Advent: The Trees Are Burning

About ten years ago I read about two-thirds of the Miles Franklin winning Australian novel Eucalyptus. The fact that I did not complete the novel says more about me than it does about the book. I had neither the patience, nor the discipline, to handle Murray Bail's mythic imagining of the Australian story and his opulent descriptions of every kind of eucalyptus trees.

Nevertheless, for the past decade I have been enchanted with the thought of planting and tending to trees. It is hard to surpass these wild and magnificent creatures. Whenever I pass through Canberra now, no visit is complete without some time spend wandering the forests and meadows of the National Arboretum. My imagination turns from Bail's Holland and Mr Cave to Tolkien's Ents - the shepherds of the forest - who protected the woodlands from the perils of Middle-earth. My mind turns too to a beguiling account of King Solomon in the Bible. Renowned for his wisdom and 'breadth of understanding as vast as the sand on the seashore', Solomon is a man who 'would speak of trees' - from the greatest pine to the smallest shrub. There's something Edenic, even Adamic, about this scene in 1 Kings. Solomon's wisdom consists not only in his compositions of proverbs, songs, poetry, and pithy little sayings. He knew and accounted of animals, birds, reptiles, fish, and trees.

What staggers me whenever I walk among the trees is the sheer vastness of type and kind. I surely would have been content with 10-20 species I think to myself. The fact that there is somewhere between 60,000-100,000 different species on the planet seems a little gratuitous. It is this abundance of arboreal life which sustains life.

We easily forget how bound our lives are to trees. Not only do I mean existentially; but scientifically and culturally too. From the air we breath to the paper we write on, from the shade we sit in to the desks we sit at, from the leaves we admire to the logs we burn on the fire; our lives are connected to the gums, cedars, and palms which cover this planet. Without each other we cannot be ourselves. And let's not be so anthropecene for a moment. It is not only us, but birds, insects, mammals, soil, and other plants which depend on trees too.

In the state where I live, since Semptember this year, almost 3 million hectares of land have been burnt and con summed by fire. We can put a number on some of the devastation these fires have wrought on human life. So far there have been six fatalities. 724 homes destroyed. 276 homes damaged. What's harder to quantify is the impact on the flora and fauna. Who knows how many trees have been lost?

At first that may not seem so significant for an ecosystem which for at least 60,000 years had been cultivated by fire. But after 23 decades of reshaping and re imagining the Australian landscape and climate, the species which have made this island continent their home for millenia appear to have reached breaking point.

Today it was revealed that a quarter of eucalyptus trees are threatened by extinction. It's not just this years fires (though they have burnt much of our local eucalyptus forests); its urbanisation and agriculture which have lead to this predicament. Personally, having grown up among gum trees (watching the lorikeets and parrots feed on their flowers in February each year), and having swept up more than my fair share of gum leaves, it's hard to imagine life in Australia without this endemic species. Their loss would be a loss for us all.

As I write this, my family is currently observing the season of Advent. It's a season which I have written about often before. We prepare ourselves for Christmas by a. joining Israel in their longing for an end to exile and God to come; and thereby looking to the time when Jesus will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And as my city is choking on smoke, and I find charred leaves in my yard - carried over 60kms by the winds from the nearest fires - I can't help but reflect on trees in the Bible. The are, literally and figuratively, a gift to be received and delighted in. They are a symbol of pride and an object of destruction. They are a depiction of hope for Israel and the nations of the world. They are the personification of obedience and hearing God's word. They are twisted and ruined, so that a tree bears God's Son to his death. They are sign of life, bearing healing in their leaves for all the world. The desire for everyone to sit under their own vine and fig tree is the desire of advent. The story of trees in the Bible weaves together the strands of beauty, justice, expectation, and salvation which make up the advent tapestry.

So what might advent offer us during the current climate and fire crisis? What might advent offer us in the midst of drought and heat waves? While some of my ecclesiastical peers would see the current conflagration to be a proleptic taste of the fire that is to come, the hope of advent is not annihilation but restoration. In one of my favourite quotes from French theologian John Calvin, we are told that: 'no part of the universe is untouched by the longing with which everything in this world aspires to the hope of resurrection.' Advent teaches us to long for and to live in light of the hope of the resurrection. We look for the one who came at Christmas to come again to mend, heal, restore, and remake his world. And that should give us reason to pause and question the tone and tenor of our lives. God made a world which was not only ontologically good and aesthetically good, but was hospitable for us and the conditions which we need in order to flourish. It was good for us. Faced then by the challenges of environmental degradation, perhaps we should attend to the Bible's diagnosis of the human condition: the voracious, intense, obsessive, and destructive misappropriation of God's good gifts in creation.

But if advent is a season for attuning our desires to the desire of the nations, than that will lead us away from the desire to grasp after and consume the natural resources we see around us. In other words, it should lead us in our pneumatic transformation towards becoming more truly human, and away from the sins and pride which facilitates the doom of our fellow creatures.

As we await the redemption of all things at God’s hand, advent trains us to deal with our disappointment and discontent with our governments. Advent announces that time is short for all secular authority. There will come a time when queens and presidents, prime ministers and premiers will be held to account their dispensing of justice and provision of peace as they lay down their authority before the lamb who was slain. John's apocalypse warns us that God hates those who destroy the earth (Revelation 11.18).

Woe then to governments that neglect their duties to preserve life.
Woe to governments that hide behind a smokescreen of science denials and obsfuscation.
Woe to those governments that would suppress the reality of things.

That will be held accountable for their lies, spin, and sloth.

So in this season of advent, as the smoke clings to our clothes and our skin, and the trees perish, advent teaches us to mourn, to lament, to pray, and to look for God's blessing on all the creatures he has made.

Let not the trees and animals suffer on the altar of human pride and vain glory.

In a lecture he gave in York several years ago, Rowan William addressed what it look like for us to co-exist with the flora and fauna of the world:

In Genesis, humanity is given the task of 'cultivating' the garden of Eden: we are not left simply to observe or stand back, but are endowed with the responsibility to preserve and direct the powers of nature.  In this process, we become more fully and joyfully who and what we are – as St Augustine memorably says, commenting on this passage: there is a joy, he says, in the 'experiencing of the powers of nature'. Our own fulfilment is bound up with the work of conserving and focusing those powers, and the exercise of this work is meant to be one of the things that holds us in Paradise and makes it possible to resist temptation.  The implication is that an attitude to work which regards the powers of nature as simply a threat to be overcome is best seen as an effect of the Fall, a sign of alienation.  And, as the monastic scholar Aelred Squire, points out (Asking the Fathers, p.92), this insight of Augustine, quoted by Thomas Aquinas, is echoed by Aquinas himself in another passage where he describes humanity as having a share in the working of divine Providence because it has the task of using its reasoning powers to provide for self and others (aliis, which can mean both persons and things).  In other words, the human task is to draw out potential treasures in the powers of nature and so to realise the convergent process of humanity and nature discovering in collaboration what they can become.  The 'redemption' of people and material life in general is not a matter of resigning from the business of labour and of transformation – as if we could – but the search for a form of action that will preserve and nourish an interconnected development of humanity and its environment.  In some contexts, this will be the deliberate protection of the environment from harm: in a world where exploitative and aggressive behaviour is commonplace, one of the 'providential' tasks of human beings must be to limit damage and to secure space for the natural order to exist unharmed.  In others, the question is rather how to use the natural order for the sake of human nourishment and security without pillaging its resources and so damaging its inner mechanisms for self-healing or self-correction.  In both, the fundamental requirement is to discern enough of what the processes of nature truly are to be able to engage intelligently with them. 

- Rowan Williams, Renewing the Face of the Earth: Human Responsibility and the Environment, 2003.

The Word of God is not Bound

"The word of God is not bound. God speaks, and the world is made; God speaks and the world is remade by the Word Incarnate. And our human speaking struggles to keep up. We need, not human words that will decisively capture what the Word of God has done and is doing, but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the Word's light has been made manifest. It is no accident that the Gospel which most unequivocally identifies Jesus as the Word made flesh is the Gospel most characterised by this same circling, hovering, recapitulatory style, as if nothing in human language could ever be a 'last' word. 'The world itself could not contain the books that should be written' says the Fourth Evangelist, resigning himself to finishing a Gospel that is in fact never finishable in human terms." - Rowan Williams, The Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer - Sermon at Service to Commemorate the 450th Anniversary

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.

A Sign of God's Purpose

An excerpt from a most excellent sermon Archbishop Rowan Williams gave on Sunday in Harare, Zimbawe. Worth checking out:

"This Eucharist is the sign of God's purpose for all of us; it is a feast in which all are fed with Christ's new life, in which there is no distinction of race, tribe or party. In this community there can be no place for violence or for retaliation: we stand together, sinners in need of grace, proclaiming to the world that there is room at God's table for all people equally. What the Church has to say to the society around it, whether here or in Britain, is not to advance a political programme but to point to the fact of this new creation, this fellowship of justice and joy, this universal feast... The message we want to send from this Eucharistic celebration is that we do not have to live like that – in terror, in bloodshed. God has given us another way. He has opened a door of possibility that no-one can shut. He has announced that he will welcome all to the marriage feast of his Son – and so we see that all, even our bitterest enemies, still have a place in his peace if they will only turn and be saved. Did you hear what St Paul said in today's epistle? 'Fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are noble, right, pure, lovely and honourable.' We need to feed ourselves and most especially to feed our young people with such things, to hold before us that great new possibility opened up by God for our minds to be transformed, to be excited not by the false thrills of violence and bloody conflict, by the overheated language of party conflict, but by the hope of joy and reconciliation." - Rowan Williams

Jesus Stands Over the Church

“There is at Easter no Christ who simply seals our righteousness and innocence, no guarantor of our status, and so no ideological cross. Jesus is alive, he is there to be encountered again, and so his personal identity remains; which means that his cross is his, not ours, part of the history of a person who obstinately stands over against us and will not be painlessly assimilated into our own memories.” – Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, pp. 71-72.

Again, h/t Michael

New Series: 20 Centuries in 20 Posts

An Introduction
We are on the cusp of three third millennia since Jesus Christ walked the face of this earth. Time has marched on, and what once was has been separated from us by the years and centuries that have past.

Yet the past continues to beckon us. The Christian claim is that in this particular person the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. We believe that through his life, death and resurrection we can know God. Although separated by time and space, the past calls us because to this one man every tongue will confess that he is Lord.

We also believe that God is at work now in the community that arose in response to him. We believe that the church is the new humanity in embryo, the people of the ascended and reigning Christ Jesus.

A central part of the Christian confession has been the “catholic and apostolic church.” Yet from my own experience we struggle with the church. For many in the Western tradition, the church is a tool, a resource. Rather than being the body of Christ, the bulwark of truth, the family of faith, the church is like a loose collection of Jesus’ Facebook friends. So it comes as no surprise that within my own context that we also struggle in being able to tell the story of the church. A large number of Church history books are published every year – most of them focused on retelling particular segments from the church’s life. But I suggest that we find it difficult in being able to coherently (and interestingly) tell the 20 centuries of church history.

Church history matters because the church matters. So in the coming weeks hebel will attempt to grasp the bull by the horns and tell 20 centuries of church history in 20 posts. Church history is far more diverse and complex than what I’ll be able to do. 20 Centuries in 20 Posts is not an attempt to be the definitive guide to church history; instead I intend it as a means to provoke further study and reflection.

What I aim to do in 20 Centuries in 20 Posts is to tell the narrative of the church’s life in a way that takes seriously our belief in the “catholic and apostolic church”. So much church history that is published is western in focus; it assumes the move from Palestine to the Vatican and St Paul’s was a natural historical progression. 20 Centuries in 20 Posts will attempt to tell the church’s story giving due regards to the major branches of the church: Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant/Reformed. I want to tell history that is coherent as well as accessible and interesting. I will assume no prior knowledge, but I will leave you to do further research for yourself. And I want to be generous and gracious in my interactions with the past, knowing that it’s not historical facts and figures I’m dealing with but brothers and sisters in the Lord.

According to Rowan Williams the purpose of historical study is to question and also be questioned by the past.

“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.” - Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?

As we shall see, the Christian past belongs to the Christian present.

On the Need for Science to be Human

"Science needs to remain human in that sense, to be self-aware of itself as human science, aware of incompleteness, aware of the joy of non-fulfilment. And at that level at least, science is bound to be operating with an image of humanity itself as a life form attuned to truth and to growth. Metaphysics, perhaps, or even worse, faith; and yet it is hard to see how the real life of the scientific enterprise can be sustained without that image of what is properly and joyfully and fulfillingly human. Recognised or not, the resonance of this with the life of faith is worth noting. Faith, our Christian faith, presupposes that we are indeed as human beings attuned to truth and to growth, made by a God whose love has designed us for joy, and discovering that this directedness towards joy mysteriously comes alive when we look into the living truth, the living wisdom, of the face of a Christ who drives us back again and again to question ourselves so that we stay alive."

- Rowan Williams, A Homily for the 350th Anniversary of the Royal Society.

Free for Their Full Humanity

Rowan Williams recently had this to say on the foundation of CMS:

"Those who founded the [Church Missionary] Society were close to those who fought against the slave trade in the British Empire and also those who were working for better conditions for working people in England. They were concerned, troubled and angry that working people in England and slaves in the British Empire could not truly experience their own full humanity. And so their missionary activity was always connected with the concern to set people free for their full humanity." - Rowan Williams

The Eclectic Society was a remarkable group of men. They founded CMS, fought for better working conditions in Great Britain, fought against the slave trade in the British Empire, and ensured a Christian chaplaincy to the new colony in New South Wales. They wanted to liberate people from a life that was thoroughly dehumanizing. But they also had a deeper motivation: to see the Christian faith spread and for people to know real humanity, the "measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph 4.13).

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.

Williams on the Ascension

Following on from yesterday's post, here is a quote from Rowan Williams on the ascension:

"This is the transition that Ascension Day marks … it’s the moment when Jesus ‘goes away’, stops being an object we concentrate on in itself, and yet becomes more deeply and permanently present: ‘I am with you always, to the end of time.’ He is with us as the light we see by; we see the world in a new way because we see it through him, see it with his eyes." - Rowan Williams, Open to Judgement, p 82.

h/t Chris Swann who has some excellent comments related to this quote.

Belonging to the State

"In the accounts of the Christian martyrs, especially from the Second Century, one repeatedly comes up against one particular moment when Christians are challenged as to whether they will take part in religious veneration of the Emperor. It is the crucial question. The martyrs are the people who say they cannot. But in some of the accounts of martyrdom, there is a little bit more to it than that.One text, which comes from North Africa, in the mid-Second Century, depicts the Christians being tried in court as saying that they were perfectly prepared to pray for the Emperor, but not to him. One of them says, 'We pray for the Emperor. We pay our taxes.' In other words, this Christian was saying, we regard ourselves as loyal to the state and we take part in the processes that make the state work and, what is more, we pray for the good of the state; what we will not do is regard the state as sacred in itself.

This was seen, quite rightly, as an extremely subversive idea. It suggested that individuals, even slaves, could negotiate their relationships with the state, in some degree: they were not obliged to regard it as holy; there was another realm in which decisions might be taken and values and priorities fixed. That tension is reflected in the language that the Church used about itself.The early Christian community called itself an Ecclesia, using for itself the word normally used for an assembly of citizens in an ancient city, the assembly that reflected on public matters and took decisions together, so that, in effect, when the martyrs appear before their Roman judges, they stand for a citizens' assembly over against a Holy Empire.

Although that does not instantly create a new kind of Christian politics, it does create a very unsettling element within Roman society. Here are people claiming that, in some area of their lives, they belong outside the holy boundaries of the state and the Empire.Therefore the state begins to be seen not as a sacred comprehensive system, but as a mechanism for getting things done. The martyrs I referred to a few minutes ago promised to pay their taxes, because that makes society work, but that is the level at which their loyalty is engaged. Their deepest belonging is with the community who are citizens of some other kingdom." - Rowan Williams, Early Christianity & Today: Some Shared Questions, 2008 Gresham College Lecture.

What would it look like today for Christians to assert their identity as being outside the State whilst at the same time sustaining the State? And surely this would differ from country to country: The French Christian struggling under the weight of rigid secularism would have different issues to an American and America's 'Manifest Destiny' or a Chinese Christian where everything is suppressed for the glory of the state, or a Christian in a Muslim country where the whole state is under sharia law. And what if you were a Japanese Christian and had to sing a national anthem that praised the Emperor as a god? Pray for those around the world who live out the reality of this question every day.

The Church is Bigger Than You Think II: Jesus is the Church

“[W]here Jesus is, there is the Church; the Church as the assembly of those who are finding their relationships, their lives transfigured by the presence of Jesus. Church is the event of Jesus’ presence with its effect of gathering people around him and making them see one another differently as they see Him. The church is the immediate affect of Jesus. And hence St Paul can write about the new creation which happens when people are drawn into fellowship, drawn into relationship with the risen Jesus and encourages us therefore to think that the church itself is the beginning of the new creation.

It is not an institution designed to further a programme, not an association of people who happen to have the same ideas, but the beginning of God’s reclaiming of the territory of human life and not just human life either, God’s reclaiming of creation as his own and God pouring into creation of his saving and transfiguring power so that the world, human and non human will once again show radiantly who and what he is as God…The church is what happens when Jesus is there, there received and recognised.

- Rowan Williams, keynote address Mission Shaped Church Conference, June 2004.

Jesus in himself constitutes the church. Church is not what we do. It is where Jesus is present. Not that he is bodily present with us. However, Jesus is present with us now both Verbally and Spiritually:

"In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory." Ephesians 1.13-14. See also the 'in Christ' language in 1.3-12 and 2.12-16.

Jesus Christ is the Church - made present through the Word and Spirit. It is in him that we find our identity as the church: chosen in Christ, adopted God's children through Christ, redemption through his blood, knowledge of the mystery of God's will (for Jews and Gentiles), and obtaining an inheritance. So that in Jesus the church (the covenantal family of Jews and Gentiles) is now one new humanity. We are one body, with many parts, but connected to the one whole, which is the body of Christ.

Our church assembly is important. But we are all connected to each other and united together in Christ by faith. And where is, there is the church.

Part I

'Jesus is my Boyfriend'

I've found something that Rowan Williams and Mark Driscoll (from the very little that I've read) agree on. Williams, that a good deal of twentieth century theology has been characterised by bewilderment and agnosticism about the figure of Jesus, sitting next to a hugely popular devotional 'idiom' that s uncomplicatedly focused on the worship of Jesus.

"The late twentieth century has witnessed an extraordinary explosion of devotional song, whose popularity seems to cross an unprecedented range of cultural and linguistic boundaries; in a way curiously reminiscent of the Middle Ages, there is now an international language for worship - not literally a single tongue, but a strongly unified style. Its roots are evangelical and charismatic, but it has conquered great tracks of the Roman Catholic world as well. Some of it, perhaps much of it, has a solid theological basis, and can be strongly evocative of the paradoxes of 'meekness and majesty' (to allude to the refrain of a well-known example); much of it is utterly unadorned and often deeply moving adoration of Jesus. But there is a disquieting element in a good deal of this literature.; it is not just that devotion to Jesus can often be expressed in a way that detaches it from the Trinitarian dynamic of the New Testament, it is also that the erotic idiom of medieval and Counter-Reformation spirituality can reappear with fewer checks and nuances than in early centuries. Jesus as object of loving devotion can slip into Jesus as fantasy partner in a dream of emotional fulfillment. To avoid sentimental solipism, there needs to be either a strong and self-critical theological environment or (which is often the same thing in other guises) a clear orientation to the world's needs and the action of Chris in the whole social and material environment."

Similarly, in The Radical Reformission, Driscoll talks about being a members of churches (pre Mars Hill) where the minister was a manly man (i.e. a former NFL star), who taught the Bible 'verse by verse' and didn't make Driscoll view Jesus like a life long prom date.

Can you think of any songs that have the problem Williams speaks of? Or can you think of any songs that meet the standards of the Archbishop? Write and let me know.

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.

Vox Populi Vox Dei

given all the uproar over Rowan William's "sharia lecture" you may find this lecture given last night at the London Economics School (for the 'Yes Minister' fans) by Tom Wright very interesting.

Rowan Williams on the State

"The modern state needs a robust independent tradition of moral perception with which to engage. Left to itself, it cannot generate the self-critical energy that brings about change – change, that is, for the sake of some positive human ideal. As a guarantor of security, internal and external, and increasingly as a broker and provider of people’s ‘market’ requirements, it is not equipped to work as moral forum. The increasing assimilation of the state, in ways that would have startled Wilberforce’s contemporaries, to the provider of goods demanded by a population means that the primary question is likely to be about the means of provision rather than the ideology cal desirability of what is demanded. Quite understandably, the experience of command economies in the twentieth century and the appalling oppressiveness of systems that have had clear definitions of ideological desirability have strengthened the case for a severely neutral state apparatus and have reinforced the growth of the ‘market state’. But this leaves it with a set of questions about its moral legitimacy that cannot be left indefinitely ignored."

Rowan Williams

Anglicanism 3

Williams once again on Anglican Identity:

"The different components in our heritage can, up to a point, flourish in isolation from each other. But any one of them pursued on its own would lead in a direction ultimately outside historic Anglicanism The reformed concern may lead towards a looser form of ministerial order and a stronger emphasis on the sole, unmediated authority of the Bible. The catholic concern may lead to a high doctrine of visible and structural unification of the ordained ministry around a focal point. The cultural and intellectual concern may lead to a style of Christian life aimed at giving spiritual depth to the general shape of the culture around and de-emphasising revelation and history. Pursued far enough in isolation, each of these would lead to a different place – to strict evangelical Protestantism, to Roman Catholicism, to religious liberalism. To accept that each of these has a place in the church’s life and that they need each other means that the enthusiasts for each aspect have to be prepared to live with certain tensions or even sacrifices – with a tradition of being positive about a responsible critical approach to Scripture, with the anomalies of a historic ministry not universally recognised in the Catholic world, with limits on the degree of adjustment to the culture and its habits that is thought possible or acceptable."

I know one theo-blogger doesn't consider just posting quotes to be blogging, but here you go.

Rowan Williams on Church

Here are some quotes Doctor Williams I stumbled across by on Church,...enjoy.

"The Church claims to be the most comprehensive human society there is - the new human race in embryo. And it claims this because of its belief that it is established not by any human process grounded in and limited by events, cultures and so on, but by God's activity."- Rowan Williams

"Where Jesus is, there is the Church; the Church is the event of Jesus’ presence with its effect of gathering people around him and making them see one another differently as they see him." - Rowan Williams



5 points if you can name the website that launched the bear.