Tomorrow I have the great joy & honor of speaking at a conference sponsored by the Communion Partners. Humbling and so exciting!
I have been laboring at my talk for a couple of weeks now, and in the main I am excited about it. Since, however, I missed the deadline for lining up audio-visual support prior to my talk, I am going to post two quotations, which I plan to use in my talk here.
… Prayer … is the chief context in which the irreducible threeness of God becomes humanly apparent to the Christian. It does so because—as one ceases to set the agenda and allows room for God to be God—the sense of the human impossibility of prayer becomes more intense (Rom 8:26), and drives one to comprehend the necessity for God’s own prior activity in it. Strictly speaking, it is not I who autonomously prays, but God (the HS) who prays in me, and so answers the eternal call of the “Father,” drawing me by various painful degrees into the newly expanded life of “Sonship.” There is, then, an inherent reflexivity in the divine, a ceaseless outgoing and return of the desiring God; and insofar as I welcome and receive this reflexivity, I find that it is the HS who “interrupts” my human monologue to a (supposedly) monadic God; it is the HS who finally thereby causes me to see God no longer as patriarchal threat but as infinite tenderness; but it is also the HS who first painfully darkens my prior certainties, enflames and checks my own desires, and so invites me ever more deeply into the life of redemption in Christ. In short, it is this “reflexivity in God” this Holy Spirit, that makes incarnate life possible.–Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 42.
If same-sex marriages are indeed to be equal in every way to heterosexual marriages, then all reference to the creation of humanity as male and female will have to be excised from the teaching and liturgy of the Episcopal Church. It is entirely in keeping with this logic that the traditional preface to the marriage rite has been dropped in the alternative marriage rite adopted at the General Convention. The church cannot be called the bride of Christ without causing offense, and the maleness of Jesus is inherently problematic for the new teaching.
Before coming to the 2018 convention, I had not heard the news that when Jesus returns we do not know how gender will be expressed, if at all, in the glorified humanity that will appear. Apparently, in the new creation cisgender identity will, along with every tear, be wiped away.
The theology and doctrine of the church are like pick-up sticks or, as our Roman Catholic brethren sometimes put it, “a seamless garment.” If you change one doctrine, there are a host of other doctrines that must be changed as well in order to be consistent and coherent. —
Leander Harding, “Being Disarmed.”
Also,
here‘s some pics of the NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. (My claim is that, if one meditates on the rings of Saturn as captured in these photographs, one can appreciate the plausibility of neoplatonism–that the most real things in the world are not physical–at a deeper level.)
This past Sunday at Christ Church South we had a really fun “Sunday School” (aka, “Christian Formation”) Class during the 10AM hour, right before the service of Holy Eucharist. Fun, and riveting. It was a lively discussion, and I admit that some of what I said, some of the “dopamine bombs” I dropped, may have caused a bit of confusion. Hence some clarification might be in order.
Let me back up a bit.
Last year at Christ Church South, 31 adults were confirmed (or received, or “reaffirmed”) into the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Way of following Christ. What a joy it is to “do life” and to walk with Christ, together with these brothers & sisters in Christ, these new friends who share in our Eucharistic community!
And yet, Christ Church (in Tyler, Texas) exists and functions in the midst of a particular cultural context. One dimension of that context is that East Texas is what you might call the “Bible Belt,” or a particular region in the “Bible Belt.” This means that the dominant cultural assumptions in East Texas are shot through and penetrated by (a watered down) conservative, Protestant life theology.
Now, this is not all bad. Even conservative, Protestant fundamentalists are sisters and brothers in Christ, and, as a fellow follower of Christ, I rejoice in our common fellowship in the Lord. To be sure, the purpose of this blog post is not to denigrate or to insult these fellow believers in any way.
And yet, in order for me to clarify a couple of points which came up in last Sunday’s class, I must differentiate my position from some convictions which are held in some quarters of the conservative, Protestant, evangelical world. There are two areas, in particular, which I have in mind: the relationship between the human soul and body, and the issue of dichotomy versus trichotomy vis-à-vis the human soul.
First, the human soul and its relationship to the human body. Now, I don’t have time to write an entire tome on this issue (nor do I desire to do so). The specific claim I made yesterday, in the context of robust discussion surrounding the question of what “happens” to the soul after the death of the individual human person, is that the Hebrew language—the language in which (what Christians call) the Old Testament was originally written—has no term for soul. (Ironically, during the liturgy, the congregation read Psalm 116:1-8 together, and in one of these versed the word “soul” is used!)
I do not deny that English translations of the OT employ the word “soul” to translate a certain Hebrew term. Nor am I arguing that such a move is an erroneous translation.
The Hebrew term which is often translated as “soul” is the Hebrew nephesh. As is often the case, here it is wise to go back to the beginning of our story, and to attend to the very first (or at least one of the first) instance(s) of this term in the Hebrew Bible. I have in mind Gen. 2:7: “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” The phrase “living creature” here is the Hebrew nephesh haya. (The term nephesh is the same term which pops up in Ps 116:8.)
Gen 2:7, by the way, is “riffed on” by Paul in 1 Cor 15:45: “Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” Here Paul is saying that Christ is kind of like the “new and improved Adam.” Now, the word for “being” here is the Greek term psyche (as in “psychology,” the logos of the soul). Paul translates—or rather he quotes the Greek Septuagint (LXX) translation of—nephesh in Gen 2:7 as psyche.
Paul uses a Greek concept, that of the individual human soul, the psyche, to communicate the truth of the Hebrew Scriptures. This kind of thing happens all the time in the apostolic teaching of the apostles, contained in the NT. It is worth remembering that it is the Greek LXX which the apostles—including the Gospel writers—authoritatively quote.
But the point is that psyche is a Greek concept. It is different from the Hebrew nephesh, which really means something closer to “life” or “creature” or “living thing.”
This is what I mean when I claim that the Hebrew language—unlike Greek—contains no term for our concept of soul. There is an important point to grasp here, and it bears upon questions such as “what happens to the soul after one dies?” To “cut to the chase” in this brief blog post, that the Hebrew Bible has no concept of the soul is a cautionary warning, in my opinion, that we ought to beware of certain overemphases on the idea of the soul “going to heaven” when one dies. This is especially true when it comes to the sustained stress of St. Paul, a brilliant first century Jewish thinker who understood the Greek mind and also sat at the feet of Gamaliel, precisely on the resurrection of the body, not least in 1 Cor 15, the very context in which he quotes Gen 2:7.
The second point of clarification has to do with trichotomy versus dichotomy.
It was Charles Schofield, associated with the history of Dallas Theological Seminary, in the notes of his Schofield Study Bible, who did much to popularize the idea that the human person consists of three fundamental “parts:” body, soul, and spirit. I am confident that Pentecostal and charismatic emphasis on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit also plays into this, along a separate but related trajectory of thought and Christian culture. The result: most folks in East Texas just assume this position—that the human person is trichotomous—to be true.
And yet, none of the church fathers held this view. Neither did Thomas Aquinas. Neither did CS Lewis. Now, maybe Schofield and the Pentecostals are correct, and the weight of premodern Christian tradition is wrong … but I seriously doubt it.
The truth, in my opinion, is that there are many “parts” to the soul: spirit, heart, mind, will, memory, imagination, etc. But this does not undermine the fact that, in its most fundamental constituent parts, the human person is dichotomous, having only two parts: body and soul. Just as the body has many “subparts” (head, neck, torso, kneecap, eardrum), so does the soul (will, memory, etc.).
This article (written by me) was published in the Crucifer, the semi-monthly newsletter of my parish, Christ Church (Tyler).
On page 446 of the beloved Book of Common Prayer, we read that “The ministry of reconciliation, which has been committed by Christ to his Church, is exercised through the care each Christian has for others…. The Reconciliation of a Penitent [the official name of the rite under discussion] is available for all who desire it.”
Further, on page 317 of the same Book of Common Prayer, we read:
And if, in your preparation [for Holy Communion] you need help and counsel then go and open your grief to a discreet and understanding priest, and confess your sins, that you may receive the benefit of absolution, and spiritual counsel and advice, to the removal of scrupal and doubt, the assurance of pardon, and the strengthening of your faith.
My experience as an Episcopal priest over the last eight years of ordained ministry in this church is that precious few parishioners in our Episcopal parishes makes use of this resource in the BCP, to their detriment. After all, as the Anglican dictum goes, “All may; some should; none must.”
And yet, my main point in this super brief Crucifer article is a “report” of sorts from the ground, from the “trenches.” Over the past several months, we here at Christ Church have seen the number of Confessions (to a priest) skyrocket. We are seeing “revival” of sorts of the Rite of Reconciliation. It is so very encouraging.
Most encouraging of all? On average the folks making use of this rite are under age 30. Thanks be to God! May this encouraging sign for the future only increase and continue.
