Monthly Archives: January 2008 - Page 2

The Second Annual Karl Barth Blog Conference

Posted by on January 24, 2008 1 comment

 Travis has announced the upcoming Second Annual Karl Barth Blog Conference.  After last year’s smashing success engaging Karl Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, this is sure to be an excellent series of collaborative posts as well.  Here is the information on the conference which is scheduled for early June:

The topic for the conference will be Eberhard Jüngel’s God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. The projected schedule is as follows:

  • Day 1 – “Introduction,” by WTM
  • Day 2 – “The Passion of God: Some Questions for Jungel on Divine Suffering,” by Scott Jackson; Response by Matthew Bruce.
  • Day 3 – “TBA,” TBA; Response by TBA.
  • Day 4 – “Minor Premise: Incipient Theological Ethics in God’s Being is in Becoming,” James Cubie; Reponse by Shane Wilkins.
  • Day 5 – “God’s Objectivity: Revelation as Sacrament in Jüngel’s ‘God’s Being is in Becoming’” by Thomas Adams; Response by Chris TerryNelson.
  • Day 6 – “Demythologizing the Divide between Barth and Bultmann: Jüngel’s Gottes Sein ist im Werden as an Attempt toward a Rapprochement between Karl and Rudolf,” by David Congdon; Response by TBA.

‘Force is no Attribute of God’

Posted by on January 23, 2008 1 comment

“‘Force is no attribute of God” – that is the basic principle for the Trinitarian theologians.  God’s divinity does not consist in his ability to push things around, to make and break, to impose his will from the security of some heavenly remoteness, and to sit in grandeur while all the world does his bidding.  Far from staying above the world, he sends his own glory into it.  Far from imposing, he invites and persuades.  Far from demanding service from men in order to enhance himself, he gives his life in service to men for their enhancement.  But God acts toward the world in this way because within himself he is a life of total self-giving.”

–Arthur McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1982), 82.

The Pernicious Domination of Choice

Posted by on January 23, 2008 6 comments

In various discussions of ecumenism and ecclesiology one of the elements that often comes up is the issue of the church’s givenness, or non-givenness.  One of the standard lines is that the Roman church is a structure that is greater than the sum of its parts, it is a “given”, whereas Protestant churches are self-made fabrications of a group of individuals who “create” a church by their own choosing.  And prima facie, such a description seems plausible, given the state of a great many evangelical churches in the West.  However, such a diagnosis of Protestantism as a volitonal fabrication versus Roman Catholicism as a stable rock of givenness is more than naive.

The more pressing and real issue behind these often rhetorically charged discussions is the dominance of choice in the social structuring of the modern world.  Modernity and late-capitalism have constructed a world of transience, illusive immediacy, and hypermobility in which it is fundamentally the choices and preferences of individuals (provided that they possess enough capital) which determine the activities, affiliations, and practices of personal life.  While various ecclesial traditions quibble about who is “voluntaristic” and who is “given”, the truth of the matter is that late-capitalism has constructed us all as persons who approach life on the basis of the sovereignty of choice.  Whether we are Roman Catholic of Protestant, we are all constructed as self-contained individuals whose concrete religous practices, geographic locations, and social affiliations are determined by the capitalist economy, rather than the ekklesia. 

This is why Roman Catholic theologian Tracey Rowland is absolutely right to argue that the pressing issue for Christians concerned with the integrity of eccleisal life, practice, and witness is “not so much whether one is a self-described Protestant or Catholic, but that of where one stands in relation to the cultural formation described as ‘modernity.’”  The problem is that the integrity of our ecclesial traditions have become so fragmentary under capitalist discipline that they either have little ability to cultivate any sort of ecclesial ethos at all (many Protestants), or they maintain the ethos of tradition while losing the socially formative power of that tradition to the domination of the market, which structures and regulates the lives of its Christians (many Roman Catholics).

What Christians, whether they are Roman Catholic or Protestant are called to, is intentional devotion to and appropriation of their rootedness in the historical tradition of the church, begining with the story of Israel, climaxing in the history of Jesus, and carried on historical church in the power of the Spirit.  The reality of choice, as constructed in late-capitalism as the all-powerful arbiter of shaping life, must be met head-on by Christians.  The simple fact of the matter is that choice goes all the way down, whether we like it or not.  We all have the option of leaving whenever we want.  The market has given us this power.  The vocation of Christians who wish to stand against the economic forces of fragmentation which seek to tear asunder the body of Christ is, more often than not to refuse to make the choices which capitalist order places in our laps.  What is necessary is for Christians to take on an inherently self-limiting posture regarding their vocational and economic “options” in the world.  One way in which this is being done, and has been done throughout the church’s history is the monastic practice of vow-making, particularly embodied in the Benedictine vow of stability.  Such modes of covenanted life, which limit, curtail, and stand against the proliferation of choice in the capitalist order are absolutely central in the cultivation of the kind of alternative eccleisal consciousness the church is called to be.  In short, what is necessary if Christians are to embody an alternative to the economic hegemony of modernity and capitalism is that we be willing to be fools. 

Eating and Death

Posted by on January 22, 2008 3 comments

One of the issues that is often glossed over in reflections on the Eucharist is the reasoning behind the fact that through our eating a meal together, we proclaim the death of Jesus.  Today, one would not normally associate death with a celebratory meal; meals are an instantiation of life, not context of commemorating a death.  The question for Christians goes to the theological significance of what eating means and how such an action can me construed as a symbolum of the death of Christ.

The reason why such a connection is difficult for us to often see is, I contend, largely due to the particularly modern sort of necrophobia which attends our understanding of death.  (Though, of course, this skittish necrophobia is but the flip side of a pervese necrophilia.)  Our cultural understanding of death is based on a particular ontology if you will, and ontology of possession and violence.  Personal identity is construed in modernity as the distinctive possession of the individual person.  I have that which I am.  To be alive is to posses myself, be in control of myself, etc.  Thus, for the world today, death can only be understood as a form of radical and catastrophic violence.  Very few today think of death as a “change” or “going to sleep”, rather death is seen is a catastrophic mutilation, a horrific dispossession which destroys and violates.  It is to be avoided at all costs, for if we believe in identity-as-possession, death ultimately means the complete and total undoing of our being.

On the basis of such an understanding of death, the idea that a celebratory meal should proclaim and commemorate a death is irrevocably scandalous.  And it is precisely the logic of identity-as-possession that is subverted by the Eucharistic logic of celebration.  Jesus’ life and death subvert the narrative of possessed identity; Jesus’ entire life was one in which rather than maintaining and preserving his life, he continually expended it for others in a pattern of self-giving which had its culmination is his death.  Throughout his life, Jesus defied the idea of possessed identity by receiving his life totally from outside himself, from the Father, and by expending that life as gift for others, even to the point of death.  For Jesus, identity is not possession, rather is is pure gift, which is always and only received and must always and only be given away.  Jesus’ death is not the catastrophic mutilation, or erasure of his identity by forces from without, rather Jesus chooses to die.  “No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord.”

We are given, in Jesus a very different paradigm and practice of death.  For Jesus, death is not a final robbery, a last destruction, but the culmination of self-expending love which is the eternal life of the triune God.  Jesus’ complete self-expenditure culminates in him being completely and utterly used up.  His death is not something forced on him, but rather characterizes the very shape of his entire life of total self-giving which nourishes and engenders the life of the triune God in those who are joined to Christ by the Spirit.  Christ’s death is his total giving of himself for the sake of engendering and communicating life to others.

That is why the Eucharist proclaims the Lord’s death.  For in eating we are nourished; in eating, life is communicated to us.  The bread and wine of the Eucharist do not so much represent Jesus’ being killed, as his total self-expenditure, culminating in death through which we are nourished, sustained, and transformed.  Eating signifies death, not because death is violent mutilation, but because it is the form of the radically prodigal, self-expending love that is the divine life which is given to us in Christ.  The Eucharist embodies the transformation of identity from possession to gift.  It proclaims a logic of redemption in which life, rather than needing to be secured as a possession, can be given away to the fullest.  It proclaims that the ultimate ground of all being is the infinitely fruitful life of the Father, who suffuses all things with infinite life, such that the giving away of life, even unto death no longer need terrify us.  For in the bosom of the Father, death itself is transformed in to vivifying and luminescent life.

Arthur McGill: We Worship the Fecundity of God

Posted by on January 21, 2008 6 comments

“The Christian worships not the absoluteness of God but the fecundity of God, the fact that the Father engenders the Son who carries the fullness of divinity.  God is not God as superior, as superior to us in holding onto the divine reality.  We do not worship God as self-contained divinity.  We worship God for the glory of the Father, a glory which consists in bearing fruit.  That is the meaning of the cross.  We worship God as Father, that is, as the one who engenders the Son.  We worship God further as one, who not only engenders the Son, but engenders in all of us the same life.  Where do we see the glory of God?  In the Son.  Here the Father is glorified, and fruitful power is the Father’s and not the Son’s own.  Worship then is a response to glory.  Where is glory?  In Jesus’ act of dying.  In the act he shares his glory and bestows life, but we worship here the glory of the Father.”

–Arthur McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 74-75.

The Gift of the Martyrs

Posted by on January 19, 2008 5 comments

“Christ crucified must thus remain ‘metahermenutical’; he stands outside modernity, outside the market, outside every human order of power, as a real and visible beauty.  Nor can worldly power ever overcome him in his mystical body, because, again, the very gesture of the rhetoric of his form is one of donation, of martyrdom, and one that the powers of this world can suppress only through a violence that creates martyrs, and so confirms – contrary to all it intends – the witness of a peace that is infinite.  In the time of sin, governed by an eschatological hope that has already been imparted in history but that is still deferred, Christian rhetoric can be only a declaration of witness, and a gift.  A gift of martyrs – which is the name that must, finally be given to the Christian practice of persuasion – can never be returned violently, as the Same; because this gift is always peace and beauty, violence can ‘receive’ the gift, but never return it.”

–David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 441-442.

Basic Ontology: A Meditation

Posted by on January 18, 2008 5 comments

The truth of the matter is that giving life away isn’t the least bit sexy or heroic. Frankly it’s often the most draining, shitty way to live that you could ever think of. After all, giving life away means that often your life is going to end up being consumed by those around you. In the end living a life of self-giving can only end in being used up. At least that’s how it often feels.

And how do you keep on with that sort of life when all it does is stretch you thin? You expect it to be cathartic, but often the tears, the pain and the nights of groaning leave you with nothing but more shell and less substance than you ever thought you’d feel.

Worse, though than all the unresolved pain is the trivialization of pain that goes on in your own head. In some ways it is far worse to suffer the pain of those weathering hell and death than to have your own hell to fixate on. The great pleasure of personal suffering, is after all, that it, at least is mine. At least that I can hang onto, name as my own and present to others as something that is unique to me.

Living a life of self-divestment and mutuality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when it starts meaning that more often than not you won’t get to hang onto even your own pain and suffering but must learn to share even that with others. What could be more offensive to our pride than the fact that we have to let others into our own prideful graspings and the bitterness that we so often feel makes our life interesting? When we are gripped by the realization that we have to live a life of self-giving even to the point of parting with the pain we so desperately cling to as our own, then we have perhaps begun to plumb the depths of what life in Christ means.

The worst thing in all this is the profound alienness that attends every act of selflessness. With every loving word I utter, every loving embrace I offer, part of me screams that I am a fraud who will soon be found out for what he truly is. This is, of course as it should be. If our acts of selflessness and love felt like something of our own we’d at best be a walking contradiction and at worst an arrogant blasphemous example of someone who thinks they don’t need Christ to remake their identity.

But there is often nothing harder than being brought face to face with the reality that we are from beginning to end constituted by others. How stricken we can be when we learn that in the end nothing is really ours at all. What do we have that we haven’t been given? Sure, we create illusions of “earning” what we have. But those things are just that, illusions. At the end of the day everything we have is a gift that we could never secure or guarantee for ourselves.

Often, of course the illusions are more comfortable. Living as a “self-made man” (what an idiotic statement that is!) is a compelling, enticing temptation. But all of that really is just a temptation to self-deception. Deep down we know that all we are is given to us (or taken from us) by those around us. Lives are shaped, hearts are formed, loves are crafted in and through the gifts we give to, or withhold from one another.

The ultimate horror of living in the culture of illusion is that the gift of life poured out for us, on which we depend for our very being is never guaranteed to be returned to us when we expend ourselves for the other. Or at least all we can see is that the greatest saints, who have selflessly expended themselves to the fullest lie cold in their graves.  The cross cannot guarantee the resurrection.

It is the common perception of the sovereignty of death that the resurrection forever shames, exploding and imploding all at once. In Jesus, God divests himself of his own life completely and to the fullest, and yet through his complete and total self-expenditure – and only through it – are the abundant gifts of resurrection life flung forth into the raging, crooked universe. Here is the ultimate scathing glory of the resurrection. The resurrection forever affirms that amidst all the illusions of possessing and withholding our lives for ourselves, that the givers of life shall never be stifled. The resurrection forever shames and mocks the demonic wisdom that claims that life is a matter of having and getting.

The glories of broken bread, blood poured out, flaming tongues and embraced strangers stand forever in unshatterable witness against any wisdom that would shame a life devoted to self-giving and the unrestricted welcome of the stranger. At the end of the day, despite its crooked brokenness and alienated aloneness, the cosmos is everywhere charged with the goodness of God. Those who are so fortunate to be able to taste and share a life of self-giving are indeed working with the grain of the universe.

So we should forever be grateful for the unsexy, for the unfun, for ugly, for the awkward, for the life-takers, for those who would stretch us thin and see us expend ourselves to the point of death. In Christ we learn that the life-stealers, the biters and the devourers are not the adversary to be opposed, but the estranged friend to be loved, even to the point of being consumed.

Do we dare live as if this were true? Do I dare? Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know at all. But on my best days my vision is clear enough to see that the resurrection of the expended Christ into God’s glorious future mocks any life lived to myself. The God who gives until he has nothing left and then gives again forever shows that any life held onto is life extinguished into a hell of my own making. “Abandon hope, all you who enter here” is perhaps inscribed not on the gates of hell but on the hearts of any who would seek to look inside themselves for life. And in the end, that is hell, isn’t it?

But thanks be to God who has de-possesed us from ourselves in Christ! Thanks be to the God who does not live to himself or die to himself but always to and for us, his unworthy, beloved creatures. Only because God doesn’t live for himself or die for himself can we follow in that pattern and dare to believe that none of us lives to ourselves and none of us dies to ourselves. So thank him! Thanks-giving is the ultimate act of being de-possesed. In thanks we acknowledge that what we need for life is ultimately outside ourselves. Thanks, perhaps is the only true form of praise. For it alone mirrors and participates in the self-divestment and unrestricted giving that characterizes the very life of God.

Martyrdom: The Refusal to Ontologize Evil

Posted by on January 18, 2008 Comments Off

“Martyrdom denies tragedy and refused to ontologize evil by physically accepting the others’ lack of good.  Participation in the Eucharist creates martyrs, not victims.  It positions us in the divine economy, which, while it is lived out in the temporal city, resists the categories of tragedy and sacrifice, and envisions an apocalyptic hope in the final imitation of Christ: resurrection.  Resurrection is the end of sacrifice.  The divine/human gift exchange, manifested by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (and followed by those who call him Lord), creates an apocalyptic world that ends tragedy.  It is a world where the other, the martyr (as one among many “others” placed outside the walls of the territorial city), not only makes politics possible, but demonstrates true politics by witnessing to the kingdom that has arrived and is still to come.”

–Tripp York, The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Scottdale: Herald Press, 2007), 25.

Death, Martyrdom and the End of Words

Posted by on January 17, 2008 10 comments

I like words.  No, I love words.  I confess that I especially love theological words that I can often italicize, either because I like to emphasize them or (even better), because they are Greek or Latin words, the mere transcribing of which lends credibility to any argument.  Ekstasis, perichoresis, hypostasis, circumincessio, logos incarnandus, unio mystica, kenosis, plerosis, prolepsis, eschatos, koinonia, visio dei and other such fabulous words and phrases are ones that I want to throw into my writing whenever possible.  And I will continue to do so.

However, I would like to suggest that often the mere use of powerful words from our tradition can serve as a way of doing little more than playing a theological role-playing game in which we pretty much just talk a lot of shit without saying anything real.  To say it differently, and with more ironic flair, we often spend all our time doing “ontology” without even wondering about what our musings about the nature of being have to say about who or how we ourselves must be.

Many theologians who have drank from the patristic wells have seen how the Christian naming of Jesus as God, and the doctrine of the Trinity constitute a radical interruption in the history of metaphysics which is incredibly subversive.  To say that life is victorious over death is the to basically crush the larxnx of the entire world’s intellectual history under your boot in one fell swoop.  If Jesus’ resurrection, rather than our inevitable deaths are the true outcome of the world and all human stories, then everything is different.  It is a claim that literally destroys everything we’ve ever thought about the world and resurrects something entirely new in its place.  If life, rather than death is determinative of the being of the world then, quite literally everything is made new.

However, we’re often able to say such things in ways that are so boring and utterly suspect because of the way in which we ultimately fear what it might mean if our radically Christian view of the world might be true.  Do we dare live as if life rather than death will finally triumph?  And not just finally, but now, in my life and in my concrete comings and goings?  The simple fact of the matter is that the wider wisdom of the world constrains our lives in ways that are far to manifold to count.  We live as though self-protection is, at the end of the day, really how things must be done if we’re to really live.  Oh, sure we still play our linguistic role-playing games, and say stuff like “being is ek-static” or “personhood is realized in communio”, but such statements are really just words that are thrown out by a bunch of people who live their lives pretty much on the basis of the “denial of death.”

I intend to malign no one except for myself.  The point I am making is simply this: our ontologies don’t matter unless they are embodied in our lives.  The problem with doing a radically Christian ontology is not that it isn’t possible or that no such radical ontology exists, the problem is that we’re not able to live with the results.  If we truly believe that the resurrection rather than death is the last word about life, that means that we’re going to have to live as if death does not matter.  And we’re just not quite ready to swallow that.  Can we really live in a way that bears witness to our confession that life is more powerful than death.  Can our ontology be an ontology of martyrdom?

The thing is, most of us won’t because if we do then we have to die.  And death, despite our claims and italicized words is pretty much still sovereign over our imaginations.  If I were to state what I think it takes to be a truly great theologian, it would probably be something along the lines of “One who practices the rationality of the martyrs.”  The question for us is whether or not that is a rationality we are willing to follow to the end.

Hans Urs von Balthasar: ‘The Meaning of the World is Love’

Posted by on January 16, 2008 3 comments

“You, to whom I gave birth with much suffering at the Cross, will be prostrate in painful labor with me until the end of the world.  Your image mysteriously blurs to merge with the image of my virginal Mother.  She is an individual woman, but in you she becomes the cosmic Mother.  For in you my individual Heart, too, widens to become the Heart of the World.  You yourself are the holy heart of the nations, holy because of me, but unifying the world for me, making my Blood circulate throughout the body of history.  In you my redemption ripens, I myself grow to my full stature, until I, two-in-one with you, and in the bond of the two-in-one flesh — you, my Bride and my Body — will place at the feet of the Father the Kingdom which we are.  The bond of our love is the meaning of the world.  In it all things reach fulfillment.  For the meaning of the world is love.”

–Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Heart of the World (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979), 203.

In Defense of Sacrifice

Posted by on January 15, 2008 2 comments

Much in vogue these days is talk of an ‘economy of gift’ over against an ‘economy of exchange’ as more appropriate to Christian theology and practice.  Many of these conversations are exceedingly illuminating and helpful.  However, one major theological casualty in these and other discussions is the category of sacrifice.  A common sentiment nowadays, whether it is generated by a facile Girardianism, or certain forms of postmodern feminism is that Christian ethical practice cannot be oriented around the notion of sacrifice.  Rather than calling for a form of gift-giving which is self-sacrificial, we are called upon to reject the violent and oppressive tendencies of such language and strive for an economy of giving in which we give, not out of our lack but out of our abundance, where giving is compatible with continuing to possess and retain our own.  Rather than an economy of self-emptying we are summoned to an economy of self-fulfillment in which our giving to others need not, indeed must not come at cost to ourselves. 

Now, there are certainly good reasons to be skeptical of the way in which the language of sacrifice is often deployed to violent and oppressive ends and that should not be brushed over.  However, if the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is what is finally normative for Christian claims about reality, economics, ethics, and indeed about everything, then we cannot shy away from the ultimately kenotic shape of God’s engagement with the world.  We dare not, out of fear of oppression try to find a way around cruciformity.  The sacrificial language of the Bible is not so easily thrust aside.  In Christ, sacrifice is shown to mean, not scape-goating or punishment of one person in the stead of another.  Rather, for Christian sacrifice names the movement from death to resurrection that is the life of the triune God into which the world is invited in the Spirit. 

Sacrifice is having nothing and yet possessing everything.  It is the mystery of death and life unified in favor of indestructible life.  The overabundant surplus of gift which is the resurrection cannot be grasped through mode of action which eschews the sacrificial shape of Christ’s kenosis.  This is the supreme mystery of the Christian faith.  This is the wisdom of the cross.  The fullness of life breaks into our so thoroughly ‘deathed’ lives, not from our establishment, but our disestablishment, not through our philanthropy, but through our poverty.  The rejection of sacrifice, rather than being an instance of liberation, is in fact the triumph of the wisdom of the world over the wisdom of cross.  We must reckon with the fact that is only and always and eternally the Lamb, the Lamb that was slaughtered who is worthy to receive power.  That is the gospel of our salvation.  That is the message of freedom that allows us flourish in emptiness, and give precisely out of our complete and utter poverty.  And it is in that movement that rather than losing our lives, we find them.  Rather than the triumph of death over life, in the profoundly sacrificial economy of the triune God death itself is deathed.  And that is good news.

Simon Chan: The Church is Prior to Creation

Posted by on January 15, 2008 5 comments

“The church precedes creation in that it is what God has in view from all eternity and creation is the means by which God fulfills his eternal purpose in time.  The church does not exist to fix a broken creation; rather, creation exists to realize the church.  To be sure, the church’s coming into being does require the overcoming of sin, but that is quite different from saying that the problem of sin is the reason for the church’s being.  God made the world in order to make the church, not vice versa.”

–Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity, 2006), 23.

Grace as Interruption or Superadditum?

Posted by on January 12, 2008 16 comments

One of the issues I’ve pondered recently are the ways in which divergent concepts of grace inform theological ethics and ontology.  I see two fundamentally different ways of defining grace that vie for dominance in Christian theology, one of them broadly Protestant and the other broadly Roman Catholic.  The most common and, perhaps intuitive understanding of grace is that of grace as a superadditum, a supplement, a correction, or alteration which brings the created world into a state of beatitude.  The fundamentally understanding of sin on this view is that sin is a misdirection which must be redirected by grace.  Grace supplements the lack created by sin, suffusing it with the rectifying and integrative wholeness which restores created being to that point from which it got off track by sin.  The fundamental axiom of this view is that of Thomas Aquinas: “Grace does not destroy, but perfects nature.”

In contrast to this, there is another significant view of grace, not simply as a supplemental aid that restores and completes what was already there, but rather as a radically new interruption of the life of the triune God into the world inescapably inslaved to sin.  This radical interruption of grace does not merely complete nature, but rather names the destruction of the world of sin and death and the actualization of a radically new creation.  The advent of God’s grace in Christ, on this view does not merely sanctify and purify the world, but reconstitutes it de novo in a completely new reality, and completely new kingdom.  Grace, rather than being a supplement within nature, actually instantiates the annihilation of “the natural” and supplants it with the radical newness of resurrection.  Resurrection, on this view names not the resuscitation of nature, but rather the death of nature and the glorious enfleshment of a new nature, a new creation, a new Jerusalem which supersede and bring about the end of the old.

To my mind there seem to be elements of truth in both of these views, or at least I feel that both of these views can reasonably be called Christian.  My own leanings are toward the second view, which to my mind better expresses the radical gratuity, unprecedented, and irreducible nature of the grace of Christ which comes to us in the resurrection.  Any concept of grace which sees it as simply a superadditum tends to turn grace into a band-aid.  However, I wonder, is there a way for there to be a way of holding these notions in some sort of parallax without simply looking for a placid middle ground or tired attempt at reductive synthesis?  Is there a way for us to say that Barth and de Lubac are both right about nature and grace?  Is there a paradox of grace in which continuity and discontinuity with nature can be recognized in the midst of the primally interruptive nature of the radical grace of the resurrecting God?

A Further Thought on Baptism

Posted by on January 10, 2008 20 comments

The key issue that pedobaptists have with advocates of believers baptism is the way in which believers baptism ties the recpetion of baptism to the ability of the recipient to make a confession of faith and a commitment to a life of discipleship.  It is alleged that this requirement being placed on the baptized mitigates the gratuity of God’s grace.  However, all acknowedge that in the New Testament there is an integral link between faith and baptism.  There can be no administration of baptism without faith if it is to be true to the pattern of the New Testament and the early church.  Advocates of pedobaptism have typically responded that it is required that the parents of the infant being baptized do so on the basis of their faith and commitment to raise the child as a Christian.

So, in truth there is not really a difference between advocates of believers baptism and infant baptism as to the role of faith in baptism.  Both believe it is indispensible that the act of baptism be united with the act of faith.  Pedobaptists simply argue that the parent’s faith is sufficient grounds for the baptism of their children (thus, the children of unbelievers are not the subject of baptisms, for there is no way for baptism to be united with faith on that account).

The point I simply want to draw out is that neither pedobaptism nor believers baptism is more voluntaristic than the other.  Both require that the human response of faith is necessary for a valid baptism.  It is not that one insists on human response whereas the other is purely gift.  Both require that the gift of baptism be recieved in faith.  The question that pedobaptists have to answer is why and how it makes theological sense for the faith of parents to merit the baptism of their children who do not have faith.

Baptism, Voluntarism, and Violence

Posted by on January 10, 2008 19 comments

One of the critiques often leveled at the Anabaptist churches is their alleged voluntarism.  The practice of believers baptism and the rejection of infant baptism has often been critiqued on the basis of how it seemingly ties together the human activity of personal commitment to discipleship with God’s divine act of saving grace.  In other words, it is alleged that refusing baptism to those who are unable to make a commitment to discipleship denies the gratuitousness of the grace of God and rather, in a Pelagian fashion makes the work of grace dependent upon our act of repentance.

To make a full argument against this characterization would be far more extensive than is possible here.  However, I want to underscore two fundamental points that are often neglected by critics of Anabaptist baptism.  First, the fundamental political reason why the Anabaptists rejected infant baptism was due to the way in which baptism in the context of medieval Christendom was basically coterminous with allegiance to the sovereign.  It not longer signified a break from the world, an induction into a radically new form of life in the Spirit, but rather sanctified and fused the world of domination and violence with the church in a synthesis that was contrary to the gospel.  As such, believers baptism, in addition to having stronger biblical support seemed the only way for the act of baptism to be reformed in a way that would enable it to “say” what baptism is supposed to proclaim.

Second, fundamental point that must be understood about the relationship between believers baptism and grace is rooted in the commitment of the Anabaptists to nonviolence.  Fundamental to the Free Church ethos is firm devotion to the teachings of Christ on non-coerciveness and peacemaking.  The reason that baptism is refused to those who are unable to make a profession of faith is because membership in the community of the cruciform Lord cannot be coerced.  No one can be born into membership in the community of the Spirit, they must be reborn into it.  To apply baptism to an infant does not yield an image the sovereignty of grace, but rather of grace as coercion.  The reason that baptism is only offered to those capable of making a confession of faith is because of the conviction that the radical grace of God is ultimately nonviolent and non-coercive.  God’s grace does not foist itself on us but rather woos us, drawing us to the Father, through the Son in the Spirit.  The insistence on believers baptism, far from denying the gratuity of grace is rather a testimony to the non-coercive nature of the event of grace as one of gift and response. For adherents of believers baptism the gift of baptism can never be imposed, it can only be recieved.  Properly understood, believers baptism is not voluntaristic in the least, but rather is a testament to the fact that grace of the triune God is not coercion, but liberation, new life, indeed the glorious creation of a new world.

For those who would critique the practice of believers baptism, I think these two points should be taken with much greater seriousness, and I have seen very little substantial engagement along these lines.  The tradition of the Free Churches with their insistence on the baptism of believers constitutes an important challenge to the practice infant baptism which should at least be taken with seriousness by exponents of the mainline tradition.

Also, for those wanting to see some of my further thoughts on this issue, as well as some qualifications about infant baptism, see my earlier post on Baptism, Voluntarism, and Politics.

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