It was deeply satisfying to preach this sermon.

In this chapter, the key point has to do with the nature of desire or eros.

In addition to reducing eros down to sexual desire (see previous post) secular modernity roots desire in an economy of lack or scarcity. So the reason I want something (a cup of coffee, a new pair of jeans, a relationship with another person) is that I lack this thing.

This economy of lack presupposes that the things of this world (including relationships and other people) are posessions to be controlled and consumed.

Christianity’s understanding of desire, however, is not at all rooted in this economy of lack. This understanding, which seems so foreign to our fallen and modern minds, begins with St. Paul’s situating the Church as in Christ, Christ being both the source of all things as well as the consummation of all things. If I am a member of the church (Ward’s “We”) then I am in Christ, there there is absolutely nothing that I lack. (I know this by faith which of course is penetrated through & through by reason.)

If this is true, then lack or privation which Augustine (as well as Hegel) connects to evil cannot be the source of my desire.

What, then, is the source of my desire? Here, as well as elsewhere, is where human language fails. Perhaps we can say that my desire is stimulated by my participation in God, or perhaps we can say that I desire the Other simply because the Father desires the Son (and vice-versa, throwing the Holy Spirit in the mix, too).

Or perhaps you could say what my wife and I have always said to each other in answer to the question “Why do you love me?” The only answer which satisfies the questioner is “No reason.”

I think (I hope) I might be reaching “a simplicity on the far side of complexity,” that is, a grasp of the big picture of what Ward is saying and doing in this book.

My dad & I have a long-standing argument over the question, “Is the world getting better & better, worse & worse, or something else?” It is easy, especially for Christians in the West today, to think that the world is getting worse & worse. However, what Ward (along with other practitioners of theological genealogy) shows is that the state of affairs we have today (I am thinking, for example, of rampant and dominating consumerism, and its many destructive effects) is really just a point on the trajectory of certain developments which have been happening for centuries now within modernity.

A few such developments are key to Ward’s thesis: the reduction of eros down to libidinal desire; the reduction of real community to transaction, then to imagination, then to virtualness.

These trends, along with the Hegelian and Freudian belief that the “nuclear family” is the building block of civilization, are all at work to produce the situation in which we find ourselves today: a culture in which we are determined in almost every way and at almost every level by the capitalistic marketplace which endlessly stimulates our desires, promising satisfaction but never delivering. (Worst of all, it is this dynamic which grounds most postmodern forms of community, or vestiges of community.)

However, what if we are at a “late point” in the history of these trajectories? For example, Ward shows how transactional community (seen clearly in the commodification culture of the Industrial Revolution) has led to imaginary community (ie, the formation of community, for example, in the modern nation state around nothing but the imagined belief that we are a real community), which has led to the virtual community which characterizes life today.

Well, what will this lead to? It is easy to see this as the last phase in modernity’s long project of the destruction of true community. If so, then that is good news, and perhaps we could say that, in this narrow sense, the world is getting better and better (or something like that).

In this chapter / essay (chapter 4) Ward rehearses five movements of displacement, narrated in the Gospel stories, of the body of Jesus (we are here speaking of the soma typicon): the transfiguration (which shows that bodies can be transfigured), the institution narrative of the Eucharist (which shows that bodies can be transposed), the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension (in which Christ’s body is expanded to fill the entire church and cosmos).

I really appreciate Ward’s critique, in light of his “nyssan” cosmology of materiality, of Calvin’s view of the Eucharist, presupposing as it does the spatial location of the body of Jesus in heaven.

What Ward is doing, quite rivetingly, is starting with Christology and then developing from there a Christian cosmology. If Christ’s body is somehow iconic or paradigmatic of all creation (Col 1:15; Eph 1:10, 22-3) then this makes sense. And, as I have been saying Ward has a precedent in this effort in Gregory of Nyssa.

I am realizing that Graham Ward’s Cities of God is, among other things, a postmodern retelling of the theology (or perhaps, more accurately, the christology, which includes for him the doctrine of creation as well as that of the church) of Gregory of Nyssa.

He who sees the Church looks directly at Christ…. The establishment of the Church is the re-creation of the world…. A new earth is formed, and it drinks up the rains that pour down upon it … but it is only in the union of all the particular members that the beauty of Christ’s body is complete (Nyssa, On the Making of Man, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds) Gregory of Nyssa, Dogmatic Treatises etc. Michigan: Eerdmans, 1979, 13, 1049B - 1052A).

… and again:

[The Church, the Spouse of Christ] is wounded by a spiritual and fiery dart of eros. For agape that is strained to intensity is called eros (ibid, 13, 1048A).

Ward points out in chapter 3, “The Ontological Scandal,” that, much to the chagrin of the likes of Bertrand Russell and all other empiricist types, materiality (don’t forget that Ward is theologizing, or philosophizing, about bodies in this book) is transient.

That is, it arrives in the mode of a gift. It is not static; it cannot be stockpiled; it cannot be commodified and transactionalized.

Rather (and here is where secular postmodernists such as Derrida have trouble making affirmations), it exists in the mode of gift, “continually in a state of being gifted to us, animated by God” (89). That is, “nature cannot be natural without the Spirit informing it at every point” (88).

Consistent with this view is Gregory of Nyssa’s view that the materiality of creation is literally an energeia of God, a mode of Trinitarian dynamis, or power. For more on the energies of God, see here.

In Graham Ward’s _Cities of God_ he does a good job (see chapter 3, “The Ontological Scandal”) of distinguishing between two kinds of speaking & “naming.”

One view, what we might call the “speech of man,” represented by the likes of the early Wittgenstein and British Empiricism, thinks that, through our language, we have direct control of the things of this world. (This presupposes all kinds of things, such as that our perception links up with discreet objects, which in turn presupposes an atomistic view that reality is primarily composed of discreet units of stuff, of matter. Both of these assumptions are at odds with Christian theology.)

The other view, which we might call “the speech of God,” is that we are creatures of God who speak not because we are in control of anything (or even that we know what we are doing) but rather because we are always already in a prior relationship with God and his creation. We speak and name because we cannot help it, in terms of efficient causality. We speak and name because we are images of a relational and speaking God, in terms of formal causality.

Two implications, both of which are key to Ward’s theology:

1. The “hermeneutic ontologies” of postmodern, continental philosophy (Vittimo, Derrida, Foucault, et al) seem to have much more in common with the Christian view than with the former view.

2. The latter, Christian view has a much greater openness to the “ontological scandal” prompted by Jesus when, gesturing toward a loaf of bread, he says, “This is my body.”

I continue to be so grateful for the theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy. It has scratched my postmodern itches, and given me a theology to believe in, especially as an Anglican / Episcopal priest.

One way in which this kind of theology in general, and Graham Ward in particular, encourages me is to remind me to be theologically humble and nonjudgemental, embracing the weakness and contingency of my own, and my church’s, theological claims about God and the world.

As is the case for theology in general, Radical Orthodoxy has its more traditional types, and its more revisionist types. Graham Ward, author of _Cities of God_, is clearly of the latter ilk.

And yet, I have long thought that there are two types of theological revisionists or theological subversives: those subverting from a position which is essentially outside the tradition, and those subverting from a position inside the tradition. I would rather not name the names of those (even within my own church) who fall into the first category, but Graham Ward, I think, falls in to the latter. Along with the likes of Origen and de Lubac, Ward’s sources of subversion are truly theological, and not secular.

To wit:

A holographic presence of St. Augustine permeates these pages [the pages of Cities of God] whispering of the two loves [amores] of which only one is holy, the other impure [immundus], the other sociable [socialis], the other self-centered [privatus] (Augustine). He whispers also of the two places in which these two amorous desires operate “the course of the two cities, the one heavenly and the other earthly, which are mingled together [permixtarum] from the beginning down to the end. Of these the earthly one has made for herself false gods whom she must worship by making sacrifice; but she who is heavenly and a pilgrim on earth does not make false gods, but is herself made by the true God of whom she herself must be the true sacrifice. Yet both alike either enjoy temporal good things, or are afflicted by temporal evils, but with diverse faith, diverse hope, diverse love, until they must be separated by the last judgement, and each must receive her own end, of which there is no end. About these ends of both we must now treat.” (Augustine, de civitate dei , Bk. XVIII

What a quotation. By the way, this quotation reminds me that the difference between Augustine’s two cities (the heavenly and the earthly, of God and of man), is not “good” and “bad” or “holy” and “evil” or “natural” and “gracious,” but rather “faithful / holy” and “fallen.” The point is that you cannot say that the City of Man is bad, since it is rather only fallen, potentially and in principle redeemed. It also falls short only to emphasize that the City of Man is natural, since as Augustine knew, the natural is always already charged, suffused, receptive to, divine grace.

The problem with the Roman Empire, the problem with the American Empire, is not that it is bad or natural, but rather that it is fallen.

Another thing. The heavenly city merely sojourns as a pilgrim on earth not because the earth is bad, or because the earth is going to “burn,” but rather because earth has yet to find her destiny as fully and finally permeated by that realm where God is fully present, that is, heaven. (NT Wright’s theology of overlapping dimensions: God’s and man’s.) To be a stranger on earth is, strictly speaking, to be a stranger on the earth which is not yet fully united to God’s realm. That is, it is to await the day when our earthly dwelling will also, fully and finally, be our heavenly dwelling.

In Graham Ward’s _Cities of God_, which after many years I finally have the leisure to focus on in an extended way (I’m on vacation in Seattle), he is forwarding what he calls the “analogical worldview.” Among other things, this perspective - shared by the Augustinian Christian tradition as well postmodern theorists such as Lacan, Foucault, Slajov Zizek, and the Jesuit Michel de Certeau - sees the things of this world (airplanes, bodies, hospitals, trees), as (a) text(s) which (like all texts) are culturally produced. As texts they call for interpretation.

Ward lays out six “shared characteristics” of “the analogical worldview:”

1. All human knowledge is culturally conditioned / mediated / embedded.

2. Human knowledge consists only in interpretation, not ontological claims. It does not claim to explain or even to describe.

3. Human knowledge, therefore, is indeterminate and open-ended.

4. There is no ideology-free zone.

5. Human beings have an “identity” which is open-ended and in flux.

6. Ontology is seen as “weak” or “hermeneutical,” as opposed to “a strong ontology of being as true identity.”

I love these six characteristics and am in full agreement with them, but I want to point out how they are all negative, or rooted in a hermeneutics of suspicion and finitude. That is, they are not actually theologically constructive. For that, Ward needs to be supplemented (as they do by him) by Milbank and Pickstock, who offer a theology of participation (rooted in neoplatonism) which “grounds” this analogical worldview in constructive, affirming, positive, cataphatic ways.

Put another way, in these six characteristics, Ward is making a much needed deconstructive move, but much more is needed than just this. The tradition, as non-identically repeated by Radical Orthodoxy, provides this “much more,” it seems to me.

Graham Ward concludes his Cities of God with this paragraph:

We constitute and continue to prepare for what the Psalmist in Psalm 107 calls a “city of habitation.” The city of habitation gathers out of every land, receives those spirits who have sunk, rescues the troubled from their distress, satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. We make visible a theological statement about embodied redemption. The body on the street of [Austin] accuses me, calls out, not like the blood of Abel, for vengeance, but like the blood of Christ for justice, for a new relationality. Alone I have no answer to give to my accuser. I cannot begin to conceive how I alone can change the economic, the political and the cultural promotion of social atomism. And I am as seduced by the next person by the bright new goods in the tastefully lit windows — the calls to how I should look, should dress, should accumulate, should spend, should protect my own best interests. The theologian’s task cannot be one which provides the solutions. The matrices of power — economic, cultural, and historical — that brought about and continue to produce alienation, solipsism, incommensurate and unequal differences, are complex. The theologian’s task is to keep alive the vision of better things — of justice, salvation, and the common good — and work to clarify the world-view conducive to the promotion of those things. As such, the theologian prophesies, amplifying the voice of the accuser. But the theologian is also mother, brother, friend, lover, son, child, church member, neighbor, cousin, taxpayer, resident, colleague. Alone I have no answer to give to my accuser, and because of his or her own silence, his or her own degradation, then I can pass by and, muttering an apology, pat my pockets of loose change. But something in me dies with such a denial. And so I must find a way not to be alone before that accusation. I must find a way of not being paralysed by the accusation, and frozen into the condition of being permanently accused. I must speak. I must respond. I must not be afraid of the differences. And I must find a way of joining with those who are also ashamed. There is the beginning: the reappropriation of analogical relations, the delineation of a theological cosmology, the constitution of cities of God, the recognition that I only belong to myself insofar as I belong to everyone else — insofar as I have been given to this situation, in this context, with these questions, and this task saeculum saeculorum. Given, thank God, by God, in God, suspended….

Followers of Bishop NT Wright (among whom I count myself, since he was a primary reason I left the PCA to become an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Texas) will know that his third (and final?) book in the series which began with Simply Christian which was then followed up with Surprised by Hope is called After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters, and is, among other things, the good bishop’s treatment of the Christian tradition of virtue.

This is good news, since (in my opinion) one of the most urgent tasks for the church in terms of its current vocation in our nihilistic culture of consumeristic emotivism is training the people in virtue, closely related to what the ancient church called paideia.

For a briefer taste of what Bishop Tom is up to here, check out this video lecture, given at Fuller Seminary a few months ago.

Here are some of my notes on this lecture:

For Aristotle, happiness (eudaimonia) which is our telos as human beings, is not something that “just happens” naturally. In fact, it is something which must be intentionally chosen, and then repeatedly put into practice, such that they eventually become “second nature.”

Nothing in this is inconsistent with how God graciously saves us and sanctifies us. As Reformed theology has always insisted, sanctification is synergistic.

NTW’s three proposals:

1. Rehabilitate virtue within Christian discourse, as opposed to Enlightenment and Romantic thought.

2. “Rethinking Aristotle into a Christian Key.” The eschatological vision of “new heaven & new earth” allows us to reframe Aristotle’s theory in a new and creative way, which other virtue thinkers have yet to grasp. Reframes “ethics” (as opposed to rules or consequence calculations, that is, deontology and utlitarianism / consequentialism) within the a theology of stewardship of creation. Substitute NH&NE (”new heavens & new earth”) & resurrection for eudaimonia.

a. The telos is the NH&NE, inauged by Jesus, and completed in the future.

b. This telos is achieved thru the kingdom-establishing work of Jesus.

c. Christian living in the present consists in anticipating the NE&NE through the Spirit-led practice of the acquiring of the theological virtues of faith, hope & love wh transcend & strengthen the cardinal virtues. These sustain our present existence which already reflect God’s healing & victory & glory of the future world. A true anticipation.

3. This challenges the church in such a way to sustain the mission to which it is called.

Pelonias in Hamlet: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man.”

Nobody knows the language of virtue as their mother tongue, but we do glimpse that country from afar from time to time, we pick up hints about how its language works, what patterns of brain & body are needed. The more we practice that language, the more easily familiar it will be.

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

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

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

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

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

This, below, is a piece I wrote for the monthly newsletter of St. Richard’s Episcopal Church, where I am currently serving as Assistant (to the) Rector.

At the center of our insanely hectic lives, there must be leisure. In the middle of our mechanistic, frenetic modern world there must be festivity. At the heart of our active church, at the foundation of our busy families, there must be deep rest. There must be, that is, if we are going to survive.

We must, individually and corporately, renew the festive center, by which I mean that, instead of allowing the “microwave culture” (a phrase of Rev. Mary’s which I heard her utter within five minutes of meeting her) in which we live to crowd out life as it was meant to be lived, we must put “first things first.” We must “begin with the end in mind.” (Yes, I am appealing to all you Stephen Covey types.)

And what is our end? The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) describes it as “enjoying God forever.” Does that sound restful to you? If not, if it sounds boring or scary, then you might be misunderstanding the nature of the God we worship.

The classical Christian tradition of virtue (which baptizes and builds upon the life and practice of the likes of Plato and Aristotle, who lived in 5^th century Athens) puts this same idea in terms of the beatific vision, in which humanity will one day participate in the very life of the Trinity in ways that we cannot now begin to imagine. (Remember that, even though “God does not have a body,” this does not mean that God is less than embodied, but rather infinitely more: God so radically transcends our material world and existence (since they cannot begin to contain God) that it is accurate to say that he does not have a body.

The divine, infinite life of that community of persons called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is described by theologians as a dance. (Sounds festive, does it not?) This dance is not just movement (though it does include something like that) but rather all kinds of loving, relational dynamics that we cannot imagine. Suffice to say that they greatest party you have ever experienced (complete with all the “fun stuff” you experienced at that party) pales in comparison.

What’s crazy about this picture is that, according to classical Christian theology, this dance is what we are invited into, and we are invited into it now.

Learning this divine dance is what we are doing in the liturgy. To quote Peter Leithart (from Against Christianity),

Worship trains us in the steps for walking, for dancing rightly through life. Christian cult trains us I the protocols of life in the presence of God, and thereby, since all life is in the presence of God, acclimates the worship to Christian culture…. Christian ritual displays the world how we believe and hope it will be one day. Ritual displays to public view who goes where, how each of us fits into the whole, how the members of the body are knit into one while remaining many, how the melodic lines of each individual life harmonize into a communal symphony…. Through the rituals of worship, we begin to realize together who we are together: of course we are a sinful people who needs to break away from the world, to make a weekly Exodus from Egypt; of course we are an ignorant people who needs to be instructed and reminded each week of our language and our story; of course we are the children of the Heavenly Father, who has given all things freely in Hin Son and displays that gift in the gift of food; of course, we have been ingrafted into the community of the Trinity, for each worship service begins and ends in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and ends with the triune name spoken over us.

Is this how you imagine and understand what we do every Sunday morning at St. Richard’s? Here is true festivity and true rest.

Peter Leithart, in Against Christianity, writes:

Modernity is a revolt against ritual, and the modern city is an unprecedented attempt to form a civic community without a festive center. (p 79)

As Peter Leithart argues in this book, the church and her liturgical worship are the true festive center of human life, activity, and culture. In addition to countless other things we could say about the church’s liturgy, this fact of church-as-festive-center is why we worship with wine in the Eucharist.

What are some practical steps that leaders in the church can take to renew this center of festivity to our lives?

I am encouraged by what I experienced this last Thursday and Friday at our monthly diocesan gathering of curates. One of my new curate friends was telling me that I should read some contemporary author on politics and natural rights theory, and while doing this I could tell that he had a very negative view of “postmodernism.” As I heard him talk, I asked if he was influenced by Francis Schaeffer, and sure enough, he is a big fan.

This is the same basic conversation I have been having for almost 15 years now, so I thought I would just state what I mean by “postmodernism.”

What I mean by it is simply antifoundationalism. It is basically the admission that the modern followers of Neitzche, including Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, have successfully put forth a genealogical critique of modern (and therefore, secular) ethics, showing it to be grounded not in some ontological reality but rather in various versions of a will-to-power. This move is known as a hermeneutic of suspicion.

Now,  “good postmodernists” both agree with these post-Neitzcheans, and disagree with them. They agree that there is value in genealogy as a way to see where so many of the conditions of our time which seem to us as “self-evident truths” actually came from, but they disagree that this history is just a chain of arbitrary transitions. Rather history is a story of “constant, contingent shifts either toward or away from … the true human telos.” (Theology and Social Theory 279)

The good postmodernists agree in the validity of an ontology of difference, but this difference is not necessarily violent, not “equivocal at variance,” but rather rooted, ultimately, in the difference within the Trinity and therefore within humanity (as image of God). This difference, then, is, at its truest level, a harmonious difference.

These two presuppositions of secular postmodernism (genealogical historicism and an ontology of difference), therefore are embraced and modified by us “good postmodernists.” The third premise of secular postmodernism, which flows from the other two, and is utterly rejected by Christian theology, is ethical nihilism. This premise is more complicated, since almost none of the contemporary or recent neo-Nietzcheans actually embrace this nihilism. Actually, they sneak in, through the back door, an ahistorical Kantian self whose freedom must then be protected by someone … someone, that is, with power. Thus, for these neo-Nietzcheans, “the protection of the equality of freedom … collapses into the promotion of an inequality of power.” (Theology and Social Theory, 279)

By the way, there are planty of foundationalists in the Episcopal Church, but there are a whole, whole lot more in the PCA.

I just saw a really thought provoking (though not “perfect”) documentary which winsomely tells Gene Robinson’s story called “The Bible told me so.” Recently a friend “came out of the closet” with me in a private conversation. The Episcopal Church General Convention did its thing a week or so ago, with the rest of the communion beginning to respond. There are people of same-sex orientation both at my former home parish (some of whom are extremely close friends), as well as at the church were I am currently serving as Assistant to the Rector. I have dear friends (including my parents) at The Falls Church in Northern Virginia, a parish which left their Episcopal bishop over issues related to this. Many others I know are struggling with this complex set of issues. So, I thought it might be time for me once again to clarify “where I am” on all of this (including to myself).

My own interpretation of Scripture, in light of tradition and reason, is pretty much the same as that of Richard B. Hays at Duke Divinity School. This is my “default view,” and I have blogged extensively about it here.

This position is quite traditional on the broad spectrum of things.

As important as the role of my own interpretation Scripture is in all of this, however, I am motivated more by ecclesiology (which, of course, ultimately comes from Scripture via tradition and reason). To go down the revisionist road on same sex issues would violate the trust of our African bishops in the Anglican Communion. It would trample on the catholicity of the church.

You might ask, What about the homosexual persons right here in our own backyard? We must minister to them and embrace them and challenge them with the Gospel. I often find myself quoting Tim Keller who responds to the question “If I become a Christian will Jesus tinker with my lifestyle?” by saying, “To be a Christian, you must make Jesus the reason you get out of bed in the morning.” The Gospel runs deep, deeper than anything else in this world.

I think that is much of what is going on here. In Romans 2:1, St. Paul basically looks at the Judaizing types and says “You religious types who are accostomed to judging others from a distance are condemned because you do the same things.” Wow. I am a “religious type.” And Paul is correct: I do the same things. Am I totally pure sexually? How can I judge others?

Rather than judge, I am totally convinced of the need to listen. I am a big believer in the listening process which was proposed by recent Anglican Instruments of Communion over the last few years, a process which, depressingly, seems not to be “working.” And yet, being in listening relationships of trust with homosexual persons has done more to help me in all of this than anything else in the last couple of years. Such relationships do not make the issues go away, but they do recast them dramatically.

Hey, I might be wrong in terms of my own interpretation of Scripture. I hope that I am wrong. I want to be wrong on this one, just like I hope that all people are ultimately, somehow saved (even though I cannot see how that can be squared with Scripture).

I am grateful to have a bishop who is committed to the Windsor Process, and to the Covenant as a way of deepening the unity among our bishops and provinces globally. I am grateful that our bishop’s close relationship to the Archbishop of Southern Malawi (where our diocese works to dig and construct clean water wells for the poorest of the world’s poor) is one of the factors which compelled him to vote as he did recently at General Convention. That is exactly how things should be; that it what “communion” means.

All of the above comments apply to the Church. When it comes, however, to how to think about homosexuality out in the secular world, in terms of “the culture wars,” I inisist on the importance of thinking about this theologically.

The church is its own body politic and we are in a cultural moment in which the nation state wants to privatize the church and discipline the populace (including the body of Christ) through violence. This is the deep heresy which causes much of our confusion about homosexuality. This heresy must be resisted.

In fact, I have more in common with someone (such as ++Rowan Williams) who identifies and fights against this deep heresy but who has (or has had) revisionist tendencies on this particular sub-issue  than I do with someone (such as almost all conservative evangelicals, including almost all of the people in the PCA as well as in CANA) who is oblivious to this heresy which is ripping our culture apart at the deepest levels, but who holds an “orthodox view” on the particular issue of same-sex erotic behavior.

The main thing for the church to focus on is not “the culture wars” but rather the discipline of our own members such that true virtue is cultivated for the common good, as leaven in a loaf of bread. This has nothing to do with violence, except insofar as violence is something to be resisted and repudiated.

More than anything, we must hear and heed Bishop Wright’s call to pray:

I have said many times that, for all those involved in this whole messy situation, the main priority at the moment is prayer. That remains my conviction and my plea. Prayer for the church; for our beloved Communion and the many other Christians with whom we seek to deepen fellowship; for Archbishop Rowan; for wisdom, courage, clarity and vision; for God’s glory, the extension of his kingdom, and the power of the gospel and the Spirit at work in hearts, lives, communities and throughout our world.

Arnold I. Davidson (U. Chicago), in his introduction to the thought of the magisterial intellectual historian Pierre Hadot, summarizes on major stratum of Hadot’s thought as “contamination.” (Philosophy as a Way of Life 4). Contamination is the idea that, seemingly from the very beginning of Christian doctrine, any “pristine” forms of thought quickly – if not immediately – get synthesized and meshed with “non-Christian” ideas, from such various sources as Greek mystery religions, ancient mythologies, neoplatonic philosophy, etc.

Davidson points out that for schools of thought such as Aristotelianism, Platonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, this kind of “contamination” is a real problem.

But not so for Christianity, at least not in the same way. Why not? Because Christianity, from the very beginning, is always already contaminated. Just read Paul’s writings (and his life and times in Acts) in the NT. Christianity is already, just a couple of decades after the death of Christ, messily interacting with Judaism. And Paul opts, time and time again, for pragmatic ways and means: circumcising Timothy, taking on Jewish vows (in Acts, he does this not once but twice, the second time explicitly to show his Jewish detractors just how Jewish he is), etc. But, even prior to this, the Incarnation itself is already “contaminated.” God contaminates himself by taking on human flesh. Indeed, this kind of messiness is always already packed into the essence of the Christian religion.

Pluralistic diversity is at the very center and foundation of the Christian religion (not to mention the Christian God). May the denizens of pluralistic secularism come home to the true pluralistic community of the members of the body of Christ in the eucharistic community of the church.

There are two kinds of tradition which play important roles in the life of the church for the world.

First, there is (oral) “Tradition,” which, as St. Basil says, refers primarily to the handing down of ritual actions in the liturgical worship of the church. This kind of tradition is of course in theory subject to Scripture, though it is hard to imagine how it could “contradict Scripture.” On the other hand, there is a sense in which this kind of tradition is prior to Scripture in that, since time immemorial, it has conditioned the public reading of Scripture in specific, proscribed ways. The public reading of Scripture, in other words, is embedded or enfolded within this ritual action which is the church’s liturgy. (Scripture itself refers to this kind of Tradition.)

Second, a very different type of tradition is what Alisdair MacIntyre (and others) have described in the following terms (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue p 221):

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

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

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

In his article about the Church of Scotland’s recent decision to “appoint” its first openly practicing homosexual minister, Westminster Seminary’s Carl Trueman argues that the decision of some evangelical churches to remain in the C of S but not to associate (including financially) with the denominiation or with non-orthodox parishes is “strange ecclesiology.” And I agree.

However, Truman’s own ecclesiology, it seems to me, is just as strange, in its advocacy of separating from denominations when they don’t conform to one’s own idea of “orthodoxy.”

It seems to me that this approach (inscribed into the history of Protestantism, and, in its own way, post-Tridentine Romanism) is problematic on three levels:

First, who gets to say what orthodoxy is? Some arbitrary conglomeration of individuals and congregations who band together on the basis of agreement? On the contrary, orthodoxy is the rule of faith, which is concretely embodied in the creeds of the church in her liturgy. Beyond this, we are called to engage in an ongoing, open-ended discussion of real listening and give and take. This discussion has a name: tradition.

Second, and related, the very idea of a denomination is fatally problematic. That is to say, efforts to organize the church on the basis of any doctrinal content other than what all Christians believe amounts to ideological gnosticism, and not the witness of proclamation of the Christian church. It guts the church of her primary way of imaging the God of which she is an icon: unity. (Within this unity of God and analogously of the church there is of course great diversity. Hence the presence of various interlocutors in the ongoing dialogue.)

Third, as NT scholar (and friend) Daniel Kirk points out here, denomination wars aggravate and encourage Gentile-like (and Pharisee-like) conflict before a watching world. This is the very kind of division and power-play that Jesus and Paul rail against. (Of course the church has always been full of sinners, but denominationalism raises this kind of conflict to a new level.)

What binds the church together in unity is her eucharistic liturgy, which necessarily involves Scripture, bishops, and creeds (among other things). I do believe in something called “church discipline” (as I have posted on here) but this is quite different than breaking the unity of the church at a structural level. (What I mean by “unity,” by the way, is eucharistic unity: sharing the eucharist around the same table.)

In his Theology, Rhetoric, and Manuduction, Peter Candler “defines” participation and representation (p. 34):

By ‘participation’ I refer to an ontological principle by which creatures ‘are’ by analogy to the way in which God ‘is,’ but also the notion that sacra doctrina is a kind of scientia which participates in God’s knowledge of himself, and is therefore not something superadded to God.

And again,

Representation … is a matter of immediate apprehension by virtue of an exterior sign, and is removed from the variables of time and human communities. As such, representation is the fundamental philosophical and theological strategy of modernity.

I have been trying to map out the genealogy of modern Thomist movements (using Fergus Kerr’s Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians as well as The Cambridge Companion to Christian Thought), and here is what I found:

1. Leo XIII decided to “revive scholastic philosophy and theology which had fallen largely out of use,” and issues Aeterni Patris (1879), to “advocate the return of the church to ‘the wisdom of St. Thomas.’” (“Thomism [1], modern, Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, 703).

2. Desire Mercier, at the Higher Institute of Philosophy (which he himself established in Louvain in 1889) was able to bring (the study of) Thomism and scholasticism into dialogue with the contemporary scene, largely due to the fact that he was working in the vernacular (French), as opposed to many of his contemporaries at monastic schools, etc., who were required to write in Latin.

3. Thus the study of Thomism and scholasticism begins to gain currency in the late 19 century. Enter Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson, who (were perceived to have) resonated with many aspects of Thomism. Many Catholic thinkers begin to be attracted to them.

4. But due to the non-Catholic aspects of some of their thought, they also cause something of a scare, and this prompts  a reaction (including Pius VII’s Humani Generis in 1950). Garrigou-Langrange and Gardiel, both 20th century Thomists who were reacting against (the catholic attraction to) Blondel and Bergson, both ground the mind’s immediate grasp of reality in the stable concept of being abstracted from the object of sense experience, thus securing a longed for stability. This sounds like representation to me. Garrigou constructed “a Thomistic metaphysics and philosophy of God grounded upon the three degrees of abstraction he had inherited from Cajetan, the 16th-century Dominican commentator on Thomas.” (“Thomism (1), modern” 704) Maritain (like Garrigou, a Dominican) was deeply influenced by Garrigou (especially his Cajetan view of the three degrees of abstraction), but also by Bergson (an influence he never superceded). Maritain is a “systematic neo-Thomist.”

5. Etiene Gilson. Gilson, the hallmark of whose work is a close textual attentiveness to the medievals (Augustine, Bonaventure, Thomas, and Duns Scotus) opposed Maritain’s proclivity toward abstraction as a basis for knowledge, and claimed that this kind of neo-sholasticism is not Thomistic. Gilson limited his work, however, by and large, to historical study of Thomas’ text.

6. Balthassar, de Lubac, Congar are more properly thought of as humanist Thomists, following Gilson, and are critical of Thomist scholasticism, including its Baroque and Twentieth Century retrievals.

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

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

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

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

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

Some encouraging news from the world of the Episcopal Church.

Dr. Phil Turner, Dr. Ephraim Radner (member of the Covenant Design Group), and Dr. Christopher Seitz, along with about fifteen bishops in the Episcopal Church (including our own +Don Wimberly) have issued a statement which insists that the diocese (with its bishop and standing committee) is the “chief organ of unity” in the church. By “church” here the document intends the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion, and the historic church catholic. This is the view, for example of St. Ignatius, who saw the unity of the church in the bishop, surrounded by the bishop’s presbyters. (One source on which the paper is based is a letter from ++Rowan, written several months ago.)

As I have written elsewhere, this view is utterly consistent not just with the proposed Covenant, but also with the Windsor Report itself (together with the documents and the ecclesiology on which it is based).

Why is this important? And why now?

Because one of the things which the Epicopal Church General Convention will be dealing with this summer (even if by way of avoidance of the issue) is the proposed Anglican Covenant. Many bishops and leaders in the church have already predicted a rejection of the covenant by the General Convention. The argument of this paper, though, is that if this happens, individual bishops / dioceses will have the right to voluntarily affirm the covenant to Canturbury and the rest of the Communion.

One interesting point made in the paper is that, since membership in the Anglican Communion appears in the Preamble to the Episcopal Church’s constitution, a breach of that membership (something which a rejection of the covenant could bring about) would amount to a nullification of the church’s constitution itself.

Please pray for the Church, pray “for the peace of Jerusalem.”

For the introduction to this series, go here.

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion to this series.