Monthly Archives: June 2007 - Page 2

Luke Timothy Johnson vs. Eve Tushnet on Homosexuality

Posted by on June 18, 2007 7 comments

I just came across a very fascinating and well-written exchange on homosexuality in Commonweal.  In it, New Testament scholar and theologian, Luke Timothy Johnson and freelance writer Eve Tushnet debate the current Catholic teaching on same-sex relationships.  Interestingly enough, Johnson, who is both a creative and theologically conservative theologian, argues against the current teaching of the Catholic church, while Tushnet, an openly lesbian woman takes the traditional position, arguing for submission the traditional teachings of the church and Scripture on marriage and sexuality.  Regardless of the position one takes on this issue, I think Tushnet’s peice is quite good and should give anyone much to think about in regards to this particular question facing so many churches.

Here’s a few paragraphs from her article:

The coming-out story is a quintessentially American story. It is self-discovery in opposition to societal regulation. It is personal liberation-as American as “lighting out for the territory.” There are ways to tell the Christian story so that it corresponds very well to this story of self-discovery and liberation: through Christ we are freed from sin and come to know ourselves; in Nietzsche’s phrase, we “become what we are.” But there are other ways of talking about Christian life-ways that focus on sacrifice, martyrdom, dying in Christ to live with him-which are perhaps less quintessentially American, and for that reason all the more necessary for us. There’s a reason all Catholic churches have a crucifix, an image of the tortured God.

Johnson, like many writers who oppose the church’s prohibition against all homosexual acts, points to the real virtues exhibited by so many gay couples: loyalty, caretaking, and compassion. Anyone who supports church teaching must still acknowledge that these virtues are real; that deep, often sacrificial love works through these couples like gold threads in cloth. The question is whether that is enough. How could it not be? How could Christ require more?

And behold, one came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” …The young man said to him, “All these I have observed; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions. (Matthew 19:16-22)

The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants.

And so the central problem emerges: Whom do we follow? How do we follow love? Can a human beloved have the same ability to overturn us completely-to read and interpret and reshape us-that Jesus himself has? Can love of another person do the same work as the love of God?

Almost all the time, love of God will deepen and strengthen our love of others in obvious ways, rather than conflicting with that love or posing a dilemma. And so we are tempted to believe that our love of God and our love of others won’t ever conflict. But there will be times when it does seem like God is asking us to choose. At the very least, God may require us to radically reshape our understanding of what love of another person should look like. God may ask you not to stop loving your partner but to express that love without sex.

The analogy between God’s love for us and our love for one another is real but partial, and needs to be understood in light of the entire teaching of the church. The church does not teach that whatever anyone does out of a deep conviction and a desire to express love is always intrinsically good. We can sincerely seek to do good and yet actually act wrongly; this happens all the time. Even the saints get stuff wrong, as do all kinds of loving, sincere people. It might even be said that the reason we have church teaching in the first place is that loving, sincere people do their best and still sometimes get things very wrong.

Johnson begins by saying that his position “stand[s] in tension with Scripture.” But he then seems to use human beloveds as a kind of walking Scripture in themselves, able to contradict and correct the merely paper canon. So he writes:

I think it important [for the integrity of our position] to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us.

I’m not convinced this is how human love stories relate to the divine love story. Loving one another can be an echo of the love we receive from God; it can be the child of that love; it can be preparation for our own awestruck love of God. (I would argue that my erotic and romantic love of women has been all three of those things, at different times.) But our human experience, including our erotic experience, cannot be a replacement for the divine revelation preserved by the church. We must be careful not to let it become a counternarrative or a counter-Scripture.

When I was baptized and confirmed, pledging, “I believe all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches,” I did it basically as a leap of faith. I knew why I needed to be Catholic; I knew that as a Catholic I’d have to follow this stuff, faith seeking understanding and all that; I trusted that eventually I would understand the reasons behind the teaching a little better. And I do. Even so, I waver on how much I think I understand the teaching from day to day.

But what has constantly surprised me about the Catholic Church is just how much there is for me here. There is a rich theology of friendship, helping me to express my love of women both sacrificially and chastely. There’s honor for both celibacy and married life, and resources for living fruitfully in either of these states. We have Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, we have saints who are possibly even crazier than I am, we have the Anima Christi and Thomas à Kempis’s rewriting of the Song of Songs as a hymn to the crucified Christ. I feel as if every week or so I discover yet another hidden treasure of the church that speaks to me in exactly the way I need in order to deal specifically with my struggles, resentments, longings, and strengths as a woman and a lesbian. We can make the church’s teaching believable by becoming more Catholic-which is, not coincidentally, what we should be doing anyway.

Trinity & Gender

Posted by on June 18, 2007 3 comments

One topic that has been quite a field of controversy in contemporary theology is that of the doctrine of the Trinity’s relationship to gender.  On this issue, the problem of subordinationism in the Trinity as providing an ideological warrant for female to male subordinationism, is usually central.  Also central to this discussion, of course is the issue of gendered language for God, which is no small controversy.  Calling God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not as simple a claim as it once was.  Or perhaps we stil have no idea what a complex thing it is to say that God is rightly named as Father, Son, and Spirit.

Regardless, I don’t so much want to probe those two questions, but rather to ask what people think about the very idea of the doctrine of the Trinity as a framework for working out theological perspectives on gender and difference.  Does the doctrine of the Trinity really bear on how we understand gender relations?  Does a theology of gender have its roots in the inter-trinitarian relations, or is persuing that avenue a mistake?  Is there something like maleness and femaleness in God which provides a transcendental reference point for our understanding of gender?

 I invite any thoughts on this issue.

Radical Trinitarianism §1: Introductory Theses

Posted by on June 15, 2007 7 comments

In the last few years everyone has been talking about the “renaissance of Trinitarian theology”, either to affirm it as a blessing from on high, or an aberration from the pits of hell.  Or was it Hegel?  Whatever, they’re basically the same thing, right?  Regardless, the point is that everyone is in some way interested in being the most authentic Trinitarian possible.  For some that means figuring out how the Trinity models social relationships for us.  For others it is about figuring out how God is so different from us that trying to model our social relationships on the Trinity would be rather like an octopus trying to model its number of arms on an opossum.

I hope my theology may fall somewhere in the middle and still be quite recognizable as radically Trinitarian in all its dimensions.  And to that end, here are a few theses about the Trinity that I would offer towards the construction of a truly “radical Trinitariansim.”  What I mean by this is a theology that is Trinitarian through and through, not slavishly or simplistically, but radically (radix=from the root).

  1. The reality of the cross and resurrection of Christ is the epistemological ground of the theology of the Trinity.  The event of Christ’s cross and resurrection is the event of God in the world, and that event is the outpouring of absolute love.  It is only on the basis of a Trinitarian understanding of the cross of Christ that the statement “God is love” can be true.
  2. The Trinity is not merely the culmination of Christian theological reflection on the mystery of God, but its presupposition, ground, and structuring principle.  The Trinity is not a question which theology seeks to solve, but rather the framework from within which all of theology’s questions are to be posed and solved.
  3. The relations between the persons of the Trinity are not, as such a model for human relations, to be slavishly imitated.  Rather, the richness of the Triune being is the ground of all creaturely being which shapes creaturely existence into its own distinctive shape.  The shape of creaturely existence grounded by the Trinity is one of persons is covenantal communion.  This is grounded centrally in the incarnation of Christ, the second person of the Trinity.  The shape of authentic human existence is revealed in Christ as communion between human and Triune persons through the covenantal self-giving of God in Christ and the Spirit.
  4. The life of the Trinity is not closed off from the world.  Rather the life of the Trinity is love, the very same love which creates, sustains, and redeems the world.  All creation, then has its own contingent, creaturely existence within the relations of love that constitute the Trinity.  Apart from participation in the life of God, creatures descend into non-being.  This attempt to reject the communion of divine love which sustains the world is the essence of sin.  Sin the the active seeking of non-being; that is, it is seeking to extricate ourselves from the circle of Triune love.
  5. Salvation is the exercise of God’s Triune love in Christ which overcomes all boundaries and subsumes within its ardor every distance which we would seek to impose between ourselves and God.  It is the embracing love of the Triune God which holds the world in all its contingency and rebellion from the non-being and death it seeks in striving for authomoy from God.  The fire of the Triune love, precisely by subjecting itself to the very experience of non-being, godforsakenness and death thus triumphs over sin, death, and godlessness through the Spirit of resurrection. 
  6. The church is the location in the world where the outpouring of Triune love is visibly and palpably located.  Through the church’s practice of the form of Christ, in word, sacrament, and deed, the Triune love continues to take human shape in the world of sin and death in the form of covenant communion.  The outpouring of the Triune communio that is the church is the shape of redemption in our world and manifests theeschatological telos of world its in the communal-covenantal fellowship of the sacramental church.
  7. The future of the world is the Trinitarian life.  And that future is present now, through the Spirit of Christ in and through the sacramental-spousal body of Christ, the church.  The future of the world is shalom and New Jerusalem, glimpsed now in the koinonial fellowship of the ekkelsia.  This future is not consummated now, but it is present in the sacramental-spousal life of the body of Christ.  It is to this place, this people, where the presence of the Triune God is embodied for the world that we must look to discern and experience the shape of redemption, sanctification, new life, and hope.

The Ironies of Idolatry

Posted by on June 15, 2007 1 comment

Here’s a rather ironically idolatrous tattoo.  While the intention is doubtless to portray the United States as a Christian entity, it actually seems to have the effect of saying that Christ was crucified by America and on the American flag.  Which to me seems strikingly appropriate.

cross_1061.jpg

Capitalism & The Idolization of Indulgence

Posted by on June 15, 2007 Comments Off

In light of the recent discussion of sexual fulfillment and personal wholeness, I think this quote by Eagleton might be of some interest to people.  It shows well how it is capitalism which trains us to identify our own fulfillment with the satiation of any appetite we have.

Old-style puritanical capitalism forbade us to enjoy ourselves, since once we had acquired a taste for the stuff we would probably never see the inside of the workplace again… A more canny, consumerist kind of capitalism, however, persuades us to indulge our senses and gratify ourselves as shamelessly as possible.  In that way we will not only consume more goods; we will also identify our own fulfillment with the survival of the system.  Anyone who fails to wallow orgasmically in sensual delight will be visited late at night by a terrifying thug known as the superego, whose penalty for such non-enjoyment is atrocious guilt.  But since this ruffian also tortures us for having a good time, one might as well take the ha’pence with the kicks and enjoy oneself anyway.

So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure.  On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, it is a thoroughly aristocratic creed.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 5-6.

Sexuality, Personal Wholeness & the Church

Posted by on June 14, 2007 8 comments

I recently came across this post by Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic online.  It provides some interesting thoughts about homosexuality and the church.

Fundamentally, [being gay is about] one’s core emotional identity. It’s about whom one loves, ultimately, and how that can make one whole as a human being … a single person’s moral equilibrium in a whole range of areas can improve with marriage … because there is a kind of stability and security and rock upon which to build one’s moral and emotional life.  To deny this to Gay people is not merely incoherent and wrong, from the Christian point of view.  It is incredibly destructive of the moral quality of their lives in general…

You can’t ask someone to suppress what makes them whole as a human being and then to lead blameless lives.  We are human beings, and we need love in our lives in order to love others, in order to be good Christians!  What the church is asking Gay people to do is not to be Holy, but actually to be warped … no wonder people’s lives, many Gay lives, are unhappy or distraught or in dysfunction, because there is no guidance at all.  Here is a population within the church, and outside the church, desperately seeking spiritual health and values, and the church refuses to come to our aid, refuses to listen to this call.

What I find most interesting and theologically horrifying about this statement is its idolatrization of marriage and sexual love.  Sullivan makes plain what I think many gay Christian apologists most strongly assert, namely that their sexual orientation is one of, if not the most determinative aspect of their identity and as such, to deny them the full expression of that identity in sexual relationships is tantamount to asking them to be less the fully human.  As Sullivan says, being gay is a homosexual person’s, “core emotional identity”.  If that is indeed the case, I don’t know how a gay person could be a Christian.  On the same hand, if it is the case the being straight makes one’s heterosexual orientation their “core emotional identity”, then neither could a straight person be a Christian.

The gospel of Jesus Christ explicitly denies that our “core emotional identity” is something interior to ourselves.  What defines is not something which we possess, but rather that which happens to us extra nos in Christ.  A Christian, gay or straight in no way derives their “core emotional identity” from their attractional orientation, or from their sexual practices.  What constitutes Christian identity is the self-giving of God in Christ which brings us into communion within the Triune life and thus with one another as the body of Christ.  Put differently, it isn’t the union of sexual love, but the koinonial, kenotic communion of the Eucharist which defines and establishes our identity and humanity.

However, Sullivan is right when he says that “We are human beings, and we need love in our lives in order to love others, in order to be good Christians!”  Indeed we do, but God’s answer to that reality of human neediness and vulnerability is not marriage, it is Pentecost.  The church is the communion of love and solidarity that makes it possible for any Christian, gay or straight to live a life of virtue, fulfillment, and joy.  The good news about the life given to us in Christ is that no one, gay or straight need derive their identity from being married or having sex.  What Christians must explicitly deny is that it is in marriage that we are given this ”kind of stability and security and rock upon which to build one’s moral and emotional life.”  If that’s the case then Jesus had no foundation for his moral and emotional life and neither do I!

The source of our stability is not in marital union, but in the cross and resurrection of Christ and in his sacramental body, the church.  The challenge to the church is, then to live faithfully in such a way that the world may know that such lives of emotional and moral stability can be formed and nurtured in the common life of the church.  We are called as a church to deny the idolatry of marriage as that which “makes us whole.”  What makes us whole is the work of God in Christ, who reconciles alienated peoples together in one body.  Wholeness, for Christians is not that glorious cigarette after a good tussle in the sheets, it is Shalom. And that shalom is not found in marriage or in sexual expression, it is found in the cross, in the Eucharist and in lives lived in common, committed to reconciliation, support, and mutual love.  That is the church’s vocation, to be the space in which those things exist.  When that is indeed the case, and only then, does the church have moral credibility when it calls people to the peculiar sexual practices – which often involve great sacrifice – that characterize Christian discipleship.  That is not easy news, but I am convinced that it is good news.  And really, a cigarette shared with good friends over conversation and laughter is just about as good as one after sex.

Worst Theological Probleme Meme: Update

Posted by on June 14, 2007 Comments Off

Well, after a lengthy dead period, this little idea of mine is finally growing some wings. 

Besides the ones that have recenly appeared here as guest-posts, David Congdon has just produced a sucinct critique of Thomas Aquinas, which should stimulate some discussion. 

And for those of you that are interested, here are a few of the other ones that have been posed around the blogosphere since I first started the meme:

 Michael’s critique of Jürgen Moltmann (sorry David H., you weren’t the first)

Derrick’s critique of Wolfhart Pannenberg

I’m still waiting on one of the other Princeton Barthians to give us something on Bart and/or Jüngel. 

Worst Theological Problem Meme: Jürgen Moltmann

Posted by on June 14, 2007 1 comment

A Guest-Post by David Horstkoetter of Flying Farther. 

This challenge exposes a weakness I have, for all the reading I have done, I have rarely focused on one person’s systematic theology. And this limits the choices I feel even somewhat confident enough to talk about. However, if I were to pick someone, it would be Jürgen Moltmann. Given that theology in some areas (most prominently seen in liberation theology) has shifted from a focus upon the believer/atheist dichotomy to the person/non-person, James Cone has made the point that many theologies have lost their relevancy insomuch as they address an old question. However, there is a motif within European-born theology that holds promise for continuous relevancy between old and new theology: the suffering and hopeful Christ. This is why I have chosen Moltmann (no matter how much Halden might dislike him. heh.). Moltmann seems to be able to bridge the gap between many aspects of liberal, liberation, and conservative theology, but still retain a Christocentrism and this strength of Moltmann is very important for me right now.

The truth be told, I’d begun writing a rather lengthy response to this meme sometime ago, only to realize that I should read more to adequately critique and thus I kept putting this off. So now as I actually write this, in an effort to not come off crazy or extend beyond myself, I’ll attempt to level one solid of crititque that I have noticed myself, but have also been vocalized by others as well, particularly by some faculty here.

Despite all that Moltmann has accomplished (helped revive Trinitarian work, helped revive eschatology, a great deal of thought on theodicy, a theology of Creation and even “opened up a veritable new chapter in theology, in which the suffering of God is almost a new orthodoxy” says Grenz and Olson in 20th Century Theology), Moltmann is not flawless – far from it.

In my book the most difficult flaw to deal with, is the lack of method. Moltmann simply does not line out a hermeneutical method (although I hear he says that he will finally write one). I like his writing and understand it well enough, but as far as he approaches the Biblical text or theology as a whole, there is next to no information on method from what I have seen. In fact, this is also a gripe I have heard from a few professors here at Union. So for me, to access Moltmann’s conclusions, I sometimes have to construct my own arguement, an arguement that satisfies me and reaches his conclusion, because it just does not exist in his writings. With a lack of method, the rest of his writings seem to take on a whole other level of difficulty.

For instance, Moltmann came by Union for a Q and A while giving lectures in the city. We were given the lectures ahead of time to read. Here is a section:

The justice which Christ will bring about for all and everything is not the justice that establishes what is good and evil, and the retributive justice which rewards the good and punishes the wicked. It is God`s creative justice, which brings the victims justice and puts the perpetrators right. The victims of injustice and violence are first judged so that they may receive their rights. The perpetrators of evil will afterwards experience the justice that puts things to rights. They will thereby be transformed inasmuch as they will be redeemed only together with their victims. They will be saved through the crucified Christ, who comes to them together with their victims. They will `die` to their evil acts against their victims and the burden of their guilt in order to be born again to a new life together with their victims. Paul also expresses this with the image of the fire through which every human work is proved: `If any man`s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire` (1 Cor. 3.15). The image of the End-time `fire` is an image of the consuming love of God and not an image of the wrath of God. Everything which is, and has been, in contradiction to God will be burnt away, so that the person who is loved by God is saved, and everything which is, and has been, in accord with God in that person`s life is preserved.

The purpose goal of erecting the victims and correcting the perpetrators is not reward and punishment but the victory of God`s creative justice over against all that is godless in heaven, on earth and under the earth. Victorious divine justice will not separate humankind into blessed and condemned at the end of the world, but will unite them for God`s great Day of Reconciliation on this earth. On this day all the tears will be wiped away from their eyes, the tears of suffering as well as the tears of remorse, for there will be no more suffering and pain nor crying (Rev 21, 4). The earth will than be cleaned up from the dirt of sin and death. The shadows of sin will disappear together with the night of death: “And death shall be no more”. Annihilated are the powers of annihilation.

Now, I was curious as to how this plays out in light of the scriptural text, Matthew 25, specifically about the sheep and the goats. I asked him and he said we are misreading the text. Well of course we are reading the text differently, but the only answer he gave to the question was that we are both the sheep and the goats – we are at least one point in our life, the person in prison, the visitor and the one who does not visit. Alright, I got that, but how does this work with the surrounding text? I would love to arrive at his conclusion (and kinda do actually), but he has not voiced well his hermeneutical method. So, the only way I can reach some of his conclusions is by creating my own theology and determining my own method with some goal in mind. Right. ‘Cause thats easy, especially with all the other hermeneutical problems to consider. Sigh. So in the end, until he lines out his method, Moltmann in my book will be someone with great insights and a visionary, but not a very good theologian in the professional sense.

Looking back, I did do a post on Hauerwas that might also apply to Halden’s challenge. While Hauerwas is technically an ethicist and not exactly systematic, he does collapse the categories of theology and ethics into one category and has covered a great deal of territory in his many writings. So I suppose the reader can take their pick between Moltmann’s lack of method, or Hauerwas’ faulty use of history.

Worst Theological Problem Meme: Hans Urs von Balthasar

Posted by on June 13, 2007 16 comments

A Guest-Post by Fred from Deep Furrows

I’m a student of literature and not a theologian, but Hans Urs von Balthasar has had a extensive influence upon my adult life. Criticizing Balthasar is difficult for several reasons: 1. he was broadly and profoundly educated in Western culture as a whole, much more than I or any other; 2. he thinks symphonically, so revising one part in the score impacts everything else; 3. he wrote at a time of intense theological ferment, so the critic has to remember that his theology is part of a larger conversation. I cannot even begin to criticize Balthasar on these terms.

The biggest difficulty for me is how to be critical of Balthasar without substituting my own limited measure for his; that is, how can criticism become an opening to greater and deeper reality and not merely an exercise in affirming my own prejudice and opinion?

The first work of criticism is to look clearly at the object in question. This past weekend a brief conversation with a friend clarified the issue for me. A reader, writer, and teacher of fiction, she expressed a strong distaste for Balthasar’s theologizing of fiction. I suddenly realized that the value of Balthasar’s writings is not for fiction or the arts – instead, the value is for theologians, whose discourses have become too narrowly preoccupied with building theoretical systems. Balthasar opened the dusty ivory tower of theology to human experience in the forms of poetry, music, history, and more.

With this insight, I would offer some criticisms of Balthasar, but more of his theological reception and my own reading.

1. Balthasar does work that extracts key theological themes, often drawing on literary and cultural critics (he also did plenty of first-hand work, but his was a massive undertaking). As literary criticism, Balthasar’s books make great theology. Being a student of literature, I must remember the richness of literature beyond these themes. To impose these themes on literature a priori is to reverse Balthasar’s great adventure.

2. A related point is that to read great literature one needs great humanity, a humanity that is stunted if one replaces reading literature with the theological commentary it inspires.

3. Balthasar writes from Europe, and so he properly takes a European perspective. He notes that he was incapable of broadening his Theological Aesthetics to other cultures and noted that Asia would be especially “important and fruitful” (Vol I, p 11). As an American, I have an American perspective which of course includes England, Europe, Asia, etc., in addition to America.

4. Even Balthasar’s reading of selected European works must be complemented by further theological work which draws upon human culture. If this doesn’t happen, then Balthasar’s opening of theology to human experience as expressed in culture lapses back into abstract theoretical discourse. The Ressourcement series from Eerdmans has made several great works that inspired Balthasar available in English (most beautifully Charles Péguy’s splendid poem, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope).

5. Balthasar frequently lamented the lack of serious, significant creativity in the contemporary West. Of itself, Balthasar’s work doesn’t inspire a renaissance, but only indicates it.

6. What I say here comes from my experience that Jesus Christ renews and deepens my humanity, but also that tenderness for my humanity makes me receptive to Christ. Your mileage may vary.

An earlier, more lopsidedly positive, evaluation of Balthasar by me can be found here: Why I love Hans Urs von Balthasar

Three Quotes on Homosexuality & the Church

Posted by on June 12, 2007 6 comments

I’m not going to offer any commentary on these quotations, I only want them to stimulate thought.  For those who are interested in my own take on this issue, my theses on sexual identity and Christian ethics should give you a good idea.

Eugene Rogers:

The difference between members of a same-sex couple is not “merely psychological,” but also an embodied difference, if only because sexual response is nothing if not something done bodily. Difference cannot be reduced to male-female complementarity, because that would leave Jesus a deficient human being. Jesus did not need a female other half to be fully human. (This point raises the issue of what singleness is for, but that’s a question for another day.)

If this account is correct, then it turns out that conservatives wish to deprive same-sex couples not so much of satisfaction as of sanctification. But that is contradictory, because so far as I know no conservative has ever seriously argued that same-sex couples need sanctification any less than cross-sex couples do. It is at least contradictory to attempt in the name of holiness to deprive people of the means of their own sanctification,

Conservatives often claim it’s dangerous to practice homosexuality, because it might be a sin. I want to propose that the danger runs both ways. It is more than contradictory, it may even be resisting the Spirit, to attempt to deprive same-sex couples of the discipline of marriage and not to celebrate same-sex weddings. I don’t mean this kind of rhetoric to insult others or forestall discussion. I just mean that the danger of refusing to celebrate love is real.

 Robert Gagnon:

The call of the gospel will make different demands on different persons because every individual carries his or her own set of biological or social baggage and has a unique role in God’s overall redemptive plan. Was it Jesus’ “bad luck” to be the Messiah and to have imposed on him the “added burden” of dying on the cross for the sins of the world? Paul had the “bad luck” of being called to a life of hardship that few, if any, followers of Jesus have had to face. Was it fair of God to impose on Paul the “added burden” of denying, on a daily basis, his basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and protection from severe social abuse and violence, all for the cause of the gospel? Some persons have the “bad luck” of turning out to be exclusive pedophiles, or of having seemingly uncontrollable desires for multiple sex partners, or of growing up without the kind of stable family environment that nurtures a capacity for lifelong sexual commitment, or of finding sexual stimulation only in coercive sexual activity, or of having a strong disposition for alcoholism, or of being afflicted with a strong sense of insecurity and distrust that makes faith in Christ difficult, or of being far more susceptible to feelings of covetousness than most. On and on we could go. It is wrong to be callous to the particular sufferings that people experience as they “work at their own salvation with fear and trembling” amidst God’s gracious work in them (Phil 2:12-13). But it is equally wrong to give the impression that one person’s particular “bad luck”… justifies a circumvention of the gospel’s call or to convey that a particular constellation of intense desires constitutes “who you are” and establishes an inviolable, God-given “destiny.” A person who does not experience homoerotic desires may be beset by other types of sinful impulses that impose even greater burdens on an obedient Christian life. Yet no one gets an exemption as regards death to self, whatever the particularities of one’s individual life experiences.

     The hope of the gospel message is that our identity is not found in “who we are” in the flesh but rather in who God is shaping us to be in the Spirit of Christ. Any other message, including a message of moral-biological determinism, is a false gospel.

Tim Otto:

Both sides of the church find themselves sick of the other side’s lies. The affirming church looks at the lies of the traditionalist church with its modernist “fix- it” techniques of orientation change, marrying the opposite sex, or the claim that homosexuals have a special “superpower” called “the gift,” and says, “If you’ve got to tell so many lies, how can you claim to have good news? You must have forsaken the gospel.” And the traditionalist church looks at the affirming church and says, “Gosh, if you’re preaching sex outside of marriage what you are preaching is just Enlightenment liberalism dressed in drag. You must have given up on scripture.”

… As both sides try to articulate an ethic that “everyone” can do, we end up telling lies and betraying the gospel. As both sides repent, and stop telling lies, then I suspect that the stakes won’t seem so high, and that may make it more possible to actually talk. But just as the Christian criteria for ethics is not that it be possible for everyone, a Christian ethic must be possible for someone, in some specific place. …So the question becomes, if you argue that a homosexual ought to be celibate, is that miracle more possible in your congregation than elsewhere? Or, if you argue for homosexual marriage, is that miracle more possible in your congregation than elsewhere?

What then is Biblical Authority?

Posted by on June 11, 2007 4 comments

The nature of biblical authority is a much-debated concept, not only between, but within traditions. Indeed it is a vital and pressing issue for anyone who believes that Christians do not live by proof-texts alone!

So, then what should we make of biblical authority as a doctrine the church must adhere to and live by? What does it mean to claim that the Bible is a primary authority to which our thinking about God, humanity, and the world must answer? All I can do is offer a modest, reductive, and incomplete proposal, which despite its limits, I think moves us in at least some sort of good direction.

First, to claim that the Bible is authoritative is principally to acknowledge that God has a history, and that we are not able to be in communion with God in abstraction for that history. To claim that the Bible is authoritative is to claim that it tells us truly what we need to know about God’s historical being-for-us. The Bible is authoritative because it tells us the story of God’s being and act in and for the world, a story in which we are participants. In short, the Bible bears authority because it provides the primary vista on the mode in which all humanity must be related to God: in the history of Israel and Jesus.

Second, to claim that the Bible is authoritative is to claim that all our speaking and acting must conform to the Bible’s own presentation of God’s desire and destiny for his creation. In other words to claim that the Bible is our authority is to make a profoundly ethical claim, namely that God speaks and we must obey him.  Of course, it is simplistic and wrong to claim that the Bible tells us what to do about all issues moral. The Bible is not such a textbook. Rather, what the Bible does is bear witness to the end for which God has created the world, and thus invites us to participate fittingly in this ongoing drama. The shape of our lives in speaking, acting, and relating to others is ruled, not by a moral code of principles mined from the Bible, but from the grand narrative of Scripture which discloses the end for which God has destined us in Christ.  In short, to practice biblical authority means to live, not moralistically, but eschatologically.

Third, to claim that the Bible is authoritative is to claim that the church is the community in which the Bible is situated and within which it is intelligible as Scripture. For a book of any kind to “have authority” in any real, empirical sense, it must be given authority by those who place themselves under it. We can certainly say that the Bible has inherent authority by virtue of God’s relationship to Scripture, but we must likewise say that it is the church’s Spirit-guided practice of according authority to Scripture that brings about the function of the Bible’s authority in any meaningful sense. Thus, to claim that the Bible is our authority is to claim that the church exists in a relationship with God in history which makes the possibility of biblical authority meaningful. For us to even claim that the Bible is our authority is to confess the fundamental claim of our faith. Namely that God has spoken to us in Israel and Jesus, and precisely from within this history, attested as it is by the witness of Scripture, we discover the truth about God and ourselves.

Finally, to claim that the Bible is our authority is to claim that our lives are to be lived in doxology before Scripture’s God, in continuity with Scripture’s own liturgical and theological trajectories. To claim the Bible as our authority is to claim that the identity of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as disclosed in the narratives, poems, discourses, prophesies, visions, and songs of the Bible is the one true God and that he alone is to be worshipped and glorified. Acknowledging that the Bible is authoritative is to claim that we must be found worshipping Scripture’s God, singing Scripture’s songs, praying Scripture’s prayers, telling Scripture’s stories, and obeying Scripture’s commands. Thus, the practice of biblical authority is at once liturgical and literary.  The life shaped by the Bible is a life surrendered in worship of the Triune God of Scripture in which the songs of Scripture are offered up as a sweet and pleasant aroma to the God of Israel, Jesus, and the World.

A Theo-Dramatic Bible?

Posted by on June 8, 2007 2 comments

Recently Byron has posted a lengthy review of Kevin Vanhoozer’s tome, The Drama of Doctrine. I have a review of my own on Amazon and another published in Neue Zietschrift, and I may post one of them here later for people’s reading pleasure. But, in the meantime, I wanted to think a bit on some of the issues which Vanhoozer’s proposal raises about the nature of doctrine, and specifically the doctrinal role of the Bible.

Vanhoozer’s vision of theology, boiled down – and certainly oversimplify – is that theology is direction about how we should fittingly participate in the ongoing drama of redemption. Thus, for Vanhoozer, the primary way of conceptualizing the shape of God’s engagement with the world in Jesus and the Spirit is in terms of dramatic encounter. Thus, as Christians we find ourselves within this drama of divine-human encounter in Christ and must strive in discipleship in learning how to rightly “play our roles” in the theodrama.

Now, at the outset I want to affirm this basic theodramatic orientation.  This basic vision of redemption as the dramatic interplay of speech and action between Triune and human persons is, I think an undeniably crucial way of envisioning and understanding God’s relation to the world in Christ. Long before Vanhoozer crafted this elegant evangelical appropriation of the language of drama, it was Hans Urs von Balthasar who thoroughly explored such a theodramatic approach to understanding the Christian faith. Indeed, it was Balthasar who unquestionably demonstrated the indispensable importance of understanding the divine-human relationship in dramatic terms.

However, Vanhoozer the evangelical and Balthasar the Catholic have quite a different set of concerns toward which they seek to deploy their respective theodramatic arsenals. And for Vanhoozer, one of the central aims of his theodramatic theology is to find a new way of situating the Scripture principle (sola scriptura) within a theodramatic context. However, this is where Vanhoozer’s approach gets perhaps, a bit messy. In his treatment the Bible appears in the play first as the recounting of the history of the original theodrama, as an actor in the ongoing performance, and (most predominantly as a script which rules and directs our performance.

So, the question I am left with is whether it is really possible for the Bible to be all of these things in a theodramatic framework that does not push its categories to the point of redundancy or absurdity. It’s certainly one thing to say that the character of the Triune economy of salvation is something akin to a drama, and entirely another to try to figure out who’s the director, who’s the writer, and who’s the audience, which I fear Vanhoozer goes a bit too far in trying to do.
But, for my present purposes, I pose he question. What is the Bible’s theodramatic role? To my mind, we must give the simplest answer possible to avoid, on the one hand inflating the importance of the Bible in the economy of salvation, and on the other, by dropping it out of the picture entirely. At a minimum we need to acknowledge that the Bible is in some significant sense tied to God’s ongoing action in our world and simultaneously affirm that it is fully embedded in and concerned with history. So, if I were pressed to give an answer, about the Bible’s theodramatic role, what would I say?

Well, first of all the Bible cannot be an actor. Only persons are actors, and despite what some fundamentalists think, the Word that was with God and was God, is Jesus, not the protestant canon. The Bible can no more be an actor in God’s drama than the U.S. Constitution can be in the story of American history. To be sure, God acts through Scripture, but that is precisely the point – it is God, not the Scripture who is doing the acting!

So, the real question we have is this: is the Bible a script, or a record of past performances?  Here we would have to work much too hard to redefine what is normally meant by “script” in order to consider the Bible to really be such a thing. The Bible is certainly theodramatic, but it appears, prima facie to be, not so much a script, but as a collection of theodramatic memories and histories which present themselves to us as a training school as it were, in which we can imaginatively take up residence so as to find ourselves situated within the same theodrama that is present in the Scriptures.  This seems to be the best way to think theodramatically about the Bible, keeping its theodramatic and humanly historical character in view simultaneously. The Bible gives us a story, a history of what has happened in the theodrama so far and hints at the future to come. It doesn’t script our roles for us, but rather provides us with a way of seeing what the drama is really all about so that we can figure out, through the memories of Scripture, the guidance of the Spirit and communion with one another what it really means for us to find ourselves as participants in God’s drama.

Rowan Williams on Discipleship

Posted by on June 7, 2007 2 comments

Jesus has brought us together precisely so that we look at one another with that degree of expectancy, which (as again I usually have to say) doesn’t mean that you will agree with everything the other Christian says. It simply means that you begin by saying, ‘What is Jesus Christ giving me here and now?’ Never mind the politics; never mind the policy; never mind anything, just ask that question and it does perhaps move you forward a tiny bit in discipleship. Can we live in a Church characterized by expectancy towards one another of that kind? It would be a very biblical experience of the Church.

But now, awareness, expectancy, discipleship as not something intermittent – all of this presupposes the category of following, which is so very basic in all the language about discipleship. This listening awareness, this expectancy, presupposes following because it presupposes that we are willing to travel to where the master is, to follow where the master goes. And, of course, in the gospels, where the master goes is very frequently not where we would have thought of going, or where we would have wanted to go. Hence, taking up the instrument of our execution – the cross – and walking his way.

Rowan Williams, “Being Disciples”

Baptism, Voluntarism, and Politics

Posted by on June 6, 2007 15 comments

In my last few years of theological stumbling around, I’ve found myself becoming quite a bit more “ecumenical” than my younger evangelical self would once have been comfortable with.  And, of course any of you who know much about my interests, know that Hans Urs von Balthasar, and much of contemporary Catholic theology has become incredibly influential in my thinking. 

However, I still find myself to be, at the core, a free-church anabaptist.  At least of some sort.  Principally, I am an anabaptist in my beliefs about Christendom and specifically how the church must be an alternative culture in the midst of the nations in the world.  In this brief bit of theological rambling I want to look a bit at how our practice of baptism shapes and is shaped by how we undertstand the church in relationship to the world.

A comprehensive treatment of the logic of anabaptist baptism is found in Thomas Finger’s A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology, which is a very thorough and balanced historical and theological study of anabaptism. Lee Camp’s account of baptism in Mere Discipleship also shows the logic of anabaptist baptism in a very accesible way.  It was primarily because of the conflation of baptism and citizenship under Christendom that the anabaptists insisted on viewing baptism as an initiatory act, entered into in faith whereby one’s allegiance is given to God and his people (the church) over against other social formations. The practice of infant baptism essentially inscribed all persons at birth into the church by virtue of the fact that they were part of a nation with which the church was conflated. That is why the anabaptists felt compelled to reject it — because of its enmeshment with the Constantinian settlement.

Now, are there ways of practicing infant baptism that are not Constantinian? I certainly think so. Nor do I dismiss the legitimacy of infant baptism out of hand (leaving aside for a moment the discussion of biblical warrant).  However, I think the connection between baptism and discipleship is eroded when infant baptism becomes the standard practice.

Today, proponents of infant baptism strongly draw a correlation between baptism and circumcision in ancient Israel.  And that connection is, of course undeniable, at least on one level.  Namely, they are both signs of being included in the covenant community.  But the crucial question is how one comes to be included in the church versus how a child came to be included in biblical Israel. For you this answer should be obvious. We enter into the church through God’s act of justification by grace through faith. If entry into the church is based on justification by faith, it seems at best theological awkward to confer baptism on infants where personal faith and discipleship cannot become a factor in their inclusion in the church (except through their parents as Luther argued, though I don’t think this holds much water).

It seems to me that infant baptism can undercut the distinctiveness of the church as an alternative social reality because it renders church membership a function of a different social reality, either through the family or through the state. If one’s identity as a member of a “Christian nation” or a “Christian family” is enough to place one inside the church, it seems to me that the distinctive nature of the church’s social reality as a community created de novo by the work of the Spirit which transcends nation and family ends up getting eclipsed.

Finally, while infant baptism does have a long history in the tradition, the tradition is not unambiguous about the practice of baptism. There were standard practices of delaying baptism until death because of different medieval theologies of the impossibility of postbaptismal sin. None of this serves to refute or support infant baptism, but I do think we need to acknowledge the variety in the tradition on this topic.

And if cultural realities are factors in how we are to rightly embody our sacramental practices, the real question before us is what mode of baptism captures the essence of what is being “said” (vera visibli) in baptism? To my mind anabaptist baptism and the clear imagery contained therein of passing from one life and one social reality to another most rightly “says” the truth about what baptism is.  In administering baptism to believers who committ their lives to following Christ we say that there is indeed a break between our “former way of life” and our new life in Christ.  Our citizenship is transferred from Babylon to Jerusalem.  And none can be born in Jerusalem, we must be reborn as children of the Jerusalem from above.  Only then is she our mother.

Believer’s baptism is not about some sort of voluntarism, in which we get baptized because we made a choice to join a voluntary association of individuals.  It is about recognizing that Christ’s call to discipleship requires full allegiance and committment from the one who emerges from the waters.  Believer’s baptism is, in my view the most inherently and rightly polictical mode of practicing this sacrament.  It presents what is at the center of the Christian faith, that in Christ we die and rise again with him into the realm of his Lordship, his Kingdom.  The life we rise to with him is precisely the life of following him, of continuing to traverse the road from Jerusalem to Golgatha.  Baptism is indeed our induction  into the community of faith, but most centrally it is the stripping off of one mode of life – life in the flesh – and the putting on of a new life – life in the Spirit.  These considerations, in my view lend credibility the the tradition of believer’s or disciples baptism.  The politics of baptism must never be forgotten.  In baptism we die to the powers of Babylon and are reborn into the cessation movement of the Lamb. 

The Maasai Creed

Posted by on June 5, 2007 6 comments

The Maasai Creed was composed around 1960 by Catholic missionaries as an adaption of the Nicene Creed for the Maasai (an African tribe of semi-nomadic people who live primarily in Kenya and Tanzania).

I find the emphasis on the life of Christ, which is entirely missing from Western Creeds to be very interesting and moving.  That, and the total earthiness of this way of telling the gospel story.

We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth. We have known this High God in the darkness, and now we know him in the light. God promised in the book of his word, the Bible, that he would save the world and all nations and tribes.

We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from that grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.

We believe that all our sins are forgiven through him. All who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love, and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.

H/T: Speaking of Faith

Switch to our mobile site