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.
6 comments:
I really love the thing about "no longer needing to worry about our individual significance (goodness/righteousness etc.), because we share in God the Son, who is significant." This, I think, is a really central idea somehow.
I've been having some online conversations lately about "self-realization"; one person mentioned Joel Osteen and wondered if a kind of "self-realization" focus was "an important way ahead for the church." He noted that preachers like Osteen "seem to scratching where people are itching."
But I've been personally unable to find any kind of Scriptural notion of "self-realization" (Wikipedia definition: “The basic premise of self-realization is that there exists an authentic self which has to be discovered by psychological or spiritual self-striving.”)
Leaving entirely aside the "self-striving" thing, there really doesn't seem to be any reference to "an authentic self" anywhere in Christianity. You don't find it in A.A., either.
And here, Fairbairn's idea avoids that notion entirely, too. All very interesting, at least to me....
Well, I think you're right. I don't think there's any "authentic self" to be redeemed. I think you and I are our authentic selves. The problem is not that we are not who we are meant to be, the problem is that we are a good and wonderful creature that is constantly making poor and wrong use of ourselves.
Fairbairn has a couple of discussions of myths we create deflect responsibility. I suspect AA has a few things to say about that. I think the idea of an "authentic self" is such a myth. Oh, it's not my fault, my authentic self is sweet, good, and innocent. If only I could find it...
And I think that fits into an entire holistic notion of responsibility. Humans are a mixture of frailties. We create a lot of compartments for our various nerve impulses: body, mind, spirit, id, superego etc.
At one point, Fairbairn talks about whether Jesus's human and/or divine nature died on the cross. And Fairbairn says that natures don't die, people do. I'd say that about sin, too. And so following Chalcedon, "the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person..."
And if He's the model for our anthropology, I'd be careful positing some compartment that is somehow not incapacitated by sin.
Joel Osteen fills a need, I'm sure. It's just not one I think we need to meet.
Fairbairn has a couple of discussions of myths we create deflect responsibility. I suspect AA has a few things to say about that. I think the idea of an "authentic self" is such a myth. Oh, it's not my fault, my authentic self is sweet, good, and innocent. If only I could find it...
This may be part of it, I agree. But I think there is another thing at work here: I think some people feel very lost because, to put it very inadequately, they don't know who they are.
They have taken on other peoples' thoughts and emotions - they grew up, perhaps, never being valued for who they were, and continue to desperately miss that kind of validation - and they're trying to get rid of having become somebody else in order to please others. They are trying to locate their own core.
So I do have some sympathy for this argument. What I'm trying to work out now is how this particular problem works itself in Christianity. How to say, in other words, that the search for the "authentic self" even in this case is also a lost cause; that there is a better path that will fix this, too. I think Christianity speaks to all people and addresses all human problems - universal redemption, that is! - so there must be a response to this. Or so I believe.
Still working on the problem....
Interesting. I've never thought about it that way. I suppose other people have tried to define my identity for years, but I often have resisted. That's not to say I know entirely who I am, but I have a strong sense of what I am not and should not be.
The Christianity part is more difficult. People in Jesus's day did not define themselves as individuals as much as we do today but as members of groups. Jesus's major concern was to validate "out" groups like Samaritans and gentiles, bring groups like lepers and the disabled back into their community-based identities, and ultimately create a broad-based group identity in Himself.
There might be something in there. Followers of Jesus often defy their group identity, to which you were often born. Paul and Joseph of Arimathea defy their Pharasaical identity, Matthew ceases being a tax collector, and Peter goes from fisherman to evangelist (better at the latter).
Yeah - what you say is interesting. We - Americans I think especially - are unrooted from "group identity" in many cases, so perhaps "individual identity" has become more dominant psychologically.
Perhaps, in the end, the idea is the same: giving up the search for one's individual identity and taking on identity in Christ.....
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