Occasional Theology Delivered at the Wedding of D and K Perry

Homily at the Marriage of D___ and K___ Perry

By the Reverends Robert and Caroline Osborne
Delivered June 4, 2022 at St. Joseph of Arimathea

Welcome to a moment that has been in the making for a long time. K__ shared with me that she has known D___ for her entire life. Their story began in Massachusetts when K___ was still in the womb, as both sets of parents became friends while studying in seminary.

For years their different but in many ways parallel paths crisscrossed at different events—until last year when they hit it off at a wedding of all places.

So it feels full circle in a wonderful way for us to be gathered here today to celebrate their marriage. Those two parallel but different paths are here and now merging into one path that they will walk together for the rest of their lives.

The road may have had several twists and turns, but perhaps that is part of why the joy of today is so great. Facing the challenges of a long distance relationship, D___ then moving to Tennessee in the midst of a pandemic to be closer to K___, all these things make the joy of this day all the more beautiful.

Having been through so much this past year, it is no surprise to either of you that, as wonderful as today is, there will also be challenges ahead. And the vows you make today are meant both for when it is easy to love each other and for when it is hard.

That is why one of our readings for today, 1 Corinthians 13, is such a good reading for a wedding – it talks about love not just as a joyful, sunshiney feeling of butterflies and beautiful wedding dresses and happy tears, but also as a choice and a commitment.

That love, which the Apostle Paul wrote about for the whole church, should also be lived out in your marriage, especially since God made marriage to be a representation of Jesus and his bride, the Church. When you pursue the sort of love described in that passage, you show the world a picture of the sort of love God has for us, and we, empowered by the Holy Spirit, have for him. That is a pretty high calling! If you don’t feel some awe for what you are about to step into, then you don’t understand it!

1 Corinthians tells us that this is a love that is unselfish: it is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it does not boast. This is a considerate love. A love in which you each put the other person’s needs above your own. If only one of you did that, it would become an unbalanced and painful love. But when you both put each others’ needs first, it is an incredible, self-giving, generous, and refreshing love. A 1 Corinthians love is a longsuffering love. It always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. It is not easily angered.

In fairy tales, the hero and heroine get married and live happily ever after. They fail to tell you that one of them might forget to clean up their toenail clippings or is grouchy when they're hungry--not that I am saying K__ or D___ will do those things.

All I am saying is, a love like the one described in 1 Corinthians is longsuffering. It doesn’t get hung up on the small, though sometimes very irritating, things, and it persists through the big and difficult things. When you commit to a longsuffering love, you will both rest in the security of that committed love even in the most difficult times.

And finally, this love is a humble and forgiving love. It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs, and it delights in the truth.

K___ and D___, in planning a wedding and preparing for a marriage the two of you have learned a bit about forgiveness. The times you have forgiven each other--both big and small--over the course of your time dating are not an exception to the way relationships work. Forgiveness in marriage, as in all of the life of faith, is the rule. A forgiving love is a safe, joy-filled, and growing place for a sinner, and all of us here are sinners, bride and groom included.

A forgiving love is one that best exemplifies the love of Christ for the Church. A forgiving love is one that is a witness to the world of the greatest love, the love from which all other loves derive: that is, the love of God.

So, D___ and K___, as you enter into marriage today, as the two of you cease to be just two separate individuals and are joined into one union by God--my charge to you is to choose, commit to, and embrace a love like that described in 1 Corinthians: an unselfish, longsuffering, humble and forgiving love.

Just like today’s joy is made all the sweeter by the long road it took to get here, when you love with a 1 Corinthians love, all those wonderful good times will be even better.

As you pursue that life of loving witness, may God bless your marriage with joy, peace, and an overflow of love that, in turn, blesses the lives around you. Amen.

__________

A Toast at the Marriage of D and K Perry

by Thom Chittom

D___ and K___,

When I look at you now, I see nothing but blessing. The blessing you have been in your childhoods. The blessing you are to each other. The blessing of our families’ friendship made permanent today. And the river of blessing that is rolling into you and through you and on into your future together.

Today you take up, hand-in-hand, God’s original command for human beings to go out into the wild world together and cultivate it. What an adventure you have ahead!

Let me say a few words to take on your way:

Always cherish the truth. People are forever unfinished. Talk about it. Time brings new things. Meet them in the strength of a united transparency. God is a god of light and not darkness after all.

When you disagree, fight for each other and not for yourselves. You win when you, plural, win. Remember, our God is three persons in one loving and even erotic mutuality.

And finally, think on the mystery of marriage—there is not two of you, but three. Going with you today there is one who sticks closer than a brother, one like a son of man. He is wisdom itself. Listen to him! If you do that, you will be blessed. If you do that, he will make saints of you in time, and you will be a blessing.

Now, I join everyone here and celebrate your marriage today. We love you. We support you. We bless you.

__________

Notes

D___'s father delivered a wedding toast during the wedding mentioned in the homily above. It is recorded on this blog as occasional theology and should be considered in parallel.

The liturgical material may be of interest to provide wider theological context. Gen. 2.4-9, 15-24; Ps. 127; 1 Cor. 13.1-13; Ps. 67.; Matt. 7.21, 24-29. Fr. Jody Howard also gave the longer nuptial blessing and concluding prayer from the BCP pp. 430-431.

A Facebook post I made on Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2020: "I can think of no better day in these circumstances than Trinity Sunday. For the unity of the three persons is to be one without monotony, to be unity without destroying plurality. And for that unity to be a forever bliss of giving and receiving love. We human beings, then, may know that it is possible to fully love without destroying the uniqueness of others and to be loved without destroying ourselves. This is a unity that worldly power knows not of. All the powers can do is destroy the other or press chaotic difference into submission with brutal force. That is unity without freedom, which is no unity at all. It will never understand or be the freedom that love freely gives." I might also point out that the triune persons are not homo sapiens. We are analogy not equality.

more thinking about purity (circle drawing) and hermeneutics' constant bickering

If the theory of science sets itself the further task of investigating such conditions as are subject to our power, on which the realization of valid methods depends, and if it draws up rules for our procedure in the methodical tracking down of truth, in the valid demarcation and construction of the sciences, in the discovery and use, in particular, of the many methods that advance such sciences, and in the avoidance of errors in all of these concerns, then it has become a technology of science. ~ Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 11.

The more I pursue theological studies, the more I am challenged to give up my purity addiction and embrace the lordship of Jesus. Let me unpack this, beginning with evangelicalism.

Evangelicalism came out of the fundamentalist movement. While confessing the authority of scripture, evangelicals did not want to disengage from cultural ideas and science. They wanted to stay in dialogue. Nevertheless, evangelicalism retained the purity culture of fundamentalism. And what is purity? Purity is an over-realized eschatology. It is "radical discipleship." It is what the Bible is really saying. Call it the first-century church, call it Christian America," call it the Christian home, xmarriage, xsingleness--it goes by many names. At the deep center of all of these purity moves is, I believe (and I'm still thinking about this), a baptized existentialism (or a spoon-cooked commercial ethic) which privileges individual action as the locus of truth. In that I see the Enlightenment plus the Great Bargain. Let me put these together.

The Enlightenment was and is a profound eruption in the Western mind. It removed most accepted forms of knowledge in favor of experiment and demonstration. The invidivual was encouraged to doubt everything. Knowledge was democratized. Its basis was experience rather than revelation.

The Great Bargain is far older than the Enlightenment. It is in the DNA of human living. The Great Bargain is when a human being decides that if they perform an act or produce a thing then God (or whatever passes for God or the gods) will hand over whatever good it is that the human being wants: fertility, a cushy job, rain on the crops, victory over the enemies, get a girlfriend, be free of illness, whatever. This is the root of idolatry. It goes back into the deepest selfishness of the human heart. And people make this bargain without even realizing they are doing it.

The Enlightenment makes the individual king of his own knowing. The Great Bargain makes the individual's actions or choices the king of their own success. Combine them in a religious context, and we get purity as control of knowing and control of acting where control and conformity produce the happy and highest form of life. Consider, as an example of this, the Bible.

The Bible is so central to evangelicalism, examining its use in that movement should isolate a bias toward purity. Evangelicals properly profess the Bible to be God's prophetic word. I certainly do not deny that. Observe that how that is can be understood differently. From the purity side, it means embracing an obedience to the Bible in the form of sola scriptura, but it is an obedience of adherence. Understanding is cultivated in order to conform. Exegesis and other textual disciplines work to isolate and explain in order that the present may be brought into conformity with the past. Certain hermeneutical tools or methods will be favored over others as they aid in this task. Of understanding, there may never be exactness, but the pursuit of exactness can be even more useful than a clear arrival. Even as I write this, I struggle hard in my soul. These are my people and the tools I was trained on. This hermeneutic is my hermeneutic, and I am still convinced of their value and am a student of them. But if they are sound, they can be shaken without harm. Purity culture is a subtle beast. The question is worth asking; truth has a way of broadening into freedom. The cathedral of Christian orthodoxy is larger than any one historical movement or moment.

Back to the Bible, then. Isn't it interesting that the Bible itself always defers to Jesus; Jesus is the revelation of God. It is hermeneutical about itself, certainly, but in the center is not an exegetical arrival but the person Jesus. It is as if we've decided the Pledge of Allegiance is about a flag and not about the country; we have switched out the sign and the signified (nodding toward Augustine's On Christian Teaching (de doctrina Christiana)).

This does not discount the Bible or the careful study of the Bible. The Bible is the divinely sanctioned, apostolic, human witness to the visitation of Yahweh to his people. Yet, it is not what is worshiped; Jesus is worshiped. So we don't study the Bible to be right; we study it to better know its author. Nor do we expect perfection in the Bible, but we do expect it in the one about whom it witnesses. That is one step.

The second step is the Walter Bruggemann step. Bruggemann is a well-respected Old Testament scholar. He points to Jewish ideas of belonging and says that to belong is not to agree in everything, but to join in and participate with others in the argument. The Bible, he says, is like an argument. Different perspectives crush up against one another and battle it out. And one is invited to take up the Bible and join the age-old community of arguers. Participation is community. Argument is being formed by and forming that community. And that community itself is being formed by its texts, which are the fundamental arguments of one's worldview.

That is a much, much different way of thinking about reading and participating and approaching the Bible than the perfection model. The argument model does not guarantee resolution, but formation. Not arrival so as to be right, but struggling to understand and in the struggling becoming a kind of struggler (lex orandi; lex credendi).

Let's say we adopt the Bruggemann model. Now we ask about the unity of the church. Before, in the purity model, we groaned about how far the church has fallen from Jesus's utopic plea that "they would be one as we are one." But now, in the argument model (that may not be the best word; I'm thinking out loud), the church in its struggle to embody the teaching of Jesus, in its centuries of debate and dialogue, looks different. Burning people at the stake is something purity models do (especially when they are wed to political purity); the argument model sees argument as engagement--as listening--as caring together with others.

I'd be willing to bet purity model churches structure their liturgies (for even non-denoms have liturgies) around purity. I'd be willing to bet purity models adopt a purity model of outreach, of the use of church funds, of the education of their children, of the expectations of the faithful, of their dialogue with communities and individuals outside the church. Purity culture is a circle-drawing culture: agape is on the inside; judgment is on the outside.

The Bible itself, in the argument model, models its resultant community in a different way. And its God is probably going to be a unity of plurality and not a monad (but that goes in a different direction). Consider grace. The scandal of grace is God’s operation to break a purity circle “while we were yet sinners.” The second are the many instances where Jesus breaks purity and yet, instead of being made unclean, he makes clean. When I talk about circle drawing, by the way, I'm talking about the creation of purity culture. The difference between purity and argumentation is the negation or acceptance of a hermeneutical model of knowing.

Rhetorical Forms in the Bible: Parataxis / Hypotaxis

Today, I want to talk about parataxis. Parataxis (from Greek: παράταξις, "act of placing side by side"; from παρα "beside" + τάξις "arrangement") is a rhetorical technique that uses short, simple sentences, one after the other, without an explanation for how they connect. Some people compare it to the speech of children. Punctuation is allowed: commas, semi-colons, and periods. These force juxtaposition. But every element of punctuation can be replaced by “and”--coordinating conjunctions are allowed, but not subordinating conjunctions. The result is a string of pearls where every idea is as important as the next, a staccato text without consistent rhythm. In her article on parataxis, “There’s Parataxis, and Then There’s Hypotaxis,” published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Constance Hale writes that “parataxis can also lead to a sense of things piling up, a rush of ideas, a fast-moving narrative.”

Parataxis is different from asyndeton, though they are easy to confuse. Both lack syntactical structure and therefore ask their audience to guess at the gaps. The difference between them is one of intent. Asyndeton is an intentional removal of conjunctions to tighten the pace and length of a text or speech. Parataxis is not intentional. Its quick waterfall never contained connective material in the first place. In a sense, then, asyndeton is a subset of parataxis by way of human intention.

Mark’s Gospel is an excellent example of parataxis in its ubiquitous use of καί between clauses. Bruce Metzger observed that 80 of 88 sections in Mark begin with καί. Sixty-four percent of the sentences in Mark begin with καί. Thirty-three of the thirty-eight sentences that make up its first chapter begin with καί. About this, Rodney Decker said:

It appears that Mark’s usage of καί as an unmarked sentence (and clause) connective is very similar to narrative books that I have examined in the LXX. Adjusted for length, the frequency of sentence-initial καί in Mark is very close to 1 Maccabees and 1 Chronicles . . . with Genesis and Joshua close behind.[1]

Mark’s frequent use of καί is therefore a result of exposure to the LXX (probably reflecting Hebrew’s eponymous vav). It was not intentional; not asyndeton.

Another example of parataxis (which also results from the Hebrew conjunction vav) is its restoration in the English translation of Robert Alter’s Five Books of Moses. Since the KJV, English translation committees working in Old Testament books have used subordinate clauses for easier reading without consistent demands on the reader to supply connection. But, as Alter says in his introduction, parataxis reflects the Bible’s context in which the reader was asked to “establish precise connection between actions.” Eliding it, he continued, also ruins the effect of the language and creates “a kind of narrative arrhythmia.” “The artfulness of biblical parataxis is precisely in its refusal to spell out causal connections, to interpret the reported narrative data for us.”

“Parataxis is the ordering of words in parallel clauses linked by ‘and,’ with very little syntactic subordination or the accompanying subordinate conjunctions such as ‘because,’ ‘although’ or ‘since’ that specify the connection between clauses. It creates ‘one beautifully uncoiling rhythmic sequence’ that ‘marches us steadily from one point to the next in the narrative sequence.’ In the Hebrew, parataxis is very much an artful vehicle, generating imposing cadenced sequences of parallel clauses and often exploiting the lack of causal explanation of the relation between clauses to create thought-provoking ambiguities.”[2]

For the purpose of illustration, let me give two more examples. One from Ernest Hemingway. As a young man in Paris in the early 1920s, Hemmingway was influenced by the work of Paul Cezanne and Ezra Pound. Placing images and colors next to each other without explanation achieved an emotional response that Hemingway adopted. He liked the way parataxis allowed him to build impressions that would ultimately suggest a meaning without saying it. He could provoke emotion without explanation. Here is an example from an early story, "Big Two-Hearted River":

“Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.”

The fictional Nick Adams takes the reader on a ride through his consciousness of clipped sentences. Each one sits equally with the rest. And none of them overtly tell the reader anything about Nick's overall mood. And now, an example from the Old Testament, NRSV + LXX.

Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the ordinances—that the Lord your God charged me to teach you to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, so that you and your children and your children’s children may fear the Lord your God all the days of your life, and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I am commanding you, so that your days may be long. Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you. (Deut. 6.1-3 NRSV)

***

Καὶ αὗται αἱ ἐντολαὶ καὶ τὰ δικαιώματα καὶ τὰ κρίματα, ὅσα ἐνετείλατο κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν διδάξαι ὑμᾶς ποιεῖν οὕτως ἐν τῇ γῇ, εἰς ἣν ὑμεῖς εἰσπορεύεσθε ἐκεῖ κληρονομῆσαι αὐτήν, ἵνα φοβῆσθε κύριον τὸν θεὸν ὑμῶν φυλάσσεσθαι πάντα τὰ δικαιώματα αὐτοῦ καὶ τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦ, ὅσας ἐγὼ ἐντέλλομαί σοι σήμερον, σὺ καὶ οἱ υἱοί σου καὶ οἱ υἱοὶ τῶν υἱῶν σου πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας τῆς ζωῆς σου, ἵνα μακροημερεύσητε. καὶ ἄκουσον, Ισραηλ, καὶ φύλαξαι ποιεῖν, ὅπως εὖ σοι ᾖ καὶ ἵνα πληθυνθῆτε σφόδρα, καθάπερ ἐλάλησεν κύριος ὁ θεὸς τῶν πατέρων σου δοῦναί σοι γῆν ῥέουσαν γάλα καὶ μέλι.

It is difficult to see it in the NRSV, but plain enough in the Septuagint underneath; the text is one short, breathless clause after the next. Moses's oration builds on and on about itself. The effect is hypnotic.

Contrast parataxis with hypotaxis. In hypotaxis, grammatical information abounds as sentences lengthen in complexity with subordinate clauses. Syntactical structure is intentional and "the logical relationships among sentences are explicitly rendered" (John Burt).

The subordinating style orders its components in relationships of causality (one event or state is caused by another), temporality (events and states are prior or subsequent to one another), and precedence (events and states are arranged in hierarchies of importance). 'It was the books I read in high school rather than those I was assigned in college that influenced the choices I find myself making today' -- two actions, one of which is prior to the other and has more significant effects that continue into the present.[3]

Good writing is an intentional combination of parataxis and hypotaxis.

__________

[1] Rodney Decker “Parataxis in Mark’s Gospel” https://ntresources.com/blog/?p=672 accessed 3/20/2022.
[2] Everett Fox, “Robert Alter and the Art of Bible Translation,” Expositions 2:2 (2008): 231-281. Princeton University Press quoting Alter in Twitter on April 24, 2019. I also recommend reading chapter 1 from Robert Alter’s the Art of Bible Translation: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780691189253-002/pdf
[3] Stanley Fish, "How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One", 2011.

Rhetorical Forms in the Bible: Asyndeton

Today, I am going to talk about asyndeton \uh-SIN-duh-tahn\. A. T. Robertson will get us started--from his Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research:

The Greeks, especially in the literary style, felt the propriety of indicating the inner relation of the various independent sentences that composed a paragraph. This was not merely an artistic device, but a logical expression of coherence of thought. Particles like καί, δἐ, ἀλλά, γάρ, οὖν, δή etc., were very common in this connection. Demonstrative pronouns, adverbs, and even relative pronouns were also used for this purpose.

What Robertson is saying is that good Greek is overt about how sentences join up; they use connectives to tell the reader or hearer how to put it together. In English, we do not use explicit connectors, but educated Greeks did. These many connectors supplied the reader or hearer with info about the writer/speaker's intentions.

When a Greek sentence does NOT have an explicit connector, that is called asyndeton. Asyndeton is an unmarked connection.

There is a hermeneutical principle that says, "Choice implies meaning." And therefore, when an author employs asyndeton, when an author does not include connectors and the information they represent, it means something. As Steven Runge says in his Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: "The use of asyndeton indicates that the writer chose not to make a relation explicit. The relation must be gleaned from the context" (22).

Think of it like seeing a young man and a young woman walking together in a bridal store. A quick glance says that there are no rings on fingers. So, there is some asyndeton going on here; connectors aren't there to give you info about their relationship. Nevertheless, in communication anyway, the assumption is that consecutive sentences relate. So, you could make the assumption that even though there is no explicit relationship between these two people (rings), the context still implies a relationship.

So, asyndeton doesn't mean there is not a connection. It just means that the connection is implicit, not explicit. And, going back to literary information, an author may have reasons to prefer subtlety. "Good argumentation is not always clear. Asyndeton may allow the movement of the argument to be realized only after more of the story is heard, and then with the benefit of gaining a better hearing." An author might even intentionally throw down asyndeton to disrupt the flow and call attention to the next thing coming in his argument.

Going back to our young couple--there could be no connection at all. These two people may be in the same place for different reasons altogether. There is always that possibility. Now, let's talk about that lovely early Christian sermon, probably given in the Jerusalem church, James.

James displays a significant use of asyndeton. As the speaker moves from idea to idea, the resulting text is thick with it. Scholars often made the mistake of assuming that such rampant asyndeton meant rampant discontinuity. But not so fast! Asyndeton can mean discontinuity--as with our couple who isn't a couple, but it can also mean implied cohesion or even such tight cohesion that there is no need for explicit connection. Interpreting asyndeton means interpreting along a continuum from tight connection to no connection. The exegete has to rely on contextual clues.

Indeed, authors, such as those of the NT, may employ asyndeton differently according to their own style. Here is Stephen Levinson from Discourse Features of New Testament Greek:

The ways in which καὶ and δὲ are used in John’s Gospel do not correspond exactly with how they are employed in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts. This is because two other forms of linkage are employed in John’s Gospel in contexts in which καὶ and δὲ would have occurred had the material been written in the style of the Synoptics. One of them is asyndeton (the absence of a conjunction), which is John’s default means of conjoining sentences (Poythress 1984:331), instead of καὶ. John’s other common marker of linkage is ὅτι; he uses it as a low-level development marker in certain contexts in which the Synoptics and Acts use δὲ. (81-82)

Therefore, as choice implies meaning, close reading and attention is always required of the exegete.

Rhetorical Forms in the Bible: Anaphora

I'm going to be digging into this rhetorical term anaphora. Looking at the new testament through ancient rhetoric is all the rage these days, btw. Why? Because the study and practice of rhetoric was the Minecraft Redstone goodness of the ancient world. If you could understand language, much less read and write, you absorbed rhetorical forms. And those forms would shape you. So, for example, scholars can look at the structure of Galatians against rhetorical forms to see if the way material is being presented conforms to established structures, structures that would help us understand what he meant to highlight and how.

I dipped my (amateurish -- because this fad came in after my formal schooling) toe into this while doing the initial blogpost on an "example of how to do exegesis" series I have been writing using Mark 12, the story of the widow's mite. That last bit that Jesus says "This widow has put in more than the others because while they gave of their plenty she gave all she has." That rhetorical device is called syncrisis, which is a subset of a rhetorical form called an encomium, which is a public praise used to praise (or shame) someone in order to invite public emulation (or avoidance). Syncrisis is when this is done in a comparative way. Syncrisis tweaks the encomium. Not only does it praise or shame, but it highlights a persons worth (or demerit) to society.

So, what I am saying is that Jesus himself is employing rhetorical devices. He is using syncrisis to not only shame one group and to praise another, but to further comment upon their value to society. In this case, the widow is praised as someone not only to be emulated but also to be seen as far more valuable to her community despite her lack than those with means who gave from their plenty. It is a complete upset of even a pious understanding of who was valuable and who was not.

How did you do this? Did you study ancient rhetoric? No. I saw Jesus using some kind of structure. I found a page of ancient rhetorical forms online. And I just read them until I found one that fit. Was it correct? Well, no one is testing me. Jesus is obviously employing some kind of rhetorical structure. Why not one well-understood in the entire ancient world?

So, anyway, anaphora. This is a compound Greek noun composed of the prefix ανα (before) and φορειν (to carry). "Anaphora is a rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses. By building toward a climax, anaphora can create a strong emotional effect." Here is a short article about it in reference to the rhetorical stylings of Martin Luther King Jr. Here are entries about anaphora in the Net Bible and in the Handbook of Biblical Criticism. I also like this definition and video from Oregon State University.

Anaphora is seen directly in Jesus's Beautitudes 'blessed are . . . blessed are . . . ." And, finally, George Kennedy in New Testament Interpretation Through Rhetorical Criticism (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984) observes that the eleventh chapter of Hebrews is a splendid example of anaphora, (“By faith…By faith…By faith…By faith…”). This is not only pleasing to the eye and ear, but results in a progressive building of rhetorical “tension” and at last culminates in a satisfying resolution (“because God has provided something better for us”).

There is also another use of anaphora. Here is the NET Bible:

2. the use of a substitute word, such as a pronoun, in reference to a something already mentioned in a discourse; also, the relation between the substitute word and its antecedent. It is contrasted with cataphora, the use of a pronoun for a word or topic not yet mentioned. Thus, in the sentence “John was tall but he was not very heavy,” the “he” is an anaphora for John, or an anaphoric reference to John.

The Wikipedia entry on Anaphora in its linguistic use is quite detailed on this and worth a read. Lovers of the pronoun will already appreciate anaphora, because a preposition refers back to the previous proper noun as its antecedent. Thus, our pronoun is an anaphor and it is functioning anaphorically.

Amy Beach's 10 Commandments for Young Composers

I am a sucker for lists, and especially for lists made by creative masters about how to approach their art. Such lists look beyond their subject into the deeper shape of human mastery itself. This list was written by fin de siècle American composer Amy Beach. I am going to annotate it, however, placing her items in bold above my own glosses. As much as I love music, what I am really after is how theology should be done as a craft. Theologians, beholden as they are to the academy of today, no longer apprentice their work. The craft of theology is simply not done. And so, therefore, it has to be recovered from the arts that do.

~~~

1. Spare neither time nor strength in the perfecting of the technique of composition, beginning with the simplest rudiments. Your musical material must be perfectly under control as is language in the case of a writer of literature. One must never be compelled to pause in the development of an idea through lack of knowledge of spelling or grammar.

Be about the business of your craft. Don't start by writing a systematic theology. Start at the level of your control and work from there. Start at a place where your biography and curiosity meet at the edge of what you know. Jürgen Moltmann's Doktorvater advice to the young Miroslav Volf was to pick hard problems. Work from the top of your intelligence, but do not give up control.

2. Begin with small things--ideas that can be expressed in small form.

I turn to Moltmann again, whose work first introduced me to this truth: theology is a biographical discipline. Your story is your approach and your goal. Do not deny your history anymore than you would deny the historicity of your sources or the tools of historiography itself. Discover the questions of your life. Find your project is how I've said this in the past. And, screw the academy, be honest about it. Doesn't Augustine do as much in the Confessions?

A great deal of theology--most of it--has been occasional. The New Testament itself is so. So-called systematic theology is just a mirage. Origen wrote First Principles when one human mind might know everything. The systematics that came later are products of tradition--we can see that--and products of their time. Aquinas's summas are governed by a purpose. So be ok with your own. Whatever makes theology in you, that is enough.

3. Study how best to develop all the possibilites of a small form. A small gem may be just as brilliantly cut as one weighing many carats.

Respect the theology that you have enough to be serious about it. Use the best grammar and rhetoric you have to speak clearly and memorably, even beautifully. You are not cutting a gemstone with tools. You are cutting (interrogating) your idea with criticism, with varied contexts, with curiosity and even skepticism until what is left is as true a form as you can make.

4. Learn to employ as much variety in form as possible. Above all things, avoid becoming stereotyped in the expression of melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic ideas.

In his book The Intellectual Life, A. G. Sertillanges talks about what to read before you begin writing. Consider your influences. Ask what it is about the theology you love to read that makes you want to write. What inspires you and what deflates you and why? Discover your lights. Karl Barth wrote under the gaze of John Calvin, Amadeus Mozart, and before Matthias Grünewald's central panel of the Isenheim altarpiece.

Consider too the straightjacket of form and syntax brought on by the academy. Writing no one reads. Speaking no one listens to. So much technical language and so little life. One may have to step to that meter, but there are other genres. Theology lives in the praise of many tongues. The unseen gravity here is money and the need to make a living or perhaps some idea that writing theology will make one famous. The former makes sense; the latter not so much. In my opinion, neither of those reasons should figure in to the occasion of reading and writing theology. What matters is the desire to do the work. What matters is the doing itself. Be like those cathedral artisans who drew in the highest ceilings hidden figures meant for the pleasure of God alone.

5. Subject yourself to endless labor in the analysis of works by the old masters, especially using, as illustration for the form upon which you are now engaged, a master's work in the same form. There is no better way to learn how to write a fugue than dissecting one by Bach, preferably one from "The Well-Tempered Clavichord."

To do theology is to participate in a confessional tradition. No question or problem is unique to you. There is a moment where a Christian realizes he or she stands in the dim center of a giant cathedral. The body feels the immensity of the house and the ears take in its labyrinth. The work is to explore and learn the house of your people. It is your house, not the house of a stranger. But you grow like a ward into maturity. To do theology is to grow into maturity. Theologians are explorers. What are libraries but maps of charted (or uncharted) territory?

Find a master in the house and begin your acquaintance. A theologian I know devotes each year to a one contemporary and one classic theologian. If there is no better way to learn to write a fugue than to dissect one by Bach, then go and dissect Athanasius's De Incarnatione or Anselm's Cur Deus Homo. Dissect arguments. See how ideas move together. Choose theologians who are working on the problems you are working on.

6. Begin early to study the scores of stringed quartet music by Haydn and Mozart and the early Beethoven. It is well to select one work and subject it to the most careful analysis, studying it until it is learned by heart.

Begin early. Do not get bogged down in secondary material. The best theology is held away from those who need it most. Don't read about Luther, read Luther. Don't read about Gustavo Gutiérrez, go read him. Begin early. "Stop throat clearing," as a friend would say. Don't wait until you can understand. Begin.

It is well to select one work. Every theologian is best known for a few works. Even Augustine may be limited to the Civitas Dei, the Confessionis, De Trinitate, and perhaps De Doctrina Christiana. Most do not have near that many, and all circle around a handful of ideas. Go read sermons. Sermons are a genre in which the author is trying to be as clear and concise and as interesting as possible. We do not read enough sermons.

7. Use every possible opportunity to hear a good stringed quartet, if possible at rehearsals, as well as at concerts. Take a score of the composition and study it while it is being played.

Luther famously said that a theologian is made by three things: Oratio (prayer), Meditatio (study and esp. of scripture), and Tentatio (failure, angst, distress, and suffering--what is called Anfechtung). With Luther, I believe that in order to theology as a craft, we must be intent about our pursuit of Jesus. The prayer closet is akin to the practice room; oratio as contemplatio. But let me turn this outward as well: I believe that craft requires some public demonstration of one's work, whether by preaching or publication or in some other method.[1] Next, study. Where as before there was the business of your cell, now get to your carroll. You are never too old to use a highlighter, a reference book, a lectionary, a whiteboard. These are the tools of the trade. I do not think temptatio needs explanation; theology is a fruit theodicy begets. But, also, we do theology in the play of the thing. We read and write in the middle of our life and within the lives of the people and communities around us. Pay attention to the play.

Karl Barth is rumored to have said, Pray with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Theology is made better by being well informed not only by sacred but by secular history and by the book of nature as a whole. Do not shun the sciences, the marketplace, or the judge's bench.

At rehearsals as well as concerts. If possible, join societies and attend conferences. Go to where theology is being done. And go to church; theology is done there every Sunday. If you can, participate. Share your work. If no one gives rehearsals and concerts, give one. "The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing matters except sitting down every day and trying."[2]

8. Hear as much choral music as possible. The study of voice writing, as illustrated in the master works. Is of the greatest importance.

Know your confessional tradition. Do not be ignorant about the tradition in which you worship. Learn everything you can about it. And if you cannot abide what you learn, go where you can. Liturgy is theology's muse. Find a community where your voice can be lifted up, and where other voices lift yours up in praise to Jesus.

9. The crowning glory of music study is familiarity with the master works in symphony, played by a fine, modern symphony orchestra. Carry into the study of symphonic composition the same thoroughness with which you have analyzed works for the piano, stringed quartet and chorus, beginning with the simpler and earlier composers.

As you grow in understanding and maturity, you will be able to take on more. Aquinas's Summa. Barth's Kirche Dogmatik. Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes. Mastery of the craft is firsthand knowledge of the greats. There is no shortcut.

10. Remember that technique is valuable only as a means to an end. You must first have something to say--something which demands expression from the depths of your soul. If you feel deeply and know how to express what you feel, you make others feel.

Hans Urs von Balthasar said that his theology was a kneeling theology. Luther devoted himself to a theology of the cross. Those seeking to do theology should carefully weigh Paul's words of 1 Corinthians 3:10-15.That which is not worship is pride. And avoid avarice.

Sacred theology is not a word to be lightly taken upon our lips. Theology is a very human business, a craft, and sometimes an art. In the last analysis it is always ambivalent. It can be sacred theology or diabolical theology. That depends upon the hands and hearts which further it. But which of the two it is cannot necessarily be seen by the fact that in one case it is orthodox and in another heretical. I don't believe that God is a fussy faultfinder in dealing with theological ideas. He who provides forgiveness for a sinful life will also surely be a generous judge of theological reflections. Even an orthodox theologian can be spiritually dead, while perhaps a heretic crawls on forbidden bypaths to the sources of life. How all-important it is that a vigorous spiritual life, in close association with the Holy Scriptures and in the midst of the Christian community, be maintained as a background to theological work. ~ Helmut Theilicke

Also:

"For the young Orwell, the world as it was made no sense. His upbringing at Eton and work in the Imperial Burmese Police jarred so horribly with what he saw, and felt, that he spent the rest of his life in the gaps, trying to explain them. This led inexorably to a political philosophy. But, as an abnormally acute looker, he found he had to change his whole way of life to see what mattered and in order to write honestly about it.

"Decades later, John Berger went through the same kind of transformation. A keen young painter, he came to wonder what the point of art was, in an age facing nuclear ­annihilation. Growing up in the crucible of modern British patriotism, his father a war hero, learning his craft during the London Blitz, gifted and lettered, he found he had to change his life, to live with other kinds of people – Haute-Savoie peasants above all – in order to make sense of the world." ~ Andrew Marr for "New Statesmen"

__________

[1] "The amateur . . . does not expose himself to judgment in the real world. If we show our poem to or friend and our friend says, 'It's wonderful, I love it,' that's not real-world feedback, that's our friend being nice to us. Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure." (Stephen Pressfield, The War of Art (New York: NY. Black Irish Entertainment, 2002), 71)

[2] Ibid., 108.

Science Pushes Back Theodicy

Geology and the fossil record continue to push on our understanding of origins. In this case, it is the historicity or nature of the fall.

In a post on Christian Scholars Review, Ryan Bebe laid out the territory as follows:

Given that the fossil record demonstrates eons of animal death and predation before the advent of humanity, most authors recognized the difficulty of maintaining the classical cosmic Fall as an explanation for the presence of animal death in our world.

Yet, some thinkers explored the possibility of retroactive or angelic Falls to account the life and death we see in nature. Others deemed that these aspects of the living world are necessary for the existence of some other good—pain being necessary for simple self-preservation, for example—or because a natural world with evolutionary pain and suffering might be the only way to bring about moral, sentient beings like humans. Some scholars attempted to reconsider specific attributes that have been ascribed to God—his love, power, and activity—in fairly radical ways, while others looked to kenosis as an explanation for why God might voluntarily limit himself in terms of how he interacts with the world.

Still other thinkers focused on the value that suffering can have or the promise of eschatological redemption, while some even insisted that there really isn’t even a problem here, because animals may lack the neurological capacity to suffer, even if they can experience some form of pain.

In other words, animal suffering has become the locus for discussion about the rightness or wrongness of suffering in general. It has become the locus of debates around theodicy, predating Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor by many hundreds of thousands of years.

Works cited by Bebe are: Bethany Sollereder, God, Suffering, and Animal Cruelty; Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation; Michael Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw.

Methods I Use to Jumpstart Creative Thinking

Over the years, there are a couple of techniques I've used to kick my thinking over into different lanes, which is my definition of creativity. There is nothing new under the sun, so no one is truly creative in the novum sense. What we are creative about is mixing up what is already there. The demands of daily life, of limited resources, and of mediocre expectations combine to keep us thinking safely in the ruts that work. (They may not be optimal, but they work.) Creativity runs outside the lines. Here are a few ways of making that happen, in no particular order:

Adjust your abstraction. You can take anything and adjust between concreteness/quiddity and abstraction. These are called levels of construal, where concrete is low construal and metaphysics is high construal. Picking up crafts for your kid's Sunday School class is low construal. Carrying on the pedagogical tasks of instructing the young in the faith is high construal. The same act can be viewed along either, but high construal provides a motivation and an awareness of purpose that low construal does not, and low construal carries the energy of movement and activity in a way that high construal does not. So, adjust your abstraction.

You already know. (Das weisst du doch!) Ninety-nine percent of the time, we do not express or act or communicate or own-up-to what we already know. My wife calls this "working at the top of your intelligence." That is true, but it isn't all of it. We are always playing games like we don't know things when we do. We just do not want to be honest about whatever it is. Just today, for example, I was in a meeting and someone suggested we look into whether shorter marketing copy is better. We already know that. The paper we need to research. The repair we need to make. The question we need to ask so-and-so. Often, we already know. We can already write that paper, make that repair, and we already know what so-and-so would say. We just are afraid to act. You already know what to do. You already know what you want to do. You have it already mapped out, listed out, and sorted in your head. You are just afraid to admit it for some reason.

A friend of mine has another way of putting this. He says we need to learn to call experts. And by this he doesn't mean other people, but ourselves. He tells the story about a motorcycle repair he was doing, and he could not get something to work. So, he stepped back and imagined that he was a motorcycle repair expert who had been called in. He looked at the bike in front of him through the imaginary eyes of this expert, and he was able to make the repair. He already knew how to do it, but he needed to find a way to unlock that and act. I think of him sometimes and tell myself, "Ok, take the next hour and act like you are brilliant."

Trace the margins and find the best solution. Whatever a problem is, someone else in some other field of humanity (or nature itself) has already found an elegant solution. You think that because you are working in a new technology or because your problem is complex that this cannot be the case, but I assure you it is. There are only a handful of real problems. Like Plato's ideas, they infest nearly everything. Likewise, there are only twenty years worth of problems and these just get recycled over and over again in every field and endeavor. So, whatever it is that you are working on, abstract out the problem so that only the bones of the outline are there. Then, when you have simplified it so that it is almost a template or a shape, like a cut-out moon or octagon or star, look around and see if that pattern exists in other fields. I especially look to fields that have been around for thousands of years. Ask farmers and fishermen, ask weavers and cooks and storytellers and dancers. Ask the insects in the yard or the trees growing beside the walls. There is a good chance that if you will seek and wait, you'll find as elegant a solution as any you would have come up with after expensive trial-and-error.

Incidentally, this inability to discover new problems is frustrating and sad. Most people think there are a lot of problems, but there aren't. When you investigate the coolest programming language or scientific discoveries, they are mostly moving pieces around on the same board but with different jargon. Most businesses talk like they want to be innovative--they don't. Most systems talk a good talk, but they like things the way they are. Real experimentation is alien to human homeostasis along every dimension. We kill prophets and ridicule artists in their lifetimes. Most of the time, I just let myself sleep in the ebb and flow. But sometimes, I wake up. I feel the infinite possibilities of things shimmering underneath every atom and second. And I hunger to get with others and tackle creative problems. But I do not know who these others are, and I do not know what those problems could be. And so, befuddled and unable to act practically from my temporary lucidity, I am sad for a bit, and then it passes. I suspect the problem is a class problem, and that were I not working-class (basically), I might know what to do or have the means to do or at least to stay in that place until I do know what to do. But I don't and it is best to get on with things.

Get in front of a whiteboard (or whatever does the same). There is something about standing there with a marker in your hand and writing that opens up the mind. Wrestle in a different medium. Get your muscles involved. Muscles have memory. They can work problems out. The anecdotal and experimental data on walking and thinking is legion. Let your body help.

Sit with it. People do not appreciate the value of simply sitting with a problem. Bundle it up in the front of your head, and then toss it to the back and let your subconcious masticate on it for a while. Get some good sleep. Go about your life. But, be ready. When your subconscious is done, it will throw back some kind of an answer, and you'd better be prepared to record it somehow. Pull the car over. Record it on your phone. Borrow a pen in a restaurant. Whatever. And get it all out because it will not make sense to you partially when you come back and look at it in the morning. You have to get it all out--every weird and funny idea about it, because only the whole thing has value. And then, honestly, it may only be ridiculous, but it may not be. It is the subconscious after all. What can you expect!

Throw Out the Easy Stuff. When considering any real problem, the first few solutions you think of are probably junk. Where solutions are easy, there are no problems. You obviously have a problem, so distrust easy solutions.

Get clear on details. Building from the last point, quick fixes that pop easily to mind or when you are tempted to wonder why people don't just solve using x because isn't it so obvious are signs you need to dig into the details. Creativity requires a clear grasp of the details. Creativity is not an escape from reality; it is a different way of framing what is there. Get curious about everything. The process of acquiring insight stirs up curiosity. Sometimes, though, you'll need to stir the pot with willpower. If your curiosity fails, come at it a new way. But ride that curiosity to clarity.

Go Fish in the Desert. Try applying your hypothesis to an unrelated example. Have fun blowing it up and taking it apart. Take something away; discover what is necessary and what is not. Sometimes changing the color of the background makes things pop.

What is the Gospel?

What is the gospel? I'm not sure I know. And though I ask as an individual, I but form my lips around the question of others before me. And their answers and insights are offered back again.

We pick out constellations in the stars and name them. But astronomy tells us those shapes represent no actual relations. The stars of Orion's belt are separated by light years of empty space. And a September moon to us is far bigger and brighter than the Andromeda galaxy behind it.

When we decide to look beyond the constellations of the way we define the gospel and begin trying to see it as it is in the universe of scripture, the change is no less drastic. I expect we will end up knowing far more than we did. But the gospel we started with may look far, far different in the end. That is what is happening to me.[1]

These were my astronomers. I took a course in the minor prophets from Walter Kaiser and was changed by the encounter. I studied Galatians under T. David Gordon. Gordon was the first professor I ever met who embraced the New Perspective on Paul. Greg Beale introduced me to the profound and intimate relationship between the New Testament and the Old. N. T. Wright helped those seeds grow, as did Michael Heiser and Carmen Imes. And Juergen Moltmann and Johannes Metz made me see that eschatology is fundamentally political and the gospel is fundamentally political theology. The gospel is a political theology if nothing else. And if it is not political theology, it is not the gospel. Political theology is thinking about scripture that begins, is shaped by, and is applied to communities of purpose. I specify purpose because these communities are working together to achieve real ends, and this means that there is a need for theology, there is a need for the gospel. Perhaps it is impossible to have a community without some sort of purpose. (I do not call crowds communities, but mobs rudely are.)

It is not American Individualism

I used to understand the gospel as an appeal to the individual to "Save yourself from this corrupt generation" (Acts 2:40 NRSV). You confessed, believed, and were baptized. You got saved and belonged thereafter to God. This is not untrue, but it is uncontextual.

When a collection of beliefs is lifted out of actual human ways of being, they cannot be lived or practiced but only assented to. Such a cerebral anthropology has little of incarnational, communal Christianity in it.~ C. Humphry

It is not Classic Liberalism

Theologian Roger Olson defines classic liberal theology as "theology centered around symbolic realism-—Christianity mostly cut off from history except for transforming symbols such as the cross and resurrection and Parousia. . . Christianity is largely reduced to spiritual formation and social transformation."[2]

Note this bit from a recent piece about conservative psychologist Jordan Peterson in the New Statesman, "Peterson said to me that religion is a feeling or experience rather than a statement about the existence of God. Religion manifests in the deep sense of awe and the infinite one might experience when reading literature or gazing upon a sunset, he said. He thought that technically there was no difference between great literature and religious experience. If religion is about deep biological experience, couldn’t you say that sex is religious, too? 'It should be, but it depends on how well it’s done,' he said."[3]

So What is It?

The gospel is necessarily political faith, hope, and love

Amos 5

Part of the original Christian message was a radical revaluation of Israel’s legal and prophetic tradition and a thoroughgoing denunciation of the power of Rome and all other empires. Flat things exist on two dimensions. And I, too, am learning to think differently in two ways. One is to fix New Testament language about salvation deeply into its Old Testament context. The other is to understand it in its ecclesial setting and not through the lense of American individualism. I started with a pseudo-Reformational framework sucked through the straw of a me-and-Jesus vertical whose horizontal was only transactional: save the lost. This cannot be correct. The New Testament does not alter so greatly that one cannot talk about an Old Testament church. If anything, the social ethics central to Old Testament piety are not erased by the New but highlighted with eschatological fire.

It is necessary to understand New Testament things within their Old Testament wineskins. So, for example, baptism is circumcision. Missions is the regathering of the lost ten tribes back to the mountain of God. Good works is Torah keeping. Christians are renewed priests in Jesus's living temple. What is salvation, then? Is it an ethical change, like repentance; a change of direction toward the right way? Is it an ontological change from one kind of being into another kind of being? Or is it a covenant marker: one goes from being a pagan outside of the covenant community to which God has made promises to being a member in that community. That community has always been there. Its covenant markers have simply enlarged to include Gentiles. The promise to this community is the eternal, living Spirit. The fire of Sinai only descended on the mountain and on Moses. At Pentecost, each believer became a little Sinai upon whom the glory came to rest. The fire burned inside the living tree of the people of God, and they did not burn up.

The gospel is necessarily good news for matter and our bodies

In an October 27, 2020, podcast of "OnScript," Dr. Esau McCaulley, being interviewed about his book Reading While Black (IVP Academic, 2020), concluded his interview with a discussion about the misshapen priorities which govern the fields of New Testament and Pauline Studies. The emphases of the Protestant Reformation dictate what is considered of primary importance in these fields. This means that a brilliant book on, say, Paul's pneumatology will not be considered a brilliant book on Paul in the same way that a book on grace will, such as John Barclay's Paul and the Gift (Eerdmans 2015). Similarly, the best book on Hebrews ever written will not be called the best New Testament book. The academy privileges certain topics and downplays others. Works on community, eschatology, the Trinity, etc. just cannot be valued in the same way by the academy as, say, a work on Galatians.[4] McCaulley continues:

"Here's a question, Biblical scholars: How do we never talk about policing in our scholarship, when black people have been talking about policing for a hundred fifty years! Why don't we talk about it? What I'm saying is that we have to do better in the things that we center. And there's a reason why this is all masculine, right? It is all masculine in the sense that when you look at the kinds of things that our female scholars--and I'm not saying that female scholars do not write about grace--but look at their interests and look at the things that they write about, and do we consider those things worthy in their own right? . . . [Interviewer Dru Johnson: "You can argue infinitely about it in etheral space, and it never has to get grounded in a body. You can talk about how it comes down to a body--"] See. And this is the question . . . we are talking about New Testament scholarship more broadly. It is a manifestation of privilege to argue for over two hundred years about how we should think about something and not, while at the same time, ignoring so many issues in the Biblical text that touches on the lived experience of oppressed peoples. . . . [Is justification] the only thing?"[5]

The gospel is necessarily good news for the bodies of others, individually and corporately, human and otherwise.

I think of Howard Thurman's poem, "The Work of Christmas"--

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.

Or consider the Christology of John Keble's hymn "Blessed Are the Pure in Heart"
The Lord, who left the sky
our life and peace to bring
to dwell in lowliness with us,
our pattern and our king.

The gospel will simultaneously and necessarily include the horizontal and the vertical

The gospel is how Jesus is

More later

1. To see the extent of this change, let me copy here a note I made a few months ago in response to a question from one of my kids: "What is God doing now?" I told them, "God is holding the cosmos in being and directing it toward his desired purpose: to bring all things under the rule of Jesus. Therefore, having installed Jesus on the everlasting throne of David, the Father has sent the Spirit who, through the church, his priestly nation, is regathering the ten lost tribes from the nations (which is the mission work of the New Testament.) This regathering will reach its climax in the return of Jesus. Meanwhile, the preaching of the church is putting the Principalities and Powers on notice that their pagan tyranny is over. And the reborn people of the church are displaying the image of God to all creation. The Spirit sanctifies the church and gifts it for participation in the regathering and for displaying to all who God is. The church prays by the Spirit for God to hallow his name, bring in his kingdom, and enact his will in its worldwide situation, and it cooperates with him by grace in the doing of it.

[2] Roger Olson, "What is 'Progressive Christianity" https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2021/11/what-is-progressive-christianity/ accessed 11/19/2021.

[3] Freddie Hayward, "Why do students still want Jordan Peterson to tell them how to live?" The New Statesman. UK ed. 1 December 2021. https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2021/12/why-do-students-still-want-jordan-peterson-to-tell-them-how-to-live accessed 12/3/2021.

[4] This is Thomas Kuhn's paradigmatic framework from the Structure of Scientific Revolutions applied in the humanities. Just as science operates within sets of beliefs called paradigms which are passively enforced by a system of social and financial rewards and punishments. Scientific research, then, is "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (UCP. 1962, 5).)

[5] OnScript podcast "Esau McCaulley -- Reading While Black" aired October 27, 2020. Accessed November 30, 2021. https://onscript.study/podcast/esau-mccaulley-reading-while-black/.

A letter to my children on dating

July 30, 2019
Dear K and C,

Sometimes there are topics which require time, order, and right circumstance. Because that so rarely happens, I have decided to give this format a try. The topic on my mind is courtship, dating. I want to give you the best foundation for doing this that I can. The reason why is not because I think either of you are making foolish choices in this area. It is because I want you to know that I have something to say about this very important part of your lives. Or, really, that God has good things to say about it which are far more useful and nuanced than the "don't have sex before marriage" monodrone that blares from the churches. Yes, we live in a sex-saturated culture; you know more about sex and sexuality than many adults did a generation ago. Where we stick to the science, we do well, but what we find mostly are consumer attitudes of self-indulgence. So many are adrift and hurt when it comes to love. Perhaps I can save you some trouble.

1.
God is love, and in him we live and move and have our being.

Just a guess, but most bits of advice on dating do not begin with the love of God. Odd, when you think about it. I'm not talking about the existence of God. If you wish to debate about the existence of God, we may as well debate the existence of the people you want to date in the first place. No. We begin together beholding the love of God. You see, everything we talk about--our hopes and questions, our bodies, our emotional and physical needs, the way that we turn from childhood and begin stepping forward into the future with others, the joy and satisfaction of being together with people in love--all of it is a love-gift of God. Not a distant, unknown God. Not an impersonal force. But a God who is involved with us. All the things I just listed, aren't they the topics we care most about? Our God, because he made us, made those things. And our God, because he lived as a human being among us with a family and friends and so on, knows all about them. And our God, because he has promised to renew the world, values those things. Love gets into the details. Love doesn't keep its distance, and anything that does is not love.

This creating-knowing-promising love of God tells us that love is like a good conversation. It may begin in a lonely, scary place; the sexual chaos I mentioned earlier tells us we are a lonely people. The conversation may begin there. But as we give our attention and ourselves to another person, we get to know them. Should they become lifelong friends or a spouse, we will spend our lives enjoying that ever deepening talk. I am fortunate to have a handful of friends whom I have known for years--what a treasure! We see each other after a long absence, and we pick right up where we left off. Cultivate people like that in your life. Make the effort (love makes the effort). And I think you know that my wish when I was looking for a wife was to find someone I loved talking to and would enjoy talking to as much or more twenty years in as twenty minutes. God certainly blessed me there with your mom; talking with her is a highlight of every day. My point here is to say that love doesn't sit still, it moves toward what is beloved, and it doesn't stop at acquaintance but it numbers the hairs of one's head and plays the finest heartstring of the soul. We cannot talk about dating until we see it within the horizon of the love of God.

2.
Everyone is made in the image of God (the imago Dei) and worthy of respect.

The relevant text is Genesis 1.27: "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (NRSV). God is spirit, so this text does not mean that God made people to look like him. That is the way the Greek pagans thought--painting pictures of themselves on the sky and naming them gods and goddesses. The truth is the other way round. Our God communicates. He wants his creation to be ruled by regents who represent him, who speak as and for him, who govern and act as he does. Human beings are meant to represent him to creation. And creation, as it listens and looks to human beings, will know what its creator is like. Human beings are important and valuable, no matter their age, race, class, or sex because they--we--are made in the image of God.

C. S. Lewis talked about the imago Dei when he said, "It is immortals whom we joke with, marry, snub, and exploit." Indeed, it is not immortality but image that should give us pause. It is God's very own.

So, in our relationships with other human beings, we must recognize them as bearers of God's image and treat them accordingly--and they us.

3.
God loves people, so love people

A youth leader of mine once chimed, "You should never date anyone you wouldn't want to marry." All the adults within earshot agreed, and I did too, though I knew little about it. As I aged, I followed their advice, for I knew no better. Now I do. So let me amend this bit of folk wisdom because it is much too serious. It assumes that every date is a potential marriage invitation--which it is not. The world is full of funny, silly, thoughtful, shy, ecstatic, reserved, detailed, slovenly, color-coordinated, rustic, unusual, adorable people. How amazing is that! What riches are all around us. It is stupid to make every conversation ring with the overtones of choral matrimony, and people in real life do not make this mistake. When you begin working, you'll be around all kinds of people for hours and days at a time without the pressure of marriage. So do not be so serious or afraid. Get to know them! Learn how to value and appreciate all kinds of people. Youth is the time of exploration. Stoke your curiosity and meet all sorts of people, men and women. Be curious about them. Even go out with some of them. Your life will be far richer. And you will have an opportunity to practice loving your neighbors in ways small and great.

4.
Practice hospitality.

In 1981-82, a coworker of my dad's started a karate class in his home. His name was Bob, and he had two sons around my age. One was a band kid; the other was a greaser. My dad was at a time in his life where he was trying new things, and he decided he'd try karate. I came along too. We met in Bob's garage. It was filled with mats scattered everywhere on his smooth concrete floor. For the first year, we worked on how to stand properly and throw punches, and we did a lot of kicking. But eventually we started sparring--play fighting. "Today, we are going to begin with some sparring," someone would say. Next you know, you were blocking punches and trying to give as good as you got. Sparring was pretty handy. It proved why standing properly and other points of our training were necessary. There were also skills that could only be taught by sparring. Sparring prepared you for the real world. Think of it like practice.

People practice at anything they wish to do well. Even minor things like keeping good table manners at home, taking a few practice swings with a bat, or writing a rought draft before you start a final paper are forms of practice. Dating is also practice. You spend time with the person you are dating--taking walks, eating lunch, thinking about life, and so on. And, in so doing, you learn a great deal about yourself and them. This practice prepares you for acting well in the communities of your adulthood: in churches and businesses, in taking more of a role in your family, and, yes, for marriage and family life.

Considering hospitality--most people hear the word hospitality and they think of hotels or dinner parties. Both do not equate to what Paul meant when he told the church in Rome to practice hospitality or what Peter meant when he taught Christians to be hospitable without complaining. Hospitality was an attitude of open service and sharing of what one had--even with strangers. It was a virtue highly prized all over the ancient world, Christian and pagan.

The times I've seen it best practiced, it was done by those who planned before the need arose. A pastor in my youth opened his home on Sunday nights to grilled cheese sandwiches and talk. A couple at North Shore in MA always made enough food on Sunday and planned to invite visitors over for lunch. Hospitality is an intentional set of the heart. It puts coffee on and makes sure fresh sheets are on the bed. The people I think best of as I look back through my life are those who welcomed me.

Dating is a form of hospitality. You spend your time and share your table with someone else. You receive them into your circles of friends and family as well as into the inner circles of your stories and hopes and ideas. You may even receive them into your heart. Whether you date the same person or different ones, the opportunity for setting the table is always there, and one should embrace it as a skill that can grow throughout life. Hospitality is a secret to deep and lifelong blessing.

5.
Do not kill.

The commandment not to kill, which sounds a note quite dissonant from hospitality, is ethical shorthand. Though it appears negative, like the other commandments, its meaning is largely positive. Consider a young mom who takes her children out to play at a local park. The sun shines in the blue sky. It is a warm day in late April. Green is the grass, and the kids like to run. "Don't go into the street!" she calls. And a little later, seeing her oldest is swinging very high in the air, she yells, "Do not go so high!" Is this young mom out to spoil their fun? Didn't she bring them to the park in the first place? No and yes: She wants her children to have a great time, but it would be exhausting for her to list everything they can do. More sensible is a short list of what they should not. A few quick boundaries and the rest is open to her kids' imaginations. So it is with the "shall nots" of the commandments. So, how does this help us read the sixth commandment in a way that gives us wisdom about human relationships?

The commandment not to kill releases us to preserve, protect, and value the lives of others--not only with our bodies but with our words and our minds too. It is not enough to refrain from killing our neighbor. By neighbor I refer to Jesus's parable about being a good neighbor and to his summary of the Torah: to love God and to love your neighbor. Our friends are certainly our neighbors. Our enemies are too. We should take pains to keep them safe, valuing their lives as our own. This goes for our hearts as well. We must check our anger and bitterness because murder is but the outward fruit of an inward deed. "We are required faithfully to do what we can to defend the life of our neighbor; to promote whatever is good for him or her, to be vigilant in warding off harm, and should danger come, assist in removing it." (John Calvin)

6.
Tell the truth.

God tells the truth. "He is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). But our human hearts are shade and shadow. We spend a lifetime trying to understand others and ourselves. Part of the practice you take on with dating is learning how to live and tell the truth.

We tell small children that honesty is best, even if it means a little suffering. That is a good conclusion, but honesty can be hard to come by. What can be trusted? Emotions aren't always reliable. As Agatha Christie's great detective Miss Marple said, "One's feelings are not always reliable guides." Our inner selves rise and fall like the waves. C. S. Lewis has good things to say about the oscillating nature of the human inner life in Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. Sometimes you will look hard for the truth but you cannot find it. In such cases, the search has to be enough. This is part of the practice, digging underneath hurt feelings or anger or whatever else to uncover what is really going on and learning how to communicate that clearly to your person, the imago you are with. You learn how to protect and value their life and not just your own. And when your compass gets spun--and it will--ask God for wisdom and go with the truth you have. As my dad used to say, "Live so you can look at yourself in the mirror."

Because we were just talking about the commandment not to kill, I think now about the commandment not to bear false witness. The context of the commandment is the law court; don't lie on the stand and subvert justice. But think about it this way: without justice--without truth in law--society doesn't work. Community fails. People can't live together. It is the same in the microcosm of relationships. If people lie to each other and cannot trust each other, the community they make together is not going to work. On the other hand, if they speak honestly and come to trust each other, an intimacy can be forged that will not break beneath a lifetime's battering.

Be truthful with your time--and theirs

Being in other's lives takes a significant amount of time. It is also hard to tell whether such time will be short or long. Do not overstay. Try not to waste people's time or your own from a refusal to accept the sweet and the bitter of living.

Be truthful with your words--and practice good listening skills

Becoming a good listener might be one of the most important skills a human being can devote themselves to acquiring. I am a horrible listener, to my shame, and sometimes blame bad memory on what is lack of focus or care. But love calls us to attention. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Life Together, "Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for [others] is learning to listen to them." So cherish friends and lovers who want to listen, and take time to listen to them. Good listening is part of hospitality.

As with listening--both that I am terrible at it and that it is such an important part of human maturity, think about the words you use. Do not make promises lightly, if you can help it. And try to use the divine gift of language (λογος) for good and not evil.

Be truthful with your body--and theirs, contra gnosticism.

Human beings have a bad habit of separating our bodies from our minds. Some of us give pride of place to our mental life and treat our body like a braying mule. Others let the body lead. We know we must value both, but the balance is difficult. Like handedness, all of us tend to one over the other, though they come as a pair.

We love with our bodies and our minds. One does not happen without the other. The internet allows us to share our lives in real time with people all over the globe, but it is no substitute for really being there. Words and ideas are not enough. The body wants its part. We shake hands or hug friends. We kiss and caress close family and those we love. Even God who spoke the cosmos into existence, though he is more present everwhere than we are anywhere, became a human being for us. Love moves irresistably toward its beloved. We crave connection. We want to be with others.

Therefore, in a lonely culture like ours, we should not be surprised that sex and sexuality blare from radio and screen. We should not be surprised that sex is used to sell everything, that cultures adopt all kinds of governing rituals around it, that the problems it creates make for the stories of literature and for whole disciplines of counseling and recovery. Sex is how we continue after death. And while we live, our loves move us to intimacy, and intimacy finds its apotheosis in sex. And we should not be surprised the our culture wants to possess the body and ignore the rest. And even the body it desires, and that we are told if not trained to desire, is a customized or idealized body, a body of marketing and advertising, not of life--a lie.

The body, with the mind, should be a keeper and expresser of truth. And what is sex but hospitality! What I am encouraging you to do is to own your whole self and be commited to living truthfully. Tell the truth. Look at the example God gives us. He tells us he loves us, yes, and we see his love most clearly expressed in the crucified body of the dying Jesus. Word and act together speak the same. This is what the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was talking about when he said, "Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed."

7.
Forgiveness.

Is it any surprise that forgiveness is such an important part of being with others? Poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote, "Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die." If this is true of friendship, it is certainly true of marriage. If our lives as disciples of Jesus are characterised by grace, should we expect our relationships to be perfect? Perhaps the story we are telling is a gospel.

8.
Let it Shine.

The gospel of Jesus informs all I have said. The summons of the gospel is the honest summons of the whole world to God's great feast. When we--when you--practice these truths, the light of God's character will shine out from you into the world. You might say that dating in this way is just a specific mode of living the Christian life. And if you say that, you are correct.

I hope you will discover that the foundation sketched above will help you ask and answer particular questions in a wiser way. Wisdom is a small compass by which we can orienteer across wild and unknown landscapes. Perhaps my words will help you as you navigate to remember your creator in the days of your youth. And I hope they will bless you as well.

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Epilogue: Diotima's Ladder

In the Symposium, Socrates tells about a philosopher he met named Diotima. She was very wise, he said, and she described the human quest for beauty as ascending rungs of a ladder (Gen. 28.10ff). At the bottom are beautiful people and things all around us. But what calls us through bodies, things, and ideas, she said, is beauty itself. The philosopher must ascend in contemplation upward, rung by rung, to reach the real end of their desire for beauty, which is the form of beauty itself. Diotma's metaphor, though pagan, well describes God's summon to us as we age through friendship and courtship into marriage and parental maturity. Even as these things shape the steps of our outer lives, our inner life progresses through them inward toward the very origin of the beautiful, the true, and the good, which is the Triune God. Life will make saints of us if we choose. Love will lead us up the ladder by the ancient way of purgation, darkness, illumination, and union. Love will lead us through the veil of things into the joy of the living and ever-flowing love of the Triune persons. There is no gnosticism here, there are no secrets. But, like a secret garden, few care to see the door in the center of their daily living and go in even though every relationship they have points the way, though anyone may put their hand to the gate, though a welcome is posted right above for all to read,

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”
And let everyone who hears say, “Come.”
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

My Pattern Breakthrough

After my last post on pattern languages, I felt I had the missing piece: patterns are problem-solution vehicles. They are not merely answers. But little did I know how prescient this would prove. I took my deck of patterns to lunch and began to randomly spread them out on the table: TIME, WIDOWS AND ORPHANS, BREAD, TEMPLE and so on. Suddenly, the questions behind these answers began screaming out at me. It was as if I could finally hear. They were always there, but I hadn't considered them. When I created the cards, I was regurgitating concepts with little thought as to why they exist in the first place. Now, the questions revealed themselves. TEMPLE, I read. This answers questions about God's presence with his people and the world. CHAOS AND DISORDER. This is about identifying the problem itself--why things are what they are and what God is overcoming. WISDOM. This answers how we know what to do in the world and how to recognize God's way versus other ways. One by one, as I picked up cards at random, I could easily see the questions behind the answers I'd written down. And then, something more came into view.

I saw real taxonomic order within the questions and their pattern-answers. Let me explain. CREATION. This is about the origin of the world, why it exists and what sort of moral entity it is. Other pattern cards such as HISTORY or the IMAGO DEI or WORK fall naturally under CREATION as they are more narrow in terms of taxonomic categories involved, more influenced rathern than influencers, and have a finer specificity of application. The same kind of relationship exists on the question side. WORK, for example, asks an ethical question about what it is proper to do. The question of what we should do exists within the larger question of where we come from. But, say, one asks about euthanasia. There is no card for this. The pattern language is not meant to be defined by cards. The cards are meant to create a framework of address. Anyway, euthanasia and whether it is morally right to kill yourself or another certainly is a narrower question than the question of why do we die, which is itself a subset of the question why we exist at all.

The taxonomic order extended into the type of cards I had written. Besides obvious patterns like THE SWORD or KENOSIS were cards that aren't patterns but buckets that organize patterns: The last things, Jesus of Nazareth, the missio Dei. These are the classic categories of the craft and creeds. They are probably answers to questions themselves, yes, but they are different too. They are category cards, such as the ones in Group Work's deck, and they answered a nagging question for me about exactly how the categories might fit in a pattern language without making it uniform. I see now there's little danger of that.

A pattern language as I understand it now is highly individual. Even if two were constructed by brothers of the same mind, I think their resemblance, though present, would still differ such as with franternal twins. The patterns that express the language are unique, and how they are grouped together is unique. Using Gadamer's term: what is expressed and how it is expressed is governed by prejudice. Not only, but how it is used to categorize and address questions is unique. As in real life, one man talks constantly of God's simplicity and another of the church and its sacraments. My initial insight was correct: the use of a theological pattern language could allow one to map (and interrogate) their own system and to do the same with the systems of others.

A final thought: like any language, a pattern language has three audiences. In this case, the question, the answer, and the reader or user of the pattern language who is thinking along with it. All three must ultimately be taken into account to make a living language.

Pattern Theory Upgrades

A search on this blog will suggest I have a sweet tooth for Christopher Alexander's pattern language approach to democratizing bodies of expertise. Alexander's initial insights have grown over time as they have been taking up by many different fields: architecture, computer science, education, and social sciences. Now I read architect Hajo Neis's article "From a Pattern Language to a Field of Centers and Beyond" and discover terms like overall pattern language approach and pattern theory and practice. The conversation out there is maturing, and Neis's article has a few upgrades to suggest. What follows is a list of upgrades.

Pattern Development has an Ethical Telos. The discipline has clarified Alexander's "quality without a name" so that it now talks about quality of life. Neis calls it "the improvement of life, human development and improvement of the environment in which we live." This means that pattern theory understands what it is doing as an ethical act and has gone so far as to recommend the ethical principle that should be followed. As I consider how to do a theology pattern language, this asks what my ethical principle is.

Patterns Exist for Solutions. Neis expands on the term pattern and calls it a problem-solution pattern, and he is clear that solving problems is the point. "A pattern is . . . a rule which addresses a clear problem which may occur repeatedly in the environment, states the range of contexts in which this problem will occur, and gives the general features required [to] solve this problem." A pattern is like a hypothesis which is stated with evidence pro or con. It is a system based primarily on functional considerations. The principle of patterns lays out of way of tackling problems that invite dialog. Patterns are formulated as archetypal, general solutions that can find endless forms of specific solutions and applications according to context and interpretation." Patterns should be as clear as possible in order to promote understanding and invite dialog. In this sense, they are a way of scientifically encoding a discipline--I keep thinking of the dialogic system of Thomas Aquinas's great summas.

Connections make a language. Nais confirms what I expected. The language part of a pattern language emerges as patterns are connected to general and to specific patterns around them. A pattern begins by listing off related patterns at a higher level from it, and it ends by listing patterns at a lower level. This democratizes expertise and "provides users an organized procedure to help make sense out of otherwise complex situations." Patterns provide shared grammar. Patterns require user participation to make value; words are made for speaking.

Languages are General and Specific. Nais also confirms how pattern languages are used and how they are contextualized! "An architect . . . select[s] a set of patterns and use[s] these solution-patterns as archetypal starting points for a design and building process." Planners, he continues, will choose out a set of patterns appropriate to their need, and then--here is the innovation--they will create new patterns required for that particular project. The original pattern language Nais calls the General Pattern Language. Such pattners are a archetypal solutions. They are not contextual. The new, customized set of patterns are contextual. Neis calls these the Project Pattern Language. "Each project is different and unique in its own way and therefore needs its own Project Pattern Language as an important aspect of innovation, originality, and creativity within the larger complex system of functionality and harmony. . . . a Project Pattern Language may contain quite a few patterns in their solution or hypothesis form."

Patterns are just part of the thinking process. A pattern language (general or project) sits in a continuum of thinking that may begin in ideas, dreams, poems, and any kind of creativity. "In a project language, patterns are not the only defining elements any more, but all kinds of specific ideas, dreams, visions, may make up a coherent language for a particular project. Narratives, stories and poems could serve as starting points for a project and can serve as starting points of innovation, improvisation and creativity. . . . pattern languages do not replace design, but they are part of the design process."

Anti-patterns: the what not to do. These are proposed solutions that create more problems than they solve and therefore should be avoided. Such bad solutions are called anti-patterns. Neis doesn't go into it, but introducing a no creates a new subtlety to the overall language.

Final thoughts: Combining these insights with other posts I've accumulated on pattern writing, I understand now that simply saying a theological thing like bread, covenant, Son, or water is not making a pattern. Even thought these words may represent a nexus of theological meaning, they don't clearly solve anything. They need to be reworked with the user in mind in order to be made useful for them. Those nodes may often represent the solution to a problem, but saying the bare thing doesn't clearly help the user.

By understanding the problem-solution nature of patterns, I see now that the quality without a name that governs my system must exist on the vertical and horizontal planes simultaneously. In an earlier post, I said worship would be the telos of my system. But this is only the vertical. Recalling the service a pattern should be to a user, the telos must be to guide the user into greater degrees of worship of the triune God.

A friend's wedding toast

A long-time friend of mine recently celebrated a daughter's marriage. He wrote the following blessing for the new couple. I thought it was good and asked him for a copy. It is a product of occasional theology, and it gets at what I think Paul is trying to get at in his treatment of marriage in 1 Corinthians. Anyway, here it is.

To [Bride and Groom], no longer two but one:

Love one another with patience and kindness, with honor and respect. Persevere together in the hope of your shared faith and in the fidelity of your sacred union. Be always seeking the truth, speaking the truth, living the truth, and rejoicing in the truth.

Work hard to discover your unique gifts together--spiritual and vocational--as individuals in Christ and as an anointed couple. Seek to know each other well in order that you may speak courage and wisdom into each other. By the power of the Holy Spirit, advance God's kingdom together, his rule and reign in your own hearts and then out into the world. May the zeal of God accomplish this. May you always work specifically in the areas of your giftings. May you bear much fruit as you abide in the vine. And may material prosperity be yours as well by the success of your efforts. But store up for yourselves treasure in heaven. Keep your hearts pure.

If you have children, whether born by water in your image or by the grafting of adoption, love them with the love of Christ, remembering that God has known them from eternity and has loved them first. May you reap from them the joy you have so faithfully sown into your mother and I.

Above all [name of couple], no longer two but one, be conformed to the likeness of Christ, who is the perfect image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. May your union portray the mystery intended, that is, Jesus, the bridegroom of his beloved church. May the grace of God be upon you. Amen.

Doctor Ehrmstuhl on the phone

The other day, I stopped during hours at the office of Doctor Ehrmstuhl and was pleased to find him at his desk. His office was generously lined with books and could have been tidy until he left off shelf space and began stacking along the floor. He motioned for me to come in and he seemed pleased to see me. It had been a while. Nevertheless, he was in animated conversation with someone on the phone. I waited so long that I finally took down some of it, and so here it is. These are my notes, remember, so factual mistakes or exaggerations are my own.

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I too was taught that differences between traditions, and especially between east and west, are due to the different emphases along what, for lack of a better term, is called the Christ event: birth-to-ascension. Over that, I lay the linguistic, political, and geographic differences that have shaped and separated both halves. I would add, on my own, that the east seems to properly begin with the community whereas the west has been fascinated by the individual and individualism to our very day. (He drummed his fingers on the table in muted staccato.)

You are right that the east is not as interested in how to be cleansed and more in how to live a holy life. The high example of that for EO are the monks of Mount Athos. EO kept the monasticism that Luther democratized in the West. It also retained a Neoplatonic core that the west gave up for Aristotelianism in the fourteenth century w Thomas Aquinas.

Let's separate mysticism from theosis (deification is a Latin term which doesn't quite ring with the right overtones.) Theosis, the doctrine that the new humanity is made like God, is definitely front-and-center in EO. Funny enough, it is in the west as well. A couple of decades ago, scholars started finding it in the Reformers--especially Calvin. Theosis has been in the west all this time as well. When we talk about the imago Dei's renewal in the sanctification process, the end goal where this is going is Christlikeness or theosis. I asked Tom Wright about it probably ten years ago now, and he affirmed that theosis is not only permissible but biblical. That said, it is NOT becoming a God or God, it is becoming like God: being made in the image of his Son.

That is why I don't like deification. It doesn't leave enough difference in the undertones and it suggests that one, in our own track, can improve and improve until one finally arrives at divinity. This is a kind of Mormon or New Age or New Thought or some brand of Wesleyan perfectionism. I prefer theosis because it keeps a note of distinction in between that which is by nature and that which is by grace. It is soteriological, not ontological.

(At this point, Dr. Ehrmstuhl remembered me. We exchanged some whispered pleasantries, and he assured me he was almost done. But, whomever he was talking to seems to have hit a nerve, and the doctor's attention swiveled back to the conversation.)

Mysticism is a style of discipleship which often refers to saints in the tradition who emphasized prayer and ascetic discipline, figures like Theresa of Avila, San Juan de la Cruz, Francois Fenelon, Catherine of Siena, or anchorites like Richard Rolle or Julian of Norwich, and many others. But mysticism is a slippery word. Evelyn Underhill lays it all out in her work on mysticism. There are dangers here. You could be a neopagan and practice this, or a Buddhist or whatever. A deep question in my project is what to do with mysticism in the Christian tradition. Should we jettison it or not? Should mysticism even exists where the Solas exist? The short answer: a highly qualified yes. I do not agree with the hesychastic approach of the EO. They seek the uncreated light born of the energies of the Trinity. I think it is the ever-flowing agape life of the Spirit (Augustine's maestro) who calls us in the solas always higher up and further in. When theology turns its gaze there, it becomes apophatic--it can only say what is not.

(Here, his interlocutor took up the challenge. The Doctor swiveled in his chair. He finally broke in:) There is a Mount Athos documentary on YouTube. It is good. (More from the other side.) Hesychasm has nothing to do with the solas. I was using the solas as a part/whole to mean the framework of Reformed theology. Oh yes, a synecdoche--good catch! What I mean by that is that, because of that Neoplatonic core, EO developed a mysticism that is different than the mysticism of the West. And so I do not find their way into prayer a live option. What I know of it seems a way wholly apart from scripture. It risks keeping the divine Jesus and not the man. Or it might avoid Jesus altogether and try to climb on the rope of the Spirit alone. Therefore, it rings alarms in my head, not least of which is the alarm of gnosticism. I am not saying that EO monks are gnostics. They would probably be quick to shut that down. I'm just saying that it makes me nervous.

The whole essences and energies things comes out of Neoplatonic problems with the doctrine of the Trinity: how does the ineffable God have anything to do with finitude? The thinker here is Gregory of Palamas. (The doctor got up and rummaged around on his shelves.) The general understanding these days is that this language is strange to Western ears, but that it is orthodox. Trinitarian thinkers, EO or Western, are getting at the same thing. I read Palamas in that slim Classics of Western Theology volume. His isn't language I'm adopting anytime soon, but okay. One is stuck with the tradition you grew up with. I am okay attempting to be an informed Westerner.

(Here, again, his interlocutor took up the conversation for some distance.) Your thoughts on individualism and monasticism are good ones. I am not a good guide wading out any deeper into EO waters. I will say this, though. The danger with monasticism is that it has a tendency to create spiritual hierarchies (classism) in the church, and that is going on in EO. I prefer monasticism without hierarchy, and there are models for that even in Protestantism. My own denomination, for example, has various monasteries scattered about, as do other Protestant denominations.

Oh, I completely agree that the path of awakening, purgation, and union is the established way. But it has to be found correctly. Simply put: if it is not in Jesus, it is not available. He is the foundation stone. But not to worry: Paul's language of union with Christ, of being buried with him and raised with him, of being made alive in him: that is the invitation. So the mystic way is not to know nothing and to realize nothing, but to know Christ, following the pull of the Spirit, and to be remade after his image. It is to be invited, because the church has been invited, to the meal that the Trinity has set.

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At this point, I got a phone call from my wife. The doctor and I nodded genially, and he may have apologized. And I left.