Theology of Revelation Part 1

I’m revisiting my idea of natural theology, trying a different approach. Bear with me. So, I’ve decided February will be a good place to talk about the theology of revelation. For the Rest of the month, we’ll be dealing with a theology of revelation, or at least until I get bored with the topic, or run out of things to say.

This is Part 1, On Analogia Entis and the work of Karl Barth

The analogia entis means the analogy of being, or the justification of seeking to know the Creator in and through the created order and known objects.

We must ask the question is it the wisdom of God, or the invention of the anti-Christ?

Barth is rightly concerned that natural knowledge renders revelation unnecessary. Based on Kantian assumptions, one can only see the logical connection and sound the alarm. However more surely before Kant was, St. Thomas Aquinas and Christianity’s eschatological hope is.

Barth’s concern is that either we are caught up in the sphere of grace and revelation, or we are not. He wants to establish a radical distinction between the realm of grace and the realm of nature. But all this is a pious and devoted form of Deism, it separates God from the created order, revelation from everything that the revelation has claimed belongs to it. It too radically separates creation from Creator.

Barth has created a great divorce between that which God has united. If there is no natural knowledge at all, the only thing left is the clockwork God, whose purpose in the world is absent, who has abandoned the masses or will save them all regardless of their creed or confession. If there’s no natural knowledge, no analogy between creature and creator, we’re actually engaging in Docetism. While universalist hope is our task, because Love hopes the impossible, we cannot teach this as fact. If the world is abandoned and analogy is impossible, we’re living in and with a total depravity of the created order.

Barth may say that Christ is reprobate as well as elect, but his program necessarily shifts total depravity onto the world as we know it. It shifts complete depravity from individuals onto systems in the world, but these systems like the created order are still maintained by God. These systems are still good despite their rebellion under the power of evil. Just as man is saved through transfiguration so too, Reason, Nature and inference are fallen, but can point the way through being drawn up in the life of faith.

The Old Testament vision of systems of the world is that despite their seeming to interrupt the flow of God’s time, they’re actually participating in a larger liturgical framework, thus Daniel’s vision of the seventy years of weeks. The whole point is that ten jubilees or the fulfillment of jubilees will establish the glorious kingdom and that despite the kingdoms of the world represented in the vision of the man made of different materials, their order is as nothing, because the true calendar, the calendar of God’s divine liturgy endures.

Despite the exile, despite the fallenness of the created world, the heavenly liturgy is drawing all things up into itself. (For more information on this interpretation of Daniel see John Bergsma “Cultic Kingfoms in Conflict in the Book of Daniel” Letter and Spirit, volume 5; 2009, 51-76.)

We can retain the infinite qualitative diffference, the supreme otherness of God, without descending into Deisitic notions because of the work of Christ, and the fact that the analogy is not essentialist in a static framework. Christian apologetics does not argue for deity, or for a gnostic ladder by which in our philosophical questions we ascend to God. The analogia entis is not ontologically progressive in a hierarchy of being that seeks ultimate similarity, but analogizes infinite difference and their relation. If being is taken as becoming, then the difference is retained, and the Desitic platonism that necessitates Barth’s response is done away with.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar has argued that Barth oversteps what needs to be done; what response is demanded is not reducing the gospel to the propositional truths. Barth’s enemy is not really natural knowledge but the proprietary absolutization of this knowledge. What is necessary is avoiding the reduction but just because a reduction is possible does not mean the whole analogy is impossible altogether.

It would have sufficed to reject the reduction of revelation to logical principles based on a prior understanding on the nature of God based on reason. Von Balthasar gives the example that if someone sees a stranger, they can say that they know him, even if they have never spoken to him or met him formally, so long as they know something about him; yet it is just as legitimate to say he does not know the stranger, both are true. (Hans Urs Von Balthasar Love Alone is Credible, San Francisco, Ignatius; 2004), 47.

Love and War- A Book Review

Having Trouble with marriage? You’re not alone.

What the Eldredge bestsellers Wild at Heart did for men, and Captivating did for women, Love & War is intended do for married couples. It’s intended to use pop culture and some insight into Christianity being read as a love story and provide the framework for helping Christians see marriage as a struggle that is to be fought through. Like their previous books, this one has bestseller written all over it.

John and Stasi Eldredge have contributed some culturally significant works on Christian spirituality through the experience of men and the experience of women individually. Now they turn their focus to the incredible dynamic between those two forces, and the significance of marriage to the Christian life.

They have a candid openness that will grab readers from the first page. The book opens with some keen insight and quickly takes us to a scene three years into John and Stasi’s marriage, where Stasi proposes that they get a divorce.

Each talks independently to the reader about what they’ve learned, giving their guidance personal immediacy and a balance between the male and female perspectives that has been absent from all previous books on this topic. The cooperative writing works really well with the way they use the stories and provide commentary on one another.

They begin Love & War with an obvious, all too often ignored and extremely necessary acknowledgement:  Marriage is fabulously hard. They attempt to re-frame marriage for us, not as the idealistic vision at the end of fairy tales, but as the struggle for that all the way through. Marriage in their book is shaped as the struggle towards happily ever after, it is the beginning of that fight, and deserves full command of all our resources.

Bringing this interpretation of marriage to the popular level could be extremely successful in helping passive and sated couples overwhelmed by the difficulties they face. Putting the struggle for marriage at the heart of what it means to be married is something Christians need, especially in the developed world. Often we’re told that marriage is idealistically easy. Or we assume that things will sort themselves out once we’re married.

The book’s opening chapters dispel this myth and try to help us reimagine what marriage might mean, if it’s not a walk off into happily ever after. The Eldredges often state the centrality of Love as the guide for marriage, and how that love shapes the way we live for and with each other.

Alright, now that we’ve gotten the summarization out of the way, here’s my two cents.

I really appreciated this book, it tells stories, it is honest, it is genuinely a good book about marriage. It’s not a book that goes, “and that’s how we became perfect and if you follow these 7 steps you can too.” It’s not pretending to offer all the answers, but it does point us in the right direction.

They start with the premise that marriage is hard, and that it’s hard because of our own sin and brokenness, a radically divergent view from many other voices and books about marriage out there today. They are not trying to teach us, that there are some princinples or some verses out there that will help us make everything better, but they do state that we are sinful creatures, who need to find life in God, deal with our brokenness, and shutdown the spiritual attacks against our marriages.

Eldredge writes, “So long as we choose to turn a blind eye to how we are fallen as men or women, and to the unique style of relating we have forged out of our sin and brokenness, we will continue to do damage to our marriages.”  This book really diverges from the typical prosperity approach of name it and claim it, pray these things, or look at these verses and solve your marriage. As well meaning as some of those books are, they don’t get to the heart of the problem, we are sinful creatures.

The eldredges are right about many things, but one thing that is truly important is that life is a love story. It’s a love story, bookended by two marriages. One of the first couple, and in a larger sense God to creation, and in the book of the Revelation to St. John, to Creation again, but a renewed and restored creation. Marriage is central to the redemption of creation, and the Eldredges pick up on this.

They’re almost sacramental with their language about marriage, and talk about how the kingdom is riding on marriage, it’s riding on the success of the couple caught in the epic struggle, and this is very true. I thought that at times they too easily shut out the local church and communal life’s relation to marriage, and I think that’s one point where all the Eldredge books are a bit weak.

As much as Christianity is about our joining the story of God as individuals, it’s so we can be refashioned into a true community, where our neighbors can speak to us, and share with us the meaning of life.

John and Statsi talk about the importance of right desire, and I think they’re right to say that the intentionality of our marriages, the focus on our desire is an important step. Now, I’d offer one corrective, that the desire shouldn’t stop at wanting our spouse, but should be framed by the Christian story, and a couple working together towards the desire of new creation.

Nonetheless, the book is a great start, and it offers a lot to think about. I really enjoyed reading a book on marriage with no fluff, no fillers, no 5 simple steps, 4 easy rules, or a Stepford Wife complex. It was nice to hear about real marriage, the nitty gritty struggle, and experienced voices offering wisdom to a culture that often lacks this sort of dialogue about what it means to share life together.

To buy the book, check out WalterBrook Multnomah

Disclaimer: This was book was provided for review by WaterBrook Multnomah.

Athanasius on Mary as Ark

“O noble Virgin, truly you are greater than any other greatness. For who is your equal in greatness, O dwelling place of God the Word? To whom among all creatures shall I compare you, O Virgin? You are greater than them all O [Ark of the] Covenant, clothed with purity instead of gold! You are the ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manna, that is, the flesh in which divinity resides” (Homily of the Papyrus of Turin).

Mary is continually the dwelling place of the Word, for He experiences all things as present. Time is always now to God, so he experiences like the cross the womb as eternal present. He has never essentially left her womb, but ever remains within her holy dwelling. She is ever continually providing us the true bread which is come from heaven.

Holy Mary outstrips even the angels and stands above them, radiating the awesome power of holiness. The mother of God is our blessed life, and the One who leads us in and with the Spirit to Christ. The Spirit on the one hand and the Mother of God on the other ever point to the Son of God as the One by whom men shall be saved.

To appraise the necessity of Mary, and to give her due veneration is not idolatry, but a proper recognition of the significance of the Mother of God in our devotion to Christ Himself. She is the Ark who ever bears the presence, and the Fathers who died for Christ, died also to protect the integrity of his mother in our devotion. For more on Mary as Ark of the New Covenant, click the picture.

On Speculative Theology

While some may say speculation is dangerous, and that we can only know in part, I say let us contemplate the divine mysteries, let us wonder about the nature of salvation, let us attempt to grasp the Trinity.

We were created to treasure that which is beyond measure, and ever anew bring out treasures from the infinite storehouse. We are all scribes for the kingdom, we’re always doing theology and we must be like the master of a household who can bring forth what is old and what is new in the text. This is not to say that every Christian becomes a theologian, or is able to do speculative theology, but we should all make the attempt. We should rightly respect both the Heirarchy and the Charismatic impetus of the church. We will never stop having treasures to draw out, we will never appraise He Who Is Beyond Appraisal, yet we can and rightly should seek to draw treasure out of the appraisal.

The Hierarchy and the general fence of orthodoxy keeps us with the faith and we draw both what is old and what is new from the same storehouse. meaning both the Charismatic impetus and the Hierarchy work together for us to properly be about the Church’s business. With only new treasures, or to put it another way, only the charismatic impetus, we are in the grasp of many dangers. To name three, we are in danger of apostasy through arrogance, we are in danger of losing touch with the faith of our fathers, and we are in danger of devaluing everything we think we know because we have no masure of comparison.

Charismatic Protestant churches are often filled with sensory experience, but without a proper respect for contemplation and the via crucis, these experiences become a drug substitute. They sedate the masses without actually bringing them into the moral or spiritual formation. Without a measure to respect and to bring ourselves in line with, our speculations quickly descend into nothingness.

Even the most celebrated of experiences can be heretically inclined. Just because a pedophile can produce art that celebrates his sexuality does not make it morally acceptable. So too, just because we can have high experiences does not mean they are legitimate. Without the moral formation of spiritual experience, we are simply taking drugs, putting off reality, and excusing ourselves from loving our neighbor.

With only old treasures the dangers are just as real. With only Hierarchy we’re in danger of missing the spiritual development that Churched life creates, we’re in danger of falling into absolutism instead of constant reform and renewal appropriate to the nature of the Church’s continuity in time, and we’re in danger of ossifying something that has living power today, even now to transform lives, and to draw the faithful into proper subjective appropriation.

Our imagination has to speculate and draw the charismatic impetus towards the Hierarchy, and the Hierarchy towards the charismatic impetus. The reason I used these two points is not because they are actually opposed or even in tension in actuality, but because they are often understood this way. THey should and do naturally flow to and from one another when appropriated rightly.

To hit the mark in our speculative imagination is not useless, worthless or just purely theoretical, and to miss is no great danger if we recognize the error of our ways in humility. To assume that these things are true is the inclination of our restless heart, and thinking about exactly how their truth takes form is not a waste of time. Even a bad theory can help reinforce their truthfulness.

St. Augustine on Restlessness and Worship

“Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and infinite is thy wisdom. And man desires to appraise thee, for he is a part of thy creation; he bears his mortality about with him and carries the evidence of his sin and the proof that thou dost resist the proud. Still he desires to appraise thee, this man who is only a small part of thy creation. Thou hast prompted him, that he should delight to appraise thee, for thou hast made us inclined toward thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.

What makes this quote interesting is Augustine’s ability to see humanity’s natural inclination and goal the worship of God. He says that humanity’s grasp is for the infinite, to appraise it, to lay down the lengths of eternity. We have been made, in Augustine’s mind to appraise the infinite. To seek to speak about the ineffable, to desire to measure infinity itself, and to contemplate that which is beyond contemplation.

God’s mercy and very creation has indeed prompted us that we should delight in Him and His appraisal. For we have been made inclined towards the natural, inclined towards the coming of Christ and the embodiment of Justice. We have been made inclined towards divinity towards Christ Himself, and we are restless, fretting to and fro in blindness until we find rest in the fulfillment of the desire of our already claimed heart. This rest is none other than the rest of salvation, which I believe Augustine is picking up from the New testament book of Hebrews.

The Latin text would more or less translate, at least the way i would translate it: “You have made us inclined towards thyself and our unquiet heart is only quieted in you.”

The allusion to Genesis 1:26-27, God’s

creation of human beings, resounds ex-

plicitly, for our ears, in “thou hast made

us” (fecitis nos). But for Augustine’s read-

ers it was also evident in ad te, “toward

thyself,” because the Latin Bible renders

the act as God’s creating humans “toward

[his] image” (ad imaginam) rather than

“in” it. According to this understanding,

Christ alone is the Image of God, and

human beings are made “toward” that

Image. But Augustine’s “toward thyself”

also implies an innate inclination in hu-

man nature: by our very nature we are

drawn toward God. That is why the hu-

man heart is “restless” amidst all the goods

of the created world. So many things

please, but none of them, finally, satisfies.

-  Robert McMahon [/source]

I’m modifying my original position to correct McMahon whose argument I had picked up on, without realizing it when i posted. I’d say that the image-bearing-ness is not toward rather than in, it is both. We are made towards the direction of something we already share in. We may in fact be moving towards the image, as McMahon’s reading of Voegelin seems to imply, however, this is not an either/or.

Likely for Augustine it’s a both/and. Yes the Latin implies motion, but it’s not strictly translated as such, and can also mean according to. I am not sure what the official ruling on the translation is, but I think we’re better off going with the reading that uses according to as the primary, as in, according to a blueprint, and then towards and in.

We are  made inclined to Christ Himself by nature, and that is why the world with all its good cannot ultimately satisfy. Augustine presents the restless heart in his argument about appraisal because he’s linking treasure with our heart, and the greatest treasure is to Augustine, appraising that which cannot be appraised, God Himself.

While we have an incompleteness, we do not have a complete lack of direction. Total depravity makes no sense to Augustine because he still thinks in terms of the necessary goodness of creation, unlike Calvin who interprets his work much later and through a lens that affirms the worst ideas about God. We may have a restless heart, a lack of completion and an unquietness about us, but that is not synonymous with total corruption. These are characteristics that are evidence of the direction we have been created in.

Restlessness, uneasiness and lack of tranquility are marks of the direction we’ve been created in, and what we have been created for. They’re markers to us of the nature of what we truly desire. We truly desire God, we truly desire the justice of the resurrection we truly desire that which God has first given us. We desire to know Him, and this we have been given in Christ. Thus adoration of the blessed sacrament is no waste of time, or cultic idiocy it is what we have been created towards. We are restless until we find what it means to truly rest. In the capacity to contemplate the mystery of Christ Himself, we have reached our goal.

Update: this post has been modified from it’s original contents due to a concern with translation and the idea of Being/Becoming in Genesis 1:26. I added the blockquote via McMahon on Voegelin’s reading of Confessions. It seems to be something I was thinking before I knew someone else had applied this reading, or mayhap I read it long ago when i studied Augustine as an undergrad. either way, there’s a source now.

God Has Made Me Free FOR my Neighbor

Christian kindness is not ordinary kindness, it’s loving kindness. The incarnation is God’s absolute freedom to be for us, and in our behalf. His love is manifesting the entire life and career of Christ, and when we speak of the kindness that is the fruit of the Spirit, we are actually talking bout the kindness that God has shown us in the life and work of Christ. The Spirit works that kindness in and through us, the loving-kindness that redeems and reconciles the world. Our kindness when it is grasped by the Spirit of Christ is brought into the work of God’s reconciliation of the world.

The fruit of the Spirit are the outpouring of God’s goodness in and through us, they are little perfections that are anticipations of eternal glory. They are gifts to us as a community so that we can show the world the nature of the kingdom we believe in. When we make room for them we are anticipating the work of the kingdom and letting that kingdom embody us. Practicing kindness is another way that we participate here and now in the heaven that God has called us to.

Christ Himself is the vine, and the kindness we see in Him is one that bears compassionately with others, and calls the world to repentance in accordance with the coming kingdom. The source of all our action and our hope, our kindness, benevolence and almsgiving is none other than Christ Himself. We see and recognize that to be disciples, we must indeed do those things which we have been commanded.

When we trust God in the patience of knowing the end of the story, that patience will produce in us the kindness to bear with all things, because we know what end we wait for, and we can answer graciously at every turn, in word and deed. Kindness happens when we make room for it, when we learn in patience that God has made room even for the little children. The patience we learn by being friends who trust in God will lead us to loving-kindness, to the kindness rooted in the love of God for the world.

Matthew 19:13-15:

Then little children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them; but Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.’ And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.

Kindness and virtue are eschatologically oriented. Christian kindness is not an action that has no meaning and derives from being a good person. It has to be in our minds shaped in the fires of patience and the gracious response that establishes a small form of reconciliation between God and the world.

Kindness is not just something we do because it’s a nice thing to do or the right thing to do. We as Christians do not seek virtue because it makes us good people. Christians seek virtues because they are heavenly manifestations of the kingdom we claim to believe in. Grace empowers them to lead us and others into the experience of the kingdom here and now.

Polycarp argued that anyone occupied in these three things: growing in the faith, accompanied by hope, and led by love, has fulfilled the commandment of righteousness (ch. 3:2-3). Drawing from the Scriptures he would also say: “Whenever you are able to do a kindness, do not put it off’ (Prov.3:28), because `almsgiving frees from death’ [Tobit 4:10ff]” (ch. 10:2).

To participate in these good works is to liberate ourselves from the throes of death, but just as importantly to liberate in a small way our immediate world from the throes of death by letting the kingdom manifest in our lives and the lives of those around us. Kindness is not just a happy thing to do, it’s a rebellion against the powers of death.

It is for freedom’s sake that God has set us free, but that freedom, is not the freedom from everything, it is the freedom to be truly for anything. Sin had held us bound to death and the chaos and destruction that in brings. The experience of God deepens our appreciation for all things, and allows us to embody life to and for them, in their behalf.

“When the things of earth grow strangely dim,” is when I have failed to understand that the Creator God desires right stewardship of His creation in loving-kindness. The love in this loving-kindness is none other than the self-emptying, crucified, glorified, redemptive, forgiving work of God Himself.

To be free as a Christian means the freedom to be truly for my neighbor. To be able to provide true friendship, true love, true patience, true kindness. The experience of God deepens my creaturely ability to be for the other, because I have recognized an all consuming otherness that has used absolute freedom to act in my behalf also.

Basil the Great, A prayer

O God and Lord of the Powers, and Maker of all creation, Who, because of Thy clemency and incomparable mercy, didst send Thine Only-Begotten Son and our Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of mankind, and with His venerable Cross didst tear asunder the record of our sins, and thereby didst conquer the rulers and powers of darkness;

Receive from us sinful people, O merciful Master, these prayers of gratitude and supplication, and deliver us from every destructive and gloomy transgression, and from all visible and invisible enemies who seek to injure us.

Nail down our flesh with fear of Thee, and let not our hearts be inclined to words or thoughts of evil, but pierce our souls with Thy love, that ever contemplating Thee, being enlightened by Thee, and discerning Thee, the unapproachable and everlasting Light, we may unceasingly render confession and gratitude to Thee: The eternal Father, with Thine Only-Begotten Son, and with Thine All-Holy, Gracious, and Life-Giving Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Amen.

I think it’s crucially important that we remember that God is Lord of the powers that be already. Any responses?

Touch Not the Lord’s Anointed

My Experience with Mother Mary.

So, I just got back from my trip to Ave Maria, in Southwest Florida. To those who don’t know, it’s an amazing place if you like Orthodoxy. So, my friend Harrison and I were off to our adventures which included sitting in Grad class on the New Testament, and then lunch before going to see the Oratory (chapel, to those who don’t know) and taking a general tour of some other thigns I hadn’t seen yet.

When we briefly entered the chapel of perpetual adoration, I almost wept at the beauty of Our Lord. But that wasn’t the end of my contemplation.

As we entered the oratory Harrison showed me around and he politely whispered the facts about the oratory to me. As we approached the front of the oratory, I saw a statue of Mother Mary and was particularly drawn to it.

Then it happened.

I kissed my fingers and went to touch the statue, and it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks, that to do this unworthily could easily result in my death. I stopped for a moment, made the sign of the cross and repented of any sin, known and unknown before proceeding to touch the foot of the Blessed Virgin.

It hit me, this is the Mother of God, the Holiest woman in all existence, the only human being who has ever embodied the presence as the Human Ark of the Covenant.

Quickly i realized the frailty of my own soul and the terrible gap that stands between myself and the great saints. I stand broken, judged not in God’s wrathful search to destroy me, but in His merciful embrace. I stand judged not by looking to my own sins, but the sinlessness of the Mother of God. Hail Holy Queen is the only response that left my lips in that moment, and I was terribly afraid that I should have died when i lay that kiss upon our blessed mother’s feet.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our deaths. Amen.

Hail Holy Trinity

How could you possibly understand?

My frustrations are nothing, these moments passing by slip through your fingers like wishes ignored, and you have made me a contemptuous sight in your eyes. My weeping heart tears at my chest and my fists tear at my eyes, asking, “Are you still alive!?”

What response could I possible give to indulge the demands? This spirit, this moment, this endless serenade upon the shattered glass that are my broken dreams, and yet I don’t know what I’m complaining about. Drunken and intoxicated with defeat, with avarice and malice, I feel a thirst for my own blood, yet you comfort me. This child of yours beats his hand against his chest, heart pumping in bloodied hands, and this moment calls for a revolution from the inside.

mixed metaphors fit for a miser.

mixed metaphors mistaken for misery.

Trepidation.

Hail Holy Trinity.

I don’t even know what I mean to say anymore. I am a jumble of ideas, and i think I feel as though the crowd is truth. The winds sweeps through my hair catching my inner thoughts at the roots and makes me face annihilation.

The mirror, is there even a face there today at all?

I am calling out, calling my heart to life and watching it die in my hands, as the mirrors of others reflections embed themselves into this fragile organ, making imprecise incisions upon this weeping face. Messiah, Holy Father, Blessed Spirit, tell me, hold me, weep with me.

Can you, even you deliver me?

Audience…who needs them? I am not the blessed saint you wished me to be, but I want to try. I don’t know what to say. I’m hurting, and broken, I’m aching and all I can do to keep from destroying myself is to retreat into the hollow and sweet shadows, hiding my face behind pages of broken glass, and yet they’re all here, judging me in all my fullness. They don’t know that I’m all alone. Forgive them. I’m too sensitive. I’m just hoping I make it alive through this.

Blessed One, Father, intimate unto me your plan, and receive me into your Holy bosom, Your sacred heart, let its warmth animate my broken shell to new life. Commune with me and bring that reign that chains me to freedom. Out and reaching into the brokenness of others, teach me to love myself, teach me to love your loves.

I am willing, my life is yours, and all that I am is in your hands. Forget me not in my solemn hour of darkest temptation wherein I feel the necessity of failure set before me. Do you then believe that I can really do this?

Honestly I have my doubts. Sacred Father, teach me not to exert myself in the meditations of my mind alone, teach me to receive, to breathe deeply in faith.

Holy Christ, let your blessed touch restore me as with the women you restored, teach me your love and kindness, and as your fingers reach for my tears, let my heart reach for yours.

Those sacred tears which have wept for all the world and all times, let them be my comfort and shelter in my hour of need.

Holy Christ, may your presence guide me as a rod of direction and a light to my meandering steps out in the wilderness.

Such as you went into your exodus, let me go forth outside the camp into your exodus, and into faith.

Holy Spirit, be my mentor and my guide, my blessed reception into your love, and my only friend.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, I ask that you would entreat your Son in my behalf, holding me near to yourself as my mother and my blessed comforter in this hour of need. Holy Mary pray for me and my broken lanterns, for these wandering steps upon what seems a wasteland.

Holy Spirit gather unto me your sacred comfort and let me see in other faces the light of your love which brings life. I ask these things in all humility Father, as One who recognizes the greatness of your glory.

Lord have mercy, by your Son’s passion have mercy on me a sinner, Be that Father to me which I could never recognize without your presence

Jesus have Mercy on me, your disciple by your great passion which speaks to me of the life I shall lead, You who call to me to lay down my victory and take up this cross

Spirit have mercy on me, joining me to your sufferings and sacrifice in the world, teaching me to pray as you do, entreating in behalf of the world with tears and suffering as you do

Hail Holy Trinity, Lord of all, Redeemer, Creator, Counselor in All

You are my guidance in this hour of need and brokenness

Hail Holy Trinity

Be my comfort in suffering, this I ask in earnest

On Prayer in Community

When we pray, it is so that Jesus might embody us, and carry us into His work in the Spirit. Praying in community is not just a quaint way to pass time, but enjoining ourselves to the work of the saints. Prayer is enjoining the work of the kingdom, and embodying it through submission.

Prayer is what can begin to draw us outside ourselves and into one another. You’re putting yourself in the stream that flows from the throne and putting yourself at its mercy, prayer is not about your control or gifts, it’s about Jesus, and His power to redeem through you and your body.

Ecstatic prayer is welcome but only insofar as the experience draws us not into itself but into one another, and into Christ. Prayer in community is the gift that we have been given. Our Father is not just about me and Jesus, it’s about all the brothers and sisters and mothers of mine who do the will of Him Who has Commissioned us. When we enter this task, it is our joy to embody together a foretaste of what heaven is truly like, ultimate self disclosure to God and neighbor.

Jurgen Moltmann on The Experience of God

When I love God I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes, the embraces, the feelings, the scents, the sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my senses in the creations of your love. In all the things that encounter me, you are waiting for me.

For a long time, I looked for you within myself, and crept into the shell of my soul, protecting myself with an armour of unapproachability. But you were outside—outside myself—and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others.

The experience of God deepens the experiences of life. It does not reduce them, for it awakens the unconditional Yes to life. The more I love God the more gladly I exist. The more immediately and wholly I exist, the more I sense the living God, the inexhaustible well of life, and life’s eternity.

—Jurgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 98

What Comes Naturally

“But some things just come naturally….that’s just in his nature.” No. Plain and simple. No.

Human nature is already claimed, and what comes naturally may indeed be other than Christ and His life, but this is no longer what’s natural to us. What’s natural to us is the life that Jesus makes possible. The future and purpose of nature is Jesus Christ Himself. When we think of what’s natural, we as Christians don’t begin what the world thinks is natural. The natural has been revealed to us as that which comes from the end, the Kingdom, wherein God’s reign is full. We as the Church are the community where the laws of new creation are normative for our life and practice._

Being the church, we must learn that nature has been redefined for us around and in Jesus. We don’t begin to think about what comes naturally apart from Jesus. He commands the center of everything we think and say. God has ideas about nature, and they are presented to us rather clearly, and we have to think in and with God’s revelation.

God’s idea of nature is Jesus. What comes naturally, is that Kingdom, and its laws, not this one. What comes naturally is recovered on the basis of the gospel. “The Natural is that which after the fall is directed towards the coming of Christ”. [1]

What matters here is that Bonhoeffer is telling us that Jesus isn’t just something cute that happened once upon a time, He reorients all of human nature towards Himself, and whatever deviates from this is no longer natural, but unnatural. It is unnatural to oppose the coming of Christ.

It is incumbent upon us to learn to think this way about the world, or else we will fail to have the imaginative power that the gospel demands of our communities. We know the end of the story, we know that in the end, God will set all things to rights, and that justice will pour out over all creation. We know that God’s good creation was never intended to be as we see it now. That’s what Jesus means. Jesus is God’s idea of what creation is and means, because God Himself enters creation and lives the life of a creature always disposed to God in the right manner.

We think in and with the end of the story, because that’s what God intended, and intends for everything. Someday everything in all creation will look and think and act like Jesus, this is not to say we stop becoming individuals. What will happen is that just as Jesus is infilled with the presence of God so too we will be. Just as the sacraments are filled with His presence so too, each of us in our unique subjectivity will refract the manifold and unlimitedly creative power of the Triune God. We will all be sacraments, all creation will indeed in the end be sacramental. If you wonder what new creation looks like, look at the table of communion.

What comes naturally is the redeemed world we hope for. That’s what has always been intended. What’s in our nature as Christians is not us, but Christ. He is the goal of creation, and in Him we will be more and more truly ourselves.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer Ethics p. 143. 1995.
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Thanks for Reading. -eli

On the reason for Miracles

I’ve seen the miracles but then again crazy people perform “miracles” all the time. Miracles don’t prove the gospel, that’d be too easy.

I’ve always believed that miracles are gifts. They’re something that’s outside of the person working them, they come upon us, they sneak up on us, they manifest themselves. No amount of formula, positive thinking or lengthy prayers can make them happen.

Miracles are not posessed, they possess us. Most of the satisfying things in life only need a recipient, so too, miracles need recipients open to their possibility, not wonder-working heroes. They’re gifts from the Spirit that claim us as receivers, not something we own, ever. If someone says “behold I have such and such a gift, make room for it,” they’ve misunderstood the purpose of charismatic gifts and miracles. The authority for gifts in our community derives not from specially gifted individuals who can make themselves heroic, but from people willing to join one another in cross-bearing mutual service.

Of course we should make room for one another in mutual submission, in love and hope for the Future of God, but trying to force others to make room for the giftings we feel we have is to miss the point of the gifts. They are not our own, but come to us from the outside for the upbuilding of the church, not our egos.

Most importantly, the gifts and miracles are completely natural in the world we come from

They’re signs, like signposts on the road they’re pointers, but they’re pointers that give themselves to us by claiming us. They’re sign posts that spring up to show us a greater reality we can’t forget. The reason not everyone is healed is because were we a community of the strong only, the weak would be put out from our midst.

A recent example was a caretaker I came across who was attending an ultra-Charismatic church wherein she was told to get off her bi-polar medication to show God she has faith. But I think this misses the point entirely. This woman came to me weeping as I was out with my pastor, we were doing a visit, and this poor caretaker was in tears, having an anxiety attack and ready to fall apart at any moment. This is not life, and this is not what it looks like to make room for the Spirit of life.

While some are healed in this way, it’s a Russian roulette, not faith. It’s a few suicides per single person that’s healed, those are odds I can’t stomach. If you feel you can, be my guest, but I’m not willing to take the chance of losing a single life. Making room for the Spirit of life is very different from taking yourself off medication.

Medication and the Spirit are not opposed. We don’t have to prove our faith to God, it’s after he’s healed that He says to us our faith has made us well. Raising our expectations and trying to live outside our means is not faith, and calling that faith is heretical. That’s not faith, that’s a cultural form of capitalism, that has bankrupted our social life.

We’ve been told to stretch everything, to acquire everything, to live beyond our means in everything, to attempt to be strong in everything, and thus we are shattered people, dragging ourselves from meeting to meeting, from experience to experience.

Miracles belong to the world we come from, and are like advertisements for the already present reign of God they’re like visible secrets, whispers that we see and hear and celebrate. This reading of miracles doesn’t force us to the edge of insanity to prove our faith to God, it relocates the center of Faith as God himself, whose crucified body we have to have the audacity to believe is among us when we take of His bread and His wine. That’s faith. When we are faced with the overwhelming power of a society that pushes us to be more perfect, we have the courage to be broken before God and neighbor, that’s faith.

Miracles are whispers to us here and now that our king isn’t our king. That economics, finance, politics, government, fashion, media are not the rightful kings of the world and Jesus is. Miracles are beautiful foretastes of what will someday be true of all reality, everything will be set right, and for this hope we say Hallelujah.

America is NOT a Christian Nation

All government is corrupt, and all national powers are an affront to the Lordship of Jesus. Jesus was not just a threat to Pilate and the the religious orders, He was and is a Threat to Caesar, a threat to the heart of America.

Reducing Christianity to principles, as some of the conservatives claim the Founders did is the heart of atheism, “we appreciate the Christian story, but we just want the principles. We don’t want any of those miracles or the specifics about this God, just his ideas, more or less. So that we can put those ideas under a new god, global capitalism.” That’s not Christian government, that’s called plagiarism.

I think it’s rather telling how little power we feel we have in the face of this god, called global capitalism.

We feel the world to be eminently at its end because we cannot imagine a way forward or way back from the ever expanding markets that Liberal technocratic society has created and combined with fascist and militaristic culture to create an ever expanding and ever more virulent marketing and commodifcation of everything that life is and means.

America’s demands that we increase our vision, grow our expectations, desire more power, clout recognition or promotion and call this faith is just another symptom of how deeply America is opposed to Christianity and seeks to subvert it. In many cases it has sadly succeeded. Christianity does not want you to have the american dream, or that promotion. Christianity wants you to worship the Triune God in Christ, and love your neighbor. Everything else is commentary.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar on Scripture

“The Holy Scriptures, taken in isolation, cannot provide the word of response, because the letter kills when it is separated from the spirit, (sic) and the letter’s inner spirit is God’s word and not man’s answer.” Love Alone is Credible ( San Fancisco: Ignatius, 2004), 77.

The bible taken in the framework of sola scriptura falls because it cannot bear the weight of testifying to the love of God as is required of it The Scriptures can invite us to witness to the Life Of God’s self emptying love, but scripture is the invitation not the event itself and even then one of many invitations which work together to create our subjective response to God’s action in our behalf. Ultimately only Jesus can do this, thus the scriptures can only testify to the act of God which interprets itself to us. The cross is the apex of our understanding and begins a whole new way of thinking. It begins to reclaim the absolutism placed on anything but Christ Himself, even the law and all its commandments are secondary, even our highest dogmas are idols if they do not point to Christ Himself, either we understand this and live as such or else we have failed to do Christian theology.

The bible alone cannot teach us to recognize Christ because the inner life of scripture concerns Jesus, not our response to this event or how it should be ordered. We must receive our response from Jesus’ manifest encounter with us as living event. This event of Spirit provides us with the only appropriate response to the radiating glory we recognize when we first see God’s love in the cross, namely awe.

This event defies being constricted to any word, for in it He is the One who is not constrained. The cross is the absolute freedom of God to be for us, and it will not be bound to any word, save that name of Divine Love itself. Even the canon is suspect in the face of the radiating glory of this event, taken together with witness and our own compulsion to discern the great mystery it becomes intelligible in the Spirit, but taken in isolation the text becomes the aberration of the True Word that is Christ.

Christian Principles, The Abstracted Gospel

Recently a friend and former professor of mine was engaged in a forum where he heard several professors of business talk about how we should work to get the world to follow Christian economic principles. He disagrees, and I do as well. The reason being, these principles serve as a form of Constantinianism, as identified by John Howard Yoder.

Update: “…To get the world to follow Christian principles in the economic realm [is] an attempt to abstract the message of the kingdom that in the end neuters the gospel of its power and absolves the church of living as people of new creation.” – My professor friend

These principles were they put in place would not make us work towards the gospel, they would absolve us from the gospel. Were these principles to happen to coincide all at once, there would be no reason for the church. If you have all the “principles” of the church in common life, why go to church? If there’s no difference between being an American investor and a Christian investor, why stop to consider that a rabbi’s death has claim on you and what you do with your money?

Once upon a time the Enlightenment project assumed it could do the same thing. It assumed that the religious differences we have could be put aside if we could boil it down to a few core dogmas about God that were universally acceptable. This did not put an end to war, famine or bloodshed, it just gave people even more destructive forms of control over society. Without the Enlightenment project Nazism and Stalinist projects are inconceivable.

Boiling Christianity down to principles is not the renewed life of Christianity, and yes I’m talking about people like John Maxwell, who have capitulated to this “leadership culture.” Leadership is desired by our culture, but without the virtues that Christianity produces to make real leadership possible it’s an act of self-congratulatory masturbation. It’s a nice big empty pat on the back for finding the “core underlying truths.” Yet, the core underlying truths are simple, Jesus Christ the rabbi from Nazareth was vindicated by God from the grave and is therefore this world’s rightful king. This rabbi was and is God along with His Spirit and the One Whom He calls Father. Together they are One God.

When you abstract the gospel which is the Church’s proclamation, from the life of the church, you don’t still have the gospel, you have another creature altogether. It looks like the gospel, but is not the gospel.

The proclamation of the church has power to speak, but only from within the life of the church, if taken outside this context, it becomes another form of coercive market serving power.

It is the church that has to be the live solution to economic problems through charity, training, catechesis, worship, communal life, liturgy. All of these things are the politics of the church, and they belong in her. When we take them out, no matter how right they may sound, they are not the gospel.

The Alternative Politik (Peacemaking Part 3)

Without a Peacemaking community present as an example to the world, the world has no choice but to resort to violence.

Peacemaking is a habit developed by learning to speak truthfully to one another and bear with one another forgivingly. If we do not do this, we are dominated by the world, and we will not love one another.

If we love one another, it is not because we have affection for one another, but because we forgive one another’s sins.

Christian love looks like the manifestation of this forgiveness, we must lay down our lives for others and brave the sufferings of unity and love, this is the only way our love will grow deeper. Disciples are the people who maintain fellowship where others would break it off, but they do so in the unity of purpose that is carrying the cross of Christ in our life as a community. If we cannot develop this habit our community will not be known as one that bears the name “Sons of God.” Peace is how God reclaims creation, that’s how He goes about setting things right.

Peacemaking is not just for the holy individuals but is the task that allows us to be recognized together as the community that are the sons of god. Individually we fail to make peace at all times, but that does not mean that together we fail to achieve this, because together we can make it known that peace and not discontent, peace and not bitterness, peace and not the sword are how we live our lives, and we are willing to bear the crosses necessary to make that happen.

Confessing another has hurt you is a cross bearing not sword bearing action. When it’s done rightly it’s an act of surrender to the other, it’s making yourself vulnerable to them, and to God, so that He might be your peace in it. The reason Jesus charges us with confrontation is because being a forgiving people, requires it. If we openly share in a life together that acknowledges shortcomings, failures and griefs it will draw the various strands of us together into something that is not easily broken. When we learn to forgive, we’re participating in the peace of God, because God’s peace is our forgiveness.

We must remember that God’s messiah rightly suffered to establish peace. That peace transforms us, and shows the world what sort of God we believe in. When we live this peace we are showing the world what it means to be a Christian, and just what kind of life we truly believe is possible united under this Jesus of Nazareth.

He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. – Isaiah 2: 2-4 (KJV) It’s time to beat our grievances into repentance, and our selfish holding onto pain into forgiveness, the only way that happens is with lots of work, and imagination, but it can be done. That’s what it means to have peace in the Spirit.

The peace that passes all understanding, and the peace that flow from us are one and the same, they’re a peace bought at the cost of a crucified Jesus who makes peace in the cross. We will only learn to make peace when this cross is present and living in the community of them who gather around and receive their life from His crucifixion. Blessed are the peacemakers is not a suggestion, but one of the core meanings of what it is that the church embodies. Either we live this together as a community, or we are not the church. Blessed are the peacemakers is non-negotiable, it’s gospel. Where forgiveness abounds, it is there that the people are blessed.