Creedal Christian

Episcopal Church Slogan Indulges Dismissive Parody

2012-01-28T13:15:00.003-06:00

Recently on Facebook I came across a poster that says: "The Episcopal Church: Resisting Fundamentalism Since 1784 (Like Jesus resisting the Pharisees since the First Century!)"

Calling this "a dreadful poster" that is "utterly appalling" and which makes him embarrassed to be an Episcopalian, J. Michael Povey notes at least two historical inaccuracies:

First: We have not resisted fundamentalism since 1784. Fundamentalism as a major factor in American Protestantism did not emerge until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Second: The assertion that Jesus ”resisted the Pharisees” is a rather simplistic interpretation of scripture. What we see in the gospels is that Jesus had disagreements with some of the Pharisees.

"We are to be pitied," Povey continues, "if the best we can say about fundamentalists is that we resist them." And he rightly notes that a cheap shot like this poster's slogan "feels good, but it does nothing to build up (edify) the people of God."

In my neck of the Episcopal woods, this sort of thing often crops up in the form of Baptist bashing. Perhaps it's partly because Episcopalians in Mississippi are vastly outnumbered by Baptists and we sometimes feel defensive about being different and in the minority. I also know many Episcopalians who were raised in the Southern Baptist Church who had dreadful experiences, some of which can only be described as spiritually abusive. Then again, some of the reasons for Baptist bashing may come from the hubris of actually believing that we are more enlightened than they are, and so from the heights of our intellectual and moral superiority we feel entitled to dish out dismissive judgment. There are, of course, many reasons to disagree with the Southern Baptists and other Christians. And there are all kinds of reasons to be grateful for discovering the riches of the Anglican tradition in this small part of the Anglican world we call The Episcopal Church. But it reflects poorly on who we are and what we actually stand for as Episcopalians when the best we can do is bash other Christians with whom we disagree.

Fr. Tony Clavier has also noted the historical inaccuracies in the slogan "Resisting Fundamentalism since 1784." And he also points to an irony at its heart:

A particular church which seeks to describe itself as existing over against some other form of Christian expression narrows itself, in fact becomes as reactionary as the body from which it distances itself. The slogan is sectarian.

Fr. Tony then offers some fine thoughts on "conversion to" vs. "conversion against," what Anglicanism at its best offers, and how we might engage in a more positive and faithful form of evangelism:

One understands that many converts to Anglicanism in America enter our red doors to escape forms of Protestantism in which they have felt oppressed and constrained. Fair enough. Similarly many converting from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism are driven by similar motives. Again, fair enough. Yet one hopes and prays that their conversion is conversion to rather than conversion against. One also hopes that their aversion to elements in their former church homes isn’t a means of avoiding disciplines which are merely Christian in the odd belief that Anglican churches are places where one may believe anything or nothing, or worse still places where their secular political and social beliefs are embraced unquestioningly. Our Liturgy, our Creeds, our submission to Holy Scripture as God’s revelation demand a positive and yes a submission of mind and heart and lifestyle. When we perhaps clumsily proclaim that Anglicans have no theology of their own, we say something important but not something vague. We embrace the faith of the Church with a capital C. When we state that human language cannot fathom the mind of God we don’t mean that God has failed to reveal in Jesus all we need to know and believe for our salvation. If God has not so revealed himself he is not a God to worship and adore.

Anglicanism offers and presents at its best the way of salvation which takes seriously not merely selected proving texts from the Bible, nor a religion which panders to local political opinions and parties, but fundamentally -there’s that word – foundationally or basically a vision which takes seriously the Church, the ministry, the sacraments and a treasury of spirituality, personal and communal through which cultures, races, nations may apprehend and embrace the Gospel of Jesus the Lord. It seeks not merely to offer a way of death or after death, but a way of life which embraces the whole person in their context. Anglicanism at its best is not dismissive but admissive, neither belittling intelligence nor confounding what we sometimes patronizingly term a simple faith.

If we are to recover our patrimony we must tell our story without indulging in dismissive parody. We have no title to superiority, called as we are to servanthood, compassion and mercy, to be reconcilers in a divided nation and world rather than contributors to division and arrogance. Can we not rather advertise ourself as “The Episcopal Church, Telling the Story of Jesus since 1784″?

In our Baptismal Covenant, we have promised to "proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ" and to "seek and serve Christ in all persons." This poster's slogan breaks both of those promises. And so J. Michael Povey and Fr. Tony are right: in telling our story and affirming what is good about The Episcopal Church, we can do better than indulge dismissive parody of other Christians.

Phillips Brooks: Preaching About Christ vs. Preaching Christ

2012-01-24T06:35:00.000-06:00

"[There] is an immense amount of preaching which must be called preaching about Christ as distinct from preaching Christ. There are many preachers who seem to do nothing else, always discussing Christianity as a problem instead of announcing Christianity as a message, and proclaiming Christ as a Saviour. I do not undervalue their discussions. But I think we ought always to feel that such discussions are not the type or ideal of preaching. They may be necessities of the time, but they are not the work which the great Apostolic preachers did, or which the true preacher will always most desire. Definers and defenders of the faith are always needed, but it is bad for a church, when its ministers count it their true work to define and defend the faith rather than to preach the Gospel. Beware of the tendency to preach about Christianity, and try to preach Christ. To discuss the relations of Christianity and Science, Christianity and Society, Christianity and Politics, is good. To set Christ forth to men so that they shall know Him, and in gratitude and love become His, that is far better."

~ Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

from Lectures on Preaching (1877)

Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany

2012-01-16T18:07:00.008-06:00

Year B: 1 Samuel 3:1-10; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51

[Listen to the sermon here.]

It’s a day I’ll never forget.

It was an October afternoon back in 2005, and I was sitting in my office at Church of the Incarnation in West Point, MS. The phone rang, and when I answered the voice on the other end said, “Hi Bryan. This is David Luckett.” Now, for those of you don’t know, David was the interim dean of this Cathedral at that time, and he was someone I knew had had a rich history of ministry in this diocese, a priest whose experience and character command respect. But I didn’t really know David, so I had no idea what in the world he was doing calling me. With a bit of cautiousness in my voice, I responded, “Oh, hi David. What’s going on?” To which he replied very succinctly and directly: “We’re looking for a canon priest for the Cathedral. When can you be here?”

With just a handful of words from a man I hardly knew, my life was turned upside down. In an instant, everything changed. And looking back at that time and at the years since, I can honestly say that David’s phone call that day was more than just a phone call. It was a call from God to serve as a priest in a new place. And while that call initially scared the dickens out of me, I am so grateful that I said “yes” in response.

Wouldn’t it be great if God’s call to us was as clear and distinct as a phone call? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could always know with reasonable assurance, if not 100% certainty, exactly what God wants us to do with our time and talents at any given moment in our lives?

I’ll bet that most of the time, we don’t hear God’s voice the way I did in that phone call from David Luckett. Or take this morning’s Old Testament reading, in which the young boy Samuel very clearly hears the voice of God, but even then he has no idea that it’s actually God reaching out to him. In an almost comical scene, he keeps waking up Eli, mistakenly thinking that it’s the old priest summoning him. And even Eli is slow on the draw. It takes three times before it finally dawns on Eli that it’s actually God speaking to the boy. Only then can Eli provide guidance for Samuel, instructing the boy to open himself to God with words that could serve as a prayer: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (1 Samuel 3:9).

There are several things about this story that we do well to note as we seek to hear God’s word in our lives. For starters, it’s no accident that Samuel hears God speaking when it’s late at night and the day is done. God rarely shouts at us. Instead, God’s is often a still, small voice in the midst of a world filled with noise, chaos, and confusion. So, in the words of an old prayer, it’s when “the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over” that we can most clearly discern God speaking in our hearts, inviting us to seek His face.

This has tremendous practical implications for we who live in the age of continuous and instant Internet and smart phone access. It’s perhaps no understatement to say that many of us are addicted to text messaging, web surfing, and Facebook status updating. And I say that as someone who loves to check out what all of y’all are up to on Facebook. I am watching you!

The technology is not bad or evil, but if we’re not careful it can distract and insulate us from the things of the Spirit. If we want to cultivate a deeper sense of God’s presence in our lives – if we yearn to have a clearer sense of just what God wants with us – we simply have to make time and space for it. It doesn’t happen all by itself. We have to turn off the TV’s, the computers, the phones, and the iPods, entering into stillness and silence, opening our hearts and minds to God.

“Be still, and know that I am God” we read in the Psalms. It’s not easy to be still. It’s hard work to enter into silence. It may push some of us beyond our comfort zones, and that can be scary. But that’s the place to begin. And over time, we may just discover that our discomfort with silence and stillness gives way to a deepening sense of peace, security, and God’s abiding presence.

“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

What if, in the silence of our hearts, we hear something in response to that petition? How do we know it’s really God’s voice and not just our own desires and aspirations that we’re hearing?

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). That’s good counsel from the first epistle of John. For the truth is that we are not our own best guides.

Is what we think we’re hearing from God consistent with Holy Scripture, God’s Word Written? Is it consistent with the teachings and example of Jesus Christ, God’s Word Incarnate? Answering those two questions is critically important! But even then we can deceive ourselves into believing we’ve heard God’s voice when we really haven’t. We can be masters of self-deception.

And so, like Samuel, we need someone like Eli to help keep us on track when it comes to discerning whether or not we’re really hearing God’s Word. A spiritual director, a clergy person, or just a good friend – someone we can trust, someone we can confide in, and someone who is not only compassionate but also willing to offer honest feedback and to hold us accountable – we need such people in our lives. Sometimes they can see things we can’t. And sometimes they can hear the still, small voice of God when we’re listening to some other voice.

Of course, we can never rule out the possibility that – like a life-changing phone call on an otherwise ordinary afternoon – God’s call can come out of the blue at an unexpected time and in an unexpected way. The God revealed to us in Holy Scripture is a God of surprises. God has a way of catching us off guard, coaxing or at times even pushing us into places and among people we’d never expect. If we find ourselves in such a place and it scares the dickens out of us – well, it could be God telling us something. But even then, we do well to test the spirits.

The bottom line is there’s no fool-proof way to insure that we’ve really heard God’s voice or that what we think we know of God’s will is, in fact, God’s will. As finite and fallible beings, we cannot claim absolute certainty. Thomas Merton put it well: “ … the fact that I think I am following [God’s] will does not mean that I am actually doing so.” But Merton is also right to add: “But I believe that the desire to please [God] does in fact please [God].” And the words we sang in today’s Sequence Hymn remain true: “Jesus calls us; o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea, day by day his clear voice soundeth, saying, ‘Christian, follow me.’”

By bracketing out the noise of our busy lives, entering into stillness and silence, testing the spirits, and remaining open to surprises, our task is to listen so that we can really hear the clear voice of Jesus calling us. For in our Baptisms, our Lord claims our lives and our loyalties for Kingdom work. Whether as lay or as ordained persons, each of us has a unique calling and a special place in that work. May God give us the grace to hear that call that we may give our hearts completely in service to the One who loves us more than we can possibly imagine.

Spiritual Revitalization and the Non-Negotiable Book of Common Prayer

2012-01-14T10:49:00.000-06:00

Over at the Daily Episcopalian, Dr. Derek Olsen has offered excellent thoughts on how to revitalize the Episcopal Church during a time of institutional decline and cultural change. The core of his prescription? More liturgy! And in the midst of other changes that may need to happen, an uncompromising commitment to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

Here's an excerpt from the essay that suggests how Derek develops all of this:

... many of our people know the Book of Common Prayer as the book that our Sunday services come from. I’ll challenge this mindset in a moment, but this much at least ought to be the case. The Sunday services that Episcopalians experience should be common because they should proceed in common from the Book of Common Prayer. Whether it ought to be or not, Sunday morning is our main scheduled moment in the cultural eye. Deciding to monkey with the services in order to appear relevant doesn’t look relevant, it looks desperate. While I realize that the reverend clergyperson might have had a flash of insight on Thursday night that involves changing everything around to make some point about something going on in the news or culture, consider that not everyone else might share or appreciate that insight. Consider that the couple on the brink of divorce or the mother who just heard of the death of a neighbor’s son, might not be feeling your whimsy at the moment. We have enough things in our life and daily surroundings that change on a constant basis. Click over to the CNN website and the stories will be different from what was there just 5 minutes ago.

We need some constants too.

One of the most consistent and enduring images of God in the Psalms is the rock. What if our church could witness to that aspect of who God is by at least providing the stability of common prayer?

I’m not saying the book is perfect. There are certainly some things that I’d change if I had the chance. But recognize this: 1) it is an authentic expression of the historic Western liturgy that has nourished literally millions who have come before us. 2) It is an authentic expression of the English devotional experience. (The importance of this is not that it’s English, of course, but that it is a rooted, embodied, inherited tradition that has been embraced and passed on by a diverse group over a period of centuries—not just dreamed up by a few people last week.) 3) It is an authentic expression of historic Anglican liturgy that balances reform of Western norms with Scripture and the theological and spiritual practices of the Early Church. That’s actually quite a lot of things going for it—and it’s more things than would be going for most services either you or I would dream up.

Most people I know don’t go to church on Sunday morning to experience the rector’s latest exciting innovation; they go to church because they hope to experience God and to get a concrete sense of what it means to live out love of God and love of neighbor. Using the book doesn’t guarantee any of this, but it is a big step in the right direction.

Frankly, I don’t care if you’re “into” Quaker spirituality and so want to cut out some of the prescribed prayers and have us sit in silence then; I’m “into” Anglican spirituality, and I’d appreciate it if you did what the book says to do. Perhaps I’m a little touchy on this topic, but I’ve seen too many places where Sunday morning deviations from the book are about the rector inflicting the twists and turns of their own spiritual journey on the congregation. If we want to get serious about being the Episcopal Church then I suggest we would do well to get serious about our core messages and principles and—by canon as well as plain ol’ good sense—these are in the book. As a layperson, I see the book as a contract. It may not be exactly what I want, but it’s an agreed-upon corpus of embodied theology that we have all given assent to. I promise to use the book, and I expect that the clergy will do the same. This is a benefit that we offer those who come seeking—a place of stability in a culture that desperately needs it.

Derek continues by noting how the Prayer Book provides "a full integrated spiritual system that is intended as much for the laity as the clergy," that can "bring the practitioner and their community into a deeper relationship with God" through the disciplined recollection of God by means of (among other aspects of the Prayer Book) the Daily Office. This is a critically important reminder of the need to bring each day captive to Christ through the Daily Office since, after all, the Daily Office is a means of grace. Derek writes:

In the liturgical round, the Book of Common Prayer gives us specific moments to stop and orient our time and ourselves around the recollection of God. As a result, one of the most important parts of the book is the Daily Office section that provides forms for prayer at morning, noon, evening and night. These prayer offices are our fundamental tool for disciplined recollection; they provide the foundation for our spiritual practice. This foundation, then, is punctuated by the Eucharist on Holy Days (at the least). And, conceptually, this is how we should view Sundays—not the day of the week on which we go to church—but as a Holy Day which recurs on a weekly basis.

This liturgical round lies at the heart of Christian spiritual formation - the process of making, nurturing, and sustaining disciples of Jesus Christ - and thus is central to the identity and work of the Church. Derek sums up the implications very well:

Much of the talk I’ve heard about how effective or energetic a parish is seems oddly institutional. That is, the discussions seem to focus on what sort of programs are run out of the building, what sort of activities the institution supports. But that’s only part of the story. The other part that is harder to quantify yet no less important is how the faith is filtering into the everyday lives of the people in the parish. When the strengthening effects of the sacraments, when daily recollections of God impel a person to stand up against questionable business practices in the office or against a bully in the schoolyard, the Gospel is being lived entirely apart from what programs are housed in the church edifice. ...

For me, this is where the church lives or dies. Are we forming communities that embody the love of God and neighbor in concrete actions? Not just in what programs the institution is supporting, but are we feeding regular lives with a spirituality that not only sustains them but leads them into God’s work in a thousand different contexts in no way related to a church structure? Are our parishes witnessing to their members and to the wider community in their acts of corporate prayer for the whole even when the whole cannot be physically there? Therefore this is why, when we worry about the fate of the church, my answer will be a call for more liturgy. Not because I like to worship the worship, but because of the well-worn path to discipleship found in the disciplined recollection of God that the liturgy offers.

My firm belief is that if membership is a problem, our best move is to head for spiritual revitalization. People who are being spiritually fed, challenged, and affirmed by their church will be more likely to show it, to talk about it, and to invite their friends and neighbors to come and see it for themselves. This won’t—it can’t—fix all situations, but even if it doesn’t, spiritual revitalization is what the Church is called to be about.

Derek is right that this will not and cannot solve all of our problems. But there's no doubt in my mind that he's pinpointing things essential to revitalizing the Episcopal Church: a non-negotiable commitment to "the spiritual system of our Book of Common Prayer," "the common prayers agreed upon there," and "the structure of the church that we have received."

There's no way I can begin to do justice to Derek's excellent essay in this posting, so be sure to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it all.

Rising Spiritual Apathy

2012-01-07T15:35:00.000-06:00

According to some recent polling data, there's a growing segment of the American population that could be described as the "spiritually apathetic." Writing for USA Today, here's how Cathy Lynn Grossman frames the data:

When Ben Helton signed up for an online dating service, under "religion" he called himself "spiritually apathetic."

Sunday mornings, when Bill Dohm turns his eyes toward heaven, he's just checking the weather so he can fly his 1946 Aeronca Champ two-seater plane.

Helton, 28, and Dohm, 54, aren't atheists, either. They simply shrug off God, religion, heaven or the ever-trendy search-for-meaning and/or purpose.

Their attitude could be summed up as "So what?"

"The real dirty little secret of religiosity in America is that there are so many people for whom spiritual interest, thinking about ultimate questions, is minimal," says Mark Silk, professor of religion and public life at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.

According to the polling data:

•44% told the 2011 Baylor University Religion Survey they spend no time seeking "eternal wisdom," and 19% said "it's useless to search for meaning."

•46% told a 2011 survey by Nashville-based evangelical research agency, LifeWay Research, they never wonder whether they will go to heaven.

•28% told LifeWay "it's not a major priority in my life to find my deeper purpose." And 18% scoffed at the idea that God has a purpose or plan for everyone.

•6.3% of Americans turned up on Pew Forum's 2007 Religious Landscape Survey as totally secular — unconnected to God or a higher power or any religious identity and willing to say religion is not important in their lives.

Citing David Kinnaman, author of You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church ... and Rethinking Faith, Grossman summarizes the "So Whats" like this:

They're uninterested in trying to talk a diverse set of friends into a shared viewpoint in a culture that celebrates an idea that all truths are equally valid, he says. Personal experience, personal authority matter most. Hence Scripture and tradition are quaint, irrelevant, artifacts. Instead of followers of Jesus, they're followers of 5,000 unseen "friends" on Facebook or Twitter.

And Kinnaman himself says this: "'Spiritual' is the hipster way of saying they're concerned with social injustice. But if you strip away the hipster factor, I'd estimate seven in ten young adults would say they don't see much influence of God or religion in their lives at all."

Read all of the USA Today article.

Many years ago, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote the following:

And if there is one thing I long for above all else is that the years to come will see Christianity in this country able to capture the imagination of our culture, to draw the strongest energies of our thinking and feeling into the exploration of what our creeds put before us.

If Kinnaman is right that the "So Whats" represent seven in ten young adults, then the church has her work cut out for her when it comes to capturing imaginations in ways that not only bring people to Christian faith, but that also address the serious issues of mainline church institutional decline!

Lutheran Satire Presents a 12 Days of Christmas Special

2012-01-06T09:27:00.000-06:00

This is hilarious!

More from Lutheran Satire here.

Truth, "Postmodernism," and Classical Anglicanism

2012-01-05T09:55:00.001-06:00

In the following video, Fr. Jonathan (who blogs at The Conciliar Anglican) offers a helpful perspective on the nature of truth in a "postmodern" context and thoughts on the importance of classical Anglicanism:

Early in the video, Fr. Jonathan says that classical Anglicanism "is the Gospel," and he goes on to say that classical Anglicanism "is not just a way, but the best way of coming to know the truth about Jesus Christ that's revealed in Holy Scripture and the witness of the early Church."

Later in the video, after noting that many cradle Episcopalians/Anglicans understand and present the faith in ways that deviate from tradition, here's how he answers the question, "What is classical Anglicanism?"

Classical Anglicanism is the faith of the early Church, the faith that we see reflected in the early Church Fathers and the Councils of the Church, the faith that was brought by early Christians to the British Isles, a faith that was then restored to the British Isles by St. Augustine of Canterbury in the year 597, a faith that had to again then be restored to the Church of England at the time of the Anglican Reformation in the 16th Century, a faith that produced many martyrs in the centuries after, not just in England but around the world, and a faith that is explained, that is put forward, that is expressed in the 39 Articles of Religion, the Catechism, and, most especially, in The Book of Common Prayer. And if that is not the Anglicanism that you've been taught, then it's not classical Anglicanism. And it may not be the Gospel either.

The video is also up on Fr. Jonathan's blog in a posting entitled "My truth, your truth, and a cheap shot at Pat Robertson."

Watch it all!

Musical Interlude with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: "The Beginning and the End"

2011-12-31T17:36:00.002-06:00

God Was Uniquely Present in Jesus

2011-12-30T11:49:00.000-06:00

"In this real flesh-and-blood man, Jesus of Nazareth, God was uniquely present in the world. This man was not just a great teacher of profound truths about God and the secret of a happy, successful life. He was not just a revolutionary political leader with a vision of a more human and just society. He was not just a great moral hero for us to imitate as best we can. He was not just a very godlike personality, the model of a truly spiritual life. Nor was he just the founder of a religious club later called the church, where religious people with a common interest in him come together to admire him and admire themselves for admiring him. To know this man is not just to know a very great, very good, very wise, very spiritual human being. It is to know God. His very name is 'Jesus,' which in Hebrew means 'God helps' or 'God saves' (Matt. 1:21). He is the 'Christ,' the 'Messiah,' the 'Anointed One' of God. He is the 'Son of God' (Mark 1:1). His miraculous birth is a sign of the fact that where he comes from, who he is, and what he does cannot be explained in terms of the ordinary process of human life and history. This man comes from God. What he says and does is God's word and action. He is 'Emmanuel,' God-with-us (Matt. 1:23)."

~ Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine (1994)

E. L. Mascall on God's Ultimate Purpose

2011-12-27T18:00:00.001-06:00

“The stupendous theme [of Christianity is] that God’s ultimate purpose for the human race and for the whole material universe is that they should be taken up into Christ and transformed into a condition of unimaginable glory, and that it is for this that God took our human nature, in which spirit and matter are so mysteriously and intricately interwoven.”

~ Eric Lionel Mascall, The Christian Universe (1966)

Hat tip to Matt Gunter

Musical Interlude with Mumford and Sons: "Awake My Soul"

2011-12-27T09:20:00.002-06:00

‎"In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, you invest your life"

Responding to the Incarnation: A Sermon for Christmas Day

2011-12-25T12:55:00.000-06:00

After hearing that beautiful account of our Lord’s birth, and the angelic fanfare accompanying it, what more is there to say? The story preaches itself. To add anything to it almost feels like taking the “merry” out of Christmas.

It reminds me of something a Christian educator once told his students. He said: “A deep instinct has always told the Church that our safest eloquence concerning the mystery of Christ is in our praise. A living Church is a worshiping, singing Church; not a school of people holding all the correct doctrines.”

To be sure, correct doctrine is vitally important. Like a compass that always points north, statements of correct doctrine like the Nicene Creed point us in the right direction, keep us on track, and protect us from losing our way. And so we will affirm this day that the One who is God from God, Light from Light, and true God from true God did as a matter of historical fact become incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.

But the mysteries of God’s truth, beauty and goodness cannot be contained by rational explanations or dogmatic statements. And so centuries before the Church hammered out orthodox doctrine about Jesus, the Church was on its knees with bowed heads and on its feet with outstretched arms in the wonder, love, and praise of worship.

On the day of our Lord’s nativity, we’re on our surest and safest ground, not in saying something profound or trying to figure it all out, but in doing what the multitude of the heavenly host and what the shepherds did: glorifying and praising God.

Worship: what other response can there be to the impossibly good news that God the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen, has been born of a woman as a helpless baby boy, a real flesh and blood human being? What other response is appropriate when we come face to face with the incredible truth that God chooses, not to be a distant deity, but to come among us as one of us? That God comes, not in the power of vengeance, but in the vulnerability of love? That in the Person of Jesus Christ God assumes our humanity in all of its frailty and limitations so that what is assumed may be healed and so that we may be united with the God who loves us more than we could possibly imagine?

Worship. Praise. Thanksgiving. That is the Church’s response to the glorious mystery of the Incarnation of God in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. And that’s why we’re here today: to join our voices with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven who forever sing praises in response to good news of great joy.

For today we celebrate the joy of a wedding. In the birth of Jesus, humanity and divinity marry each other. In the Incarnation, God and man form “one flesh” for all eternity. In the birth of Jesus, God lowers Himself to our level and raises us up to His. On this day, heaven comes down to earth and earth rises up into heaven. And we who have been baptized into the Incarnation – into that wonderful and sacred mystery of Christ’s Body the Church – we, too, partake of His divinity. We, too, are citizens of a heaven that perfects rather than negates the body and the earth.

Anticipating this moment, St. Bernard of Clairvaux said:

"A physician is coming to the sick, a redeemer to those who have been sold, a path to wanderers, and life to the dead. Yes, One is coming who will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea, who will heal our diseases, who will carry us on his own shoulders back to the source of our original worth."

My friends, that One has come with the birth of Jesus. What else can we do in response, but fall to our knees in worship, raise the cup of salvation in thanksgiving, and sing with the heavenly host and with the saints both living and dead: “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.”

So come, let us adore him, Christ, the Lord.

Musical Interlude with The Band: "Christmas Must Be Tonight"

2011-12-24T18:00:00.002-06:00

Come down to the manger, see the little stranger
Wrapped in swaddling clothes, the prince of peace
Wheels start turning, torches start burning
And the old wise men journey from the East

CHORUS:
How a little baby boy bring the people so much joy
Son of a carpenter, Mary carried the light
This must be Christmas, must be tonight

A shepherd on a hillside, while over my flock I bide
On a cold winter night a band of angels sing
In a dream I heard a voice saying "fear not, come rejoice
It's the end of the beginning, praise the new born king"

CHORUS

I saw it with my own eyes, written up in the sky
But why a simple herdsmen such as I
And then it came to pass, he was born at last
Right below the star that shines on high

CHORUS

Lyrics and music by J.R.Robertson
© 1977 Medicine Hat Music

A Physician is Coming to the Sick

2011-12-24T08:54:00.000-06:00

"A physician is coming to the sick, a redeemer to those who have been sold, a path to wanderers, and life to the dead. Yes, One is coming who will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea, who will heal our diseases, who will carry us on his own shoulders back to the source of our original worth."

~ St. Bernard of Clairvaux

Hat tip to Catholicity and Covenant

From Doubt to Perfect Belief: Thoughts on St. Thomas' Feast Day

2011-12-21T15:41:00.001-06:00

Today on the Church calendar we remember St. Thomas the Apostle. Drawing on Lesser Feasts and Fasts and the New Book of Festivals and Commemorations, here's part of what we read about St. Thomas at For All the Saints:

The Gospel according to John records several incidents in which the apostle Thomas appears, and from them we are able to gain some impression of the sort of man he was. When Jesus insisted on going to Judea, to visit his friends at Bethany, Thomas boldly declared, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16). At the Last Supper, he interrupted our Lord’s discourse with the question, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” (John 14:5). After Christ’s resurrection, Thomas would not accept the account of the other apostles and the women, until Jesus appeared before him, showing him his wounds. This drew from him the first explicit acknowledgment of Jesus’ deity, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).

Thomas appears to have been a thoughtful if rather literal-minded man, inclined to scepticism; but he was a staunch friend when his loyalty was once given. The expression “Doubting Thomas”, which has become established in English usage, is not fair to Thomas. He did not refuse belief. He wanted to believe, but he wanted to be certain that what the others had seen was not simply an apparition or a vision, that the one whom they had seen was actually the same crucified Jesus, that God had actually raised him from the dead. Thomas serves as a witness to the bodily resurrection of the Lord in a Gospel that bears witness to the Word made flesh. For this reason, Jesus gave him a sign, though Jesus had refused a sign to the Pharisees. And yet, the Lord’s rebuke: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29), demonstrates that the sign itself does not create faith, that faith would come by the hearing of the word of those who bore witness to the crucified and risen Jesus as Lord and Messiah.

I sometimes think we Episcopalians make too big a deal out of doubt. It's almost as though doubt - not really being sure about much of anything when it comes to the Christian faith, remaining in a state of indecision about belief in basics like the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Trinity, etc. - is a virtue to be encouraged, nurtured, and sustained, while the strong conviction of belief is discouraged as somehow anti-intellectual and even a kind of "fundamentalism."

To be sure, honest doubt is as much a part of the life of genuine faith as trust and loyalty. Lord knows, we all go through times in our lives when what seemed sure and certain yesterday feels up in the air today. This is one of the reasons why I appreciate the Prayer Book's emphasis on the objective character of Baptism: "The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble" (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 298; emphasis added). The reality of my status as a member of the household of God transcends my feelings and subjective faith state at any given moment in time. And so William Willimon gets it right:

I don’t know about you, but I don’t always think like a Christian. I don’t always feel like a Christian. I certainly don’t always act like a Christian. But that is not the basis of my relationship with God. That relationship is based not on me, and what I do, but on God and what God does. So when you are having trouble being a Christian, touch your forehead, remember your baptism, and remember that you are a Christian because we [the Church] told you so.”

But falling back on what God does as opposed to what I do is no excuse for cultivating doubt as though belief about the basics of the Christian faith doesn't really matter. As Matt Gunter of Into the Expectation has noted: "Unless we are willing to doubt our doubts, our doubts are just excuses to avoid the implications of believing."

It seems to me that one of the reasons why John's Gospel highlights Thomas' doubt is precisely to move us beyond a place of staying stuck in doubt to a place where we can not only doubt our doubts but also embrace belief in the risen Lord and the implications such believing has for how we live our lives. The language of the Collect appointed for St. Thomas' Feast Day is relevant to this point:

Everliving God, who strengthened your apostle Thomas with firm and certain faith in your Son’s resurrection: Grant us so perfectly and without doubt to believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God, that our faith may never be found wanting in your sight; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

To believe in Jesus Christ as our Lord and our God "perfectly and without doubt" such that "our faith may never be found wanting" in God's sight: that is the end for which we strive. And that is the end in which we find the true fulfillment of our lives.

R.I.P. Ruth Spivey Gray

2011-12-19T10:34:00.003-06:00

Today is a sad day for Episcopalians in the Diocese of Mississippi, for today we bury a truly remarkable lady: Ruth Spivey Gray. When I think of what it means to be a saint of God, Mrs. Ruthie is at the top of the list. Here is her obituary as published on The Clarion-Ledger website:

Ruth Spivey Gray, 83, of Jackson died Thursday, December 15, 2011 at St. Dominic's Hospital after a lengthy illness.

Funeral services will be Monday, December 19, at 2 p.m. at St. Andrew's Episcopal Cathedral in Jackson with burial following in Canton Cemetery. Visitation will be from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. on Sunday, December 18, at St. Andrew's and from noon until 1:30 p.m. on Monday prior to the funeral service. Sebrell Funeral Home in Ridgeland is handling arrangements.

Mrs. Gray was born March 10, 1928 in Canton, the daughter of the late Lloyd Gilmer and Ruth Miller Spivey. She attended the University of Mississippi, where she was president of Tri Delta Sorority and a member of Mortar Board.

She was a lifelong Episcopalian and a fifth generation Mississippian. Throughout her adult life she gave her time and energy to a variety of concerns, especially the cause of reconciliation of the races in Mississippi. During the turbulent decades of social change in Mississippi, she joined her husband, Duncan M. Gray, Jr., in his public involvements in civil rights and human rights causes while living in Cleveland, Oxford and Meridian before moving to Jackson when he became Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi in 1974.

She was a strong supporter of public schools during the integration crisis and served as citywide PTA president in Meridian during a critical time of transition. She continued to be involved in citizen lobbying efforts on behalf of public schools throughout her life. Other civic involvements included leadership positions with the Girl Scouts, president of the Meridian Symphony League, consumer representative to the Mississippi State Board of Nursing, and service on the Jackson Planning Board.

Within the Episcopal Church she was involved in numerous Diocesan outreach ministries and sang in parish choirs for over 21 years, a reflection of her lifelong love of music.

She was especially interested in Camp Bratton-Green, the diocesan summer camp, serving as a staff member for more than 20 years. She had a lifelong love of the outdoors and enjoyed leading her family and friends in exploring the mountain trails near the home she helped design at Sewanee, Tenn.

But above all, she will be remembered most as a devoted wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

She is survived by her husband, the Rt. Rev. Duncan M. Gray, Jr., of Jackson; two sons, the Rt. Rev. Duncan Gray III (Kathy) of Jackson and Lloyd Gray (Sally) of Tupelo; two daughters, Anne Finley (Mack) of Adams, Tenn., and Catherine Clark (Shelton) of Nashville, Tenn.; a brother, Lloyd Spivey, Jr., (Ebbie) of Canton; ten grandchildren, four great-grandchildren; and a host of nieces, nephews and cousins. She was preceded in death by her sister, Marie Anne Spivey Lloyd (Thames).

The family expresses its gratitude to all who provided care and support throughout her illness, especially the congregations of St. Andrew's Episcopal Cathedral and St. James' Episcopal Church.

The family requests that in lieu of flowers, memorials be made to Camp Bratton-Green at Duncan Gray Center, 1530 Way Road, Canton, MS 39046.

Mrs. Ruthie's husband is the Rt. Rev. Duncan M. Gray, Jr., another hero of our diocese and of the larger Church. You can read a transcript of an interview with him on the Civil Rights Documentation website here. You can also watch a video interview about his time as rector of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Oxford, Mississippi that includes Bishop Gray's experience with the 1962 riot on campus concerning James Meredith's entrance to the University of Mississippi. Also, there are two books about Bishop Gray, Jr. that are definitely worth reading: Will Campbell's And Also With You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma, and Araminta Stone Johnston's And One Was a Priest: The Life and Times of Duncan M. Gray Jr.

There's no doubt in my mind that Mrs. Ruthie played a critical role in Bishop Gray, Jr.'s ministry and in his civil rights activism. And her gentleness and compassion touched countless lives with the love of Christ. St. Francis is purported to have once said: "Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, use words." Mrs. Ruthie's life was a sermon that proclaimed the Good News of God in Christ. That remained true even during the most difficult times of her illness. Her suffering is now over. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.

"How great will your glory and happiness be, to be allowed to see God, to be honored with sharing the joy of salvation and eternal light with Christ your Lord and God ... to delight in the joy of immortality in the Kingdom of Heaven with the righteous and God's friends" ~ St. Cyprian

The Episcopal Church of Sudan Backs Away from the Episcopal Church USA

2011-12-18T15:30:00.004-06:00

I'm saddened and concerned by the news from the Episcopal Church of Sudan. Peter Carrell at Anglican Down Under sums it up:

The Anglican church in Sudan (i.e. the Episcopal Church of Sudan, with more members than all Episcopalians/Anglicans in the USA) has come out boldly and clearly and stated it is recognising ACNA [Anglican Church in North America] as a fully orthodox church. At the same time it is distancing itself from most of TEC, and disinviting PB Jefferts Schori from coming to visit the ECS.

Nicholas Knisely at "The Lead" on Episcopal Cafe puts it like this:

Archbishop Deng Bul, the Primate of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan, has written to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church to withdraw her invitation to visit Sudan this spring. He cites the Episcopal Church's support of gay and lesbian Christians as the cause.

Here's the letter Archbishop Bul sent to Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori (h/t TitusOneNine):

The Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church
United States of America

Thursday 15th December 2011

Dear Bishop Katharine,

Advent greetings to you in the name of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

It is with a heavy heart that I write you informing you of our decision as a House of Bishops to withdraw your invitation to the Episcopal Church of the Sudan (ECS). We acknowledge your personal efforts to spearhead prayer and support campaigns on behalf of the ECS and remain very grateful for this attention you and your church have paid to Sudan and South Sudan. However, it remains difficult for us to invite you when elements of your church continue to flagrantly disregard biblical teaching on human sexuality.

Find attached a statement further explaining our position as a province.

(Signed)

--(The Most Rev.) Dr. Daniel Deng Bul Yak, Archbishop Primate and Metropolitan of the Province of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan and Bishop of the Diocese of Juba

Part of the attached statement explains the reasons for withdrawing the invitation as follows:

We are deeply disappointed by The Episcopal Church's refusal to abide by Biblical teaching on human sexuality and their refusal to listen to fellow Anglicans. For example, TEC Diocese of Los Angles, California in 2010 elected and consecrated Mary Douglas Glasspool as their first lesbian assistant Bishop. We are not happy with their acts of continuing ordaining homosexuals and lesbians as priests and bishops as well as blessing same sex relations in the church by some dioceses in TEC; it has pushed itself away from God's Word and from Anglican Communion. TEC is not concerned for the unity of the Communion.

The Episcopal Church of Sudan is recognizing the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) fully as true faithful Orthodox Church and we will work with them to expand the Kingdom of God in the world. Also we will work with those Parishes and Dioceses in TEC who are Evangelical Orthodox Churches and faithful to God.

We will not compromise our faith on this and we will not give TEC advice anymore, because TEC ignored and has refused our advices.

We have many Sudanese members of the cathedral I currently serve. I have no idea how or if this will affect their feelings about the Episcopal Church USA. Our cathedral has also been contemplating a medical mission to South Sudan, and my diocese is involved in efforts to raise money to build a Cathedral for the Diocese of Bor. Will this decision adversely affect those initiatives or even shut them down? Or will my diocese and/or cathedral be deemed worthy of inclusion among "those Parishes and Dioceses in TEC who are Evangelical Orthodox Churches and faithful to God?"

Musical Interlude with Johnny Cash: "The Man Comes Around"

2011-12-17T17:24:00.005-06:00

And I heard as it were the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying come and see and I saw
And behold a white horse

There's a man going around taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down
When the Man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup?
Or disappear into the potter's ground
When the Man comes around

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling, voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

Till Armageddon no shalam, no shalom
Then the father hen will call his chickens home
The wise man will bow down before the throne
And at His feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the Man comes around

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still
Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still
Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still
Listen to the words long written down
When the Man comes around

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling and voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

In measured hundred weight and penny pound
When the Man comes around

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And his name that sat on him was Death
And Hell followed with him

© 2002

Christopher Hitchens Turns the Tables on a Liberal Protestant

2011-12-16T11:11:00.003-06:00

Christopher Hitchens, the British journalist, "New Atheist," and author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, has died. While I've posted a number of things critical of the New Atheists on this blog, I am truly sorry for Hitchens' illness, suffering and death. And I wish to offer prayers for his friends and loved ones as they mourn their loss.

I also wish to note that, in spite of the ways in which Hitchens misrepresented religion, Matt Kennedy is right: "Factually speaking [Hitchens] understood the implications of the gospel far better than the average liberal protestant." I note, for example, this exchange between Hitchens and Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell (my comments are in italics):

Sewell: The religion you cite in your book [God is Not Great] is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Preach it, brother Hitchens!

Sewell: Let me go someplace else. When I was in seminary I was particularly drawn to the work of theologian Paul Tillich. He shocked people by describing the traditional God—as you might as a matter of fact—as, “an invincible tyrant.” For Tillich, God is “the ground of being.” It’s his response to, say, Freud’s belief that religion is mere wish fulfillment and comes from the humans’ fear of death. What do you think of Tillich’s concept of God?”

Hitchens: I would classify that under the heading of “statements that have no meaning—at all.” Christianity, remember, is really founded by St. Paul, not by Jesus. Paul says, very clearly, that if it is not true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then we the Christians are of all people the most unhappy. If none of that’s true, and you seem to say it isn’t, I have no quarrel with you. You’re not going to come to my door trying convince me either. Nor are you trying to get a tax break from the government. Nor are you trying to have it taught to my children in school. If all Christians were like you I wouldn’t have to write the book.

Notice how quickly Sewell changes the topic of conversation after Hitchens undermines the false dichotomy of fundamentalist faith vs. liberal religion with a single sentence! Of course, Hitchens is wrong about one thing: St. Paul did not invent Christianity. But Hitchens' statement that a core concept of Tillich's theology has "no meaning - at all" humors me. It reminds me of a story (I don't know if it's true) about a time when Karl Barth was visiting New York City. Tillich was teaching at Union Theological Seminary at the time. There was a really thick fog one day, which prompted Barth to say: "I see that Professor Tillich is thinking."

But back to the interview:

Sewell: Well, probably not, because I agree with almost everything that you say. But I still consider myself a Christian and a person of faith.

Hitchens: Do you mind if I ask you a question? Faith in what? Faith in the resurrection?

Sewell: The way I believe in the resurrection is I believe that one can go from a death in this life, in the sense of being dead to the world and dead to other people, and can be resurrected to new life. When I preach about Easter and the resurrection, it’s in a metaphorical sense.

Hitchens: I hate to say it—we’ve hardly been introduced—but maybe you are simply living on the inheritance of a monstrous fraud that was preached to millions of people as the literal truth—as you put it, “the ground of being.”

In response to Sewell saying that while she agrees with almost everything Hitchens says she is still "a Christian and a person of faith," Hitchens turns the tables by asking Sewell simple, direct, and probing questions that go to the heart of Christianity: "Faith in what? Faith in the resurrection?" Well, sure, if by "resurrection" you mean a metaphor rather than an historical event that really happened to a person called Jesus of Nazareth. Hitchens will have none of it as he suggests that Sewell's liberal Christianity lives "on the inheritance of a monstrous fraud." One gets the sense that while Hitchens hated religion per se and thought of all forms of Christianity as "a monstrous fraud," he was particularly impatient with watered-down versions of Christianity that revise or evade the substantive truth claims of the Christian faith.

Read all of the interview.

Keeping the Catholic Faith

2011-12-14T00:55:00.001-06:00

"Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly."

Thus we read in the Athanasian Creed.

C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to Sister Penelope Lawson's translation of St. Athanasius' On the Incarnation, acknowledges that this ominous sounding part of the Athanasian Creed has been a stumbling block for many. And he offers a perspective that may serve as a corrective to misunderstandings:

St. Athanasius has suffered in popular estimation from a certain sentence in the "Athanasian Creed." I will not labour the point that that work is not exactly a creed and was not by St. Athanasius, for I think it is a very fine piece of writing. The words "Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly" are the offence. They are commonly misunderstood. The operative word is keep; not acquire, or even believe, but keep. The author, in fact, is not talking about unbelievers, but about deserters, not about those who have never heard of Christ, nor even those who have misunderstood and refused to accept Him, but of those who having really understood and really believed, then allow themselves, under the sway of sloth or of fashion or any other invited confusion to be drawn away into sub-Christian modes of thought. They are a warning against the curious modern assumption that all changes of belief, however brought about, are necessarily exempt from blame.

"The operative word here is keep; not acquire, or even believe, but keep."

If Lewis is right, then it's important to clarify some of the relevant meanings of the verb "to keep." Drawing on dictionary.com, I note the following.

"To keep," meaning:

to hold or retain in one's possession; hold as one's own
to maintain (some action), especially in accordance with specific requirements, a promise, etc.
to associate with
to observe; pay obedient regard to
to conform to; follow; fulfill
to observe (a season, festival, etc.) with formalities or rites
to guard; protect
to maintain or support
to take care of; tend
to remain in (a place, spot, etc.)
to maintain one's position in or on
to continue to follow
to continue unimpaired or without spoiling

Each of these strikes me as a fitting way to unpack what it means to keep the Catholic Faith.

One of the most overlooked of the Baptismal Covenant promises is also relevant:

"Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?" (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 304)

"Will you continue in the apostles' teaching?" That could be rephrased to say, "Will you keep the apostles' teaching?" in the senses of "to keep" noted above. The phrase "apostles' teaching" points back to the first full half of the Baptismal Covenant: the Apostles' Creed, which here serves as the summary of the Catholic Faith into which we are baptized. So while we do not use the Athanasian Creed in the formal worship of the Episcopal Church, our Baptismal Covenant expresses a similar intention: to keep the Catholic Faith by maintaining and supporting the apostles' teaching, remaining in it, conforming to it, and guarding and protecting it.

This is another reminder that it's not just clergy who live under vows. Lay Episcopalians are also bound by vows to keep the Catholic Faith. And so all of us - lay and ordained - are bound by solemn promises to discern whether or not how we are living, and whether or not any given course of action contemplated by the Church is in keeping with the Catholic Faith of apostolic teaching.

This Baptismal Covenant promise also links continuing in the apostle's teaching with continuing in the apostles' fellowship. Given this linkage (which has a biblical warrant in the first letter of John), breaking with apostolic teaching entails the consequence of breaking apostolic fellowship. And that consequence is not benign.

St. Hippolytus once wrote: "The world is a sea in which the Church, like a ship, is beaten by the waves, but not submerged." Breaking apostolic fellowship is like jumping off the ship into the stormy sea. Far better to remain in the boat by continuing in the apostles' teaching and keeping the Catholic Faith!

Bishop Spong: "Shifting the Paradigm"

2011-12-12T14:39:00.004-06:00

I see from the Episcopal Divinity School Fall 2011 newsletter that Bishop Spong gave a lecture in St. John's Memorial Chapel back on October 21 entitled, "Shifting the Paradigm - From Rescue to Expanded Life." Here's some of what the newsletter article reports:

In his address, Spong declared Christianity's "old symbols increasingly are bankrupt ... [and] the new symbols have not yet fully arisen so that they are recognized." He compared the present day with that of Augustine, Aquinas, or the 16th-century Reformers - a moment of "paradigm shift" that "calls for the death of what has been and the birth of what is to be - and that is never a comfortable time." In particular, he said, the titles "savior," "redeemer," and "rescuer" applied to Jesus in liturgies, hymns, and sermons have "become bankrupt, useless, and even distorted ... I think all of them have got to go."

"What is the problem with these titles?" Spong asked. "They all imply a particular definition of human life, which I think is false. ... [W]e are constantly insulting our humanity out of a particular theological frame of reference. We are beggars approaching God. We are telling God how unworthy we are." Such a theological construct, said Spong, is "simply not true. ... It is therefore bad anthropology, and no one can build good theology on bad anthropology."

"Our problem is not a fall into sin," maintained Spong. "It is that we have not yet achieved our full humanity."

The source of acts of evil, said Spong, is found in humanity's survival instinct, "the evolutionary baggage that every one of us carries." Because it is part of human nature, "our only hope is that we are lifted beyond it. We have to be called, we have to be merged into a humanity that somehow finally escapes survival as our driving force."

Words like savior and redeemer and rescuer "simply lock us into the old paradigm," Spong argued. Instead, telling the story of Jesus "as the source of love calling us to love beyond every boundary, to love wastefully, to give it away, to never stop and count the cost: that's a new image of what it means to be human."

I won't waste time by critically assessing any of this (others have done that work quite well with regard to Spong's published writings). But I will say that Bishop Spong is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness of an increasingly post-Christian society. Instead of saying, "Prepare the way of the Lord," however, Spong declares a different message: "Catch the wave of the 'paradigm shift' by purging the Church of creedal Christianity and classic consensual ecumenical teaching. Then, exercising the authority of your own private judgment, and for the sake of being 'relevant,' create something new to replace the old, dull, dead dogma."

By contrast to Spong's project, note these words from the preface in Thomas Oden's Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology:

I wish to provide neither a new interpretation of old ideas, nor a new language that is more acceptable for modern sensibilities. Rigorous accountability to the ancient teachers themselves is a large enough task, without adding to it other heavy burdens. If that seems irregular, it can be viewed as a response to a prevailing excess, one that inordinately emphasizes self-expression, often exaggerated in current self-importance. I do not pretend to have found a comfortable way of making Christianity tolerable to vanishing forms of modernity. I present no revolutionary new ideas, no new way to salvation. The road is still narrow.

I do not have the gift of softening the sting of the Christian message, of making it seem light or easily borne or quickly assimilated into prevailing modern ideas. I do not wish to make a peace of bad conscience with dubious "achievements of modernity" or pretend to find a comfortable way of making Christianity expediently acceptable to modern assumptions. If Paul found that "the Athenians in general and foreigners there had not time for anything but talking or hearing about the latest novelty (Acts 17:21), so have I found too much talk of religion today obsessed with novelty.

I am dedicated to unoriginality. My aim is to present classical Christian teaching of God on its own terms, undiluted by modern posturing. I take to heart Paul's admonition: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we had already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted [par o parelabete, other than what you received from the apostles], let him be eternally condemned [anathema esto]!" (Gal. 1:8, 9; emphasis added by Oden).

Truly, the difference between Spong and Oden is a difference that makes a difference!

I'm reminded of something James Griffiss wrote in his book The Anglican Vision: "I believe ... that our [Anglican] history and foundations demonstrate a pattern of continuity and change - continuity with the tradition of the gospel we have received in Christ and, at the same time, a willingness to interpret and understand that gospel as changing situations might require." Spong's project repudiates continuity for the sake of change. By contrast, I think that Oden's book embodies continuity in ways that enable faithful interpretation of the gospel in changing situations. (I would say the same thing about Luke Timothy Johnson's The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters.)

So yes, let's shift the paradigm. But let's shift it away from "progressive" attempts to drive the Church off the Christian reservation. Instead of novelty and "relevance," let's focus on continuity and faithfulness to the dogmatic core of the Christian faith. For, as Dorothy Sayers once put it, "It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man - and the dogma is the drama."

Musical Interlude with Thousand Foot Krutch: "Shook"

2011-12-07T22:30:00.003-06:00

More on this Canadian Christian rock band here.

St. Nicholas of Myra: Punching Heretics in the Face

2011-12-06T11:55:00.004-06:00

Today is the Feast Day of St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. Among many noteworthy aspects of his life, I note the following from the now defunct Lesser Feasts and Fasts: "As a bearer of gifts to children, his name was brought to America by Dutch colonists in New York, from whom he is popularly known as Santa Claus."

St. Nicholas is, of course, quite a different person from the Santa Claus who has become the patron saint of Western consumerism. And for Christians who find the very idea of "heresy" unsavory, and for whom taking the idea of heresy seriously may be the last remaining heresy, St. Nicholas should be deeply problematic. I note the following from an article entitled, "The Historical St. Nick: Santa Claus Punched Me in the Face":

St. Nicholas, hardened by his imprisonment under Diocletian, knew how to handle himself in a fight. Modern forensic facial reconstruction of the relic-skull of St. Nicholas, now in Bari, Italy, reveal a stout man with a bent nose, the result of several breaks. Being the genuine man of his roots, St. Nicholas didn't leave his common ways behind when attending to Church matters.

Constantine convened the Council at Nicaea in 325 to settle the Arian controversy. During a heated debate with Arius, Nicholas, indignant at Arius' unyielding obstinacy, punched him in the face. Though secretly thankful, the emperor had no choice but to strip Nicholas of his bishopric. ...

Generous to a fault, the real St. Nicholas spent his life in service to his community. He defended his faith even if it meant a punch in the face. If you get boxing gloves for Christmas, the giver knows the history of the broken-nosed Bishop of Myra.

While I admire St. Nicholas' willingness to defend the truths of the Christian faith as though something vital and precious is at stake, I do not condone the use of violence against persons because they espouse heretical views. Other saints have also been willing to defend the faith, but without the use of violence. So perhaps both those who don't like the idea of heresy as well as those who think it's important to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy can agree: in our commemoration of St. Nicholas, we do well to note that not everything about the man can be commended as worthy.

Advent Video Downplays the Penitential Character of the Season

2011-12-04T10:51:00.000-06:00

Thanks to the Anglican Curmudgeon for highlighting the following video about Advent:

I appreciate this video's emphasis on Advent as a season of "expecting, waiting, hoping and praying." But in differentiating Advent from Lent, the video raises concerns when it says that Advent is "about hope not repentance." In a previous posting I've addressed the question "Is Advent a penitential season?", with more thoughts on the penitential character of Advent here.

As noted in my previous postings on this topic, downplaying or denying the penitential character of Advent flies in the face of the liturgy. Today, the second Sunday in Advent (RCL Year B), is a good example. Here's the collect appointed for this day:

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

I note also in today's epistle reading from 2 Peter the admonition to "strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish," as well as John the Baptist's proclamation of "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" in today's Gospel reading from Mark.

Advent: it's about hope and repentance.

Musical Interlude with Luka Bloom: "Exploring the Blue"

2011-12-02T22:15:00.002-06:00

I go down into the water
And dive as deep as man can go
Into those dark places
Watch the underwater flow

Exploring the blue
Exploring the blue
Exploring the blue
In search of you

Here I stand by the mountain
And I look up to the sky
Knowing it's a matter of having to climb
Above this place these clouds lie

Exploring the blue
Exploring the blue
Exploring the blue
In search of you

It may be high
It may be low
Where I think you are
That's where I'll go
That's where I'll go
That's where I'll go

I go down into the water
And dive as deep as man can go

© 1992 WB Music Corp./
Luka Bloom Music ASCAP

G. K. Chesterton: "Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas"

2011-12-01T06:42:00.004-06:00

"Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded."

~ G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905)

Evelyn Underhill on the Sacramental Principle

2011-11-30T10:14:00.000-06:00

"It is true that at bottom worship is a spiritual activity; but we are not pure spirits, and therefore we cannot expect to do it in purely spiritual ways. That is the lesson of the Incarnation. Thus liturgies, music, symbols, sacraments, devotional attitudes and acts have their rightful part to play in the worshipping life; and it is both shallow and arrogant to reject them en masse and assume that there is something particularly religious in leaving out the senses when we turn to God. Through such use of the senses man can receive powerful religious suggestions, and by their help can impregnate an ever wider area of his life and consciousness with the spirit of adoration. If music is something that may awaken the awed awareness of the Holy, if pictures can tell us secrets that are beyond speech, if food and water, fragrance and lights, all bear with them a memory of sacred use - then the ordinary deeds of secular life will become more and more woven into the seamless robe that veils the Glory of God. But this will not happen unless the sacramental principle - the principle of the spiritual significance of visible deeds and things - has a definite expression in our organized religious life."

~ Evelyn Underhill

quoted in Love's Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (2001)

Advent is a Dangerous Season

2011-11-27T08:37:00.002-06:00

Commenting on Mark 13:24-37 (the Gospel reading assigned for this first Sunday in Advent), Matthew Skinner writes about the dangerous character of the Advent season for the Huffington Post:

Here comes Black Friday, even earlier than usual. Bell-ringers are appearing outside stores. Advertisers are shifting the consumerism-as-therapy machine into high gear. And Christians say: This is a good time to think about the world falling apart.

We're not trying to be morose. We're starting Advent.

The season of Advent (four Sundays preceding Christmas) traditionally begins, not with backward-looking remembrances of circumstances surrounding Jesus' birth, but with eerie images of cosmic mutations and grand promises of a future in which Jesus plays -- to put it mildly -- a noticeable role. Don't wear the tacky Christmas sweater just yet; track shoes and a hazmat suit may capture the mood better. ...

The impulses behind Advent should alarm those who are overly enamored with the current system (who probably number more than 1 percent), as well as any others who are overly confident in their ability to engineer what's best for the world.

Advent expresses the insistence that all is not right in our societies. That's a dangerous expression. Stoking hopes for a new world order, for justice really to be for all, usually implies that old systems, governments and loyalties aren't what they're cracked up to be.

Notice: The transformation anticipated in Mark 13:24-37 is such a monumental and all-encompassing upheaval, its description must resort to symbolism. The symbolism is unnerving, even though it was familiar to ancient audiences. It suggests that, in the face of the God's desires coming to full fruition, every other power (symbolized by sun, moon and stars) receives notice and sees its light go out. No aspect of human existence goes untransformed when God enters in for good.

The claims of Advent should rattle all who benefit from exploitative and domineering forms of power. This means a lot of us, of course.

I'm struck again this year by how quickly so many people in my neighborhood - most of whom are churchgoers - have already decorated for Christmas. The tree and ornaments go up almost as soon as the sun sets on Thanksgiving Day. And by the afternoon of Christmas Day, all of the decorations come down, with Christmas trees on every curbside waiting for the garbage pickup.

Perhaps, in light of Skinner's piece, we find Advent so disturbing and subversive that we bypass the season in our haste to get on with the good cheer of Christmas. Then again, many Christians in my neck of the woods belong to non-liturgical churches and thus may not even be familiar with the term "Advent" (much less the idea that there are twelve days of Christmas!). And even many of my fellow Episcopalians (clergy included) seem confused by this most complex of seasons, some even openly denying that Advent is a penitential season (in spite of the evidence to the contrary in the lectionary readings and collects appointed for each Sunday).

Regardless, when it comes to the dangerous season of Advent (as with so many other aspects of Christian faith and practice), the Church has lost and the secular culture has won. Rather than serving as an occasion for lament, perhaps the increasing marginalization of things like Advent offers an opportunity for Christians who inhabit liturgical traditions to bear renewed witness to the Light in the darkness of this world. One thing is for sure: doing so means standing out from the crowd's celebration of our consumer culture’s Advent-trumping version of Christmas.

h/t to BC at Catholicity and Covenant for bringing Skinner's article to my attention.

Reducing Christian Faith to Contemporary Secular Assumptions

2011-11-26T22:43:00.000-06:00

In an article entitled "Shrinking Jesus and Betraying the Faith," the Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison (retired bishop of South Carolina) takes aim at two biblical scholars whose work finds a welcome home within many "mainline" churches:

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan are two remarkably popular theologians who teach a version of Christianity that reduces the Christian faith to contemporary secular assumptions. For Crossan, Jesus was an illiterate Jewish cynic. No Incarnation, no Resurrection. The Easter story is “fictional mythology” (p. 161, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography). Borg claims that Jesus was only divine in the sense that Martin Luther King and Gandhi were divine. Borg dismisses the creeds (p.10, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time) Jesus was a “spirit person,” “a mediator of the sacred,” “a shaman,” one of those persons like Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, et al. (p. 32)

Recently Borg and Crossan have collaborated on a book, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem. Their Jesus is a semi-revolutionary leader of peasants and outcasts against the priestly elite and those who accommodate to the dominant system of Roman coercive authority. It was not our sinful condition that demanded his crucifixion but this elite. Borg and Crossan’s Jesus does not come from God to take away sin but arose from among the innocent to teach us how not to be a part of the dominant systems. They fail to understand the depth of sin in all of us at all times, including peasants, as well as the elite. More importantly they lose the assurance of ultimate mercy and forgiveness.

Speaking of elites these two “scholarly authorities” purport to tell us, “What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus.” They pander to an increasingly secular culture and to the human itch to find some undemanding simplicity that now finally explains everything. And they do this while ignoring, and without reference to, the multitude of superior contemporary scholars such as Richard Bauckham, Raymond Brown, Luke Timothy Johnson, N. T. Wright, Richard Hays, Leander Keck, Christopher Bryan, and scores of others whose works reflect the faith of scripture and the creeds.

Citing a blog posting by a clergy colleague in another diocese, I've offered criticism of Borg and Crossan (as well as Elaine Pagels and Bishop Spong) on this blog. And I've added to the mix Fleming Rutledge's recent critical response to Borg, as well.

I cannot agree with everything Bishop Allison says in his article. And sifting wheat from tares in what I've read by each of them, there are helpful nuggets of wisdom to be found in the work of Borg and Crossan, in spite of their affiliation with the Jesus Seminar (I note that Borg's work was an important resource for a sermon I preached on Mark 1:40-45).

Nevertheless, I've always found it odd when folks who find the overall agenda of scholars like Borg and Crossan persuasive also want to worship in churches whose liturgies affirm the very doctrinal content of the Christian faith this scholarship ultimately denies. Embracing paradox is one thing (after all, Christian orthodoxy affirms the paradoxical nature of the Christian faith). But embracing contradiction is something else.

Giving Thanks

2011-11-24T10:12:00.002-06:00

On this Thanksgiving Day I am grateful for family and friends, life and health, the gifts that God so freely gives and the call to serve with those gifts that comes to each of us every day. I give thanks for those who regularly read this blog (including those who are critical of the things I write and quote), and I wish all of you every blessing. And I am struck anew by the wonderful "General Thanksgiving" in The Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we your unworthy servants give you humble thanks for all your goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all whom you have made. We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for your immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to your service, and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory throughout all ages. Amen.

Thanks be to God for the gift of the Prayer Book, whose liturgies, collects and prayers train us how to pray when our own words fail us.

Thanks be to God for the gift of Holy Scripture, which contains all things necessary to salvation and which, as we read and study and prayerfully engage this gift, trains us to embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.

Thanks be to God for the gift of the catholic creeds that succinctly summarize the story and preserve the mystery of the Church's faith.

Thanks be to God for the gift of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who loved us so much that he was willing to give everything for our sakes, including his life.

And thanks be to God for the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery, the mystical body of Christ into whose risen life our lives are forever joined in the sacrament of Holy Baptism and who reminds us that we are graciously accepted as living members of Christ's body in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist.

William Law sums it up best:

"Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account; and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator."

Union with the Living Christ

2011-11-22T06:46:00.000-06:00

Redemption occurs not through assent to doctrine but through union with the living Christ by faith. This life could not occur with a dead Christ. The engendering power of Christianity could not be proclaimed if Christianity spoke only of a person who was but no longer is. If he ceased to be alive, he could not have an effect on our present life with God.

Believers are joined to the Lord in a spiritual union and fellowship with each other that is sustained by their relation to this living Person. The continuing life of Christ includes our life. In this union Christ shares empathetically in our struggle even now, and we share in the fullness of his life with God the Father.

There is hardly a point in Christian teaching at which we seem to be further distanced from modern consciousness than the exaltation of Jesus. When we look toward him with jaded modern eyes, we tend to reduce him to something manageable. So modernity struggles to identify experientially how his consciousness has affected our modern forms of consciousness. The only conception of a living Christ that is allowable under the constraints of modern naturalism is that his influence lives in the memory and actions of others, analogous to the way heroes exert continuing influence. But the worshiping community celebrates that he acts upon us as one who himself is personally alive. The missing element in such an analysis is his own continuing personal life.

The ancient ecumenical testimony is that Jesus now lives so as to engender life in us. His living presence is the real energy and force and power of historic Christianity and present Christian life. Detached from the living Christ, the branch withers, the flower fades.

~ Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity (2009)

The Church is Beyond the Times

2011-11-21T11:15:00.000-06:00

"The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue."

~ G. K. Chesterton

Bishop Budde vs. Bishop Wright

2011-11-19T10:04:00.002-06:00

There's an interesting piece on The American Spectator's website entitled "Spiritual Decay." It's about Mariann Budde, the new bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. It talks about Bishop Budde's candid acknowledgement of the elephant in the Episcopal Church's living room (good for her!), even as the piece is critical of her ideas for how to address the problem. I was struck by the following statement by Bishop Budde:

"I'm pretty confident that the gospel is clear on this in terms of our accepting people as we are created by God to be and not asking people to change to conform to some uniform standard of human expression."

This statement brings to my mind a passage from Simply Christian in which N. T. Wright addresses the practical implications of Baptism (you can read the passage here). I was struck by the following statement by Bishop Wright:

"We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically even in a church ... where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love and to promise what we already desire."

Perhaps a comparison of these two statements by Anglican bishops gives us a feel for the depth of the chasm that divides us.

Musical Interlude with Bruce Cockburn

2011-11-17T20:26:00.002-06:00

I recently rediscovered the music of Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn. The spiritual depth of his lyrics and the accompanying music are quite powerful. Below are some of the gems I've come across on YouTube with some lyric samples, closing with a gorgeous instrumental piece.

"There's roads and there's roads and they call, can't you hear it?
Roads of the earth and roads of the spirit.
The best roads of all are the ones that aren't certain.
One of those is where you'll find me till they drop the big curtain."

"Somebody touched me deep in my bones
Turned a key in the hole there was somebody home
Some would say that I'm dreaming but I swear that it's true
Somebody touched me I know it was you"

"I'm blown like smoke and blind as wind
Except for when your love breaks in
Maybe to those who love is given sight
To pierce the wall of seeming night
And know it pure beyond all imagining"

"When you know even for a moment that it's your time
Then you can walk with the power of a thousand generations"

The Source of False Religion

2011-11-17T07:58:00.002-06:00

The source of false religion is the inability to rejoice, or, rather, the refusal of joy, whereas joy is absolutely essential because it is without any doubt the fruit of God’s presence. One cannot know that God exists and not rejoice. Only in relation to joy are the fear of God and humility correct, genuine, fruitful. Outside of joy, they become demonic, the deepest distortion of any religious experience. A religion of fear. Religion of pseudo-humility. Religion of guilt: They are all temptations, traps – very strong indeed, not only in the world, but inside the Church. Somehow “religious” people often look on joy with suspicion.

The first, the main source of everything is “my soul rejoices in the Lord…” The fear of sin does not save from sin. Joy in the Lord saves. A feeling of guilt or moralism does not liberate from the world and its temptations. Joy is the foundation of freedom, where we are called to stand. Where, how, when has this tonality of Christianity become distorted, dull – or rather, where, how, why have Christians become deaf to Joy? How, when and why, instead of freeing suffering people, did the Church come to sadistically intimidate and frighten them?

~ Fr. Alexander Schmemann

h/t to Salt of the Earth

Anglicanism Has Doctrinal Content

2011-11-13T16:48:00.002-06:00

Drawing on Philip Turner, Sublunary Sublime reminds us that Anglicanism does, indeed, have doctrinal content:

Contrary to Maurice Wiles’ opinion that Anglicanism has no identifiable content, Philip Turner states that, “the doctrinal content Anglicans share is embedded primarily in liturgical practices the purpose of which is to form the character of a communion of believers. Its liturgical and formational setting means that the doctrinal content of Anglicanism is, as it were, scattered through a complex of practices rather than focused in a specifically theological document.”

Turner is careful here, noting that if one says that the primary focus of Anglicanism is “liturgical practices,” then one is also saying in the same breathe that the heart of Anglican theology is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. For at the center of the Book of Common Prayer is the “prayer to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.”

The complex of liturgical practices that comprise the doctrinal content of Anglicanism is, of course, found in The Book of Common Prayer. And the Catechism at the back of the 1979 Prayer Book offers "a brief summary of the [Episcopal] Church's teaching [i.e., doctrine] for an inquiring stranger who picks up a Prayer Book" (p. 844). I note also that the Prayer Book describes the Catechism as "a commentary on the creeds," which underscores the normative centrality of the doctrinal content of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds for the Episcopal Church (ibid.).

So even if it's true that, as one bishop and Anglican priest have written, "The Episcopal Church does not readily think in terms of 'doctrine'," that's not because we have no identifiable doctrine. It's right there in the Prayer Book. We corporately enact it every time we gather for the liturgy. And in the Prayer Book's ordination vows, clergy have voluntarily promised "to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church" (pp. 513, 526, & 538). That would be a very strange promise to make if we had no identifiable doctrine!

The Corrupting Influence of Christian Politics

2011-11-08T06:46:00.001-06:00

The Rev. Dr. David P. Gushee, Distinguished Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University and co-author of Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, takes on the manipulation of Christian symbols and theology for the sake of getting votes and consolidating power in a column entitled "Christian politics create unholy alliances." He writes:

Politicians continue to use and abuse the language and symbols of Christian faith in order to win political support. They speak of God, Jesus, Christian faith and Christian values. They bow their heads in prayer at a million chicken dinners. Then Christian voters — perhaps flattered, perhaps reassured — think that these evocations of holy Christian symbols and terms actually mean something.

In playing the God card, politicians often deploy religion as a kind of tribal identification. ... Some conservative Christians are tempted to look for the candidate who is (or appears to be) most clearly a member of their religious-political tribe — rather than focusing on the candidate's résumé, skills, foreign policy proposals or more full domestic agenda. These voters check off the Christian box and look no further, just as some liberals check off a candidate's "pro-choice" or "pro-union" box and do the same. ...

It's not just the politicians' fault. If church leaders and rank-and-file Christians were not susceptible to these appeals, they would not work. Head fakes in the direction of Christian symbols still make many Christians swoon. Religious tribalism gets out the votes. It helps that the promise of access to power still intoxicates. ...

This version of Christian politics is inherently corrupting to Christian faith, ethics and witness. It encourages politicians to take God's name in vain, and to do so routinely. (That would be a violation of the Ten Commandments, if Christians still cared about such things.) It tempts church leaders to abuse their offices and abandon their core vocations as they entangle themselves with politics. It confuses the message of Christianity with that of the politician of the moment. It damages the moral witness of Christians in culture. It makes it harder for millions to even consider the claims of historic Christian faith. It drives many away from God altogether.

This kind of Christian politics is also corrupting of American politics. When a significant minority of the body politic votes mainly on the basis of what amounts to religious tribalism, it encourages everyone else to do the same thing. But tribal politics is toxic. It has destroyed nations from Yugoslavia to Lebanon. And it does nothing to bring to office leaders with the skills to actually solve our everyday problems. We need effective leaders, not religious symbols.

Gushee continues by issuing a challenge:

Precisely as a Christian, I call for my fellow Christians to try an experiment. For lack of a better term, let's normalize, even secularize, our approach to the next election. Ask all candidates to drop the God talk. Recognize and reject all forms of religious pandering. Punish candidates who make base appeals to religious tribalism. Evaluate candidates according to their past performance and current policy proposals related to the major challenges facing our nation. Read the Declaration of Independence and Constitution for a refresher. Pastors, stay home and preach the Gospel rather than being precinct captains. If you want to engage in relevant political reflection, wrestle in your sermons with how constitutional democracy and broad Christian moral principles relate to each other.

Christian politics is corrupting both Christians and politics. Our nation is in too much trouble to endure another round of this sorry spectacle.

Let's do better.

Amen, Dr. Gushee!

Read it all.

Episcopal Bishop Tried, Convicted, and Deposed for Heresy

2011-11-07T10:57:00.002-06:00

The recent issue of the Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin contains a fascinating article. Entitled "The Red Bishop," it's about the Rt. Rev. William Montgomery Brown (1855-1937). Brown was the bishop of Arkansas from 1899-1912, during which time he became a Communist and openly rejected core teachings of the Christian faith. According to one source, Brown "is best remembered as the first Anglican Bishop to be tried for heresy since the Reformation, and the first of any creed in America to be deposed for heretical teachings." He ended up accepting an offer to be a bishop in the Old Catholic Church (and, incredibly, one source says that the Russian Orthodox Church offered to take him in!).

Here's some of what the article says:

Some called him the Red Bishop, others the Bad Bishop, or even the Mad Bishop. But no one called Episcopalian William Montgomery Brown a boring bishop

A Gilded-Age Ohioan educated at Kenyon's Bexley Hall seminary, Brown cut a broad swath through life, a man of God who morphed into a man of Marx-and Darwin, too. He was the first Episcopalian bishop, and only one so far, to be tried for heresy.

Bexley Hall, a fixture at Kenyon until 1968, holds few stories as fascinating as Brown's. His career-part Willy Loman meets Elmer Gantry, with touches of Horatio Alger Jr. and Jay Gatsby-reflects both the meandering path of an individual life and the winds of social change that swept across the land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Above all, Brown strove to hold sway among those around him. "It's a constant in his life, this business of wanting to be somebody," said historian Ronald M. Carden, author of William Montgomery Brown (1855-1937): The Southern Episcopal Bishop Who Became a Communist. ...

Bishop Brown had a rocky career in Arkansas. Internal church politics made his election controversial. His sometimes autocratic style and ongoing local church disputes worked against him. So did his annual stays in Galion, far from the diocese.

He tried to shore up his standing-to "mend his political fences," as Carden put it-by embracing southern attitudes toward race. In a book called The Crucial Race Question, Brown proposed strict segregation for the Episcopal Church: one autonomous but separate church for blacks, another for whites.

"Amalgamation is a ruinous crime," he wrote. Cain's murder of Abel, by comparison, was "a crime that was venial compared with that of miscegenation." ...

Seeking to wield influence, drawn to ideas on a grand scale, Brown continued to cobble together visions of Christianity and political philosophy. The Ohio seminarian turned Arkansas racist now developed a scheme for a sort of church egalitarianism.

In a 1910 book, he unveiled a plan for "leveling." The idea was that members of all Protestant denominations would select their own bishops and all would come together under the umbrella of Episcopalianism. As part of the project, Brown dropped some elements his church held dear, such as apostolic succession and a priestly class.

Brown campaigned for his plan nationally. But Episcopalians, both lay and clerical, shunned his ideas. Some bishops burned the book; churchmen even talked of heresy, according to Brown's autobiography. He ignored the routine duties of his diocese while campaigning for his plan, further alienating local congregants. ...

In Galion, Brown's physician, apparently looking for ways to reinvigorate the bishop intellectually, suggested he read Darwin. With time to read and contemplate, Brown began to change his views.

And the change was big. "I no longer believed in a personal God, nor in a six-day creation, nor in a literal heaven and hell," Brown wrote. No fall of man, nor a redemption through the blood of Christ, either. Creeds, he decided, were symbolical, nothing more.

Others guided him towards socialism, and he began reading Marx, too. "That was another revelation," Brown wrote. "Darwin was now my Old Testament, Marx my New." ...

In 1920, Brown summarized his new philosophy in Communism and Christianism, a 247-page book urgingreaders to "Banish the Gods from the Skies and Capitalists from the Earth."

Brown wrote that capitalism had failed, that "millions are insufficiently fed, clothed, housed and warmed, and are doomed to a perpetual and exhaustive drudgery which leaves neither leisure nor energy for the cultivation of their soul life."

He called for "economic levelism," a spreading out of wealth and new respect for the worker. "Communism is for me the one comprehensive term which is a synonym at once of morality, religion and Christianity," he wrote.

Some church leaders thought him daft. Ignore him and he'll go away, said others. Still others called him a heretic who must be brought to account.

Church officials pondered their options. Eventually, three bishops, the minimum required, charged Brown with heresy. Eight like-minded bishops gathered in 1924 for a trial in Cleveland. They served as judges and jurors. And they quickly convicted him.

"They were going to hang him up by his thumbs, no matter what," Carden said. And so Brown, once a rising star of mainstream Christianity, had become a pariah.

Read it all.

All told, it's not only a fascinating but also a sad story. And it serves as a reminder that the issue of bishops who openly reject the faith of the Church and teach things that contradict that faith hardly began with Bishop Pike or Bishop Spong. Nevertheless, unless I've missed something, Brown is the only bishop in the Episcopal Church who has ever been convicted and deposed for heresy (something which might seem unthinkable to most of us today, regardless of how far off the reservation a bishop's theology may go).

Rehabilitating Pelagius

2011-11-04T17:23:00.002-05:00

A resolution submitted to the Annual Council of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta asks the Council (in the words of George Conger) "to reverse the condemnation of the Council of Carthage upon Pelagius, and to explore whether the Fifth century heretic may inform the theology of the Episcopal Church." Here's the original resolution:

R11-17 Contribution of Pelagius

Whereas the historical record of Pelagius’s contribution to our theological tradition is shrouded in the political ambition of his theological antagonists who sought to discredit what they felt was a threat to the empire, and their ecclesiastical dominance, and whereas an understanding of his life and writings might bring more to bear on his good standing in our tradition, and whereas his restitution as a viable theological voice within our tradition might encourage a deeper understanding of sin, grace, free will, and the goodness of God’s creation, and whereas in as much as the history of Pelagius represents to some the struggle for theological exploration that is our birthright as Anglicans, Be it resolved, that this 105th Annual Council of the Diocese of Atlanta appoint a committee of discernment overseen by our Bishop, to consider these matters as a means to honor the contributions of Pelagius and reclaim his voice in our tradition And be it further resolved that this committee will report their conclusions at the next Annual Council.

Submitted by the Rev. Benno D. Pattison, Rector, the Church of the Epiphany

I see from the diocesan website that the Council amended part of the resolution as follows:

Amended as follows (otherwise unchanged):
Be it resolved, that this 105th Annual Council of the Diocese of Atlanta recommend that the bishop appoint and oversee a committee of discernment ~~overseen by our Bishop~~, to consider these matters as a means to ~~honor~~ understand the contributions of Pelagius ~~and reclaim his voice in~~ to our tradition

Conger reminds us of who Pelagius was and why he was condemned by the Council of Carthage:

A British monk, Pelagius rejected the doctrines of original sin, substitutionary atonement, and justification by faith. Mankind possessed an unconditioned free will and was able to obtain his own salvation through personal betterment rather than grace, he argued. In the Letter to Demetrias, Pelagius argued that Adam’s sin was not what caused us to sin. Humans were born good, but over time became wicked through voluntary acts. “Over the years our sin gradually corrupts us, building an addiction and then holding us bound with what seems like the force of nature itself.”

The Council of Carthage in 416 [sic] condemned Pelagius’ teaching. Augustine argued that the British monk’s teaching contradicted Paul’s words in Philippians 2:12-13 because Pelagius located the capacity “to will and to do” what pleases God in human nature rather than in God’s grace. (On the Grace of Christ, V.6 and VI.)

(Citing Alan Jacobs' Original Sin: A History, I touched on some of the problematic aspects of Pelagius' rejection of original sin in a previous posting.)

So what have been some of the initial reactions in response to this resolution? Here's Conger again:

The proposed resolution has brought mixed responses from the Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies chat room, with some ridiculing the notion that the Diocese of Atlanta believed itself capable of redefining church doctrine. However, other deputies have endorsed the resolution saying it gives a breath of Celtic Christianity to the Episcopal Church and enhances the church’s theological diversity.

One person says this on Conger's website:

I can just see the headlines in some newspapers if the Diocese of Altanta really does formally state that Pelagian views are fine as part of the diversity of TEC: “Diocese of Atlanta denies the concept of original sin.” But it does seem as though our Presiding Bishop agrees with Pelagius as described above–we’re all born good and in need of kind teachers, rather than a savior. And if people act selfishly or worse, it can be attributed to their upbringing, rather than anything inherently wrong in the human condition.

Rod Dreher responds to the resolution by simply saying: "It’s not heresy, dear, it’s enhancing diversity."

David Gibson offers quite a different response in a posting entitled "Cool News of the Day":

Great news. Why? For one thing, there is a chance that Pelagius may have got a raw deal way back when, and it would be important to revisit the issue and to learn about early Christian history, which no one seems to recall terribly well.

I'm not much of a Pelagian, or neo-Pelagian, if you couldn't tell. But I do think that it's great when Christians argue about doctrines and dogmas and things that really matter, rather than the usual arguments over whether praise music is dreck or the cantor's Latin pronunciation is off. (Both are likely true. Done.) It's too easy to slip into heresies without thinking about it.

They were fighting in the streets over Arianism. How about an "Occupy Carthage" movement, starting in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta in the 21st century? It could be good to re-fight these battles every millennium or so, to clarify what a religion believes. But we need to know history in order to repeat it. Or not.

A couple of responses to Gibson's piece are interesting, like this:

I commend the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta for their initiative in ‘rehabilitating’ Pelagius. It seems to me that “Command and control” motivation took precedence over dialogue and truth finding as Augustine (of Hippo) provided the ecclesial sword so profoundly taken up by Constantine to establish the “imperial” church. Pelagius taught that “right ordering” of self was the key to bettering one’s relationship with God. Augustine, on the other hand, seemed to deny the intrinsic goodness of self and creation and promoted “abnegation, mortification and self-denial” - the emptying of self (does God really want an empty vessel returned to “Her”?). If there was a heretic here is is more likely Augustine, and his motives were suspect as well.

(I note that Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom goes a long way towards rebutting the whole "command and control" thesis so central to the hermeneutic of suspicion's approach to this period of Church history.)

And there's this:

There is a great tendency in modern theological circles to elevate the arch-heretics of the ancient church to the status of Fathers of the Church, though their views were repudiated by the Fathers of the Church. So, if the Episcopal Diocese of Atalanta has their way, not only Pelagius, but Origen, Severus of Antioch, Theodore of Mopsuetia, Arius, Apollinarius, Sabellius, etc. will now be added to the list of church fathers and maybe venerated as saints. ...

The Blessed Augustine erred in his insistence on grace and denying of free will. But that does not prove that Pelagius and his followers, like Julianus, were right. It is also important to note that though the eastern churches couldn’t figure out what the problem with Pelagius was, Pelagius and Julianus were still condemned by the Synod of Jerusalem in 416 (if memory serves). Pelagius was not a saint and should not be elevated to that rank nor should he be ranked as a church father. He was just as wrong (if not more so) than Augustine.

And looking at things from across the pond in the Church of Ireland, BC at Catholicity and Covenant writes:

That reference [in the resolution] to "our birthright as Anglicans" is somewhat interesting, not least in light of the words Article 9: "Original Sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk) ...". One assumes that the Diocesan Convention of the Diocese of Atlanta is fully aware that it does not have the authority to act in a manner contrary to the church catholic and the Anglican tradition. Right?

I guess we'll find out soon enough!

"Jesus Trumps the Bible"

2011-11-02T11:49:00.001-05:00

According to the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, that's what Biblical scholar and Jesus Seminar fellow Marcus Borg said twice at a recent gathering. On her blog Generous Orthodoxy, Rutledge responds by briefly exposing the false dichotomies that prop up Borg's claim:

This is an extraordinarily irresponsible thing for a scholar and leader in the church to say. It can’t be said often enough: we have no access to knowledge of Jesus except through the Bible and its interpretation. There is no record of him outside the Bible until years after his death. The only way to understanding who he was is through the witness of the New Testament apostles. Therefore to suggest that he “trumps the Bible” is to suggest that we can cut loose from the Scriptures and construct a Jesus according to the perspectives of our own time. It has been shown over and over again that attempts to construct a “historical Jesus” or “real Jesus” apart from the faith-based witness of Scripture end in failure because such attempts are grounded, not in the text, but in the bias of those who undertake them.

Borg talks constantly of the “pre-Easter Jesus” and the “post-Easter Jesus.” Again, this often-heard distinction is based on a false assumption. We have no access to the pre-Easter Jesus. Every single word of testimony to him in the New Testament is refracted through the Resurrection. Therefore, any attempt to reconstruct a Jesus before anyone knew he would be raised from the dead are doomed to fail, because such projects, again, will always reflect the personal agenda of the interpreter.

Like it or not, therefore, we must rely upon the Scripture as our only witness to Jesus. There is no other witness.

Read it all.

Citing Rutledge's blog posting, C. Wingate at Tune: Kings Lynn also offers a critical perspective on Borg's claim that Jesus trumps the Bible. Along the way, Wingate exposes the unstated bias of liberal modernist approaches to Jesus and the Bible by writing:

If an unexamined life isn't worth living (an exaggeration, I would say), then unexamined scholarship is worse than worthless. It's impossible for me to read the "mainline" material and not come away with the conclusion that it's largely worthless because it begs the question. It already knows that Jesus cannot be a miracle worker, cannot be aware (somehow) of his divinity, cannot indeed be divinely born of a virgin. OK, so where's the proof of all these "cannots"? Well, Borg, at least in close proximity to the passages I've quoted, doesn't say, but one gets the sense that the scriptural God is distasteful. But like all good modernists, he fails to put his own predilections on the spot. If the problem with traditional Christianity is that it doesn't "work" for everybody (and within it's own schema, that's not a problem ), the problem with the modernists is that they won't admit that their scheme doesn't work for everyone either, and that the traditionalist scheme does work for probably the majority of Christendom. The relativism that they try to paper over this with doesn't wash: they really believe that the traditional teachings are wrong for everyone. So the big issue in this is really the whole problem of doubt, the unexamined and taken-for-granted doubt that is at the root of the modernist program. It is that doubt which is the true teaching of the moderns, and it is a teaching that does not move me, for I do not doubt, not on their terms.

Read it all.

Folks like Borg do a good job of feeding the doubt and skepticism of those who distrust orthodox Christian teaching about Jesus and Holy Scripture. And in doing so, they open space for setting aside the authority of traditional Church teaching on pretty much any subject in ways that allow for the individual's preferences to trump the Church's faith and practice. In addition to Rutledge and Wingate's criticisms of this "project" as articulated by Borg, we also do well to keep in mind something that Fr. Matt Gunter noted a while back on his blog Into the Expectation:

"Unless we are willing to doubt our doubts, our doubts are just excuses to avoid the implications of believing."

Rowan Williams on the Communion of Saints

2011-11-01T08:42:00.001-05:00

In a passage worth pondering on this All Saints' Day, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reflects on the meaning of "the communion of saints." He connects this article of the Apostles' Creed to the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist. And he succinctly articulates a vision of the Church as one in which we receive the gift of new life in relationship with God and other people.

In its original Latin the Apostles' Creed announces belief in the communio sanctorum; and this could mean one of two things - or maybe both. It could be 'the sharing between holy people' or it could mean 'the sharing of holy things'. Now when the New Testament, especially St Paul, talks about 'holy people', it doesn't mean quite what we might mean by 'saint', it isn't offering a sort of verdict on a lot of spectacularly good lives. Christian people are 'holy' simply because they have been adopted by God into relationship, into that family relationship expressed in saying 'Our Father'. So the 'sharing between holy people' isn't some kind of club for the spiritually gifted; it's simply the relationship that holds together those who recognize and express their adoption by God. And so this sharing becomes tangible and visible when Christians are together just breathing the air of Christ, making real in words and actions who they are in relation to Jesus. The 'communion' that is meant here is what becomes visible when Christians are simply saying who they are.

And what does this involve? The Church is the community of those who have been 'immersed' in Jesus' life, overwhelmed by it. Those who are baptized have disappeared under the surface of Christ's love and reappeared as different people. The waters close over their heads, and then, like the old world rising out of watery chaos in the first chapter of the Bible, out comes a new world. So when the Church baptizes people, it says what it is and what sort of life its people live. Baptism is an event in which the 'sharing between holy people' comes to light and we see what the Church really is, a community in which people are constantly being brought into new life by being given a new relationship with God and each other.

It is also the community of those who are invited to eat with Jesus. Just as, in his earthly life, Jesus expressed his promise to create a new people of God by sharing meals with unlikely people, just as, after the resurrection, he shares food with his disciples as he re-calls them to their task, so it is with the whole Church. We are in the Church because we have been invited, not because we have earned our place. And so when the Church gathers to eat and drink with Jesus in Holy Communion, the Church once again says who and what it is. In baptism and Holy Communion, the nature of the Church is laid bare for us. What is the Church? It is simply those who have been immersed in, soaked in the life of Jesus, and who have been invited to eat with him and pray to the Father with him.

~ Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust (2007)

Celebrating Halloween as Faithful Christian Witness

2011-10-30T15:14:00.001-05:00

A while back I shared a piece entitled "Halloween is Christian - Wonderfully So!" by Shannon Johnston (who is now the Bishop of Virginia, but was the rector of All Saints' Episcopal Church in Tupelo, Mississippi when the piece was first written). Turning to the Church's liturgical calendar, Bishop Johnston connects Halloween to All Saints' Day and the truth of Christian baptism, summing it all up like this:

Halloween is the time when Christians proclaim and celebrate the fact that Satan and the occult have no power over us and cannot disrupt our relationship with our Lord and Redeemer, as long as we live faithfully to Christ. We show this by making fun of such pretenders, lampooning them in their face. This is why our costumes and decorations certainly should be witches, devils, and ghosts. In the victory of Christ, Christians are privileged to do this and we must not be timid about it!

Bishop Johnston's piece is a fitting response to those who insist that Halloween is Satanic and that Christians should therefore shun it. Quite the contrary, Halloween is a wonderful opportunity for Christians to bear witness to the heart of our faith in a risen Lord.

I recently came across some reflections on Halloween by an Orthodox Christian that complement Bishop Johnston's thoughts very well:

Every year, on Hallowe’en, I sit on the front porch of my house with a bowl of candy, a box of beeswax candles, and a large icon for the Feast of All Saints.

Every child who comes to the house gets a piece of candy, and may also light a candle and place it before the icon. Very few kids (even the jaded teenagers) turn down the opportunity.

For those who ask, I tell them that the meaning of the word “Hallowe’en” is “the eve of the Feast of All Saints”.

If they press me on the point, I tell them that they can think of the true meaning of Hallowe’en as being that, because of Christ, they can dress up like ghosts and goblins and whatnot, because we do not need to fear those things any longer.

I wish I had a few photos of the kids in Satan masks, lighting a candle and placing it before the icon…

I love the idea of lighting candles to place before an icon for the Feast of All Saints. And I'm now more pleased than ever that my 8-year-old son plans to dress up for Halloween this year as the Grim Reaper!

A comment at another blog sums it all up nicely: "Death is real. The body will rise. And Christ mocks Hell."

A Grim Milestone for the Episcopal Church

2011-10-29T10:59:00.000-05:00

More bad news about the elephant in the Episcopal Church's living room, this time from The Courier Journal:

The Episcopal Church has marked a grim milestone when it reported membership has dipped below 2 million within the United States for the first time in decades.

It had 1,951,907 stateside members in 2010, down 3 percent from the previous year, according to its research office.

Membership has been steadily declining since the 1960s, when it and several other historic Protestant denominations were at the peak of their membership and cultural influence. There have been long-running debates over the causes of the declines. Theories include liberal trends in theology and/or sexuality, the wearisome fighting over those issues and the declining birth rates of the denominations’ largely white, better-educated membership.

Read it all.

St. Paul Did Not "Invent" Christianity

2011-10-26T14:27:00.004-05:00

Greg Carey, professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary, has written a brief essay that effectively shuts down the absurd thesis that St. Paul invented a new religion called Christianity. In the process, Carey undermines the false dichotomy of "the religion of Jesus" vs. "the religion about Jesus" (with the former being somehow "better" and more "authentic" than the latter). He writes:

It's not rare to encounter people who claim that Paul "invented" Christianity. The basic idea is that Jesus taught a pure and ethical form of Judaism that focused on God and gracious living, while Paul developed a religion that worshiped Jesus rather than God. Though this idea literally makes no sense historically, it's gotten a lot of run. Even the occasional serious academic book "blames" Paul for perverting Jesus' message in inventing Christianity.

One easily appreciates the appeal of this position. In the first three Gospels -- Matthew, Mark and Luke -- Jesus speaks continually about the kingdom of God. He does not ordinarily speak about himself. In the fourth Gospel, however, Jesus talks about himself all the time. Even ancient Christians recognized this phenomenon. Writing around the year 200, Clement of Alexandria described John as "a spiritual Gospel" on the grounds that it relayed not the literal history of Jesus' career but its spiritual and theological significance. How did followers of Jesus move from a religion focused upon Israel's God and God's kingdom to a religion devoted to the person of Jesus? For many, the Apostle Paul fills that gap.

However, every bit of evidence we possess demonstrates that Paul did not, in fact, invent Christianity. Let's begin with how Paul came to follow Jesus in the first place. The book of Acts claims that Paul, having already persecuted some believers in Jesus, has a visionary encounter with the risen Christ. Paul himself describes that encounter as an "apocalypse," or a revelation. In any event, Acts agrees with Paul that the new apostle turned for support to a community of believers that already resided in Damascus.

If Paul invented Christianity, how did that community in Damascus come to exist? Paul's "conversion," as some call it, occurred within just two or three years of Jesus' death -- and already communities of Jesus followers were spreading beyond Judea and Galilee into Samaria, Syria and other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Moreover, a look at Paul's missionary career debunks the notion that Paul invented Christianity. Having joined the believing community at Damascus, Paul later goes on to Syrian Antioch. The believing community there -- Acts refers to them being called "Christians" -- supports Paul and his partner Barnabas in their missionary activities (Acts 11:19-26). Obviously, the church would not have supported Paul if his teachings represented a radical departure from what they already knew. ...

So we have a pattern. From Damascus in southern Syria, to Antioch in northern Syria, to Ephesus in Asia (today, Turkey), to Rome and hopefully on to Spain, Paul extends his missionary work to embrace the entire northern Mediterranean rim. As he does so, he relies upon churches located in major cosmopolitan cities to support his mission. All of these churches existed prior to and independent of Paul's mission, yet they support him. This could not be the case were Paul inventing a dramatically new interpretation of Jesus.

Read it all.

I note also C. S. Lewis' thoughts from 1947 on that "most astonishing misconception [that] has long dominated the modern mind on the subject of St. Paul" to the effect that "Jesus preached a kindly and simple religion (found in the gospels) and that St. Paul afterwards corrupted it into a cruel and complicated religion (found in the epistles)." Lewis addresses that misconception in his introduction to J. B. Phillip's translation of the New Testament epistles entitled Letters to Young Churches. You can read it in my posting entitled "Impeaching and Banishing St. Paul."

Hanging Out with Brian McLaren at Clergy Conference

2011-10-24T12:22:00.000-05:00

The blogging well has been running a bit dry lately, so I'm hoping that taking a few days away from the parish for our annual clergy conference at the Duncan M. Gray Episcopal Camp and Conference Center will provide rest and renewal, and perhaps some inspiration for future postings.

I note that this year's speaker for clergy conference is Brian McLaren, the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, a leader in the so-called Emergent Church movement, and the author of such books as A Generous Orthodoxy and A New Kind of Christianity. Given the controversy that McLaren has stirred up in some quarters, it will no doubt be interesting to spend a day with him.

To be honest, I'm frankly not sure why so many Episcopalians groove on McLaren's work. What's he got that's so spectacularly awesome that others don't have? And my hermeneutic of suspicion kicks in whenever I hear folks talk about our need for a "new" kind of Christianity. Besides the fact that such language sounds a bit Spongian, all too often the "new" Christianity on offer is not any newer than Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment critiques of traditional Christian faith and practice. Plus, talk of a "new" kind of Christianity can come dangerously close to throwing out the baby of the Church's core faith with the bathwater of non-essentials. (Note, for instance, Scot McKnight's review of McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity in which he concludes: "I read this book carefully, and I found nothing new. It may be new for Brian, but it's a rehash of ideas that grew into fruition with Adolf von Harnack and now find iterations in folks like Harvey Cox and Marcus Borg. For me, Brian's new kind of Christianity is quite old. And the problem is that it's not old enough.")

My reservations notwithstanding, I plan to listen to what Brian has to say. And I'm particularly interested in what he thinks might be the best approach to addressing the elephant in the Episcopal Church's living room.

N. T. Wright on the Implications of Baptism for the Christian Life

2011-10-18T15:00:00.001-05:00

I share below an important passage from Anglican bishop N. T. Wright's book Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. In it, Bishop Wright briefly teases out the practical implications of Holy Baptism for the Christian life. He touches on the sometimes painful renunciations and surprising rediscoveries we face when we live into our baptisms. And he discusses the difficulties of morally discerning and differentiating those aspects of our lives that need transformation from those which can be affirmed and celebrated as they are, our need to be in relationship with sources of wisdom beyond ourselves, the role of rules in the Christian life, and the joy of following a different path from the world's. An entire book could be written to flesh out what this passage entails. Actually, it has been written ... by Bishop Wright. It's called After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. But perhaps more of that another time.

Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That ... is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage. The model of pilgrimage is helpful, since baptism awakens echoes of the children of Israel coming out of Egypt and going off to the Promised Land. The whole world is now God's holy land, and God will reclaim it and renew it as the ultimate goal of all our wanderings.

We begin our pilgrimage with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Our goal is the renewal of the presently corrupt creation. This makes it clear that the route through the wilderness, the path of our pilgrimage, will involve two things in particular: renunciation on the one hand and rediscovery on the other.

Renunciation. The world in its present state is out of tune with God's ultimate intention, and there will be a great many things, some of them deeply woven into our imagination and personality, to which the only Christian response will be "no." Jesus told his followers that if they wanted to come after him they would have to deny themselves and take up their cross. The only way to find yourself, he said, is to lose yourself (a strikingly different agenda from today's finding-out-who-I-really-am philosophies). From the very beginning, writers like Paul and John recognized that this isn't just difficult, but actually impossible. We can't do it by some kind of Herculean moral effort. The only way is by drawing strength from beyond ourselves, the strength of God's Spirit, on the basis of our sharing of Jesus' death and resurrection in baptism.

Rediscovery. New creation is not a denial of our humanness, but its reaffirmation; and there will be a great many things, some of them deeply counterintuitive and initially perplexing, to which the proper Christian response is "yes." The resurrection of Jesus enables us to see how it is that living as a Christian isn't simply a matter of discovering the inner truth of the way the world currently is, or simply a matter of learning a way of life that is in tune with a different world and thus completely out of tune with the present one. It is a matter of glimpsing that in God's new creation, of which Jesus' resurrection is the start, all that was good in the original creation is reaffirmed. All that has corrupted and defaced it - including many things which are woven so tightly into the fabric of the world as we know it that we can't imagine being without them - will be done away. Learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being, anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption.

The problem is that it is by no means clear what to renounce and what to rediscover. How can we say no to things which seem so much a part of life that to reject them appears to us to be the rejection of part of God's good creation? How can we say yes to things which many Christians have seen not as good and right but as dangerous and deluded? How can we ... avoid dualism on the one hand and paganism on the other? Somehow we have to work out which styles of life and behavior belong with the corrupting evil which must be rejected if new creation is to emerge, and which styles of life and behavior belong with the new creation which must be embraced, struggled for, and celebrated.

This takes nerves of steel, and a careful searching after wisdom. We are to be informed by the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus; by the leading of the Spirit; by the wisdom we find in scripture; by the fact of our baptism and all that it means; by the sense of God's presence and guidance through prayer; and by the fellowship of other Christians, both our contemporaries and those of other ages whose lives and writings are ours to use as wise guides. Listing all these in that fashion makes them sound as if they are separate sources of teaching, but in reality it isn't like that. They work together in a hundred different ways. Part of the art of being a Christian is learning to be sensitive to all of them, and to weigh what we think we are hearing from one quarter alongside what is being said in another.

Only when we have set all that out quite clearly can we ever speak of "rules." There are rules, of course. The New Testament has plenty of them. Always give alms in secret. Never sue a fellow Christian. Never take private vengeance. Be kind. Always show hospitality. Give money away cheerfully. Don't be anxious. Don't judge another Christian over a matter of conscience. Always forgive. And so on. And the worrying thing about that randomly selected list is that most Christians ignore most of them most of the time. It isn't so much that we lack clear rules; we lack, I fear, the teaching that will draw attention to what is in fact there in our primary documents, not least in the teaching of Jesus himself.

The rules are to be understood, not as arbitrary laws thought up by a distant God to stop us from having fun (or to set us some ethical hoops to jump through as a kind of moral examination), but as the signposts to a way of life in which heaven and earth overlap, in which God's future breaks into the present, in which we discover what genuine humanness looks and feels like in practice. ...

We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically even in a church ... where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love and to promise what we already desire. The implicit religion of many people today is simply to discover who they really are and then try to live it out - which is, as many have discovered, a recipe for chaotic, disjointed, and dysfunctional humanness. The logic of cross and resurrection, of the new creation which gives shape to all truly Christian living, points in a different direction. And one of the central names for that direction is joy: the joy of relationships healed as well as enhanced, the joy of belonging to the new creation, of finding not what we already had but what God was longing to give us. At the heart of the Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.

~ N. T. Wright, Simply Christian (2006)

The Daily Office as a Means of Grace

2011-10-15T16:15:00.001-05:00

After posting some of R. R. Reno's thoughts in a piece entitled "Bringing Each Day Captive to Christ Through the Daily Office," I am pleased to see BC over at Catholicity and Covenant sharing some of Richard Hooker's defense of the daily reading of scripture in the Daily Office as a means of grace. It's not just the sermon alone that conveys the Word of God. And it's not just the dominical and ecclesial sacraments that convey grace. The daily reading of scripture in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer also has a sacramental character.

I'm also thankful that BC points us to a posting at The Rector's Corner that offers a good introduction to the Daily Office. There we read:

The heart of the Daily Office consists of the Psalms and the Lessons. This is the “illuminative” face of prayer par excellence. When considering the vastness of the Scriptures, it can be daunting, though: “Where to start?” one might rightfully ask. A solution sometimes suggested is to start at the beginning of the Bible and go to the end. This can be useful for some people, but most find it impossible to maintain and/or mystifying in the extreme. It also means that one does not get to the Gospel for quite a while.

Fortunately, the Church has an easier and more practical answer available.

That answer is the lectionary, "an orderly and extensive reading of the Bible" with selections from the Old Testament, the New Testament epistles (sometimes the Book of Revelation), and the Gospels appointed for each day of the Church calendar year.

Reading the Bible in accordance with the lectionary and in the context of the liturgies of Morning and Evening Prayer is a disciplined yet powerful way to encounter the living Christ in our daily lives. And, as The Rector's Corner notes, the canticles - the songs of praise read or sung in thankful response to the scripture readings - help to facilitate that encounter:

The canticles ... provide a response to the lesson just read. They remind us the scriptures are not “data” to be consumed but encounters with God, moments of transformation to be pondered and integrated into our full being.

The Latin for "office" is officium meaning "service" or "duty." And so the Daily Office is one's Daily Service or Daily Duty. The ordination vows do not explicitly require clergy in the Episcopal Church to read the Daily Office, but it is one of the most reliable and deeply Anglican ways to fulfill the promise to "persevere in prayer." And while it may seem that approaching one's prayer life as a "duty" to fulfill in accordance with fixed liturgical forms in The Book of Common Prayer is old-fashioned, legalistic, and even lifeless, my experience has been just the opposite. After 15 or so years of trying to be faithful to the Daily Office, I have discovered it to be a spiritual anchor and a lifeline to God.

I have also discovered that the fixed character of the liturgy coupled with the movement through books of the Bible offers an important way to move me beyond an introspective preoccupation with myself. The Daily Office serves as a vehicle of transcendence, opening me to the grace and presence of the God who utterly surpasses all that I can think or imagine, and who is yet closer to me than my own breathing. From time to time, there can be surprises when a well-known canticle or collect, or a scripture reading that just happens to be appointed for this particular day, speaks directly to something I'm struggling with or going through. I don't know if that would have happened if I had been trying to make it happen. But it's a powerful reminder that, as the Prayer Book's catechism puts it, "God still speaks to us through the Bible," and not just through the Bible, but also through the whole of the Daily Office.

I give thanks for the gift of the Daily Office as part of the bedrock of my faith and spiritual practice. And I commend it to you.

If you are interested in learning more about how to observe the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, read the above-cited posting at The Rector's Corner entitled "Day by Day we praise you: an introduction to the Daily Office." Also check out "The Daily Office Tutorial" at Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. I also recommend reading Derek's posting "Promoting the Daily Office" at haligweorc. You can also pray the Daily Office online at St. Bede's Breviary and at The Daily Office from the Mission of St. Clare.

The Inclusive Gospel

2011-10-06T12:21:00.001-05:00

Given all of the rhetoric about "inclusion" in the Episcopal Church these days, and with the reminder that one of the grounds of accusation against the Bishop of South Carolina is his attack on the "false gospel of Indiscriminate Inclusivity," it's important to clarify what it means to say that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is inclusive. To that end, I find the following statement helpful and faithful to the biblical witness:

Everyone is accepted in Christ, but no one is affirmed as they are.

The Left tends to emphasize the first part of this sentence while ignoring, minimizing, or denying the second part.

The Right tends to emphasize the second part of this sentence while ignoring, minimizing, or denying the first part.

The challenge for the Church is to proclaim a genuinely inclusive Gospel by affirming the truth of the whole sentence.

Remembering That I'll Be Dead Soon

2011-10-05T22:56:00.000-05:00

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

~ Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011)

CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios

Quote taken from a Commencement Address
delivered at Stanford University on June 12, 2005

Why We Resist Christianity

2011-10-04T22:11:00.000-05:00

"People try to persuade us that objections against Christianity spring from doubt. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion."

~ Søren Kierkegaard, Journal
quoted in Works of Love (c. 1847)

"This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal. It is different from the temptations that met us at the beginning of the Christian life. Then we fought against admitting the claims of the eternal at all. And when we had fought, and been beaten, and surrendered, we supposed that all would be fairly plain sailing. This temptation comes later. It is addressed to those who have already admitted the claim in principle and are even making some sort of effort to meet it. Our temptation is too look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. ... For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves. For each of us the Baptist’s words are true: 'He must increase and I decrease.' ... What cannot be admitted–what must exist only as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy–is the idea of something that is 'our own,' some area in which we are to be 'out of school,' on which God has no claim."

~ C. S. Lewis, "A Slip of the Tongue" (1956)
in The Weight of Glory

"Precisely because the voices of offense and fear dominate our responses to the gospel, we need to shed illusions. To put the matter bluntly, the problem with traditional Christianity does not rest in the fact that the so-called modern mind is too sophisticated, too scientific, too worldlywise to believe. Rather, the problem is that we do not want to believe. We want a 'gospel' that affirms our increasingly fragile self-images. We want a 'gospel' that helps us remain stable and unchanging in a world full of threatening forces that might sweep us away. We do not want repentance. We do not want transformation. In short, we do not want what Christianity teaches."

~ R. R. Reno, In the Ruins of the Church (2002)

The Foundation Event for the Entire Christian Religion

2011-09-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

With the crucifixion the life of the man known as Jesus of Nazareth comes to an end. But the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation event for the entire Christian religion.

If Jesus were not raised from the dead, then all we would have is the memory of a very delightful, lovable, courageous, but misguided man. It would mean that while many might be drawn to him because of his compassion and honesty, yet this earth was altogether too ugly a place to contain such a beautiful spirit. The evil in men could not stand to be near something so threatening, threatening precisely because his spirit is so enviable and yet so unobtainable. Better not to have him around. And so, earthman had to kill him.

If Jesus were not raised from the dead, it would also mean that though men scream, shout and shake their fists at the heavens, there is no answer, no response. Look to the heavens. Plead. All you get is silence. Whatever gods there by, they seemingly have no stake in or even interest in Jesus. We may be among those who would remember the man we loved with deep affection and passionate hope. But now, alas, the cup is empty, the dregs bitter.

But if the resurrection is true, then earth may still be an ugly, hostile place, but the entire purpose of the universe and the power behind it can be understood in terms of that single life. Jesus becomes the key to it all. ...

If you want to know the secret to your life, then look to Jesus and learn of the present Lord, the risen Christ, who awaits to enter your life and bring you the power and the spirit to make you a child of God, a brother or sister of Jesus, who is the first-born of the new creation.

~ John Stone Jenkins, What Think Ye of Jesus? (1979)

The Elephant in the Episcopal Church's Living Room

2011-09-28T10:05:00.001-05:00

Rod Webster is the Vice President and General Manager of the Church Insurance Companies (which are all wholly owned subsidiaries of the Episcopal Church's pension fund). In the following video, Mr. Webster names the elephant in the Episcopal Church's living room with the backing of empirical data. It's not a pretty picture:

Several things Mr. Webster says stand out for me, including:

"Closing churches outnumber new churches by 2.5 to 1."
"Just over 40 churches each year are closing based on the data we collect and the data we manage very carefully over the last 39 months. And of course each year that suggests that the number of churches closing is about the size of very small, admittedly, Episcopal diocese each year, offset, in very small part, by new openings."
" ... we anticipate, of course, a larger number of closings in the near future."

The "Episcopal Congregations Overview: Findings from the 2008 Faith Communities Today Survey," which was delivered to the deputies and bishops at the 2009 General Convention, lays out similarly grim data. As I recall, however, virtually nothing was said about any of this at General Convention.

This should be a wake-up call. But aside from the occasional rhetoric about "moving from maintenance to mission," it appears that many of us are okay with the status quo of allowing the elephant to stay in the living room. I hope I'm wrong about that!

Is there, in fact, a sustained discussion at the highest levels of the Episcopal Church that seeks to proactively address the very serious issues raised by Mr. Webster and the "Episcopal Congregations Overview" report? Is there a plan for dealing with our decline?

The New Testament Knows Nothing of Solitary Religion

2011-09-27T15:45:00.001-05:00

"No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.' It was one of the Wesleys, I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion. We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another."

~ C. S. Lewis, "Membership" (1945)
in The Weight of Glory

Defending the Historic Creeds: 2

2011-09-26T11:45:00.003-05:00

In light of various attacks on the historic or catholic creeds as theologically "defective," "exclusionary," and/or "irrelevant" to the needs of contemporary worshipers, and given the reality that there are now both authorized as well as unauthorized "creeds" used in place of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds in worship (some of which are deeply flawed), I think it's helpful to review why we need the historic or catholic creeds, what things are necessary for an affirmation of faith to be genuinely Christian, and how persons can recite the creeds with integrity.

Bishop Frank E. Wilson addresses these matters in a most helpful way. In Faith and Practice, he writes:

Obviously there must be a recognized framework of Christian teaching if Christianity is to possess any substantial character at all. To become a Christian, or to be a follower of Christ, or to believe in the Gospel means nothing until something explicit is offered to show what such an act of allegiance covers. If I say that I believe in Napolean Bonaparte, what do I mean? Do I mean that I am convinced he was truly an historical person, or that I approve of his military policy, or that I sanction his rather questionable personal life? Such a statement means nothing until something is specified about it. To say that you believe in Christianity but not in creeds is like saying you believe in education but not in schools, or that you believe in justice but not in laws, or that you believe in mathematics but not in the multiplication tables. Christianity is a way of life and it must have a road to travel with directions, landmarks, and recognized points of progress.

Drawing on the historic creeds, Bishop Wilson continues by noting the essential marks of a genuinely Christian affirmation of faith:

Creation Of All Thing by God.
The Incarnation.
The Crucifixion.
The Resurrection.
The Ascension.
The Final Judgment.
The Holy Ghost.
The Church.
Holy Baptism.
Eternal Life.

"Expunge any one of these from the Christian faith," Bishop Wilson writes, "and you have a mutilated Gospel which is not Christianity."

I note that the Apostles' Creed offers no explicit reference to Holy Baptism. However, I think one can argue that affirming belief in the communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins presupposes Baptism. For it is through the waters of Baptism that we receive the forgiveness of sins, are set apart as holy, and thus enter the fellowship of the saints.

In response to the question, "Do we really need the historic creeds?," Wilson writes:

The historic Creeds are a protection to the integrity of the Gospel. They are a unifying bond extending throughout the Christian world. They preserve the continuity of the Christian religion. They maintain a standard by which all developments of Christian doctrine may be tested. They are a compass for Christian travelers and an anchor against spiritual drifting. They serve as a constitution for the Church and a check upon changing by-laws and disciplinary regulations. They make for stability of purpose in the Church as a whole, and the recitation of them is a powerful aid in fortifying the faith of every individual Christian.

But what if I'm not really sure I believe all of this stuff? How can I then recite the Nicene Creed with integrity? Wilson addresses those concerns as well:

How can one stand in a congregation and go on record as believing these articles of faith when some of them are beyond one's ability to understand and about which one's belief is certainly dubious? How can I say, 'I believe' when I am not sure whether I do or not? The difficulty here lies in a misconception of the purpose of the Creed. It is not a contract especially drawn up for each individual worshiper. It is a statement of the Church's faith in which the individual shares as a member of the Body of Christ. To hesitate over it is like a man questioning his family relationship because he cannot understand some of his father's peculiarities. No one can say he completely understands every item mentioned in the Creed, but that need not prevent him from reciting it in unison with his fellow-worshipers. There are plenty of things about the human body which the physician does not understand. Yet he does not wait until he is sure about everything before treating his patient. He must treat his patient as a whole person even though some parts of him he may not understand. Those unanswered questions he holds in suspension while he goes about his healing business. So the individual Christian may have questions in his mind which he cannot resolve, but he holds them in suspension while he says the Creed with the rest of the Church. He is not announcing to the wide world that he knows all about it. He is pledging his allegiance to Christ and stating his adherence to the Church which teaches that faith.

Reciting either the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed challenges the individualism that we in the West take for granted. Writing about a completely different topic, Lauren Winner makes an observation in this regard that is directly relevant to the importance of the historic creeds for the Christian faith:

... in the Christian universe, the individual is not the vital unit of ethical meaning. For Christians, the most basic images, metaphors, and signs are corporate, and the basic unit of ethical meaning is the Body, the community. Israel experiences covenantal fidelity as a people, and the People of God is a collective - not merely an aggregate of individual persons, each doing [or believing] his or her own thing, but a body. In the Bible, God elects the People of Israel as a body. He sustains them as a body. And, finally, he redeems them as a body.

And Bishop Wilson adds this clarification:

If we think of ourselves as isolated persons dealing with God separately, we shall always be in intellectual trouble. When we learn to consider ourselves as parts of a corporate society, we shall see how the Creed serves the Body of which we are members. The members come and go, but the Body lives on in order to produce and nourish new members.

Along with the corporate character of the Christian faith, Bishop Wilson reminds us that the faith of the Church is bigger than any one of us. And for that reason the Church's faith transcends our capacity to fully comprehend. So even as the creeds protect the orthodox faith of the Church, they also preserve the mystery of that faith. Jettisoning, revising, or replacing the historic, catholic creeds of the Church risks changing the Christian faith into some other faith, and reducing the mystery of the Christian faith to something more "manageable," politically correct, and sectarian.

Evangelism in an Age of Extreme Moral Individualism

2011-09-13T16:23:00.000-05:00

In an op-ed piece entitled "If It Feels Right," David Brooks writes about interviews with young adults around the United States conducted by a team of sociologists under the direction of Christian Smith. The research team write about their work and its results in Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood. Here's part of what Brooks writes in response:

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.

Add to the problem of "extreme moral individualism" the reality that more Americans are tailoring religion to fit their needs, and the Church faces daunting challenges when it comes to the work of evangelism. For even when done in ways that avoid fire-and-brimstone guilt trips, proclaiming by word and example the Good News of God in Christ at least implicitly suggests that our moral individualism is not enough. We need authentic community. We need shared practices that move us beyond ourselves to serve a world in need. We need Someone beyond ourselves to whom we are called to be in accountable relationship. We need transformation.

I think many people sense how deeply they need this. How can the Church help them articulate that need? And how can we invite them into a place where God's grace can touch them in those places that need forgiveness, healing, direction, and purpose? Those aren't easy questions to answer when the culture makes it seem obvious that evading the call to embrace life-changing moral demands in favor of private judgment is the pathway to true fulfillment.

In his book In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in An Age of Diminished Christianity, R. R. Reno speaks to this problem by offering a descriptive and pejorative critique of the cultural landscape dominated by moral individualism and the spiritual-but-not-religious mindset. He writes:

We live in an age in which the narrow way of discipleship is a scandal. We decry dogmatic conformity and claim to celebrate diversity. We covet novelty and make a cult of creativity. We have readily at hand any number of evasions of the narrow way. We imagine that we must distance ourselves from the apostolic tradition in order to be "open to the Holy Spirit." We beat away the claim of psalm and canticle by pretending that these inherited forms of prayer are not God's praise given to us but are expressions of the religious imaginations of pious ancients. We raise a smokescreen of ambiguity by claiming that a properly "incarnational theology" is open to God in all things and therefore we should not limit ourselves to things that are labeled "Christian." These slogans and many more are as easy as they are ubiquitous.

We articulate the same evasions in our moral lives. ... And in an age of "sensitive moral judgment" we mix and match Christian teachings with our moral intuitions. We want to pirouette across the stage of world history, retaining our worldly roles while genuflecting to the altar. We hide behind shibboleths about the "Anglican way" of Scripture, tradition, and reason as if those who preceded us in the faith were engaged in a great balancing act.

The challenge of moral individualism's evasion of shared practices, beliefs, and commitments is hardly found outside the Church alone. The flight from authority and truth that make claims on our lives and loyalties is very much inside the Church as well. To one degree or another, we all participate. And so we who are ecclesial insiders do well to resist temptations to look down our noses at the unchurched and the partly churched as though we are immune to making moral choices and taking theological positions largely on the basis of individual preference. Even when we rightly grasp the problems and challenges, we are not nearly as counter-cultural as we may like to believe. And so our efforts to faithfully proclaim the Gospel in word and example should be chastened by the humble awareness that we, too, need the forgiveness, grace, and guidance that only Jesus Christ can give.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on 9/11

2011-09-11T18:22:00.001-05:00

Bringing Each Day Captive to Christ Through the Daily Office

2011-09-07T16:15:00.001-05:00

Open the Book of Common Prayer to its first rites. There you will find a demand and promise of remarkable ambition: the unending cycle of daily prayer. The features of this daily prayer epitomize the spiritual drama of the Christian life, both in goal and in focus, for the ambition to mark each day grows out of a faith in Jesus Christ as the Alpha and Omega. We are to dwell in him, and to do so each day must brought captive to Christ.

We should not imagine that this ambition is optional or peripheral to the Christian life. Daily communal prayer, or what the Anglican tradition (following the lead of the larger Western tradition) calls the Daily Office, serves as the engine of intimacy. ...

An opening sentence for Morning Prayer expresses the need for daily prayer: "Watch, for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep" (Mark 13:35-36). We are warned, rightly, against our tendency to sleep-walk through the life of faith. Prayer morning and evening responds to the exhortations found in the book of Isaiah: "Awake, awake, put on your strength, O Zion! Put on your beautiful garments" (52:1). The Daily Office stands as the primary means by which the church might make us wakeful and watchful. It is in this sense an order of vigilance. The demand of the Daily Office echoes the word of Jesus who is speaking not only to Peter but also directly to us when he asks, "Are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour?" (Mark 14:37)

Yet this order is more than a spur or goad; it is also a consummating celebration, for the master of the house has come. "Who can fail to do you homage, Lord, and sing the praises of your name?" asks a canticle for Morning Prayer, itself drawn from the book of Revelation (15:4). ... The sweet honey of the Psalms nourishes, and the diadems of prayer, taken from Scripture and sanctified by centuries of use, glorify God. To awaken in prayer is to put on strength. For this reason the Daily Office is not only watchful and vigilant but receptive and doxological. The purposes of the Daily Office are pentecostal and adventine, as consummating as expectant. Awakened in prayer, we receive that which we hear. Eyes open, we do not just see; we get up and go with Jesus (cf. Mark 14:42). Our minds and hearts walk down pathways of ancient prayers, many of which defined the boundaries of Jesus' own religious practice in the first century. Thus do we live in Christ, and he in us.

~ R. R. Reno, In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith
in An Age of Diminished Christianity (2002)

The Creeds Preserve Mystery

2011-09-04T08:20:00.000-05:00

In a blog posting entitled "Creed and Mystery," Fr. Matt Gunter addresses the difficulty some people may have with the Creeds feeling "too definite" and thus dismissive of "a sense of mystery." Fr. Gunter rightly notes that "the Creeds actually 'preserve' the mystery from domestication while focusing our attention on the mystery within the context of revelation." He goes on to write:

The Creeds focus us on mystery within the context of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. There is plenty of mystery and much escapes our understanding. But, we are not left with nothing but guessing about God. The Creeds began as baptismal formulae and through baptism we are invited into the mystery of a God who is One, yet Threefold. We are invited into the mystery of a God who does not remain aloof, but became one with humanity and the dusty world through the Incarnation - for us and for our salvation. We are invited into the mystery of Jesus Christ who is, in a mystery beyond our comprehending, both human and divine. We are invited into the mystery of the forgiveness of sin. And so on.

Rather than constraining mystery, the Creeds, particularly the Nicene Creed, were conceived as means to preserve that mystery from the tendency to domesticate Christian faith in one way or another to make it less paradoxical or more intellectually comfortable. That is one way to understand the various heresies rejected by the Church. It was the heretics who in fact presumed to know more about the mystery of God than is prudent, not those who defended what came to be known as the “catholic” faith summarized in the Creeds. It was the heretics, not the orthodox, who insisted on resolving paradoxes like the Incarnation and the Triune character of the Godhead. The Creed is the Christian way into the the mystery of God.

Read it all.

I have increasingly come to understand the Nicene Creed less and less as a straight jacket that stifles critical thinking and kills the spirit and more and more as an opening into a whole world of meaning and purpose, and an invitation into the life of God.As coldly analytic and rational as it may sound, the Creed is actually a mystical opening into transforming relationship with the triune God.

The articles of the Creed touch on the mysteries at the heart of Christian faith. Putting mystery into words is, of course, awkward at best. The mysteries of God cannot be contained by rational explanations. But like a compass that always points north, the Nicene Creed points us in the right direction. The compass is not the destination just as the Creed is not God. But it would be much easier to get lost as to what is truly essential for reaching the goal of the Christian journey without it.

Perfect Freedom Through Serving God

2011-09-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

Few things evoke more fear and trembling among Episcopal seminarians than the General Ordination Examination. In seven three-hour essay questions administered over five days (shortly after the New Year of the seminarian's senior year), the GOEs cover the seven canonical areas of Holy Scripture, Church History, Christian Theology, Christian Ethics and Moral Theology, Studies in Contemporary Society, Liturgics and Church Music, and Theory and Practice Ministry. It's an exhausting week of writing.

Even though I did not attend the three years of seminary at Sewanee because of my work at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University, I was still required during my year of Anglican Studies at Sewanee to take the GOEs. Given the focus of my work in Vanderbilt's Graduate Department of Religion in the "Religions, Ethics, & Society" program, I recall some concern about how I would do in the canonical area of Holy Scripture. I was pleased to see that one of my highest scores was in this canonical area. I came across that GOE response while going through some old papers recently, and I thought I'd post it here for the heck of it.

Canonical area of Holy Scripture.

Limited Resources: Bible, Concordance, and Book of Common Prayer.

The Collect for Peace in the Prayer Book addresses God with the words "whose service is perfect freedom" (page 57) and "to serve you is prefect freedom" (page 99). The Prayer Book's understanding of freedom is deeply rooted in Scripture. This question asks you to analyze two biblical passages relating to these words of the Collect, and to reflect on their significance for Christian life today.

A. Address the following with reference to Exodus 19-20:

The context of these chapters within the book of Exodus.
The significance of the context for understanding these two chapters.
The themes of service and freedom as they are linked in these two chapters.

B. Address the following with reference to Matthew 5:17-48:

The context of this passage within the Gospel according to Matthew.
The significance of Exodus 19-20 for interpreting this passage.
How does the distinctive character of discipleship in Matthew 5:17-48 reflect the themes of service and freedom?

C. Using your exegetical work, show how service to God is prefect freedom for the contemporary Christian.

Part A
1. Chapters 19-20 of the book of Exodus narrate the Sinai theophany, the giving of the Decalogue to Moses on Mount Sinai, and Moses' giving of the law to the people of Israel. Positioned in the middle of the book, these two chapters form the heart and the turning point of the exodus story. In the crucible of the wilderness, Exodus 19-20 narrates the formation of a disparate group of former slaves into a people set apart by and for the will of God. Viewed in light of a general overview of the entire book of Exodus, as well as the particular events before and after chapters 19-20, one can discern an overall narrative structure. This structure moves from slavery to freedom through through the wilderness. The movement is accompanied by God's giving and the people receiving laws for the sake of serving God.

In broad strokes, chapters 1-18 of Exodus narrate the birth and the call of Moses as the leader of the enslaved Israelites, Moses' confrontation with the Pharaoh, the plagues sent by God on Pharaoh's house, the release of the Israelites and their escape from the Egyptian army through the Red Sea, and the beginnings of their long sojourn in the wilderness. Chapters 21-40 outline additional laws for the Israelites, instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant and the tabernacle, the calling of Aaron and his sons as priests in service to the Lord, the Israelites' apostasy in worshiping a golden calf, and the renewal of the covenant relationship with God.

2. The context of Exodus 19-20 is important for understanding the significance of these chapters. The overall context affirms the intrinsic connection between law and loyalty, service and freedom. A closer examination of the immediate context before and after chapters 19-20 underscores a central point of the book of Exodus: the intrinsic relationship between the Israelites' freedom, God's loving-kindness, and the requirements of God's law.

After the initial euphoria of escaping from the Egyptian army through the parted waters of the Red Sea, the Israelites face a number of crises. In particular, they face food and water deprivation (chapters 15-17), and they must contend with the hostile Amalekites (chapter 17). These incidents underscore a truth that many of the Israelites find difficult to accept: their new-found freedom entails hardship and suffering, the challenges of social cooperation, and the need for ongoing trust in and obedience to God. For example, when God shows Moses how to give the Israelites water in the wilderness of Shur, the text ties this gracious act of care to teh service God requires of the Israelites: "There the Lord made for them a statute and an ordinance and there he proved them [i.e., tested their faith]" (Exodus 15:25 RSV).

The chapters immediately following Exodus 19-20 recount additional laws for governing the Israelite community. In addition, detailed instructions for the liturgical and priestly service to God are provided. These chapters may seem odd in the context of a people living on the move in the wilderness. Perhaps they reflect the experience of the community at a later time when they have settled in the Promised Land. However, these chapters successfully underscore the centrality of obedience to law and service to God as the cornerstone of Israelite freedom. God liberated the Israelites, not for the sake of securing their autonomy, but for the sake of forming a people whose very identity lies in serving and worshiping God.

3. A closer examination of Exodus 19-20 not only confirms the intimate relationship between service and freedom established by the book as a whole; it also provides the theological legitimacy for this linkage. With respect to this linkage of service and freedom, God's words to Moses in 19:4-6 makes four important points clear. First, God's powerful act of liberation provides the foundation for the covenant relationship that Gods wants to solidify with Israel (v. 4). God is the initiating agent of freedom and relationship, not Moses or the Israelites. Secondly, the conditional structure of the covenant relationship outlined in verse 5 ("if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, [then] you shall be ...") demonstrates God's willingness to honor the newly granted freedom of the Israelites. Unlike slavery under Pharaoh, covenant with God entails a rejection of coercion in favor of the people's voluntary consent. Thirdly, God's liberation of Israel and His desire to live in covenant relationship with them demonstrates the extravagant and unmerited grace of God. Even though the whole earth belongs to God, He nevertheless chooses the Israelites from "among all peoples" as "my own possession" (v. 5). And finally, God explicitly links the Israelites' freedom to obedience and service. God has chosen and liberated the Israelites to serve as "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (v. 6).

God demonstrates that these words are not just empty rhetoric by allowing Moses to present the covenant offer to the elders of the people. The text makes clear that God does not coerce a relationship that links freedom to service. Rather, God honors the freedom of the Israelites to either accept or reject the covenant relationship. In response, the people voluntarily agree to do all that God speaks to them (cf. Exodus 19:8).

The Ten Commandments revealed to Israel in Exodus 20 further clarify the linkage of service and freedom constitutive of the covenant relationship. According to The Book of Common Prayer, the Ten Commandments teach two overriding duties: "our duty to God, and our duty to our neighbor" (p. 847). The Ten Commandments, in other words, form the cornerstone of moral meaning and moral order for Israel. As such, the commandments explicitly link the freedom given to the Israelites with the service God expects of them.

Service to God includes loving and obeying God, putting nothing in the place of God, showing respect for God in thought, word, and deed, and intentionally worshiping, praying, and studying God's ways on a regular basis (BCP, p. 847). Service to neighbor includes loving and honoring parents and other authority figures; respecting life by working for peace, cleansing our hearts of hatred and malice, and extending kindness to all of God's creatures; rightly acting on our bodily desires; acting towards others with honesty and fairness; truth-telling; and active resistance to the temptations of envy, greed, and jealousy (BCP, p. 848).

In short, the Ten Commandments underscore the teleological character of freedom. God gives the Israelites freedom so that they may rightly pursue the ends of serving God and their neighbors for God's sake. God's laws stipulate the goods and ends to which authentic freedom is to be ordered, and the wrongs freedom must shun. This means that Exodus does not view the obligations and service dictated by the law as alien to freedom. On the contrary, God's giving of laws to form the boundaries of covenant relationship is internal to the very meaning of freedom. The service of God, in other words, forms the very foundation for freedom.

Part B
1. The most immediate context for Matthew 5:17-48 is the section of this gospel traditionally referred to as the Sermon on the Mount (5:1-7:27). The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount comprise the charter "document" for life in the kingdom of heaven. As will be discussed below, the codification of Jesus' teachings in this section of Matthew's gospel provides a way to demonstrate the continuities between the Christian gospel and the formation of Israel as God's covenant people in the Old Testament. Instead of replacing the Jewish law, Jesus' teachings and deeds fulfill the law (5:17).

Looking at the broader context of the passage, the salvific deeds and proclamations of Jesus surround Matthew 5:17-48. Immediately prior to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus proclaims his central message: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). The call to "repent" is a call to return to the right way, suggesting that the people of Jesus' day had wandered from the right relationship required by God's covenant. Jesus then calls the first four disciples (4:18-22), preaches the gospel, and heals the infirmities of the people in Galilee (4:23-25). Jesus' words and deeds form "great crowds" of people, suggesting that God acts through him to reform, heal, and renew a covenant people (Matthew 4:25 RSV). As soon as the Sermon on the Mount concludes, Jesus immediately resumes his healing ministry by cleansing a leper (8:1-4), healing a centurion's servant (8:5-13), and healing Peter's mother-in-law (8:14-17). The overall context suggests God's work of calling people into relationship and restoring people to wholeness through the words and deeds of Jesus. Matthew's Jesus, in other words, incarnates the spirit of the divine law by freely responding to God and neighbor in words and deeds of love, trust, and truthfulness.

2. Exodus 19-20 provides an appropriate hermeneutic lens for interpreting Matthew 5:17-48. This is particularly due to the concern in Matthew for demonstrating the continuities between the gospel revealed in Jesus Christ and the ancient faith and practices of the Old Testament. The author and audience of Matthew's gospel were most likely Jewish Christians concerned about the place of Jewish law in their new faith. What was the significance and role of the law, and what had happened to the covenant, now that God's kingdom has come near in Jesus Christ? Were Christians liberated from the service requirements of the Jewish law?

Matthew's Jesus provides a clear and decisive answer to questions about the status of law in the Christian life: "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17 RSV). Jesus continues by noting that anyone who "relaxes one of the least of these commandments" and teaches others to do the same "shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven;" by contrast, persons who obey the commandments and teach others to do likewise will be greatest in the kingdom (Matthew 5:19 RSV). When Jesus exhorts his hearers to a righteousness beyond that of the scribes and the Pharisees, he makes it clear that treating the law as a collection of external rules heteronomously imposed from without represents a complete misunderstanding of the law. Such a view of the commandments severs the individual's freedom from the service that fulfills the law. Jesus wants to restore the wholeness and unity of service and freedom by teaching the commandments, not as authoritarian imperatives engraved on tablets of stone, but as the source of life-giving freedom and service engrafted on tablets of flesh (cf. Deuteronomy 11:18 & Proverbs 3:3).

Matthew's emphasis on the requisite interior dispositions for living in a covenant relationship of service to God and neighbor echoes themes that surface in Exodus 19-20. In particular, Matthew adopts the Exodus narrative's insistence that God's law is the foundation of life-giving freedom in community rather than an external burden. In addition, the Exodus narrative's teleological conception of freedom finds a place in Matthew's gospel. Jesus Christ has come in the flesh to fulfill the law for the same reason God liberated the Israelites: to empower persons to pursue the related ends of serving God and neighbor.

Just as Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the law from God, so, too, Jesus ascends the Mount of Olives to impart a right understanding of the law. Rhetorically, Matthew 5:21-48 is structured as follows: "You have heard it said ... but I say to you." Instead of abrogating what "was said to the men of old," this rhetorical device allows Matthew to show how Jesus reveals the inner spirit of obedience to God's commandments (Matthew 5:21 RSV). Within this rhetorical structure, Jesus cites specific commandments revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus 20 (as well as other parts of Jewish law). In the process, Matthew's Jesus reveals how true obedience to the commandments revealed to Moses in Exodus 20 requires an even more radical form of service to God and neighbor than even the best contemporary interpreters of the law could imagine.

Two examples of Jesus' invocation of the Ten Commandments will suffice. Exodus 20:13 reads, "You shall not murder." Jesus teaches that it is insufficient obedience to simply refrain from murder. Fulfilling this commandment requires persons to expunge the roots anger from their hearts (Matthew 5:21-22). In Exodus 20:14 one reads: "You shall not commit adultery." Jesus teaches a more stringent obedience to this commandment than simply refraining from the act of adultery. He says "every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27 RSV).

3. In his words and deeds, Jesus fulfills God's law in Matthew's gospel. In his teachings on the law in Matthew 5:17-48, Jesus exhorts his followers to do likewise in this concluding exhortation: "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). Implied within this statement is a vision of Christian discipleship consistent with Exodus 19-20 in its insistence on the unity of service and freedom.

The concluding exhortation of Matthew 5:17-48 echoes the Old Testament command of the Lord: "Be holy, for I am holy" (Leviticus 11:44 RSV). In addition to the mysterium tremendum of God's presence (revealed in clouds and thunder on Mount Sinai in Exodus 19), God's holiness entails loving-kindness and justice. By giving the Ten Commandments as the foundation for the covenant relationship, God teaches the Israelites that, in their words and deeds, they are to grow in the image and likeness of the One who liberated them. God's character must become Israel's character. God freely chooses to live in covenant relationship with the Israelites, serving them with his mighty acts of grace and power. So, too, the Israelites are to freely serve God and one another. Likewise, as Jesus teaches in Matthew's gospel, Christians are to observe not merely the externals of the law but its spirit as well. In doing so they will grow into the image and likeness of the God who calls them into covenant. This a God "who makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45 RSV). As followers of Jesus Christ - the One who perfectly incarnates the law of God's love for all creation - Christians must do no less.

Going beyond the merely negative connotation of not doing something wrong, Jesus insists that obedience to the commandments must convey positive, life-affirming connotations. Instead of an attempt to avoid unpleasant consequences by keeping things squared with God, a right understanding of living by God's commandments points to the cultivation of those virtues of character that rightly dispose persons to freely give themselves to service of God and neighbor. Jesus wants persons to transcend rote obedience by joyfully and freely giving themselves in service to God and the world.

Part C
Exegesis of Exodus 19-20 and Matthew 5:17-48 provides biblical support for the theological claim that serving God entails perfect freedom. In addition, it provides ways for seeing how this can be true for Christians today.

The Israelites discovered that liberation from external coercion was only the beginning of their new life of freedom. Lacking shared goods and ends, the Israelites' new-found freedom would have dissipated into the aimless wandering of a mere collection of individuals who would likely have ended up under the dominion of another imperial power and/or losing their divine calling by assimilation into an alien society. The gift of the law gave the Israelites a set of moral standards for exercising their new freedom in service to the common good of "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" set apart for the service of God (Exodus 19:6 RSV). Likewise, Jesus' call to return to the wholeness of the law by cultivating the necessary dispositions and virtues for rightly serving God and neighbor underscores the internal connection between human freedom and service.

In both Exodus and Matthew, Holy Scripture affirms a teleological conception of freedom directed towards the end of serving God and neighbor. Somewhat paradoxically, scripture teaches that those who find true freedom are also the ones willing to give up their autonomy by freely accepting the reciprocal rights and responsibilities of life in community. In both the Old and New Testaments, scripture unapologetically affirms loyalty to the realization of God's will in a covenant community as perfect freedom. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, this is a counter-cultural proposition. It flies in the face of an individualistic, consumer culture that idolizes freedom as liberation from all external restraints and relations for the sake of self-actualization and self-fulfillment.

It is precisely in its counter-cultural implications that the biblical connection between service of God and perfect freedom finds its relevance for contemporary Christians. From a biblical perspective, the Western obsession with autonomous freedom comes dangerously close to equating liberty with license. Lacking an adequate sense of shared purpose and acknowledgment of ends for which we live together, human life degenerates into a series of trivial pursuits. In an age characterized by unprecedented powers of technical control, the sovereign self has remarkable freedom to exercise its autonomy while lacking much of a self through which to be autonomous.

The biblical message provides an alternative vision of freedom. The message turns the sovereign self on its head by exalting the covenant community as the locus of the good life. The biblical message paradoxically insists that human beings find self-fulfillment only by abandoning the search for self-fulfillment through selfless service to God and neighbor. By demonstrating in word and deed the truth that service and freedom are interconnected, contemporary Christians who serve God by serving their churches and their needy neighbors provide powerful testimony to the relevance of the gospel for a world enthralled by the idol of the sovereign individual.

Taking on the "Spiritual but Not Religious" Mindset

2011-08-31T10:07:00.001-05:00

The Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniel is the senior minister of the First Congregational Church (UCC) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. In a recent reflection entitled "Spiritual but Not Religious? Stop Boring Me," Daniel takes on the flight from commitment to anything or anyone in particular other than one's own subjective preferences and desires that passes for "spirituality" among many in our culture. My response is to exclaim: "Hammer hits nail on head!"

On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is "spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo.

Next thing you know, he's telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and . . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet?

Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories and throughout our deep tradition.

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.

Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.

Rowan Williams: "We Need the Creeds"

2011-08-28T16:33:00.001-05:00

In response to the question, "Can finite human beings say true things about an infinite God?", Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams offers a nuanced response that correctly notes the limits of human reason and language while faithfully upholding the doctrinal content and normative boundaries of the Christian faith.

How refreshing it is to hear the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion strongly affirm "we need the creeds and we need to have a place to stand" and, with reference to the Nicene Creed, state that "we can say, yes, this is how God has shown Himself and not be embarrassed about that." And how heartening it is to hear him clearly and unequivocally state "when I say that the Savior is of one substance with the Father, I mean exactly what I say, and I believe it to be true and I believe my life depends on it." Amen!

Listen to the Archbishop's response and read a transcript of his answer below.

"Can finite human beings say true things about an infinite God?"

It’s a really interesting question. And I find it fascinating that in the early church in exactly the same era when people are beginning to shape creeds and formulae, they’re also beginning to say quite extravagant things about how little we know about God. So it’s not entirely a new tension. But I would say it’s a tension not a contradiction. When I say the Creed, when I say the Nicene Creed – and I say “of one one substance with the Father,” “the Holy Ghost who proceeds from the Father” or “from the Father and Son” and so on – I believe I’m speaking the truth. I believe I’m telling the truth about God, that what God has shown us of Himself is best, is truthfully, expressed in those words.

And at the same time I know that whatever has been said is not adequate, it’s not the whole story. So I think in very simple terms true as far as it goes is what I’d have to say. Which doesn’t mean that it’s ever going to be shown to be untrue, you need to revise it or say, “Well, I’m not so sure about that.” On the contrary, when I say that the Savior is of one substance with the Father, I mean exactly what I say, and I believe it to be true and I believe my life depends on it. And if you press me and say “So what exactly does that mean?”, I say, well, God knows exactly what it means. But, to use a formula I’ve sometimes found helpful here, that’s the least silly thing I can think of saying about this, it’s the least inadequate way of talking about it. It will take me a huge step forward in understanding the truth and it will project me further on that journey into the fullness of the truth.

So I think we need the creeds and we need to have a place to stand. And we can say, yes, this is how God has shown Himself and not be embarrassed about that. But the worst thing is when we think that the creeds or any other formulation just lot got up and say, done that, we’ve understood that, and now we move on.

It’s a bit like saying well, you see the footprint of a large animal in the forest. It’s a real mark, it’s made a real difference, you can tell a great deal of truth from that, there it is when you’ve said that you’ve said something true and accurate. But you haven’t seen the whole animal. We at least have an advantage there, we have seen the face of God in Jesus Christ.

All our Christian language is an attempt to say something quite new, quite unexpected, gratuitous has happened. We couldn’t have predicted it, it didn’t come from us. And we’re feeling our way around that great mystery that’s been put down in the middle of us.

~ Rowan Williams

The Chief Premise of Christian Teaching

2011-08-27T06:49:00.000-05:00

"That Christ is now alive remains the chief premise of Christian teaching. Lacking that premise, Christianity is easily turned into tedious moral obligations, pretentious sounding historical research, unsufferably vague speculative philosophy, or desperate self-help psychology."

~ Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity (2009)

One Proper Anxiety for Christians

2011-08-26T10:57:00.001-05:00

"Finally, brothers and sisters, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus Christ that, as you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God (as, in fact, you are doing), you should do so more and more" (1 Thessalonians 4:1).

There is only one calamity for a Christian, this being disobedience to God. All the other things, such as loss of property, exile, peril of life, Paul does not even consider a grievance at all. And that which all dread, departure from this life to the other world – this is to him sweeter than life itself. For as when one has climbed to the top of a cliff and gazes on the sea and those who are sailing upon it, he sees some being washed by the waves, others running upon hidden rocks, some hurrying in one direction, others being driven in another, like prisoners, by the force of the gale. Many are actually in the water, some of them using their hands only in the place of a boat and a rudder, and many drifting along upon a single plank or some fragment of the vessel, others floating dead. He witnesses a scene of manifold and various disasters. Even so he who is engaged in the service of Christ draws himself out of the turmoil and stormy billows of life and takes his seat upon secure and lofty ground. For what position can be loftier or more secure than that in which a man has only one anxiety, “How he ought to please God?”

~ St. John Chrysostom

Are Bishops Really Necessary?

2011-08-25T13:54:00.000-05:00

Or, as Fr. Jonathan asks: "Can There Be a Church Without a Bishop?"

Drawing on classical Anglicanism, Fr. Jonathan answers that question like this:

Bishops are not simply a nicety but a necessity. ... The grace which saves us comes to us by Christ alone in His sacrifice upon the cross, but the way we receive that grace is through His Word preached and His sacraments celebrated. The authority to be Ministers of Word and Sacrament is left to the apostles alone, who pass it on to the bishops alone, who share it with the presbyters in a limited fashion but always with reference back to their own apostolic ministry. In the absence of bishops, the Church ceases to be the Church.

So what about Christians who do not live under the historic episcopate? Are such Christians living without grace and apart from truth? Fr. Jonathan offers this in response:

... in churches where episcopacy has been abolished or never existed in the first place, there is an absence of an essential element of the Church, that ministry through which Christ promised to provide grace to His people. This does not mean that there is no grace in those churches, but rather that the grace that is found there is given by way of concession, by the mercy of Christ, rather than through the normal means that Our Lord has established.

... if there is grace present within a church that has denied episcopacy, it is being given through extraordinary means. This is somewhat akin to the question of whether or not a person can be saved without Baptism. Sure, God can give a person that grace, through an extraordinary mercy, but that does not mean that it is ok for us to not baptize or to simply characterize Holy Baptism as a symbolic gesture and nothing more.

Read it all.

William Reed Huntington was a 19th Century Episcopal priest whose book The Church-Idea: An Essay Towards Unity (1870) laid the groundwork for the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (which, as Fr. Jonathan notes, " remains the standard in the Anglican Communion for assessing whether or not the marks of the Church are present in any given community of Christians"). In The Church-Idea, Huntington identifies four things as "the absolutely essential features of the Anglican position" on what is necessary for the Church to be the Church:

The Holy Scriptures as the Word of God,
The Primitive Creeds as the Rule of Faith,
The two Sacraments ordained by Christ himself, and
The Episcopate as the key-stone of Governmental Unity.

Huntington argues that the episcopate provides “an essential condition of oneness in the Church.” As a warrant for this claim, Huntington appeals to the principle of headship discernible in the orders of creation. From the constitution of families to nation-states to churches, headship provides the organizing principle. “Headship is God’s law,” Huntington argues, for “Double and triple-headed creatures are monsters that exist only in fiction, or, if born, are only born to die.” And he continues: “From its fountain in the bosom of the Holy Trinity,” the principle of headship “flows downward through all the ranges of created life.” Grounded in the Trinitarian life of God, the principle of headship provides theological justification for hierarchical social organization because this principle is inscribed in the very orders of creation. Based on this reasoning, every social institution requires embodiment in a central figurehead.

In addition to purported laws of nature, Huntington also defends the necessity of the episcopate by appealing to antiquity. Since the apostolic age, the principle of headship has taken form in the episcopate. This gives the episcopate “a strong historical presumption in its favor.” Huntington believes that this presumption is so central that “Anglicanism stands or falls” by it. He hammers this point home in strong language:

… if the Episcopate have no more claim on our regard than any other form of ecclesiastical polity, then the sooner Anglicans in America shut their church-doors and burn their prayer-books, the better; for they are only adding, upon insufficient grounds, one more to the sectarian divisions under which the land groans. But if they have in the Episcopate that which links them by an actual historical connection to the Church of the primitive times, then ought they to thank God and take courage, and do all they can by the removal of misapprehension and disabilities and needless partition walls of prejudice, to make their inheritance available for the enrichment of the whole scattered flock of Christ.

Are bishops really necessary for the Church to be the Church in her fullness? Fr. Jonathan and William Reed Huntington stand within the mainstream of the Anglican tradition in responding to that question with an unequivocal "Yes!"

The Decisive Question

2011-08-22T01:14:00.001-05:00

In the Gospel reading assigned for yesterday (Pentecost 10, Proper 16, Year A), Jesus asks the most important question anyone can ever answer when he says to his disciples, "But who do you say that I am?" (Matthew 16:15)

How each of us answers that question is critical, for Jesus is not merely one proclaimer of truth among other proclaimers. Jesus is the Truth. And Jesus is the Game-Changer.

It's easy to answer Jesus' question by giving a version of the disciples' first response: "Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets" (Matthew 16:14). We have versions of this response today, with figures like Spong, Ehrman, Borg, Crossan, and Pagels providing "scholarly" warrants for suspending commitment to Jesus Christ as the fully human and fully divine Lord and Savior.

But if, like Peter, we decisively answer Jesus' question by saying, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God," it will change our lives in ways we could never imagine and take us to places we might never have dreamed of going.

The passage below comes from Thomas C. Oden's Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology. In it, Oden draws on the ancient ecumenical consensus concerning Jesus' identity to pose anew the challenge of the Gospel question.

When we meet the Jesus of the [biblical] text, he is constantly calling us to a decision. It is a decision about who he is. Historical scholarship wants to suspend judgment while these facts are being examined. Yet the decisive question persists in the New Testament texts: Is Jesus really the expected One?

The Jesus of the texts presses us closely: you must decide, yes or no. The decisive skandalon of the Gospel question is: Does the evidence show that Jesus indeed is the Anointed One? Only in facing this question does the critical inquiry into Jesus begin. ...

The evidence is personal - a real person embodying the Word of God to humanity: "I am the way" (John 14:6). "He who is the way does not lead us into by-paths or trackless wastes. He who is the truth does not mock us with lies. He who is the life does not betray us into delusions which are death. He himself has chosen these winning names to indicate the methods that he has appointed for our salvation. As the way, he will guide us to the truth. As the truth, he will establish us in the life" [Hilary of Poitiers].

A decision must be faced by each hearer. It must be made now. Why? There is no more time remaining before God's own coming. Since God's coming is now, all are called urgently to repent and trust in God's emergent rule. To delay is to say no.

~ Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity (2009)

The Basis of True Religion

2011-08-19T11:53:00.001-05:00

The appointed Gospel reading in the daily Eucharistic lectionary for today is Matthew 22:34-40.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, " 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Jesus' response to the Pharisees is sometimes called the Summary of the Law or the Great Commandment. It reveals the basis of true religion.

True religion starts with loving God, not in some kind of sentimental, feel-good sort of way, but in total commitment of heart, soul, and mind. And so Jesus cites Deuteronomy 6:5 as the greatest and first commandment. That verse from Deuteronomy, of course, is part of the Shema, the basic creed of Judaism. "It means," notes William Barclay, "that to God we must give a total love, a love which dominates our emotions, a love which directs our thoughts, and a love which is the dynamic of our actions."

The second commandment Jesus cites is Leviticus 19:18. Only when we love our neighbor in concrete acts of justice and compassion does our love for God become real and not merely an abstract idea. As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount: "You will know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16).

In Basic Judaism, Milton Steinberg offers thoughts that are relevant for this passage from Matthew. He writes:

... basic to Judaism is a twofold affirmation concerning God on the one hand and man on the other; the former being that a man shall seek to know God, love Him, revere Him, and do His will; the latter that a man shall love his fellow men also, dealing with them in righteousness and mercy.

What is more, the duality of the attitudes as to God and man is more seeming than real. For to Judaism on love is the obverse and consequence of the other. Piety toward God is meaningless unless it induces compassion toward human beings. (Can one genuinely revere the Creator and not His creation, the Spirit but not Its manifestation?) By the same token, every act of righteousness and mercy reveals the Divinity [image of God] resident within the doer and implies the recognition of an equal Divinity [image of God] touching the person done by.

The simultaneous love of God and man: here is Judaism's first postulate and final inference, its point of departure and its destination, the root of it and its fruitage.

This passage from Matthew shows us just how deeply and thoroughly Jewish Jesus was. And by laying out the basis of true religion in Jewish terms, it also serves as a powerful reminder that the roots of our faith as Christians cannot be torn from its Jewish soil without withering and dying on the vine. Judaism's first postulate and final inference ground Christian faith and mission. And by perfectly keeping these two commandments, Jesus the Jew from Nazareth embodies the point of departure and the destination of true religion. Indeed, Jesus is the incarnation of the Great Commandment.

Some final thoughts on this passage from St. Cyril of Alexandria:

Therefore the first commandment teaches every kind of godliness. For to love God with the whole heart is the cause of every good. The second commandment includes the righteous acts we do toward other people. The first commandment prepares the way for the second and in turn is established by the second. For the person who is grounded in the love of God clearly also loves his neighbor in all things himself. The kind of person who fulfills these two commandments experiences all of the commandments.

May God give us the grace to fulfill these two commandments, that we may experience the blessings of all the commandments.

He Is Our Life

2011-08-18T10:20:00.000-05:00

“Christianity is of course the life of Christ: and as such it is necessarily a life like Christ’s. But, speaking exactly, it is distinctly not a life like Christ’s in us, but the life of Christ in us: not a life resembling His, but Himself our life. Jesus Christ certainly stands to us in the relation of example, but even more distinctly not in that of mere example, but of source, and power, and of content and matter our life. He is our life ....”

~ William Porcher DuBose

Confirmation is Not About Membership

2011-08-17T15:09:00.004-05:00

Even though the current Book of Common Prayer has been in use for thirty two years, one occasionally still hears Episcopalians talk about confirmation as the way to "join the church." For example, I recently came across this statement on a parish website:

"Confirmation is also the official vehicle by which a person joins the Episcopal Church."

In light of 1979 Prayer Book's theology of baptism, this is not accurate. Note, for instance, this sentence at the top of page 298 (emphasis added):

"Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ's Body the Church."

"Full initiation" means that nothing else is required for membership. A valid baptism is sufficient.

I note also the following statement from the Prayer Book's catechism:

"Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ's Body, the Church ..." (p. 858, emphasis added).

It's hard to imagine a clearer statement of how one becomes a member of the Universal Church.

Moving from membership in the Universal Church to membership in the Episcopal Church, the following canon is crystal clear:

"All persons who have received the Sacrament of Holy Baptism with water in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, whether in this Church or in another Christian Church, and whose Baptisms have been duly recorded in this Church, are members thereof." ~ Title I, Canon 17, Sec. 1 (a)

The Episcopal Church maintains that all persons baptized with water in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit are members of Christ's Body the Church. And all such persons whose baptisms are duly recorded in an Episcopal parish register are members of that one part of Christ's Body called the Episcopal Church.

So confirmation is not about membership. Instead, as the catechism puts it, "Confirmation is the rite in which we express a mature commitment to Christ, and receive strength from the Holy Spirit through prayer and the laying on of hands by a bishop" (BCP, p. 860). Or, to put it another way, confirmation is about those who were baptized at an early age making a mature public affirmation of faith and receiving strength to take on the commitment to the responsibilities of their baptism (cf. BCP, p. 412).

This is all clearly laid out in the Prayer Book and the canons. So it's surprising when Episcopalians don't seem to know it!

The Deepest Need of Humanity

2011-08-14T06:00:00.002-05:00

"The deepest need of humanity is for salvation from sin. This is the quandary to which the gospel speaks. The church that forgets the gospel of salvation is finally not the church but its echo. The church that becomes focused upon maintaining itself instead of the gospel becomes a dead branch of the living vine. The church is imperiled when it becomes intoxicated with the spirit of its particular age, committed more to serve the gods of that age than the God of all ages."

~ Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity:
A Systematic Theology (2009)

Jeremy Taylor on Anglican Orthodoxy

2011-08-13T08:54:00.000-05:00

In honor of his Feast Day today, here are some thoughts on Anglican Orthodoxy from Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore.

"For its Doctrine, [the Church of England] is certain it professes the belief of all that is written in the Old and New Testament, all that which is in the three creeds, the Apostolical, the Nicene, and that of Athanasius, and whatsoever was decreed in the four general councils or in any other truly such; and whatsoever was condemned in these our church hath legally declared to be heresy. And upon these accounts above four whole ages of the church went to heaven; they baptized all their catechumens into this faith, their hopes of heaven were upon this and a good life, their saints and martyrs lived and died in this alone, they denied communion to none that professed this faith. 'This is the catholic faith,' so saith the creed of Athanasius; and unless a company of men have power to alter the faith of God, whosoever live and die in this faith are entirely catholic and Christian. So the Church of England hath the same faith without dispute that the church had for four or five hundred years, and therefore there could be nothing wanting here to saving faith if we live according to our belief."

~ from a "Letter to a Gentlewoman Seduced to the Church of Rome" (1657)

"Every Minister ought to be careful that he never expound Scriptures in publick contrary to the known sence of the Catholick Church, and particularly of the Churches of England and Ireland, nor introduce any Doctrine against any of the four first General Councils; for these, as they are measures of truth, so also of necessity; that is, as they are safe, so they are sufficient; and besides what is taught by these, no matter of belief is necessary to salvation ..."

~ Rules and Advices to the Clergy (1672)

Hat tip to Catholicity and Covenant for the second quote.

The Best Awful Sermon

2011-08-08T13:47:00.004-05:00

This is hilarious!

Flawed Creed

2011-08-06T16:39:00.004-05:00

Recently, in a service of Morning Prayer, the following "Affirmation of Faith" was used in place of the Apostles' Creed:

We believe in God,
the creator of all life and beauty,
who blesses our journey.

We believe in Jesus Christ,
who lived as a friend and savior to all he met
as he traveled the countryside,
who ate and laughed,
wept and celebrated with people in all walks of life.

We believe in the Holy Spirit,
who rides on the breeze in the country
touching all with gentleness and love,
who strengthens our commitment,
who offers us eternal hope.

We believe in the church,
which stands open to all travelers
and bears witness to the everlasting love of God.

I don't know who actually wrote this "creed," but it comes from Kate Wyles' book From Shore to Shore: Liturgies, Litanies and Prayers from Around the World. I find it deeply flawed. I'll touch on just a few of the reasons why.

Affirming belief in a God "who blesses our journey" makes God sound more like a life coach than the God revealed in scripture. And this creed also assumes that our journey is, in fact, worth blessing. The Church cannot and should not affirm all viewpoints and interests, and God does not bless everybody's journey.

The section about Jesus reveals the most about this "Affirmation of Faith" precisely by what it does not affirm. For starters, it speaks of Jesus only in the past tense. That makes sense, because there's nothing here about the Resurrection (not even in a watered-down, "spiritual" sense). Also missing are any affirmations of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, the Ascension, the Second Coming, and the Final Judgment. All of which begs the question: why Jesus and not some other prophetic figure from the past?

The Jesus of this "Affirmation of Faith" sounds like a really great guy. But he is not affirmed as a living Lord. Luke Timothy Johnson gets it right: "To consider Jesus simply as a figure of the past means to consider Jesus not from the perspective of a Christian but from that of one who stands outside Christian conviction."

I also note that in this "Affirmation of Faith" the Holy Spirit has been "niceified," allowed only to be gentle and loving without convicting anyone of sin. But since there's no affirmation of the forgiveness of sins here (and thus an acknowledgment of a serious problem with human nature for which we need forgiveness and healing), that omission makes perfect sense. We're okay just as we are.

It's good to state that the Church is "open to all travelers." We certainly want to be inviting and welcoming. But as with the opening part about a God who indiscriminately "blesses our journey," this "Affirmation of Faith" embraces a half-truth. Yes, it's true that everyone is accepted in Christ. But it's also true that no one is affirmed as they are.

I think this "Affirmation of Faith" goes well beyond what H. Richard Niebuhr described as liberal Protestantism's devotion to "a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom with judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Indeed, it strikes me as post-Christian. So why would anybody want to use it in Christian worship?

Christian Hope as Faith in the Divine Sovereignty of Sacrificial Love

2011-08-02T10:36:00.000-05:00

"As Christ is past, present and future, so also is the Church as it rejoices in the anticipation of the goal. 'It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that we shall see him as he is.' Thus the Church lives in hope, and Christian hope rests not upon signs that things seem to be going well, but upon its faith in the divine sovereignty of sacrificial love. So we live in hope both of the goal of heaven and of the coming of the Kingdom of God in this world, and hope is stirred by the presence of the Holy Spirit who is in the Pauline teaching both the first fruits of the heavenly harvest and the promise of the heavenly treasure. So sharing in the grief of Jesus, the Church may also share in his joy. There is the joy of living in the awareness of another world, as we look to the things that are unseen. There is joy too in the present experience of the transfiguring of suffering .... When our grief becomes not ours alone but a grief shared with Jesus, then the joy of Jesus becomes ours."

~ Michael Ramsey, Jesus and the Living Past (1980)

Canterbury Letters to Geneva George (15): Secondary Causes

2011-07-31T21:17:00.000-05:00

Below is the fifteenth installment in the series I'm publishing on behalf of a friend entitled "Canterbury Letters to Geneva George." Before reading and responding with comments, please be sure to read my introduction and the author's introduction to this series at the first posting entitled "Canterbury Letters to Geneva George (1): The Via Media." And also read the other postings in the "Canterbury Letters to Geneva George" series here.

Dear Geneva George,

We seem to be a lot closer in our thinking than I realized. At least, that’s what I thought until I got to your discussion on the third page about secondary causation. You say you agree that God is not the author of evil in the sense that He uses secondary means to accomplish his decrees. But that is not the sense that I meant it when I said God is not the author of evil, so you are affirming agreement with a position I didn’t advocate.

Before I explain why I didn’t use the popular secondary causation argument, let me make sure I understand your terminology correctly. If I am hammering a nail into a piece of wood, I am the primary cause of the nail going into the wood, while the hammer is the instrumental or secondary cause, right? Similarly, for all of God’s decrees, He is the primary cause while the instruments or means by which He accomplishes those decrees are the secondary causes. Have I understood?

Assuming I have understood correctly, here’s why I don’t find that explanation particularly helpful. If the statement that God is not the author of evil means merely that God determines evil through secondary causation, then by the same logic we would have to say that God is not the author of salvation, since He uses secondary causation in the work of redemption, such as the work of missions and preaching the Word (Romans 10:14). During your discussion of evil you said that God does not get the credit for what happens through secondary means, so it hardly seems consistent to reverse this when we are dealing with the secondary means leading to salvation. You can’t have it both ways and are going to have to pick.

I looked up the Jonathan Edwards passage you referenced and I was surprised to find that most of it is actually 100% consistent with everything I argued, particular where he writes:

“But if, by ‘the author of sin,’ is mean the permitter, or not a hinderer of sin; and, at the same time, a disposer of the state of events, in such a manner, for wise, holy, and most excellent ends and purposes, that sin, if it be permitted or not hindered, will most certainly and infallibly follow: I say, if this be all that is meant, by being the author of sin, I do not deny that God is the author of sin (though I dislike and reject the phrase, as that which by use and custom is apt to carry another sense). And, I do not deny, that God being thus the author of sin, follows from what I have laid down; and, I assert, that it equally follows from the doctrine which is maintained by most of the Arminian divines.”

If that is all you meant, and all that Jonathan Edwards was saying, then there would be no difficulty. The problem is that this is not all that has been said, as I showed in my previous letters.

Blessings,

Canterbury Chris

Conservative and Radical

2011-07-29T13:45:00.001-05:00

"Every Christian should be both conservative and radical: conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it."

~ John Stott

Anglicanism's Magisterial Authority

2011-07-28T17:15:00.001-05:00

A couple of years ago I published a piece entitled "How Much is 2 Plus 2?" in which I offered responses to troubling things I've heard from some "progressive" Episcopalians when it comes to doctrine and ecclesial authority. Here's an example of what I've heard someone say:

To claim that there is such a thing as 'the faith of the Church' and that the Bible, the creeds, and the liturgies of the Prayer Book embody that faith is merely a way of trying to impose one's own views on other people. The Episcopal Church doesn't have teaching that's binding on anyone. To say otherwise is to endorse indoctrination, not inclusiveness.

Fr. Jonathan of The Conciliar Anglican has written a piece entitled "The Anglican Way: Magisterial Worship" which refutes such nonsense. Here's a sample:

... classical Anglicans share more in common with Orthodoxy than with our sister churches in the west. We have no specifically Anglican confession. We do not narrow our doctrine down on every last matter but only on those matters where the Holy Spirit has definitively spoken in the Church through the Scriptures and the Fathers. We allow mystery to be, well, mysterious. There is, however, an important and distinctly western element to the way that we live this out that separates us from our Eastern brethren. We have a magisterial authority.
The word magisterial comes from the Latin for “magistrate” or “master.” That which is magisterial is that which conveys the mind of the master. It is official and authoritative. Magisterial authority within the Church is that which is exercised to provide us with the framework of both how to understand our Christian faith and how to live good Christian lives. In the Church of Rome, this function is performed largely by edicts of the Pope. In traditional Reformation Protestantism, it is the work of the confessions. Some more radical Protestants deny the need for any magisterial authority beyond the Bible itself, though in practice this usually means that the whims of individual preachers and teachers fill in the gap. For Anglicans, magisterial authority rests in the Book of Common Prayer. ...
Anglicanism holds scripture in the highest place of authority and yet acknowledges that scripture has to be interpreted from within the life of the Church to be properly understood. While there is more than one way to pass down this apostolic faith from one generation to the next, liturgy is by far the best. This is because liturgy is not simply didactic. Liturgy is participatory. Liturgy is dynamic and relational. When we read the words of a confession or listen to a good talk by a learned Christian preacher, we may learn many good things about God, but when we participate in liturgy we actually encounter God. We learn who He is and who we are in relation to Him by worshiping Him, hearing His Word proclaimed, and receiving His grace through the Sacraments. ...

... the Prayer Book has always been for Anglicans the highest source of authority for teaching and understanding the faith of the scriptures. The liturgy is not just an expression of our faith but the teacher of that faith itself. It forms us in our faith, and as such we are called to submit ourselves to it.

Fr. Jonathan also notes what can happen when we fail to submit to Anglicanism's magisterial authority:

It is no accident that the unraveling of traditional faith in some parts of the Anglican Communion has coincided with the introduction of new liturgies that obscure both the beauty and truth of classical Anglican worship. Our liturgy is our center. When it goes, everything else eventually will go with it.

And again:

At some point along the line—and it really would require some careful study to be able to discern when—we stopped thinking of the Prayer Book as magisterial, as an authority that we submit ourselves to, and started thinking of it as a creative outlet for the theological whims of the moment. Hence, we see turbulent efforts at liturgical revisions marking the last thirty years every bit as much as we see a breakdown in The Episcopal Church of belief in the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Alternative liturgies abound today, each seemingly less historical and more heretical than the last, but even these do not seem to be placing limits on the clergy in many dioceses who feel free to dispense with authorized liturgies altogether and create their own from scratch. Letting go of the liturgy has meant letting go of the faith.

I note that some of the ways of letting go of the faith through illegal liturgical revision are downright silly and irreverent while others signal a renunciation of our core identity in favor of accommodation to religious pluralism and cultural relativism.

Fr. Jonathan has written a very fine piece, so read it all.

The motto “Praying Shapes Believing” sums up the importance of liturgy or common prayer as the means for passing on the faith of the Church and as the glue that holds the Church together. But there seems to be a breakdown in the connection between the liturgy and what people actually believe and how they are formed. So as part of a more proactive focus on doctrine (particularly as laid out in the historic creeds), we would do well to use the Prayer Book as a central resource for teaching. In addition to better education and formation as Anglican Christians, that might also address the problem of why so many feel the need to tinker with the Prayer Book.

William Reed Huntington on Reconciliation, Ecumenism, and Catholicity

2011-07-27T14:05:00.000-05:00

Today is the feast day of Episcopal priest William Reed Huntington (1838-1909). Here's what the Holy Women, Holy Men blog says about him:

“First presbyter of the Church,” was the well-deserved, if unofficial, title of the sixth rector of Grace Church, New York City. Huntington provided a leadership characterized by breadth, generosity, scholarship, and boldness. He was the acknowledged leader in the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church’s General Convention during a period of intense stress and conflict within the Church. His reconciling spirit helped preserve the unity of the Episcopal Church in the painful days after the beginning of the schism, led by the Assistant Bishop of Kentucky, which resulted in the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church.

In the House of Deputies, of which he was a member from 1871 until 1907, Huntington showed active and pioneering vision in making daring proposals. As early as 1871, his motion to revive the primitive order of “deaconesses” began a long struggle which culminated in 1889 in canonical authorization for that order. Huntington’s parish immediately provided facilities for this new ministry, and Huntington House became a training center for deaconesses and other women workers in the Church.

Christian unity was Huntington’s great passion throughout his ministry. In his book, The Church Idea (1870), he attempted to articulate the essentials of Christian unity. The grounds he proposed as a basis for unity were presented to, and accepted by, the House of Bishops in Chicago in 1886, and, with some slight modification, were adopted by the Lambeth Conference in 1888. The “Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral” has become a historic landmark for the Anglican Communion. It is included on pages 876–878 of the Book of Common Prayer, among the Historical Documents of the Church.

In addition to his roles as ecumenist and statesman, Huntington is significant as a liturgical scholar. It was his bold proposal to revise the Prayer Book that led to the revision of 1892, providing a hitherto unknown flexibility and significant enrichment. His Collect for Monday in Holy Week, now used also for Fridays at Morning Prayer, is itself an example of skillful revision. In it he takes two striking clauses from the exhortation to the sick in the 1662 Prayer Book, and uses them as part of a prayer for grace to follow the Lord in his sufferings.

In his book The Church-Idea: An Essay Towards Unity (1870), Huntington claims to answer to the question of “what Anglicanism pure and simple is” and to clarify “the absolutely essential features of the Anglican position” regarding the "Church of the Reconciliation" in America. According to Huntington, those features are:

1st. The Holy Scriptures as the Word of God.
2d. The Primitive Creeds as the Rule of Faith.
3d. The two Sacraments ordained by Christ himself.
4th. The Episcopate as the key-stone of Governmental Unity.

Huntington’s four-fold explication of the Church-Idea laid the groundwork for the formulation of the Chicago Quadrilateral at the General Convention of 1886 and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1888:

That, in the opinion of this Conference, the following Articles supply a basis on which approach may be by God's blessing made towards Home Reunion:

(a) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as "containing all things necessary to salvation," and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.

(b) The Apostles' Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.

(c) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself - Baptism and the Supper of the Lord - ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of Institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.

(d) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church

To this day, Huntington's The Church-Idea remains an outstanding American contribution to Anglican thought on ecclesiology and ecumenism. And it also shows that Huntington believed that the Gospel is universal and comprehensive in scope, i.e., catholic. The community called together by this Gospel must, therefore, embody the intention of the Gospel to save “all souls collectively.” And this means that the Church on earth must form a visible unity.

For more detailed discussions of Huntington, as well as background for the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, check out two of my earlier postings: "William Reed Huntington and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral" and "On the Way to the Quadrilateral."

In The Church-Idea, Huntington argued that “Anglicanism stands or falls” with the historic episcopate, and he drove the point home in strong language:

Indeed, … if the Episcopate have no more claim on our regard than any other form of ecclesiastical polity, then the sooner Anglicans in America shut their church-doors and burn their prayer-books, the better; for they are only adding, upon insufficient grounds, one more to the sectarian divisions under which the land groans. But if they have in the Episcopate that which links them by an actual historical connection to the Church of the primitive times, then ought they to thank God and take courage, and do all they can by the removal of misapprehension and disabilities and needless partition walls of prejudice, to make their inheritance available for the enrichment of the whole scattered flock of Christ.

Huntington also wrote eloquently about the connection between reconciliation and catholicity:

If our whole ambition as Anglicans in America be to continue a small, but eminently respectable body of Christians, and to offer a refuge for people of refinement and sensibility, who are shocked by the irreverences they are apt to encounter elsewhere; in a word, if we care to be only a countercheck and not a force in society; then let us say as much in plain terms, and frankly renounce any and all claim to Catholicity. We have only, in such a case, to wrap the robe of our dignity about us, and walk quietly along in a seclusion no one will take much trouble to disturb. Thus may we be a Church in name, and a sect in deed.

But if we aim at something nobler than this, if we would have our Communion become national in very truth, - in other words, if we would bring the Church of Christ into the closest possible sympathy with the throbbing, sorrowing, sinning, repenting, aspiring heart of this great people, - then let us press our reasonable claims to be the reconciler of a divided household, not in a spirit of arrogance (which ill befits those whose best possessions have come to them by inheritance), but with affectionate earnestness and an intelligent zeal.

141 years later, Huntington's ecumenical call for the nobler aim of reconciliation and catholicity continues to resonate.

Anglicanism as an Expression of Catholic Christianity

2011-07-25T19:14:00.001-05:00

At his blog genu(re)flection, Caleb Roberts offers interesting thoughts in a posting entitled "Why I am Anglican." He expounds upon the following three dimensions of Anglicanism as expressions of Catholic Christianity that called him beyond his more Protestant upbringing:

Nicene Orthodoxy
Apostolic Succession & Episcopal Polity
A Sacramental & Liturgical Spirituality

I resonate with the reasons why Caleb was able "to break the glass ceiling of 'TULIP Calvinism'" for Anglicanism. Increasingly, I, too, share "an appetite for catholicity":

... a real, tangible sense that I believed and worshipped in a manner that was representative of the whole scope of the Church’s life in history. That was really the impetus for it all: I wanted to be a Catholic Christian.

Perhaps it’s more than a desire; I often view it as nothing less than an obligation and a conviction to find the most catholic expression of Christianity I can and submit myself under it. The sad fact of our present moment is that the Church is visibly divided and we shout “I am of Apollos” louder and more fervently than ever in history. But there are still some simple criteria for those desiring true catholicity to consider. Some of my readers may be wondering, with all this talk of catholicity, why I haven’t “gone all the way” and become Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. Well, that is a valid concern but quite frankly, it is because neither the Roman Catholics nor the Eastern Orthodox are catholic enough that I have chosen to become Anglican. It isn’t because the Anglican Communion in its comprehensive, institutional state embodies the full breadth of catholic Christianity; some of the most foolish and poorly-disguised wolves to presently claim the name of Christ are Anglicans. It is rather that within Anglicanism, there exists and can exist, in my estimation, the most catholic expression of Christianity available to us today. It is by no means perfect — show me a church or a denomination that is — but the criteria for catholicity that I maintain can be found within her.

I agree: at its best, Anglicanism is the purest expression of catholic Christianity in the West.

Caleb continues with some excellent reflections on the centrality of the Nicene Creed for any genuinely catholic expression of the Christian faith that this Creedal Christian can't help but quote:

To be a Nicene Christian is to be a Catholic Christian in the most basic sense because the Creed is the foundational litmus test of true belief. Whereas one can disagree with the various statements of faith of today’s denominations and still remain a faithful Christian, to oppose any article of the Nicene Creed is to necessarily advocate heresy. Because the conditions of orthodoxy/heterodoxy are so simply defined in relation to the Creed, a Catholic-minded Christian keeps it always in view as the standard of doctrine and resists any temptation to place additional confessions and statements of faith alongside it to narrow the scope of orthodox belief to that of his particular affiliation. ... As a result, the Anglican standard of doctrine is ultimately a positive one; it reaffirms the beautiful simplicity of the Nicene Creed and only distinguishes itself from other communions in those areas where innovative doctrines have burdened authentic Christian belief.

Caleb's reflections remind me of a section in one of my earliest blog postings entitled "The Radical Creed":

The mysteries of God cannot be contained by rational explanations. But like a compass that always points north, the Nicene Creed points us in the right direction. The compass is not the destination just as the Creed is not God. But it would be much easier to get lost as to what is truly essential for reaching the goal of the Christian journey without it. Anglicanism agrees. Beginning with the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral in the late 19th Century and reaffirmed by subsequent Lambeth Conferences and General Conventions of the Episcopal Church during the 20th Century, Anglicanism maintains that the Nicene Creed is "the sufficient statement of the Christian faith" (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 877).

It's worth pausing for a moment over that word "sufficient." The Nicene Creed is "enough." We don't need anything more to express the core of the Christian faith. But at the same time, we can make do with no less. This is why Anglicanism - unlike the Reformed tradition - is a creedal rather than a confessional tradition. Anglican bishop Charles Harris put it well when he said:

"The Nicene Creed aims at promoting unity, the later confessions at justifying division; the former states only what is essential, the latter descend into detail and include a large number of disputable and highly contentious propositions" [from Creeds or No Creeds (1927), quoted by Frank E. Wilson in Faith and Practice Revised Edition (Morehouse-Barlow, 1967), p. 71].

It's a very heartening sign to see folks like Caleb join the Anglican fold. May there be many more like him!

Canterbury Letters to Geneva George (14): Is God the Author of Evil?

2011-07-25T13:29:00.002-05:00

Below is the fourteenth installment in the series I'm publishing on behalf of a friend entitled "Canterbury Letters to Geneva George." Before reading and responding with comments, please be sure to read my introduction and the author's introduction to this series at the first posting entitled "Canterbury Letters to Geneva George (1): The Via Media." And also read the other postings in the "Canterbury Letters to Geneva George" series here.

Dear Geneva George,

You asked, “Within your Arminian system, how do you reconcile evil with the existence of a sovereign God?” Well, to start with, I never advocated anything like an Arminian soteriology when I disputed your explanation of evil. That is a different question altogether. However, on the question of how I explain evil, I do not try to explain it. All I can say is that for some mysterious reason, God has seen fit to allow evil and work good out of it, and this somehow fits together within His sovereign plan.

But while I do not attempt to explain evil, I do reject all explanations which make God the author of evil. I promised in my last letter to respond to that, so let me have a shot at it now.

To start with, if God is the author of evil, then He fosters wickedness in people's hearts. But if so, then God is sinful by the Biblical definitions of sin and evil. Consider that in the Proverbs the ones who incite and tempt to evil, like the fool's friends or the prostitute, are just as morally guilty as the simple man himself who falls prey to those temptations. James says that God does not tempt us, but if God is the author of evil then He is doing a lot more than merely tempting us: He is fostering the evil in our hearts and inciting us to sin. If God does this, then the words "God is good" are no longer intelligible because God is violating His own self-revelation of what constitutes goodness.

Consequently, if God really is the energizing principle behind both the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent then we would have to conclude that the Biblical categories used to describe God are ultimately non-descriptive. Moreover, it would make a mockery of the anti-thesis that we find throughout the war-Psalms if God is the causal force behind both sides. This would be similar to how the Rothschilds secretly financed both sides of the American civil war.

Moreover, if God is the author of evil then we would have to conclude that evil is just as much an intrinsic part of God's character as His goodness. But in that case, we are left without a standard for distinguishing between good and evil. Using God's character as the standard for distinguishing good and evil would then be akin to using a tape measure in which inches and centimeters were all mixed up. God can only be the standard for distinguishing between good and evil if the former and not the latter is fundamental to His character.

(Check out chapter 3 of C. S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain on some of the necessary preconditions to goodness behind intelligible. While Lewis doesn't put enough emphasis on the noetic effects of sin, he makes some good points which relate to this question.)

It is on these grounds that I would object to the position taken by Gordon Clark in his book Religion, Reason and Revelation, and the whole Superlasparian tradition that he was part of. Clark writes:

"God is the sole ultimate cause of everything. ... The men and angels predestined to eternal life and those foreordained to everlasting death are particularly and unchangeable designed. ... Election and reprobation are equally ultimate. ... There was never the remotest possibility that something different could have happened. ... God is neither responsible nor sinful, even though he is the only ultimate cause of everything. He is not sinful because in the first place whatever God does is just and right. It is just and right simply in virtue of the fact that he does it. ... Since God caused Judas to betray Christ, this causal act is righteous and not sinful. By definition God cannot sin. At this point it must be particularly pointed out that God's causing a man to sin is not sin. There is no law, superior to God, which forbids him to decree sinful acts."

I have always found it problematic when thinkers like Clark appeal to God's actions rather than His character as the source of justice. Biblically, the standards of justice and goodness as well as God’s actions proceed from the same common cause: God's own nature. C.S. Lewis pointed out that if "good" means only "what God wills", then the statement "God is good" means merely "God wills what God wills", which is meaningless, for the devil also wills what he wills.

But there is a deeper problem with Clark’s position. While there is some truth mixed into this quote (error usually has truth mixed with it), it does seem to trivialize evil. When Job or the Psalmists are asking God “Why, oh why are you letting the wicked prosper in his way?”, the answer, according to Clark, would be simply “Evil exists because God makes people sin because God wants them to sin. End of story.” This trivializes the very personal and agonizing prayers that we find in the Bible in general and the Psalms in particular. This is one of the reasons I don't think it’s helpful to go down that road, because it is not the road that the Biblical writers go down.

This same trivialization of evil is apparent in other less extreme supralapsarian thinkers. Just today someone shared with me a Facebook status posted by a well-known reformed teacher who said that because God is sovereign, even those things which are not as they ought to be really are just as things ought to be. He went on to say that there are ultimately no bad things, since God is completely sovereign. Now if all he meant is that even bad things work out ultimately for good, then I have no problem with that. But there is a great different between saying, on the one hand, that God works good out of evil, vs. saying that that since God is the author of all things that evil isn’t really bad, or that everything which happens ought to be.

To say that God created and authored evil is a reductionistic approach that removes a necessary paradox from Christian theology. Any theological framework that takes seriously God’s goodness, His control over all things and the reality of evil in the world is going to have some degree of tension resulting from the interplay of these realities. That tension (which is not just intellectual, because many of the Psalmists struggled with this tension in an intense personal way) is necessary, not least because all the great heresies throughout history have arisen from a person or a group extrapolating the implications of one principle and, in the name of consistency, overriding other foundational doctrines. Put somewhat more technically, all heresy arises from a failure to preserve dialectical tension. The early Christological disputes are a perfect example, with different heretics defining the relation between Christ's humanity and His divinity in a way that failed to do justice to both. Other examples would be the relationship of Christ to the Eucharist or the relationship between the one-ness and the three-ness of the blessed Trinity. On all such questions we have to preserve a significant aspect of paradox and mystery. Where the Bible remains mysterious, we ought to remain mysterious.

Your comments about Proverbs 16:4 seem to ignore what the verse actually says. It says that God has made all for Himself including the wicked, but it doesn’t say that He creates their wickedness. Even if the passage did say that, we would be obligated to interpret it in a way consistent with the Bible’s meta-themes about God’s character.

It seems that part of the problem may be that Calvinists have a tendency to be rationalistic, so they will extrapolate principles to their logical extension rather than letting things be fuzzy at the edges to maintain the dialectical tension necessary for preserving important meta-themes about God.

Of course, this raises the question: if God is not the author of evil, where does it come from? Again, I’ll be upfront with you and say I don't know what causes evil. Nor is my overall position undermined by my ignorance on this point. In fact, my position wouldn’t be undermined even if someone could present a seemingly airtight argument to the contrary, such as: if God created everything ex nihilo, then if we trace everything back far enough He would seem to be the cause of everything like clockwork; ergo, God is the author of evil. Although such an argument has a certain logic about it, John Byl has rightly pointed out in The Divine Challenge that “if the falsity of the conclusion is more plausible than the truthfulness of the premises, then it is rational to reject the premises. ... The advantage of this method of refutation is that one need not pinpoint exactly where the initial error occurred."

At this point an atheist could say that this simply proves that the existence of evil is incompatible with a good God, but the problem here is that without God as a standard the very concept of evil is meaningless. If God’s goodness is not our starting point then there is not a problem of evil because there is no ultimate standard in which the categories of good and evil can have any legitimacy. And that is a crucial point, for many atheists and skeptics throughout the history of Western philosophy have used the problem of evil as grounds for concluding that God is either not all-good or not all-powerful or not all-knowing. David Hume's famous formulation of the difficulty remains the most iconic of such arguments. The difficulty here is that the philosophical problem of evil assumes a neutral framework in which we can meaningfully critique God's actions in the world and conclude things about his character, ability or omniscience as a result. But in reality, once any or all of these attributes are doubted, we no longer have a framework in which we can meaningfully talk about moral values at all, or the privation of such values in the existence of evil.

There is a big difference between the problem of evil that the Psalmists struggle with (see Psalm 74 and Job 21) vs. the standard philosophical formulations of the problems. The former rightly assumes that God is good and in control no matter what happens and even if what is happening is difficult to reconcile with God's faithfulness. (Here again C.S. Lewis is most helpful, in particularly the last paragraph of his chapter "The Rival Conceptions of God" in Mere Christianity). Thus, either we have God, with evil as a problem, or we have no God and no evil at all since without God the concept of good and evil is meaningless.

OK, I’ve kind of wandered off topic. I guess that means it’s a good time to end.

Blessings,

Canterbury Chris

Sermon for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost

2011-07-24T00:17:00.006-05:00

RCL, Year A, Proper 12: 1 Kings 3:5-12; Psalm 119:129-136; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

[Listen to the sermon here.]

I can’t believe it. It feels like yesterday, but it was actually 10 years ago that I was living in Sewanee, TN and getting up very early each morning to drive into Chattanooga for CPE. For those of you unfamiliar with the lingo, CPE stands for Clinical Pastoral Education. It’s sort of like boot camp for aspiring clergy. For 3 months, you work full-time in a hospital setting doing pastoral care and processing the interactions with supervisors and colleagues. I’ll bet that anyone who’s done CPE would agree: spending 40-plus hours a week (not to mention weekends on call) entering into people’s lives in times of crisis, grief, and loss can be emotionally draining and spiritually challenging.

One of my assignments at Erlanger Hospital was the Neurosurgical Intensive Care Unit. I’ll never forget one of the guys I met there who was suffering from brain tumors. He was in a lot of pain, and perhaps because he was so very afraid he was willing to let me, a complete stranger, catch a glimpse of the turmoil in his soul. He told me that what was happening to him was God’s doing. I asked him why he thought God would afflict him and he told me it was because he had stopped attending church. God was punishing him for failure to worship. I was stunned by this man’s loss of trust in God’s goodness, and by his conviction that being right with God was all up to his own efforts. And I was also deeply saddened, because what this man needed as much as anything else was the conviction that whatever the coming days and weeks might bring, he was loved by a God who would never, ever abandon him. And that somehow – even if only in the world to come – what he was going through would be redeemed and made right by a loving and just God.

This man’s case may sound extreme. But I wonder if it is. Don’t we all go through periods in our lives that challenge our trust and confidence in God? Don’t we sometimes have cause to wonder if God is really on our side, if God really cares for and loves us? Maybe it’s a medical diagnosis. Maybe it’s a move to a new place where we don’t really know anybody. It could be the collapse of a relationship that’s left us feeling shattered or the death of a friend or family member. Maybe it’s an opportunity we really wanted that’s passed us by. Or perhaps we’ve lost a job and now find ourselves in a place we never dreamed we’d end up, having to reinvent who we are and reassess what matters in our lives.

There are countless ways that life can throw curveballs that cause us to question God, and even to lose our confidence that God’s intentions towards us are benevolent and loving. When we enter those dark valleys, the words we hear this morning from the apostle Paul may sound dissonant. He says: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God” (Romans 8:28).

All things?

Really?

I’ve been through times in my life and in relation to family and friends when that verse sounded more like a sappy line from a Hallmark greeting card than the inspired words of Holy Scripture. But it’s important to remember that Paul is no shallow sentimentalist. On the contrary, he’s someone deeply acquainted with suffering, loss, grief, and death.

Paul was a guy who had it all: education, power, social status and respect, and a promising future as a leader among the Pharisees. His reputation as a fierce defender of Jewish orthodoxy and a force not to be messed with was solidified by his relentless persecution of those men and women who dared to publicly assert the heresy that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and that he had been raised from the dead. Paul was on a crusade to stamp out that nonsense. But then the curveball came, and when it hit, it utterly shattered the image of having it all together that Paul projected to the world. Out of the blue on a road to Damascus, Paul encountered the risen Jesus. And it knocked him flat. His very identity – everything he thought he knew for certain about the scriptures and God’s truth and his role among God’s chosen people – collapsed. It was such a devastating blow that it would take three years for Paul to recover and be ready to venture out into the world with a new identity and a new message (cf. Galatians 1:18).

But it hardly got any easier for Paul. Proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ didn’t restore his social status and prestige. Instead, proclaiming the Gospel ensured for Paul a life in which persecution, death threats, beatings, imprisonment, ship wreck, hunger and the very real possibility that everything he’s worked for may fail, were just another part of the typical work week.

And yet, in spite of it all, Paul can still say with absolute confidence that all things work for good for those who love God. And he can still say with absolute confidence that nothing in all of creation – not even sickness or addiction or broken relationships or a lost job or even death itself – nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And even though he could be arrested or killed at any time, even though his enemies who preach a different gospel may prevail and destroy everything he’s worked for, Paul still says this not only with confidence, but also with joy.

Either Paul is crazy, or he knows something that many of us either don’t know or haven’t allowed to sink into our bones.

I believe that Paul is not crazy. And I believe that Paul’s letter to the Romans was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is thus rightly received as the authoritative Word of God. And so what Paul says in our epistle lesson this morning is true. And it’s truth that has the power to change our lives.

There are times in life that we so easily experience as the end of the world: times when our sins come home to roost, when we lose something or someone we love, or when sickness or death cast a dark shadow. When those times come, Paul reassures us that they do not ultimately define who we are and they do not get last word. There’s someone that can give us a sense of identity, meaning, and purpose that can never be taken away by the changes and chances of this life. Indeed, if Paul is right, there’s someone worth risking everything for, someone worth living and dying for, someone whose love can touch and heal and transform us to the depths of our bodies and to the core of our souls, and someone we can trust absolutely.

That someone is Jesus Christ.

My friends, the grounds of our confidence and joy in life cannot be found in our own efforts to insure our security or to please God. It’s not found in the prestige of where we went to school, where we live, what we do for a living, what kind of car we drive, or where we worship. It’s not even found in our relationships with family and friends. All of these things will change and eventually pass away.

Our confidence and joy in life are grounded in a deeper and more reliable reality: the reality of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, the forgiveness of our sins, and an expectant hope for the world to come. It’s the joy of knowing that our personal well-being and the fate of the world are not determined by current circumstances or by whether we succeed or fail in pleasing God. They are determined, not by what we do, but by what God has done and continues to do. They are determined by the victory of God in Christ over the forces of sin, suffering, sickness, death, and decay, a victory we share by virtue of our baptisms.

Paul’s confidence and joy are gifts bestowed by the Holy Spirit. But those gifts don’t just belong to Paul. They are given to all Christians in Holy Baptism. So perhaps the real question is not, “How does somebody like Paul manage to be so confident and joyful in the midst of so much trouble?” The real question is, “What hinders us from sharing the same confidence and joy as Paul’s?” What keeps us from living with confidence in the power of Jesus’ forgiveness and the hope of his resurrection? What prevents us from owning the truth of our baptisms: that we are marked as Christ’s own forever and that we are eternally safe in his love?

Perhaps we can name what those things are. Perhaps we cannot. Either way, I invite you this morning to bring all of that stuff with you when you come to communion. Offer all of it – the good, the bad, and the ugly – to God. And in return, receive the precious gifts of Christ’s Body and Blood, the outward and visible signs of the truth that in Christ, God is quite literally dying to love you. And then go forward with the reassurance that nothing will ever take that love away.

In Christ, we are secure and we are loved. May that love penetrate into the depths of our being. And may it bear the fruits of unquenchable joy and unassailable confidence in the truth that, ultimately, all things shall indeed be well.

Mary Magdalene: First Witness and Messenger of the Resurrection

2011-07-22T14:06:00.002-05:00

Today is the feast of St. Mary Madalene. Here is what Lesser Feasts and Fasts says about her:

Mary of Magdala near Capernaum was one of several women who followed Jesus and ministered to him in Galilee. The Gospel according to Luke records that Jesus "went on through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out ..." (Luke 8:1-2). The Gospels tell us that Mary was healed by Jesus, followed him, and was one of those who stood near his cross at Calvary.

It is clear that Mary Magdalene's life was radically changed by Jesus' healing. Her ministry of service and steadfast companionship, even as a witness to the crucifixion, has, through the centuries, been an example of the faithful ministry of women to Christ. All four Gospels name Mary as one of the women who went to the tomb to mourn and to care for Jesus' body. Her weeping for the loss of her Lord strikes a common chord with the grief of all others over the death of loved ones. Jesus' tender response to her grief - meeting her in the garden, revealing himself to her by calling her name - makes her the first witness to the risen Lord. She is given the command, "Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God" (John 20:17). As the first messenger of the resurrection, she tells the disciples, "I have seen the Lord" (John 20:18).

In the tradition of the Eastern Church, Mary is regarded as the equal of an apostle; and she is held in veneration as the patron saint of the great cluster of monasteries on Mount Athos.

Anglican bishop N. T. Wright argues that a biblical case for the full participation of women in the orders of the Church includes, among other material, John 20. This is the chapter of the Gospel according to John in which Mary Magdalene is the first person to both discover that Jesus' tomb is empty and to encounter him raised from the dead. And not only that, but Mary is also the first person to be commissioned by Jesus to proclaim the good news of his resurrection. Check out what Bishop Wright has to say in the following video beginning around 2:25.

Wright notes in his comments that in the ancient Jewish and pagan world, the commissioning of Mary Magdalene as the first messenger of the resurrection is "so counter-intuitive," and he's correct. As I noted in another posting few years back, women in Jesus' day were not allowed to testify in court and they were regarded as unreliable witnesses. And so, in light of Mary Magdalene as the first witness and messenger of the resurrection, Wright says:

In the resurrection there is a radical reevaluation of the role of women. ... Apostolic ministry grows out of the testimony that Jesus is alive. That to me is the basis of apostolic ministry. And I cannot understand why that should be problematic if you're a biblical Christian.

Thank God for Mary Magdalene, and also for Mary, Salome, Joanna, and the other women who not only discovered the empty tomb of Jesus, but who also had the courage to proclaim the Good News that Jesus is risen indeed.

Bishop Robinson's Statement About Jesus Sparks Controversy

2011-07-20T21:49:00.001-05:00

The Right Reverend Gene Robinson, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, recently said something that has set off controversy in some quarters. Here's the reported statement of the bishop:

“I know Jesus to be the son of God,” he told a group of about 50 people, “but what a small, limited God we would have if that was the only manifestation. I think Christians should stay away from spiritual arrogance and show more love, mercy and zeal for justice.”

Fr. Peter Carrell at Anglican Down Under responded as follows:

Now this is a media reported statement not a theological essay or paper, so I am not going to declare this to be evidence of heresy. But, on the face of it, here is an Anglican bishop making a christological statement which, putting it diplomatically, falls below the Nicene and Chalcedonian par.

The least we could expect of Anglican bishops around the world is that, different and diverse though they may wish to be on human sexuality, whether Hooker meant this or that re Scripture, reason and tradition, and what robes should be worn on which occasion, they all subscribe to the common ecumenical creeds.

The statement above is not unique as a sign that not all Anglican bishops are completely convinced of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of the Father in whom the fullness of God dwells.

Read it all.

Bishop Robinson's statement reminds me of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's slippery statements about Jesus, and particularly her response to the question "Is Jesus the only way to get to heaven?" in an interview with Time Magazine back in 2006:

We who practice the Christian tradition understand [Jesus] as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.

(I've written more about the PB's theological views here and here.)

What some dismiss as "an awfully small box," others affirm as the Incarnation. And while some affirm Jesus Christ as the norm above all norms, others affirm him as one norm among other possible norms. Fr. Carrell is correct that "not all Anglican bishops [or priests and deacons, or laypersons, for that matter] are completely convinced of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ." And it is impossible to find a middle ground of compromise between those who affirm the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and those who clearly (or more stealthily) deny his uniqueness.

One commenter pressed Fr. Carrell's criticism of Bishop Robinson by saying:

Just what is 'heretical' about Bishop Robinson’s statement that so offends you, Peter? I just don’t 'get it.' ... Bishop Robinson says that affirming Christ as the Son of God in words is not enough; deeds matter. What is your problem with this?

To which Fr. Carrell replied:

I specifically spelled out that I do not think the media report constitutes evidence to declare 'heresy.'

It does look like a statement was made which falls below par and I am using the opportunity to reflect on the possibility that the Covenant, over time, could raise the standard to which bishops aspire when they speak, not least in being unafraid to espouse the uniqueness of Christ.

Yes, +Gene went on to make a fine statement about avoiding spiritual arrogance, and living out the gospel. No problems.

I do have a problem if a bishop seeks to link spiritual arrogance to affirming the uniqueness of Christ. We can make the affirmation and be humble at the same time.

Whether or not the Anglican Covenant can raise the doctrinal standard is a debatable point. But there has been and continues to be, in some quarters at least, a tendency to equate making orthodox claims to truth with arrogance. Sadly, there are cases in which that charge sticks. But Fr. Carrell is right to insist that it is quite possible to affirm the uniqueness of Jesus Christ with humility. Indeed, it is quite possible to affirm the reality of Absolute Truth without claiming absolute certainty. I believe that's called faith.

The charge of arrogance is a sword that can cut both ways. For there is also an arrogance behind some of the attempts to downplay the uniqueness of Jesus Christ for the sake of being more "tolerant" and "inclusive." Such arrogance implicitly claims to "know better" than the combined authorities of scripture and tradition. And there is also an arrogance driving some of the claims to special revelation in our day, claims that have not been recognized and received as genuine revelation from God by many (if not most) other Christians living in the world. Again, there's an implicit if not explicit claim here that "we know better" and/or "we are enlightened and those who disagree with us are not" (a judgment which gives the lie to "inclusion").

On the basis of this one reported statement, no one can say with certainty that Bishop Robinson is guilty of Christological heresy. Nevertheless, I agree with Fr. Carrell that Bishop Robinson's statement "falls below the Nicene and Chalcedonian par."

I see that, in the light of Preludium's defense, Catholicity and Covenant has also weighed in on Bishop Robinson's statement:

+New Hampshire was not attempting to affirm the continuity of the Old and New Covenants. Nor was he referring to natural revelation. He was, it appears, suggesting that the scandal of the Incarnation is, well, far too scandalous. Or, to use his own words, "small" and "limited". We - the Church - require a 'larger', more 'generous' vision of God than the Incarnation.

Read it all.

The Basis of Our Relationship with God

2011-07-19T16:41:00.001-05:00

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t always think like a Christian. I don’t always feel like a Christian. I certainly don’t always act like a Christian. But that is not the basis of my relationship with God. That relationship is based not on me, and what I do, but on God and what God does. So when you are having trouble being a Christian, touch your forehead, remember your baptism, and remember that you are a Christian because we [the Church] told you so.”

~ William H. Willimon