Category Archives: Doxology

The severity of hope

Posted by on January 5, 2012 13 comments

The reduction of hope is one of our greatest temptations. Hope, unlike optimism, nostalgia, or raw self-assertion speaks of a space in which all our abilities to “deal” with our situation have vanished. We have no raw data, resources, skills, or powers with which to get a handle on things, and are left only to hope. When have no reason or rationale to anticipate a resolution, we are left either to descend into despair, or somehow to inexplicably live in expectancy of a hope beyond our hopelessness, a Word that cannot be produced, but can only be cried out for, and if uttered, only received with thanks and praise.

The severity of hope is easy to close one’s eyes to precisely because it is so deeply severe. Allowing ourselves to live in expectant hope, when all the signs point to its irrationality and foolishness is supremely difficult and disarming. To venture into the realm of hope is come to the very edge of the void, to finally surrender one’s cleverness, resourcefulness, and courage and cry out for a salvation that is, quite simply impossible on the basis of all that is. As my friend Peter Kline has recently pointed out in his superb essay on Lady Gaga’s Marry the Night video:

The line between despair and hope is razor thin. Both face the future anxiously as a kind of empty darkness. The only difference is that whereas despair cowers before the darkness in fear, grasping for some-thing to stabilize the dizzying anxiety . . . hope leaps forward, dancing into the darkness with an inexplicable expectancy that love is present and that love will come. . . . Love is the impossible possibility of dancing the night away on the razor, treating it not as the precipice of despair, but as the edge of glory.

Walter Brueggemann makes some similarly helpful points in his essay “Faith at the Nullpunkt” in his The Word that Redescribes the World. Examining the crises of faith that Israel negotiates in the Old Testament, he speaks of the point of utter failure, in which the securities of Israel utterly break down in exile. It is precisely at this nullpunkt where the challenge of hope begins. In the face of hopelessness Israel is faced with the dual calling to, on the one hand “relinquish what is gone, to resist every denial and every act of nostalgia, to acknowledge and embrace what YHWH has ended”; and on the other hand “to receive what is inexplicably and inscrutably given by YHWH, to resist every measure of despair, to await and affirm what YHWH, beyond every quid pro quo, now gives.” But the crucial point in all this, the point at which we are all tempted tame and blunt the severity of hope is that we can assure and possess “no automatic move from relinquishment to reception; one does not follow necessarily from or after the other” (62).

The movement from despair to joy, from fissure to healing is not a movement that can be held in hand. We cannot anticipate or secure it. Rather, in the very depths of the darkness of the nullpunkt we can only cry out for it, only hope for it. Ultimately hope, if it is not to be reduced to a grasping for control, or a dishonest and self-possessed optimism, must be understood as that which

stakes everything on the unfettered “Thou” who is not in thrall to the reasonableness of any nullpunkt. All nullpunkt, in every sphere, have common properties. In the end what counts is the capacity of this “Thou” to intrude into the nullpunkt and override it. (Brueggemann, 71)

Hope, real genuine hope must not shy away from this bare point of hopelessness. If we are to avoid abandoning hope for nostalgia, self-assertion, or self-imposed blindness and despair we must not close our eyes to the point of dissolution, of emptiness and screaming in which the world, and all of us in it ultimately find ourselves.

The nullpunkt, in its many forms, is enough to evoke deep and raw fear. The exile offers a fear of abandonment. The pressure of chaos invites fear of obliteration. The immediacy of death bespeaks nullification and nonbeing. The nulpunkt carries the prospect of total nullification. Into that is spoken, “Do not fear.” The antidote seems modest in the face of the threat. Unless, of course, the antidote is uttered by one who is trustworthy. Everything depends upon that. The future always depends for Israel [and the church, the world, and ever human person] upon the trustworthiness of the One who characteristically hovers somewhere between the fear so palpably grounded and the faith so fragilely embraced. It is the pivot point of hope: “Do not fear!” (Bruegggemann, 71)

But this “Do not fear!” is not simply the assurance that there is nothing to fear. No, the word of grace which comes among us and tells us “Do not fear!”, the perfect love that casts out all fear (1 John 4:18) comes not before, but after and during the night of trembling in which blood is sweat from the brow of Jesus. The calling not to fear is spoken precisely into the face of that which is utterly and ultimately fearful. And this calling, this severe hope turns always and only on the one who speaks it. It can ultimately be true only if this one is indeed trustworthy and has and will overcome death forever. And it is this one, the Crucified Resurrected one who indeed speaks this to is, precisely on the precipice of hopelessness: ”Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hell” (Rev 1:17-18).

Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses

Posted by on June 8, 2010 252 comments

by Nathan R. Kerr, Ry O. Siggelkow, and Halden Doerge

In a recent conversation on this blog regarding an important review, by Ry Siggelkow, I (Nate Kerr) suggested in the comments that to think rightly what it means to say that “mission makes the church,” that mission as lived proclamation of and witness to Christ’s Lordship is indeed constitutive of the church’s existence in the world, we will need to engage in a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the church’s relation to the world in light of the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Kingdom of God that happens in the historicity of Jesus Christ. In the course of those comments I offered to write a “guest post” in which I gave some indication of what I think those reconsiderations might entail. This is that post—which has come together with more than just a little help from my friends, Halden and Ry. Together we offer these reflections in hope that they may contribute to the task of theology in the service of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We should like to begin these brief reflections with an oft-quoted passage from the conclusion of John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics:

The believing body is the image that the new world—which in light of the ascension and Pentecost is on the way—casts ahead of itself. The believing body of Christ is the world on the way to its renewal; the church is the part of the world that confesses the renewal to which all the world is called. (Yoder, Body Politics, 78)

This passage and others like it from Yoder’s oeuvre have been the impetus for a number of contemporary modes of “ecclesiocentric” construals of the Kingdom of God in relation to the world. The church’s missionary thinking, so the argument goes, is ecclesiocentric just to the extent that the church ontologically precedes the world and, ultimately, supercedes the world with respect to the Kingdom’s eschatological fulfillment. As the late twentieth-century theologian and missiologist J.C. Hoekendijk has argued, however, such “church-centric missionary thinking” is itself a false start. For from within such ecclesiocentric thinking, Hoekendijk claims, the call to mission, or evangelism—that is, the call to proclaim and to embody “the gospel”—often turns out to be “little else than a call to restore ‘Christendom,’ the ‘Corpus Christianum,’ as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the Church” (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 15). That is to say, the church aligns itself with the Kingdom and against the world by way of the production of its own alternative, habitable culture. As John Flett has convincingly argued, mission thereby becomes tied inextricably to the extension of this “culture”; this culture, this particular way of life, just is the gospel that is proclaimed, and the church’s missionary relation to the world cannot but be a function of its own culture—gospel proclamation turns out to be a matter of the church’s propagation of its own way of life, and evangelism a mode of integrating the world into this particular habitable culture.[1] Thus, on such an ecclesiocentric reading of the church-world relationship, the church is most missionary precisely at that point at which the church is most intentionally “self-regarding” (Hauerwas). And herein lies the reason why we must insist upon resisting such an understanding of the church as ontologically “prior” to the world as such, in relation to the Kingdom: viz., it presents us with not only an ecclesiologically but missiologically idealist logic—such an intentionally self-regarding conception of mission requires the construction of another (“the world”) as productive and reflective of its own identity.

The problem with such an ecclesio-concentric understanding of the church’s relation to the Kingdom and the world, says Hoekendijk, is that it misconstrues the basic scriptural sense in which the kingdom of God is first and foremost the Kingdom for the world. The Kingdom is oriented from beginning to end towards the oikoumene—the whole world.

For this oikoumene the Kingdom is destined; world (kosmos/oikoumene) and Kingdom are correlated to each other; the world is conceived as a unity, the scene of God’s great acts: it is the world which has been reconciled (II Cor. 5:19), the world which God loves (John 3:16) and which he has overcome in his love (John (16:33); the world is the field in which the seeds of the Kingdom are sown (Matt. 13:38)—the world is consequently the scene for the proclamation of the Kingdom. (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 41)

In short: “Kingdom and world belong together.” The order of God’s economy is thus “God-World-Church, not God-Church-World” (71). This is the order of God’s own missionary existence in Christ. And by participation in this missionary existence of God, we must give new expression to the church’s own missionary existence: the order of this existence must be that of Kingdom-World-Church, not Kingdom-Church-World.

What we should like to propose, then, is that the quote from Yoder with which we began these reflections should be read through the perspective of this alternative Kingdom-World-Church order. Precisely as such, we might better come to understand the implications of Yoder’s insight that mission has to do with coming to “see the church in relationship to the world rather than defining ecclesial existence ‘by definition’ or ‘as such’” (Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 78). The church only exists as “living from and toward the promise of the whole world’s salvation.” (Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 12).

As such, the church thereby exists as one dimension of a thoroughgoing apocalyptic realism. That is to say, the church exists insofar as it is constituted by the manner in which, in the apocalypse of Jesus Christ, “the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world,” proving victorious over the fallen powers of this world for the sake of this world’s salvation (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 54). What really matters, then, for the church, is its mode of participation “in the reality of God and the world in Jesus Christ today” (55).[2] And that reality is without reserve that of the apocalyptic rectification of all things to God in Christ. That event of apocalyptic rectification is constitutive of reality itself; and the event of the church takes place firmly within that reality of the reconciled world “that is real only through the reality of God” disclosed in Jesus Christ (54).[3] The church thus exists as an ergon Kyriou (a work of the Lord), which means to say that the church exists for the sake of the unique and special share that it is given in the cosmic meaning of the sovereignty of this world’s living Lord. But precisely as such the church does exist, and its existence is precisely that of a special function and task. As to the nature of that special existence, function, and task, we should like to conclude these reflections. We shall do so by putting forward some provisional theses on the existence, nature, and task of the church. There could be more, of course, and these could be articulated with more depth and precision. But these are, after all, mere theses—and provisional at that.

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Revolutionary Christianity

Posted by on May 25, 2010 5 comments

David Rensberger, in his helpful article, “Conflict and Community in the Johannine Letters” points out the deeply revolutionary and apocalyptic nature of the Joahnnine message, especially in relation to Christology and the ethics of agape:

The author of the Letters defends incarnational Christology not just because it is “what you heard from the beginning” (1 John 2:24), though that is part of his appeal, but because it rightly expresses the nature of the God who is love.What is at stake, in this author’s view, is not the authority of tradition but the most fundamental theological insight of Johannine Christianity: that God, out of love, entered fully into the human condition, risking and suffering death itself in order to bring life to human beings.

This is not an essentially conservative theological position. It radically challenged the established religious cultures of its time, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, by insisting on the freedom of God to act in a way utterly unanticipated by tradition, a way that upset not only commonplace theological and philosophical assumptions but hierarchical social structures as well. What is happening in 1 and 2 John is not so much a struggle against revolutionaries as a struggle within a revolution. Neither side questions that the way of God is contrary to the way of the world (though the author tries to associate the opponents with the world in 1 John 4:3-6). The battle is over how the revolution is to be conceived: in its original terms as radical divine intervention in the world, or in a new way as radical divine opposition to the world. In a sense, it is a struggle over how to maintain the purity of the radical Johannine way, whether by preserving the pure teaching “heard from the beginning” or by purifying it still further from contamination by the flesh. The Elder is trying to prevent, not the success of a revolution, but the diversion of a revolution onto a path that he fears may cause it to fail.

It never ceases to amaze me how deeply the Johannine corpus delves into the most fundamental issues of Christian faithfulness, never disentangling but always bringing to the fore the inextricable connection between Christological confession of Jesus as the fullness of God, come in the flesh, and the ethic of radical, self-giving love. All of this is predicated on God’s own descent into the world in Jesus, this radical divine intervention that can only, to my mind, be described as apocalyptic.

In Jesus God’s Trinitarian agape has invaded “the world” (i.e. the system of powers and principalities whose dominion over creation is predicated on the power of death) and created a rupture within it, a rupture of self-abandoning love that goes to the cross for others. And in the sending of the Spirit this Christic rupture of love continues to break into history, giving men and women to one another in this same pattern, rhythm of cruciform love, the love that seeks not its own but willingly lays itself down for the other. The church is the sign and sacrament of this rupture within the rule of the fallen powers, this rupture of agape, of self-abandonment into love. It is only by this radical gift of God’s Trinitarian love, the love that breaks through the powers of death, that we are given to one another, to live together within this Christic agape. And thus it is only in a common life of constant prayer and doxology by which we continually offer up our own our bodies (Rom 12:1-3) to God’s agape that we can live and embody the gospel, the gospel of self-abandoning love.

And it is precisely in this self-offering, this abandoning of ourselves in love for one another that we stand, fully in the utter fleshliness of the Jesus’s revolution. There is nothing more concrete, nothing more fleshly, nothing more earthly, than this love, the love of Jesus Christ, and him Crucified. Which for us always must mean “Love one another, just as I have loved you.”

The Doxological Self

Posted by on September 2, 2009 12 comments

To move towards something of a synthesis of my last two reflections on Augustine’s Confessions let us consider:

  1. Augustine’s act of recounting his life and accounting for his past “selves” is an act of self-construction in some sense. Augustine is becoming a person through telling the story of his conversion.
  2. The act of confession, of telling the truth about God and ourselves is ultimately, and in Augustine’s case manifestly, an act of joyful doxology, of delight in God. To confess is to joyfully speak how we have been radically de-centered and dynamically caught up into God’s own life.

As such, for Augustine, his act of “self-construction” is not what we think of in the modern sense of determining ourselves, becoming a pastiche of preferences and judgments on the basis of our desires. Rather, what Augustine is doing in narrating himself in the Confessions is fundamentally doxological (and missionary—more on this later). Thus the “self” that Augustine renders through his personal narrative is a distinctly unselfed self. A person whose center lies not in himself but in God’s radical intrusion radically transformative presence into his life. In short, the self that Augustin construct in confessing is a distinctly doxological self.

Thus, whatever we may make of Augustine’s relation to the rise of the modern self, Augustine himself had very little in common with it. Augustine ultimately discovered his “self,” his personhood through doxology—that is through being caught up in God’s radical grace which elicits the excessive response of praise and thanks in all of one’s actions. That is why Augustine’s autobiography cannot be cast in any other linguistic mode but that of doxology.

What is Confession?

Posted by on September 1, 2009 18 comments

One of the interesting things about reading Augustine’s Confessions is the way it makes one reflect on what the practice of confession means in a full theological sense. Clearly Augustine’s act of confessing in his account includes what we normally think of, namely the public admission of sin. However it is clearly much, much more than that for Augustine. All throughout the Confessions the language is saturated with longing, prayer, inquiry, exultation, sorrow, joy, and hope. In short, the language of the Confessions is the language of the pslams, or more generally, of prayer.

Put even more succinctly, for Augustine, confession ultimately is centered in speaking the truth about God and creation in all its dramatic complexity and contingency. “Confession” means something like profession of the fullness of our faith, proclamation of the gospel in all its dimensions. Confession is the passionate commitment to speak the truth in all its beauty in the face of our own manifest slavery and contradiction. However for Augustine this task is not one of sheer moral resolve, let alone humiliation, rather it is an exercise of joy in God.

To boil it all down, confession must ultimately be seen as the articulation of our own doxological transformation. In confession we recount how we have been and continue to be caught up into God’s radical love which draws us away from sin and futility and towards the fullness of life and joy in sharing in the triune life. In short, confession is doxology. In confession we are drawn to speak (or sing) the truth of God’s intrusion into our lives of sin and slavery out of the excess of the joy that comes from knowing God and knowing ourselves and our neighbors in God.

Confession is not a difficult moral duty. Rather it is an exercise of doxological delight in the beauty of how God has seized in Christ and through the Spirit given us a share in the very life of the Trinity.

The Faith of Abraham

Posted by on March 31, 2009 Comments Off

Throughout Romans 4 Paul draws comparisons between the faith of Abraham and the form of faith that Christians are called to in response to the faithfulness of Christ. What is Abrahamic faith for Paul? According to 4:20 it seems to entail at least two things.

First, the text notes that “No distrust made [Abraham] waver concerning the promise of God.” The phraseology is interesting here. It does not simply say that Abraham perfectly trusted God, rather it says that no distrust caused him to waver regarding his commitment to believing God’s promise. Thus, Abrahamic faith is characterized by ongoing commitment in the face of uncertainty.

Second the verse goes on to note that “he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God.” Thus, Abrahamic faith is inherently doxological. Moreover, Abraham’s praxis of doxology is precisely what established and strengthened his trust in God’s promise.

Abrahamic faith is a nexus of commitment sustained through praise that persists in the absence of existential knowledge. This is, appropriately, an apt description of the faith of Jesus as well.

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