Monthly Archives: July 2008 - Page 2

Nature, Grace, and the Prevenience of the Apocalypse

Posted by on July 15, 2008 37 comments

The whole issue of nature and grace continues to come up in conversations of late. This is, of course, derivative of other long-standing conversations largely between the churches of the Reformation and the Roman Catholic communion regarding the severity of the effect of fallenness on creation.  The conflict between Barth and Pryzwara over the analogia entis remains a paradigmatic case of this sort of discussion and the deep-rooted divergence within Christianity over the extent of sin and the nature of the continuity and discontinuity between creation and redemption.

I tend to fall instinctively on the Barthian-Protestant side of this whole issue on the basis of the descriptions of redemption in the New Testament, particularly its apocalyptic texts in which the picture painted is one of total inversion, radical disruption, and climactic new creation in which the old creation dies and is resurrected as a new reality. I am very resistant to notions of nature which posit some sort of potentiality pregnant within nature for redemption. There is no more inherent propensity in nature for redemption than there is in the dead, cold body of Jesus for resurrection.  The redemption of nature comes, not from any inherent being-toward-redemption that lies within, but entirely from outside itself, being manifested in the apocalyptic intrusion of God into the world in Christ.

However, the radical apocalypticism of the New Testament, the radical novum of resurrection life should not lead us to some sort of Žižekian ontology of the void in which the concept of rupture simply becomes the reigning philosophical category.  We must posit, as Alan Lewis does in his theology of Holy Saturday, a “resumption beyond rupture” in which the radical inversion of the crooked cosmos rent by sin is not merely torn further asunder by grace. The violent rending of the Temple veil in the hour of the cross did not occur merely as an iconoclastic event of condemnation, though it was not less than that.  Rather it was the event of redemption.  The rending of the veil of alienation occurred so that all alienation might end.  The veil is not merely torn, we are reconciled in one body through cross.  The apocalyptic rupture that Christ brings to the world is the intrusion of freedom.  The freedom in which all things to be reconstituted in the future of the resurrected Jesus, and thus through him reconciled to the Father in the Spirit.

We must find a way to properly articulate the prevenience of God’s apocalyptic grace that neither imbues nature as such with a potentiality for redemption nor leaves us stumbling about in a dizzying fog of rupture without resumption, of apocalypse without new creation. Marcionism is not an option for faithful Christian theology.  The radical apocalypticism of the New Testament must never be tamed, but neither must we interpret redemption as some sort of alien abduction.  What is needed is neither a Žižekian sort of philosophy of rupture nor a seamless nature-redemption unity which skirts away from the radicality of the apocalypse of God in Christ.  Still less needed is some sort of middle ground. Rather, what is needed is deeper penetration into the nature of Christ’s apocalypse on the basis of the messianic theology of the Old and New Testaments.

What I suggest is that a canonical reading of the Christian Scriptures will reveal a prevenience of the apocalypse that is witnessed to in the messianic speech and ministry of the patriarchs and prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. The radical inversion of the cosmos that is culminated in Christ’s resurrection, while a complete novum is what it is within the framework of God’s whole economy of recapitulation. The coming of Christ in newness of life is truly new, truly unprecedented, truly irreducible, and radically singular in its significance.  And it is such precisely in that it recapitulates, enfolds, purges, and enlivens all created history.  Christ is the concrete universal who, in his resurrection, disrupts creation-under-sin in a way so radical as to annihilate all forms of death and sin even as he consummate, redeems, transfigures, recreates creation in a way unanticipated, even by any primal natural harmony.  What we have in redemption is neither the obliteration of the first creation, nor merely its restoration, but an apocalyptic transcendence of the first creation which fulfills it precisely in superseding it.

What we need to bear in mind in understanding the radicality of the nature of apocalyptic grace is the whole eschatological economy of recapitulation that it consummates, as Douglas Knight has admirably shown in his recent book.  The apocalypse is an utter novum, but it is not without any antecedent in the Trinitarian history of God and God’s people.  Rather the apocalypse is prevenient in all movements of divine generosity and love as seen in the whole history of Israel and the nations.  In short, the radical inversion of Christ’s apocalypse is the culmination of God’s eschatological economy of recapitulation, transfiguration, and new creation.  We remain ever and again disrupted by the sheer novum of Christ’s apocalypse precisely as we continue to venture down the path of the holy pilgrims of Israel and the church, remaining on the way towards the New Jerusalem within which all things find their coherence, fulfillment, and transformation.

Mark Driscoll, the Church, and Family Idolatry

Posted by on July 14, 2008 52 comments

In a recent interview, Mark Driscoll makes the following comment describing how he understands the relationship of priority between the nuclear family and the church:

“There is no office such as pastor’s wife or pastor’s children and I work very hard to ensure that our family remains our top priority over the church. Too many pastors put their ministry above their family and their wives and children get active in the church just so they can be close to their husband/daddy which is tragic. We have a normal fun family life and by God’s grace my wife and kids love Jesus, me and our church.”

This, to my mind, is perhaps the most clear articulation of the kind of idolatry of the family that is common among evangelical Christians in America today.  For a lengthy clarifying discussion of this whole issue, please see this conversation between Craig Carter and myself.

For my part, Driscoll’s comments are perhaps the most horrifying thing I could expect to hear from the mouth of any pastor about the priority of the family.  It turns out that the Catholics have something going about clerical celibacy after all!

The problem with Driscoll’s statement is not just that its the standard conservative line, or that it is the battle cry of the Dobson’s and Robertson’s of contemporary evangelicalism.  The problem is rather the sort of moral universe that such comments presuppose.  Driscoll reifies the dominant notion that “natural” institutions like the family simply are the moral norm which have value in and of themselves merely by vritue of their existence.  The ethical vision of the New Testament, by contrast, is constituted by a radical interruption of all such “natural” conventions of morality and social life.  The scandal of the ethic of Jesus and the early church is precisely that all the commonly accepted priorities, allegiances, and social formations of this age are radically disrupted by the apocalyptic erruption of the advent of Christ in death and resurrection.

Bonhoeffer serves as a far better guide to the nature of the apocalyptic ethics of Jesus when he states:

“So people called by Jesus learn that they had lived an illusion in their relationship to the world.  The illusion is immediacy.  It has blocked faith and obedience.  Now they know there can be no unmediated relationships, even in the most intimate ties of their lives, in the blood ties to father and mother, to children, brothers and sisters, in marital love, in historical responsibilities.  Ever since Jesus called, there are no longer natural, historical, or experiential unmediated relationships for his disciples.  Christ the mediator stands between the son and the father, between husband and wife, between individual and nation, whether they can recognize him or not.  There is no way from us to other other than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him.  Immediacy is a delusion.”

“But it is precisely the same mediator who makes us into individuals, who becomes he basis for an entirely new community.  He stands in the center between the other person and me.  He separates, but he also unites.  He cuts off every direct path to someone else, but he guides everyone following him to the new and sole true way to the other person via the mediator. … Those who left their fathers for Jesus’ sake will surely find new fathers in the community, they will find brothers and sisters; there are even fields and houses prepared for them.  Everyone enters discipleship alone, but no one remains alone in discipleship.  Those who dare to become single individuals trusting in the word are given the gift of church-community.  They find themselves again in a visible community of faith, which replaces a hundredfold what they lost.”  (Discipleship, 97-98)

Too much of the contemporary evangelical church wants to rush to conclusions about having happy family, a comfortable life, a stable career, and personal security.  There is this angst amongst Christians when the inversion of Christ’s call is talked about too much.  Instead we flee quickly to the promises of abundant life that are given in the gospel as if they legitimated our current aspirations and dreams.  However, the promise of abundant life, as Bonhoeffer understood is nothing other than the complete annihilation and recreation of our current ideas about the good life.  What we need is not satisfaction, not the assurance that we can have it all.  What we need is the eviscerating call of the Crucifed and Resurrected One who demands that we follow in the path of his kenosis, and so, giving up everything, and only thus, gain everything and more.

Divine Suffering is Divine Impassibility

Posted by on July 11, 2008 22 comments

James discusses David Bentley Hart’s beautiful statements on the nature of divine Triune infinity in a recent post.  For Hart, the affirmation of divine infinity necessitates the upholding of divine apatheia.  And he is right.  Or partly right about this.  The problem with Hart’s rejection of divine suffering isn’t that he misunderstands apatheia, which he defines perfectly and the infinite fullness and plenitude of the Trinitarian love; it is rather that he fails to allow this defi

nition to fully inform his concept of divine infinity. In Hart’s work there is a constant oscillation between a positive definition of divine infinity as “the power to cross every boundary” and the love which “consumes every pathos in its ardor” and a negative definition thereof which sees infinity as “everlasting immunity to every limitation” or that which “cannot be interrupted.”

Hart is right in stating that “divine apatheia is the infinite interval of the going forth of the Son from the Father in the light of the Spirit” and that “every interval of estrangement we fabricate between ourselves and God –sin, ignorance, death itself– is always already exceeded in him.” However, the mode of divine exceeding does not imply that God does not or cannot experience the interval of the finite in God’s own being. Precisely because of the overabundant dynamism of the divine infinity of kenotic love, there is no reason to assume that the finite intervals of sin and death cannot enter into the life of God. The

 finite poses no threat to the infinite but is taken into in the ardor of the Trinitarian love and only so is overcome, redeemed, and transfigured.

So Hart is right that God is not sundered by suffering, but he is wrong to say that this constitutes an immunity thereto. God need not be immune to suffering because anything that suffering imposes on God’s being is taken seamlessly into the folds of God’s infinite love and overcome by it. But that overcoming is not a static “always already” as Hart sometimes seems to imply; rather it is a dynamic consumption and absorbtion that is a real experience in the life of God. Cross no less than resurrection are realities that enter into God’s very life. The tears and blood of Christ are the tears and blood of the eternal Son of the Father. But this is not “change” in God. Rather it is a current, a ripple in the cascading tidal wave that is God’s eternal Triune love. But that makes God’s experience of it more real, not less. The divine pathos revealed in the Christ who weeps, hungers, and cries out in pain is the divine apatheia catching all creation up into the life of God in which such sufferings, the onslaught of the non-being of evil is absorbed, annihilated, and transfigured into the eschatological feast of love.

Theology, Ethics, and the Natural

Posted by on July 10, 2008 4 comments

Lately there has been a nice discussion about issues of nature and grace; the problem of continuity and discontinuity between creation and redemption.  In my view, the problem with talk about nature as such is that we don’t have the slightest idea what nature is until we have plumbed the depths of what God has done in and through Christ’s redemption. If “nature” refers to God’s creation existing accoring to God’s intention and purpose, then we have to say that nature as such does not exist now. What exists now is a bastardization of creation bound over to the principalities and powers. That is the reality of nature as we experience it under the conditions of fallenness. Thus, our only way to talk about creation-as-God-intends-it, in light of Christ, is to talk about its interruption, defeat, and reconstitution as an apocalyptic new creation.

If I were to try to state my views on nature and grace, creation and redemption, I would probably try to say it as something like this:

Grace does not supplement a lack in nature, or complete an already pregnant potentiality within nature; rather grace interrupts, overturns and supercedes the natural, only thus fulfilling God’s intention for all created being which is revealed in Christ. Moreover this fulfillment is not a restoration of a primal order, but rather its transcendence in an unprecedented superabundance of new creation that can only be known through Christ and his act of apocalyptic redemption.

Sanctorum Communio: The Best Protestant Ecclesiology Ever Written

Posted by on July 10, 2008 19 comments

One of the recurring, and very significant criticisms of Protestant churches and theology involves the lacunae of an explicit and substantive ecclesiology.  While there are of course some extremely significant ecclesiological resources within the heritage of the Reformation, particularly Luther’s ecclesiology and the ecclesiology of the Radical Reformers, much of this and any continuity with the strong ecclesiology of the Roman catholic church has been lost in contemporary Protestantism.

One shining example in 20th-century theology of taking the church with absolute seriousness is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio, his first doctoral dissertation — which was approved when he was at the tender age of 21, mind you.  The book transitions nimbly between philosophy, sociology, and theology as it presents a vision of the church that is at once radically catholic and radically reformational and evangelical.  Christians from any tradition will be challenged by the seriousness and power of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology.  For him, the church is “Christ existing as church-community.”  The church itself is the very presence of Christ taking eschatological shape in the world through the Holy Spirit.  However, this should not be understood to mean that the church can understand itself as simply being institutionally identical with Christ by virtue of what the church is in herself, or a natural prolongation of the incarnation.  Rather, when Bonhoeffer claims that the church is Christ existing as community, he is claiming that the church is present only where Christ is indeed existing in the world as community.  It is not a reassurance to the church that they are where Christ is, but rather a radical challenge to the church to radical self-questioning and prayerful ecclesial self-examination.  Bonhoeffer calls into question any easy identification of ourselves and our churches with the fullness of Christ’s body by demanding that we refuse to tame our definition of the church or of Christ’s presence so as to legitimate our own ecclesial experience and practice.  In this Bonhoeffer poses a distinctive challenge both to Roman catholics and to Protestants in regard to ecclesiology.

Unlike most Protestant ecclesial understandings, for Bonhoeffer the church “is not merely a means to an end but also an end in itself.  It is the presence of Christ himself, and this is why ‘being in Christ’ and ‘being in the church-community’ is the same thing.”  However, unlike much of the emphasis in Roman catholicism which binds Christ’s presence in the church almost exclusively to the church’s office –at least for all practical purposes– for Bonhoeffer it is axiomatic that the presence of Christ as the church through the Holy Spirit takes place through the whole communion of saints as the people of God, all of whom mutually constitute one another, each person being irreducible and indispensable to the other.  Ultimately Bonhoeffer concludes that the sanctorum communio is present both in the churches of the Reformation and in the Roman church.  He takes the most difficult path, that of calling the dominant self-understandings of both Protestants and Roman catholics into question on the basis of the word of God.  And that is what we both always need.  

In my view, Bonhoeffer’s work represents the most substantive ecclesiology to ever be written by a Protestant theologian.  As such, re-engaging with Bonhoeffer’s thought will become more and more central to Protestant Christians who care about ecclesiology and ecumenism.  And similarly his contribution should be widely read by Roman catholics.  If Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology were taken seriously by various folks in the ecumenical landscape, I believe far more common ground could be found than is often the case in cross-confessional debates about ecclesiology.  Regardless of what one think of Bonhoeffer’s proposals ultimately, there is no denying that this is some of the most brilliant work on ecclesiology to be done in modern times.  Ignoring it is not an option.

200,000 hits and counting

Posted by on July 9, 2008 1 comment

Inhabitatio Dei has now crossed the threshold of 200,000 hits.  While it took me over a year and a half to reach the milestone of 100,000 I have somehow managed to double that in a mere three months!  I’m going to take that as a good sign.  Thanks to all those who read and comment here.  I look forward to more.

May we Love the Other for their Own Sake?

Posted by on July 8, 2008 10 comments

Bonhoeffer suggests in numerous places in his writings that the gospel forbids us immediate relationship with the other.  Rather, Christ, the mediator separates us from the other, standing between us, demanding that all our relations to the other be mediated through him and him along.  I now am free to love the other only in Christ and through Christ.  According to Bonhoeffer we are called away from the sort of love that loves the other for one’s own sake to a vision of loving the other for Christ’s sake.

However, this raises the question, can we ever love the other simply for the other’s own sake?  I think that for Bonhoeffer the answer was yes, given that he critiqued Barth’s commentary on Romans on the basis of his belief that it turned the love of the neighbor into a mere cipher for the loving of God.  For Bonhoeffer, the answer is that we love one another in Christ and through Christ.  We love one another for the sake of Christ, and for the sake of the other insofar as the other person is created in Christ and for Christ.  We love the other “for their own sake,” but the very being of the other is defined by their being taken up into the reality of God in Christ who takes on the humanity of all persons.  Thus, in loving the other for their own sake, we love them precisely as those whose being is defined by their assumption by Christ through the Spirit in the unio mystica.    

But I think the question is worth pondering further, can we love someone in abstraction from that persons’ transfiguration in Christ?  Is the personhood of all persons constituted in Christ by virtue of the incarnation, or can persons exclude themselves from the sphere of Christ’s redemptive assumption of humanity through sin?  Is there even such a thing as “an other in and of oneself”?  If it is true that, through the incarnation, Christ has assumed all of humanity, what does it mean to love the other as a distinct other?  How is loving the other different from loving Christ?  Is there ultimately any difference?

The Bonhoeffer Book that was Never Written

Posted by on July 8, 2008 6 comments

In Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer includes a filled-in outline of a short book he hoped to write, which, sadly he was never able to begin.  It certainly would have been something if it had been written.  He intended it to be a short book, of no more than 100 pages consisting of three chapters.  First, he wanted to write a chapter that presented “A Stocktaking of Christianity.”  This was to deal with four subjects, 1) “the coming of age of humankind” (which Bonhoeffer writes about elsewhere in Letters and Papers), 2) “the religionlessness of those who have come of age (the complete uselessness of the “god of the gaps” idea), 3) the Protestant church (consisting of a critique of Pietism, Lutheran orthodoxy, and the Confessing Church under the rubric of Jesus disappearing from sight and most centrally, that there is “No taking risks for others”), and finally 4) public morals, chiefly related to sexual behavior.

Bonhoeffer’s second chapter was to deal with “The Real Meaning of Christian Faith.”  This was to consist of 1) a discussion of God and the secular, and 2) a discussion of the identity of God as rooted in Christ, who establishes our relation to God as “a new life in ‘existence for others,’ through participation in the being of Jesus.”

Bonhoeffer’s third chapter was set to deal with the vision of the church that this vision of Christianity required.  Here is his conclusion:  

“The church is the church only when it exists for others.  To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need…. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving.  It must tell people of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others.  In particular, our own church will have to take the field against the vices of hubris, power worship, envy, and humbug, as the roots of all evil.  It will have to speak of moderation, purity, trust, loyalty, constancy, patience, discipline, humility, contentment, and modesty.  It must not underestimate the importance of human example… it s not abstract argument, but example, that gives its word emphasis and power.”

I think someone needs to write this book for the church in America today just as much as it needed to be written by Bonhoeffer for the church in Germany in 1944.  Who knows, maybe someone will still write it.

The Successful against the Crucified

Posted by on July 7, 2008 4 comments

Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, soon to be the subject of the upcoming blog conference is loaded with poignant theological-ethical analysis of a great many propensities towards error and idolatry in Christian thinking.  In the midst of the vissitudes of pop-protestantism in the West, with its various emergent, televangelist, and seeker-sensitive streams, I find Bonhoeffer’s critiques pretty stirring indeed:

“The form of the crucified disarms all thinking aimed at success, for it is a denial of judgment.  Neither the triumph of the successful, nor the bitter hatred of the successful by those who fail, can finally cope with the world.  Jesus is certainly no advocate for the successful in history, but neither does he lead the revolt of the failures against the successful.  His concern is neither success nor failure but willing acceptance of the judgment of God.  Only in judgment is there reconciliation with God and among human beings.  Christ sets the human person judged by God, the successful and the unsuccessful, over against all thinking that revolves around success or failure.  God judges people because, out of sheer love, God wants them to be able to stand before God.  It is a judgment of grace that God in Christ brings on human beings.  Over against the successful, God sanctifies pain, lowliness, failure, poverty, loneliness, and despair in the cross of Christ.  Not that all this has value in itself; it is made holy by the love of God, who takes it all and bears it as judgment.  The Yes of God to the cross is judgment on the successful.  But the unsuccessful must realize that it is not their lack of success, not their place as pariahs as such, that lets them stand before God, but only their acceptance of the judgment of divine love.  It is the mystery of God’s reign over  the world that this very cross, the sign of Christ’s failure in the world, can in turn lead to historical success; this cannot be made into a rule, though in the suffering of God’s church-community it repeats itself here and there.” (pp. 90-91)

One of the beauties of Bonhoeffer’s ethics is the way in which he resists turning God in Christ into a familiar, even as he calls Christians to participate in Christ’s sufferings, and find their identity in Christ.  In Bonhoeffer’s thought we can never assume an easy confluence of our action and God’s will.  Rather we must constantly subject ourselves to the judgment of God’s Word in Christ and the Spirit.  Only in so doing do we come to participate in the reality of God.  Bonhoeffer’s ethics are never comfortable or satiating for the Christian seeking self-validation.  Rather they are always a call for us to see how the Lord who lives outside of us, enthroned in the life of the Triune God continues to disrupt us, calling us our of our incurvatus in se selves into the life of following after him.  Herein lies the fundamentally apocalyptic nature of Bonhoeffer’s theology and ethics.  And this is what, in my view, makes him so very interesting and vital for theology and ecclesial life today.

Bonhoeffer and the Theology of Romantic Love

Posted by on July 7, 2008 18 comments

Bonhoeffer’s Life Together is an undisputed classic on the concept of Christian community.  Along with The Rule of Benedict and other similar texts on communal Christian life, Life Together provides an incisive and subversive presence in Christian literature on the church and community.  Personally, I have always found two of Bonhoeffer’s emphases in Life Together most insightful.  One is his discussion of confession and the Lord’s Supper in his final chapter.  The other is his contrastive discussion of what Bonhoeffer calls “spiritual” love and “self-centered” or “emotional” love.  Now, as the editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works Series relate clearly in the editorial notes, Bonhoeffer does not mean by this that genuine love stemming from the work of Christ lacks feeling or passion, nor does he imply that the base love which he is critiquing is something easily identified as such.  Bonhoeffer borrows Paul’s notion of “spiritual” and “carnal” (cf. 1 Cor. 3:1ff) to describe, in as stark a manner as possible, the different sorts of human communion that can be enacted in the world.  There are essentially two forms of communion that are possible, one is direct, immediate relationship with another person, resulting in a fusion between the self and the other.  The second possibility is communion with the other through Christ, who stands between the self and the other as mediator, denying any possibility of immediacy, domination, or fusion of the self and the other.

Bonhoeffer’s descriptions of the self-centered, dark, and ingnominious nature of natural love corresponds roughly to what people commonly think of as eros.  It is the desire to possess another, to absorb the other into oneself.  ”In  the self-centered community there exists a profound, elemental emotional desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is a yearning from immediate union with other flesh.  This desire of the human soul seeks the complete intimate fusion of I and You, whether this occurs in the union of love or — what from this self-centered perspective is after all the same thing — in forcing the other into one’s own sphere of power and influence.”

This sort of dominating, possessive love is decried by Bonhoeffer as predatory on genuine Christian love and community.  In the Christian community our communion with one another can never be an expression of the extension of ourself into the other, but rather of receiving the other as gift insofar as Christ sees fit to gift us with one another amidst the concreteness and difficulty of life under the Word of God.  ”Because Christ stands between me and an other, I must not long for unmediated community with that person.  As only Christ was able to speak to me in such a way that I was helped, so others too can only be helped by Christ alone.  However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love.  In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died, and rose again, as those from whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepared eternal life.”

Bonhoeffer goes on to argue as follows, “Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ.  That is why self-centered love seeks direct contact with other persons.  It loves them, not as free persons, but as those whom it binds to itself.  It wants to do everything it can to win and conquer; it puts pressure on the other person.  It desires to irresistible, to dominate.  Self-centered love does not think much of truth.  It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the person loved.  Emotional, self-centered love desires other persons, their company.  It wants them to return its love, but it does not serve them.  On the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving.”

While some might want to argue against Bonhoeffer that there seems to be a dichotomy between eros and agape in his descriptions, one certainly cannot deny that his diagnosis rightly indicts the destructive and horrific nature of misdirected desire in human life.  As Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux stressed in their writings, the problem of human love involves its misdirection to wrong ends.  Our passions, rather than being ordered to the good through the love of God are directed wrongly and as such lead to sin, death, domination, and suffering.  Moreover, in our sex-obsessed culture in the West, this indictment of the all-consuming eroticization of the self is needed more than ever.

What Bonhoeffer describes as self-centered love in Life Together is strikingly exact as a description of Western attitudes towards romance, love, sex, and personal fulfillment.  The longing to be completed through immediate contact with another is the reigning mythos of romance in our age.  It is the object of voracious, often violent pursuit at all costs, and as Bonhoeffer points out, “Emotional, self-centered love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a community that has become false, even for the sake of genuine community.”  The hallmark of the love of our age is that we cannot bear to see it fail (or rather, not succeed in the way we want).  ’Love conquers all’ has become a sentimental maxim that really just means no one should ever break up with me.  The kind of love that animates our romantic imaginations today, as Bonhoeffer says, “is by its very nature desire, desire for self-centered community.  As long as it can possibly satisfy this desire, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others.”  This describes how I have gone after romance in my life if anything does.  And I suspect that I’m not alone in this.

Certainly Bonhoeffer did not intend to write a treatise on romantic love for twenty-first century Christians who still happen to be single and think that marriage is going to fulfill them somehow.  However, in an age where our longings for friendship and intimacy are ciphered through the ubiquitous notion of romantic self-fulfillment, Bonhoeffer’s critique has a great deal to offer in smashing some key idols that plague us.  The fact is that in our romantic imaginations we seem to remain disturbingly trapped in the zeitgeist of our age, hoping that by journeying deeper into the abyss of our selfishness we will somehow find the community that we long for with the other.  As Bonhoeffer points out however, the only way to find such true communion is the release of the other from our longings for possession and domination.  For the Christian, true love, and indeed true romantic love, must take the shape of kenotically making space for the freedom of the other, rather than seeking to captivate and secure them in relationship to oneself.

And this is truly the challenge, for releasing the other into freedom, not demanding their reciprocation of your service and care is to place oneself in a posture of radical vulnerability.  To love without seeking to possess is to live precariously.  Such a mode of living cannot guarantee the outcome longed for.  Of course, living by possession and domination cannot guarantee it either, though somehow we are easily seduced into thinking it can.  But the truth is that all our strategies for control cannot secure our longings in any lasting way.  These strategies and efforts are the heavy yoke of slavery and death.  The vulnerable way of agape, of cruciform, kenotic love cannot promise the sort of fulfillment we often long for, just as the cross cannot guarantee the resurrection.  However, such an ethic of self-dispossession is the only way for us to live in a manner that is open to receiving the divine gifts of communion that we have tasted in Christ.  

Bonhoeffer is right in his call away from the libidinal drive towards self-at-the-expense-of-the-other.  For those of us caught in a culture of idolatrous romance and false idealizations of relational fulfillment, the call to see the crucified and resurrected Christ standing between oneself and the other is supremely necessary.  If we learn to see anew, in this Christic manner, we will indeed be poised for a new sexual revolution — thought of course, such a revolution would be one of freedom rather than the solipsistic slavery that is omnipresent in our culture.  The world of Sex and the City needs to be invaded by Finkenwalde.  But the line between Carrie Bradshaw and Dietrich Bonhoeffer runs through each one of our hearts.  And that is why other elements of Bonhoeffer’s account in Life Together are deeply relevant to our age, chiefly prayer and confession.

For it is in confession and prayer one to another that the darkness of our lives and inclinations are exposed to the light of the gospel, bringing us into freedom.  And, living as we now do in the sphere of freedom, we are able to love one another without the drive toward possessiveness remaining sovereign.  Lives that eschew the lust for domination that is encoded within the discourse of romantic love today are indeed possible.  And it is only in such lives in which all our loves and longings are reconfigured by the gospel that we can find true freedom from the powers that enslave us in regard to sexuality and romance.

Yahweh is King

Posted by on July 4, 2008 9 comments

As has become my tradition, here is my scriptural reading that I do every fourth of July:

“At the end of twelve months he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, and the king said, ‘Is this not magnificent Babylon, which I have built as a royal capital by my mighty power and for my glorious majesty?’ While the words were still in the king’s mouth, a voice came from heaven: ‘O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is declared: The kingdom has departed from you! You shall be driven away from human society, and your dwelling shall be with the animals of the field. You shall be made to eat grass like oxen, and seven times shall pass over you, until you have learned that the Most High has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals and gives it to whom he will.’ Immediately the sentence was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven away from human society, ate grass like oxen, and his body was bathed with the dew of heaven, until his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers and his nails became like birds’ claws.

When that period was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me. I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored the one who lives forever. For his sovereignty is an everlasting sovereignty, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does what he wills with the host of heaven and the inhabitants of the earth. There is no one who can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What are you doing?’ At that time my reason returned to me; and my majesty and splendor were restored to me for the glory of my kingdom. My counselors and my lords sought me out, I was re-established over my kingdom, and still more greatness was added to me. Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are truth, and his ways are justice; and he is able to bring low those who walk in pride.” (Daniel 4:29-37)

Bringing One Another into Being

Posted by on July 3, 2008 6 comments

I seem to keep returning to Douglas Knight’s The Eschatological Economy.  I certainly think that it deserves to be counted among the best theological books in recent years.  One suggestive claim offered in the book involves, in a sense, a heightening, or a radicalization of what in recent years has come to be called a relational ontology.  However, Knight moves beyond the tired (though true and necessary) assertions that “to be is to be related.”  Rather he looks more closely at the relationship of being and action in the context of an ontology of communion, or what he refers to as a doxological ontology.  Here he claims, rightly in my view that “Being and doing are one and the same thing.  The work of each creature is the being of all other creatures.”  

The crux of this issue, and what makes this ontology truly radical in its construal of sociality (and sanctification, which Knight discusses later in the book) is that it unites being and action, not in my own individuated selfhood, but rather in the community of the church in which we actively bring one another into being in and through our actions on one another.  We “suffer” one another and as such are given ourselves.  The action of all other creatures in relation to me is my being.  It is not merely my well-being, but my very being.  However Knight goes further.  ”It is not only the being but the freedom of other creatures” that is constituted by the action of others toward us.  ”The freedom of all creatures is the task of all other creatures, and it is sustained only by live relationship with all other creatures.”

All of this of course is ultimately from God.  It is God whose action constitutes our being and sustains us as creatures.  ”The freedom of humankind is the task of God, and very subordinately it is the task into which God introduces human beings.  Under God we bring one another into being.”  This notion, of our action bringing on another into being and freedom is quite radical.  It reorients our notions of growth and holiness, and their relation to our own disciplines and practices.  The actions and practices we undertake ‘on our own’ are not so much for our own personal growth, improvement, or transformation as they are for the liberation of others.  I pray, offer hospitality, and study, not so that I become a certain sort of spiritual person, but rather so as to be taken up into God’s work of bringing God’s children into being and freedom.  As I pray I become part of God’s economy of growing us up into “the freedom of the children of God.”  My prayer frees the other, just as their prayer and hospitality free me.  Sanctification is not the development of the self, but the formation of the other.  The ultimate aim of disciplines and practices, what Knight refers to as paideia, is the offering of doxology to the Triune God in the form of a community of holy agapeic love.  I cannot bring myself to where I need to be to rightly participate in this doxological communion.  I can only be brought there by the other.  By the Triune God who through Christ and the Spirit re-forms us through a whole nexus of graced mediations, most centrally the church, who under the word strives as a body to bring all its members into the fullness of Christ.  And that is the fullness of being.

The Theological Role of Historical Criticism

Posted by on July 2, 2008 10 comments

These days there is much talk about the inherent limits of historical criticism as a tool of biblical hermeneutics.  Historical criticism, it is said reduces the Bible to a collection of ancient texts to be dissected rather than affirming the Bible as the scriptural canon of the church.  However, no one is really questioning the total viability of historical criticism as a serious tool of biblical and theological study.  It has been chastened, but certainly not denied, cast away, or declared useless.

So, my wonderings on this matter relate to what positive role there is for historical criticism in the task of theological interpretation and the theological enterprise more generally.  What function is historical criticism supposed to serve and how does it uniquely fill that function.  On thing that comes to mind for me is the way in which historical criticism prevents the objectification or reification of the text in itself as divine authority, a form of bibliolatry.  And yet, I don’t see how we really needed historical criticism for this insight, as it is rather a Christological one.  So, I’m interested in what people might think, what is the theological role of historical criticism?  Do we really need it at all?

Bonhoeffer Blog Conference: Call for Papers

Posted by on July 1, 2008 9 comments

“The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one’s own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. This is the demand, before all others, that must be honestly made of anyone who wishes to be concerned with the problem of a Christian ethic.” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Now that we have just seen the close this year’s excellent Karl Barth Blog Conference, it pleases me greatly to issue the call for papers for the first Dietrich Bonhoeffer Blog Conference.  The topic for this conference will be: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Contemporary Theology. The aim of this conference is to foster sustained reflections on Bonhoeffer’s last major theological work, Ethics or Bonhoeffer’s ethical work more generally, and to explore its implications within contemporary theological, ecclesial, and political contexts. While a few spots are already filled (which will be announced shortly), there is plenty of room for submissions and proposals. Any submission related to this general focus would be open to consideration. Creative approaches to the ethical work of Bonhoeffer is encouraged.

I anticipate that this conference will take place in mid-late November, 2008 just following AAR. Submissions can be emailed to me at halden-at-wipfandstock-dot-com. Also, if you wish to promote this event on your own blogs, that would be appreciated.  Please note, I realize that a number of people have emailed me previously about this.  Given the volume of questions that I have received I have not been able to respond to everyone.  So, even if you have emailed me previously, please submit a proposal to me at this time if you wish to participate.

Edited to Add: The target word count is 1,500 to 2,500 words.  Again, this is a target, not a limit, though of course an excessively large post will need to be edited to make it workable as a blog post.

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