Category: Theology and Church

Come Now, Let Us Reason Together

AKMATheology and Church8 Comments

In the aftermath of the Episcopal Church (USetc)’s General Convention, there’s been a flurry of breast-beating, moaning, finger-pointing, boasting, and other edifying demonstrations of ecclesiastical vitality (or not) in the various social media sites. So far, my favourite has been George Conger’s riposte to the Wall Street Journal’s slimy mendacity about General Convention, since Conger is by no means carrying water for the ECUS& establishment. But no sooner had most readers agreed that you get what Rupert Murdoch pays for when you read a financial red-top, than Ross Douthat stirred things up again by musing that (with specific attention to the Episcopal Church (US&) ) ‘liberal Christianity’ might not be able to survive; and then my grad-school classmate Diana Butler Bass parried that without liberal Christianity, the whole enterprise might not survive. Add in all the various supporters and detractors, and one can sympathise with Rachel Held Evans’s plea that people remember that not everyone has to belong to a partisan ‘side’.
 
As an observer, it seems that several points are being bandied about as though they all lined up tidily to separate sheep from goats. It ain’t necessarily so.
 
First, let’s please stop treating attendance statistics as simple indicators. They’re not by any means irrelevant, not a bit, but if I had a savings account, I’d bet a sizable portion of it that you could shift those attendance figures considerably just by making clergy into better preachers. Regardless of whether they’re preaching the true gospel, a false gospel, justice and equality, holiness and traditional sanctity, one can almost certainly improve attendance by recruiting and training better preachers. So if all you want to do is boost your attendance statistics, there’s a (non-partisan) way to increase attendance. Of course, that also suggests that attendance per se isn’t a very revealing test — but tackling the preaching deficit might enable you to game the system and claim something about your parish, or your side, or whatever.
 
Second, the rush toward cheerleading for one side and finger-wagging at the other side underscores a different problem (again, for any ‘side’). Rather than upholding deliberation, humility, respect for difference, and determination to seek truth and to support desperately needy, injured, oppressed people, a very great many people opt to stand on sidelines waving pom-poms for one side and taunting the other side.
 
Third, contra Ross Douthat, liberals have been doing theology over the past decades. But pro Douthat, that theological reflection has tended to allow itself to drift increasingly from points of orientation by which Christian faith can readily be distinguished from cultural humanism. So on one hand, it boots not to say ‘You haven’t done your homework!’ nor to respond ‘Oh yes we have!’ Douthat reasonably asserts that ‘liberals’ tend to relax their allegiance to the discrimen (‘a configuration of criteria…’) by which one recognises sound Christian teaching; and responses to Douthat say “Captivity to tradition is the problem!’ — but that’s not an argument against Douthat’s concern that ‘liberals’ don’t hew close to the Christian doctrinal tradition, it’s an affirmation of it.
 
Fourth, neither ‘we have to update doctrine’ nor ‘we mustn’t change anything’ bears a demonstrable causal relation to attendance numbers. You can sell people bottled tap water, my friends; you could fill a church with fiery social activists, or you could fill a church with entrenched doctrinaires, but neither proves anything about what the gospel is or should be — any more than the popularity of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted shows that it’s a better film than Moonrise Kingdom. You can’t prove church teaching with attendance numbers, can’t, can’t, can’t. (I will offer a tip: the New Testament, if one still regards that as relevant, offers several lists of characteristics by which to identify the presence and effects of the Spirit. ‘Big attendance numbers’ doesn’t appear on any of those lists.)
 
Fifth, as a Christian theologian, I believe that the soundness of theological teaching does indeed manifest itself over the long run. That doesn’t imply that the churches should teach only what has been handed down from long ago; the church has changed its mind, and the church has erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith. There is no way to guarantee that you’re not off-base. On the other and, if you adhere to what millennia of the saints have taught and believed, you’re a least somewhat less likely to be found in error than if you decide that you’re going to think it all up on your own, taking as fundamental a set of political and philosophical ideas developed over the last couple hundred years. The Enlightenment wasn’t A Bad Thing, but neither was it the dawning of the messianic era. If there’s something you want to identify with Jesus, or Christianity, then your argument is stronger if you can actually give numerous reasons for making that identification; and the more such reasons that you can provide, the stronger the theological argument. And if you want to repudiate a great deal of what is plausibly associated with Jesus and Christianity, it’s not unreasonable for people to question the extent to which your enterprise is still ‘Christian’.
 
I won’t set myself up as a prophet who speaks God’s mind and adjudicates conflicts among ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ relative to the vitality of churches. On strictly secular grounds, though, I can assure people who laud shallow theology and deprecate reasonable criticism that they’re selling sackcloth as silk, and that’s not a recipe for long-term viability. It’s not a family trade you want to hand down to your children. Cheerleading and finger-wagging help you sort out who’s on your side and who’s not, they make for great pep rallies, but they don’t obviate the need to do something wisely and well.
 

On Death, Part 3

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To summarise the New Testament understanding of death, then: Death constitutes both an inevitable element of temporal life (life according to the flesh), and a representative figure for all the characteristics of temporal, physical life. Thus Death bears a defining connections to sin, not necessarily because sin causes death, but because both sin and death are universally manifest in temporal life. Everybody dies, and nobody’s perfect.*
 
(The topic of ‘justification by faith’ matters so much for the Apostle Paul because it touches on the magnitude of God’s merciful grace; that for which an even-steven exchange is made, that which we can claim as our due, has nothing to do with grace. And by this logic, any effort we make to shore up our standing before God amounts to a repudiation of God’s forgiveness, God’s grace, and even Christ’s self-giving on the cross. Thus, necessarily, self-justification collaborates with Death. All share in lives coloured by sin; none of us can lay claim to attainments that would suffice to exculpate ourselves, and the persistent temptation to immunise ourselves to any possible criticism enmeshes us, once again, in the snares of Death.)

As such, Death is both integral to the fullness of (temporal) humanity, and is an adversary, since it represents an unnecessary Iimitation. Death ‘wants’ to finalise our separation from God; it has never been able to do so, and in laying claim to the life of Jesus, Death over-reached and its power was broken by the inextinguishable life of Jesus; though its power has not vanished, from the Mount of the Resurrection we can see Death’s brittleness. Strengthened by Christ’s encouragement and sustained by the Holy Spirit, we can outwait death.
 

Excursus on Suicide: The Bible expresses no explicit deprecation of suicide at any point. When the Bible narrates the deaths of Abimelech (an ‘assisted death’, since the wounded leader demanded that his armour-bearer kill him), Saul, Saul’s armour-bearer, Ahitophel, Zimri, and (arguably) Samson die, the narrator betrays no sign that their self-determined deaths warrant criticism. Judas’s suicide (in Matthew’s version of the story — Luke simply has him stumble and explode) likewise receives no criticism. All these, it should be noted, kill themselves under circumstances when they can not take life after death (and judgment) as given aspects of their faith in the God of Israel; they are hastening their departure to Sheol, but they do not seem to be transgressing the Torah.** When Paul ponders his ‘desire to depart and be with Christ’, he stops not because suicide would be a sin, but because he may still do some good for the Philippians. Paul’s case stands out because of his invocation of the topics of resurrection and judgment; were he to have known that suicide would bar him from entering the kingdom of heaven, it would seem exceptionally peculiar that he not acknowledge it. To this extent, then, the evidence of the Bible suggests no opprobrium to suicide or to assisted suicide.
 
To what does all this add up, with regard to a biblical practice of the ars moriendi?
 
First, that although the Christian hope affirms that Death has been broken, yet Death persists as an element in every human life. Death is not a failure of discipleship, nor an unjust imposition. We rightly grieve at death, for we who remain are the poorer without our brothers’ and sisters’ presence among us. This grief, however, takes its place within a broader frame in which death does not bring our relationships to a terminus, but interrupts what will be rewoven. Indeed, unwelcome as a person’s death itself may be, it marks the hinge which opens onto the fulness of life in God’s presence, which we confidently hope to share. We live in Death’s shadow with mindfulness, but without fretfulness; with earnestness, but not without joy.
 
The inevitability of death does not justify carelessness in how one lives. We will be held accountable for the use to which we put our days and nights, as for our wealth, strength, intelligence, and other resources. A biblical ars moriendi rejoices in the on-going opportunity to shape lives that bespeak Christ’s grace, and accepts the limitation on this opportunity.
 
While the Bible offers various characterisations of what will ensue after death, we have good reason not to take any of them as precise specifications of Heaven, or Hell, or any other state. The sheer diversity of those accounts militates against supposing any one of them is more concretely applicable than others. We are promised that resurrection life is in some sense bodily, but ‘bodily’ in a sense we cannot yet ascertain. We have been taught those who have understood and sought God’s approval will flourish, and those who defy the ways of life, of truth, of grace and hope will subsist in their alienation from divine blessings. Whatever pictures one associates with those assurances, they suffice to underscore the worth of directing our lives toward a death congruent with our affirmations and our hope.
 
We may sum up a biblical ars moriendi as the enacted acceptance of unearned justification. We practise hopeful generosity, and renounce the fearfulness that withholds trust from God; we practise humility, and renounce the presumption that we have escaped the effects of mortal limitations on our understanding; we practise solidarity with the breadth of our sisters and brothers, and renounce the enmity that strives to separates us from one another. In harmonious unity, disinterested respect for others, and confident grace we adorn lives given for God’s glory, and accept death as a completion of that offering.
 

 

* Whatever one may think of the Augustinian tradition of binding ‘original sin’ to biology, to Adam’s primal transgression, and so on, he must be correct to insist that it’s futile and a distraction to look for some point in time at which an infant first becomes subject to sin. Sure, cute li’l babies don’t belong to the same category as remorseless self-serving financiers in a certain sense — but all babies are mortal, all babies will sin sooner or later, hence we may say with justification that all humans are subject to sin. Slice the problem some other way if you want to avoid the bugaboo of original sin, but I’m not sure there’s an intelligible way to parse temporal human-ness apart from mortality and sin.
 
** On the other hand, it should be noted that despite the abundance of crimes and misdemeanours set forth in the Old Testament, only rarely does anyone invoke the Torah explicitly as a criterion for distinguishing good from bad, mitzvah from averah; an argument from silence relative to the Torah’s apparent toleration of suicide requires support from positive evidence.
 

On Orders and Renunciation

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In a curious development pertinent to my recent post about being obliged to ‘renounce my orders’ so as to serve in a different province of the Anglican Communion, the House of Bishops of the Province de l’Église Anglicane au Rwanda has had to instruct some its member bishops about orders and jurisdiction as well, though apparently with different terminology.
 
For the benefit of anyone who’s interested by the topic, but unfamiliar with the current state of play among Episcopalians/Anglicans around the world: some US Episcopalians are disaffected because of doctrinal/disciplinary matters in the US Episcopal Church (most prominently involving sexuality), such that they no longer can acknowledge the spiritual authority of bishops whose teachings and practice seem (to these disaffected Episcopalians) to fall culpably short of the standards for bishops. Some clergy among these US Episcopalians have been consecrated bishops by the Rwandan province, so that they can minister as bishops to other alienated US Episcopalians. A number of these Rwandan-US bishops recently withdrew from the authority of the Rwandan Anglican Church (for reasons to which I am not privy).
 
Now, I read that on 29 March, the Rwandan House of Bishops has advised these (separated) missionary bishops that

there are only three ways that we may “release” clergy affiliated with us:
 
1. By transferring them to another jurisdiction within the Anglican Communion;
2. By their voluntary renunciation of orders;
3. By formal ecclesiastical discipline.

 

So, at least in Rwanda’s understanding of canon law, ‘renouncing orders’ is categorically different from ‘transferring to another jurisdiction within the Anglican Communion’.
 
Obviously Rwandan canons don’t affect the canon law or interpretation of the US Episcopal Church — but this interpretation of ‘orders’ and ‘transferring’ appears to make more sense. The bishops in question must (on this interpretation — I’m not arguing anything about their side of the disagreement) have a canonical relationship with one or another Anglican province, but that’s a separate question from whether their orders as bishops are valid. If on the other hand they have no relationship to another recognised Anglican body, the status of their request to withdraw from the Rwandan Church is canonically intelligible only as a request to be removed from the roll of actual bishops. If my situation were interpreted on this basis, we would say that I wish to move (‘transfer’) my vows of obedience and allegiance to the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway and the Scottish Episcopal Church — not to renounce my orders altogether.
 
If I understand the interpretation of canon law from the US Episcopal hierarchy, my priesthood is not in question — they’re interpreting my ‘orders’ as sort of ‘the ordered relationship that binds me to my bishop and the doctrine, disciple, and whatever of this [US Episcopal] Church’. On their account, then, it would be possible for me to maintain my ordained status without having a canonical relationship with a particular Church (and, by extension, so would the US-Rwandan bishops, if in fact the US Episcopal Church recognised their episcopal orders in the first place) — though I would not be authorised by any Church to exercise that priesthood. The Rwandan interpretation (again, if I understand it correctly) is that apart from a relationship with a particular Church, the idea of ‘orders’ is incoherent; the validity of orders depends on a living relationship of authority and accountability with a Church.
 
Of these two, I had been operating on premises closer to those expressed by the Rwandan bishops than those I’ve been instructed to observe by the relevant US authorities. I see elements of soundness in each. Ordination confers a grace that isn’t itself dependent on temporal authorities, or geography; but on the other hand, ‘orders’ outwith a relationship to a Church are gravely problematic.
 
I’m not usually very interested by canon law — but these developments point toward intriguing theological and political (in the sense of ‘church polity’) nuances. In all of this, I emphasise that I’m cooperating with my understanding of US policy, not repudiating anybody’s authority or rebelling against them. “Dissenting about what I think is a good idea’, maybe; but not rebelling or repudiating.
 

On Renouncing My Orders

AKMATheology and Church / Uncategorized20 Comments

I wrote, a while back, about becoming a priest of the Scottish Episcopal Church. At the time, I was mostly looking back into the murky church history of the years between the Reformation and the repeal of legal restrictions on episcopal worship in Scotland; this morning, I take up the topic again to check in after an unsettling, but ultimately (I think) benign chain of events.
 
When I first came over to Scotland, I arranged with the Dean of the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway to be licensed (as a priest whose residence lay in another diocese) to serve at the cathedral, and all was well. Blessings abounded, I went to meetings of Synod even though I didn’t have to, helped out at St Mary’s and other congregations, and relished working in the Diocese.
 
As the years rolled by, though — and as it became clear that I wasn’t about to return to the States — it seemed that I really ought to say to Glasgow, ‘This is where I belong’. It bothered me, a bit, to receive clergy mailings from Chicago (and not from Glasgow); it felt odd to serve on the Doctrine Committee of the Scottish Episcopal Church when my canon-legal identity bound me to Chicago. So I wrote back to the Diocese of Chicago and said, in effect, ‘Let’s arrange a transfer from Chicago to my new home diocese. You’re Episcopalians, we’re Episcopalians, what will be the bother?’
 
Didn’t hear anything for a while — and then, several weeks ago, I received an email from 815, the Episcopal Church Headquarters in New York City. From one of the very important offices in 815. And the email explained to me that in order to become canonically resident in Glasgow, I had to renounce my orders.
 
That bowled me over. There was no way on earth I wanted to renounce my orders; my ordination to the priesthood was exactly what I wanted to preserve, but in a different location. I had heard and read about clergy turning their backs on the US Episcopal Church because of the directions it has taken on particular topics of urgent contemporary concern, but that wasn’t me. I’m not a conscience-driven or disgruntled departee, seeking a more congenial theological-ideological haven. Scotland is possibly next after the US and Canada among Anglican provinces in our leftward inclination. Honesty requires that I acknowledge having some ruffled feathers about the convulsion at Seabury and my scramble to find work after having been turned out of my (tenured) position; nonetheless, I started this correspondence precisely because I did find a job, and I just wanted to minister, as a Scottish Episcopal priest, where I live.
 
I wrote to several trusted [U.S.] Episcopal Church friends, who responded with sympathy and dismay, and with an indication that (a) I was not alone in feeling stunned that I would have to renounce my orders, and (b) it was not as dramatic a step as it sounded. As emails volleyed back and forth between me and canon lawyers and Church Pension Fund officials (yes, I am anxious about my hypothetical retirement, and no, this doesn’t rise to the level of a matter of conscience for which I’d throw away my pension), the message gradually shaped up that this was a step more formidable in its title than in its effects. I am obliged to renounce my orders in the [U.S.] Episcopal Church, but not to renounce altogether my priestly orders. I must ask Bishop Lee of Chicago to be released from my vows of obedience to him, but I am not thereby defrocked.
 
The terminology sounds 100% wrong to me, as it did to Bishop MacDonald. I take the point that, since the relations between the [U.S.] Episcopal Church and the Scottish Episcopal Church are collegial and not corporate (as it were), one diocese cannot merely hand me over to another. And the pastoral angle of this — that it seems not to have occurred to anyone that talking me through the process would make sense, and that I might have intelligible questions about the terminology and consequences of the process — was pretty much a train wreck. Assuming that everything I’ve been told holds true, this is my word to clergy moving from one provnce to another: it’s OK, ‘renouncing your orders’ in this context just means being released from your oath of obedience to one diocese so that you can make that oath truthfully somewhere else, and don’t worry about your pension (unless the circumstances of your departure make someone suspect that you’re undermining the [U.S.] Episcopal Church. But someone at 815 (at least at 815, if not on a diocesan level) should be in a position to recognise these circumstances and oversee the transition.
 
This morning, I wrote to Bishop Lee, copied to relevant administrative figures, saying that if and only if my understanding of the situation holds true, I would like Bishop Lee to release me from my oath to him — I would like, in these terms, to renounce my orders. I think the story ends happily here, with me in Glasgow, with Bishop Gregor, and robins singing and the sun shining (Americans, did you know that our robins over here are different birds from your robins? That’s really disorienting.) The weather is lovely, Margaret is home from an enlivening and encouraging theological conference, I’m a happy priest of Glasgow and Galloway, and it’s all OK.
 

On Baptism and Eucharist

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The Diocese of Eastern Washington Oregon has made formal what is increasingly the normative practice in US Episcopal parishes, by proposing the abolition of the canon that strictly forbids offering communion to people who have not been baptised. Over the past decade, this canon has been so widely, publicly, proudly flouted that one wonders how any canon might be enforceable; that’s a topic for another day, though. I call this situation to mind because my ecclesiastical boss, the Provost at St Mary’s Cathedral, has reiterated his sense that communion without baptism is an adiaphoron. On this, as on a number of things, Fr Kelvin and I reach very different conclusions.

I won’t repeat the careful arguments that colleagues have articulated (Matt, Derek, Robert, Tobias, Bryan, list courtesy of Matt); the Web makes generously possible the exploration of related links, and I can’t presume to gild their lilies. It may be worth remembering a few points of orientation as we consider the pros and cons, though.

First, Fr Kelvin perhaps skews the discussion by characterising those who disagree with him as being ‘obsessed’ with which sacrament precedes which. It is not in our power to control God’s freedom to introduce some people to the captivating grace of the gospel, so no one is suggesting that we quench the Holy Spirit. ‘Obsession’ may apply as much to persistent demands for change as to persistent conviction that a particular change is unwise.

Second, narratives about who received communion before baptism and how it affected their lives may inform, to some extent, the discussion — but they can’t decide the issue. Last January, a climber fell 1000 ft during an attempted ascent of Ben Nevis, tumbling down three cliffs, and survived with only relatively minor injuries. He may have reconciled himself to his enemies during that fall, he may have attained blissful oneness with the universe, he may only have enjoyed the adrenaline rush of confronting death — but none of those makes ‘falling off Ben Nevis’ a good idea as a normative practice, no matter how benign its effects in his case. If someone can show that communion without baptism as a general practice builds up the Body of Christ, that’s one thing; but no matter how much we give thanks for the positive effects of pre-baptismal communion in individual cases (such as Fr Kelvin himself, Sara Miles, or any other person) these remain the marvellous instances of the unpredictable power of the Spirit, rather than decisive warrants for a far-reaching change in the theology of the church.

For (third) theology remains a complex system in which changes to this point here affect the entire network. Kelvin appositely cites the example of the Episcopal Church USA, which put great energy behind what they call ‘Baptismal Theology’ (itself a shift in emphasis with far-reaching effects), only to find themselves now confronting a popular proposal that would relativise baptism altogether. Change we must, by all means; we’re never not changing, whether we like it or not. But since so much of the church through so much of history (especially in the Episcopal tradition) has held firmly to the premise that baptism — as sacramental incorporation into the Body of Christ — should normatively precede Eucharist — as the sacramental nourishment of that Body — that it’s somewhat misleading to minimise the proposed change. The magnitude of the discernment and articulated theological deliberation that undergirds the practice of baptising before participating in communion far overshadows the infrastructural foresight that has been advanced to justify communion without baptism.

Let’s set aside bugaboos of ecclesiastical storm-troopers demanding identity papers before allowing people to line up for communion. In even the most sternly traditional churches, strangers receive communion every day without proving that they’ve been baptised, and no one’s suggesting (to the best of my knowledge) that this principle be enforced more rigorously. Let’s not indulge in trivialising characterisations of one position or the other as ‘trendy’, ‘politically correct’, ‘fusty traditionalist’, ‘fascist’, or other arguments ad opprobrium. If the sacrament of the Eucharist matters in some way, let’s take the discussion seriously and mount deep, considered, theological arguments one way or the other, with a view to strengthening the Body of Christ. It doesn’t seem to be the case, just now, that we’re suffering from a hypertrophy of theological wisdom, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that current stresses have favoured partisanship over profundity.
 
[Late addition: Link to Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s thoughts about communon without baptism.]

Understanding Aberrant Interpretation

AKMABible / How To Do Exegesis / Theology and Church3 Comments

My work in hermeneutics has always sought out explanations for interpretive divergence — in the first instance, for proximate disagreements among well-qualified readers who generally share their premises and conclusions, and in the second instance, between ‘mainstream’ and ‘off-beat’ interpretations. It’s easy enough, and rewarding enough, to come up with a theory of hermeneutical correctness. Everyone wants to be right, and most people want to have a theoretical apparatus that justifies coercion directed against those who aren’t right. Fewer people, though, want to understand why one would reach wrong interpretive conclusions in the first place.
 
For a while, I corresponded with Lee Perry, the author of Holy Grail: Cosmos of the Bible; he was a genial and patient correspondent, who understood that I declined to assent to his conclusions, while he did not ever waver in his own confidence that he had discovered the true meaning of the Bible (among other cultural phenomena). Perry, and other conspiracy theorists, national treasure hunters, Bible code-hunters, and sundry outsider interpreters, can be literate, erudite, ingenious, articulate, and 100% wrong. What hermeneutical reasoning can give an account of intelligent, well-intentioned people arriving at bizarrely wrong conclusions? The problem is doubled when you look at interpretive change from a historical perspective (as does Frank Kermode in ‘Can We Say Absolutely Anything We Like?’ in The Art of Telling/Essays on Fiction 1971-82); ideas that seem outlandish in one decade turn out to be tiresomely obvious in another.
 
In the course of exploring outsider biblical interpretation*, I’ve now come to pay particular attention to Hutchinsonianism, a peculiar intellectual affliction that beset the north of England and Scotland in response to the Enlightenment.† Hutchinson taught that the unpointed Old Testament text anticipated New Testament teachings, but that hostile Jews had introduced misleading vowel points into the Hebrew Bible. The doctrine of the Trinity was specifically set out there as well, and all manner of natural science (since all truth was revealed, Hutchinson was ardently anti-Newtonian). Hutchinson’s works influenced an interesting stratum of marginal English and Scottish clergy and educators (apparently including the founder of King’s College/Columbia University, Dr. Samuel Johnson), which is how they came to my attention.
 
OK, I have to get back to research — trust me, if I come up on any irresistible Hutchinsonian tidbits, I’ll share them here. The point, though, is that a hermeneutics that can’t give a plausible, respectful account of difference — even bizarre-to-the-point-of-hallucinatory difference (I’m looking at you too, Muggletonians) — fails in one of its most important tests. A hermeneutic of self-congratulatory correctness does little to advance mutual understanding, and much to aggravate interpretive conflict. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, our first desideratum in hermeneutics should be to clarify the basis on which reasonable, lucid, erudite minds may reach divergent conclusions,
 

 

* Anyone who has ever observed me turn purple and splutter over the terrible writing and utterly vacuous biblical interpretation of The da Vinci Code will understand that I undertake this research not out of any fondness for interpretive implausibility, but strictly out of an obligation to take outré interpretations seriously as part of my hermeneutics.

 
† I also may be supervising a thesis on Blake’s christology, and Blake may have been influenced by Hutchinsonianism — so there are two reasons.
 
** William Van Mildert, Bishop first of Llandaff and subsequently of Durham, after whom the disinguished chair in Divinity was named (once occupied by my Doctrine Committee colleague David Brown, now held by my Chicqago-area Episcopal colleague Mark McIntosh), appears to have been strongly influenced by Hutchinsonian theology.
 

On Miracles

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The other day, my [old] grad-school classmate Craig Keener wrote a column for the Huffington Post about belief in miracles. I think that we do agree about some things, but it would take some ground-clearing to figure out where our agreements lie; and since it’s a topic that draws much attention, which topic generates more heat than light, I too decided, after having thought things over, to write a blog entry for you, most excellent reader.
 
First, I see no point whatever in trying to persuade people that miracles happen. People who repudiate the idea of miracles have excellent reasons for so doing — and citing the number of people who do (or don’t) ‘believe in miracles’ is absolutely beside the point. The number of people who believe absurd things, or disbelieve obvious things, will always depend on what you think is absurd or obvious and on the credulity of large numbers of only-partly-informed respondents, and the case of miracles represents a paradigm instance of what many people will think a priori to be absurd (or obvious). If you think miracles are absurdity, rest assured that I’m not trying to rope you into something you resist; I ain’t. You just stick with what you already know to be obvious and absurd.
 
Granted that a great many very sensible people think that the idea of miracles is absurd, why do I not count myself among them? Let me suggest several ways. First, I am heir to a body of wisdom that upholds the category ‘miraculous’ as a significant, if rare, constituent in our way of life. ‘Miracles’ are significant in subtle ways, admittedly (and some wiseacre will submit that those ways are so subtle as to be invisible); but I don’t understand a way that someone who professes Christian faith can simply write off the category of ‘miracle’ as useless, unimportant, regressive, banal, superstitious, or whatever. Some things about Christian faith involve (so far as I can understand) assertions that run counter to common sense — and I’m OK with that. If I self-identity as a Christian, as a servant and teacher of the church, and a brother of the great theological sages throughout the ages, I cannot simply discard what they handed on to us. Among those hand-me-downs, the saints have consistently included assertions about ‘miraculous’ things having happened.
 
Second, I am amply aware that I don’t know enough about most topics to submit what cannot have happened, or why. I quickly add that I’m not appealing to this as if it were a positive argument in favour of ‘miracles’ — no way that works! — but it does require me to hesitate before I say ‘I know the causes of this event well enough to rule out (or rule in) X or Y influence’. A miracle-skeptic will very rightly say, ‘I know the way of the world sufficiently well to assert that material causes (including a certain apparent randomness) suffice to explain why this improbable event happened; indeed, improbable things happen all the time, in theologically-coloured situations and otherwise, such that it’s meaningless to assert that this is miraculous whereas that is just one of those things’. They are satisfied by their knowledge of causes and effects (bless ’em); I’m not satisfied by mine.
 
Third, I don’t understand how one can imagine the Bible in any non-Pickwickian relation to Christian life without taking miracles as something more serious than something to be explained away. If one supposes that the Bible holds a primary place of reference for Christian life (and I acknowledge that my boss doesn’t*, in the sense I propose here), one ought to have something to say about the prominence of extraordinary events in that compendium. Moreover, since we are instructed repeatedly in Scripture to pray with specific ends in mind, and that those prayers are not merely adventitious to what ensues, my understanding of the Bible obliges me to pray even for apparently impossible developments.
 
So I advance my own affirmation, subject to correction, that I don’t suppose that I know the causes for all of the extraordinary occurrences in life. Some are assuredly the strictly random outworkings of contingency in material existence, even if to us subclinical pareidoliacs it seems as though there must be some obscure casual connection. But at the same time, the occurrence of apparently inexplicable events, and their occasional convergence with prayer, and even their correlation with identifiable causes (or ‘congruent circumstances’ or something like that, if one wants to be cautious about asserting causality) fit coherently within a picture of a cosmos brought into being in a particular way — and in that way of envisioning a cosmos, I am satisfied for ‘miracle’ to identify the category of remarkable developments that fits particularly aptly into the biblically-limned character of a Creator-God, a Divine Author, whose temporal fingerprints are healing, release from shackles, transformative illumination, and perhaps above all else, amazing grace.
 
I think Craig probably wants more mileage from the miracles in which he believes, but maybe I’m wrong. (Wouldn’t be the first time!) The reticent version of miracles I sketch here, though, tries to preserve an elasticity that may strengthen it to survive harsh winds and fierce discursive storms. At any rate, it’s my best effort (for now).
 

 

* I’m a bit perplexed by several points in Kelvin’s argument. As far as I can tell, there’s simply no evidence that Hooker held Scripture, tradition, and reason to bear equal authority; I’d be interested to see evidence supporting that point, when Book V, Ch. 8.2 (p. 34) says ‘Be it in matter of the one kind or of the other, what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.’
 
There are surely differences among (a) asserting that the Bible provides ‘the rule and ultimate standard of faith’ (which I take to indicate a sort of theological court of last appeal, always (of course) requiring reasoned interpretive work), (b) affirming sola scriptura (not I, by any means), and (c) asserting that the BIble constitutes ‘one, single infallible source of authority’. In the church’s tradition, the teaching of the creeds hangs on their being plausible authorised interpretations of what the conciliar fathers read in Scripture, so I don’t think I can own allegiance to the creeds without at the same time allowing a primary authority to Scripture (without just planting a flag at the creeds and saying, ‘Here and not elsewhere I choose to recognise ecclesiastical authority’). This, however, probably marks one of those spots on which the Cathedral’s clergy arrive at different conclusions, which is not surprising.
 

Somewhat New Edition

AKMASermons / Theology and Church / UncategorizedLeave a comment

Back when Wipf & Stock very kindly supported our beloved St Luke’s in Evanston by printing a small book of my sermons as a benefit for the parish, we prepared the manuscript in AppleWorks(!). I sent W&S a PDF of the manuscript with funky margins that they had specified, which they somehow wrought into the handsome published paperback.
 
In the spirit of the e-book era, I thought I’d re-upload the book in a more manageable PDF format. First, I tried manipulating the PDF output with Cheap Impostor, the invaluable booklet-layout software, but the margins were too extreme to wrangle into the space of a sensible layout. Then I opened the AppleWorks file, where I saw a headache-inducing array of mark-up. It’s been years and years since I worked primarily in AppleWorks, so I quickly decided that I would copy-and-paste the innards of the file into a more congenial processor (I used Pages, though I also work happily with Mellel). The last trick involved manipulating margins so as to fit an A5 layout with page content matching, to the extent possible, the pagination of the original edition. This is exactly the kind of project that appeals to someone who’s writing a book that must be done as soon as humanly possible.
 
One final step: I don’t have access to a good original of the cover Wipf & Stock gave the book, so I whipped up a new version based on the colours of Trinity College, Glasgow. Done, and done! So this morning I am uploading the more tablet-friendly PDF version of the ebook; some other procrastination day, I’ll see if I can transmute the copy to a Kindle version, and if I ever upgrade to OS X Lion and download iBooks Author, I’ll see about running the manuscript through that (and I think I remember that there are a couple of lingering typos that I wanted to fix). But for now, here’s what I’ve got.
 

 
Please remember that the whole project was organised as a benefit for St Luke’s, so if you download a copy (of your kindness) please think about sending a donation to them (this isn’t necessarily an on-going commitment; or you can send an old-fashioned ‘check’). The congregation has sailed through some rough waters, and they have very significant repairs to complete on the exquisitely beautiful building (repairs that they are addressing, commendably, only in tandem with outreach to international and neighbourhood missions).
 
[Update: there are other, newer sermons at various points in these pages. If you search for “sermon” or some keyword from the text from which you’re working, perhaps in combination with “in the name of the”, you may turn them up. Plus, there’s the ‘Sermons’ category, which does not actually include all the sermons in my blog, but does pick up a few. When I have time (/hollow chuckle) I’ll try to ensure that all sermons are tagged for that category.] [Now done.]

Too Much Life

AKMABible / Theology and ChurchLeave a comment

Daniel honoured my ponderings about the prominence of ‘the cross’ in his fourth chapter by blogging further about the problem of cruciformity in Pauline ethics and ours. I have a few brief comments about our discussion, but I will keep them short because I didn’t sleep very well last night, and I will probably make even less sense than usual.
 
First, I re-emphasise that I have no objection to the axiom that we mustn’t let our theologia crucis be suppressed in favour of a theologia gloriæ. I am not ashamed of the gospel; lift high the cross! Cross, cross, cross. All okay by me.
 
My hesitation involves situations wherein the sound exposition of Pauline theology (and Michael Gorman’s Cruciformity and Apostle of the Crucified Lord are two of my favourites, which I’ve assigned in classes for years) entails such an emphasis on the cross that it may no longer be evident that ‘the cross’ isn’t by itself the vehicle of our redemption. One of the virtues of narrative theology lies in its appropriate, important insight that moments in the story don’t do the whole work of the story itself. Specifically, in this case, the cross (perhaps more precisely ‘the way of the cross’) matters for disciples in conjunction with what led to it (faithfulness in action, regardless of how appreciatively that faithfulness is received — whether with acclaim from the crowds, or with persecution, torture, and execution at the hands of Roman power), and it matters in conjunction with what came after (the revelation that God’s power for life is so great that death cannot prevail over it). So it may be that ‘the cross’ and ‘cruciformity’ function suitably as shorthand for the whole story, but capsule summaries don’t substitute for the defining narratives of our identities. We want to keep an eye on our short cuts, lest we fall into the error of mistaking the short cut for the Way.
 
But that word of caution contains what may be my response to myself and to Daniel. I noted his attention to, and he reaffirmed, the daunting dangers of ‘successful’ ministries; humility, in its evangelically healthful mode, not in the feigned humbleness of Uriah Heep or the culturally-mediated self-abnegation that scars the souls of many of our neighbours, characterises faithfulness to the Jesus who set his face to go where he would be least popular, where rancour against him was most concentrated, where he may well (without supernatural foresight) have anticipated the most hostile of receptions. Faithfulness tarries not to cultivate fame, nor avoids facing opposition (nor seeks suffering, nor refuses truthful praise); faithfulness follows where the Way leads.
 
There will be no short cut to discerning whether our course is unduly influenced by craving for approval, or by ineradicable shame. Again, short cuts aren’t the gospel. But the steadfastness that sustains faith through ups and downs, whatever the (im)balance of those circumstances, bespeaks the character of Jesus, and even of that gospel-mad Paul (whether you love him or not).
 
Anyway, thanks for the good read and the worthwhile conversation, Daniel!
 

Daniel Kirk, Jesus, and Paul

AKMABible / Theology and Church / Uncategorized3 Comments

… the Christian life is the kind of thing that makes the kings of the earth nervous — not because it encounters them with the force of arms, but because it testifies to a power that not even death can contain. (Kirk, 76)
 

 
   With Chapter Four, Daniel Kirk’s Jesus Have I Loved turns to the ethical implications of the understanding of New Testament theology that he’s been tracing in the first three chapters. As in previous chapters, he describes Jesus first. The Jesus whom Kirk presents here called disciples to specific behaviour: following, teaching, healing, exorcising, proclaiming, cross-bearing, and so on. Although the Jesus of John’s Gospel puts great emphasis on ‘believing in me’ (‘believing in his name’, believing in the son’, ‘believing in the Son of Man’), even John portrays a Jesus who instructs his followers that whoever believes in him will do his works, and even greater works, and that they must love one another as Jesus loved them, so that ‘the love of a Christian community is none other than the continuing embodiment of the self-giving love of Jesus’ (Kirk, 79).
 
   Kirk then shows the continuity of Paul’s ethical exhortation with Jesus’ teaching. While Paul doesn’t simply repeat what Jesus said, the development from Jesus to Paul involves their different settings relative to the overarching narrative that Kirk proposes. Jesus lived (according to the flesh) before the resurrection, and his teaching relative to death and resurrection remained obscure to the disciples. Since Paul can look back on the resurrection, he and his audiences can take account of the resurrection and trace its implications in a way that would have been unintelligible for Jesus. Nonetheless, the narrative Paul teaches, like the narrative that depicts Jesus’s own ministry, identifies the cross as the pivotal element in recognising God’s work and God’s will. Whereas for Jesus, discipleship entailed following him on the way of the cross, Paul takes discipleship as the vocation of ‘making [one’s] life a living narration of the story of the crucified Christ’ (80).
 
   Kirk extends himself to disabuse readers of the notion that justification by faith is in any way antithetical to actually, you know, doing good things. This effort bespeaks a different ecclesiastical ecology from that which I’ve inhabited; I rarely, if ever, encounter someone who treats good behaviour as a threat to their pure sanctity. Much more common in my worlds is the ‘believer’ for whom believing, the right kind of believing, and concentrated correct believing constitute the epitome of adhering to Jesus. Kirk’s exhortation applies as well to the latter as to the former, though I wonder whether some believers might let themselves off the hook too easily on the grounds that they aren’t anti-works (just works-indifferent). In any case, Kirk draws on Paul’s repeated emphasis on ‘faith working’, on the ‘work of faith’, and God’s making it possible for us ‘to will and to work for his good pleasure’ — and of course, on Paul’s predictably forceful moral instruction. After these pages, a casual reader will find it difficult indeed to imagine how anyone could ever doubt that Paul wanted believers to live in particular ways.
 
   Kirk wants not simply to argue that Christian believers should not be allergic to works, though; he wants to show how that working coheres with, and perpetuates, the gospel that Jesus proclaimed. The pivotal element that aligns Paul and Jesus, according to Kirk, is the power of God, greater than sin and death, that transforms the life of the believer. Transformed believers will readily accept the derision, rejection, abjection of their scornful neighbours; while not all would actually be crucified, the cruciform life of enduring abuse in order to bear witness to the power of resurrection life will apply to all. God, in the Spirit, can free believers from their imprisonment to mortality, to the earthly powers of success, fame, and acclaim — imprisonment to the temptation to secure for themselves control over the contingencies of life by triumphing over adversaries and circumstance. Contrariwise, Kirk reminds his readers that Paul’s strength was made perfect in weakness, in being rejected and punished and trashed.
 
   Readers who take up Kirk’s exposition of Pauline theology (and Jesus’s theology) will endeavour in all things to make themselves transparent to the luminous power of the gospel. As people who have been in-corporated into the life of Jesus, sharers in the life of Christ, they will act in the world in ways congruent with their exemplar Jesus, as they were coached to by Jesus’s eminent interpreter, Paul. That way of life isn’t determined by rule-following (for no one will be justified by works of the law), but by that divine power made flesh in Christ, communicated to us by the Holy Spirit, that transforms our inclinations from death-fearing servitude to sin into life-embracing freedom for godly action in the world.
 
   In all this, I applaud the trajectory of Kirk’s interpretation of Jesus and Paul (and particularly in Chapter Five, where Kirk treats the topic of inclusivity — but that’s not my chapter to discuss). I would argue with him on points of detail here and there, but these would be the sorts of argument that we might conduct convivially over a pint of Chip 71 or Cart Blanche, or perhaps one of Kirk’s own home brews. Kirk speaks from a vision informed by Hays and Gorman, adopting the trope of ‘discipleship as playing/improvising a role in the divine drama’ popularised by Wright (pioneered by Lash and Young, redeployed by Vanhoozer, and focussed into ethical principle by Wells), yet with a voice of his own. Kirk’s Jesus Have I Loved… exemplifies the best sort of New Testament theologising in current scholarship — richly grounded in (critical) appropriation of Scripture, remaining recognisably close to Scripture’s own words, arranged so as to reveal a persuasive greater coherence.
 
   So compelling a depiction of Jesus’s and Paul’s narrative understanding of the gospel, though, inescapably raises weighty questions. Kirk devotes particular time to one in particular: how does a servant of the ‘upside-down’ gospel approach leading, or teaching, or decision-making? Kirk astutely points to the risk of performative contradiction for the teacher who persuasively lectures (or ‘writes’) about the self-denying humility of cruciformity — what if the book becomes a best-seller? What if the acclaim that accompanies an insightful ministry of scholarship impels all people to speak well of you? (And, conversely, how do we distinguish the disagreeable prophet from the just plain disagreeable person, the lowly leader from the crummy leader?) Kirk confesses to being haunted by Paul’s gospel as he lectures through 2 Corinthians, and one can readily sympathise with his plight — but is it too much to ask that he dwell a bit longer on how his readers might cultivate a spirit of humbleness that eschews the culturally-prominent markers of financial, occupational, and ‘reputational’ success?
 
   Kirk also draws all threads of the theological narrative to their convergence at the cross; fair enough, for it would take a foolhardy critic to question the centrality of the cross for contemporary theology (especially in a chapter with a well-known epigraph from Dietrich Bonhoeffer). At the same time, since Jesus and Paul both draw so richly on the precedents and the sensibilities of the Old Testament, I’d have welcomed a stronger sense that the narratives in question don’t just begin at Matthew 1:1. To be clear, Kirk’s earlier chapters make strong narrative connections with the Old Testament — the point here is that dominical and Pauline narrative ethics draw strength from their continuity with the characters and teaching of the Old Testament, in a way that this chapter’s focus on the Old Testament as represented just by the abstract concept of ‘law’ or by the Ten Commandments short-changes. The narrative that Jesus inherits and passes along to his disciples (transformed, yet recognisably ‘the same’ in theologically important ways) is more deeply understood as it engages the broad swath of stories that precede Jesus’s advent. That additional depth and richness would well serve Kirk’s purposes in this chapter, if he invoked it.
 
   Finally, Kirk’s focal emphasis on the cross also provoked me — perhaps counterproductively — to wonder. At the risk of a serious misstep, which I would earnestly recant if proven — Is the cross itself the central, defining characteristic of the paradigm that Kirk (and Gorman, and their numerous admirable forebears) identify? In this chapter, the cross sometimes seemed to figure more importantly than the imperishable vindication that followed it, a little as though the resurrection were an afterthought. Make no mistake: I’m not soft-pedalling the cross, but wondering how truly it captures the ‘and resurrection’ good news if we refer continually to ‘cruciformity’, ‘the cross’, and so on. My concern derives from having thought more and more recently that the relation of the good news of Jesus to the character of holiness, wisdom, and purity adumbrated in the Old Testament can be deflected by accenting the characteristics of suffering. The point of the good news in this regard, after all, is not that we should look forward to misery, or that we should seek out persecution, or that only someone who has been scarred by abuse can understand the gospel; rather, the point is that God’s power for life, for justice, for restoration and harmony, all are greater than the obstacles that sin and death set before them. This is actually a harder teaching for me than the centrality of the cross, because the former version of the cross can modulate into an abstraction, a figure, a generality — whereas the latter requires that I regard my own impending death as no more worrisome than a cold, requires me to regard my financial instability as relatively inconsequential in light of the depth of the riches of God’s glory. Does abstract-metaphorical invocation of ‘the cross’ sometimes serve, ironically, to screen from us the daunting prospect of actually living in the way that Kirk shows Paul to be teaching?
 
   It takes a provocative thinker to push a reader as far as Kirk has pushed me, especially since I started the book so sympathetic to Kirk’s own vision. For such a vivid treatment of the true power of resurrection life, and the transformation in ourselves that it would call forth if only we could let it, Daniel Kirk should be (humbly) applauded. And now, I’m about ready for that pint.
 
(The foregoing is my contribution to the Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul? blog tour, organised on behalf of Daniel’s book by Baker Academic. Yesterday, the tour stopped at James McGrath’s place and Jamie Arpin-Ricci’s; the tour continues tomorrow with contributions from Tripp Fuller and Jim West.)