A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Macquarrie on Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament

    I returned from Florida yesterday afternoon to find some actual decent weather here in DC. I mean, it’s hot, but not stiflingly, oppressively humid like it has been. And Capitol Hill is noticeably quiet with the congressional recess.

    Having missed Mass yesterday morning we went to last night’s Evensong and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament service at St. Paul’s, the parish we’ve been attending.

    Evensong was lovely, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Benediction service as I’d never been to one before. Though few things could be more calculated to offend one’s Protestant sensibilities, I found it to be very moving: it was a quiet, reflective service of thanksgiving, meditation, and adoration.

    For those not familiar with this type of service (as I wasn’t until last night), it consists of kneeling in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance while singing hymns (in this case two beautiful hymns by Thomas Aquinas traditionally used for Benediction and Corpus Christi) between which there was a brief meditation by the priest; then the priest blesses the congregation with the Sacrament, making the sign of the cross over them with the monstrance; finally, the congregation responds in prayer using a version of the Divine Praises and the singing of Psalm 117 with an appropriate antiphon.

    By the door there was a helpful pamphlet written by none other than the late John Macquarrie, explaining the meaning and value of the Benediction service. Macquarrie breaks it into three essential parts: contemplation, the blessing, and thanksgiving/adoration. He calls it an “amazingly simple and beautifully proportioned act of worship, and although it is very brief, it has a wonderful completeness.” I have to agree with that judgment.

    Macquarrie writes:

    God does not leave us with just some vague general knowledge of himself. It is true that St. Thomas believed that there is a “natural theology” and that every thinking man can form some idea of God. But beyond this, we believe also in God’s “revelation” by which he has extended and purified our knowledge of him. We may think of revelation as meaning that at particular times and places and in particular events and persons, God, as it were, has focused his presence and has caused to shine brightly and clearly before us that knowledge of himself which otherwise we can only dimly grasp. The great events in Israel’s history were “revelations” of this kind. Above all, Jesus Christ was “the true light that lightens every man” (John 1:9), the great focus of God’s presence and acting in history. But Christ in turn appointed the bread and wine of the Eucharist to be the focus in which generations to come would find anew his presence. Anglican theologians have wisely avoided trying to give too precise a formulation of Christ’s “real presence” in the Eucharist, but they have consistently affirmed it and it is, of course, implicit in our liturgy. It is in terms of this focusing of our Lord’s presence that the service of Benediction is to be understood — and also justified, if anyone thinks it needs justifying. Psychologically speaking, we need some concrete, visible manifestation toward which to direct our devotion; theologically speaking, this is already provided for us by our Lord’s gracious focusing of his presence in the Blessed Scarament.

    When this is understood, complaints about “idolatry” or “fetichism” are seen to be beside the point. Let us assure any who may be perturbed over such matters that we are not being so stupid as to worship a wafer, nor do we have such an archaic and myth-laden mentality that we believe the object before us to be charged with magical power. Rather, it is in and through the Sacrament that we adore Christ, because we, being men and not angels, have need of an earthly manifestation of the divine presence, and because he, in his grace and mercy, has promised to grant us his presence in this particular manifestation.

  • Only a suffering God can help(?)

    In an earlier post I mentioned that Keith Ward, unlike many contemporary theologians, has a generally positive view of the influence of Greek philosophy and thought-forms on the development of Christian theology. In his view Hellenistic thought allowed the early Christian theologians to deepen their understanding of Jesus as not only the Son of God but the cosmic Word who holds all things together.

    However, in agreement with many contemporary theologians, Ward thinks that the influence of certain forms of Platonism resulted in a mistaken affirmation of the impassibility of God:

    One of the chief influences of Platonism was that God, the Supreme Good, was generally conceived as immutable and impassible. Being perfect, God could not change, and divine perfection could not be affected by the sufferings and imperfections of the world. This creates major difficulties for any doctrine of incarnation, and especially for a doctrine that holds the eternal Word to be the only true subject of Jesus’ acts and experiences. (Re-Thinking Christianity, p. 69)

    How, Ward asks, can we conceive of a genuine union between a being that is unchangeable and a changeable and changing human being? Moreover, is this view of divine impassibility and immutability “adequate to belief in an incarnate and suffering God”?

    Nicea and Chalcedon produced statements about the person of Christ that most (not all) subsequent Christians have found ot define the limits of an adequate idea of the incarnation of God in Jesus. But many more recent theologians have thought that the Platonic idea of a totally changeless God is not really adequate to the Christian perception of a God who becomes incarnate and who suffers for the sake of humanity. A process of further re-thinking about God is positively mandated by the puzzles the ecumenical councils leave unresolved. (p. 70)

    Ward seems here to be taking sides in the debate over divine impassibility. Many recent theologians of a variety of perspectives and confessions have been willing to throw divine impassibility overboard, to the point where in an article from back in 1986 Ronald Goetz writing in the Christian Century was able to call the idea of a suffering God “the new orthodoxy.”

    Apart from the question of making sense of the union of the divine and human natures in Jesus, much of the value of the idea of a God who suffers has been taken to reside in its effects on the problem of evil and the doctrine of the Atonement. It’s been suggested that theodicy requires God to be the “fellow-sufferer who understands” (in A.N. Whitehead’s phrase), a perspective frequently emphasized by process theologians.

    Regarding the cross, instead of being the place where satisfaction is made, or Jesus is punished in our stead, it’s taken to reveal the solidarity of God with all who suffer. The atonement becomes more of a response to human pain than to human sin, and God is revealed supremely as a God of compassion (“suffering-with”).

    Now, I think this may be good as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it goes far enough. Leaving aside whether or not we can meaningfully speak of God suffering in the divine nature (and I’m not sure we can), it’s not clear to me that the value of a suffering God, morally and religiously, is as great as some have claimed.

    There’s no doubt that sharing in someone else’s suffering can have value, but I think one should be careful about ascribing too much value to suffering as such. Ironically, this is what critics of more traditional atonement theories often argue: that they valorize suffering and are complicit in oppression. But whatever else we might say about those traditional models, suffering is usually seen as instrumentally, not intrinsically, valuable. The sufferings of Christ are praiseworthy because they make possible forgiveness and liberation from sin.

    I worry that to focus too much on the suffering of God can actually exacerbate rather than ameliorate the problem of evil. Is it really better if God is trapped in the web of suffering too? Doesn’t that actually just make things worse? Some process theologians compound the problem by denying the actuality of personal immortality, thus rendering God impotent to redeem suffering, except insofar as it is somehow incorporated into the divine being as a necessary part of realizing certain values.

    In other words, even if we want to affirm that God shares our suffering, the Christian hope has traditionally been one of victory over and liberation from suffering. Again, just as traditional atonement theories are criticized for focusing on the death of Christ to the exclusion of his earthly ministry on the one hand and his resurrection and ascension on the other, the “suffering God” motif can become excessively cross-centered while downplaying the victory over death and suffering that Jesus won and has promised to share with us.

    To his credit Ward doesn’t really do this. He sees the suffering of God as the price that had to be paid to unite humanity to divinity, to take the life of a human being irrevocably into the Godhead, which in turn makes possible our participation in the life of God.

    Recent theology has, probably rightly, been wary of “triumphalism,” but Jesus’ triumph over sin and death is the cornerstone of Christian faith. Certainly God identifies with the victims of injustice, violence, and sin, but he does so in order to lift them to new life.

    Christianity, it seems to me, is ambiguous about power: Jesus relinquishes all earthly power to the point where he becomes a passive object, beaten, tortured, spat upon and finally crucified. But the power of the divine life is such that the bonds of death are unable to contain it. God triumphs over the powers of evil, and ultimately this victory will be consummated when the entire creation is freed from bondage and reconciled with God. So suffering and victimization are just one part of the story, however important. The ultimate promise isn’t simply that God shares our tears but that he will wipe them away:

    Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
    “See, the home of God is among mortals.
    He will dwell with them;
    they will be his peoples,
    and God himself will be with them
    he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
    Death will be no more;
    mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
    for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4)

    Connecting this back to the work of Christ, it seems to me that suffering with us is at best part of the story. Christ comes to be God with us (Emmanuel) in order to share our condition, but also to transform it. He comes to be in the place of sin and suffering with us, but in doing so he changes the character of that “place.” Not in the sense that we no longer have to suffer or die, but that the character of that suffering, and of our own deaths, is changed. This might be expressed in the Eastern idea of theosis – that God became human so that humans could participate in the divine life.

    In his book Jesus Our Redeemer, the Australian Jesuit Gerald O’Collins writes:

    Simply by itself the suffering which Jesus endured out of love did not bring about redemption. To be sure, many people have found comfort through seeing the crucified Jesus as their fellow-sufferer. He did not suffer on the cross alone but between two others who underwent the same death by slow torture (all four Gospels) and with his mother standing near to him (the Gospel of John). That scene has been applied and appreciated down through the centuries. Like many other soldiers who fought in France and Belgium during the First World War, my own father found himself in a terrain of wayside shrines, representations of Christ on the cross with the Virgin Mary keeping lonely vigil at the feet of her crucified Son. Often scarred and badly damaged by shells and bullets, those shrines gave soldiers on both sides the feeling of Jesus as their brother in the terrible pain and suffering they faced. Jesus had drawn close to them and they knew his presence in their terrifying situation. (p. 192)

    However, O’Collins goes on to emphasize that it is the divine love, not suffering as such, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that has value and the power to redeem us. The love poured out through these events has the power to heal us and unite us to the divine life. The divine self-manifestation is itself redemptive, even though in a fallen world it necessarily has a cruciform shape.

    One way of understanding this is suggested by Paul’s dictum that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In Jesus God has entered into the human experience so thoroughly with his forgiving, healing love that there is no “place” we can occupy where God’s love is absent. Not the place of suffering, of guilt, or of death. Hans ur von Balthasar, as is well known, daringly suggested that this extended to the depths of Hell itself. God’s love in Jesus permeates everything such that we can’t separate ourselves from it by anything we do or suffer.

  • Sex, marriage, and false dichotomies

    Marvin has a terrific post on same-sex marriage in the church, pointing out the silliness of some of the slippery slope arguments (Next it’ll be group marriages! Marriage to animals!) made against churches blessing these relationships. Far from being part of some hedonistic collapse in moral standards, the movement for recognition of gay relationships is in many ways a conservative one, with same sex couples seeking to reap the benefits of stable, committed, monogomous relationships.

    I don’t post on this much, because it’s amply covered elsewhere, but one of the reasons I support same-sex marriage (as well as civil marriage or unions or whatever they end up being called) is because I’m conservative about sex. Eros is a powerful and dangerous force, one that is best channeled into a stable, faithful relationship that is enabled to contribute to the well-being of the surrounding community. Both Paul and Luther seem admirably pragmatic about marriage, seeing it as a way of taming our sinful impulses. And Jesus says that it is a penultimate institution, intended for this world, but not the world to come. To me this suggests a certain flexibility in approaching marriage: it’s intended to contribute to human flourishing here and now, not necessarily to mirror some eternal archetype. I’d add, of course, that it can be a kind of school of virtue where we learn to love by committing ourselves to loving one particular other person (a bit more on that here).

    Maybe I’m unusual, but I had no objections same-sex relationships before I became a practicing, adult Christian, so I didn’t really go through some process of “overcoming” ingrained objections to them. I was raised in a conservative small town, but pretty much as soon as I came into contact with gay people I couldn’t discern any reason to object to two people of the same sex being in a romantic relationship. Maybe it was partly due to the fact that I was routinely accused of being a “fag” by other kids in school (it seemed to be a generalized term of abuse for bookish, awkward, or otherwise anomolous kids, which is not to trivialize the torment that actual gay kids often undergo, mind you), but I found myself rather instinctively sympathizing with gay classmates.

    As someone who leans to the traditional side in matters theological I’ve tried to understand and sympathize with the traditionalist position here, but, in my judgment, the biblical evidence is too ambiguous (a useful overview here) and the arguments from natural law, etc. too unconvincing to sustain that position in the face of my experience of gay folks (and I would now add gay Christians). And I’d add that the fact that this has become a “debate” over an “issue” that often takes place at a very abstract level far removed from people’s actual lives and relationships seems to me to be quite wrongheaded.

    So, in the church I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing with the “liberals” about this but not about certain theological matters, while being out of sync with a the “conservatives” on what for many has become the sin qua non of faithfulness. However, I do think that a lot of people “on the ground,” especially younger ones, are less likely to line up in quite the way that the most vocal people on both sides would have it. So I’m hopeful that there’s a possibility of a “third way” that isn’t just in the mushy middle but rejects what I think are the false choices being presented to us.

  • A 21st century latitudinarianism

    I’m traveling for work, currently staying at a resort in Florida for a company meeting. There’s a reason people don’t vacation in Florida in August it turns out. Though it may actually be more pleasant here than it was in DC when I left…

    Anyhoo, my flight was delayed for three hours, which gave me time to make it through a big chunk of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity. This has been billed as a sequel of sorts to Pascal’s Fire, and the themes will be familiar to anyone who’s read much of Ward’s other work.

    Ward is an anomaly in some ways. He’s liberal in certain respects, wanting to subject Christianity to critical scrutiny (the book jacket has blurbs from Hans Kung and John Shelby Spong), but he’s also a staunch defender of theological realism and natural theology against the attacks both of its atheistic despisers like Richard Dawkins and non-realist religious thinkers like Don Cupitt. Ward also affirms the Resurrection, the possibility of miracles, and the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity, though sometimes in ways that might make those of a more traditionalist bent somewhat uneasy.

    The main thrust of Re-Thinking Christianity is to argue for a more pluralist and generous Christian theology in part by appealing to the history of, well, rethinking Christian beliefs. This process of rethinking, Ward argues, didn’t begin with the modern period, or the Enlightenment, or the Reformation, but goes back to the very beginning of Christianity. If a certain theological revisionism is part of the warp and woof of Christian theology, then further development can’t be ruled out a priori.

    Ward contends that this process is discernible in the New Testament itself, where we see a variety of theological perspectives existing side-by-side and can trace some evidence of development. For instance, it seems that at least some early Christians expected an imminent parousia followed by the restoration of Israel with Jesus and the Apostles ruling an earthly kingdom. In time this Jewish messianic gospel came to be eclipsed by John’s logos theology and Paul’s drama of death-and-resurrection. Even Paul himself seems to have moved from an early belief that the Lord would return soon to a longer time horizon for his eschatology.

    Ward’s aim isn’t to debunk later developments by pointing out their divergence from some early pristine Jewish gospel. Quite the opposite in some ways. He sees the process of re-thinking as drawing out the implications of the Christian response to God as disclosed in Jesus when this conviction is set in different contexts.

    Unlike some 19th and 20th century liberal theologians (and some more recent neo-orthodox ones), Ward isn’t interested in purging the “simple message of Jesus” from alleged Hellenistic accretions. In his discussion of the early centuries of the Church during which the great ecumenical creeds were hammered out he affirms the value of using the tools and concepts of Greek philosophy to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the universal divine wisdom, as the logos theology of some of the early Fathers did. This was both a salutary response to the intellectual and cultural context in which they found themselves and a creative use of ideas that would’ve been foreign to Jesus and the Apostles to deepen their apprehension of the divine mystery.

    Ward also points out that recognizing the process of rethinking that has gone on over the centuries makes it more difficult to ascribe a sacrosanct status to particular expressions of the faith. For instance, medieval conceptualizations of the Atonement or purgatory can rightly be seen as innovations that have to be judged on their merits rather than simply accepted as “the traditional view.” Old innovations aren’t necessarily more correct than more recent ones.

    The Reformation, Ward thinks, elevated the principles of pluralism and re-thinking even if in some cases it was against the intentions of the Reformers themselves. Replacing the Pope with the Bible as the supreme religious authority may not in theory demand a proliferation of interpretations of the Christian faith, but this is what happened as a consequence of the inability of all parties to agree on the correct interpretation of the Bible. But rather than lament this fact, he sees it as a step toward recognizing that the things of God will always yield divergent interpretations and thinks that Christians should accept this as a fact of life rather than insisting on the absolute correctness of their interpretation (or that of their church, sect, pastor, favorite theologian, etc.).

    If the Reformation yielded at lest a de facto more pluralistic Christianity, the Enlightenment and succeeding centurie pushed this principle even further. The critical approach to the Bible and church history, the revolution in the understanding of the natural world, and radical changes in social affairs all helped to undermine the certainties of Christendom. The appeal to authority and tradition largely ceased to carry the weight that it had even for many of the Reformers. The new knowledge yielded by science and critical historical investigation haven’t yet, Ward thinks, been fully assimilated into Christianity. They call for re-thinking many of the traditional expressions and conceptualizations of things like original sin, the Incarnation and Atonement, and the nature and destiny of the cosmos.

    On the whole Ward thinks that this can be an enrichment of Christian thought and faith. For instance, a cosmos as vast and intricate as the one revealed to us by modern astronomy and physics, perhaps populated with many species of intelligent life, can give us a greatly expanded vision of God’s power and providence as well as a richer and more diverse vision of God’s kingdom.

    Ward examines one particular tradition that has tried to assimilate the findings of science and critical history into Christian faith, the German liberal tradition associated with Harnack, Ritsschl, and Troeltsch. While Ward admires the way in which they tried to focus on the ethical core of Christianity, their distrust of metaphysics, de-Judaized Jesus, and radical skepticism about the reliability of the Gospels leave us with a seriously impoverished faith. He argues that the principles undergirding such skepticism beg major metaphysical questions and that it’s possible to affirm Jesus as the Incarnation of God in history even while accepting the principles of historical criticism and the findings of modern science. Neither history nor science commit us to the kind of metaphysical reductionism that is often passed off in their names.

    Ultimately what Ward thinks we should take away from this history of re-thinking Christianity is not that it’s impossible or unreasonable to affirm traditional Christian beliefs such as the Resurrection or divinity of Jesus. It’s that we can no longer take for granted that the way in which we formulate those truths is final and adequate to reality. Ward doesn’t put it this way, but you might call this an “eschatological reservation” about all our theological claims. Since in this world we see through a glass darkly all of our ideas about God and attempts to describe the divine reality will fall short. Consequently, we should maintain a sense of humility about our beliefs, especially those that lie away from the center of core Christian commitments or are the result of fine philosophical distinctions and abstract argument (he uses the example of the arguments over the nature of the Trinity).

    If there’s one place where I might quibble it’s that Ward doesn’t seem to have a very strong sense of the consensus of the Church as at least having a significant presumption in its favor. Granted that re-thinking has always occurred, doesn’t the burden of proof lie on the innovator? It’s hard to say exactly what this burden consists in or what kinds of considerations merit overturning a settled conviction, but it seems to me that if we affirm that the Spirit guides the Church, then we will be inclined to think that she has gotten at least many of the important things rigit over the long haul. I’m not sure Ward would deny this, but he does say things that seem to suggest that more traditional beliefs don’t enjoy special privileges here, whereas I’d want to say that beliefs which have stood the test of time shouldn’t be lightly cast aside.

    What Ward seems to me to be defending is in many ways a kind of old-fashioned Anglican latitudinarianism. This was the view that required agreement on essentials but allowed diversity on inessentials, with “essentials” being defined rather narrowly. Thus debates about the precise nature of the Trinity, free will and predestination, and other thorny theological issues, disputes over which had led to bloodshed, could be left as matters over which people of good will could disagree. In our time we might add debates about various ethical issues which threaten to split the churches. Clearly the challenge is walking the line between latitudinarianism and indifferentism, but that might be something worth doing in a time when dogmatism seems nearly as prevalent as ever.

    In a follow-up post I’ll talk a little about the balance of the book where Ward discusses re-thinking Christianity in the thought of Hegel and Schleiermacher, Christianity in a global context, and the relationship between liberalism of the kind he’s been defending and liberation.

  • Church shopping: update

    I know I said earlier that we were thinking of reverting to Lutheranism, but after a couple of visits I have a feeling we’re going to end up at St. Paul’s Episcopal on K Street, a venerable Anglo-Catholic parish.

    For me this is less about a particualr form of churchmanship than what seems to be a vibrant parish centered around Word and Sacrament, committed to beautiful and reverent worship, and serious about Christian formation and discipleship. Plus, the peoeple we’ve met have been very friendly and welcoming (even after learning that we’ve just come from the Church of the Advent in Boston who recently “stole” St. Paul’s Director of Music!).

    If we end up here I think it may be time for me to consider being received into the Episcopal Church. I was never confirmed in the Lutheran Church (though I was a member of different congregations – I’m not exactly sure what the distinction is in the ELCA), and it seems like maybe I should commit to a church body. Obviously the Episcopal Church has its problems, but I can’t helpf but feel somewhat dishonest about continuing to be nourished by parish life without committing in a more formal way. Also, my theology has shifted in some ways that make Lutheranism somewhat less congenial than it once was (even though I still strongly affirm certain central Lutheran insights). I guess we’ll see…

  • Christians and markets

    Here’s a smart article by Kathryn D. Blanchard, a professor of Religious Studies at Alma College. She argues that Christians, especially the Christian intelligensia, need to get beyond abstractions about “the market” and “capitalism” and look at the ways in which particular markets can serve or impede human flourishing.

    She makes some points that ought to be better known among Christian thinkers than they apparently are: that markets are as much about cooperation as competition, that in the real world human relationships, including market relationships, are better described by language more complex than that of narrow utility maximization, and that there is great potential for good and evil in the way markets work.

    Lately some Christian thinkers have taken to condemning “capitalism” or “the market” wholesale, but, instead of proposing some alternative system like communism or socialism, they propose the church itself as an embodiment of an alternative system of economic practice. No doubt there are good reasons for promoting alternative economic arrangements for various purposes, but Prof. Blanchard is surely right to point out that it’s folly to suppose that markets are evil per se or that one should try to extricate oneself from them:

    Most markets in the real world, however, tend to fall somewhere in the grey area between good and evil. They are the media by which moderately well-off, educated, responsible and well-intentioned Christians (you know who you are) acquire objects of ambivalence, such as organic food, liberal arts educations, modest homes, Italian wine, the internet, comfortable or even fashionable shoes, air conditioning, jogging strollers, or beds. These are items that most of us not only enjoy (or hope to enjoy someday) but—let’s be honest—believe we cannot live without, even if we feel somewhat sheepish about them.

    Later she writes:

    Quixotic attacks on a generalized capitalism can give way to fruitful interactions with particular markets and market behaviors, starting with our own and moving outward—especially with an eye toward the coercive externalities they may visit on our neighbors near and far. We must get up off the communion rail and bear witness to the “kin-dom” of God in small acts such as writing to our elected representatives about justice for migrant workers, supporting news sources that aim to reflect the truth, foregoing meat from factory farms or fresh blueberries in November, or buying carbon credits to offset the last flight we took to an annual meeting.

    With God’s help, such humble acts may lead us into bolder ones. It’s not enough to sit at our marketed computers in our market-sponsored offices writing marketable books and articles about how bad “the market” is. Like “the church,” the market is people. Our economic task is to create and support just markets, while crying out against and divesting from unjust markets.

    Obviously she isn’t proposing that the market should absorb all relationships. The error of at least some economists and libertarian types is to think that the unregulated market can effectively provide all the necessary goods for society. More sober thinkers realize the need for a strong moral, cultural, social and legal framework to keep the market “in the box.”

    Christians, I think, are often uneasy with markets in part because they rely on virtues less exalted than that of self-giving love. But Prof. Blanchard is surely correct when she says that the motives we have when we engage in behavior within markets (like in the rest of life) are more complicated than pure love or pure self-interest. As she wisely says, “the market is people” who are, decidedly, a mixed bag.

  • Jesus Freaks and CCM

    This Slate article examines the connections between the at times far out lives and music of the 60s “Jesus People” and contemporary Christian Rock.

    The Christian embrace of hip youth scenes can be traced, like so much, to the cultural ferment of the 1960s. Given that we are all weathering a Summer of Love flashback, it might spice up the tired images of the Haight Ashbury rebels to realize that a few of them were Christians. These mystic hippies sparked the mass Jesus People movement, which injected a distinctly Christian feeling for love and apocalypse into a counterculture already up to its mala beads in love and apocalypse. By the early 1970s, a new Jesus had hit the American mind—communal, earthy, spontaneous, anti-establishment. And this Jesus continued to transform American worship long after the patchouli wore off, inspiring a more informal and contemporary style of communion and celebration that, while holding true to core principles, unbuckled the Bible Belt from American Christian life.

    It goes on to discuss some of the figures in the Jesus People music scene, including some truly bizarre ones.

    Also see this recent First Things article on the Jesus Movement.

  • Lord, teach us to pray

    This weekend we were visiting my family in my ancestral homeland of Western Pennsylvania. As is our habit, we attended the early service at the ELCA congregation in my hometown. This is a gem of a church and we always receive a warm welcome when we worship there, even though we don’t have a particular connection to the parish.

    Anyway, the pastor was on vacation but in his stead the ELCA bishop of the Northwestern Pennsylvania Synod, Ralph E. Jones, presided and preached. The Gospel lession was the story from Luke 11 where the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray and he responds by giving them the Lord’s Prayer as well as by telling them that their Heavenly Father is always ready to give them the gift of the Spirit.

    Bishop Jones’ sermon began with recounting a message he’d heard on a Christian radio station against the practice of “rote” pre-written prayers. God, the speaker suggested, wants prayers that come spontaneously “from our hearts.”

    However, Bp. Jones, good Lutheran that he apparently is, suggested, the problem with prayer “from the heart” is that our heart’s desires are often self-centered and misaligned with God’s will. What prayers like the Lord’s Prayer do through repeated use, he said, is form us in such a way that our thoughts and desires gradually come to be aligned with God’s will.

    As he put it, if I pray from my heart, I’ll spend a lot more time asking for things than praying for others or offering praise or thanksgiving. But the prayers of the Bible (and the tradition of the church) help us to readjust our vision and our priorities in line with God’s kingdom. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that pre-written prayers keep us in touch with “sound doctrine” and prevent our religion from becoming wholly privatized. I’m also reminded of Bonhoeffer’s dictum that our prayer should be rooted in God’s word, not in the poverty of our hearts.

    He also pointed out that, according to the Gospel text, the gift that God is always ready to give us when we ask in prayer is the Holy Spirit. Some Christians have been misled into the view that God will literally give us whatever we ask for if we have sufficient faith (this seems to be the root of some “prosperity gospel” preaching). But in this story at least, the gift of the Spirit seems to be chiefly what is promised. And the role of the Spirit is to form us into new people who love God and our neighbor.

    I don’t think this should be taken as an argument against “spontaneous” prayer or to say that we should only use pre-writter prayer forms. Personally most, though not the entirety, of my prayer life (pitiful as it is) consists of traditional prayers. I tend to think of prayers as tools for helping me to focus on God, and the great prayers of our tradition seem to me to do this best. This isn’t to say that Christians shouldn’t have recourse to spontaneous prayer, but I do think that Bp. Jones is right that those prayers need to be formed and directed by God as we believe he has revealed himself to us.

  • July reading notes

    I recently finished a book called Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine by Vincent Brummer. Brummer is a Dutch philosopher of religion in the Reformed tradition and this book is an attempt to give an account of these central doctrines of Christian belief. Brummer starts from the premise that loving fellowship with God is our greatest possible good and that we have nevertheless become estranged from God. He then analyzes the Atonement as the way God effects reconciliation. The subsequent chapters on Christology and the Trinity tease out the implications of this view.

    Brummer heavily emphasizes the existential, personal, and relational aspects of Christianity, such that certain accounts of the Atonement (such as penal substitution) are ruled out as inadequate. This is because they don’t show how genuine reconciliation and restoration of fellowship is made possible by the Cross, but focus on things like paying off debts or removing guilt. It relies on a model of relationships couched in terms of rights and obligations rather than one of loving fellowship.

    In Brummer’s view, the Atonement is God’s act to remove obstacles that prevent us from being reconciled to Him. These obstacles include our ignorance of our own predicament, our ignorance of the divine love and will, our impotance to align our will with God’s will, and our lack of love and delight in the divine will. Brummer relates his discussion of soteriology to all three persons of the Trinity, arguing that they work to restore our lost fellowship with God.

    There’s also an interesting discussion of “social” vs. “Latin” models of the Trinity. Brummer critiques recent social trinitarians for lapsing into de facto tri-theism and says that any form of social trinitarianism that abandons the Platonic assumptions of, e.g. the Cappadocians is prone to this error. He then attempts to defend “Latin” trinitarianism against charges of modalism. My takeaway was that neither of these models is fully satisfactory.

    Currently I’m in the middle of Ronald Bainton’s The Travail of Religious Liberty, a little paperback I picked up at a used bookstore in Georgetown. This is a series of biographical studies from the Reformation and early modern periods of persecutors, heretics, and those who remonstrated for religious liberty, essentially tracing the period from the Spanish Inquisition to the British Act of Toleration. Bainton is probably better known for his book on Luther and his study of Christian attitudes toward war. But this is a little gem, full of fascinating historical detail and theological insights.

    On deck is Keith Ward’s new book Re-Thinking Christianity. This is billed as a sequel of sorts to his Pascal’s Fire (see here for more) and promises to examine the way that Christian theology has changed in significant ways over the centuries in response to different contexts. Part of his agenda, I think, is to construct what you might call a “liberal orthodox” theology, or a theology that is faithful to the central claims of Christianity while being open to insights from secular learning and culture as well as other faiths.

  • Michael Vick, Gregory of Nyssa, and our duties to animals

    In light of the allegations of animal cruelty being brought against pro football player Michael Vick, Diana Butler Bass looks to the writings of the 4th century church father for some hints about how Christians might think about our connections to other creatures and the duties we have toward them.