Day One Reflection on Medieval Theology

All you need is love; all you need is love, love; love is all you need.  These famous words, penned by the brilliant Lennon and McCartney, are more right theologically than we often assume.

Augustine and others in his day were deeply concerned about lapsarian priests and bishops, particularly as their lapse impacted the efficacy of sacraments.  "if the priest is not truly in the Church due to sin then is my baptism legitimate?", people often asked.  To wit, an overwhelming majority in the church in North Africa said, NO!  This response was deeply troubling for everyone to hear.  Christians asked, "what happens if I am baptized by a priest with an undisclosed pattern of sin in his life and years later I learn of the priest’s lapse from the Church?"  More common was the problem of a priest that recanted his faith under the duress of persecution, raising the question of his ability to  administer the sacraments.

Augustine called a time out from the ensuing panic and controversy, and spoke a calming word to the Church.  In his writing called Homilies on the First Epistle of John, he suggested that the Donatists (those who believed the efficacy of the sacrament depended upon the moral uprightness of the priest) were looking in the wrong place to find evidence that the sacrament worked, particularly as it related to the washing of sin in baptism. 

Baptism’s efficacy, he argued, was not contingent upon the priest or bishop, but the efficacy was found in the measure of love demonstrated in the life of the baptized Christian.  Rest easy fundamentalists, doctrine still mattered to Augustine, but, above all else, the quality of love in the life of a follower was the identifying hallmark. 

I don’t know about you, but I find that assertion very convicting.  The assurance of our life being in union in Christ is not evidence by the measure of orthodoxy (certainly it matters but it is insufficient by itself), but it is how we love one another in  an orthodox manner.  Love of the church, love of the scripture, love of Christ, love of our enemies.  Love, love, love what we need is love to know if our baptism in Christ and communion with Christ is efficacious.

Day Two Reflections on the Patristic Period: Mystery Not Mastery

            Preserving mystery not presenting mastery was the point of theological philosophizing at Nicene and elsewhere.  It was the heretics, the outsiders, the atheists that insisted upon the simplicity of the Ideal/Divine.  Yet it was the church that sought to maintain the mystery even while explaining the scriptures to pagans.  Homoousios was not an attempt to scientifically, philosophically "nail down" what God was, but a rendering, a painting, an artistic impression of His nature.  It was a term for comprehension with mystery not for dogmatic mastery.

            Why press for Enlightened, dogmatic certainty in our faith and theology?  To become like the ancient pagans that believed only the simple, the certain and the unified could be true of the divine.  Don’t be like the pagans and Enlightened rationalists.  Listen the ancient fathers, and leave room for mystery in our faith, theology and discussion of the same.

Patristic Theology: Day One Reflections

Here is a brief writing our professor had us do at the end of the day to answer the "so what" question of what we were learning.  This piece is not well written or edited, but it is merely an immediate reflection of the day's learning.

            The work of theology is incredibly contextual, answering the questions posed by each culture and each generation.  Not that each culture or generation needs to reinvent the wheel, but certainly we need to appreciate new ways to see and use the wheel.

            However, I do not sense in the free, evangelical church today there is any desire to wrestle anew with old and new questions of theology.  There seems to be an Enlightened, certainty that these matters of theology are well settled, and, therefore, there is little purpose in doing theology in the church.  Put in other terms we often seem to say, “just read Wayne Grudem’s “Systematic Theology” because this is the an excellent statement of well settled matters.”

            Reading the Apostolic church writers will shatter any comfort the Protestant church has in the narrative that paints the Reformers simply as saving the church and renewing it to its former, pristine 1^st and 2^nd century status by breaking from the Catholic Church.  This Protestant narrative also asserts that, “believing this great Reformational work has been accomplished, we can forget all the theological messiness and move forward to the higher task of making good moral followers of Jesus.”

            The Apostolic Fathers’ writings show how they thought about and wrote about the biblical text in very different terms and categories.  They simply had different concerns and questions for their day, and their theology, derived from scripture, was dramatically shaped by their contemporary events and culture.  Likewise, our culture has its own set of questions, and, as we live under the authority of the biblical text in this age, we need to develop a theological response to the contemporary questions/issues, thereby producing a theology for today and this culture.

            The danger in seeing theology as well settled and static is that the church will become an isolated enclave.  Doing theology anew puts us into this world and puts our settled understandings and interpretations at risk, in a good way.  Reading theology from different ages and different cultures makes us sensitive that our theology is very embodied, contextual and mutable.

Epistle of Diognetus

This is an early apostolic text, titled Epistle of Diognetus, by an unknown author from approximately 130 A.D.  This is only a portion of the 5th chapter.  Go to www.ccel.org for a full text.

Churches today needs to hear this 2nd century description and ask if the same could be written of it today.

As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring.They 
27have a common table, but not a common bed.²⁸³²⁸³    Otto omits “bed,” which is an emendation, and gives the second “common” the sense of unclean. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh.²⁸⁴²⁸⁴    Comp. 2 Cor. x. 3. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.²⁸⁵²⁸⁵    Comp. Phil. iii. 20.They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life.²⁸⁶²⁸⁶    Comp. 2 Cor. vi. 9. They are poor, yet make many rich;²⁸⁷²⁸⁷    Comp. 2 Cor. vi. 10. they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless;²⁸⁸²⁸⁸    Comp. 2 Cor. iv. 12. they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.

Tyranny of the Immediate, part I

I am sure, like me, you have felt at times pressed and stressed by a variety of situations.  Sometimes the circumstances of life can feel overwhelming.  At other times the endless string of events in life produce not anxiety but boredom.  Routine, patterns and well tread paths can form another type of stress, a thirst for significance.  Either way, we often suffer from the tyranny of the immediate whether experienced in terms of stress or boredom.  These two horns of our immediate dilemma, I believe, require two different yet unified solutions.  In this first part I only wish to deal with the issue of boredom or that sense of meaningless produced by the routine and rote of life.

            I am a big fan of the Star Wars trilogy.  I have to clarify two issues that last statement presents.  First, when I say fan I do not mean a “dress up like your favorite Star Wars character and stand in line for hours upon hours to be the first to see the next installment of the trilogy” fan.  Second, when I say trilogy I mean A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  I very much enjoyed episode III, but it is nothing without episodes IV, V and VI. 

ANYWAY, I loved these movies as a kid, and I still do as an adult.  As a kid I wanted to be Luke Skywalker.  I think many of the kids seeing that movie wanted to be Luke, and there is a reason he is the protagonist of the film.  He is everyman.  He is the simple, ordinary person that just happens to be in the midst of extraordinary circumstances.

And much like us, Luke Skywalker finds himself in circumstances very much out of his control.  We meet him early in A New Hope, and the only word to describe his state of being at that point in the narrative is bored, farming, fixing droids and doing other chores for his uncle.  He is in the midst of an existential crisis, longing for meaning and something bigger.  He longs to be free from the tyranny of the present that is chaining him to the routine. 

He thinks this freedom will be found by flying off into space and having great adventures, but Luke will not find freedom from the tyranny of the immediate by engaging in great adventure.  Once he does find great adventure, curing his boredom, he only exchanges boredom for stress, the other horn of our dilemma.

Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, in Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination, provides an interesting remedy to the tyranny of the immediate we all face.  He suggests that our imagination must assist in grounding us in our past.  Our origins, he suggests, are half of the solution to the tyranny of the immediate.

Being a Christian, Old Testament theologian, Brueggemann sees the only founding moment, past or story of origin that matters is Creation.  Whether you believe the Creation narrative takes place within 6 literal days or over the course of 60 gazillion years is irrelevant and misses the point of the narrative.  There was nothing; then God said, “Let there be” and there was.  Creatio ex nihilo.  Humanity was placed in the midst of Creation to be the image (idol) of God; we were to be his agent to rule over creation on his behalf.  This is our founding moment, our story of origin.  This story of our past can help liberate us from the tyranny of the immediate by giving context to the present.

How does this story do this for us?   We were given a charge and an identity in the Garden.  We were created to have dominion, as kings and queens, over the realm God created.  We were told to be fruitful and multiple, essentially become co-creators of God’s world.  Not creators in the same sense as God, ex nihilo, but creators in the sense of using what God had made to make new and different creations.  These charges were our work, and they remain our work today.

We were also given an identity in the Garden.  We were created differently from all other parts of creation; we received the breath of God to make us the idols, representations or images of God.  We are God’s agents toward creation. 

When we experience the boredom and meaningless of life, I believe, it is because we are unconnected from our founding moment and are ruled by the tyranny of the present.  In the day-to-day matters of life we get lost; we often lose our sense of self and identity.  Who am I, is not an uncommon question that cries out when in the throws of the roteness of life.

Laundry, dishes, commuting to work, shuffling kids to ball games, making dinner, cleaning the dishes, making the boss happy, making the client happy, paying the bills often seem like task masters, willing us toward one activity after the next with no sense of purpose, direction or meaning.  I suspect that this feeling overcomes us because of our lack of imagination.  We fail to see what cannot be seen and to experience what cannot be touched.  Our imagination can vividly bring to mind what is not metaphysically present; our imagination can connect our present to our creational past, contextualizing the present reality.

The imagination (not necessary fancy or fiction) can evoke our founding moment, our creational past to bring meaning to the present routine of life.  Laundry is no longer laundry, and a sale at work is no longer a sale at work.  The events and tasks of life can be seen as executing our creational mandate to bring order (a kingly ruling metaphor) to creation.  In the seemingly mundane task of the present we can rightly, truthfully imagine that we are the kings and queens God created to rule over these tasks on his behalf, bringing order and glory to Him. 

Additionally, these tasks do not in and of themselves bring us a sense of identity; we all know they cannot by the emptiness we experience when we try to make them do so.  I am not a teacher.  I am not a father.  I am not a husband.  I am not a homeowner.  I am an image of God with a mission.  This time, this place and these events are the space in which I have been set to carry out the mission and be what God made me to be.  Simply, God is pleased and worshiped when I am who He made me to be and do what it is He has set before me to do.

Remember when Luke first confronted the poster boy for cosmic evil (Darth Vader) in The Empire Strikes Back?  The two tangoed in a furry of death and light saber desvio.  Darth Vader told Luke, famously, “I am your father.”  That shocking cinematic moment was Luke learning of his founding moment.  Realizing he was Darth Vader’s son suddenly brought context to the events of his life.  He was no longer just a simple, poor farm boy stuck doing meaningless chores; he could understand those events in light of his creational reality.  He was hiding, being protected from a cosmic evil that sought to destroy him.  That farm and those chores now had meaning; he understood why he was where he was.  He also had an identity.

Now don’t press the Star Wars analogy too far.  For Luke his creational origin produced enormously negative emotions.  Our creational origin does not.  It’s just an analogy.

            While our creational past, rightly imagined, can begin to provide context to our present, invading our present and freeing us from the tyranny of the immediate and routine.  Creation is not the whole story or total solution to our present dilemma.  Even if we have a mission and an identity that provide us meaning, what do we do when life is not merely boring but it is chaotic, filling our time with suffering?  This suffering is the other horn of our present dilemma, and it will require another response, another moment and other blog.

Join the A-Team this 4th of July!

Some years ago I read a non-fiction book by Tom Clancy called, “Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces.” I was interested in all things military, and this book rendered an insightful picture of America’s finest warriors and their mission. What was particularly interesting was Clancy’s depiction of a Special Forces A-Team. As a youth I grew up watching, rather faithfully, the TV show “The A-Team,” and I was somewhat excited to see that it was remade for the big screen this summer. But, not surprisingly, Clancy made it clear in his book that the Special Forces A-Teams are nothing like the TV show. Rather than having exciting shoots outs with bad guys and blowing up all sorts of stuff, A-Teams have a much broader mission, and it was Clancy’s description of the broader mission that was most fascinating.

A-Teams are comprised of 12 men that have unique, individual contributions to make to the team. For example, one member of the team is a medical expert, yet another member is a communications expert. Each individual member of the team brings to the team a specific skill that allows the entire unit to live as a self-sustaining community. Interestingly, every member is also cross-trained in each other’s discipline to ensure some measure of continuity if one member is killed in action.

A-Teams, in addition to being self-sustaining communities, are deployed “down range” or in another country for purposes much broader than mere violent destruction of the enemy, although combat is certainly part of the mission. More often than not they live in and among the native population to train, educate, cooperate, facilitate and communicate with the native population and its leaders. They provide practical assistance with any of the needs the native population may have. The point of this imbedded existence is not merely to be nice guys, but they are literally ambassadors of the United States to this population, winning the hearts and minds to the America paradigm and mission in the world.

With the current war in Afghanistan there is much talk of winning the hearts and minds of the local population, and it is the various A-Team units deployed in Afghanistan that are about the business of this mission. They speak the language of the Afghanistan people. They often dress like them and eat their food. Their mission is to so blend with the population as to become a credible, American ambassador to the native population so the mission of the United States can be advanced in that country.

Needless to say this picture of an A-Team is an excellent model for the church of Jesus the Messiah. We, much like the A-Team, have our unique, individual giftings and passions to contribute to the community to assist in making us a self-sustaining body that is deployed “down range” for God’s mission. I think this is Paul’s point when he says in Romans 12: 4-5, “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”

Moreover, our citizenship is in another political kingdom other than our host country; we are “down range.” We speak, dress and eat like the native population, and we are to blend with the local population so as to be credible ambassadors of Christ and His Kingdom. How silly and incredulous it would be for an American A-Team member to become confused while in Afghanistan as to where his true allegiance rested; how absurd it would be for him to marry a local girl, build a house, settled down and become a full fledged member of that society. Yet this is exactly what we do as the church in America, especially on the 4th of July.

We need to hear Peter’s admonition afresh this weekend, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.” (I Peter 2:11-12). We are “aliens,” as the NIV puts it, in this country; we are green card residents. We are not citizens of this nation or any other. Just as Israel was in exile in Babylon, so New Israel/the church, in some senses, is in Babylon today.

Peter rightly describes our counter cultural identity in the preceding verses, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (I Peter 2:9-10). Peter is pulling straight from the Old Testament here; wherein God commanded the Israelites they were to be a unique, distinct nation in and among the nations. They had a mission from God to call all the nations to worship of YHWH. We the church, Peter says, are the New Israel with a very old mission. We like the A-Team members are chosen to be a special people for a special mission, God’s mission to proclaim the good news that Jesus is King and He will return to “put the world to rights.”

We cannot settle down in such a manner that we begin to think that this present nation, its interests, culture and its political and economic system are home. They are not. They should be as foreign to us as the Afghan culture is to the A-Team. However, we should be well versed, fluent, embodied in this culture because it is the area of operation God has assigned to us. Remember that even while Israel was in exile in Babylon Jeremiah told them to plant gardens and build houses because you are going to be there awhile (Jer. 29). We are here, “down range,” for His purposes.

In practical terms, I am grateful for the area of my assignment. I appreciate the freedom with which we can go about God’s mission in this part of the world. But I am not comfortable being called a patriot. I am not comfortable singing patriotic songs in church. I am not at ease with the manner in which conservative political missions, American foreign policy missions and God’s missions are discussed in the same breath as if they are the same thing. Don’t get me wrong. I support our military troops mission to protect this world from the evils of Islamic fundamentalism, but like Francis of Assisi I’d rather personally cross the battlefield to go talk about Jesus with my Islamic enemy, knowing full well it would likely result in my death, than pick up an M-4 carbine and fire it across the same battlefield. By the way, the Islamic forces gave Francis safe passage to and from their lines in the battlefield because of how radically different he was from the allegedly “Christian” crusaders they had encountered.

Be in the world, but not of it. It is a hard and sometimes controversial line to draw. But I think this 4th of July weekend it might be good for we in the church to learn something from the A-Teams fighting in Afghanistan on the 4th of July for the “freedoms” we are so excited to sing about on this day of “Independence.”