On the way to a Presbyterian ordination service in NYC the other day I was talking with a friend who’s a Catholic priest. Needless to say it stimulated some thinking. I came across this quote on a great blog this morning:
The Reformed, following Calvin and the best of those who spoke in his wake, sought to witness to how the cross and the eucharist are held in a unity that does not violate but reinforces their distinction via two forms: The constitutive form is the cross while the mediating form is the eucharist. ‘The cross is always central, constitutive, and definitive, while the eucharist is always secondary, relative, and derivative. The eucharistic form of the one sacrifice does not repeat the unrepeatable, but it does attest what it mediates and mediate what it attests. What it mediates and attests is the one whole Jesus Christ, who in his body and blood is both the sacrifice and the sacrament in one. As the sacrifice, he is the Offerer and the Offering. As the sacrament, he is the Giver and the Gift. The Son’s sacrificial offering of himself to the Father for us on the cross is the ground of the Father’s sacramental gift of his Son to the faithful in the eucharist’ (Ibid. 151). As TF Torrance has shown in Theology in Reconciliation, the cross is the ‘dimension of depth’ in the eucharist. The eucharist has no significance in and of itself. Its significance is both derived and grounded in the cross. The cross alone is, as TF Torrance notes, the saving ‘content, reality and power’ of the eucharist. It is to this that the Reformed minister and church directs our gaze.It was precisely such a position which led PT Forsyth, the theologian of the cross, in his lectures on The Church and the Sacraments, to offer the following statement:The Lord’s Supper is the most complete and plenary of all the cultic ways of confessing the work of reconciliation, where the sin of humanity is conquered by the grace of God in a holy Kingdom. It is therefore the real centre of the Church’s common and social life. This should not be sought in social reunions, or ecclesiastical monarchy, or philanthropic cohesion, but in the spiritual region, in the worship, and the theology moulding it. For here we are summoned to what is our vital centre deep within all the individual wills that wish to unite, to what is the centre of the faith that makes the new Humanity, and to the goal which rounds all’. (p. 260)
Sean D. Kelly wrote a remarkably engaging and insightful piece on the NY Times Opinionator blog yesterday. He takes on the task of unpacking what Nietzsche really meant when uttered that “God is dead” over a century ago. God is dead, Kelly argues, in a very particular sense…
He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live. Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.
This de-centering of a culture’s shared sense of organizing values and ultimate meaning has some upsides. It allows marginalized minorities to “achieve recognition or even be held up and celebrated…Social mobility ─ for African Americans, gays, women, workers, people with disabilities or others who had been held down by the traditional culture ─ may finally become a possibility.” But it has its downsides for sure. With a loss of a shared universal sense of meaning we can be driven to live lives of quiet desperation, feeling that there is no God or god-like purpose that is worthy of our allegiance, we instead choose from a variety of consumer options and identities in search of self-actualization. To be sure, people may still engage in what look like lives of traditional religious devotion, but they can only do so in a delusional fashion, imagining that their neighbors can’t possibly be living admirable or meaningful lives because they do not share the believer’s commitments.
Kelly lifts up Melville’s Moby Dick as charting an alternate way forward. Melville rejects the impulse to search for a transcendent organizing center that would animate Western culture, coming as it does from the combination of the biblical and platonic traditions that have together come to shape us so deeply. He wants to replace this with a new polytheism:
Melville himself seems to have recognized that the presence of many gods — many distinct and incommensurate good ways of life — was a possibility our own American culture could and should be aiming at. The death of God therefore, in Melville’s inspiring picture, leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings. Such a nation would have to be “highly cultured and poetical,” according to Melville. It would have to take seriously, in other words, its sense of itself as having grown out of a rich history that needs to be preserved and celebrated, but also a history that needs to be re-appropriated for an even richer future. Indeed, Melville’s own novel could be the founding text for such a culture. Though the details of that story will have to wait for another day, I can at least leave you with Melville’s own cryptic, but inspirational comment on this possibility. “If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation,” he writes:
Shall lure back to their birthright, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; on the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
Richard Mouw describes this scene from the film Hardcore (1979) in his wonderful little book Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. It’s a great read.
Someone passed this quote along to me the other day from a book review J. Greshem Machen wrote in the 1920′s. Still has something to say to us today perhaps.
The entire book is really based upon the pragmatist assumption that religion can be separated from theology and that a man can obtain the values of the religious life apart from the particular intellectual conception which he forms of his God. This assumption leads in the first place to an artificial treatment of history, which altogether fails to do justice to the real complexity of human life; and it leads, in the second place, and in particular, to the reconstruction, contrary to all evidence, of a primitive Gentile Christianity which shall exhibit just the type of nontheological religion which the modern pragmatist desires.
Peter Leithart posted a great review of J. Budziszewski’s The Line Through The Heart, a new work on natural law theory. Leithart is quite complementary in his review which concludes with the suggestion that natural law, even with all of Budziszewski’s qualifications, can’t achieve what many of its enthusiastic supporters think it can:
Paul says all know God and His requirements from creation, but J. Bud is right that we suppress, evade, rationalize, pretend, and can do that for so long that we virtually forget we’re evading. However that law is woven into our minds and hearts, it is woven differently from the way language, thought, creativity, and many other human qualities are woven. Somehow, it is possible to unravel knowledge of God and remain human, which must mean that it is woven differently…Let me make that point stronger, in a Hauerwasian direction. The universe has, I agree, a grain, a design given it by the Triune Creator, and we are to live in accord with that grain. But we discern that grain not from “unaided reason” (J. Bud hedges with “so-called unaided reason”) but in the light of Christ, by the Spirit, through the spectacles of Scripture. When we have the mind of Christ, we see how the world is to be, and how humans are to live, and we learn in turn that the world is not as it should be. To put it more strongly, provocatively: There is nothing bigger, more basic, more universal than Christ the Lord, the One by whom all things were made, the One in whom all things cohere. Christ must be given epistemological priority, and natural law theories, even of the best varieties, don’t honor that priority…This circles back to the practical point. If this argument is true, then the persuasiveness of natural law of J. Bud’s variety requires just as radical a conversion as the fundamentalist demands. It requires the same conversion.
After having studied Romans 14 this week in church, conduct in the midst of theological disputes and church conflict is fresh in my mind. Paul suggests that regarding food and calendar practices the Roman Christians all should “be fully convinced” of their position in their own minds (14:5) at the same time resisting the temptation to pass judgment on those with differing convictions (14:13) I began re-reading Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology this evening and came across some wonderfully relevant passages about the penultimate nature of our theological convictions and our confidence in a fallible church’s fidelity.
No structures of historical continuity merely as such can assure the integrity of witness to reality that is other than the transmitting group, at least if that witness is such as to require hermeneutical reflection. Thus neither Scripture nor creed nor liturgy nor teaching office, nor yet their ensemble, can as historical structures guarantee the fidelity of our proclamation and prayer to the apostolic witness. Affirmation that the church is still the church pledges the certainty of a historical continuity that no structures of historical continuity can make certain. This affirmation therefore reaches beyond its immediate object to be faith that God uses the church’s communal structures to preserve the gospel’s temporal self-identity and so also the temporal self-identity of the gospel’s community.
Invoking such an activity of God, the church speaks of the Spirit. Thus the church believes that her Scriptures are instruments of the Spirit in her life; that her dogmatic decisions may truly begin, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”; and that ordination grants a “gift” of the Spirit to preserve continuity of the apostolic teaching. Faith that the church is still the church is faith in the Spirit’s presence and rule in and by the structures of the church’s historical continuity. Indeed, even the church’s recognition through the second century of who were and who were not apostles cannot be justified except by trust in the Spirit’s leading.
But if it is God the Spirit who sustains the gospel’s and so the church’s self-identity through time, then that identity cannot be mere historical continuity with the church’s past beginning. For the Spirit is precisely God as the power of the future, God as his own and our transforming outcome. If it is the Spirit who sustains the gospel’s and the church’s self-identity through time, then that identity is primarily anticipation of an end and just so perpetuation of a beginning, anticipation of the “eternal gospel” and just so reiteration of a historic message.
Therefore, until we have identified the particular deity of the Spirit that is, until we have the trinitarian interpretation of God more fully before us we cannot fully understand the church’s tradition, nor therefore Scriptural or creedal or liturgical or ministerial authority. [emphasis mine]
Recognizing that in the midst of our disagreements the Spirit is in our midst guarantees us two things. First, that all parties see through a glass darkly regardless of whatever partial truths are affirmed on either side of any given argument. Any truth confessed is a truth that is confessed on the way to a future which still awaits our arrival. Second, the Spirit’s presence is our guarantee that despite any and all falsehoods either party may hold, they hold them as member’s of a community not abandoned by the Spirit, and thus one that will be safely (if begrudgingly at times) led into all truth.
Were America’s founding fathers divinely inspired? Glenn Beck says yes. That’s an astounding claim. Especially when thrown out comprehensively. As a Christian I’d say the Apostle Paul was divinely inspired when he wrote the Epistle to the Romans, but not in everything he said or did. I watched this wondering what back meant. The other thing that was funny about this segment is the founders Beck points to in the picture to his left: Washington, Franklin and Samuel Adams. Now Samuel Adams was an orthodox New England Calvinist, but Washington and Franklin were both deists. While Washington attended Anglican services regularly, he never was confirmed and never took communion. This was a common practice among Anglicans with deistic sympathies and low christologies. His Freemasonry seems to have made him sympathetic to what we might call today religious pluralism. Franklin was an “out” deist who didn’t believe in the divinity of Christ, the resurrection or the doctrine of the Trinity. I wonder why Beck wouldn’t put up pictures of James Madison or John Witherspoon, both orthodox Calvinists, alongside Samuel Adams. All that being said, the theology of Washington and Franklin is not all that significant to me when evaluating their political achievements. They were brilliant, courageous, visionary men who deserve our gratitude and heart-felt respect. But why do they have to be divinely inspired? And would that make them authoritative sources for faith and life, which as an orthodox Christian I take Holy Scripture to be?
It’s funny, I am sitting in the lobby of Union Theological Seminary, having come up here from Princeton Theological Seminary, reading a reflection about theological study at Yale Divinity School in the early 80′s. In it Rusty Reno talks about the joys of discovering Michael Wyschogrod in his graduate student days:
We were all the more attracted to Wyschogrod because he spoke up for the authority of revelation when the modern Protestant tradition in which most of us had been raised had gravitated to the liberal theological project. Put simply, theological liberalism tries to distill essential, timeless teachings from the historical forms of traditional teaching, thus liberating a supposedly greater and more profound religious truth from the limitations of its historical, communally authoritative formulations and allowing for a more plastic, mobile, and critical relation to church teaching…We knew the liberal theological project had to be resisted. The church’s universal mission can tempt her to deracinate her own teachings. This temptation becomes all the more powerful in the modern era when an emerging secular culture begins to compete with the church for the intellectual loyalty of educated people. Feeling torn between two masters, modern Christians seek a third and higher set of principles, a view of Christian faith that allow us to manage the difficult relations between the doctrinal truths that church teaches and modern life.
Reno describes Wyschogrod as a Jewish Barthian. He’s not the first one to do so. But what he sees in Wyschogrod’s theology that in his mind Barth lacks is carnality:
The Body of Faith read like a Barthian “No!” to liberal theology, which had its own career in nineteenth and twentieth-century Judaism. It showed us that Jewish faith is rooted not in universalizing abstractions but in the concrete reality of the seed of Abraham and the particularity of God’s commandments, what he refers to as the “carnal election” of Israel. Wyschogrod points out that the Christian notion of the Incarnation implicit in the I am that Jesus pronounces plays a role similar to the Jewish doctrine of the election of Israel. Both say that God puts all his eggs in one basket, with Jews pointing to the Jewish people and Christians pointing to the Jewish body of Jesus on the cross. Both involve a “carnal election,” or, as he puts it elsewhere, a “carnal faith”–that line of biological descent, that man hanging on the cross…Carnal election, carnal faith–the formulations arrested us. Most of us had decided to study at Yale because the program in theology participated in the Barthian “No!” to liberal Protestant theology. Yet, for all the influence Barth exerted, in retrospect I can see that we were vaguely dissatisfied with Barthian theology. His theology certainly reflected an intense and rich affirmation of that man hanging on the cross, but there was something troublingly thin about Barth’s undoubtedly impressive achievement. He once said of Schleiermacher that the great founder of modern liberal theology tried to talk about God by talking about man in a loud voice. Perhaps we were unconsciously suspicious that Barth tried to talk about God by talking about theology in a loud voice. In a word, Barth’s voice seemed to lack “carnality.”
I might want to quibble with Rusty’s assessment of Barth, but the piece made me want to go re-read Wyschogrod.