Trinity Catena 2

The shalom of the persons is the eschatological shalom of the people of God, which we are called to and long for, which we await with all creation, and to which we summon our neighbors.

***

Humanity is not peaceful. Groups negotiate, press, compete, and conflict. “The thunder of many peoples, they thunder like the thundering of the sea. The roar of nations, they roar like the roaring of mighty waters!” (Isa 17.1) There is no peace in politics. And individuals fare no better. As Søren Kierkegaard said, “There is not a single living human being who does not secretly harbor a disharmony.” What we want is a garden; what we have is a flood.

Shalom (שָׁלוֹם) is the Hebrew word for peace. It is a rich, rich word that means more than the absence of hostility. Pastor Timothy Kellner defined shalom as “a multidimensional, complete well-being—physical, psychological, social, and spiritual; it flows from all of one’s relationships being put right—with God, with(in) oneself, and with others." Shalom is what Jesus offered when he pitied the discord of the crowd and said, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.” And shalom is what Jesus procures for his people by his death and resurrection.

The hymn of praise in Colossians 1 says that the cross made such a peace as to affect the reconciliation of all things “whether on earth or in heaven” to God. The embrace of Colossian’s shalom extends from the individual, to the household, to human communities, to thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers, and to all of creation. “He himself is our peace.” (Eph 2.14a) It is the joy of the church to summon the world’s peoples to this peace. But it is a shalom begun, yes, but not fulfilled–not yet.

So, as we wait between the roar of the nations and the harmony of peace, we search out the very vision and archetype of the shalom we hope for. That vision is the quiet unity of the persons of God. All other definitions of peace, peace of self, of community, of nations, of creation, are a thousand reflections. The pure oneness of the godhead is its very seat. "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you" (Augustine). "When I am united to you, there is no more sorrow or toil. Only you, my God" (Gregory of Nyssa).

A Trinity Catena

1. The story of redemption is the perfect and absolute love of the persons for each other being separated (for our creaturely sake) like light through a prism on the wall of history. The Godhead does as it is. [Explain]

2. The shalom of the persons is the eschatological shalom of the people of God, which we are called to and long for, which we await with all creation, and to which we summon our neighbors. [Explain]

2a. Love requires a lover and a beloved and the love itself. When we, following scripture, assert "God is love," we confess that God is a plurality in unity; God is love. [Explain]

2b. The life of the church--in all its varied practices--tells and participates in the Father's sending of the Son and the Spirit for the sake of the world. The church community is the imago Dei and its spirituality is no exercise in individualism since God is a fellowship, not a monad.

2c. To state in another way: the Great Commission is a repetition of the sending of the Son, which is itself a reflection of the eternal begetting of the Son in history. But this time, the church is invited.

3. The people of God whose head is Jesus of Nazareth are invited to participate by grace in the loving oneness of the persons. By grace, not by nature. The flesh of Jesus is forever scarred. This is the doctrine of theosis, the foundation of Christian anthropology. In the words of the early church fathers: He became like us so that we can become like him.

4. Christian spirituality is inside out: an always moving current into God and into the community. There is a holy and joyful eros to it as we, through the Son and by the Spirit, are caught up into the perichoretic dance to the Father.

4a. Christian spirituality is triune from the foundations.

5. The Doctrine of the Trinity, revealed just in the light of awareness as we became no longer servants but friends, is a summing up of the whole. And, together with the two-natures of the Son, tells the whole thing in a glance.

6. Afterthought: Do not get overcome by how are there three in one. Sometimes you emphasize the oneness; sometimes the threeness. Heresy cannot be avoided. So, sin boldly!

Beauty is a form of Hope

"When we make beauty, it is a form of hope." ~Anne Hathaway casually uniting aesthetics, eschatology, and ethics.

Esau McCaulley says his church, the black church in America, has something to say

Yesterday, I finished Esau McCaulley's book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. IVP Academic. 2020. McCaulley's bona fides are beyond question. He has a PhD from St. Andrews. His Doktorvater is N. T. Wright. He teaches New Testament at Wheaton College. He is a priest in the ACNA. He is a black man and a Christian. This is a book McCaulley was born to write. And it is a book with a message: the South got somethin' to say.

These notes are not a book review. Rather, they are a short treatment of some of his ideas. Nevertheless, if you have never read his book, I do recommend it. The faculty and staff of my alma mater, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, read it together. That encouraged me to pick it up; it took five years to find a cheap copy bc I'm a cheapie. Plus, I am very interested in looking at the faith through the eyes of non-white people.

Chapter One: The South got Somethin' to Say

As he grew up, McCaulley found himself caught between two communities in the Black church. One of these was evangelical scholasticism and the academy. The other, social justice and the pulpits. He appreciated the serious scholarship of the former, but its papers and commentarites "displayed little concern for how biblical texts speak to the experiences of Black believers" (12). He also thought they read for a white audience, if they even made it out of the first century. "To me, it was a sign of privilege to imprison Paul and Jesus in the first century (13). But what about the social justice side? Here, scholarship was viewed with suspicion. Getting the exegesis right and whiteness have often gone hand in hegemonic hand. Wasn't exegesis the tool of white churches seeking to baptize slavery in the first place? McCaulley cedes the point but disagrees. Looking at the earliest strate of Black ecclesial leadership, he finds plenty of exegesis--and a thoroughgoing message of liberation and freedom.

As McCaulley argues, God is a liberator. Liberation erupts from God's very character, from out of and to his ontological sabbath shalom.[1] God desires freedom for his people. And his expectation is that his freed people will live lives of holiness, living out their liberation before the world. They participate in God's continual and peaceful call. Any reading of the Bible that says otherwise is in error. Scholarship and justice pick up the liberating cross together in whatever historical situation it is found and partner with one another to discern the mind of Christ for this day.

Handpicking other points of interest

McCaulley goes in for re-examing texts used historically to subdue and subjugate Black Christians. Eschatology is on his mind, the kind of eschatology that bubbles up into every living moment. Eschatology stimulates the church to act for justice and for liberation against the horizon ofeventual and certain shalom. But eschatology is also "not yet." And, in the intervening time, there is mourning.

Speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, McCaulley writes, "To mourn involves being saddened by the state of the world. To mourn is to care. It is an act of rebellion against one's own sins and the sins of the world. . . A theology of mourning never allows us the privilege of apathy. . . Mourning is intuition that things are not right--that more is possible. To think that more is possible is an act of political resistance in a world that wants us to believe that consumption is all there is. Our politicians run on our desires by convincing us that utopia is possible here and they alone can provide it." (65) I do also like his emphasis that this mourning leads to a hope to see elements of the Kingdom of God come to be, its liberation unto justice. And that this involves telling truth. As Luther said, A theologian calls a thing what it is. "Peacemaking is a sign of God's inbreaking kingdom. . . . Through our efforts to bring peace, we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent. . . . Therefore the work of justice, when understood as direct testimony to God's kingdom, is evangelistic from start to finish." (Ibid.)

I am caught by this: "For Zecharaiah and Elizabeth, the miracle child is John. For the African American Christian, the miracle is the Black Church born of truly miraculous circumstances and whose witness to Jesus has served as something of a forerunner preparing America to accept a truer and fuller gospel" (84). This fuller gospel is one that, while grounded in respectful and canonically comprehensive exegesis, includes the necessary hermeneutic to place those exegetic results in dialogue with today. Preaching is a public gift of the Black Church.

McCaulley reads with the end in mind. His work is eschatological. He understands the Christian vision of the future--the liberated, risen church--as one that embraces difference: difference of skin, of language, of culture. "These distinct people, cultures, and languages are eschatological everlasting. At the end, we do not find the elimination of difference. Instead the very diversity of cultures is a manifestation of God's glory. . . . Our distinctive cultures represent the means by which we give honor to God. He is honoered through the diversity of tongues singing the same song." (118) Liberation does not lead to the removal of color, thinking of people who claim to not see color. That approach to difference is well-meant, perhaps, but incorrect. "The gospel does not cancel ethnic identities.(113)"

So when McCaully approaches scripture, he considers it in its historical-grammatical context and he considers it eschatologically.[2] In the Easter light, as von Balthasar said. So, he weds the careful tools of the evangelicals with the social energy of the progressives.

Laws of restraint suggest an eschatological purpose

McCaully discusses a way of reading Biblical ethics that I found very helpful. Referencing Jesus's teaching on divorce, McCaully observes that Jesus brings ethics back to creational intent. Let's call this the creational ethic. But, Jesus acknowledges that the law does exist to restrain error. Paul does the same when he says the law is the paidagogos. The law makes pastoral sense of difficult situations. Let's call this pastoral consideration.

Applying this to the slavery question in America. The Bible's teaching around slavery is pastoral consideration. Its teachings limit the worst aspects of slavery. And, as they do their work, they erase the foundation that supports the sinful institution itself. They do this because the creational intent--the deeper ethic--is liberation-unto-freedom. God made all human beings to be his imago in the world. So the limiting effort of the law serves a temporary purpose guided by the deeper and eventually overcoming liberation of eschatological reality, in this case, a free people worshiping God's messiah together.

Scars suffered in the present do not prevent eschatological participation

Finally, there is McCaulley's discussion of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Christ is our reconciler, our liberator to shalom in the Kingdom of God. One would not have thought a eunuch could ever be liberated. Weren't his public wounds permanent? He was not only a a Gentile, but he was permanently impure by the nature of his injury. As McCulley reminds his reader: eunuch's were despised. The man suffered the injustice of castration from the community at large, and "in a culture with strictly defined gender roles, he would be seen as aberrant" (110). But the eunuch is in fact liberated. He "found hope in the shamed Messiah whose resurrection lifts those with imposed indignities to places of honor." And "The eunuch [was always] an image bearer [of God]. Christ showed the eunuch who he truly was." McCaully's point is that blackness, like castration, does not prevent Jesus's liberating act from fully delivering black men and women to wholeness, dignity, and value in the Kingdom of God, to "God's eschatological vision for the reconciliation of all things in his Son." Christ's redemption is a liberating act for all people who for whatever reason suffer indignity and shame. Christ has made a place for them all in the kingdom.

__________

[1] I hope one sees the divine mission underneath this mention of liberation.
[2] cf Theology Along Three Axes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever you think it is, it is worse

Two generations ago, theologians talked about how all theology had to be done in the shadow of Auschwitz. This means that those seeking to think clearly in the work of theology cannot be naive. It does not do to be naive about human potential. One cannot simply posit a benign State or politic. Anthropology does not work from good material. No, whatever you think it is, it is worse.

Epistemology must ask about truth in a room of unapologetic liars. Soteriology must ask about salvation for narcissistic savages. We thought modernity always changed because the market was on its way to perfection. Turns out, constant change is because the center never did hold--nothing did. Social justice will never arrive. Politics will never be just. Ethics is a room full of sinners trying to assuage their guilt. The Bible, of course, is not surprised. As it is written:

There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one. Their throats are opened graves; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of vipers is under their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.

Theologians must call things what they are. And, in so doing, must realize that whatever they think it is, it is worse.

For this reason, eschatology is fundamental to theology and all theology must be fundamentally eschatological.

Theologians in Blogs Getting Coffee: Theologie der Hoffnung

Good morning, friends. Today, I get to talk to you about a fundamental idea in one of those most important books in my life, Jurgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope. Moltmann wrote Theologie der Hoffnung in the mid sixties. He himself is a biographical theologian because he has an interesting biography. He was conscripted into the German army at 15. Surrendered eagerly to the American army soon after. And he spent the next few years in various POW. He was converted in camp. Became a pastor after the war. And, from his work as a pastor, started thinking a lot about a subject we think about a lot: hope.

It was, oddly enough, during his honeymoon that he read a book called the Principle of Hope (Prinzip Hoffnung) by a neo-Marxist philosopher named Ernst Bloch. The book gripped his imagination. And he often said to his new bride: "Christians have more reason to hope than anyone. Why aren't we thinking like this?" Moltmann decided to begin thinking about the category of Christian hope. By then, he had begun lecturing at university, and he began using his lectures as a method to work through these questions.

Let me give you a taste of what Moltmann sounds like. This is from the preface in his paperback edition. Recall that Western theology in the sixties is trying to come to terms with the aftermath of WW2 + Auschwitz, and people are asking, "What now?" The Existentialism of Sartre and Marxist atheism were attempting to answer people's questions. So, Moltmann says,

"Why has Christian theology allowed [the category of] hope to escape it, when this is its very own special theme? . . . What has happened to the early Christian spirit of active hope today? . . . For [Marxists], atheism was the presupposition of active hope; for Jean-Paul Sartre, atheism was the presupposition of human freedom. But for me, the God of promise and exodus, the God who has raised Christ and who lets the power of the resurrection dwell in us, is the ground for active and for passive hope."

Moltmann quickly realized that the category of hope falls under the theological category of eschatology, which is the doctrine of last things: the end of the world, the coming of Jesus, the judgment, etc.

It was a category that presented some problems. From the perspective of a table of contents, eschatology always comes last. (Oh, I apologize: eschatology = eschatos (last) + logos (Eng. suffix: -ology) = word about x or study of last things.) Whenever theologians wrote theology or address catechetical lectures, eschatology was simply stuck to the end. It was the runt. Not only, but eschatology is often treated as an escape category irrelevant to the lived world. Moltmann saw from Ernst Bloch's book, Prinzip Hoffnung, that this didn't have to be the case. The future, he saw, may just have everything to do with the present (and even more than you'd expect). So, as I say, he got to thinking about it in his lectures, and they became his book Theologie der Hoffnung in 1965.

I can't help but mention that eschatology wasn't limited to Bloch. New Testament theology had been in an argument for a hundred years about aspects of Jesus's person and teaching. The Jesus that emerged was a teacher who was a thoroughgoing eschatological prophet and who cannot be understood apart from eschatological categories.

Last thing today. I know this is taking some time. I'm putting a little here and there so you guys can kind of touch in. Let me leave you with a bit from Moltmann, from his introduction. He is talking about how eschatology has been denigrated as being irrelevant etc. So he says--and the big moves he is making are there to see in this:

"In actual fact, eschatology means the doctrine of the Christian hope, which embraces both the object hoped for and also the hope inspired by it. From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. . . . For Christian faith lives from the raising of the crucified Christ, and strains after the promises of the universal future of Christ. . . . Hence eschatology cannot be only a part of Christian doctrine. Rather, the eschatological outlook is characteristic of all Christian proclamation, of every Christian existence and of the whole Church. . . [God] encounters us in his promises of the future. [Therefore] eschatology should not be [the end of theology], but its beginning."

Tomorrow I will talk about how he takes Luther's simil anthropology and makes eschatology its context, now that eschatology is the very bath in which theology bathes and not some forgotten chapter or wishful thought.

Give up the myth of human progress?

“Clearly science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born 5,000 years ago. Any victory over our species’ destructive tendencies will likewise have to come from institutional and cultural development. We know what humans are capable of: in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong formation, they can behave monstrously. The hope for progress can consist only in the belief that there is some form of collective human life in which the capacity for barbarism will rarely find expression, and in which humans’ creative and cooperative potential can be realized without hindrance. [John] Gray regards such hope as utopian, but it can be supported both by experience and by reflection. Moral and political progress is inevitably more difficult than scientific progress, since it cannot occur in the minds of a few experts but must be realized in the collective lives of millions; but it does happen. Experience shows that some societies are much more decent than others, and that in fits and starts, cruelty, oppression and discrimination have become on balance less acceptable over time.” Thomas Nagel. NYT. 7/5/13.

In this quote, Thomas Nagel defends the myth of human progress. And I wonder, reading it, whether the holocaust is not made more horrible by its deep challenge to this myth. The German people were (and still are) shining examples of the best of Western civilization--and evil still took and used them without interference to accomplish in reality the things that only exist in our unspoken nightmares.

I've been thinking off and on about this myth of human progress. I love this myth. Believing it gives my life and my own civilization meaning and purpose. I am at the crest of thousands of years of progress. I am better than my forebears. And those who come after will be better, happier, and healthier than me. Their children would be geniuses to my age. And yet, lets face it, this is a thoroughly secular eschatology bound on a highly selective reading of the facts.

In short, the Judeo-Christian worldview should have none of it. It is a kind of antichrist. One of those lies that hold down the truth.

On the other hand, can someone just give up the myth of human progress? Can someone simply rewire the operating system they imbibed with their mother's milk?

a universal dual

I have been struggling for three years or more to escape from one universe into another. Wandering and flailing in the dark, gathering snatches of truth from rumor and hearsay, leaving the familiar paths of habit--catchphrases and methods--and striking out into the woods after this or that light or landmark.

When I say universe I'm speaking of a universe of meaning: familiar symbols, habits, and assumptions that fix the stars and horizons that make up the mental furniture of daily life. Human beings exist in a meaning universe more directly than the physical one. Ask the reductionist-materalist how difficult it is to truly cleave to the "nothing but" of things and then watch them realize that this, too--this arrival at the bare whatness of objects in the physical universe is just another shaping of the mental universe of meaning. That's the double-edge of Kant's great divide: even the scientist is a phenomenologist.

I didn't furiously start and break into the forest chasing after a new universe. You don't realize you've left a path until it is long behind you. It starts with tiny deviations. "Look at that over there!" Then a quick investigation to get a better view. Soon you've left the trail behind.

The first steps were quite simple: the resolution that matter is not of itself a sinful thing. The body too can hope. An eschatological lean toward the Postmillenial end of Amillenialsm. A strict habit of avoiding material notions about godself so that the triune being is not a thing among things. A denial of the present-day urge to use the doctrine of providence as a divining rod. A realization that it is modernity that values authenticity, this baptized in "God has a plan for my life" (the kingdom of God recruits worshipers for God's sake, not for the sake of a realization of one's inner you.) Leaving Anabaptist traditions behind and joining an Episcopal church. These all taken together slowly lead away from that universe that others have called the enchanted universe.

Just naming the darn thing took years. The enchanted universe--yes! I've blogged about this before. This is the universe in which the Christianity of my youth dwells. Naming the other universe has taken nearly as much time. I'm an alien and a stranger to it after all. Moving in large rooms by candlelight. Nothing is familiar. This is the sacramental universe.

I've not fully arrived in the latter. And so much of the habits of mind and the phrases that go with being a Christian go with the former, it has been an odd process of sorting it all out. The brits have pants but call them trousers. Both universes have the word "worship" but mean very different things. It is a repatriation.

Here are a few things I've discovered: One fundamental difference between the two is the way each understands the relationship between God and the world. The god of the enchanted universe is far away, though invoked and expected in the smallest parts of daily life with great fervency. Matter in the enchanted universe is hopeless, the world will burn up and the soul will one day put aside the body and go on to a better realm. The god of the sacramental universe is astonishingly close, though far less invoked and expected in daily life. One expects laterally, the way that plants grow or time flows in unnoticeable continuity that evades the most intense awareness. Matter has hope, the world will be redeemed and transformed, and human beings will go into the new creation as embodied persons, transformed, yes, but still human beings. The eschatologies are different, and so is the drama. Warfare characterizes the former; wonder the latter--at least in my experience.

The way religion and science relate to one another is also very different depending on which universe you inhabit. In the former, science is a helpful maker of comforts but is not allowed to say anything of real importance. In the latter, science is taken seriously. It is not embraced, but it becomes a partner in dialogue. If one is a Christian coming up in an enchanted universe, the only option available if you take the scientific route is to put things in tight boxes, otherwise there is no motivation to engage in the mental and physical rigor of scientific investigation. If one grows up in a sacramental universe, there is a great deal of motivation to pursue the sciences, perhaps more motivation than if one grows up an agnostic.

At any rate, the doctrine of revelation is far different in the two universes. In an enchanted universe, revelation is immanent and pregnant in all things, what is necessary are the keys to its discovery. It is personal, and so God is personal. In a sacramental universe, revelation is restricted to word and sacrament: and perhaps even to word through sacrament (word governed by sacrament). It is largely impersonal, though one's person is caught up in the story. God became a person, and so what is confessed is a God in three persons. The self is wholly at the center of the enchanted universe; God's redemptive purpose at the center of the sacramental one. Faith is also differently understood. In the former faith is a Kierkegaardian leap full of the will and human drama; in the latter it is a signpost planted by the Holy Spirit sticking stubbornly from one's own rocky heart, sometimes a beacon but most times a nuisance.

science and religion; enchanted universe; sacramental theology; Christianity

thinking about the horizontal line

The Big Idea is Christian freedom, which is the proper living out of the eschatological life and the proper dismissal of all that is not so. Pragmatic, certainly, but requiring a proper knowledge of freedom as we find it now, in the now of today and in a manner not excluding the body of flesh or community. It is the freedom for one's neighbor and from one's religion.

Summing up Gaffin

A few months ago, I began a post which addressed John Calvin's understanding of the fourth commandment using Richard Gaffin's published dissertation, Calvin on the Sabbath. For want of time, I never completed a review of Grudem's critique . . . until now. The sabbath, Gaffin concludes, is thoroughly eschatological. Calvin simply does not understand this, and therefore is unable to do justice to the fourth commandment. His reasoning is as follows: (1) Calvin’s generalization of the fourth commandment as rest nullifies its uniqueness The heart of the fourth commandment, Calvin says repeatedly, is the injunction to practice spiritual rest. Spiritual rest, he makes clear, is perpetual cessation from sin so that God may perform his sanctifying work in us. This conclusion, however, isn’t just a portion of lawfulness but a summary of the whole law! Further, to attribute to any one of the ten commandments the comprehensive force that belongs to Christ’s summary of the law--to love God and neighbor--effectively deprives that particular commandment of its place in the decalogue so that a portion of the decalogue receives the meaning divinely intended for the whole. “He [Calvin] has overlooked its specific [unique] place in God’s law and consequently missed its true meaning” (146). (2) Calvin does not devote serious attention to the Sabbath as an ordinance of creation Calvin’s teaching addresses only a post-fall Sabbath and does not understand that the meaning of the Sabbath must be governed by the pre-fall, creation Sabbath. If the basic concern of the fourth commandment is, as Calvin says, resting from sin, then sin (as well as the entire ordo salutis) was required before the fall. “The meaning of the Sabbath institution prior to the fall seems not to have crossed his mind” (146). (3) Calvin’s teaching on the Sabbath disparages the other six days of creation If the message of the fourth commandment is: Stop Sinning!, then the other six days are the producers of the sin from which one is resting. Calvin saw no use or value in the six days of work. The six days are, for Calvin, days of the sins of the flesh, days which were supposed to be rested from on the Sabbath. The six days become an influence which must be resisted and bound up to make way for piety. That is why Calvin understood the Mosaic commands to cease from labor on the Sabbath as necessary in the face of “sinful human inability to practice daily public worship”(ibid). People need a command to make them cease from labor, otherwise worship would be precluded by the market. Indeed, Calvin enjoins a daily assembly for worship. "The mention of six days of labor is a recognition of sinful actions, not a command to engage in legitimate human callings or other cultural activity. . . . These two elements can only be related antithetically, or the days of work viewed, at best, concessively” (147). Thus, the meaning of the Sabbath is spiritualized and made wholly ecclesial. (4) Calvin’s teaching on the Sabbath forbids positive interpretation. Calvin equates the six days of labor with labors of the flesh. He spiritualizes work and rest as sin and the cessation from sin. It is true that the other commandments presuppose sin, but they also have a positive side; do not murder is also an injunction to protect and value other lives. There is no such postive interpretation available to Calvin for the fourth commandment. Should Calvin have understood it positively, where working as well as resting is in view, then sin would have become a requirement for God’s good governance of creation--a real dilemma! Indeed, the interpretation Calvin gives to the fourth commandment is only meaningful in a world of sin & redemption. On the other, when Calvin states as its core teaching that the creature is to imitate the creator--a notion with relevance apart from redemption--the result summarizes the whole law and neuters its specific force [per the first point above]. Therefore, Gaffin concludes that Calvin is unable to do justice to the fourth commandment as a Creation ordinance, as a principle intended to govern human life before and after the fall and which, together with its neighbors, fits within the framework of Christ’s summary of the law. (5) Calvin ignores the eschatological purpose of the seventh day Gaffin is sympathetic to Calvin's reasons for spiritualizing work and rest; the law of types is replaced by the reality of Jesus’s work. But, he says, Calvin did not fully consider types existing in creation before the fall. The Sabbath is an eschatologically-oriented type. We look forward to its eschatological fulfilment. Eschatological light has shone upon the creation from the beginning, and a creation Sabbath has to include that. It is the Spirit who is “the source of (eschatological) life” (152). The pneumatological is always the christological, to be in the Spirit is to be “in Christ.” The realm of the Spirit is the eschatological realm. The weekly Sabbath was a continual reminder to Adam that history is not a ceaseless repetition of days. Rather, at the beginning of each week he could look forward to the rest of that seventh day. That weekly cycle impressed on him that he, together with the created order as a whole, was moving toward a goal, a nothing less than eschatological culmination. (ibid.) A weekly day of rest faithfully observed by the church is a concrete witness to a watching world that Christians are not enmeshed in the turmoil of an impersonal historical process but look with confidence to sharing in the consummation of God’s purposes for the creation. There does indeed remain an eschatological Sabbath-rest for the people of God. It is not a command, but a reminder of the better that is coming. Thus, the fourth commandment makes the meaning of the seventh day interact with the meaning of the previous six. The day of rest gives meaning to, and in turn receives meaning from, the six days of labor. There is a philosophy of history here. The Sabbath’s enjoined rest from labor not a practical demand but an eschatological reminder: we are to meditate upon our six days in the light of the eschatological seventh. Quoting Geerhardus Vos (from what I assume is The Eschatology of the Old Testament (P & R Publishing, 2001)) Gaffin writes: The Sabbath is not in the first place a means of advancing religion. It has its main significance apart from that, in pointing forward to the eternal issues of life and history . . . a day devoted to the remembrance of man’s eternal destiny cannot be properly observed without the positive cultivation of . . . religious concerns. . . . But, even where this is conceded, the fact remains that it is possible to crowd too much into the day that is merely subservient to religious propaganda, and to void it [of any spiritual good.] Finally, the eschatological nature of the Sabbath makes Sabbath-keeping a present impossibility. After the fall, human beings cannot possibly fulfil the fourth commandment. Its rest points to the state where all has been perfected, and no more work is necessary. In this present age, work is always necessary. Human beings can't achieve a consummation from their own resources. They cannot bring the psychical creation to its eschatological fulfillment. Therefore, Sabbath-keeping requires and is fundamentally a pneumatological extension of grace, and a practice of hope (and suffering--see Moltmann Theology of Hope chapter 1). fourth commandment; John Calvin; reformed theology; Wayne Grudem; eschatology; theology of work.