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.