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?

Peter Leithart, in Against Christianity (p 89), writes

… Calvin was fatally wrong in suggesting that [the Roman Church's] Galatianism was found wherever there is an emphasis on ritual per se. Calvin notwithstanding, the redemptive-historical move that the New Testament announces is not from ritual to non-ritual, from an Old Covenant economy of signs to a New Covenant economy beyond signs. The movement instead is from rituals and signs of distance and exclusion (the temple veil, cutting of the flesh, sacrificial smoke ascending to heaven, laws of cleanliness) to signs and rituals of inclusion and incorporation (the rent veil, the common baptismal bath, the common meal)…. Rituals are as essential to the New Covenant order as to the Old; they are simply different rituals.

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.

Bishop Tom Wright’s expansion of the Jesus Prayer:

“Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, set up your kingdom in our midst.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon us sinners.

Holy Spirit, breath of God, renew us and all the world. Amen.“

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

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

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

To quote Reno,

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

Joel Green writes in this Festschrift to Richard Hays about the event of Pentecost in Acts 2:

“I will urge that Luke’s account constitutes a profoundly theological and political statement displacing Babel - and Jerusalem - and Rome centered versions of a unified world in favor of an altogether different sort of community. Unity is found at Pentecost, but not by reviving a pre-Babel homogeneity. With the outpouring of the Spirit, koinonia is possible not by the dissolution of multiple languages but rather by embodiment in a people generated by the Spirit, gathered in the name of Jesus Christ.” (pg. 199)

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.

For years I have been saying that “Prayer is God reaching forth to God” and drawing us up into that process within the Trinity. This is a quotation of someone, though I can’t remember whom (maybe Kallistos Ware?).

Fr. Robert Barron, Catholic Priest and director of Word on Fire, says (in this video) that prayer is quieting ourselves to the point where we can overhear the conversation that the Son and the Father, through the Spirit, are having, about you.

I have finally finised Rupert Shortt’s Rowan’s Rule (man, it is tough to finish a book with an 18-month old daughter!). I have blogged about it here a few times, but, as I thought about what to say about the book sort of as a summary, I realized that the following quotation, found on the last two pages of the book (pp 424-425), would suffice. Written in Latin, this is the tribute, composed by Richard Jenkyns, of the honorary Doctorate of Civil Law presented to ++Rowan at Oxford University in 2005:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity; and in various places the Bible warns us that the glory of this world is deceitful and transitory. And yet the office of bishop has a certain splendour about it, so that the traditional nolo episcopari used once to seem somewhat insincere. But these days a prelate’s life is less gracious and more burdensome, and so that man is especially to be praised who has the chance to spend his life in the shady groves of the academe, and yet consents to undertake the business of administering the Church. Moreover, the Archbishop of Canterbury has to unite opposites: he holds the first place among the Queen’s ministers in the order of precedence, and yet is required to despise worldly success; he is most exalted and most lowly, the shpherd of shepherds, the servant of the servants of God. We are indeed fortunate that at a time when the Church faces difficult challenges, we have a guide and governor who exhibits so many virtues. His writings embrace both divinity and human life, since as well as producing profound and penetrating theological studies he has written poems of subtle and delicate feeling. The Latin vates means both bard and seer; he merits that label, since he writes abotu God with a poetic imagination, while his verse finds the spirit of God in people and places. “Behold the great priest:” he has the mind of a theologian, a saintly smile, the eye of a poet, and the beard of a prophet. He knows that an honorary doctorate is to be reckoned of small worth and to be classed with that vanity of which Ecclesiastes wrote; he asks not for our praise but for our prayes. Yet it is right and proper that we should bestow such honours as are in our power on a good and wise man; and so it is with sincere warmth that we offer him this pledge of our affection and symbol of our hope….

See this thought provoking article by Brooklyn Presbyterian minister Matt Brown.

The day before yesterday was my last day as a Starbucks partner (after three and a half years). On so many levels, I will miss it (partner discounts, unlimited espresso shots while working, the regular customers in my store, my many partner friends, etc.).

However, even in my two days of subsequent freedom, I am realizing what is so destructive about the life of a Starbucks partner. The lack of any long-term pattern in one’s day to day, week to week schedule makes it impossible to live by any kind of rhythm or routine or rule. This is just one of many ways in which our capitalistic, publicly traded “free market” lifestyle of unbridled, consumeristic desire destroys true shalom.

Our “standard of living” as (post-)modern Americans is at an all-time high, but our quality of life an all-time low.

I am thankful to be “post-Starbucks” for many reasons, but cheif among them is that I no longer have to open my store at 4:15 AM on this random day, and then close it at 11:00 PM on that random day, with no rhyme or reason or pattern to the scheduling madness.

Which means that I can renew my efforts to read, pray, meditate, and run in disciplined ways, like yesterday and today, when I was able to pray the Daily Office, meditate, and exercise.

For me this kind of rule or rhythm is the foundation of everything else I do.

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

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

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

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

More from Rupert Shortt’s autobiography of Rowan Williams, Rowan’s Rule (p 346-7):

“Richard Hooker … thought that the ordering of the household of faith required what Rowan terms ‘contemplative pragmatism:’ ‘pragmatic’ because sin makes the Church more muddled than the tidy-minded are prepared to allow, but ‘contemplative’ as well, owing to the ‘hidden action of God beneath the generally unbroken surface of the world’s processes.’ Hooker habitually warned his hearers of what an inexact science theology is. As Rowan reminds us, George Herbert gave a similar warning about spiritual experience. In other words, there should be room in the Church for those hanging on by their fingertips, as well as for the firm in faith.”

“Bishop Stephen Sykes once gave a crisp account of why he feels both attracted to and repelled by Anglicanism. On the positive side, he listed four chief strengths: a ‘quiet and confident Catholicism,’ an openness to a range of spiritual traditions, the exercise of authority with consent, and a developing baptismal ecclesiology. His dislikes included ‘the triviality an superficiality into which our eclectic openness can fall,’ the proneness of Anglicanism to fashionable causes and ‘the all-consuming ruthlessness of the campaigners, for whom politics is all.” – Rupert Shortt, Rowan’s Rule: the Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I was particularly interested in this comment about “baptismal ecclesiology,” since the absence of such a thing is one of the main reasons (you might say “the efficient cause”) of why I finally left Presbtyerianism.

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.

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

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

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

After which each individual ordinand responded,

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

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.)

I have a great deal of respect for Peter Rollins. Both of his two recent books are provocative and stimulating. What I appreciate about him is that he brings his knowledge of “postmodern” theory (Zizek, Derrida, Levinas, and others) to bear on Christian theology. Rightly so.

However, when it comes to what I regard as “the great divide” in the Church and in Christianity, Peter Rollins falls clearly on one side.

One side says that our worship is an expression of our theology and our convictions. The other side says that worship is something that we simply inherit from the past (as tradition or in Greek paradosis, ie, “handing down”) and then (yes, critically) reflect on that received tradition and ask questions like “In light of this way of worshiping, what can we realize about God and creation?”

Rollins clearly lands of the former side. Which means that he, along with, perhaps, the rest of the “emergent movement,” thinks that worship is, at the end of the day, an expression of our theology.

I disagree. I, along with the bulk of the catholic tradition in both the east and the west, think that “the law of worship is the law belief.” Lex orandi, lex credendi. Our theology flows from our worship, and not vice-versa.

For default Lutherans like myself (for such are almost all modern evangelicals) “perfection” is a bad word when it comes to thinking about the Christian life.

And yet, this term is crucial to the way in which the tradition conceives of virtue and the meaning of human life.

As Alisdair McIntyre points out in After Virtue, St. Thomas followed Aristotle in seeing man (or humanity) as a “functional concept.” That is, man is like a hammer or a watch. A watch has a certain purpose or telos: to accurately keep track of time. If a watch performs this function well, we say that it is a good watch, and so also for a hammer which drives nails well.

Now, when it comes to being human, St. Thomas says something similar. Our telos is to grow into the habitual worship of God. Never fully or finally completed, perhaps, on this side of the grave, this journey is nevertheless consummated in the beatific vision, when we will behold God (historically “to see God,” as in Christ’s words in the sermon on the mount, have been understood to be a kind of intellectual beholding) “as he is,” “face to face.”

Now, I think that this perspective sheds much light on the difficult issue of “universal salvation” and many issues related to it. For it is perhaps the case that we can say many, many things about all people, all human beings, which indicate a precious and deep relatedness to God: all are created in God’s image; all are children of God; all have inherent to their personhood “the seeds of the divine logos” (to quote Justin Martyr).

All humans have all of this, but all of this is not enough. For none of this is our telos. All these things are good and wonderful starting points, and these things do in fact indicate that we all belong to God. However, what God wants for us, what God created us to grow into, is this habitual worship of God. This is our purpose; this is our fulfilment.

If a human being does this well, then there is a sense in which she is “a good person.” This is what the tradition (Aristotle, Thomas, Kenneth Kirk) call eudaimonia, “happiness,” “blessedness,” “well-being,” or “success.” This is, I want to suggest, a good way to understand the biblical idea of “salvation.” In which case those who fail to realize this telos are “not saved” in the sense that they are not reaching “perfection,” not reaching their God-given purpose.

This can help to explain how all human beings might be deeply beloved of God (and this despite the reality of the fall), etc., while still preserving the biblical (and historical) sense that not all are, finally in the end, fully “saved.”

Imagine that I am a herione addict who is also a baptized Christian. Imagine that I am hanging out with my fiancee, also a baptized Christian, at a very loud bar or club in downtown New York City.

My fiancee is bodily present with me, but I am not very aware of her, for the music is too loud, there are too many partying people shouting and moving all around us, and I have herione coursing through my veins. She is there, but I am almost totally unaware of her.

Is God there in the club with me? Yes, he is, at least as fully so as my wife is there with me. Psalm 139 assures us of this: “You hem me in, behind and before” (v5); “If I ascend into heaven, you are there, and if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there” (v8). (St. Paul makes a similar point with respect to Christ in I Cor 6: the Christian who unites himself to a prostitute drags Christ into that relationship with him. There is no escaping the presence of Christ, it seems.) Truly, God is there in the club with me, but I am (almost?) totally unaware of his presence.

What happens when I leave the club, and walk away from the loud, coursing music? I become a bit more aware of God and his presence in my life. When the drugs begin to wear off the next day and I sober up, I become more aware yet still.

However, let’s say that, a day or two later, my thoughts are racing with fears, anxieties, and decisions I am facing. Well, those things are just like the loud music in the club and the herione that I was using to escape from reality: they are serving as a distraction. They are distracting me from the awareness that God is with me, that God is in me, that God is the one in whom I “live and move and have [my] being” (Acts 17).

What is contemplative prayer? In his Christian Meditation James Finley articulates over and over again, in many different ways, that meditation or contemplative prayer is the discipline of peeling away these distractions, like the layers of an onion. You get rid of the herione, you get rid of the loud music, you get rid of the thoughts about the decisions which are confronting you.

You try to do this for perhaps 10 minutes a day (at first, at least), in the context of a psalm or a Scripture passage or something which draws you closer to Christ.

When a thought (or a bodily sensation, such as an itch or hunger) comes into your consciousness, you (discipline yourself through lots of failure and practice to try to) neither grasp onto the thought nor to violently reject it. Rather, simply allow it to enter your consciousness, and then to float away. Watch the thought come, and then watch it leave. Gently bring yourself back to … back to … what? Back to nothingness.

Or at least as close to nothingness as I as a creature can get. A state of openness and emptiness, where you are not thinking (or trying not to think) about anything.

Why? What is so special about this disciplined sustaining of a posture and attitude of emptiness? It is simply this: when all the layers of the onion are peeled away (the noise, the thoughts, etc.), when everything is gone, there is still one thing that remains: God in his loving presence. If, that is, Psalm 139 is true.

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.”