2010 November

Advent-izing the Imagination

November 29, 2010 by Tripp Fuller 2 Comments

As advent begins I am reminded just how much the idea of God’s coming and our need to wait for it can change our imagination. So often we assume a rather limited spectrum of what is and isn’t possible. For example, we have a relationship in certain unhealthy reciprocal habits and from within the cycle it looks like a dead end. Often times a pause, an opening up of new perspectives, inputs, and distance from the raw emotions of a situation will give us the ability to see alternatives we didn’t in the midst of it. Waiting in many instances increases possibilities. In some situations, like those relationships that are troubled, what it brings is the understanding necessary for forgiveness, the courage to be honest, or the space to take stock personally. What amazes me still (and you would think you would get use to it) is how time, friendly ears, prayer, and perspective can hope to a darkened horizon.

This isn’t just true for our relationships with friends or family but on a larger scale too. I was reminded of this by a friend commenting on one of the lectionary passages this week from Isaiah where he gives this vision, “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” The brilliant 16-year old exegete was struck by the connection of education (no learning of war) and the practice (no sword lifting) and said, “this could be seen as idealistic babble and give a bunch of calls to the “reasonableness” of war training but if you just step back from it and see where having a big military with a big price tag has got us you gotta think something is wrong. Maybe we should be learning something different and then we will be able to see it….I don’t know….whatever.”

I think this student was right. So many of our most pressing issues, from the micro to the macro, could look different if we thought more was possible. Perhaps this season of advent, as we anticipate the coming of God, we will find our imaginations opened to possibilities beyond our ‘normal’ with all of its unquestioned broken, selfish, cyclical, and unjust assumptions.

Filed Under: living

An Apologetic Christology for the Postmodern with Roger Haight: Homebrewed Christianity 87

November 17, 2010 by Tripp Fuller 8 Comments

Roger Haight is a prolific theologian, American Jesuit, and an excellent example of the Chicago School of theology. Standing in the tradition of greats like Paul Tillich and David Tracy, Roger seeks to articulate Christian theology for and to the cultural context. In his career he has focused his attention on the postmodern context of the West, those who wrestle permanently with doubt and stand on the boundary of the church with their questions. In addressing these people Dr. Haight reveals what is possible when the beauty of the Christian tradition is correlated with the questions and anxieties of people today. In this conversation we discuss his work in Christology but end up touching on a whole number of other issues including religious pluralism, ecclesiology, the nature of Orthodoxy, and the application of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for the entire church.

As you may know, Roger Haight has had a quarrel with the Vatican over his Christology. As we begin a series here at the podcast on Christology, I imagine you will begin to notice through comparison and increased understanding of the theological context and questions present today, that Roger is a faithful Christian theologian attempting to contribute constructively to the thought and practice of a church he loves. Of course you can decide yourself!

An Apologetic Christology for the Postmodern with Roger Haight [ 1:16:24 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed Under: podcast

The New Orthodoxy

November 8, 2010 by Deacon Hall 18 Comments

A Christian hipster dressed ironically

I’d like to make something clear upfront, here. I’m not completely orthodox. I have some beliefs that don’t mix well with older forms of Christian thought, even if they’re often times congruent with some of the oldest forms (for instance, I’m a universalist). I’m not saying this, however, in order to earn your accolades; I’m saying it because, generally, if I want much of today’s American church–at least Mainline and Emergent–to take me seriously, I feel I have to make such a profession of heresy. Heresy has become the new orthodoxy.

I don’t blame anybody for this transference of orthodoxy. I think it’s relatively natural. It’s a reaction to the strict Evangelical moralism and Five-Point Calvinism (if these could ever even be considered orthodox in their own right) that held tight grips over the U.S. for so many years, and under which some persons, congregations, and denominations place the whole of their intellectual stock still. Indeed, this type of intellectual movement–from “orthodoxy” to “heresy”–is precisely the type of movement that Hegel, in a much more metaphysically oriented manner, explicates in, well, the whole of his thought. Out of every position develops a counter-position, especially when that original position’s “common sense” seems to become “common non-sense.”

The good part of this type of position is that it has at least nominally rejected of old labels, namely, of who is necessarily included and excluded from the church based on the particularities of their belief. Even if the development of orthodoxy, however, was vital in many ways to the cohesiveness and development of the ancient church, it has long been unnecessarily divisive, a way in which to exclude (i.e. hang or burn) those for whom one has, say, political problems. It often remains this way today, albeit, we usually don’t burn each other anymore. Accordingly, I fully support the rejection of orthodoxy, strictly speaking, as the criterion for inclusion in or exclusion from the Church or as a means of doing a violence at all. I’ll further add that creativity (which all orthodox positions were as they emerged) in theology is itself very helpful.

Heretics then...

...and heretics now. I'll go ahead and take this one.

However, I think this new position also has some real problems. First, as I’ve already insinuated, this non-orthodox position can itself become an orthodoxy, both in upholding the trueness of its rejection of orthodoxy, but also in its rejection of those who still buy into orthodoxy. The first of these points results in the neglect of historically orthodox thought, namely, a study of the doctrines that people have found orthodox and why they have found them orthodox. This lack of study simply leads to a watering down of one’s identity as a Christian, whether one buys into the historical tenets of orthodoxy (whatever the period of study’s orthodoxy might be, because they have changed) or not.

Accordingly, it might be good to know that, for instance, Athanasius saw the necessity of Trinitarian thought for being able to posit any sense of salvation that Christ might offer humans, not simply or necessarily because he hated Arians (which he did). Everything rested for him upon affirming the divinity of Christ, whose union with humanity (Athanasius does not yet have the vocabulary of Chalcedon) makes possible the salvation of humanity—its deification—and therefore the meaningfulness of Christ at all. Take again someone like Luther (one of my all time favorite theologians) who demands, as part of the Protestant tenants, justification by faith alone. This doctrine was a freeing doctrine for him. That is, since it is only God who can give faith and, through it salvation, Luther was freed from the torments of sin found in his conscience which (rightly) told him always and forever that he was not good enough, not able enough, not faithful enough. Because of this doctrine, Luther found freedom to actually love, rather than despise, God for the first time. This list could go on.

The point, however, is that this knowledge of orthodoxy is important in understanding oneself as a Christian regardless of how one ultimately interprets these doctrines or understands their truth value; in other words, orthodox beliefs need not—rather, ought not—be rejected out of hand without some sympathetic understanding of the doctrines’ origins, meaning, and continuing relevance. To fail to understand these traditional and orthodox beliefs is to fail to understand the history, orthodox or not, of the church, which is to fail to understand oneself as a Christian. Granted, you probably won’t find yourself in the bowels of hell for such neglect (you probably won’t anyways, according to my interpretation), but certainly this point ought to be of concern to self-professed “Christian theologians,” lay or professional (I actually wouldn’t say that such concern is necessary for Christians uninterested in theology). At least part of the Christian’s identity is gained historically in the promulgation, reinterpretation, and repetition (a word that I’m using in Kierkegaard’s sense) of ancient beliefs.

The second point made above was that we, claiming orthodoxy in our heresy, end up rejecting the “older” more “primitive” believers in their continued value of orthodoxy as a criterion of church inclusion; I’ll withhold most of my comment. I think Dr. Phillip Clayton and the bearded Tripp Fuller are empirically testing the waters of what inclusion means and how far it goes in their Big Tent Christianity project. I tend to think that we draw lines of inclusion and exclusion somewhere (after all, we heretics tend to be intolerant of intolerance, exclude the excluders, and despise those who despise persons beyond their own group, etc.), but I don’t know where, and I won’t say that we do so necessarily…or at least not quite. What I do know is that we can allow our own proclivity toward factually excluding persons–that we are always already excluding in some form– to humble us heretically orthodox, refraining by means of this knowledge from the false belief that we are universally inclusive and tolerant (words made of gold for this particular brand of orthodoxy). At least this way, we do not merely pay lip-service to our desires for inclusion, we are simply honest with our inability to achieve such inclusion on our own.

Of course, this admission gives us over to an important Christian suggestion: that we don’t simply want God to help us but, in our sin, absolutely need God to help us. This statement, however, ought to make us all feel a bit uncomfortable because I can’t think of a more historically definitive and orthodox Christian stance.

Filed Under: church history, emergent, thinking

I heart Kathryn Tanner’s Christocentric Christology!

November 2, 2010 by Tripp Fuller 8 Comments

Kathryn Tanner’s newest book is an impressive, creative, and inspiring work of theology. It brings to life the historic conversation within the tradition around Jesus and enlivens it with her keen sensitivity to the present challenges we are facing as a church. I have no idea how many posts I will get out on the book but here’s my attempt to get heart of the book….a book you should just read for yourself! Ohh there is a podcast with her coming your way this Advent!!!

In Christ the Key she intends to display the force of her most central theological commitment, that God desires to give humanity the fullness of God’s own life in deepest way possible – through Christ. For her Christ is indeed the key but in a very specific way. It is through God’s participation with us and for us in the hypostatic union that all of humanity comes to participate and share in the divine life. The nature of the human, the trinity, God-World relationship, atonement, and whole host of other theological topics are developed out of this central thesis such that from her account of the incarnation unfolds more than simply her Christology.

No concept has as much interpretive power in Tanner’s account than participation. Throughout her description the work of the Cappadocian Fathers and Gregory of Nyssa in particular play an essential role. From them she is able to appropriate a modified Platonist vision of participation in which all particular human beings participate in the human being par excellence, Jesus Christ the image of God. In contrast to a more traditional Platonist scheme, a strict ontological divide is placed between the Creator and creaturely reality. Because there is a strict dichotomy between the two there cannot be “an ontological continuum spanning the difference between God and creatures” (18). Instead it is the Christological commitments fashioned in response to the Arian controversy that reveal a two-fold participatory relationship between the creature and their Creator, both of which take as their origin the eternal Son. The Son is both the Word from whom all creation comes and the incarnate one in whom the perfect union and image of God is given to the world. Creaturely existence which is composite and has being only through participation in that which it is not leads Tanner to distinguish between weak and strong participation, both of which are divine works of grace originating in the Son.

Weak participation is our givenness as a creature of God brought forth from the Word. Prior to the act of creation what we receive preexists in God the Word and our coming into being is then a movement that originates in God, making our image-bearing identity something we do not possess but derived from our participation in the Word, the image of the invisible and incomprehensible God. This weak form of participation, while not our own, is part of our created identity before God. Strong participation, in Tanner’s mind, is our coming to participate in what we are not, namely God. This intense form of participation took place and is made possible through the incarnation in Jesus Christ. Here in this particular human being God was redemptively present in a unique way with a universal horizon. As Tanner puts it, “Jesus, in so far as he is divine, does not just have the divine image within himself through participation but is it” (35). In Christ his humanity shared fully in the derivative dignity of humanity, its weak participation, and yet because of Christ’s divinity God’s own being is given and shared with humanity as a whole. Through the Word’s incarnation “the Word has us in a new way and that means we can have the Word in a new way” beyond the previously available possibilities (36). The hypostatic union is the means by which the ontological gap between the Creator and God’s creatures is bridged. This makes the life of Jesus more than simply a model of the perfectly faithful human being but neither is the life of Jesus relegated to the neglected preface of God’s redemption through the cross and resurrection. Through the dynamism of her two forms of participation she is able to follow Athanasius who saw that the Word is known both in the act of creation and redemption through his work. In Augustinian fashion, the eyes of faith are necessary to see the incomprehensible God present in Jesus. In fact, for Tanner seeing in faith does not mean comprehension but participation for in being one with Christ, “incomprehensible in his divinity, we take on the very incomprehensibility of the divine rather than simply running after it, working to reproduce it in human terms” (56). Through the uniting of humanity and divinity in the one human Jesus, he becomes both the pattern and the cause of a new form of reconciled human life – a human life that participates by grace in the divine life.

Having established both forms of human participation in God as derivative from the Son it follows that her Christology would be centered in an exploration of the nature of grace. Here the intricacy of her ground breaking account come to the fore. One way of setting the stage for the contribution of her work is by considering how she is able to weave the Christological concerns of the Cappadocians together with the Reformers. Of course the centrality of grace for Christology is vintage Protestantism, yet her incarnational approach allows her to nest it within the cosmological frame of the Cappadocians. How she accomplishes this becomes clear in her account of the human predicament.

For Tanner it is nature and not sin that is the primary place of departure for understanding the character of grace. Human beings are images of God by grace and not by nature. This difference is important for distinguishing humanity from the eternal Son and incarnate Christ. Only Christ is the image of God by nature and we were created to participate in God. The human predicament is not then, our failure to live up to the potential that was rightfully ours in our own nature, namely being a sinner before God. Humans “cannot be the image in virtue of the human nature with which we were created. Grace is necessary to make us strong images of God because our nature as human creatures is incapable of doing so” (59). Our coming to strongly participate in the divine life comes through God’s own free loving initiative that was present in our creation through the Word and redemption through the incarnation. It is hard to exaggerate how this shifting of the human predicament from sin to nature transforms her account of grace. The problem is not humanity’s fallen status because of our participation in sinful humanity. Grace is not God’s creative response to a failed and fallen project. Instead we are given grace through our originating status as beings from God created to live before God. One could say that Tanner’s redemption story from creation to consummation could be summed up as ‘grace upon grace.’

The removal of sin is not key to the Christological metanarrative of grace, it is God’s initiative and intention to bring a creature into existence who could come to participate in God’s essence. That humans are not divine yet created for it is the predicament in which the grace of God’s strong participation with us in Christ is best understood. As Tanner puts is plainly, connecting the two works of grace, “humans have to be given God in addition to being given themselves” and it is in Christ that both God and humanity are one so it follows that “the grace of God in Christ becomes the highest way of addressing the impediment to God’s design posed by creation, irrespective of any problem of sin” (60). Important to note here is how Tanner’s account of grace does not require sin to create the conditions for its coming. In differentiating her grace laden account from the Catholic view of the nature-grace relationship she restates the function of grace by distinguishing it from a continuum view. In a world where sin is present there can exist a continuum between humans and their natural responsiveness to God, yet “there cannot be any such continuum between God and creatures. Grace that takes the form of the gift of God’s own presence is for this reason never anything less than unexacted” (133). Human nature cannot exist apart from grace and its coming is not a supplement to what was already present precisely because it was created from and for grace – participation in God. The human, even one in sin, is not in the process of overcoming what they have become to become what they are not. The human is in the process of receiving the fullness of the divine life that God chooses to freely give in Christ. Here one becomes exactly what one is, God’s. Human nature differs then from other animals because its nobility comes not from being itself apart from God but by being itself before God. It is constitutive of our very nature to adhere to the goodness of God for our ultimate value depends on something outside ourselves (139).

If human nature is given in grace and completed in grace then specific attention needs to be given as to how both of these acts of grace are given. On multiple occasions Tanner uses a helpful distinction by differentiating between conceptions of participation that inhere within the human and those that adhere. Even in the above discussion about humanity’s weak participation in God as creatures Tanner consistently wants all our goodness to come from adhering to God. This distinction being employed even the account of our created status clearly serves to emphasize the nature of grace but more than that it enables her to make the connection between the Cappadocians and the Reformers more robust. By centering the story of redemption on the transformation of human nature rather than the conquering of sin, Tanner is echoing the theological heart beat of Gregory of Nyssa and yet this peculiar grace laced account enables her to speak it in the accent of Luther.

For Tanner in both creation and redemption it is the divine that is being given to us so it must never “become some kind of ‘inherent form,’ some odd but still human quality of a supernaturally elevated sort.” No it “remains the power of the divinity itself, made ours by clinging to what we are not. Rather than being inherent in us, this power merely adheres to us in virtue of that clinging” (104). The goodness given by the Word in creation and redemption is properly alien to us, the pure gift of divine participation. Grace is not the result of a process with incremental improvement but a disjunctive leap to a different condition. Just as the creature is given their existence in a free decision of grace from God, so too is our redemption an act of God’s grace that brings what we lack by nature. Humans are no more responsible for their recreation in Christ than they are for their creation from the Word. Our divinity is always external to our nature, an adherent to our being that comes from God by grace. By making that which is divine in the human an adherent our human nature remains unchanged under the effects of sin. Our corruption is not the corruption of what we were but the loss of what we are not (65). Here her previously developed anthropology that emphasized a natural openness, malleability, and plasticity in the world bears theological fruit. If sin does not entail the transformation of human nature then to what is sin directed? For Tanner it is the status of the divine power within us that is the focus. By locating sin’s distorting effects to our environment “our operations are corrupted because sin alters what is available in our surroundings for our proper nourishment. Without any disease or damage to our natural capacities, we are poisoned or polluted from without, because of what we have done to the only environment suitable for us” (68). If the human is by nature in need of divine nourishment then a different environment substantially alters the human’s relationship with God and World without altering human nature (42). In this way Tanner is able to affirm both total depravity and the preservation of our created nature in spite of sin.

The final observation to make about the nature of Tanner’s grace led Christology is how the incarnation of God in Christ is able to transform our human nature. Tanner is clear that “the incarnation is for the sake of human redemption,” which means it is “not to give the Word a human shape but to bring about an altered manner of human existence, one realizing on the human plane the very mode of existence of the second person of the trinity” (147). The incarnation ultimately serves neither a pedagogical intention of God nor a preparatory purpose but is “the primary mechanism of atonement” (252). Humanity, sinful through the hardening of our hearts to God’s influence we become closed off to God. In a sense our weak participation in God is weakened as we more openly embrace our sin-filled environment. Sin’s influence on the individual is dramatic. For Tanner sin’s solution is not a return to a more open human nature, through a renewal of our weak participation, but the completely new way in which the Word and Spirit are ours in Christ. For this reason the human needs from God precisely what it cannot do for itself in two respects. The human needs both its sinful context changed so that it can freely love God and it remains in need of a new nature so that it may participate in the God. The hypostatic union is the context in which Tanner sees both acts take place. In Christ the attachment of humanity to the divine is closer, stronger, and categorically different than that which is available to the human nature alone. Jesus’ relationship to the divine is not simply one of radical human faithfulness and devotion to the divine but the humanity’s assumption “into the unity with the second person of the trinity to form a single person; a hypostatic union” (71). To be clear about the nature of the divine initiative in the incarnation Tanner emphasizes how the hypostatic unity is a precondition for the life of Jesus and the means by which both sin’s influence can be negated and the human nature transformed. Because it is precisely God who is acting in Christ, all of humanity is transformed. Tanner compares the gain humanity makes through Christ as “comparable to the natural connection that the Word enjoys with other members of the trinity” (73). Because Christ is attached to us in virtue of the humanity he shares with us, we share in the divinity that he participates in. Justification then is “a matter of the incarnation and of the divine powers possessed by the humanity of Christ in virtue of that unity with the Word. Sanctification refers to what happens to the humanity of Christ on that basis over the course of his life and death” (99). In Christ we receive the gift of God’s own life and its impact both justifies us and enables us to participate in Jesus’ own sanctification. Tanner’s vision has this thoroughly Protestant chant of grace and yet it is amplified through connecting to the cosmic vision of the Cappadocians. The individual Christian indeed comes to know God through God’s benefits and yet God’s gracious intention has always been to give all creatures the fullness of God’s own life and this story swallows sin, defeats death, and transforms our nature.

Filed Under: books, thinking

Stewart, Colbert, and the…Gospel?

November 1, 2010 by Deacon Hall 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking over the recent Stewart/Colbert rally. I watched it livestream and liked for the most part what they were trying to do. Even if their own shows and political views stray definitively toward the left, they managed to keep the rally itself pretty neutral. I appreciated that as someone who (gulp!) has actually voted for a Republican on more than one occasion.

Really, the only part that lost me was Stewart’s concluding speech. It wasn’t bad, and I had no particular problem with what he said, except maybe that I think he and a lot of left-leaning individuals tend to underestimate a lot of peoples’ motivations for being “unreasonable” in the first place. Rather, it was the fact that he gave the speech at all. I kind of imagined it like this: Maya Angelou recites one of her beautiful poems as only she can do, only to be immediately followed on stage by an interpreter who then tries to explain the poem. They had already accomplished what they needed to accomplish…which was what?

To join the swaths of pundits, what I thought and hoped Stewart and Colbert needed to accomplish was a break in contemporary political discourse; they needed to offer a stop, like a dam to a river, to the torrent of commentators that keep mouthing and jawing in the 24 hour news cycle. In this regard, I thought comedy a perfect apparatus to do such; comedy can take people off guard, allow what is seemingly sensible to be seen as less sensible under a new light. Take, for instance, the late Mitch Hedberg’s line, “Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.” The statement takes a perfectly normal (and delicious) food and just sort of sees through it, breaks our previous relationship with it. I think that’s what I wanted and partially received from Stewart and Colbert.

This idea, however, got me thinking that maybe what I expected of Stewart and Colbert was not necessarily their job at all. I say this because I wonder if such explicit disruption isn’t one of jobs of the Church? As a Christian, I take it as a given that Jesus of Nazareth was united to God as God’s revelatory self-expression, enough so that Jesus as a person was definitively divine—nothing particularly new, here. I also take it that, in the New Testament witness of Jesus, we can, among other things, understand Jesus as a moral example without reducing him to one—again, nothing new here. Among the seemingly infinite lessons to learn from this God-man, then, was that he was constantly disruptive: from reinterpreting his own scriptures, telling his mother whom his “real” brothers and sisters are, expressing parabolic ideas about the kingdom of God, performing miracles, driving the money-changers from the Temple, to his taking on the cross and resurrecting. In fact, these latter two disruptions (the cross and the resurrection), Paul interprets as having disrupted the greatest scourge of creation death itself. The Gospel is at least, then, a Gospel of God’s disruption in this world, in almost all aspects of what it means to be a world.

To push this point further, it seems to me, in fact, that many influential church leaders have taken just such a clue from the Gospel. Martin Luther-King Jr. comes immediately to mind, whose disruptive voice helped to usher in civil rights legislation in the U.S., for instance. Or, take again, Martin Luther who, love him or hate him, ushered a poignant critique against the corruption of the Church of his day while reinterpreting one of the core tenants of Christian belief, Justification; or take again Thomas Aquinas, whose brilliant synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine made the church leaders of his day definitively uncomfortable, to the point that he was accused of and had to defend himself against heresy; the list could go on.

Perhaps we can take something from both the original disruption and the exemplary repetitions of this disruption, even if only imperfectly, as each situation demands, and without having to believe that any disruption we enact is even as terribly effective or as important as our predecessors’. In other words, if God has broken into and interrupted our lives for the better, couldn’t we at least attempt, even if we utterly failure, to do the same in any number of our contemporary situations and regarding any number of contemporary issues?

Maybe, then, the U.S. Church could stand on the coattails of Stewart and Colbert, who, attempting to explicitly do so or not, have brought at least a partial disruption to U.S. political dialogue, especially the provocateurs who inhibit if not only from developing but beginning at all. The Church need not address or stand for any particular standpoint in this case; it really might need to just stand as the Church at all, disrupting the situation as it stands

At any rate, taking a cue from Stewart and Colbert, I’d love for churches from around the U.S. to also hold a rally in D.C. at the mall under a banner of something like “Rally to Eat Nachos.” It’s neither overtly Christian nor particularly political, but it need not be; as Saint Francis tells us in what I think are mutually interpreting statements: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love” and “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” Even if such a rally didn’t directly do terribly much, it would be both funny and very disruptive in its own Christian way. By offering, if not for only a couple hours, what is basically a big church picnic on the steps of the capital (one where we eat the greatest food that God offers to creation), such a rally might continue to offer just enough of a break in the current political situation to ripple its way through the political atmosphere. It would be a subtle but perhaps poignant protest against the altogether absurdity of our current political climate. Such a rally doesn’t fix the economic outlook or directly help the many individuals and families currently in despair (which, of course, we ought to be doing, too), but maybe it’s a piece of a larger pie that can help instigate dialogue that can more definitively help.

Filed Under: politics, public policy, thinking