The Spiritual War

It should not surprise us that the great spiritual war we must fight in our modern day and age is to love one another.  The world runs, it seems on war: whether between states or more commonly between ideological factions, or between businesses who compete not as fellows, but as enemies bent on market domination.  Our marriages are wars, our friendships are wars, we even war near constantly with our children.  That war is part of life in a world beset with sin and death should not surprise us; but we must find the root of these wars and do battle against it.  Is not the source of this trouble that we do not see each other, from the most famous celebrity to the most outcast homeless or most deranged criminal, as being made in the Image of God, as icons of Christ Himself, however damaged?  Can He not restore that which is His and was made to refer back to Him, the Source of all Good and Life?  It is strange, then, that we must war against war, but we must.  Life comes only through the death of God on the Cross; we must join in that war, but it is not a war fought with the weapons of world, whether those be material (guns, bombs, and so forth) or passionate (malice, hate, indifference, apathy).  Rather, this war is fought through prayer, especially with the Psalms, and through acts of justice, goodness, mercy, humility and kindness.  That our churches have spectacularly failed to train us for this contest is one of the greatest obscenities of our age: we must go to our pastors or priests or prelates and demand of them training in the spiritual life that overthrew Rome and Gaul and Persia.

Philosophy for the Young

A brief thought in the importance of philosophical training, especially for the lower levels of education:

Philosophy, especially post-Kant ("Kant" being a German name that can be roughly translated as "Satan"), has earned, for all philosophy, the reputation of dry, mostly incoherent thinking about impractical things.  Whether this is fair or not is beyond my immediate (practical?) concern.  The problem with this state of affairs is that philosophy, especially that stemming from Plato and Aristotle through the Church Fathers and Ascetics, is eminently practical.  One of its main concerns is to develop virtue, habits of heart, mind, and body that lead one (both the soul and the society) away from akrasia (acting against the will's natural desire for the Good) and towards hesychia (peace, stillness, ease in any situation).  In other words, philosophy seeks to enable the student to wisely engage in all aspects of existence without being overwhelmed by the allure of material, sensate things or the power of the emotions.

Having been a teacher for 8 years and a human for roughly 4 times that, I've seen the necessity in students to have developed these virtues by the time they reach college (or wherever post-secondary they end up: homemakers, tradespersons, artisans all need virtue, not just some educated "elite").  Many students I've known have been anxious to get "practical" training, yet suffer from debilitating emotional problems or attachments to transitory goods (such as the vast accumulation of wealth).  This is not, of course, to say that true, diagnosed mental illness can be treated or cured through Plato: these things must be competently handled by trained (and virtuous!) counsellors and mental health practitioners.  However, for many who do not have a diagnosable illness, a sturdy askesis of philosophy would help to reorient and redirect the errant passions, desires, and loves back to the Good.

A person, suitably and properly trained in virtue, can then take up any higher learning, or trade, or profession towards the end for which they are made.  That this needs to be accomplished before the state of adulthood (culturally defined here as 21, although most cultures historically have placed it much earlier) seems obvious to me, yet the lower levels of learning rarely address these matters (if, even, they can in our state of cultural and societal disarray).  Richard Rorty, if I remember correctly, once said that if a child isn't virtuous by the time he/she reached college, there was no hope for them -- they had calcified in a state of arrested development (and, Lord, I pray this isn't true).

This means, ultimately, that philosophical training must start in the home, as young as possible.  But, if you are like me and live in an almost constant state of akrasia and acedia (spiritual listlessness), this seems not only daunting, but despairing. Where shall we go to learn that which we desire to pass down to our youth?  It is here that, I think, the broader classical Christian tradition has something great to offer: 2000 years of handing down ("tradition") this life, refined away from the inherent problems of the Socratic tradition in all its variants.  I'm not speaking solely of the intellectual content of the Faith, either, but the life of the Church, her discipline or askesis: fasting, feasting, feria, alms giving, prayer, self-denial, love of God and neighbor.  These we must learn, or relearn, to build up our children to live virtuous lives.

Well, so much for brief...

An Address of Sorts to Geneva College Students

I've always wondered what would happen if I got the chance to give you all a valedictory address.  Sort of like a commencement speech, but to all the classes and lacking in the typical self-focused irrelevance.  As my memory fades from the institution (in 3 years once this crop of first year students graduate), this seems to me to be my only chance.  What would I say, though?

First, you have been and will continue to be loved.  If there is one overarching theme I see coming from young Christian students, it is this: you do not believe that God could love you, or could continue to love you because of your (real or perceived) faults in morality.  We all perpetuate this, as we are convinced that if we are really saved, we must automatically lead holy lives.  But, my joys, this simply isn't true.  God calls us, eventually, to wholeness.  But it is a wholeness that always bears Christ's Cross, just as Symeon of Cyrene on the Via Dolorosa.  We find Christ by entering His sufferings, not by "having it all together" or "being perfect."  Indeed, don't take this as a license to cupidity; rather it is a sterner call to the holiness that we feign and therefore fear.  God calls us, daily, to our martyrdom. As we turn from the shoring up of the self and the ego, we find that these are merely false fronts -- duck blinds -- given by sin to hide the fact that they lead to nothingness, to the nihil from which we were called into being.  Sin tells us that God cannot love us, for God reveals the horror of what sin truly is.  We are all disordered in our loves; we must walk together on the road, leaving no man or woman behind.

This leads, naturally, to the second point: we must love if we are to know love.  God loves us, but just because "the Bible tells me so" is insufficient.  Love is a mode of existence, not a sentiment or a feeling, certainly not just a claim made without support.  This is why St John says "God is love," not "God has love."  To really know, in a much deeper than rational way, we must enter that mode of existence.  We must forgive our friends and our enemies, then we will see that Christ's forgiveness has been there all along.  We must love -- warm and fill -- our brothers and sisters, then we will find the One who says, "When I was hungry, you gave me food; thirsty and you gave me drink."  We should note that the sheep in that parable are surprised: "When did we do this to You?"  Cultivate those surprises.  Never fail to hope and expect Christ in the other, even when they fail to live up to our world's standards of "where God is pleased to dwell."  We are to become, by graced askesis, God's Temple.  However, we must not determine where God in His Spirit may move, for He is "everywhere present and fulfilling all things." Those who refuse to see the Christ will "weep and gnash teeth," seeing that the Love was already there, but they had cut themselves off from it by not loving the brother they could see.

Third, this love is transformational, or better yet is is transfiguring.  When Christ shines out the Unceeated Light on Mt Tabor He is giving us a glimpse of our own destiny.  Loving one another is not a giving a place for continued sin: it is a call to suffer for and with those who need God's glory to indwell them.  It may take years, and seem to bear no fruit, but God gives the increase in His own time and often in the hidden chambers of the heart.  Love one another.  Love is cruciform, so you will suffer.  Count it joy when you suffer for the Kingdom in this way: your reward is greater than the whole world.

Know, my joys, that many have suffered with and for you already.  Your parents, your teachers, your friends -- we are, along with all the saints, the Great Cloud of Witnesses looking to the Lord Jesus, who begins our Faith and beckons us to the end in Him.  Take up this Cross -- light and easy compared to the glory which will certainly be revealed in us -- with us.  The Church, those gathering in Christ's Cross and revealing His Resurrection, is important.  Our cultural religion would have you believe that you can have all the benefits of Jesus without religion.  In a sense, this is true: if we mean by religion a set of more-or-less arbitrary rules meant to manage guilt and create exclusive tribes.  The Lord Jesus does not dwell there.  But if we mean that community who seek, over time and in obedience to those who have traveled the Road before us (for what else is Tradition, friends?), to inhabit the Cross and live that mode of existence I've called love, then where else would the Christ be?  This is true religion, this is the Church.  It will involve rites and rituals and other things we find, for a variety of reasons, distasteful.  Medicine is often distasteful -- that doesn't mean it isn't healthful.  True, bad medicine leads to greater sickness: we must cultivate a spiritual awareness that can tell when our spiritual direction is harmful, so that we might seek out the good.  The wisdom here is hard: what seems rough at first might lead to health, to the crucifixion with Christ of the false self.  That which placates our conscience, or enables us towards self-actualization, or whatever may feel good for a time -- and we may mistake it for the Truth -- but it leads to death.  How are we to tell?  Is the Cross there along with the joy and the peace?  Joy and peace are of no avail, they are the City of Man, without the Cross.  In the Cross, they are God's grace and light spilled out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.  We need to find spiritual directors, fathers, mothers, and companions who know the joy and the Cross -- they can, through God's indwelling -- lead us in His paths and tend our souls.

Lastly, sing.  There is a reason that the whole ancient Church chanted every part of her liturgy.  Find that reason.  It must be sung.

God's blessings on you.  You have blessed me for 8 years in the classroom.

Yours in Christ,

Prof. Russ

What about the Basil Option?

Rod Dreher, writing over at The American Conservative, has been formulating what he calls “the Benedict Option” in our current cultural moment:

If an avalanche is coming, you don’t surrender to it and slide down the hill with the rocks, and you don’t get yourself killed by standing in front of it hoping that God will stop it before it hits you, or that someone will show up at the last minute to rescue you. You get out of the way, and take shelter where you can until it passes you by.

The idea is based on a brief passage in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, in which he advocates the necessity of small communities disengaging from the dominant cultural landscape in order to preserve what is good, true, and beautiful in those self-same cultures. St Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine Order of monks, did just this in the waning days of Western Roman civilization.

One of the difficulties of this, pointed out by many reviewers and commentators, is that Benedictine monasticism requires a fairly hefty withdrawal from the world; it is generally better situated among rural areas and out of the way places. Much of the history of Western monasticism, taking its cue from St Antony of Egypt and others, can be understood as this pull away from the urban to the secluded. Dreher speaks often of how the Benedict Option does not require one to become a survivalist, but we should be open to the practicality, even wisdom, of a complete disengagement from the urban cultural and political scene. Wendell Berry comes to mind as a possible “abbot-at-large” for the Benedict Option.

I don’t want, in any way, to diminish what Dreher is trying to accomplish; on the contrary, a revival of monasticism in its cenobitic form would do this country a world of good. The constant witness against the crass and ubiquitous materialism that the cloister preaches is a dire necessity for us; the devotion to intimate care from oblation to dormition constitutes a non-verbal gadfly against our revulsion of those who are young and those who are dying. However, the Benedict Option is best suited for the “highways and the hedges” in our country. So, instead of criticizing, I want to suggest that another saint provides a more concrete model for urban cultural engagement on the level that Dreher is arguing for: St Basil of Caesarea, rightly called the Great.

Basil is credited with developing what St Gregory of Nazianzus, in his elegy for his friend, called the ‘New City’ and which we know as the ‘Basiliad’:

A noble thing is philanthropy, and the support of the poor, and the assistance of human weakness. Go forth a little way from the city, and behold the new city, the storehouse of piety, the common treasury of the wealthy, in which the superfluities of their wealth, aye, and even their necessaries, are stored, in consequence of his exhortations, freed from the power of the moth, no longer gladdening the eyes of the thief, and escaping both the emulation of envy, and the corruption of time: where disease is regarded in a religious light, and disaster is thought a blessing, and sympathy is put to the test. (Oration 43.63)

Basil had set up a community of religious dedicated to the care of the urban poor, the displaced, the leper, the sick, and the dying. All within the metropolitan limits of Caesarea. Part of what allowed this to take place was Basil’s preaching on the true use and reality of wealth (a sentiment shared by none other than St John Chrysostom): the rich are for the health of the poor, the poor are for the salvation of the rich. It was a form, if you will, of separation in the midst of the world. Bounded by the strong sense of Apostolic Tradition, of the true Faith, and then sent out as humble, consubstantial healers in the city. This, it seems to me, is what Dreher is after.

The question that arises in my mind, though, is whether or not we have a solid enough Faith here in the States to start these sorts of communities of outreach and healing. Can there be any chance of coherent community outside a unified Faith, at least on the local level? Can the Presbyterians continue to fracture and shatter into a million warring factions (see Jonathan Frame’s classic and depressing essay “Machen’s Warrior Children” for how this has worked out on a level outside of the PCUSA) and expect to be a cultural bulwark? Can the Catholics recover from the cultural damage caused by the sex scandal? Are the Orthodox a significant enough presence in our urban areas, and are they willing to give up ethnic and nationalist distinctives for the sake of the salvation of the American soul?

The Boast

In Romans (and Galatians) St Paul is at pains to exclude some sort of "boasting" before God.  It is explicitly condemned in 3:27, being excluded by the "nomos of Faith."  What is this boast? Most often, I've heard, and paradigmatically assumed, that it is a boast of law completion; I've kept the law, so I have something of which to boast of before God and man (implying that I can then leveraged that boast into some sort of earned salvation scheme -- effectively tying God's hands).  However, the first place in Romans St Paul uses the word is 2:17, where the boast is not in nomic performance, but a "boast in God," which seems -- utilizing 9:4-5 -- to be a boast in terms of election: the Judean has confidence before God because of his privileged covenantal status (granted initially by God via Abraham and later through Moses), which can be backed up (at this point as proof, not as merit) by circumcision and nomic obedience.

It goes without saying, I think, that this changes a good deal of how the early chapters in Romans are to be interpreted.

H/T to the book I'm reading: Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans: 2009).

A Prayer for Salvation

Lord Christ, by the grace of Your Cross and by the power of Your Resurrection, save me, save my family, save my friends, save my enemies. Save, Lord, all men as is Your desire. Amen.

Meditations on Holy Week

The fig tree withers
and the temple is cleansed.
May the passions within us
find the same fate, as You,
the Lover of all Humankind
grant us Your Great Mercy
on the Tree.

As You entered into Jerusalem,
cleansing the Temple,
so enter our hearts, O Good One,
and drive from them the sinful passions
that beset us and defile us.
For You love humankind
and are the Savior of our souls.

O Lord Christ, as You were silent before Your accusers,
so we are silent before You, the Source of Living Waters
whom we have spurned time and time again.
Open our lips, O Lord, that our mouths might proclaim Your praise;
Silence the tongues of our accuser, the enemy of all souls,
and crush the head of the murdering dragon,
granting us Your Great Mercy
and the world's salavation.

As Joseph was lifted out of the pit
by the remembrance of the cupbearer,
so You Lord were lifted up on the Cross
causing the thief to cry out,
"Remember me in Your Kingdom, O Lord!"
His cry is ours so that this day
we might join You in the Paradise who is the Spirit,
You who are the Lover of Humankind
and the Savior of our souls.

Your cry, O Christ, upon the Tree
"My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
spoken from God to God -- Hallelujah
for in our Godforsakenness of death
of sin, of corruption, You abide with us,
every crying out in intercession;
for you are the Lover of Humankind
and the saver of our souls.

The Tomb, cut out of rock,
will receive the one proclaimed,
"Behold, the Man!" on this day
of man's primordial creation.
From dust to dust, You return
to be resurrected the third day
so that we, being dust, might be raised
with You to Heaven,
for You are the lover of Humankind
and the Savior of our souls.

A Tale of Two Ecumenisms?

Carl Trueman, professor of Church History at WTS, has been writing some important articles over at First Things.  Important, I say, because of his strong stance on Presbyterian Confessionalism.  Other Protestant authors, such as Peter Leithart (advocate of a sort of Reformed Catholicism), tend to respect the classical confessions (Westminster, Heidelberg, etc.) while connected more strongly to the Patristic and Medieval influences on the Reformation.  However, for many, that has opened the doors to seeing the priority of authority resting in broader Church history, not with the Reformed confessions; that is, many (some? I don't have statistics) have crossed the Tiber, the Thames, or the Bosporus due to the ecumenical outreach of modern Reformation thinkers.  Trueman, while appreciating the influence of Patristic and Medieval sources on Reformed thought, stays committed to the confessional authority and heritage that the post-Reformation scholastics bequeathed to Reformed communions.  My own sense of where this sort of dialogue is going leads me to believe that there will be a Reformed retrenchment against moderate and soft subscriptionism: the Confessions will, I think, in short order regain their authoritative standing in Reformed churches (my reservations about such a move can be found here).  This is no prophecy, however; I could be quite wrong.

Trueman's latest article goes further by calling attention to the work of "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" (ECT), a group I have some passing affinity with (the former president of the college I teach at was a member -- it made him into a "lame duck" president in the eyes of the Board).  Trueman contrasts, very helpfully, the sort of ecumenism at the root of ECT versus the sort of informal, conference- and book-based ecumenism that seems to hold in broader Evangelicalism.  Think how many conservative Reformed pastors extol Mark Driscoll (Charismatic) or John Piper (Baptist), for an example.  A very, very important issue is raised here, but it isn't the one I wish to focus on.  Rather, it is a rather surprising inconsistency in his reasoning about doctrine.  He says, "perhaps the biggest disappointment about ECT is the fact that, like stadium evangelicalism, it disconnects matters which should be connected." By itself, there is much to be said about this.  However, as the article unfolds, we see Dr. Trueman doing the very separation he castigates.  He applauds Catholic theologians for getting the doctrine of God right, but says that the modern evangelicals, even those who totally botch the Trinity, get the doctrines of authority and salvation right.  In fact, he "still do[es] not see any advance beyond the sixteenth century" in matters of ecclesial authority or justification.  However, while the early Reformed may have held orthodox views about God (the charge of Nestorianism might be able to be leveled at Calvin and can certainly be leveled against Vermigli and others), the moderns by-and-large do not, which means that a separation has taken place: soteriology and theology are at odds in modern evangelicalism.  The problem, though, is that this is untenable: one's doctrine of God is one's doctrine of salvation.

In John 17, the Lord Christ [or St John in an editorial aside] says, "This is eternal life: to know You, the One True God and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent."  Knowing, as it well known among biblical scholars, is a participatory act, not a merely rational one: to know is to be in union with the one known.  To know God, to have eternal life, is to be in union with Him (the Father) and Jesus Christ (the Son) -- the assumption, spelled out elsewhere in Scripture, is that this done through the Spirit.  Eternal life, then, is not merely a gift, separate from God.  Since He alone has immortality (1 Tim. 6:16), to have "eternal" life is to partake in the life of God Himself, the Life that John says is Jesus (John 1:4).  Salvation, then, is participation or union with the Trinity.  To have your doctrine (or "knowledge" if you will) of God wrong is to not have salvation.  One can understand all sorts of things about the so-called ordo salutis and the relationship of justification to that (although I think that Chris Tilling's critique of both Old and New Perspectives as not being sufficiently Trinitarian is indispensable here), but if we have not God, we have nothing but sounding brass.  The two cannot be separated because, in essence, they are the same thing.

While Dr. Trueman may not be guilty of the separation (he seems to hold a more Catholic understanding of God, yet with Reformed soteriology), modern evangelicalism is.  The question of why, then, orthodox Protestants and orthodox Catholics disagree on the mechanisms of salvation becomes salvifically pertinent.  Both cannot be right (it is possible, as my Orthodox friends would aver, that both are wrong).  However, if we understand salvation as union with God (or, to use the Patristic term, as theosis), the question of imputation vs impartation becomes insignificant.  "Righteousness" is not something outside of God, either as a "created" grace or as a legal decree: righteousness is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who pours out the love of God in our hearts (Rom. 5:5).  The Orthodox distinction between Essence and Energy is helpful here.  How does one "become" righteous?  By being united with Christ in His death (His historical energy, as it were).  This union is accomplished by the indwelling of the Spirit at ecclesial baptism -- St Paul's argument in Romans 5-6 -- all because of the faith of Christ in the Incarnation.  More needs to be said about this, of course, but at the very least it pushes us to see that we need a third ecumenism that surpasses both ECT and the new evangelical consensus.

Review of "The Bible Tells Me So"

Enns, Peter. The Bible Tells Me So (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 267pgs.

Enns, a professor at Eastern University, writes often on his blog about the mounting scholarly and popular problems inerrancy faces.  This book, The Bible Tells Me So, lays out his case in a popular idiom.  It ranges through his field (Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) through the New and into modern criticism.  His main point, it seems, is that Scripture cannot bear the weight inerrantism puts on it: a claim that is, in my opinion, becoming more and more undeniable every day. The implications of this, for the life of the evangelical church, are staggering, although they are mostly left as subtle or provocative hints throughout Enns' text.  He lays out no program of how to interpret the Bible post-inerrancy, but merely strives to show that the old paradigm has no proverbial clothes on.

The argument is fairly clear; however, you cannot beat something with nothing.  In the end, the Bible is left, not as a normative collection of books (a canon for faith and life), but as a set that "carries the thoughts and meditations of ancient pilgrims and, I believe, according to God's purpose, has guided, comforted, and informed Christians for as long as there have been Christians" (234). He argues, at various points throughout the text, that portions of the Scriptures were "left behind" by later authors, especially those parts in which God is presented as a tribal-warrior death with a "hair-trigger temper."  I was left wondering how that might play out exegetically: are we allowed to leave behind parts of Scripture today? I realize that this comes dangerously close to committing the slippery slope fallacy on my part, but recent moves by various parts of the church have accomplished this very thing.  It gets to the very thorny (whether you are an inerrantist or not) issue of how "cultural conditioning" works in the New Testament (especially).

One thing Enns focuses on is the way both Jesus and the Apostles interpreted the Old Testament. It is well known that they, and the Church Fathers, Scholastics, Mystics, and others up until the Reformation, used very strange (to us) methods to derive meaning for their day, in light of what Jesus did and, therefore, who He was.  In fact, Enns says he would give a student a bad grade (among other things) if they engaged in that sort of exegesis. Here is one of the main points that we should focus in on: Enns has, unwittingly?, cut out how Protestants do biblical study, but has not put anything else in its place.  The historical-critical method doesn't cut it, since the history does not conform to our modern understandings of what counts as historical accuracy (an argument I've made before); grammatical-historical suffers from the same fate; redemptive-historical as well, although this one might get a bit more of a pass as it tends to focus on the canonical narrative, yet it assumes the full historical validity in the Scriptures.  What else can there be? If we cannot make recourse to "objective" history, what can we do?  Or, if apostolic (read: ecclesial-liturgical) readings are appropriate and necessary to maintain the Scriptures as "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Tim. 3:16-17), how do we engage them without making "the Bible mean whatever you feel like making it mean" (168)?

Enns never quite says.  He offers some suggestions of how we are to approach the Bible post-inerrancy (236-244), but they do not amount to a complete exegetical agenda (nor, to be fair, was this his intent, as this is a popular level book, but I have the feeling that many will walk away from their reading wondering how the Bible, especially the OT, is normative for life today).  What Enns is seeking to accomplish in this work is important: we must read the Scriptures, if we are to know the God who inspired them, as they are meant to be read. They cannot bear the weight that sola Scriptura inevitably places on them.  But what?  Enns confesses that "I continue to work all this out for myself" (236). Just as Deuteronomy ends with the Israelites outside the Promised Land, so does TBTMS.

Trying to think alongside Dr. Enns, here are some thoughts as we seek to move forward: the Lord, the Apostles, and the Fathers/Mothers of the Church are all agreed that the key to reading Scripture is not found within method, or scholarly acumen. The key, the skopos of St Athansius and the hypothesis of St Irenaeus, is Jesus Christ, accessible to us by His Holy Spirit through participation in the life of the Church.  In other words, the Bible is an ecclesial document that cannot be properly read outside of the Church worshipping and communing. Lex orandi, lex credendi. Only being indwelt by the Spirit, what St John calls in his first epistle "the anointing you received from Him" (2:20, 27), can equip us to read the Scriptures towards salvation: this Spirit is the down-payment of the Church (not of individual believers in a "soul competency" sort of way -- this would lead to confusion and chaos, as can be seen in the history of Protestantism generally). Of course, this leads us to the question that continues to irk me: where is the Spirit? Who (which tradition/communion) has Him?

This is, to me, the great question.  It is, at least, the most important question I've ever come across. Enns, I think, points us back to this question, even if he is not explicitly asking it.

The Telos of the Creation

I'm currently rereading Al Wolter's Creation Regained (Eerdmans, 2005; second ed.), as it is a textbook in a class I'm teaching.  I chose it specifically because it was so instrumental in my becoming a Neo-Calvinist (or Reformational) in college and grad school.  I was a card-carrying Dooyeweerdian, fighting for the end of dualism, especially in theology (which, to tow the party line, was beholden to Platonic dualism or one sort or another).  Now that I'm teaching, I knew this was one book I wanted my students to read: it had been so formative for me, how could I resist?

You can never go home again.

Maybe it is the intervening years, maybe it is the changes that I went through in seminary, maybe it is my ever-deepening reading of the Fathers of the Church, I don't know.  But I find myself, over and over again, disagreeing with Wolters.  Some things I can heartily affirm: creation is good, even despite the ravaging effects of sin.  However, after that, things get dodgy.  Part of it goes to some of the tacit (worldview?) assumptions that go unexamined throughout the book.  One is that creation, as it stands, is meant to largely run as we experience it (not in its corruption from sin, but in its creational structure).  However, this opens Wolters up to the charge of an incipient deism, especially once we reach his thoughts on "salvation as restoration."  As he puts it, "redemption means restoration -- that is, the return to the goodness of an originally unscathed creation and not merely the addition of something supracreational" (69, emphasis original).  Redemption functions as a reset button, as it were, on creation.  However, this ignores the fact that the original creation was meant to run on "the addition of something supracreational," that is, God's Life.  God, who promises to be "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28, Eph. 1:23, etc.), pours Himself out into His creation "deifying" it, to use the Patristic term.  Creation was meant to be filled by God from the beginning.  Salvation, then, cannot be about merely restoring the creation and then developing it along human lines (which is where Reformational thinking goes about its "culture making"); rather, salvation is about restoration and glorification.  Certainly, we can and should develop the creation to its potential, but if we do not realize that the point of its potential, the telos of its telos, is union with God, then we miss the point entirely.

I wonder, although I cannot prove this so do not take it as a rebuke or accusation, if all this might be the effects of the crypto-Nestoranism that plagues much of Reformed Christology (going back, some argue, to Calvin himself -- I cannot judge one way or the other).  In classical Nestorianism, the person of the Word takes on human nature without changing it or fulfilling it.  It is a "union of wills," at best.  Human nature is not raised up into theosis, or deification, or glorification (whatever you want to call it), but remains untouched by the indwelling of the Logos.  This means that, while Christ restores nature (for how could sin negatively affect His human nature after the resurrection), He does nothing else with it.  It is not a true, Chalcedonian union.  Rather, classical Christianity has held that creation is fundamentally incomplete -- and tends back to the nihil as both Sts Athanasius and Maximus the Confessor argue -- without the vivifying presence of God "everywhere present and fulfilling all things."  Creation is not enough; that doesn't mean it isn't good -- acknowledging creational limitation built into its very structure by God is not Gnosticism.  Restoration is not enough.

This gets to the second assumption that I must disagree with: sin is what is wrong with the world.  Don't get me wrong, though: sin is a problem.  But it is more of a symptom to the real problem, which is the corruption of death.  Again, St Athanasius speaks on this much more powerful than I can in his On the Incarnation.  God is Life, so to be separate from Him is to be in a state of death.  Mere biological existence (which is in line with the structural norms given by God) is now necessarily in death; something does need to be added back, which is God.  Now, death is brought into the world via sin, but, as St Athanasius says, you can repent of sin, you can't repent of death.  Christ, in His Incarnation (which includes the Cross, Resurrection, Ascension, and Session) not only defeats sin, but death as well.  It is only through His full union with human nature that this can be accomplished for us.  Death is the real problem.  Culturally, this means that mere "development" along the lines of redirected creational structures isn't enough; every discipline, every cultural endeavor, and so on must go through the Cross.  Each aspect of creation must partake of the death of Christ to be freed from the corruptive effects of sin and death.  This means that we will not, and cannot, "bring in the Kingdom" by our efforts, nor will we reach a sort of "principled pluralist" utopia.  Rather, we remain faithful in all aspects of life, bringing them again and again to the Cross, so that they might be raised on the last day (which is itself the fullness of the Crucifixion).  I haven't fully worked through the implications of this -- but it has changed the way I interact with cultural goods and norms.  One thing I know now, though, is that the fullness of the Kingdom will not be realized culturally or socially until Christ comes again -- I have officially left post-millennialism for a robust amillennialism.

More, of course, needs to be said and written.  But this brief introduction will have to suffice for now.

Apocalyptic Hopes

We will have the whole world fight against us
raise up a banner, bathe itself in our blood:
for what? to prove that it is strong, has reason
for its pride?  Oppressor and oppressed alike die;
from dust they come and to dust they return.
There is no hierarchy in the grave.

Let them beat the air, shadow-boxers all;
let us give ourselves bodily over -- the only power
they possess is to kill the body. When we cease to love
is when we kill the soul.  Fear that.  And repent.
Violence is the way of the world, the last dying gasp
and grasp upon a life we pretend to own:
filled to the brim with apocalyptic vision and heavenly hope
based on hate and subjugation.  This is not the Kingdom.

Let us dwell on the Cross, let us call out for the nails,
the scourge, the beatings -- call the thorns a true crown
true power, true prestige in mockery.  Conformed to his death
humiliation
so that after a brief rest, we might rise in his light.

Canonical Readings of the OT

One of the advantages of an ecclesial reading of the OT is that is frees the so-called canonical reading from dependence on any genetic theory of textual origins.  As it stands, the canonical method focuses most heavily on the texts as we have received them; however, it also pays some homage to the redaction and development of the text, hypothetically reconstructed.  The underlying assumption is that the older material is more authentic, but the final form is that with which we have to do, making it ecclesially binding, but not strictly primary in a textual sense.  This ignores the fundamental theotic character of the texts.  A reading in concert with the ecclesial goal of theosis allows the final form, the form passed on by the Apostles, to have a much deeper and richer character, especially as regards idiosyncrasies.  While I don't currently have time to delve into it, I imagine that an ecclesial reading would nullify the supposed findings of the Documentary Hypothesis.  More work will need to be shown on that.

Paradigms for OT Interpretation

These are some thoughts towards a project tentatively entitled: "The Icon of the Old Testament: Liturgical and Ecclesial Hermeneutics".

One of the great difficulties attendant upon interpretation of the Old Testament is its ostensible status as history.  Quickly, though, we find many problems in this, not least that 'history' and 'historiography' mean something different post-Enlightenment.  We read, fundamentally and almost by necessity, the OT differently than it was intended.  Argument abound, then, as to how much of the OT passes our modern canons of history, with predictable "liberal" and "conservative" results -- neither actually giving much knowledge, again, predictable.  Each side goes back and forth about the historical utility of, say, archaeology in determining whether or not some biblical event or another really happened, as if our interpretation of long-past events, whether found in strata of tells or lines of text, will give us an objective peek into this reality.

Part of the problem, possibly, is that we have confused literal meaning with historical accuracy (whatever that, in itself, might mean).  To read the Bible literally means to read it as a telling of history, of "what really happened" at certain points in time.  No doubt, the Scriptures do present history, a "what happened," but to claim that they are objective, post-Enlightenment historiography is to miss the point.  At the same time, to claim that since they come out of a certain nation's collective experience and confirm their deeply held beliefs that the Scriptures must therefore be either relativistic or propagandistic, separated from any historical mooring, is also to miss the point.  Both rely on a sense of history that the Bible, or her authors, seem to not be interested in.

Literal meaning, in the original sense of the term, has to do with the literary meaning: that is, how the story or narrative works.  But, to fully get to that meaning, another context needs to be taken into account.  In some ways, this upsets the whole understanding of how Patristic and Medieval interpretation takes place.  St John Cassian, in the Conferences, details what Dante will later call the "Allegory of the Theologians" or the fourfold method of Scriptural interpretation: literal, symbolic/allegory, moral, and anagogical.  The impression built, not necessarily by Cassian or others, is that this interpretive scheme function as a ladder, each rung leading (hopefully) to the next until theosis or the beatific vision is achieved.  However, this would be to ignore the more circular, or helical, nature of this schema.  All of the senses rely on the Spirit of God, on union with Christ, therefore all of this senses are liturgical and ecclesial: the Scriptures cannot be understood without participation in the life of the Church and her sacraments.  Evidence for this can be found all over the Patristic writings, from Cassian to Athanasius to Augustine and so on.  The context for the literal sense is the anagogical sense, in other words; the same for the moral and symbolic senses as well.  They depend on each other, and more importantly, they depend on the "pillar and ground of the Truth" that is the Church, who has received the "Deposit" of Faith from the Apostles.

This turns our attention, interpretively speaking, to the telos of the Scriptures, specifically of the Old Testament.  Why do we have these books?  What is the point?  It is only when we grasp the ecclesially anagogical underpinnings of the texts, that is their intended to be used in the life of the Church to bring people to theosis or the beatific vision, that the literal meaning can become clear.  When our Lord Jesus says in Luke 24 that "everything must be fulfilled that is written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms," He is grounding all Christian interpretation of the OT in the reality of Himself, which includes the Church and the Theotokos.  All the Scriptures, in some way, shape, and form, point beyond themselves -- at the literary level and most importantly at the historical level -- to the Christ, the Logos of God the Father, for the salvation of the hearer and the reader alike.  In seeing the literal and the historical meaning as iconic, instead of as straight forward post-Enlightenment narrative or history, these senses become clearer.  First, they were not intended to bear the weight, historically speaking, that we have placed on them: the texts themselves are theological interpretation of the events "as they really happened."  We cannot, due to how history works, access the past in any sort of certain way -- historiography always involves a certain amount of educated guesswork and reconstruction.  Any history is a more or less tendentious and partial interpretation of events that are themselves enmeshed in an infinite number of contexts, all of which are necessary to grasp and ascertain for their full sense to objectively emerge.  If we clear away our expectation of objective history being conveyed by the texts, many (but by no means all) of the discrepancies between "liberal/critical" and "conservative/fundamentalist" interpretations disappear.

Second on the list of of iconic corrections, the texts can be freed from the suffocating restraints that some versions of "inspiration" put on the Scriptures.  We would do well to remind ourselves of what St Paul actually says about inspiration in II Timothy: "All Scripture is inspired and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness."  Notably absent is utility towards scientific endeavors and ancient historiography.  Could it be possible that, without losing the utility of the Scriptures to do exactly what Paul said they could do, the stories of Creation might be written in forms conducive to not only the time in which they were composed, but also in a form that remains conducive to our salvation today, without necessarily being a point-by-point breakdown of "what really happened"?  One objection that is often raised about this is that if Genesis 1-3 were written in a mytho-poetic style, then why didn't God just write (or have written) propositions which we are supposed to believe, i.e. what we should learn about God from this narrative, the moral of the story as it were.  To do so, though, is to mistake a certain understanding of what truth is for truth itself.  As Alasdair MacIntyre, among many others, asserts, we are storied creatures.  We generally do not learn by propositions, unless those propositions are themselves couched in a larger, sometimes hidden or subconscious narrative.  To reduce the Creation stories, whether in explication or in preaching, to a series of talking points and "lessons," is to rob them of their power.  Salvation is not composed of aphorisms, although as Proverbs shows, aphorisms do have their place.  Rather, it is the indwelling of the story, in the life and sacraments of the Church, that fully mature the believer towards salvation.

Enough for now, as it is late.

The Wheat and the Tares

The wheat and the tares
both grow under the shining Love;
known early, early by the Farmer
but left to sprout until seed -- together.
Under the loving care the one
blossoms forth thirty-fold
sixty-fold, one-hundred-fold hallelujah;
the other bitters and resents the ground
the air, the early and late rains,
most of all the heat, damned heat,
of the Sun of righteousness.
So is revealed, before Harvest,
the presence in the heart
of Heaven and Hell.  Will the tare notice
the Fire, or see it as more of the same?
Doubtless the wheat threshed, crushed,
chaffed, stripped, ground into the Loaf
will be saved as through another Fire --
though He is truly the same.

IC XC NIKA

While having a chat with a student and friend today, it started to dawn on me why the Christian life is necessarily cruciform, that is, why we must daily share in the death of Christ.

The power of the enemy (Satan and the demons, and by extension those who are under their influence) is death: they can kill the body through sin; this is what happened in the Garden and is the reason why our Lord calls Satan the "first murderer" (instead of Cain).  However, since Christ voluntarily took death onto Himself (instead of being under its dominion through sin), He was able to show who He truly was by destroying that power through resurrection.  We share in that death through baptism, as St Paul says in Romans: his means death has no power over us and, if this is the case, then neither does sin, since "sin is the stinger of death" (1 Cor. 15:56).  However, since we have only the first fruits of Christ's life, the Holy Spirit who is God, and God is not yet "all in all" (God has defeated death on the Cross, but defeat in war doesn't mean pacification: the last enemy to be destroyed is death), we can -- voluntarily -- come under the power and dominion of death once again through sin.

How shall we escape this body of death?  The Lord renews us in our baptismal death, in our sharing of His Cross, through repentance.  In other words, when we die to self in baptism or repentance, we defeat again in Christ the power of the enemy.  Death can have no claim on us who repent, but rather God "will shortly trample Satan under your feet" (Rom. 16:20).

Repentance is our freedom from the oppression of death, of demons, of sin; let us join again today in the death of Christ.

The Range of Inspiration

One aspect of Evangelical and Protestant theology that is in desperate need of rethinking is inspiration.  This is, arguably, happening already through the work of Pete Enns and others.  The payout of this is yet to be seen: the work is in its very earliest days.

One of the questions that must be asked is: when did the work of the Spirit in inspiration stop?  The obvious answer is: when the last Apostle finished writing their last book/died.  However, it is not so easy.  Does the Spirit only inspire writing?  We might get this idea from 2 Timothy 3:16, but to do so would be to misread the text.

"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work."

Where in this text does it say that only the Scriptures are inspired?  It doesn't.  Such is an assumption brought to the text.  Now, a rejoinder might be that nothing else in Scripture is explicitly called "inspired."  As is well known, an argument from silence is not ultimately convincing, to say the least.  (It is also worth noting that St Timothy is an apostolic legate, so this verse is not saying the Scriptures can do all these thing outside or without the Church:  Timothy, as the de facto bishop, is being given instructions on how to utilize the Old Testament in the context of his ecclesial work.). What can be learned from this is that while the Scriptures are inspired, that doesn't mean that nothing else is.  When  Paul tells Timothy or St Titus to "guard the deposit/that which has been entrusted to you," it is a safe, and historically accurate, assumption to believe that this Apostolic tradition was itself inspired.  What that Deposit consisted of, of course, is a matter of long debate.  At the very least we learn from early apologists such as Tertullian and St Irenaeus that it entails the Trinitarian regula fidei (which is the basis of my contention that the Trinity is the necessary assumption behind understanding the Bible: God Himself is the interpretive key, what Irenaeus calls the hypothesis and St Athanasius calls the skopos).

Back to the initial contention: inspiration ceased with the last writing of the last Apostle/their death.  It would seem that I've taken care, at least provisionally, of the first part. However, as the Deposit would have been completed by the death of the last Apostle (and, according to St Jude, much earlier: "the Faith once for all delivered to the saints"), then the initial definition still stands, even if slightly modified.  However, it seems that this understanding of inspiration was not held by Christians at all from their earliest days.  In the Counciliar Definitions, there is an appeal to the work of the Spirit in the deliberations: "Seven holy and ecumenical Synods which were directed by the inspiration of the one and the same Holy Spirit" (text from the so-called Eight Ecumenical Council of 879/880).  In some way, the Spirit continued to move and speak in the Church: not in the sense of adding to or augmenting or contradicting the ancient Deposit, but clarifying through the Fathers the language and the means used to teach it and apply it to the life of the Church.  Many, I know, would object to this line of reasoning, especially if they are traditionally Protestant (i.e., icons had been exonerated in the 7th Ecumenical Council).  There are disturbing questions that must be addressed if this is not the case, though.  Did the Spirit cease His work with the death of the Apostles?  The Lord Christ promised that the Spirit "would lead in all the Truth" in John 16:14 -- is this promise only for the Apostles?  If so, what guarantees do we have that we (or the Reformation, for that matter) have access to the unadulterated truth?  (Answer: none.).

And so, again, it comes down to which ecclesial tradition bears the Spirit?  As should be plain by now, I cannot confidently answer that question.

Some of the corollaries of all this (being the actual reason I started writing tonight) concern what might be called "later" practices of the Church.  To return to the Facebook discussion referenced in the last post, what about "prayer beads"?  Can this practice, which seems to have arisen in the Egyptian monastic movement, be legitimate even though it isn't Scriptural?  One Reformed who answered the question said a very interesting thing (paraphrased): we don't find prayer beads in the pre-Christian Jewish tradition, therefore they are a later pagan influence.  This sort of thing is certainly heard often, especially in some Reformed circles (those influenced by Theonomy, for example).  The assumption behind it is that the inspiration of the Spirit in praxis ceased with the Apostles.  To truly discern appropriate practice becomes, then, somewhat conjectural and certainly a form of archaeology.  It certainly runs the risk of Judaizing.  It also vaunts an unrecoverable past over the historical practice of the Church (interesting to note that this same critique can be applied to the textual theory that centers inspiration in the non-extant autographa).  However, there is no biblical reason to favor a reconstructed Jewish tradition over what actually happened historically: St Paul became a Greek for the Greeks, and so did the Church herself.  It has, and I think this is probably most true in Orthodoxy, retained many aspects of her Jewish heritage, but the Tree has not been stunted at the roots.  Rather, through the ingrafting that Paul mentions in Romans 12, the Tree is truly cosmopolitan: the standard by which praxis is judged is not by its Jewishness, nor even necessarily if it appears in Scripture (let us remember that Jesus did not condemn phylacteries, jus the enlargement of such), but by whether it accomplishes the goal of theosis, or becoming like Christ, or acquiring the Spirit (three ways of saying the same thing): inspiration, in other words.

The Limits of Sola Scriptura

There is a very common objection, from Roman Catholics and Orthodox, to the doctrine of sola Scriptura: it makes each individual believer the official -- and potentially infallible -- interpreter of Scripture.  For some Protestants, of course, this is true.  It was true in my case, at any rate.  I remember a student, who is now a relatively well-known Lutheran apologist, talking to me once about my views on justification.  He asked how I could hold a certain position, since it didn't seem to jibe with the Westminster Confession.  My response, which was the same I gave my pastor at the time, was that I didn't particularly care if my interpretation lined up with the WCF, as that was a human produced document of only relative authority.  Rather, all I cared was whether or not my understanding agreed with Scripture.  What I didn't realize at the time was that I had made my own reason, and investigative powers, the benchmark of interpretation.  I was not necessarily any closer to what Scripture actually meant, but I was very close to what I meant.  This is not to say that my baseline critique wasn't valid, it just didn't go far enough.

Let me explain.

There is no reason to believe that my researches in history, philosophy, textual transmission, or even theology would lead me to a particularly proper interpretation of Scripture.  Using the historical-grammatical interpretive method (and this could be applied to most other "critical" methods) actually leads us into a quagmire: if we cannot understand the Scriptures without detailed analysis of the history and language behind them, then we will never truly understand the Scriptures.  Both fields, linguistics and archaeology, are fraught with human interpretive foibles.  Not to mention that those communities who, historically speaking, have not had access to decent scholarship are therefore put in an unenviable position: they may believe, but they cannot fully or truly believe.  They are relegated to an impoverished state in the Church.  (This is also a problem with holding that inspiration stops with the autographa, or original documents from the Apostles and Prophets -- they don't exist anymore, so any copy of the Scriptures is potentially riddled with errors; how can we confidently know what to believe, especially with scholars like Bart Ehrman telling us that the communities in charge of the manuscripts have emended them to suit their particular ideological needs?)  Not only this, but the sort of biblical interpretation as rational, scholastic endeavor means that those unable to engage on that level (children, the mentally handicapped, the uneducated) cannot fully benefit from the teaching of the Word of God.

To get around some of these individualist difficulties, there is the option to be a confessionalist: that is, the baseline interpretation of Scripture, at least theologically, is found in the WCF or the Three Forms of Unity, etc.  (There still is the option for grammatical-historical work here, of course; but at least it has boundaries around what is and isn't possible to ascertain from the texts themselves).  This does lead right into debates about how to interpret these documents and the various positions of "strict" v. "moderate" subscriptionism.  Supra- or infra-?  Paedo- or credo-?  And so on.  However, this isn't the problem that I had/have with the confessions.  That lies in the actual authority of them.  The reason my denomination holds the Confession in high regard is due to the belief that they are an accurate interpretation and application of Scripture.  But, who gets to decide that?  The authority of any confession becomes, quickly, circular.  "We believe the Confession to be adequately interpreting of Scripture; why do we believe this?  Because Scripture rightly interpreted produces the Confession."  This is, of course, a gross over-simplification of the issue; but the point remains.  As I've argued before, there is no "plain, clear, obvious" reading of Scripture.  Each reading arises out of a certain theology, out of a regula fidei that is necessarily foreign to the Scriptures themselves (in other words, there is no such thing as solo Scriptura).  The authority of the Confession, then, is a presupposition that cannot be adequately verified: it is an authority because it is an authority.  It reminds me, rather, of the Anarcho-Syndicalism scene in Monty Python's The Quest for the Holy Grail.

Both ways of engaging in sola Scriptura, the individual, academic route and the confessionalist route, both fail to provide an adequate authoritative base.  Both, in the end, must succumb to a form of fideism: we believe this to be the interpretation of the Scriptures because this is what we believe.  Maybe, in the end, this is where, epistemologically speaking, we must end up.  I hope not.

Again, the question becomes: where is the Spirit?  If there is any theme that runs through my thinking, it is this.  If we want to properly interpret the Scriptures, that is, if we want to read them towards the goal of salvation, then we must read them with and in the Spirit.  This assumes, though, that the Spirit is an actual reality (Gr: hypostasis) and not just a cipher for an emotional state.  We cannot say that we have the Spirit, and so are interpreting Scripture rightly, based on how we feel or on the presence of ostensible charismata, as both of those things can be engineered or manipulated (not just by preachers, but by our non-corporeal enemies).  How do we know who has the Spirit, then?

Certainty

A friend posted a question on Facebook about those who are Reformed and the use of prayer beads.  A discussion of those who were more or less committed to sola Scriptura ensued, with some Anglicans and Orthodox chiming in.  What was said isn't particularly relevant to what I'm writing right now -- the discussion proceeded down the same old talking points that are common to such things.  No real surprises at all.  For me, the important thing is once again how shaky it all is for us humans.  Either the Church fell into idolatry rather quickly (icons are being found earlier and earlier in the archaeological record, mosaics -- even of the Zodiac -- adorn Jewish synagogues; invocations of the saints are on record from very, very early, etc.) or the Reformation got it wrong.  I've tried, and maybe it is just my feeble mind, but I cannot see it any other way.  Of course, along the way, there were abuses: we shouldn't expect anything else.  But could the Church, whom Christ said He through the Spirit would lead into all Truth (Jn 16:13 -- or could our Lord be saying only the Apostles would be so led, with their descendants having to fend for themselves?), and which St Paul called the "pillar and ground of the Truth" (1 Tim. 3:15), have so monumentally failed in her dogma and worship (the twins that comprise the word "orthodoxy") that the Reformation (in its Calvinist and Zwinglian forms) was necessary to reset it?

And with the ongoing difficulties I've had in my faith, this question has loomed large.  The question is important, since being part of Christ's Body is tantamount to salvation (maybe this is why the Reformation developed the teaching of the "invisible Church"?): but which Church?  Which authority do we submit to that faithfully carries the life of Christ into the world still?  I've been told that I just need to have faith, by which seems to be meant blind belief: but the question of how I might be saved, how I might be healed and restored and glorified -- and the world along with me -- seems to need more than just "faith" in that restrictive sense.  It strikes me as more akin to Kierkegaard's "leap of faith" than what we see in the Gospels and Acts, which is predicated on the active presence of the Spirit.

While I flirted with a certain sort of ecumenism for awhile, I don't think in the end that it works: the mutually conflicting claims from all sides cannot jibe with one another.  We might say that many disagreements affect matters that are not important to salvation, such as a cappella music versus pianos/organs versus modern instruments.  However, if we believe there is any part of our doctrine and practice that does not lead us to or away from salvation in Christ, then we would do better to completely excise that thing.  I've heard, although I cannot confirm it, that Zwingli did not have singing in his churches.  If it doesn't matter how we worship God in song, then song is an unnecessary distraction from the real work of the Church.  If, however, how we sing helps to form us in Christ (and chanting of the Psalms, not metrical singing and certainly not praise bands, has the historical upper hand here), then we should hold firmly to it.  This doesn't mean, by the way, that there is an overly restrictive formula at work, an "if you sing like this, then God must save you" sort of thing: I cannot get into the theory behind the expansiveness of boundaries at this point, but let me point to Zeno and his paradoxes as a guide.

One way forward might be to ask, again, what the nature of salvation is.  If it is merely getting to heaven when we die, then there is no authority by which we might examine that claim.  All near-death experiences are unverifiable, even that little boy's from the popular book and movie, so there really is nothing but blind faith here.  The authority, I think, often lies with those able to be rhetorically astute in their (well-intentioned, no doubt) manipulation of fear.  In other words, sophistry.  We are all afraid of death, or at least have reservations about it, and these sorts of guarantees salve troubled souls.

Let's imagine, then, that salvation is becoming a 'good' person (whatever that means -- a problem with this possibility already).  Many of those who would be considered either heretical or pagan by ostensibly Christian groups produce impeccably moral people.  I'd even, and this is controversial, include atheists into this: I've met many who treat other human being respectfully and with love -- sometimes with greater earnestness and intensity than card-carrying Christians.  The objection might be made that those others are moral without stable reason.  That is, their morality is part of "common grace" but ultimately fails because it is irrationally held: it goes against their deepest held beliefs since only those who believe in the Christian God can be truly moral.  Understandable, but impossible to prove.  Plus, there is plenty of empirical evidence to show that, prima facie, the objection is false.  At any rate, the reality of the virtuous atheist shows up the theory that salvation is being/becoming moral.  This isn't to say that morality plays no part in Christian salvation, but it cannot be the be-all end-all.

Two down.  Maybe salvation is being made into a saint.  Now, you might think that I'm just repeating the "salvation as morality" claim, but I'm not.  A saint is not the same as a moral person, as any look at the history of saints will show.  Nor am I using the common Protestant definition of a saint as any one and every one who believes -- I've yet to see any Scriptural evidence to back up that particular understanding of sainthood (I've come to believe -- and I need to write this up -- that the differences between Colossians and Ephesians hinges on what a "saint" is).  No, a saint is one who has been healed of the corruption inherited from Adam, that is, who partakes of the Holy Spirit to such an extent that they can truly exclaim with St Paul "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me" (Gal. 2:20).  But again, how can this be shown?  Have I met any saints?  If this is the true definition of salvation, to be made a saint, what is the process by which this happens?  In other words, here is the crux of the matter: which ecclesial tradition allows for the possibility to become like the Apostles, like St Mary, like our Lord Christ Himself (albeit by grace, not by nature) in holiness?

And so, again, I'm stuck.

Sermon: Luke 2:22-40

The text of a sermon given at First Presbyterian Church of Beaver Falls this Sunday.  I'm thankful for their warm hospitality.

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“After the Feast”

We’ve just come out of the great celebration of our God and Savior’s nativity.  The stockings have been emptied, the packages unwrapped, the tinsel is in various states of decay.  Our bellies may still be smarting from the feasts we’ve had in the last month or so: worry not, January 1 starts our national two week diet, where we foreswear anything rich and vow to visit the gym.  Many of us have spent the last month reflecting on some aspect of the Incarnation, that event – still ongoing – in which God takes human nature to Himself and is born of a Virgin.  And so we celebrate Christmas.  However, once all is said and done, we don’t really know what to do with ourselves until Easter.  Jesus Christ, the old trope goes, came to do three days’ work.  His whole mission, we are told, is to die and rise again.

While there is truth in those sayings, they miss some very important things about the Incarnation that can only be seen if we slow down, read the texts, and pray for their application to our hearts.  With that in mind, we turn to our passage in Luke’s account of the Gospel.  Here we see what, to our eyes, looks like an odd scene: Jesus being presented in the Temple, His Mother going through the purificatory rites outlined in Leviticus 12.  The point that St Luke seems to be making, one he will make again, is that this Jesus has fulfilled the Law of Moses.  Not just some parts, but all.  The reason that the Law was given, as the Lord will say later on, is that it pointed to Him and prepared the world for His arrival: “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me” (24:44).  Christ fulfills the Law, not so that we can ignore it and neglect it, but to bring about the purposes for which is was given – the point, or the end, of the Law, as St Paul calls Christ in the Epistle to the Romans: “For Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (10:4).

In fulfilling the Torah of Moses, our Lord also supercedes it: it is the shadow, He is the reality.  There is, then, a bit of irony in the passage: the most pure Lord, holiness Himself, who cannot dwell in uncleanness, is brought to the Temple by His Mother, Mary, in whom He dwelled, for her purification.  The sacrifices here, then, show themselves to be types that are passing away: the blood of pigeons and doves is no longer necessary as the presence of God Himself in her womb, plus the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit at the conception, renders her clean.  By bringing the Lord and the sacrifices to the Temple, the old system has been brought to completion and, as the author to the Hebrews tells us, “In that He says, ‘A new covenant,’ He has made the first obsolete.  Now what is obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (8:13).

This might, though, lead us astray into thinking that, really, for all practical intents and purposes, the Law can be neglected.  To do so, though, would mean that we miss what the Law was actually about.  Why did God spend so much time in Exodus giving the plans for the Tabernacle and then repeat them, almost word for word, when it was constructed?  Why so much space detailing the sacrifices and holy days and procedures for priests and laity in Leviticus and Deuteronomy?  If He was just going to fulfill it and cast it aside, why have it in our Bibles?  Take a second and consider the word “fulfill.”  What does it mean?  If you have a glass of water, and you “fulfill” it, you do two actions: you bring it to its intended point (to hold liquid) and to its fullness – you fill it full.  For Christ to fulfill the Law and the Prophets does not mean He abolishes them, according to His own teaching in Matthew’s account (5:17); no, it means He invests them with the fullness of their purpose and brings them to completion.  In the case of the Temple, and the sacrifices, and cultic regulations, consider the great OT promise: “I will be their God, and they shall be My people, and I will dwell among them” (Ex. 29:45; Ez. 37:26, 27).  God, St John tells us, has come to dwell among us in Jesus Christ (Jn. 1:14); St Paul tells us that “for in [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Deity in bodily form” (Col. 2:9).  We can extend this, though: from whence did Christ receive this Temple that is His Body?  From Mary.  She has become a Temple of the Lord, in which He dwelt.  And who is Christ’s Body?  The Church.  All the OT provisions, and teaching, and regulations about Temple, sacrifice, cultus, priesthood speak of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and because they speak of Him, they speak of us who are joined to Him by faith and baptism.  When you read the OT, certainly you are reading about the history of Israel, but more urgently you are reading about the life in Christ.  You are reading about God’s purposes for the world, to make His whole human creation a clean and spotless dwelling place.  A place free of sin and corruption and death; a place of holiness and righteousness; a place where His glory might shine out to all the world, as St Paul says, “Do all things without complaining and arguing, that you might become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world” (Philip. 2:15).

Christ’s mission, which of course will culminate in His death and resurrection, is so much more than we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine: He came to construct the Temple of God, we the stones and He the substance.  How, though, shall we become the holy stones of God’s cosmic Temple, the pure Body of Christ?  How can we, different in ages and vocations, temperaments and abilities, join together with one heart and one mind to be built upon the one foundation of “the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20)?  Let us turn to the end of our Gospel reading for today.  It is another one of those curious moments that make us scratch our heads: “And the Child grew and become strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him” (2:40).  Why, if Jesus is “the fullness of the Deity in bodily form,” does He need the grace of God to be upon Him?  How can He become strong in spirit?  Whatever the Lord does, let us remember, He does for the sake of those He is remaking in His Image.  It is not because His divine nature is limited by the flesh that He grows and so on, but for our sake.  He becomes what we are – including going through all our stages of life – so that we might become what He is, as St Irenaeus of Lyons tells us.  All our earthly existence is taken up by our Savior so that we might, in the midst of our earthly life, take up His heavenly existence.  If you are a child, do not fret that you cannot be holy, cannot know God, until you are an adult.  No, Christ was an infant in perfect communion with His Father, Christ was a child who knew His God intimately, Christ was a teenager able to be filled with wisdom, an adult who did His Father’s will.  He has done this for us, but more He has taken the great limitations of our current existence, sin and death, and has defeated them on the Cross.  What is stopping us from becoming like Him?  You have, as the Epistle reading for today declared, “received adoption as children” and so “God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:5-6).  You are a son of God because He is the Son of God: you have died to your sins and to death itself because He has died for our sins and trampled down death by His death.  Now, instead of cowering at the dread judgment of God which will come upon all those who “suppress the Truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18) leading to their share in the “everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41), you will instead cry out “Abba! Father!” and, in the words of today’s Psalm, “Praise the Lord!”

We have, like Simeon, seen the Lord’s salvation.  We must go a step further, though; as members of His Body, we have a part, a share, in that salvation.  The world is saved by Christ through us.  Shall we not then say, in the words of the Prophet Isaiah, “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch” (62:1)?  The book of Revelation speaks of this.  The seer, John, is shown a vision by one of the attendant angels who says, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the Lamb’s wife.”  “And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God.”  Note, here, that St John expands our understanding of the OT once again: not only is the Church the fulfillment of the Temple, but she is also the fulfillment of Jerusalem.  When we read that Zion is “the apple of [God’s] eye” in Zechariah 2:8, it is speaking of us.  Read Psalm 48 and “Walk about Zion, and go all around her.  Count her towers; mark well her bulwarks; consider her palaces; that you may tell it to the generation following.  For this is God, our God, forever and ever.”  More than this, though, her destiny, to be filled with glory of God so that she “shines out like the dawn,” leads to “the nations of those who are saved shall walk in its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it.  Its gates shall not be shut at all by day (there shall be no night there).  And they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it.  But there shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life” (Rev. 22:9-10, 24-27).

The last verse given returns us to the question posed at the beginning: now that the Feast of Christ’s Nativity is over, what shall we do?  We shall seek to be indwelt by Christ, to shine out His glory, and to be purified from all unrighteousness, as St Paul admonishes us, “Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Cor. 7:1).  Christ’s coming among us, His birth and His growing through all the stages of human life, is a great gift from our God and Savior, but it is a high calling as well.  All our lives are to have the aroma of Christ, the scent of His sacrifice on the Cross, so that we, becoming conformed unto His death, might share in His resurrection life for the life of the whole world.  Amen.

Brief Thoughts on Christian Ethics

The point of the Christian life is not to become a better, more moral person.  The end, the telos, is to become Christ: not just to be like Him, but to participate in His Life and His Body.  If we think about this, though, this precludes all moral striving.  No matter how hard we work, we will never be filled with the Holy Spirit and so share in the divine nature.  Hence the necessity of faith, not just as rational (or even moral) assent, but coming under the authority and obedience of the King who offers the grace (Himself) so to do.  To become Christ is the goal: who is Christ?  He is the theandros, the God-Man, one who in His Person as the Word indivisably and unconfusedly unites the divine and the human natures.  How are we in any way to attain to Him?  We are human persons, who through faith in baptism are filled with the Holy Spirit who shares His nature with us.  This is why the Spirit rested on Christ in His baptism; this is why our Lord did nothing without the Spirit in His sojourn; so that we might, as sons of God remade in the pattern of the Son of God, might be joined with the Spirit for our salvation.  To acquire the Spirit, then, is the goal of the Christian life.  To acquire the Spirit is to become Christ; to become Christ is to become divine, glorified, theotic.  Here is where the central importance of the Tabernacle cultus and liturgy, detailed in the middle of the Torah, becomes so key: the Law was never about becoming moral, it was about becoming a Temple: pure, undefiled, holy.  A place for God to dwell.  The whole point of the commandments of God is not to make Him happy, as if our Lord needs that emotion (the One God dwells in blessedness of which happiness is but a pale shadow), no, the point of the commands is to be prepared for God's residence within us.  But, just as the unclean always threatened the sanctity of the holy courts, so sin, death, Satan, and the disordered passions threaten Christ's Holy Temple, His Body, the Church.  This makes the Law not about ascent to God to curry favor, but about guarding sacred ground: ethics, then, is priestly work.

This is why St Silouan the Athonite's dictum that "My brother is my life" is so important: the priests are not doing an individual task, but the collective work of protection and sanctification of the Church.  I cannot do my work as a priestly guardian without reference to my brothers and sisters, nor without their constant aid and intercession so for strength and forgiveness of sins (which, to digress briefly, is why the communion of saints is so vital).  All are saved together, none are saved alone.

It is worth noting that in the cultic regulation there are two categories of defilement: sin and symbols of death.  Sin is, in Levitical terms, the conscious breaking of the Torah, which leads to death (whether as a consequence of the action, i.e. murder or the death penalty, or on the social level, i.e. adultery shredding families apart).  The symbols, though, are those things that are not inherently sinful, but still reference death, especially as inherited through Adam.  An example would be the regulations concerning childbearing (Lev. 12): after a woman gives birth, she must go through a period of ritual purification after the flow of blood dams.  Then she must, if she is to readmitted to the Temple, offer a "sin offering."  Why?  Has she sinned?  No, rather the term is better understood as "purification offering" (cf. Milgrom's commentary on Leviticus): since Eve, childbearing has been a sign of both hope ("your Seed shall crush the serpent's head...") and the consequences of death ("greatly will I increase your pains in childbearing").  A birth symbolizes the curse on Eve, but it is not insurmountable: there will come One who will save all women through being born by a virgin.  This second category, the symbols of death, are fully dealt with by the destruction of death through the Resurrection.  No longer do menstruations or child bearings make women unclean and disallowed from worship of the true God (one has only to reach in faith for the fringes of the Lord's garment to be fully healed!).  Sin, however, remains as a defiling agent; here is why St Paul, for example, speaks of various actions, attitudes, and lifestyles as defiling or polluting the people of God.

To return to the main point, we know that the power of sin is strong enough, compelling enough (why else would our first parents even countenance the serpent?), and pervasive enough that we cannot resist it.  Here is where our brothers and sisters come in, especially those who have had their passions healed and purified ("saints"): they can offer us forgiveness.  Now, some might say, only God can forgive sins!  True!  God is the only One who forgives sins and He deigns to do it through the intercessions, through the rebukes, through the gentle and stern corrections of others.  The root of forgiveness, which is often lost in our overly legal culture, is release: the Church, as the Body of the Christ, undoes the bonds that hold us tight.  And the Lord promises (and warns) that if we forgive the trespasses of our brother and sister, our own trespasses are forgiven as well.  We are set free as we set others free.  This is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of the world.  This is, not morals and ethics, but entering the Cross, actualizing baptism, becoming the body, sharing the One Loaf, salvation.