If ever there were a perfect text for the meaning behind the feast of the Epiphany, surely it is the Third Song of Isaiah (Canticle 11, BCP p. 87), taken from Isaiah 60.

Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has dawned upon you.

For behold, darkness covers the land; deep gloom enshrouds the peoples.

But over you the Lord will rise,  and his glory will appear upon you.

Nations will stream to your light,  and kings to the brightness of your dawning.

Your gates will always be open; by day or night they will never be shut.

They will call you, The City of the Lord,  The Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

Violence will no more be heard in your land, ruin or destruction within your borders.

You will call your walls, Salvation, and all your portals, Praise.

The sun will no more be your light by day; by night you will not need the brightness of the moon.

The Lord will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory.

Darkness covers the land; deep gloom enshrouds the peoples. When Mary and Joseph were en route from Nazareth to Bethlehem it was surely the case that darkness and gloom were in control. God’s people sensed that they were still in exile, that “restoration” was a cruel joke, that the false gods and oppressive powers had the upper hand. Into this milieu a totally new kind of king was born.

Nations will stream to your light; kings to the brightness of your dawning. As Anglican New Testament scholar NT Wright ceaselessly points out, this “business” about the “nations” began way back with Abraham. It was then, with Abram (as he was then called) that YHWH first announced that his work in and through his covenant people was to bless the whole world, all nations on the earth. “In you,” God promised the Father of our Faith, “all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” And so it is, that when we see these strange magician-kings bearing gifts to and worshipping the babe in the manger, we are literally seeing the fulfillment of that prophetic thread which is woven throughout the Old Covenant Scriptures.

They will call you the City of the Lord, the Holy One of Israel. Duke New Testament Scholar Richard Hays, in his Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, writes persuasively that the fulfillment of the Old Covenant occurs not simply in the man Jesus Christ but also in his Body, the Church. The New Covenant ecclesia (the Greek word for “church”) in which God’s people meet, no longer in Central Zion Proper, but now decentralized  all over the globe, is this “City of the Lord.” When black people, white people, rich people, poor people, conservative people, liberal people, etc. etc. gather in Eucharistic fellowship with the Baptized Faithful, it is then that the “nations [are streaming] to your light.”

The Sun will no more be your light by day; by night you will not need the brightness of the moon. When I tuck Bella and Ellie into bed each night, just after we finish our prayers, they always remind me to turn on the nightlight (which sometimes turns out to be the light in the bathroom next to their room). However, on those rare occasions when these little girlies persuade me (or their Mommy) to sleep with them all night, this infantile need for a nightlight disappears. In the very same way, St. John tells us in his Apocalypse, “And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.” (Rev. 22:5, ESV)

Have you ever noticed how, in the Christian Faith, so many things come in “three’s”? Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Peter, James, and John.  Faith, hope, and love.

Another “Trinitarian triad” which is especially relevant at this point in our church year is found in the Memorial Acclamation of our Eucharistic Prayer:

Christ has died.

Christ is risen.

Christ will come again.

I’ve long reflected on our confession of this “triple event” in terms of Advent, a time when we prepare for the coming of Christ. (Note that, in Latin, the verb venire means “ to come,” and the prefix ad means “to” or “toward.”) It points, I think, to the reality of the three “comings” of Christ, all of which require our preparation. Christ came; Christ comes; Christ will come again.

First, Christ came. He came to our hurting and broken world 2000 years ago as baby boy, born to a young teenage girl in Palestine. He came to an afflicted people, in desperate need of something, someone, to put their hope in. This first coming, when the God-man walked upon the pages of historical time and space, is something catholic Christians actively re-member every year in Advent. We relive it, we reimagine it, we prepare for it. When it comes to this, the “first coming” of Christ, what is going on is that we are preparing for the remembrance of a past event (not unlike the annual preparation for one’s wedding anniversary).

But, second, Christ comes. Every Eucharist, every time the Word is read, in fact every moment of our lives, God in Christ approaches us in loving relationship. This is true on so many levels we scarcely have time or space to discuss it. In my Christian formation class this year during Ordinary Time we spent many weeks discussing and practicing a form of prayerful reading called lectio divina, and this is why: Christ is always present, and yet the challenge and need is for us to develop and cultivate an awareness of that presence. Hence, we pray. We meditate. We contemplate. We wait. We listen. “Be still,” the Psalms instruct, “and know that I am God.”

Finally, Christ will come again. This we confess at every Eucharist in the words of the Nicene Creed: “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” No man knows the hour, and few should claim to know the manner, but that he will return, we are absolutely certain. And though the details are hazy, we are told that he will come like a thief in the night. (1 Thes 5:2) Therefore, St. Paul admonishes, “let us not sleep, as others do, but keep awake, and be sober.” (1 Thes 5:5) Sounds like preparation to me.

All of this reminds me of a quotation from Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes: “We imagine the past, and we remember the future.” The past, the first coming of Christ, is an event which renews and redeems the world, simultaneously bringing Israel’s story (for us, the Old Testament) to its anticipated climax. It is no ordinary event. It is the “axis mundi,” the pivot of history. It is, at the same time, the climax of our story, yours and mine. When we read about God’s people in the Old Testament, we are reading about our community, our selves. This is an event we are imaginatively to re-inhabit.

The future, in turn, is something we “remember,” for we have already been told how it will end. Putting aside all of those dense, thick commentaries on the Book of Revelation for a moment, we do see in the last two chapters of our Story a renewed community, celebrating the ultimate victory of God and his Lamb. We know, in other words, “who wins” in the end, and we know that our destiny is sure: to rest in and to enjoy our Three Person God forever with all his Saints.

We imagine the past; we remember the future. In so doing we are enabled more and more to live fully into the present moment, in which Christ comes to us continually and without reservation.

I am currently in the final stages of discerning a possible opportunity to begin doctoral work at the University of Dallas under the esteemed postmodern medievalist Phillip Rosemann. As a part of our ongoing dialogue designed to culminate in a final decision (mutually discerned) to apply to this program or not, Professor Rosemann invited me to read Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong. In so doing he correctly perceived, on the basis of our discussions so far, a great interest on my part for texts and authors related to genealogy, or the intellectual developments which have led western society and culture down the road it has taken in particular toward secularism and modernity.

I must say that the Ong book is among the most original books I have read in a while in its fecundity and heuristic value, rivaling even Pierre Hadot’s work in its ability to shed light upon our cultural and intellectual predecessors, showing how they viewed the world and why.

Whereas much of Hadot’s work focuses on the “schools” of ancient philosophy (Stoicism, Epicureanism, etc.) and shows how they organically lead to major historical strands within Christianity, Ong takes as his point of departure the “pre-literate” culture makers of the Homeric poets and bards, whose description of the world, as is the case with all pre-literate (ie, oral) thought leaders, is decisively shaped and determined by the form of their discourse. In a world which knew nothing of writing (let alone an alphabet or still less moveable type and the printing press) their description of the world was cast in terms of formulaic units of text (eg, repeated patterns of subjects, verbs, and objects), repetition of events, epithets (eg, “crafty Odysseus,” “the wine-dark sea,” “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”). Just as important, their “genre” (to be horribly anachronistic) was epic narrative, which we would identify as closely related to poetry, given its conformity to strict patterns of meter or scansion.

This book reminds me of the phrase of Alfred North Whitehead who spoke of the “simplicity on the far side of complexity.” The explanatory power of Ong’s thesis (which builds on the work of, among others, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, and Milman Parry) to explain why the ancients described their world they way they did is staggering. For example, there is the simple matter of memory (a topic given ample attention by Ong). Why did the ancients rely so heavily of formulaic expressions, epithets and repetition in their rendition of important events? (Why, for example, is there so much repetition, say, in the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 or in the Abraham cycle of the same book?) Why, further, did they not cast their reports in ways more amenable to the modern, “scientific” mindset? Before one delves into complex matters of historical development, there is the simple fact that they were just trying to remember the account being given. Think about life with no writing at all: of course “tools” such as repetition, formula, and epithet would be of great value. (Note that I am here presupposing that the Bible has an oral provenance which precedes its being committed to writing in the Hebrew language. This is an assumption shared by Ong.)

To take this a bit further, consider again the structure of the creation account of Genesis 1. Why is it structured in terms of six days? Given Ong’s thesis, it would be a great mistake not to include in one’s answer to this question that the communal guardians of the story were simply trying to remember an ancient narrative, to continue the story in the living memory of the people. This is the case regardless of whatever else one might want to argue about the creation story of Genesis 1, any account of Genesis 1 (seeking either to undermine it or to bolster its validity) must take these factors into account.

Briefly I want to list some other areas to which this book is particularly relevant:

- I have already hinted at the area of Biblical criticism.

- I have already alluded to the genealogical import of the book.

- Plato. Ong highlights the deep ambiguity in Plato’s posture toward writing as opposed to orality: in the Republic he banishes poets from the city but then in the Phaedrus and elsewhere he extols the beauty and value of oral dialogue, complaining that writing will lead to a loss of memory.

- Rhetoric. Ong shows how, paradoxically, rhetoric both presupposes writing (Aristotle could have never developed the loci communes without the mental structure afforded him by writing) and is eclipsed by (that especially intense form of) writing (known as alphabet-based moveable type). The Romantic movement, itself utterly dependent upon moveable type as well as a level of interiority which only a deeply literate culture could achieve, was the nail in the coffin of rhetoric.

- Depth Psychology. In a fascinating discussion of Freud, Ong shows how the depth psychology which he spawned is utterly dependent upon literary developments which could only be achieved in a highly literate culture, for example the development of the round character. (The characters of oral narrative are by necessity “flat,” eg, Odysseus, Adam, Abraham.)

- Derrida. In addition to interacting with Derrida’s reading of Plato viz a viz speech and writing (a crucial issue explored in Catherine Pickstock’s After Writing), Ong masterfully, provocatively, and simply shows that what Derrida does is to downgrade oral discourse so that he does not have to deal with it. If orality is stricken with the metaphysics of presence, then Derrida is liberated to deal only with the written text, and to attempt to argue that the text is all there is. Page 162 is the best (and most concise) summary of Derrida I’ve seen.

Don’t know why I never noticed this before. As with many Christian leaders, Galatians 3:28 (“In Christ there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male or female, for all are one in Christ.”) is an important verse for me.

However, I had never really noticed that is the parallel passage to this in Colossians, Paul adds the language of “barbarian,” including a reference to the Scythian, to these pairs: “no distinction is drawn between Greek or Jew, between those who are circumcised and those who are not, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, because the Christ is in each one is the only thing that matters (Col 3:1-10).”

To quote Dallas Willard (from The Divine Conspiracy, page 126):

Inclusion of the Scythian here is instructive and should be understood to refer to the very lowest possibility of humanity. The Scythian was the barbarian’s barbarian, thought of as an utterly brutal savage – largely because he was.

In this chapter, Bell continues with his (quite right) insistence that our popular understandings of heaven are far removed from the thought-world of the Bible, of first-century Judaism (of which Jesus and his first followers were a part).

Again, in doing this he is popularizing a similar line of work as that of NT Wright, massively prominent biblical scholar and Anglican bishop. (See here, and here.)

Again, I will list & briefly comment on the points Bell makes.

1.     There is something wrong with the idea that the Christian life is about going to heaven when we die. Basically, this would imply that this world, my life, my family, my body, my work, simply does not matter, and that the “main point” is to “get the heck out of Dodge.” Even before we turn to the Bible, we can sense in our bones that this picture of bailing out, leaving the world behind, is just wrong.

2.     Bell points out that Jesus, like all other first century Jews, had no concept of “eternity” as in “eternal life.” Bell does a good job of showing that this is not what the rich man meant in Matt 19 (see verse 16 and following) when he asks him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Rather, this man and Jesus both would have been thinking of “the age to come” (Hebrew olam habah; Greek zoe aionion). That is, to the Hebrew mind (including in the Second Temple period) “eternal life” the way we think of it was not a big deal. “The age to come,” however, was a big deal. History is going somewhere. God is up to something. He is going to fix this broken world. He is going to do this, they would have thought, “in the age to come.” This is what the following Old Testament passages are about: Isa 2, Isa 11, Isa 25, Ezek 36, Amos 9.

3.     These passages point to three realities w.r.t. this “age to come.” First, the age to come will include all nations; it will be inclusive and universal in scope. Second, the picture we get is very earthy: it consists of grain, crops, wine, people, feasts, homes, and buildings (p34). Third, we can see that this vision is something deeply rooted in the creation narratives of Gen 1 & 2. That is, this vision for the way creation is supposed to be was not new. God has always been looking for partners who will work with him (think of Tolien’s “subcreation” and “subcreators”) to extend the garden, and to cultivate the whole earth. I like this paragraph (35 – 36):

For there to be new wine, someone has to crush the grapes. For the city to be built, someone has to chop down the trees to make the beams to construct the houses. For there to be no more wars, someone has to take the sword and get it hot enough to melt it down into the shape of a plow.

That is, bringing about God’s creative purposes takes work.

4.     When things don’t work the way God intended, he gets angry and he becomes full of hate. When modern western people say that they can’t believe in a god of hate or anger, remember this (37):

Yes, they can. Often, we can think of little else. Every oil spill; every report of another woman sexually assaulted; every news report that another political leader has silenced the opposition through torture, imprisonment, and execution; every we see someone stepped on by an institution or corporation more interested in profit than people every time we stumble upon one more instance of the human heart gone wrong, we shake our fist and cry out, “Will someone please do something about this?”

5.     What did Jesus mean by “heaven?” First, he meant “God.” Bell is correct here: Matthew’s “Kingdom of Heaven” is tantamount to Luke’s “Kingdom of God.”

6.     Second, “Heaven” is where God’s will is being done, in real time and in real space. Again, Bell is correct here. The Kingdom of God “happens” wherever Jesus is worshipped and made Lord.

7.     Third, Since our time & place is so often not where God’s will is done, what this means is that, right now, heaven and earth are not one. To gloss this in NT Wright language, “God’s dimension” and “man’s dimension” are not presently overlapping, but (as Bell points out on pp 43 ff) the whole story of the Bible (Old & New Testaments together) is the story of God’s dimension & man’s dimension beginning to overlap & to become one. (My note: this most fully happens in Jesus Christ & his body, the Church, but one day it – the union between God & world – will be “all in all.”)

8.     If this is true, then “right now counts forever,” and digging wells for clean water now matters since in “heaven” there will be clean water for all. This is the future breaking into the present, getting dragged into the present. (Fancy word for this: eschatology.)

9.     What Jesus’ encounter with the rich man in Matthew 19 shows us is that not only does heaven comfort, but it also confronts. That is, heaven

“has teeth, flames, edges, sharp points” and that “certain things simply will not survive in the age to come. Like greed. And coveting. The one thing people won’t be wanting in the perfect peace and presence of God is someone else’s life. The man is clearly attached to his wealth and possessions, so much so that when Jesus invites him to leave them behind, he can’t do it.” (p 49).

This meshes perfectly with what Paul says in I Cor 3:10ff: that certain deeds, practices, words and attitudes will on “the Day” (the prophets spoke of, see above) will be burned away, but that “the builder” (ie, the one with these attitudes) will be saved.

10. As CS Lewis points out, heaven is a place so real, solid, and good that it will take a lot to get used to. In a paragraph in which Bell (knowingly or not) is pretty much arguing for something like Purgatory, he points out that things like habits and character take time, so it is an unrealistic (if widespread) assumption that in “heaven” people will be changed in an instant. What this means is that a single mom who struggles to pay bills and squeeze child support out of her ex-husband who use to beat her and to keep her kids in school, and who does all this without giving up or despairing is likely “the first who will be last,” is likely the kind of person about (or to) whom God will say “You are the kind of person with whom I can partner to build my new world.”

Heaven is more real, not less, than this world, and so it is full of surprises.

Summary. For Rob Bell, heaven

a.     is coterminous with “God.”

b.     Wherever, in this world agreed with and served.

c.      Aion, that is to say: the intensification of reality beyond our present, normal awareness of things (ie, “three dimensions”) which is charged with God and the reality of his new world, which begins here and now, and continues into the world to come.

Again, in my opinion, all of this is utterly biblical, and utterly orthodox, and utterly exciting!

In chapter 1 of Love Wins Bell makes several points, all of which are spot on, and all of which many intelligent pastors and teachers have been making for a very long time. I’m going to list the points / questions and elaborate briefly on them.

1.     There is a widespread phenomenon in the modern, western church (what this really means is the evangelical church, which no doubt has analogues in contemporary Roman Catholicism) and it is driving many people away from the community of Jesus-followers. It is the phenomenon of confusing and polluting the Jesus story with our corrupted stories. A prominent version of this is to adopt a mode of threat in our telling of the story, and then to assume that, of course, my community is on the “inside” of those who are favored by God.

2.     Often, our sub-stories totally lack hope for the world and for people, and this is light years away from the tone and direction of the Jesus story.

3.   To make matters worse, we bandy around the idea of salvation with no real understanding of what that idea means, much less how the Bible actually uses that word. Examples: is salvation a conversion experience? Is it having correct ideas in your head about God? Is it being zapped in your heart? Is it having a emotional feeling? Is there an “age of accountability?” If so, what is it, and how do we know? Is salvation something that happens to me as an individual or something that happens to a community (such as Israel in Rom 11)? Bell suggests the sobering truth that, again, more often than not the way we speak of salvation is light years away from the biblical story of Jesus.

4.     Which God? Which Jesus? Bell rightly points out that, when people say they reject Jesus (or God), we need to ask, “Which Jesus (or God) do you reject?” Frequently, the Jesus being rejected is a Jesus who ought to be rejected. Maybe the Jesus being rejected is an unbiblical Jesus. Maybe the Jesus being rejected is a Jesus who was associated in a five-year-old’s imagination with a man who was molesting her. Bell gives the example (p 7) of a woman whose father raped her while saying the Lord’s Prayer, from Renee Alston’s Stumbling Toward Faith:

I grew up in an abusive household. Much of my abuse was spiritual. When I say spiritual I don’t mean new age, esoteric, random mumblings from half-Wiccan, hippie parents…. I mean that my father raped me while saying the Lord’s Prayer. I mean that my father molested me while singing Christian hymns.

Surely, to reject this “Jesus” can be seen as a step in the right direction (as CS Lewis would firmly agree).

In his introduction to Love Wins Bell clearly says that he does not take himself to have all the answers. Rather, he is asking some questions, rooting his thought in the categories the Bible itself gives us. In this he is doing the very same thing that NT Wright has been doing, and in fact, a great many (even most?) of the “bombshells” he is dropping, particularly in chapter 1 (dealing with “heaven”), are nothing more that what NT Wright has been teaching for years. Thus, Bell is traveling nowhere that Bp. Wright has not travelled before.

The second big claim Bell rightly makes in the introduction is that, to the extent that he has a “position” on this “issue,” this position of his is nothing new, and is well included within the mainstream of the “ongoing discussion” (p xi) that the church has been having for centuries. In this he is utterly correct. In fact, he is essentially espousing a view of Christian tradition which has been articulated by Alisdair MacIntyre:

The traditions through which particular practices are transmitted and reshaped never exist in isolation for larger social traditions. What constitutes such traditions? We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate. For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution–a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital–is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

- Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 221

In this sense tradition is an ongoing dialogue that takes place over large periods of time within particular communities.

In conclusion, Love Wins (in the introduction at least) is in the very good company of NT Wright and Alisdair MacIntyre, and, thus, is a welcome and much needed articulation of theology especially since it is written at a much more popular level.

A final critique, however. Bell clearly has a “catholic” way of understanding tradition. It is too bad, therefore, that he does not have (or has not expressed, or has not acted on) a catholic ecclesiology.

That is, what is the church? Would that Bell were in a communion of churches, an actually embodied tradition (note what MacIntyre says above about communities: these are concrete communities of bodies & souls. Indeed, they are eucharistic communities (at least for scripture & tradition).

Here again, the emergent church slouches toward catholicity, but still lacking the actual ability to embrace the catholic church of history.

Here again (as has been the case for about a decade) “eccleiology!” is my mantra.

Oh how I wish Rob Bell would read John Milbank & Radical Orthodoxy.

Those of you familiar with the teachings of Tim Keller will see realize that the title of this post is “stolen” from him, as is the basic point of the Epiphany teachings we are doing as we delve into Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

Where we’ve been in Galatians so far:

1. We started out by looking at the so-called Parable of the Prodigal Son as a “lens” through which we view Galatians (thus “reading Scripture with Scripture”). This parable from Luke 15 is really about two sons, and not just the sinful, lost, younger son. As we have seen, the older brother is just as much in need of repentance as the younger brother who wasted his father’s inheritance in Las Vegas living it up, gambling, drinking, carousing, and (as the text says) sleeping with prostitutes. The elder brother is just as much as in need of repentance: just as much as the younger brother, he is using his father as a means to an end. Just as much as the younger brother, he is trying to control his father, the only difference being that the elder brother is trying to control the father through his obedience, through doing what’s right, through “the works of the law.”

2. Who is Jesus always getting upset with in the Gospel stories? Elder brother types: scribes, Pharisees, teachers of the law. The squeaky clean types, the cultural and religious conservatives, the ones who believe in absolute truth, the morally upstanding types, the ones who would be much happier living in red states.

3. What is Galatians about? It is a polemic levied against the “elder brother types,” but in this context they are not called “Pharisees;” they are called “the Circumcision.” Different characters from the Gospel stories, but the plot remains fundamentally the same.

4. Now, what’s crazy is that Paul himself is, by nature and by nurture, an “elder brother type.” As he states in Galatians 1, he had been a “Pharisee of Pharisees,” more zealous than his contemporaries for the purity of the law.

5. However Paul is a man who has been changed by grace! The risen Christ appeared to him (see the book of Acts), knocking him off his horse and onto his can. And after a season of meditation in the desert, trying to figure out what in the world had happened to him on that road to Damascus, trying to make sense of the Scriptures (for us, the “Old Testament”) in light of this shocking revelation of Christ, he begins to reach out in love to the very ones he had so murderously despised: the Gentiles! The Gentiles: the unclean ones, the sinners, the younger brother types.

6. This is the heart of Galatians: the life of Christ is not one of status quo religion, whereby we assume our own superiority over those who are different from us (this is the basic posture of the human heart, and the basic nature of so much of what passes for “religion”).

7. OK, then, what is the Christian life about? Two things (which we will consider together on Thursday nights for the next few weeks):

a. A New Law of Freedom (ch 5).

b. A New Community or Family (ch 6).

Bella: “Daddy, I don’t want to go outside and play in the front yard because I’m afraid that the bad guys will get me.”

Daddy: “Sweetheart, who are these ‘bad guys’ you’re talking about?”

Bella: “You know, the bad guys Auntie M. told me about, the bad guys on the news who kidnapped and did real bad things to that little boy last night. I saw it on the news, Daddy.”

Daddy: “Sweetheart, those people should not have done those bad things, and we must be careful and aware of our surroundings, but do you remember last week in the playground that you spit on your friend when she took your Hello Kitty ball away from you?”

Bella: “Yeah, I’m sorry I did that, Daddy.”

Daddy: “I totally forgive you, Sweetie, but since you did that, I mean, since you hit her and spit on her, does this make you a ‘bad guy?’”

Bella: “No, Daddy! I’m a good girl!”

Daddy: “But at that moment your heart was just as angry and hurtful as some of the people you see on the news.”

Bella: “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Daddy: “And, guess what else, Bella?”

Bella: “What, Daddy?”

Daddy: “I once knew a man who got thrown into jail for stealing a lot of money. That’s bad, right?”

Bella: “Right.”

Daddy: “Well, did you know that that same man loves his little daughter just like I love you?”

Bella: “How do you know, Daddy?”

Daddy: “Because that man is your Uncle ‘S.’”

This dialogue is typical of ones I have with my seven year old daughter, Bella. What I’m trying to do here is to show her that, in a sense, there is no such thing as “good guys” and “bad guys.”

With one exception, I tell her, and that is the case of characters in stories. Characters in stories can be good or bad. So for example, Saruman in the Lord of the Rings is truly bad, with no qualifications.

I would argue that something similar holds for the story of Holy Scripture which finds its climax or fulillment in (the paschal mystery of) Christ, which is one reason I have a different take on the role of narrative for the Christian understanding of violence than those who argue that there is no place for violence in the Christian story or in Christian theology.

What I want to show in the rest of this essay, however, is that, in another sense, there is such a thing as “bad guys.” The moral tradition of Christian virtue teaches that man is a functional concept. That is, the human being, created by God for a concrete and specific end or telos, is analogous to a human-made tool, for example, a hammer. A hammer can be said to be a good hammer if it successfully drives nails into pieces of wood. Alternatively a hammer (or a clock or a chair) may be said to be a poor hammer (or clock or chair) if it fails to fulfill its telos, the purpose for which it was made, properly.

According to the Christian tradition, rooted in Holy Scripture, the telos of humanity is to glorify God or (alternatively stated) to participate in the mystery of the triune God. To the extent that a person does this well and properly, she is a good woman. To the extent that a little boy or girl or grown-up fails to do this, he or she is a bad person.

Where does this leave us? It leaves me with a tension, a dilemma which might be undecideable. When forming the character of my seven year old, I want to discourage her from viewing the other (in particular those who are different from her) as “bad guys.” I want her to examine her heart and to verify the biblical truth that “all have sinned,” that “the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, who can know it?”. I want her to pluck the beam out of her own eye first.

I think this posture is biblical and consistent with the spirit of Jesus, for whom the only “bad guys” were the power-mongers of religiosity of his day.

Since, like my seven year old, I have the capacity (even the tendency) for violence in my own life, I’m not really justified in speaking of others as bad guys.

And yet, I must admit that the moral tradition of Christian virtue ethics also maintains that there is such a thing a “good guys” and “bad guys.”

At the end of the day, am I myself a bad guy? In my view, that is for my (Christian) community to judge.

From Augustine’s Homilies on the First Epistle of John:

Then let us rejoice and give thanks that we are made not only Christians, but Christ. Do you understand, brothers, and apprehend the grace of God upon us? Marvel, be glad, we are made Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members: the whole man is he and we… The fullness of Christ, then, is head and members. Head and members, what is that? Christ and the Church (In. Io. XXI.8).

Thanks, David Thomas.

Yesterday, in my first week “on the ground” here in Tyler (see here), I went on an 8-mile run with some amazing members of the community here, ranging from age 55 to 28.

At one point during the run, the 28 year old man mentioned that he has been impressed by the teaching ministry of Ravi Zacharias (who also greatly influenced Bouquet and me in our college years at UT).

Of course, I said nothing disparaging about Ravi on that run, and I do have tremendous respect for him.

And yet, one of the interesting things about being here in Tyler is that I find myself in a new community, who have no idea what motivates me in ministry, or, for example, why I chose to become an Episcopal priest, thus having to leave the more “conservative” Presbyterian Church, the PCA.

So this afternoon I was re-reading Peter Leithart’s Against Christianity, and it hit me in fresh way: this is the real difficuIty I have with folks like Ravi: the church plays a very little role in their teaching, certainly not a central role, as it did for the Apostle Paul. Here’s the quotation:

“The Bible gives no hint that a Christian “belief system” might be isolated from the life of the Church, subjected to scientific analysis, and have its truth compared with competing “belief systems.”- Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, page 14.

The point is not at all that what we believe does not matter (2 Pet 3:15). Rather the point is that the enemies of the faith (colluding with gnosticism) have succeeded in disembodying what the book of Acts describes as “the Way.” Being a Christian is not simply about believing the right set of propositions, but rather about living a life in solidarity with the community of faith: confessing the faith with them, serving and being served by them, sharpening them, etc.

A Sermon by Matt Boulter

St. Richard’s Episcopal Church

February 21, 2010

Lent I C

In the great 19^th century German legend Faust, we meet the scholarly Dr. Faust in his study, struggling to figure something out, to discover some great scientific breakthrough. And then all of the sudden, a sinister and mysterious being called Mephistopheles appears out of nowhere in his study. Now, in the previous scene of the story Mephistopheles – a kind of Satanic or demonic figure – is seen in heaven dialoging with God, engaging God in a wager that he, Mephistopheles, can tempt God’s favorite human, Dr. Faust, and cause Dr. Faust to enter into a pact with himself, thereby betraying God.

And so here Mephistopheles is, in Dr. Faust’s study, and sure enough, Dr. Faust gives in: he agrees, by actually signing a contract with a few drops of his own blood. The terms of the contract? Faust will serve Mephistopheles for all eternity in hell, if Mephistopheles will just give him everything he wants before he dies.

Now, I won’t ruin the story for you by telling you how it turns out, but suffice to say that something similar is going in today’s Gospel lesson from the 4^th chapter of Luke’s Gospel, but with one key difference: the great tempter in our story today is not named “Mephistopheles;” he is named simply “The Devil.”

Now at first glance that might not seem too terribly important to you, but then you might notice that this character is explicitly named in this little story not once, not twice, but three times. It’s as if he is named three times, once for each of the three temptations which confront the famished Jesus … Jesus who is full of the power of the Spirit (having just been baptized in chapter 3) and who has just been led into the desert by that same spirit for the explicit purpose of being tempted.

Now what’s going on in these three temptations? Well, I think that by mentioning “the devil” 3 times, Luke is actually giving us a big hint, for the word “devil” in Greek has a very simple meaning: it means “the one who divides;” “the divider.” Who or what is the devil? Well, there’s a lot about the devil I’m not too sure about, but this I know: the devil is one who divides the things and the people that God has put together, and that, my friends, is a huge clue as to the nature of these temptations here in this desert in Luke chapter 4.

What is Jesus tempted with here? Three things: bread, power, and health. Now, let me ask you question: are these 3 things – bread, power, and health – are these bad things? No! They are good things! And it’s the very same for you & me this Lenten season. The things you are giving up: chocolate, beer, coffee, whatever … these are not bad things.

We are not called to give up sinful things for Lent; we are called to give up sinful things all the time.  During Lent, what we are called to “say no” to is good things: chocolate, beer, bread, power, health. But the question remains, “Why?” Why should we say “no” to these things if they are so good?

And the answer is the same for us as it was for Jesus: the short answer is that we are not so much saying “no” as “not yet.” God wants us to have all of these things in abundance: chocolate, beer, bread, power, health … but he wants to give them to us as gifts, not as things grasped. And so you see, we’re not actually saying “no” to them; we are saying “not yet.”

See, all of these things being offered  to Jesus by Satan … in each case, the “carrot” being dangled before Jesus was something which was already his by God’s promise.

When the Divider offers bread to the famished Jesus, imagine what was running through Jesus’ mind. “Hmmm … what would a kingdom based on feeding miracles look like? A ministry of providing bread out of nothing could blaze a trail right to the king’s throne, with throngs of followers supporting me. Then I could finally restore the fortunes of Israel and God’s people.” See, Satan was offering Jesus a shortcut to the Kingdom. But Jesus said “no.” By faith & the HS – the very same resources you & I have, by the way – Jesus determined not to grasp his kingship, but to wait for it as a gift.

The very same thing is going on in the 2^nd & 3^rd temptations: in each case the Devil is tempting Jesus to choose: “you can choose God, or you can choose the bread. You can choose God, or you can choose the chocolate. You can choose God, or you can choose the power of the king’s throne.”

But, you see, in every case, this is a false dichotomy, b/c what Jesus understood is what St. Paul tells us: that God has promised us all good things; that he holds nothing back from those who love him; that if we trust him, we will live in the promised land flowing with milk and honey, and we will receive the most lavish inheritance you can imagine. This is why Paul, in today’s Epistle lesson from Romans 10 has the audacity to say that “the Lord bestows his riches on all who call on him.” (RSV; NRSV has “… is generous to all who call on him.”) Paul has the audacity to say that God gives us riches. What is that!? Is it a warm feeling in your heart? No: it is all good things; it is your inheritance in Christ from the God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. It is life in the new heavens and the new earth.

This is does not mean that Christians are not called to suffer. On the contrary suffering is the prerequisite to all of this. Death must come before resurrection life. What happens to Jesus here in the wilderness is just a foretaste of his cross experience. We are called to follow Jesus into the wilderness, and we are called to follow him to the cross.

But, still Jesus understood “the logic of the gift” — that God was always going to give him the bread, the power, the health anyway … so why grasp after it? Why do what Adam did in the garden? Better to have a little patience and humility now, and then receive all good things as a free gift from the giver of all good things.

In the book A Severe Mercy, the story includes 18 real-life letters which CS Lewis wrote to the author after the author had lost his wife to cancer. The story – it’s an autobiography of faith, if you will – is really about the struggles and temptations of romantic love. And in one of these letters CS Lewis is trying to comfort and encourage this widower who has lost the love of his life and who is suffering from a loss of romantic and sexual love and affection. And CS Lewis quotes some ancient poem and one of the lines is this: “Worship the Morning Star, and then take your earthly love thrown in.”

See, that is really what is going on in Lent. It is not an “either / or.” “Worship God, and take everything else thrown in.” “Seek first the Kingdom, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, and all of these things will be added unto you.” The false dichotomies are just that: false. We don’t have to choose. By saying no to chocolate I am not really saying no to chocolate. I am saying “not now” to chocolate. And by saying “not now” to chocolate, I am saying “yes” to God, and I am waiting on his good gifts. I am “seeking the morning star and taking all earthly delights thrown in.”

I am refusing the false dichotomies and the short cuts of the Divider. I am saying “yes” to God, and saying “yes” to God’s gifts. I am saying “God, I want you now, and I really like chocolate and beer and all that good stuff, but I am willing to wait for it in your time, and in your way.” (And you know what? Chocolate tastes so much better when it comes as a gift and not something grasped. And it’s the same way with sex, with power, with health, and with everything else God has made.)

Don’t choose between God and God’s good gifts. Say “yes” to both, and wait for the gifts in God’s good time.

What we are really saying “no” to in Lent, is “no” to the Divider. That’s what Adam failed to do in the Garden, And it’s what the New Adam succeeded in doing in the desert.

What God has joined together, let no one divide.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

This article is part of a larger series, the introduction to which is here.

I recently had a conversation with a neighbor of mine about going to church on Sunday.

When he found out that I am a “pastor type” he apparently felt the need to justify why he does not really believe in going to church on Sunday. “I can have ‘church’ at home,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”

“Well,” I responded, “certainly lots of people feel that way, and it kind of makes sense, I guess. But I think it is important to consider what the Bible says about things like that.” I went on to allude to I Peter chapter 2 by saying, “One of the images that the Bible gives us of God’s people is that of living stones.”

I continued by saying that if you look at a stone wall of a building one of the interesting things is that the stones are resting upon one another. That is, the stones need each other. A single stone cannot make a wall.

A similar dynamic comes into play when we consider the biblical image of “many members, one body.” Here the many members come together to form a whole organic unity, a complete body. An eye, or a spleen, cannot hope to constitute a healthy human body in all its complexity, as St. Paul teaches in places like I Corinthians 12.

It is the same way with “going to church” and the Christian life. In general is not possible for only one person to worship God by herself, if she never gathers with the community. Our private devotion and meditation (“in your prayer closet”) flows out from the worship of the gathered community, from the “work of the people” (which, as we saw last month, is what “liturgy” literally is).

The bottom line here is that in the Christian life, we need each other. “There are no ‘lone ranger’ Christians.”

I want to bring out, however, a second aspect to all this. There is another reason why staying at home on Sunday to read our Bible (or to watch a “televangelist” on TV) is not full Christian worship in the way the Bible describes it.

What are we doing when we worship God? The collects in our Prayer Book which we say over and over every Sunday give us a strong hint. Almost every one of them ends with some version of “through Jesus Christ … who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit….” You see, worship, at its heart, at its core essence, is a participation in the life and love of the Holy Trinity. It is as if in worship we are entering into a stimulating conversation or a beautiful dance which has already been going on between three Persons who deeply love each other. This loving community hospitably invites us into their joy, into their peace, into their glorious life.

But reading the Bible in my armchair at home, as important as that is, is not conducive to this kind of fellowship with the Divine community, if separated from the worshipping life of the people of God. When I read words on a page in my armchair at home, there is no conversation there: it is just “me, myself, and I” with static words on a page. But in worship on Sunday it is all about conversation, dialogue with God in and through other people. In the responsive psalm the people dialogue with the choir. In the confession and absolution we dialogue with Christ. After Jesus summons us by his Word in the sermon, we respond in conversation in the word of the Creed.

In this way, we are caught up into a Great Conversation with the Divine Community in a way that just cannot happen in my armchair at home. The real purpose of my armchair at home, and the real purpose of my Bible reading, is to re-member and to extend the Great Conversation in which I was caught up last Sunday.

In a sense, then, worship is prior to Scripture in that worship provides the context for Scripture. This makes sense historically, as well, when we realize that the continuous worship of the new covenant church actually predates the writings of the New Testament Scriptures.

The Bible is tremendously important, but its true home, if you will, is not primarily my armchair at home or my home office or study, but rather in the liturgical worship of the church. Out of this fountain, the rest of our Christian life flows.

It is now clear to me that, in fact, there has been a significant shift in the translation of this Greek term in I Cor 6:9 and in I Tim 1:10. Wyclif’s translation in 1380 is “thei that don lecherie with men” (Webster’s definition of “lechery” is “free indulgence of lust; selfish pleasure”). Tyndale (1534), Coverdale (1535), Cranmer (1539), the Geneva Bible (1557), the KJV (1611), and the ASV (1901) render it “abusers of themselves with [the] mankind.”

In 1946 the RSV changed to “sexual perverts” and in 1973 the NIV translates it as “homosexual offenders.”

Dale B. Martin rightly describes this shift from a “reference to an action that any man [I would say “any person”] might well perform … to a perversion, either an action or a propensity taken to be self-evidently abnormal and diseased.” (Sex and the Single Savior, ch 3)

I think it is horrible to say that male-female sex & sexual desire is “normal,” while (fe)male-(fe)male sex & sexual desire is “abnormal.” This is not a theological statement. What is a theological statement is to say that male-female sex & sexual desire is creational in the sense of God’s creation-intent, while (fe)male-(fe)male sex & sexual desire is anti-creational, in the sense that, as a result of the fall, it runs counter to God’s creational intent.

Thus, I think that this 20^th century shift in the translation of this term is deplorable, since it buys into the late 19^th century view (documented by Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality) that same-sex attraction is a disease. It is wrong to allow such secular assumptions to creep into our translation of the Church’s sacred text(s).

This year (2010) I am redoubling my efforts to better develop (and justify) my convictions on same-sex issues. In addition to that, I strongly suspect that part and parcel with this process is a deeper grasp of the nature of Scripture in the Christian Tradition.

Therefore, I am reading Dale Martin’s Sex and the Single Savior (2006) with great interest. Martin identifies himself as both a “reader-response” theorist and as a post-structuralist. He thus roots himself within two schools of thought from which I have learned much over the years, and which I think ought to be incorporated into theology in a non-reductive way. That is, theology ought to be open (as Radical Orthodoxy is) to both of these ways of thinking without granting them complete hegemony over Scripture, turning it into something which they alone can define and describe. For example, reader response theory rightly points out the role of the reader’s (or the community of readers’) interpretation for meaning. However to reduce the meaning of the text down to just this aspect (thus ignoring authorial intent and the text itself) does violence to meaning.

When it comes to the biblical hermeneutics of historical criticism, whereas I would want to recognize the legitimacy of this approach as a part of the total meaning of the text (seeing a pre-modern precedent in the sensus literalis), Martin wants to discard it completely.

Only thus can Martin deny that Scripture affirms the immorality of same-sex practice, which is one of the central goals of his book.

Martin rejects all attempts to justify the use of this hermeneutic approach theologically. For example, he rejects the argument that, due to the historical nature of the Christian religion (seen for example in the doctrine of the Incarnation), historical criticism is necessary or helpful for determining the meaning of a text.

That God took on flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazereth is unverifiable by historical study, says Martin. And I agree with him on this. However, the point of the historical – critical method (rightly used) is not to verify the claims of Scripture or theology. This would be to subsume theology under the standards of modern science. Rather, the historical – critical method is rightly used to shed light upon the original meaning of a text (be it author’s intent or original audience’s understanding).

So the Incarnation’s unverifiability (and resultant unfalsifiability) by the canons of modern scientific study is irrelevant to the validity of the use of the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation.

For Origen, by way of contrast, the meaning of the terms employed by the ancient author (or authors, or redactor(s)) is helpful for understanding the original meaning of the text. This is not at all to say that the sensus literalis, was the most important sense for someone like Origen. On the contrary, Martin rightly points out that this is not the case. However, it is a crucial aspect of the full meaning of the text, and it is also first in order of sequence, serving as a foundation for other senses such as the allegorical sense.

Nothing Martin says in this book undermines such an approach.

Why is it that Advent is not merely a time of mirthful exuberance? After all, the event we are anticipating and waiting for – the birth of Jesus – is a happy event.

Advent is, to be sure, a time of joyful expectation, but it is not just that. It is much, much more. It is tinged, it is colored with a certain sense of “Lord, have mercy on me.” Why?

To realize why this is, consider the attitudes of the two main figures which Christians have associated with Advent for the last 1600 years. First, consider John the Baptist, known in the Eastern tradition as “John the Forerunner.”

Was John exuberantly excited about Jesus? I am sure that at one level he was, but the impression we get is that John was also deeply shaken by the coming of this Jesus. He said, “When he comes, I will not even to worthy to relate to him as a slave would to his master: I will not even be worthy to untie his sandals.” He echoed the cataclysmic picture painted by Isaiah, a picture which is breathless in its anticipation of justice and salvation, but which also senses the shaking of the foundations of everything we think we know. When this Messiah comes, he will turn our worlds upside down; he will cut us to the quick.

Profound joy, mixed with deep and sober penitence.

Consider the Virgin Mary. Was Mary excited about the Redeemer of her people whose arrival was imminent? I am sure that at one level she was. But she was also barreled over with penitent humility. “How can these things be? … Here I am, your slave; have your way with me, according to your word.” Sure Mary was prostrate as she uttered these words to St. Gabriel.

Why this sober aspect of Advent? Because, to paraphrase Rowan Williams, when Jesus comes into the world it is unplanned, overwhelming, making a colossal difference. It satisfies out deepest longings, but we don’t know what it will involve, other than risk and pain, along with the restoration.

And so we can respond to Jesus by saying “No, thanks. I prefer my own darkness,” or we can say “Yes, I will take you, along with the risk and the pain.”

Either way, this is sobering if not scary stuff.

“The Names of God” in the Summa Theologica (Section 1.13 / Question 13)

When Thomas speaks of the “names” (Lat. nomen) of God, he means the words we use to describe God, including his “attributes,” such as “good,” “wise,” etc. (not just biblical names such as “Lion” or “Rock”). In the first section (1.13.3) Thomas argues that some of the words we use do, in fact, refer to God literally. Unlike some words such as “rock” or “strong” which are metaphorical in that they posit an analogy between God and creation, other words such as “good” are literally referential of God, even though they, too, Thomas admits, are derived from our understanding of creatures.

Literal, yes, but univocal, no, for “no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures.” (69) The definition of “wisdom” is dependent upon its referent. So it does not mean the same thing when referring to God as it does when referring, say, to a serpent. (Since this is the case, it seems like Thomas does not believe in univocal language at all [not just with respect to God]).

(Section 1.13.5) Words of perfection describe something in God which preexists what they describe in creatures. In fact any term of perfection, when applied to a creature, refers to something independent of the creature. For example, to call a man “good” is to invoke the objective reality of “the good” which is totally independent of the man spoken of. Not so with God, however. When we say that God is good we are not invoking some standard which God is then compared to and subsumed under. Rather, what we are signifying is not distinct from God’s “essence, power, or existence.” (70) So “good” here is not univocal: it means something different, or at least something non-univocal, when applied to God vis a vis creatures.

However, “good” here is not (purely) equivocal, either. Otherwise, we would have no knowledge of God, for language of God would always be guilty of the fallacy of equivocation.[1] Rather, language about God is analogical, since it is neither univocal nor equivocal.

Analogy functions in two ways. First, many things (two or more) can have a “proportion” (relationship?) to a third thing. For example, “healthy” can refer to urine or medicine, because both are related to a third thing: the body. Second, two things can have a relationship to each other. For example, “healthy” can refer to medicine or to an animal, since these two things are related to one another directly (ie, without a third thing). Our language about God falls under this second category. The two “things” are creation and God, and they are related in terms of cause. The perfections in the cause “preexist in the most excellent way.” (71)

Hence Thomas’ arguments about language presupposes his argument about causation, that God is the cause of creation.

Not just words are univocal or non-univocal. Agents (ie, causes and effects) are, too, since “the non-univocal agent is the universal cause of the whole series.” (My “gloss” on this: Thomas is saying that the cause “contains” the whole series. Hence its “meaning” must contain the meaning of all the effects, or something like that.)

Thomas has been presupposing that language and causality themselves are analogous or somehow related, and he makes this pruspposition explicit near then end of this section: “[This universal agent ] can be called an analogous agent, in the same way that in predication all univocal predications are traced back to the first non-univocal analogous predication, which is being.” (72) Bauerschmidt puts it nicely: “Whatever we affirm in our language involves a logically prior affirmation of some sort of being.” (72)[2]

Analogical language lies between univocal language and equivocal language. Hence our language about God is true, although it still contains an element of non-fixedness or perhaps ambiguity.

I find it interesting that, throughout this entire discussion, Thomas is speaking about God as if God were not incarnate. I am not suggesting that this is inappropriate. However, it does seem that in the Incarnation opens up whole new possibilities between God and man. For now, in Jesus, there is not an analogy between God and man, but a unity or an identity.

In The Rule of Benedict Joan Chittister writes,

To be a member of a Roman family, the family whose structures Benedict understood, was to be under the religious, financial and disciplinary authority of the father until the father died, whatever the age of the children. To be disinherited by the father was to be stranded in a culture in which paid employment was looked down upon. To be punished by him was to lose all security of family, outside of which there was no security at all. To lose relationship with the father, then, was, literally, to lose one’s life.

Far from being unique to the 6th century Roman culture in which Benedict lived, this is how it was with virtually all pre-modern cultures in human history. Certainly it was true for the cultural provenance of the book of Ruth, in which Naomi loses not just her husband (Elimelech) but her two sons (Chilion and Mahron) as well.

It was also the case for the woman at Nain, whose story is narrated in Mark 9, and who, like Naomi, lost husband and son. And for St. Paul, who, for example, in Galatians 6 (and elsewhere) compares our life in Christ to being free children and heirs.

May it be today, then, that I live like the free son of God I am, resisting every yoke of slavery with which the world entices me.

“O Lord, you know all my desires,

and my sighing is not hidden from you.” (Ps 38:9)

“God is not the kind of father who casts off sick and erring children; if he were, he would have no children.” – Martin Luther.

Rusty Reno, in Christian Theologies of Scripture, gives an overview of Origen’s “doctrine of Scripture,” that is to say, Origen’s spiritual interpretation of Scripture (trained as he was at Alexandria).

Reno argues that biblical interpretation, for Origen, is preparatory. Its goal is to enable us to “see Christ” in new ways. (As I have written about here, this language of “seeing” is really talking about a kind of intellectual apprehension, the intellectus fidei, which is essential to the beatific vision, the traditional goal of the Christian life.) Interpretation “cannot bring us to the destination in the same way that a syllogism can bring us to a conclusion.” (28)

This is why Origen’s interpretation, later developed into the reading practice of lectio divina,  never offers the same kind of fixed conclusions as modern interpretaton does, and this is also why Origen can seem to modern readers to be inconclusive and open-ended. (My inner fundamentalist often objects that this kind of “open-endedness” is soft headed and “liberal.” Yet, one cannot possibly argue that Origen was “liberal.” That category simply does not apply.)

To quote Reno,

Because Origen’s understanding of biblical exegesis entails a movement toward contemplation of the divine intention which has so disposed all things, his approach – and indeed all of the patristic tradition – will always strike us as ‘out of control.’ Modern biblical interpretation is not based on the hypothesis that all things are fulfilled in Christ. We do not believe that believe that God disposes all things in a single divine economy. Instead, we want to build a structure of written characters which can receive the truth of our preferred worldly economies: the economy of ancient Isrealite religion, the economy of ‘what really happened,’ the economy of concepts that float around in the minds of ancient authors or redactors, or, if we are of a postmodern bent, of the minds of the readers of Scripture. In all these ways, we tend to fasten down scriptural texts. We plot the Scriptures onto something more stable, more manageable than the world  of signs, and the last thing we want to do is to step away from solid ground. This is the hermeneutical strategy of putting scriptural texts into their historical contexts. Or we contextualize Scripture by translating it into an idiom of systematic theology. Either way, we move out of the semantic flux of scriptural words and into a limited economy in which conclusions might be drawn and our minds might come to rest. (29)

As I re-enter full-time pastoral ministry, I find myself wanting to say to people from the pulpit, “All of God’s promises to you are ‘Yes’ and ‘Amen.’” (2 Cor 1:20).

How do I know this? Am I just an “optimist” who should join the Optimists’ Club of Austin?

Here is how I know. Look at how that verse ends: “All of God’s promises are ‘yes’ and ‘amen’ in Christ.” Christ who is the crucified, risen Christ. This means that the fulfilment of God’s promises to you requires death, as we live into the reality that is Jesus Christ.

That is, we know that God’s promises to us are ‘yes’ and ‘amen’ because we know that we are in Christ, the one in whom we know that God’s promises are ‘yes’ and ‘amen.’

This past Saturday I had the joy of attending an ordination service at (beautiful) Christ Cathedral in Houston, at which several good friends were ordained to the diaconate. (I myself am supposed to be ordained to the diaconate sometime this fall.)

There were several strking ocurrances during the service, but one of the most poignant for me was when Bishop Doyle asked each ordinand, one by one,

Will you be loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of Christ as this Church has received them? And will you, in accordance with the canons of this Church, obey your bishop and other ministers who may have authority over you and your work?

After which each individual ordinand responded,

I am willing and ready to do so; and I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation; and I do solemnly engage to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church.

Many people who keep up with me will know that, in my new role as candidate for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, I am in the process (it will surely be a life long process) of trying to think more deeply about issues surrounding human sexuality.

Talking about this recently with a fellow seminarian (actually, a friend in the Lutheran program here at my seminary) I was confronted with a really good point.

Many conservative types (such as myself) who perhaps have a more “traditional” opinion regarding homosexuality become quite silent when the topic of divorce comes up. My friend suggested (though I don’t think I agree with him) that the Scriptures are more clear on this issue than on homosexuality.

What is true, however, is that Jesus explicitly addresses divorce, and not homosexuality, in the gospel narratives (Matt 19). Why is this important? Because, as another friend pointed out, Anglicanism has always followed “the catholic tradition” of seeing the Gospels as having a certain priority over other parts of the Christian Bible, and this view is embodied in our liturgy. For the classic statement of this by Origen, see here.

Joel at Living Text has a post on divorce which I find quite compelling.

For the introduction to this series, go here.

What is the point of all this? Maybe it is this. Have you ever wondered why it is only modern “protestant types” (liberal and evangelical: really two sides of the same coin, in that they both reject all of the above) who get all hot & bothered over biblical “contradictions?” It is not a coincidence.

“Catholic types” (read: historical traditions who have always known that Scripture is a time bound practice in the bosom of the church) don’t really get too hung up about it, and for good reason.

Another way of saying all of this is that Scripture is mediated through the church and her liturgy. And if that is the case, then the messy details which might seem like an outsider to be earth shattering differences, are in fact part of a larger conversation and development.

Intro to series. Part I. Part II. Part III.

Finally, NT Scripture itself teaches that there is another stream of “revelation” or “teaching” or something that comes to the church (this is ecclesiology) from God other than just Scripture: see the following:
•    2 Thess 2:15. Here the verbal and written apostolic instruction is subsumed under the heading of the ‘traditions’, suggesting not a two source revelation paradigm, but rather one source -  God, who uses two unified means, namely written and oral which are harmonious rather than contradictory.
•    Luke 1:1-4. Here we find the oral tradition (v.2) preceding Scripture as a source of catechesis (the word used in v.4).
•    John 20:30 and 21:25.
•    There is Paul in I Cor 11:23: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you….”
•    There is 2 Tim 2:2: “Entrust the things which you heard from me to faithful men.”

Conclusion to this series.