Dispatches from Australia 2

In their famous 1989 book Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon describe the end of a world - the capitulation of Christendom to secularism - in 1963 when a local cinema opened on a Sunday.

I started school in 1990. It was a state school on the urban fringe of Sydney. About half the buildings at the time were demountables. In between learning to tie my shoes and get through the day without a nap, there was a whole new "liturgy" that I had to learn. In particular, there were two sets of words the student body was expected to know.

• The first was a song that was sung every few weeks at the school's formal assembly. It turned out this song was God Save the Queen, which had only been relegated from Australia's national anthem to Australia's royal anthem several years earlier when the graduating year of 1990 had started school  (i.e. 1984). Looking back on it now, and the painting of Queen Elizabeth II from the late 1960s which hung in the office, my primary school feels like sometimes it would be at home on The Crown.
• The second, I would come to learn, was The Lord's Prayer, which was said at least once per week during school assembly. As we stood in straight-ish lines on the asphalt quad, the older years would recite the prayer from memory - Protestant bit and all.

That world has long since past. For me, it disappeared almost in the twinkle of an eye, and had vanished by the time I started my second year at primary school. With the weight of globalization as the cold war ended, along with a rising sense of an Australian identity, republicanism, multiculturalism, and an increased awareness of our indigenous heritage, it's surprising that I even encountered these two sets of words regularly at school in the first place.

It would be tempting though to ascribe their disappearance to the irreversible tide of secularism, which seems to sweep Australia with increasing ferocity every five years as census results are announced. According to popular assumption, religion is occupying a declining space in public ad private life, and eventually will all but vanish from Australian life (except for indigenous religion apparently, because that can explained away as "cultural").

It might just be that Christendom took longer to root out from Australia's Blue Mountains than it did to the American South. Admittedly, Australia has a long and complicated relationship between faith and society. But amidst those complications, Australia has been, by and large, accommodating (e.g. not antagonistic) towards religion. And the truth of the matter is that secularism is not a new phenomenon in Australia; it has been with European Australia since 1786 when Richard Johnson was appointed Chaplain to the First Fleet.

Although it may come to a surprise, secularism is a thoroughly Christian achievement. The word “secular” has come to mean “non-religious”; drop by any P&C meeting these days and when the world "secular" is used, it is understood to be in opposition to faith and organised religion. But it was never meant to mean that. “Secular” comes from the Latin word saeculum, which means “age.” It was  developed by Augustine of Hippo to account for the now and not yet eschatological tension Christians find themselves in. By definition, the opposite of “secular” is not “sacred” but “eternal”.  So “secular ” means “of this age” rather than the eternal.

Secularism actually is a consequence of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which announces that all earthly governments have been relegated to penultimate status. The Australian government is not eternal. Each and every government is secular because there will come a time when the governments of the world cast their crowns before the lamb who was slain. As Oliver O’Donovan has helpfully written:

“The most truly Christian state understands itself most thoroughly as “secular”. It makes the confession of Christ’s victory and accepts the relegation of its own authority… The essential element in the conversion of the ruling power is the change in its self-understanding and its manner of government to suit the dawning age of Christ’s own rule.”

With the ascension of Jesus Christ, secularism is the stripping of governments of their pretensions to command our absolute and whole-hearted obeisance.

Rather than the rise of secularism then, I wonder perhaps what we have witnessed in Australia over recent decades is the loosening of our common bonds. The traditions and institutions which have served our society have gradually been weakened and become unintelligible to us. Philosophically, concepts such as secularism and representation have become gibberish to us, unmoored as they are to their original intent and purpose. Whatever the case, we may have reached a point expected by several cultural commentators, who foresaw it with a sense of joy (Nietzsche), sadness (Tolkien), or despair (TS Eliot).

For O'Donovan, it actually is an occasion for chastened optimism for gospel opportunities in a society like ours. He writes that "Western civilization finds itself the heir of political institutions and traditions which it values without any clear idea why, or to what extent, it values them." Christian witness and theology has an opportunity to shed light on institutions and traditions whose intelligibility is seriously threatened. There is an apologetic value for Christians to think theologically about politics during a crisis of confidence in our politics. This is unlikely to result in a return to the situation of my primary school in 1990. That may not even be desirable. However, what is needed from Australian Christians is a commitment to our institutions and society at large for the sake of the common good because we know Jesus' lordship over all things. To do so would be to swim against the current and buck the trend that has dominate western societies at large since the 1960s (at least). But perhaps Christians are at their best in society when their swimming against the general trends.

The Greatest Gift of Christendom

Arguably one of the greatest challenges facing Christians today is how to respond to secularism. Whilst this is not a particularly new phenomenon, what Christians are finding in 2016 is that the plausibility structures which make faith seem possible have changed, shifting the conditions of belief. It's potentially harder to be a Christian now then it was 500, 100, or even 50 years ago because belief in God has not only been displaced as normative, but is now positively contested.

This age of contested belief is fuelled in part by what we might call the 'secular myth': modern society continues to progress and advance both scientifically as new discoveries are made and technology is increasingly harnessed to solve our problems, and morally as society becomes more fair and equal. This myth suggests that as society advances, religion is culturally replaced or displaced, demoted in importance to the point of redundancy. Our institutions (well, what's left of them) increasingly become neutral ground, forming an objective, unbiased, and a-religious sphere (broadly equivalent to the French concept of laïcité).

Behind all of this is what Charles Taylor refers to subtraction stories: accounts which explain the secular as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what’s left over after we subtract superstition. Subtraction stories are those tales of enlightenment and progress and maturation which see the emergence of modernity as jettisoning the detritus of belief and superstition. Once upon a time, as these subtraction stories rehearse it, we believed in sprites and fairies and gods and demons. But as we became rational, and especially as we marshalled naturalist explanations for what we used to attribute to spirits and forces, the world became progressively disenchanted. Religion and belief withered with scientific exorcism of superstition. And what we have left from this is the secular, modern world, devoid of such superstition.

It's a powerful myth. It's a shame that it has little correlation with history. In his book A Secular Age, Taylor goes to great length to argue that the secular is not merely distilled, but produced and created. That we could go from a world where disbelief in God was implausible to a world where belief in God was implausible is not the leftovers of a distilled society, but the accomplishment of new accounts of reality and meaning.

However I think that it is possible to go further. Secularism is in fact the one of the greatest gifts Christendom gave to the world. That is to say, secularism is not what comes after Christendom in spite of Christendom; Christendom was the first was the creation of the secular, the first implementation of a secular age. This might be controversial to say, because Christendom and secularism seem to be diametrically opposed to each other. The enlightenment project was a self-conscious repudiation of Christian political settlement which had preceded it. But there would be no secularism without Christendom - not in the sense that one the reaction to another - but perhaps in a more classical understanding secular, Christendom creates the secular conditions. Oliver O'Donovan puts this succinctly:

Jesus has ascended in triumph to God’s right hand; yet the subdued “authorities” of this age, St. Paul held, “persist” (Romans 13:6). This, he said, was to approve good conduct and “to execute God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” The reign of Christ in heaven left judgment as the single remaining political need. We should observe that this was an unprecedentedly lean doctrine of civil government. Judgment alone never comprised the whole of what ancient peoples, least of all the Jews, thought government was about. Paul’s conception stripped government of its representative, identity-conferring functions, and said nothing about law. He conceded, as it were, the least possible function that would account for its place within God’s plan. The secular princes of this earth, shorn of pretensions to our loyalty and worship, are left with the sole function of judging between innocent and guilty. 

The political-theological achievement of the Roman world in the fourth century was the recognition that the announcement 'Jesus Christ is Lord' is the announcement that he has dethroned the powers and authorities. It is this recognition which creates the secular. It is the government of the age, (knowingly or unknowingly) charged with task of judgment until creation's perfection at Jesus' return. This recognition dispels all government pretension to be the most true thing, the ultimate reality of totalitarian regimes. It dispels the possibility of theocracy, for Christ is the one Lord. According to O'Donovan again:

The most truly Christian state understands itself most thoroughly as “secular”. It makes the confession of Christ’s victory and accepts the relegation of its own authority... The essential element in the conversion of the ruling power is the change in its self-understanding and its manner of government to suit the dawning age of Christ’s own rule. 

Modern societies have inherited this political institution of the gospel, although they may not know it. This unintelligibly of secularism by secular states may account for the fraught socio-political situations we witness today as nations which had assumed one thing about secularism (such as its homogeneous nature) are confronted on the one hand with an increase of pluralism, and on the other different experiences of secularism around the world (secularism in India and China look different not only from each other but also from secularism within Europe or the United States).

The opportunity for the church as it negotiates with and responds to secularism will be to explain the political institutions and modes such as the secular which the modern world has assumed from ancient Christian world but does not quite know why it values them. In making the institutions of modernity intelligible to the modern world, the church will need innovative ways to announce and embody the truth of Christ's Lordship, and that the secular is no mere neutral space, but one which exists for his purposes in the world.

Toil and Telos

It was cold and wet that June weekend when I started one my first jobs. I was still in high school, but had taken a job in a lumber yard in the Blue Mountains, helping one of my dad's mates. There were upsides to the task: I got paid, which was always a bonus, and I learnt how to drive a bobcat around the yard. But mostly, it was hard, backbreaking drudgery. My role was to fill bag after bag with 30kg of wood. More often than not it was either raining or threatening to snow, and my gloves were barely enough to keep any warmth in my hands, let alone keep the splinters out (especially when we'd deliver a truck load of wood to someone's house). Look closely at my hands today and you'll still find the scars. Fueled on one cheese and ham toasted sandwich from the igloo like shed on site, it was toilsome labour. Nevertheless it kept my family and many others in our community warm through the bleak mountain winter.

It's a job I think back on from time to time as I meet with PhD students and academic staff. Their work and mine as a 17 year old could not be more be different. There are not many splinters to contend with when you're writing a doctorate in history or chemistry. Nevertheless, it would not be adequate in either situation to describe work as mere toil.

Yes work is hard, it's laborious, sometimes it's even tedious. Toil is the characterisation of work in a broken, frustrated world. However, work has the potential to much more than this. True, sin's entry into the world has frustrated our work, leaving all our labour vunerable to the ravages of time and death. But to define work as just drudgery leaves us without any ability to consider whether work is good or bad. To work in pokey machine development may be toilsome. But the mere fact of travailing does not guarantee that particular work is good. Toil may be an adequate description of work today, particularly in a fallen world, but merely offering a description of work is insufficient. The goodness or not of work is not found in the ontology of work alone, but also in its teleology. In the words of Oliver O'Donovan, work is

'a condition of rest and worship, and rest and worship are a condition of work.  Work satisfies our destiny as human beings called to fellowship with God.'

Work is purposeful because it points both to the rest which is structured into the rhythms of life in creation and the rest which is achieved in Christ's gospel accomplishment.

Herein lies the deficiency of defining work as mere toil: it is not an evangelical definition of work. It is, to be sure, a definition based in the reality of the fall. But whereas the fall can name a present experience of work, the teleology of our labour is only revealed in the gospel. It's in Jesus' lordship that work is re-purposed, not in the construction of the new creation, but as a harbinger of the new world as Christ's people live and labour in a way which accords with the reality of that Lordship. Our work will in this age only ever be partial as God's rest is achieved in and only through Jesus. But where our labour contributes to the welfare of others, and is empowered by rightly ordered love for God and neighbour, we can say that our work is not only toilsome, but good.

There may be times and circumstances when the only reasonable expectation of our work is to endure.Our work has been frustrated. But what the gospel gives us is the ability to bring new meaning to our work*, to understand work in relation to its telos; that is, to see work with the eyes of faith, as a sign of the reality that God is still at work in this world (John 5.17), and will bring creation to the completion of his purposes in Christ Jesus.


* It is this superimposition of meaning on our work which may prevent work becoming idolatrous. Our work's significance is not found in its ability to provide us with security, comfort, approval, our power, but the way it signifies Christ's provision of all these things for us. 

The Line of Connection

Earlier this year I was given a very special book: Oliver O'Donovan's The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine, first published in 1980. Little did I realize that it would have so much to do with some of my interests this year. In chapter six,  which concludes a study on Augustine and eudaemonism, O'Donovan lays out a beautiful summary of Augustine's take on creation, teleology and redemption.

Augustine's picture of the universe shows us one who is the source and goal of being, value, and activity, himself in the center of the universe and at rest; and it shows us the remainder of the universe in constant movement, which, while it may tend toward or away from the center is yet held in relation to it, so that all other beings lean, in a multiplicity of ways, toward the source and goal of being. But the force which draws these moving galaxies of souls is immanent to them, a kind of dynamic nostalgia rather than a transcendent summons from the center. Such a summons, of course, is presupposed; but it is reflected by this responsive movement which is other than itself, so that there is a real reciprocity between Creator and creature...

It is the meaning of salvation that is at stake: is it ‘fulfillment,’ ‘recapitulation’? . . . Between that which is and that which will be there must be a line of connection, the redemptive purpose of God. We cannot simply say that agape has no presuppositions, for God presupposes that which he himself has already given in agape. However dramatic a transformation redemption may involve, however opaque to man's mind the continuity may be, we know, and whenever we repeat the Trinitarian creed with Saint Augustine we confess that our being-as-we-are and our being-as-we-shall-be are held together as works of the One God who both our Creator and Redeemer.

Between that which is and that which will be there must be a line of connection...if salvation is truly salvation, if redemption is truly redemption, it necessitates continuity between that which is natural, and the perfect.

Forgetting to be Secular

Over the past two years I've enjoyed dipping into Charles Taylor's epic A Secular Age and James K.A. Smith's reading guide, How (Not) to be Secular. More recently I have been reading Augustine and Oliver O'Donovan, and have rediscovered this quote by O'Donovan on the Christian (and eschatological) nature of the secular, which seems to be along the same lines as Taylor and Smith:

"The Christian conception of the 'secularity' of political society arose directly out of this Jewish wrestling with unfulfilled promise.  Refusing, on the one hand, to give up what it knew of God, itself, and the world, accepting, on the other, that what it knew was incomplete and demanded validation, Israel understood itself and its knowledge and love of God as a contradiction to be endured in hope. 'Secularity' is irreducibly an eschatological notion; it requires an eschatological faith to sustain it, a belief in a disclosure that is 'not yet' but is absolutely presupposed as the inner meaning of what we know already.  If we allow the 'not yet' to slide toward 'never,' we say something entirely different and wholly incompatible, for the virtue that undergirds all secular politics is an expectant patience. What follows from the rejection of belief is an intolerable tension between the need for meaning in society and the only partial capacity of society to satisfy the need.  An unbelieving society has forgotten how to be secular."

- Oliver O'Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community, 42.

From Sinner to Singer

Jesus said that it is not what goes into a person that makes them unclean, but what comes out of their heart. Out of the abundance of the heart come all kinds of sin: evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. This failure of heart, what Christian theologians have described as concupiscence or our tendency to sin, is described by the Apostle Paul in a tight little passage as the consequence of false worship.

Despite the beauty and delight of the world around us, we refused to respond to our Creator with a due sense of thankful or praise (Romans 1:21). Instead, we turned to from the Creator to the creation, worshipping it in his place, desiring the things he had made rather than our maker (Romans 1:23, 25). Through idolatry, our hearts became just as darkened and our thinking futile as the things we worshipped.

Paul is probably picking up on the idea prevalent in the Old Testament that we become what we worship. This is seen in Isaiah; the prophet is commissioned to preach to his idolatrous generation with the result that they deaf, blind, and dull hearted (Isaiah 6:9-10) – just like the idols they worship (Isaiah 42:8, 17-25)! Hence why one of things the Servant of the Lord brings is the restoration of sight to the blind.

Likewise, the Apostle John can describe our hearts in this manner. John can urge his readers to guard against idolatry (1 John 5:21; cf. 1 Corinthians 10:7, 14) because he knows that our concupiscence lies in our love of things in God’s good world (1 John 2:15-17). The problem lies not out there; it lies in mangled love or over-desires: ‘the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, pride in possessions’.  It is not hard to imagine as Andrew Cameron does that this is John’s commentary on that moment in the garden when sin was let loose on the world: (cf. Genesis 3:6) good for food’ [desire of flesh]; ‘pleasing to the eye’ [desire of eyes]; ‘desirable for wisdom’ [pride].[1] What John describes is our thankless, obsessive, destructive misappropriation of the Creator’s creation. Our love for the wrong things has bent us out of shape.

It was his reflection on these verses that led St Augustine to describe our propensity to sin as disordered love. Human beings are liturgical creatures – we are made to worship something. In our refusal to thank and glorify God, our hearts have turned to find something else to worship.

 

These are thy gifts; they are good, for thou in thy goodness has made them. Nothing in them is from us, save for sin when, neglectful of order, we fix our love on the creature, instead of on thee, the Creator.  (City of God, XV.22)

What is needed is for our misdirected hearts to be reordered, for our hearts remain restless until they come to rest in that for which they were made (cf. Confessions I):

But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally. (On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)

Millennia later, the former Augustinian monk Martin Luther diagnosed the human condition in a similar way. According the Luther, our life and worship is incurvatus in se, turned in on ourselves.

Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake. (Lectures on Romans)

In his A Treatise on Good Works, an exposition of the Ten Commandments, Luther says the call to
“have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) and the call to believe in Jesus alone for your justification
(Romans 3–4) are, in essence, the same thing. To say you must have no other gods but God and to say you must not try to achieve your salvation without Christ are one and the same.

Now this is the work of the First Commandment, which commands: “Thou shalt have no other gods,” which means: “Since I alone am God, thou shalt place all thy confidence, trust and faith on Me alone, and on no one else.”

For Luther, idolatry is the fundamental root of our sins and problems; you do not lie, commit adultery, or steal unless you first make something more fundamental to your hope and joy and status than God.
Anything you look to more than you look to Christ for your sense of acceptability, joy, significance, hope, and security is by definition your god—something you adore and serve with your whole life and heart. That is an idol, by definition. 

In like manner, John Calvin wrote in his Christian Institutes that “the human heart is an idol factory” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, I 11.8). Our hearts and minds are perpetually industrious in imagining new things to love and worship. This long tradition of equating sin with idolatry was neatly summarized a few years ago by moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan:

 [I]t is possible, notwithstanding the truth that we love and know only the good, also in a sense to love evil. We love evil by resting in the pattern of loves and dreads that comes immediately to us, treating our dreads as though they were equally real with the goods we love. ... This is perfectly expressed in the traditional Christian doctrine of original sin, described memorably by Martin Luther as an incurvatus in se, a self-enclosure. In sin we divide the good world God has made into two “worlds”, one good and the other evil, and we make our own contingent perspectives the criterion for the division. And this gives a new, negative sense to the term “world”, which we have hitherto spoken of positively as God’s creation. This negative sense is characteristic of the New Testament, and points to the reality a constructed world, a world of our own imagination, pitched over against the created world and in opposition to it.[2]

The great human tragedy is that despite being the divinely commissioned image-bearers in the world, we turned from reflecting that image to the creation and love of other images. We exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped idols of our fashioning. Out of the abundance of the heart comes all kind of impurities, and our hearts had grown ruinous. Yet whilst the human heart spewed forth impurity, the Jesus Christ – the very image of God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15) – came forth to heal our hearts. His work is summarised by Hebrews 1:3 as such:

He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high…

Hebrews goes on to say that this purification came through Jesus’ own blood (9:14). He has put away sin once and for all (9:26), enabling those purified by him to serve the living God. The end result as pictured in Hebrews 13 is a life issuing forth as a sacrifice of praise. Those purified by Jesus the great high priest are enabled to live a life of worship to God. Along the same lines Paul encourages the mind set on the Spirit to be transformed, as the body worships God (Romans 12:1):

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

This is the antithesis of the perverted worship of Romans 1. Whereas in Romans 1 humans were dishonoured in their bodies, worshipping and serving creatures, disapproving of God which issued in a depraved mind, in Romans 12 Christians are instructed to present their bodies in the service and worship of God, which leads to the renewing of their minds, that they may approve God’s will. The achievement of Christ is to turn God’s enemies into those who are by the Spirit conformed to the image of God’s Son. We are set free from sin to respond to God by grace. In other words, we are turned from sinners into singers. We do not live under slavery to sin. The prayer of conversion is, with John Donne, that God would “Come | And recreate me now grown ruinous.”   We are made fit to worship the true and living God. Far from being hostile towards and unable to please God, I am someone who lives for the praise of God’s glory. Rather than being incurvatus in se, I live (in another of Luther’s phrases) coram Deo; that is, before God, before his face, and in his presence.

This is not to deny the presence of sin in Christians, what Don Carson describes as “shocking, inexcusable, forbidden, appalling, out of line with what we are as Christians.” But to be a Christian is to have one’s darkened heart renewed by the Spirit, so that the abundance of this heart, by God’s grace, produces fruit. Having been purified by our high priest, we are transformed from idol makers to glory reflectors, from incurvatus in se to coram Deo, from sinners to singers.

We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. (Romans 6:6)

Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. (Hebrews 13:15)

---

[1] Andrew Cameron, Joined-up life: A Christian account of how ethics works (Nottingham: IVP, 2011), 52-53.

[2] Oliver O’Donovan, New College Lectures 2007: Lecture 2 ‘Admiring’. http://www.newcollege.unsw.edu.au/newcollegelectures.html.

Moments of Recapitulation

Here is an interesting and novel thought: what the Church does in ministry should reflect what the gospel is. I've been spurred along in this idea recently by Tim Keller, who argues that the gospel should fundamentally shape our doing of ministry. Following DA Carson, Keller argues that the gospel consists of three moments in Jesus life: 

1. The Incarnation (what Keller describes as the upside-down aspect of the gospel) where Jesus, though he was rich, became poor, and made himself the servant of all. This creates a community of service, where people live out an alternative way of being human, seeking neither moral, financial or social superiority.
2. The Atonement (the inside-out aspect of the gospel), which speaks of the way we are justified by grace and not by works. Grasping this changes the way we relate to God, to others and ourself.
3. The Resurrection (the forward-back aspect of the gospel); Jesus is reigning now, and Christian live in the light of this reality, looking forward to the day when Jesus ushers in the new creation. So now we live by faith, hope and love, especially love.

Few churches will follow through on the implications of the gospel: the upside-down, inside-out, forward-back kingdom. But for Keller, the gospel is the Christian life, and the church that comprehends the Gospel of Jesus Christ will "champion and cultivate" all three aspects of the gospel.

Oliver O'Donovan proposes a similar idea in The Desire of the Nations, that the Church's life and ministry is a recapitulation of Jesus's own life and ministry. And what we see in the sacraments is a visual reflection of Jesus own kingdom announcement. O'Donovan traces God's political authority within Israel. The Lords reign is, first, an exercise of power that gives Israel victory or salvation; it is, second, the execution of judgment or justice within Israel; and it is, third, the establishment of Israel's communal identity as a people existing over time (an identity connected at first with the land and, later, with possession of the law). These three aspect summarize what it means to say that the Lord rules as king in Israel, and a fourth aspect is added by O'Donovan. The Lords rule is acknowledged—though not established—in the praise Israel, as a worshiping community, offers (which incidentally, provides a stinging critique of liberalism's view of authority).

These four aspects of God's kingship are recapitulated in the career of Jesus. He does mighty works of power that bring salvation; he proclaims the judgment of Israel; he reforms the understanding of the law upon which the identity of a restored Israel is based. The praise that acknowledges Gods rule corresponds now to faith that recognizes the reign of God in Jesus.These four moments are 

1. the advent of Christ to save 
2. the passion of Christ in which the judgment of the world is given
3. the restoration of Christ, which affirms Israel's new identity in its representative
4. the exaltation of Christ, the coronation of the one who has triumphed over the powers that oppose Gods rule.

Christ is the head over the church, and O'Donovan argues that these moments of his Kingship are recapitulated within the church's life. They structure the church:

"The church represents God's Kingdom by living under its rule, and by welcoming the world under its rule. It recapitulates the Christ-event  in itself, and so proclaims the Christ-event to the world. The Christ-event, then, is the structuring principle for all ecclesiology, holding the key both to the church’s spontaneous ‘catholic’ existence and to its formal structure."

As Chris Swann has noted before, their are four moments that enact the distinctive shape of the church’s identity:

1. Advent – gathering community – Baptism. Marked by the sign of baptism, the Church now gathers to herself those who acknowledge Jesus as Lord
2. Passion – suffering community – Eucharist. Marked by the sign of the Eucharist, the Church now suffers—paradigmatically in her martyrs, but in countless other ways as well.
3. Resurrection – glad community – Keeping the Lord’s Day. Marked by the sign of her keeping of the Lords day as a little Easter, the Church now rejoices in the restoration of the creation.
4. Exaltation – community that speaks the words of God – Laying on of Hands. Marked by the sign of the laying on of hands, the Church now speaks Gods word in prophecy and prayer.

O'Donovan is in agreement with Keller, that churches have often been tempted to understand themselves in terms of one of these “moments” alone—as marked by mission alone, by suffering alone, by triumph alone, or by social responsibility alone. But such truncated understandings cannot recapitulate the narrative coherence of the moments in the story of Christ.

It's quite a big claim, "the structuring principle for all ecclesiology". And it's different to other accounts I hear of the Church's life and mission. Yet I find it quite compelling, that the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, the true Israel, orders the Church, giving it cohesion and definition.

Postscript
At this point it may seem that O'Donovan sees fours in everything, as O'Donovan also offers a tantalizing, though fleeting, correlation between these four moments of recapitulation and the order of ministry within the church:

1. church gathers – ministry of recognising Christians – primatial bishop
2. church suffers – ministry of suffering service – deacon
3. church recovers creation order – ministry of instruction – presbyter-bishop
4. church as prophet – ministry of diverse administration to build up the community – lay charism

40 Years worth of Education

Having commenced a formal theological study this year, I sometimes wonder what I've signed up for. Four years can feel like a long time, especially right now when I'm learning Hebrew verb paradigms:

קָֹטַל
קָטְלָה

קָטַלְתָּ

Anyway, I stumbled across a magazine in the college library today that was honouring the ministry of Oliver O'Donovan (he's retiring later in the year). There was a quote from a 2008 report on an Anglican catechism by the Global South Anglican Theological Formation and Education Task Force (which O'Donovan was apart of) that drove home one of the reasons why theological college is and should be a long and thoughtful process:

"The clergy must be ready to think theologically for themselves, and not only say just what their congregations (or bishops!) are expecting. All of them have to be able to go on thinking and preaching, faithfully to the Gospel, for perhaps forty years after they leave college. Some of them will have to take the lead in criticizing and interpreting movements of thought that have not yet even come on the horizon. And they have to be able to resource the theological needs of tomorrow’s church." - Anglican Catechism in Outline: A Common Home Between Us

Again, like Barth's advice for novice theologians, it is humbling to read this.

The Elizabethan Divines

This is just a theory of mine, but it feels like this second Elizabethan reign has been a golden age for British theology. Not that a British Institutes or Church Dogmatics has been written during this time - don't would be totally un-British. But over the past few decades, they has been an amazing group of theologians lecturing, publishing and serving the church in the UK and around the world. They are all theologians born during or in the period immediately after WWII: Rowan Williams, NT Wright, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Bauckham, Colin Gunton, John Webster, Jeremy Begbie, Alister McGrath and so on. Building on the work of the like of Moule, Caird, Torrance and Chadwick, they've all contributed to the growth of the church in their own unique way.

As they start to retire, it will be interesting to see who replaces them in the church and the academy.

Resurrection and Renewal

“In proclaiming the resurrection of Christ, the apostles proclaimed also the resurrection of mankind in Christ; and in proclaiming the resurrection of mankind, they proclaimed the renewal of all creation with him. The resurrection of Christ in isolation from mankind would not be a gospel message. The resurrection of mankind apart from creation would be a gospel of a sort, but of a purely Gnostic and world denying sort which is far from the gospel that the apostles actually preached” - O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 31

h/t Michael

The ‘Desacralisation’ Of Politics

"But secular authorities are no longer in the fullest sense mediators of the rule of God. They mediate his judgments only. The power that they exercise in defeating their enemies, the national possessions they safeguard, these are now rendered irrelevant by Christ’s triumph. This is what might properly be meant by that misleading expression, the ‘desacralisation’ of politics by the Gospel. No government has a right to exist, no nation has a right to defend itself. Such claims are overwhelmed by the immediate claim of the Kingdom. There remains simply the rump of political authority which cannot be dispensed with yet, the exercise of judgment." - Oliver O'Donovan

Through Christ's life, death, resurrection and ascension he has been given all power and authority in heaven and earth. And if he has all power and authority, than our governments have been stripped of their power; they have been reduced to providing justice (Romans 13). To do anything else would be a dangerously idolatrous encroachment on Christ's rule.

Resurrection and Science

"By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it..." Rev. 21.24

I studied an Arts degree at Sydney Uni. To be more precise, I majored in Ancient and Modern History. So, as I'm back at uni now serving alongside the postgrad/staff faculty of the SUEU, I don't pretend to know much of what the science guys I meet with are saying when they start talking physics. An I'm often annoyed and frustrated by the arrogant, modernist faith placed in scientific knowledge and achievement. It's a mean metanarrative right?

However, a fascinating thought was explained for me tonight as a talked to a friend. Is the resurrection's affirmation of creation (c.f. Oliver O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order) also an affirmation of scientific inquiry into creation? My friend has written a 2000 word paper on this topic, which I'm yet to read, but if anyone else has thought more seriously about this than I have, I'd love to hear what you think. Especially if there are any scientists out there.

...mens eadem...

"Don't be conformed to this present evil age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind..." - Romans 12.2

"The word of God was the sweat of [Paul's] brow, but it was also the life of his mind. Our juncture of history is rather like Paul's in one respect: it requires a Christian preacher to come to the defence of the life of the mind. As Universities daily conform themselves more closely to the school of wizardry in children's fiction, a repository of magic techniques to get startling effects, who else is left to care for how people, as individuals, think for themselves about the coherence of understanding, principle, and purpose that makes the difference between living in freedom and living in servitude? As the young flock in ever greater numbers to our Universities and colleges, who is there to talk to them seriously, and with all the resources of refined scholarly culture, about the meaning of their human existence, about how vast quantity if scatted or organised information can be distilled into something worth a humans being's while to be occupied with in his or her one and only venture in life? Of course, we shall be told that virtue cannot be taught, that the existential dimension of wisdom is something each person must discover for him or herself, not a topic for inclusion in a syllabus, to be "covered" in a tutorial. All of which is perfectly true. Yet wisdom can be present or absent as a goal and a horizon, before which everything covered in a syllabus can begin to assume its real importance. But this requires teachers who believe that learning is not simply perfecting a performance, but has to do with the terror and hope that is due to existence itself. It requires teachers who believe in the human reality of salvation and loss, who live out their academic roles as those who continually ask how they may be saved?" - Oliver O'Donovan, No End to the Word, The Word in Small Boats, 2010.

Swimming Up The Tiber

The Roman Catholic church this week has announcemed that it has created a structure to welcome home 'traditional' Anglicans unhappy with the 'rampant liberalism' (ACL) in the Anglican church. Whether this will have the apocalyptic consequences for the Church of England that The Times says it does remains to be seen (Ruth Glendhill talks about this leading to the disestablisment of the CofE, and reclaiming of churches and cathedrals by Roma Catholics “'stolen' from them at the Reformation'). Oliver O'Donovan, commenting on the nineteenth article in the 39 Articles of Religon ("so also the Church of Rome hath erred..."), had this to say on ecumenism and institutional unity:

"Ecumenism is one of the ways in which the institutions of the church must be shaped and re-shaped to express the truth of the church itself more adequately than they do. But, of course, not any form of institutional unity will be appropriate. It must be a kind of unity which corresponds to the unity which the Holy Spirit gives, a unity which can comfortably embrace the diversities of gifts, operations and services within the united confession that 'Jesus is Lord'. Unity of the wrong kind will fail, just as disunity fails, to make the church institutions an effective sign of the gospel." - Oliver O'Donovan, On The Thirty Nine Articles - A Conversation With Tudor Christianity, 1986.

The Problem With Bible Reading II

A Question of Authority

Coincidentally after my previous post which quoted John Blanchard on the power of public Bible reading, Anglican Bishop Rob Forsyth has also written on this issue: The Marginalisation of Scripture. Rob quotes Oliver O'Donovan's lecture in April (mentioned on hebel here) to describe the place of scripture within our churches, and particularly how it has been sidelined in recent years. Rob argues that: "It can be easily be overwhelmed by the other elements: the music, the singing or, even more likely in our culture, the preaching."

Several years ago I heard a sermon that said that the most important of church is hearing the bible read out loud. How can the public reading of the Bible be central to our church gatherings? According to O'Donovan and his friend and contemporary Tom Wright, it comes down to authority. O'Donovan's account on this authority is superb. According to Wright:

"...[I]n public worship where the reading of scripture is given its proper place, the authority of God places a direct challenge to the authority of the powers, not least those who use the media, in shaping the mind and life of the community. But the primary purpose of the readings is to be itself an act of worship, celebrating God's story, power and wisdom and, above all, God's son. That is the kind of worship through which the church is renewed in God's image, and so transformed and directed in it's mission. Scripture is the key means through which the living God directs and strengthens his people in and for that work. That, I have argued throughout this book [Scripture and the Authority of God], is what the the shorthand phrase 'the authority of scripture' is really all about.

Indeed, what is done in the classic offices of Morning and Evening Prayer by means of listening to one reading from each Testament, is to tell the entire story of Old and New Testaments, glimpsing the broad landscape of the scriptural narrative through the two tiny windows of short readings. To truncate this to one lesson, or to a short reading simply as a prelude to the sermon (and perhaps accompanied with half an hour or more of 'worship songs'), is already to damage or deconstruct this event, and potentially to reduce the power and meaning of scripture, within this context , simply to the giving of information, instruction or exhortation. Equally, to have a reading that lasts about 90 seconds, flanked by canticles that last five or ten minutes (the practice in some 'cathedral-style' worship), conveys the same impression as a magnificent sparkling crystal glass with a tiny drop of wine in it. The glass is important, but the wine is what really matters." - NT Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God.

Or as O'Donovan argues:

"It is simply that without a proper value assigned to the corporate exercise of public reading of Scripture, private reading must look like an eccentric hobby. No collective spiritual exercise, no sacrament, no act of praise or prayer is so primary to the catholic identity of the church gathered as the reading and recitation of Scripture. It is the nuclear core. When Paul instructed his letters to be passed from church to church and read, it was the badge of the local church’s catholic identity. This is not to devalue preaching, praise, prayer, let alone sacramental act; these all find their authorisation in reading." - Oliver O'Donovan, The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice.

The reading of the bible at church is a means through which God speaks to his gathered people. Not only is it meant to be a transformative and profound moment, is it an act of worship by Christians to our God. Which is why we should strive to do it well. Not because we are professionals, but because we value excellence in our ministry, because we believe that it honours God and inspires people. I'll be blogging on this later in the week...

Good Books: The Answers

OK, here are my answers to the Good Books Meme. In case you've forgotten, here are the rules:

i. List a helpful book you've read in this category;

ii. Describe why you found it helpful; and

iii. Tag five more friends and spread the meme love.

Here goes:

1. Theology
I was introduced to theology when I was 15 years old by reading a compendium by Alistar McGrath. And I've loved theology ever since. The book I'm placing here is Karl Barth's Dogmatics in Outline. These were the first theological lectures given in Germany after WWII, with the text based off notes a student took as Barth was pretty much speaking off the top of his head. Despite the brevity of DIO, it has an urgency and compassion that has a powerful impact. It also taught me the phrase toho mobohu.

2. Biblical Theology
I won't hold back here - Climax of the Covenant by N.T. Wright is awesome. Focused on some key Pauline passages, Wright really bring to life God's plan to redeem his creation from evil through Israel and Jesus. I already had a framework for this through Goldsworthy and Dumbrell, but Wright's explanation of the narrative of scripture is par excellence.

3. God
Many Christians have profited over the past 50+ years from reading T.C. Hammond's In Understanding Be Men. But I found Colin Gunton's Act and Being to be really helpful in thinking through who God is and what language we should use to describe him. It particularly awoke me to all the Greek philosophical ideas that had creeped into Christianity.

4. Jesus
I loved Bauckham's God Crucified, and I'm tremendously excited about reading Jesus and the God of Israel. But, I'll have to go with N.T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God. This is a book that every evangelical Christian should read. This book fits together the picture the gospels present of Jesus and help us understand him and what he was all about. I'm not sure that any other book besides holy scripture has so thoroughly changed me and shaped me. If you haven't read it already, read this book.

5. Old Testament
Besides a whole heap of commentaries, I found Dumbrell's Faith of Israel helpful reading in understanding the whole Old Testament. Like Chris, Barry Webb's Five Festal Garments was another handy little book for me. As was David Peterson's Christ and his people in the book of Isaiah.

6. New Testament
I guess I can't use N.T. Wright again, so I'll go with Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. I haven't finished it yet, but Bauckham has a depth of of knowledge and wisdom, and this comes to the fore in this wonderful book. And guess what - the gospels are actually based of eyewitness accounts, not just the ramblings from this different apostolic communities.

7. Ethics
Surprise, surprise...I'm going with Oliver O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order. Tremendously helpful book in understanding that the starting point for evangelical ethics is the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But I'm going with this book because I found it incredibly hard. OOD is dense, and especially in Resurrection and Moral Order. But this book is filled with treasurer for those who have the patience to sift through and find it. The moral of this story is, keep reading hard books, even if you only take in half of it (or less).

8. (Church) History
I've read a bit of church history, and really appreciate the writing from people like MacCulloch, Noll, Bebbington, Norris, but I'm going to pick Rowan Williams short book Why Study the Past. Williams argument is that Christians have more reason than anyone else to do history well, because often it's a. our own history we are dealing with, and b. we're often engaging with our brothers and sisters in Christ down through the centuries. He also offers some helpful analysis of key historical moments, like the the reformation and the early church. An honourable mention goes to Philip Jenkins 'The Lost History of Christianity'.

9. Biography
I wish I read more biographies than I do. J.C. Ryle has some great little biographies on the leaders in the great awakening in England. But a biography I love and cherish is Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cranmer: A Life. This is probably the definitive history on England's reformer, and offers great insight not just into this tumultuous period of history, but also into this great man of faith.

10. Evangelism
One of the best books going here is John Dickson's Promoting the Gospel. But I'm going to pick John Chapman's Know and Tell the Gospel because it really is a quite simple book to read, and for the sake of sentimentality (this was the first Christian book I owned). Chapman has been greatly gifted as an evangelist, and has some wonderful insights. The only thing is that it might be quite dated now (the book is over 20 years old and Chapman himself was born in 1930) so for something more relevant to today read Dickson's book.

11. Prayer
This might sound weird, but as a kid in church, I found An Australian Prayer Book and the whole tradition behind (i.e. the BCP) really helpful for my prayers. (Reading the preface to both of these books helped too). It's Trinitarian and Chistological depth shouldn't be underestimated. Although being full of set, formal, liturgical prayers, I know how to pray to the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit because of it. It modeled prayer for me, and gave me a vocabulary to use in prayer.

Whoa, what an exercise. That took longer than I expected. I've already tagged my five, and well done to Byron, Chris, Steve, Duncan and Michael who've completed the meme (also Sam, Joe and Paul). Looking at this list makes we want to read more books by dead people. I might go do that.

Read The Bible II

More from Oliver O'Donovan's latest lecture, The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice:

“No collective spiritual exercise, no sacrament, no act of praise or prayer is so primary to the catholic identity of the church gathered as the reading and recitation of Scripture. It is the nuclear core. When Paul instructed his letters to be passed from church to church and read, it was the badge of the local church’s catholic identity. This is not to devalue preaching, praise, prayer, let alone sacramental act; these all find their authorisation in reading. As we know from St Thomas Aquinas, the act of breaking bread and sharing wine is not a Eucharist unless the narrative of the institution at the Last Supper is read.”

This reminds me of something Ian Powell said in a talk several years ago. The most important thing we do at church (besides meet with Jesus) isn't the music, or the supper, or even the sermon. The most important thing we do is to hear God's word. So pay attention.

But here's a question. We read far less of the scriptures in church then our brothers and sisters did a 100 years ago. And it seems as though many Christians today read far less of the bible then they would have a 100 years ago, even a generation ago. Is there any connection between the two?

Read the Bible

"The practices that acknowledge the authority of Scripture in the church arm it against the greatest danger of a culture that declares itself “post-modern”, the loss of a sense of difference between image and reality. Let us follow the lead given us, then, by the demand that the Bible be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed - in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading." - Oliver O'Donovan

If you haven't read Oliver O'Donovans speech 'The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice' make sure you do. Given at the end of April 2009 at the launch of his new book, it is a reflection on the Jerusalem Declaration's statement on scripture that: We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all thungs necessary fro salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached. taught and obeyed in its plain and canoical sense, respectful of the church's historic and consensual reading.

What does it look like to be respectful of the church's historic and consensual reading? Anyway, I found this comment sobering:

"Fifty years ago Stephen Neill, in identifying the elements that characterized Anglican Christianity, named as the first of these “the biblical quality by which the whole warp and woof of Anglican life is held together...The Anglican Churches read more of the Bible to the faithful than any other group of Churches. The Bible is put into the hands of the layman; he is encouraged to read it, to ponder it, to fashion his life according to it.” That these words would be wholly impossible to write today ought to sober us."

O'Donovan on resurrection

In proclaiming the resurrection of Christ, the apostles proclaimed also the resurrection of mankind in Christ; and in proclaiming the resurrection of mankind, the proclaimed the renewal of all creation with him. The resurrection of Christ in isolation from mankind would not be a gospel message. The resurrection of mankind apart from apart from creation would be a gospel of a sort, but of a purely Gnostic and world-denying sort which is far from the gospel that the apostles actually preached.[…] So the resurrection of Christ directs our attention back to the creation which it vindicates.

- Oliver O'Donovan. Quoted by Rob Forsyth, AnCon 1998 "Resurrection - the dawning of hope...".

"Dual authority"

"Jesus proclaimed the 'fulfilling of the time' which had brought the 'Kingdom of God near' (Mark 3:15). The problem with the question - which continues to be discussed and answered today in terms very little different from those used by the church Fathers - whether the kingdom which fulfilled Israel's time was a 'political' or a 'spiritual' one is that it treats the terms 'political' and 'spiritual' as known quantities, As though the competing answers, 'political', 'spiritual', or 'both political and spiritual' could make us wiser, when in fact we need to know what the alternatives posed by the question could mean! Political theology must explore the meaning of the alternatives and show why the question, though of fundamental importance, could never be given a straightforward answer. For the terms 'political' and 'spiritual' take us to the very substance of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, which spans the two. We have to let ourselves be instructed, even surprised, by what each of them contains: to rediscover politics not as a self-enclosed field by human endeavour but as the theatre of the divine self-disclosure; to rediscover God as the one who exercises rule.
Yet, as in speaking of the Incarnation itself, we cannot affirm the hypostatic union without the two natures, so with the Kingdom of God we cannot conceive the henosis of political and spiritual without the duality of the two terms held together in it. That is why those who have asserted that a conception of Two Kingdoms is fundamental to Christian political thought have spoken truly, though at great risk of distorting the truth if they simply leave it at that. The unity of the kingdoms, we may say, is the heart of the Gospel, their duality is the pericardium. Proclaiming the unity of God's rule in Christ is the task of Christian witness; understanding the duality is the chief assistance rendered by Christian reflection."

- Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, p. 82.