I recently stumbled across something which truly animated my soul (to dabble in prolixity). ‘Tis the following, one of “twenty-four theses of Radical Orthodoxy:”

As much as the secular, most pietisms are disliked since, as advocating the ‘spiritual’ they assume there is a secular. Radical Orthodoxy rejoices in the unavoidably and authentically arcane, mysterious, and fascinatingly difficult. It regards this preference as democratic, since in loving mystery, it wishes also to diffuse and disseminate it. We relish the task of sharing a delight in the hermetic with uninitiated others.

Wow. I’ve long sensed myself to be something of an evangelist. Not the kind, of course, that stands on the corner of a crowded and intersection and preaches at the volume of many decibels (though I have done that … recently!).

Rather, I’m the kind of evangelist who cannot conceive of pastoral ministry, or any other way of being human, apart from building communities of worship in which people come to participate in “real social space,” centered on Christ, belonging just because they, we, are human. (How Holy Baptism relates to this must be addressed in a separate post.)

And yet I confess that I have always felt a certain tension between, on the one hand, this urge, this conatus, to commend a message and to invite into deeper community, and, on the other hand, my theology which resists the attempt to dumb anything down, to “be relevant,” or to make the Gospel easier or more palatable.

Hence my encouragement at the above quotation.

Suddenly it all makes sense. As CS Lewis reminds us, human beings are designed to praise and laud Something Bigger than Oneself, and this is necessarily a social phenomenon. We cannot sing the praises of a good film or a rich red wine by ourselves … at least not fully. We must tell someone else; we must share the experience.

And yet, the experience we must share must be “bigger than oneself,” lofty, grand, great, unattainable. It must be beautiful in mystery. It cannot be easily grasped or conveniently assimilated.

So it is that, paradoxically, the difficult, ineffable way of theology and the divine, advocated by such personae as CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Rowan Williams, and those involved in Radical Orthodoxy lends itself most “naturally” to the zeal of the evangelist.

The following is an article I wrote for the newsletter of my church.

Last night while driving home to Dallas I got a call from a dear parishioner who is struggling mightily with a personal situation. “Father, Matt,” he said through the tears, “you are my only friend. I need to talk to you.”

Now, last Sunday in the nave I preached a sermon based on Jesus’ interaction with the rich man in Mark 10. Jesus, the Great Diagnostician, immediately and astutely puts his finger on the one thing which is keeping this law keeper out of the Kingdom. For this man, the barrier happens to be money. His money is the thing, the idol, the “precious,” which is displacing the “one thing needful,” the Lord Jesus Christ, from the center of his life.

In the face of all this, Jesus lovingly (Mark is at pains to point out) looks at him and calls him to let his money slide. Just let it slide. For me the tragedy of this story is that, given the opportunity for true freedom, this law keeping rich man walks away in bondage. He is unable to the let the Lord of the Whirlwind turn his life upside down, thereby restoring true order to his life.

He is unable to let Jesus center and structure his life. He does not understand what our Old Testament less from Amos last Sunday says: “Seek the Lord and live.” He does not understand that God’s ways are the best ways because we were designed to “run” on God, like a car is built to run on gasoline (not chocolate milk). He fails to see that when we “seek the morning star,” to quote CS Lewis, we get “all things thrown in” like a gift.[1] Gifts, which are free, are given to (and by) free men & women, but this man walks away from Jesus in bondage.

What I did not have time to address in my sermon on Sunday was the “how.” How do we let Jesus de-center and re-center our lives?

Here is, again, where, I think of CS Lewis. You see, what we need to do is to fall in love with Jesus, and this happens by a kind of “good infection.” The whole reason we are developing a network of neighborhood groups at Christ Church (I continue to think that his is the most important work we are doing) is to create the environment for people to “get infected.” It happens, often over a period of time, in community centered on love.

Have you ever noticed that when you fall in love with someone (if you are married think about your spouse) your whole life is turned upside down? You begin to see everything in light of the loved person. He or she is not an activity or a task that you squeeze into your already-over-committed schedule. Instead, certain things slide, but everything gets better.

This is how it is with Jesus, and this, really, is what my friend who called last night truly needs. It is what we all need. A relationship with Christ, catching flame in the context of a community of friends centered on love.

Be careful, though: your world might be turned upside down. Such is the life of true freedom.

My wife (quite the Inklings scholar) reminds me that, while Tolkien wanted the circle of friendship between him, Lewis, and few others to remain small, Lewis wanted it to be large and expansive. It is tempting to want to read Anglican and Roman approaches to church into these postures.

Happy All Saints (the better to celebrate, I offer the following quotation)!

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles [Williams] is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [Tolkien's] reaction to a [specific kind of] joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true friendship is the least jealous of the loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend…. In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in his own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. (The Four Loves)

Perhaps this is why Lewis, in another All Saints quotation, asks “Is any pleasure on earth so great as a circle of Christian friends by a fire?” (Letters of CS Lewis)

Perhaps, too, this is why ++Rowan Williams says that “It takes the whole Church to know the whole truth.”

At the gracious invitation of the Tyler Museum of Art, I recently gave a lecture there entitled “Christians Then & Now: Religious Art and the Christian Church.” This event was held in conjunction with the exhibit, “Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria and Albert Museum.”

Abstract: “When it comes to approaching Christian art, there are really two different approaches. The first is the approach of the spectator, the tourist, someone viewing the art from the outside, as if the art were an object, an inert item. That is one approach, and it is an approach which I am going to suggest is connected with what one thinker calls ‘the disenchantment of the modern world.’ The other approach is that of the participant, the member, the one who belongs. What I suggest is that that approach … might have something to do with the ‘re-enchantment’ of the postmodern world.”

You can podcast the talk here.

(Note: the audio quality on the first couple of minutes is not great. My apologies.)

In the last chapter Bell’s main accomplishment was to show that heaven is something that starts now.

As for heaven, Bell argues, so also for hell.

First, though, Bell rightly begins with the several biblical words (in both Greek and Hebrew) which get translated or interpreted as “hell.”

He starts out with the Old Testament, and rightly points out that one won’t find much support for the “traditional” understanding of hell in the Old Testament, where, despite the common use of the word sheol (which means “the grave,” though admittedly in a more imaginative sense than we modern people are used to), “what happens after a person dies isn’t very well defined.”

Now, before we turn to the New Testament, it is important to be reminded that the New Testament is every bit as “Hebrew” or “Jewish” as the Old Testament is. Thus, if the OT is not really interested in the state of the human soul after death, then we probably should not expect the NT to be, either.

I  want to develop this point a bit. It is called “reading Scripture with Scripture,” and it allows us to illuminate obscure passages of Scripture with other passages which are more clear. That is, if we are confused or unsure about the meaning of various passages in the NT which seem to talk about hell, then what should we do? We should turn to the OT. We should let the obvious “Jewishness” of the OT shed light upon the (equally, but for us less obviously “Jewish”) NT.

This is what we would ordinarily do if we were reading in the NT about something obscure such as angels, or how to think about one’s enemies, or the relationship between suffering and obedience. In every case, it is tremendously helpful to turn to the OT and seek context and clarity.

However, when we do this with respect to the NT’s portrayal of “hell,” we find nothing in the OT but a reinforcement of the very Jewish understanding of sheol as a highly imaginative version of “the grave.”

What do we find when we turn to the NT? Two main words: Gehenna and Hades (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Sheol). (The exception to this is 2 Peter’s use of Tartarus, a term referring to a mythological abyss.)

Gehenna was the name of the city dump out side Jerusalem. Jesus speaks of it only while rebuking the religious leaders of his day, and never to folks we would ordinarily think of as “sinners.”

When Jesus speaks of Hades, it is in contexts such as Luke 16, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Some notes Bell makes about this parable:

1.     The rich man is a stand-in for Jesus’ hearers, the religious types.

2.     The “hell” which the rich man created was the result of not loving his neighbor, and even in “hell” refusing to serve his neighbor.

3.     Jesus’ mention of “resurrection” (pointing to the resurrection he himself was about to undergo) shows that the meaning of Jesus’ story was “directly related to what he was doing right there in their midst.”

4.     When we interpret hades in this parable in light of the OT (and its use of sheol) one thing we notice is that the rich man is alive in the midst of death. He is dead, but he is also alive. “He is in Hades … but he hasn’t died the kind of death that brings life.” (page 76-77)

The upshot of all this, for Bell, is that Jesus is talking about hell later (that is in the next life), but also about hell now, and that we should “take both seriously.”

Bell goes on (rightly, in my view) to interpret other passages (such as Matt 26 – “those who live by the sword will die by the sword”) as actually referring to the “hell” which would ensue if Israel continued to fight the Roman Empire with the weapons of the latter’s warfare: a hell which did ensue in 70 AD when Rome destroyed Jerusalem (as Bell rightly points out). (page 79ff)

Bell similarly (and rightly) dismisses the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as having anything directly to do with Hell.

Then, in his last major point of the chapter, Bell argues the point that, so often in Scripture, the portrayals of God’s judgment so often include offers of restoration. This includes Jer 32; Jer 5; Lam 3; Hos 14; Zeph 2,3,9,10; Isa 47; Hos 6; Joel 3; Amos 9; Nahum 2; Micah 7.

In Isa 19, the prophet announces (in a passage resonant with Ps 87) that “in that day there will be an altar in the heart of Egypt” (Israel’s arch-enemy). “Things won’t be what they seem,” Bell writes. “The people who are opposed to God will worship God. The one who were far away will be brought near. The ones facing condemnation will be restored.”

Bell brilliantly then turns to the NT, reading Scripture with Scripture. He shows how this same dynamic of judgment leading to restoration is seen over and over in Paul, including in the passages in which he talks about people (such as Hymenaus and Alexander in 1 Timothy) “being handed over to Satan” in order that they might be restored.

Paul makes this explicit in 1 Cor 5 where he tells his friends to hand over a certain man to Satan “for the destruction of the sinful nature so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” (page 90)

This “day of the Lord” imagery meshes perfectly, Bell suggests, with Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25 (known as “The Great Assize”) when Jesus says that the “goats” will be sent into the aion of kalazo, translated by many English versions of the Bible as “eternal punishment,” but which can more accurately be understood as a period of pruning or trimming.

I want to point out two things at this point:

1.     Bell is not (at least not at this point) denying the existence of “hell-in-the-afterlife.”

2.     What he is denying here is that people “go to hell” against their will. That is actually the main point of the chapter, and this is absolutely consistent, for example, with the view of hell that CS Lewis imaginatively portrays in his book The Great Divorce. (And I don’t see an avalanche of controversy raging in the evangelical world about CS Lewis.)

In light of a good convo with a friend last night, and in light of our upcoming “Monster’s Ball,” I thought I wd repost this, from St. GK.

“The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules–a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.” –”Omar and the Sacred Vine,” Heretics

This past weekend I went back and re-read Book IV of Mere Christianity (out of all four “books,” this is my favorite). I have probably read this material a dozen or more times in my life. It is so helpful though to keep going back to it. These are the very last lines in the entire book.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. Book look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

In Radical Orthodoxy: a New Theology the authors write:

The great Christian critics of the Enlightenment — Christopher Smart, Hamann, Jacobi, Kierkegaard, Peguy, Chesterton and others — in different ways saw that what secularity had most ruined and actually denied were the very things it apparently celebrated: embodied life, self-expression, sexuality, aesthetic experience, human political community. Their contention, taken up in this volume, was that only transcendence, whcih ‘suspends’ these things in the sense of interrupting them, ‘suspends’ them also in the other sense of upholding their relative worth over-against the void. (3)

In Praying Shapes Believing Lionel Mitchell employs this same (theo)logic when discussing how the liturgical year “saves” ordinary time by transcending it:

The Christian year is a mystery through which every moment and all the times and seasons of this life are transcended and fulfilled in that reality which is beyond time. (14)

God bless Rowan WIlliams. Few leaders in the church if any do I respect more. However, in this interview with Richard Dawkins, he makes a fatal flaw.

Rowan says that God, as creator, “shapes the entire process” of evolution. For the purposes of this discussion I have no real problem with this statement.

Dawkins then supplements Rowan’s comment by adding, “by setting up the laws of nature in which context the entire laws of evolution take place.” And Rowan nods his head in agreement. This leads to a further discussion about the laws of nature, or the laws of physics, in which both men tacitly agree that there is something called “the laws of nature.”

This is my qualm with how Rowan proceeds. I think that a much better approach would have been for him, right at the point which Dawkins brings up this idea of the laws of nature, to say something like, “I am fine with that idea as long as what you mean is really just a convenient way of referring to patterns that we discern in the world that repeat themselves more or less consistently over time. However, I do believe that God is actively “behind” these so-called laws of nature such that every time an apple falls from a tree, it is God who is somehow willing or causing that apple to fall.” (This is not to deny the reality of secondary causation, by the way.)

He could have invoked GK Chesterton, who said that every time the sun goes up, it does so because God tells it to, and when it does, God excitedly says, “Oh, do it again! Do it again!”

To give too much ground to an abstract and distant (from God) set of laws of nature is to give the impression that Deism is true. Deism, the very topic of Dawkin’s book _The Blind Watchmaker_.

Much to Dawkins’ chagrin, Scripture and Christian tradition do not at all imply that the world is like a machine that God wound up and set in motion.

Rather, the world is an enchanted place, “charged with the grandeur of God” and God’s active presence. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it: “God’s works of providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions.”

Incidentally, to see what one of Dawkins’ atheistic comrades Christopher Hitchens thinks of Rowan Williams, see here.

In the past I have written about Lauren Winner’s Real Sex, and I want to do so again, as part of a larger conversation.

Bouquet and I have a pair of good friends who are in their early-to-mid twenties and who are in a dating relationship which is getting “pretty serious.”

They recently approached Bouquet wanting to discuss the issue of sexuality, in particular asking the question, “Based on Christianity, is it really the case that ‘sex outside of marriage’ is wrong?’”

Great question, and one that I am always asking myself, and so I want to blog about it.

I want to start with a line from CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity, specifically from Book III entitled “Christian Behavior,” and chapter 5 of that book called “Sexual Morality:” “[t]he … Christian rule is “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or abstinence.”

First off, notice that Lewis is saying that marriage and not “a wedding ceremony” is a prerequisite for sex, on the Christian view. This is an important point because nowhere in the Bible is there a clear precedent for, or a clear teaching on, a wedding ceremony. Instead, what there is clear teaching on in Scripture is something called “one flesh union.” This is what is portrayed in Genesis (Gen 2:24) and in the sexual theology of St. Paul which always has the creation narrative(s) — or as Lauren Winner puts it in her book, the original order of God’s good creation which we see in the creation stories — in view (see I Cor 6:16 for Paul’s direct quotation of Gen 2:24).

In other words, even if the the Bible does not seem to have a lot to say explicitly about wedding ceremonies, it does clearly teach that sex goes with marriage. And so the question becomes, “What is marriage?” And the answer to that question is seen as elsewhere in the two verses cited above: marriage is one flesh union.

Now what is interesting about that is the word “flesh.” For, as Winner alludes to in her book, both the Greek and the Hebrew words (sarx and bassar, respectively) for “flesh” point in two directions are the same time. The word can mean “body,” and / or it can mean something like “the holistic life of the self” or the “one’s own life in its totality.” For the former meaning see I Cor 15:39 or II Cor 7:5, and for the latter see, again, I Cor 6:16. (There is a third meaning of the word which is less important for our purposes, though it is related to this second meaning: it can refer simply to the human person or to humanity as a whole, as in Jn 17:2 and Acts 2:17, and a fourth meaning can be “the sin nature” as we see in Gal 5.)

So when the Bible portrays the man Adam and the woman as “one flesh” it is referring both to both meanings. To quote Lauren Winner:

“One-fleshness … captures an all-encompassing over-arching oneness — when they marry, husband and wife enter an institution that points them toward familial, domestic, emotional, and spiritual [one might also add: financial, psychological, and social] unity. But the one flesh of which Adam speaks [in his "love poem" in Gen 1:23] is also overtly sexual, suggesting sexual intercourse, the only physical state other than pregnancy when it is hard to tell where one person’s body stops and the other’s starts.”

What is marriage? It is a relationship of holistic unity with another person, and this includes at its center the bodily unity of sex. Because this holistic unity involves so much, because there is so much at stake — physical health, emotional health, economic health, social health, psychological health — it requires commitment.

The kind of lasting commitment one finds in biblical portrayals and descriptions of covenants. And it is here, in the need for commitment, where the actual marriage ceremony becomes a serious matter, and one which wise people will consider very seriously.

To summarize, does the Bible teach that one must get married before having sex? I am not sure if it does or not, but I know that it does teach that one must be married before having sex (although it requires this not as some abstract law, but rather as a way to protect the health or shalom of the person), and a wise person will recognize that the best way to start being married is actually to get married.

Thanks to Jeff Myers for pointing out this quotation:

Hooker had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism. He would
never have dreamed of trying to ‘convert’ any foreigner to the Church
of England. It was to him obvious that a German or Italian would not
belong to the Church of England, just as an Ephesian or Galatian would not have belonged to the Church of Corinth. Hooker is never seeking for ‘the true Church’, never crying, like Donne, ‘Show me deare Christ, thy spouse.’ For him no such problem existed. If by ‘the
church’ you mean the mystical church (which is partly in Heaven) then, of course, no man can identify her. But if you mean the visible
Church, then we all know her. She is ‘a sensibly known company’ of
all those throughout the world who profess one Lord, one Faith, one
Baptism (III.i.3)” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 454).”

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.” – Broadcast talk 6-11-35

“Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.” – “Wine when it is red” All Things Considered

“… The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine. And for this reason, If a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional, something he does not expect every hour of the day, something which, unless he is a little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day. But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without; something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being without. The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary. If there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a strong man, and said, “This will enable you to jump off the Monument,” doubtless he would jump off the Monument, but he would not jump off the Monument all day long to the delight of the City. But if we took it to a blind man, saying, “This will enable you to see,” he would be under a heavier temptation. It would be hard for him not to rub it on his eyes whenever he heard the hoof of a noble horse or the birds singing at daybreak. It is easy to deny one’s self festivity; it is difficult to deny one’s self normality. Hence comes the fact which every doctor knows, that it is often perilous to give alcohol to the sick even when they need it. I need hardly say that I do not mean that I think the giving of alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily unjustifiable. But I do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is the proper use of it, and a great deal more consistent with health.

“The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules–a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.” –”Omar and the Sacred Vine,” Heretics

“I have asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin by telling you on thing that Christians do not need to believe. If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth…. But of course being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic — there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.” Mere Christianity, ch. 1

Anyone who has spent much time in discussion with me will know that I love to quote G.K. Chesterton’s analogy of the sun, in which he basically says that Christian mysteries (ie, the Trinity and the Incarnation) are like the sun: you cannot look directly at them, but they illuminate everything that we see.

Only now am I realizing how dependent this idea is on Plato. In the Republic (509b) Plato teaches (in the words of Catherine Pickstock) that "as the source of all light, the sun is more diffi-cult to see than anything else, but it is a beneficent mystery that lets things be seen in their true nature, while itself remaining but obliquely visible. As well as letting things be seen, the sun gives things to be seen, for although it is beyond being, it is the ground of all being(s)."

What this passage asserts, and what Jacques Derrida fails to see in his reading of the Phaedrus, is the transcendant, ecstatic nature of the good. It is beyond us (and all other beings), but it is particible.