Monthly Archives: April 2007

Is "The Body of Christ" a Metaphor?

Posted by on April 30, 2007 15 comments

Here I just want to pose a question that I’ve reflected on for a while. In many textbooks on ecclesiology, or constructive theological ecclesiologies it’s common to organize the material in a “trinitarian” way under the rubrics of three biblical “metaphors” for the Church, namely the church as the people of God, the body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Now, as a heuristic way of organizing a textbook, perhaps this has some merit, and at least some good intentions. However, I submit that this way of dicing up an ecclesiology is fundamentally flawed. I’ll leave aside for the moment the apparently modalistic mood it bestows simply by nominating three images for the church based on the three persons of the Trinity. What I find more troubling is the fact that such a heuristic presupposes that these three “metaphors” occupy the same semantic and theological universe of meaning. Why is it immediately apparent that “people of God” and “body of Christ” are in any way two members of the same semantic method of speaking about the church?

What I want to question in particular is the assumption that these three images of the church are “metaphors” as commonly conceived. Literarily speaking, a metaphor is an indirect comparison between unrelated subjects that typically uses “is ” to join the first subjects. In other words, a metaphor describes a particular subject by that which it is not. Now, surely the image of the church “the people of God” is anything but a metaphor. That comes as close to a empirical description as we’re likely to be able to produce. Similarly, “temple of the Holy Spirit” is not technically a metaphor because what that term communicates is precisely that the Holy Spirit is present, that he indwells – tabernacles in – the church-community. The Church is the place of the Spirit’s presence, and thus is literally, not metaphorically his temple.

Now, the question I really want to raise though, is in regard to the image of the church as “the body of Christ.” In Scripture, obviously this term is used for a variety of things, namely the physical human body of Jesus of Nazareth, the bread of the Eucharist, and the church-community itself. Now, the question I want to pose is simply whether or not this stream of biblical language is a metaphor or not. What does it mean to talk about the church as the “body” of Christ? Is there any real, organic, physical reality that is expressed by this image? Or is it simply a metaphor for something else? If so what is it?

What does it mean for us to call the church Christ’s body?

A Treasury of Theological Humor

Posted by on April 27, 2007 2 comments
Now, I’m sure much of this has been posted before throughout the theoblogosphere, but nevertheless I think it’s worth drawing our attention to some of the theological funnies out there. First, of all a site that has given me great amusement since college is known as The Brick Testament. Here we get to see countless Lego depictions of biblical stories, most of them quite hilarious. For example, from Deuteronomy 23:1:

‘A man whose testicles have been crushed…’


‘…or whose penis has been cut off…’

‘…must not be admitted to the congregation of Yahweh.’

There are countless other depictions of stories, parables, legal codes, and even a literalistic depiction of Paul’s command for women to be silent in the churches. If you’re looking for a laugh and a place to kill some time, look no further.

Now, if you want to extend into the further blasphemous, and still more funny, you should certainly check out the adventures of Mr. Deity. This series basically explores what it might bean for us to conceptualize God as a middle-aged metrosexual – who used to date Lucifer (Lucy), by the way. The best episode, I think is a parody of sorts of the Reformed notion of the covenant of redemption, in which the Father and Son together make a covenant that the Son will redeem the world by dying on the cross.

Now, if you’re still needing more theological laughs, you can turn to the always reliable Wittenburg Door, which makes for some great laughs, such as a hard-hitting investigative piece on the turf wars between evangelical social activists, with Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo going head to head (and Brian McLaren trying to bring them all together in an open and generous conversation about their common hatred of George Bush).

And if you finally need something to make you realize that you’ve spend too much time in front of the computer and need to walk away shaking your head, you can always check this out:

Balthasar: Some Online Resources

Posted by on April 26, 2007 2 comments

I just recently came across the website of Joel Garver, a professor of philosophy at LaSalle University. He has a number of his own writings posted, including a wonderful and sucinct sketch of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s life and theology. For any who want to understand this giant in contemporary theology, but find themselves daunted by the size of the Balthasarian corpus, this is a great place to start.

Against Being Born Again: Wiliam Abraham

Posted by on April 26, 2007 Comments Off

The language of new birth has been gradually cut loose from its natural setting in the neighborhood of the coming new age of God. It thus lost its connections with the convert’s needs to see himself or herself as an agent of the kingdom of God, called by a new birth to participate in the new creation and inspired by the Holy Spirit. It has cemented into patterns of morality that often neglect the weightier matters of the law and that focus on the peccadillos of individual, personal behavior. In some hands it has been very skillfully used to undergird the fortunes of the free-market economy, the fortunes of this or that nation, and the election of conservative politicians. Born-again politics is the ultimate secularization and prostitution of this fragment of the language of Zion and a perfect example of the degeneration of the concept.

William Abaham, The Logic of Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 122-123.

A Greater Courage

Posted by on April 26, 2007 Comments Off

I’d like to formally welcome my friend, and regular browser of my bookstore, Derrick Peterson to the theoblogosphere. Derrick is an avid reader of Wolfhart Pannenberg and knows his thought better than anyone else I know personally. I think we can all look forward to some excellent discussions on his new blog, A Greater Courage. And, incidentally in one of his first posts, Derrick takes up the gauntlet of the worst theological problem meme and offers us an extensive theological critique of Pannenberg, which should engender some good discussion.

Unspun & other Miscellanies

Posted by on April 25, 2007 3 comments

As many other theo-bloggers have announced, Amazon’s new site, Unspun is quite an entertaining way to make lists of various and sundry things. The top theology blogs list is quite fascinating, and I’m surprised that I made it well into the top ten, sitting at number 5 right now (though, the bottom half of the top 10 fluctuates quite a bit, so by the time you look at it, I may be number 23 again!).

In other news, Micheal has happily picked up my belated suggestion that we should start critiquing our favorite theologians, offering a nice critique of Moltmann. To the rest of you, I say, don’t let a good idea die! If you have time, I’ll love seeing who people end up critiquing.

Toward a Theology of Evangelism

Posted by on April 25, 2007 5 comments

Well, I am back. Actually, I’ve been back in the great and wonderful land of Oregon since last Saturday, but couldn’t resist extending my blogging seista a bit longer. But now I am truly back.

The question that’s been recently on my mind is that of evangelism. This is currently a topic that my congregation is exploring, mainly with a view towards figuring out how our common life can be turned towards evangelism. Now, part of what makes any sort of discussion of this topic difficult is the sordid conceptual mess that obtains in most western churches that strongly emphasize “evangelism.” In broad strokes I think most Christians assume to quickly that they know what evangelism is, and given a rather superficial understanding thereof, find themselves stuttering about oddly constructed tensions between “evangelism and social justice”, or between “being the church” and “being missional”.

In light of some of this I’m going to turn my attention back toward William Abraham’s excellent book The Logic of Evangelism and a handful of other books on theology of mission that I’ve stacked up for the last few years. I’m sure I’ll post more on this topic in days to come, but for the moment let me leave off this discussion with a couple of points and some questions.

The first and most important point I would emphasize is that evangelism is an ecclesial practice. Evangelism is not something that takes place outside the context of the church in which individual Christians (sic) invite non-Christians to establish an individual relationship with Jesus. At the very least our definition of evangelism must emphasize that the Christian practice of evangelism is the action of the Christian ecclesial community in which that cultural body makes itself visible to the cultures of the world and invites persons from those cultures into the culture of the church. Evangelism is about the manifestation and presentation of a different way of being and becoming persons in community.

Thus, my second claim would be that evangelism is fundamentally political. The church is called to be about embodying an alternative cultural reality which centers around the acknowledgement that Jesus alone is Lord. Evangelism is nothing less than the political proclamation that all other claimant to people’s loyalties are false gods and false lords. To practice evangelism then, is a dangerously subversive activity that calls persons away from their bondage to the principalities and powers and into the new life of the church, which is actualized through the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

Now, here are some questions I would pose:

What is the best way to define evangelism?

How does evangelism relate to the doctrine of the Trinity, particularly the reality of Jesus as the Logos?

What forms of evangelization are appropriate for a post-Christendom church?

Douglas Knight on Church and World

Posted by on April 13, 2007 3 comments

Here’s an excellent quote from one of the books I’m reading while on the road. I’ll definitely be posting more on this fascinating book by Douglas Knight, which I think is one of the best pieces of constructive theology from last year. Look for a full review soon.

Of the church and the world, which represents a wider, and which a narrower, space? It is the church which is wider than the world. The world has a vanishing duration, while the church, and the new creation inaugurated in it, has an expanding duration. The church is an eschatological being, not a special case of relationships, the possibility of which is established elsewhere. The church is visible tip of the not yet visible company of heaven. This company is held together by God, and made visible by him to us on earth. The church understood on this eschatological definition, holds together what would otherwise drift apart. The church sustains the world, which has no unity of its own, and so the church represents that future in which the world will be spacious and free.

Douglas Knight, The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 17.

Book-Buying Hiatus

Posted by on April 12, 2007 5 comments

No, I’m not taking a hiatus from book buying. Rather, I’m on a de facto hiatus from posting because I’m buying books across the country for the next week and a half or so. As some of you know, in addition to working in publishing, I also work for a used theological bookstore which is kind of a sister company. Over the last couple months I’ve labored putting together appointments with a variety of libraries and professors of philosophy, Bible, and theology who are interested in selling off their academic libraries.

Today I bought books at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and was treated to a variety of rare and fascinating philosophical books, including a lot of old German editions of Husserl and Hegel. What really caught my eye was a great old volume of Scotus’ major writings that I was tempted to grab for myself. Tomorrow I’ll be buying books in Atlanta, Georgia, including around 2,300 books from New Testament scholar, Robert Kysar. Hopefully it’ll be quite a haul.

After that it’s a stop off in South Carolina for more philosophy books, then up to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina to buy books from the remarkable scholar, Geoffrey Wainwright which should be quite a treat. I’ll also by staying at the Rutba House, an intentional community in Durham where a number of friends and great folks live. Then I’ll be heading to Richmond, Virginia, the highlight of which will probably be some Old Testament and Judaica books from Frank Eakin, another noted scholar. Then, it’s up to Baltimore, Maryland and Washington D.C. for more theology and philosophy, with a stop I’m looking forward to with Stephen Fowl, a good friend and theologian. Then, finally I’ll be heading home, by way of Sioux Falls, South Dakota to pick up some church history and theology books from the library at North American Baptist Seminary.

Hopefully, I’ll be back home and posting regularly by April 22nd, or so. Until, then I’ll post as I can. Hopefully some of you can take me up on critiquing your favorite theologians in my absence!

Judas & Jeremiah: A Holy Saturday Homily

Posted by on April 7, 2007 1 comment

Holy Saturday is perhaps the most vivid symbol of what it means to live between the already and the not yet. On Holy Saturday the horrors of the crucifixion (which unbeknownst to the disciples were actually the glories of God’s self giving) are past and the glories of the resurrection are still lying ahead in the unanticipated future. In the in-between time we are left with nothing but empty silence and lots of time on our hands. The great question that Holy Saturday brings to us, the followers of Christ, is that of how we are to live when everything that makes sense disappears and everything we know seems turned upside down. What do we do when sisters die of cancer, friends fall to their deaths and brothers who were once partners in the gospel run away from us?* And what do we do after those times have passed and we are left with nothing but time to sit in silence and contemplate our brokenness? How do we live as the church of Holy Saturday? How do we be a people who can listen, speak, and hope on the day of silence and confusion? I think two “Holy Saturday” experiences from the Scriptures give us a good clue.

Perhaps no one other than Jesus experienced the horrors of Holy Saturday like Judas. Matthew is careful to tell us that after betraying Jesus, Judas experienced a major change of mind, stumbling back to the place of his transgression and seeking absolution.

When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” But they said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, “It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.” After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.” (Matt. 27:3-10)

Judas repents, confesses his sin, retraces his steps and seeks to return his blood money and most of all seems to long for some kind of absolution from the leaders of the people of God, the chief priests. But in response to his confession, Judas is brushed coldly aside – “What is that to us?” and commanded to go on alone – “See to it yourself.” He is left alone, forsaken and abandoned in the depths of his transgression. And it is important to note that his going out and hanging himself were not in response to the death of Jesus, but to his rejection by the religious leaders. He is told to “see to it himself” and, being thus left alone and without recourse he goes and hangs himself.

Judas’ is the ultimate act of Holy Saturday despair. In the face of the horrors that have been unleashed and which he is complicit with and being left alone, rejected by all he is left to nothing except to take his own life. Judas is left alone without a face of love to call him out of his fixation on his own horrible failure. In his appeal to the priests he is met with the harshest words possible. Do you seek a future for your guilty, treacherous life? “See to it yourself.” Are you dwelling alone in a place of silence, despair and utter hopelessness? “What is that to us?” And as the priests use Judas’ blood money to purchase his graveyard they turn any chance for healing and hope into a nightmarish hell of Saturday despair.

But even more troubling is the fact that all the disciples seem to have totally forgotten their lost brother. They are all scattered (except for the women, who follow Jesus all the way to his grave [Mk. 15:47; Lk. 23:45]), attending to their own despair. They are too absorbed in their own failures and perhaps anger at Judas to stand between him and his noose. They may have stuck together after the death of Jesus, but did they even give a second thought to Judas? Was his sin even beyond the thought of forgiveness for them?

What we have in the story of Judas and the disciples is one of Saturday despair. The horror of the day of silence, when everything unravels is faced by Judas alone. With no brother to stand beside him and no priest to offer him forgiveness he is driven into the Field of Blood to end his life with a noose. This is a Holy Saturday possibility that we all face. Will we be the disciples, who ignored the broken, the guilty and the godforsaken on the day of silence and shame? Or worse yet, will we be the priests who callously cast off the repentant offenders?

But this is not the only story of disciples on “Holy Saturday.” It is no accident that in his account of the Field of Blood, Matthew points back to the prophet Jeremiah and the story of a different field, on a different “Holy Saturday” occasion. In Jeremiah 32 we are told the story of how Israel is on the verge of being overrun by Babylon. There is no hope for Israel on this one and Jeremiah knows this all to well. And yet, out of the blue the word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah that he is to buy a field which will almost certainly be stripped from him in the near future. Jeremiah’s purchase of the “field at Anathoth” is the opposite of Judas’ Field of Blood. Jeremiah, in the face of certain destruction and death, takes a stance of hope rather than despair. His “field of hope” flies in the face of Judas’ Field of Blood. Jeremiah is like a child building a sandcastle in front of a tidal wave, a beautiful act of senseless hope in the face of overwhelming hopelessness.

It is this way of living in Holy Saturday that we are called to as the church. In the face of hopelessness and death we are called to be conduits of hope that dare to speak and listen on the day of silence. We are to dare to continue to give of ourselves, even to the point of death even when all hope seems to have vanished. When foundations dissolve, when brothers betray and God seems silent, we are called to buy fields of hope, to stand between our betrayer and his noose and to break bread together in senseless hope that we serve a God who abounds in surprises that follow the day of silence. We are bound to remember Holy Saturday and to live in it in senseless, glorious hope. Let us be a church that lives in Holy Saturday, longing to see the surprises of the self-giving God who transforms fields of blood into fields of hope. We are called this day to continue in the form of the self-giving that is the very life of God. On this day, this cold and silent yet gloriously beautiful day, let us remember the brokenness and the senselessness that we face as followers of Christ. And then let us gather up our courage in the Spirit and continue to give ourselves away without ceasing. In the deathly quiet of Holy Saturday, let us interrupt it with songs of hope, bread broken and lives poured out.

*[Side note: these are all events that did indeed happen to my church the year that I first gave this sermon]

***I owe many of the inisights of this whole discussion to Eric Severson, “Listening on the Day of Silence: Khora and Holy Saturday,” Paper presented at the Wesleyan Theological Society Conference, 2005***

The Body of Christ: A Maundy Thursday Homily

Posted by on April 6, 2007 1 comment

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread, and after had given thanks he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, every time you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For every time you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1 Corinthians 11:23-26)

“This is my body.” There are few verses of Scripture that have aroused more controversy than these four words of Jesus. It is said that two of the great reformers, Luther and Zwingli once met to debate the Lord’s Supper, with Luther holding the view that Christ was indeed “really present” in the elements and Zwingli insisting that the Supper was a mere memorial through which we remember Christ. As they say at the table and debated Luther wrote with his finger in the dust of the table “this is my body.” That seemed to end the debate. Years later when Zwingli was killed in battle, Luther upon hearing of it remarked that he definitely deserved his fate. For all the zeal that the doctors and reformers of the church have had for thinking accurately about the Eucharist and its relation to the life of the church, much of what has taken place in that history has been profoundly un-Eucharistic, as this story tells most clearly of all.

It is not by accident that this passage in the letter to the Corinthians appears but a chapter before 1 Corinthians 13, and it is not by accident that in our gospel reading, Jesus declares his new commandment: that we love one another just as he has loved us. Today we celebrate the last supper the final meal of the Lord with his disciples before his death “for us.” If there is one thing that ties together the Eucharistic theology put forth in these scriptures it is that this practice of together eating the bread and the wine, partaking of the Lord’s body and blood (whatever that ultimately means) cannot be understood or even thought about unless we practice it in Christ’s own Eucharistic way of being, which is to say in his love.

The invitation, given by Christ to participate in the feast that remembers him, that shares in his body and blood, given for us is an invitation that is given out the superabundance of his divine love. When we partake of the Lord’s Supper we come and “receive” from Christ the body that he gives us out of the depths of his love. We often think of the love of Christ as seen most in his sufferings, which is certainly true, it is there in his death and descent into hell that we see the lengths to which God goes to pour out his love into all our brokenness and sin. But, it is crucial to recognize that in the meal that Christ gives us, we see that God’s desire to give himself to us, embodied in loving, kenotic service already comes before we conspire to overthrow his love which threatens to turn our world of sin upside down. God is always-already giving himself to us in Eucharistic love, before we can get our wits together and run to the temple with our thirty pieces of silver.

And this brings me to one of the main points I want us to hear as we celebrate the Lord’s gift of his supper to us. While so much of the church’s energy over the years has been spent speculating about what it might mean to call a loaf of bread and a cup of wine Christ’s body and blood we have ignored what I take to be the center of what Christ says to his church when he gives us the supper. “This is my body which is for you.” At the heart of the Eucharistic celebration lies the fact that the body and blood of Christ are Christ’s gift of himself to us. Or, to say it differently, Christ loves us so much that he lets us slaughter, crush and consume him. The very idea that a loaf of bread, torn apart and eaten could be someone’s “body”, or even be talked about that way says something quite significant about what kind of body that person would have! The defining feature which marks Christ’s body, then according to these Eucharistic scriptures is that Christ’s body is given away, ripped apart and liquefied among many people, who are his enemies. That is the essence of Eucharist. Eucharist is what God does in giving himself away to humanity, letting himself be broken apart and spread throughout all people, who “eat” and consume the gift of God.

And yet, herein lies the miracle of Christ’s body. Unlike normal food, which gets broken down and eliminated, Christ’s body, when consumed by sinners, takes them up and consumes them in the rapture of divine love. When we take the Lord’s gift of himself and tear it apart, we find ourselves drawn by a power that is greater than our attempts to break and tear. We find that even as we break apart the body of Christ, we are drawn together ourselves into one body, with Christ as head. We think we have sundered the body of Jesus when we betray him and hand him over to death, but it is in fact that very action on our part which he uses to gather all the children of God together into himself, from all corners of the world.

And so we find ourselves in a conundrum, we thought that we had “broken” the body of Christ, finished it and left it to die. But it turns out that it was not we, but Christ himself that broke his body for us, that we might be made whole! Suddenly we find out that we are Christ’s body. Whether we wanted it or not, Christ has loved us so much, and given himself to us so ultimately, that we are now suffused with his life and bound together around him just as surely as my muscles and organs are bound together around myself. Through our very betrayal and flagellation of our Lord’s body, we have, through a Trinitarian miracle become that body ourselves. The Spirit himself unites us with Christ and now, somehow we indeed become the body of Jesus which is now to be given “for you”, that is, for the world.

To be embodied is ultimately to be available to others, as Robert Jenson has said. If I had no body, I would not be available to you for relationship. Thus, when God comes to save us, he comes to us in a body, Jesus of Nazareth. It is that body that is God’s availability to us, his gift of himself to us as savior. As we now believe that the human body of Christ has ascended to the right hand of the Father, which is to say, into God’s future, we must ask how is God now available to the world? The answer, according to the church is still, “In Christ’s body.” Christ has ascended into God’s future, but that is precisely what is made available in the present in the church as the people of God come together bound by the Love of God, celebrating the Eucharistic feast in which we re-member the self-giving of Christ. When we re-member the loving gift of the Savior, God’s future happens now. Christ’s body has ascended into God’s future and it is precisely that future that exists now in and as the church. That is what it means when we call the church the body of Christ. It means that the church is the place where Christ is “located.” We have been blessed by the wondrous grace of the Triune God in which, through the Spirit we are made into the body of Christ, the place where Christ’s life – God’s future – is made available to the world. We are the body of Christ, in loving one another as he loved us and in celebrating (eucharistia) his self-giving for us as Savior. This is what it means to be the body of Christ, to love all with the love of Christ, and to give thanks to God for giving us that love.

And thus, to be the body of Christ, to be God’s embodied availability in the world is to be given a vocation: a vocation of love. The body of Christ, Jesus’ Eucharistic gift of himself is given “for you.” The definition of Christ’s body is i
t’s “for-othersness”. So, as we come together and remember the gift by which our Lord handed down to us the feast of love, the Eucharist, through which we remember him and are drawn back into participation in his life, let us allow ourselves to truly be his body. To be his body is to ultimately live by Christ’s “for-othersness”. It is to live a life of kenosis, of self-emptying out of love for the other. This is the vision that is given to us in the history of our Lord who girds himself with a towel and washes our feet. If we are to be his body, we must never be without a towel around our waist, washing the feet of our brothers and sisters, wherever they may be.

“For I have given you an example – you should do just as I have done for you.” (John 13:15)

Amen.

Between Cross & Resurrection: A Review

Posted by on April 5, 2007 Comments Off

This is a modifed version of a review that I wrote on Amazon some time ago. As we are now entering Holy Week, I thought it was a fitting time for such a post. Let me just lay my cards on the table and say up front that Between Cross and Resurrection, remains one of the most moving and powerful works in theology that I have ever read. Alan Lewis was a masterful writer and theologian whose character, passion and humility is apparent on every page of this wonderful book.

As the title suggests, this book seeks to unpack the relevance of Holy Saturday (the day Christ lay dead in the grave “between cross and resurrection’) for Christian theology and life. The fact is, there are few areas of Christian doctrine and practice this book does not touch on in some significant way. This book is a brilliant exercise in narrative theology, which situates a trinitarian doctrine of God within the thoroughly narrative framework of the Church’s three-day story of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Christ. The first section of the book essentially involves telling the three-day story that stands at the center of our salvation and then begins to unpack its implications for our understanding of the nature and power of God and for theological ethics.

The central thesis that Lewis advances throughout the book is that Jesus’ statement that ‘those who lose their lives will find them’ is not only true of us, but is antecendently true of God. The Triune God is the one who knows how to die and thereby enter into the fullness of resurrection life. The key theme that Lewis plays up here is not the suffering of the cross overwhelming the victory of resurrection, but rather how the resurrection forces us to think about radical nature of the suffering and death of God in Christ. Since the resurrection confirms that Christ was in fact God, when we reflect back on Holy Saturday we are left with the shocking reality that God is found and identified among the suffering and the dead. The way that the Triune God overcomes the powers of sin and death is not by matching them with brute power, but by surrendering to them and then abounding all the more in overflowing life. The key verse the Lewis often returns to is Paul’s statement “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more so that, as sin reigned in death, grace might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life in Jesus Christ, our Lord.” (Rom. 5:20-21). God’s way of dealing with sin and death is not to overthrow them through power, but to surrender to them and then abound still more with resurrection life that cannot be surpassed by sin and death. The second section involves more explicit theological unpacking of the three-day story.

In particular, Lewis focuses on the trinitarian context in which the theology of the cross, grave and resurrection must be understood. In one of the best chapters in the book, “From God’s Passion to God’s Death” Lewis brilliantly demolishes conventional conceptions of God’s omnipotence and other central elements of classical theism which derive from Greek and Modern thought rather than the narratives of the cross. Through an examination of Barth, Moltmann and Juengel, Lewis shows that God’s very nature and the very form of his power is seen through the suffering love and weakness of the cross and the grave through which the ever abundant life of resurrection breaks forth. I cannot begin to do justice to the ways that Lewis formulates all of this. The implications are staggering. If the very from of God’s power is seen in surrendering to the powers of sin and death through love and then faithfully awaiting a transcendent hope on the other side of negation and death, then our perspective on violence, oppression and injustice is radically transformed.

The final section of the book deals specifically with our practice of living in light of the three-day story. Lewis offers an amazing chapter on world history where he particularly discusses Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Chernobyl. He then moves on to articulate a theological politics that derives from the narrative of Holy Saturday. He follows this up with discussions of the the church’s mission to the wider culture as the cruciform and “grave-shaped” followers of Christ, setting out an excellent discussion of missional ethics and theology. Finally, he sets forth a vision for the church as the trinitarian community of mutual love, peace and self-donation.

Lewis was not only a brilliant theologian, but a brilliant writer whose theology of Holy Saturday was born out by his own Holy Saturday experience of terminal cancer. I have learned much from this amazing book, and I intend to return to it repeatedly in days to come. In particular I find myself coming back to it every Lent, as I prepare to teach on Holy Saturday as I do every year during Holy Week. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Worst Theological Problem Meme

Posted by on April 2, 2007 22 comments

Ok, I’m going to see if I can get something started here that might be interesting. We all certainly have our favorite theologians, with whom we identify and on whom we draw for our theology. Now, of course none of us want to be uncritical readers, so we admit that our fav has “some” problems, of course. But usually when asked we come up with little surfacy things like “She doesn’t write clearly” or “He doesn’t develop this idea fully”, or “He didn’t embody his theology in his life,” etc. In other words our criticisms are often veiled compliments.

So here’s the challenge. Pick your favorite or most influential theologian. I know this will be hard, but just try to be as honest as you can and think of what theologian has really influenced your thought the most.

Then, write at least a solid paragraph about the most problematic aspects of their theology. And it has to be a real criticism that carries some weight. I’ll see what I can do to get us started, so here I go: Robert Jenson.

Jenson is one of my favorite theologians and his theology is very close to my own. I share his trinitarian and ecclesial instincts very closely. I think he is the most conceptually brilliant and substantive American dogmatic theologian since Jonathan Edwards. But he’s got some major problems. The first one that I would identify is his weak theology of the homoousion. Jenson, unlike Torrance, for example does not really discuss this central feature of orthodox trinitarian and Christological dogma. To be sure, he believes Jesus is fully God, but what this means for him, and how it relates to his understanding of the incarnation and preexistence of Jesus are open questions for Jenson. Secondly, I think Jenson is weak precisely where he is strong: ecclesiology. He is right, I think to closely connect Christ to his body, but he comes to close to collapsing Christ into the church. For him, the eucharistic body of Christ is the only body that the Risen Jesus has. The ascension plays no role in his thought whatsoever. Jenson comes at once perilously close to a complete identification of the church with the trinitarian Son, despite his insistence that the church does not become another hypostasis of the Trinitarian life. In the end he is left simply saying that the church does not become a fourth member of the Trinity, simply because he doesn’t wish to say it. Thirdly, I think again, Jenson is weak where he is the strongest, namely in his connection between the being of the Triune God and the narrative of Christ. For Jenson, the resurrection of Christ defines the being of God. He even states that the resurrection is God’s ousia. The question that is inevitably posed to Jenson is whether God “needs” the world to be himself. To this Jenson always responds, that he does not, but seems bereft of resources to show why this so. While I think Jenson is absolutely right to see such a close relationship between the narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection and the being of the Triune God, I think there must be a more adequate way of formulating our trinitarian doctrine to safeguard the transcendence of God, while never claiming that God somehow transcends or is other than Christ. All three of these problems seem to pose the question about whether or not Jenson is a theological liberal. The deep connection between God and the historical process, the loss of Jesus as a distinct personal subject over against the church (and with this, his hesitance toward the bodily resurrection) seem to all add up to some the key features of classic liberalism.

Ok, so, now we have begun. I now ask all you theo-bloggers out there to continue this meme and speak freely about your favorite theologian’s weaknesses. Who will join me?

Ontology, Difference, and Narrative

Posted by on April 2, 2007 10 comments

In some recent discussions, both in the blogosphere and in my church, the question of essentialism and its key problems for Chrisian theology have recently been brought to the forefront of my thoughts. Now, just to be clear, when I refer to essentialism, I’m referring of the philosophical idea that there is a set of characteristics, all of which any entity of a specific kind cannot fail to have. Thus, to be human, I must posses ______, which constitutes me as human. This characteristic is the “essence” of what it means to be human. To be a human one must posses this “essence”.

Such an ontology, must be rejected for a number of reasons, one of which I want to take a look at here. A key problem with essentialism is that it is ‘essentially’ violent. Essentialism is violent precisely because it determines our ontological status as something that we posses in and of ourselves. If reason, for example makes me human (as has often been thought in Christian theology), then my possession of reason must be safeguarded at all costs in order for me to retain my personhood. On such an essentialist framework, no matter what the characteristic is asserted to be, my ontological status is something that I posses, and therefore can be dis-possessed of. Therefore anything that comes to me from outside myself, that is different is a threat. Who I am as a being is something that comes from within myself. Anything that comes from outside can only diminish or worse, destroy who I am.

An essentialist ontology ultimately wants to deny any ontological weight to difference. Within an essentialist framework, difference can only be violent, since my be-ing is self-enclosed because my ontological status exists by virtue of a given characteristic that I possess in and of myself. Thus, for an essentialist, it seems that difference would be the ultimate foe, to be feared and resisted. Despite its long pedigree in Christian theology, we have to call this whole ontological framework radically into question precisely on Chalcedonian grounds.

While there are ways in which the definition of Chalcedon can be read as affirming sameness against difference within the framework of essentialism, it also seems to radically undermine such an ontology because difference is presupposed throughout, i.e. Christ absolutely both divine and human. Thus, on a Chalcedonian framework all our knowledge of God is given precisely through the sheer difference of Christ from us, in that he is not merely “same” (human), but irreducibly “other” (divine). What the incarnation says is that essentialism is false because in Christ we see that sameness and difference coexist in perfect, noncompetitive harmony, and only in its light do we have knowledge of God. An incarnational ontology demands that we view difference, not as violent, but precisely as the area in which noncompetitive, salvific communion is established between humanity and God in Christ. What we are confronted with here is a gospel-ontology, a story of being that takes its shape fundamentally from the narrative of Christ. For a Christian, our story of being must be nothing other than the story of the death and resurrection of Christ. Soteriology is ontology.

In contrast to a gospel-ontology, an essentialist ontology corresponds to a theology of creation, particularly a doctrine of creation in which creation is seen as a cosmos. For the essentialist, what exists is fundamentally a “thing” which is what it is by virtue of its internal essence, which is ‘essentially’ timeless and universal. However, in the biblical understanding of creation, what the Triune God creates is not a cosmos, but rather a history. If creation were a cosmos constructed of a bunch of self-defined (and therefore self-enclosed) essences, communion would be impossible. All things would remain self-enclosed, self-defined objects that could never experience communion as something other than the violent intrusion of alien forces upon their being. But because creation is a history, namely the history of Jesus, communion is not only possible, it is actualized in the concrete history of Jesus’ cross and resurrection. If creation is a history, then the only way to formulate a gospel-ontology is to narrate the story of Jesus. In a history, what exists is not a given, rather what exists is what it is in virtue of what it is dynamically becoming in relation with the Future. In a history persons shape and form one another as they are drawn toward the End if the story, the dramatic denouement. And if history is ultimately understood correctly as the history of Jesus we can say that in history, persons find their identity, their dramatic coherence in the communion between the Triune God and the world that happens in the history of Christ’s death and resurrection.

Thus, in contrast to essentialism, we have our being, not because we possess some essence, but because we are included as characters in the dramatic history of Jesus Christ. For Christians, the narrative of Christ is our ontology. Our being exists ekstatically – outside ourselves — precisely in Christ’s concrete history. In Christ, ontology and history are not just united, they are one and the same thing, in perfect nonviolent, noncompetitive harmony. Our be-ing takes place insofar as the history of Christ incorporates us into its movement, that is into the story of Christ’s love which is just another way of saying ‘death and resurrection’. Insofar as we are drawn by the Spirit to participate in the history of Jesus, we come to be. We come to be precisely as participants in the Christ-history, which is the ultimate story of being, createdness, and salvation. The end of that history, the end of our story of being is thus, not violence or fear, but peace, feasting and joy. The other, the different, which to an essentialist could only be a source of fear and danger, is in the gospel-ontology, pure gift. “Perfect love casts out all fear.” Thus, in a gospel-ontology, we are driven to say the following when we tell our story of being: “To be is to be a part of the story of the love of God, which is identical with Jesus’ death and resurrection.”

Holy Saturday: What Kind of Harrowing?

Posted by on April 1, 2007 4 comments

This weekend, I was at my church’s covenant retreat when all members of the church go away together to celebrates the Lord’s covenant with us, and our commitment to one another as members of Christ’s body. And, as we do every year each of us was given the name of a sister of brother to bring a gift for. I was happy to receive a book I have been waiting for for some time, Light in Darkness by Alyssa Pitstick in which she rigorously examines Hans Urs von Balthasar’s doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell. Essentially, Pitstick argues that Balthasar’s doctrine of Christ’s descent is unavoidably in contradiction to the totality of the Catholic tradition’s teaching on the descent into hell. For her, Balthasar’s view that Christ’s descent into hell entails his experience of the fullness of alienation, sin and death, which he then absorbs, transfigures, and defeats through resurrection is untenable. She insists that the totality of the tradition holds that Christ in fact descends only to the “limbo of the Fathers” in which the righteous, justified dead of the Old Testament awaited the coming of the Messiah. Christ’s descent is not in any way soteriological, rather it is…well, we’re not quite sure what it’s for. At best it seems that he goes to an already-redeemed bunch of Old Testament saints to let them know that he’s defeated death. He certainly doesn’t descend into hell and experience the depths of alienation between God and man opened up by sin. In fact, he doesn’t come in contact with sin whatsoever in his descent, only those saints of old who were already justified.

Now, this book has already set off something of a debate among Balthasar enthusiasts, and I’m sure you can tell that I’m among them. I think Pittstick has written a flawed book on a number of levels. First, it is a decidedly one-sided reading of the tradition on Christ’s descent into hell. She pretends that the Fathers were unanimous about this, when in fact they varied in opinion on this as much as they did on every other doctrine. Second, while Pitstick is bold in her theological claims, as any young theologian should be, she ends up letting her ideas run away with her and manages to turn boldness into outright arrogance. She directly questions Balthasar’s orthodoxy, accusing him point blank of formulating a theology that is a “conscious rejection of Catholic tradition.” Apparently she considers her newly Ph.D-crowned intellect the superior of the previous and current popes in determining the orthodox status of Cardinals of the Catholic Church! Third, her engagement of Scripture is very shallow, brief, and selective. She doesn’t touch Romans, probably because it entirely contradicts her case. While I am not a Catholic, I think most Catholics, including the Magisterium insist that they would rather be at variance with the tradition than with Scripture, for according to Vatican II’s decree on revelation, Dei Verbum, the “teaching office of the Church is not above the word of God, but serves it”. However, this seems to have no clout with Pitstick.

For those interested, there is a spirited exchange between Pitstick and Edward Oakes, available in First Things. There is both an initial, and follow up interchange between them available online. Oakes, I think demolishes Pitstick’s case, particularly showing how it is decidedly biased against protestant theological insights, Scripture, and bears extreme Christological problems, chiefly Pitstick’s monophysite tendencies.

Now, I do think Pitstick’s book is important in that it calls attention to the stream in the tradition of the Harrowing of Hell, in which Holy Saturday is the beginning of Christ’s triumph over death. I think this is an important image that must be held dialectically in tension with Balthasar’s biblical emphasis on Christ’s descent into the fullness of death, so as to be “Lord of both the dead and the living” (Romans 5). Christ does indeed break down the gates of Hell, and as the Icon powerfully shows, pull Adam and Eve from their graves, ripping all of sinful humanity from the clutches of death. But he does this not from without, or even from within Pitstick’s rather immaculate limbo. He does it precisely from within, descending into the depths of our sin and alienation from God, and only thusly, by plumbing the depths of hell does he suffuse all that is lost and sinful with the radiance of divine goodness, joy, and light. Christ is indeed the Harrower of Hell, but his harrowing takes place in the mode of cruciformity, not crusade. This is the shape of our redemption, of divine Triune abundance that is the living union of power and powerlessness. In short, it is the superabundance of life that flourishes always, and only through the practice of life poured out.

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