Comments on: Baptismal identity

By: Billy Daniel

Billy Daniel — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:12:20 +0000

If the “hackneyed dismissals” are directed toward my comments, my sincerest of apologies. Dialogue is necessary, and as Rowan Williams himself has reminded, to end the conversation is to end theology. My questions have to do with what sort of existence does apocalyptic theology offer the human, and yes, with regard to the analogy of being, but specifically as articulated by Maximus with Irenaeus:
“We believe that the logos of the angels preceded their creation; that the logos of each essence and of each power which constitute the world above, the logos of men, the logos of all that to which God gave being… but this same logos is manifested and multipled in a suitable way to the Good, in all the beings who come from him according to the analogy of each, and he recapitulates all things in himself… For all things participate in God by analogy, insofar as they come from God….”

By: R.O. Flyer

R.O. Flyer — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:03:00 +0000

What is gained by merely asserting hackneyed dismissals of those who reject a pseudo-Przywaraian doctrine of the analogia entis? Really, what’s the use of dialogue?

By: Adrian

Adrian — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:11:20 +0000

I’m sorry I don’t follow. Why must I adhere to the analogia entis so as to secure my existence? How is an understanding which grounds existence in a different theological category (election, etc.) deficient for the solidity of creation?

By: Billy Daniel

Billy Daniel — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:17:14 +0000

Evidently you don’t exist, either. Or maybe you only exist when the Spirit plugs you into the matrix for a momentary event of being, but as soon as it’s removed you’re back to non-being.

By: R.O. Flyer

R.O. Flyer — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:51:13 +0000

Wait, the rejection of the analogia entis leaves no room for the “solidity of creation?!”

By: Adrian

Adrian — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:13:27 +0000

Thanks a lot Kim. I’ll be sure to be on the look out for both of those essays.

By: Frank Valdez

Frank Valdez — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 10:00:42 +0000

We need to remember Williams’ great work “The Wound of Knowledge”. His discussion of Gregory of Nyssa there cannot be understood very well in terms of “stable” versus “unstable” identities. It is our continual growth into the life of the Trinitarian God that gives us both stability and instability . Stability because we are always growing in the same direction, one of increasing conformity to the Image of God, Jesus Christ. Instability because that continuing growth always calls us to become more than what we have thus far become and will therefore repeatedly plunge us into recurrent crises in which we must learn how to reconfigure and redescribe what we’ve already learned in startling new ways. This is what Gregory describes as “epektasis”. This is why Williams sometimes sounds like Nate Kerr and sometimes sounds like David Bentley Hart. Let’s not ignore the fact that he was John Milbank’s teacher.

By: Studiosus Sorenus

Studiosus Sorenus — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:41:42 +0000

I dare say that it is not since the Bishop Mynster himself that we have witnessed one who is so masterfully adept at such an obtuse wielding of his own teacher’s equally obtuse ideas.

Indeed, God creates out of nothing. Wonderful! Yes, wonderful to be sure. Let us press this point home, let us not grow weary, and let us press it home with such directness that we negate that one thing more wonderful that those Christians of our day insists that God does still: viz., making saints out of sinners. Of course, let us not forget that our ana-logic of being requires that we shall have to reject even this if it calls into question the necessary existence of Lord Everyman. Our sin may persist eternally, but at least we shall “be” — according to that great Nevertheless of humanity itself! — from all eternity!

There is certainly no reason to reply any further at all to the Reverend Kerr. He no doubt must believe that he is bound to be understood so poorly he shall soon be declaring that even his complaints about people not understanding him are being misunderstood! With such pitiable complaints about not being understood, he is surely to miss the one point that we should all so clearly be capable of coming to understand: humanity exists! His teleoscoping of the singular and the subjective is bound to bracket and omit that one most universally objective truth of all. Humanity exists!

By: Billy Daniel

Billy Daniel — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:26:02 +0000

So, out with the Cappodocians then. That’s a shame. I guess recapitulation is out too; certainly can’t have assimilation. Do humans really exist?

By: kim fabricius

kim fabricius — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:59:26 +0000

Sorry to come so late to this thread. I would just want to confirm that the last thing Williams could possibly mean by “look[ing] constantly into ourselves” is what Adrian fears. Williams is thoroughly Augustinian about the perils – viz.., the fantasy and self-deceit – of introspection, and equally thoroughly Wittgensteinian in his suspicions of the “private self”. You might want to check out two of his essays: “Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer” (1988) and “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics” (1995). Not, of course, that Williams rejects the notion of the “inner life” as such. But as he puts it in the former essay:

“Religious interiority … means the learning of patterns of behavior that reinforce the awareness of my finite and provisional status, my being in time. It is neither a flight from relation, nor the quest for an impossible transparency or immediacy in relation but that which equips us for knowing and being known humanly, taking time with the human world and not aiming to have done with knowing (and desiring).”

Precisely because of the instability of the self – and the church – not to mention the human heart of darkness – watchfulness with patience, suspicion with grace, truth with tenderness, are key Williamsian virtues.

By: Nate Kerr

Nate Kerr — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:44:05 +0000

Yeah, that whole analogia entis thing — its too palatable for my tastes.

By: Billy Daniel

Billy Daniel — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:01:48 +0000

Since using the word philosophunculism is an act of philosophunculism, and because not knowing the term sphallolalia is unphilosophunculistic, I suppose I fail on both accounts… Briefly, it is the matter that Kerr evidences a misreading of Augustine, Kierkegaard and Williams. But it is the “nothing but sinners” claim that is most troubling. Is not the end of every human to become truly human—in the specific Athanasian sense that God was made man, or is human being-as-nothing-but-sinful dissolved in an Origenist union with the One? It seems here that human freedom and volition are impossible, if we are “nothing but sinners.” To say that “I am a sinner” is very different than saying “I am nothing but a sinner.” Did or did not Christ re-deem fallen humanity, especially in the sense that Williams outlines in his address: “To be baptized is to be identified… with Jesus who, in the depths of hellish human experience, remains united to his Father.” I guess I’m just trying to figure out whether or not the apocalyptic imaginary leaves room for God to create human essences. It appears that the transcendent God of apocalyptic theology does not leave room for the solidity of creation, that humans do not have a being analogous to Being—God, but are expressions of Being in momentary acts of God in creation. I trust that I am misunderstanding apocalyptic theology here, but this is what appears to be meant.

By: Frank Valdez

Frank Valdez — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:57:58 +0000

It’s a reminder that “palatable” is not a theological category.

By: R.O. Flyer

R.O. Flyer — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:41:54 +0000

Funny, I interpreted it as an exercise in sphallolalia.

By: Halden

Halden — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:37:56 +0000

Is this a serious accusation or just an exercise in philosophunculism?