I'm pulling for Jerome Bettis to win this year's Super Bowl. Cheering for the Steelers was made much easier when the team showed up in Detroit yesterday wearing Notre Dame Green with #6 on them (Bettis' number at ND).
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Cheer, Cheer for Old Jerome Bettis!!
I'm pulling for Jerome Bettis to win this year's Super Bowl. Cheering for the Steelers was made much easier when the team showed up in Detroit yesterday wearing Notre Dame Green with #6 on them (Bettis' number at ND).
Monday, January 23, 2006
New Audio Sermons
I have just added some new audio sermons from my time in the Peace Reformed Pulpit. These messages seem fairly relevant for these days...
Streaming: Peace, Purity and Unity: A Sermon on 2 Cor. 13:5-14
The download is here for you podcast types.
Streaming: When God Tells You to Jump in the Lake - 2 Kings 5. Download here
Streaming: The Others - Romans 1:1-17. Download here.
Streaming: Peace, Purity and Unity: A Sermon on 2 Cor. 13:5-14
The download is here for you podcast types.
Streaming: When God Tells You to Jump in the Lake - 2 Kings 5. Download here
Streaming: The Others - Romans 1:1-17. Download here.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
It's All About the Christology!!!
You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451.
Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com |
I guess I made it, but I don't know what the heck happened to Wayne.
December 5, 1971
I called the rectory in my home town today. I am somewhat embarrassed that I did not know this before, but the above date is my spiritual birthday. I was baptized on December 5, 1971 at St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church in Anderson, Indiana.
Many Christians can name the date of their evangelical awakenings. I suppose that I have had such experiences now and again over the years, but I have never been able to bring myself to name one of them as the date of my conversion. I have always said and written that my life as a Christian began with my baptism as an infant. Now I have a real space and time day to go with it.
Many Christians can name the date of their evangelical awakenings. I suppose that I have had such experiences now and again over the years, but I have never been able to bring myself to name one of them as the date of my conversion. I have always said and written that my life as a Christian began with my baptism as an infant. Now I have a real space and time day to go with it.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Thoughts on the AMiA Winter Conference 2006
For a good time now I have been fearful of whether the African face of AMiA was the real deal. Not that I had any particular reason for this suspicion, mind you. The folks that I have met over the past couple of years in Chicago and now in St. Louis have been of exceptional quality and integrity. They have manifested a deep concern for the catholicity of the Church and fidelity to the Apostolic Faith. Put simply, I feel very proud and humbled to know such people. The concern was the manner in which the Mission came into being in the first place. Episcopalians have permitted so much revisionism to flourish under their aegis that one is rightly suspicious of the sudden retreat toward orthodoxy when a gay bishop is ordained. After all, if you can embrace all the other terrors of modernity, what could occasion the sudden exclusion except a pernicious homophobia?
Of course, I have long given up this fear when it comes to the AMiA folk that I know personally, but the question has remained when it comes to the broader organization. I already know that St. Louis and Chicago are the catholic strongholds of AMiA where other places give greater latitude to the “happy-clappy,” church growth element of American evangelicalism. I could stomach that as long as the Liturgy of the Prayer Book remained intact, but the bigger question was whether the realpolitick that drives more banal evangelical church practices drives the Anglican Mission’s ecclesiological self-understanding as well. Put simply, are the bishops of the so-called Global South really bishops, or do they merely function as a wax nose giving ecclesiastical cover to otherwise disaffected, maverick evangelical conservatives?
Fortunately, the Global South bishops are true bishops. Far from disconnected or ignorant of the specific cultural challenges in North America, they demonstrate a far subtler understanding of our situation than most of us are of there’s. Archbishop Datuk Yong Ping Chung of South East Asia addressed the gathered crowd in his opening night homily and felt no discomfort whatsoever in admonishing us as our bishop. Our Primate, the Most Rev. Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda demonstrated his ease with being in charge by extending the Liturgy an extra half-hour while inviting the other seven visiting primates to address us individually. Turning to the American missionary bishops, Kolini then told us that he has “never regretted laying hands on” the Rt. Rev. Chuck Murphy and the Rt. Rev. John Rogers. Now, it’s pretty hard to get at the flavor of these actions, but they communicated to me a certain comfort with ecclesiastical authority – not lorded over those under their charge, but humbly expressed without self-consciousness.
The general African flavor of AMiA also plays out in the manner that the churches relate to one another. Far from being beholden to the money that comes from the richer Western churches, the Africans have declared themselves in broken or impaired communion with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in Canada despite the financial cost. In AMiA, there is certainly a monetary benefit to Rwanda and other African provinces, but there is no hint of our playing the role of condescending benefactors. Rather, it is they who consider us impoverished for the poor state of the Church in the West. One Archbishop told us of his conversion at the age of eighteen because of the efforts of Western missionaries. To paraphrase his comments, Americans had brought the light of the Gospel to that which was formerly called the “Dark Continent,” but now that a great darkness has settled on us, those to whom our grandparents had brought enlightenment were bringing a little of that light back to us.
If it is to be believed that in the next millennium the center of gravity in Christendom will shift away from Europe and North America to regions south of the Equator, AMiA stands to be a leader organization in the United States. AMiA is already working on the question of how to more closely integrate the theological and clerical formation of priests on both continents. Africa stands to benefit from the great Western theological tradition and the West stands to benefit from the development and appropriation of distinctive African theologies.
There are some 76 million Anglicans worldwide and the numbers will increase principally in Africa. Archbishop Bernard Molango of Central Africa told a small number of us that he is confirming at least a hundred new converts annually in each of the parishes of his diocese. Other of the bishops gathered confirmed this general sense that God is working powerfully in Africa.
I have long been concerned about the real power of Reformed Presbyterianism to really go the distance in the new millennium. Its confessional tradition, liturgical minimalism, and general suspicion of symbol, ritual, tradition, and embodied spirituality seem only appealing to rich white-folk. The problem, however, is the seeming absence of an alternative. Now, I am the last guy to buy into a fad or a sales pitch and I am generally post-cynical, but this week was truly amazing and it has stoked both my enthusiasm and imagination for what shape my vocation may take in the future.
Of course, I have long given up this fear when it comes to the AMiA folk that I know personally, but the question has remained when it comes to the broader organization. I already know that St. Louis and Chicago are the catholic strongholds of AMiA where other places give greater latitude to the “happy-clappy,” church growth element of American evangelicalism. I could stomach that as long as the Liturgy of the Prayer Book remained intact, but the bigger question was whether the realpolitick that drives more banal evangelical church practices drives the Anglican Mission’s ecclesiological self-understanding as well. Put simply, are the bishops of the so-called Global South really bishops, or do they merely function as a wax nose giving ecclesiastical cover to otherwise disaffected, maverick evangelical conservatives?
Fortunately, the Global South bishops are true bishops. Far from disconnected or ignorant of the specific cultural challenges in North America, they demonstrate a far subtler understanding of our situation than most of us are of there’s. Archbishop Datuk Yong Ping Chung of South East Asia addressed the gathered crowd in his opening night homily and felt no discomfort whatsoever in admonishing us as our bishop. Our Primate, the Most Rev. Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda demonstrated his ease with being in charge by extending the Liturgy an extra half-hour while inviting the other seven visiting primates to address us individually. Turning to the American missionary bishops, Kolini then told us that he has “never regretted laying hands on” the Rt. Rev. Chuck Murphy and the Rt. Rev. John Rogers. Now, it’s pretty hard to get at the flavor of these actions, but they communicated to me a certain comfort with ecclesiastical authority – not lorded over those under their charge, but humbly expressed without self-consciousness.
The general African flavor of AMiA also plays out in the manner that the churches relate to one another. Far from being beholden to the money that comes from the richer Western churches, the Africans have declared themselves in broken or impaired communion with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in Canada despite the financial cost. In AMiA, there is certainly a monetary benefit to Rwanda and other African provinces, but there is no hint of our playing the role of condescending benefactors. Rather, it is they who consider us impoverished for the poor state of the Church in the West. One Archbishop told us of his conversion at the age of eighteen because of the efforts of Western missionaries. To paraphrase his comments, Americans had brought the light of the Gospel to that which was formerly called the “Dark Continent,” but now that a great darkness has settled on us, those to whom our grandparents had brought enlightenment were bringing a little of that light back to us.
If it is to be believed that in the next millennium the center of gravity in Christendom will shift away from Europe and North America to regions south of the Equator, AMiA stands to be a leader organization in the United States. AMiA is already working on the question of how to more closely integrate the theological and clerical formation of priests on both continents. Africa stands to benefit from the great Western theological tradition and the West stands to benefit from the development and appropriation of distinctive African theologies.
There are some 76 million Anglicans worldwide and the numbers will increase principally in Africa. Archbishop Bernard Molango of Central Africa told a small number of us that he is confirming at least a hundred new converts annually in each of the parishes of his diocese. Other of the bishops gathered confirmed this general sense that God is working powerfully in Africa.
I have long been concerned about the real power of Reformed Presbyterianism to really go the distance in the new millennium. Its confessional tradition, liturgical minimalism, and general suspicion of symbol, ritual, tradition, and embodied spirituality seem only appealing to rich white-folk. The problem, however, is the seeming absence of an alternative. Now, I am the last guy to buy into a fad or a sales pitch and I am generally post-cynical, but this week was truly amazing and it has stoked both my enthusiasm and imagination for what shape my vocation may take in the future.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Calvin's Eucharist and Local Presence (Part 2)
In 1 Corinthians 11 the Apostle Paul is writing to a community that had failed to embody Christian koinonia. In that community, the eucharist had not yet been separated from the larger communal meal. Apparently when the Corinthian Christians came together, the meal would begin with the breaking of the bread, then each believer would “take out” (v. 21) his own meal to consume it without sharing (v. 21) or “waiting upon” (v. 33) others. This lack of mutual sharing, one getting drunk while another went hungry, underscored the social and economic inequities within the community and compounded the oppression of the poorer believers. The Apostle chastens them saying, "When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat." (v. 20). To paraphrase, St. Paul is saying, “You are celebrating a supper all right, but don’t deceive yourself into thinking that it is the Lord’s supper.” What is being described, then, is not a general instance of the manducatio impiorum, but the specific instance where a professing Christian congregation invalidated their eucharist by failing to discern their own identity as the ecclesial body of Christ. St. Paul looked at their foodways and saw no evidence that they had really understood the kingdom Christ was bringing into the world. The Corinthian church didn’t look like the Kingdom of God at all. It was as though Jesus had never been crucified. The scandalon is that this cognitive dissonance took place even as they communed in Christ’s sacramental body.
Should we wish to make the secondary application of this passage to general instances of the manducatio impiorum, it is important to keep the question of cognitive dissonance in mind. When St. Paul warns the Corinthian Christians regarding the “unworthy” or better “careless” reception of the eucharist, he is describing their failure to “discern” a body that is really and objectively present both sacramentally and ecclesiastically. If an unbeliever presents himself at the altar of a true Christian church, he objectively partakes of the sacramental body of Christ because he partakes in the objective presence of the gathered ecclesial body of Christ. Now it is true that an unworthy or careless participant in the eucharist, whatever his profession, eats and drinks only “judgement to himself,” but this is because of his failure to discern something that is objectively there. The ecclesial body and the sacramental body stand and fall together. For this reason, St. Paul says that unworthy participants are guilty, not of eating mere bread and wine only, but of “profaning the body and blood of the Lord.” Put simply, faith discerns the body and blood of Christ; it does not manifest them. The incarnation of the body of Christ is an objective reality and his being present is underwritten by the promise: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matt. 18:20).
This manner of resolving the difficulty inherent in the question of the real presence has a real pastoral payoff and an inherent practical benefit. First, the notion that the real presence is restricted to those who receive with true faith would seem to annul the Reformed notion of sola gratia. As soon as the presence of Christ, and thus the validity of the eucharist, depends on the quality or character of our faith, we move from an economy of gift giving to an economy of exchange. Faith becomes the currency that procures the presence of Christ. This would not seem to represent a biblical understanding of how God manifests himself. To return briefly to prophetic conceptions of “day of Yahweh,” the sudden coming of the Lord to his temple is a given (Cf. Mal.3:1). While this coming of God may signal the advent of salvation or damnation—of vindication or desolation—the faithlessness of God’s people is irrelevant to his appearance. Indeed, when Christ fulfills the promise of Malachi it is in his “judgment” (contra “cleansing”) of the temple (Cf. Matt.21:12; Mk. 11:15; Jn.2:14-15). It is for this reason that prior to communing at table, our Book of Common Prayer prescribes the so-called “prayer of humble access” for the Priest who prays “in the name of all those who shall receive the communion:”
As clergy we can never give the appearance that we are turning people back upon themselves or their spiritual own resources as the means of their healing. Better here on pastoral grounds to prefer the Formula of Concord’s construal of the presence of Christ to that of Calvin:
Should we wish to make the secondary application of this passage to general instances of the manducatio impiorum, it is important to keep the question of cognitive dissonance in mind. When St. Paul warns the Corinthian Christians regarding the “unworthy” or better “careless” reception of the eucharist, he is describing their failure to “discern” a body that is really and objectively present both sacramentally and ecclesiastically. If an unbeliever presents himself at the altar of a true Christian church, he objectively partakes of the sacramental body of Christ because he partakes in the objective presence of the gathered ecclesial body of Christ. Now it is true that an unworthy or careless participant in the eucharist, whatever his profession, eats and drinks only “judgement to himself,” but this is because of his failure to discern something that is objectively there. The ecclesial body and the sacramental body stand and fall together. For this reason, St. Paul says that unworthy participants are guilty, not of eating mere bread and wine only, but of “profaning the body and blood of the Lord.” Put simply, faith discerns the body and blood of Christ; it does not manifest them. The incarnation of the body of Christ is an objective reality and his being present is underwritten by the promise: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matt. 18:20).
This manner of resolving the difficulty inherent in the question of the real presence has a real pastoral payoff and an inherent practical benefit. First, the notion that the real presence is restricted to those who receive with true faith would seem to annul the Reformed notion of sola gratia. As soon as the presence of Christ, and thus the validity of the eucharist, depends on the quality or character of our faith, we move from an economy of gift giving to an economy of exchange. Faith becomes the currency that procures the presence of Christ. This would not seem to represent a biblical understanding of how God manifests himself. To return briefly to prophetic conceptions of “day of Yahweh,” the sudden coming of the Lord to his temple is a given (Cf. Mal.3:1). While this coming of God may signal the advent of salvation or damnation—of vindication or desolation—the faithlessness of God’s people is irrelevant to his appearance. Indeed, when Christ fulfills the promise of Malachi it is in his “judgment” (contra “cleansing”) of the temple (Cf. Matt.21:12; Mk. 11:15; Jn.2:14-15). It is for this reason that prior to communing at table, our Book of Common Prayer prescribes the so-called “prayer of humble access” for the Priest who prays “in the name of all those who shall receive the communion:”
We do not presume to come to this, Thy table, trusting in our own righteousness but in Thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under Thy table. But Thou art the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord so to eat the flesh of Thy dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink His blood, that we may evermore dwell in Him and He in us.
As clergy we can never give the appearance that we are turning people back upon themselves or their spiritual own resources as the means of their healing. Better here on pastoral grounds to prefer the Formula of Concord’s construal of the presence of Christ to that of Calvin:
We believe, teach, and confess that not only the true believers [in Christ] and the worthy, but also the unworthy and unbelievers, receive the true body and blood of Christ; however, not for life and consolation, but for judgment and condemnation, if they are not converted and do not repent, 1 Cor. 11, 27. 29.
For although they thrust Christ from themselves as a Savior, yet they must admit Him even against their will as a strict Judge, who is just as present also to exercise and render judgment upon impenitent guests as He is present to work life and consolation in the hearts of the true believers and worthy guests.
We believe, teach, and confess also that there is only one kind of unworthy guest, namely, those who do not believe, concerning whom it is written John 3, 18: He that believeth not is condemned already. And this judgment becomes greater and more grievous, being aggravated, by the unworthy use of the Holy Supper, 1 Cor. 11, 29.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Calvin's Eucharist and Local Presence
Although the the Articles of Religion do not directly reference Calvin, their use of Augustine in Article 22 is nearly a direct quote from Calvin’s Institutes 4.17.34, [Battles Vol. 2, 1404]. Unfortunately this seems to represent a rather selective use of Augustine. While it is true that Augustine writes, “he who received the power of the Sacrament, not only the visible Sacrament; and indeed inwardly, not outwardly; and who eats with the heart, not who presses with the teeth” (Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 26.12), Calvin is highly selective when he uses Augustine to support his doctrine. Elsewhere, Augustine is able to make the following affirmations that seem to affirm a local presence:
None of this is new, of course, but I'm starting to lose confidence with regard to Calvin's rejection of the local presence and in his treatment of the manducatio impiorum. I could use some help if anyone wants to set me straight.
That bread which you see on the altar, having been sanctified by the word of God is the Body of Christ (corpus est Christi). That chalice, or rather, what is in that chalice, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the Blood of Christ (sanguis est Christi). Through that bread and wine the Lord Christ willed to commend his Body and Blood, which he poured out for us unto the forgiveness of sins. (Sermones 227, PL 38)
Christ was carried in his own hands [Ferebatur enim Christus in manibus suis] when, referring to his own Body, he said, 'This is my Body.’ For he carried that body in his hands [Ferebat enim illud corpus in manibus suis]. (Enarrationes in Psalmos 33:1, 10, PL 36).
None of this is new, of course, but I'm starting to lose confidence with regard to Calvin's rejection of the local presence and in his treatment of the manducatio impiorum. I could use some help if anyone wants to set me straight.
Friday, January 06, 2006
Strike Three ... Throw this guy out!
This is one of those times where the scandal of a divided Christendom is particularly pressing.
For the handful of you who are yet unaware, Pat Robertson has recently gone on record attributing Ariel Sharon's stroke to the divine judgement of God for his trading away land for peace. Back in the Fall, of course, he was praying for the death of more Supreme Court members and advocating the assassination of a Venezuelan head of state.
It's too bad that we have allowed for a situation in which professed Christian leaders are accountable to no one for their words. Some mechanism should exist to inhibit him. Unfortunately, there is no umpire to call Robertson out on his third strike.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Epiphany
The EPIPHANY, or the Manifestation of Christ
to the Gentiles.
God, who by the leading of a star didst
manifest thy only-begotten Son to the
Gentiles; Mercifully grant that we, who know
thee now by faith, may after this life have the
fruition of thy glorious Godhead; through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
W.W.N.T.W.D?
This seems to be a blatant defiance of Bishop Tom's authority. We should be in prayer that he will act with integrity and prudence.
LONDON: VICAR'S BLESSING IGNORES GUIDELINES FROM BISHOPS
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
THE TIMES
December 22, 2005
A VICAR who had his civil partnership blessed at a church service yesterday could face disciplinary action from the Church of England.
The Rev Christopher Wardale, 59, the vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Darlington, Co Durham, and Malcolm Macourt, 58, a retired lecturer, registered their union at a ceremony in Newcastle before having it blessed at a local church. The blessing, attended by Dr David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, breached guidelines issued in July by the bishops of the Church.
Clergy were advised against conducting formal blessings of civil partnerships to avoid equating them with marriage.
In the guidelines, condemned by evangelical Anglican Communion archbishops from the Global South as giving the appearance of “evil”, the bishops said that clergy could enter into partnerships, but only if they would abide by Church teaching that sex should be confined to heterosexual marriage.
The guidelines are an attempt to head off a split between conservatives and liberals over homosexuality and the clergy.
A spokeswoman for Dr Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, said yesterday: “The bishop is taking advice about what action to pursue.”
A "Converting Ordinance"
I'm not a player in the so-called "Federal Vision" controversies that are currently plaguing my former denomination (Presbyterian Church in America), but some persons whom I consider friends are.
In any case, I am posting these files because a good number of persons on the wrong side of those debates are constantly whining about "innovators" who treat Baptism and Eucharist as "converting ordinances." The paper I posted the other day treats the Sacramental thought of Solomon Stoddard in a tertiary manner, but it bears repeating that Stoddard's theology of Baptism and Eucharist was actually less "Catholic" than many of his fellow Congregationalists. Rather than the sacraments being "means" they were merely the possible "occasion" for a person to receive an "effectual calling" (i.e. "initial justification by faith" on Puritan terms).
Ironically, it is this sub-catholic sacramentology that brings Stoddard and the current crop of Zwinglians in conservative American Presbyterianism into close similitude.
Anyway, I just thought that people batting about terminology like "converting ordinances" ought to have some small idea of what they are talking about and poor students standing for licensure and ordination could benefit from the historical background. Also, Stoddard is one of the dearer American Puritans and this work is apparently not available online anywhere else:
Solomon Stoddard, An Appeal to the Learned, Being a Vindication of the Right of Visible Saints to the Lord’s Supper, Though they be destitute of a Saving Work of God’s Spirit on their Hearts (2nd ed.;Boston, 1751).
Part 1 (Preface through Book 1)
Part 2 (Books 2 and 3)
In any case, I am posting these files because a good number of persons on the wrong side of those debates are constantly whining about "innovators" who treat Baptism and Eucharist as "converting ordinances." The paper I posted the other day treats the Sacramental thought of Solomon Stoddard in a tertiary manner, but it bears repeating that Stoddard's theology of Baptism and Eucharist was actually less "Catholic" than many of his fellow Congregationalists. Rather than the sacraments being "means" they were merely the possible "occasion" for a person to receive an "effectual calling" (i.e. "initial justification by faith" on Puritan terms).
Ironically, it is this sub-catholic sacramentology that brings Stoddard and the current crop of Zwinglians in conservative American Presbyterianism into close similitude.
Anyway, I just thought that people batting about terminology like "converting ordinances" ought to have some small idea of what they are talking about and poor students standing for licensure and ordination could benefit from the historical background. Also, Stoddard is one of the dearer American Puritans and this work is apparently not available online anywhere else:
Solomon Stoddard, An Appeal to the Learned, Being a Vindication of the Right of Visible Saints to the Lord’s Supper, Though they be destitute of a Saving Work of God’s Spirit on their Hearts (2nd ed.;Boston, 1751).
Part 1 (Preface through Book 1)
Part 2 (Books 2 and 3)
Sunday, December 18, 2005
What I've Been Up To...
I finished both of these in the last couple of weeks. I am fairly happy with them, but they have not been beaten around by the experts. Let me know if you find particularly offensive errors.
Making The Invisible Visible: The Puritan Wager And Sacramental Hospitality In New England
Development By Rectification: John Henry Newman’s Conception of the Schola Theologorum and the Oxford Movement
Blessings to you all in this Christmastide.
Michael
Making The Invisible Visible: The Puritan Wager And Sacramental Hospitality In New England
Development By Rectification: John Henry Newman’s Conception of the Schola Theologorum and the Oxford Movement
Blessings to you all in this Christmastide.
Michael
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Man, I Sure Do Miss This...
As many of you know, this will be our first winter away from Chicago in several years. Although I really miss the guarantee of snow and cold that we would get up there, this is something I am glad to be rid of...
Today was one of those days where a 45 min. commute would take 2.5 hours.
Today was one of those days where a 45 min. commute would take 2.5 hours.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
The Practical Roots of Liturgical Reform
My friend, Mark Horne, has raised some important pastoral concerns regarding the participation of physically and cognitively impaired persons in the sacraments. I contributed the following as feedback, not to chide Mark, but to share from my own struggle to overcome the practical and credal limitations imposed by American Presbyterian/Reformed practice.
Presbyterian Bedside Rites (If there is such a thing)
PCA folk generally won't be able to properly imagine the communion of persons outside of public worship (whether because of cognitive or physical difficulties) without a minor liturgical reformation regarding bedside rites and the reservation of the Sacrament.
First, The Westminster standards preclude private masses, and the usual practice of inviting the elders and deacons to an off-site service would seem to violate the spirit of that precept. If anything, the Puritans who composed the confession would have been working from the principle that the grace of the sacrament is non-peculiar and spiritually available elsewhere, so why go to extremes to provide something nonessential?
Secondly, when the Sacrament is re-consecrated in these services (where it is properly consecrated at all), a real disservice is done to the notion of the common table. The Book of Common Worship prescribes this solution to the dilemma. I used it for a while, but stopped when my conscience got the better of me.
Having a number of older folks in my Chicago congregation, I adopted beside liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer and bought a portable communion kit with a pyx to reserve a portion of our Sunday sacrament. I added to the kit some anointing oil and a small stole.
By the time I left Chicago, my home bound folks came to expect that I would bring Holy Communion each time I visited. Fortunately, the RCA isn't quite so hung-up on these things, and I was able to get away with my "Puseyan" innovations.
Presbyterian Bedside Rites (If there is such a thing)
PCA folk generally won't be able to properly imagine the communion of persons outside of public worship (whether because of cognitive or physical difficulties) without a minor liturgical reformation regarding bedside rites and the reservation of the Sacrament.
First, The Westminster standards preclude private masses, and the usual practice of inviting the elders and deacons to an off-site service would seem to violate the spirit of that precept. If anything, the Puritans who composed the confession would have been working from the principle that the grace of the sacrament is non-peculiar and spiritually available elsewhere, so why go to extremes to provide something nonessential?
Secondly, when the Sacrament is re-consecrated in these services (where it is properly consecrated at all), a real disservice is done to the notion of the common table. The Book of Common Worship prescribes this solution to the dilemma. I used it for a while, but stopped when my conscience got the better of me.
Having a number of older folks in my Chicago congregation, I adopted beside liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer and bought a portable communion kit with a pyx to reserve a portion of our Sunday sacrament. I added to the kit some anointing oil and a small stole.
By the time I left Chicago, my home bound folks came to expect that I would bring Holy Communion each time I visited. Fortunately, the RCA isn't quite so hung-up on these things, and I was able to get away with my "Puseyan" innovations.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Lots of Projects
I'm trying to get some stuff finished for the end of the semester. The good news for those who come for the the theology (as opposed to the latest on Notre Dame and general smart-assed comments), I am preparing one paper on John Henry Newman's understanding of the Schola theologorum and one paper on how the fatal problems of the "Puritan experiment" in New England were actually anticipated and pastorally mitigated by the participants themselves (esp. Solomon Stoddard and Cotton Mather).
In the meantime, I am concerned that many of you might be facing the holiday blues. Here is a nice prescription of cyber-Prozac for you. Just click on the link.
THE LLAMA SONG
In the meantime, I am concerned that many of you might be facing the holiday blues. Here is a nice prescription of cyber-Prozac for you. Just click on the link.
THE LLAMA SONG
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Lines from Pants Wars
Special credit to AKMA for the link.
Lines from Star Wars that can be improved if you substitute the word "Pants" for key words:
We've got to be able to get some reading on those pants, up or down.
The pants may not look like much, kid, but they've got it where it counts.
I find your lack of pants disturbing.
These pants contain the ultimate power in the Universe. I suggest we use it.
Han will have those pants down. We've got to give him more time!
General Veers, prepare your pants for a ground assault.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants back home.
TK-421. . . Why aren't you in your pants?
Lock the door. And hope they don't have pants.
You are unwise to lower your pants.
She must have hidden the plans in her pants. Send a detachment down to retrieve them. See to it personally Commander.
Governor Tarkin. I recognized your foul pants when I was brought on board.
You look strong enough to pull the pants of a Gundark.
Luke. . . Help me remove these pants.
Great, Chewie, great. Always thinking with your pants.
That blast came from those pants. That thing's operational!
A tremor in the pants. The last time I felt this was in the presence of my old master.
Don't worry. Chewie and I have gotten into pants a lot more heavily guarded than this.
Maybe you'd like it back in your pants, your highness.
Your pants betray you. Your feelings for them are strong. Especially one. . . Your sister!
Jabba doesn't have time for smugglers who drop their pants at the first sign of an Imperial Cruiser.
Short pants is better than no pants at all.
Lines from Star Wars that can be improved if you substitute the word "Pants" for key words:
We've got to be able to get some reading on those pants, up or down.
The pants may not look like much, kid, but they've got it where it counts.
I find your lack of pants disturbing.
These pants contain the ultimate power in the Universe. I suggest we use it.
Han will have those pants down. We've got to give him more time!
General Veers, prepare your pants for a ground assault.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants back home.
TK-421. . . Why aren't you in your pants?
Lock the door. And hope they don't have pants.
You are unwise to lower your pants.
She must have hidden the plans in her pants. Send a detachment down to retrieve them. See to it personally Commander.
Governor Tarkin. I recognized your foul pants when I was brought on board.
You look strong enough to pull the pants of a Gundark.
Luke. . . Help me remove these pants.
Great, Chewie, great. Always thinking with your pants.
That blast came from those pants. That thing's operational!
A tremor in the pants. The last time I felt this was in the presence of my old master.
Don't worry. Chewie and I have gotten into pants a lot more heavily guarded than this.
Maybe you'd like it back in your pants, your highness.
Your pants betray you. Your feelings for them are strong. Especially one. . . Your sister!
Jabba doesn't have time for smugglers who drop their pants at the first sign of an Imperial Cruiser.
Short pants is better than no pants at all.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
A Post-Critical Historical Theology
Beyond Ideology and Utopia: Towards a Post-Critical Historical Theology
I've been wanting to do this ever since I started reading Paul Ricoeur five years ago. It was something of a grind because where the shape of Ricoeur's thought is basically intuitive once you get the basics, the details are really complicated.
I have basically operating with this framework for a while now, but needed the space to map the details. Hopefully it will prove useful to the two of you who read this blog.
Special thanks are due to Kevin Vanhoozer who introduced me to Ricoeur and to Brian Robinette for his proofreading and helpful feedback.
I've been wanting to do this ever since I started reading Paul Ricoeur five years ago. It was something of a grind because where the shape of Ricoeur's thought is basically intuitive once you get the basics, the details are really complicated.
I have basically operating with this framework for a while now, but needed the space to map the details. Hopefully it will prove useful to the two of you who read this blog.
Special thanks are due to Kevin Vanhoozer who introduced me to Ricoeur and to Brian Robinette for his proofreading and helpful feedback.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
WWJD? (What Would Jesus Drive?)
You say that your Hummer just isn't enough to drive your kids to soccer? Suburban streets not safe enough and you need the offroad capacity to make it past your mailbox? Check this out:
At 7 miles per gallon, how could you refuse to partake of this symbol of decadent waste?
At 7 miles per gallon, how could you refuse to partake of this symbol of decadent waste?
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Christianity and American Religious Diversity
NOTE: None of this is new and discerning readers will detect retreaded Milbank, Ricoeur, and even Alan Bloom. I just needed to get something posted before you all left for good.
Diana Eck has argued that America is no longer a “Christian nation,” but rather “the world’s most religiously diverse nation.” [A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).] This can only be received as true if one buys into the premises that precede the conclusion.
In one sense, of course, America has never been a “Christian nation.” Critical historical inquiry into its constituting documents reveals that the United States of America is a deliberately secular project, firmly rooted in the philosophy of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. The Declaration of Independence (1776) recognizes a Creator who endows “certain unalienable rights,” but this is far from the particularity required to affirm the one, tri-personal God, decisively revealed in the God-man, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Indeed, this affirmation countenanced a number of differing and mutually exclusive interpretations among the signatories themselves. More importantly, the Constitution of the United States (1787) and first ten amendments constituting a Bill of Rights (1789/91) specifically disestablishes any particular religion or religious expression. Viewed from this perspective, the fact that the majority of American citizens were Protestant Christians is irrelevant to the question and enfranchised representation is merely a matter of which historical stratum one chooses to investigate. The fact that, say Scientology, was not enfranchised in colonial America is more an accident of history (given that the Church of Scientology wasn’t founded until 1955) than an indication of its in principio exclusion.
On the other hand, one must account for religious practice as part of the discourse of American religion. Simply put, for the majority of its existence the United States has been composed of a predominantly Christian majority. Furthermore, whether one wishes to speak of the vitality and orthodoxy of the founding fathers’ personal religion or not, it remains the case that even they were either practicing Christians or men whose intellectual wealth was predominantly composed of borrowed Christian capital. From the perspective of such thoroughgoing Christian inculturation, then, we may speak, as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus often does, of an “incorrigibly and confusedly Christian America.” [See, for example, his “Re–evangelizing a ‘Post–Christian’ World,” First Things 139 (January 2004): 72-3.] It is in this space of schizophrenic tension evoked by the two words – “incorrigible” and “confused” – that Eck is trying to stake out territory and while we may concede the point that the increasing diversity of American religious expression heightens one’s appreciation of the strain, it is also important to realize that this condition is congenital to modernity and to our very modern civil experiment.
Catholicism, Modernity, and American Religious Pluralism
In his essay “The Catholics in the World and in America,” [in World Religions in America: An Introduction (ed. Jacob Neusner; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2000) 66-77.] Fr. Andrew M. Greeley is likewise trying to manage this tension. A liberal Catholic himself, Greeley is concerned to distance himself from the hostile receptions of American democracy in the recent, ultramontane Catholic past (ie., the dominance of the so-called Pian papacies of 1846-1958) and to downplay Roman Catholicism’s doctrinal particularity in order to emphasize its capacities for hospitality and malleability. He does this by pursuing two rhetorical strategies: one drawn from the phenomenology of religion and the social sciences, the other drawn from the Catholic understanding of the analogia entis.
Greeley’s statement that, “religion is poetry before it becomes prose,” is a useful summation of the idea that first order practices such as story, ritual, community, and experience precede the second order reflection which gives rise to dogma, cult, and code. From the perspective of phenomenology and the social sciences, the rule of prayer precedes the rule(s) of belief (lex orandi ante lex credendi est). This preference for religious practice over religious reflection allows Greeley to subordinate “official” self-descriptions of the Roman Magisterium to the lived experience of Catholicism in its embodied manifestations. Put simply, it matters less to Greeley what Catholics should be, believe, or become and more what they actually are being, believing, and becoming. The result for Catholics in a religiously diverse culture is a convenient and quite exploitable cleavage between Magisterial apologists for Catholic particularity and the indigenous catholic community which must negotiate between faith and culture. Because “poetry” is polyvalent and thus more malleable than “prose,” Greeley’s vision of Catholicism is more adaptable to American culture than the older visions he seeks to transcend.
When Greeley speaks of Catholicism’s ambivalence to, “contaminating God by comparing God to creatures and human experience,” he is invoking the principle of the “sacramentality” of the world rooted in an analogy of being. According to this understanding, particular beings in the world participate in, and thus reflect, the Supreme Being that is God. Because all things in the world live in, move in, and have their being in God (Acts 17:28), these particular beings are a said reveal the Divine in more or less reliable ways. This “analogical” or “sacramental” imagination underwrites a general hospitality toward the world and toward all things human.
Facing the question of emergent religious diversity in the United States, Greeley’s conception of Catholicism’s hospitality towards the human opens some space for the renewed appreciation and integration of religions that are not specifically Christian or Roman Catholic. He cites as precedent several examples from the history of Catholic missiology where pagan religious practices were retained as Catholicism incarnated itself in a particular culture, but were harmonized with and then integrated into the Christian story. This construal of the continuity of human religious experience does have its drawbacks to be sure. Greeley cites Catholicism’s tendency toward, “superstition and a mixture of Christianity with and paganism that is called folk religion.” More important, however, is a danger that Greeley does not name: the tendency toward an uncritical, paternal colonialism that dismisses the integrity of non-Christian religious experience.
Religious Diversity and American Christian Particularity
Helpful though Greeley’s winsome vision of Catholic Christianity may be, it is to the peculiar particularity of Christian affirmation that we must return, for it remains the chief obstacle in our negotiation of the American space between the “incorrigible” and the “confused.” The sacramental imagination of Catholicism must be balanced by the Divine otherness implicit in the principle of Protestantism. As the Fourth Lateran Council put it so well, “In every similarity between the world and God, there is an even greater dissimilarity.” [Maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine, Canon 2.]
First order religious experiences invariably result in second order reflection. Doctrine, cult, and code emerge because they are socio-cultural necessities. We are truer to the nature of things when we admit that the rule of prayer not only precedes the rule of belief, but that it is the rule of belief and vice versa (lex orandi, lex credendi). The rule of belief thus names the boundaries of prayer and preserves it from becoming a merely self-referential, self-deconstructive idolatry even as it creates the space in which faith experience may flourish.
Because this reality is attendant to all religious faith, we are bound as students of other religions to attend as much to religious particularity as we are to religious similarity. By neglecting this balance we neither benefit society nor preserve religion and we unwittingly suborn the ideology and utopian vision of what may be the real American religion – the secular. The secular consensus from which American democracy sprang is itself an alternative and exclusive atheology that must be thought and constructed like any other theology. As such, secularity is inimical to full-throated religious commitment and advocacy. In its wake religious experience tends to suffer marginalization and society loses the potential therapeutic value of faith that is lived undiluted.
The implications of this critique of secularity are beyond the scope of this short exploration but it certainly entails the conclusion that there is no such thing as “religion” in the sense of an abstracted “thing,” standing behind and underwriting all particular religions. Christians are not practicing “religion,” but Christianity; Muslims are not practicing “religion,” but Islam. “ Religion” is a construction of secularity and ceases to be useful as a concept in the face of genuine religious particularity. When we subordinate religious particularity to generic “religion,” we are neither very good students of a given faith nor are we becoming adequately self-critical adherents of our own faith.
What then is the committed Christian to do in a religiously pluralistic culture? First, as Greeley’s article suggests, Christian orthodoxy is capable of remaining fully itself and while remaining extremely adaptable and quite patient of human diversity. The complicating presence of human sin creates an already/not yet tension in human redemption that closely mirrors the tension between the “incorrigible” and the “confused.” We can live in a world where everyone is not yet Christian because we recognize in prayer that the Kingdom is yet coming. Secondly, basic honesty requires humble admission that Christianity makes exclusive claims on public truth and public history. Ideology and utopia are necessary for social cohesion. Embracing Christian ideology and utopia with humility and self-criticism is the mark of integrity, not totalitarianism. Thirdly, affirming, public Christianity is a stable ground from which one may engage non-Christian religious similarity and particularity. Once we honestly admit (to ourselves and others) that we are about the business of persuasion we may engage non-Christian faith experience for all it is worth. All religions are telling stories that construe the world in particular and exclusive ways. As we know from our experience with literature, the best writers become so by first being the best readers.
Diana Eck has argued that America is no longer a “Christian nation,” but rather “the world’s most religiously diverse nation.” [A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).] This can only be received as true if one buys into the premises that precede the conclusion.
In one sense, of course, America has never been a “Christian nation.” Critical historical inquiry into its constituting documents reveals that the United States of America is a deliberately secular project, firmly rooted in the philosophy of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. The Declaration of Independence (1776) recognizes a Creator who endows “certain unalienable rights,” but this is far from the particularity required to affirm the one, tri-personal God, decisively revealed in the God-man, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Indeed, this affirmation countenanced a number of differing and mutually exclusive interpretations among the signatories themselves. More importantly, the Constitution of the United States (1787) and first ten amendments constituting a Bill of Rights (1789/91) specifically disestablishes any particular religion or religious expression. Viewed from this perspective, the fact that the majority of American citizens were Protestant Christians is irrelevant to the question and enfranchised representation is merely a matter of which historical stratum one chooses to investigate. The fact that, say Scientology, was not enfranchised in colonial America is more an accident of history (given that the Church of Scientology wasn’t founded until 1955) than an indication of its in principio exclusion.
On the other hand, one must account for religious practice as part of the discourse of American religion. Simply put, for the majority of its existence the United States has been composed of a predominantly Christian majority. Furthermore, whether one wishes to speak of the vitality and orthodoxy of the founding fathers’ personal religion or not, it remains the case that even they were either practicing Christians or men whose intellectual wealth was predominantly composed of borrowed Christian capital. From the perspective of such thoroughgoing Christian inculturation, then, we may speak, as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus often does, of an “incorrigibly and confusedly Christian America.” [See, for example, his “Re–evangelizing a ‘Post–Christian’ World,” First Things 139 (January 2004): 72-3.] It is in this space of schizophrenic tension evoked by the two words – “incorrigible” and “confused” – that Eck is trying to stake out territory and while we may concede the point that the increasing diversity of American religious expression heightens one’s appreciation of the strain, it is also important to realize that this condition is congenital to modernity and to our very modern civil experiment.
Catholicism, Modernity, and American Religious Pluralism
In his essay “The Catholics in the World and in America,” [in World Religions in America: An Introduction (ed. Jacob Neusner; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2000) 66-77.] Fr. Andrew M. Greeley is likewise trying to manage this tension. A liberal Catholic himself, Greeley is concerned to distance himself from the hostile receptions of American democracy in the recent, ultramontane Catholic past (ie., the dominance of the so-called Pian papacies of 1846-1958) and to downplay Roman Catholicism’s doctrinal particularity in order to emphasize its capacities for hospitality and malleability. He does this by pursuing two rhetorical strategies: one drawn from the phenomenology of religion and the social sciences, the other drawn from the Catholic understanding of the analogia entis.
Greeley’s statement that, “religion is poetry before it becomes prose,” is a useful summation of the idea that first order practices such as story, ritual, community, and experience precede the second order reflection which gives rise to dogma, cult, and code. From the perspective of phenomenology and the social sciences, the rule of prayer precedes the rule(s) of belief (lex orandi ante lex credendi est). This preference for religious practice over religious reflection allows Greeley to subordinate “official” self-descriptions of the Roman Magisterium to the lived experience of Catholicism in its embodied manifestations. Put simply, it matters less to Greeley what Catholics should be, believe, or become and more what they actually are being, believing, and becoming. The result for Catholics in a religiously diverse culture is a convenient and quite exploitable cleavage between Magisterial apologists for Catholic particularity and the indigenous catholic community which must negotiate between faith and culture. Because “poetry” is polyvalent and thus more malleable than “prose,” Greeley’s vision of Catholicism is more adaptable to American culture than the older visions he seeks to transcend.
When Greeley speaks of Catholicism’s ambivalence to, “contaminating God by comparing God to creatures and human experience,” he is invoking the principle of the “sacramentality” of the world rooted in an analogy of being. According to this understanding, particular beings in the world participate in, and thus reflect, the Supreme Being that is God. Because all things in the world live in, move in, and have their being in God (Acts 17:28), these particular beings are a said reveal the Divine in more or less reliable ways. This “analogical” or “sacramental” imagination underwrites a general hospitality toward the world and toward all things human.
Facing the question of emergent religious diversity in the United States, Greeley’s conception of Catholicism’s hospitality towards the human opens some space for the renewed appreciation and integration of religions that are not specifically Christian or Roman Catholic. He cites as precedent several examples from the history of Catholic missiology where pagan religious practices were retained as Catholicism incarnated itself in a particular culture, but were harmonized with and then integrated into the Christian story. This construal of the continuity of human religious experience does have its drawbacks to be sure. Greeley cites Catholicism’s tendency toward, “superstition and a mixture of Christianity with and paganism that is called folk religion.” More important, however, is a danger that Greeley does not name: the tendency toward an uncritical, paternal colonialism that dismisses the integrity of non-Christian religious experience.
Religious Diversity and American Christian Particularity
Helpful though Greeley’s winsome vision of Catholic Christianity may be, it is to the peculiar particularity of Christian affirmation that we must return, for it remains the chief obstacle in our negotiation of the American space between the “incorrigible” and the “confused.” The sacramental imagination of Catholicism must be balanced by the Divine otherness implicit in the principle of Protestantism. As the Fourth Lateran Council put it so well, “In every similarity between the world and God, there is an even greater dissimilarity.” [Maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine, Canon 2.]
First order religious experiences invariably result in second order reflection. Doctrine, cult, and code emerge because they are socio-cultural necessities. We are truer to the nature of things when we admit that the rule of prayer not only precedes the rule of belief, but that it is the rule of belief and vice versa (lex orandi, lex credendi). The rule of belief thus names the boundaries of prayer and preserves it from becoming a merely self-referential, self-deconstructive idolatry even as it creates the space in which faith experience may flourish.
Because this reality is attendant to all religious faith, we are bound as students of other religions to attend as much to religious particularity as we are to religious similarity. By neglecting this balance we neither benefit society nor preserve religion and we unwittingly suborn the ideology and utopian vision of what may be the real American religion – the secular. The secular consensus from which American democracy sprang is itself an alternative and exclusive atheology that must be thought and constructed like any other theology. As such, secularity is inimical to full-throated religious commitment and advocacy. In its wake religious experience tends to suffer marginalization and society loses the potential therapeutic value of faith that is lived undiluted.
The implications of this critique of secularity are beyond the scope of this short exploration but it certainly entails the conclusion that there is no such thing as “religion” in the sense of an abstracted “thing,” standing behind and underwriting all particular religions. Christians are not practicing “religion,” but Christianity; Muslims are not practicing “religion,” but Islam. “ Religion” is a construction of secularity and ceases to be useful as a concept in the face of genuine religious particularity. When we subordinate religious particularity to generic “religion,” we are neither very good students of a given faith nor are we becoming adequately self-critical adherents of our own faith.
What then is the committed Christian to do in a religiously pluralistic culture? First, as Greeley’s article suggests, Christian orthodoxy is capable of remaining fully itself and while remaining extremely adaptable and quite patient of human diversity. The complicating presence of human sin creates an already/not yet tension in human redemption that closely mirrors the tension between the “incorrigible” and the “confused.” We can live in a world where everyone is not yet Christian because we recognize in prayer that the Kingdom is yet coming. Secondly, basic honesty requires humble admission that Christianity makes exclusive claims on public truth and public history. Ideology and utopia are necessary for social cohesion. Embracing Christian ideology and utopia with humility and self-criticism is the mark of integrity, not totalitarianism. Thirdly, affirming, public Christianity is a stable ground from which one may engage non-Christian religious similarity and particularity. Once we honestly admit (to ourselves and others) that we are about the business of persuasion we may engage non-Christian faith experience for all it is worth. All religions are telling stories that construe the world in particular and exclusive ways. As we know from our experience with literature, the best writers become so by first being the best readers.
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Civil Disservice in New Orleans
This is nauseating.
When formal F.E.M.A. director, Michael Brown, testified before Congress as to how "disfunctional" New Orleans was, I wondered how correct that portrait was. Of course one cannot prematurely conflate this with that, but from the underwater bussing exhibit to the visible incompetence of Mayor C. Ray Nagin to this, it's hard to avoid the impression that "disfunctional" is putting it lightly.
For those without high speed connections, here is the written link.
When formal F.E.M.A. director, Michael Brown, testified before Congress as to how "disfunctional" New Orleans was, I wondered how correct that portrait was. Of course one cannot prematurely conflate this with that, but from the underwater bussing exhibit to the visible incompetence of Mayor C. Ray Nagin to this, it's hard to avoid the impression that "disfunctional" is putting it lightly.
For those without high speed connections, here is the written link.
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