“Liturgy exists not to educate, but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.” – Aidan Kavanagh

Catherine Pickstock gives the word “liturgy” a wide resonance. But she also devotes many pages of her book AW to analyzing a specific liturgy: the celebration of the Christian Eucharist, in which the elements of bread and wine are said to become the body and blood of Christ. Drawing particularly on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, she asks how Christ is made present in the Mass.

I found that the understanding of presence that you get in Aquinas’ understanding of the Eucharist is not the kind of fetishized presence of modernity. It is not one that is somehow “enthronable” or “stockpileable.” It is a presence which is mysterious, and one which seems to bring the meanings of words together. One thing that stuck Aquinas about the Eucharist is that although it is perhaps the highest instance of God’s action through human action on earth, nevertheless it seems to use the most ordinary objects, it seems to use the most banal objects: bread and wine, grape and grain. Nothing could be more local and more summoning or ordinary labor – transport, commerce – all the things which ordinarily seem to take us away from “high piety” – and one of the things that A says about the choice of elements is precisely their ordinariness and their association with human conviviality – eating and drinking and the good smell of the bread and wine. Plus it was significant for him that bread and wine involve human trade and travel and commerce and so forth, and so the lowest and most basic elements of human survival and human operation are brought into the moment of heightened realization of divine presence. And so for all these different reasons you can see the ways in which we are being reminded in the Eucharist that there really isn’t an area of human operation which isn’t somehow preincluded in God’s gift. And we’re are reminded also that liturgy is something which all of human action and human operation leads toward and presupposes. If, even, in the manufacturing of bread we are being led toward the Eucharistic celebration, it helps us to reposition our understanding of all human labor as praise of the divine. And again this brings us back to the idea that liturgy isn’t something that we should think about only on Sundays or high feast days but its something that all our human labors might become, that human labor itself might be liturgy. And so there isn’t necessarily a separation between life and liturgy. Even washing up could be offered up as a sort of divine praise. All human actions could be.

And so, equally, if we think of the tree which I referred to earlier as fulfilling its “tree-ness” by worshipping God – and this is the way in which Aquinas saw the world around us, where everything is worshipping God in its own way – and so when the tree fulfills its telos as a tree, that moment of fulfillment is the tree’s worshipping God, or copying God in its own manner. And so a Eucharistic sensibility is one in which one sees everything as participating in praise of the divine.” — Catherine Pickstock in an interview which one can listen to here.

Liturgy, as Catheine Pickstock explains it, signifies an underlying attitude and not just a specific order of celebration. It is, as she says, “a way of being on the way.” A way of receiving, and releasing, what is only ever present in passing.

Liturgy isn’t just going to church on a Sunday. When I was analyzing what a liturgical worldview might be like, I tried to conceive it as a way of life, rather than as a text or as something we did every now and then. And this is something I found in Plato again, when he is looking at the life of the philosopher and the philosopher’s desire to recollect the highest principles of the good and to communicate them to his pupils. He was trying to show that philosophy isn’t a decadent pursuit which occurs on the ancient Greek version of a high table at a college, but rather is a way of life, where everything must be orientated toward a vision of the good, and if one can Christianize that vision…. Well, in a way that is what I’ve been doing in my analysis of liturgy: trying to show how a way of life might help us to unsettle all the dichotomies and pernicious categories that I analyzed in secular modernity.” — Catherine Pickstock, in an interview one can listen to here.

John Milbank sees the church as an encompassing an ultimately cosmic community. And this view is complemented by the emphasis in Catherine Pickstock’s work on liturgy. Liturgy, in its most basic meaning, refers to the order of words and actions that is prescribed for public worship. but in her book After Writing, CP has given the term a much wider meaning. She argues that he muddles and uncertainties in which modern philosophy has ended up can only be overcome by recognizing that language only finally fulfills itself in praise and celebration. That is, in liturgy. And so she she subtitled her book “On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.”

In my subtitle I was trying to hint at the ultimate argument of my book which is that the spatialization of modernity as I have described it can only be shattered or in some way challenged by a liturgical worldview where one is no longer trying to enthrone one’s own constructs but is now trying to reposition one’s self in that broader context which sees  the whole of reality as arriving from a divine creative source, and that we can only undo these dichotomies by some kind of liturgical enactment. One of the things I did in my book when I was analyzing secular reason is to show that the human self is by definition a divided self when it is trying to enthrone its own constructs. It starts to lead an almost duplicitous life. But a liturgical self is one which acknowledges fully its own dependence on a divine transcendent reality and is so committed to that reality that it can’t admit any divisions or internal contradictions. There is something completely simple about liturgical language. It simply says “I am nothing, and I worship you and I depend on you.” And along with this liturgical worldview comes the recognition that everything around us is in the mode of gift and is a gift from God. And so not only does it affect our relationship with our self and with God, but also our relationship to the world around us, and how we receive it.” — Catherine Pickstock in an interview which one can listen to here.

Catherine Pickstock gives liturgy a much broader sense. She argues that the muddles and uncertainties in which modern philosophy has ended up can only be overcome by recognizing that language only fulfills itself in praise and celebration, that is, in liturgy.

The spatialization of modernity can only really be shattered or in some way challenged by a liturgical world view in which one is no longer trying to enthrone its own constructs but to reposition ones self in that broader context which sees the whole of reality as arriving from a divine creative source. We can only really undo all of these dichotomies by some kind of liturgical enactment. One of the things I did in my book when I was analyzing secular reason is to show how the human self, by its self, is a divided self, and when it is trying to enthrone its own constructs it starts to lead an almost duplicitous existence, but the liturgical self is one which acknowledges freely its complete dependence upon another being, a divine, transcendent reality, and is so committed to that reality that it can’t admit to any kind of internal divisions or contradictions. There is something completely simple about liturgical language. It simply says, “I am nothing, and I depend upon you and I worship you, and along with that liturgical worldview comes the realization that everything around us is in the mode of gift and arrives as a gift from God. And so not only does it affect our relationship with ourself and to God himself, but also to our relationship with the world around us, and how we receive it.” — Catherine Pickstock, in an interview which one can listen to here.

“I’m very much in a tradition of Anglican thinkers going back to John Neville Figgis who have insisted that the church is the purpose of salvation, it’s not just the collection of believers or the saved. The church is the realization of salvation, because the church is the realization of reconciliation, ultimately b/t everybody. Ultimately the church is, as the Eastern Orthodox stress, bigger than the cosmos, because it’s the cosmos linked to God and returned to God. So church for me is a very big reality. It’s the site of the true human sociality. So, again, very much in the tradition of Anglican socialism I tend to see the church itself as the political vehicle. You don’t need a political party, b/c the church has a social purpose that goes beyond the political understood in the normal sense, because it’s not just about equal sharing and punishing wrongdoers. It’s about forgiveness and reconciliation and restoring and giving superabundantly to each other. So it involves some kind of social purpose that can’t be fully realized in this world but can to some extant and goes beyond the social purpose and the political purpose of the state, so much so that even ideally state functions should be minimalized in relation to ecclesiastical functions. The more we had real church in our economic practices, in our social practices … the less you would need these state functions. Liturgy also is crucial here: the sense that worshipping God is the true social purpose and that everything, all our economic activities are ultimately oriented to making the true worship of God in the kind of ritual patterns of the daily life that come to a head in what happens in a church. Without a sense of what binds us together you don’t have a real society.” — John Milbank, in an invterview which you can listen to here.

“The Church is at once very very spiritual and very very concrete. The Church continues that sense of the Incarnation, and I mean that quite literally, that the church is a communion of souls, it extends to another world, but it also is the material practices, it’s also physical churches, it’s also sacred sites, it’s also the continual sacralization of space, its also parish boundaries. I mean, I believe in all this fantastic stuff. I’m really bitterly opposed to this kind of disenchantment in the modern churches, including I think among most modern evangelicals. I mean recently in the Notthingham diocese they wanted to do a show about angels, and so the clergy – and this is a very evangelical diocese – sent around a circular saying, “Is there anyone around who still believes in angels enough to talk about this?” Now, in my view this is scandalous. They shouldn’t even be ordained if they can’t give a cogent account of the angelic and its place in the divine economy. I want everything put back again, in one sense. I believe in the lot. Pilgrimages, you know, everything. The importance of sacred sites, the traditions about the unseen, even about there being other creatures hidden within the dimensions of this world. These are things which I think we should take seriously that exist in many dif traditions. And I think that one of the problems we have is that we have the wrong idea about monotheism, you know, that of course there are gods and angels and spirits, and what have you, in incredible plurality. The point about the divine unity is that it’s beyond all that. Monotheism is not denying the gods. The most radical monotheists have always seen that. There are many spiritual powers, and there may be some place between the good and the bad among them like the early Irish theologians acknowledged. Who knows? The point is that he supreme God is one who transcends any of that kind of thing, so for me, the church is supremely concrete and supremely spiritual and I think that there is a sense in which, in a fallen world corporeality can lead us into despair, it’s a site of decay. And we can only not despair if corporeality is restored. So with the Incarnation and without the resurrection, we are not really going fully to value embodiment as glorious.” — John Milbank, in an interview which can be listened to 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.

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).

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.)

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 background on this issue see this article, and also see Jon Barlow’s blog post (and don’t overlook the insightful comments).

While on the one hand Rowan is far from “calling for the introduction of sharia into British law,” it is true that he is suggesting, and beginning to articulate in public, a different kind of politics, and alternative politics which is rooted in the political theology of Radical Orthodoxy.

Some thoughts:

1. When it comes to the larger culture, the church has two vocations: to convert, and / or to suffer as martyr. Great wisdom is required to discern when and how to apply these two vocations.
2. England, like the US, is no longer a Christian nation. (Actually, it is debatable if the US, unlike England, ever was a Christian nation in any meaningful sense.) Modern England is a modern nation state which participates in the grand Enlightenment political project of privatizing religion in the name of creating a public space for diversity and tolerance. This, however, presupposes an ontology of original violence (in radical opposition to the Christian ontology of original, edenic peace) and actually serves as a mechanism for the state to tyrannize and control the public according to its own needs.
3. The archbishop’s suggestion of an eventual recognition of sharia in the UK (a nation which, like its neighbor France, is increasingly populated by Middle Eastern people, many of whom are Muslims) is a slight move to undermine the hegemony of the modern nation state. This is a state, remember, which plunged itself into the “Iraq War” in an alleged claim to be fighting forces of evil, a claim which grows more dubious with every passing day. (Note: Archbishop Rowan did not “call for” the inclusion of sharia into the British legal system; he merely said that such a development is inevitable, suggesting that such an inevitable development would be a good thing.)
4. This is not to sanction sharia in every sense, or to deny that it itself sometimes legitimates violence against women, etc. Rather, what is going on here is an attempt to give a religious community the right to practice its politics, to bind itself together, publicly and without domination by the modern nation state.
5. What, then, of cultural Christianity and its dominance in the West? Two things to keep in mind: first Williams does not consider the modern nation state of England to be Christian in any meaningful sense, and, secondly, he senses that it is time in the West for the Church to let go of secular power and to begin to practice her second calling, that of martyrdom.

For credible detailed analysis of his comments, see this.

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.

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.