Theosis Democratike or the New Holiness: Part 1

In the last month, I have read Martin Thornton's Christian Proficiency, Donald Fairbairn's Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers, and a bit of Matthew Kelly's Rediscover Catholicism. 

Speaking from three different traditions (Anglican Catholicism, Reformed Evangelicalism, and Roman Catholicism) to three different audiences (the mid-century Church of England, modern American evangelicals, and Roman Catholics in the English-speaking developed world), these authors all come to fairly similar conclusions: that the purpose of the Christian faith is to make humans into the Body of Jesus Christ and restore each individual to the fullness of their humanity by participation in the common life of the Church and the Triune God. The end of the Body and each member is is theosis or "holiness."

Holiness, each author writes, is the route to renewal of the Church in a skeptical and/or disobedient age.  

The works differ, of course. Fairbairn is more theological. Thornton is more practical. Kelly is more accessible (a balance between praxis and light theology). But there are very strong commonalities to their prescriptions.

First, the holiness they discuss need not be an extraordinary holiness, limited to clergy and religious or those residing in the foreign missions. As Thornton emphasizes, all of us are called to evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience and to the stability of life that the Benedictine tradition teaches embraces all three. As Kelly emphasizes, holiness may be pursued in marriage, in singleness, in orders, and in religion. The lives of the saints need not to be sanitized but honest about their weaknesses and failings. And Fairbairn frequently emphasizes how ordinary human relations can be slowly oriented toward the relationships that subsist between the Persons of the Trinity.

Indeed, the holiness they proclaim is an ordinary holiness: one oriented around (as Thornton explicates most fully): a common rule of Eucharist, Scripture reading/common prayer, and private prayer but individually tailored to the needs of each soul. This ordinary holiness in its fruition becomes extraordinary, when acts of sacrificial love becomes as natural as breathing, so that we can say in all earnestness: "We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do" (Luke 17:10).

There is important differences. I find Fairbairn's problematization of our search for significance to be far more compelling than Kelly's problematization of "disobedience." I could make the potshot critique that complaining about our age's inclination to disobedience to divine will is what you'd expect from a tradition that has not yet repented for its domination by the lust for mastery. (Anglicans still have not either, after all.) Fairbairn is also concerned with obedience, but he helpfully justifies that obedience can be the means of love, which I found more helpful. 

However, diagnosing the collective moral problem of secular life in terms of significance rather than disobedience (to a tradition that in many places seems too vacuous against which to rebel) is compelling because of its explanatory value. A man recently testified in favor of elective abortion in Texas.

"When I was 23, a young woman I knew needed an abortion. More importantly to me, so did I.

"I wasn’t ready to be a father. Not in the least. I wasn’t prepared to be tied to this woman for the rest of my life. I wasn’t interested in any part of fatherhood. I had plans, and things I wanted to see, and do, and become.

"I like to think that, if it had come down to it, I would have changed those plans, and taken an interest, and prepared myself. But I didn’t have to find out, because abortion was safe, affordable, and accessible."  

The life of the unborn child in question did not fall to malice or any real incapacity of its father and mother. Instead, mother and father made a moral decision highly antagonistic to the worldviews of both Fairbairn and Kelly, because it would change what they would "see, and do, and become." In a world without God, Christ, and the life of the world to come, the quest to become "someone," to make a difference, and make an impact becomes the highest moral good.

We must be careful, lest the new quest for holiness described by the three authors sends us along the same kind of path as the secular world. Recall, for instance, what the Preacher says concerning the saints in the 44th Chapter of Ecclesiasticus. Most of the just are known to God alone.

In the second part of this post, I will consider what is necessary to make a vibrant, ordinary, and democratic holiness possible in the Episcopal Church and more conservative contexts along the spectrum of catholicity.  

 

The Scottish Reformation Just Called: It Wants Its Ascetical View of the Sacraments Back

However, as central as Bible reading and prayer are to the cultivation of one's relationship to Christ, neither of these practices fits the images Jesus uses in John 6-7 as well as another common Christian practice, the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist. Jesus is speaking here of eating and drinking, and while it is true that Bible reading, prayer and other Christian disciplines are ways of eating and drinking from Christ, the one rite of the church that involves literal eating and drinking is the Lord's Supper.

Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Fathers

What's amazing about this passage is that Fairbairn wrote this text as a professor at a Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church seminary: a denomination that maintains the spirit of the Covenanters in 21st century America. The spiritual ancestors of Fairbairn threw stools at Hooker's and Laud's disciples.

And yet in this passage, he essentially recapitulates what Martin Thornton calls "the Rule of the Church." Fairbairn is clearly nervous doing so, because he realizes he is proposing something innovative to his "evangelical" audience. And yet he does it.

It may help to reflect upon history to see that the view Fairbairn takes is a classical Presbyterian view. John Knox considered the Mass superstitious. He was particularly explicit about denying the Mass was a sacrifice. (I feel more sympathetic to Knox than I once did about the position he took in the debate discussed here on 28 September 1562 . But Knox (nor Calvin for that matter) were memorialists. The Lord's Supper was not performed solely as a memorial or in mere obedience to the Lord's command. Instead, Knox saw its ascetical purpose:

First, we confess that it is a holy action, ordained of God, in the which the Lord Jesus, by earthly and visible things set before us, lifts us up unto heavenly and invisible things. And that when he had prepared his spiritual banquet, he witnessed that he himself was the lively bread wherewith our souls are fed unto everlasting life.

And therefore, in setting forth bread and wine to eat and drink, he confirms and seals up to us his promise and communion (that is, that we shall be partakers with him in his kingdom); and he represents unto us, and makes plain to our senses, his heavenly gifts; and also gives unto us himself, to be received with faith, and not with mouth, nor yet by transfusion of substance; but so, through the virtue [power] of the Holy Ghost, that we, being fed with his flesh, and refreshed with his blood, may be renewed both unto true godliness and to immortality.

And also [we confess] that herewith the Lord Jesus gathered us unto one visible body, so that we are members one of another, and make altogether one body, whereof Jesus Christ is the only Head; and, finally, that by the same sacrament, the Lord calls us to remembrance of his death and passion, to stir up our hearts to praise his most holy name.

John Knox, 1550, Summary of the Lord's Supper

In fact, in terms of ascesis , Knox might have had a higher view than his Roman Catholic opponents. Most Roman Catholics prior to the Reformation were taking communion twice a year (correct me if I'm wrong). They were going to Mass regularly sure, but their ascetical practices saw the core of their participation not in eating and drinking but "gazing" and "carrying about" (paraphrasing Articles XXV and XXVIII, 1979 Book of Common Prayer, pp. 872-873). Communion every month to three months would have been an improvement.

Roman Catholic encouragement of the practice of daily communion was a genuine response to the ascetical concerns of the Reformers but not the theological ones, of course.

I therefore find Fairbairn's insistence on evangelicals recovering the idea of the Lord's Supper as an ascetical practice of literal regular eating and drinking to the Body's renewal to be encouraging. I'm far more interested in holding the outline of ascetical discipline in common with the evangelical church than detailed theological positions. The first points us all to organic unity with Christ. The second only points us to a tenuous and perhaps impossible intellectual unity with one another.

Substitutionary Atonement I Can Support

With this in mind, let us return to Jesus's anguished cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!" At this moment, as he hangs on the cross, God the Son is suffering the full wrath toward our sin, yours and mine. The Father has loved his one and only Son from all eternity and still loves him now, considering the Son as God. Yet somehow in this moment, the Father is also turning away from that Son, forsaking him because of the sin that the Son, considered as man, is bearing in place of us. The Son, considered as man, is alienated from the Father... Again, we must emphasize that this alienation comes about because God the Son has, in his humanity, been immersed in the consequences of our human sin. God the Son is not estranged from the Father as God. Instead God the Son is so alienated as man. But nevertheless the person who is alienated from the Father at this moment is God the Son. Why? Because this and only this could serve as an appropriate sacrifice to undo your estrangement from God, and mine."

Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Fathers .

Random Thought On Baptism and The Saints

There comes a point in every new relationship where the two people involved express what they are: boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, doctor and patient, lawyer and client, or just good friends (or enemies).

At that point, if the relationship is to endure, the two people need to relate to one another. They need to do actual things to "keep the relationship going." The ways we relate to one another vary with the people involved and circumstances. The way humans engage in relationship is always messy, imperfect, and from some impure motive. But it is all we know how to do. Humans are social animals capable of complex communication. Not relating is contrary to our nature.

For Christians of a catholic persuasion, baptism is the point at which we define our relationship with God. At that point, I think the tone of all our other relationships starts to match the tone of our relationship with God. I've certainly seen that in my own life. For me, the way I think about relationship with God is strongly colored by how I think about romantic relationships. A few days ago, I remembered that in college, I had confronted aridity in my spiritual life by writing modernized homages to the Psalms. My homage of Psalm 10 began, "O Lord, I will hate you and revile you and say, The Lord is standoffish like a teenaged girl." Um, yeah...

(Vowed celibacy is a tremendous gift to the Church, precisely because vowed celibates are liberated to think about God in other ways. On the other hand, clerical marriage has provided deep insights to those of us currently unaffected by the eunuch-making power of God.)

Thus, the major failing of the church in North America in a variety of traditions resembles for me my failing whenever I have a girlfriend (a far less committed relationship than baptism, but bear with me), what ever do I do with her? By which I mean, how do I grow the relationship? How do I relate? And in the case of the churches, how do I relate to God and maybe grow my relationship?

The answer that catholic tradition gives is ascetical discipline: life according to Rule framed by Mass, Office, and private prayer; balanced by fasting, corporal and material almsgiving, and the exercise of vocation; and consonant with the evangelical counsels, dominical commands, and apostolic counsels.

Derek Olsen at Haligweorc has been doing an excellent job for several years trying to bring ascetical discipline to the Episcopal Church in the 21st century, mainly by trying it in his own life, writing about it some of the time, and making available or pointing people to online resources like St. Bede's Breviary. He's currently working on creating some sort of guidebook on the subject.

Recently, Derek pointed out Martin Thornton's Christian Proficiency. I think that Derek's guidebook project is a way of updating Thornton's work and translating it to the context of 21st century North America. I probably will have more to say later on Thornton's work and the process of updating and translating it in the context of my own life, but I very much appreciate the recommendation.

But what I noticed today was the strong resemblance of the theological landscape, both in theory and practice, of Martin Thornton and Donald Fairbairn, who descend from two opposite sides of the Reformation in Great Britain: one more catholic and the other more reformed. The common thread is that the theology both present is grounded in reading the Holy Scriptures through the lens of the Church Fathers: Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and the Cappadocians are their guides to the Scriptures. And in this consensus, there is hope and grace for American Protestantism, if we can learn to relate to one another as we agree that the Persons of the Trinity relate to one another and to us.

And the common thread is that we are morally, physically, and spiritually corrupt because we are alienated from the life and love of the Trinity that loves us still. In baptism, we give up trying to fight mortality, corruption, and the scourge of self-justification. We die with Christ, and our lives are hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). And by that mystical process, we enter into a new relationship with God that takes the form of participation (koinonia) in Christ and by extension in the entire divine nature (see 2 Peter 1:4).

And by doing so, Fairbairn says, we no longer need to worry about our individual significance (goodness/righteousness etc.), because we share in God the Son, who is significant. We no longer need to worry about the chaos of our lives, because the chaos of our lives results from the imperfection of our relationships and being in Christ points us toward the perfect relationship between the Father and the Son. We no longer need to worry about the significance of our vocations (in the world or the church), because all are now equal in dignity. We only need to worry about our fitness for and disposition toward what we are doing.

The deepest connection between what Fairbairn says about practical applications of Trinitarian theology and Thornton says about how we are to relate to God comes when Fairbairn discusses the creation of Eve. To Fairbairn, Eve's creation gives Adam someone to which to relate as an equal, allowing Adam to better understand how the persons of the Trinity relate to one another (and thus improving his relation to or "pure contemplation" of the Father, as Athanasius puts it in Contra Gentes).

Eve is not a clone, and God commands the two to be fruitful and multiply. From the beginning, our human relationships really were meant to enhance our ones with God. And God contemplated that humanity would exist in some form of variety: remaining human but differing in new and exciting ways.

And since Christ redeems us to point us toward the pre-Fall condition, our redemption and our justification by faith are common, being from a common corruption. Our relation to God in Christ is both individual and corporate. Each of us is becoming a type of Christ: an image of the Son. So the Father relates to us as individuals. Yet God enjoys the diversity of humanity and the way that our relating mirrors the relating of the Persons, and thus seeks to unite us in a form of political community under Himself, "For you have redeemed from every tribe, language, people, and nation: a kingdom of priests to serve our God" (Revelation 5:9-10).

I think this reading outlines ascetical discipline as Thornton understands it. One's Rule of life is partially corporate. It has certain common elements and ideally is chosen in conversation with a spiritual director. It is also individual, tailored to the person's life and character. At one point in Rowan Williams' Silence and Honey Cakes, he says something like God does not want me to be Jesus, he wants me to be the best Rowan Williams I can be. That's what relating to God is all about. Rule is not a set of moral rules, more like a medical prescription. And because it's individual, one's accountability to it is mainly between one and God. To fail in it is not a sin in itself but an occasion to reflect on why one failed (for right and/or wrong reasons).    

The key is that ascetical discipline is a way of guiding our relating to God, perhaps even loving Him. And ascetical discipline functions by habit, so that what we first do out of desire, self-justification, or obligation, we soon do out of affection and the love for stability. I think Thornton uses the analogy of kissing one's wife to explain this.

Relating to God is still extremely difficult. Dead and hid as we are, we are still in the body: a thing that is good and to be received in thanksgiving, but still a place of struggle. If we believe the Scriptures that Jesus is our corporate husband, He still presents to us a perfect but unattainable standard for relating to God. If God has redeemed human relationships and human relating, it helps us to see examples of that redemption, in the way that putting numerical values into an equation can help you see how the equation behaves as a pure equation.

To use Thornton's language, the saints signify for us efficient and proficient examples of relating to God. By contemplating the saints, we may be inspired to a higher quality of relating to God. These examples were revealed by the signs they did, the way they described their relationship with God, as well as the quality of the relationships they had with others. We commemorate them, because we are inspired by the way they reflect Christ and demonstrate the love of the Trinity but remain fallible people, just like us. And that is why we honor the Blessed Virgin Mary so highly and by the name Theotokos, because her relating to God surpasses every other example we know besides Jesus. Her odd place in the hierarchy of being comes from two inescapable facts: (1) she was human in every way that we are, including sin; (2) but that she experienced the life of the Trinity in her very body.

For Thornton, one can directly relate to the saints, who he presumes to be in the Church Militant and Expectant as much as the Triumphant. I suspect he would think who we commemorate personally or corporately would depend on relationships that most point us as individuals and corporate bodies toward God.

For those who lean more to the reformed side of the Reformation in Great Britain, the nature of the Church Triumphant vs. the Church Expectant presents difficulties. While I find the idea of purification that comes with the idea of the Church Expectant to be personally effective and Scripturally grounded, the full doctrine is extra-Biblical and thus cannot be insisted upon as necessary to our confession (Sixth Article of Religion). However, I think we all do acknowledge the communion of saints. Some of these saints are currently within space-time. All of these saints are ultimately outside time as the common elements of Daniel's and John of Patmos's visions suggest. At the least, there is no harm in talking to them or thinking about them, as long as we remember that they remain, from the standpoint of justification and "power," our equals in the Kingdom of God.         

Atonement and the Sacrificial Nature of the Eucharist

When I consider "atonement theory," I do not object to the need for atonement. I object to asserting that it is divine will and initiative that the medium for atonement must be the separation of soul from body and the shedding of blood.

For I read, "Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and make good your vows to the Most High. Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall honor me" (Ps. 50: 13-15).

It seems ridiculous to me that an uncreated being should be propitiated by destroying what He has created and more ridiculous that He should be propitiated by the destruction of the earthly body that shared or had shared in his divine life (as with Adam and Jesus).

I can imagine God destroying to express his will and maintain His government. In Genesis 6, God almost decides to wipe the slate clean. (I have computer simulations that go awry sometimes, so I know the feeling.) What I baulk at is the idea that doing so is satisfactory to Him: why else is He so insistent on saving faithful remnants (Noah, Lot, various divisions of Israel) or indeed unfaithful ones (Cain)?

And if God were satisfied by the death of ungrateful wretches like me, think about the schizophrenia implied by Ezekiel 18:23, "I desire not the death of sinners, but that they turn from their ways and live."

Instead, I think this insistence on bloody satisfaction comes from our initiative. The most obvious example is Lamech's proclamation of his own personal lex talionis, "Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, mark what I say: I kill a man for wounding me, a young man for a blow. If sevenfold vengeance was to be exacted for Cain, for Lamech it would be seventy-sevenfold" (Genesis 4:23-24).

If the Fall is chiefly expressed by our desire to legislate in place of God ("knowing what is good and evil" and "determining what is good and evil" could be expressed by the same Hebrew words, see D. Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers), Lamech takes the cake. The Law revealed to Moses is a tutor here indeed (Galatians 3:24), in that it moderates our personal legislation by creating institutions like the cities of refuge (Numbers 35) and insisting that vengeance be proportional: lex talionis (Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:20; Deuteronomy 19:21).

But when He who truly has power to legislate takes on human nature, He has this to say, "You have it heard it said, 'eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him also with the left" (Matthew 5:38-39). And these were no idle words on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Jesus didn't send twelve legions of angels to bust up the place but endured shame, spitting, and death. Epiphanius of Cyprus calls Jesus's restraint "economy," and this idea points us to how God relates to us.

And again, the same One said when asked how often one should forgive and the number seven was put forth as an option (the reverse of the vengeance of Cain), Jesus responded with the reverse of vengeance of Lamech, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times" (Matthew 18:21). If anything God seems to be pointing us away from the satisfaction of bloody vengeance.

So far, I only really have demonstrated convincingly that humans should not exact satisfaction for wrong acts by blood atonement. Perhaps, this is something simply reserved for God and we may impute this satisfaction to Him in understanding Christ's work on the cross.

The problem is that if justification is by faith alone and not by works of law, whether revealed to Noah, Moses, or by Lamech or Jesus (as Paul and the Reformers did) and salvation consists in participation in the Trinitarian life (we relate in Christ to the mutual love of the Father and the Son), the key ethical content of the Holy Scriptures does not aim at our justification by works but to pointing us to what it means to participate in the Trinitarian life. That is, it orients us to the way God is, thinks, loves etc.

And I think it turns me away from thinking that Jesus is an atoning sacrifice to God that genuinely satisfies God. I instead feel turned to think that Jesus's sacrifice is atoning in that it convinces our sinful selves that we have atoned. I do not deny that the work on the Cross does things that are effectual in the context of life, the universe, everything, and the life of the Trinity, but the atoning sacrifice bit is not God's idea. Instead, God does what needs to be done in such a way that it meets our idea and fallen perspective on atonement. He shows His love for us by doing something utterly absurd.

When those of us of a more catholic bent celebrate the Eucharist, we often see it as an actual, but bloodless sacrifice. Part of this sacrifice is done in memory of the sacrifice (however it was one) of Jesus Christ and is sacrificial by participating in that action, which as performed by Christ in his human nature is an event with a defined point in space-time, but as Christ as God the Word is performed outside space-time, and so is always accessible to our participation. (Madeline L'Engle's Episcopal Bishop Nason Colubra splendidly explains the basic outlines of this idea in An Acceptable Time.)

But part of the sacrifice we make is the one to which God points us in Psalm 50, "The sacrifice of thanksgiving." That's what Eucharist means in Greek, "thanksgiving." The grand sacrifice we make to God is to say thank you "for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for your immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and the hope of glory" (Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 101). If we read Psalm 50 in this way, the vows mentioned are not works of law: promises we make to exchange/manipulate God's favor by doing "good" deeds. They really wouldn't be good deeds that way. The vows to which Psalm 50 refers are our baptismal vows: a historically mutable, extra-Biblical set of promises we have made to serve Christ as Lord. But they signify a promise of obedience (that evangelical counsel). Donald Fairbairn in his Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers convincingly argues that obedience (between equals, no less!) is the way that love between the Son and the Father is expressed.

And thus the Eucharistic sacrifice is a locus for remembering what God has done for us, bringing our concerns to Him ("call on me in the day of trouble"), and orienting ourselves toward gratitude and obedience, all of which are our imperfect loving sacrifice to God.

As you can tell, the Holy Brothers like the work of Donald Fairbairn well enough to engage with it and very much would like to thank "JMG" of Mockingbird for bringing it to our attention.