My paper in Rome today discusses Rowan Williams’ theological conception of Christian tradition. Here’s an excerpt:

“There is a profound apocalyptic dimension to Williams’ thought here. The meaning of doctrine is not latent within doctrinal history itself. The truth of doctrine is not immanent within the church’s own history and practices. Rather, the truth of doctrine comes to the church from beyond the church’s history. This means that an essential discipline of Christian theology is the practice of self-dispossession, of renouncing the claim to any final vision or any authoritative grasp of the truth.

“Following Donald MacKinnon, we might speak here of the ‘kenotic’ shape of doctrinal identity. Even where orthodoxy emerges as the historical winner from the struggle with heresy, that same orthodoxy must relinquish the right to claim a total vision or to interpret the direction of history. In relinquishing this right, orthodoxy preserves its own essential vulnerability vis-à-vis its founding event – and it confesses that the church can receive truth only from outside itself, as a gift that enters history from beyond history, tearing history open in the apocalyptic rupture of God’s advent.

“Williams’ role as Archbishop of Canterbury in recent years illustrates precisely this dialectic of kenosis and apocalypse. As a churchman, he combines an uncompromisingly rigorous commitment to the truth of doctrinal orthodoxy with an absolute refusal to grasp the truth as a possession or to wield it as an instrument of power. Indeed, the most striking thing about Williams’ conduct as Archbishop of Canterbury is his willingness to fail, his refusal to pursue any ideal of ecclesial ‘success’ in abstraction from the church’s spiritual identity as a community defined by weakness, fragility and self-dispossession.

“This rejection of the idolatrous notion of a ‘successful’ church, this willingness to fail, is at the same time a profoundly apocalyptic gesture: the church’s identity is not immanent within its own practices and institutions; its identity is that which exceeds it, that which comes to it as gift, that which fills its own emptiness and abasement. Williams’ approach here stands not only as a witness to the church’s proper identity, but also as a sharp critique of the tendency among some contemporary political theologies to hanker after the fleshpots of Christendom, or to envision the ecclesial polis as existing in any way other than that of discipleship and crucifixion. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has observed, the church’s suffering is infinitely more dangerous to the world than any political power it may retain – the church’s only authentic power is its weakness.â€

Labels: ecclesiology, Rowan Williams

A guest-series by Douglas Harink

Part 2: Whither “God’s Politics�

As I noted in the last post, in Wallis’s vision the churches do have an important role to play, a contribution to make, an influence to have among the people of God known as America: “The politics of God is often not the same as the politics of the people of God [i.e., America]. The real question is not whether religious faith should influence a society and its politics, but how†(p. 56). “Our religious congregations are not meant to be social organizations that merely reflect the wider culture’s values, but dynamic countercultural communities whose purpose it is to reshape both lives and societies†(p. 7, emphasis added).

As those statements reveal, one of the most remarkable characteristics of Wallis’s vision, obvious on nearly every page, is the thoroughly instrumentalized understanding of religion. God, church, faith, and prophetic religion are all parts of the greater whole which is America, completely absorbed into the discourse of American politics, taken up for use in the cause of the American nation – of a just, compassionate and democratic American nation to be sure, but it is the nation that religious discourse is made to serve as its proper end.

Not only that, but religious discourse must be policed by the discourse of national social and political life. Wallis writes: “We bring faith into the public square when our moral convictions demand it. But to influence a democratic society, you must win the public debate about why the policies you advocate are better for the common good. That’s the democratic discipline religion has to be under [my emphasis] when it brings its faith to the public square… Religious people shouldn’t be told just to be quiet, they should be invited to participate as citizens… [in] the democratic discourse on the most important values and directions that will shape our society†(p. 71).

It becomes clear here and throughout the book that the proposals Wallis makes under the guise of “God’s politics†are in fact all proposals from within the system, for the system, and by the system of a so called democratic society. All discourse about God, faith, and the church is so thoroughly co-opted into the project of making America a better nation, that it is never allowed to fundamentally disrupt the solipsistic discourse of the American social and political project. In other words, there is something fundamentally idolatrous about Wallis’s theological discourse; it is certainly no less idolatrous than the discourse of the Religious Right which Wallis is very good at exposing. Unless Christian discourse about God, faith and the church is allowed in the first place to be absolutely free of its usefulness for Americanism, it will always be idolatrous.

The good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it is God’s radical and decisive invasion of our humanly constructed worlds, and God’s deliverance from and destruction of the powers that hold us in bondage. The American nation, or the Canadian nation, or any other nation for that matter, is a humanly constructed world; it is a power that enslaves human beings and makes us serve its ends. Every nation is in the first place an idolatrous regime to which God comes in the Gospel to set his people free. Before the church and its discourse can be of any use to American people, it must learn that it does not exist in the first place as America, or to be of use to America, but it exists as the church, constituted in its worship and service of the one true God.

In other words, whether America as such stands or falls – and it will surely one day fall – should not be a matter of primary interest to the churches in America. Indeed, paraphrasing 1 Thess. 1:9-10, the church in America must learn to “turn from the idol America, to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven whom he raised from the dead, that is, Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.†The problem with the church in North America is not primarily that it has been co-opted by the Right or Left. It is that it has failed to be the ekklesia, a people called out by God from the nations, to be a loyal citizenship of the peaceable regime of the one true God, and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I am more likely to agree than disagree with Wallis on his social and political goals, many of which are already realized in Canada in some measure. I also agree when he argues against privatized faith, and therefore I disagree with the consciousness of many Canadian Christians for whom the privacy of religion is a basic creed. But in fact an understanding of faith or religion as in the first instance precisely personal and private is at the very foundation of Wallis’s vision. He does not question that assumption; he argues instead that faith or religion should not stay private. It should always in one way or another, he says, make the transition through “values†into the public and the political realm. In other words “religious†discourse about God, faith and the church is not in itself intrinsically and immediately political; it gets political by going out of itself, as it were, and translating itself into the political discourses and performances which are always already going on “out there†in the places of worldly power.

Here we come to the heart of Wallis’s failure to resist American idolatry. For he fails to see that the eternal life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the God revealed in the Gospel, is the original and true politics. He fails to see that Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, in his life, passion, death on the cross, resurrection and ascension, as narrated in the gospels and in such texts as Phil 2:6-11, is the original and true politics of God on earth, in the flesh, publicly performed for all to see. Wallis fails to see that the chosen people of God, in whom the Spirit works to bring about a faithful political life, is not America but Israel and the church. He fails to see that the first and primary and normative political performance is exclusive worship of the one God revealed in Israel and in Jesus Christ. That is divine politics in the true sense, and one need not and must not go to Ottawa or Washington DC or London to “get political†in the true sense. For, as St Augustine has taught us, in light of the divine politics revealed in the gospel, what goes on as political in those places of worldly power is a parody of politics at best, and a dangerous and deadly illusion at worst.

How then do people get truly political? They believe the Gospel, they are baptized into the body of Christ, they worship the triune God, and they participate in the eucharistic life of the congregation. Only out of this primary and constitutive political performance will the people of God be capable of interrupting, even if only among themselves, the idolatrous and destructive discourses and performances in our nations which go by the name of “politics,†and of speaking the word of truth to the nations for their judgment and healing.

Labels: Douglas Harink, ecclesiology, politics

Well, I finally decided to bite the bullet and update my library with the new edition of Bonhoeffer’s works. So I’ve now got a pile of these lovely volumes on my desk, and I’m gradually working my way down the stack. I must say, I’m very impressed with this edition, and with the new English translations. It’s an editorial achievement of enormous scope and astonishing exactitude, and the publishers have produced the series beautifully. Right now, I’m reading Bonhoeffer’s magnificent Ethics – so here’s an excerpt from the opening section:

“When God in Jesus Christ claims space in the world – even space in a stable because ‘there was no other place in the inn’ – God embraces the whole reality of the world in this narrow space and reveals its ultimate foundation. So also the church of Jesus Christ is the place [Ort] – that is, the space [Raum] – in the world where the reign of Jesus Christ over the whole world is to be demonstrated and proclaimed. This space of the church does not, therefore, exist just for itself, but its existence is already always something that reaches far beyond it…. The space of the church is not there in order to fight with the world for a piece of its territory, but precisely to testify to the world that it is still the world, namely, the world that is loved and reconciled by God. It is not true that the church intends to or must spread its space out over the space of the world. It desires no more space than its needs to serve the world with its witness to Jesus Christ and to the world’s reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ†(pp. 63-64).

Labels: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ecclesiology

In an interesting post, Jason argues for a religious understanding of marriage, and he cites P. T. Forsyth’s view that marriage is much more than a social contract: “the more one ponders the solemn implicates and slow effects of marriage, moral and spiritual, the more one feels that it has something sacramental in its nature.â€

I think this is exactly the wrong thing to say about marriage. In fact, I’d like to see the church stop its custom of benignly validating the institution of marriage. The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the church: the state authorises a legal union, and then calls upon the church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity. Here, as elsewhere, the church proves itself to be the state’s faithful servant: yes, we will validate state authority with a harmless blessing; yes, we are only too pleased to sanctify the wedding ceremony, and to clothe the social functions of romantic love and family life with a saintly aura.

Notice that the church is not invited here to proclaim its own proper message of judgment and grace. The church is not invited to bear witness. Instead, we are simply asked to add God’s blessing to the social order and to the state’s authority. Here the situation is just the same as in those churches where all infants born into the nation-state are provided with baptism: the church’s witness is undermined completely by its willingness to serve as the state’s lapdog. We are like the comically odious Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice – that sycophantic clergyman who waits upon the pleasure of his exalted benefactress, Lady Catherine De Bourgh, and is only too pleased to do her bidding whenever the opportunity arises.

If there is anything distinctively Christian to say about marriage, then the first step should be the church’s flat refusal to co-operate in the grim and desperate business of wedding ceremonies, and a flat refusal to provide the state with any so-called “marriage altar.†As Karl Barth has put it, marriage “must be completely divested of the character of a religious doublet to the civil ceremony†(CD III/4, p. 228).

Indeed, far from merely authorising weddings with pious talk about the “spiritual and moral†depths of marital love, the church’s witness demands a critique of romantic love – yes, a critique of marriage itself! As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has incisively argued in Life Together, the sexual relationship is by no means “sacramental in nature.†Instead, in our own societies romantic love functions as an idol which demands absolute subservience.

Halden explores this theme in a brilliant engagement with Bonhoeffer: “The longing to be completed through immediate contact with another is the reigning mythos of romance in our age. It is the object of voracious, often violent pursuit at all costs…. The fact is that in our romantic imaginations we seem to remain disturbingly trapped in the Zeitgeist of our age, hoping that by journeying deeper into the abyss of our selfishness we will somehow find the community that we long for with the other.†In Bonhoeffer’s analysis, the marriage relationship is not “sacramental by nature,†but it is selfish and parasitic by nature. In its hidden depths one finds not the comforting glow of religious sanctity, but an abyss of violence and self-will, a voracious need to find my own image reflected in the face of another.

But such a bleak analysis is not the last word. If the church refuses to sanctify the social order and the state’s authority as “naturally†blessed, it is also true that the church is a community with its own proper practices, its own virtues, its own proclamation of the good as that which has interrupted and reconfigured the natural order through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

If we begin to refuse church participation in wedding ceremonies, perhaps the way will be opened for a renewed sacramental understanding of marriage. The church refuses to recognise the marital relationship – or, for that matter, “the family†– as the fundamental social unit. Instead, the Christian community recognises the body of Christ as the fundamental social order of the new creation. And within this new society, within this economy of friendship and hospitality and self-giving, the church also bears witness to particular instantiations of Christian friendship, to specially gifted loci of generosity and hospitality and self-giving love.

Here, Christian marriage is sacramental precisely because it bears witness to the incursion of the new creation. It interrupts the existing order with the glad tidings of God’s new world. It interrupts marriage itself – and all the parasitic violence of romantic love – with the joyful and generous reality of the peace of the body of Christ.

In short: let’s say No to church-sanctioned weddings, No to the culture of romance-at-any-cost, but Yes to the sacrament of marriage, Yes to the body of Christ. To paraphrase St Paul: For in Christ Jesus, neither marriage nor singleness is anything; what counts is a new creation.

Labels: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ecclesiology, ethics, marriage, sex

“The Catholic Church is a complex of opposites, a complexio oppositorum. There appears to be no antithesis it does not embrace…. Ultimately, most important is that this limitless ambiguity combines with the most precise dogmatism and a will to decision as it culminates in the doctrine of papal infallibility.

“From the standpoint of the political idea of Catholicism, the essence of the Roman-Catholic complexio oppositorum lies in a specific, formal superiority over the matter of human life such as no other imperium has ever known…. This formal character of Roman Catholicism is based on a strict realization of the principle of representation, the particularity of which is most evident in its antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today….

“The Church requires a political form. Without it there is nothing to correspond to its intrinsically representative conduct. The domination of ‘capital’ behind the scenes [of modern politics] is still no form, though it can undermine an existing political form and make it an empty façade. Should it succeed, it will have ‘depoliticized’ the state completely. Should economic thinking succeed in realizing its utopian goal and in bringing about an absolutely unpolitical condition of human society, the Church would remain the only agency of political thinking and political form. Then the Church would have a stupendous monopoly: its hierarchy would be nearer the political domination of the world than in the Middle Ages.â€

—Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Umen (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 7-8, 25.

Labels: capitalism, Carl Schmitt, ecclesiology, politics

Halden has posted this little gem from Stanley Hauerwas – some questions which he asked a group of trainee youth pastors in Princeton:
Of course, things are a little different here in Australia – we never bother much with patriotic gestures, except perhaps at a football game. But I did once visit a church where they prayed solemnly for God's blessing on “our Queen†and for “the success of our troops†– at which point, I felt pretty sure that the odds on my salvation were getting longer...

Labels: ecclesiology, liturgy, Stanley Hauerwas

Commenting on Karl Barth’s section on church law (CD IV/2, §67.4), John Howard Yoder writes: “Barth is affirming for the first time in mainstream … theology since Constantine the theological legitimacy of admitting about a set of social structures, that those who participate in them cannot be presumed to be addressable from the perspective of Christian confession.â€

—John Howard Yoder, “Why Ecclesiology Is Social Ethics: Gospel Ethics Versus the Wider Wisdom,†in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 108.

Labels: ecclesiology, John Howard Yoder, Karl Barth

Chris has posted an interesting series on this question, and he offers a Reformed critique of de Lubac and Zizioulas.

Labels: ecclesiology, eucharist

In an excellent post, Halden observes: “protestantism is always the question, the objection, the provisional mode of protest that takes place within the wider presupposition of the givenness of the Catholic church. It is always protestants who must justify their identity as non-Catholics rather than the other way round.â€

And this means that “we cannot assume the perpetual existence of protestantism. We must be open to the possibility of the end of protestantism if we are to be true to the aims of the Reformers themselves.â€

Labels: ecclesiology

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

When it comes to theological brand-names, they don’t come any sexier, or more marketable, than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The inherent nobility of his short life, his blistering intelligence, and his martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis places Bonhoeffer among the unassailable luminaries of our time. Even Christopher Hitchens – who savaged Mother Theresa in a vicious polemic entitled The Missionary Position – can’t find anything bad to say about him: “Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by Nazis for his refusal to collude with them.â€

Because of his near universal appeal, it was inevitable that Bonhoeffer’s demanding body of work would be made more available for popular consumption and reduced to an “Everyday-with-Dietrich†style anthology of sayings, sermons and other morsels of spiritual advice. But every now and then, one comes across an appropriation of Bonhoeffer that is so perverse that one is compelled to put one’s foot down and say, “Enough is enough.â€

Anyone who has read John Shelby Spong – whose books I’ve always found very easy to put down, and almost impossible to pick back up again – will by now be familiar with his pretentious appeal to Bonhoeffer’s “non-religious Christianity.†His strategy, of course, is to position himself as the heir to Bonhoeffer’s legacy, the realization of his dream. But nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is it outrageous to pass off the bilious swill that Spong mass produces as being in the same league as Bonhoeffer, but Spong effectively destroys his own intellectual credibility by failing to recognize that he is implicated in Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion. Let me explain.

An important touchstone in any consideration of Bonhoeffer’s attack on religion is his remarkable book, Discipleship, whose manuscript was completed exactly 70 years ago this week. Unlike Bonhoeffer’s earlier books, written effortlessly in the unmolested surroundings of the University of Berlin, Discipleship reflects a deep sense of urgency, as though it was demanded by the reality of an escalating crisis.

There had been, in Bonhoeffer’s reckoning, a chronic malfunction in the church’s life which all but neutralized any effective witness it might have to the world. Somehow “grace†had ceased being the power which binds us to Christ, which elicits the repetition of the drama of death and resurrection in the lives of members of the church. It had instead been cheapened, and re-tooled so as to consecrate indiscriminately all the banality, idolatry and godlessness of culture.

When the church peddles a form of “grace†aimed at making people “feel more secure in their godless lives,†it frankly ceases being the church, insisted Bonhoeffer. Having forsaken its duty to be “salt and light,†the church whored itself to the state, offering its wares in exchange for financial security and the benefit of a quiet and peaceful existence. It was thereby reduced to the status of a mere service-provider, the state-sanctioned dispenser of sentimentality and meaningless assurance. He writes: “We gave away preaching and sacraments cheaply; we performed baptisms and confirmations; we absolved an entire people, unquestioned and unconditionally.… When was the world ever Christianized more dreadfully and wickedly than here?â€

This instrumentalization lies at the heart of what Bonhoeffer calls the “religion-concept†(Religionsbegriff). In so far as “religion†represents a mere expression of the human longing for transcendence and meaning, it can be employed by a culture as a pagan affirmation of the people’s inherent divinity. For Bonhoeffer, the shared category of “religion†was the means by which the church had been absorbed into the bloodstream of German culture, and thereby rendered complicit, impotent, idolatrous.

Bonhoeffer’s call for “non-religious Christianity†(Nicht-religiöse Christentum) had nothing to do with abandoning rigid dogma and other forms of traditional Christianity in favour of a more spontaneous communion with the Ground of Being. Instead, it stands for the church having the courage to be the church, to follow Jesus in his uncompromising concreteness, and not to seek refuge in the shadows of pseudo-theological, liturgical or ethical obscurantism. The irony, of course, is that the mishmash of pop-existentialism and flaccid pluralism that Spong urges upon the disaffected faithful is precisely the kind of cancerous religiosity to which Bonhoeffer was opposed. The following passage from Spong’s A New Christianity for a New World speaks for itself:

“God is the Ground of Being who is worshiped when we have the courage to be. Jesus is a God-presence, a doorway, an open channel.… These are the claims that will be part of the Christianity of tomorrow. I am hopeful that such a Christianity can be born and that with it an invitation can be offered to all people to step into their own humanity so deeply that they will find it a doorway into God.â€

While Spong famously predicted that “traditional faith is dying,†Bonhoeffer would have pronounced this brand of “new Christianity†dead on arrival, a carcass from which the breath of the Spirit and the pulse of Jesus’ mission have long since disappeared.

Labels: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ecclesiology, John Shelby Spong, politics, religion, Scott Stephens

A guest-post by Ray Anderson, Fuller Theological Seminary

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian theologian. Rather, one should say that he became a Christian theologian. Eberhard Bethge, his former student and biographer, notes the year 1933 as a “transition from theologian to Christian.†In 1936 Dietrich wrote to a girlfriend and confessed: “I plunged into work in a very unchristian way.… [T]hen something happened, something that has changed and transformed my life to the present day. For the first time I discovered the Bible…. I had often preached. I had seen a great deal of the church, spoken and preached about it, but I had not yet become a Christian†(Bethge 2000, 203-5). By his own admission, his two most scholarly writings, Sanctorum Communio (1927) and Act and Being (1930), were written by a theologian who was not yet a Christian. I take the word “Christian†here to mean “disciple†– one who does not merely believe in Christ, but experiences Christ.

2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a lonely theologian. Though he had a twin sister, was home-schooled by his mother, and was raised in a highly interactive social environment, his decision to become a theologian was met with curiosity and even some scorn. He was caught between his mother’s piety and his father’s open contempt for religion. Kenneth Morris says that in making his decision to become an academic theologian his “father pitied him and told him so†(1986, 75). For all his analysis of the social aspect of the self, Dietrich grew increasingly isolated in the midst of his activity. “With some exaggeration it might be said that because he was lonely he became a theologian, and because he became a theologian he was lonely†(Bethge 2000, 37). When a theologian writes (in Discipleship, 87), “Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads to death†(Jeder Ruf Christi fährt in den Tod), we know that the door to life has become so narrow that only one can pass through at a time. Perhaps Bonhoeffer had already read the bleak observation of the 19th-century German underground theologian, G. J. Hamann: “In a world of fugitives / One who moves in the opposite direction / Will appear to run away.â€

3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a conflicted theologian. While others perceived in Dietrich self-assurance and even a bit of arrogance, he often experienced self-contempt and even periods of depression in his own soul, or what Bethge, who perhaps knew him best, called accidie or tristitia. These periods often followed times when he had been particularly effective in preaching, teaching or leading others. However, as Bethge recalls, after his arrest and imprisonment in 1943, he no longer experienced these times, as he was gripped by a sense of duty. In spite of enforced inaction, he had finally achieved the concrete discipleship that he longed for (Bethge 2000, 506, 833).

4. Bonhoeffer was a worldly theologian. While the “worldliness of Christianity†became a dominant theme in his Letters from Prison, underlying this perspective was his conviction that the God who became human in Jesus Christ abolished the distinction between religion and the world. In his earliest writing he stated that religion is dispensable, God is not. “Not religion, but revelation, not a religious community, but the church: that is what the reality of Jesus Christ means†(Communio 1963, 112). Later, having witnessed the utter failure of the church as a religious institution to act on behalf of the oppressed Jews, he followed Christ out of the church into the world. Only those who live fully in the world have a claim to follow Christ, he wrote from prison. The God of religion whom we seek to call into the world on our behalf, has already entered the world in the form of a suffering God. “The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God†(Letters, 360). The “worldliness†of Christianity is not our invention, but our calling. The ambiguity of this situation, he asserted, is precisely what the incarnation created for us. It is ambiguity that creates prophets.

5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a prophetic theologian. He was one of the first to recognize and point out the disastrous consequences of Hitler’s campaign against the Jews. In June 1933, when the church struggle erupted over the National Bishop (Ludwig Müller) and the opposing General Superintendents were suspended, Bonhoeffer urged an interdict upon all pastoral services (baptisms, weddings, funerals, etc.) as a way of confronting the German Christians with their unholy alliance with Hitler. But he could not arouse sympathy for this drastic action. In fact, Barth advised against this radical proposal, suggesting that “we should let the facts speak for themselves.†In September, following the Brown Synod, Bonhoeffer urged the formation of a new Free Church and even wrote to Barth requesting his support. But here again Bonhoeffer was disappointed at Barth’s counsel to wait until the present leaders “discredited themselves†(Bethge 2000, 292). It was in April 1933 in his article on “the Church and the Jewish Question†that he suggested that the only way to act responsibly would be by “throwing a spoke in the wheel†of the national government. Prophets often die by their own words; theologians seldom do.

6. Bonhoeffer was a postmodern theologian. Postmodern ethics was anticipated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he turned the “modern†basis for ethics (as advocated by Kant) on its head. He wrote: “In the sphere of Christian ethics it is not what ought to be that effects what is, but what is that effects what ought to be†(Communio 1963, 146). The problem of Christian ethics, said Bonhoeffer, is the same as the problem of Christian dogmatics, the realization of the reality of revelation in and among God’s creatures in the form of concreteness, immediacy, and obedience. In a world where good and evil are mixed, and where ambiguity conceals the divine commandment, the Christian’s ethical responsibility is to follow and obey Christ, not merely to adhere to abstract ethical principles. There is no place for “self justification†by virtue of reliance on predetermined principles for action. “Principles are only tools in God’s hands, soon to be thrown away as unserviceable†(Ethics 1995, 71).

7. Bonhoeffer was a post-denominational theologian. What he viewed as the demise of the church was its claim to a special place as a religious institution and its failure to exist in solidarity with the world in obedience to Christ. His participation in ecumenical conversations and dialogue marked a blurring of denominational boundaries and the recognition of authentic Christian existence in mutual friendship, as expressed in his final words sent to Bishop Bell in England from his death cell: “for me it is the end but also the beginning – with him I believe in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests and that our victory is certain – tell him too that I have never forgotten his words at our last meeting.†Writing from prison, his view of the church’s future was incarnational and ethical in a truly worldly sense. “The church is the church only when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give always all its property to those in need…. The church must share in the most secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving†(Letters, 382). Denominations are religious institutions at the edge of the world; the church is an incarnational presence in the midst of the world.

8. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a practical theologian. Practical theology deals with God’s self-revelation and activity through the life and ministry of human beings. From the early Barth, Bonhoeffer learned that the act of God reveals the being of God. His second dissertation, Act and Being (1930), attempted to bring Barth’s concept of “pure act†into the historical realm through Heidegger. But Bonhoeffer was never a disciple of Barth. True, Barth led him away from idealism into critical realism with regard to divine revelation, but God’s life and activity through the human person Jesus Christ became for Bonhoeffer the praxis of revelation and thus the form of practical theology. His Christology was orthodox so far as Christ is the form of God in the world, but practical so far as the Christian is the form of Christ in the world. Because the former was merely a dogmatic assumption, his own theological praxis was concerned with action prior to reflection – a statement that scandalized his students.

9. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a maverick theologian. John Maverick was a 19th-century Texas rancher and legislator who received a herd of cattle in payment of a bill and turned them loose on the range without a brand. When one of them turned up without a brand, it was assumed to be one of Maverick’s. Many have tried to mark Dietrich with their own brand, to no avail! He slipped away from the death of God theologians when they realized that the same man who wrote from prison about living in a world without God was the one who invited a Russian atheist fellow prisoner to participate in a final communion service just before being executed. Pacifists put a claim on him but felt betrayed by his admission that he would kill Hitler himself if the lot fell to him as a member of the conspiracy. Evangelicals like his talk about Jesus but wish Bonhoeffer had been more concerned about his unsaved relatives and friends. Social activists applaud him for his concern for the oppressed but are embarrassed by his orthodox Christology. Even in death, as in life, he remained unbranded.

10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a martyred theologian. There is disagreement over this, of course. His complicity in the conspiracy thrust him directly into political resistance. In the minds of many traditional Lutherans, this excluded him from being a Christian martyr. In a sermon preached in 1932 he had this to say about martyrs: “the blood of martyrs might once again be demanded, but this blood, if we really have the courage and loyalty to shed it, will not be innocent, shining like that of the first witnesses for the faith. On our blood lies heavy guilt, the guilt of the unprofitable servant who is cast into outer darkness†(Bethge 1975, 155). By his own definition, he was a martyr. He never claimed justification for his actions, other than to assume guilt as a necessary component of responsible action. Whether it was true or not, he thought that his actions, to the very end, were those of a Christian disciple in obedience to Christ. Martyrs live for what they confess to be true, and die for it. Only those who confess the same truth will call a person a martyr.

Labels: church history, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, doing theology, ecclesiology, ethics, politics, Ray Anderson

Understanding the function of tradition remains a central task for theology today – and ecumenical progress requires an ever deeper understanding not only of one’s own tradition, but also of the internal “grammar†of other Christian traditions. But this is by no means easy. Indeed, as Gerhard Ebeling once remarked, relatively few Christians have ever had to made a real choice between traditions – in most cases, one’s own tradition simply maintains its own powerful self-evidentness in contrast to all other traditions.

Ebeling’s observation highlights the complex difficulties surrounding ecumenical understanding: if I have never encountered (say) the Roman Catholic tradition as a genuine possibility for faith, and so have never had to choose between this possibility and the possibility of my own tradition, then I’ve not yet really begun to understand the Roman Catholic tradition at all.

For this reason, we can learn a lot from people who have made a transition from one Christian tradition to another. Such people have experienced tradition itself – they have encountered both the non-self-evidentness of their own tradition, and the attractiveness and coherence of another tradition. So if we listen to the stories of people who have made such ecclesial transitions, it’s possible that the function of tradition will become a little more translucent, a little more thinkable.

With that in mind, we’re starting a new series here at F&T, entitled “Encounters with Tradition.†The series will feature guest-posts from several people who have made a transition from one Christian tradition to another – from Protestant to Catholic, from Baptist to Anglican, from evangelical to post-evangelical, and so on.

Perhaps these stories of diverse “encounters with tradition†will help us all to encounter our own (and other) traditions in a fresh way.

Labels: ecclesiology, ecumenical, tradition

A few days ago, Rowan Williams was in Toronto, and he gave a lecture on “The Bible: Reading and Hearing.†The full text is available online – it’s a profound and brilliant theological meditation on the place of biblical interpretation within the eucharistic life of the church. Here’s an excerpt:

“[T]he ‘time’ in which we hear Scripture is not like ordinary time. We are contemporary with events remote in history; we are caught up in the time of recitation, when we are to reimagine ourselves. For this moment, we exist simply as listeners, suspending our questions while the question is put to us of how we are to speak afresh about ourselves.â€

Labels: ecclesiology, lectures, Rowan Williams, Scripture

A couple of weeks ago, Benedict XVI released the apostolic exhortation “Sacramentum Caritatis†(Sacrament of Love), which he described as a complement to his first encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est†(God Is Love). In case you haven’t seen this yet, it’s a fascinating and impressive exhortation that deserves a close reading (all 97 paragraphs!) – you can see the full English text here.

Although both Protestants and progressive Catholics will have many reservations with the document, it is nevertheless a beautiful theological and pastoral meditation on the eucharistic mystery. As anticipated, the Holy Father reinforces some of the most problematic aspects of Catholic teaching, such as the necessity of priestly celibacy (§24), the refusal of the eucharist to divorced and remarried persons (§29), and the eucharistic obligation of Catholic politicians to “support laws inspired by values grounded in human nature†(§83). He also advocates the reintroduction of the Latin Mass (§62) with Gregorian chants (§42), as well as a series of more modest (and very sensible) reforms in relation to the offertory (§49), the exchange of peace (§47), and the homily (§45).

The exhortation concludes on a joyful note that reiterates the relation between eucharist and mission: “The Eucharist makes us discover that Christ, risen from the dead, is our contemporary in the mystery of the Church, his body. Of this mystery of love we have become witnesses. Let us encourage one another to walk joyfully, our hearts filled with wonder, towards our encounter with the Holy Eucharist, so that we may experience and proclaim to others the truth of the words with which Jesus took leave of his disciples: ‘Lo, I am with you always, until the end of the world’†(§97).

Labels: Benedict XVI, ecclesiology, eucharist, liturgy

by Kim Fabricius

1. Two’s company, three’s a crowd: pneumatology has always been the odd “ology†out in trinitarian thought. In the Nicene Creed (325), the third article is so minimalist it’s almost a footnote. Only in the aftermath of Nicaea, mainly as a result of Basil of Caesarea duking it out with the Pneumatomachi, did the Holy Spirit get some extended creed cred at Constantinople in 381. Then there was the domestic bust-up between East and West over the filioque clause from the 9th century, leading to the messy divorce of 1054. In the 20th century the Pentecostal and charismatic movements foregrounded the Spirit in the Western church, but, again, not without controversy. No doubt about it: while often rather anonymous, the Spirit is a holy troublemaker.

2. The Holy Spirit is God. By “appropriation,†after a nod to creation, we tend to associate the Spirit with ecclesiology, and also with anthropology – the Spirit within us (as in Calvin’s “testimonium internumâ€) and among us (as in John V. Taylor’s “Go-Betweenâ€). And that’s okay, indeed crucial – as long as there is no collapse into immanentism. But immanence is always ominously imminent: witness the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism, the historicism and subjectivism of liberal theology, and the ecclesiomonistic preoccupations of much postliberal theology. The Holy Spirit must never be confused with, collapsed into, or commandeered by the human spirit or the church. The Holy Spirit is God.

3. What about the filioque? Too much ink, let alone blood, has already been spilt on this contested issue for me to add to it. There are good biblical as well as patristic grounds for positions both pro and contra. The pneumatological advantages of a double procession include: a stress on the Spirit as personal being rather than impersonal force, a specific (Christological) content and criterion for discerning the spirits, a guard against lapsing into natural theology, pantheism, and fuzzy mysticism. The pneumatological advantages of a single procession include: an assurance of the cosmic and global sweep of the Sprit’s activity, a break on Christomonism, a bulwark against dualism, modalism, and subordinationism. Of course the Western church, with its unilateral action, must take most of the blame for the Great Divorce. In my view, it should now retake the initiative, this time in reconciliation, with the widely accepted ecumenical formula that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father through the Son.â€

4. Is the Holy Spirit feminine? Don’t be silly! None of the Trinitarian personae is gendered. And I’m afraid the Fathers would smile at any sisters (and brothers) who think they thought otherwise. Thus the idea that taking the Spirit to be feminine would provide a maternal balance to masculine and patriarchal Father-Son imagery rests on a mistake at source, quite misunderstanding the nature of trinitarian imagery and theological language. The intention of revisionists is to achieve a balanced differentiation, and thus transcendence, of the sexes in God, but I wonder if it doesn’t rather just sex him/her up, misleading the church into a kind of Canaanite captivity. The Holy Spirit is neither he, she, nor it. The Holy Spirit is God.

5. And God is who God is in God’s acts. What, then, does the Holy Spirit do? In the Old Testament, the Spirit is the divine dynamo that quickens life, empowers people, and inspires prophets. In the (synoptic) gospels, the Spirit quickens, empowers, and inspires Jesus. It is Luke, in particular, who highlights the intimate connection between the Holy Spirit and Jesus – in his birth, his baptism, his temptations, his Nazareth manifesto, his healings, his prayer-life, his passion – to which Paul adds his resurrection. Colin Gunton emphasises the role of the Spirit as “the mediator of the Son’s relation to the Father in both time and eternity,†as the source of the “otherness and particularity†of Jesus, and as the agent of his freedom and obedience. “The Spirit,†says Kathryn Tanner, “radiates the humanity of Jesus.†Gunton also stresses that it is the Spirit “who forms a body for the Son.â€

6. Eugene F. Rogers picks up this theme in After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West (2005), and extends the discussion to the resurrection and ascension – and to Pentecost and beyond. “In the world,†Rogers writes, “the Spirit is not Person or thing, because the Spirit is Person on thing. And the Spirit is Person on thing because the Spirit is Person on Person. The Spirit rests on material bodies in the economy, because she rests on the Son in the Trinity.†Again: “To think about the Spirit it will not do to think ‘spiritually’: to think about the Spirit you have to think materially.†Following Rogers’ trajectory, I would suggest that there are rich pickings here for a political pneumatology: the Spirit of Jubilee who inspires a praxis of liberation and an economy of grace.

7. The church is itself a body-politic, instituted by the ascended Christ, constituted as the koinonia of the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, however, koinos (unclean) is the exact opposite of hagios (holy). And as Jesus crossed cultic boundaries, Paul Avis ventures that “if the Old Testament concept of holiness means separation, the New Testament concept means, even more than ethics, participation.†Which is to say that it is not moral rectitude but the forgiveness of sins – the credal characteristic of the communio sanctorum – that distinguishes the citizenship and embodies the holiness of the church. “There is no greater sinner than the Christian church,†said Luther. Which is why in the ecclesial body-politic, the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer and the practice of mutual confession are the centre of the civics of sanctification.

8. The Holy Spirit gathers the church – in order to send the church. “The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning†(Emil Brunner). In his seminal Transforming Mission, David Bosch observes that whereas Paul relates pneumatology primarily to the church, “the intimate linking of pneumatology and mission is Luke’s distinctive contribution to the early church’s missionary paradigm…. For Luke, the concept of the Spirit sealed the kinship between God’s universal will to save, the liberating ministry of Jesus, and the worldwide mission of the church.†Bosch also observes that while the early Fathers focussed on the Spirit “as the agent of sanctification or as the guarantor of apostolicity,†and the Reformers “put the major emphasis on the work of the Spirit as bearing witness to and interpreting the Word of God,†it was only in the twentieth century that there was “a gradual rediscovery of the intrinsic missionary character of the Holy Spirit.â€

9. Mission, however, transcends monological evangelism. Missionaries once commonly spoke of “the great unreached.†“Unreached by whom?†I ask. Religious pluralism? On the contrary, (a) I find the exclusivism-inclusivism-pluralism paradigm confused and unworkable; and (b) I resist a purely conversionist missiology precisely on the basis of a high Christology, a cosmic pneumatology, and a robust ecclesiology. The Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov says, “We know where the church is; it is not for us to judge where the church is not.†Thus the Holy Spirit inspires the church to engage in mission without closure, mission that does not predetermine the divine action, mission practiced as dialogue, a listening as well as a speaking witness. Indeed Rowan Williams (in a fascinating essay “The Finality of Christâ€) speaks of a “readiness for dispossession,†warns of the “seductions of ‘totalized’ meaning,†and, trying to break the logjam of the exclusivism-inclusivism-pluralism paradigm, points to a Christ that, as the revelation of God, “is God’s question, no more, no less. Being a Christian is being held to that question in such a way that the world of religious discourse may hear it.â€

10. The Holy Spirit is the divine glorifier. After Moltmann, both Pannenberg and Robert Jenson find a direct connection between pneumatology and eschatology. Both accord an ontological priority to the future and link it to the Spirit: Pannenberg speaks of the future as God’s mode of being, and Jenson says that “the Spirit is God’s own future that he is looking forward to.†They both seem to bind God’s deity to the perfecting work of the Spirit, which is the apotheosis of creation. Although there are philosophical (Hegelian) problems with this vision, and theological dangers too, there is an awesome boldness, beauty, and grandeur to it. In the eschaton, the Holy Spirit is stage centre, cover of anonymity blown, face-to-face in the faces of all the redeemed in their infinite diversity (Vladimir Lossky). The end is doxology.

Labels: doctrine of God, ecclesiology, Holy Spirit, Kim Fabricius, Trinity

by Kim Fabricius

1. To adapt a famous saying of Emil Brunner, the church exists by ecumenism as fire exists by burning. Church unity is not an optional extra, or AOB on the parish or presbytery agenda, or a responsibility that can be delegated to the ecumaniacs, it is integral to MOAB, the ministry of all believers. Ecumenism is not an ecclesial suggestion, it is a dominical command.

2. In the Farewell Discourse in John, Jesus asks the Father to sanctify his disciples in the truth as he sends them into the world. Then he prays: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may be one. As you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world will believe that you have sent me (John 17:20-21). The ecumenical imperative is inherent in the missionary imperative. How can the church, with integrity, proclaim shalom to the world when we are not a truly catholic koinonia? And our catholicity must be recognisably visible; a merely “spiritual†unity is a form of ecclesial docetism.

3. And speaking of koinonia and shalom: consider the cases of Martin Niemöller and John Howard Yoder. Niemöller said, “Because I was an ecumenist, I became a pacifist,†while Yoder observed that the ecumenical movement has its roots not only in the mission field but also in the peace movement. However my intention is not only to draw attention to the connection between unity and non-violence, my more general point is this: orthopraxy should be as integral to the ecumenical project as orthodoxy. After all, in the New Testament unity in ethics is no less central than unity in doctrine. Faith and Order Departments are not the only bureaus in our ecumenical instruments.

4. Nor can faith and order issues be reduced to a checklist where churches tick the boxes. Which leads to the question: Do you think of Christian unity primarily in terms of consensus to be reached, or koinonia to be received and witness to be shared? If the former, it would not be surprising if you were indifferent to ecumenism – indeed you would be right to be so: unity-as-consensus is always but a hair’s breadth from a kind of works righteousness. We are called not to agree with each other but to love one another.

5. We are called to be one because God is one. But the one God is Trinity: that is why unity cannot mean uniformity. The watchword of ecclesial diversity can sometimes give the impression that it is simply a tactical ploy to appease Christians who value freedom of conscience and fear centralised authority. On the contrary, it issues from the very nature of God. And scholars as denominationally diverse as Ernst Käsemann, James Dunn, and Raymond Brown confirm that “there is not just a narrow stream of faith in Jesus in the New Testament, but a great wide river of many currents†(Jean Mayland). There are, of course, limits to acceptable diversity, but I would suggest that they lie within the parameters of: (a) a common baptism, (b) a Trinitarian confession of faith, and (c) a belief in Christ crucified and risen as Lord and Saviour. All else, I suggest, is adiaphora – particularly matters of polity. Moreover, it would be unreasonable to expect more agreement between our churches than we accept within our churches.

6. And episcopacy? There is no question about espicopé (oversight) as such. The question is mono-episcopacy. The question is complicated by what John Webster rightly calls “naïve†accounts of apostolic succession – “their incapacity to envisage the history of episcopacy as political and ideological.†And non-episcopal churches, of course, cannot accept that mono-episcopacy is the esse of the church – the ascended, ruling Christ alone, the one high priest (Hebrews) and έπίσκοπος of our souls (I Peter 2:25), is the esse of the church. But that does not prevent us from being open to mono-episcopacy as the practical, rather than constitutive, bene esse of the church, along the lines of what Calvin called “convenienceâ€, and what we might call “practical reasonâ€. The crucial question is: does mono-episcopacy best witness to the ministry of Christ in his church, and best serve the apostolic project of missio Spiritus? Anglicans and Lutherans – as well as non-episcopal churches! – have recently shown some movement on questions concerning the nature of episcopacy and the reconstruction of the episcopate. Of course if Rome pursues the Frank Sinatra school of ecumenism – “I did it my way†– the future is bleak. But you know the old saying: At the next Vatican council the bishops will bring their wives – and at the one after that they will bring their husbands!

7. An even more promising suggestion that relativises the issue of mono-episcopacy comes from the 19th century Wesleyan ecclesiologist Benjamin Gregory. Commenting on the visit of Peter and John to new Christian communities in Samaria (Acts 8), Gregory observed that “whenever they found the work of the Spirit, the apostles lost no time in recognising, receiving, and connecting that which had been established independently of their own initiative.†Which insight leads Gregory to what the Methodist theologian David Carter calls a doctrine of apostolic recognition: namely, that “it should be the duty of the leaders of any church that claims ... a genuine apostolic continuity to recognise the preservation ... of Christianity under whatever forms and structures it may find.†And a doctrine of apostolic recognition, it seems to me, entails, at least, a generous approach to eucharistic hospitality. As Paul tells the divided church at Corinth, it is not because there is one body that there is one loaf, just the reverse: because there is one loaf, there is one body. The fraction prohibits faction. Ultimately, apostolic recognition rests on the acknowledgement that our unity is in Christ alone.

8. Of course it is not only conservative Catholics who can frustrate ecumenical initiatives, conservative evangelicals can be equally obstructive. The card they usually play is that truth trumps unity, and they are fond of citing Ephesians 4:15ff. George Caird, however, comments on “speaking the truth in loveâ€: “Paul is not recommending frankness of speech tempered by consideration, nor is he suggesting that the claims of truth and love must be held in some sort of tension. There is no Christian truth which is not ‘rooted and grounded in love’, and love is the only legitimate test of men’s adherence to the truth of the gospel.... Those who perpetuate the divisions of Christendom on the grounds of their loyalty to truth can draw no support from this epistle.†Or as I once heard a Catholic theologian expound I Corinthians 13: unity of charity trumps unity of faith.

9. In my view, perhaps the greatest obstacle to an ecumenical future is the refusal to acknowledge our anti-ecumenical pasts. Catholics have killed Protestants, and Protestants have killed Catholics – indeed Protestants have killed other Protestants. I submit that progress in unity will be a pseudo-progress, a movement in historical denial, unless we engage in specific, collective, and mutual acts of penitence, forgiveness, and pledges of “Never again!†Only with the healing of memories can the church proceed in a pilgrimage of hope and promise. And, of course, repentance, recognition, and reconciliation are only staging posts on the ecumenical journey: there is an elephant in the caravan and its name is Israel. And journey’s end is the whole οίκουμένη.

10. Finally, a confession: I am part of the ecumenical problem, not its solution. The fact of the matter is that ecumenical work always seems to depend on church leaders, the men at the top – and they usually are men – working at the national or international level, while Christians at the grassroots are marginalised and patronised. Moreover, our discussions tend to focus on deracinated ideas, divorced from their social location and unrelated to questions of ideology and power. They are also often off the pace of hermeneutical developments – and, crucially, contemporary biblical theology. The recent Common Statement by Lutherans and Roman Catholics on the doctrine of justification, for example, “ecumenical breakthrough†though it may be, takes little account of the “new perspective on Paul†that has been reconfiguring New Testament studies since the 1970s. Dogmatic theologians are now rightly expected to be fluent exegetes; we should expect no less from ecumenical theologians. With regular, informed, and prayerful meeting around the Word in local communities, dry bones may yet be knit together and live.

Postscript: A Joke
The Trinity were discussing their upcoming holidays. The Father said, “I think I’ll go somewhere in Africa this year: they’re still so patriarchal there.†The Son said, “I’m going to Jerusalem again: they seem to like me there, and I get such good service.†“What about you?†the Father and Son asked the Spirit. The Spirit replied: “Rome: I’ve never been there before.†[For Rome, feel free to substitute Geneva, Wittenberg, Canterbury, Constantinople, etc.]

Labels: ecclesiology, ecumenical, Kim Fabricius

Timothy George, ed., God the Holy Trinity: Reflections on Christian Faith and Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 175 pp. (with thanks to Baker Academic for a review copy)

This little volume draws together nine papers originally presented at a Beeson Divinity School symposium on the Trinity. The papers, edited by Timothy George, represent a wide range of ecclesial traditions: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Baptist, Holiness, and Presbyterian. The collection aims not at conceptual discussion of trinitarian theology, but rather at elucidating the relationship between that doctrine and the concrete life of Christian faith and worship. Thus the crucial question addressed is: “How does the doctrine of the Trinity shape the ways of the Christian life, its worship and prayer, its service and mission?†(p. 13).

In the opening paper, Alister McGrath emphasises the fundamental mystery of trinitarian dogma: “The doctrine of the Trinity represents a chastened admission that we are unable to master God†(p. 20). McGrath thus wonders whether some contemporary trinitarian thought has become too speculative and too detached from the witness of Scripture. His target here is especially social doctrines of the Trinity, which leave one “with a sense of bafflement†at how “a series of rather ambitious social and communitarian doctrines [can be deduced] from the mystery of the Trinity†(pp. 31-32). In contrast, McGrath follows Robert W. Jenson in arguing that the doctrine of the Trinity “identifies and names the Christian God,†so that the doctrine functions as “an instrument of theological precision, which forces us to be explicit about the God under discussion†(pp. 33-34).

McGrath’s paper sets the stage for the rest of the collection, since the remaining essays focus on the significance of the Trinity for the concrete practices and experiences of Christian faith. Gerald Bray argues that the doctrine of the Trinity did not arise from philosophical speculation in the early church, but “from the realities of Christian spiritual experience†(p. 55); and James Earl Massey offers a fascinating account of the underlying trinitarianism of the African-American spirituals. Avery Dulles emphasises the ecumenical significance of the concept of the divine processions of the Son and Spirit, while J. I. Packer gives an account of John Owen’s Puritan trinitarian piety. Timothy George highlights the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity for inter-faith dialogue between Christianity and Islam, and Ellen Charry seeks to revive the notion of the divine perfections by emphasising their practical and soteriological significance.

The most enjoyable chapter, however, is Frederica Mathewes-Green’s reflection on Rublev’s icon of the Trinity. Mathewes-Green is a popular Eastern Orthodox writer rather than a theologian; but she offers a beautiful, concise meditation on Rublev’s depiction of the Trinity. As in much iconography, Rublev “distort[s] perspective in order to give us a sensation that the scene is bursting out toward us, with the chalice in the center pressing itself our wayâ€; as the scene rushes towards us, this distorted perspective gives us a sense “of being off-balance in an unfamiliar, powerful world†(p. 89). Most significantly, though, Mathewes-Green observes that none of Rublev’s three figures is speaking: “The tranquillity of their silence is sufficient†(p. 90).

Finally, the volume closes with a moving sermon by Cornelius Plantinga: “From all eternity inside God, inside the mystery of God …, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit make room for each other, envelop each other, call attention to each other, glorify one another. It is the ceaseless exchange of vitality, the endless expense of spirit upon spirit in eternal triplicate life. The only competition in glory of this kind is to outdo one another in love†(p. 155).

Labels: book reviews, ecclesiology, ecumenical, Trinity

“[W]hat the bread and cup as visible words specifically say, is precisely something about the embodiment of Christ in the life of the church. That Christ is indeed present as body, that he is not in our midst as a disembodied pure spirit, is itself an essential part of the gospel proclamation. If Christ were not present in the body, every gospel-address would be false.â€

—Robert W. Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), p. 107.

Labels: ecclesiology, eucharist, Robert W. Jenson

Andrew Burgess, The Ascension in Karl Barth (Barth Studies Series; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 209 pp. (with thanks to Ashgate for the review copy)

Douglas Farrow’s 1999 work on Ascension and Ecclesia has gone a long way towards reviving interest in the theological significance of Jesus’ ascension. In a more recent article, Farrow suggests that Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics IV is “one of the major works of ascension theology†– and in this new study, Andrew Burgess seeks to develop this suggestion by demonstrating that the concept of “ascension†plays an important role throughout the Church Dogmatics.

Although Barth does not often explicitly affirm Jesus’ ascension, Burgess proposes that the ascension functions as “a presupposition in Barth’s thought†(p. 23), and he argues that this presupposition has far-reaching implications for the whole dogmatic structure of Barth’s theology.

For Barth, “the ascension informs a dynamic of presence and absence – Jesus Christ’s coincident presence and absence during ‘this time between’†(p. 19). The church is the community that exists in this “time between,†in the dialectical space between Christ’s presence and absence. Burgess thus highlights the significance of ascension in Barth’s conception of time. Through his lordly agency, Jesus “reaches into the lives of His people … in such a way that they are now made to share His time†(p. 38). Barth’s whole account of ecclesiology and Christian life is thus structured by this view of the church’s existence in the “time between.â€

One of Burgess’ most interesting suggestions is that Barth’s fundamental disagreement wi