The Ink Tank: Editorial cartoon roundup – Boston.com

The Ink Tank: Editorial cartoon roundup – Boston.com.

Walter Brueggemann on Psalm 31 and Steadfast Love

Walter Brueggemann is a recently discovered voice of inspiration. This sermon was given at Duke University Chapel on May 15th 2009. I cannot help but be laid bare by this sermon. I love it. This is the work I’ve done for two years, this is what I hope I am like someday when i’m all grown up.

I think Bruegemman is exactly right when he mentions that this is not an ordinary life, it is a life of yieldedness, of faithfulness and waiting. It is a life of trust, of candor and of suffering. The Christian life is extraordinary.

My favorite lines from the homily:

“My Times are in your hands”

“She tastes the bread and it [The Bread of the Eucharist] tastes like faithfulness”

What do you think of this? Any responses?

My Thoughts on Veteran’s Day

It’s an abomination to thank anybody for murder. Whether they are soldiers in this country or any other. Murder is murder. Our exalted rhetoric about the defense of freedom is an abomination, it’s horrific. I do not thank them, not as veterans of this nation, because more than words of thanks they need love from a community that hopes they shall be set free from their burden someday. As humans I stand with them enduring the weight of the evil that comes with killing in the name of a nation state, and its purported ideas of freedom, justice and free consumerism for all. They have fought for empty ideals, vanity and desolation. They are the ones who must live with blood on their hands, and we are responsible too for the blood which they shed. We are guilty of creating societies where bloodshed is praised as heroism, and where the murderous are exalted. We should not celebrate as much as weep. The taking of a single life does infinite damage to the psyche.

On Teaching Scripture

I was recently having a conversation about this issue and hope that this might spur some dialogue.

I think that the teaching of scripture is about the formation of disciplines in the listening audience. It’s teaching them to think in and with the narrative that scripture presents to us. Teaching scripture is less about looking at the text and more about looking with the text at the One it witnesses to.

Theology is at the heart of our preaching whether practical or speculative, whether historical or spiritual, it’s the content of our message that will determine what values are being formed in the congregations we are teachers for. Theology has a very practical voice, as theologians and teachers our imaginative challenge is to understand the text’s voice in such a way that it speaks not to a reality out there, as to the realty we participate in here and now through the revelation of the cross and our call to take up crosses and die as a peaceful community bearing the marks of Christ in our bodies.

Now, while I agree that putting the bible into the hands of individuals is a danger if there is no central visible authority, including the creeds and the sacraments, i think that this can be a somewhat productive exercise if it leads to communal dialogue and poring over the witness together. The scriptures challenge us to wrestle with them, and to know them we must face the challenge that is this haunting book, we must walk away from it, both with smiles and with tears, with rejoicing and great sorrow. Our knowledge of scripture is not and never a mastery of a text, it is a humble reception, a yeilding, and a self-disclosure, as we open ourselves to this story, we will find it opening itself up to our interpretation. This witness shows us a world that is often broken, unjust and painful, we have to be able to recognize it for what it says and live in the haunting world of the text. This text shows us humanity as a broken object. Yet, it teaches us that despite our ideas about the world we find ourselves in, we know the character of God and His faithfulness, and that in itself challenges us to live a different life.

Teaching the scriptures is not atheological, as many of our contemporary low churches would have us assume. Nor is it all theological in a sense that we turn the church into a class of elite super-nerds bashing each other with the text. The first message of this text, the primary message is the crucified God who has shown us that He is for us, who has suffered that we might know the faithfulness of this God. It is not the pastoral task to innovate fresh revelation as has been assumed by some charismatic and third-wave circles. Our task is to understand that what has been given to us is the fresh revelation, and we must look with the text to understand the one it witnesses to. The text speaks in ways that challenge our imaginations to conform to an ever increasing consciousness of a world outside ourselves, a time outside our nations, and a history initiated at creation which culminates in new creation.

The way to live and do theology is prayer. Theology is liturgical at heart and it should seek to create liturgies public and personal for Christian living. Theology is not a set of rational philosophical tenets with no corresponding voice in the world we find ourselves in. Our theological preaching is a dialogue with the Crucified God, and it forms the worldview we live in, as a backdrop, that sets all things within itself. All Christian action, all human action is theological, we must merely ask ourselves which gods and powers we are serving with our preaching and with our lives. The speaker of the message will determine the way its content is read and received, our best task to show the world that Christianity matters is to be that community so shaped by this text in love that we come to trust one another, speak truthfully together, and share the common discipline of following a path alternative to the one the cultures of the world would ask us to follow.

As a charismatic, i would challenge the contemporary “prophets” to remember that the prophetic task is not soothsaying, divination or even a “word from the Lord”, the prophetic task is reading this text rightly, that we might nourish and evoke a consciousness that is alternative to the one the world has to offer. Teaching scripture is about knowing the fresh revelation, the self-interpreting word of God which is Jesus Himself and the undeniable glory of his sufferings. The fathomless beauty, the yawning abyss of divine love, which can only open itself wider and wider, to bear all things. Our task is to point to this, and let it shape the way we think, teach, preach and live.

“There can be and should be no non-theologians in the body of Christ.”

-Karl Barth.

A great book expressing this very thing is Stanley Hauerwas’ book A Cross Shattered Church

God Escapes Me

The most intimate nearness, the nearness closer to my innermost being than i am to myself has transcended me. God escapes me, words escape me, as I dwell in the deep shadows of the suffering of my people. I am faced with despair at times, that mayhap the almighty has forgotten us, has forgotten the simple and the needy.

I look to the cross and see one in our midst, but infinitely far off, and at times I feel that He too has gone some place far beyond, what was once a historical fact is over now, and the resurrection has taken him from our midst, and placed him into a beyond so far he cannot remember what he suffered.

God escapes me, I cannot find utterance and the desolation is ineffable, beyond comprehension and senseless beyond understanding. I don’t have any reason to feel this way, other than the inexplicable madness that I see in the world around me. I cannot see why or in what way these tears are justified, in what ways new life will spring forth from the abysses and clutches of death and despair, how the suffering of even a single child will have been worth it.

I know that these sufferings are the sufferings of Christ himself, but the objectivity of the claim escapes me. God is far off, he is not a God who is near, he is the absence, He Himself is the great silence the eternal abyss that swallows all things into himself. There is no peace among the dead, nor rest among the living, heaven is a chaos, and the throne of the lamb is under girded by suffering martyrs, waiting patiently for an end that is promised.

I cannot see the life promised, nor do i know where He has gone, but surely God is not in our midst. He has forsaken us, and delivered over to the powers of this world, He has died, and we were the ones who killed Him. He has risen, and we were the ones who sold out everything that this means in favor of bread, we sold the burden of freedom for the bread of the church, for the will to be told what to believe, in the hope that being told might save us.

I do not have the courage to believe what He has promised, and find myself struggling to see the meaning in the senselessness that escapes words. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, but which martyrs are starting what churches? I do not find the courage to hope what has promised shall come to pass, how can I know that what I believe is even right?

Even with the objectivity of the revelation of Christ, what if all of us are wrong, what if God once again, simply reimagines everything surprising all of us n the end?

Yet, I look to the crucifix, there one suffering, alone and dejected, showing me that yes, God still works wonders for the dead, His praises are heard on the lips of the weak and the outcast, his love flows to the god-forsaken. His cross beckons us all to die, there is no victory or life without the necessary way of death. I will follow, despite my protest, I will be led into this new exodus, I will pass through death, and follow the way that leads to life. We have killed God, yet, in His death is the beginning of life itself, and Jesus of Nazareth has compassion on us. He is the love which we can know, and the first promise of a world that has to be more real than this one, the first sign of a promise which remains to be fulfilled.

We are at the end of this day and all the ones that follow, the people of easter, the people who have chosen to be shaped by the story that this man Jesus has to tell, and we gather at the table of original blood, to sing hallelujah, to the one who himself has entered into and beyond the depths of our deepest despairs.

We are going to him who is outside the camp, facing the consuming fire and the shadows and darkness of ones who find themselves outside, yet, Hallelujah is our song. Despite the hope that I have, God escapes me, still, Hallelujah is my song.

St. Mark the Monk

“Unless a man gives himself entirely to the Cross, in a spirit of humility and self-abasement; unless he casts himself down to be trampled underfoot by all and despised, accepting injustice, contempt and mockery; unless he undergoes all these things with joy for the sake of the Lord, not claiming any kind of human reward whatsoever – glory or honor or earthly pleasures – he cannot become a true Christian”

This is a quote by the Orthodox Father, St. Mark the Monk. I love this quote, and I think it rings true. Christianity is the process by which we learn to renounce all things save One, and to will this one thing is the purity which we all seek.

Take the Bible out of the Hands of Children

“Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important that for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.”
— Stanley Hauerwas

What do you think about this?

Glossolalia and the Charismatic Life

I’ve been spending a decent amount of time reconnecting to my charismatic roots, in a more constructive way, and trying to draw out some work from myself that could help to form a charismatic theology that is from the movement and for the movement. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the glossolalia, and the place of spiritual gifts in the Christian life, often certain parts of the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement has seen it as a concrete sign of a baptism of the Holy Spirit, an ontological shift that is evidenced by the gift, the words often used being ‘initial evidence’.

Yet when we look at the earliest Christian traditions, baptism itself was baptism in the Holy Spirit. When we are baptized we are baptized in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I think our movement has done a disservice to the Triunity of God by making the baptism of the Holy Spirit a secondary evidence, and has largely missed the point of what it means to speak in other tongues whether of men or of angels. Paul nowhere says that the Corinthians, who are seemingly the most charismatic among the early churches, have been sealed with a second evidence. Nor does he rejoice at this display of tongues but goes about correcting abuses and speaking to them about the worth of prophecy and love. If there were any evidence of the tongues being an ontological distinction or the evidence of a special blessing, I think Paul might have at least mentioned it in his address to the Corinthian church.

To discuss glossolalia or for that matter any spiritual gift is to speak of the Spirit Himself, as active in our experience, and to speak of Christ as manifest through the Spirit. When we speak of the Spirit we are being drawn to discuss not one member of the godhead in isolation, but must remember that the Trinity is always at work in a unity in otherness, and that this will reflect in the way the Spirit works in us as well.

When we speak of the gifts of the Spirit, we are speaking of the Spirit’s nature in how He affects the gifts in us and has effect through us in their application in the community which is the fellowship of his sufferings. The spirit testifies to the kenotic self effacement of Christ and it is through this that we recognize the divine act as love. The spirit also fulfills this kenotic movement by being the fullness of love which descends into our midst to draw us up into love, and to show the way by making clear the sign of the cross. Further this fulfillment takes place by bringing us into the same motion of kenotic self effacement, bringing its completion not only in the Son of God, but in the community which is His body. Further by emptying himself to be among us, He continues the work of Christ. The Spirit does not cease to testify to the kenotic self effacement of the Son, but continues to testify in and through us, by our own kenotic movement which is an embodied sign of this continued act and should be expressed most concretely in the charisms of the community which the life and suffering of Christ has made possible in the Spirit.

The Spirit as a member of the godhead suffers and leads us to suffering as a primary way of uniting us with Christ, Paul even goes on to call the church a fellowship of suffering. He also mentions elsewhere that His sufferings are the signs of his apostleship, it seems strange in a culture that puts credentials in other areas of merit than suffering. The Christian gifts and life are going to be drawn from the depths of suffering with Christ, our life as Christians is always a receiving of God’s revelation, and that revelation culminates in the divine glory that is the cross. Thus the cross should be ever before us, if we are to be in the constant reception of revelation. If it is ever before us, the cross will always invite us to participate in it, and thus draw closer to Christ. The cross is the act of Divine love, and its objectivity as revelation will make the cross take form in our lives. The suffering of the Christian is a mark of love, a sign of dedication to the One whom they have responded to showing forth unity. Christ himself makes possible for his disciples to follow Him by giving them gifts, “he ascended, he led captivity captive and gave gifts to men.” He that descended to the lowest depths was raised with a new vitality that allowed Him to bestow gifts upon us, and of those gifts one is the grace(charis) not only to believe but also to suffer. It has been (charismata) gifted to us to suffer.

God wishes to speak to the world and he does this through His theo-pragmatic self-revelation. It is the act of God in Christ that speaks to us. The God-Act is always God’s primary means of communication. God speaks to us through the absolute divine act of crucifixion and resurrection, this deed always interprets itself to us, and will not be subsumed as completely intelligible or available to us because it is absolute. It is always opening itself up more, but it will never cease opening, its self-emptying is eternal, and its message is Omni-temporal. The charisma of the Spirit relate to this in the following manner:
Our acts in the Spirit are manifestations of the continued act of God in Christ and are a participation in the divine narrative of God’s liberation of the world through His suffering.
Where the charisms truly are, there is Christ at work in the world, really He Himself, not just a spiritual presence, but in some way He himself is present where the Spirit is. If this is so, then the charismata are very similar to the sacraments of the church, highlighting the inter-dependability of both. Further these actions are already in some provisional way participating in the victory of God, it is not that miracles and the manifestation of gifts are themselves the kingdom, but they are signs of the kingdom, and announcing to us the coming of God.
Our actions in the spirit should take on the form of crucifixion/resurrection, for it is by the Spirit that Christ is able to be crucified. IT is also by the Spirit that Christ is raised. So too the church can only be charismatic if she is led along the path of Christ to enjoin the fellowship of His sufferings and show forth both the suffering of God and His resurrection. Charisms are about both our suffering and our joy, our burdens as well as our celebrations.
The charisms we experience are limitless because the Spirit is always interpreting the act of God on our behalf in new ways due to His infinite ability to create and diversify. There is no number to the spiritual gifts, but rather, the Spirit is always finding creative ways to speak in and through and to the church at all times. Further, it seems counter-intuitive to the biblical narrative to limit the gifts to a certain number or kind, rather we should allow the work of the Spirit in anything that builds the church in such a way that Christ is present to be considered a gift.
God speaks to the world through the church and her charisms, but only insofar as these charisms serve God and neighbor in a unified motion, the charisms of the church are never private, but for the sake of the world and the building up of the church.
Because the deed of God is self-interpreting as Love, our charisms must flow from this love, and will manifest according to our ability for solidarity and perception of the needs of our brothers and sisters. The deed of God among His people will manifest as love, self-interpreting through the actions of a crucified-glorified body gathered at His table. Our deeds in God necessarily correspond with and answer to the deed of God and thus the cross is the criterion of our charisms.
The charisms are always pointing to the absolute which is the cross, as the manifestation of divine love, and must embody this message in such a manner that their manifestation is personal (i.e. they are for the sake of our neighbor, and must participate in the love that is had between persons) liturgical, (i.e. they are always for the sake of God and the true worship of Him, including the establishment of justice and the manifestation of mercy as part of our worship of God) political, (i.e. a calling of the world to repentance) ecclesial, (i.e. a manifestation for the sake of the community and the enjoining of the one body in unity under the one sign which is the meal we gather at) and self-emptying (i.e. the charisms should lead us away from self awareness and into God/neighbor awareness, if they do not do this, then they are subject to our suspicion). Thus through these acts the charisms are manifestations of the self-interpretation of the act of divine love.

The life of Christ as a whole points to the cross and becomes intelligible only from this point, we cannot separate the teachings of Christ from the fact that they too point to the cross. Every word of teaching and the whole life of Christ is united by what Von Balthasar has termed a “Logos of the Cross” (Love Alone is Credible 85). That same logos is the center point for our discussion of Christian gifts, we cannot separate the gifts from what they signify, they are signs of the suffering Christ, who still redeems the world through the one act to which we enjoin ourselves at baptism and in a continual offering up of our bodies as living sacrifice, including our gifts.

To be gifted means to be crucified with Him in order to point to the center of the reality we as Christians witness to, which is the self-glorification of divine love in the Cross of Christ. The life of Christ is the fullness of the manifestation of the power and wisdom of God precisely in its impotence by the standards of the world, and so too our charisms are signs of this manifestation. Our charisms are just as equally about our union with God as they are about our abandonment by God, the two sides represent the life of Christ, crucifixion-resurrection, both are indissoluble for the act of revelation. The act which still takes place among us for the sake of the world. And the Christian life is the reception of revelation and thus must take upon itself this dialectical form if it is to truly embrace the whole of Christian existence, for it must show forth both sides of the coin if it is to truly reveal the sign of God in the world. It is thus in short that the crucifixion is inseparable from the resurrection, the darkness we undergo for the sake of light, the suffering for the sake of love.

This means that in order to properly show the crucifixion-resurrection dynamic, they church must be gathered around a concrete manifestation. Namely we must be a people gathered around the Eucharist. In order to properly discern the way in which the crucifixion-resurrection dynamic is carried out we need the sign of Christ’s body as the concrete manifestation able to guide us and interpret itself to us. In order to do so, the church needs to be deeply sacramental and confessional. The sacraments, and especially baptism and the eucharist show the dynamic tension of death and new life, and the whole life of discipleship is only intelligible from the standpoint of death and resurrection. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” In order to properly discern the nature of the charisms the church must be gathered around the meal at which the crucifixion and resurrection are Omni-temporal, the eucharist. The reason for this is that the eucharist transcends time, coming to us from the future of God, the only way that the body of Christ can be present to us today as a means of grace is from that time in which God’s will is made perfect. The table at which we gather is the Lord’s and the bread which we eat is His body, the community gathered around it is His, and He must take form in them that would gather at His table. The eucharist is the crucifixion, resurrection and eschaton present at once in a single event which challenges us with the whole life of Christ and its significance as a remembered and continued sacrifice and a present as well as future victory. Further it serves to show us the past, present and future of the community who gathers around it. It is the means by which we remember the distinctive nature of our community, and the creeds likewise are a verbal confession of that to which we bear witness. If we are to be a community that can discern properly between evil and false spirits and the Spirit of the Lord, we will need to maintain that which the Lord has given us as gifts for our discernment. Both eucharist and creeds are tangible reminders of the nature of our community not by pointing to the specifics of the persons in the community or their gifts, but to the God which is worshipped. Without being confessional and sacramental the charismatic church descends into spiritualism and personality cult which becomes indistinguishable from the virtues of the outside world. Conversely, without a properly Charismatic presence Christianity becomes a way of thought or a system of theses, not a way of living that is objective.

Christ has shown us that love is not something light or carried out by emotional disposition, it is something suffered. Love is the act of God’s reconciling the world to Himself, our love derives from the divine love. It is something borne, and so too our charisms since they flow from love, must bear the burdens of love and manifest the scars and markings which validate our identity in the fellowship of love. Love is not our own but comes to us from the outside inviting our participation in itself. Love is objective, and bears in itself both something wholly other and something disclosed to us, it transcends immanence and escapes expression in its full reality. Yet it comes to us from above and makes itself known among us, becoming an object giving itself over to us, and thus inviting us to be subject to it. The Divine Love suffers the world, and in our participation in that, through our charisms we too must suffer the world for the charisms are our participation in the divine life of the Trinity which is a suffering. The Spirit continues to intercede in our behalf with labor pains and groans and uttering too deep for words. So the church that is charismatic must be a suffering church, one laden with the burdens of love if there is to be known among her the love of God. If she is to be truly enjoined to her lord she must join him at his cross, which makes the way for her resurrection. It is only in sharing the divine death that we can part take in the divine life, we see this in Paul’s theology of baptism.

To be gifted is to part take in God’s love, and every Christian life and every human life do so, every life is gifted life. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7 RSV). Yet these charisms are eschatological, they are signs of the love of God from below. They are the manifestation of the love of God among us which sigh for the coming of God, and the fullness of the love of God from above. The charisms while working for the common good of the church, as all manifestations of the Spirit are, work also in tandem with the final good, which for us is that final reconciliation of all things. Our charisms are pointers to the fullness of God’s love from above, they bear in themselves the manifestation of longing for the fullness of all things. The gifts we bear are the sufferings of love which long for the completion of all things, which groans for their wholeness and the coming of God. In discussing gifts, Paul also goes on to talk about the members working together and where one member suffers, all suffer together. This seems to imply that while the charismata work for the common good they also have an aspect of unifying solidarity, where if one is suffering by grace as a gift, all suffer, and if one member is honored all rejoice together (1 Cor. 12:26).

In all the aforementioned ways, the charismata are ultimately a sign, pointing to the reality of the divine love, and thus calling into question the world’s self understanding and showing forth that reality is only intelligible from the logos of the cross, such that the signs of our charisms show the world the possibility of love. The manifestation of our gifts are signs to the world of the guilt which it bears, calling into question idolatries and corruptions and placing before them the objective divine love which is a consuming fire. The credibility of the charismata are in relation to their correspondence in relation to the divine love, this is where they become authoritative among us and distinct from other actions. The charismata of the church are prophetic, they serve the community calling it to true faith by witnessing to the love of God in a theo-drama, acts of God for the people drawing all reality towards the center that is Christ Himself.

All Christian spiritual gifts have nuptial and thus eschatological meaning. The gifts, like our embodiment are for the sake of our union with the Christ and with each other. They have meaning for the sake of our union, and our marriage in the body of Christ. The whole purpose of the gifts as with human sexuality is not happiness, pleasure or empowerment, but theosis. The gifts are for the intimacy of the fellowship which is ours and are sacred for the up building of the intimate life that we share in as a community gathered around body and blood. They are gifts that we present to others and to the world, as a sign of union. Our gifts are signs of our union with each other and with Christ, thus they serve as gifts not for ourselves, but for one another and in serving one another they all serve the One Lord. Our gifts are for our self-disclosure to receive our being from the church and Christ and in doing so, are marks of the being which we are developing into, which is God’s call to us. The gifts are ultimately about our development into the likeness of God, and where the charismata are not developing a community that looks like the crucified-glorified Christ, their use and validity is in question.

Now we proceed to the second half of this essay the construction of a doctrine of glossolalia from the logos of the cross. We must undermine many word-faith and Pentecostal uses of the glossolalia as a form of individual piety and development, and propose alternately what is truly going on and what the gift of the glossolalia is for. First off, let me distinguish between glossolalia and xenoglossia, for the sake of not ignoring completely the other. Glossolalia is ecstatic speech, and xenoglossia is the speaking of a language previously unknown to the speaker. I see both as valid, though the glossolalia in particular has need of reappropriation within the logos of the cross if it is to cease to be a form of individualistic pietism of the most perverse and idolatrous kind. I think that the glossolalia can be a meaningful and powerful form of prayer but it must be appropriated properly in order to have this validity.

If our experience of the Spirit is not the experience of something wholly other that modifies the self, then there is really no experience at all (Spirit of Life, 30). Human being means being-in-relationship and without an otherness or a draw towards otherness in our charismatic life we suffer the loss of humanity especially in the midst of our attempt to have greater spiritual experience. So my attempt will be to draft a glossolalia that is in, with and for the other, and thus truly gives us to ourselves properly by reminding us that even we are mediated to ourselves by Christ, and His otherness draws us towards Him, transforming us through real experience in encounter. Without that experience of the other, it is questionable whether we have had experience at all, and if we cannot give expression to it, then the experience lacks depth and will pass from us. Charismatic theology needs to find expression that liberates it from the throes of imperialism and post-enlightenment rationalism. The glossolalia need not have a “scientific” validity in order to be affirmed. Pragmatism is not afterall the criterion of the church’s judgment on matters, but the true worship of Christ is, and so too, our glossolalic experience is about the expressing of Christ among us.

The glossolalia placed within a logos of the cross realizes that it is not for our own sake that we bear such a gift but for sake of the world, its purpose should be to serve God and neighbor as is the purpose of all spiritual gifts. While it seems slightly unthinkable from within certain traditions of the use of glossolalia, I think it is necessarily going to have to develop beyond focusing on self-edification if the glossolalia will retain Christian meaning in our lives.

For some, this gift is all about personal edification, but I think that this is an erroneous starting point. Contextually if we look at the passage Paul is talking about the order of service and I agree with Paul that it is highly unproductive for one person to speak in tongues at the front of a service or to take control of a service and not be able to utter intelligible words. This obviously can only serve to edify themselves, and I think that at this point is making a pointed statement about their use of tongues, not saying that it should be used for personal edification but rather that it does no good to stand up and claim a center of attention while being self-serving and not serving others. I think that a proper reading of this passage sees Paul telling congregants to stop claiming attention with manifestations that do not benefit the whole and build up the entire church. I don’t think that Paul is saying that the self-edification is a purely negative thing either, but is rather calling it what it is, an act of pride among the Corinthians. It is not to say that all acts of self-edification are such, but rather that we should approach them with the realization that they are a secondary function, and subject to suspicion. Self-edification done Christianly is the edification of my neighbor and my God, the only way to edify myself is to attend to God and neighbor and find the contours of myself in the process. The purpose of the gifts is the up building of the church, and the unification of the One Body. In truth the manifestations of the Spirit will come when the people seek to build up the church (1 Cor. 14:12).

I think that the glossolalia, if we were to look at it cohering with Paul’s general theology of the church as a fellowship of Christ’s sufferings will have to be coming out of a recognition of our weakness. That is not to say our sinfulness, but our limitations in areas of compassion, in knowledge, in ability to pray properly and in our ability to speak to God as we ought to. The glossolalia are an admission of weakness, and we need a recognition that this gift is not our own, but an expression of the Spirit’s utterings which are sometimes too deep for words. The charism of tongues is not something we turn on and off, despite the experience of many charismatic/Pentecostals it is rather something that presents itself to us and invites us into itself. The glossolalia is not a possession of ours, but is possesses us, and draws us into awareness of the world. It is a form of intercession which we do not initiate, but rather are drawn up into. We must speak of it this way if it is to have any significance at all as a true experience of the wholly other, for if the glossolalia becomes our possession then we are claiming to have become able to control God.

We do not possess the Spirit, but rather are called to self-disclosure by which we come to know God, it is in our vulnerability that we see that it was God who first made Himself vulnerable to us. The glossolalia is an invitation to the realization that even we will be at a loss for words and will not be able to express fully the depths of human suffering, or the heights of human joy, and for that, there are utterings which embrace the whole of life and draw us into their work. God draws us into the work of His praying for us by allowing us to speak with and for Him, making us part of the inner life of the Trinity and allowing our voice to be heard in His, and His voice to be heard in our own. But what these voices are saying together is not for the benefit of the one praying alone, it is an enjoining with the Spirit to groan for the whole creation. Glossolalia is about the fellowship with Christ, which is a fellowship of His sufferings,. This is truly the manifestation and fulfillment of the self-emptying of the Son, for He emptied Himself and continues to do so by the Spirit. His Spirit is drawing us into Himself by giving Himself to us and through us, as well as with us emptying Himself to pray for the whole creation.

The spirit gives utterance, when we speak of the personal dimension of the experience of the glossolalia we must remember that we are weak, and that God is made strong in our weakness. Our experience does not always have utterance, there are things which simply escape words, and cannot be brought down into them no matter how hard we might try. This is where our limitations begin and the glossolalia’s power comes to be known to us in our weakness. When we cannot find expression for things, either life in general or words in particular, the Spirit grants us power to stand before God and pray and communicate and confess as we should. But glossolalia is not merely a matter of the ecstatic function of the mouth, though this is the primary expression, I believe that glossolalia is an expression of the entire body as a communicative language. Body language can be glossolalic, meaning the movement of our bodies, in dance or prayer can be expressions of yearnings and utterings in behalf of the creation. The glossolalia is about the weakness of our lives to express the fullness of reality when we are at a lack for words.

God is the justifier of our experience by drawing it into Himself and expressing it through things we cannot utter, through the expression of our mouths as well as our bodies. The gift of tongues is about embodiment, it is about our bodies as able to speak with and in God for God and for our neighbor. The body in this charism becomes embraced in the intercessory work of the spirit, as both an ecstatic praise or an ecstatic lament. The point of its ability to be both a praise or a lament is highly important for this charism because historical evidence shows both, and we must remember as I mentioned above that our charisms as a whole should reflect both the crucifixion and the resurrection.

The glossolalia is meaningful, and is a part of the overall whole of Christian devotion, but does not take precedence as an initial sign of an ontological change. I remember as a newly converted Charismatic wondering why not everyone spoke in tongues, and being taught that not everyone had been “enlightened” to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that I was among those lucky enough to have received some sort of extra special grace. Contrary to this, I think it’s important that spiritual gifts are not signs of an extra special work of God that sets someone above or beneath us. We cannot adduce that someone is very spiritual or not spiritual based on the gifts they manifest, we are to know each other by the supreme gift and the center of the Christian life, which is love. The glossolalia do not create a special class of spiritual people who enjoy an access to God’s presence and Spirit that others do not know. Let’s call that idea what it is, cultural imperialism, the tongue-speaking have fashioned themselves as the ecclesiastical elite, and regard those who do not speak in tongues as in some ways not experiencing God in the fullness that they enjoy. It is forcing a culture of “us” the tongue speaking to try to make “them,” the non tongue-speaking, to become like “us” and in agreeing with this idea we are actually alienating, and hindering the work of the Spirit.

The rule of Christ is not hegemonic, but an invitation to embrace, it is a self-disclosure, and if enjoining the church means opening ourselves to a community that has opened itself to us, then we cannot have a doctrine of tongues that cannot square with the Gospel’s. It is a sign of the work of the Spirit towards the end, it is one among various gifts being used by God to intercede for and with the community, it is up building the church and can be used as a meaningful form of prayer that acknowledges weakness, and realizes our own fallibility. Looking to the cross we find our challenge and we see our own weakness, looking along the cross we see what shall become true of all reality because of this great love. Modifying G.K. Chesterton, I think that Christians should be radically engaged in celebration, but also radically committed to suffering, seeing both as necessary and essential to the true life of faith. Our charismata allow us to enjoin the fellowship of His sufferings. The fellowship of His sufferings though, is also the fellowship of the life giving Spirit, and both sides must be retained as viable and necessary, ecstatic celebration and ecstatic lament are both sides of the one Christian way which stands in the shadow of the cross, witnessing to the reconciliation of all things that is happening and has already happened.

De Profundis

The darkness feels stifling, consuming the light of my eyes
Choking the frail hope i retain that you will be my deliverance
I am in the midst of great darkness, and no lights present themselves to guide me
I am lost beneath a great cloud of fog, and my direction is uncertain

They said you would be my light,
They said that if I had enough faith you would always make everything work
They said i could trust in you to make me normal.
They spoke of your great glory, but it was only to serve the ends they thought appropriate
They told me not to be sad, to overcome by pretending to be happy
They told me to tell others I was blessed and not cursed
above only
and not beneath
More than a conqueror. They told me to conquer and make violence against the devil and his forces, they told me to be a one man army, to have the faith of a prophet.

I was led into the place where my hands were stained with blood, I tried to fix myself
I was led to the place where malice was my accomplice and a altar was placed before me
I was led upon the dais to behold the altar, and I burned incense to myself.
I was led to the place where my discomfort was my enemy, and i had to atone for myself.
I was led into darkness.

I was told that what matters is me, that who I am, and MY story are way God is going to use me. And now I am in deep darkness.
I was told to seek after the things of the world, just to do it in a way that appeased the mandates of cultural humility.

The darkness swallows everything. There is not one thing that escapes decay, not one thing that escapes corruption, and we are all fallen.

I am in darkness, and I am unhappy. I am in pain, and I am discontent.
I sometimes wish I was not acquainted with You, and Your gospel.
I sometimes wish I was different, another.
I sometimes desire to be forsaken.

But you will not leave me. You have called me to the cross, and it pains me,
you have called me to death and it is not easy.
You have called me to a holy dread, and it will not give me the desires of my wicked heart.
You have spoken to me by speaking to the world, and we tremble at the sign
The cross is our mt. zion, and we have all seen the glory of the lord and been called to respond

You have started a world in which there is no more pain, and that world is already-not yet
where there is joy, you are there
where there is suffering, you are there
where your church suffers, you suffer with us
where your church is crucified, you are too
where your people are beaten and scourged, this is already our glory
where your people are weeping and famished, you are starving among the weakest

You are the human, you are the objective humanity,
you are the one who knows what it means to live before the Father as a man
teach me my beloved and cross shattered Lord, what it means to suffer unto the shedding of blood
and reassure me that these sufferings are well to experience
The suffering of the world is not foreign to you, you are the suffering one
you are the ever suffering one,
we remember the testament of your great sorrow, and we enjoin our suffering to yours
you are dead, but not atheistically, we do not proclaim your death because you have ceased to be
but we proclaim your death, because we know that without it, there could be no life
we proclaim your death because we know we have been found wanting,
we proclaim your death because it shows us we are accepted
we are loveless sinners, beloved children

death is our enemy, and we reject her power, we reject her sting,
yet the suffering is our life, and our sweet promise, the darkness we pass through is for the sake of light
the darkness we endure is exhaustible, and we bear the fury of the world with courage,
not because we are inexhaustible, but because you are, and as we bear the suffering of the whole world enjoined in you, we shall find that your inexhaustible love is what guides us through the night
and gives us assurance in the midst of despair

it is not that we are happy, but that we have courage to endure our fears
it is not that we have power, but that you make possible a community which does not need it
it is not that we have blessings according to the world, but that we have one bread, and one cup which is the sweetest blessing of all
it is not that we are the most miraculous, but that you yourself have given us the greatest miracle of all
It is not that we have the greater works which we we seek, there is truly no greater love, no greater act than to suffer and lay down one’s life
Teach me to suffer by the way of your son, that my life brings to you principalities and powers subjected and laid at your feet Holy King of Israel

From the depths we cry to you oh Lord, your unhappy, and suffering children
From the depths we cry to You, your beloved children

Spirit be my guide in darkness, that where I am in the midst of sheol you are there
Spirit be my purger, and let my purgatory be in this life
Jesus be my teacher, that i may follow even unto death
Father, be that which you are, self-emptying love
Bring that vengeance which we seek, peace that destroys the powers of war
bring the vengeance which makes peace out of chaos, which brings order out of nothing
bring the vengeance and the wrath which dissolves alienation and marginalization
bring the justice which overcomes corruption, and the various injustices of the world
bring about that which you promised, the reconciliation of all things
and most of all, give us the patience to wait, with love and trust that you will not fail us.

The Christian Narrative and Psychology

-1The Christian Narrative and Psychology

The twentieth century marked the formalization of psychology as a way that the modern human could understand their own inner workings which had become important since the Enlightenment. It established itself as a discipline by applying what had developed into the “natural sciences” to humans as objects of inquiry. The ensuing developments created a very specific branch of discourse on human beings called psychology. Psychology and Christianity have had a past filled with various interactions, some positive, others negative.

This is a proposal towards a Christian psychology, which I hope to engage in more concretely as time passes. The reason for this proposal and not an inquiry on various possible integrations is that the Christian faith has a lot to learn but it also has a lot to offer and must remain distinctively itself. Because we believe that what modernity calls psychology will be inherently problematic at some points in its interaction with the Christian narrative, we must avoid syncretism and allow the tradition to speak to us from its own voice.

Contrary to some beliefs psychology did not start in the nineteenth century, it was and is an enterprise that is native to Christianity, and various thinkers in the ancient world. Augustine’s Confessions are a champion example of Christian thought regarding what could be considered psychology. Christianity has always been concerned with the human nature’s relation to God and the world and each other, and this has led to profound inquiries into human nature, and disposition. Furthermore, ours is a religion that has been challenged profoundly to answer questions about integrity, morality, development of persons, obstacles to that development, the structure of emotions, and behavior dispositions. The tradition has often found voices that were strongly concerned about the nature of persons, Augustine, in essence based his whole program of what human nature is on its call to worship God, and sought to define the moral life and the good within the context of that calling. Far from being non-psychological, Augustine’s work reflects some of the most profound inquiry into the human condition ever written.

Psychology as presented by the current establishment is at its heart an apologetic for modernity’s conception of human being. It has at least until very recently, been a way that modernists and secularists could make spiritual and ontological descriptions that we have been taught to implicitly accept as normative. “Psychology” can be a discursive formation among others when used to assert ideas against Christian truths. But Christianity must reject these assumptions and the limitations established in order to maintain her own assertions on what is human nature, and what constitutes a psychology. Psychology can be an instructive and beneficial science when used properly, and while the descriptions of the institution called psychology may be helpful, these are not things which are foreign to the Christian narrative.

So we can see that it is not the case that Christians do not already have a psychology, it is just that its discursive structure differs from the limitations that the current establishment of psychology has demarcated for itself, and it is very narrow in scope indeed. Ancient psychology had the freedom to ask ultimate questions and saw them as affective towards behavior and development, whereas most forms of psychology represented in the American psychological institution and major universities across the world tend to dismiss these questions as secondary to their own discourse, or of an unrelated field, or consider the questions objects of study, without asking the questions themselves. Christians believe that life is integrated and while there are many aspects of being human, the mind is not separable from the rest of life, because Christians believe that the mind is a gift from God. While it is helpful for psychology to have demarcations, it is only to show that a Christian psychology has a broader sweep, and is distinctive from modernity’s project. This distinction is always welcome.

What the twentieth century schools call psychology are not the only things that might have the ability to be justifiably called by that name. What this establishment has sought to claim as a new project unheard of before modernity is simply untrue. While we have to admit the exponential growth of data in the last 150 years, we do not have to assume that with this data comes the chronological superiority of the recent developments over against the past. Christians of all types have been concerned with Human nature, development, and behaviors, St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory the Great, C.S. Lewis (in his Screwtape Letters), Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy are all Christian psychologists. The goal of a contemporary formation of Christian psychology seeks to retain their ideas our method will differ, at least mildly. I do not assert that Christian psychology only be an academic way of talking about Christian views on human nature, but that we remember that a lot of Christian psychology has been written as narrative. We should see these authors not as secondary to the main body of psychological work, but as Christians see their work through the lens of psychology and give them equal footing to the works of secular psychologists.

Notice how Christian psychology as cited above is narrative in character, it happens most often within the context of stories, it is the stories we tell and the overarching story that is our own that motivates us to inquiry and action as regards the human person. While we embrace empirical studies, we do not place on them a favor that dismisses as irrelevant the Christian tradition, or what its authors have said about the nature of humanity. We rather give preeminence to the tradition and propose questions that the tradition can answer on its own terms. We are not bound to empirical method, but rather use it as another tool among a multiplicity of others serving the purpose of the church which is to call all humans to recognize that their reality is only as intelligible as its worship to the God revealed in the life of Jesus Christ. Psychology does not have to be an apologetic for modernity’s definition of human kind. The Christian tradition has much to offer as its own discipline alternative to the secular modernist project especially in the areas of personality psychology and psychotherapy.

Christian psychology is an alternative type of psychology that starts with foundations based not in the “third language” of reason and universal perspectives, or individual autonomy, but within the assumptions of the Christian narrative. There are words and thought structures in the Christian story ready to answer, if not already answering the questions of psychology. These answers just need to be illuminated in the context of psychology though a certain hermeneutic lens and we shall see that all over the Christian narrative and history is a rich proliferation of material on various topics that could be grouped together as a Christian psychology.

It will be the task of a distinctively Christian psychology to read these texts for their answers that would be termed “psychological” and see these either presented in full quotations or reinterpreted so that they may form a body of work that could be recognized by our contemporaries as psychology. While we do not embrace their limitations on what constitutes a psychology, we should engage in psychology and its establishment as Christians.

We should seek to allow the Christian narrative to speak to psychological questions, but on it own terms and with its own particular answers. The tradition has many answers to offer about the nature of human persons, what the basic needs and tendencies of humans are, what their teleologies and directions are in regards to their psychic nature. Christian psychology is an alternative to the modern project and its assumptions that human beings are autonomous minds cut off from all other things, and living solely for themselves. The Christian alternative offers meaning in communion and community, development through acts of service, well being through being a peace maker, being willing to suffer for Jesus, and being poor in spirit.2 Modern psychology has proliferated the view that a human being is little more than a brain operating a body, or at best some sort of soul operated by a brain trapped within a body. In most psychological establishments, the mind and its health are detached from questions of being, and seen as programmable and purely physical. The Christian narrative offers another anthropology, and thus another psychology.

Our tradition has from the beginning had a stake in certain claims about human nature, development, motivations, character formations and how to go about achieving the proper character and correcting bad character, all things which modern psychology is about. It seems to me that it is not that Christian psychology does not as yet exist, it just does not exist in a form recognized by the current psychological establishment and many Christians as psychology. Yet it is there, waiting to be interacted with.

It is my concern that liberals, both political and theological will sell themselves short on what makes Christianity Christian in order to maintain a sense of being relevant to the outside world. However, the jettison of Christian convictions in favor of others is not only going against the tradition it is going against the very grain of the universe that Christians understand through the revelation of Jesus Christ. Christians have made a metaphysical claim about the universe, starting with the teachings of Jesus who said that to be blessed (makairos gr.) is to be among other things, poor in spirit, and to mourn, and to make peace. Doing well according to Jesus, and the New Testament witness is compatible with suffering. These claims are not only metaphysical, having a claim in the way we see reality, they are psychological. Jesus is claiming that the person who is well and doing well, is one who suffers for His sake and lives a life directed towards others, wellness according to Jesus is not a private affair, but one which is for the sake of others. People who are psychically whole can suffer, mourn, be meek, reviled, long for righteousness, be merciful, be pure in heart. These are all marks of the psychologically developed Christian.

The integration approach to Christian psychology seeks usually to marry one or another view of psychology with the established Christian tradition in a form of syncretism that leaves neither one the same. Some models are influencing the church towards assertiveness and personal empowerment. We reject this assertion, citing it as idolatry. Christians believe that the real power in the world is had not by people who carry crowns but crosses. Rather than agreeing with the world’s ideas we seek to read the tradition as it presents itself to us through the church and participation in the community, and ask questions that might help us answer the same questions being addressed by establishment psychology.

The only thing that integration between psychology and theology will do is establish a hybrid that is neither here nor there and is ultimately irrelevant because it is based in neither of the two traditions strong enough to maintain a historical presence. It will be modernity’s anthropology with questions about how to see Christians develop as such, which will render largely unintelligible work. This has already been the case in many places where Christianity has been used in the psychology of religion. It is not my aim to have Christians withdraw from psychology, but to engage in psychology as Christians, backed by the tradition to which they have sworn allegiance, informed by Christian anthropology and pastoral as well as spiritual considerations.

Christian psychology is not a matter of applying this or that theory offered by the establishment to the bible or Jesus or psychoanalyzing historical figures to get behind the text. Instead Christian psychology is a way of reading the text, a way of reading the bible the historical narrative and the church as answers to psychological questions. Christian psychology is at its heart a hermeneutic that will focus on reading Christian history, from Jesus through the saints to the world of today as part of a narrative, as part of a story able to answer our questions about ourselves and our development and nature from the convictions of our belief. Thus Christian psychology will look fundamentally different from the psychology offered to us from the establishment that has drawn its story from the Enlightenment.

There is a the question of what Christian psychology looks like in the 21st century, and I think that the answer lies in two fields. I think that Christian psychology should continue to be developed as narrative, in stories, plays, novels, and other forms of narrative that show to us the Christian life as a story we can participate in. These texts will continue to be inspirational to Christians of all levels if they are written as well told, well plotted, stories, not Christian books, but Christians writing books about everything else, including psychology. Dostoyevsky was a master of this, and I think that within the community, Christian psychology should continue to at least in part maintain itself as a storied discourse. If our theology is inherently narrative, then our psychology should be as well.

However, stories alone will not answer all possible questions and a body of work that looks like the psychology of the establishment should also be welcomed. A systematic formation of Christian answers to psychological questions is necessary. Yet this body of work might not be immediately recognizable as a psychology by established psychology because it is approaching with a different paradigm. It is a paradigm that says that The Triune God matters, it is also saying that the alternative psychology is devoid of true or ultimate meaning because it fails to realize this. We should welcome a systematic approach that would draw out a distinctive discourse we could call a psychology from our tradition and set the answers before us, and we should try to draft distinctively Christian answers to questions about behavior and development from within our anthropological commitments.

A Christian psychology must while rejecting the anthropology of the establishment continue to engage it, to assess questions about the two hemispheres of the brain, the cognitive abilities of newborns, the way in which eyewitnesses construct and reconstruct memories, the components of intelligence and many other things. The Christian story may not always have answers for these things nor do we seek proof texts of one or another part of the tradition, but that is why we have a narrative theology, it draws on developments, and sees our theology as developing towards a goal. There will be methodological conflicts, since assertions about the natural world will not lead the Christian psychology I am proposing to make judgments on the nature of God, since we see the created order as partially unknowable, since it is fallen, and mistrust natural theology as a way of reaching the God we see revealed in Jesus Christ.

A Christian psychology that rejects natural theology will be shaped very differently by these questions than a theology that makes every observable detail of ultimate importance in assessing the character and nature of God. We believe rather that only God reveals Himself to us, we cannot find Him, and He reveals Himself to us through the life, death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. To look at the world is to look at both a fallen order, and the birth of a new one, therefore a Christian psychology takes stock of the nature of things, but reserves ultimate judgment to her metaphysical claims, that the world in which we believe is a world where violence is passed, where disability, and personality fragmentation are at an end. A world where all things are made right. We reject the belief in inalienable rights, and the dignity of the human person, because we see these things not as inherent qualities of a person, but contingent upon the climax of our narrative, the cross. Thus our beliefs about the nature of disability, and suffering will differ greatly from those of our establishment counterparts, since our narrative shapes our interpretation of the evidence, as their narrative based in the Enlightenment shapes theirs.

Not only is a Christian psychology sourced differently from an academic perspective, drawing texts not normally considered psychology as sources, furthermore it is pastorally driven. The goal of a Christian psychology is not self-actualization or empowerment, nor is it personal autonomy, but is primarily concerned with the proper worship of God and pastoral developments towards that worship in the life of the individual and the community. Personal aims of a Christian psychology are solidarity with the poor, and the weak, a constructive correction of vices, and a mediation of the Christian narrative in intelligible ways as to make realizable by a wider audience the claims of the faith. For protestant churches, Christian psychology should function largely as catechesis does in Orthodox traditions. It is about the formation of Christians, and interactions with their teleological development, which stated exclusively is that human life is only as intelligible and proper as its worship of The Triune God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth, and all claims about the meaning of life and interpretations of data set forth are subject to inspection by this hermeneutic lens and required to be in coherence with it..

So, to be more specific, a Christian psychology should have a few key elements to make it a psychology in the first place.

I suppose this begins with an understanding of what we mean by human nature, and whether there is at all a human nature to be talked about. Karl Barth rejected the idea of human nature, saying that the only true human is Christ. I think Barth is right, but it does not answer the matter of we face as counselors, pastors and psychologists, so we can call it the fallen nature, or human tendency. But these questions are shaped by Christian teleological and eschatological beliefs, so that the goal is Christ, and human nature looks like Jesus himself. Christ is the source of human nature, and the true humanity, to be truly human one must be truly Christian. So, the goal of human nature is exemplifying what the church has claimed about Christ, historically, and at its heart, human nature is about the Christian virtue of charity. But we must ask specific questions within this framework about the motivations and needs of human persons, not only theologically, but theopragmatically, in terms of the Christian life, what are our needs, desires and behaviors? What in humans is necessary for them to function properly according to the purpose for which they were created?

A psychology should sketch if not at the very least make suggestions on what personality traits characterize a fully developed and mature person, keeping in mind a necessary gap between this side of the eschaton and the fullness of the resurrection. This question is really a development of the nature of pastoral care, by describing in detail what characterizes Christians as Christians in their behaviors. We recognize that modern psychologies have virtues as well, some of their virtues are merely incongruous with certain claims from within Christian orthodoxy. This is basically the work of the church anyways, describing person hood according to certain ideas that Jesus and the church have claimed, but maybe repopularizing them and presenting them in a way that liberal protestants as well as conservatives might understand. Seeing the Christian narrative and participation as part of that personhood, will help create not an autonomous individualized account, but help us ask the question, what sort of relations is a fully developed person engaged in?

When we ask that question a whole new set of ethics is being done that respects the communal nature of human being, and shares the Christian claim that all being is communal. Being itself is a type of communion, especially for Christians. So the propositions set forth should ask about what type of relations such a person is engaging in, and what type of virtues they show forth in those relations. This is the only way to undo modern psychology’s obsession with privatizing the individual. Further this leads to integrating questions about successful personhood with successful developments, especially if we open the bracket of relations to not only interpersonal ones, but questions of relation to their environment and agency.

I suppose the next thing necessary is what psychology calls neuroses, dysfunctions and disorders. In other words, a Christian psychology proposes vices or behaviors that are destructive towards the psychological formation and well being of the person and their relations. Again, this will map not only dysfunction but its effect on community life, studying the strain on relations as well as the strain on the individual, seeing both as in communion. Christian psychology maps dysfunctions and disorders carefully, developing a language about those destructive traits and relations. This again, is an exercise part theory, part pastoral care. It needs to develop a language within which to frame vices opposed to the Christian narrative and meet the needs of the individuals who suffer the vices. A Christian psychology can at this point be highly scientific by testing the responses of the tradition, or developing methods consistent with the Christian narrative and test them to see if they work. If we ever come to a place where a proposed solution does not work, or does not prove fruitful, we can reinterpret the tradition for other solutions, or innovate new methods that do so within the context of the overarching Christian narrative.

These things will help us create a psychotherapy, or in Christian terms, a set of relationships that will prevent or treat the unhealthy interactions and behaviors. Christian psychotherapy should develop itself as what the church is in its pastoral context. Thus Christian psychology will have effects on the way pastoral ministry is carried out, as well as ecclesiological considerations since, what we are talking about in discussing the behavior and well being of persons is really asking the church to consider the care and guidance she will provide to her members. It is grounded in the belief that the only thing that makes a real difference in these matters, is the incarnation, life, death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Christian psychotherapy is at it’s heart reconciliation. This will take different forms on a case by case basis, but it should include the practices of confession, penance, and recognizing sin, while realizing the call of Jesus for us to conform to His call to be disciples as part of the solution to the problems we will face.

Christian psychotherapy does not ask us to face ourselves, it asks us to face Christ, and confront our sins with the call to being a disciple of Jesus. Christian psychology will be healing to us, but not by mediating us to ourselves, only in mediating Christ to us as the only possibility of a true self. A response to guilt will feature here, but the Christian task is the assumption of such guilt without having it mediated to us by conscience. It is acknowledging that we are judged not by ourselves, but by Christ. The only thing that conscience will give us is ourselves, and Christians must reject this since our teleology is shaped by our relation to Christ and participation in the people that He has called us to be. For Christians conscience is not the voice of virtue, but the voice of self-defense and excusability. For Christians our goal is not moral autonomy, but the recognition that all our wholeness and goodness comes from Christ and is mediated to us by the church. Conscience has no part in a Christian psychology, because it is a tool by which humans remove from themselves the responsibility of the voice of God by making themselves that voice, it is either self-righteousness or self-debasement neither of which recognizes the person of Christ as our judge and savior. For Christians the life that is whole and good is proper response to God’s commands, and necessarily include love of neighbor, proper methods of “treasuring” e.g. Matthew 6:19-24, and the necessity of communion, confession and prayer as ways in which the Christian life is lived truthfully.

In closing, Christian psychology is about living according to the life the church has seen exemplified in Christ and made possible by Him. Christian psychology is a pastoral endeavor shaped by sources outside those of 20th century considerations but should make these sources intelligible both to the outside world and ourselves as psychology through a hermeneutic lens. Christian psychology is a development from within Christianity that offers its own particular set of claims about what it means to be human, and Christian from the perspective that God matters. And Christian psychology must avoid most if not all of modernity’s concept of the human being since it is inherently opposed to the community that Christ has called to Himself. Christian psychology is at its heart a liturgical and pastoral act that is akin to a virtue ethics, but will place its pastoral emphasis on the proper worship of God, and the community which He has called to Himself as the final solutions to the problems persons face. There are methods and means of attaining these and the Christian psychologist is there mostly as an interpreter, showing the faith as a catechist, instructing pastorally, and mentoring with the truth that is Christ and His call in Love.

Criteria for healing

I just am thinking about the role of healing in our communities, and if they should be included in public liturgy, and if so, what is their role, and what are the determinative criteria for their acceptance as part of the liturgy?

What makes an unacceptable healing? is there such a thing?

How are we to be a community gathered around the Lord’s table with a concern for the charismata being a part of our worship Christianly?

Those are just some questions i’ve been asking.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Christian Reflection On Labor Day

A Christian Response to Labor Day:

I think we should be grateful for our particuar place, which we should feel is a part of our embodiment, and thus our vocation. But we must also critique our penchant for war as a country and the deification of patriots, labor unions and inalienable rights. We should remember that we are creatures, and that labor day is also a call to remember our labors unto God, to steward creation, and to take care of a world which is very good.

A christian engagement of labor day should i think also remember workers, in all countries and concern itself with remembering the struggles put forth to make the world we live in one that comes at sometimes no cost to us but high costs to them. We should remember that what we call labor here is in many cases built on the intensely difficult struggles of others and that our country has reached success through stepping on other countries along the way.

I think that a Chrisitan engagement of labor day remembers that this country we find ourselves in was built in part by slaves, and by the power of people breaking their backs for the institution called industry, by children in factories, and men starving during the great depression.

Further, it remembers that the place of that memory is not as an idealistic ancestor worship but sees labor as part of embodiment and what it means to be created as a human being. It remembers the Labor of God, both in Creation and the cross as labors of love and generosity.

Labor day for Christians means remembering that while we participate in the American narrative, and we do so as Americans, it is only secondarily to our lives as Christians. We are inescapably American, and while we love this country, it is a penultimate love, it cannot claim our total allegiance, not in its stories or its collective memory. We . I further think that labor day can help us reflect on our labors as a church body, while remembering that our lives as Christians are told by another story.

This year, Labor day falls on the monday after the 23rd sunday of ordinary time. And for the church the liturgical color is green, it is a reminder of growth, and for me a reminder of our expectation that a new day is rising and has already risen, and a new world is coming yet is already here. It is a reminder of the coming future and its already present place among us at the Lord’s table where we gather to meet new creation.

It is the feast day of St. Regina who was a martyr, according to what we know of her from some sources. According to these sources

“She was born in the 3rd century in Alise, the ancient Alesia where two hundred years earlier Vercingetorix had fought so valiantly against Caesar. Her mother died at her birth, and her father, a prominent pagan citizen, entrusted the child to a Christian nurse who baptized her…In 251, at the age of fifteen, she attracted the eye of a man called Olybrius, the prefect of Gaul, who determined to have her as his wife. He sent for the girl and discovered that she was of noble race and of the Christian Faith. Chagrined, he attempted to have her deny her faith, but the saintly maiden resolutely refused and also spurned his proposal of marriage. Thereupon, Olybrius had her thrown into prison.”

Her Symbols include: Shepherdesses, Against poverty, impoverishment,torture victims.

What we should do with these things in this particular year is remember where we are at as a country, and what her life can remind us of. While we are in recession, or coming out of one, whatever the case is, we can remember those who are less forutnate than we are. We can remember those who are oppressed, we can remember martyrs who like St. Regina have suffered for the faith. We can remember the internally displaced refugees, and those who are laboring to liberate them, we can remember the labors of those working for peace, and the labors of those who are our neighbors. We can remember the workers without jobs, the people who will not be celebrating today, the people who have no labor to set themselves to, the families concerned about their tomorrow.

We can remember them and pray for them, we can be Christians and offer them a better allegiance, a better society, and a better hope, the Christian hope that What God The Father has done for Jesus, He will do for all of us at the appointed time. That our hope and our labors towards that hope are not in vain but are worth the work which we put into them, because that work will be caught up into God and recreated to justify all things finally at the end of all things.

We can take this time to reflect as well, on the readings for today, and see what they mean, and how they challenge us to encounter Jesus Christ and give up ourselves and embrace Him and only Him.

Reading 1
Col 1:24–2:3

Brothers and sisters:
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake,
and in my flesh I am filling up
what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ
on behalf of his Body, which is the Church,
of which I am a minister
in accordance with God’s stewardship given to me
to bring to completion for you the word of God,
the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.
But now it has been manifested to his holy ones,
to whom God chose to make known the riches of the glory
of this mystery among the Gentiles;
it is Christ in you, the hope for glory.
It is he whom we proclaim,
admonishing everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom,
that we may present everyone perfect in Christ.
For this I labor and struggle,
in accord with the exercise of his power working within me.

For I want you to know how great a struggle I am having for you
and for those in Laodicea
and all who have not seen me face to face,
that their hearts may be encouraged
as they are brought together in love,
to have all the richness of assured understanding,
for the knowledge of the mystery of God, Christ,
in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Responsorial Psalm
Ps 62:6-7, 9

R. (8) In God is my safety and my glory.
Only in God be at rest, my soul,
for from him comes my hope.
He only is my rock and my salvation,
my stronghold; I shall not be disturbed.
R. In God is my safety and my glory.
Trust in him at all times, O my people!
Pour out your hearts before him;
God is our refuge!
R. In God is my safety and my glory.

Gospel
Lk 6:6-11

On a certain sabbath Jesus went into the synagogue and taught,
and there was a man there whose right hand was withered.
The scribes and the Pharisees watched him closely
to see if he would cure on the sabbath
so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.
But he realized their intentions
and said to the man with the withered hand,
“Come up and stand before us.”
And he rose and stood there.
Then Jesus said to them,
“I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the sabbath
rather than to do evil,
to save life rather than to destroy it?”
Looking around at them all, he then said to him,
“Stretch out your hand.”
He did so and his hand was restored.
But they became enraged
and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.

Today’s Collect is:
Almighty God, every good thing comes from you. Fill our hearts with love for you, increase our faith, and by your constant care protect the good you have given us. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

-Quotes on St. Regina Taken from http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/calendar/day.cfm

Jurgen Moltmann’s Prayer

God, creator of heaven and earth

it is time for you to come,

for our time is running out

and our world is passing away.

You gave us life in peace, one with another,

and we have ruined it in mutual conflict.

You made your creation in harmony and equilibrium.

We want progress, and are destroying ourselves.

Come Creator of all things,

renew the face of the earth.

Come, Lord Jesus,

and brother on our way.

You came to seek

that which was lost.

You have come to us and found us.

Take us with you on your way.

We hope for your kingdom

as we hope for peace.

Come Lord Jesus, come soon.

Come Spirit of life,

flood us with your light,

interpenetrate us with your love.

Awaken our powers through your energies

and in your presence let us be wholly there.

Come Holy Spirit.

God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

Triune God,

unite with yourself your torn and divided world,

and let us all be one in you,

one with your whole creation,

which praises and glorifies you

and in you is happy.

Amen.

Why aren’t more Christian prayers structured to address God in both unity and diversity? Mayhap this is a theological failing on our part to pray according to belief. Maybe it’s merely a matter of style. Thoughts?

The Last Stanza is taken From Jurgen Moltmann’s The Source of Life, which is a short work on pneumatology as well as his The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life (London: SCM, 1997), 160.

Body and Character in Luke and Acts

Body and Character in Luke and Acts by Mikeal C. Parsons

Mikeal Parsons has illuminated ancient attitudes about the body and its relation to morality in the ancient world that are fascinating and seem to on the whole make more sense of the biblical texts he has chosen to illuminate than other conjectures such as the immediate presupposition of inauthenticity. Parsons has shown continuity with the texts being examined and Luke’s overall message convincingly, while not completely persuaded, I feel that Parsons has done a great job of bringing an orthodox view of the text as plausible back into the academic arena through a brief and scholarly study which presents alternative views of the text informed by a largely ignored area in terms of biblical scholarship.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term physiognomy, it is an ancient pseudo-science about the relation of the physical body to the perception of character, namely ideal bodies were inclined to ideal morals and disabled or deformed persons were considered to have flawed morality corresponding to their physical appearance. Parsons has shown how this consciousness was permeating the ancient world’s perception of literary characters beginning with Greek poetry, and its use in making moral judgments about literary figures. He parallels this to Luke’s presentation of the four characters he has chosen to examine in his inspection of the use and subversion of .

Parsons has chosen four pericopes to cover in his short but penetrating study, the story of the bent woman, Zacchaeus, the man lame from birth, and the Ethiopian eunuch. He provides keen insight to each of these stories, and informs us of how these characters might have been received by Luke’s audience before he turns the tables on the audience by overthrowing the general pathos which their stereotypes have taught them to adopt.

It is interesting to see the way that the “physiognomic consciousness” plays into these stories and seems a plausible way that the authorial audience would have seen the text. I don’t know what my ultimate reservation is, but I feel that my suspicion of the work might lie in its lack of theological finale. While touching on various topics I thought he might delve into more, Parsons refrains, perhaps to keep the work objective, perhaps because he works best as an expositor, but I feel that the conclusions that could be drawn from the work were not present sufficiently, and left me curious to see more. Instead I was left with a brief epilogue whose last two sentences were a wonderful conclusion yet, seemingly unfinished. Although Parsons has invited theological inquiry based on his study, which I hope to see some of soon.

The book also has great virtue though, as a work which forces us to reconsider our own biases of morality based on outward appearance, and we are reminded that the early Christian community is radical, because it includes the weak, the frail, the outcast and the judged. In the formation of theology, especially moral theology in the advent of this century, it is an important work in historical ethics of the Christian community.

I feel that what was important to my observation and inquiry in the characters presented in the stories Parsons presented was the way healing played a role in the stories, because it has different effects on the person being healed at each turn. The bent woman is obviously healed of a disease which afflicted her 18 years, and is physically healed from what has made her outcast, and the same goes for the lame man. While the connecting factor between these two is a healing and common theme of weakness and morally dubious character, which is interesting in itself, my initial concern is with Zacchaeus and the Ethiopian Eunuch.

If Parsons is right about Zacchaeus being a dwarf by congenital defect, Jesus does not restore him to the community by their standards of what a moral person looks like, which while seemingly obvious is still significant. This means that Jesus in Luke’s narrative does not see dwarfism as barrier to the kingdom of God, nor does he see it as a lack of wholeness. For someone developing a theology disability or deformity, it is highly significant that this is the case. For Luke’s Jesus is a healing Jesus, and I think it is noteworthy that Luke’s Jesus does not make Zacchaeus taller. If we look at the text with its physiognomic dimensions Jesus challenges Zacchaeus to become magnanimous in character, which would seem difficult to the people who underrated him as a person small of character due to his physical stature. Jesus also calls him a son of Abraham, Jesus sees Zacchaeus as part of the eschatological community by virtue of the choice which he has made to bring restitution to his failures. His salvation is not merely a matter of his being good now, but is a reinterpretation of his social status as well, making him equal in the community of Jesus’ followers despite his physical differences.

While to us this may seem commonplace, or to be assumed, it is highly uncharacteristic of ancient religions at large and specifically uncharacteristic of Judaism. While it is noted that deformed persons had a popular place in the Roman culture it was as objects of ridicule, collected like trophies by the emperors Domitian and Nero, and Augustus even bought a congenitally short small person as a pet for his niece.

While Jesus encounters him, he makes no move to “heal” Zaccheus as in cure him of his congenital defect, even though in other cases he does, such as the man blind from birth. This raises interesting questions.

The Eunuch as well raises some interesting questions, if he is a castrated or sexually mutilated man is not restored sexually by baptism or by extreme unction as he is brought into the community through baptism which is just as important as if he had been. While he is through Parson’s argument given a new place in the community and a new honor in Christ, he is not healed at least in the sense of a physical restoration of function, and though the audience is forced to reconsider his character, his role in the community is reinterpreted by the early Christian community as one who is ritually pure.

The Christian polemic against the temple cult and a new and radical inclusivism are only part of the whole picture of the moral formation which Luke is using through these illustrations.

It seems that in light of physiognomy early Christians reject the assumptions of morality as inherently tied to physical appearance, which was not to remain so historically as some prominent Christian leaders that Parsons notes were persuaded by physiognomic interests. It might even explain what we moderns think absurd theological considerations when we read about some church theologians and the way in which they think Christians should laugh properly in society.

In conclusion, I feel that this book is important, and should be read by anyone with an interest in the Abrahamic community, healing, or outcasts as themes in Lukan literature. I would like to see the implications these texts have for Christian healing and a theology of disability. While books on the subject of disability and theology are coming from every angle and exploding in the contemporary interest, I think it’s of great value to examine why Jesus healed the way he did and what healing might have been in Christ’s idea of His mission. It seems important to me to know whether Jesus had a particular physiognomic concern, or whether he had a moral or ontological concern for the people he healed. While it would be largely speculation, the text might provide some insights, though we must allow that it was not built in such a way as to answer that question directly. I’d like to do some more work reading Luke-Acts and commentators on the text since it is of great interest to me.

The Apocrypha and the Protestant Life- What we may have missed

In the next week or so i’ll be starting a three to five post series on my reading of the apocypha and what it means to protestants.

I’ll be beginning the series with personal reflections on some of the books, and move towards an exegetical/ theological statement that the works can make as a whole towards us, and then draw on the series as a whole to see where the future of Charismatic theology might go, so subscribe to the blog and stay updated.

eli

On Impassibility and Classical Theism

The following is taken from a comment i made on a friend’s blog. Let’s hear some responses:

As a scion and proud heir of neo-orthodox theology I cannot help but feel that the yesterday today and forever is a statement about God’s faithfulness, not his ontological state. We cannot have an immutable God if He is to remain the God Jesus has revealed to us. The incarnation is an event not only in time and space but in the Trinity itself. The Crucifixion is another event in the Godhead and cannot be reduced to an ambiguous mystery that doesn’t fit in with our concept of God.

The life and times of Jesus Christ reveal God to us, he is the lens throguh which we read the bible, and our theology, and any patriology any word we wish to say about the Father will not be true unless mediated to us by the life of His son, for no one knows the Father except the Son.

An immutable God is in the worst case a monad who has no relation at all to the real world, and at best one who will ever remain static in the face of our love. Even if that static response is absolute and undying love, it is invalid, because it was a choice in the Godhead, a choice out of a dynamic love that chose the incarnation, a choice out of covenant faithfulness that forever altered the godhead from unknown to known. From otherworldly to our very neighbor, whose face we can see, whose wounds we can touch, whom we eat and eat with.

You cannot eat an immutable God. Case closed.

I need help, God, I need your help.

My mind is on fire, my heart aches.

I feel disconnected and broken. I feel hurt, and I’m asking for you to reach out to me. I can’t think straight, my breathing is racing, and my heart is bleeding within me.

I feel disconnected, and abandoned, like those near me have passed into a beyond I can’t go to. Tell me why these things happen, as my heart bleeds chaos into the universe.

You never have asked a greater thing of me, and I’m feeling forsaken.