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 ]

300 words on Education

There is a 300-words-a-day project in which some great writers are participating. One on education caught my eye this morning:

As I was reading the paragraph, I could not help but notice the parallels between the state of education in Byzantium circa 775 and the US today. How many of our civil servants are truly wise, capable of understanding the law and applying it, understanding history’s role in shaping where we are today, and able to govern effectively? Furthermore, study after study shows that our population is getting less intelligent with every generation. What value does our education system put on philosophy, language, literature, the arts, and preserving the American culture? Scott Barstow

Now, I couldn’t care less about American culture. In my opinion, there are only a few things about it that are redeeming, the rest is mostly garbage. I do, however, lament his point about the education system. It is incredibly likely that I will not attempt to pursue (and therefore somewhat likely that finishing the MTS is a priority) a PhD because there is no where to use it.

More Mystery, More Enigma

I am coming to enjoy mystery and enigma which cannot be solved. They are tension, as such. Tension cannot be possessed, objectified, or codified by us. Tension can only be experienced, lived, related to and in.

In our time analytical knowledge is prized, taught, and sought after. This form of knowledge only works through possession. Hence this form of knowledge denies that contradiction exists. Contradiction cannot be known. This tension which cannot be possessed cannot be, and therefore is excluded from the realm.

Sadly we all are contradictions. We are all in tension. People cannot remain human and be possessed or objectified. When possessed, they become objects of analytical knowledge. They are no longer human. They become quantitative, not qualitative.

We can, however, know one another as humans: in contradiction and in tension. This is not analytical knowledge, but dialectical knowledge (perhaps even speculative knowledge). We are defined by our relations. We define ourself by our relationships. These create the tensions within us.

The analytical annihilation of mystery in our time has destroyed our faith in our ability to know in this other way. We are further from one another. And the deepest wish of analytics is to have everything objectified and possessed. This is harmful to us, as individuals and as a culture.

I need mystery, tension, and contradiction. I need to understand relationally. Only then can I find meaning. And meaning is why we are all here.

This is Why I Love Liturgy

A work, a performance, can be taken as worship – even as the Book of Common Prayer says we are unworthy to give it – because God meets us there:

Thesis 4: Christian worship does not lie in a realm outside of religion. To seek a direct correspondence between leitourgia (“the work of the people”) and divine action is to forget that worship itself is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Calvin). Furthermore, such easy correspondence risks fetishizing and instrumentalizing worship. The problem is structural and runs deep; in truth, the very discipline of “ecclesiology” is prone to idolatrous self-aggrandizement. Thus the critique of religio strikes at the very heart of Christian worship.[6] The occasion for sin occurs preeminently as leitourgia—the “work of the people” to self-justify, to strive to stand aright before God. Indeed, worship is the site marking our deepest estrangement from God. But this is not the final word! In Jesus Christ, God decisively wills to be God-for-us and so our idolatrous “work” becomes the site of our reconciliation with God. Reconciliation occurs not as exchange or production, but as a gratuitous event of grace. In this event the Spirit “takes up” our “work” to stand aright before God and transforms and transfigures our prideful attempts to “make a name for ourselves.” Our worship only becomes true praise, then, as our “work” loses track of itself under the great pressure of God’s own doxa. Such doxa happens as the event of God’s grace evokes gratitude “like the voice an echo.” Indeed, “Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightening” (Barth, CD IV/1, 41).
[HT: Inhabitatio Dei

How To Read

Justice David Souter is talking about how to read, interpret, and judge the Constitution. This, just as well, could have been writing about how to read the Scripture. Well done. Take into account the contradictory/opposing trajectories within meaning for you. I can’t even add anything to it. It is that good. Not a coincidence he is an Episcopalian. They understand these things.

Natural Theology

I am, by and large, shocked that Protestant theology has refused natural theology a place. I’m reading De Visione Dei by Nicholas of Cuza right now, and I love every chapter. I am so taken up by this neo-Platonist natural theology. I find it so very compelling. It makes so much sense out of our experience, Scripture, and the place where both meet. I can’t ignore it’s argumentative force, I am compelled to agree with so much of it.

But Protestantism has gone hand in hand with the “Enlightenment” ideal of rational objective Aristotelian proofs. And correspondingly they’ve got no natural theology. The best they can do is the best Aquinas could do – God in the uncaused causer. Neo-platonism is capable of so much more.

I don’t understand why we’ve given it up. I really don’t.

Update

Kind of elucidates my point. Reading over that seems to be far less than what my, admittedly, cursory readings of Augustine, Bonaventure, and Cusa accomplish.

Really Texas? What Gives?

Studying theology, and therefore history, I understand the necessary, importance, and motivations behind revisionist history. But this is just too far.

First:

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

Making policy decisions without consulting experts, or promoting yourself as an expert without any credentials whatsoever makes you a dilettante. I’m a little scared of turning into Jim West here, but what gives? I’m utterly amazed that anyone can read history the way they are attempting to.

Revisionist history can be held in respect when the overall society agrees with a general way of interpreting the historical data based on their ideology. The ideology, at the same time, recognizes that it purposefully glosses over specific points in order to create a polished and complete narrative. That is not what is happening here. This is willful disdain for the general and accepted interpretation of history. It would be one thing to say: “I don’t agree with the current interpretation and here is my evidence.” It is quite another to rewrite the books with your ideology with zero evidence. I expect, quite quickly, for this to get shot down (or disregarded) because it can never conform to the accepted interpretation. Nor does it have any explanatory power whatsoever to go beyond the current accepted interpretation.

To give a historical and theological dimension to this: there is no question that exilic editors created revisionist history about the golden years which preceded them. There is no question that Luke-Acts portrays Christianity in an acceptable light to the Roman Empire – despite it’s formative leader Jesus being crucified as a political insurrectionist. What none of these writers did, however, was act in a position of power to remove items from written history [i.e. not removing them in their "curriculum": their collected literary works later received as Scripture]. What these writers did do was offer new evidence and new rhetorical interpretations of older evidence.

I don’t imagine that Texas will actually affect other curriculums or the textbooks that would affect other curriculums (the articles worry, but are split over the possibility). For a long time I have looked with shame at the educational system I’ve been, and continue to be, a part of. At the graduate level, I can finally say, that the education system has a chance to make a huge difference. Sadly, not many people get that far because of the failures in the system well before this level. I feel very, very fortunate and thankful to be able to receive and use all these various tools to look at the world, and myself in the world, in such a more nuanced and powerful way.

More on Why I Like Rowan Williams

It is not just the eyebrows folks:

But ‘where Jesus is’ is in itself quite a many-layered notion. Jesus is in the neighbourhood of God the Father and so when we stand where Jesus is we too are in that neighbourhood and we learn his language of his relation to God the Father. But the incarnate Jesus is also in the neighbourhood of the chaos and the suffering of the world – a world he has entered to transform… To speak in those terms is really to paraphrase the epigram which I think originates with the great Irish Benedictine, Columba Marmion. He spoke about Christ being simultaneously in sinu Patris and in sinu peccatoris: in the bosom of the Father and in the bosom of the sinner. Christ is simultaneously in the neighbourhood of the Father and in the neighbourhood of the sinner, the formlessness, the shapelessness and dissolution, the dis-integrity of creation. He is in the heart of both realities, simultaneously. And that, of course, suggests that when we as baptized persons come to be in the neighbourhood of Jesus, that same dual proximity is what we have to get used to.
Lecture

Keep on reading. It is fantastic. [HT Inhabitio Dei]

Glenn Beck is a Complete Idiot

… the Dead Sea Scrolls, you know what they are? … So here’s what happened. When Constantine decided that he was going to cobble uh together an army, he did the um Council of Nicaea, right, Pat? (Pat: Yea.) The Council of Nicaea, and what they did is brought all of the religious figures uhh together, all the Christians and they said, “Ok, let’s put together the Apostles’ Creed, let’s you know, you guys do it.” So they brought all their religious scripture together, that’s when the Bible was first bound and everything else. And then they said, “Anybody who disagrees with this is a heretic and off with their head!” Well, that’s what the Dead Sea Scrolls are. They are those scriptures that people had at the time that and they said, “They are destroying all of this truth.” Whether it’s truth or not is up to the individual, but at that time those people thought that this was something that needed to be preserved and so they rolled up the scrolls and put them in clay pots and they, they put them in the back of caves where no one could find them. They were hidden scripture because everything was being destroyed that disagreed with the Council of Nicaea and Constantine. That’s what those things are.
[HT]

You couldn’t get it more wrong if you tried.

Ah, Philosophy

[SMBC]