Monthly Archives: April 2009 - Page 3

Rowan Williams’ Holy Week Lectures

Posted by on April 10, 2009 3 comments

This year for Holy Week, Rowan Williams has delivered a series of lectures entitled “Growing in Prayer: What the Saints tell us about the Spiritual Journey.” Here are links to the mp3 files of these presentations. Definitely worth a listen.

Also, thanks to Jason who first alerted us to these lectures. He’s also been blogging up a storm recently, so folks should check out his blog if you’re not doing so already.

Bodily Presence

Posted by on April 9, 2009 4 comments

“Jesus’ community with his disciples was all-encompassing, extending to all areas of life. The individual’s entire life was lived within this community of the disciples. And this community is a living witness to the bodily humanity of the Son of God. The bodily presence of the Son of God demands bodily commitment to him and with him throughout one’s daily life. With all our bodily living, existence, we belong to him who took on a human body for our sake. In following him, the disciple is inseparably linked to the body of Jesus.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (DBW4), 232.

The Time of Grace

Posted by on April 9, 2009 2 comments

“The time of grace is the final time in the sense that one can never reckon with a further, future word beyond the word of God that confronts me now. There is a time of God’s permission, waiting, and preparation; and there is an ultimate time that judges and breaks off the penultimate. In order to hear the ultimate word, Luther had to go through the monastery; Paul had to go through his piety toward the law; even the thief ‘had’ to go through conviction and the cross. They had to travel a road, to walk the full length of the way through penultimate things; they had to sink to their knees under the burden of these things. And yet the ultimate word was not a crowning but a complete break with the penultimate.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethic (DBW6), 151.

Love and Community

Posted by on April 9, 2009 Comments Off

“Love finds community without seeking it, or precisely because it does not seek it. Those who want to lose their lives will save them. Those who want to lose their lives will save them. This is the only way in which surrendering myself to what God wills for my neighbor really leads to the community of the sanctorum communio established by God; to realize each person serves as an instrument of God.  Thus we find that the Christian community of love has a unique sociological structure: the mutual love of the saints does indeed constitute ‘community’ as an end in itself, that is, community in the strict sense of the word.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio (DBW1), 176.

Day of Bonhoeffer

Posted by on April 9, 2009 Comments Off

Today, April 9 marks the sixty-fourth anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom at the hands of the Nazi authorities in the closing years of World War II. Bonhoeffer has become, in the decades since his death, an iconic figure both within and outside the ecumenical Christian community. His writings and life have marked modern Christianity in an indelible way.

In recognition of Bonhoeffer’s own witness and his massive contribution to the task of Christian theology, today will be dedicated solely to quotes from, and comments on Bonhoeffer’s writings. He is a saint who is always worthy of memory, no matter what avenue draws us to reflect upon him.

Bit of Bonhoeffer

Posted by on April 8, 2009 1 comment

“God is a God who bears. The Son of God bore our flesh. He therefore bore the cross. He bore all our sins and attained reconciliation by his bearing. That is why disciples are called to bear what is put on them. Bearing constitutes being a Christian. Just as Christ maintains his communion with the Father by bearing according the Father’s will, so the disciples’ bearing constitutes their community with Christ. People can shake off the burdens laid on them. But doing so does not free them at all from their burdens. Instead it loads them with a heavier, more unbearable burden. They bear the self-chosen yoke of their own selves. Jesus called all who are laden with various sufferings and burdens to throw off their yokes and to take his yoke upon themselves.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (DBW2), 90-91.

Beating the Body?

Posted by on April 7, 2009 8 comments

Paul’s thoughts on the role of physical bodily discipline in his letters often seems a bit on the contradictory side. Consider on the one hand:

I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. (1 Cor 9:27)

On the other:

Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism . . . these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. (Col 2:18; 23)

While, I suppose we could take the easy way out and just assume that Colossians was the product a later development of the Pauline tradition, the canonical question still remains for those who consider the New Testament to be the church’s Scripture. What are we to think, biblically speaking, about the role of physical discipline in Christian sanctification?

Polygamy is Coming to Canada…

Posted by on April 7, 2009 10 comments

Interesting op-ed piece in the Ottawa Citizen:

Looks like a historic legal battle is shaping up over polygamy, the outcome of which will surely be determined by the Supreme Court of Canada.

I understand why, for political reasons, the government feels compelled to fight polygamy tooth and nail, but I suspect the government will lose. The polygamists have what seems to be an unassailable constitutional position. If polygamy is an expression of their religion, and if the participants are all consenting adults, then I don’t see how the state can say no.

Note the words “consenting” and “adults”. No court would allow you to take a child bride, commit sexual assault or practise kidnapping simply because you say your religion allows you to do so. But a three-way marriage between consenting grown-ups? That’s different. Sure, it strikes many people as a weird arrangement, but so did gay marriage — which is now legal. Again, it’s about consenting adults. A marriage between, say, a 20-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman would strike me as weirder and even more unappealing than a marriage involving one man and two wives, but that’s not sufficient grounds to make such marriages illegal.

The government is going to argue that polygamous marriages violate Canadian values such as equality of the sexes. But go into some religious communities right here in Canada and you’ll find traditional marriages (one man, one woman) that do not uphold what secularists would consider sexual equality.

I’m not championing polygamous marriages. I’m just saying that in a free society, especially a constitutional democracy, it’s probably impossible to prohibit them.

Adults sure do tend to consent to a lot of insanse stuff. Alas for the day adulthood and consent became the bedrock of  democratic ideology/ethos. Or was that day one?

The Conservatism of Obama

Posted by on April 7, 2009 7 comments

From George Packer in the New Yorker:

What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether… [Obamaism]’s also a pretty good description of what used to pass for conservatism—a sense that social relations and institutions are fragile things, and that, while government can’t create wealth or impose equality, at moments like this it has to establish a new equilibrium between individuals and huge economic forces, so that society doesn’t crumble. But modern conservatism has grown into exactly the opposite of its origins, in Burke’s respect for tradition and Madison’s promotion of countervailing checks on concentrations of power. Instead, like any revolutionary creed, it is abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience and existing conditions.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

Debaptism?

Posted by on April 7, 2009 1 comment

Horstkoetter points us to a rather fascinating report from the BBC about a fellow who, baptized as an infant into the Anglican Church and now a committed atheist, has been issues a certificate of debaptism.

What I found particularly funny is that, according to this report, the Catholic Church is agreeing to remove those who wish to be debaptized from their records as members of the church, while the church of England will not do so. The reasoning: baptism is simply a matter of public record in England. Read more »

The New Atheism and the Cost of Secularism

Posted by on April 7, 2009 12 comments

“Can one really believe–as the New Atheists seem to do–that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward, free of the constraining hand of archaic faith, will naturally make society more just, more humane, and more rational than it has been in the past? What evidence supports such an expectation? It is rather difficulty, placing everything in the scales, to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives have already been swallowed up in the flames of modern ‘progress.’ At the end of the twentieth century–the century when secularization became an explicit political and cultural project throughout the world–the forces of progressive ideology could boast an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses, but not much in the way of new moral concepts. At least, not any we should be especially proud of. The best ideals to which we moderns continue to cling long antedate modernity; for the most part, all we can claim as truly, distinctively our own are our atrocities. One could, I suppose, argue that the secular project had somehow been diverted from its proper course at the dawn of the twentieth century, just as the new ideologies were assuming concrete political forms, or had been stalled or subverted by certain intransigent forces of unreason. This would be a more credible claim, however, if the twentieth century’s horrors were demonstrably aberrations within the larger story of the modern world. But, in fact, the process of secularization was marked, from the first, by the magnificent limitlessness of its violence. One does not have to harbor any nostalgia for the old order of Christendom, or of the church’s degrading association with the state, to be conscious of scularity’s cost. . . . In purely arithmetic terms, one cannot dispute the results. The old order could generally reckon its victims only in the thousands. But in the new age, the secular state, with all its hitherto unimagined capacities, could pursue its purely earthly ideals and ambitions only if it enjoyed the liberty to kill by the millions. How else could it spread its wings?”

~ David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 222-23.

An Interview with Robert Jenson

Posted by on April 6, 2009 8 comments

Pretty interesting interview with Robert Jenson that was originally published in the Christian Century in 2007. It’s been made available for free here. A few of the questions and responses are particularly interesting, regarding ecumenism, the church of the global south, theology and politics, and the question of Christ and culture:

What do you hope for and what do you foresee regarding the ecumenical movement?

I foresee continued stagnation — abstracting of course from an uncovenanted intervention of the Spirit. The ecumenical movement is not very interesting if it is simply an apparatus for practical comity and joint political agitation; its heart must be concern for what ecumenists have called “faith and order,” that is, for the theological and structural divisions that prevent fellowship at the Lord’s table, and for the possibilities of overcoming them.

Of that concern there are now few stirrings outside professional ranks; indeed, people find it hard to imagine what enthusiasm there once was in congregations and educational institutions.

That Faith and Order ecumenism is dead in the water has for some time been widely recognized. Out of that recognition, scores of American church leaders five years ago endorsed an initiative to hold a “second Oberlin.” The Faith and Order movement in North America had been kindled by a 1957 conference at Oberlin College, mostly of mainline Protestants; the hope was that a similar but more broadly based conference might rekindle the movement. An independent foundation was created to carry the effort, since it was apparent that for many reasons the National Council of Churches could not. In January of this year, the foundation’s incorporating directors formally terminated the venture. It was undone by mainline Protestantism’s present indifference to and distraction from the whole matter, by evangelicalism’s unconcern about separation at the Lord’s table, and by deliberate obstruction from within the established ecumenical apparatus.

To be sure, this pessimistic assessment indeed abstracts from the unpredictable work of the Spirit. When Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said on several much-quoted occasions that further major ecumenical progress depended on a new “depth of faith” worked by a new initiative of the Spirit. That can happen at any time and is what we should pray for — and prayer is the most optimistic act a creature can perform.

What do you think will be the theological impact of global Christianity’s geographic shift away from Europe and North America and to the Southern Hemisphere and Asia? And of the rising influence of Pentecostal churches and the relative waning of churches in the historic confessional traditions?

I think that is unpredictable. As an intrinsically missionary faith, Christianity repeatedly invades geographically or historically new turf — and it never finds that turf religiously unoccupied. In the ensuing conversation and argument, Christianity will discover both agreements with the antecedent religion and necessary disagreements. As the missionary partner, Christianity will change in some ways, whether the other does or not: it will have to address new questions and configurations of thought, and weigh liturgical and cultural practices to be adopted, adapted or rejected. A form of the church will emerge which may look and sound very different from previous forms — as different, say, as a late-fourth-century Eucharist in Alexandria from a first-century breaking of bread in Jerusalem.

Some have thought they could so securely identify a general and repeated pattern of religious history as to predict the outcome of a particular contestation of this sort. I am tempted to such hubris but try to resist it. It is in any case too soon, in my view, to know in what ways the churches of Africa or India or China will be specifically African or Indian or Chinese a century or so from now.

Accounts of theological and political disputes in this country often pit the religious right against mainline or liberal Protestantism. How would you describe the main features of the American religious landscape and where would you locate yourself?

Contrasting liberal or left with conservative or right yields, in my view, a map of very limited utility. For my own part, I have been labeled both ways, depending on who was disapproving of me.

At least theologically, there are two effective divisions between American Christians, One is between those for whom the gospel is itself the norm of all truth and the person of Christ therefore the founding metaphysical fact, and those for whom some other agenda or “theory” is the overriding norm. The other is between those who use “justification by faith” — or in the especially aggravated case of Lutherans, the “law and gospel” distinction — to fund their antinomianism, and those appalled by this. The language in which I have described the alternatives will doubtless betray on which side of each division I find myself.

Churches on the left and right often see themselves in opposition to the dominant culture — whether they are opposing abortion rights on one side or opposing U.S. foreign policy on the other. Is Richard Niebuhr’s description of “Christ against culture” still a helpful way to speak about the church’s political stance with regard to the world?

I have long thought that Niebuhr’s book, for all its individual insights, was based on a false setting of the question. Whatever preposition you put between Christ and culture, its mere presence there marks and enforces the supposition that Christ and culture are entities different in kind. But it is of course only the risen Christ who can now have a relation to a culture, and this living Christ’s body is the church. And the church — with its scriptures, odd rituals and peculiar forms of government — is plainly itself a culture.

Therefore the real question is always about the relation of the church culture to some other culture with which the church’s mission involves it at a time and place. And I do not think the relation can be the same in every case. During the time of “Christendom,” the culture of the church and the culture of the West were barely distinguishable. I do not think this “Constantinian settlement” was avoidable. When the empire said, “Come over and help us hold civilization together,” should the bishops have just refused?

As to Christendom’s consequences for faith, some were beneficial and some were malign, as is usual with great historical configurations. During the present collapse of Christendom and its replacement by an antinomian and would-be pagan culture, confrontation must of course be more the style.

Luther on Ecclesial Community

Posted by on April 6, 2009 1 comment

“Those who seriously want to be Christians and to confess the gospel in deed and word ought to write themselves in by name and perhaps gather by themselves in a home for prayer, Scripture reading, Baptism, Holy Communion, and other Christian exercises. In this kind of order one can know those who do not behave as Christians, punish them, reform them, cast them out or excommunicate them according to the rule of Christ (Matt 18:15f). Here one could also impose common aims upon the Christians which would be contributed willingly and distributed (II Cor 9:1,2,12). One would not need a lot of grand singing there.

“Here one could also conduct Baptism and Communion in a brief and fine manner, and direct everything ot the Word, prayer, and mutual love. One  should have a good, brief catechism. . . . In sum, once one has the people who seriously desire to be Christians, the orders and procedures could quickly be brought about. However, I cannot and may not yet have the people for it. And I do not see many who are urgently seeking it.”

~ Martin Luther, Preface to the German Mass.

Your Hope Must be Dashed: A Palm Sunday Sermon

Posted by on April 5, 2009 7 comments

Today is Palm Sunday, the day that marks what is often called Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Many of us, as children, remember the Palm Sunday church services we experienced growing up in which we waved palm branches singing Hosanna. There are a few ironies of about this. If we take up the song of the children of Israel on this day, we make a profound mistake about the nature of Christ’s lordship. The songs of Hosanna that the children of Israel greeted Jesus with when he entered Jerusalem, far from being a moment for us to celebrate are tragic failures of comprehension. When the children of Israel sang “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” they failed to understand Christ’s lordship. Palm Sunday is not a day of triumph for Jesus, it is a day of temptation. Temptation to be the sort of Messiah that Israel wanted. The kind of Messiah who would bring about the kingdom of their own hopes and dreams. Their joy in anticipation of the coming of David’s kingdom was a hope that Jesus came to dash.

We often comment, with raised eyebrows, how incredible it is that the same crowd which welcomed Jesus with the cries of Hosanna could bring themselves to, a mere week later call for his crucifixion. How, we wonder, could they so clearly see his lordship on Palm Sunday only to make a great reversal and call for his crucifixion on Mandy Thursday? We scoff and wonder at their wishy-washiness and inconsistence.

To look at the matter in this way, however, is to make a profound mistake about what is really going on here. It makes perfect sense that the Jews would call for Jesus’ crucifixion, given the kind of lordship he came and presented. Almost immediately upon his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus began to dash the hopes that had called forth the cry of Hosanna. He comes to the Temple, immediately after his entry into Jerusalem, looks around and leaves. He does not proclaim the coming of the kingdom that they longed for. He does not install himself as the Davidic heir. He leaves and goes outside the city, to fellowship with his friends in Bethany. In the days that follow Jesus pronounces judgment after judgment on Jerusalem and the Temple. He comes, not to fulfill, but to dash the hopes of Israel.

The cries of Hosanna are cries from a people who believe that God is coming to address and satisfy their needs and hopes as they define them. When Jesus comes to such a people he comes, not to fulfill their hopes but to dash them to pieces. This is the bad news of the Gospel.

We commonly associate Palm Sunday with Holy Week. However, this is, in one sense a profound mistake. Palm Sunday is the last Sunday of Lent, not the beginning of Holy Week. Lent is our remembering of Christ’s journey to Jerusalem, his journey of suffering servanthood, of obedience, of humility. Lent begins with Christ’s temptation in the wilderness and ends with his entry into Jerusalem. This is of profound significance for the story of Christ’s wilderness temptation is parallel to Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The triumphal entry is the apex of Satan’s temptation that is put to Christ in the desert. Here, in Jersusalem, amidst the cries of Hosanna, the hopes of all Israel cascade down on Christ, calling to him, beckoning him to be the answer to Israel’s yearnings as they define them. On Palm Sunday the people of God beg God’s Son to be the kind of God they most desire, the kind of God they most long for, the kind of God they need.

Christ comes to dash such hopes, to extinguish and transform such desires, to redefine our lives and our longings. He comes to replace our infantile and self-centered hopes with a vision of the fullness of God’s love. Christ comes, not to fulfill our hopes, but to dash them. He is the great disturbance, the ultimate interruption. What we learn on Palm Sunday is that we cannot even hope in God rightly until we allow God, revealed in Christ to define for us what the promises of God truly are. We are, all of us, bound and inclined to find in God’s promises the answers to our desires as they stand. We all think that God’s salvation will mean the fulfillment of our desires as they stand and the removal of all things holding us back from that fulfillment.

Christ comes to dash such hopes. Christ comes to destroy such desires.

Palm Sunday is not a day of triumph, but a day of awkward, sad, pitiful failure. It is a day that reminds us that God’s salvation can never be defined in advance by us. What we think salvation means for us and our lives may be, and almost always is, the opposite if the gift God wants to give us.

Christ came to dash the hope of Israel. Christ continues to come to us, through the Spirit to dash our hopes ever and again. And this is cause for great rejoicing. We are set free in Christ from our infantile hopes, our selfish longings, our misguided yearnings. We are set free from the tyranny of our own desires. Christ comes, not to satisfy our hopes, but to transform them into something altogether new.

The bad news of the Gospel on Palm Sunday is that God will never be God on our terms. He will never be the answer to our own, self-defined questions. God comes to us in Christ and demands that we abandon our questions and instead answer his. And God’s question to us in the Gospel is simply this: “Who do you say that I Am?” Who do you say that the this one—this man who lives life wholly for others, who makes himself nothing, who does not regard equality with God as something to be held onto, who empties himself, who though he was rich, for our sakes was made poor, who having loved those who were his own, loved them to the end—who do you say this person is?

This is what the world is presented with in Christ. Jesus was a man who lived a life so utterly full of agape, of self-expending, other-regarding love that it culminated in him giving up his very life for others. This is what we see in Christ: a love that so utterly abandons itself to us, so thoroughly lavishes itself on us that it ends up empty, dead, and forsaken. This is who Jesus is. The question of the Gospel is what we have to say about that. Who do we say that this one, who loved infinitely is?

The answer the church has given, sometimes with stammerings, stutterings, and fanciful qualifications has always been that this one, this man who lived wholly for others is God and that therefore this infinite love is the future of all things. But for us to say yes to this one, for us to admit that the one who emptied himself is God, we must submit ourselves to the severe mercy of having our hopes dashed. This is the lesson of Palm Sunday: that only when we have our hopes dashed by the wholly other reality of Christ’s person are we set free into the life of shalom which God promises.

Palm Sunday is a reminder to us that God came, not to fulfill our hopes, but to bring them to nothing, and that by so dashing our hopes he has done exceedingly, abundantly, beyond all we could ever ask or think.

Bring it on Back

Posted by on April 5, 2009 Comments Off

Derrick’s blog has been rebooted with a good post on David Bentley hart’s new book, Atheist Delusions, which seems to be the first in a series on ecclesial aesthetics. Good stuff. Check it out.

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