Good Friday and the Song of Songs

In the King James Version of the Bible, the phrase "daughters of Jerusalem" appears only in two books: the Song of Songs and one appearance in the Passion narrative of Luke (23:28). I have been contemplating what this would mean: the connection between the passion of the Song and the Passion of the Lord. I have seen some echoes of the Lord's Passion in time, marked by the division of the Song by its common refrain: " I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem...that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please." Good Friday, in this view, might parallel the longest part of the Song (3:6-8:5), but I'm not sure there's such a clear division.

The older Greek theologians speak of Christ's economy in his Passion. Epiphanius of Salamis mentions that the Lord could have sent legions of angels to destroy his enemies etc. In one way or another, He could have directly revealed Himself as He truly is. The Lord as Lord instead is sleeping, unable to be roused. In order to love us, He must be patient. He must have a Passion.

The "day" begins at 3:6 with the description of Solomon's palanquin. "Who is this coming from the wilderness like a column of smoke?" Even just this phrase is pregnant with resonance. The Lord led Israel in the wilderness with a pillar of cloud or smoke by day, and by night, by a pillar of fire. The Lord on this day goes out into the wilderness again, outside of the city gates of Jerusalem, escorted like Solomon is, by "picked warriors", but not of Israel. The triumphal procession (parodos in Greek) of Jesus's ironically royal entry into Jerusalem becomes a new exodos out of the city, carrying a cross.

"Come out, maidens of Jerusalem: you maidens of Zion, welcome King Solomon, wearing the crown which his mother placed on his head, on his wedding day, his day of joy" (3:11).

In traditional Roman Catholic interpretation, the Song is filled with Marian imagery. In the plain meaning, Solomon is crowned by Bathsheba, his mother. In the view I take here, Jesus's crown of thorns is a crown given him by Mary, from whom he derives His human nature. Our sins, weaknesses, and vanities are as a crown of pure gold upon his head.

Here, we also have the resonance with Luke 23, the lamentations of the women along the way. But the Lord says to them, "For the days are surely coming when you shall say 'blessed are the wombs that never bore and the breasts never suckled.'" Our unrepented sins, the systemic evils we tolerate, again and again crowns our children with the crown of thorns Jesus is bearing for us today, once for all. That God executes justice on the human nature resting in Himself allows us to turn in forgiveness to the most unforgivable and seek forgiveness for whatever we need. Gandhi said, "Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," but the Crucifixion is the only thing that allows us to keep our sight, to have genuine power to break the cycle of vengeance. We cannot do it alone.

And then we go into a love song. This is a mystical reading, so I just let Chapter 4 fill me. Jesus is crucified for us, for love of His Church to whom he imputes righteousness, as a lover imputes every merit to his beloved, whether others would see it or not. Our language parallels the suffering of the lover with every other suffering, so that we can imagine the pain of the world and the deepest depths of human iniquity being transformed into unconditional, one-way love (as Paul Zahl puts it). This is the transformation of the Cross: the mystical conversion of sin into redemptive love.

Christ drives the moneychangers out of the Temple for a variety of reasons, but it also signifies the same thing as the tearing of the Temple's veil. We cannot make any exchange for God's favor or forgiveness. There is only one type of exchange that is needful. And the Song says this, too, "If someone were to offer for love all the wealth in his house, it would be laughed to scorn."

The Song read this way also crosses the boundaries between lover and beloved: bride and bridegroom. Let us remember, "The watchmen came upon me, as they made their rounds of the city. They beat me and wounded me and those stripped off my cloak. Maidens of Jerusalem, I charge you, if you find my beloved, tell him that I am faint with love."

I will admit that I have not seen Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ . I'm thinking of seeing it tonight after Good Friday services. I've never quite understood the wallowing in Christ's suffering. But the Song changes that for me. The whipping, for instance, now speaks to me of the faintness from blood loss. I know what it is to feel faint from blood loss or dehydration. I know what it is to feel faint with love. It always has been hard for me to understand why we dwell on the brutality of Christ's death. But the world is brutal. And the more brutal it is for Jesus, the more He can convert it to love and embrace us. "When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself."

The Holy Brothers pray that you will know the breadth, and height, and depth of God's love for you in the brutality of His Passion.

Ora et Labora 2.0?

But they maintain the fabric of the world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer -- Eccl. 38:34

I've said it in these pages quite recently, but George Barna literally defines the American Evangelical Christian. His eponymous Group is not so much a market research firm as a change agent in certain segments of the Christian church. So I noted with interest "a Barna Update" on "Faith, Work, and Calling." .

The key point of the Barna Update is that American Christians, still a significant proportion of the population, have the same anxieties as everyone else. I'll put it bluntly: the American labor market is now shaped by: (1) the reduction of labor costs through offshoring and automation; (2) the over-credentialing of about half of the population (note I do not say overeducating); (3) the expansion of jobs in the service industry, particularly in health care; and (4) a small number of highly compensated jobs in the areas of automation, offshoring, higher education and training, and the financial services necessary to keep the capital flowing; (5) the parallel bureaucratization and growth in scale of public, private, and ecclesial structures (I'm not blaming anyone, just making an observation); and (6) the demand for intense specialization in occupations that are likely to be economically sustainable for much less than the duration of an adult's working life.

Some of this is obvious in the Update, and some of this shrouded under the pall that neo-liberalism casts over all of us. Yet if you talk to relatively well-educated Americans of around 30, you soon find yourself in a competition to determine who is most miserably in debt, engaged in the most meaningless or frustrating work, and under the most bureaucratic control. As you might imagine, I almost always lose.

A common critique of this attitude is that my generation are incurable whiners whose precious self-esteem cannot handle the reality of labor as drudgery. However, in many cases, they describe contradictions between a service and the economic transaction beneath that service. The young social worker may be told, "It is not how well you serve a client, but how many clients you serve and justify with paperwork, no matter how poorly." The young banker may be told, "We're not here to increase liquidity unless it makes us the most money to do so." The young pharmacist may be told, "Steer the customer away from the generic and don't worry if they might not be able to afford a full month's supply. That's not our problem."

At the same time, the dynamism and tightness of the present labor market presents the appearance of greater freedom and yet attendant anxiety. The geographic reach of the labor market expands in proportion to greater specialization as over-credentialing saturates specialized labor pools. McDonald's is always and everywhere hiring the unskilled, but the skilled are constantly seeking the market in desperate need of them. This is true of "blue collar" as well as "white collar" jobs. The young specialists imagine they can live anywhere but often end up bouncing from place to place, straining relationships.

Nowhere is there the freedom of the mid-19th century American labor "market", where an adult white male could know and practice the basics of everything from navigation to blacksmithing to agriculture to political oratory. Our ancestors, too, moved, changed jobs frequently, and often failed, but their skills were more general and their failures less destructive (barring addiction). And if you were lucky enough to succeed, you could settle somewhere happily for life. These days we are frightened that our choices might leave us destitute, alone, and far away from "home."

What I hear from the anxieties expressed in Barna Group polling is the desire for a new theology of work or a new emphasis on the theology of work. They are a bit skeptical of that over in Charlottesville (i.e. David Zahl of Mockingbird ). And I'm skeptical, too. There's plenty of theology of work here and there. The passage in Ecclesiasticus I cite at the beginning of this entry has an interesting perspective on the work of the learned professions versus the farmers and craftspeople. Dorothy Sayers has a nice essay . Jesus has a few things to say about being a soldier that I've always found interesting.

Nevertheless, the desire for more thought about the theology of work may have the wrong end. There is a strong tendency in American Protestantism to see the mere assent to belief as the root of all accomplishment. In this case, if I believe the right things about work, I will make the right choices and find fulfilling, impactful, significant, and perhaps even remunerative work so that I can happily bestow my surplus on the church of my choice. Or as the Mockingbirds would say, You're turning work into a focus for the law. If believing the right things about work achieved anything, everyone without such great work must be believing the wrong things. And thus the vicious cycle of anxiety would continue. Or perhaps, a theology of work is only demanded to make the structural evils of our labor market more bearable.

There is an alternative. The origins of Christian monasticism in both East and West lie in the economic and political turmoil of the 3rd-6th centuries A.D. on the shores of the Mediterranean. Offshoring was not quite the issue it was today, but there is some parallel in the contracting of Germanic tribes by the Roman government to execute military functions. Social mobility, always a tenuous but not unheard of concept in Greco-Roman society, was greatly reduced, as the symbolic extension of citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire ironically coincided with a reduction in the supply of slaves. By the end of the 3rd century, many humbler Roman citizens were finding themselves in a condition little different than an agricultural slave in the days of Spartacus: the beginnings of serfdom.

Matters were little better for the Roman lower and upper middle classes. Their privileges in all areas of law had gradually eroded. Prices were fixed. Occupations were transmitted by inheritance. A lower middle class Roman of the Republic had a good life. Playwrights wrote (sadly lost!) dramas involving marriage plots between young men and young women seeking to make their way in the world in the small craft workshops of Italy. By 300 A.D., that world was forever lost to bureaucratic control of economic life. The upper middle classes likewise inherited their jobs. Tradition held that some portion of public expenditure came from the private means of officeholders, but either the proportion grew with a declining tax base and/or the wealthy families in town were not doing so well anymore. Whatever the cause, holding public office became so financially ruinous that the people who were once the most ruthless political campaigners of the ancient world became the people who had to be compelled into public service by the draconian force of law.

The ancient situation I describe is much different than the modern one, but both, I think, are broken all the same. The response of the institutional Church was to become a parallel institution to the public institutions and eventually parallel to the Emperor himself. However, for Greco-Roman Christians of all classes, there was another option: the wilderness.

Going into the wilderness was not a new thing, nor just a Christian thing, but it was equal opportunity. We mainly hear of the rich ones. Antony of Egypt saw himself as the young man of the Gospels, but sought the perfection of giving away his possessions rather than mourning the counsel. We hear of a former imperial tutor who lives slightly more comfortably than a monk of humbler origins, who complains of it. He is told that this man is used to fine foods and silk sheets, so he is equally ascetic to the complainant, if not more. Benedict and Pope Gregory, both high Roman magistrates, long to live in the mountains of Italy.

Monks go into the wilderness, because they can do no other to pursue the Christ in an utterly broken world. They know that others can. We hear of a doctor in Alexandria who gives away his services for free and keeps the sick in his home, finding new patients by wandering the streets and listening for their moans. The angels tell a monk that this man is greater than all monks.

And the irony of this all is that the humbler among the monks maintain their craft. There are blacksmiths in monasteries, for instance, anything to keep them self-sufficient. Yet the learned or the once rich do the simplest, least skilled, but most attentive of crafts: the weaving of reed mats, literally making fabric to center their prayer.

So if we want work to work for us, we may need to give up control and let the deceptive freedom of opportunity pass us by: to seek sufficiency rather than abundance, the simple and humble rather than its opposite, maintaining the fabric of the world in prayer rather than seeking to improve it.

"Frankly Medieval"

Mockingbird's weekly round-up linked to an essay in First Things on the relative accessibility of Calvinism and Lutheranism to American Evangelicals.

There are some important, Anglican-relevant points made about the contrasting marketability of Lutheran and Calvinistic confessional documents and the contrasting intellectual formation of lay people in either context. Yet a key failing of the essay is that I have no idea which Lutherans and Calvinists are being compared. I'm assuming people in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America still hand out the Book of Concord, while I often have to inform Presbyterians (PCUSA) about the existence of the Westminster Confession or Calvin's Institutes. Given that it is First Things, I wonder if the contrast is between the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, the Christian Reformed Church, and the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

Just keep that in mind if you read the essay.

The fun part comes when the author points out that the sacramental (not merely the liturgical) atmosphere of Lutheran churches contrasts with Calvinist churches because of their differing sacramental theologies. Calvinists see the sacraments as memorials or recognitions of actions or interior states already completed. Baptism signifies baptismal faith in God. The Lord's Supper is an act of personal or corporate recognition of God's saving work. The focus is on the remembering we do (anamnesis).

The Lutheran view (and the majority Anglican view is consistent with it) is that the sacraments (and liturgical acts of penance) are vehicles of Grace for God to act on us. We trust their efficacy, because (1) they are instituted by God in Christ; (2) the Pastor acts in the person of Christ to bring Christ's words to us; and (3) Christ is trustworthy. I would say that the liturgical tension between Lutheranism and the older catholic forms is that the Lutherans transmit Christ to us more in the pose of his Earthly ministry rather than as glorified High Priest and King.

The Evangelical Anglican view of baptism is a hybridized version of these views: the liturgy does nothing in itself but describes and signifies what we believe to be happening.

Now that the theology is set forth, the author talks about how it infects the atmosphere.

 If our young Evangelical would happen to visit a Lutheran church, long before he hears about theological differences, he will “feel” that the experience of church and spirituality is different in the Lutheran church. With a nod to Cary’s argument, if the Lutheran church, as it were, “does” it right, it will feel alien relative to the average American church—it will “feel” frankly medieval. And it will feel that way irrespective of whether the Lutheran church sings praise songs instead of hymns, or whether it uses traditional or modern architecture in its building. Word and sacrament is what it’s all about. Christians are actually united in baptism with Christ on the Cross, and we actually receive Christ’s forgiveness by receiving his body and blood respectively broken and poured out for that forgiveness.

Bible-Mindedness and Episcopalians

In recent days, the press has been covering the American Bible Society's (ABS) annual survey on the use of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament in the United States today, performed by the well-known Evangelical pollster, George Barna. Barna literally defines the term, "Evangelical" more than any other American by engaging a continuous series of polling of Evangelicals as a group contrasted with the rest of the American population.

Most of the attention has been dedicated to the rating of metropolitan areas as more or less "Bible-minded." By Barna/ABS criteria, the least Bible-minded part of the United States is Providence, RI and New Bedford, MA, while the most "Bible-minded" is Chattanooga, TN. (Knoxville won last year).

While I appreciate the ammunition to argue that Tennessee rather than Oklahoma is the true "buckle of the Bible Belt," I must critique the standards by which the calculation was made. The ranking was by "percentage who report reading the Bible during the past seven days and who agree strongly in the accuracy of the Bible." "Reading the Bible" was limited to reading outside of church or synagogue. It is not clear what standard of belief in Biblical accuracy, but I infer from the ABS site that, "the inspired Word of God with no errors" was the minimum standard. Therefore, the poll merely has determined who reads the Bible the way George Barna does (primarily outside of liturgical worship) and agrees with Barna's standards of Biblical inerrancy. In effect, Barna would exclude most of the inhabitants of England in 1603, who were illiterate, yet whose hearing of the Word in twice-daily acts of liturgical worship would be the major textual experience of their lives.

+Bishop Knisely of Bible-mindless Rhode Island had this to say,

"A biblically minded person is someone who deeply understands and lives the values of the Gospel, not someone who merely reads it often."

He then observed,

"That said, I'm certainly in favor of people engaging in a regular way with Holy Scripture. Another recent study pointed out that while Episcopalians are not as likely to read their Bibles individually during the week, they are the people who read the Bible the most, together in Sunday and daily worship. Our lectionary takes us through the entire Bible together, every three years. We read the Bible, we just read it differently. That's true of all the liturgical churches, which are the largest expression of Christianity here in Rhode Island."

The charity of bishops to their flocks aside, I'd say that the ideal is that Christians in liturgical churches read through the Bible every three years in the course of Eucharistic and Office readings. The lived reality is that the Office has fallen by the wayside wherever you go.

As a segueway to why I think Episcopalians should read the Bible more (and talk about it), let me note an interesting conversation I overheard during the spring. I was sitting in a coffee shop near Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, listening to two women in their mid 20s reading through Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians. I initially assumed that these young women were Evangelicals. However, further listening to extra biblical conversation indicated that they were Roman Catholics. Since the late 1970s, social issues have brought Evangelicals and Roman Catholics closer together in the political realm. Could it be that the habit of Bible study (so rare among my Roman Catholic relatives) had been transferred at least in the cultural milieu of the Religious Right? I have no idea, but the thought is intriguing.

Why Episcopalians Should Read and Discuss the Bible More

1. Your children have no idea what you believe.

Children, by necessity, have living memories similar in magnitude to one liturgical cycle. And chances are, they're hearing the readings only on Sunday. In the same way you discuss confidently what your children are learning in school, you need to be able to discuss confidently what they are learning in Sunday School and what is being said in church. My father discussed the sermon with me every Sunday when I was growing up. A solid grounding in the Bible (and how living, breathing Episcopalians read it) will give children a foundation for committing to Christ and practicing Christianity in the future and resist the attractions of more authoritarian approaches to following Christ. And if they don't come to believe, they will have a new appreciation for history, culture, and literary analysis.

2. We need a credible word spoken into our lives

In Paul Zahl's Grace in Practice , he writes about a ritual he suggests for every married couple. The first thing they should do in the morning, before they listen to the radio, check their e-mail etc. is: (1) read a short portion from the Bible together; (2) exchange prayer requests with one another; and (3) pray spontaneously. How very Evangelical. Anglo-Catholics may prefer an abbreviated Morning Prayer.

The reading of Scripture first thing in the morning is the important part. Zahl talks about the importance of a word being spoken into the marriage outside of it. Human communication inevitably is a place of struggle, as our incurvatus in se selves seek to be known and heard more than to know and listen. And indeed, the Bible (as long as the passage is from the Lectionary or chosen by a good random number generator with a key (there are 31,102 verses in the King James Version…) is ideally such a word. All the other words in our lives have an uncertain agenda. The ones we speak are ultimately self-promoting, and so also are the ones we hear from those like ourselves. We believe that the source of Scripture has an agenda that is to our benefit and speaks credibly, even if we do not hear Scripture credibly. Scripture is the foreign word we need to hear.

3. We need to discuss what he have in common beyond the institution

The fastest-growing churches are the ones to which people want to belong. That point may sound trivial, but it's not. The fastest-growing churches are the ones that find people who bring together those who belong together. One parish to which I belonged realized that there were a whole group of people interested in political Progressivism and liturgical worship. People drove there from fifty miles away. Their Christian Education hour was typically focused on politics, social ills, and culture. The most Bible was discussed might have been in the 20s and 30s group, which was mostly composed of Evangelicals who wanted to be Progressives and/or had been alienated by Evangelicalism.

If we want to create vital churches that are genuinely inclusive, we need to find affinity groups beyond politics, race, and class. And if we are Christians, the affinity group we need to seek is those who love and follow Jesus Christ. And the Holy Scriptures ultimately point to him.

Too many times when I am with church people, I find myself discussing politics, either that of the civil authorities or that of the Church (at the parochial through international levels). And when I bring the Bible into these discussions, I often hear, "I disagree with that." I don't hear, "I do not interpret that verse, passage, entire book in that way and here's why." So we devolve into the mere exchange of opinions and very little insight into Jesus.

I think Episcopal churches would be stronger (growth is another issue) if we could discuss the Bible with another in a way the demonstrated mutual engagement with the text. The Bible and the Sacraments are the most obvious foci of our unity, and they are the healthiest ones to discuss as well. Grounding ourselves in Scripture will make it easier to have conversations about the difficult institutional issues we often face.

4. We need to be able to talk with Barna's "Bible-minded" Christians as fellow disciples, not as the Other

This past Sunday, I was at an ecumenical service. The hosting pastor said on a couple occasions that he thanked us, "that we thought it not robbery" to attend. I guessed that it was a Biblical allusion, but I had no idea the reference. Google told me that it is the King James rendering of the phrase from the kenotic hymn of Philippians 2, "who being in the form of God, did not think equality with God something to be snatched at." (I admit that my memory of rendering this verse comes from translating it from the Vulgate.) I am still not sure how I feel about this allusion, but I recognize it as an incisive comment on ecumenism. To participate in a service like that does require that we humble ourselves. In the future, I will have something to discuss with the pastor in the future that does not dwell on the competition for souls or service opportunities that otherwise engages the visibly disunited Body of Christ.

Rules For Being an Episcopalian

For the next Men's Group (one of the adult Sunday School classes at church), we're supposed to prepare what we think are the rules of the Episcopal Church. Here is my list. I've tried to be minimally snarky. Let me know if there's anything I'm missing. Rules 1. Attend church on Sunday and whatever feast days your parish celebrates. 2. Give something up for Lent. 3. Pledge something, anything. 4. Love God, love your neighbor. 5. Sexual relationships should be stable, mutual, faithful, and ideally lifelong. 6. Don't mess with the Altar Guild. (In most other Provinces, this rule would read, "Don't mess with the Mother's Union.")

Profile of Christ Episcopal Church, Charlottesville

...is included in this piece. Christ Church is the physical home of Mockingbird

Partying Like Mary Magdalene

I am in the middle of Glennon Melton's Carry on Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed. The book is a series of personal essays by a "mommy blogger" with the kind of past that respectable suburban mommies sometimes have but do not talk about in public.

The strength of the work is that it is a public examination of the author's soul. Yes, she tells her "conversion story." But she also talks frankly about the struggles she has with parenting, marriage, and friendship. She is converting every day, just the way I should. Melton is a recovering alcoholic, drug user, and bulimic, so you almost could imagine subtitling this work, "The Christian Life: One Day at a Time."

Since we are late in the octave of Mary Magdalene, I will point out Melton's reading of last Sunday's Gospel. I doubt Melton is familiar with the Jesuit technique of lectio divina, but she knows to how to use it. She sees herself in Martha and specifically in Martha's anxiety about hospitality (or as Melton renders it, "hostressing": "And Martha is still in the kitchen grabbing her hubby's shoulders and yelling, 'WHAT DO GODS AND DISCIPLES EAT?'"

Melton reads this story by asking some questions, "Is it possible that hospitality is not about perfect food or fancy furniture? Could the better part of hospitality be listening? If you can't do both, could the better part be focusing on your guest instead of trying to impress or even feed him? Could the better place be the family room, at the foot of your guest, instead of tucked away in the kitchen? Maybe."

She responds to the Gospel by inviting her best friends to a party where she chooses the better part, like Mary Magdalene. She insists everyone comes in their pajamas, bringing whatever they want to eat, whatever they want to drink, whatever they want to drink out of, and something on which to sit. And Melton then sits on the floor at their feet and listens.   

We Believe In The God Who Arrives

I found this observation from Fr. Charles OFM Cap. to pair well with the passage from William James quoted by A Thinking Reed

A merely human religiosity can see prayer as an addressing of ourselves to a deity somewhere up in the sky, either literally or in some rarefied sky more palatable to persons imbued with modern science. [...] From the call of Abraham to the Resurrection appearances, Christian faith speaks of a God who arrives, who is adventitious. He is not a supreme being who must be pulled down from the sky or a cthonic power that must be conjured up from the netherworld. Rather, he is a Presence discovered, sometimes as a surprise, as with Abraham and the three men, or simply recognized precisely when he calls us by name, as with the Risen Lord and Mary Magdalene. Prayer and adoration, then, as the postures that make us disciples of Jesus Christ, are acts of hospitality, of graciously receiving the Presence of God as he arrives in the particular circumstances of our days.

Theosis Democratike or the New Holiness Part 4: Community Amidst the Chaos

If you've been reading this series, your first question will be: where's Part 3? It's coming, perhaps some time in the fall. I thought I'd talk today about community.

Fr. Cramer linked to this post on Facebook today. This week's Gospel pushed people to think in a certain direction, I think. The sermon I heard on Sunday emphasized, "just showing up an hour per week for Sunday worship."

I have two immediate replies to this kind of thing that somewhat contradict one another. First, I think, "Wow, look at our low expectations!"

Second, I think, "How fortunate I am to have a free Sunday morning free on which to worship. I know many young Christians who are (right now) cooking meals for the aged in residential care, opening the local big box store, or dressing in Colonial garb for a hot day taking tickets. We're not just missing the people who are sailing or sleeping late."

I can understand the anxiety of the preacher. Down to one service in the summer, we've lost a good portion of attendees from our later service. The parish budget has been impacted by the deaths of several pledge units, and summer absenteeism cuts into cash flow.

In other words, I hear overt concern about the spiritual welfare of those who are missing, but I sense in discussions of Average Sunday Attendance and summer/necrological pledge deficits that the interest is financial.

I don't think this paradigm can last. That is, I don't think we can center a particular community or Christian community in general around Sunday morning worship and Coffee Hour. There is something about that institution which is particularly tied to expectations about class, labor, and leisure that no longer hold.

Ultimately, our model of church comes from a tradition of State compulsion and social pressure. It cannot be sustained in an era when both have faded away. Moreover, whether technology outpaces the decay of ecology or vice versa, we will need community that saturates our lives more than a single act of common weekly worship or fellowship. Either the balance will favor Kunstler, and we will need to make the world once more by hand, or Kurzweil is right, and we will lose all sense of our hands. In either case, we will need one another in a way that cannot be sustained by a 2-3 hour mass meeting that many of us cannot manage to attend. Indeed, we need one another in that way now.

The communities that will be functional in the future still may meet on Sunday morning. We still do organize our society somewhat after the rhythm of an era dominated by those who hallowed "the first day of the week." The leadership of the community may commit to that worship. But the church will not only meet then. Small groups will meet throughout the week to meet, talk, study, perhaps serve the church and the world, share a meal, and pray in common. Many may never attend a Sunday service other than perhaps on Easter. Once in a while, a priest may come to teach, hear confessions, and make Eucharist.

And that will be it.    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theosis Democratike or the New Holiness: Part 2

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

Catholicity: Rooting and Grounding in God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theosis Democratike or the New Holiness: Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Substitutionary Atonement I Can Support

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

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

Random Thought On Baptism and The Saints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atonement and the Sacrificial Nature of the Eucharist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...For That Which Is Signified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-Creating with the Millennials: Some First Steps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do Millennials Want to Know About the Christian Life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Should Millennials Give the Church?

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

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

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

2. Find mentors

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

3. Pledge

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