A Brief Note on Sex (Even Just the Heterosexual Kind)

In May, I remember reading with joy and anguish what Elizabeth Smart had to say at an event about human trafficking (one of the great moral scourges of our time),

"Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, saying she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum. 

"'I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I'm that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away." And that's how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value,' Smart said. 'Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.'

"Smart says children should be educated that "you will always have value and nothing can change that."

For a decade or so, I have been anxious that the innovations in the Episcopal Church with respect to GLBT inclusion have been impoverishing what and how we teach about sex everyone, gay or straight. At the same time, I found both Roman Catholic and evangelical teaching on sex made me uncomfortable.

Just now, I realized why. I have a visceral objection to any connection between sex and a commercial transaction. And a discourse that makes virginity or sexual interactions of any kind into either a gift (a common Roman Catholic view) or a consumer product (like gum) troubles me.

Sex is certainly not something to be held in dishonor. Medieval preachers often understood marriage to be a monastic order, but a very special one, ordained by God Himself. Sex and its direct connection to parenthood is a way we can experience in the body the way God relates within Himself and with us. The mystery may be imperfectly participated in by defect of body or soul, and God through Christ and the leading of the Church by the Holy Spirit has opened up to us other ways to experience the mystery, but "it was not that way from the beginning." Marriage's place is primal but not necessarily one of primacy. 

For most of the Church's history, sex has been a unique part of the charism of marriage. And if Episcopalians are going to be a witness for the wondrous estates of the gays and lesbians in the Body of Christ, we need to be clear about this. To adopt a medieval view, fornication is bad in two ways: (1) it risks children not being raised by their natural parents, which is the ideal; and (2) it divorces something temporal from the spiritual context in which it is meant to be experienced. Point (2) is still very much valid, no matter how we take point (1).

When I blanche at relations between sex and commerce, I see the explicit divorce of the temporal thing (something done in the body) from its spiritual component (God and the virtues) so clearly, because the commercial exchange makes me see that the entire interaction is temporal. The difference is one of degree, not form. 

Now, it's also possible for sex to have a bad spiritual component, which should be discussed, but I think differs from "simple" fornication. The medieval theologians, whatever their flaws, recognized fornication as a species of lust. And as early as Augustine, it was recognized that manipulation, disrespect for liberty and autonomy, and exploitative self-regard was a species of lust: libido dominandi (the lust for mastery).

Which is all to say that any teaching on fornication is pretty ironic if it's comparing fornicators to used chewing gum, a self-gift that is given or exchanged, or any temporality. Sex is a state into which we enter, not an exchange relation. And thus, if we are uncomfortable with practices that seem like the buying and selling of husbands and wives, we should reflect whether it is simony: what Simon Magus did when he tried to buy the Holy Spirit from the Apostles with silver.

The only way I have been able to see sex as a temporality is to compare it to a wedding ring. It comes to you as a gift. You keep it safe. It merely symbolizes your relationship, so as long as the relationship exists, no one would fault you for having it replaced if it were lost. And you would only sell it as an act of desperation. It's not the best analogy.

And when the groom used to give the bride a ring (men didn't wear wedding rings in the 17th century?), the 1662 Book of Common Prayer has him say, "WITH this Ring I thee wed, with my Body I thee worship, and with all my worldly Goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

The ring is thus a symbol of sexual intimacy with both temporal and spiritual consequences ("my Body I thee worship") and of endowment with temporalities ("all my worldly Goods I thee endow"). The only way marriage avoids participating in the vices that underlie fornication and simony is the total mutual commitment of persons and property in the company of God. I think the totality of the implied economic exchange is one way married people can participate in the evangelical counsel of poverty.

However, the spiritual and temporal components of one's sexuality cannot be lost. For too long, humans in western civilization turned virginity into an asset. This thinking still pollutes most Christian teaching about sex. So let's think about it a different way.

Jesus said, "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man" (Matthew 15:11) and to explain this (the Pharisees saw the stern critique immediately) He also said, "Do not you yet understand, that whatever enters in at the mouth goes into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashed hands defiles not a man" (Matthew 15:17-20).

I don't think Jesus is just talking about food. I think he is talking about everything we do in the body. Defilement for his audience meant sexual impurity as much as it did eating non-kosher food. And he emphasizes this, not by talking about the vices of our heart, but by saying that what his audience considered gross violations of the Law came from the heart. 

So in the classic tale of evangelical or Roman Catholic advice books, when some poor sweet innocent young Christian has slept with a man who breaks off the relationship and she feels like she's lost something, the Gospel teaching is that no transaction has taken place. What she (or he) feels is the conviction that her heart has been revealed: that something in herself has gone astray. 

Repeated, unexamined behavior in this way can change us physically and spiritually. Unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease is a risk, especially when you get in a situation where you are having sex but not talking about it outside of having sex. Sex can be addictive, which can lead us astray to get our fix. And worse yet, in cases of rape and sexual abuse like that of Elizabeth Smart, we are not culpable for those changes, but they may happen anyway.

The Good News is that our failures in sex can be remedied like our failures in every area of life, because they proceed from the same set of weaknesses. Victims of abuse need to be pointed to their intrinsic worth and God's love for them by the deepest love those who love them can muster. 

The rest of us need to use our failures as an opportunity to reflect and turn once more to God. But let's try to lay off analogies in which sex uses us up and spits us out, shall we?

Theosis Democratike or the New Holiness: Part 2

Last time, I promised I'd discuss how to introduce "a vibrant, ordinary, and democratic holiness" to the Episcopal Church and to any other ecclesial context in need of renewal. The solutions I put forth fall under three broad alliterative headings: Catholicity, Catechesis, and Community, and they are, of course, linked. In this part, I will discuss Catholicity: the recovery of catholic practices that aid the spiritual development of the members of Christ's Body.

Catholicity: Rooting and Grounding in God

By catholicity, I do not mean greater orientation to Roman Catholic practice per se. Instead, what I'm advising is the reclamation of three practices central to the pre-schism (pick yours) catholic church: Eucharist, the offices of corporate prayer, and Penance. The end of this reclamation is a church whose members are in a defined and reasonable program of spiritual development.

One critique I have of Thornton's Christian Proficiency is how he talks about Proficient Christians (by which he means those in a defined and reasonable program of spiritual development) as an elite. There's probably some hint of the debate in the Church of England about whether the parish church should minister to the "faithful remnant" or the parish at large. Yet even in Thornton's time, that question was moot. No priest, as Justin Lewis-Anthony implies in his excellent  If You Meet George Herbert on The Road, Kill Him, should be ministering to the parish at large without the help of that "faithful remnant." And that faithful remnant will be poor ministers of grace without Grace working in their lives.

Moreover, a general emphasis on the principles and infrastructure of proficiency will be of immense evangelical benefit. Into our parishes on any given Sunday walk baptized Christians of free church traditions, baptized Roman Catholics, or curious seekers of other kinds. As things stand now, none of these see the formational power of our worship (the Roman Catholics should see but may not have been well catechized.) They see a cultural institution or a political rally. They imagine the people are there for reasons other than religious faith. They might be more impressed if they understood we were trying to work out our salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).

About the time I was born, the Episcopal Church began to restore two important catholic practices of spiritual formation at the expense of another. The Eucharist returned to its central place in the life of the Church and a rite of Penance was included in the Book of Common Prayer. The cost was a reduction in emphasis on the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, let alone Noonday Prayer and Compline.

Donald Fairbairn, as I pointed out in a recent post, recommends greater emphasis on the Eucharist in the evangelical church, rightly emphasizing that the Eucharist is the way Christ has ordained for feeding His Body. The diffusion of weekly Eucharist in the Episcopal Church has been an almost unmitigated good. What has gone wrong is that the importance of self-examination has been de-emphasized. The use of "An Exhortation" or the Penitential Rites has fallen mostly into disuse. And one cannot blame Prayer Book revision. Both of those elements were retained in the 1979 BCP and can be used with Rite II as easily as Rite I.

And worse yet, suppose you felt keenly the words of An Exhortation outside of a few valiant Anglo-Catholic parishes, how could you take its counsel?:

"And if, in your preparation, you need help and counsel, then go and open your grief to a discreet and understanding priest, and confess your sins, that you may receive the benefit of absolution, and spiritual counsel and advice; to the removal of scruple and doubt, the assurance of pardon, and the strengthening of your faith."

By the wayside also has fallen the Office. Its use (except in valiant Low Church and High Church parishes) has mostly shrunk to irregular Choral Evensong, to the extent that some younger Episcopalians have been surprised to discover that the Office is possible without the Choir. I've had some success turning younger Episcopalians onto St. Bede's Breviary (the best of a host of sites), but there are also podcasts for those who like to listen to audio during the run or at work.

Some people still like communal Office, though. Moreover, our labor system is no longer controlled by Sabbatarians. We need to offer more services during the week: ferial or feast day. And noonday services may not work either. Lay-led offices may be the solution. Might there be a group of lay people who would like to pray MP or EP with company one day in the week? Could you notify people about cancellations by Twitter? Why, yes you could!

Thornton's "Rule of the Church" also encompasses private prayer (colloquy), in which one talks frankly with God in one's own words. I know I have had much trouble formalizing my practice here, but I have been fortunate to have been exposed to so many different approaches. Thornton's work reminds us that recovering catholic practices means turning to the spiritual disciplines of the past: English or otherwise. I am happy to say that Episcopal clergy are turning to these practices: particularly to those of the Society of Jesus. However, the individual nature of colloquy makes it incumbent on those in charge of Christian education to expose the parish to the diversity of catholic ascetical practice. Something I am sure will stick.

What I have discussed seems daunting. A priest reading this might say, "I can't do all of this." A lay person might say, "I don't know how to do all of this, even if I had the time." In the next part, I will discuss what changes need to be made in Christian Education to make catechesis more efficient for everyone involved. In the following part, I will make some radical proposals about how we might better organize parishes for growth in both numbers and the divine life.

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.
    

...For That Which Is Signified

Very recently, I was sitting less than 20 minutes' drive from Moore, OK, discussing the historical reconstruction of Earth's climate system. I'll summarize the discussion by saying that the climate system is complex, our records of it always will be incomplete, and that reconstruction of the past always defies our ideal standards of proof and causality. Nature is impersonal. It has no motivations, only the compulsions of forces and the gradients in mass, composition, and energy that sustain them, which do arise at random. 

When we attempt to understand the co-evolution of life with the climate system, we are tempted to read those compulsions as motivations. One thread of intelligent design is that the historical evolution of the Earth system is motivated to produce human beings or at least some creature, "blessed with memory, reason, and skill," as the Eucharist Prayer puts it. One example is the mass extinction about 250 million years, at the end of Permian and the beginning of Triassic time. At the end of the Permian, there lived a creature called Lystrosaurus , a synapsid (mammal ancestor) who had evolved a rib cage and internal organs somewhat resembling ours so as to live underground like a gopher. Perhaps thanks to this lifestyle, Lystrosaurus survived the mass extinction and passed on its traits to its descendants, who perhaps include us. 

Stephen Jay Gould takes on the idea of teleological evolution in Full House , and for the moment, I'll accept his conclusion that the case for humanity as the telos of evolutionary processes is weak. Intelligent design tries to make a rational, objective case for something that is ultimately subjective: that we are one of the intended results of creation, like light and darkness, the celestial objects, plants, the birds of the air, the fish in the sea, and all the creatures that live on land. That the ultimately random and impersonal forces of nature do somehow harmonize. But we know this from revelation, not from nature. And it is from revelation, we, too, must understand how to read impersonal natural forces on shorter timescales.

I was on Twitter in Detroit Airport on Monday when I saw a debris signature in a radar image someone had posted. I had flown out of Oklahoma City a couple of hours before, and I tried to orient myself in the image with the places I'd been in the previous few days. Already having been delayed in Oklahoma one night, I had been quite enthusiastic about leaving before another round of severe thunderstorms developed, and seeing evidence of a tornado on radar within ten miles of the airport I would have been in, had the random odds of airline re-booking not been in my favor, came with some self-justification. Oh, how good had my judgment been. And then I thought, "That's a sprawling metropolitan area. I've seen those houses clustered here and there on the landscape. People live there. And that's a big tornado." Before I left Detroit, it was clear that a very strong tornado had caused multiple fatalities and severe damage.

It is a tenet of our civil righteousness that most dead people do not deserve to be dead. We make exceptions for murderers, some of those who abuse drugs or children, and people who die by sheer incompetence (if we are unconnected with them), but we draw the line well beyond people who die in natural or anthropogenic disasters. And by disasters, I mean those fatal events of a scale where grief is overwhelming because grief is correlated. And in these cases, we often attribute the escape of survivors to the grace (or visitation, as I sometimes say) of God. At funerals, we are known to say the converse: that the dead are dead, because God wanted them with Him in heaven. Our civil righteousness, however, bristles at the idea that the dead died for their sins or those of society as a whole, though some preacher almost always goes there. 

Mark Joseph Stern has a piece in Slate today about journalists trying to inject divine agency into people's experiences of the Moore tornado, which helpfully re-hashes some Enlightenment ideas about theodicy or atheodicy (justifying the ways of no God to man). (Or as  At one point, Stern quotes Isaiah 45:7 and then remarks, "These are thorny theological questions." As a mesoscale meteorologist (the particular type of scientist who studies tornadoes), I know that tornadoes are the outcome of physics on a planet like ours that has a day and a night, varying climates, seasons, and transports water from the land to the sea. As Callan Bentley points out, meteorologists at the National Weather Service and on broadcast media gave advance and accurate warning of the tornado in Moore as well as the probability for severe weather generally in Oklahoma. As a theologian, I know that tornadoes also are a manifestation of harmony that arises from apparently contradictory natural forces. For Athanasius in Contra Gentes, harmonious structures like tornadoes (not one of his examples) gave him insight into the oneness and goodness of God, which seems remarkably frustrating when the objects of demonstration kill people. 

In such cases, I'd say to people like Callan Bentley or Mark Joseph Stern, I pray, not because I believe it does anything (you'll hear why in a minute), but because if the Church is One Body with Christ, it ought to cry in pain when it is so badly injured. That we cannot cry in pain for all injuries is a measure of our limits, not the futility of prayer in such cases.

Which is not to say that Bentley and Stern don't have a point about divine agency saving people from tornadoes. They do, but I prefer to let Jesus make my argument. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, He justifies it by giving an example of the holiness of God, "Who lets the Sun shine on the evil and the good, and sends rain upon the just and unjust alike" (Matthew 5:45). One of the solemn and insoluble mysteries of the world is that we can find both sustenance and death from the operations of nature and that what we find can be (but is not always) decoupled from the content of our character. 

Jesus also insists that anthropogenic disasters and even mass murder is subject to the same calculus. See, for instance, Luke 13: 

"1 And there were present, at that very time, some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

2 And he answering, said to them: Think you that these Galileans were sinners above all the men of Galilee, because they suffered such things?

3 I say to you, No: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish.

4 Or those eighteen upon whom the tower fell in Siloe, and slew them: think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem?

5 I tell you: No: but unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish."    

To paraphrase Peter: we know that Jesus's disciples died and their earthly bodies experienced corruption. Indeed, the tomb of Peter and others is with us to this day. Jesus is not saying that if repent, hide ourselves in Him, or experience whatever form of soteriological unity you prefer, we can escape the mysterious, intractable vulnerabilities of the created order. After all, Jesus couldn't. Or since we know Jesus could, we know that he didn't. Instead, I only can read Luke 13 to mean that death at any scale or random, lucky escapes at any scale signify for us law and grace in the eternal and soteriological context. Dying or not dying in a tornado is not the action of law and grace to individuals, it merely signifies these things for us. An unbelieving scientist need not start a sentence with "A God who is powerful enough to do X" and expect a believing scientist to be convinced of anything, the God we believe is as powerful and necessary as the laws of physics and their consequences thereof. But more.

So why do we confuse the signifier with the signified? Why do we identify the survivors with Grace and used to identify the dead with the punishment of the Law? Jacob Smith, the priest in charge of Calvary St. George in New York City may have reached the heart of this when he spoke at Mockingbird's NYC conference last month on "Ministering to Winners: The Poor, Captive, Blind, Oppressed (and Other People Like You and Me) or perhaps "the theology of the Cross vs. the theology of glory." At one point, he mentions that old Reformation term (familiar to my readers through *Christopher), we are curvatus in se. To paraphrase the Rev. Mr. Smith, the overwhelming action of universally accessible human salvation is reduced by the action of sin in our hearts to the glorification of our own personal story. And it's just the same when we see the miraculous escapes of others from natural disasters.

And I suppose I might have something different to say if I were being burned at the stake and the fire did not harm me or one of the other apparent suspensions of the natural law we hear of in the acts of the martyrs, but until then, I will try desperately to convince myself that the world entire is the proper object for thanksgiving, not just my lucky breaks.    

Co-Creating with the Millennials: Some First Steps

Yesterday, I was sitting at brunch with someone from church, who said, "I really like the way you've incorporated yourself into the church. So many young people just want so much from the church but won't give anything, they need to meet us half way."

The next words out of my mouth were not, "I am a single, straight white male, lifelong Episcopalian with a well-paying, if not particularly stable job. If I can't fit into this church, you should close your doors now."

This leads us to Crusty Old Dean's latest essay on the future of The Episcopal Church as my generation, the Millennials, eventually succeeds into leadership. Crusty Old Dean helpfully argues that this succession process should begin yesterday and be more cooperative than presently envisioned by the powers that be, so that TEC and other mainline denominations do not fail as miserably with the Millennials as they have with Generation X.

Reading essays about Millennials and Christianity always makes me feel inadequate. I feel, as a more or less intensely practicing Episcopalian of a certain age, that I should have brilliant insights about how to incorporate my generation into the church. I should feel constantly empowered by the Holy Spirit to win my generation for Christ. Or perhaps I have been reading too many eHarmony profiles (more on that later).

Unfortunately, I don't have any such brilliant insights, because I can't speak from my own experience. The way that Anglican Christianity and I are one is a type of the unity of the Godhead (in the least blasphemous and most inferior way possible). My faith and practice are inexplicable mysteries to me. I'm a cradle Episcopalian, who's never been off the figurative membership rolls of a parish since baptism, and whose longest period away from worshipping in an Episcopal church was ten happy weeks with an ELCA parish in suburban Houston (I didn't have a car). I've never been in the ordination process. I've never taken off a year to do domestic or foreign missionary activity, though I've taken a couple of weeks every once in a while. And I've been a member of three parishes of which neither parent was a member. I'm not bragging. I'm just pointing out that the number of people I know with background and experience like mine is smaller than the fingers on one hand.

Crusty Old Dean, in the essay I linked to and in other places, recounts being in meetings where he is the only generational representative in the room (in his case, X). And the others then have the politeness to ask him for his thoughts. I've had those moments, too. The realization I've had is to think about those of one's generation who are not here but might like to be, or even not know they want to be.

So now that I have professed my ignorance on the subject, let me now pontificate upon it. Crusty Old Dean proposes co-creation of a new Episcopal Church with Millennials. In other places, he thinks about creating a broader mainline body. I've seen what co-creation between Boomers and Millennials looks like. It is or was called the Occupy Movement.

Away from Wall Street, Occupy was a marriage of college-aged activists and Boomer/GenX-led activist groups. The latter groups often were closely associated with partisan politics, like MoveOn.org, or connected to partisan groups with little or slightly more influence in American electoral politics, such as the Democratic Socialists of America or the perpetual Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. In other cases, the groups were more local, grassroots organizations with limited partisan affiliation. Let's draw the analogy between the partisan/electoral groups and denominational structures or national ecumenical groups. Let's also draw the analogy between the local, non-partisan groups and parishes, individual ministries of parishes, and local parachurch/ecumenical organizations.

One Lesson from Occupy: Democratically-Joined Activities vs. Top-Down Institutional Efforts

So what happened with Occupy? Well, there was conflict. The most important conflict centered around Millennial concern that Occupy was being co-opted by the Boomer/GenX-led organizations. In one reading, Occupy was a brand. Occupiers were cautious about the brand being associated with one party or another. In another reading, Occupiers were concerned that their time and effort were being stolen by organizations who they could not influence.

This conflict was resolved cruise director style. You choose the activities in which you want to participate. The stuff more people want to do generally is more fun. Whatever MoveOn.org wanted to do would not be endorsed by Occupy but non-partisan political efforts by another organization could be announced in General Assembly meetings. Non-institutional efforts outside of Occupy could receive somewhat more formal endorsement from Occupy. For example, Bank Transfer Day is not an institution. Someone posts an idea on a calendar. If the idea goes viral, people do it. Bank Transfer Day could be sponsored by the NCUA or someone, but it's a clear, purposeful, and defined activity that doesn't attempt any kind of national institutional organization.

The lesson we can take from this conflict and its partial solution is that doing church in the future may look like a series of hastily planned, low-budget experiments. The future urban parson or lay reader may walk from park to park tweeting that they're sitting on a bench somewhere or in a coffee shop. Larger, in-person events especially may be very unpredictable. Even GenX seems not to understand the purpose of RSVPing sometimes.

The advantage we have as a church is access to space, knowledge, and a living tradition of prayer and ascesis. If we structure our experiments right, those who spend time with us will serve and be renewed.

At the moment, another Millennial and I are running a fairly random discussion group in the local pub one night a month. We're doing it mostly through a Facebook group. I don't have much hope for it, honestly. But if you asked me what I needed, I would say that I'd love access to the church bulletins of every parish within twenty miles (Presbyterians and Methodists, too). There's probably one to three people in every parish who'd be up for this, but I have of no way of knowing who they are, and I want it to be a soft sell. Second, I need access to my church on that night for Compline. Note that these ideas probably wouldn't cost much money but require an investment in trust and communication. I don't want to hear concerns about the content of our discussions or worries about competition with this or that. I just want to forum to bring 20-40 year old mainliners together to talk about the things that matter to us.

Occupy presents the church with other lessons, but I'm going to make the transition to another important subject:

What Do Millennials Want to Know About the Christian Life?

The problem with 21st century adulthood is that it doesn't have a manual, it has a Library of Babel filled with them. Between the Internet and the unprecedented democratization of the printing press in the digital era, there is no shortage of advice in the form of the written word. If you're a mainline Protestant, though, you're in a bit of a bind. Episcopalians take some fairly clear sides in the culture wars in General Convention, but relating what we say there to everyday life is complex.

Recently, B.P. Zahl (just to distinguish from her husband and many distinguished in-laws) and Gibson published a study on young adults' relationship with God . Their sample, which included me, represented a group of Millennials deeply engaged with the Christian faith. The conclusion (probably an overly strident reading): young adult Christians experienced God as far less loving and more judgmental than they had been taught in church. For many people my age, there is a disconnect between life and doctrine.

For reasons that should be obvious by the very mention of it, I've been reading a lot of eHarmony profiles. And because my level of religious engagement is out of the ordinary, the computer matching wizards of Pasadena have been matching me with women who want "a leader," "a man after God's own heart," "Godly head of a household," who is "interested in homeschooling," so they may live "pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen ;)" Some expressions recur over and over again to the point that I recognized them as scripts. Evangelical Christian publishing (and some Roman Catholic), preaching, and formation sets forth a coherent vision of "Biblical womanhood." I disagree with that vision, but I admire it for its coherence. No one is telling me how to be a godly Episcopal man in my personal and professional life, though I'll thank Derek for referring me to Martin Thornton as a start.

Some of this advice, of course, will be relevant to dating and mating. Surely, the third date is not "the sex date," but when and how a romantic relationship should become physical is a dubium . So is how to date someone who is not a Christian or from a much different Christian tradition. How do you articulate your faith within the marriage or in childrearing? Or perhaps we can even add, how do you know you're called to marriage at all?

But much of this advice will go into areas of vocation and work/life balance, a key Millennial concern in employment.

Ultimately, Millennials want to be told what to do and why they're doing it, but they also want to know what to do when they can't do what they're supposed to be doing or when circumstances spin beyond their control. Seriously engaging with popular culture may help. Mockingbird is doing some good things. I'd love to see something on April Kepner of Grey's Anatomy or Pastor Casey on the Mindy Project.

What Should Millennials Give the Church?

Although I made a little fun of his sentiment, I agree with my Boomer friend about the need for Millennials to give as much as they get in the course of the necessary leadership transition. To other Millennials, I'd give three pieces of advice.

1. If you don't like the place, trust your instincts and find somewhere else.

I've been very lucky with my last three parishes. I haven't needed to church shop. The church down the street (more or less) has been the one for me. But I've visited some parishes that would scare me off. Trust that instinct. As Crusty Old Dean points out, being a young person of faith can be tough, especially an Episcopalian. You often sense that other Christians as well as the secular people you work with think of you like the Church at Laodicea. The last thing you need is for your parish church to feel hostile or merely isolating.

2. Find mentors

Joining a new parish is very much like starting a new job. You need to know the parish's history, the state of its finances, learn about ministries that will suit or develop your gifts, and just make friends. Sometimes, your mentors will be your grandparents' age, but enjoy it. You have a lot to learn from them. They have a lot to learn from you.

3. Pledge

Most Millennials I know stick two bucks in the collection plate, the "loose plate." Loose plate is a useful revenue source for the church. The Canons require that some of it goes to some special purposes, but if you're regularly attending a parish, make a pledge. It doesn't have to be much. The average American Christian tithes every four to five years. If you're a college graduate and employed outside academia, that's $15 a week or so. But the impact on incorporation is huge. The people who count the offerings will see your name somewhere on the line connected with the money. They'll have a record that you regularly show up to church. And the compensation for this financially burdensome breach of privacy is that they will start treating you like a fellow member of Christ's Body and not like some weird alien to be feared, ignored, or appeased. Besides, at some point, you're going to have pay for this anyway. You better start getting used to the idea. Trust me. The more you like where you are, the more you will give. And the more good you will see your gifts doing.

I Have A Vocation, Just Not That Vocation or Responsibility, What's That?

In an older era, when the lines between academic and religious instruction were far more blurry, professors were described as being "called" to their professorships, just as we speak of clergy being called to their cures.

In that light, I am in my first call and feel an odd affinity with my clerical analogs. If I were a regular/ordinary professor, the parallels would be more striking. I would teach on a regular basis. Note, for instance, that early Protestant New England used to refer to a ceremonial centered around the preaching of the Word as "lecture."

My job also familiarizes me with the roles that clergy have beyond their primary job description. I raise money (or at least try to do so). I advise on the purchase of equipment. I go to and sometimes lead meetings. I have control over a small budget and must watch carefully to make sure it is being spent properly.

Now, most white collar workers share these secondary roles in one way or another. The commonality between professors and clerics is a central focus on the proclamation and interpretation of texts, an unusual freedom from bureaucratic forms of control, the need to be mostly self-directed, and the sense that one's most valuable and efficient interactions are on the personal level. The cure of souls and the education of the mind most naturally occur on the scale of the individual, so we both recognize the importance of collaborative development in the realm of both the spirit and the intellect.

Older language again teaches us something. George Fox used to roam around 17th century England harassing the professors in their steeple houses, by which he meant priests of the Church of England in their parish churches. In this thinking, the priest, elder, presbyter etc. is always a professor of "religion" or of the things of God.

Recently, Derek posted on his concerns about a curious phenomenon: "Clergy tend to be folks who didn't/couldn't find fulfillment in the church as laity."

One part of his discussion (oft mentioned in the comments) touches my experience. If you're bright and have a devout, yet geeky interest in Christianity, people are always wondering why you don't become ordained. My answer is very simple: my vocation is not to be a priest. My vocation is to keep people from dying on other planetary bodies, unravel and meditate upon the history of Earth and other planetary bodies, and possibly figure out to how make other planetary bodies more like Earth (or otherwise flourish).

Not all of us are going to have such engaging and time-consuming vocations, but most of us are not going to have clerical ones. What we need to think about is how being a lay person can be more fulfilling. And part of that is understanding that the vocation of a lay person is often complementary to what they do in the world. In some cases, it's analogous. How many of your church's Sunday School teachers are teaching or have taught elsewhere? Do you have interior decorators, hair dressers, florists, and other aesthetic experts on the Altar Guild?

Sometimes, what the laity does in church is not analogous, but still complementary. A lawyer may enjoy helping out with the emergency homeless shelter, because she enjoys ministering to the material needs of the disadvantaged rather than their legal ones. The concern I have for the laity is that we too often are repeating the patterns of our vocations in the world within the church, or the exact, yet kindred opposite, we pretend that the standard operating procedure of human institutional structures does not apply on Sunday morning. And I see danger in both of those bad habits for clergy-lay relations as well as the general health of our parishes. If we want a church that serves the world as Jesus calls us to do, we need a laity that feels empowered and renewed by what they do in the church, not a laity that is simply transferring their skill set from the world to the church.

As Derek mentions, we can do this, because we have means that the world does not know. I truly believe that God does empower, restore, and direct us by the things we do and that this process can happen more effectually if we have a better sense of who He is, what He has done, and what we can do to relate to Him, as he always is seeking to relate to us.

The other issue that comes up in the comments is what happens when a lay person is better educated in the intellectual content of the faith and/or perhaps better formed spiritually than the clergy. The church is a hospital for sinners. The Three Holy Hierarchs and the Desert Fathers and Mothers are constantly reminding us that the soul and the body are cared for by analogous means and arts.

In medicine, basic science researchers without M.D.'s are common. Excluded from clinical practice, by their own choice, they explore fundamental biology, chemistry, and even physics in search of ways to improve the standard of care. In collaboration with physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and others, they have helped bring medicine to extraordinary, if imperfect heights in comparison with the 19th century. There is jealousy and conflict in this relationship, but it tends to be generational. Doctors believe the science of their own day over the bleeding edge.

In that light, it's not surprising to me that there's tension between clergy and other theologically educated individuals. Clergy, like many allied professionals, suffer from a little impostor syndrome.

Clergy need to realize that their specialness does not lie in how smart they are or how fit they are for ministry. We set them apart in particular because they meet a standard, but once they've met that standard, we set them apart because they have made a choice, vows, and taken on the high responsibilities that come with the cure of souls, the preaching of the Word, and the celebration of the Sacraments. Their specialness lies in the acceptance of that responsibility, just as my project responsibilities change between when I'm Principal Investigator of a grant or I'm just being paid off the grant. If I'm PI, my specialness does not change if my student is more brilliant and better-educated in physics than I am. (Which I'm sure is going to happen some day.) I'm responsible for directing their abilities to the best project outcome I can.

I wish I could separate out what clergy do and laity do and talk about spheres and onlapping magisteria etc. But when I read the Gospels, I don't see Jesus or the Apostles, our clerical prototypes, keeping to that kind of script. Our lay prototypes are the ones who Jesus heals and are sent out to proclaim what has been done for them. The only true distinction I see is one of responsibility, "Feed my sheep."

Three Faiths, One Program

I'm currently in the midst of Bruce Feiler's Abraham , less of a search for a the "historical Abraham" but an extended meditation on how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have viewed Abraham, particularly the stories they tell about Abraham outside the bounds of the Scriptural witness of Genesis.

In a little more than a hundred pages, it has been quite clear to me that all three faiths not only share many of the same stories, but also the same language of signs that interprets them. All three religions have their interpretive fundamentalists, surely, though the Jews are less prone to this than the rest of us, but we share a system of mystical interpretation that brings together a whole set of thinkers that never co-existed in time or space.

A good example is Feiler's account of the interpretation of the shofar by a Jerusalem shofar-maker. The shofar-maker refers to the shofar as a lawyer. Traditionally, the shofar is blown at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the beginning of a week in which God is said to take an annual account of the sins and good deeds of the world. The shofar, the maker says, is a reminder to God of Abraham's offering of Isaac.

The concept of Jesus as our lawyer or Advocate with the Father is familiar from Christianity, and Christians from very ancient times have recognized parallels between Jesus's self-offering and the binding/sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis. (I've probably written on the prefiguring of Jesus as advocate in the Book of Job.) Indeed, in Ascensiontide, we often sing the Rosh Hashanah Psalm, "God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of the ram's horn." Now, I have no idea what that really meant to the God-inspired Jew who wrote that. But I do know what it meant to early Christian interpreters reading Jesus' life.

Later Jewish interpreters replied by arguing that the story in Genesis suggests that Isaac himself was actually killed and raised by God after three days. Isaac's sacrifice became the inspiration for Jewish martyrdom in the face of forced conversion by Christians, an idea signified for Jews by the imposition of ashes. One can almost hear the Letter to the Hebrews, "These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth." (Feiler has engaged obliquely with Hebrews in Abraham so far (particularly the idea of relating to God by living as an alien), but I'm curious to see what else he makes of it.)

For Muslims, the binding of Isaac is more complex, as is the Crucifixion of Jesus. The Koran actually says that Isaac was the sacrifice, though if you were to ask most Muslims, they would say Ishmael was. Moreover, the Koran suggest the binding occurred in a dream rather than in waking life, as Genesis does. As for the Crucifixion, the Islamic account is a weird twist on the typological thread in the Gospel accounts.

So let me remind you of the Christian absorption of Jewish typology. As alluded to in the Letter to the Hebrews, the Crucifixion is a culmination of the Jewish sacrificial system. Traditionally, the Yom Kippur sacrifice involved the choosing of two goats. In the Gospels, Pilate gives the Jewish people the choice of releasing Jesus and the similarly named Jesus Barabbas (Jesus, son of the father). One is guilty of preaching a subversive spiritual kingdom. The other is guilty of "stasis," a word that signifies in Greek, the subversion of the temporal order (riot, rebellion...). And the high priest's party stirs up the crowd to call for Jesus, not Barabbas (but yet...). Thus, just as the Kohen Gadol (the High Priest) casts lots between the two goats, so here as well. Who is sacrificed in the Temple or who is offered to Azazel, the demon of the desert (and quietly shoved off a cliff in the wilderness) is not something the Gospel writers are very clear about. But within the first century after Jesus's death, incidents of Jesus's life (especially his last days) were being interpreted as a sort of Jewish Fasti, the Jewish sacred calendar encompassed in a human life.

For Islam, the Crucifixion is unacceptable, in two ways. First, if Jesus were actually killed, the typological parallels to Ishmael/Isaac would be impossible to ignore, making Jesus very much like God's son/partner. But the Koran is clear that God has neither son, nor partner. Second, the entire post-Easter narrative has to be wrong, because it makes Jesus, the authoritative advocate with the Father and the Holy Spirit into the Paraclete. Muslims believe that Jesus promised the Paraclete. They, however, believe that Muhammad was the Paraclete. Therefore, the Islamic Crucifixion involves Jesus being assumed into heaven before even being placed on the cross. Someone is put in his place, bearing his likeness. The Koran, I think, is ambiguous on who exactly it was. Islamic-influenced pseudo-Gospels put Judas there. I wouldn't be surprised if some say Barabbas. The idea that Simon of Cyrene was substituted pre-dates Islam by four centuries. In fact, like the ambiguity about whom exactly Abraham sacrificed, Islam attains greater intellectual consistency by not specifying who exactly suffered on the Cross.

I point to these complexities, because I notice that the stories that three most numerous Near Eastern monotheistic religions (note that few others exist in very small numbers) tell and the rituals they use are a strongly overlapping set. Rather than create entirely new typologies, polemic among the Big Three is a process of re-shaping, call and response. Rather than making up a new game, religions explore the creative freedom of the game that Abraham or God or whoever invented. The closest phenomenon I can think of is that of the evolution of U.S. history textbooks over the 20th century, in which the same first three centuries of European settlement, revolution, republic-making, expansion, and civil war are shaped into a vast diversity of narratives that tell us how historians want to see the United States.

Which leads me to a fascinating conclusion. That the big Three are the same logical system. However, as Russell and Godel established, there is no universal system of mathematical logic. Every system must be based on axioms. The fun is trying to see what axioms are the most general. For Judaism, I find it in the opening of the Krias Shema, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one." In Islam, I hear it in the Shahada, "There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God." The distinctions between the big Three very much stem from these axioms. But what is the Christian equivalent? The historical Creeds are just too long to be the fundamental axioms. And many Christians reject the Creeds. The Creeds contain the axioms that distinguish smaller sub-sets of faith in Jesus.

Instead, I find the fundamental axiom of Christianity in Rite I of the Book of Common Prayer (which I was fortunate to hear this morning), "Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God..." In other words, by stating that Jesus is Lord, both explicitly and with the English for "Shema" (hear!), these words are a very subtle variation on the opening lines of the Krias Shema. The close parallel of the axioms fundamentally distinguishes Judaism and Christianity by the messianic secret above messianic secret of Jesus, "I am the Lord." But it's not a contest.

The brothers of this holy house extend these thoughts to you on the Sunday of Judgment in Advent and pray that you may greet your counsel with boldness at the time of his appearing.

The Inhumanity of Nature and Society is the Seed of the Church

Tertullian famously said that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." That's certainly one way to read the New Testament narratives and the martyrologies of the latter eras, but it's a bit of a shortcut. I would argue that persecution was not the fuel for the growth of the Early Church. Instead, persecution strengthened the power of the evangelical message by revealing clearly and bloodily the corrupt and inhumane nature of society. Yet because those who present the early evangelical message to us were themselves oppressors (Paul's self-understanding as a persecutor of the church, for instance, shapes his soteriology in a way that would be distinct from Onesimus), the Gospel tends to be posed as the good news of salvation from one's individual contribution to collective inhumanity (one's sins) through Jesus Christ rather than salvation from the collective inhumanity of society and nature through Jesus Christ. I am afraid to say that this is the deep and nearly irremediable flaw of Patristic writing, perhaps only tempered by the indistinct lens on less elite characters seen in the accounts of the Egyptian monastics. Once an elite individual experiences conversion in a society so much at the whim of nature and so cruel to the least among them, that individual sees those communal sins reflected clearly in their own viciousness.

Therefore, the effect of the Gospel is strongest where nature is most directly afflictive to human life or where society is structured in the least egalitarian manner. The temptation that comes is to pose the Gospel as good news of magical salvation from nature (a common theme in evangelical/Pentecostal thought) or as an excuse for general social reform (the liberal tendency). Possible counter-examples lie in the death camps of Hitler and Stalin, but you may note that 20th century dictators in those presumably nominally Christian societies killed their enemies in the countryside and the wilderness, where no one could see them. The Caesars (and many later Christian rulers) felt quite comfortable erecting crosses on public highways and getting rid of religious dissenters as a form of public entertainment. Roland Barthes commented on a capital case in France in the 1950s, "When the State decides to kill a man, they deny him the power of speech." The inhumanities of the First World, at least, are most easily maintained, when they are most invisible.

Rowan Williams, if you listen hard enough, is constantly trying to find a kernel of the Gospel that speaks to a relatively prosperous and egalitarian society like England. He warns how technology is allowing us to limit personal human interactions. He moans about the demanding and conformist expectations on children in the educational system. He is trying desperately to find a Gospel that will not fall into the category of socialist or Establishment moral judgment, but he naturally has some trouble making the Gospel intelligible in a social welfare state with a relatively stable electrical grid.

Perhaps the strongest argument for the power of the Gospel with regard to nature actually comes from Stephen Jay Gould's Full House , where he argues that there is no evidence that humans represent the culmination of evolution or that the evolution of humanity (or the type of sentience we possess, since sentience is not unique to us) was the necessary outcome of evolution. The Discovery Institute's musings to the contrary, we are not privileged in the grand course of planetary or cosmic history. The intelligibility of physical law (reason) may argue for the existence of God; I'll let the philosophers continue to dither about that, but without revelation, we are a random, irrelevant species that would be better off ending our increasingly dangerous campaign of ecological and biogeochemical disturbance by jumping into the ocean. The salvation that Jesus Christ brings to me is to assert that the emergent randomness (like humans, whales, and copepods, both as individuals and species) in an otherwise neat and tidy natural order is not random, but beloved, even perfectible in Himself. He then can more easily proceed to saving me from my sins.

Responsory Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church for the Feast of John Donne

The Officiant shall say

Almighty and everliving God, your holy apostle Paul has taught us to make prayers, supplications, and thanksgivings for all people.

To which the People shall reply:

We humbly beseech thee most mercifully to receive these our prayers, which we offer unto thy divine majesty.

That it may please thee to inspire continually the universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord.

Grant that all they that do confess thy holy name may agree in the truth of thy holy word and live in unity and godly love.

Give grace (O heavenly Father) to all Bishops, Priests and Deacons.

That they may both by their life and doctrine set forth thy true and lively word and rightly and duly administer thy holy Sacraments.

And to all thy people give thy heavenly grace, and especially to this congregation here present, that with meek heart and due reverence,

We may hear and receive thy holy word, truly serving thee in holiness and righteousness all the days of our lives.


We beseech thee also to defend and save all those in authority among the nations, especially the President of the United States, the Governor of this State, and the Mayor of this City.

And grant us also the grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace.

We most humbly beseech thee of thy goodness (O Lord) to comfort and succor all them which in this transitory life be in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity.

I ask your petitions, either silently or aloud.

The People may add their own petitions.

O Lord, thy servant, John Donne, whom we commemorate this evening, reminds us that when the Church buries someone, that action concerns us all:

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice;”

We bless thy Holy Name for all thy servants who have departed this life in thy faith and fear and beseech thee that it may also be for them and us as Donne has said, “

“God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”

Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and advocate. Amen.

A Quick Thought on a Royal Engagement

I greeted with joy the announcement from Clarence House this morning that Prince William of Wales will marry Catherine Middleton. Why? I am an American citizen with some English roots. But that's not it. It's also fairly probable that the future man and wife never will be crowned and instead will take up a quiet life in the country after a bloodless constitutional reform, so the couple's impact on the world stage is likely to be limited to philanthropy.

No, I was overjoyed at the thought of a grand televised Anglican royal wedding. Certainly, new music will be commissioned. We will see the spectacle of +Rowan and perhaps +John and +Richard and other much controverted English bishops processing about to officiate at the joining of a rescue helicopter pilot and his artistic wife. It will be unspeakably grand, beautiful, and silly, and unlike a certain wedding roughly twenty nine years ago, it will feel more like a fait accompli of a love match than a virgin sacrifice.

What Reason Cannot Fathom

Let the clever world be angry that God's son should forsake his throne of honour, that he should clothe himself in flesh and blood and suffer as a human being. The greatest wisdom of this world must before the counsel of the most high become the greatest folly. What God has decided, reason cannot fathom; she is the blind leader who misleads the spiritually blind --
Recitative from Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (Cantata No. 152) -- J.S. Bach and S. Franck

Franck's lyrics screamed at me from the program page at a concert I recently attended. The epoch in which it was written marks a transition between the two great challenges of reason to the Christian faith. The older reasoning was skeptical that a metaphysical being ever could or would take a physical form. It was a bit of an epistemological jeu de verite , of course. Plato's concerns were more ethical than ontological. He despised the fabulous stories of the fallible Greek gods and was convinced that somewhere out there, the ideal Jupiter more likely smiled on his notions of virtue than gazed upon earth in search of his next lay. Eight centuries later, Augustine was faced with many of the same ethical concerns and eventually embraced the Christian faith, because it made relationship possible with an ideal Jupiter who still has transcended fallible human nature. The Christian faith provided the earthy stories that engaged the plebeians but grounded them in the virtue ethics of the aether beloved by the philosophers.

In these times, I only can explain the captivation of the wise with the exercise of unmitigated, uncorrected, unsupplemented, and arrogant reason with a genuine disregard for virtue outside their own private sphere. The recent feast of St. Michael and All Angels draws this problem into focus. Angels in popular Christian culture and sometimes theologically have served as a cipher for the mysteries of being. Tradition has assigned the motions of the stars, the turnings of the winds, and even reality itself to the communication of the aethereal plans of the Divine Maker into the quotidian reality of middle earth. Angels, originally mediators (jn the sense of communication) between God and men in the Holy Scriptures were transformed by Platonism into much more detail-oriented providers of divine information content. And so as our understanding of nature has improved, the natural philosophical need for angels has diminished to nearer its proper level, that is, nil, but those of a natural philosophical bent have forgotten that there are other philosophical needs beyond those of nature.

People certainly need angels for some reason. In the last year, we have been treated to a spectacle of a Norwegian royal princess and her business partner operating educational and practical programs for communication with angels. They do not have an exclusive monopoly on this kind of thing. All manner of folk will mediate communication with Ascended Masters, angels, spirit guides, and the dead these days. No matter in how much detail nature is put to the question for her secrets, most of the world still seeks realia beyond the most rigorous notions of the real.

The temptation of the new atheists has been to deride this kind of behavior. For them, a course in angel communication is no less a crime against reason and good mores than the kinds of things I say or do seven mornings per week. I can't imagine, honestly, why they never wonder if there might be something more to human notions of a metaphysics than neurochemistry, or perhaps, evolutionary adaptations that maintain social cohesion or that encourage risky behavior to enhancs sexual competition. The end point of this thinking is that our moral actions, our emotions, and the relationships we form are nothing more than a series of chemical reactions in a social context. Eventually, I do imagine that we will confront the moral and existential challenges of human life with the help of chemical buffers, for in a purely natural philosophical universe, the anxieties of those Germans whose funeral music I heard last Saturday night were very real, indeed tragically so, but they lacked any significance. And so with love and so with beauty. As we gain more and more of God's creative freedom among the things that are seen, we will seek to control the inconvenient manifestations of those things that are unseen.

In the first lesson at Evening Prayer last night, the Prophet Daniel is caught up in a vision on the banks of the Tigris. As for his companions, they see nothing but still sense something odd is occurring. Daniel encounters his unnamed Lord, which the rabbis who go for this kind of thing probably read as Metratron, the apotheosized Enoch, but who we traditionally read as the Second Person of the Trinity. The Lord tells Daniel that He strives with the Prince of Persia and soon with the Prince of Greece, but He only has the help of Michael, "your Prince", that is the Prince of the Jewish people. Persia and Greece are the great hegemonic powers of the era. The fate of God's chosen people will depend on their strategic decisions. It would be tempting to imagine the invisible hosts of heaven and hell striving on the battlefield in parallel to Alexander the Great or something, but we are reading prophecy rather than watching the Russian fantasy film, Night Watch . Instead, the Lord is speaking of the necessary struggles that precede His Incarnation. These struggles can be viewed to be of a temporal nature, requiring the restoration of the Jews to Judah and their cult at Jerusalem, but they also can be spiritual. Both Persia and Greece present to the Jews the whole new set of relations, ethics, emotions, and philosophies. The war against the Prince of Persia is less about Jewish power than about Jewish identity. (Which is the true power in the pre-Christian world in that it makes possible the Christ.) Daniel is stuck in the service of Persia, but the great question of his life is always whether he still can remain a Jew. The war in heaven is indeed a Platonic war, a war of ideas.

In the second lesson, we hear of the beginning of the final campaign is this universal war of ideas, in which the victorious Lamb finally is prepared to open the seven seals and transform natural philosophical reality entire in the image of his glorious resurrected Body. The precursor of this transformation is the transformation of primary mimetic form of that Body, that is, the Church, which is described as a kingdom of priests drawn from every tribe, race, language, and nation. In a time of exciting extrasolar planet discoveries, I find it significant that the scroll of the Lamb is sealed with seven seals, the canonical number of heavenly bodies and crystal spheres that the ancients at the time of John of Patmos's revelation believed separated us from God. For as the Apostle reminds us, "...our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." We will be misled if we project the natural philosophical world upon the worldview of the Old and New Testaments, which viewed the universe as a completely different set of relationships in which the physical and metaphysical worlds were connected. Thus, we have little to fear from Jupiter beyond its baleful influence on the long term evolution of Earth's orbit and the motions of asteroids and comets, but we have much to fear from the ideas, vices, and actions signified by Jupiter.

Ultimately, it's not easy for a modern to understand such things. Even the relicts of this worldview in our time are merely for show. No competent astrologer of the ancient world would publish the generalized horoscopes we see in the daily paper. Astrology didn't work because the stars have any influence on human affairs, it worked because looking to the stars allowed the astrologer to unconsciously gain insight into the psychology of the individual and his or her social relations. It is very little different than a mathematics professor I know who remembers theorems by staring at the foliage outside of his window.

So instead the tradition of the Church leaves us with angels to remind us of the gulf between us and God, the existence and significance of invisible things, and the wondrous mystery that the invisible things have crashed into this world once before and will do so again.

Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Gen Y This And Gen Y That

Fr. Bob recently posted a brief quote about the Millennials (Generation Y) on his blog recently. My visceral response to it captured for me how I feel about the kinds of generational generalizations that have become fashionable in the last few years. I think this kind of demographic thinking can come to represent the worst kind of discourse of humans about power. It is the step between, "We will win because of the power of our ideas" and "We will win through overwhelming force." Instead, demographic analysis becomes a way for older generations to project their discontents on the rising generation and say to the theses of their age, "We will win by the power of our ideas seeded in the minds of a new generation." Or as the Salty Vicar once put it, "We will eat your children."

As a Millennial, I, of course, would like to blame my parents' generation as a whole for all manner of evils: the rape of the environment, the destruction of traditional institutions of American civic life, the corruption of the traditional institutions that survived, the loss of idealism, and the obsession with theological uncertainty and transgressive theories. But there is nothing historically inevitable about my generation doing the opposite or reforming the Boomers' mistakes. You can't put vices back in the box. You can't go back to the forest. Social change is inherently hysteretical. The very process of change prevents the system from being anywhere as reversible as it was versible.

I would prefer that if older generations have programs of innovation or reform, they realize that some Millennials may accommodate them. But they do not allow those Millennials to participate in these programs of innovation or reform independently, creatively, and moderately, so that they do not allow those programs to be instructed and corrected, they diminish those Millennials as human beings and impoverish themselves.

I'm pretty sure Fr. Bob knows these things. He, after all, is operating at the grassroots. But let him and others like him be reminded of them anyway.