Litania Pro Sede Cantauriae (ex Archivis Monachiae)

Note: I am buried in problem sets and trying to keep calm about my problem sets. This is somewhat more productive than being buried in the Communion's unpleasantness and trying to keep calm about the Communion's unpleasantness. If you want to feel insurgent, read the Scotist. So here's something I did before I was buried in problem sets. I intend to continue work on the Articles and argue that Dionysius Areopagites and not Plato is the Anglican ur-theologian at some point in the future. And, yes, I know the Latin is funny.


Miserere nobis, Domine.
Miserere, nobis, Christe.

Domine, miserere nobis. Christe, audi nos.
Christe gratiose audi nos

Deus Pater, Creator caeli et terrae
Miserere nobis

Deus Filius, Redemptor mundorum.
Miserere nobis

Deus Sancte Spiritus, Sanctificator Fidelium
Miserere nobis

Sanctissima, Benedictissima, et Gloriosa Trinitas, Unus Deus
Miserere nobis

Benedictissime et Summe Dignissimeque, Iustissime et Honestissime Aequitabillimeque, Perfectissime et Mysticissime Potentissimeque.
Adoramus Te, Trinitatem in Unitate, Unitatem in Trinitate.

Noli revocare, Domine Christe, iniquitates nostras, neque iniquitates progenitorum, noli munerare secundum peccatas. Parce nos, Domine Bone, parce populum tuum, quem redempsisti Sanguine Pretiosissimo Tuo, et Misercordio Tuo, preserva nos in saecula saeculorum.
Parce nos, Domine Bone

Ex omni malo et malignitate, iniquitate, artificiis et laesis diaboli, et damnatione perpetua
Salva nos, Domine Bone

Ex caecitia cordis omni, superbia, securvando, hypocrisia, invidia, odio, malitia, et defectu omni caritatis
Salva nos, Domine Bone

Ex affectibus immoderatis peccatosis et dolis mundorum, carnis, et diaboli.
Salva nos, Domine Bone

Ex omni doctrina falsa, contrasalvifica, schismatica, et ex ingravando cordis, et contemptu tui Verbi et mandatorum tuorum.
Salva nos, Domine Bone

Ex fulgure et turbine ventorum, motu terrae, incendio, diluvio, plaga, pestilentia, et famine.
Salva nos, Domine Bone

Ex omni tyrannia, coniuratione, et bello civili, violentia, pugnis, homicidioque, et morte subito imparatoque.
Salva nos, Domine Bone

Per mysterium Incarnationis Tuae Sanctae, Nativitatem Sanctam Tuam et sesubiugendum Legi, Baptismum, Senegandum in deserto, et Temptationem.
Salva nos, Domine Bone

Per Agoniam Tuam et Sudorem Sanguinosam, Crucem Tuam et Sepulturam, Resurrectionem Gloriosam et Ascensionemque, Adventum Spiritus Sancti.
Salva nos, Domine Bone

In omni tempore tribulationis nostrae; in omni tempore prosperitatis nostrae, in hora mortis, et in Die Iudicii
Salva nos, Domine Bone

Nos peccatores te imploramus ut audires nos et te placeret regere et gubernare Ecclesiam Sanctam Tuam Catholicam secundum Ius Tuum.
imploramus te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret illuminare omnes episcopos, sacerdotes, et diaconos cum scientia vera et intellegendo Verbi tui; et ut utroque proclamando modo vitae, proponerent et demonstrarent proprie
imploramus te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret benedicere et curare omnem populum tuum
imploramus te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret promittere operarios in messem tuam et trahere omnia in regnum tuum
imploramus te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret dare omnibus increscendum gratiae ut audivissent et accipissent Verbum tuum et cessissent fructos Spiritus
imploramus te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret trahere omnes erratores et deceptos in viam veritatis
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret nobis dare cor pro timore et amore Tui, et vivendo diligenter secundum mandata tua
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret ita regere corda horum in auctoritate ut iustitiam agerent, misericordiam diligerent, et ambulare solicitum in viis veritatis.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret finifacere bella in omnibus mundis, dare unitatem, pacem, et concordem omnibus nationibus et donare libertatem in omnibus populis.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret dare et preservare fructos terrae providentosos pro usu nostro ut omnes utintur in proprio tempore.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret preservare omnes, qui sunt in periculo propter laborem aut peregrinationem.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret preservare et praeprovidere feminas omnes in infantilabore, infantes et orphanos, viduatos, effiliatos, et omnes quorum domi sunt fracti et disordinivulnerati.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret solosos visitare, omnes patientes in mente, corpore et spiritu fortificare, et deficientes et infirmos consolare cum presentia tua.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret supportare, adiuvare, et consolare omnes qui sunt in periculo, necessitate, et tribulatione.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret miserere omnia
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret nobis dare veram penitentiam, solvere nos ex peccatis, negligentiis, et ignorantiis nostris, et nos inducere cum gratia Spiritus Sancti pro amendando vitas suas secundum sanctum Verbum tuum.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret solvere inimicos nostros, persecutores, defamatoresque et convertere corda tua.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret stantes fortificare, infirmicordantes adiuvare, occidentes elevare, et ad finem decontere Satan sub pedibus nostris.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Ut Tibi placeret donare fidelibus vitam aeternam et pacem.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

O Communio Mystica Sanctorum, O Ecclesia Triumphans, O Cumulus Testium
Addite orationes tuas nostris

Sancta et Benedicta Maria Virgo
Ora pro nobis

Sancta Dei Genetrix
Ora pro nobis

O altior cherubis, gloriosior seraphis. Genetrix Verbi Aeterni.
Ora pro nobis

Vos Custodes Archangelici Angulorum Mundorum, Sancti Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, et Uriel
Orate pro nobis

Vos chori angelorum
Orate pro nobis

Vos sancti ordines spirituum benedictorum
Orate pro nobis

Tu Praecursor Christi, Sanctus Iohannes Baptizans
Ora pro nobis

Tu Custos Sancti Infantis, Sanctus Iosephus
Ora pro nobis

Vos sancti patriarches et prophetae
Orate pro nobis

Tu Clavicurator Sanctus Petrus
Ora pro nobis

Tu Minime Apostolorum, Sanctus Paulus
Ora pro nobis

Tu Saltiricrucificate, Sanctus Andreas
Ora pro nobis

Tu Fulminifili, Sanctus Iacobus
Ora pro nobis

Tu Dilecte Domini, Sanctus Iohannes
Ora pro nobis

Tu Dubitator et Fidelis, Sanctus Thomas
Ora pro nobis

Tu Frater Domini, Sanctus Iacobus
Ora pro nobis

Tu Spiritiviator, Sanctus Phillipus
Ora pro nobis

Tu Derminude, Sanctus Bartolemaeus
Ora pro nobis

Tu Scriptor, Sanctus Matthias
Ora pro nobis

Tu Zealos, Sanctus Simon
Ora pro nobis

Tu Fortis, Sanctus Judas
Ora pro nobis

Tu Sortelecte, Sanctus Matthias
Ora pro nobis

Tu Ioviproconfute, Sanctus Barnabas
Ora pro nobis

Tu Magister Theophili, Sanctus Lucas
Ora pro nobis

Tu Primus Evangelistarum, Sanctus Marcus
Ora pro nobis

O Septuaginta
Orate pro nobis

Tu Apostola Apostolorum, Sancta Maria Magdalena, et comites tui
Orate pro nobis

O Sancte Iosephe Arimathaeae, qui sepulit corpus Domini et navigavit ad metalla stannosa Cornubiensis
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Aristobole, Pastor in Britannia
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Albane et martyri Verulami
Orate pro nobis

O vos sancti episcopi Gallorum
Orate pro nobis

O Sancte Patrici, Apostolus Hibernorum
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Ninias, episcopus Galviensis Pictorum
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Columba, nobilissime, penitens, et apostolus Pictorum
Ora pro nobis

Omnes vos sancti apud Hibernos, Pictos, et Britones
Orate pro nobis

O Sanctus Pater Gregorius Magnus, qui angelos non Anglios visit.
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Augustine, Conditor Sedis Cantauriae
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Laurenti, Petriplagatus
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Melliti, Hierophans Cantauriae
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Iuste
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Honori
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Deusdedite Frithona
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Theodore Tarsenis, Murifex Ovilium
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Bertwald
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Tatwin, Aenigmifex
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Nothelme, Quaestor Bedae
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Bregwin
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Jaenbert, Plaga Offae
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Aethelhard, Renovator Primatiae
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Oda Severus, Orator Virtutis
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Dunstan, Prelatus Phroneticus
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Anselm, Theologicus and Defensor Libertatis Ecclesiae
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Thomas Becket, Martyr ad altare Dei apud cathedram tuam
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Edmund, Fugitivus Potignensis
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Thomas Cranmer, Scriptor Orationis Communis
Ora pro nobis

O Sancte Guillame Lauda, Malleus et Martyr
Ora pro nobis

Vos sancti Ecclesiae Anglicanae
Orate pro nobis

Omnes vos sancti Dei Nostri
Orate pro nobis

Domine, audi nos.
Christe, audi nos

Imploramus ut Tibi placet donare ut habitavissemus Regnum Tuum in communione sanctorum omnium.
imploramus Te ut audires nos, Bone Domine

Filius Dei, imploramus Te ut nos audires
Filius Dei, imploramus Te ut audires nos

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccatis mundi
miserere nobis

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccatis mundi
miserere nobis

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccatis mundi
dona nobis pacem

Kyrie eleison
Christe eleison

Kyrie eleison

[Nota Orationem Domini diceri in anglice ut sequitur. Locatio literarum antiqua est. Pronuntiandia praecisa verborum incognita est]

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.

Domine, surge, nos adiuva
Et salva nos propter Nomen

Deus, audivimus cum auribus et patres matresque nostri declaraverunt nobis labores nobilissimos quas egisti in antiquis diebus, quam portavisses lucem Verbi tui cum apostolis tuis ad insulas Hyperboreales in finibus cratonis Europae in Tellure. Et quando servi tui turbati sunt obstinacia Anglorum, movisti servum tuum Gregorium mittere Augustinum ad Cantiacos. Et ibi Augustinus ovile tuum Cantauriam condidit. Et multi apud sanctos secuti sunt Augustinum in sede. Sed quando errores Ecclesiae Romae excrescerunt numerosiores quam spinae quas natura pro rosis ordinat, rex Anglorum regulamentum Ecclesiae Anglicanae carpsit. Sed credimus sicut Ierusalem primos Christianos judicavisset et Roma et Nova Roma essent iudices communionis catholicae ante schismas antiquas et remansissent iudices communionis fracti in his mundo, Cantauriam condidisti quam iudicem Ecclesiae Anglicanae in Una Sancta Catholica et Ecclesia Apostolica, quam primum inter pares, quam metropolitanum metropolitanorum, quam conventorem seminis dispersi per omnes mundos.

Domine, surge, nos adiuva
Et salva nos propter Nomen

Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum Amen.

Domine, surge, nos adiuva
Et salva nos propter Nomen

Versiculum: Serva nos ex inimicis nostris, O Christe.
Responsum: Specta plagas nostra cum gratia
V. Specta pie dolores cordium
R. Cum misericordia, miserere iniquitates populi tui
V. Cum favore et misericordia, audi orationes nostras
R. O Filius Davidis, miserere nobis.
V. Et nunc et in aeternam, cave audire nos, O Christe.
R. Gratie audi nos, O Christe. Gratie, audi nos, O Christe

Oremus.

Humiliose Te imploramus, O Pater, despectare deficiencias nostras et pro gloria Nominis, avertere malos istos omnes quos meriti sunt iustissime et donare in nostris omnibus tumultibus ut poneremus totum creditum et confidentiam nostram in misericordia tua et servi tui essent in sanctitate et puritate vivendi pro honore et gloria tua per nostrum solum Mediatorem et Advocatum, Dominum Nostrum Iesum Christum. Amen.

-----------------------------------------------

I'm worried. I'm really worried. I'll continue doing what I can on the Articles, though I will be more occupied than formerly.

XIII. Of Works Before Justification

Note: The entry below is a good example of a misreading of an Article. The comments are corrective and instructive, so make sure to read them.

Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ...

One of the great quests of the Enlightenment was for a scientific system of morals. This was not to be a revolution in morals, since most of the philosophes were quite content with the bourgeois or benign aristocratic morals of their class or the class of their patrons. But above all else, they sought to divorce morals from the "superstitions" of inspired religion.

To some extent, this was a laudable goal insofar as they sought to eliminate the need for the religious wars of the previous two centuries that had wrecked much of Christendom and produced untold human misery. Theologies that stressed endurance in beatings, chains, untold tortures, and even unspeakable death were popular prior to the philosophes, but they were merely the necessary counterweight to theologies of the sword. Notable among the courageous and the prophetic of these times were the members of the Religious Society of Friends, who disavowed not only wars of religion but also all forms of outward violence, taking these principles not from some new revelation from heaven but as a core teaching of the New Testament.

The Articulators, however, likely were often theologians of the sword or silent partners to such theology. It is one thing to say that they strived for compromise between Calvinist and Roman Catholic views (and perhaps ended up lukewarm and schizophrenic Lutherans), but it is another thing to pose them as tolerant men. They sought civil peace through ecclesiastical order. One justification for such compromise would be that if they had things right enough in their attempt to renovate the catholic faith, divine favor would shine on the English kingdom. Thus, civil and ecclesiastical polity closely shared their discourses. A Jesuit did not merely spread the errors of Popery but were agents of the foreign powers of the papal court, the Emperor, the King of France, and the King of Spain. Roman Catholicism was not a threat to the health of souls, it often seems, it was a threat to the cherished liberties of Englishmen. To a lesser extent, tensions with the Dutch took on a religious character as well as a civil one. But Roman Catholicism was the greater enemy. The laity of the Church of Rome in England were treacherous puppets and her clergy were the puppeteers. The courts Christian did not condemn such for heresy and transfer them to the civil arm for burning. At times, these were too clogged with "overzealous" Protestants. Instead, it was the prerogative courts and the common law courts that tortured and condemned Catholics for treason and consigned them to a traitor's death.

As Americans, we still bear the prejudices of our English ancestors. We sympathize with the victims of the auto da fe but have less consciousness of the weight of the late Tudor and Stuart persecutions of the Catholics. They both were bloody. But the blood ran too in Germany, France, and Spain and thence we have the concerns of the philosophes.

I give such voluminous and apparently irrelevant background to the first clause of Article XIII, because the first objections we have to it come from our interiorization of the quest of the philosophes for the objective classification of action in the moral sphere. From the Christian perspective and for reasons we have discussed, I believe such a program fails on two grounds.

1. An objective and scientific system of morals will tend toward quantification of what it considers. I am not the most ardent opponent of consequentialism, but I usually fear most types of moral calculus because almost all forms of quantification, especially in the social sphere, become involved in quantitative discourses related to the means of exchange and production. Economists now can analyze the worth of human lives in terms of fixed dollar amounts. This is useful for a variety of purposes, but it becomes positively immoral when moral boundaries are crossed for the sake of profit, whether individual or communal. Even when quantitative arguments are divorced from the economic they can become troublesome. "Do we drop the bomb on the city and kill 50,000 of them to save 1,000,000 of ours?" The easy answer is that 950,000 lives are saved, so let's drop the bomb. What does it matter as long as we save lives? One possible analogy that argues against this would be a man with $100 who spends $5000 to gain $20,000 worth of goods is still out $4900, unless he can resell the goods. But you cannot resell lives, relationships, or reputations. Treating moral questions quantitatively invokes the thinking of economics implicitly. And to some extent, this thinking can be refuted by showing where the analogy breaks down. Yet it would best to avoid such thinking altogether and simply uphold the entirety of the Moral Law whenever possible.

2. An objective system of ethics only can work if there exists either an absolute frame of reference accessible to human thought or a system by which a moral action can be transformed from one frame of reference to another. In the latter case, the method almost certainly would be quantitative and potentially subjective. In the former case, Christians believe that this absolute frame of reference exists in "light inaccessible hid from our eyes." The absolute frame of reference in morals is God. God alone can see the effects of all our works. Thus morals are inevitably bound to "superstition," properly interpreted.

This is not to say, though the Article is not as clear on this point as it should be (and possibly teaches error as we will say later), that all of the outward acts of non-Christians are automatically depraved because they are not pleasant to God. The Article is clear that the righteousness of God is located in our interior relationship with God. Thus, it is clearly possible for non-Christians to practice civil righteousness as Christians do and to have customs of neutral or positive moral content that differ from those of Christians. And as has happened again and again in Christian history, it is possible for the civil righteousness of non-Christians and their customs to be sanctified by the Gospel. For in the account of the Apostle in Romans, it is clear that civil righteousness is possible according either to reason or the Law, but we all fail in civil righteousness and are subject to condemnation. But yet the Law is clearly a source of principles of civil righteousness. And yet Christ said that He did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfill the Law, not only in the sense that He fulfilled its mystical promises of Himself but also in the sense that He made it possible for a righteousness greater than the Law but not entirely dissonant with it.

...neither do they make men meet to receive grace or (as the School-authors say) deserve grace of congruity

I do not know of whom the Articulators were thinking, but Aquinas seems to consider this idea in II.114.3 of the Summa Theologica. The core of the idea is in the leading answer to the objections,

"Man's meritorious work may be considered in two ways: first, as it proceeds from free-will; secondly, as it proceeds from the grace of the Holy Ghost. If it is considered as regards the substance of the work, and inasmuch as it springs from the free-will, there can be no condignity because of the very great inequality. But there is congruity, on account of an equality of proportion: for it would seem congruous that, if a man does what he can, God should reward him according to the excellence of his power.

"If, however, we speak of a meritorious work, inasmuch as it proceeds from the grace of the Holy Ghost moving us to life everlasting, it is meritorious of life everlasting condignly. For thus the value of its merit depends upon the power of the Holy Ghost moving us to life everlasting according to Jn. 4:14: 'Shall become in him a fount of water springing up into life everlasting.' And the worth of the work depends on the dignity of grace, whereby a man, being made a partaker of the Divine Nature, is adopted as a son of God, to whom the inheritance is due by right of adoption, according to Rm. 8:17: 'If sons, heirs also.'

In other words, Aquinas and likely most of his contemporaries seem to have believed not that man was incapable of meritorious action but that the salvificity of meritorious human action consisted of participation in the Divine Nature and the consequent will. To simplify: when we permit the Spirit to move within us, our meritorious actions spring from the acts of God, thus our participation in Him is deeper than if we were to do meritorious acts by our own free will, since at most, we merely participate in God to the extent we participate in what is good and thus piddlingly. The salvificity of this participation by the extension of our will from God's is apparently called grace of congruity, since our actions and the will to do them are in harmony with those of God. However, I doubt that the opinion of the Schoolmen on the potential but piddling merit of actions proceeding from our own free will is truly consonant with the first part of the Article discussed.

...yea, rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.

I find the truth of this conclusion highly dubious. First, it assumes the exercise of free will is inherently sinful. To say it is not sufficiently meritorious or effectual with regard to justification seems proper. But it is quite a leap to say free will is inherently sinful. Free will seems to be the property of rational creatures. Therefore, we would have to believe that God created us to be in a state of sin and rebellion against Him from the beginning. I see nothing to justify that Adam and Eve lacked free will from the beginning. And yet they were primally innocent.

But on the contrary, one could argue that the commands of God were few and simple, thus they surely could be done as God intended them, for they concerned foods that are permissible and one type of food that was not permissible. Thus, the exercise of the unfallen will was not sinful as long as choice was exercised with regard to the permissible foods. For instance, choosing to eat a pomegranate rather than grapes was not sinful. But after one exercise of free will in violation of the divine command, the will became depraved and thus incapable of doing anything without sinning.

Or as Galatians 5:16-18 puts it, "What I mean is this: be guided by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of your unspiritual nature. That nature sets its desires against the Spirit, while the Spirit fights against it. They are in conflict with one another so that you cannot do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to law."

Thus, non-Christians are enslaved to their unspiritual natures, which make everything they do sinful. Well, OK. Maybe, I just don't know anything. Maybe, I don't have the proper Biblical pessimism about the utter depravity of our natures. So I guess I really shouldn't care about the good works of non-Christians and find anything praiseworthy in them. Non-Christians are never to be an example for me. Indeed, if they live in my polity, I should persecute them, since all they do is sin quietly in their own houses, sin grievously when they feed the starving beggar at their door, sin wickedly when I burn their house down and drive them from their land rather than resisting me, and cause unspeakable pollution of the ground when they pray to God on my behalf.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. But surely we can imagine the same essential act performed by a person led by their spiritual nature and by a person of an unspiritual nature? In a particular case, we can imagine that God views the first as pardonable and the second as damnable. In another case, we can imagine the first act as congruent and salvifically worthy but the second act as incongruent and salvifically unworthy. The fallacy I see in this talk about utter depravity of the will is that it seems to intuit some sort of salvation by works anyway by arguing that non-Christians cannot do anything good. But Christians somehow can do good things. Maybe I'm imagining this fallacy. But let me repeat this: our sanctification and justification (or whatnot) is founded not on what we do but the alignment of our will and ultimately our being with God. Thus, having discussed grace of congruity and salvation by faith rather than works, can the Articulators call all non-Christian acts objectively iniquitous without my skepticism. We all sin. But we all do good.

In the Old Testament, the clear problem of the conscientiously righteous man, e.g. Job, is this: What use is piety if I am going to die anyway? What use is my righteousness before God (which is confirmed in the Scriptures) if I shall make my bed the grave and hand over my flesh to the corruptibility of the primal chaos beasts? If nothing I can do merits eternal life, what hope do I have? This hope we believe is Jesus the Christ. And I suspect the problem of Job is the problem of most non-Christians in this world. It is not that everything they do is evil (though like all of us, much of it surely is), it is that what they do good is of no use in the reference frame of eternity. Their souls are meant for eternity and yet they have no hope for eternal life.

A friend of mine once asked me, "Do you think being Christian makes you a better person?" I answered, "No, I think I am a Christian because I am worse than everyone else." My unspiritual nature needs to be kept in line. As Paul says to close Galatians 5,

"Anyone can see the behaviour that belongs to the unspiritual nature: fornication, indecency, and debauchery; idolatry and sorcery; quarrels, a contentious temper, envy, fits of rage, selfish ambitions, dissensions, party intrigues, and jealousies; drinking bouts, orgies, and the like. I warn you as I warned you before, that no one who behaves like that will ever inherit the kingdom of God.

But the harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the old nature with its passions and desires. If the Spirit is source of our life, let the Spirit also direct its course."

Now I have seen the mere appearance of mere appearance of all these things within the circles of the worlds. Virtue and violence are our common inheritance. And I may read of Him who brought the form of the things of the second class into the worlds and said, "Peace is my last gift to you, my own peace I leave with you, peace which the worlds cannot give, I give to you." As for the forms of the first class, I do not know where they reside, but I do not want any part of them nor ever come near to them. But I long for the forms of the second class. Now how could I have recognized for what I yearn if I did not recognize how the fruits of the Spirit shared some qualities with those things that I see as mere appearance of mere appearance, but through the Spirit I knew the fruits were better? How can I say that this is what humans call love, but this love I sense is greater?

Well, that's a bit of Platonism, but the idea is very simple. The names of the fruits of the Spirit existed before Christ came into the world, though their fullness was unknown as Christ was unknown and unrecognized. Would anyone say that love is sinful? Would anyone say that patience is sinful? Would anyone say that self-control is sinful? Paul tells us that there is no law against these things. Yet the concept of all these things surely was prior to Christ. Thus, people loved, were patient, and were continent before Christ, though in mere appearances and without knowledge through the Spirit. And yet the Article would have us believe that love (insofar as it was love) was sin, patience (as far as it was patience) was sin, and self-control (as long as it was self-control) was sin? As if these things were not sin, how are they sin? Who has bewitched you, O Articulators?

As always, this is a work in progress. Feel free to show me where I've gone wrong or where you think the Articulators went wrong.

Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that you may crucify your unspiritual nature as Christ was crucified in the flesh, so that you will not glory merely in the things that shall pass away just as the waning light of the Sun brings all the shadow but will rise with Christ into those things that are real and alight even in the darkness.

XII. Of Good Works

Angloblography of the Day

Two items I saw today are worth reading.

First, The Address of the Archbishop, Metropolitan, and Primate of All Nigeria to General Synod : Like many others in the Communion, I have become a close watcher of ++Peter Abuia. And I have found speeches like this most helpful in seeing him as a brother in Christ, which can be difficult these days in the midst of the unpleasantness. I certainly don't agree with everything he says and I am worried that he is calling for Africa to go into laager (and I don't mean beer) and about his interpretation of apocalyptic signs. But there is no question when I read his addresses to the Church of Nigeria that God called him to be overseer of that church. He knows how to push their buttons.

Second, Pontifications has a critique of the Paul Zahl article I linked. I'll let the experts on Lutheranism speak to the question of whether Luther really was monergistic, but I think Father Kimel is right to point out that the ARCIC documents are important in this discussion. Yet I should point out that Zahl also mentions the issue of authority. Now Zahl likely only means papal authority, but I think it is important to remember that the issue of authority is also connected to the question of Roman Catholic dogmatic pronouncements that potentially are inconsistent with the Faith of the Undivided Church.

Now onward to further talk about Justification, Sanctification, and all that!

XII. Of Good Works

Albeit that Good Works, which are the fruits of Faith, and follow after Justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God's judgment...

Of course, we went through this story yesterday, but I would like to continue to assure you of the hopelessness of our position. But let's take a slightly different tack. There is a story of Jewish wisdom that goes like this. (I am afraid Madonna turned it into a children's book.) As I remember the story, it goes like this: A thief has been caught in the act. He is taken to the village rabbi to be judged. The rabbi asks him to restore what he has stolen and pronounces this sufficient atonement. The people are amazed. There is a woman among the people, a notorious gossip. She continues to feel increasingly guilty and is shunned by her neighbors. Seeing the judgment on the thief, she thinks the rabbi will set her some easy task to atone for her gossiping ways. So she goes to him with her problem. He says that atonement is possible in her case and asks her to bring him a feather pillow. She does so. The rabbi takes the pillow and tears it apart in the midst of a gust of wind. He tells the woman she will atone for her gossip if she can find the pieces of the pillow and put it back together. She is horrified. Is gossip so bad?

The moral of this story is that stolen property can be restored by the falsehoods and embellishments we tell of each other are not so easily taken back. But this is true of so much of our sin. If we live in a universe constantly at the edge of chaos, both metaphysical and mathematical physical, the harm we do is often nearly impossible to heal. Like most chemical reactions, our sins are irreversible and their effects spiral out of control. This is why it is so important that we forgive one another, since restitution often is impossible. But this is also why we should seek and be thankful for God's forgiveness. We potentially are responsible for so much.

For fun, let us consider the illustration Jesus uses in Matthew 18:21-35 of the magnitude of our "debt." (Remember, folks, this is only an illustration. God does not accept Visa.) The smaller debt in question is 100 denarii, actually a somewhat substantial sum. My experience with Roman prices usually fixes it at about $2000. It is a quite believable debt of one servant to another. But the servant owes to his lord, 10,000 talents. There is some debate about how much a talent was in Jesus' day, but let us estimate it to be in the order of magnitude of the sacred talent and set the value of the shekel equal to the denarius for sake of argument. The debt then becomes 30,000,000 denarii (or $600 million or so). Or to be more realistic, this would be a sufficient amount of money to make payroll for a Roman legion for about a century. And Jesus uses this amount to illustrate the burden of sin on a presumably ordinary man. Against such debts in the divine economy, our good works can mean little in the sense of restitution.

Yet they are pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively Faith; insomuch as by them a lively Faith may be evidently known as a tree discerned by its fruit.

At the heart of this part of the Article likely are two great moments in the Scriptures. The first, of course, is that much disputed and little understood speech of James to the prosperous and connected of the church to which he writes. First, he warns in 2:8-11 that if we do not love our neighbors as ourselves in any way, we participate generally in rebellion against the commandments of God, "For he who said, 'You shall not commit adultery' said also, "You shall not commit murder." And of course, James suggests that we are all under judgment on these grounds, "Always speak and act as men who are to be judged under a law which makes them free." Simul iustus et peccator is not a statement merely about our being in God's eyes, it is a way of summarizing how should we live and comport ourselves. And I would argue that this business of showing mercy to another is a key to justification and sanctification if it is a matter of our participation in Christ, for James says, "In that judgement there will be no mercy for the man who has shown none. Mercy triumphs over judgement."

This is the same syllogistic and participatory rhetoric as Romans but implicit. If we die to sin as Christ died, we will live in Him. If we forgive as He did, we will be forgiven. This is not salvation by works in that a man earns salvation through participation, for no man but Christ made effectual those things in which we participate. In a day and age when inheritance has less and less bearing on everyday life, the next analogy I shall give may mean less. But in a Roman will, the testator often could charge his heirs to perform certain obligations before they could enter into their inheritance. The heirs did not earn their inheritance. It was the free gift of the testator, but they did perform some acts to claim the inheritance. It may be this way with us. Though I suspect we still generally don't fulfill those obligations well either, but as the Prayer of Humble Access says, "But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy."

But after this discussion, James says words to mar a press cycle during a Presidential campaign, "What good is it, my friends, for someone to say he has faith when his actions do nothing to show it? Can that faith save him?" And then James presents a poor fellow Christian to his hearers. He asks whether such a person simply should be told to "Fare well, keep warm, and have a good meal." Note his rhetoric: the better-off Christian is wishing health, clothing, and food to the poorer Christian. It is almost a magical formula. James is posing the better-off Christian as someone who has faith that the poorer Christian will be well, yet does nothing. "What good is that?" James next is faced with the growing dichotomy between what we call the active and the contemplative lives. Forget the story of Mary and Martha in this regard. Instead remember that monastics of great contemplation generally are not without charity. But James has a great retort which I'll translate very freely, "Oh, you believe in God, do you? That's great. But even the demons do that and it can scare them back to hell." James desires a faith made manifest. He cites the example of Abraham, whose faith was so great that he tried to sacrifice his only son. He asks his hearers whether their faith is that great.

Abraham's sacrifice apparently remained a high standard for faith in Holy Tradition. In the Institutes of St. John Cassian, we can read of a father who entered a monastery with his son. He was separated from his son during his novitiate but could see the boy being cuffed, scolded, and otherwise ill-treated by his elder monks. Finally, the Abbot wanted to test the strength of the father's faith. He ordered the father to throw his boy in a local stream. The father did so. Fortunately, the Abbot had set other monks to save the boy. But the monks who did so reported to the Abbot that the man had repeated the act of Abraham. Personally, I would have put father and son in different monasteries, so there would be less justification for abusing the boy, but it's still instructive.

So much for the good works of a lively Faith. But what of fruit? The reference comes from Christ's warning about false prophets in Matthew 7:15-20. Simply enough, those you can trust as Christians bear good fruit and those you can't bear bad fruit. The Didache has much to say on telling the bad trees from the good trees. And thus we should beware of televangelists, who generally act like the people we are warned about in the Didache. But if the tree analogy is not quite apropos to the question of good works, the general agricultural and horticultural imagery is more relevant elsewhere. In the Parable of the Sower, we are told of seeds that grew and yielded "a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold." Paul sees good fruit and bad fruit more specifically in the works of the spirit in contrast to the works of the flesh. And we should also remember concerning good works that if others see our good works and glorify the Father, those same others will see our evil works and curse Him. And thus such acts are not well-pleasing to God. This is not the Onion. Jesus is not a sucker.

And we also see the Jacobean (or Jamesian) synergy of faith and works in the more mystical theology of John, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener...Dwell in me, as I you...I am the vine; you are the branches. Anyone who dwells in me, as I dwell in him, bears much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." *Christopher has reminded us that our telos is perichoresis, the mutual communion of our being with God. So far we are from it, but it is our end, the cause and spur of our good works, the spirit of Christ as Article IX says working within us. In a theology proceeding from the ordinances of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, we die in Christ and experience a foretaste through water, through oil, through bread, and through wine of the ultimate and dynamic perichoresis we yearn for in the Trinity. In both my experience and the mystical theology of the sacraments, I can say of the first that it is as if the Holy Spirit moves over the waters of chaos once more that the one baptized may be not merely reborn (as from the womb) but recreated out of nothing. Of the latter, Chrysostom says in Peri Hierosynes that at the Eucharist, Elijah again strives against the priests of Baal. But the sacrifice is yet more marvelous, for fire is sent down on the gifts and they are not consumed. What use are such mighty acts done in our midst and even to us if we believe them and experience them merely as good wishes and empty magic to a world in need of healing?

Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that you may have a lively Faith that does not merely compress and rarefy the air with good wishes but yields the fruits of incarnate mercy: first self-restraint, then food, then clothes, then joy, then peace in the Lord.

XI. Of the Justification of Man

We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works and deservings.

Why should I be afraid in evil days, when the wickedness of those at my heels surrounds me, The wickedness of those who put their trust in their goods, and boast of their great riches? We can never ransom ourselves, or deliver to God the price of our life. For the ransom of our life is so great, that we should never have enough to pay it, in order to live for ever and ever and never see the grave...But God will ransom my life; He will snatch me from the grasp of death." (Psalms 49:4-8, 15, BCP)

I read the Psalms always as the song of three individuals. First, it is the song of the Psalmist, whether David, Asaph, or some other who first set these poems down. Second, it is the song of Jesus, perhaps even in the very hour of agony, for we hear that he cried aloud from the cross the opening words of Psalm 22. But even if He did not speak them at that hour. He lived them. They are clearly prophetic of Himself and Psalm 49 is no exception. Third, the Psalms deserve the name given to the great Canticle of Revelation, they are the Songs of the Redeemed. They are not always the songs of the redeemed triumphant, but they are the songs of the redeemed, whether angry, hopeful, or triumphant. They are songs I pray that all shall live some day.

But Psalm 49, even more than Job, always has seemed to be the strongest statement in the Old Testament of the chief predicament of all too mortal flesh united to a rational soul. No matter what, we are going to die. As Sophocles would say, "Neither wealth, nor war, nor tough sea-blackened ships" can keep death from us. We are absolutely helpless before it. It would be easy here to see us here not as damned but merely mortal. And from there, it would be easy to say that we have no need for God and simply will free ourselves of attachment to this world and embrace the nothingness. But we are not irrational creatures, I am afraid. Our souls will not fade or dissolve harmlessly into the world-soul. As Aristotle said and his medieval editors redacted, the disembodied soul is potential. Surely, this state is not a happy one. But we have come to this conclusion only by stripping away context. The divine economy is somewhat different.

What we have missed is that the association between sin and death must have been implicit in the mind of the Psalmist. Much of the ritual content of the Law can be read as an attempt to avoid and repudiate not simply human death but human non-life: human corruptibility. To violations of both the ritual and moral content of the Law, the Law attached criminal penalties. And within the Law, evildoers are not only promised civil repercussions for their actions but the curse of God and one's own people that leads to death. And this famous choice between life and death, the blessing and the curse, we are told in Matthew 25, shall be assessed finally at the end of the present system of things, drawing one side to the heavenly banquet of eternal life and the other side to the outer darkness and fire of the second death.

And if the Psalmist were David, this association would be strong for him as well. His adultery, his murder plot, and his census of his people all had drawn the death-causing wrath of God upon him and Israel. He had seen Saul unmade by his sins. And he had seen death visited not merely on the instigators of sin but on those who were mere participants (even innocents): his first child with Bathsheba, his subjects, and the great love of his life: Jonathan. I often think that these incidents might not have been God's wrath but the consequences of rejecting His protection by sinning against Him and others. For indeed, the death of David's first child with Bathsheba (presuming she had not had one by Uriah) was likely statistically. David chooses between a variety of awful natural disasters that could have happened to Israel anyway. Saul and Jonathan died at the hands of their enemies. Thus, divine punishment need not always be the mighty show of power of God in the deluge or in the execution of judgment on the gods of Egypt in Exodus, but it might simply take the form of exposing us to the death-dealing, corruptible side of physical and human nature as opposed to its providential side. (Derek, by the way, has some great thoughts on Job today, which have been helpful to my present cogitations on the theology of nature.)

But I think whatever the exact mechanisms that are involved, when we sin, we embrace corruptibility and death. Even considering the base price of our life, which surely is extraordinary, we incur in our lives a tremendous amount of debt, not only to our Creator, but among ourselves. "Debt" is merely shorthand for our limited understanding of this, of course. Jesus problematized it in this way on occasion. And who cannot be moved by the gospel songs that talk about account books and payment in full? Is the popularity of such a view a symptom of the power of the market economy over our mind? Yes. Is this necessary a bad thing? No. But we must remember in His last week of life, Jesus kicked the moneychangers out of the Temple. His righteous violence surely arose out of his objections to taking large profits selling sacrificial goods or exchanging foreign coin for "kosher" Temple silver. But it likely also was a sign to us about the difference between the divine economy and the market economy. In the Temple, the worshippers paid money for their sacrificial animals. Jesus offered Himself for our sins for free.

Thus, we finally get the issue of justification. First of all, I claim that the question of justification is poorly and erroneously posed if we talk about how we are righteous in God's eyes. More specifically, I reject all problematizations of justification which see us as the primary active party in the cause of our own righteousness. I do not reject this, because it is simply harder to argue for justification by grace if we ourselves in this way. Frankly, I am not an enthusiastic fan of either justification by faith or by works as they often are explicated. Because it often seems that faith simply becomes a form of works. Justification by faith also can be explicated in ways that put the focus on what we do or hold as an affection or habit etc. Instead, I think we should problematize God as the chiefly active party in our righteousness, for indeed Psalm 49 and its context should tell us we are helpless to make ourselves righteous, to build up stores of righteousness wherewith we can buy eternal life. Instead, the key of Psalm 49 seems to be verse 15: How do we become righteous in God's eyes and worthy of ransom and rescue from the grip of death? This I think is the chief question of justification.

In the era of the Articulators, there were two main answers to the question of justification, seemingly called by the names by which they were problematized by the Protestants. Justification qua justification itself seems to be a Protestant problematization, stemming from Martin Luther's exegetical revelation concerning Paul's quotation of Habakkuk in Romans 1:17. Using the original Greek, justification then would be dikaeopoesis . Though I think Luther was quite right in identifying some idea of this type as quite essential to Pauline theology. The first we know as justification by faith. The Augsburg Confession claims a Pauline origin for this doctrine, particularly Romans 3 and 4. But indeed much of the Epistle to the Romans is relevant to justification.

But we should be careful: Paul's discussion of these issues begins with his presently notorious discourse on the consequences of idolatry. Again, we see the idea that what is often called God's wrath has an aspect not of something which God inflicts upon us but something to which God abandons us. To some extent, such thinking may stem from God being put in the role of the master of the household or ruler, who has the power to hand us over to the executioners, people at the margins of the social order charged with putting disobedient slaves or subjects to torture and then death. But the summary point of this discourse following "Whoever is justified through faith shall gain life" seems to be the corollary: Whoever lacks faith is clearly unrighteous and deserves death.

Next, Paul warns those to whom he writes that if they participate in the same unrighteousness, they merely are depositing to an account filled with retribution that will be loosed on them at the end. 2:4 puts it, "Or do you despise the wealth of kindness and tolerance and patience, failing to see that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" Thus, it seems that the difference between the Christians and the pagans, if we may call the two groups this, is that God is letting the pagans receive the full consequences of their depravity, whereas Christians are receiving some sort of protection from it. Yet this protection apparently is insufficient to keep us from sin completely. In 2:7, we are told that those who do well and pursue the virtues of the Lamb (not Paul's language: he says glory, honor, and immortality) shall have eternal life, whereas those who continue to be ruled by the selfish ambition (of their fallen natures) we presume will receive the same retribution as the pagans. Jews and Gentiles, though judged differently (one by the Law and the other by the Law written by reason on their hearts), both still will be accountable somehow. But again Paul says, "None will be justified by hearing the law, but by doing it." All of this sounds very much like justification by works. The presumption, however, is that righteousness inside or outside the law still will be insufficient, since it should be clear that we are unable to save ourselves by our own righteousness, as we have said before. Finally in this chapter, Paul like Christ warns that external adherence to the Law means nothing if the Law has not conditioned the heart. Thus, what small righteousness we have in ourselves either comes from a heart conditioned (or written) by reason or adherence to the Law. But in general, this small righteousness still is overpowered by the general weight of our condemnation.

Next, Paul quotes the Psalmist's most famous lines on human depravity, "There is no one righteous, not one..." in favor of his assertion that "Jews and Greeks alike are under the power of sin." The small righteousness of what we have spoken has the effect in Paul's words of bringing to us "the consciousness of sin." Like the old saw that the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know, the more we do good, the more we know we mainly do evil. Job is certainly one of the most righteous characters of the Old Testament, and yet he admits quite freely his sinfulness and need for an advocate with God on account of his sins. What Paul points out is that the righteous of the OId Testament looked for has now been made known to the world through Jesus Christ. And thus Paul repeats the content of the doctrine that so amazed Luther in the ennui of his own small righteousness, "and are justified by God's free grace alone, through his act of liberation in the person of Jesus Christ...to demonstrate his justice now in the present, showing that he is himself just and also justifies anyone who puts his faith in Jesus."

Does anyone see something strange in this? Christ's sacrifice is the demonstration of God's justice. Aren't we used to seeing Christ's sacrifice as the demonstration of God's mercy? And I don't read justice and mercy as being the same thing. Paul likely knew enough about dike as understood by the Greeks and Romans to know it "consists of handing over to each his own." Mercy consists of forgiving the obligation of justice by the one to which something was due by justice. Nor is Paul's line of argument suggestive of any other notion of justice. God's wrath is fully just because it gives death to those who deserve it. How is Christ's sacrifice just rather than merciful? How is overlooking our sins just rather than merciful? Now, Jack Miles might say God had promised liberation to the Jews, thus Christ's sacrifice was just because it fulfilled that promise. Paul probably was thinking in this direction, because he talks next about the promises made to Abraham because of his faith being fulfilled in Christ. But Paul suggests the scope of God's justice is more universal, for he is the God of both the Jews and the Gentiles, and thus He provides justification that is general, "without distinction." Faith and salvation are offered freely to all. The Fathers saw the general promise of Christ's sacrifice in the curse of the serpent in Genesis and the promises to make Israel the means of glory to the Gentiles. Thus, the justice of God demonstrated through Christ's sacrifice is certainly justice in that it is a fulfillment of promise and covenant.

The next question to ask is why did God make promises at all. The promises themselves were not just but acts of mercy. We do not deserve such promises. Paul answers this question in Romans 5:8, "But Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is God's proof of his love towards us." At the final analysis, God ransoms us because He loves us. Paul tells us we are justified by faith in Romans 3 and 4. In Romans 5, he tells us we are justified by Christ's sacrificial death. The exact mechanism of these justifications, however, are not a matter of acts in ourselves, as the names justification by faith or justification by works suggest. Instead, Paul founds our justification on a process of participation in the mighty acts of God executed in Jesus Christ: a process which Paul constructs in Romans 5 and 6 as a syllogistic and process-oriented repudiation of sin, death, and non-life in us.

We emulate, we imitate, we die with Christ, so we might rise with Him. If anything the process of our justification by faith resembles that woman afflicted by a chronic discharge (Luke 8). We in ourselves are unclean, excluded from sacred rites, and the general society of our fellows, but if we can touch the hem of Christ's robe, we shall be healed. But as Christ tells the woman, our faith that such a yearning shall be honored is essential to our justification. Thus, it seems that it is necessary not only that one have faith in Christ, His life, His death, and the promise of salvation through Him. It seems also necessary that you hope, wretch though you are, not merely to believe in these things but to live them. Thus, the catholic side of me sees justification through faith in participation in the sacramental life of the Church and my Quaker education tells me that I should seek the same sacramentality in the whole of life. As Paul says in Romans 6, "Therefore sin must no longer reign in your mortal body, exacting obedience to the body's desires. You must no longer put any part of it at sin's disposal, as an implement for doing wrong. Put yourselves instead at the disposal of God: think of yourselves as raised from death to life." Need I say more?

But is there another option? Looking at the Decree of Trent on justification, the Canons do not line up perfectly with our discussion of justification and of the Articles. There is an interesting note in the main body of the decree on justification being the communication of the merit of Jesus Christ to us, an idea which I certainly appreciate for its proper posing of the issue. Canon VII apparently contradicts Article X in that it suggests some of our works before justification are not sinful. Yet Article X admits good works as a potential class before justification (as does Augsburg) and likewise admits a class of good works that are unpleasant and unacceptable to God. This appears to be a case in which the Articles admit the existence of unusual and paradoxical concepts in order to permit latitude in belief.

Canon IX speaks to the issue of mere belief creating no justification, claiming some effect of belief on the will is necessary. I do not see how this contradicts the Apostle certainly. Various Canons speak of no salvation by believing in salvation etc. I do not see these as problematic. At issue, I believe is Canon XXX, which states that the grace of justification does not remove the debt of temporal punishment in this world or in Purgatory. This Canon suggests there was erroneous thinking hidden in all those Canons that I thought perfectly innocuous. Now, I am not going to bother explaining what this thinking is. One can read the Schoolmen for these matters. But the implication of such thinking I must reject utterly. Salvific grace is not imperfect. Where does God say to any, "I shall ransom you from death to life but rough you up a little as satisfaction for my trouble"? If we are saved, we are saved. I do not exclude the possibility that the workings of salvation in the world to come may involve some sort of purificatory act: the washing in the blood of the Lamb or even a purification by fire. But I do not imagine this to be what Christ problematized as debt. Instead, if there be such purification, it shall be like someone dressing for the wedding of his or her best friends or the preparation of a bride for her wedding. We shall put on incorruptibility as perfume and immortality like our Easter finest.

Tetzel might as well have been selling the Brooklyn Bridge. And Luther caught him at it. But Luther surely realized and we should, too, that Tetzel merely was a poor student of some great but impoverished thinkers. For justification by faith appears to be at the heart of Pauline doctrine and that is wealth not to be disdained.

Wherefore that we are justified by Faith only, is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

I can't find a link for the Homily, which is one of those great Elizabethan homilies. Peter Toon of the 1928 Prayer Book Society apparently made a recording of it, but the link no longer works. In compensation, I link to Richard Kew's recent discussion of the Elizabethan homilies .

In closing, I would like to continue to add to my thoughts about the development of Christian doctrine in its social context. It is very clear that while justification by faith is a Pauline concern, its fuller elucidation as doctrine came about because of the intersection of theology with church polity and the market economy. Yet justification by faith arises out of the rejection of those social conditions for the sake of the Gospel. Does it owe its emergence not just to a reaction against one set of social conditions but to the affirmation of others such as conflicting movements in popular piety, the emergence of new technologies, and the rediscovery of ancient texts? Surely. The Gospel is ubiquitous and perpetual, but it is not always visible. God bless those who make it visible, whoever and wherever they are.

The Holy Brothers pray that whether you are Jew, Greek, American, Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, or some other creature in the image of God, the law written on your heart shall convict of your sin and lead you to seek with every fiber of your being the ransom we have in Jesus Christ, even to the stretching of your hand and the giving of your life.

X. Of Free-Will

What the Scotist Has Been Doing Lately

Dr. Bates of Anglican Scotist continues in his book reviewing ways. He and the author of the book he is presently reviewing have many anatomically insightful things to say about Anglicanism. Check it out if you have a chance.

An Opportunity in Moral Theology: Further Comment on Article IX

Although I would consider the strongly homologous analogy between individual and his city especially seen in The Republic of Plato to be received by Apostolic Tradition, it seems not to have weathered well through the struggles of the Church with caesaropapism and papicaesarism (for that matter). Thus, the logical consequent homologous analogy between what we call individual evil and systemic evil never has the foundational place in more recent moral theology (last 1500 years or so) that it should. It's very easy to do an incomplete job when faced with an antagonistic state, but such a basis for a moral theology seems downright unfashionable when the state appears morally positive or neutral. Am I wrong? It occurred to me at *Christopher's place that I should be able to say that Biblical critiques of sexual conduct in a particular society logically should be both critiques of individual sexual conduct and the social milieu in which such conduct becomes logical and permissible in some sort of carnally coupled and metaphysically unified system.

This, of course, based on *Christopher's suggestion following various Fathers (e.g., St. John Cassian) that our sexual temptations and conduct are epiphenomenal of something deeper. It occurrred to me that all of our temptations and outward conduct likely are epiphenomenal of whatever is the essence of our fallen nature. Aquinas finds the heart of natural law in the innate rules of conduct which tend to our self-preservation. As a Christian who has received some aspect of Darwinian theory, I note that evolutionary processes "at their best" likely would tend to self-preservation. And when I say at their best, I suspect I mean ceteris paribus omnia tempora (with all things being equal at all times). But the workings of nature are such that everything is not equal at all times. Moreover, if evolutionary processes were "at their best" as I have posed them, there would be neither change in biological organisms nor life itself. Thus, we have a contradiction. The equality of resources and stresses that would tend to the preservation of species limits their diversification, reducing the probability of rational creatures capable of "friendship" with God to nil. Thus, evolutionary processes "at their worst" in a moral sense likely are evolutionary processes at their best in the pre-Fall divine economy. Thus, the imperative of natural law prior to reason is really self-preservation (in genes as well) to the exclusion of all others. I am not sure how these primal imperatives were mediated in Adam and Eve before the Fall, but after the Fall, it would be entirely possible for the old primal imperative to recur but for fallen reason to mistake ever so many things as tending to preservation. And man, now being capable of planning complex schemes for the future, would seek to enhance his competitiveness in a world of limited resources.

Thus man's fallen nature could consist in the flawed primal imperative I have derived (to become like God, the ultimately self-preserving, curvatus in se etc. seem equivalent statements) but his possession of reason drives his ambitions toward the collection of resources far greater than he could gain for himself. As the Philosopher says, "There is no end to the art of acquisition" ( Politics ) and telos here likely has both its ordinary and philosophical meaning here. Thus, we are selfish beings and yet in need of much. So we seek to be in societies, which inevitably become subject to carnally and metaphysically entangled systems of communal and individual evil. But God calls us to repentance and reformation by seeking to create exemplars of just society on Earth through Israel and the Church but also by offering us abundance through sacrifice in the example and merits (I embolden, lest anyone accuse me of Pelagianism) of Christ Jesus. For Christian soteriology at its best clearly untwists the deadly combination of the fallen evolutionary imperative with reason. Our theorized natural imperative is the consequence of the inherent wealth and scarcity that nature provides with its limited resources. God offers us abundance.

The account I have given explains why I think young Earth creationists have it so easy and are quite insightful to continue in their resistance to the discoveries of the historical natural sciences. The consequences for Christian moral theology could be staggering. Yet when I find myself in "social justice" churches that preach about the "economy of abundance," I realize that I am hearing a revolution in moral theology that sounds familiar and hopeful in this direction but somehow unmoored and half-accomplished. And the most glaring sign of its incompleteness is what these churches usually say about abortion... There's an opportunity here. Perhaps, this is something the Liberal Catholicism, Anglican Modernism, and Anglican Radicalism of which the Scotist speaks should seek to take advantage of, remembering that we cannot say we have no need of the Evangelicals and Classical Anglicans.

Speaking of Those Anglican Evangelicals

Here's a piece by Paul F.M. Zahl from Modern Reformation about differences between Roman Catholic and Confessional Protestant thinking on justification issues and how they are still insurmountable. There are handy-dandy charts at the end, which will prove to any reader of the blog that I lean to the more Catholic side of the issues. And if you are getting a little tired of these debates about faith vs. grace, infusion vs. imputation, do what I do: say to yourself what a good Roman Catholic friend of mine once said to me, "You know we are not justified by faith or works but by Christ." I grimaced the first time I heard that, but he was right, of course, and keeps such issues in their proper perspective when the spirit is losing charity and the mind is wearied.

Prefatory Notes on Article X

The last conversation I had about free will involved Descartes, Kant, and the usual tired prattlings of college students who really should have a beer (or hard cider, which I like better) lest they continue their fruitless speculations on the nature of the divine omnipotence. I have a psychologist friend, who believes there is empirical proof that we do not have free will, which involves experiments in which nerve impulses in the limbs anticipate signals from the brain to move them and vice versa . And, of course, who could forget Augustine's discourse early in City of God , when he concludes simultaneously that we have free will and God is omniscient.

Thus, it seems the question of free will that occupies the philosophical landscape most of the time is whether or not our conscious thoughts freely willed direct our external actions. The "freely willed" bit asks the further question of outside influence or whether a Newtonian universe (or whatever source of outside influence you will) set in motion by God permits truly freely willed actions. Article X only has a tangential relation to these issues, which really come to the fore in Article XVII on Predestination and Election. Article X seems merely to be a continuation of the investigation into our fallen nature and the remedy it has in Christ. But these more familiar issues of free will are relevant here. They simply are not addressed directly.

X. Of Free-Will

The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God.

A more meaty version of this idea can be found in Article XVIII of the Augsburg Confession . Muslims, not believing in Original Sin per se, say that man is both naturally inclined to faith but also to forgetfulness. Thus, it is only necessary that humans be constantly reminded of God and our obligations to Him. The post-Pelagius Pelagians likewise believed that humans still were inclined to faith, needing no activity of the Spirit within us to continue in it. The proof text of Article XVIII of Augsburg and the implicit one of this Article is 1 Corinthians 2:14, "An unspiritual person refuses what belongs to the Spirit of God; it is folly to him; he cannot grasp it, because it needs to be judged in the light of the Spirit."

Of course, the things Paul says belong to the Spirit of God in this particular place is the salvation of the world through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and the general theological implications thereof. Thus, faith in the chief and lately revealed things of God is impossible without the working of the Spirit. Considering Paul's view of the Gospel as "a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks" and the slightly less ancient formula usually attributed to Tertullian, " credo quia absurdum est ," faith in these latter things surely seemed impossible for our fallen natures to comprehend without aid. Such an assertion thus is more inspiredly empirical than rigorously philosophical.

We also hear in the Acts of the Apostles a variety of accounts of the relation between faith in Christ and the activity of the Spirit. The Spirit came upon Cornelius' household as they were hearing the Gospel preached by Peter, which functions both as a sign that salvation is meant to come to the Gentiles and an indication that the Spirit may soften up those who hear the Gospel. Yet we hear in the case of the Samaritan converts that they were baptized quite willingly without receiving the Holy Spirit. But surely Peter understands Jesus better in Acts than he did in the Gospels...and Stephen accuses his persecutors of resisting the Spirit as their ancestors did. Multiple examples in the Old Testament [1 Samuel 1, for instance] suggest that effectual faith in the God of Israel did not require being filled with the Spirit, though it certainly helped. So the question remains: Is the working of the Spirit necessary to Christian faith?

[Note: I argued in the discussion to Article V that the Holy Spirit should not be understood so much as anima Dei , mainly because this gives us an incorrect impression that the Holy Spirit is flimsy and possibly may lead to an incorrect understanding of the relations between the Persons. Paul in 1 Corinthians 2, for sake of analogy, does treat the Spirit as anima Dei , but the evolving Trinitarianism seen in the rhetoric does not take anything away from the truth of what Paul says. The Spirit, being active in the world and in the believers, truly is the medium by which the truth about God is brought into the world at present, though we would expect each Person to be equally and perfectly knowledgable of the other.]

Theoretically, Jesus actually might understand the degree of our inclination against faith. I would argue that His most relevant teaching we have on the subject is probably his conversation with Nicodemus in John 3.

Here we hear the familiar analogy between those born of the Spirit and the wind, sensible and yet unintelligible. This is not far off the Pauline sentiments we have discussed about the spiritual and natural man. Here, it is the faithful that are unintelligible not the faith. But this is followed by what might be called the proof-text of the faith: John 3:16. If anyone wants a one sentence explanation of the Christian faith, this is the best one to give them. But we should point out that it is the summary of the same faith the natural man cannot believe by his own aid alone. John 3:17 makes it clear that God wishes the world to be saved and not judged worthy of destruction. But it is John 3:18-21 I find so interesting and relevant to our discussion. I simply wanted to point out that the discourse it is in is clearly very important to Jesus' teaching.

John 3:18-21 (KJV): "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God."

The name of the only begotten Son of God is, of course, Jesus, which means in Hebrew, God saves. Thus, believing in his name also could mean believing in his salvific power. But the rest of this passage is quite challenging. It suggests that our fallen nature's inclination against faith stems from our wish to deny what we do is evil. In surprising contrast to the previous verses, Jesus poses Himself as the light of God's judgment, in which we do not want to see ourselves. But the last verse suggests that he "that doeth truth" will want to be seen in the light so that his deeds will be shown to glorify God. And the most likely implication of he that doeth truth is one who believes in Christ and is his imitator and subordinate reconciler with the world. Thus, the passage does not explain how we come to faith, only how our evil deeds turn us away from the faith and those who are faithful will do good. Nor should we simplify this to good people come to Christ and bad people do not. If we are all equally human, we are all equally depraved (Christ excepted).

The Augsburg Confession, however, suggests (possibly to answer this question) that it is possible for us to obtain a civil righteousness through reason. Thus, by reason, it should be possible for us sinners to dare to walk into the light of faith. Yet civil righteousness in itself is insufficient because it frames our outward acts not our inward affections. Of course, this sounds quite good and amenable to much we have said before. But it seems to be an insufficient solution to the problem. And I suspect that the Articulators of the 39 Articles say nothing on this particular subject, because there were other explanations. I will provide one of my own at the end of the discussion of the Article.

Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.

The above sentence contains the germ of one of the most troubling Christian doctrines to many earnest non-Christians. It is often summarized, "All acts by people who do not believe in Christ are evil and worthless." Taking a Pauline tack, I would say that the usual doctrine of crime in the civil law is this: a crime consists in committing an actum reum with a mens rea , but the power of God surpasses civil power, and the punishment and reward He offers surpasses that of any earthly sovereign, thus His standard for crime is higher. Thus, crime consists either mens rea , actum reum , or both. [I think this is quite in line with Christ's teachings, especially in Matthew.] Of course, this can be fleshed out in various directions, perhaps exploring how outward righteousness without the inward righteousness of God can be problematic in the midst of changing social expectations, but if you say that, you usually hear objections to the idea of eternal law etc. But imagine if there was some perfect scientifically rational moral code, which humans followed simply to earn the approbation of their fellows. Well, this would be all well and good until you and your contemporaries died. As Job says, "What use is being pious if you are dead?" This is unsatisfying for non-Christians, because they don't buy into the whole Big Plan.

But we do. We long for that day when God will be all in all, when the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of Our God and of His Christ. And thus we, the envoys of the Kingdom, seek those things in body and in mind that are beautiful, good, and most of all eternal. For whatever reason (I think it's being stretched myself), the universe isn't headed in a good direction. But it is being turned to the good and we will see this at some future instant. And the Spirit of God working in us leads us toward that good somehow. It is not that non-Christian acts are all irredeemably evil and disordered, it is more that Christian acts have a nearly infinitely greater potential to do what is good and pleasant to God. But let us be clear: all of this is very dependent on the Spirit working within us. Our flesh obviously still has fight. The good we do is merely potential. For justly can such righteous non-Christians as Mohandas Gandhi often say of us, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." We are very poor icons of the Master. We, like the rest of mankind, still too much "follow the devices and desires of our own hearts." But we are not helpless either and thus have less excuse for our outward wickednesses.

An Alternative to Civil Righteousness by Reason As the Good Soil of Faith

The title I think should convey the idea that I would argue that fruitful faith arises because of the planting of the Gospel in good soil, as it says in the Parable of the Sower. But how is such soil prepared? The Augsburg Confession suggests it originates from civil righteousness that is suggested by reason (presumably that of your own and that of your betters). This is a partial explanation. I think the other part lies in our negligence. Now, some would say that the theory that we transgress out of ignorance of the consequences of our actions or some such thing is a little too Greek to be Biblical. But God was quite open in the Old Covenant to the idea of unwitting transgressions as we can see from the sacrificial regulations of the Torah. Nor can we argue convincingly that such unwitting transgressions only were due to ignorance of the literal commandments of the Torah. Would a midrashic tradition have developed? Would Jesus exclaim in amazement at the ignorance of other religious teachers? Christ's Crucifixion likewise seems to fall in this category of unwitting transgression. Unwitting transgressions are not diminished by their gravity, which can exceed that of more intentional acts, but they are diminished in terms of our responsibility for them.

I saw a movie last night called Pretty Persuasion , which has been panned by critics because of its general lack of believability. I was more impressed by it. Without giving too much of the plot, it involved the exploitation of human frailty and our quotidian unwitting transgressions for an end the critics seemed to have found petty. But it made much sense to me. For the moral world of the movie was not simply a world of negligence, unwitting transgressions, and petty malice. Instead, what made the moral world of the movie all the more sophisticated and the petty malice far more weighty was that it was a world without mercy, without forgiveness, and without repentance of one for another. Such a world is far more potentially iniquitous, since it allows human frailty to be exploited more effectively. Is there any greater power in this world than to hold another's sins over their head? This is one reason why the seal of the confessional ought to be so inviolable. Thanks to be God in Our Lord Jesus Christ that we live under a world of the first conditions and not the second!

And thus it occurs to me that we are made good soil by negligence. In the Last Judgment narrative of Matthew 25, both the sheep and the goats ask when it was that they were merciful unto Christ. And He tells them that if they were merciful unto the least, they were merciful unto Him. Moreover, He says elsewhere whoever is not against us is for us. Thus, we can imagine someone who feeds the hungry, clothes the naked etc. without faith in Christ, who furthers the Kingdom by negligence, not knowing the end to which their actions tend. Thus, I think the Gospels suggest we first participate in the Kingdom unwittingly. As one baptized as an infant, this seems quite logical to me. I saw the Kingdom lived around me before I came into the full acceptance of the faith. I am still coming to realize how much the Kingdom was lived around me during my childhood. But because the world does seem to be full of good and charitable people on their good days, I think it is important to spread the seeds of the Gospel, not only by reason and reproof but by exhortation to further the Kingdom wittingly.

Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that the Spirit working within you will do more than anything you can ask for or imagine, indeed bringing you into the fullness and abundance of the Kingdom of Our God and of His Christ.

Desire and Rule: The Parallel Constructions of Genesis 3:16 and Genesis 4:6-7

For Derek's presentation of the issue, see comments to the discussion of Article IX.

Derek warns quite correctly that the translation is tricky. The Hebrew, with whose translation we generally are familiar, is somewhat ambiguous. The Septuagint, well-known to some interpreters, is somewhat different. Clement's Letter to the Corinthians, for instance, uses the Septuagint version.

So let's first put forth translations of the relevant passages:

Hebrew (I'm using the KJV, since I do not trust the Revised English Bible I use generally here):

Genesis 3:16

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 4:6-7

And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. [Other versions suggest "but thou art able" is a better translation for "and thou shalt." Others suggest sin shall rule over Cain.]

LXX ( Brenton Edition )

Genesis 3:16

And to the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pains and thy groanings; in pain thou shalt bring forth children, and thy [f] submission shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 4:6-7

And the Lord God said to Cain, Why art thou become very sorrowful and why is thy countenance fallen?
Hast thou not sinned if thou hast brought it rightly, but not rightly divided it? be still, to thee shall be his submission, and thou shalt rule over him.

The controversy between the Hebrew and the LXX is that in the former, sin [lit. sin-offering] is personified as being ruled by Cain on account of his desire for Cain, whereas in the latter, Cain is told he will rule over Abel.

The first step we should take is discard the LXX, which seems to be making some sort of sacrificial commentary in 4:7 that cannot be justified as a translation concordant with the Hebrew. [Note carefully the usage here. The LXX always is important to keep in mind, since it seems to have been the authoritative version for many of the ante-Nicene Fathers.] Hence, we are left with the Hebrew. Honestly, I cannot see anything in 3:16 of particular interest as to usage. But 4:5-4:7 work very interestingly together.

First, in 4:5 Cain essentially is described as angry and hanging his head (lit. falling face). In 4:6, God asks why Cain is angry and is hanging his head in a rhetorical fashion. Oddly enough, Cain is the first character described in the Bible as angry. God's anger is assumed by others throughout Genesis, but God first is described as angry by the omniscient narrator in Exodus. But more importantly, God next effectively says, "If you had done well ["to me" is perhaps understood or not, Hebrew is ambiguous that way], you would have been uplifted." The word the KJV translates as "accepted" almost always has the sense of elevation. For instance, the swellings associated with leprosy often are described using this word. Hence, God is making a pun, "Why are you so angry and downcast? If you had done right, you would hold your head up high." Finally, God says, "If you do not do well, sin lies down before your door..." The word for "lies down" is always used for animals and abstracts, especially for sheep. Humans who lie down do so using another verb. I omitted the last part because it is translated so variably and its translation really depends on the clause previous to it and its parallel construction with Genesis 3:16.

So what are we to make of sin lying down at the door? I see two possibilities. One: Sin is some sort of wild animal that lies in wait to pounce on Cain. Two: Sin is being problematized as a bride. [This came out of thin air to me.] In Ruth 3, Ruth lies down at the feet of Boaz in a way particularly prescribed by Naomi. My Oxford Study Bible claims the interactions of Ruth and Boaz here are a reflection of traditional marriage customs. Hence, could we imagine sin as a potential bride lying at the door of Cain's tent, since presumably no desert nomad would sleep with their "back" to the door. Hence, sin is waiting at Cain's door for Cain to extend his protection over sin like Boaz or any groom of that culture and era would spread his robes over his bride, thus signifying his protection.

I don't think we can decide between these possibilities on the basis of 4:6-7 alone, but I suspect that the parallel between 3:16 and 4:6-7 is founded on the idea in 4:7 that sin is a potential bride of Cain. And thus by doing evil, he and any other human being marries sin and places it under his protection. Moreover, if this marriage imagery is correct, the sinner and sin become one flesh. But theoretically, man chooses this union by his own ordinance. We continue in sin by the self-willed ordinance of our ancestors in which we likewise participate. Thus what man hath joined together, God could put asunder.

This is unlikely to be Paul's inspiration for Romans 7:1-6. But if sin enters into a marital union with us, it does explain the general intimacy of corruptibility within us, not merely in what we generally call "sins of the flesh" but those things that Paul calls the "works of the flesh." Yet in this exegesis, our marriage to sin is a free contract we make. It is not some heritable stain or infirmity at birth, yet we possess some vulnerability to it. The pairing of human being and sin is nearly as primal as between male and female. To use Catholic language, original sin in this exegesis might consist in man being "valid matter" for sin after the Fall. And yet this vulnerability stems somehow from that apple, which gave us knowledge of good and evil.

But we must beware constructing anything out of the exegesis of a few problematic verses. However, I think this little exercise certainly has provided interesting insight for me about Genesis' account of the origin of sin. Yet I would love to hear any other ideas for exegesis of this passage.

Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray that sin may be divorced from your bed and board and that at the Last Day you shall put on the fullness of incorruptibility, thus depriving sin of the object of its lust.

Angloblography

Weekend Reading

I spent the weekend immersed too far into coverage of the aftermath of Katrina and cartoon depictions of conservative but somewhat agreeable furry animals. The first time I wanted to put my head above water I read portions of Foxe's Book of Martyrs . This is a problematic exercise, because I usually don't agree with Foxe's theological worldview but I certainly sympathize with his martyrs. It's perhaps more problematic because I really don't see the point of Christians executing other Christians over matters of religion. Is this because I'm a child of the Enlightenment? Well, yes. But there's something about it that strikes me as particularly unchristian. I didn't have words to express my feelings until I read Clement's Letter to the Corinthians in a further attempt to avoid Katrina press coverage. (I also took a few bicycle rides.) And when I read Clement, I found my concern expressed rather nicely. Clement complains against the Corinthians for persecuting leaders of their church in various nasty ways for being on the wrong side of some controversy. He points out to his readers (to put it succinctly) that persecution in the Scriptures usually involves the People of God (Israel, the Apostles, or the Church) being persecuted by other people. Rarely does the true people of God persecute anyone. Thus, religious persecution by Christians puts the persecutors in the Biblical role of enemies of God's people. Now, some Amorites, Perizzites, and even Israelites might complain against this view, but I think Clement gives the stronger interpretation.

For let us hear the preacher to the Hebrews on the Jewish martyrs, "Others were tortured to death, refusing release, to win resurrection to a better life. Others, again, had to face jeers and flogging, even fetters and prison bars. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were put to the sword, they went about clothed in skins of sheep or goats, deprived, oppressed, ill-treated. The world was not worthy of them. They were refugees in deserts and on mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground" (Hebrews 11:35-39). In some sense, I don't care what kind of justification some can bring forth for doing violence to people on account of their faith. Though all the angels absolve them, I will suspect them as enemies of the people of God. Perhaps, such acts were worthy of Moses but they are deeply iniquitous in a people redeemed by the Blood of Him who was condemned as a traitor and a blasphemer. For therein lies my true trouble with Foxe, no matter what I think of the beliefs of those being persecuted, I can't help but see Christ in them.

Jeux De Verite

Michel Foucault, as deeply relativist as his worldview was, had one thing straight: truth-games are everywhere. And I guess my definition of truth game is something like this: a meta-discourse concerning some more fundamental discourse in which some truth and wisdom is achieved at the beginning but as it continues brings declining returns unto nothing and generally obscures the discourse on which it comments. I thought of two salient examples today.

1) Anglican Scotist, as we all know, likes to reveal the liberal individualist underpinnings of reasserter theology. I find this to be productive insofar as it reveals that those who claim to be guardians of universal and eternal tradition against the darkness really are subject to the scandal of particularity they like to point out in their opponents. Today, Rev. Canon Harmon linked to a piece by Ephraim Radner of the Anglican Communion Institute which does a little of this pointing out. In this case, the reassesors are read through the lens of ECUSA's theological presentation at the ACC: To Set Our Hope on Christ as American pragmatists. I could rant for eons on Radner's piece, but it would do no good. Although I appreciate the efforts of Scotist, Radner, and all other players of this game, the meta-discourse of showing that the other is constrained by their particular cultural context obscures whatever we're all supposed to be arguing about.

This game might have more use if it were more universal and eternal but less nostrocentric. We could play it with all of our predecessors in Christ. How fun. What say you, reasserters? That's a stinky liberal game? Well, if you're going to be spoilsports about it... How about we seek a more productive discourse? Let us instead disambiguate everyone's theology from their cultural context. But I still hear objections. Well, the most authentically orthodox solution I could propose would be to suggest the worldview of the apostles is most authoritative. After all, as long as we restrict this worldview business to human beings, how many would disagree with this? Well, many probably would disagree, but I am seeking the greatest consensus. Well, let's disambiguate everyone's theology from everything inconsistent with the apostolic worldview. But then we are left with the question of what apostolic worldview? Should we listen to James and the Church of Jerusalem? Is Paul more authoritative than Peter? John, son of Zebedee, may have been a Galilean fisherman, but he surely sounded like an Ionian philosopher in his latter years. What's up with that? Did he spend too much time in Ephesus? Or should we use the worldview of the Resurrection? No, that wouldn't be good.

Let's abandon this business. Because it is founded on one very important false premise. The game and my proposed improvements do not assume even that cultural context is irrelevant to the gospel, they assume that cultural context is harmful to the gospel. For Scotist and Radner certainly seem to assume that if they can find some strong strain in a theology of the particulat spirit of its age, that strain and even that theology cannot possibly participate in the doctrine of the Church Universal. The leap I am about to take is a great one, but I think it is valid. This assumption, applied universally and eternally as is proper, proclaims the promises to the Patriarchs and the very Incarnation as vanity. And that's where every faithful Christian theologian ought to shout loudly and pull the emergency brake, "Stop this train, I want to get off."

And answering objections that God chose the ancient Near East, I would say that if we are to believe cultural context always obscures and is harmful to the salvific Word, we might wonder at the utility of the promises and the Incarnation as intelligibly universal. But I do not want to much further with this. It's clear to me that Radner and the Scotist do not mean to play the game to this end. But they should be wary. Our chief epistemological limitation lies in the illusions of coherence and completeness. W.R. Hamilton's first few Lectures on Metaphysics illuminate this idea very well. Yes, we are fallen. Yes, we participate in the continuing rebellion of our race initiated by our foreparents. But we also impose order on the chaos of our sensory and intellectual perception. Our sensory perception is limited to very narrow spectra of the potential. Our intellectual perception is limited to bare grasping at the intelligibles. God does not forsake us. God the Father is the ultimate provider of these activities in us. God the Son became incarnate, not only offering Himself for the salvation of our souls, but also forcing our intellect to admit the absurdity (to us) of the divine economy and our senses to admit their limitations. God the Holy Spirit continues this activity in us. Thus we should not fear confidence in what we know nor refuse to admit what we see. The humility of theological and general epistemology lies in admitting that coherence generally is an illusion. Our faith lies neither in sensing the coherence, nor proving the coherence, but living on this little but most blessed world and crying out in faith to God, "It doesn't fit, Lord. I cannot make it fit, Lord. But it does fit, Lord. For You Are." Thus I fear not the ignorant, for they can gain knowledge, nor the unfaithful, for their faith can be strengthened, but those who dishonestly say that something coheres perfectly when they know it does not. I fear that nothing can be done for them. And strangely enough, I am sure this means there's something wrong with me.

2) The other truth game that has been bothering me also can be seen in Randall Foster's latest post. It can be seen elsewhere. It was especially vehemently discussed in the Lutheran blogosphere before ELCA Churchwide Assembly. Yes, I'm talking about Carl Braaten's famous letter where he renews Barth's criticism of Kulturprotestantismus against the ELCA. The rules of this game are very simple: Prove X is a church of "liberal" Protestants who don't care about the universality of the church but only want to do their own thing. The ELCA in this game becomes just another Protestant denomination. As Randall Foster puts it,

"Many Episcopalians in the US are in fact liberal Protestants by conviction. They just happen to prefer a “fancy” style of worship, with esthetically appealing worship spaces, vestments and music. Many liberal Episcopalians could care less about the authority and integrity of Scripture or Tradition. Classical Anglicanism has been marginalized within ECUSA. A dozen dioceses, a few dozen embattled parishes in heterodox dioceses, a couple of seminaries—that is about all that remains today."

This truth game is especially powerful to me, because the critique is a correct, if uncharitable reading of many people I know. I really should be a reasserter. For the last six years or so, I'll go through some sort of period of doubt about the direction of the Episcopal Church and convince myself that I need to fight or leave. And then God usually forces me into a library or a new church and seems to suggest that those with whom I am tempted to align myself do not have the happy relationship with "the authority and integrity of Scripture or Tradition" they claim. And when I point this out all I hear is, "Oh, you're a Democrat" or "You don't read the Bible enough" or "You had a liberal and deceptive religious education" or "You're a scientist. That stuff you do isn't important or relevant to this" or "You know nothing about the ancient world" or "Oh, come on, it can't really mean that."

Yes, there is a Kulturprotestantismus . It is good in that it strives continually for reform and for the conformation and transformation of the Church into a fit Bride for the Lamb of God. It is bad in that it loses track of its roots, sees itself emergent from a vacuum or recovering some pristine vision of the Christian faith. If you want a Classical Anglican example of this critique, see Hooker's Preface to Laws , wherein he gives a splendid aetiology of presbyterian government. But just as easily there can be a Kulturcatholischimus , so enamoured of its roots that it sees all current practice and current prejudices as reflected in the past and sees everything incoherent with it to be irrelevant and invisible. It searches for the same pristine order but as part of a continuity, which becomes more and more muddled unless there is some Kulturprotestantismus . What I want is Kulturcatholisch . And I am sure this is what Randall wants, too. But a lot of people must open their eyes to make it happen.

Well, that was a bit of a rant, wasn't it? And it all seems dreadfully unfair. But these jeux de verite keep multiplying, obstructing substantive dialogue about Scripture and Tradition, and I am sore of heart,

Until next time, the Holy Brothers pray you avoid making Leviathans of the intellect merely for the sport of it, but instead be led by the Spirit of Truth into all truth.