Monthly Archives: March 2010

A very different power

Posted by on March 30, 2010 2 comments

This is one of my favorite quotes from Alan Lewis’s superb book, Between Cross and Resurrection. I figured it was definitely worth reposting this week:

It is a very different God, and a very different power, that we have discovered in the story of divine self-emptying, God’s capacity for weakness, the ability - without loss of Godness – to suffer and perhaps to die. This is the triune God of Jesus, fulfilled, majestic, glorified through self-expenditure in the lowly ignominy of our farthest country. There is power here, resurrecting, death-destroying, Devil-defeating; but it is the power of love, defying human expectation, which flowers in contradiction and negation, allowing sin its increase and giving death its day of victory, but only the more abundantly to outstrip both in the fecundity of grace and life. To live in the face of death an Easter Saturday existence, trusting in the weak but powerful love of the crucified and buried God, is itself to be objective, turned outward, away from self-reliance and self-preoccupation, away from our own determination to conquer death, which is in fact self-defeating and destructive. Instead, we are invited bravely and with frankness to admit or own defenselessness against the foe and entrust our self and destiny to the love of God which in its defenselessness proves creative and victorious.

Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 431.

Holy Week Sermons

Posted by on March 30, 2010 1 comment

In light of the events to come this week, here are some of my sermons and talks from past Holy Week celebrations.

Infinite kenosis

Posted by on March 29, 2010 3 comments

The infinite kenosis of Jesus, which is a condition of his infinite personhood, is that . . . relationship with Christ—which is faith—can be said to include its own cessation. The infinity of Christ’s personhood flows from the inner-Trinitarian relations, which are shown in the resurrection of Christ transcend death. In terms of the passion narrative itself, the divine Father-Son relation which appears to be extinguished in the Father’s silence as the Son dies on the cross, is regenerated in the glorification of the Son in the resurrection and in the new speaking of the Trinitarian Spirit which fills the earth. Thus, while every ordinary human relation must face its own end, not least on account of the contingency of life, the experience of alienation, or loss of relation, is itself discovered to constitute a moment within the relation that is faith. It can therefore be embraced as an aspect of the new way of relating [to existence] which faith brings. This is an interplay of light and dark therefore, whereby the boundary that marks the limit of the relation is discovered to be internal to it. In this we can ourselves come to inhabit the silence of God, which is the complete loss of relation, or annihilation, that Jesus experienced on the cross, and thereby come into the transformed reality of a new and Spirit-filled existence.

Oliver Davies, A Theology of Compassion: Metaphysics of Difference and the Renewal of Tradition, 220-221.

Willimon rethinks Christianity as practice(s)

Posted by on March 25, 2010 10 comments

Will Willimon (of Resident Aliens fame) has an article out in the Christian Century that calls into question some of the emphasis of his and Stanley Hauerwas’s work on Christianity-as-practice:

Hauerwas and I did not originate the notion that Christianity is best defined as a “socially established cooperative human activity” rather than as a set of beliefs or a type of experience. But we certainly gave a strong shove to that idea, and to the notion that there is nothing wrong with the church that can’t be cured by restoring it as a place of practice. I bear some responsibility for the now popular conviction that Christianity is a practice and that Christians are best described as people who have adopted certain practices. So I feel I should share why I am now having grave doubts about describing Christian spirituality as a practice.

Practice has become a primary term not only in describing Christianity but in speaking about religion in general. It is acceptable to speak of Christianity as a practice in company who would not tolerate a conversation about “Jesus Christ as Lord.” That should tip us off to some of the theological hazards of this approach.

Jamie Smith has a response to Willimon up at the Duke Divinity School “Call and Response” blog, to which Willimon has also responded (in the comments), making for what I take to be a very helpful exchange. Check em out.

Beckwith’s Rome

Posted by on March 24, 2010 34 comments

Jamie Smith has a review of Francis Beckwith’s book, Return to Rome up at The Other Journal. It certainly takes Beckwith to task for, among other things, making Rome in his own evangelical image. Definitely worth a read. Here’s an excerpt:

Beckwith has returned to the Rome of his evangelical dreams: a pure, pristine defender of truth, justice, and—not so surprisingly—the American way. No wonder, then, that he sees no tension between being “both Evangelical and Catholic.” His is an Evangelical Rome. This plays itself out in a curious conversation with his comrade J. P. Moreland. After reading Moreland a passage from an unnamed author who affirms that “the question about truth is the essential question of the Christian faith as such, and in that sense it inevitably has to do with philosophy,” Beckwith asks his colleague: “Guess who wrote this?” After Moreland reels off some favorite Protestant philosophers, Beckwith plays his gotcha: “It’s the Pope!” “He’s one of us!” Moreland replied in exuberance (78).

But somehow, I can’t imagine Benedict XVI on the faculty of Talbot School of Theology any time soon. So what’s going on here? Beckwith’s Pope is like Norman Geisler’s Aquinas: an anonymous evangelical. On a more macro scale, Beckwith’s Rome is evangelicalism by other means; that is, his is an intellectualized Catholicism—Rome as the home of the true set of Christian propositions or what Beckwith is wont to call “a Christian worldview.” Thus, he criticizes the Catholic teachers of his youth who “spoke of Catholicism as ‘our tradition’ rather than as a cluster of beliefs that were true” (36). The Rome to which he has returned is, ironically, the matrix of Christianity as an intellectual system—“ironically” because Cardinal Ratzinger (just a few weeks before becoming Pope Benedict XVI) has explicitly said that “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead,” Ratzinger emphasized, “an encounter, a love story; it is an event.”

The the impotence of proofreading

Posted by on March 23, 2010 6 comments

This poetry performance will be jarring music to the ears of any English teacher or editorial professional. Too good. (Adult language if you care about such things.)

H/T: Goannatree

Supersized eucharist?

Posted by on March 23, 2010 5 comments

According to one study, it looks like over the last thousand years or so our artistic representations of the Last Supper have seen the food portions get bigger and bigger:

Has even the Last Supper been supersized?

The food in famous paintings of the meal has grown by biblical proportions over the last millennium, researchers report in a medical journal Tuesday.

Using a computer, they compared the size of the food to the size of the heads in 52 paintings of Jesus Christ and his disciples at their final meal before his death.

If art imitates life, we’re in trouble, the researchers conclude. The size of the main dish grew 69 percent; the size of the plate, 66 percent, and the bread, 23 percent, between the years 1000 and 2000.

Probably doesn’t mean all that much. Still a bit odd and amusing though.

Modernity does not dare crush me!! Modernity retreat!!

Posted by on March 19, 2010 7 comments

In light of the latest discussions about Milbank, Blond, and the Red Torry stuff, somehow this seems hilariously apropos, perhaps even parabolic. NSFW.

A case of the wordy-squirts

Posted by on March 19, 2010 6 comments
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The church as digestive tract?

Posted by on March 18, 2010 29 comments

In his recent interview, John Milbank at one point comments that the church, contrary to appearances is not “an institution” (or at least it “isn’t primarily”).  Rather, according to Milbank the church is “the continued event of the ingestion of the body of Christ” which “alone mediates the presence of the God-Man.” Now, I’m all for real presence and a strong ecclesiology (whatever that really means). But the way Milbank expresses himself here encapsulates a few of my difficulties with the Radox way of approaching ecclesiology and Christology.

I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that the church has its being in receiving Christ’s presence in the Eucharist (though it obviously isn’t constituted merely by Eucharistic celebration). But Milbank seems to think that nothing much else needs to be said beyond this. The church is simply the event of people continuing to “ingest Christ” by taking the Eucharist. Isn’t there much more needs to be talked about when we say what the church “is”? What of baptism? Proclamation? Discipleship? Service? These are the things I don’t see Milbank spend any time on — not just in this interview, but in general.

Moreover to take the language of  “ingestion” as a meta category to interpret Christ’s relationship to the church is deeply problematic. It suggests a seamless organic coinherence between Christ and the church that doesn’t do justice to the dynamic and dialogical nature of how the church continually receives the self-gift of Christ in its ongoing life. Rowan Williams seems to me to to put the matter far better in describing the church as Christ’s body dialogically. “The church is not the assembly of the disciples as a ‘continuation’ of Jesus, but as 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” (Resurrection, 76).

But the image of Jesus as one who judges, calls, and recreates is precisely what Milbank doesn’t seem to care for. By contrast his comments  display a regular tendency to deny Christ any sort of independent agency vis a vis the church (if you don’t believe me, check out his stuff in “The Name of Jesus” in The Word Made Strange). Saying that the church is merely the event of Christ’s ingestion casts Christ in an altogether passive role in which he is simply the object of our (presumably Spirit-enabled) digestion. Christ does not act on us, rather we act on him, assimilating him into ourselves (after all, isn’t that what happens when we digest food?). The only sort of conflict Christ might have with us in this scheme is one involving indigestion. But a stomach ache hardly seems like an adequate image for the relationship between Christ and the church as described in the New Testament (take Revelation 2-3 for example, just for starters). Clearly Christ is the church’s judge in an infinitely more significant sense than the language of gastronomy allows for. At the very least it this language needs to be strongly qualified with other more biblical and helpful language. We don’t merely ingest Christ, we are called by him, judged by him, created anew by him. We follow him, listen to him, seek him, pray to him, wait for him…

And yet this language, the language of actual discipleship, mission, and prayer is precisely what I don’t find in Milbank. Makes me wonder how “strong” this sort of ecclesiology really is.

Satan and sex scandals

Posted by on March 17, 2010 11 comments

I’m sure we’ve all heard plenty about the recent round of abuse scandals among the Roman Catholic clergy. Of course this isn’t exactly new, but this time around it looks like they’re letting the Vatican’s resident exorcist come up with explanations for the phenomenon:

When you’re one of the most powerful institutions in the world and you’ve got an escalating series of sex abuse scandals erupting in such far-flung locales as Ireland,  Germany, Brazil and beyond on a near daily basis, how do you even begin to do damage control? If you’re the Catholic Church, maybe you say you’re going to investigate. You issue a few letters. And then just to cover all your bases, you do a little Satan blaming. In a bold and arguably wack move, the Vatican’s normally press-shy exorcist Don Gabriele Amorth has been granting interviews left and right lately, and they are a treasure trove of WTF moments.

You say you hadn’t been aware the Vatican even had an official exorcist? Thought that stuff was just for Linda Blair movies? That’s likely because, prior to last week, the Vatican had permitted its exorcist to grant one interview in the entire last century. Now, suddenly he’s doing the rounds like he’s got a new rom-com with Gerard Butler opening Friday.

Speaking to La Republica last week, Amorth, who in fact does have a new book, “Memoirs of an Exorcist,” to shill, said, “When one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia.” A few days later, he told the UK Times, “All evil is due to the intervention of the Devil, including pedophilia.” He also added that contemporary culture has “given in to the Evil One. You see it in the lack of faith, the empty churches, the collapse of the family. Compare the world of today to when I was a boy in Modena: families and parish communities were strong, women did not go out to work.”

I don’t know. If I were part of the Vatican superstructure working to get this matter settled, I don’t think I’d want this guy on my side.

Milbank Interview

Posted by on March 17, 2010 20 comments

Sorry about the dearth of posts lately. Real life is real life.

In the meantime here’s a lively interview with John Milbank at The Immanent Frame. Definitely worth a read.

The Intelligent Design Detective

Posted by on March 12, 2010 2 comments

Too funny not to repost:

H/T: J. Daniel Kirk

Call for Papers: Religion and Modernity in a Secular City

Posted by on March 11, 2010 1 comment

Call for Papers: The Religion and Modernity in a Secular City postgraduate conference will take place this coming 16-18 September at the Katholische Akademie in Berlin. The conference is being organized by the K. Akademie in conjunction with the Centre for Religion and Political Culture at the University of Manchester, and the Program on Religion, Politics and Economics at Humboldt University. Further details can be found by clicking here. The following is an abstract from the conference website:

Writing from Vichy, France in early 1940, Walter Benjamin articulated what many theologians secretly feared in his Über den Begriff der Geschichte by portraying theology as the hunchback that must keep out of sight. However, Slavoj Žižek has recently suggested that it is time to reverse Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history: “The puppet called ‘theology’ is to win all the time.” This startling reversal reveals that the extent to which Enlightenment secularization imagined it could map the rational world onto a manipulable grid, manifested in the global spread of political, economic and social structures that have attempted to inscribe the sacred within a strictly private sphere, is increasingly being called into question by the continuing public presence of political theologies. However, the question of what this new visibility of religion might mean in the context of the supposedly secular city remains less than clear. We invite proposals for papers, to be delivered in no more than 30 minutes, that address this broad theme from theology, philosophy, political theory, economics, sociology, as well as cultural and biblical studies. The keynote speaker will be Professor Graham Ward.

The language of the conference will be English. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a CV, should be sent simultaneously to both the conference organizers via email no later than 30 April 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 14 May 2010. The conference will take place in the centre of Berlin at the Katholische Akademie. Generous grants are available for presenters to cover the costs of registration, accommodation and meals.

For further information please contact the conference organizers at the following addresses:

Is evil privation?

Posted by on March 11, 2010 75 comments

It has become an almost undisputed datum in contemporary theology that evil is to be understood in the Augustinian manner as a privation of goodness. Evil has no reality or being as such. Rather it is simply a lack, a minus within the plenitude of goodness (See for example Confessions VII 13[19]).

This sounds absolutely lovely and certainly gives theologians a great way to posses answers.

However lately I’ve been thinking through some problems with Augustine’s account. Three things:

  1. Its unclear why a lack of goodness necessarily makes something evil. My biceps are probably not as strong as the could be. They lack strength, which is good for biceps to have. Doesn’t seem evil. Or to use a specifically moral example, it would be good if I gave $100 to every needy beggar I ever came across. But instead I’m more likely to give a couple bucks if I have it on me. Is there any evil going on here? I doubt it. At the very least there is no necessary evil going on here, but there is a certainly “lack” of goodness.
  2. There’s absolutely nothing in the Bible I can find that remotely describes evil this way. If it is in there, show it to me. I can’t find anything that gives even a hint that we should understand evil as a lack of goodness in Scripture.
  3. Not only does the Bible not describe evil in this way, it actually describes it in ways that seem to outrightly contradict it. All throughout the NT Paul and the other apostolic authors speak of evil as involving cosmic forces, powers, demonic agents, Satan, etc. Evil is not talked about as a lack of goodness, but an utterly real group of forces of darkness. Obviously we need to work hard at interpreting this language, but I don’t see a way to make it square up with the Augustinian notion without very intentionally bringing a pre-determined axe to bear on the Bible.

Now, of course this will bring about the oft-thrown down gauntlet that “you’re ontologizing evil!” (here’s looking at you, Horstkoetter). In response to that I find myself inclined to say “So?” Saying that evil exists or has some sort of being is not, prima facie problematic as far as I can see. Now, to be sure it would be problematic to claim that evil and God are both equally ontologically ultimate; that would be to end up Manichean. But that is decidedly something different than recognizing that evil has (contingent) being in some sense. Obviously that one needs to be unpacked more, but at the very least I’m hoping to forestall the facile accusations of Manicheanism that are so readily made these days.

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