Don’t Want To Add

I would ruin it if I did add to it:

To say that Jesus rose from the dead is, among other things, to say that in spite of the fact that his love for us in obedience to his mission led to his death — or in fact because his love led to his death — he is still present to us, really present to us and loving us in his full bodily reality. It is not just that we remember him or imitate him, or that he lives on in a religious tradition. The good news is that he rose from the dead, that he went through real death to a new kind of bodily life with us. So that when we encounter someone who needs us, when we find the hungry and the imprisoned and the homeless, we can really say that here we encounter Christ, not in some metaphorical way, but literally. He personally is with us. The difference between having faith in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus and not having such faith is, at one level, the difference between really discovering Jesus in the needy and oppressed, and simply thinking that it is a rather beautiful idea. It is the difference between really believing, like Abraham, that God asks the impossible of us, to find life through death, creation through destruction, that God makes the impossible possible for us, and not believing in God — thereby making him just some part of the machinery of our world.
[ HT: ID ]

Powerful

Thus the specific morality of the gospel is not a mater of “laws.” The gospel’s moral discourse does not say “Do this and do that because you ought/must/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” It does not have the “if . . . then . . .” form. It imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all. It does not say “Do . . . , because otherwise you won’t get into heaven.” It does not say—with a bit more religious sophistication: “Do . . . , because, although of course God will accept you anyway, that is what good Christians do.” It does not even say: “Do . . . , because virtue is its own reward.” The moral discourse of the gospel says only: “You may do . . . , because Jesus lives” (Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 81, 82).Inhabitio Dei

Orthodox Salvation

[HT: Jesus Creed]

Contemporaneous

Paul’s theme is ‘the activity of God then and now’; his one question is: ‘What was God doing in Jerusalem that is revealing as to what God is doing now in Galatia?’ Again, the contemporaneity of God’s action is not a mere application of an event that belongs essentially to the past. God is unceasingly active through the apocalypse of the gospel announcement: ‘for Paul, the history of the gospel is what it is because the God who acted in it is the God who is now acting in it’. The saving event happens in the word of the gospel. The proclamation of Christ’s ‘there and then’ is itself the mode of Christ’s redemptive presence ‘here and now’. Ben Myers

The Protestantism I was brought up in certainly relegated the Gospel action of God to the distant past. Our present action of faith was in respect to what occurred, not what is occurring. There was never a question of what God is doing now because of what he did then. Or even a special understanding that it was the same God and the same plan of redemption. The inherent goal of every preached message was always how we can appropriate what happened then for ourselves now. Moving out of that theological ghetto has, and continues to be, incredibly liberating for my faith.

Sex and Identity

An interesting little conversation took place a while ago. I am certainly late to posting on this, in fact it has been sitting around as a draft for a while. I am certainly in no place to make a judgment, rather I aim to recount all of it and gather facts. Certainly this issue has been perplexing the Church for several years now, specifically the Lutheran and Anglican denominations. There are certainly issues worth highlighting.

“If Christ [i.e. not Freud] is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness” – since Jesus himself did not participate in any of these experiences.

The quote within the quote there is the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. And it is an incontrovertible fact. Any Christocentric approach of anthropology must take this line. One can always cease to be Christocentric anthropologically, and I imagine that some have, but one is left to argue why that understanding should be preferred over the authentic and perfect humanity of Christ. I think Barth is right to underscore that our sexuality is a part of our identity, you would have an uphill battle in our times to prove otherwise. Perhaps he was mistaken to imagine that is it the pinnacle or underlying issue of our humanity.

Foucault’s argument shows that we are obsessed not with sex itself (as a physical act), but with “the truth of sex” – with the idea that sex is a revelation of truth.

For myself I find this to be true. The temptation of the act lies not so much in the act itself, but what beyond the act is signified. If sex, and sexuality, is just a red herring for us where might we look?

For one thing, I think Christians ought to take much more seriously the category of friendship, while thinking a good deal more critically about the unbridled theologisation of marriage and the so-called “family unit”

I find the overall statement of the Gospel, as evidenced in the New Testament to be specifically a new family. As I’ve become more keen, thanks to some training, to pick out the civil religion instituted as a part of the United States, I wonder just how much this idea of the family unit is tainted. Surely the thrust of the Gospel message is an entirely new community. More than a single family living detached from every other single family. This intense level of friendship is hard to sustain – that I am sure, on very few occasions I’ve tried.

Marriage, he contends, offers an expression of love and sexuality not realisable in any other human relationship, but it is no more human than any other human task or relationship.

Imagine holding marriage and friendship on the same level of humanness? I’ve never conceived of them that way. I ought to and see what comes of it. Again, if we’re to have a Christocentric approach, what is the epitome of humanity? Self-giving, self-sacrificial love with a goal of God’s will being done in the world. What does that look like in a friendship, in a marriage, in a community of faith? That ought to be what we look towards when we ask ourselves these kinds of questions, is it not?

It may, through the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit be commandeered and become in many and sundry ways a parable of the kingdom, just as many of the trivial aspects of human life are open to God’s interruption and transfiguration. But, insofar as the meaning of authentic human existence, sexuality tells us nothing. Not if we really believe that Jesus defines for us what it means to be be human. And, further to this point, only when we allow sex to be truly and wonderfully insignificant, to be trivial, will it be able to be received as a gift rather than gulpingly grasped in an idolatrous fit of fetishizing.

Sexuality and Lonliness

Wesley Hill has a very moving and truthful story for all of us to hear. He is a homosexual Christian desperately trying to understand his sexuality in light of Christianity.

I know of no more difficult path for a person of integrity to tread. Phillip Yancey

Wesley tells us that his most powerful emotion is loneliness. A disturbing loneliness that goes beyond anything I could imagine. And at times in my life I’ve been very depressed and lonely. I would not dare to put my feelings of loneliness anywhere near his. He has consciously chosen a path which he feels will lead him closer to his Lord, despite that path being the anti-thesis of his being. He does not allow himself the choice of living a non-celibate life. I could not imagine placing that kind of a barrier on my own future, having pre-made a decision that I would never marry and never enjoy another’s life intimately and sexually. Wesley’s choice is the Gospel Choice – it is the highest expression of loyalty to Christ. For that Wesley deserves our praise, compassion, brotherhood, and friendship. He ends with a question that the entire Church needs to answer for themselves.

Will the Church shelter and nourish and humanize those who are deeply lonely and struggling desperately to remain faithful?

Answering no to that is to be anti-Gospel.

Bonhoeffer’s Ethics 1

for my own note-taking and posterity

The Love of God and the Decay of the World

I appreciated the straight-line of logic employed by Bonhoeffer. He starts at one point, plots a trajectory and just keeps going. His first move is straight out of Genesis, and in my opinion right on point.

The knowledge of good and evil shows he is no longer at one with his origin

In a world where relativism reigns, the defeat of other ethical systems by supplanting the knowledge of right from wrong, good from bad, with the lack of a choice based on one’s participation in Christ is genius both on the philosophical and pastoral level. To show that Christian ethics is something wholly other than every other ethics is a unique move. The inherent claim there is that Christianity cannot be compared with the other institutions and systems of thought – there is something significantly difference about Christianity. With that intuition I heartily agree.

Bonhoeffer goes on to exemplify this distinction of knowing good and evil as setting oneself in the place of God, as the judge, the arbiter of what is right and wrong. To judge as if one sets right and wrong is hypocritical, since God is the one who sets good and evil. Jesus’ command to “judge not and you shall not be judged” is therefore to deny oneself the place which is rightly God’s. To not imagine that you are the one who is to uphold the law of God, but rather, to only do the will of God. And that will of God is exactly reconciling the fall whereby which we know good and evil.

To undo that knowledge – which Bonhoeffer explains is not that we have gained anything we previously did not know, it is merely a changed perspective that we now can put ourselves in God’s place giving ourselves a choice that is rightly God’s – is the goal of reconciliation. To know, only in the light of Christ who is the will of God, is reconciliation. And reconciliation does not perform the judgment that knowing good and evil does. Whereby one judges according to his own definition of good and evil, he determines to make every man is his own image, not in God’s image. To know, through union, and what Bonhoeffer calls action, is the way to act in the will of God, and not create disunion.

These very actions that create peace and unity is what love is. Though we cannot purely define is that way. Bonhoeffer demands that we understand God is love. Not that we know what love is, therefore we know who God is. This love comes from God, and is God’s, and His alone. Our love, is merely God’s love that we express, whether it be to our neighbor or back to God. That is the only love available. Any other is based on selfishness (which I have written about here before). If Christ is the supreme revelation of God, and God based on his love for us sent his Son to die for us – in order to recreate that unity which was lost – this is how we should understand love. Jesus’ suffering and death was an action that created unity. Though Bonhoeffer warns us that love is not defined by the action, but by the man Jesus.

High Places and Institutions

When I talk about fighting the power of evil in high places, and fighting institutions with a Gospel message, this is what I’m talking about.

Gospel as Story

This is a re-post of an article I wrote Sept 8, 2008

The Gospel story is so significant because it has real power. When Paul writes in Rom 1.18 that the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation he is right on. A story, about what God is going to do, about Jesus and what he did, and about you is God’s power. Why? Because that Story has the ability to change reality here and now. More and more I am realizing that God’s salvation is less and less about the future date in which Jesus will separate goats and sheep. Why is that true? Because the goats and sheep are already manifesting themselves today. We should already know, by our actions, which side we are on. God’s salvation is not an ethereal concept! Go and tell the Jews who walked across dry land fleeing the Egyptians that God’s salvation is a feeling in your heart. They would laugh at you. Tell David who God saved from Saul an seated as the King of Israel about this ethereal salvation. No salvation is to be found today. Today is the day of salvation. We find it when God enters our life and changes us, all the way around, from the power of sin to the power of life.

Lot’s of stories have the ability to change reality here and now. Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech was just a story. But for the tens of thousands of people who heard it that day on the DC mall were struck by it. Most of those people knew they were listening to history. Most of those people took that story and made it their own. That story changed them and the way they looked at the world. This is why Story is powerful. His speech went to war against the prevailing ideas of the time, and won. God’s Gospel is even more powerful because God is behind. In that Story, God is actually going to war.

Why does this happen? Because when what Jesus did on the cross is received by a person, it changes how they think about the world, about God, and even about themselves. When God’s plan for the world is understood by a person, they understand not to abuse the world, that God has not left it, or them, behind – but in fact is working, even now, in them and through them, to redeem it all. And that is valuable to how you are going to see the world, and what you’re going to do in the world. You are then left with the decision to “convert” which really means, to live accordingly with God’s unfolding story. That is surely what the early Christians did. They didn’t stop being Jews and change religions. They were still Jews, they just continued on with what Jesus was doing – since God was clearly working with Jesus. They kept Jesus’ story going.

And when you choose to live according to God’s story you live a certain way. You don’t abuse the world, or others. You end up looking like Jesus. Everything that the Gospel has told you about how God sees the world impacts how you see others and the issues in your day. This is how God’s Story, the Gospel, undermines our worldview. This is how the Church is supposed to look different from the world. Because the Church will have the same worldview, because they have all converted according to the same Story. They don’t buy in to the world’s carnivorous ambition, abusive tendencies, or wasteful ways. They find their joy in what God is doing, what God is redeeming, not what the world is destroying. And they get involved in God’s redeeming work in the world.

What’s the Deal With Resurrection?

I really have seven hundred places I could start, but this is closest to the main point I want to talk about:

This true meaning has remained hidden because the Church has trivialised it and the world has rubbished it. The Church has turned Jesus’s Resurrection into a “happy ending” after the dark and messy story of Good Friday, often scaling it down so that “resurrection” becomes a fancy way of saying “He went to Heaven”. Easter then means: “There really is life after death”…

Now, suddenly, the real meaning of Easter comes into view, as well as the real reason why it has been trivialised and sidelined. Easter is about a new creation that has already begun. God is remaking His world, challenging all the other powers that think that is their job. The rich, wise order of creation and its glorious, abundant beauty are reaffirmed on the other side of the thing that always threatens justice and beauty – death. Christianity’s critics have always sneered that nothing has changed. But everything has. The world is a different place.
NT Wright in Times Online

I will be the first to admit that resurrection scares the be-Jesus out of me. I do not, for one second, admit to understand what all the implications are. But I am left with certain facts. Jesus was raised bodily, not to live as he formerly lived, but to live a much more real, full, whole, holy, glorified existence. The existence Paul says we “we will be like him”. He was raised in the middle of history, far before anyone expected the resurrection to happen. After all – the only category anyone in the first century had was that “this must be the end – we just witnessed resurrection”. So, don’t be surprised when that is exactly the attitude they hold about their time.

Resurrection “meant” (in the secondary sense – its implications if you will – beyond the referent that “someone who was dead, coming to bodily life”) that God’s new creation has started. Reading any of the OT passages about resurrection, either the concrete referent of raising to life, or the metaphor about a return from exile (ala Ez 37), and you will find something about a new creation. Those are the facts that I am forced to deal with in my Christian life, and the same ones that the Church at large is forced to deal with.

That very new creation theology, I’ve found is terribly lacking in the greater Church today. The power of resurrection has been sucked out of the word. Not least because the majority of people who are practicing, preaching, and teaching Christianity are now the powerful. They are now the status-quo, the empire. And Jesus challenges the status-quo. If you don’t think resurrection, the new-creation, is a massive challenge:

… is to miss the point, to cut the nerve of the social, cultural and political critique. Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it. The resurrection, in the full Jewish and early Christian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matter. That is why resurrection has always had an inescapable political meaning; that is why the Saducees in the first century, and the Enlightenment in our own day, have opposed it so strongly. No tyrant is threatened by Jesus going to heaven, leaving his body in a tomb. No governments face the authentic Christian challenge when the church’s social preaching tries to base itself on Jesus’ teaching, detached from the central and energizing fact of his resurrection (or when, for that matter, the resurrection is affirmed simply as an example of a supernatural ‘happy ending’ which guarantees post-mortem bliss).

Saying ‘Jesus has been raised from the dead’ proved to be self-involving in that it gained its meaning within this counter-imperial worldview. The Sadducees were right to regard the doctrine of resurrection, and especially, its announcement in relation to Jesus, as political dynamite.
NT Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, pg 730-1

If you think you’ve got resurrection down pat, think again.