Friday, March 14, 2008

The Christian Historian

This is a bit long, but i think it is worth reading:

Church history is a moral matter but…it becomes fully so only within a wider theological context. The Christian engaging with the past has even stronger reasons for doing so as part of a maturation in critical and self-aware perception than the secular student, though there are important analogies even within the secular framework. A central aspect of where the Christian begins, the sense of identity that is there at the start of any storytelling enterprise, is the belief that the modern believer is involved with and in a community of believers extended in time and space, whose relation to each other is significantly more than just one of vague geographical connection and temporal succession. In theological shorthand, the modern believer sees herself of himself as a member of the Body of Christ.

Who I am as a Christian is something which, in theological terms, I could only answer fully in the impossible supposition that I could see and grasp how all other Christian lives had shaped mine and, more specifically, shaped it towards the likeness of Christ. I don’t and can’t know the dimensions of this; but if I have read St Paul in I Corinthians carefully I should at least be thinking of my identity as a believer in terms of a whole immeasurable exchange of gifts, known and unknown, by which particular lives are built up, an exchange no less vital and important for being frequently an exchange between living and dead. There are no hermetic seals between who I am as a Christian and the life of a believer in, say, twelfth century Iraq – any more than between myself and a believer in twenty-first-century Congo, Arkansas, or Vanuatu. I do not know, theologically speaking, where my debts begin and end. What any one believing life makes possible for others (and for which particular others) is not there for inspection. How my progress towards the specific and unique likeness of Christ that is my calling is assisted by any other Christian life is always going to be obscure.

…Despite the popular postmodernist talk about how we are ‘spoken by’ language rather than speaking it, we worry about our boundaries; we do not like having them unpatrolled in the way that a robust theology of Christ’s Body might suggest. But the truth is that, for anything resembling Orthodox Christian belief, any believer’s identity will be bound up with just this incalculable assortment of strangers and their various strangenesses.

Hence the Christian believer approaching the Christian past does so first in the consciousness that he or she is engaging with fellow participants in prayer and Eucharist, fellow readers of the same Scripture; people in whom the same activity is going on, the activity of sanctifying grace. This is not in itself the conclusion (they are so much like us that they must be the same really), but the implication of the Christian’s basic belief that we are called into a fellowship held together not by human bonds but by association with Christ. Particular bits of historical research may make it harder or easier to put flesh on this fundamental conviction, but the only thing that could simply unseat it is a refusal of the underlying theology of the Church to which we are committed by practicing the sacraments and reading the Bible. If you see Christianity simply as an enterprise if the human spirit within history, the challenge of understanding the past is going to be difficult, less radical. For the historian who has theological convictions, that challenge is to discern as last something of what is truly known of Christ in the agents of the past.

- Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? 2005.

Friday, March 07, 2008

The 'C' Word

"When theology confronts the Word of God and its witnesses, its place is very concretely in the community, not somewhere in empty space. The word "community," rather than "Church," is used advisedly, for from a theological point of view it is best to avoid the word "Church" as much as possible, if not altogether. At all events, this overshadowed and overburdened word should be immediately and consistently interpreted by the word "community." what may on occasion also be "Church" is, as Luther liked to say, "Christianity" (understood as a nation rather than as a system of beliefs). It is the commonwealth gathered, founded, and ordered by the Word of God, the "communion of the saints." These are the men who were encountered by the Word and so moved by it that they could not withdraw themselves from its message and call. Instead they became able, willing, and ready to receive it as secondary witnesses, offering themselves, their lives, thought, and speech to the Word of God. The Word cries out for belief, for this acceptance in recognition, trust, and obedience. And since faith is not an end in itself, this cry of the Word means that it demands to be proclaimed to the world to which it is directed from the outset."

- Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Chapter 4 (italics original).

I like what Barth says about the Word of God. But i want to know why Barth discourages the use of the word "Church", theologically at least. Any ideas why?

Incidentally, my own church has just renamed itself as a community.

100 Years in the North



This year not only marks the apology by Kevin Rudd to the Aboriginal people of Australia. It also marks a centennary of work by CMS (the Church Missionary Socitey) in Arnhem Land and Northern Australia. This work arose out off the Anglican Churches response to wholesle murder of Aboriginal people by pastoralists in the 'Top End' at the start of the 20th century. Watch the video, watch out for celebration events this year, and if you are interested in finding out more, you can by the John Harris book (author of One Blood) 'We Wish We'd Done More' from CMS.

Monday, March 03, 2008

The Transfiguration

I like Sufjan Stevens. He is a really rad song writer and artist, and at times a little eccentric. I saw his show in January, it was rocking and performed really well. His lyrics are ace, and played to beautiful music. Sufjan is an American Indy artist who sings abouts lots of things. his current project is to release an album for each of the 50 states of America. But often sings about Christian themes in a most beautiful way.

Here is his rendition of the transfiguration:


When he took the three disciples

to the mountainside to pray,
his countenance was modified, his clothing was aflame.
Two men appeared: Moses and Elijah came;
they were at his side.
The prophecy, the legislation spoke of whenever he would die.

Then there came a word
of what he should accomplish on the day.
Then Peter spoke, to make of them a tabernacle place.
A cloud appeared in glory as an accolade.
They fell on the ground.
A voice arrived, the voice of God,
the face of God, covered in a cloud.

What he said to them,
the voice of God: the most beloved son.
Consider what he says to you, consider what's to come.
The prophecy was put to death,
was put to death, and so will the Son.
And keep your word, disguise the vision till the time has come.

Lost in the cloud, a voice: Have no fear! We draw near!
Lost in the cloud, a sign: Son of man! Turn your ear!
Lost in the cloud, a voice: Lamb of God! We draw near!
Lost in the cloud, a sign: Son of man! Son of God!


Seven Swans, 2004.