On the Council of Chalcedon
Imagine a television, turned on. If you view it one way, from the perspective of something very close, one sees a collection of flickering pixels. From a more distant point of view one sees a moving picture. Both perspectives are essentially correct. Neither elaboration is more important than another. They are the same material simultaneously serving two functions. They are not separable and are not collapsible one in terms of another: the picture is not “just” moving pixels, and the pixels are not “just” a disintegrated picture. They are distinct realities occupying the same space and time. One television, two natures. This is the nearest I have ever come to understanding the articulation of the council of Chalcedon, and I’m probably wrong. But thankfully, Chalcedon was mostly a functional decision anyway, putting all disputes in their proper place rather than ultimately resolving them.
First, it answered the question left open by the Nicean council: If Jesus Christ the human is indeed fully God, how was this accomplished? Jesus Christ was composed of two natures, one human and one divine. This solidified the orthodox position by closing the gap Nicea had left – it meant that the church could now more clearly tell heretic from orthodox. One could not now claim the Gnostic position, for example, by claiming that the Jesus that was fully God was the spirit of God inside Jesus of Nazareth – and still claim to uphold the essential position of Nicea. Such positions were now more soundly refuted, and their concomitant dismissal of the material world, forever a trend in the Hellenistic thought with which Christian thought was now to be enmeshed, became itself a heretic position. Life in this world would be forever after, at least by strictly orthodox thinking, implicated in the life of the next world.
Chalcedon did not eliminate heresies, of course, but it did narrow the field of truth that could creditably be called orthodox – a process begun centuries earlier; Chalcedon certainly did not begin or end this trend, but did surely punctuate it. And while Chalcedon did unify the natures of Christ, it certainly also helped begin the division of the nature of the church. With the division between heretic and orthodox more firmly established, Christianity could begin developing that which it has had ever since: two orthodoxies. While the Latin West considered Chalcedon to be the final and practical resolution of the troublesome philosophical question, the more Hellenized East considered the same council a wonderful source for further contemplation – and called four more councils over the centuries to do precisely that.
Yes, this means, as Noll rightly puts it, that the God of the Hebraic thought-world had finally made it to the Hellenized thought-world – but simple translation did not erase the cultural and political differences of East and West – and indeed might have made further division possible. Because Constantine’s goal was not completely realized, even in Chalcedon: a united Christianity did not unite the failing Empire, as we can see in the delayed acceptance of Chalcedon in the East and the weakened Christianity that allowed later Islamic triumph in Africa.
Yes, says history: we’ll unite around this issue, but we’ll unite in different ways. And the stones that build the temple of accord become the missiles hurled in later civic splits. One brick, two natures. The agreement about the humanity and divinity of Christ was not agreement about divine and human will, and Monotheletism cooled relations between West and East. God represented as man in Jesus Christ did not equal God represented in other ways. The road to the Great Schism had begun.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
On Theological Resources: Experience This
On Theological Resources
We have only the God that is given us. That gospel comes in four ways, experience, reason, scripture, and tradition, only forces us to recognize our inability to get at God too easily. The word of God doesn’t come to us via telephone, but through a skein of veins at once separate and intertwining. As for me, myself, I grab experience first because it’s the one thing none of us can escape from, and it’s the one thing least subject to disputes concerning the machinations of authority. If one says, “God did this! This happened to me!” and tells the story honestly, another might say, “Well, that wasn’t God,” but one only need listen to them if their advice is fitting and helpful. No one has ultimate jurisdiction over God’s effect on you – whatever happens when the lawyers and priests and scribes get going on scripture and reason and tradition.
And it’s always my experiences of God that seem to inspire the most and cause the least rancor anyway. Perhaps, as a lay person, my experiences are more relatable. I understand, for example, about humiliating jobs and getting fired and feeling alone and helpless despite all my best efforts. I get it. I really do, because unlike celebrities, I understand myself and have in fact been there. And I’ve had just about every doubt a person might have. So I also understand about small moments of hope through that come through that endless bombardment of boredom and anxiety so that I can say “Here is God, God did this.” I try not to be random about it. I don’t waste people’s time. I mentioned getting fired because of the economic crisis and the general hopelessness and panic that everyone was feeling, and I wanted to think about how to work against that. But some experience of God is why we’re all there on a Sunday anyway, so why would anyone not talk about it? Maybe that means I’m part of some postmodern cult of narcissism – far be it from me to claim immunity from the times – but I hope it might mean I’m more like the people Jesus ministered to, who can’t help but tell the story. God did this! This is what happened to me!
This is my theological template for deliberation: the experience of transformation. The scriptures are not propositional truths or support for my argument but the stories of ancient experiences of God. This skews me toward the Old Testament and the Gospels and perhaps the Psalms, if I’m reading from the lectionary, though I try to tie them altogether if I can and not forget the Epistle entirely. But what disquiets me about my approach is that it is in fact so even-handed: Elijah going up to heaven in a chariot gets almost as much language as the resolution of my legal troubles and my church’s vote about its future mission. While I embrace the basic disrespect of the notion – irreverence not being generally the great mistake of the Church – one must believe that Scripture unfolds like a lotus of countless petals and can in many cases stand on its own. So I tend to compromise. Scripture gets the best of my attention, if not the overwhelming majority of it. And while word-by-word parsing of Scripture might not be my own theological flavor, I do try to let the Scripture flavor me. My experience is always mediated by and understood through the cloud of witnesses that have gone before.
I began blogging for my church with a history of the church itself, a decision that astonished me at the time, though I sought an Episcopal church in part because of their attention to the creeds and ancient churches. That decision was the shrewdest one I might have made, though it came from I know not where. But experiences of God did not stop with John sitting on Patmos, and didn’t just start up again with Martin Luther and taper off sometime after Wesley. This is my weakest area, and the most lamentable ignorance of my generation. We do not know the place that God has prepared for us and those who will come after. The world changes so fast that one can hardly imagine what Christians a hundred years ago saw and felt when they lifted their eyes unto the hills. Yet God didn’t just do this to me. God’s doing it to us, through time.
I understand this. It is an intellectual conclusion. Yet my reason is at once haphazard and the most pervasive. Above all, I try to understand my experiences of God; I hold these things inside my heart. And I want to teach theology. I minored in philosophy and read the stuff for fun. Yet I’ve never taken a class in logic and am lost at anything more complicated mathematically than a Venn diagram. Reason is obviously a gift we’ve been given, but I suppose I tend to see it less as a means of revelation itself and more of a tool we have to discern precisely what experience has revealed. It’s always there. It’s always plugging away, always trying to pull it all together and always testing all things. While our experiences of God might indeed, and I would say should, surpass reason, I know of no indication that they would ever contradict it. And yes, we must understand, so that we might confess our belief as best we can, individually and corporately. This is what’s happening to us, and this is what it means.
The truth is paradoxical: a writer by training, I abhor cliché and have already grown bored with the kind of sermons I’ve been giving. Yet even if I accepted that self-talk is uninteresting and unattractive, I could not stop doing it, not because I’m necessarily self-important but because there are no other means available. I am everywhere I go. I must be the person saying everything I speak. Thus I make my best self present in the pulpit, my best words in my mouth when I address God – as who could not? So I doubt that it’s the prolific presentation of self that makes the errors of our age so abhorrent. It’s that people are so careless about the selves that they present. They do not consider, and so are unaware of transformation – in fact they might not experience it. But if one is contemplating the experience of God in oneself and in one’s people and pronouncing the effect – I can walk! I can see! – then the gospel in our age, or perhaps the gospel in my age, is neither solemn pronouncement nor angry jeremiad but the good news of the continuing alteration of hearts, indeed, of our entire selves, by the acts of a living God unfolding for everyone as God always has, and always will.
We have only the God that is given us. That gospel comes in four ways, experience, reason, scripture, and tradition, only forces us to recognize our inability to get at God too easily. The word of God doesn’t come to us via telephone, but through a skein of veins at once separate and intertwining. As for me, myself, I grab experience first because it’s the one thing none of us can escape from, and it’s the one thing least subject to disputes concerning the machinations of authority. If one says, “God did this! This happened to me!” and tells the story honestly, another might say, “Well, that wasn’t God,” but one only need listen to them if their advice is fitting and helpful. No one has ultimate jurisdiction over God’s effect on you – whatever happens when the lawyers and priests and scribes get going on scripture and reason and tradition.
And it’s always my experiences of God that seem to inspire the most and cause the least rancor anyway. Perhaps, as a lay person, my experiences are more relatable. I understand, for example, about humiliating jobs and getting fired and feeling alone and helpless despite all my best efforts. I get it. I really do, because unlike celebrities, I understand myself and have in fact been there. And I’ve had just about every doubt a person might have. So I also understand about small moments of hope through that come through that endless bombardment of boredom and anxiety so that I can say “Here is God, God did this.” I try not to be random about it. I don’t waste people’s time. I mentioned getting fired because of the economic crisis and the general hopelessness and panic that everyone was feeling, and I wanted to think about how to work against that. But some experience of God is why we’re all there on a Sunday anyway, so why would anyone not talk about it? Maybe that means I’m part of some postmodern cult of narcissism – far be it from me to claim immunity from the times – but I hope it might mean I’m more like the people Jesus ministered to, who can’t help but tell the story. God did this! This is what happened to me!
This is my theological template for deliberation: the experience of transformation. The scriptures are not propositional truths or support for my argument but the stories of ancient experiences of God. This skews me toward the Old Testament and the Gospels and perhaps the Psalms, if I’m reading from the lectionary, though I try to tie them altogether if I can and not forget the Epistle entirely. But what disquiets me about my approach is that it is in fact so even-handed: Elijah going up to heaven in a chariot gets almost as much language as the resolution of my legal troubles and my church’s vote about its future mission. While I embrace the basic disrespect of the notion – irreverence not being generally the great mistake of the Church – one must believe that Scripture unfolds like a lotus of countless petals and can in many cases stand on its own. So I tend to compromise. Scripture gets the best of my attention, if not the overwhelming majority of it. And while word-by-word parsing of Scripture might not be my own theological flavor, I do try to let the Scripture flavor me. My experience is always mediated by and understood through the cloud of witnesses that have gone before.
I began blogging for my church with a history of the church itself, a decision that astonished me at the time, though I sought an Episcopal church in part because of their attention to the creeds and ancient churches. That decision was the shrewdest one I might have made, though it came from I know not where. But experiences of God did not stop with John sitting on Patmos, and didn’t just start up again with Martin Luther and taper off sometime after Wesley. This is my weakest area, and the most lamentable ignorance of my generation. We do not know the place that God has prepared for us and those who will come after. The world changes so fast that one can hardly imagine what Christians a hundred years ago saw and felt when they lifted their eyes unto the hills. Yet God didn’t just do this to me. God’s doing it to us, through time.
I understand this. It is an intellectual conclusion. Yet my reason is at once haphazard and the most pervasive. Above all, I try to understand my experiences of God; I hold these things inside my heart. And I want to teach theology. I minored in philosophy and read the stuff for fun. Yet I’ve never taken a class in logic and am lost at anything more complicated mathematically than a Venn diagram. Reason is obviously a gift we’ve been given, but I suppose I tend to see it less as a means of revelation itself and more of a tool we have to discern precisely what experience has revealed. It’s always there. It’s always plugging away, always trying to pull it all together and always testing all things. While our experiences of God might indeed, and I would say should, surpass reason, I know of no indication that they would ever contradict it. And yes, we must understand, so that we might confess our belief as best we can, individually and corporately. This is what’s happening to us, and this is what it means.
The truth is paradoxical: a writer by training, I abhor cliché and have already grown bored with the kind of sermons I’ve been giving. Yet even if I accepted that self-talk is uninteresting and unattractive, I could not stop doing it, not because I’m necessarily self-important but because there are no other means available. I am everywhere I go. I must be the person saying everything I speak. Thus I make my best self present in the pulpit, my best words in my mouth when I address God – as who could not? So I doubt that it’s the prolific presentation of self that makes the errors of our age so abhorrent. It’s that people are so careless about the selves that they present. They do not consider, and so are unaware of transformation – in fact they might not experience it. But if one is contemplating the experience of God in oneself and in one’s people and pronouncing the effect – I can walk! I can see! – then the gospel in our age, or perhaps the gospel in my age, is neither solemn pronouncement nor angry jeremiad but the good news of the continuing alteration of hearts, indeed, of our entire selves, by the acts of a living God unfolding for everyone as God always has, and always will.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
on Otto's Mysterium Tremendum: Dissonance
Finity is potency. Creation is God’s creating power made manifest and incarnate. In the beginning was what, potential? Not much power, either power with or power over. Power manifest is more perfect than power unrealized, no? “We are nothing” says Paul Tillich, standing over a battlefield. One imagines Mary the mother of God cocking an eyebrow, perhaps in bemusement. The little children, they are certainly something.
They can do so little, the children. But they can do something. They can bring about the kingdom of God, or at least belong in it. That too is something. No one can do everything; no one can do nothing. Everyone can and must do something. Go forth and multiply, says God. Nietzsche stares into the darkness and contemplates the abyss. A young mother stares into the darkness and perhaps contemplates a womb. These are all analogies. This is precisely why they matter.
And one does not wish to be too glib. Socrates is a mortal and Socrates must die. We’re all going to die. One recalls the story of a prophet who wonders into an American shopping mall. “You’re all going to die!” shouts the prophet. The customers, unfazed, continue. Soon the mall is hit by a meteor and utterly destroyed, the Americans never having missed a beat. Men have almost certainly died in combat this very day. In Rwanda, 25 to 50 thousand children have stepped on land mines since the conflict ended. We are fragile. We are worms, if you like that language. All the inclinations of our hearts are evil, if you prefer those words instead.
And yet, Socrates, a mortal, must have once been born. Mortality is vitality. There is no other kind of life to have – not for us, and so it seems, not for God, who died and rose again. Ye must be born again, says mortal God. Let the little children come to me. If a kernel of wheat abideth alone…but if it dies, it produces much fruit. The point is not to obliviate death or life or law and grace but to erode the line between the two because it suggests that one follows another or that they are necessarily distinct as Otto’s categories would have them be.
Rather the numinous experiences of those described in William James or, I would hazard, those described in the Hebrew and Christian bibles remain essentially much more simultaneous and inextricable from each other. Punishment comes with grace, is in some ways grace itself. Life comes through death, not simply after it. Law itself is grace because it reveals us for who we are and who we very much are not. That we are not God means also that we are not nothing.
One senses in Luther a certain rhetorical theology: if you tell them they are nothing, they will accept the gospel, the word of grace. But this does not mean that they are essentially nothing, and one wishes for a more complete and less manipulative description, say that we are all something, bound somethings, certainly, but somethings nonetheless.
One notes that the capricious and personified God of the Hebrew scriptures is indeed also the God of all nations. The point was not that YHWH was everywhere, but that YHWH would always go with them and that there was nothing so wonderful that YHWH could not do it. Personed, perhaps, but certainly not less powerful for being so – and no less dangerous – and present everywhere that mattered.
One wonders: does wonder necessarily come after dread? Might it not come with, or even before? Need the gospel come after and critique the law, or might indeed, the good news of life be the new law for heaven and for earth?
They can do so little, the children. But they can do something. They can bring about the kingdom of God, or at least belong in it. That too is something. No one can do everything; no one can do nothing. Everyone can and must do something. Go forth and multiply, says God. Nietzsche stares into the darkness and contemplates the abyss. A young mother stares into the darkness and perhaps contemplates a womb. These are all analogies. This is precisely why they matter.
And one does not wish to be too glib. Socrates is a mortal and Socrates must die. We’re all going to die. One recalls the story of a prophet who wonders into an American shopping mall. “You’re all going to die!” shouts the prophet. The customers, unfazed, continue. Soon the mall is hit by a meteor and utterly destroyed, the Americans never having missed a beat. Men have almost certainly died in combat this very day. In Rwanda, 25 to 50 thousand children have stepped on land mines since the conflict ended. We are fragile. We are worms, if you like that language. All the inclinations of our hearts are evil, if you prefer those words instead.
And yet, Socrates, a mortal, must have once been born. Mortality is vitality. There is no other kind of life to have – not for us, and so it seems, not for God, who died and rose again. Ye must be born again, says mortal God. Let the little children come to me. If a kernel of wheat abideth alone…but if it dies, it produces much fruit. The point is not to obliviate death or life or law and grace but to erode the line between the two because it suggests that one follows another or that they are necessarily distinct as Otto’s categories would have them be.
Rather the numinous experiences of those described in William James or, I would hazard, those described in the Hebrew and Christian bibles remain essentially much more simultaneous and inextricable from each other. Punishment comes with grace, is in some ways grace itself. Life comes through death, not simply after it. Law itself is grace because it reveals us for who we are and who we very much are not. That we are not God means also that we are not nothing.
One senses in Luther a certain rhetorical theology: if you tell them they are nothing, they will accept the gospel, the word of grace. But this does not mean that they are essentially nothing, and one wishes for a more complete and less manipulative description, say that we are all something, bound somethings, certainly, but somethings nonetheless.
One notes that the capricious and personified God of the Hebrew scriptures is indeed also the God of all nations. The point was not that YHWH was everywhere, but that YHWH would always go with them and that there was nothing so wonderful that YHWH could not do it. Personed, perhaps, but certainly not less powerful for being so – and no less dangerous – and present everywhere that mattered.
One wonders: does wonder necessarily come after dread? Might it not come with, or even before? Need the gospel come after and critique the law, or might indeed, the good news of life be the new law for heaven and for earth?
on Otto's Mysterium Tremendum: Consonance
The reason for our reason surpasses all reasoning. I have seen a lake, a field, a storm. God is not the lake or the field or the storm, but through the lake and field and storm I have glimpsed God not face to face but perhaps in passing. The lake and field and storm are vital to me but in no way essential to God who is extra to everything; only others, only things external to ourselves can waken us internally, through and through.
I imagine the lake and field and storm but can in no way have just imagined them or they would be dreams and not desires, not objects of desire that awaken my desire for God who is in the lake, in the waters, in the depths. I cannot swim but experienced swimming in love, in numen, an altogether different thing from imagining, from talking about swimming or thinking of swimming in passing. There are no analogies: swim like a duck? With skinny webbed feet and no arms and without perhaps getting wet at all? Perish the thought, always murder, murder the idea.
Swimming makes one wet. Swimming in love makes one wet forever. I have always been a soggy person, the waters of my baptism never quite dried off, although as I say I could not of course have ever have swum to start with, buoyancy is impossible. One always sinks, that is what we do. It is all that we can do, God is unfathomable, we cannot reach the depths. There is no walking on the bottom; we must swim from one moment to another, from one word to another - yet we have never, ever learned how to accomplish this. The idea that we can do so is fiction, imaginary and unimaginable.
I have seen a lake, a field, a storm. The field of all experience is of course as flat as the lake of love; we are surface creatures and where we cannot swim we perhaps must walk. But how does one walk? The field is a maze of sun and shadow, we are blinded by darkness and by light. We must grope our way because we are so dazzled that the darkness is not evil and the luminous is not goodness, we cannot tell them apart, that is the cause of our blindness. It is frightening, is it not?
The field is terrible but it is all that we have, the most that we can ever have. We tremble to cross. We must dread the moment of our step, it shall feel like an entire leap into we know not what not because we have no idea- as I have said we must of course grope- but because our idea might be, must be unreliable in the awful weave of darkness and of light. We have never done anything like this before, we have now fallen off our ass and must perhaps await a voice, a whisper, a roar.
A map, a legend would be worthless because the clouds that make the shadow and the sun that makes the light are both always moving and in any case could kill us, and might do so arbitrarily. We cannot say where we go but only that we should, that we must. We cannot cross the field but there is no place else to go, no other place worth going. We must lift up our eyes.
We would see a storm, the one we must into, the oldest tempest that ever was or will. We cannot understand the storm, but the storm is not our lack of understanding. It is an analogy that works until it doesn’t. The storm is mostly raging silence, it is the wind we cannot hear that most tempts us to shout. But what would we say? We cannot think through the torrent of our hearts. Whether over the surface of the water or the field of the desert the storm is most exciting. We cannot look away and must say, must do something for this something that might kill us but sends us rain instead.
It is not that we have not been talking, but that until the storm we had not known what we were saying, our minds were caught in other things, golden calves and such. Now we have seen the storm of everything and nothing and been saved from boredom and from indolence, we have been spoken to. It is the storm that we have been waiting for but cannot possibly have apprehended. There were no meteorologists for this one, no soothsayers who could scry those clouds. This one came right up out of nowhere, though the eldest could feel it in their bones.
One might say that something is coming but never known precisely what it was, because there has been nothing like this storm before, though of course the storm has always been. It is like sex, this storm, everyone thinks it’s new and maybe it is, though it’s been around forever. Just because we’ve never seen a storm doesn’t mean we ourselves haven’t been such, tempests of darkness and of light. Light shines on light, wave resounds upon wave, and deepness calls to deep, and our hearts and thoughts unfold across creation as they always and never have before, and always and never will again.
I imagine the lake and field and storm but can in no way have just imagined them or they would be dreams and not desires, not objects of desire that awaken my desire for God who is in the lake, in the waters, in the depths. I cannot swim but experienced swimming in love, in numen, an altogether different thing from imagining, from talking about swimming or thinking of swimming in passing. There are no analogies: swim like a duck? With skinny webbed feet and no arms and without perhaps getting wet at all? Perish the thought, always murder, murder the idea.
Swimming makes one wet. Swimming in love makes one wet forever. I have always been a soggy person, the waters of my baptism never quite dried off, although as I say I could not of course have ever have swum to start with, buoyancy is impossible. One always sinks, that is what we do. It is all that we can do, God is unfathomable, we cannot reach the depths. There is no walking on the bottom; we must swim from one moment to another, from one word to another - yet we have never, ever learned how to accomplish this. The idea that we can do so is fiction, imaginary and unimaginable.
I have seen a lake, a field, a storm. The field of all experience is of course as flat as the lake of love; we are surface creatures and where we cannot swim we perhaps must walk. But how does one walk? The field is a maze of sun and shadow, we are blinded by darkness and by light. We must grope our way because we are so dazzled that the darkness is not evil and the luminous is not goodness, we cannot tell them apart, that is the cause of our blindness. It is frightening, is it not?
The field is terrible but it is all that we have, the most that we can ever have. We tremble to cross. We must dread the moment of our step, it shall feel like an entire leap into we know not what not because we have no idea- as I have said we must of course grope- but because our idea might be, must be unreliable in the awful weave of darkness and of light. We have never done anything like this before, we have now fallen off our ass and must perhaps await a voice, a whisper, a roar.
A map, a legend would be worthless because the clouds that make the shadow and the sun that makes the light are both always moving and in any case could kill us, and might do so arbitrarily. We cannot say where we go but only that we should, that we must. We cannot cross the field but there is no place else to go, no other place worth going. We must lift up our eyes.
We would see a storm, the one we must into, the oldest tempest that ever was or will. We cannot understand the storm, but the storm is not our lack of understanding. It is an analogy that works until it doesn’t. The storm is mostly raging silence, it is the wind we cannot hear that most tempts us to shout. But what would we say? We cannot think through the torrent of our hearts. Whether over the surface of the water or the field of the desert the storm is most exciting. We cannot look away and must say, must do something for this something that might kill us but sends us rain instead.
It is not that we have not been talking, but that until the storm we had not known what we were saying, our minds were caught in other things, golden calves and such. Now we have seen the storm of everything and nothing and been saved from boredom and from indolence, we have been spoken to. It is the storm that we have been waiting for but cannot possibly have apprehended. There were no meteorologists for this one, no soothsayers who could scry those clouds. This one came right up out of nowhere, though the eldest could feel it in their bones.
One might say that something is coming but never known precisely what it was, because there has been nothing like this storm before, though of course the storm has always been. It is like sex, this storm, everyone thinks it’s new and maybe it is, though it’s been around forever. Just because we’ve never seen a storm doesn’t mean we ourselves haven’t been such, tempests of darkness and of light. Light shines on light, wave resounds upon wave, and deepness calls to deep, and our hearts and thoughts unfold across creation as they always and never have before, and always and never will again.
Friday, September 25, 2009
on John Wesley
“Then he (Abraham) believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Genesis 15:6
One sees in Outler’s laying out of Wesley’s life the quest not for experience of God, which Wesley seems to imagine as something general enough to be available to heathens, but on the experience of faith in God which in the Pauline, Protestant tradition had become understood as the condition for justification, for righteousness before God.
Today one wonders both at the urgency of this search as much as its occurrence. Justification seems a bygone topic. It is not a burning theological theme. Everyone is justified; we live in a perhaps illusory Eden where justification presses, I would say, on very few minds, perhaps because sin is also absent or at least relegated to sins-against-men. We apologize, we are all apologists, but one does not sense we are particularly haunted.
Wesley was haunted, saving others’ souls but not saving his own, and not finding rest even after finding God. His heart, I think, is to be commended. I would wish to have heart like it. But his reliance on his heart as a mechanism for discerning his stand before God seems somewhat more problematic. “By the most infallible of proofs, inward feeling, I am convinced: of unbelief” begins an early journal entry.
But he never says why this must be correct, why his internal intimation of unbelief must necessarily correlate to an absence of belief in total, why Wesley should be a better judge of his justification that God, not in the sense of superseding God, but in his steadfast refusal to do what he could, stop worrying about the state of his soul, and leave the rest to God. One wishes there had not been such a constant plague upon that earnest heart. Even after Aldersgate, which seems much more the typical conversion moment than anything else, he asks God why God would send the dead to raise the dead.
The problem for Wesley is not that he hadn’t had an experience of faith – which he did, several times over – but that he didn’t have the experience of faith, inclining with the Moravians that faith is the assurance of salvation and often interpreting that teaching quite absolutely. One wonders why Wesley remained convinced for so long that some experience of faith was not enough, and why he believed that he not only should but could do better, when doubt remained so firm and steadfast a force in his internal life.
This is not to psychologize John Wesley, but it is to ask how one could believe the heart, anymore than the mind, to be such a whole and perfectible thing. And it is to ask what the Moravians on the deck might have thought of him – did he appear riddled with doubt? Or might they have seen faith in him, too? And if so, what would that mean? The problem with Wesley’s interiorization of faith is not that it does not manifest itself in love – clearly it can and should and does – but that it assumes the dichotomy of inner faith and external works to start with.
In trying to balance the tables, trying to move toward a purity of heart that extends to a purity of life, one would become necessarily entangled in a self-preoccupation neither biblical nor ultimately helpful. After all, Abraham himself receives the covenant in Genesis 15 right after doubting God’s previous promise of numberless heirs and right before asking for an extra sign that the covenant would be fulfilled. And while Abraham’s faith in that time was indeed reckoned to him as righteousness, God never tells him so, and Abraham never asks. Considering this, how much assurance can anyone expect to have? Or need?
One sees in Outler’s laying out of Wesley’s life the quest not for experience of God, which Wesley seems to imagine as something general enough to be available to heathens, but on the experience of faith in God which in the Pauline, Protestant tradition had become understood as the condition for justification, for righteousness before God.
Today one wonders both at the urgency of this search as much as its occurrence. Justification seems a bygone topic. It is not a burning theological theme. Everyone is justified; we live in a perhaps illusory Eden where justification presses, I would say, on very few minds, perhaps because sin is also absent or at least relegated to sins-against-men. We apologize, we are all apologists, but one does not sense we are particularly haunted.
Wesley was haunted, saving others’ souls but not saving his own, and not finding rest even after finding God. His heart, I think, is to be commended. I would wish to have heart like it. But his reliance on his heart as a mechanism for discerning his stand before God seems somewhat more problematic. “By the most infallible of proofs, inward feeling, I am convinced: of unbelief” begins an early journal entry.
But he never says why this must be correct, why his internal intimation of unbelief must necessarily correlate to an absence of belief in total, why Wesley should be a better judge of his justification that God, not in the sense of superseding God, but in his steadfast refusal to do what he could, stop worrying about the state of his soul, and leave the rest to God. One wishes there had not been such a constant plague upon that earnest heart. Even after Aldersgate, which seems much more the typical conversion moment than anything else, he asks God why God would send the dead to raise the dead.
The problem for Wesley is not that he hadn’t had an experience of faith – which he did, several times over – but that he didn’t have the experience of faith, inclining with the Moravians that faith is the assurance of salvation and often interpreting that teaching quite absolutely. One wonders why Wesley remained convinced for so long that some experience of faith was not enough, and why he believed that he not only should but could do better, when doubt remained so firm and steadfast a force in his internal life.
This is not to psychologize John Wesley, but it is to ask how one could believe the heart, anymore than the mind, to be such a whole and perfectible thing. And it is to ask what the Moravians on the deck might have thought of him – did he appear riddled with doubt? Or might they have seen faith in him, too? And if so, what would that mean? The problem with Wesley’s interiorization of faith is not that it does not manifest itself in love – clearly it can and should and does – but that it assumes the dichotomy of inner faith and external works to start with.
In trying to balance the tables, trying to move toward a purity of heart that extends to a purity of life, one would become necessarily entangled in a self-preoccupation neither biblical nor ultimately helpful. After all, Abraham himself receives the covenant in Genesis 15 right after doubting God’s previous promise of numberless heirs and right before asking for an extra sign that the covenant would be fulfilled. And while Abraham’s faith in that time was indeed reckoned to him as righteousness, God never tells him so, and Abraham never asks. Considering this, how much assurance can anyone expect to have? Or need?
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
on Genesis 2-3: Permission, Vocation, and Prohibition
Nested Covenant in Genesis 2-3
The second account of creation, and the account popularly known as the human fall, describe less the beginning of humanity and more the humanity of our beginning. God makes the earth and the heavens and humanity, but makes ‘the man’ from the earth, establishing the very fact of his making as separate from the rest of heaven and earth as a whole. No other creation is from creation; no other creation is given a specific task. These details are neither coincidental nor unrelated.
Human is created by the creator for created purpose; as purposed, human nature and human options nest uncomfortably between broad permissions and specific prohibition. The difficulty for the humans and the tension of the narrative consist in the inherent dilemmas of choice: freedom is at once broad, giving permission to sample the trees in the garden, and narrow, denying one specific tree as a good-faith option for those living in the garden. Negotiating this tension results in human vocation, at first harmoniously, and then, through breach of relationship, in hardship and contention.
The creation of the garden comes after the creation of the human primarily as a gift but also, perhaps, so that God can present the world’s oldest profession, gardening. God plants the trees in Eden and then causes them to grow and then waters them; one can almost imagine God demonstrating the object lesson, albeit on a grand scale. The four rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Pishon and the Gihon, are interesting not because of their mysterious locations but because they are not the first streams mentioned; the one in 2:6 springs from the earth to cover the whole face of the ground, while it still doesn’t rain. In the four rivers then, which presumably come from that stream and go specific places and lay bare certain lands, we witness God’s own act of irrigation.
The garden is set; the man is now set in it to till and keep it, likely in something of the manner God has done. But the man must also eat; “You may freely eat of any tree of the garden,” says God the gracious gardener. Before there is prohibition, there is gift. With vocation, there is gracious permission. All of this, the entirety of the work, has been done simply for the human. That the man is purposed, then, does not mean here that the man fills a niche in the garden, which God could certainly do without the man’s help, but perhaps does imply that the garden fills a niche in the man, or begins to. The fruit of the trees of the garden are in synecdoche the graciousness of the creating and gardening God – they are for him.
But that permissive generosity, while cosmic, is not without limit; in fact, the mere delineation of the garden placed for the man sets bounds on the realm of human activity, just as it establishes the possibility – eat of any tree of the garden does not mention anything outside the garden. But even in the garden is a poisonous plant; “on the day that you eat of it you shall die,” says God, suggesting a reality recognizable to ancient peoples. Eating can kill. From the many plants humans find good and necessary to eat a few will in fact end your life; while eating, the act itself, is good, not all food is good in its results. All of this comes matter-of-factly, perhaps because the nature of the poison does not matter overmuch to the dying person.
Not all food is good for the man; neither is all good within the man. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” says God. The bestiary God presents to the man does not suffice. In naming the animals the man sorts and identifies them and names none of them a helper and a partner. From a broad array of possibilities, none are suitable; the text leaves us with a surfeit of choices that are not good – at least not yet. But if the man is created from creation as purposed, both like the rest of creation and set aside from it, then the woman created from the man is doubly so; bone of his bones, she is like and unlike him, woman from his man. Here, from many false starts, is the one good choice in the garden, and to her he presumably clings.
The serpent at this point should not be surprising; we have already seen the limits of goodness in a poisonous tree and in the isolation of the man. This promising garden threatens to become something more like a jungle, and the serpent’s words do seem tangled as any skein of vine. The serpent begins by asking if God denies the humans to eat of all trees in the garden, making God’s prohibition as broad as God’s permission. No, says the woman, “but God said ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden…or you shall die.’” And one would wonder here, perhaps, if the humans could eat of any tree instead of none of the trees, why they would not be permitted to eat of one of them.
The thinking is serpentine, though both God’s command and human vocation were manifestly simple. But it is through confounding the fields of prohibition and permission that the serpent leads the woman astray, confusing her and perhaps her image of God – is he gracious in possibility or pernicious in complication? – up to the point where she sees that the fruit is good to eat, the one thing it is manifestly not. And while the serpent is right that she will not die, no one dies in this text, the poison of this fruit is not of the stomach but of the heart and mind and mouth.
Tilling and keeping by this point have long been forgotten for an intellectual dissection of God’s given gifts. God’s prohibition, by psychological conflation, has been made to seem larger than God’s permission, which has somehow vanished from the text. Everything established has been undone. The cleaving and helping and partnering is no more. While the woman offers the man her fruit, she does not offer him her opinion or ask for his advice in her discussion with the serpent; he of course does no better, and they both resort to divisive accusations when both of them stand before God. Consequently, the man once placed in the garden is sent out of it, and the woman with him. The vocation the man was once given to do now plagues rather then pleasures him, and the ground from which he was created will reclaim him, and he and she will indeed die.
The second account of creation, and the account popularly known as the human fall, describe less the beginning of humanity and more the humanity of our beginning. God makes the earth and the heavens and humanity, but makes ‘the man’ from the earth, establishing the very fact of his making as separate from the rest of heaven and earth as a whole. No other creation is from creation; no other creation is given a specific task. These details are neither coincidental nor unrelated.
Human is created by the creator for created purpose; as purposed, human nature and human options nest uncomfortably between broad permissions and specific prohibition. The difficulty for the humans and the tension of the narrative consist in the inherent dilemmas of choice: freedom is at once broad, giving permission to sample the trees in the garden, and narrow, denying one specific tree as a good-faith option for those living in the garden. Negotiating this tension results in human vocation, at first harmoniously, and then, through breach of relationship, in hardship and contention.
The creation of the garden comes after the creation of the human primarily as a gift but also, perhaps, so that God can present the world’s oldest profession, gardening. God plants the trees in Eden and then causes them to grow and then waters them; one can almost imagine God demonstrating the object lesson, albeit on a grand scale. The four rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Pishon and the Gihon, are interesting not because of their mysterious locations but because they are not the first streams mentioned; the one in 2:6 springs from the earth to cover the whole face of the ground, while it still doesn’t rain. In the four rivers then, which presumably come from that stream and go specific places and lay bare certain lands, we witness God’s own act of irrigation.
The garden is set; the man is now set in it to till and keep it, likely in something of the manner God has done. But the man must also eat; “You may freely eat of any tree of the garden,” says God the gracious gardener. Before there is prohibition, there is gift. With vocation, there is gracious permission. All of this, the entirety of the work, has been done simply for the human. That the man is purposed, then, does not mean here that the man fills a niche in the garden, which God could certainly do without the man’s help, but perhaps does imply that the garden fills a niche in the man, or begins to. The fruit of the trees of the garden are in synecdoche the graciousness of the creating and gardening God – they are for him.
But that permissive generosity, while cosmic, is not without limit; in fact, the mere delineation of the garden placed for the man sets bounds on the realm of human activity, just as it establishes the possibility – eat of any tree of the garden does not mention anything outside the garden. But even in the garden is a poisonous plant; “on the day that you eat of it you shall die,” says God, suggesting a reality recognizable to ancient peoples. Eating can kill. From the many plants humans find good and necessary to eat a few will in fact end your life; while eating, the act itself, is good, not all food is good in its results. All of this comes matter-of-factly, perhaps because the nature of the poison does not matter overmuch to the dying person.
Not all food is good for the man; neither is all good within the man. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” says God. The bestiary God presents to the man does not suffice. In naming the animals the man sorts and identifies them and names none of them a helper and a partner. From a broad array of possibilities, none are suitable; the text leaves us with a surfeit of choices that are not good – at least not yet. But if the man is created from creation as purposed, both like the rest of creation and set aside from it, then the woman created from the man is doubly so; bone of his bones, she is like and unlike him, woman from his man. Here, from many false starts, is the one good choice in the garden, and to her he presumably clings.
The serpent at this point should not be surprising; we have already seen the limits of goodness in a poisonous tree and in the isolation of the man. This promising garden threatens to become something more like a jungle, and the serpent’s words do seem tangled as any skein of vine. The serpent begins by asking if God denies the humans to eat of all trees in the garden, making God’s prohibition as broad as God’s permission. No, says the woman, “but God said ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden…or you shall die.’” And one would wonder here, perhaps, if the humans could eat of any tree instead of none of the trees, why they would not be permitted to eat of one of them.
The thinking is serpentine, though both God’s command and human vocation were manifestly simple. But it is through confounding the fields of prohibition and permission that the serpent leads the woman astray, confusing her and perhaps her image of God – is he gracious in possibility or pernicious in complication? – up to the point where she sees that the fruit is good to eat, the one thing it is manifestly not. And while the serpent is right that she will not die, no one dies in this text, the poison of this fruit is not of the stomach but of the heart and mind and mouth.
Tilling and keeping by this point have long been forgotten for an intellectual dissection of God’s given gifts. God’s prohibition, by psychological conflation, has been made to seem larger than God’s permission, which has somehow vanished from the text. Everything established has been undone. The cleaving and helping and partnering is no more. While the woman offers the man her fruit, she does not offer him her opinion or ask for his advice in her discussion with the serpent; he of course does no better, and they both resort to divisive accusations when both of them stand before God. Consequently, the man once placed in the garden is sent out of it, and the woman with him. The vocation the man was once given to do now plagues rather then pleasures him, and the ground from which he was created will reclaim him, and he and she will indeed die.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
on the Council of Nicea: Consider Islam
Consider Islam. Though believed by many Muslims to be the incarnation of God’s attributes of holiness, justice and righteousness, Mohammed, the first Disciple and Prophet of Islam, is not and was not God. Mohammed is and was human. As human, Mohammed was and in some ways still is the head of a nation of people, the leader of a holy, political nation, the nation of Islam. All of this is not to say or intend any disrespect or disregard for Islam but is instead to posit the possibility that, barring the events culminating in the council of Nicea in 325 idea, things might not have turned out so differently for another Abrahamic faith, the faith of the disciples of the Way of Jesus Christ.
As the Jewish revolt and destruction of the Temple in 70 AD eliminated several possibilities for the future of Judaism, so the Council of Nicea commissioned by Constantine eliminated several possibilities for the future of Christianity. The very fact of its commissioning eliminated, of course, a version of Christianity wiped out by Roman imperialism and Christian impertinence – a fate not eliminated, let us note, for their Jewish counterparts several centuries before and which lingered through the persecutions as a distinct possibility for the early Christians, especially as the Empire grew more uncertain about its security.
But the council of Nicea itself concluded a fair number of sectarian struggles within the Christian ranks themselves. It decided with fair finality that Jesus Christ was both fully God and distinct from God the Father, against the monarchist theology of Arius – which would have allowed a monotheism much more like Islam’s, having the self-same God acting throughout all of history despite various manifestations of the same divine substance.
At the same time, the argument by which the Council refuted Arius and came to a consensus through Athanasius – that this Jesus-God was in no way subordinate to the Father-God in divinity – would come to mean that the Roman Church was in no way subordinate to the Empire when it came to its own affairs. This was in no way a given, considering who commissioned the Council and for what reason he had done so – namely, to produce a religious tool capable of reuniting the Empire as a whole, doubtless much as the Roman gods had helped to do in times past. “Let whatsoever I will, be that esteemed a canon,” spake Constantius.
Such a view would have been doctrinally consonant with the subordination of the Son to the Father in the theology of Arius. But it was not consonant with the Trinitarian equality of Father and Son in the mind of bishop Ambrose of Milan, who said to Theodosius, “The emperor is in the church, not above it,” when the unrepentant emperor came to take communion. This idea of imminent domain – that the respective kingdoms of Imperial Christendom and the Christian Church each had dominion over themselves when addressing their own affairs – may indeed have meant that the Christian West was about to begin a long and bloody relationship of church and state.
But it also made the distinction forever possible in the minds of Roman Christians and their descendants, a distinction not seen in the history of Islam, where a more rigid monotheism and a much less divine prophet would imply that the spheres of nation and faith need never be separate at all.
As the Jewish revolt and destruction of the Temple in 70 AD eliminated several possibilities for the future of Judaism, so the Council of Nicea commissioned by Constantine eliminated several possibilities for the future of Christianity. The very fact of its commissioning eliminated, of course, a version of Christianity wiped out by Roman imperialism and Christian impertinence – a fate not eliminated, let us note, for their Jewish counterparts several centuries before and which lingered through the persecutions as a distinct possibility for the early Christians, especially as the Empire grew more uncertain about its security.
But the council of Nicea itself concluded a fair number of sectarian struggles within the Christian ranks themselves. It decided with fair finality that Jesus Christ was both fully God and distinct from God the Father, against the monarchist theology of Arius – which would have allowed a monotheism much more like Islam’s, having the self-same God acting throughout all of history despite various manifestations of the same divine substance.
At the same time, the argument by which the Council refuted Arius and came to a consensus through Athanasius – that this Jesus-God was in no way subordinate to the Father-God in divinity – would come to mean that the Roman Church was in no way subordinate to the Empire when it came to its own affairs. This was in no way a given, considering who commissioned the Council and for what reason he had done so – namely, to produce a religious tool capable of reuniting the Empire as a whole, doubtless much as the Roman gods had helped to do in times past. “Let whatsoever I will, be that esteemed a canon,” spake Constantius.
Such a view would have been doctrinally consonant with the subordination of the Son to the Father in the theology of Arius. But it was not consonant with the Trinitarian equality of Father and Son in the mind of bishop Ambrose of Milan, who said to Theodosius, “The emperor is in the church, not above it,” when the unrepentant emperor came to take communion. This idea of imminent domain – that the respective kingdoms of Imperial Christendom and the Christian Church each had dominion over themselves when addressing their own affairs – may indeed have meant that the Christian West was about to begin a long and bloody relationship of church and state.
But it also made the distinction forever possible in the minds of Roman Christians and their descendants, a distinction not seen in the history of Islam, where a more rigid monotheism and a much less divine prophet would imply that the spheres of nation and faith need never be separate at all.
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