normal and necessary way. One can imagine instances of a market that buys and sells, provides, and distributes. But the mall as we now know it is the “green tree” under which the firstborn of the Canaanites were sacrificed” (p. 222)

    Finally, Zahl addresses grace in church. Here he’s at his most provocative, openly avowing a “low” or even non-existent ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is trouble, both because it is secondary to other more important topics, “such as the saving inherent in the Christian drama” (p. 226) and because it actually does harm to the extent that it “places the human church in some kind of special zone — somehow distinct from real life — that appears to be worthy of special study and attention. The underlying idea is that the church is in a zone that is free, or at least more free, from original sin and total depravity than the rest of the world, but the facts prove otherwise” (p. 226).

    To say we have no ecclesiology is not just a negation. To have no ecclesiology is to have an ecclesiology. What sort of ecclesiology is this? It is a noble one. It puts first things first. It puts Christ over the human church. It puts what Christ taught and said over the church. It puts grace over the church. It puts Christ’s saving work and the acute drama of the human predicament over the church. It puts the human hope of change over the church. It places the Holy Spirit over the church. (p. 227).

    The besetting temptation of the church is to elevate itself as an institution to a place of special prestige or power. In the impressiveness of its historical claims, or the purity of its doctrine, or the beauty of its liturgy it can become deceived into thinking that it’s an end in itself and has its foundation in itself. According to Zahl the church is properly seen as “a pneumatic, Spirit-led movement, always, like mercury in motion. Church is flux. A systematic theology of grace puts church in its right place. Church is at best the caboose to grace. It is its tail. Ecclesiology, on the other hand, makes church into the engine” (p. 228).

    Zahl calls this an “eccleisiology of suspicion,” which denies that there can be any “original sin-free zones” in this world. Those who put their faith in the church rather than God are bound to be bitterly disappointed. “A theology of grace, with its ecclesiology of suspicion, is the tonic and antidote to the church behaving badly” (p. 231). In a time when the church has been behaving badly (on all sides at different points), this strikes me as something that needs to be heard.

    Another noteworthy aspect of this book is that Zahl writes clearly and simply, with an almost whimsical tone. His text is littered with pop cultural references to old sci-fie movies, popular music, and even the plays of Tyler Perry, as well as examples drawn from everyday life. One is forced to wonder why more theologians can’t write like this.

    Despite some disagreements here and there, my overwhelming impression of this book was that Zahl is preaching a theology of grace that is desperately needed in the church and the world. This thirst for grace may be indicated by the fact that the book carries glowing blurbs from Peter J. Gomes of Harvard University and J. Ligon Duncan of the conservative Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Liberals and conservatives have both embraced different forms of “political correctness” — whether that means fealty to the Millenium Development Goals or opposition to gay marriage and abortion — which threaten to overshadow the gospel of God’s forgiving grace. But Zahl argues persuasively that this the only meaningful possibility for genuine human transformation.

  • Infallible?

    Good post and discussion at Derek’s on “ecclessial infallibility.” I’ve long had the suspicion that infallibility, whether papal, ecclesial, or scriptural, really doesn’t do any work. But I’ve been unable to articulate this to my own satisfaction. Maybe a future post.