Monthly Archives: February 2010 - Page 3

Nate Kerr on Haiti: Prayer, Solidarity, and Revolt

Posted by on February 18, 2010 6 comments

Nate Kerr has a new article up at The Other Journal responding to the issue in Haiti, and particularly underscoring the theological importance of prayer and solidarity in relation to such events of radical suffering. Its definitely worth reading. Here’s just one quote:

At the heart of all Christian prayer is the cry “Thy kingdom come!” It is with this cry that we move out into the action that speaks to God by waiting upon the free coming of God. It is with this cry that we speak to and for the coming again of Christ—that decisive action of God by which the powers and principalities of this world are to be subverted and creation is to be opened anew to its revolutionary transformation into new life. In prayer, we come to participate in this revolutionary transformation. Thus, Barth says, the action to which Christians are called by Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit is a specific kind of revolt. Specifically, the Christian prays in “revolt against all the oppression and suppression of humans by the lordship of the lordless powers,” against those powers that have gained their lordship by virtue of their refusal of humanity’s and creation’s relationship to God. At the same time, the Christian prayer of revolt is rooted in an equally specific kind of hope. The Christian acts against the lordship of the lordless powers not so as to win her own freedom from their rule (as if by some equally autonomous power), but rather in the recognition that she has been implicated in a struggle that refuses their rule as false and illusory, in recognition that she has already been liberated from their rule in the original revolution of Christ’s cross and resurrection. For Christians to cry, “Thy kingdom come!” in revolt against the lordless powers is to act “in the sphere of freedom” from the powers which “is already given to them here and now on this side of the fulfillment of the prayer.” Prayer, Barth is saying, should make revolutionaries of us all. Indeed, what kind of an invocation of God’s kingdom would it be if it did not testify through specific ways of working and living and loving to the path through and out from under the lordless powers—cosmic, political, and religious alike—that enslave the powerless poor by presuming to deny the resurrection of the crucified?

How to be reflective and thoughtful about Lent

Posted by on February 17, 2010 5 comments

Just follow Micheal’s advice.

T. F. Torrance on the meaning of Christ’s humanity

Posted by on February 17, 2010 1 comment

Kent has a review of the new book of Torrance’s, Incarnation. Here’s one of the segments he quotes from the book:

The stark actuality of Christ’s humanity, his flesh and blood and bone, guarantees to us that we have God among us. If that humanity were in any sense unreal, God would be unreal for us in him. The full measure of Christ’s humanity is the full measure of God’s reality for us, God’s actuality to us, in fact the measure of God’s love for us. If Christ is not man, then God has not reached us, but has stopped short of our humanity – then God does not love us to the uttermost, for his love has stopped short of coming all the way to where we are, and becoming one of us in order to save us. But Christ’s humanity means that God’s love is now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, really one of us and with us. (p. 185)

How to be a complete moron about Lent

Posted by on February 17, 2010 48 comments

Just follow Jim West’s Nadab’s advice.

T. F. Torrance on justification and orthodoxy

Posted by on February 17, 2010 7 comments

WTM has a solid quote from T. F. Torrance on justification and its relation to orthodoxy:

Justification is God’s word of truth and its revelation is truth. This word justification does not have to do simply with righteous living but with righteous understanding, for righteousness is God’s right or truth as well as his holiness and involves knowing as well as doing, and thus to do righteousness is the same as to do truth. (Compare Jesus’ statement, ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.’) The revelation of righteousness is the word that puts us in the truth and as such tells us that we are in un-truth. Justification says “let God be true, but every man a liar’, as Paul puts it with reference to Psalm 51. This word of justification which puts us in the truth denies all self-justification and denominates it lying, or un-truth. If God’s justification of the ungodly means that no one can boast of their own righteousness, then it also means that no one dares to boast of their own orthodoxy, for to claim orthodoxy is to claim to be in the right, to be in the truth; it is a boasting of the right, whereas in point of fact justification by putting us in the truth, reveals that we are in the wrong, in un-truth.

Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, Robert T. walker, ed. (InterVarsity, 2009), 105.

No national anthem at Goshen, please

Posted by on February 15, 2010 35 comments

You may have already heard about Goshen College’s recent decision to start playing the national anthem at sporting events. And if you haven’t heard about the backlash against this move — quite understandable and right as Goshen is a premier Mennonite college.  Anyways, there’s now a petition being signed regarding this decision, and calling upon the College to reverse it. Please consider signing it, especially if you are a Mennonite. For those of us who care about curtailing the church’s capitulation to American nationalism we really cannot afford to lose the distinctive witness of the Mennonites.

The post explaining the petition is right on:

Acquiescing to a public ritual that glorifies the nation-state is an issue that affects more than the Goshen College community or the Mennonite Church. Indeed, when Christians glorify their nation over another, they chip away at ecumenical fellowship, making this an issue for all Christians seeking to be faithful to the only God worthy of glory and praise.

Where’s the hole?

Posted by on February 14, 2010 34 comments

It seems to me that most of us — and by “us” I mean those of us who tend to read and write theology blogs — have at least one big hole in our education that we tend to regret and be somewhat annoyed about. For my part its definitely the paucity of my languages. I have a good working knowledge of Hebrew, despite being out of practice and some Greek, but as far as academic languages go that’s it. No German, no Latin, no French. And it bums me out.

Well, that’s the hole I think I have in my academic theological cred. What’s yours?

An apocalyptic “style”

Posted by on February 14, 2010 3 comments

David Toole has some comments about what that notion means:

An apocalyptic style is a way of acknowledging the strangeness of this biblical world and, by extension, the world generally . . . [apocalyptic style] founds itself not upon the identity of the same but upon the otherness of a world that never ceases to be strange. In this world, history continues not because of what kings and presidents might do but because ravens keep alive a prophet starving in the desert (1 Kings 17) and because even as kings and presidents count their people and take their polls and plan the future, the word of God comes into the wilderness (Luke 3). (Waiting For Godot in Sarajevo, 210)
Or, one might say that an apocalyptic style is a mode of doing theology which takes the utterly miraculous nature of biblical faith seriously. Of course, this can be a pretty embarrassing thing to do.

A week of the body

Posted by on February 13, 2010 Comments Off

Thanks to all who commented this week on the stream of posts about the body of Christ. I’m certainly not done with this topic, though after this week there will be posts on other topics as well. Also this coming week I plan to extend this conversation in dialouge with John Zizioulas’s work, which I have found very helpful this week, as well as in more biblical study of the Pauline texts themselves, especially in regard to the political nature of the body imagery. In the meantime, thanks to all for the discussion. I found it immensely helpful, I hope you did too.

Body and bride, ctd.

Posted by on February 12, 2010 2 comments

Further to this whole connection between the images of the body and the bride, consider the way Ephesians 5:26-33 frames the issue:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.

Here the image is, thoroughly relational, centered on the union between two spouses. It is precisely in that context that the image of the church as Christ’s body is referenced. The church here is seen as Christ’s body in the sense that Christ loves it as he loves himself, with the very love that God is. Thus the church is the body (at least here), not in the sense that it is mystically the same person as Christ, but that in Christ’s love it is brought into the deepest possible intimacy in relation to him.

Christ regards the church as his body precisely as the bride. Both images speak, seamlessly, of the infinite love that Christ has for the church, that he lavishly bestows on her, loving her so as to give himself way for her sake.

Thus the image of the “one flesh” — which describes the intimacy, both conjugal and social — of a husband and wife serve to illuminate the image the church as Christ’s body. The church is the “body” of Christ precisely in the sense that spouses’ bodies belong to each other. The church is Christ’s body because he has utterly and radically given himself to her in love, to which the church responds in gratitude, love, and service.

Body and bride

Posted by on February 12, 2010 5 comments

When the image of the church as the body of Christ is conceived as indicating a monopersonal, ontological identification between Christ and the church, it is usually found to be something of a contrast with the image of the church as the bride of Christ, which is clearly an interpersonal rather than a monopersonal image. Thus, in most ecclesiologies that take this tack, the two contrasting images serve to dialectically “balance” one another.

However, the very notion that the two images are contrastive in this way, is I think, open to question once we abandon the notion of the body of Christ should be interpreted as indicating a mystical co-personhood. Rather, the image of the body points at once to the interdependence of the members of the church (1 Cor 12:14-26) and the singular and sovereign lordship of Christ over the church (Col 1:18; Eph 1:22-23). Thus, the image of the body, like that of the bride directs our attention to the interpersonal dimension of Christ’s relationship to the church. Christ relates to the church as it’s Head, its Lord and Source (which is a very probable translation of kephale, a fact that often goes unnoticed).

The way the bride image qualifies the image of the body, then, is not that it supplies an image of distinction whereas the body supplies an image of union. Rather, both together indicate the nature of the distinctly interpersonal union between Christ and the church. In the image of Christ as Head/Source he is seen as the Lord of the church to whom the church owes its existence entirely. In the image of Christ as Bridegroom, he is seen as the one who utterly and fully loves the church, to the point of giving up his own life for her. Both images speak to the nature of the utterly intimate, unbreakable communion between Christ and the people of God: Christ is at once their sovereign Lord ans Source, and their self-giving Servant who pours out his life for them in love.

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ, ctd.

Posted by on February 11, 2010 Comments Off

What I have been proposing is that the empty tomb tradition is, theologically speaking, part of the Church’s resource in resisting the temptation to ‘absorb’ Jesus into itself, and thus part of what its confession of the divinity of Jesus amounts to in spiritual and political practice. Jesus is not the possession of the community . . . The freedom of Jesus to act, however we unpack that deceptively simple statement, is not exhausted by what the community is doing or thinking – which allows us to say that Jesus’ role for the community continues, vitally, to be that of judge, and that those who are charged with speaking authoritatively for or in the community stand in a very peculiar and paradoxical place . . . They remain under the judgement of the Risen One, along with the rest of the community, and their task is to direct attention away from themselves to Jesus, to reinforce the community’s awareness of living under Jesus’ judgement. The point at which they claim to foreclose the judgement of the risen Jesus is the point at which they occlude the reality of the continuing life or freedom of Jesus. Their rationale is to remind the community of the danger of swallowing Jesus up in its own life and practice . . . .

The tomb tradition, then should be the ground of certain kinds of questions put by the Church to itself, especially as regards its attitude to institutional authority . . .

Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Blackwell, 2000), 192f.

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ, ctd.

Posted by on February 11, 2010 3 comments

More from Rowan Williams’ Resurrection:

The resurrection faith is bound up with the existence of the community, then; but that does not immediately answer the question of the source of both faith and community. . . . That is to say: there is something prior to the community. . . . [Thus] it is and is not true to see the Church as “identified” with the risen Jesus: the Church is where Jesus is met, where bodily grace and reconciliation are now shown, it is the “body” of Jesus’ presence; but the Church still meets Jesus as an other, a stranger, it never absorbs him into itself so that he ceases to be its lover and judge. (p. 94-95)

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ

Posted by on February 11, 2010 1 comment

Rowan Williams’ wonderful book, Resurrection has some very helpful thoughts on the nature of the church as the body of Christ, and, specifically on the relationship between the church and the risen, personal body of Jesus.

We have already noted that Jesus as risen is a Jesus who cannot be contained in the limits of a past human life; the corollary of this is that Jesus as risen cannot be contained in the legitimating and supporting memory of a community. The Church is not “founded” by Jesus of Nazareth as an institution to preserve the recollection of his deeds and words; it is the community of those who meet him as risen and the place where all the world may meet him as risen. . . .

So the void of the tomb and the unrecognizable face of the risen Lord both speak of the challenge of Easter to a God who is primarily “the God of our condition.” The Lordship of Jesus is not constructed from a recollection but experienced in the encounter with the one who evades our surface desires and surface needs, and will not subserve the requirements of our private dramas. The Church is not the assembly of the disciples as a “continuation” of Jesus, but the continuing group of those engaged in dialogue with Jesus, those compelled to renew again and again their confrontation with a person who judges and calls and recreates. The Church may be Christ’s “Body”, the place of his presence, but it is entered precisely by the ritual encounter with his death and resurrection, by the “turning around” which stops us struggling to interpret his story in light of our and presses us to interpret ourselves in the light of the Easter event. The “Body” image is one of many. We need to be cautious about any tendency to see the Church as a simple “undialectical” extension of Christ; and we have already explored something of the way in which the Eucharist enshrines the dialectic by both confronting us with our victim and identifying us with him. The Church is where Christ is because it is where persons find their identity through him and before him. Christ is with the believer and beyond the believer at the same time: we are in Christ and yet face to face with him. Christian worship and spirituality wrestles continuously with what this means, as it both addresses Christ directly, and speaks in his name to God as “Abba.” Jesus grants us a solid identity, yet refuses us the power to “seal” or finalize it, and obliges us to realize that this identity only exists in an endless responsiveness to new encounters with him in the world of unredeemed relationships; to absolutize it, imagining that we have finished the making of ourselves, that we have done with desire and restlessness, is to slip back into that unredeemed world; to turn from the void of the tomb to the drama of a cheapened Calvary for the frustrated ego. (p. 74, 76)

It should be noted that I am not interested here in identifying targets for Williams’ critique so much as receiving and appropriating his constructive statements about the nature of the church as the body of Christ. And, more importantly, the tendencies he describes here seem to me to be temptations. Temptations that we are all prone to in our attempts to live out the life of the church in the world. As such they constitute a powerful and helpful exhortation. I know I find it arresting and often needed in my own ecclesial life.

The bride, not the wife

Posted by on February 11, 2010 32 comments

It is interesting that the church is described by Paul, not as the wife of Christ, but as the bride (2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:27). Clearly there is something important about this distinction. A spouse stands in a settled and determined relationship. The vows have been made, the union has been actualized, the relationship has been consummated. The relationship between two betrothed however is quite different, at least in biblical understanding.

The relationship between a groom and a bride is one of promise. They are bound to one another by vow, but their relationship is not yet consummated, though it is a binding and real relationship. Inherent in the notion of betrothal is the element of anticipation, of deferred longing, of unactualized union. The betrothed live from promise towards a future in which they will be given to one another in a full and decisive way.

This image of the church as bride seems to me to be a necessary qualification towards how we interpret the metaphor of the body of Christ. Or rather, this is the question I am interested in seeing discussed. Should the image of the bride have priority in our understanding of the image of the body or vice versa? To my mind the image of the bride is preferable as a controlling metaphor because, 1) it is much clearer in meaning, 2) it is rooted substantially in the Old Testament’s language, 3) it is clearly the controlling metaphor for the union of God and his people in Revelation, and 4) it is clearly attuned to the whole framework of eschatological anticipation that the New Testament as whole presupposes.

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