I would like to comment on the Windsor Report’s articulation of the authority of Scripture, and invite folks to comment on it.

What I find interesting about the report’s articulation of how biblical authority works out in practice is:

1. the polemical context. In light of fracturing communion caused by unilateral actions on the part of ECUSA and the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster on matters potentially of great concern to member churches, the Windsor Report is reaffirming the traditional (and the report itself rehearses this tradition) Anglican basis of authority in Scripture.

2. the implied alternatives. Not only is this conception of authority different from that of the papal see, it is also different from what tends to be the case (including historically) in protestant traditions which consider themselves to be confessional or evangelical, which tend statically to spatialize Scripture, according to the report. In contrast to this latter alternative, Scripture plays a vital role in the authority of God in Jesus Christ in the mission and life of the church as it seeks to bring about the inbreaking Kingdom of God in and for the world. This, the report claims, is how the earliest Christians thought of it, and this makes sense, when it is remembered that, while the earliest Christians did not have the New Testament canon as we think of it, they did nevertheless gather in Eucharistic synaxis to be formed by the word of God (as the preaching of the Gospel) into the body of Christ, for the sake of the world. To put it another way, it seems helpful to imagine (with a historically informed imagination, of course) how the earliest Christian communities made decisions in the era prior to the canonization of what we call the New Testament.

3. the purpose of this discussion of how authority works. This point of this entire rendition of how Scripture is authoritative, however, is to locate authority not just “in the Scriptures” (as if texts can be without interpretation in any meaningful sense) but rather in the church’s interpretation of the Scriptures. That is, the entire church interprets the Scriptures authoritatively together.

I also like the report’s articulation of the dual purpose of the NT: to fulfill the story of Israel, and to found the mission and life of the church.

And now I will paste the relevant sections of the Windsor Report itself (don’t be surprised if it sounds like NTW: he is one of the primary authors!):

The bonds of communion
52. These broader considerations lead to reflection in more detail on the specific bonds which hold the Anglican Communion together. Communion, after all, does not simply happen. Even at the human level, it is not left to chance and tacit goodwill. There are several aspects of our common life which, as well as fulfilling the primary purpose of enabling the Church to fulfil its gospel mission in and for the world, serve to draw us together and hold us in fellowship.

The authority of scripture
53. Central among these is scripture. Within Anglicanism, scripture has always been recognised as the Church’s supreme authority, and as such ought to be seen as a focus and means of unity. The emphasis on scripture grew not least from the insistence of the early Anglican reformers on the importance of the Bible and the Fathers over against what they saw as illegitimate mediaeval developments; it was part of their appeal to ancient undivided Christian faith and life. The seventeenth and eighteenth century divines hammered out their foundations of “scripture, tradition and reason”; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we have seen the ‘Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral’, in which scripture takes first place.35 The Bible has always been at the centre of Anglican belief and life, embodied and exemplified by the fact that the reading and singing of scripture has always been at the centre of Anglican worship.
54. However, the common phrase “the authority of scripture” can be misleading; the confusions that result may relate to some of the divisions just noted. Scripture itself, after all, regularly speaks of God as the supreme authority. When Jesus speaks of “all authority in heaven and earth” (Matthew 28.18), he declares that this authority is given, not to the books that his followers will write, but to himself. Jesus, the living Word, is the one to whom the written Word bears witness as God’s ultimate and personal self-expression. The New Testament is full of similar ascriptions of authority to the Father, to Jesus Christ, and to the Holy Spirit. Thus the phrase “the authority of scripture”, if it is to be based on what scripture itself says, must be regarded as a shorthand, and a potentially misleading one at that, for the longer and more complex notion of “the authority of the triune God, exercised through scripture”. The question of how this exercised through’ works in practice is vital to understanding the kind of authority which scripture possesses and hence to the nature and exercise of actual authority within the Church. It may be, historically, that the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ has characteristically emerged in contexts of protest (when one part of the Church appeals to scripture against something being done by another part). When we attempt to apply it more widely, to an entire understanding of the Church’s mission and common life, it quickly becomes apparent that its implications need to be thought out more fully.
55. For Jesus and the early Christians, ‘authority’ was not conceived as a static source of information or the giving of orders (as the word ‘authority’ has sometimes implied), but in terms of the dynamic inbreaking of God’s kingdom, that is, God’s sovereign, saving, redeeming and reconciling rule over all creation. This saving rule of God, long promised and awaited in Israel, broke in upon the world in and through Jesus and his death and resurrection, to be then implemented through the work of the Spirit until the final act of grace which will create the promised new heavens and new earth. If the notion of scriptural authority is itself to be rooted in scripture, and to be consonant with the central truths confessed by Christians from the earliest days, it must be seen that the purpose of scripture is not simply to supply true information, nor just to prescribe in matters of belief and conduct, nor merely to act as a court of appeal, but to be part of the dynamic life of the Spirit through which God the Father is making the victory which was won by Jesus’ death and resurrection operative within the world and in and through human beings. Scripture is thus part of the means by which God directs the Church in its mission, energises it for that task,
and shapes and unites it so that it may be both equipped for this work and itself part of the message.
56. How then does scripture function in this way? This is not the place for a detailed consideration of the respective authority of the Old and New Testaments, important though that discussion is. The early Christians understood themselves to be both beneficiaries and agents of the saving sovereignty of God, the ‘kingdom’ which had been accomplished in Jesus Christ. The ‘authority’ of the
apostles – a concept worked out with great pain and paradox by Paul in 2 Corinthians – was their God-given and Spirit-driven vocation as witnesses of the resurrection, through whose announcement of the good news God was powerfully at work to call men and women to salvation (Romans 1.16-17) and thus to create the Church as the sign and foretaste of new creation (Ephesians 1-3). It is within this context of apostolic witness, drawing its ‘authority’ from the victory of Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit (Matthew 28.18-20; 2 Corinthians 3.1-4.6, 13.3-4), that the writings we call the New Testament came to be written, precisely to be vehicles of the Spirit’s work in energising the Church in its mission and shaping it in the holiness of new creation. Thus, as scholarship has emphasised, the writers of the canonical gospels (despite all the obvious differences between them, and the multiple sources upon which they drew) were conscious of telling the story of Jesus in such a way as to demonstrate its fulfilment of the story of Israel and its foundational character for the mission and life of the Church. From the first, the New Testament was intended as, and perceived to be, not a repository of various suggestions for developing one’s private spirituality, but as the collection of books through which the Spirit who was working so powerfully through the apostles would develop and continue that work in the churches. This is why, from very early in
the Church, the apostolic writings were read during worship, as part of both the Church’s praise to God for his mighty acts and of the Church’s drawing fresh strength from God for mission and holiness. This, rather than a quasi-legal shorthand phrase “authority of scripture” finds its deepest meaning.”

In navigating the waters between Presbyterianism and Anglicanism, I have come to see that one watershed divide between the liturgical churches of the “great tradition” and more Reformational churches is the issue of whether the church is the continued incarnation of Christ on the earth.

I have come to land on the side of the issue that does affirm that this claim is an true characteristic of the church, that the church is incarnational in this way.

I offer below two patristic quotations (thanks to Doug Harrison) which testify to ancient precedent in seeing the church in this way. The first is from St. Augustine:

“The Body of Christ,” you are told, and you answer, “Amen.” Be members then of the Body of Christ that your Amen may be true. Why is this mystery accomplished with bread? We shall say nothing of our own about it, rather let us hear the Apostle, who speaking of the sacrament says: “We being many are one body, one bread.” Understand and rejoice. Unity, devotion, and charity! One bread: and what is this one bread? One body made up of many. Consider that the bread is not made of one grain alone, but of many. During the time of exorcism, your were, so to say, in the mill. At baptism you
were wetted with water. Then the Holy Spirit came into like the fire which bakes the dough. Be then what you see and receive what you are. — St. Augustine, Sermon 272 (quoted in Henri de Lubac Catholicism, p 37 - 38).

The second is from chapter 9 of the Didache (which I recently saw dated at 100CE!):

Now about the Eucharist: This is how you are to give thanks: First in connection with the cup. “We thank you, our Father, for the holy vine of David, your child. To you be glory
forever.” Then in connection with the piece [of consecrated bread], “We thank you our Father, for the life and knowledge which you have revealed through Jesus, your child. To you be glory forever. “As this piece was scattered over the hills and then was brought together and made one, so let your Church be brought together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom. For yours is the power and the glory through Jesus Christ forever.”

What’s more, I have learned in my studies of Anglican ecclesiology that seeing the church as the incarnation of Christ on earth actually presupposes much of what the ancient fathers & mothers of the church have to say about deification (or what Anglicans sometimes refer to as holiness).

My “Introduction to Anglicanism” class today was really encouraging. There were three group presentations on three different provinces in the Global Anglican Communion.

In particular, two of my classmates gave an excellent presentation on the church in Uganda, a church which sees itself as founded on three things: martyrs, revival, and the historic episcopate.

For more on the Ugandan church, see this article in First Things, and in particular this excerpt:

Theologically, Ugandan Anglicans share much in common with our evangelical brothers and sisters, yet we have retained the historic threefold order of ministry: bishops, priests, and deacons. This, of course, is reminiscent of the English Reformation, which theologically had much in common with the continental Reformers while retaining the historic episcopate.

And yet our commitment to the episcopate is not just about the good order of the Church. As bishops are successors to the apostles, so our focus through the historic episcopate is on apostolic faith and ministry. A bishop is ordained in apostolic succession to be the apostolic presence in the community. A bishop, therefore, is the ongoing presence and voice of the apostles. He is our link to the early Church, and this link between bishop and apostolicity gives Anglicans our transcultural identity. The implication, therefore, is that the essence of Anglican identity is to be apostolic. More than a simple unbroken line of consecrations, we are to be apostolic in nature: faithful to the apostolic message, submitted to apostolic authority in Scripture, committed to apostolic mission and ministry, and devoted to apostolic worship.

In short, an apostolic church is a missionary church. A bishop is the focus for the mission of the Church, following in the footsteps of Jesus, who commissioned his apostles to preach, to teach, and to heal. The bishop’s apostolic ministry starts with evangelism, because transformation begins with the individual. The bishop himself must have a testimony and set a direction in his diocese for evangelism and church planting. When the early missionaries came in the late 1800s, their understanding of mission was not only preaching but also education and health ministry. So, combined with our churches, there are schools and health clinics, all under the apostolic oversight of the bishop, whose charge is to preach (evangelism), to teach (schools), and to heal (health clinics).

The incarnation of Jesus Christ has been described as the “scandal of particularity.” The One who came, as Savior of all, was born as a particular man—Jesus of Nazareth—at a particular place, with a particular ethnicity, and at a particular time. Our particular experience of Anglicanism in Uganda, too, has some universal applicability. The pillars of Anglican identity in Uganda—the martyrs, revival, and the historic episcopate, all resting on the Word of God—suggest themes with historic precedent from the formative years of Anglicanism in Britain.”

The Cambridge Platonists are just that: Platonists. As such they escape much of what usually gets associated with the emergence of what Henri de Lubac refers to as “the natural” (as well as its concomitant realm of “the supernatural”), including the bifurcation of the human, premodern telos into two autonomous realms. This unified premodern telos, dominant in the ancient and medieval Christian tradition but discernable as well in antique thought, can authentically be described as praise of God or participation in God. (This is not to deny that they not fall prey to the pervasive English temptation to capitulate to the “gentlemanly” cultural status quo of their day, but such a blemish is difficult to establish on the basis of the texts I have read. Indeed, their bold and persistent call to spiritual discipline and holiness might well be seen as a posture which goes against the grain of their culture.)
As Jaroslav Pelican summarizes in the introduction to the Classics of Western Spirituality dedicated to these men (and one prominent female peer, Anne Conway), Cambridge Platonism has four primary thrusts: the sovereignty of the good, the true, and the beautiful; the goodness of inquiry; participation in the life of God; and the goodness of creation. Of these the first three stand squarely in the main of the classical Platonic heritage. And, of these, all but the second are theologically evocative of a certain approach to the Eucharist. Broadly speaking, I refer to an understanding of the Eucharist which sees it as constitutive of human deification, albeit in ways which prefigure ultimate deification (e.g., Thomas’ beatific vision), and this by radically calling into question what might be thought of as “traditional ontology,” which, after Aristotle, can be thought of as “being-as-substance.”

This move is accomplished by the following theologians who posit the following views: John Zizioulas (being – or ontology – as communion); Catherine Pickstock (being as participatory in divine excess or ecstasy); Jean-Luc Marion (God’s being as supplanted by divine agape); and Louis-Marie Chauvet (symbol – even symbolic exchange – as ontology). Even though each of these moves differ in content as well as what we might call structure (that is, they are each “messing” with “being” or ontology in different ways: for example, it is not the case that all of these thinkers simply substitute “being-as-X” for “being-as-substance”…. No, it is a bit more complicated than that.), nevertheless each of them do subvert the “traditional ontology” which is seen, for example, in the classical Roman justifications of the doctrine of transubstantiation. This is true even of Pickstock, who can be read as affirming this traditional doctrine (albeit with innovative nuances).

For this reason, then, it is surprising and disappointing (from this writer’s perspective) that the Cambridge Platonists discuss the Eucharist so infrequently. It is telling indeed that “Eucharist” does not even appear in the subject index of the Classics of Western Spirituality volume bearing their name. Indeed, even though the Cambridge Platonists resist to a laudable degree the rise of the natural (for example, Henry More vehemently argued in directly against his French contemporary Rene Descartes, after initially hoping that Descartes might expound a philosophy which would be “an invincible Bulwark against the most cunning and most mischievous effects of atheism,” nonetheless they do stand in need of reparation. And that in two particular areas, both foundational for moral theology or “ethics:” their conception of the universalizability of human reason and their reliance upon natural rights theory in service of their laudable yet deficient understanding of tolerance (both religious and political). Each of these positions are “repaired” by understanding of Eucharist as sanctification (or deification, or theopoiesis).

First, the Cambridge Platonists relinquish too much power to human reason, and they do so in a way that is inimical to Eucharist-as-deification. Of the universalizability of reason, says Whichcote: “… the intellectual nature is necessarily and unavoidably under obligation to acts of sobriety, to acts of righteousness, and to acts of godliness.” Again: “All persons, of any improvement and indifference … have this notion, that God made the world, that this has been laid before all understandings, in all ages and successions of time.” (On this view Aristotle, who believed in the eternality of matter, is relegated to the confines of irrationality.) And again: “… every man may know that God made him.”

How does “Eucharist-as-holiness” critique and therefore rescue the Cambridge Platonists here? To answer this question one must first see that essential to the Cambridge Platonists’ understanding of the universtalizability of human reason is the presupposition, and here it is quite telling that More was initially attracted to the philosophical vision of Rene Descartes) is the “flattening out of social space,” or the myth of reason which is unconditioned by the complex interplay of human social factors. In his “The Myth of Globalization as Catholicity,” William Cavanaugh suggests not only that human sociality (“complex social space”) is a necessary condition for human reason, but also that the Eucharist offers a vision and an embodiment of catholicity which unifies the human race, albeit in ways (one might say “precisely in ways”) that are always already local.

Second, in their articulation of tolerance for tumultuous 17th century England, these theologians, while positing what might be called, following John Milbank, an “original peace” of human political relationality, nonetheless apparently lack the full and most radical ratio for such an inclusive vision of human political existence. Simply put, this ratio is the Eucharist. To take just one example out of the many already mentioned above, in his The Sacraments Louis-Marie Chauvet argues sociologically that the Eucharist can be viewed as an example of symbolic gift exchange, in which a “circuit” of community members share in gift exchange which is not simply bilateral. In this community of (self) gifting, the upshot is that a superabundant economy of peace is created and sustained which truly binds people together in the fullness of human communion.

While I am not simply saying that the Cambridge Platonist’s view of human tolerance is directly critiqued by Chauvet’s view, I am suggesting that Chauvet’s picture of human community bound together by symbolic gift exchange exposes the superficiality of mere toleration. To put it a different way, toleration within human community is an unsatisfying secular parody of what true community, imaged in the Eucharist, is intended by God to be.

In summary, the Cambridge Platonists do resist a good many impulses which come with the rise of “the secular.” Nevertheless, they do not remain unscathed. A post-lubacian understanding of the Eucharist shows how their approach to (the universal nature of) human reason and human tolerance can be repaired. (In so doing, it perhaps also shows how and why the Cambridge Platonists were complicit in the rise of the “broad church” school within modern Anglicanism.)

[The Church] is called Catholic then because it extends over all the world, from one end of the earth to the other; and because it teaches universally and completely what one and all the doctrines which ought to come to men’s knowledge, concerning things both visible and invisible, heavenly and earthly; and because it brings into subjection to godliness the whole race of mankind, governors and governed, learned and unlearned; and because it universally treats and heals the whole class of sins, which are committed by soul or body, and possesses in itself every form of virtue which is named, both in deeds and words, and in every kind of spiritual gift.”

From Ephraim Radner’s “Children of Cain,” in Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 33-34.

Here is one of the best, and most responsibly critical, grapplings with Radical Orthodoxy that I have come across. Particularly disturbing is Reno’s insight into Milbank’s speculative tendencies, to the point that he reads the Gospels as “allegories of … metaphysics.” Also quite interesting: Reno’s hunch that Milbank’s speculative tendencies are rooted in his Anglo-Catholic convictions.

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0002/articles/reno.html

In recommending Texas Governor Rick Perry’s new book in defense of the Boy Scouts, Newt Gingrich writes that Perry “makes the case for why Scouting is more important than ever in combating the nihilistic forces of our culture and shaping young lives into service-oriented leaders.”

Scouting as the response to nihilism, however, is not compelling. Scouting has no body politic, it has no economic discipline of sharing, and most importantly it has no narrative of death (and resurrection).

One reason I love Radical Orthodoxy is that it is willing to meet nihilism on its own turf. It admits that, apart from Christianity’s original ontology of harmonious peace (rooted in the community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), there is no way to keep people from imposing a violent hegemony over others in our pluralistic culture.

Does Boy Scouts presuppose and affirm this understanding of creation, of the true nature of God’s world? I don’t think so.

When it comes to countering our culture’s forces of nihilism, Boy Scouts is scotch tape at best, and nostalgic, ghetto-izing power politics at worst.

For one of my classes at ETSS, I am reading John Wall’s edition of The Classics of Western Spirituality volume devoted to 17th Century “country parson” and mystical poet George Hebert.

One of the most noteworthy marks of Herbert’s spirituality, and indeed his ministry as a parish priest in Bemerton, is its public nature. As A.M. Allchin points out in his introduction to the volume, “The Country Parson is a man of the Church, the public and visible sign of God’s presence in the world.” (6)

Allchin and other Herbert scholars apply this principle to the way Herbert conceived of and practiced the discipline of daily devotion. For Herbert, the backbone and center of daily discipline is the use of the Daily Office from the Anglican prayer book. This, though, is not merely private, since it often takes place within a small gathered community (perhaps a family or a couple of friends) and also since the Daily Office is woven together in all kinds of ways with the other public services of the church’s gathered worship, including Holy Eucharist.

Allchin rightly points out that the public character of Herbert’s conception of daily devotion (which he faithfully modeled to his parish community in Bemerton) stands in stark contrast to the prevailing religious ethos which was beginning to dominate 17th century Stuart England.

Puritan Calvinists, stressing the importance of divine election as the true test of Church membership, encouraged individuals to evaluate their lives for signs of divine favor. The fragmenting results of such an emphasis are visible throughout England in the seventeenth century. For instance, John Cotton, the Puritan rector of Saint Botolph’s Church in Boston, England, for twenty years before he emigrated to America to become the minister at the First Church of Boston, Massachusetts, overtly rejected the claims of the visible congregation to be the true Church; instead, he stressed the authenticity of the invisible company of the elect and formed a separate “church” within his parish, made up of those who could meet his standards for inclusion.” (8)

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).”

How does Hooker defend church order against those who would say, for example, that the church ought not to have bishops since they are not explicitly taught in Scripture? By arguing that the social order of the church is oriented toward “the chief end of man:” society with and in God.

Hooker’s understanding of this social order is rooted in the following:

1. Thomistic teleology: the law of reason dictates that a creature incline to something “which they may be” or to their highest good. The highest good for man is society with God.
2. Reformed emphasis on the the radical “Creator / creature distinction:” the finite cannot contain the infinite. It follows from this that the flesh Christ took on or inhabited must remain fully human.
3. Putting these two together, Hooker argues that the hypostatic union, properly understood as resisting either the Nestorian or the Eutychian (read: “Lutheran,” with its articulation of the man Jesus’ omnipresence, a la Martin Chemnitz) tendencies, achieves our (humanity’s) membership in the divine society.
4. This leads to a special importance for the body of Christ, especially since it is Christ’s flesh which is the locus of his solidarity with us. Hence Scripture’s emphasis on this which is then massively developed in the history of the church (primarily in her understanding and practice of the Eucharist). It is not the case that we simply become Christ, but one may rightly speak of our “bodily consubstantiation” with his, or, better: his with ours.

I am really thankful for this opportunity to delve into Hooker at ETSS. I am starting to see his relevance for many of the things I grappling with (Federal Vision / New Perspective type issues; the social nature of the faith; the right use of Scripture; the Greek speaking church fathers; etc.). A part of me is thinking, “Why focus on so much on ancient Greek speaking Easterners when we have (English speaking) Hooker?” That’s not to say that we should not read the Greek fathers, but maybe we should, to a great extent, let Hooker interpret them for us.

His Laws is mainly an argument against the “Puritans” (in this case, names like Travers and Cartwright) who said “Scripture alone is the rule of all things which in this life may be done by men.” In the Laws he is defending a certain ecclesial — and actually cosmic — liturgical order of things, including organizational features of the church not explicitly or directly authorized in Scripture (ie, we are talking about, among other things, bishops).

He has many key themes and distinctions, but none is more important than his emphasis on society. For Hooker, the chief end of man is to enjoy — with and in the Triune God and other people — the society of God.

He presupposes a traditional view of the atonement which includes the idea (listen for overtones of NT Wright here) that Christ offered himself for the forgiveness of sins. (Let me just say that, when it comes to the atonement, that is good enough for me right there. And I have felt this way for about a decade, ever since I read something along these lines by CS Lewis about how no “one theory” about how the atonement works ought to be absolutized, and I distinctly remember disagreeing with RC Sproul on this.)

It does seem to me that Hooker, with his upfront emphasis on society (divine and human, of course), implies something that NT Wright implies: soteriology is really ecclesiology.

Atonement is not where the action is for Hooker, relying as he does on the Fathers. The action is in the divine society and our participation in it.

I want to write so much more, but Ellie Bay is starting to cry.

Suffice to say that Hooker is opposing the Puritans, who want simply to “go back to Scripture” by relying more on the Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, which, in turn, rely upon Scripture. (So Hooker is explicitly relying on both tradition and scripture.) It is a different sort of argument.

One last point: it seems to me that Hooker is a really good blend of Calvinist / Reformed thought (Creator / creature distinction: “the finite cannot contain the infinite”) and Thomism (teleology: obeying the teleological law of our nature is a necessary condition for true society).

After a long break from de Lubac, I am picking him up again, turning now to “Part Two” of Catholicism. If Part One was about how the Christian Faith is inherently and irreducibly social or corporate, then Part Two is about how it is, in a rigorously analogous way, historical, or intermingled with the created, temporal order. “… in close connection with the social character of dogma there is another character, equally essential, and that is the historic.” (141)

The point is the radically historical nature of Christianity. “For what, outside Christianity, do we witness whenever a religious movement arises above the domain of sense and effectively transcends the limit of nationality? In every case, though appearances may differ considerably, the basis is the same: an individualist doctrine of escape.”

The examples of individualist religious escape strategies abound: ancient Greek philosophy in which, for example, Plato regards the soul as “in itself a principle superior to the world”; neoplatonism in which Plotinus recommends the “flight of the alone to the Alone” and in which Porphery advocates “the withdrawal of the soul”; the religious philosophies of India; and Buddhism whose “only God is escape.” (137 - 138)

For the Christian faith, however, “the course of history is indeed a reality…. It possesses a certain density and fecundity.” Aniquity’s meaningless cycles of rebirth “have now been exploded,” de Lubac quotes Augustine as writing (de Civitate Dei lib. 12, c. 20, n. 4). This is “the triumphant cry of the Christian to whom God the creator and savior has been revealed” (142). The divine Will and plan of God brings the human race to maturity.

All history and historical development is being providentially guided, by God’s two hands of Word and Spirit, to its predestined end: new heavens and new earth (143 - 144).

This affects the Christian call to flee the world. For, like the ancient and Eastern doctrines of evasion, such a call it does indeed make, but now with “a quite different meaning and with another emphasis:” whatever is real about earthly and temporal things is a “summons to look beyond them. Time is vanity only for one who, using it unnaturally, desires to establish himself in it.” (144) Herein lies the secret of all true Christian asceticism.

Peter Toon, in Who Runs the Church? 4 Views on Church Government, goes on to outline and describe the three views held within the Anglican family on the relationship of the historic episcopate to the whole church: the esse, the bene esse, and the plena esse.

First, the view that the historic episcopate of the of very esse (or essence) of the church. On this view “the episcopate guarantees the church. Thus the church derives all her authority from the Lord Jesus Christ through the divinely ordained means of the historic episcopate. Only bishops, who are in the apostolic succession of persons and doctrine, and the priests whom they ordain, have authority and grace to celebrate the Eucharist as an effectual sacrament of grace.” (37)

Second, the view, held mainly by “evangelical churchmen and liberal churchmen,” that the historic episcopate is of the bene esse (“well-being”) of the church. This view sees the episcopate as utilitarian: it is “the best as well as the most natural method of church government, for it brings the greatest good to the church of God in terms of value and usefulness.” (37)

Third, and this is the view Toon himself takes, there is the idea that the historic episcopate is of the plene esse (“fullness of being”) of the church. The historic episcopate embodies the gospel in church order (question: do Presbyterians think in this way? Would we say that our form of church government “embodies the gospel in church order?” Some would, no doubt – especially three office Presbyterians, but some, like Thomas Witherow, simply claim that it is the most biblical form of church polity), according to Toon, and this in two ways.

First, “it provides the effectual sign” of the church’s catholicity / unity, which I suppose stems from the historical fact that the universal church – for many centuries, as least – practiced this form of government. (Keep in mind that catholicity refers to unity not just in space – geographically – but also in time.)

Second, “it includes the principle of apostolicity. The episcopally ordained ministry is sent to represent Christ to his church and is representative of his church. It provides the guardianship of the Word and sacraments, of faith, and of the flock of Christ. The historic episcopate is thus the effectual sign of the relation of Christ to his church, for it shows forth his authority within his church.” (37-38)

For many years now I have struggled to understand how Anglicans perceive their form of the episcopacy. In Who Runs the Church? 4 Views on Church Government evangelical Anglican Peter Toon makes several helpful points which I had not seen quite so clearly before:

1. The ancient church of the first few centuries which universally developed the historic, diocesan episcopacy is the same church which decided the content of the NT canon; which established the first day of the week as the festival of the resurrection on the Lord’s Day; which created major feasts / festivals such as Easter and Pentecost; which set forth the dogmas of the “blessed, holy, and undivided trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and of the one person of Jesus Christ, made known in two natures, divine and human. (This is in contrast, BTW, to the later doctrinal developments specific to the Roman and Eastern traditions, which took much more time to develop.) (24) Do we really want to accept its verdict on these things, but reject the way it developed the historic episcopate?

2. The development of the diocese and its sole bishop came about as follows: “as city churches (with their one bishop and several presbyters) established missions in nearby towns, presbyters went to the smaller churches to serve as pastors, and so it was that bishops came to have multiple churches in their care and presbyters came to be pastors of individual churches.” (25)

3. Comparing and contrasting what Ignatius and Irenaeus say about bishops is instructive for seeing how the office developed early on. Ignatius of Antioch (circa 105) establishes the monepiscopacy, consistent with three office Presbyterianism. But for “Irenaeus of Lyons (died c. 200), some six or seven decades later, the primary emphasis was upon the bishop as holder of an apostolic see and thus the sign of continuity in apostolic faith and teaching.” 25

Question: how was the purity of this apostolic teaching established or demonstrated? It could not have been merely from (what we mean by) Scripture, since the canon had not yet been finalized! Rather, it was from lists of Episcopal successions, the earliest of which we have is late 2nd century. (29) So this is not simply an argument from tradition as opposed to scripture. There was no “scripture,” just as there was no “scripture” in Paul’s time. → This is where those suggestions that the apostles taught things that are not explicitly recorded in our Bibles (Thes; I Cor 11:23ff) comes in. The situation in the first 3 centuries is analogous to that. In the absence of the Bible, what is authoritative? Apostolicity / apostolic teaching.

4. The monoepiscopacy, it must be admitted, was at least allowed by the HS. 26

5. When we look to the NT we see that “the visiting apostle or evangelist or representative of the apostle had an authority in certain matters “above” that of the local presbyters / bishops and the local congregation of Christ’s flock. So we see here a kind of two-teared authority which is consistent with the two-teared authority between bishops and presbyters. (27-28)

6. It is possible that James was “a monarchical bishop in Jerusalem.” (Acts 21:18) (27)

7. The Anglican church maintained its Episcopal orders unimpaired: “We do not arrogate to ourselves either a new church, or a new religion or new Holy Orders…. Our religion is the same as it was, our church is the same as it was, our Holy Orders are the same as they were, in substance; differing only from what they were formerly, as a garden weeded from a garden unweeded.” – Archbishop John Bramhall in 1654. (32)

After making these and many other points, Toon has a good discussion of three views on how essential bishops are to the church: the esse view, the bene esse view, and the plene esse view, which I will blog on in an upcoming post.

The word “religion” has fallen on hard times. It seems that everywhere you look, people are denigrating religion. Ironically in some ways, this is truer nowhere than in evangelical circles.

Secular people have phobias about “institutional religion.” Jesus Movement types (and Depeche Mode) emphasize “relationship, not religion.” And in my current denomination, the PCA, in many quarters at least, we are at pains to distinguish “the Gospel” from “religion.”

For many of us in the PCA, “religion” connotes rule-keeping, earning “brownie points” with God. We are convinced that when secular, post-whatever people hear this word, they, too, have a rules-based system in mind. “There’s no way I can keep all the rules in the Bible,” we suspect they are saying, deep down in their hearts.

Believe me, I resonate with much of this, and have preached and spoken this way over the years. I am willing to admit that there is a time and a place for this approach. It is a real shame that many Christians have made it seem like Christianity is all about keeping a list of “do’s and dont’s.” (In my opinion, perhaps the most compelling “anti-religious” voice in Christian history is that of Soren Kierkegaard, who considered man’s deeply engrained self-righteous religiosity to be “the sickness unto death.”)

However, in the spirit of wanting to provoke the minds and hearts and imaginations not just of conservative evangelicals but also of our post Christian culture, there is another take on “religion” which is at least as valuable.

When it comes to discussing religion with people, just define it. Go back to the Latin, which means literally “to bind together again.” This is how Thomas Aquinas and the unbroken pre-modern Christian tradition (up until the 15th century Italian Renaissance figure Marsilio Ficino) thought of “religion.”

Why don’t we? Perhaps it is because we have let secular modernity define the terms for our spirituality, instead of allowing our souls to be formed (Thomas would say “habituated”) by Scripture, tradition, and the embodied community of Jesus.

What is it that religio binds back together? Everything that fallen man has separated: body and soul, person and community, scripture and liturgy, word and sacrament, sex and love, heaven and earth, male and female, earth and technology, head and heart, (poor) people and economic health, faith and obedience.

That (among other things) is what secular people, including evangelicals, need to hear.

David Cassidy has a wonderful post on how this phrase of the Nicene Creed would have been heard in its original context. He quotes this amazing poetic text, a fifth-century inscription on the baptistry in the Lateran Basilica:

Here a people of godly race are born of heaven;
the Spirit gives them life in the fertile waters.
The Church-Mother in these waves bears her children
the virginal fruit she conceived by the Holy Spirit

Hope for the kingdom of heaven, you who are reborn in this spring,
for those who are born but once have no share in the life of blessedness.
Here is to be found the source of life, which washes the whole universe,
which gushed from the wound of Christ.

Sinner, plunge into the fountain to wash away your sin.
The water receives the old man, and in his place makes the new man rise.
You wish to become innocent, cleanse yourself in this bath,
whatever your burden may be, Adam’s sin or your own.

Thanks, Pastor Cassidy!

It was about ten years ago that my friend Rob Kirby introduced me to this wonderful, ancient poem. I had forgotten about it until a few days ago when I ran across it again in Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. St. Brigid, probably consecrated a bishop “by accident” (according to various sources, including Cogitosus), lived in Ireland during the 5th & 6th centuries. (Cahill, 172-179) Cheers!

I should like a great lake of the finest ale
For the King of kings.
I should like a table of the choicest food
For the family of heaven.
Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith,
And the food be forgiving love.

I should welcome the poor to my feast,
For they are God’s children.
I should welcome the sick to my feast,
For they are God’s joy.
Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place,
And the sick dance with the angels.

God bless the poor,
God bless the sick,
And bless our human race.
God bless our food,
God bless our drink,
All homes, O God, embrace.

Demeter’s hair was yellow as the ripe corn of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain. The threshing floor was her sacred space. Women, the world’s first farmers (while men still ran off to the bloody howling of hunt and battle), were her natural worshippers, praying: ‘May it be our part to separate wheat from chaff in a rush of wind, digging the great winnowing fan through Demeter’s heaped-up mounds of corn while she stands among us, smiling, her brown arms heavy with sheaves, her ample breasts adorned in flowers of the field.’ Demeter had but one daughter, and she needed no other, for Persephone was the Spirit of Spring. The Lord of Shadows and Death, Hades himself, the Unseen One, carried her off in his jet-black chariot, driven by coal-black steeds, through a crevice in the surface of Earth, down to the realms of the dead. For nine days, Demeter wondered sorrowing over land, sea, and sky in search of her daughter, but no one dared tell her what had happened till she reached the Sun, who had seen it all. With Zeus’ help, the mother retrieved her daughter, but Persephone had already eaten a pomegranate seed, food of the dead, at Hades’ insistence, which meant she must come back to him. In the end, a sort of truce was arranged. Persephone could return to her sorrowing mother but must spend a third of each year with her dark Lord. Thus, by the four-month death each year of the goddess in springtime in her descent to the underworld, did winter enter the world. And when she returns from the dark realms she always strikes earthly beings with awe and smells somewhat of the grave.” – Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, 3.

A few pages later in this same book, Cahill draws a connection between this Greek myth of Demeter and the “myth become fact” of the Gospel story, and how God’s people, the Church, have understood that story:

In Demeter’s story … the attentive reader may catch dark prefigurings of the Christian Mother of Sorrows and the novenas – penitential nine-day cycles – commemorating her pain at the loss of her magical Child, who rises from the grave in late March or early April.

Now, we could take this insight of Cahill’s and launch off from it in many different directions (for example, we could discuss the nature of “Christianity and culture” and why so many puritan-like or “evangelical” views of “synchretism” are wrong), but when I read this passage in Cahill this morning, I immediately thought of passage in Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World (pages 52 – 59) in which he discusses the Christian understanding of time, and how the Church has used feasting as a way to redeem created time (and creation with it).

This is particularly relevant in our postmodern, nihilistic world, a world which Schmemann calls “serious,” in contrast to the life of joyful feasting which the Gospel brings about for us who are in Christ.

“Through the Cross,” Schmemann quotes the liturgy, “joy came into the whole world.”

[The Jewish feasts of Passover and Pentecost] were – to use another image – the “material” of a sacrament of time to be performed by the Church. We know that both feasts originated as the annual celebration of spring and the first fruits of nature. In this respect they were the very expression of feast as man’s joy about life. They celebrated the world coming back to life again after the death of winter, becoming again the food and life of man. And it is very significant that this most “natural,” all-embracing and universal feast – that of life itself – became the starting point, and indeed the foundation of the long transformation of the idea and experience of feast. It is equally significant that in this transformation each new stage did not abolish and simply replace the previous one, but fulfilled it in an even deeper and greater meaning until the whole process was consummated in Christ himself. The mystery of natural time, the bondage to winter and release in spring, was fulfilled in the mystery of time as history – the bondage to Egypt and the release into the Promised Land. And the mystery of historical time was transformed into the mystery of eschatological time….” — Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 56

This entire transformation – of pagan feast to Jewish feast to Christian feast, of natural time to historical time to eschatological time – culminates, argues Schmemann, in Easter, when the Church says,

Enter ye all into the joy of your Lord,
You who are rich and you the poor, come to the feast,
Receive all the riches of loving-kindness …
And let no one bewail his poverty,
For the universal Kingdom has been revealed.

And again:

The Pascha of the Lord,
From death unto life,
And from earth unto heaven
Has Christ our God brought us….

Now are all things filled with light,
Heaven and earth and the places under the earth.
All Creation does celebrate the Resurrection of Christ the King

On whom it is founded….

We celebrate the death of Death,
The annihilation of Hell,
The beginning of a life new and everlasting.
And with ecstasy we sing praises to the author thereof….

This is the chosen and holy Day,
The one King and Lord of Sabbaths,
The Feast of Feasts and the Triumph of Triumphs….

O Christ, the Passover great and most holy!
O Wisdom, Word and Power of God!
Grant that we may more perfectly partake of Thee
In the day of Thy Kingdom which knoweth no night.

In his subsection on the sacraments, “Communion with the Mystical Body” (Catholicism 93 – 101), de Lubac explains the historical understanding of the “threefold manner of the body of Christ:”

When, with St. Augustine, [our ancient forbears] heard Christ say to them: “I am your food, but instead of my being changed into you, it is you who shall be transformed into me,” they unhesitatingly understood that by their reception of the Eucharist they would be incorporated the more in the Church. They could see a profound identity between the mysteries of the “real presence” and of the “mystical body.” And this identity was taken for granted in all their – frequently lively – discussions on the question of the corpus triforme or the triplex modus corporis Christi.”

The three forms of the body of Christ, as de Lubac describes them, are:

• the soma typicon (coined by Origen, the “typical” body, ie, the individual body of the man Jesus),
• the corpus mysticum (the mystical body, which, as William Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist and others elsewhere point out, and which de Lubac confirms, originally referred to the eucharistic body, ie, the communion bread, but then was later exalted to refer to the corpus Christi quod est Ecclesia, the body of Christ which is the church),
• the corpus verum (the true body, which originally referred to the body of Christ which is the church, but then was demoted to refer to the communion bread).

It is no secret that Radical Orthodoxy, in concert with many other intellectual historians (including Pope Benedict), sees a radical intellectual, cultural, and spiritual shift taking place in the thirteenth century with emergence of the thought of Duns Scotus.

In her book After Writing, Catherine Pickstock attempts to trace some of the ways in which this shift led to pervasive decline in the economic and political realms. Her overarching theme is that there came a shift from the bonds of kinship – displayed, for example, in the high middle ages’ approach to godparenthood and marriage – to the bonds of contract. This older web of kinship, Pickstock wants to demonstrate, is loosely bound to a sacramentality which “[structures] all forms of social interaction.” (152)

In the economic realm, lay fraternities and craft guilds provided the bonds of kinship and linked economic practice to liturgical practice. The bonds of friendship – beyond just the norm, for example, that disputes be settled through internal arbitration, to the more important informal exchange of gifts in the sense of caritas – were never formalized into contract, but rather embodied in social expectations and ritualized practices.

With the decline of the fraternities (a bi-product of the Scotist revolution), however, two pernicious developments ensue: the notion of charity is depersonalized into an abstract notion of philanthropy, which, like modern “charitable giving,” does nothing to bind giver and receiver, and, as social networks of lay fraternities and guilds decline, power shifts to a class of newly aggrandized priests / ministers. (Pickstock shows how, as usual, late medieval Catholicism and the emerging Protestant societies are mere variations on the same pernicious theme.)

If it is true, as I have summarized de Lubac’s argument in my last post on his book Catholicism, that the beatific vision will be enjoyed only by the community as a whole, then this has implications for Christ himself, who, after all, is a member of this community. (He is the head of the body, and the chief cornerstone of the temple of living stones, and our elder brother.) This is de Lubac’s point in this section.

Writes Origen (de Lubac’s primary theological mentor), commenting on Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones:

When shall come the resurrection of the real, whole body of Christ, then the members of Christ shall be knitted together, joint to joint, each one in its place, and the multitude of members will form at last, completely and in one full reality, one single body.”

Until that time, argues de Lubac, there is a certain sense in which Christ remains imcomplete. De Lubac quotes from a 1934 article in Revue Nouvelle theologique:

Christ, the Word Incarnate, was not our Redeemer by a sort of accident; it was his sole office, it governed everything else. Can it be allowed that the Redeemer’s hope is fully satisfied, independently of the outcome of his work? Has the hope of the Shepherd nothing to do with the fate of his flock? Is it enough for him to have kept clear of the wolf’s jaws that he may peacefully contemplate his sheep from afar, watching over them merely with pity as if they were not his own? As long as God’s work is not complete, as long as there are petitions of the Pater unfulfilled, can it be admitted that hope has not room in heaven, that its object is found wanting? The happiness of the individual is not substitute for that of the community. The same steadfast longing, the same desire, the same rhythm of life run through both the church militant and the church triumphant until that day when Christ shall be complete, that is, until he shall come again in glory.”

We may, writes de Lubac, conclude with Bossuet: “Jesus Christ will not be whole until the number of saints in complete. Our gaze must ever be fixed on the consummation of God’s work.” (133)

In this section de Lubac rehearses yet another exhibit in his argument for the Christian faith as primarily social. Here again he argues from patristic history combined with Scripture (and the Fathers’ reading of it).

In the first several decades of the Church it was easy for Christians to conclude, on the basis of such passages as Mt 25, 2 Tim 4:8, and Heb 11:39-40, that final consummation of Christian joy and reward would take place only at the time of judgment at the end of the world. After all, the Faith was new enough that it was easy for them to recall every Christian generation which had passed before them.

What is interesting, however, is that, even when many generations had passed and the Church finally became aware that perhaps the return of Christ was not quite so imminent as it had previously seemed, Christians – more or less universally – still clung to the idea that all would experience final joy, or the beatific vision, together, as one community.

So much so that in the fourteenth century Benedict XII had to censor the view that departed saints had to wait until the final resurrection to enjoy the beatific vision. Now, the point here is not that Benedict XII was wrong to censure this view: he was in fact right to do so, correctly condemning this “transposition into the order of time a genuine causal dependence.” (123)

The point is this: why did the Church so doggedly insist that the beatific vision will be enjoyed by the community as a whole? The answer is that she understood deep in her bones the social nature of the Church and her salvation.

To this end de Lubac quotes St. Thomas:

The end of a reasonable creature is to attain to beatitude, and that can consist only in the Kingdom of God, which in turn is nothing other than the well-ordered society of those who enjoy the vision of God.” (Contra Gentes lib. 4, c. 50, quoted on 130)

John Milbank says that Henri de Lubac sees the Christian understanding of the supernatural (supernaturalis / hyperphues) as infused with “the new Christian understanding of salvation as deification.” For de Lubac (and Danielou) “it was important to show that the authentic Latin patristic understanding of the operation of grace (especially that of Augustine) was not essentially different from the Greek patristic notion of deification.” (The Suspended Middle 16)

(I might add that David Bradshaw would probably take issue with de Lubac here; see this post.)

Does the Bible teach deification? There are several places to look, but it seems to me that 2 Pet 1:3-4 comes about as close as any to an all-out statement of deification or theosis:

“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.”

Part of what is so intriguing about this text is the use of “divine nature” (theias physews), a use of physis with few (if any) parallels or precedents in the NT.

If, however, this passage cannot simply be read as an affirmation of the theosis, then is there some other set of texts, or some other hermeneutic reality, from which the affirmation of deification does arise? At this level, one wants to resist a simplistic version of sola scriptura.

Discussing this very passage in the context of Romans 5:5 (”God has shed is love abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit”), Gregory of Nyssa says:

Paul calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Love; it is said of God himself that he is love, and the Son is called the Son of Love. Now … if this is so we should be certain that both the Son and the Holy Spirit come from that one foundation of Godhead which is the Fatherhood of God, and that of his abundance bounteous love is infused into the very heart of the saints so as to make them partakers of the divine nature, as St. Peter the Apostle taught. And this is so, so that by this gift of the Holy Spirit there may be fulfilled the words of our Lord, ‘That they may be one, as thou, Father, in me, and I in thee. That is to say: Let them be made partakers of the divine nature in the abundance of love diffused by the Holy Spirit.”

The story of the development of the Christian doctrine of God, beginning with the doctrinal disputes of the fourth century, is long and complex. Certain key themes, however, emerge again and again: ousia, hypostasis, energeia among the most important. In this book Orthodox philosopher David Bradshaw lucidly and compellingly deals with all of them, focusing particularly, however, on the ancient concept of energeia (i.e., the “energies” of God), genealogically tracing its evolution from Aristotle through the Medieval Greek speaking theologian Gregory Palamas.

Readers will find the book immensely relevant to such discussions as the relationship between faith and reason (which, according to Bradshaw, has been rent in the West but held intact in Eastern Christianity); the pervasive influence of ancient Greek thought upon Christian theology; the origins of modern, western nihilism; and the nature of the theological issues dividing Eastern and Western branches of the Christian church.

The primary thesis of the book, attempting to indict central streams of Western Christianity in one grand sweep, is that the West, beginning with Augustine, has failed to assimilate the Greek understanding of God’s energeia, a failure due in part to the exigencies of language (none of the major Latin renderings of this term – operatio, actus, and actualitas – fully capture its semantic nuances), in part to historical accident (e.g., Augustine had access only to certain “Neo-Platonist” philosophers), in part due to more pernicious reasons such as Augustine’s absolutization of Plato’s version of divine simplicity unique to his middle dialogues.

Of particular interest is the way in which Greek and Latin theology received the classical heritage. It is perhaps tempting for many to assume that the Greek speaking East is somehow more saturated with Greek thought, but this is not the case: “It is only by seeing both the eastern and western traditions as developments out of a shared heritage in classical metaphysics that they can be properly understood.” (xii)

The book is divided into five parts: the development of energeia from Aristotle through Plotinus (chs. 1- 4; note that this includes Paul’s letters, in which ten occurrences of the term are treated in the book); preliminary developments in the West (ch. 5); preliminary developments in the East (ch. 6); the growth of the Eastern tradition (chs. 7 – 8); and a systematic comparison of Augustine, Aquinas, and Palamas (ch. 9).

Beyond the general point that Christian notions of teleology have their roots in Aristotle, Bradshaw’s articulation of Aristotle’s doctrine of God (i.e., the Prime Mover) already foreshadows how the West has (allegedly) impaired the right use of ancient thought. For Bradshaw shows us how Aristotle’s theos is not simply transcendent (as he is usually viewed in the West) but also radically immanent in his relation to the world (the first heavens, for example, being moved as objects of the Prime Mover’s love). Bradshaw rehearses various other modes of participation between the creation and the divine (with energeia acting as a connecting thread) in the thought of the Hellenistic schools, Philo of Alexandria, and especially Plotinus, whose theory of two acts proved to be formative for subsequent thought. Of particular note here is the development of the concept of theurgy beginning with Porphyry but truly coming into its own in the philosophic outlook of his disciple Iamblichus, those thought – significantly – remained virtually unknown in the West.

Moving to a treatment of these ideas in a specifically Christian context, the influence of energeia is exerted most fully in the Trinitarian controversies of the fourth century. Among the most important examples is the Neo-Platonist logic behind Athanasius’ theological critique of Egyptian bishop Serapion’s denial of the deity of the Holy Spirit. Well known is Athanasius’ affirmation that “the external works of the Trinity are undivided” (in Latin, Opera ad extra trinitatis indivisa sunt.). Less appreciated is that this doctrine relies on a philosophical presupposition of Neo-Platonism: that energeia is revelatory of essence implying in this case that if we know that the three persons of the Trinity perform their works (Greek energeiai) in unison, then we know (or so Neo-Platonist thinking would hold) that their ousia must be unitary as well. In this way Serapion’s theology is demonstrated to fall short of Scriptural implications.

Here lies the primary benefit of this book. Modern western Christians of an orthodox persuasion readily accept Athanasius’ conclusions here (and elsewhere), but ought we to embrace the Greek presuppositions upon which these conclusions depend? For these presuppositions, Bradshaw shows, lead to some rather far reaching consequences, most of which center on the ancient understanding of methexis or participation (at this point the book traffics in the domain of the theological development known as Radical Orthodoxy, with its insistence on the centrality of participation in the Christian life). God mysteriously interacts with his creation in ways that shed new light on such things as the body’s role in prayer (just as the energies mitigate against a God / world dualism, so also do they mitigate against a mind / body, or even a soul / body dualism), the nature of the sacraments (the main connection here being that of theurgy), and the meaning of sanctification (hence the Orthodox understanding of theosis).

Critical reaction to this book centers on three basic points:

First, Bradshaw’s (indeed that of the mainstream Orthodox tradition) reading of Neo-Platonist teaching in the writings of St. Paul needs justification. To load, for example, Paul’s use of energeia in Ephesians 1:19 with classical philosophical meaning seems a bit suspect. What might be the Hebraic background of this idea? Even if such a query lies outside the scope of Bradshaw’s book, this is a question that must asked when grappling with these issues. (To say this is not to totalize authorial intent at the expense of other interpretive postures: such ecclesial and corporate “reader response” may well be legitimate, especially given the dual authorship of Scripture, but such a move ought at least to be explicitly articulated and examined.)

Second, Bradshaw’s genealogy of western nihilism as stemming from Augustine is tenuous (although shared with other compelling Orthodox theologians such as Christos Yannaras). It is true that Western theology and practice is more centralized, monarchical, and centered on the impersonal ousia of God (seen in the papal tendencies of Rome) than the Eastern commitment to the equal ultimacy of the tri-personhood of God. And yet, one must strain to trace modern nihilism in the west all the way back to a supposed Augustinian source. More plausible, it seems to me, is the genealogy of nihilism put forth by Radical Orthodoxy, beginning as it does with Duns Scotus and late medieval nominalism.

Third, the same objections to this account of the divine energies tend to crop up over and over again throughout the history of the church: that this view of God’s energeia reifies what are properly merely logical distinctions, that it compromises the simplicity of God, and that it comes dangerously close to pantheism. To his credit Bradshaw does not avoid these criticism, engaging as he does in a lengthy response to one of the more recent critiques of this Neo-Platonist heritage, that of Rowan Williams. And despite the fact that Williams has modified his views on this particular issue, Bradshaw does overcome several real objections.

However, Bradshaw does not sufficiently bring out the fact that, in all likelihood, important figures usually associated with Eastern Orthodoxy would likely have objections to this view, wanting to protect the simplicity of God. In particular, to say that God decides something other than what he is does not seem to be consistent with the Cappadocian Fathers or Maximus. This, of course, does not mean that it is not true, but nevertheless full context here would be helpful.

This book is the product of a lucid mind and a faithful imagination engaged with his tradition and is worthy of deep respect.

The key word in this section is the word “analogy.” I once heard RC Sproul say that “theology is the making of distinctions.” As important as distinctions are, however, I would argue, and de Lubac and others would agree, that to think theologically is to think analogically. The analogies which help us understand what the church is proliferate:

First, the church is like the human body. That is to say, the church is decidedly eschatological in its nature. Just as the human body which I now am will one day be transformed into a more glorious resurrection body (analogous, by the way, to the body of the man Jesus Christ) so also the visible, embodied church of today will one day be transformed and transfigured into something far more glorious, in full consummation with Jesus Christ. In this connection, de Lubac stresses that the church is not merely a vestibule of the Heavenly city / church, any more than the tabernacle was a mere vestibule of the temple of the old covenant of Israel. Augustine: “The church of today is the kingdom of Christ and the heavenly kingdom.” (Is this, perhaps, included in what BB Warfield rejected when he described Calvinism as “the triumph of Augustine’s soteriology over his ecclesiology?” I suspect that it is.)

Second, the church is like Christ. In Christology we reject, on the one hand, the monophysite tendency to merge or to confuse the two natures of Christ that form the duality of his person, and on the other hand the Nestorian tendency to separate those two natures thereby destroying the unity of the person of Christ. In precisely the same way, in ecclesiology we reject the tendency, on one hand, to separate the visible, embodied church from its eschatological fulfillment as well as its mystical divinity (not to mention its eschatological fulfillment, present in an “already / not-yet” way), and on the other hand to simply identify the visible, embodied church with its mystical divinity. There is some kind of hypostatic union going on here just as in the person of Christ. De Lubac suggests that these two reductionistic tendencies, being the two halves of a false dichotomy, include one another, and that Protestant theology / ecclesiology is guilty of both of them.

Finally, the church is (like) a sacrament. Christ is the sacrament of God, and the church is the sacrament of Christ, making him fully present in the world. “She not only carries on his work, but is his very continuation, in a sense far more real than in which it can be said that any human institution is its founder’s continuation.” (p 76)