Monthly Archives: November 2008

What Makes an Ecclesiology Sufficient?

Posted by on November 24, 2008 36 comments

One of the central issues in ecclesiology today concerns what makes an ecclesiology “adequate” or “sufficient” enough to do the perceived work that an ecclesiology is supposed to do within an encompassing theological vision. For example in With the Grain of the Universe, Stanley Hauerwas makes the following comment about Barth’s ecclesiology: “If the world is not necessarily lost without the church, then it is by now means clear what difference the church makes for how we understand the way the world is and, given the way the world is, how we must live.” (p. 193) This comment is related to his overall question directed towards Barth, namely “whether or not Barth’s ecclesiology is sufficient to sustain the witness that he thought was intrinsic to Christianity.” (p. 39)

This whole way of putting the matter raises an important question: What exactly makes an ecclesiology “sufficient”? Hauerwas’s comments here imply two things. First, that ecclesiology must be able to sustain a certain form of the church’s witness. Second, that the church must somehow be ontologically necessary to the world’s salvation if it is to have significance. Here, I think Hauerwas leaves himself open to critique on the issue of Christology. Is his quest for an adequate ecclesiology — a vision of the church that is able to address the problems facing the church in modernity — leading him to improperly conflate the theological roles of Jesus Christ and his gathered community?

Think on the sentence from Hauerwas above. What sense does it make for us to speak of an ecclesiology being sufficient to sustain the witness of the church? Does not the church’s witness rely solely on the Messiah who is the One witnessed to? Surely the church’s own self-understanding and self-articulation will always be inadequate to sustain the witness to which Christians are called by the Crucified and Risen Lord who calls us to follow him, leading us where we did not wish to go. Rowan Williams offers precisely the right corrective to any vision that would too easily assimilate Jesus and his community of followers in his helpful portrayal of the Resurrected Christ who appears and disappears, who cannot be held onto, but who always lies beyond the grasp of those he calls.

The only thing that sustains our witness is the object of our witness, Jesus Christ, the ascended Lord of history. To attempt to look inward, to our own moral effort, or ways of narrating our identity as the ecclesial community for the power to sustain us in our mission, is to compromise it already. Or, to put it in Pauline idiom, “Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who made us adequate as servants. . .” (2 Cor 3:5-6a).

Whatever it means to measure what makes an adequate ecclesiology, it cannot be its conceptual resources for securing a persisting vision and identity for ourselves. Indeed the very attempt to make such visions of identity secure constitute a preeminent temptation for the church. The church is called to embrace a posture of foolish dislocation, of sojourning vulnerability that eschews attempts to find its sustenance within any resources of its own. The church is called, not to recognize the granduer of itself, of its narrative, of its gifts as the sustaining architecture of its witness. Rather the church is called to recognizes its vacuity, its fundamental emptiness, and only so to become an open vessel for the fullness of the Spirit’s Pentecostal presence which engrafts us ever and again into the singularity of Christ’s transformation of history in the cross and resurrection. The only way to determine ecclesiological sufficiency is on the basis of this Christocentric theological definition.

“Let the Church be the Church”. . .

Posted by on November 21, 2008 17 comments

Its hard for me to overestimate the importance Stanley Hauerwas’s works to my theological development. He did two things for me especially, the first was making me take the church with absolute seriousness as the primary community in which Christian life is lived. The second was to introduce me to John Howard Yoder, who, I am happy to say has supplanted Hauerwas in terms of my own theological influences. And sensibilities. I’m sure Stanley would be quite glad for this as well.

One of the early quotations I remember reading from Hauerwas that had an impact on me was the following:

“Thus to say that the church must pursue societal justice is certainly right, but it is not very informative.  For justice needs to displayed and imaginatively construed by a people who have been formed to know that genuine justice derived from our receiving what is not due us.  Such people serve the cause of justice best by exemplifying in their own lives how to help one another.” (Peaceable Kingdom, 113-14)

This is a further specification of what is arguably Hauwerwas’s central theological claim, namely that “the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world” (Resident Aliens, 38). Now, while I think Hauerwas is largely right in all of this, let me offer what I take to be a somewhat Yoderian gloss on Hauerwas’s quote above:

To say that the church must be the church is certainly right, but it is not very informative.  For the meaning of ‘being church’ needs to prayerfully discerned and vulnerably discovered by a people who strive to be nothing other than witnesses to the inexhaustible event of Christ’s death and resurrection.  Such people rightly serve the cause ‘being church’ best by submitting all forms of thought and life to the never-assimilable reality of Christ’s lordship, under the guidance of Scripture, in the midst of their ongoing missional existence in the world.

The Church and the Gospel

Posted by on November 21, 2008 Comments Off

“The appointment of Jesus to be the Christ takes place in the Spirit and must be apprehended in the Spirit. It is self-sufficient, unlimited, and in itself true. And moreover, it is what is altogether new, the decisive factor and turning-point in man’s consideration of God. . . . To the proclamation and receiving of this Gospel the whole activity of the Christian community — its teaching, ethic, and worship — is strictly related. But the activity of the community is related to the Gospel only insofar as it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell that seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself. The people of Christ, His community, know that no sacred word or work or thing exists in its own right: they know only those words and works and things  which by their negation are sign-posts tot he Holy One. If anything Christian (!) be unrelated to the Gospel, it is a human by-product, a dangerous religious survival, a regrettable misunderstanding. For in this case content would be substituted for a void, convex for concave, positive for negative, and the characteristic marks of Christianity would be possession and self-sufficiency rather than deprivation and hope. If this be persisted in, there emerges, instead of the community of Christ, Christendom, and ineffective peace-pact or compromise with that existence which, moving with its own momentum, lies on this side of the resurrection. Christianity would then have lost all relation to the power of God.”

– Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 36-37.

Scarcely Recognizable Politics

Posted by on November 18, 2008 7 comments

David Rensberger’s Johannine Faith and Liberating Community is a real gem in terms of biblical scholarship. It weaves together acute social-historical analysis in its consideration of the text of John, and brings the vision(s) rendered there into conversation with the shape of Christian life today, allowing the Johannine vision to pose a real challenge to our theopolitical conceptions and constructions. Here’s an particularly good snippet:

“The Fourth Gospel, for all its sectarianism and inwardness, does not offer a mere retreat from political relationships, though the approach to them that it does offer is every bit as radical as its radical Christology. Indeed, it is just the Johannine alienation from the world that ought to make John’s refusal of allegiance to the world’s political orders somewhat less than surprising. It was an alienation of consciousness as much as an overtly social one, to be sure, yet precisely as such it could be expected to be realised ‘in the world’ as well. The politics of John may seem scarcely recognizable as politics to us. They may seem impractical or irresponsible in their stubborn devotion of all loyalty, political as well as spiritual to Jesus who had been ‘raised up’ as King of the Jews. But evidently for the Johannine Christians, who faced a complex and highly charged political situation, they were real politics and represented a real political option. The Fourth Gospel confronts the issue of Israel’s freedom in the late first-century Roman Empire with an alternative to both zealotry and collaboration, by calling for adherence to the king who is not of this world, whose servants do not need to fight but remain in the world bearing witness to the truth before the rulers of both synagogue and Empire.” (p. 99-100)

What Rensberger nails here is the oft-ignored fact that so many Western establishmentarians, be they liberal or conservative, fail to see. To read many theological accounts that tend towards “political realism” or the myriad of sensibilities that exist within that basic orbit, one would think that the perspectives of massive swaths of the New Testament, particularly the Gospels were dropped out of some ethereal realm aloof from the contingencies and realities of chance and change in the world. One forgets that none of the authors, compilers, or recipients of the New Testament books thought they were proclaiming a message of romantic detachment from “real” stuff in the world. The form of praxis presupposed and evoked by the writings of the New Testament was the way of life of the real, concrete, historical church. The idea that the “otherworldliness” of the Gospels mitigates any need for us to take them seriously as a possible course to which followers of Jesus are called in this world is nothing more than an elaborate way of begging the question — or more accurately, longing for a Christianity without discipleship. Those who find in the New Testament “unrealistic” ethical standards do so only through a form of self-induced ignorance, a compulsive urge to shut their eyes to the fact that these words, which so offend our modern sensibilities were the very form of life of the first Christians, which, they assummed would be the form of life for all who followed in their lineage.

Violence and Anarchism

Posted by on November 14, 2008 12 comments

The critic of any Christian appropriation of anarchism tends to argue that anarchy is more violent than the current order, and, as such always inherently worse than our desires to oppose whatever hegemony happens to be in place. It seems incontrovertible that the recommendation of anarchism is, by its very nature more violent, dangerous, and irresponsible than the legitimation of the status quo, which is always propped up as the form of responsible Christian action.

What Slavoj Žižek says in his book, Violence may be helpful to addressing this argument. He notes that we often reduce violence to “subjective violence”, namely the sort of visible agential violence that can be seen in an act of physical assault or harm. Violence is seen as an intrusion into a previously peaceful state of tranquility, much as critics of anarchism would see it as introducing disorder and dysfunction into a state of order and functionality. Žižek goes on, however to argue that the tranquil state into which subjective violence seemingly intrudes is not peaceful, but is in fact deeply violence, being what he calls “objective violence”, that is the violence of structures of oppression, marginalization, etc. Thus, what seems to be an intrusion into a state of peacefulness is simply an event within an already-existing reality of violent, chaotic conflict that has simply been rendered invisible by its state of acceptance and legitimation by those in power (i.e. the “invisibility” of racism or sexism).

The critic of anarchism is making essentially the same argument that the aristocracy makes against the poor in situations of conflict, that of denying the inherent disorder, irrationality, and violence of present order. Moreover, Christian anarchism  disrupts the current “arche” of the world, not with violence but with an interruptive peace — the peace of Christ. This denial of the “arches” of this world is neither violent, nor irresponsible, but rather is form of the kingdom of God breaking into the world in pneumatic, apocalyptic foretastes. Such an articulation of Christian anarchism seems supremely appropriate to the gospel, and its practice in the service of the mission of the church. What that looks like is, of course, the important question.

True Revolution

Posted by on November 12, 2008 7 comments

“This, then, is the revolutionary situation: to be revolutionary is to judge the world by its present state, by actual facts, in the name of a truth which does not yet exist (but which is coming) — and it is to do so because we believe this truth to be more genuine and more real than the reality which surrounds us. Consequently it means bringing the future into the present as an explosive force. It meas believing that future events are more important and more true than present events; it means understanding the present in light of the future, dominating it by the future, in the same way as the historian dominates the past. Henceforth the revolutionary act forms part of history: it is going to create history, by inflecting it towards this future…”

– Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 38-39.

Theological Exegesis: The Clear Winner

Posted by on November 10, 2008 22 comments

Well, the results of my recent poll on what readers think I should blog on is nothing if not unambiguous. Theological Exegesis is clearly most the most desired blog topic in the opinions of my readership.

So, true to my word, theological exegesis and biblical theology will be graced with a minimum of 50 posts next year. So now is the time — what specific topics in biblical studies and theological interpretation would people want to see? No promises on this one, but if you are interested in seeing anything that particularly piques my interested, that post might just get bumped to the top of the list.

The Point of Apocalyptic

Posted by on November 6, 2008 5 comments

“The point that apocalyptic makes is not only that people who wear crowns and who claim to foster justice by the swords are not as strong as they think – true as that is: we still sing, ’O where are Kings and Empires now of old that went and came?’ It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that belief by reducing social process to mechanical and statistical models, nor by winning some of one’s battles for the control of one’s own corner of the fallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing about the Resurrection of the slain Lamb.”

– John Howard Yoder, “Armaments and Eschatology.” Studies in Christian Ethics 1:43 (1988): 58.

Runoff Election

Posted by on November 6, 2008 3 comments

Thanks to all who responded to my poll on what they’d like to see me blog about. Given that there were five options on that poll, I thought I’d stage a runoff election between the top two contenders and see what the results are there. To whichever side wins, I will promise 50 posts on that topic in the new year.

[polldaddy poll=1081858]

Elections, Nations, and God

Posted by on November 4, 2008 11 comments

The right of national self-determination does not exist in the Bible. Before God nations have neither a right to exist nor a right to liberty. They have no assurance of perpetuity. On the contrary, the lesson of the Bible seems to be that nations are swept away like dead leaves and that occasionally, almost by accident, one might endure rather longer.

~ Jacques Ellul

Today is a particularly tempting day for American Christians, whether you are electing to vote or not. The temptation is to think that this election will change the course of history, that what happens in the polling booths across America really matters in terms of the direction and meaning of history.

Whether one thinks that they should, as a Christian vote or not, let us not be seduced into believing that the institutional self-maintenance and extension of the apparatus of this particular nation-state is of any sort of ultimate or lasting importance. The truth of the matter is that is that nations have virtually no significance within the drama of God’s salvation of the world.

On this day of fixation, panic, and misplaced confidences, perhaps we would do best to remember the words of the Prophet Isaiah, which call us, not to excessive preoccupation with the state of the nation we sojourn in, but rather in our missional vocation as God’s people:

Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings;  lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,  lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!”  See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?  Who has directed the spirit of the Lord, or as his counselor has instructed him?  Whom did he consult for his enlightenment, and who taught him the path of justice? Who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?  Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.  Lebanon would not provide fuel enough, nor are its animals enough for a burnt offering. All the nations are as nothing before him; they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.

~ Isaiah 40:10-17

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