Trinity Catena 2a

Love is the union of a lover, a beloved, and of their mutual love. When we, following scripture, assert "God is love," we confess that God is a plurality in unity; God is love.

***

It is Augustine who observes that God is love (in chapter eight of his wittily titled The Trinity). He doesn't do it as a philosopher, but as a pastor. Even while he is outlining how the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the father, and the intensity of their love is the Spirit of love itself, he reminds that love draws us out. Love requires us and compels us and irresistably changes us. Love is loving; it acts. Loving makes us lovers, bone of its bone, ever more able to see and be what loving requires. Our flaming hearts accept nothing less. And in the center of its unity we strain to glimpse the form itself-–the lover, what is being loved, and love–-and that is God.

The gaze catches so completely that I can only stammer some mystical poetry: a few lines from San Juan de la Cruz's love poem La noche oscura del alma ("Dark Night of the Soul") and from Mechthild of Magdeburg's Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead):

"In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed
Forth unobserved I went,

In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
Without other light or guide
Save that which in my heart was burning.

That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me,
Whom I knew well,

O, guiding night;
O, night more lovely than the dawn;
O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love."

---

"I cannot dance, O Lord,
Unless You lead me.
If You wish me to leap joyfully,
Let me see You dance and sing—-

Then I will leap into Love—-
And from Love into Knowledge,
And from Knowledge into the Harvest,
The sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.

There I will stay with You, whirling."

***

Anyway, then--looking out from contemplation--there's something else that this sight of God as love does to us. That God is love itself sets the tone for what Christians mean when they talk about our deepest ideas of unity and community. The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff called the Trinity the communion of life and love. “Solitude is hell,” he said. “No one is an island. We are surrounded by persons, things, and beings on all sides.” The loving community of the Trinity calls us “to maintain relationships of communion with all, giving and receiving.”

Only persons can be in communion. It means that one is in the presence of the other, different from the other but open in a radical mutuality. For there to be true communion there must be direct and immediate relationships: eye to eye, face to face, heart to heart. The result of mutual surrender and reciprocal communion is community. Community results from personal relationships in which each is accepted as he or she is, each opens to the other and gives the best of himself or herself.

We will pick up this theme again.

Excerpts from "Matigari ma Njirungi" (The Language of Languages)

I ran across a beautiful book in a bookstore in Lexington, KY last summer. It was published by the University of Chicago and titled The Language of Languages: Reflections on Translation. It is a collection of lectures by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o. His insights leapt from the page that afternoon. Here are a few that spoke to me.

This excerpt is about translation as the emancipating antidote to heirarchies of domination.

********

"If we think of culture as the eyes through which a people see the world, the implications of a people being denied their language and having to use the language of [a] dominating power becomes clear. The aim and the result are to make the dominated people look at themselves and their place in the world through the eyes of the dominant social forces. That's why language control has always been at the center of imperial, cultural, and psychological conquests. . . . The language of conquest becomes the language of being. A people so subjected may even come to see their own language as that of non-being. Therefore, for such peoples, language emancipation is a necessary component of psychological emancipation. For, in reality there is no language which is inherently more of a language than any other language; all languages, big and small, are equal in their potentialities.

"If you know all the languages of the world and you don't know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, and add all other languages to it, that is empowerment.

"In reality it is impossible for any person to know all the languages in their own country, let alone in the world. This is where the art of translation comes in. Translation makes dialogue between languages and cultures and different histories easier and more enriching. I would like to see translation elevated to center stage in relations between languages and cultures. . . . Linguistic emancipation anywhere is central to the emancipation of the mind everywhere (60-61)."

"Hierarchy as a conception of being is more clearly reflected in the relationship between languages. . . . All languages in the world, big and small, have a lot to contribute to the enrichment of our common human culture. . . . Languages and cultures can and should relate in terms of network, not heierarchy. And a network is really a system of give-and-take between equals. Translation is central to this entire system. . . . So I'd like to end by rephrasing Aime Césaire's maxim that cultural contact is the oxygen of civilization with a statement to the effect that language contact through translation is the real oxygen of civilization (70)."

__________

This excerpt is about language as the cultivation and humanization of nature.

********

"Humans translate the language and the laws of nature into those of nurture. Humans are of nature, like plants, animals, air, say ecology, and yet they stand outside it, as it were, act on it and reproduce themselves and give rise to processes which are clearly not identical with the nature of which they are a part. And yet, what humans have achieved is an extension of the various aspects of nature. The most wonderful technological tools are an extension of the human hand. The farthest-seeing telescope is an extention of the eye as are the speediest vehicles--rockets and spaceships for instance--extentions of the leg, the act of walking. And computers--don't they try to imitate the human brian? So the translation of the language of nature into their own tongues has enabled humans to create their nurture out of nature. The nurtural world of the human is an endless reproduction of what obtains in the natural nature and even the word 'cultivate' gives rise to the concept of culture as a social practice. Agriculture and social culture have a common root in the notion of cultivating nature, itself a process of translation from one environment to another.

"In short, the humanization of nature is itself a process of translation and bespeaks of the centrality of translation in the make-up of our human community. Aristotle said that poetry was more universal than history since history dealt with the particulars while poetry dealt with what could be. But there is a way in which we can say that the subject of translation is the universals contained in the particulars of nature and social experience (35)."

__________

And now the theology:

As I read the above, I cannot help but think of the major places in the Bible where language matters: the Tower of Babel, the miracle at Pentecost, and the image of the church as a numberless multitude of tribes and languages from John's Apocalypse. The first comes from the ancient world. The last comes from the world to be. And the harvest festival is our world today. I want to apply Ngugi wa Thiong'o's meditations to each and see what comes out.

Language and the World that Was

Lambeth's new model isn't pretty, but it's right

The Fifteenth Lambeth Conference ended at Canterbury Cathedral just a few days ago from this writing. There was much to celebrate about the conference. Even having the conference is worth celebrating! Deep disagreements over human sexual identity and practice have torn at the unity of the Anglican Communion for years. And even now, delegates from several conservative African diocese did not attend. This conference tried very hard to bracket that disagreement. There is a lot for the worldwide church to do. And, to a large degree, the many delegates were able to do that. But not wholly. The sore points of division cannot just be ignored. To his credit, Archbishop of Canterbury, the most reverend and right honored Justin Welby, understood this. And, in three addresses to the delegates, he admitted frankly that the communion was not whole. In his remarks on the Lambeth Call for Human Dignity, Welby said,

For the large majority of the Anglican Communion the traditional understanding of marriage is something that is understood, accepted and without question, not only by Bishops but their entire Church, and the societies in which they live. For them, to question this teaching is unthinkable, and in many countries would make the church a victim of derision, contempt and even attack. For many churches to change traditional teaching challenges their very existence.

For a minority, we can say almost the same. They have not arrived lightly at their ideas that traditional teaching needs to change. They are not careless about scripture. They do not reject Christ. But they have come to a different view on sexuality after long prayer, deep study and reflection on understandings of human nature. For them, to question this different teaching is unthinkable, and in many countries is making the church a victim of derision, contempt and even attack. For these churches not to change traditional teaching challenges their very existence.

So let us not treat each other lightly or carelessly. We are deeply divided. That will not end soon. We are called by Christ himself both to truth and unity.

Dr. Ian Paul, writing on not only Welby's remarks and on the state of discussion throughout the conference sees emerging two different models of unity. And it is these models that I want to highlight in this post. The first model of unity is the historic understanding of the Anglican communion, with its high degree of communion, a thick community, and its historic pattern of faith. This communion Catholicism talked about "living 'in communion with autonomy and accountability'" and being "enabled to be conformed together to the mind of Christ" as churches "bound together 'not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference' and of the other instruments of Communion." This was understood to entail a commitment on the part of each member church of the Communion "to have regard for the common good of the Communion in the exercise of its authority" (3.2.1) and "to act with diligence, care and caution in respect of any action which may provoke controversy, which by its intensity, substance or extent could threaten the unity of the Communion and the effectiveness or credibility of its mission." Welby's remarks, however, have turned the communion toward another definition of unity called autonomous inclusivism.

In autonomous inclusivism each Province of the Anglican Communion is autonomous and called to live interdependently. It seeks "faithfulness to God in richly diverse cultures, distinct human experiences, and deep disagreements." Quoting Dr. Paul at length here:

The opening declaration [began] with the astonishing statement that "We believe in God who is both three and one, who holds difference and unity in the heart of God’s being, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit" and then connects this to ecclesiology by claiming "Our differences embodied in the Anglican Communion both challenge and deepen our experience of God in the other. As we join in God’s mission of reconciliation through Jesus and in the power of the Spirit, our differences are celebrated and redeemed, as we are made whole in the body of Christ. In that diverse whole, we more fully reflect the image of God". The theological statement represents a serious, arguably heretical, error in relation to the doctrine of God while the ecclesiological application of this seems to make difference and diversity central without drawing any distinction between types of difference, particularly the difference between truth and error. This may help explain the new "Many . . . Other" and "walking together . . . despite our deep disagreement” wordings in the Human Dignity call in relation to sexuality.

This call, if accepted by the Lambeth Conference presided over by Archbishop Justin six years later, effectively says "those who depart from Communion teaching will face no consequences". In fact, it goes further and effectively states "the consequence of their 'unilateral actions on a matter of doctrine without Catholic unity' is that they render the Communion as a whole lacking a teaching and they require all churches in the Communion to recognise a plurality of views which everyone has to accept within Communion life". It is, I think impossible to see this as anything other than a shift from "communion Catholicism" to "autonomous inclusivism".

The one defence of the new draft call that has some weight is that it is at least speaking honestly about our realities. The problem is that it does so in a paradigm diametrically opposed to that which the Communion has developed and worked with until now.

So, there you have it, the dissolving of communion Catholicism into an autonomous inclusivism. I wonder, as I think about this, whether I am looking at a judgment of my developing ideas around St. Augustine's church. Am I looking at the weakness of a church built apart from circle drawing? And does communion Catholicism equate to a giant circle? Can a church be a hospital for the sick, or does it have to require idealogical sameness?

Just today I read an article by Joe Carter, a senior writer for the Gospel Coalition entitled "You can't love Jesus and Condone Immorality." In it he says, "The way God accepts us is 'just as I am, despite who I am, intending to change who I am.'" And he concludes, "We all have a choice to make: we can either choose to obey [Jesus] or admit we don't truly love him." It sure sounds like love, right?

I guess I'm starting to see a process, perhaps a lifelong process, where Joe Carter sees a single event. I guess I'm starting to wonder if the thickness of the communion Catholicism model--and who doesn't feel the safety and togetherness of such a model?--is really just an agreement to lie in the appropriate places. As Ian Paul said about the Archbishop's autonomous inclusivism model: "it is at least speaking honestly." What does honest unity look like? Does Joe Carter's bouncer-at-the-church-door policy produce honesty? I think Carter's is an over-realized expectation. It is circle drawing. And what is needed is eschatological hope providing a common horizon point, a Celestial City, toward which we all move. Such hope has no purchase with power-unto-conformity but only for weakness and prayer and the bitter miracle of the cross of Jesus.

Noodling around in 1 John 1

In preparation for teaching basic Greek in January, I am working through 1 John chapter 1 and saw a few things. A friend encouraged me to write them down. Beginning, then, at the beginning--

1 John 1.1

"That which was from the beginning.
That which we have heard;
That which we have seen with our eyes;
That which we marveled at
and we handled with our hands
-- concerning the word (logos) of life:"

 ὃ  ἦν         ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς,

 ὃ  ἀκηκόαμεν,

 ὃ  ἑωράκαμεν  τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν,

 ὃ  ἐθεασάμεθα

     καὶ

[ὃ] αἱ χεῖρες ἡμῶν ἐψηλάφησαν

περὶ τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς--

I made a rough translation of verse one and laid the Greek out in order to highlight the structure. Pronoun and verbs build in a series, stairstepping one to the next, trumpet blasts announcing their object: the word of life. The parallels between this and Genesis 1.1-3 in the LXX are hard to miss, beginning at the beginning itself--

1 John	Parallel
ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς	᾿Εν ἀρχῇ (LXX)
"we heard" (ἀκηκόαμεν)	Genesis's "God said" (καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός)
we see with our eyes (ἑωράκαμεν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἡμῶν)	God said "let there be light" (Γενηθήτω φῶς)
"we marveled at" ἐθεασάμεθα	Job 38:7
τοῦ λόγου	the wisdom which orders creation in Prov 6
τῆς ζωῆς	Genesis 3:20 LXX: καὶ ἐκάλεσεν Αδαμ τὸ ὄνομα τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ Ζωή, ὅτι αὕτη μήτηρ πάντων τῶν ζώντων.

Couple of thoughts on these parallels. On the Job 38 reference, I suspect that the creation side alludes to the sons of God, the heavenly council, rejoicing at creation. Now, however, 1 John includes a we, meaning the church. As for logos, John's Gospel equates the word, logos, with the wisdom or reason which gives order to creation in Proverbs 6. Stoic philosophers and gnostic mystics of the first century would agree. But 1 John blows it up. We "handled with our hands" is a body blow. Until then, the entire progression of 1 John's opening prologue is a kind of mystical contemplation on creation. But, instead of arriving at gnosis, "we handled with our hands" takes a baseball bat to the face--very hard, very painful, definitely solid.

Moving on: the verb "we marveled" (ἐθεασάμεθα) occurs in structural progression with the verbs before it. But it has something they do not. It is joined with the conjunction "and" to the verb "we handled" (ἐψηλάφησαν). As above, Job's elohim, the sons of God, the heavenly council rejoiced at creation. But we who marvel with them go one better. We handle it with our hands. The allusion to the incarnation is inescapable.

Finally, it would be erroneous to miss the name of Eve here, Zoe (Ζωή) in the LXX. Eve, of course, wanted wisdom but on human initiative. Now the τοῦ λόγου τῆς ζωῆς, the wisdom of Eve, has come, but this time at the initiative of the Creator. There is an entire theology, almost a mystagogy, that wants to spill out here. And, somewhere, I hope someone has done work on the New Testament's literary rehabilitation of Eve. I suspect something profoundly eschatological is going on here. Perhaps it is my protestantism bumping up against Mariology. I have nothing to say about this more than to point it out. And also to say that the narrative is holding its Adam very close to the chest and will do so until verse three.

1 John 1.2

The parallels between creation's development in Genesis 1 and the verbal series of 1 John 1 makes verse 2 a puzzle. It doesn't follow the parallel. "This life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us." I wish it followed Genesis on into the days of creation, but it does not. I'm not sure what it does. So, here is a guess. The following verse almost picks up where verse one left off. It uses the same verbs--we have seen" "we have heard." So, perhaps 1 John 1.2 is a sort of confession sandwiched between verses 1 and 3. In Genesis, God parts things: light from dark, the waters above from the waters below. Perhaps verse 2 exists in a space made by the parting of verses 1 and 3. Verse two deserves a closer look.

Verse 2 displays a beautiful layout of verb tenses. It says "The life was revealed (the past tense verb is passive) AND we have seen it (perfect tense: something happened, the affect of which is influencing the writer) AND we are bearing witness (now present tense and ongoing) AND we are announcing (again, present tense and ongoing) it to you all."

1 John 1.3

Well, that is just the way it works, right? God reveals himself, we see it, own it for ourselves, and announce it. Perhaps this evangelism does occur in a kind of parting, like a new day of creation is being hollowed out now for it to happen.

New thing I'm noticing in 1 John: the fundamental nature of communal belonging (koinonia). "We write this so that you will have koinonia with us / our community is with the Father and the Son [the eternal divine community] . . . anyone who habitually sins is not in community with us."

This picks up, of course, on the sweep of scripture: God makes the world in order to be in community w human beings and to enjoy a community of priests mediating his wise rule to our world of things.

1 John 1.5

The parallels between it and Genesis 1 keep going. Life comes before light. The reader is a few verses in before light is mentioned (though "seeing" is in verse 1), but life is in verse 1. Note also the emphasis placed on verbs of speech: we confess, we announce, we say, we claim to. In Genesis, God speaks. Here, the emphasis is on our speaking.

Imagine how this places preaching at the bow of the new creation: the proclamation of the word is analogous to God's Genesis-speech. The fellowship made by preaching is analogous to the human family made by God. And now I have this weird thought going on: if preaching is the analog to God's speaking in Genesis, creating the context for the new community, is baptism the victory over death and the sacraments the offering up in thanks of the fruit of the promised land?

Finally, there are a number of if/then (conditional) statements in this first chapter. I want to dig into them. And I also want to count them to see if these verbs of speaking might not mirror in some way the spoken days of creation.

whiteness in the dock

Men and women of faith are being challenged today, as they should, to confront their racial biases and to act for justice. In the face of obvious, continuous, systemic, and hideous human suffering, one cannot turn away. Christians who privately live coram Deo and dwell in communities under the Reformation call to ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei must hear their neighbors in humility and repent where necessary. One must ask one's heart hard questions; one must interrogate every stone of one's communities. No people in the United States carry this burden more than white Christians. And I am a white Christian man who came of age in the American South.

I think of John's vision of the great multitude in Revelation chapter seven. His is not a vision of the world finally falling in line with whiteness. Without saying as much, this was the assumption in the white hermeneutics of "the way it is." But this isn't the way it is. John's vision is a challenge to whiteness. It tells whiteness to take a seat alongside everybody else. This is the Kingdom, where the first are last and the last, first. There are no grounds for boasting. Whiteness is just a fellow participant in the multi-racial, multi-lingual fellowship of God's Shalom community of priestly worship. This is the horizontal eschatological hope. But what of the vertical?

The vertical is, of course, the triune God. He is a plurality of ecstatic and contemplative unity. And it is in his figure that we hear the call to be as he is. Not a monad of absolute likeness, such as Allah. Instead, a loving whole. The Trinity is why racism is an evil that will be overcome. The incarnation is why the racism that will be overcome will be human.

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Ian Almond, professor of world literature at Georgetown University in Qatar, being interviewed by Jane Clark of Beshara Magazine:

Jane: It seems to me that there are two aspects to this homogenisation. One is that it could be a movement toward the whole world having some sort of common cultural reference point, leading to us becoming more united and able to talk to each other. But on the other hand, as you say, it could lead to a loss of diversity. What's more, in your book you point out that the particular canon that has developed has an agenda, or at least, unspoken assumptions. It's not a neutral message that's being propagated, and so there are certain values and certain voices that are really not being expressed within it.

Ian: I think we have to ask ourselves -- what do we ultimately want? Do we want to live in a world where everyone's culture is equally accessible to us and our culture is accessible to everybody else? What would that mean for diversity? Diversity has to include the fact that some people's works are just never going to be understood by everyone. Some books we will never really enjoy, some poetry will never really touch us, because we simply cannot related to them, so we should learn to draw a line instead of wanting to experience every single viewpoint on the planet. We should learn to recognise the parameters of our own cultural finitude.

But then, as you've already suggested, we also have to ask -- what are the origins of that worldwide cultural community? If it comes about through a whole host of very different cultures contributing equally, it might be OK. But it isn't like that; our expeirnce of other people's cultures is very often mediated through a colonial lens, or the lens of first world countries. In India, for example, when Gujaratis or Tamils read Bangla literature, they read English translations of Bengali writers. In Mexico, Spanish has a similar role. There are 50 indigenous langauges in Mexico and the different peoples don't communicate directly: they use Spanish. So this kind of unity comes from a certain direction, and if it comes from a certain direction, it also has a trajectory.

a community of concentric circles

In this age, the community of the messiah exists in concentric circles. The outer circle (circulus ad extra) is porous and visible to the world. The inner circle (circulus ad intra) is nonporous and impenetrable. The outer circle is the visible people of the messiah "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets," the Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church. The inner circle is the elect "chosen in him before the foundations of the world." And, as in Jesus's parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13.24-30), "both of them grow together until the harvest."

It is easy to enter the outer circle. No one can forbid it. One is born into it or one bids for membership out of personal desire or in response to an invitation. And there is a liturgical sign of entry. In Deuteronomy 28:9, directly after God says "The Lord will establish you as his holy people," he commands circumcision as a visible token of membership. Male babies were to be circumcised shortly after birth, and through them, the nation is circumcised. Circumcision was replaced by baptism in the Messianic, New Testament community. Members of the circle have public access to the benefits of the community.

It is impossible, by human effort, to enter into the inner circle (see Opening a Closed Circle, 83). Its members are elect by God. The language and benefits of the community are reserved for and active in the elect alone. They are the invisible community of the inner circle "born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." The inner circle is the church militant (Ecclesia militans). It is the burning bush in which God dwells by the Spirit and every man, woman, and child is on fire.

It is impossible and evil to fix another's place on the inner or outer circle, aside from their making an overt declaration. And it can be challenging, in the day to day, to know where to place oneself.

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[1] The history of the dogma of an invisible and invisible church begins with Martin Luther. Luther's protest against Roman Catholicism demanded a new answer to the question "Who makes up the church?"

Luther called the Roman Catholic Church a “false church” (his sermon Von der heiligen christlichen Kirche in 1531). He set a true or hidden church over against it. His hidden church was separate from the visible church, the workaday church or the communio sanctorum of human beings harassed by sin and suffering, existing on and by God’s grace. This visible church was a mixture of good and bad. It was streaked with sin and harbored sinners even though it was diligent to combat sin and the perversion of doctrine. Inside it was the hidden church. "The church must appear in the world. But it can only appear in a covering (larva), a veil, a shell, or some other kind of clothes which a man can grasp, otherwise it can never be found," (WA Briefwechsel 9, 608). For Luther, then, the church is like a sacrament: the visible and hidden can be distinguished but not separated in this age. The visible may be handled and, underneath it, the hidden made available.

The false church does not value the scriptures. And, therefore, it cannot properly offer the sacraments or preach the gospel. The false church has no life in it--no inner grace, no hidden church.

Luther also perceived an analogy to his visible-and-hidden ecclesiology in the incarnation of Jesus, where God and man are one. The hidden church suffers in its flesh, even as its head, Jesus, suffered. And through that suffering the gospel life is made available to human beings.

Calvin, as is to be expected, sums up the work of the first Reformers:

"The Church," he says, "is used in the sacred Scriptures in two senses. Sometimes when they mention the church, they intend that which is really such in the sight of God (quae revera est coram Deo) into which none are received but those who by adoption and grace are the children of God and by the sanctification of the Spirit are the true members of Christ. And then it comprehends not only the saints at any one time resident on earth but all the elect who have lived from the beginning of the world.

"But the word church is frequently used in the Scriptures to designate the whole multitude dispersed all over the world who profess to worship one God and Jesus Christ, who are initiated into his faith by baptism, who testify their unity in true doctrine and charity by a participation of the sacred supper, who consent to the word of the Lord and preserve the ministry which Christ has instituted for the purpose of preaching it. In this church are included many hypocrites, who have nothing of Christ but the name and appearance; many persons, ambitious, avaricious, envious, slanderous, and dissolute in their lives, who are tolerated for a time, either because they cannot be convicted by a legitimate process, or because discipline is not always maintained with sufficient vigor.

"As it is necessary therefore to believe that Church which is invisible to us, and known to God alone, so this Church, which is visible to men, we are commanded to honor, and to maintain communion with it." (Institutes Bk. IV.1 § 7)

This post is a work in progress.
Its existence is to be a short, model ecclesiology,
 combining my model of "Saint Augustine's church",
 something on the two sacraments, and election.

Note: your grammar is not quite right.
Barth has some good tweaks.
see https://postbarthian.com/2016/04/29/
karl-barths-rejection-visible-invisible-church/ 

As if to say that the circle one should care
about is not the circle of exclusion between
people, but the circle of election.

Previous post links an available hermeneutic
to a welcoming ecclesiology.

The mission-stance of the church mirrors
the mission-stance of the Triune God.

You were not wrong to bring in the
Trinity ad extra / ad intra. Put that
back in.

The private ascesis of the Sermon on the
Mount can be appended to this as well.

The circle of the Spirit is wider than the
circle of the church.

All people are made in the imago Dei,
albeit now marred by sin. Only saints are
made into a kingdom of priests

A Response to C. S. Lewis's lecture "The Inner Ring"

A coworker named Greg asked me to respond to C. S. Lewis's lecture "The Inner Ring." I've touched on this lecture before in "Blue Longing or Yellow Laziness." Nevertheless, that post is only about private revelation. There is more to say. Pattern 83, Opening a Closed Circle, might also play an oblique role.

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Hi, Greg,

Thank you for asking me about C. S. Lewis's lecture "The Inner Ring." It is a memorable essay. I read it years ago and have never forgotten it. It is so frank about this negative and pervasive habit running through human society and into the heart. We are so governed by a desire to be included and by the avoidance of alienation. One wonders what the world--and we--would be like were it free of it.

The power of the inner ring so affects ethics and politics that I almost want to respond with a kind of highly abbreviated Republic or Utopia. But nation building is not on my mind. Instead, I wonder how Lewis's inner ring affects us in our relationship to God and in the realm of spiritual practice? And here there are three ways that I see working our human cravenness for the inner ring.

The first involves one of Christianity’s ancient enemies, Gnosticism. Gnosticism needs an inner ring. It promises salvation for anyone who enters its inner ring. Simply do this or that and one obtains the secret, the inner knowledge, one arrives or, in classical Gnosticim, one ascends beyond the flesh into the true realms of mind and spirit. This impulse is the religious impulse of the natural human being. It is idolatry’s lure.

The second involves private interpretations of scripture or revelations from God. To my mind, these play at a Christian variant of Gnosticism. God speaks especially to me. I am the recipient of private revelation. Or, applied to scripture, God made this scripture mean this particular thing to me. This is caricatured in the flop and drop joke about a man who opens his Bible and reads, “Judas went and hanged himself,” and, randomly opening his Bible again, reads “Go and do likewise.” More broadly, though, I think of the rising popularity of lectio divina.

There are various descriptions of lectio divina, but the generality is the same: one reads scripture slowly in a meditative and prayerful frame of mind, asking the Holy Spirit to speak through the text. The idea is that one reads the text and is open to words jumping out, phrases that want repeating, tugs at the heart. These, it is said, are the Spirit. One concentrates on these. Some say the reason for concentration is to simply remain in the presence of God. Others say the point is to gently bring such Spirit-highlighted phrases or words to bear on one's life. This second option is what disturbs me.[1]

This kind of lectio divina, which looks for personal meaning in the texts, is a ring-writing practice. It is absolutely singular and individual from beginning to end. One desires a particular subjectivity unique and private and apart. Read another way: one takes a public, common text inspired by the Spirit through the church in the particulars of historical culture, personality, and context, and one makes it a Great Book of the Self, ignoring the entire tradition of reading, ignoring all historical context, and going so far as to ask the Spirit to treat the grammar and syntax of the words differently and to gurgle private unction like a hidden spring into the well of your mind, a second method of inspiration very different from the first. Such is a mysticism of the worst kind.

The third thing that comes to my mind is the false use of judgment by the churches to create “pure” spaces—perhaps this is one under the label of eschewing sin or particular sins. “My church does not accept people who sin in way x. But we do readily encourage people who routinely commit sins y and z. People who sin in way x will experience private judgment and public/pulpit condemnation. People who sin in forms y and z will be overlooked, excused, or made officers and put in charge of committes.”

Lewis expands on this point as follows--note my italics:

And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well know. You yourself, once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.

I have been thinking about this for a number of years—the breezy way that we assume the work of the church largely as one of judgment, of line drawing, of forming circles of ins and outs. Lewis plainly says that this judgment-as-people-define-it exists for the sake of exclusion. I don’t think this is the work of the church—exclusion. But I do wonder how we can understand the Great Commission apart from excluding tendencies. Once I baptize a man or disciple a woman, aren’t they automatically forming an inner ring? I believe that the answer is a hard won no. By this I mean that one would think the answer is yes, but in typical God fashion, the church is asked to buck our natural tendency, break all circle making, and remain together despite real differences akin to the way Paul’s strong and weak or James’s rich and poor are commanded to ignore such differences and partake of a common eucharistic meal.[2]

The triune God scandalously eschews an inner ring. Of all that exists, surely the Godhead would be right to keep its own fellowship, its own perichoretic dance of pure bliss. But it does not. God has opened the circle for love's sake. God is on mission. And so, the gospel message is freely spread to everything. Whoever wants can hear the word preached. Whoever wants can take up or Google scripture at any time and, in the phrasing of this week’s collect, “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” Gnosticism has no place here. And there is no private interpretation of scripture: one interprets as a member of the community as it is spread across the ages in time and space. There is no private revelation, for, as Jesus said in the parable, “they have Moses and the prophets. They should listen to them.”

If someone wishes to practice lectio divina, let them first do the hard work of exegesis. Let them practice lectio scriptura. Let them struggle with grammar, syntax, culture, idiom, and all that goes under the names hermeneutics and historiography. Let them do that and then, by all means, lectio divina as you will.

The multiplicity of [Scripture’s] senses [into literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical readings] does not produce equivocation or any other kind of multiplicity, seeing that these senses are not multiplied because one word signifies several things, but because the things signified by the words can be themselves types of other things. . . . All the senses [of scripture] are founded on one — the literal — from which alone can any argument be drawn. . . . Nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense.” (Summa Theologiæ, 1a, q1, a10, emphasis mine)

Having done the work, one is working in the context of the interpreting community. (I still don't trust lectio divina because of its desire to get around the Spirit's initial method of inspiration and adopt something much more akin to the way pagans seek messages from the gods, but at least the worst sins of lectio divina are kept in check by its better educated elder brother.)

So then, struggling against the human tendency to close rings at every point of difference, Christians hold the doors open. By means of humility, they exclude no one. Lewis’s almost maudlin phrase (to modern ears) is “if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like.” Today, we hear a phrase like that and think this is exactly what jocks, white supremacists, and shady members of mob families do. But Lewis meant simply being open to like and to befriend any person regardless of what ring they are or aren’t in. The church is commanded to be open like this. It is commanded and allowed in this manner to be and become a gathering of friends, a community, a family.

Allow me to now proffer a hypothesis and say, What if only God can do the judging? Isn't it so that God's manner of judging is radically other than what we expect. With the scripture, we see that it is different and surprising. And with scripture, may it even be offensive? I hypothesize and say that God is judging the world in the work of the church, but connotatively. That is, in a manner that is not well understood by the church, probably misunderstood by the church, and is wholly outside of its ability. Indeed, doesn't scripture forbid people from assuming they can definitely say who is out and who is in? (Can we always judge rightly even about ourselves?) Perhaps the church is busy with hospitality and the Spirit is busy with the work of judging--whatever that is. I do not think human beings can well define that word. As J. R. R. Tolkien's Gandalf says to Frodo in the dark of Moria, "Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends."

Moving on then, Lewis’s last paragraph suggests the human craving for inclusion in inner rings derives from a deep longing for the gospel--being included in God's inner ring. If you are always trying to satisfy your own desires for inclusion (“them as asks shan’t have”), you’ll forever be disappointed. But, he says, if one asks after Jesus’s command to “ask the Father,” then one is put on a new road which “lies quite in another direction.” And then Lewis talks about Alice’s house. Alice steps through a mirror in her house into the reflected “her house” which exists in Wonderland. This is exactly the sort of thing that Lucy, Edmond, and Eustace discover in the painting of a Narnian ship that comes to life in Eustace’s house and sucks them all into Narnia in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. What one is looking for is already there, but one has to have eyes to see it. One has to step through a looking glass into a place that looks the same but is in another world entirely.

Thus, the whole lecture is contained in Jesus’s teaching that in the Kingdom the last shall be first and the first, last. By giving up one’s self-striving to be first, and by embracing the humility of last, one finds a community of friends and steps through the mirror into the Narnia that calls, always calls, from the center of every human heart.

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1. The use of a text to quiet the mind so that one can be silent, reverent, and attentive to the encompassing presence of God is one of the deepest chambers of Christian meditative practice. All lectio divina--even this type--is governed by lectio scriptura; Buddhist and other practices of emptying the mind of illusions in an effort to find enlightenment is not what this is. The silence of Christian contemplation is obedient to scriptures such as "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth" (Ps. 46.10) and "The LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him." (Hbk 2.20). The Habakkuk text is especially helpful as it contrasts this silence with the dead silence of the idols in verses 18 and 19.

2. In the post "Some Changes Affected By Sacramental Theology," I raise the question of whether the inclusion of a proper sacramental theology in one's ecclesiology doesn't serve a deeply irenic purpose as a bay leaf blunts bitterness in a stew. Note also this (unverified) quotation from Jaques Ellul: "The Christian's first act of non-violence is that he refrains from asking others to live as if they were Christians."

Robinson on Conscience in the Churches

A Winter 2018 post in the American Scholar excerpts Marilynne Robinson thinking aloud about conscience. And, in the doing, she puts to words some of the thoughts about how conscience was supposed to work in the early church that have been swimming around in my head. I've long had the suspicion that more needed to be said about conscience, whatever it is. (We are still waiting on the latest brain scan to tell us.) Anyway, here is the relevant portion:

In his letter to the Romans, Paul asks the new congregation, apparently divided by cultural and ethical differences between its pagan and Jewish members, “Who are you to judge another’s servant? It is before his master that he stands or falls, and the Lord will make him stand.” This is advice meant for members of a community of believers, people who accept servanthood as descriptive of their and their fellows’ relationship to God, and who see this relationship as personal in the sense that God loves where he loves and compensates for his servants’ failings by his grace. Ideally they have accepted a particular obedience, with origins in the laws of Moses, exemplified in the life and teachings of Christ. So much might the apostle see, or hope to see, in the early Church. But history tells us that no great effort has ever been required to narrow the circle of those who should be seen as God’s servants, whose errors would be made good by God’s grace and therefore should not be judged. We all know the enormities that have made themselves presentable to the Christian conscience, often enough campaigns of violence against other Christians. Sects and denominations still remember the injuries their ancestors suffered long centuries ago, and can still become indignant at the thought of them. They might also remember injuries they inflicted, if the comforts of identity were not diluted a little by such ventures into honesty.

Here is another thing Paul says in the letter to the Romans, still in the context of his thoughts on tolerance and the authority of conscience: “The faith you have, have as your own conviction before God.” That is, do not judge fellow believers and do not offend them. It may be fair to wonder whether this excellent advice has gone unheeded all these years because faith has tended to be a conviction shown to men, who, if we can trust Paul, are a good deal more fastidious than God.

This to me is a vital plank about how we approach ecclesiology, moving away from a doctrinal line in the sand (always moving and porous for insiders, always firm and impermeable to outsiders) toward a generous tolerance bound not to tolerance for tolerance sake but to God's ability to govern for himself his own people. More later on this.

Exploring pattern relationships: Community and Election

To move forward, my pattern language needs relationships. Where patterns are indexed to other patterns, meaning can be made. Apart from connection, what can be done? Below are my first two examples. One is built from *Community and the other from *Election.

Couple of comments: (a) Making relationships reveals holes. The *Election diagram is missing *Grace, for example. (b) Laying cards out like this begs some kind of method that identifies which idea is the spoke, which are antonyms or synonyms, which are higher-level or lower-level relationships, etc. (c) I don't think I understand what a pattern really is.

What is a pattern? Is it a recurring move or strategy or theme? For example, is *God the Father a pattern? What about *Water? What about *Christology?

And how many patterns is too many? Does a language need to be small enough to hold it all in one's mind, or, because patterns are indexed, can it be much larger? Does a large number of patterns suggest sloppy repetitiveness? Is too few not useful?

Finally, I have two ideas about an overall schema or index. I keep thinking about the divine economy and the Trinity and such. I keep thinking about the threefold liturgical confession: "Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again!"

I keep thinking about theological moves and movements. And so I have been toying with the following dramatic scheme:

• creation/introduction/recognition
• identification/empathy
• kenotic service
• gracious restoration
• glorious presentation.

But, then again, maybe the classic divisions such as Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, etc. are just as good.

Church Dogmatics 1.1.3 Preaching as "the audible sacrament"

This section was a complete challenge to me. Barth not only discusses preaching, but he discusses why preaching exists, how it is arrived at by an ecclesiology that is itself immersed (baptized) in revelation.

Preaching has always been a given from my youth. We read the Bible. We talk to others about what we’ve read or hear from them what they’ve read. Preaching is this same thing but broadcast out with greater authority due to the calling of the preacher and the deference of the community of hearers.

Yet, this isn’t a preaching supported by dogmatics, rather sociology or cultural anthropology. This is an emotional or intellectual appeal. Not that the preachers from my youth have not been sincere men. Not that they did not understand their own ministries dogmatically--they may have and probably did. No, I mean my understanding was largely a shallow one.

Later Reformed theology taught me to respect the Word preached, but the dogmatic apparatus was still missing.

Now I completely see the oversight; “in this dogmatics preaching is not only assigned less importance, but virtually no importance at all“ (65)! And without the confessional apparatus, how can one truly address oneself to or urge the church on to attend to proclamation? How can one understand what should be preached and why? “Proclamation along these lines can only end with its dissolution. Proclamation as self-exposition (read, oh twenty-first century, the term “authentic” or “authenticity”) must in the long run turn out to be a superfluous and impossible undertaking” (64). Indeed, without preaching the church is either the mystery of performance or a center of social justice practiced by human beings “alone in and with (the) world” (Ibid).

And now I am left to wonder about proclamation as a sacrament. “The Word is the audible sacrament and the sacrament, the visible Word” (71). I may be instructed by preaching, but do I receive grace in the hearing--a grace that allows for the “hearing of the promise” and for “obedience to it” (67)? So is grace available--I speak as if it is a substance--as a punctiliar judgment once-for-all applied or is it an ever flowing stream “whose waters make glad”?

Church Dogmatics pp 25-44: the Church Emerging

Here are a few disconnected thoughts puffed and wheezed at the summit of the slight but sheer face of Barth’s prolegomena.

Having established his presuppositions in the previous section, Barth fixes the task before him, namely to overcome Modernity (Pietism) and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism in favor of a (miraculous) Evangelische Theologie. The whole forms a scholastic Quodlibet. It is dialectical and masculine. We feel the direct, interested squint of the sportsman. The leaning in and warming to an argument from one who likes nothing better. “If this faith falls” he says, by which we may understand the two forms of faith aforementioned, “so does this interpretation of faith, so too the presupposition of an anthropological prius of faith, and so finally the possibility of prolegomena of this kind” (39)

Barth’s agenda follows in the footsteps of the Reformers by emphasizing the fallenness of humanity and the unmerited grace of God. First, he puts the error in both of these dogmatic emphases at the feet of any definition of faith which finds traction in humanity, in “human possibility” (38). That, he says, cannot be, recalling the doctrine of human depravity. Similarly, the correct definition is one that centers itself not on human possibility or decision, but only (sola) on the free (gratia) revelation of the triune God in the person of Jesus Christ.

Barth’s attitude toward Reformation emphases does not cease there, however. As I’ve said before, he seems to take up Reformation emphases without fear and explore them, twentieth-century feet soldiering about in sixteenth-century boots. The result is a Christologic prolegomena out of which an ecclesiology emerges. Let me just throw this against the wall.

Sacraments: “In, with and under the human question, dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12). Barth’s discussion of the necessity of faith for dogmatic work is working with the same tools as form the doctrine that the efficacy of the sacrament is not bound by the worthiness of the priest who administers: “The time has come to go back with a new understanding to pre-Pietist doctrine of the theological habitus in virtue of which the theologian is what he is by the grace of God quite irrespective his greater or lesser likeness to [Kierkegaard’s existential awareness]” (20). Note especially Barth’s trouble with the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation whereby “that which is beyond all human possibilities changes at once into that which is enclosed within the reality of the Church . . . Roman Catholic faith believe this transformation (emphasis mine). . . . It affirms an analogia entis . . . the possibility of applying the secular ‘There is’ to God” (41). This hints at a much more existential sacramental theology perhaps to come.

Community: "The results of earlier dogmatic work, and indeed our own results, are basically no more than signs of its [truth’s] coming. They are simply the results of human effort. As such they are a help to, but also the object of, fresh human effort. . . . Our dogmatic labors can and should be guided by results which are venerable because they are attained in the common knowledge of the Church at a specific time. Such results may be seen in the dogmas enshrined in the creeds. (15)” “To be in the Church . . . is to be called with others by Jesus Christ. To act in the Church is to act in obedience to this call. This obedience to the call of Christ is faith” (13).

Spiritual Disciplines. Prayer as “the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work” (23). “We do not speak of true prayer if we say ‘must’ instead of ‘can’. According to Romans 8.26ff., the way from ‘can’ to ‘must’ is wrapped in the mystery at the gates of which we here stand” (23-24). Penitence. “Dogmatics must always be undertaken as an act of penitence and obedience” (22). Confession. “There can be success in this work . . . on the basis of divine correspondence to this human attitude: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’” (24).

The Great Commission. This is the substance of preaching, the need to test what one preaches, and a warning against apologetics which gives unbelief an ontological hold on the argument that it neither deserves nor has.

Election underlies the entire enterprise. Election is the event. The free work of God. To bind God’s freedom is to bind his election. (And what affect will this have on Barth’s doctrine of baptism?)

Calvin on the Sabbath Day

A good half-hour with John G. on the approach of covenant theology to the fourth commandment led me to seek out John Calvin. I suspected two things. First, that Calvin would not forego the chief insight of the Reformation - that we never did nor can we add anything to the sum of salvation's graceful equation. Second, that Calvin would seek to find the moral heart of the commandment, and thus discover another way into the open country of freedom. I was right on both counts. Here is Calvin from the Institutes II.8.34:

The resurrection of our Lord being the end and accomplishment of that true rest which the ancient sabbath typified, this day . . . serves to warn Christians against adhering to a shadowy ceremony. I do not cling so to the number seven as to bring the Church under bondage to it, nor do I condemn churches for holding their meetings on other solemn days, provided they guard against superstition. This they will do if they employ those days merely for the observance of discipline and regular order. The whole may be thus summed up: . . . first, that during our whole lives we may aim at a constant rest from our own works, in order that the Lord may work in us by his Spirit; secondly that every individual, as he has opportunity, may diligently exercise himself in private, in pious meditation on the works of God, and, at the same time, that all may observe the legitimate order appointed by the Church, for the hearing of the word, the administration of the sacraments, and public prayer; and, thirdly, that we may avoid oppressing those who are subject to us.

Richard Gaffin summarizes Calvin's teaching on the Sabbath from the 1536 and 1559 edition of the Institutes in his dissertation-turned-book, Calvin and the Sabbath (Mentor, 1998). His summary reads as follows: The fourth commandment, as an element of God's immutable Decalogue, is binding upon all men at all times. Its requirements are three fold. 1. The weekly Sabbath was given to Israel as a type of spiritual rest from sin. The rest of every seventh day was to stimulate their thinking upon the Lord, who would be their Sanctifier. At the coming of Christ, spiritual rest became a reality. The Sabbath then ceased to exist as a promissory sign and, consequently, no longer has typical significance for the Christian church. This does not mean, however, that this first requirement of the commandment no longer obligates the church. On the contrary, its demand is intensified. Christians must strive to case from sinful works and thereby enter into and enjoy spiritual on every day of their lives. [1] 2. The fourth commandment requires of the Christian church, as it required of Israel, that stated times be set aside for public worship. In the case of Israel, the time was designated specifically by the Lord. For the church it is a matter of indifference which day of the week is chosen, although the first day, the day of the Resurrection, is most appropriate.[2] 3. The fourth commandment requires of the Christian church, as it required of Israel, that rest be granted to all those who labor under the authority of others.[3] (58) ---------- [1] The fourth Commandment appoints a day to symbolize (figura) spiritual rest. Gaffin writes, "Spiritual rest is 'keeping holiday' from our own works that God may perform his work in us. It is realized by renouncing fleshly inclinations and accepting the guidance of the Holy Spirit That is not something done sufficiently on one day of the week. On the contrary, once believers have begun spiritual rest, they must continue in it throughout the whole course of life," and again, "spiritual rest is an actual possession yet it will not be fully experienced until the Last Day." In the words of the 1545 Geneva Catechism, "[The fourth commandment] calls us to the reality behind it, namely, that being grafted into the body of Christ and made members of his, we cease from our own works and so resign ourselves to the government of God." [2] Calvin is clear that though the church is not commanded to meet in order to satisfy some lawful requirement of God's justice, it should meet in order to encourage the proper and orderly practice of religion. Calvin thinks the seventh day is best because of its identification with the resurrection and also because seven is a number of perfection and so, "is suitable to indicate the perpetuity of the eternal Sabbath," though suggesting that "this spiritual rest (though the same in kind) only begins in this life and does not reach perfection until we depart this world." [3] Gaffin comments, "If a day of rest is given to laborers, the order and productivity or society in general will be promoted. For when one day is assigned for rest, everyone accustoms himself to work the rest of the time." (65)