Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A Sermon for the Season

Once I have finished with my finals here at Duke it is my earnest intention to resume furnishing this blog with posts that are both original to it and of a less exclusively theological nature. Until that time, however, here is a Christmas Eve sermon that was part of the final project in my preaching class. This sermon was conceived as the culmination of an Advent sermon series on the theme "Learning to Long for Jesus;" each Sunday's sermon was titled by a different line from "O Come O Come Immanuel," and each service would include a reading from the Song of Songs. If I have not disgusted Origen I have done well.

“Rejoice! Rejoice!”

Song of Songs 8:1-2, 6-7; Luke 2:1-20

Here at First UMC we have been learning this season of Advent how to long for Jesus and every week in these four Sundays of waiting for the birth of Christ we have read from the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs. As you heard me say when I read the scripture, the poetry of this book has been always understood in the tradition of the church to speak of the love between God and his people. These are the words we can turn to as models for our own love of God and as assurances of his love for us, as testaments to its richness and passion. For it is not a love that is measured or restrained or controlled or a love that holds anything back. And likewise the love of the Bride, our model, whose words we heard read this evening, is neither lukewarm nor cautious, but gives recklessly of itself all it has to her Husband, our God.

Yet the love of the Bride is a love that we so often, all too often cannot feel. The love of this Song of Songs is a love we all would choose, a love we would all receive eagerly, and a love we would all happily, joyously give if we could only feel it truly in our hearts. For it is the love we know would quench that longing at the foundation of all our longings, the longing to love God and the longing to be loved by him. The love of God—how we long to have it! How we long to be able to give him our love! How we long to know surely that he loves us!

For it seems to us, doesn’t it, that there could be no love between this God and us. The differences are too vast, we are so small, our troubles are so small, our needs, our wants, our hopes, joys, disappointments are so small and he is God, the Maker of all that is, the Ruler of all that is, the One, so we are told, to whom the prayers of all the world go up. What time would he have to love us? What compassion could he have for people who go through commutes and reports and e-mails, who take the kids to piano lessons and then sit down for a basketball game at night, when he holds the galaxies in his right hand and all infinity in his left? What place could there be in that lofty heart for the love of us? And how could we love him? What joys would we share with one who is beyond all joy, what would we talk about with one who is ineffably beyond all we could ever think or say or do?

It is a convenient and helpful disappointment when we console ourselves and say that God is so far, so infinitely far above us and beyond us that there could never be love between us. It is a convenient disappointment because it rationalizes our distress, builds a cage in our minds for our longing so that it cannot disturb us or trouble the smooth schedule of our lives. And once we have decided there is no hope of sharing love with God, once we have squared ourselves (as we think) to the reality of things, it is so easy to pretend that old desire is no longer there, that it has gone off, that it has faded from our hearts. It is easy to pretend we have reached maturity, when we learn to say and think that God could never love us, that it would not be prudent for us to fall in love with God. We learn to live effectively, if not well, by assuring ourselves every hour that the distance is too great and the difference is too great, that God is up there and I am down here and love cannot pass the breadth of our separation.

It is a denial the mind can make easily, but which the heart will always resent. Could there be some way, we will always ask. God, we say, could there be some way? Or, like this:
“O that you were like a brother to me,
Who nursed at my mother’s breast!
If I met you outside I would kiss you,
And no one would despise me.
I would lead you and bring you
Into the house of my mother,
And into the chamber of the one who bore me.
I would give you spiced wine to drink,
The juice of my pomegranates.”

They would deride me on the street if I ran up to him and kissed him, if I embraced the God of all like that I would be laughed at. They would say to me “Don’t you know who he is?” And I fear that I would say it too, even to myself. But O that were my brother! O then I would run up to him and kiss him and embrace him and there would be not a whisper of disapproval, then I could be with him and no one would think a thing of it. Then love between us would be easy and natural; then I could love him and not feel as though I shouldn’t. Then I could give him the gifts that I have always wanted to give him, then I would bring him into my mother’s house—O that he were my brother! O that there was a way that I could love him, that all the boundaries and distances and differences could fall away and I could feel his love and feel within myself real love for him.

O that he were my brother! It is a wish we never lose no matter how we try to cloak it and deny it, no matter how we try to keep it hidden away where others cannot see it, where we ourselves may sometimes forget that it is there. And how else could we live with this desire smoldering within forever within us if we did not try by every means to smother it with resignation and the set jaw of despair? So we teach ourselves and we are taught that he can never be our brother, that the love we want so fiercely could never be. We train ourselves to stop longing for that love, to stop longing for his love, to stop longing to be able to love him. “O that he were my brother!” No, no, we learn to laugh that off. “O that I could kiss him in the street, that I could bring him into my mother’s house!” But no, I cannot do that. There is too much distance between my heart and God’s—I have never heard him really say he loved me, and I, however much I want to love him I cannot. O that he were my brother! O that he were my brother!

And if he were our brother, would we even know how to kiss him? If we suddenly found that all this crippling distance were collapsed, could we bring ourselves to lead him to our mother’s house, would we be ready to offer him the juice of our pomegranates? Or would we let him pass, and convince ourselves that it was nothing more than our imagination? And if we, in a moment of surprising courage, had the strength to embrace him when we saw him, had the strength to ignore our long-developed reflexes of denial, would it even then be long before old habits took up their places again, and we turned ourselves to a new effort of forgetting and denying? But O that he were my brother! O that he were!

I hardly think the shepherds expected they would see their God or that a chorus of angels would announce especially to them that a Savior had been born in Bethlehem of Judah. For surely the announcements of God are not given to shepherds, to men whose labor is among the beasts. No, surely if God would speak to anyone, he would speak to the men who work with armies and not animals, the men who balance the wealth of nations and whose voices are heard in the Senates and Parliaments of the earth. There could be no message from an angel to a shepherd because what could God say to a shepherd, what could God feel for a shepherd? And what would a shepherd do with God? All he knows are sheep. But the angels spoke and they said to the shepherds “These are glad tidings!” And the shepherds could not say otherwise, for they ran into town and they found the child and told his parents all the angel had said. And Mary, who had loved the child nine months, treasured all of it in her heart, the Bible tells us. For those hours the shepherds had forgotten it was foolish to think you could love God or that God could extend his love to you. Maybe one of them forgot so well that he took the baby in his arms awhile, while Mary stood there by him all full of love, love for her child, her son, and love for that foolish shepherd because he too, in that moment, loved her child.

But the shepherds left. The shepherds left and Luke tells us that they praised God for what they had seen and heard. For a night in December they allowed themselves to think they could have love for God, and for that evening they did not chide themselves when they felt that God loved them. But soon they were back to assuring themselves that such feelings are more wishes than reality, that the distance between a shepherd and God cannot be bridged, that he is so far from us that there is no way we could really love him, that we are so different from him that he would never love us ever in return. Perhaps some thirty years later one of the shepherds would let this wishful longing get the better of him again, and he would go to see a man who was healing the sick and preaching the kingdom of God. Perhaps another put his longing up forever and shouted with the crowd to crucify that man who dared to claim he was God’s Son. But most of them, I guess, like most of us, went on about their lives and only sometimes, when their guard was down, would find themselves crying “O that he were my brother!” O that he were a person I could love! O that I were to him and he to me that there could be love between us! O that he were my brother and I would embrace him and eat with him in my mother’s house! Then I could make him a part of my life and he would make me a part of his—O that he were my brother! O that there could be love between us! I would give anything that I could love him, and if a man offered me all the wealth of his house for that love I would utterly scorn him.

O that he were my brother! O that he were my son! He was Mary’s son. And when she felt him stirring about inside her, she loved him, and she loved him, O how she loved him when she held him in her arms that first time, her child, her son. And there was nothing feigned about that love, nothing false, nothing inauthentic or insincere about that mother’s love for her baby and her God. And Joseph loved him when he first put his hand upon the belly of his beloved, and he loved him when he set him in the manger, the son of the one whom he loved and the Son of his God. Here was God and nothing could stop Joseph and Mary from loving him; here was love from God and no one could have convinced them what they felt was not true.

And what is the distance of a thousand years or a thousand miles when the distance has been bridged between the ineffable majesty of God and those first coughs and cries of a newborn infant? And what does it matter that he is not here to shake your hand when you know that his face was once a face that human eyes could see, and that his face will be seen again? Why shall we not greet him in the streets of our lives with the kisses of our souls, why shall we not take him into our homes to treat him lovingly? O that he were my brother!—we have cried it, we have shouted it and wept it, but he is! He is our brother and he is ours to love and he has for us a love which is strong as death, as fierce as the grave, many waters cannot quench his love, nor can floods drown it. He is our brother and he calls from us that love we have been hiding all our lives, that love we were taught was foolish. But he is born among us and he is here for love, and though I cannot promise if you love him there will not still be those who think you are foolish, I can tell you they will only think so because they do not know what we know, that he is our brother, that we may love him, and he may love us. We know he is our brother because we have all heard tonight the story of Mary’s boy in Bethlehem! We know he is our brother and let us take him into our mother’s house and cherish him this Christmas, for we know that the Man who was born of Mary is a God that we may love. Rejoice! Rejoice! These are good tidings of great joy. Amen.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Theses on Scripture

1. Scripture is Scripture because it testifies to to the God who is in Jesus Christ. In this way the Old and New Testaments are the same.

2. The New Testament, in testifying to Jesus Christ, testifies also that the Old Testament is holy scripture, given for our instruction and encouragement. Nothing in Scripture testifies that the New Testament is scripture. Thus it would appear that the Old Testament is more authoritative than the New Testament, because the New Testament defers to the Old in making its testimony about Jesus, while the Old Testament makes its testimony without deferring to the New.

3. Yet the New Testament is generally considered normative for how we are to understand the Old Testament. It would then appear that the New Testament has priority, since we cannot grasp the meaning of the Old Testament without it.

4. The best way of understanding the relation between the Testaments is to think of the Transfiguration. Jesus is seen speaking with Moses and Elijah, that is, conversing with the Law and the Prophets, which are the Old Testament. Peter, James, and John, the New Testament, see this and are amazed.

5. In the Transfiguration, Jesus is also revealed in his glory. Conversation with Moses and Elijah is the truth of Jesus' life. The life of God on earth is lived in the company of the Old Testament. The New Testament only witnesses this, it is not an active part of it.

6. Yet precisely because the Old Testament is more intimate with Jesus it is less able to show us what that intimacy means. Moses and Elijah cannot stand outside of themselves to tell us about the conversation they are having with Jesus, but the Apostles, who are outside the conversation, can tell us about it. Yet the fact remains that it is Moses and Elijah who speak with Jesus and not the Apostles.

7. If the Old Testament is taken without the New, we hear all that Moses and Elijah say, but cannot tell who they are talking with. When the New Testament is taken without the Old, we hear the disciples speak very enthusiastically about something we cannot see.

8. Think of it this way: Jesus never engages with the New Testament, only with the Old Testament. But the New Testament recounts what he said when he engaged it.

9. If the New Testament has greater authority, it is because it gives us the words of Jesus; if the Old Testament has greater authority, it is because it was there that Jesus got his words.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

Why a sermon for Ash Wednesday, you ask? Well, because that's what I was assigned in my preaching class.

A Sermon for Ash Wednesday (Judges 11:29-40)

And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, and said, “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering.”

There’s hard stuff in scripture. You heard Joel tell you earlier to rend your hearts and not your garments; and is there anything that rends hearts and this story does not rend hearts? For whom shall we rend them? For the daughter, cut off in the prime of youth? For the father, who has found himself bound by honor and piety to commit an abomination against nature? For God? For God who alone is holy, who alone is just, and who must yet receive this sickening sacrifice? For whom shall we rend our hearts; for at these words they surely must be rent.

Or perhaps we shall not rend them. Perhaps this story does not grieve you, does not move the emotions of sadness in your soul. Perhaps you are not sorrowful; perhaps you are indignant. Perhaps you are disgusted that the church which serves a God of love would present the murderer of his own child as a hero in its scriptures; that such a God would allow and accept such a sacrifice. “With what shall I come before the Lord?” cries the prophet. “Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, o man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” Can the God who delivered the only son of Abraham be the God who left the only child of Jephthah to her death?

Perhaps you were not grieved. After all, you came to church tonight to enter prayerfully into a season of repentance, a season that is hard, but a season that you know, that is comfortable and expected and familiar. You came to church tonight to prepare; the house has been cleansed of its chocolate, the television, perhaps, is unplugged—or maybe the remote has just been hidden away. You have pledged not to pick up a tabloid as you check out there at the grocery and there’s a post-it on your computer: “No Solitaire.” You have given something up because it is a season of self-denial. You came because you were ready for Lent, maybe you welcomed it, maybe you welcomed the excuse to reject something, to shun a little bit of what has power over you in this world. Or maybe you came to church without any of these plans or feelings, but you came because you knew you needed Lent and knew you wouldn’t do it on your own. But you came to church, all of you to be encouraged in these weeks of penitence and self-denial, you came to be prepared for them in solemn tones, with the dimness of candles and the mark of the ash.

But where is Jephthah’s sacrifice in all of this? You didn’t come for the book of Judges; you didn’t come for a story that was hard to comprehend, even if you came for words that are hard to follow. Preacher, you say, I came to be told about my sin; I didn’t come to hear about a man sacrificing his daughter. Preacher, I came to hear about self-denial; I didn’t come to hear about some poor girl having to give up her life like this. Preacher, I came to be warned about practicing my piety before others—I know I needed that word; my husband and my friends and my children don’t really take this season seriously, and I get holier-than-thou with them. But preacher, this is a story about a man who prays in secret and is rewarded with his daughter’s blood. Preacher! I came to be told that I am dust—I did not come to see a young woman turned to ash on an altar by her father.

And the girl has no name! She has no name, the scriptures give her no name, the author of Judges has no name for her; her father never calls her by name. How she suffered! And yet we have no name for the memory, no name to put to the face. And yet we can all see that face—we may imagine it differently—but we can all see that young daughter’s face when she said to her father, “Do to me as you said you would. If we do not keep our pledges to God, what can we keep?” But she has no name, and her mother has no name. What can we say of her lineage, but that she is Jephthah’s daughter, and that Jephthah was born in Gilead to a whore? Who can tell her generation? She has no name that we can see; and yet for her a name has been written that she alone can read. To us she has no name; we can only call her suffering, a woman of sorrows and a companion, a nameless companion of grief.

Let me tell you her name, brothers and sisters, for it is a name that is above all names, a name before which every knee shall bow on earth and in heaven and in the depths below.

Consider another story of a father who sent his child to their death. There was a man baptizing Jews in the Jordan. To all that came he said “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. Put on sackcloth and remember your sin; cover yourselves in ashes and rend your hearts.” And a man of Galilee came to this baptizer; and he baptized him. And the heavens opened over him and a dove more radiant than the angels shine came down upon his head and a voice like power and majesty itself proclaimed, “This is my son, my dear son, my only son, whom I love, Jesus, in whom I delight.” And Jesus said, “O Father, I have vowed. Let me do according to the Word that has gone out of your mouth.” And the Spirit that was a dove became a fire, and it burned in him and drove him into the wilderness and he was tempted forty days. And it drove him out among the people and he taught and he healed. And it drove him down to Jerusalem, and he was tortured and beaten and taunted and he suffered and was crucified and died and was buried.

Is this a story of fewer tears? And yet we tell it and we cling to it and hold it. And shall Jephthah’s daughter remain unknown to us, when in the face of that child of Israel we may see the sorrow of the son of Mary? Surely Jephthah should have suffered death, when he himself desired the death and the subjection and the plunder of his neighbors, and not his innocent daughter, a virgin young and pure of heart, without deceit or dissimulation in her spirit. And surely Man should bear the punishment of heaven, man the devourer of riches and races, man who prays death for his Ammonites and gives his children to destruction to appease his own desires; surely Man should bear the punishment, and not the Son of Man, a lamb without blemish, spotless and pure; in him no sin was found. Yet God gave the Ammonites into Jephthah’s hand. But in return God desired of Jephthah a soul that was already his, a child of obedience and love who was according to the flesh the daughter of Jephthah. And what wrong was there that the one who is holy should take to himself a holy child of Israel, that the one who gave the wicked Ammonites into the hand of wicked Jephthah should draw close to his bosom the daughter who said, “Do according to the word that has gone out of your mouth. Father, give God what you have promised him, even if it is my life.”

The verse says Jephthah was brought very low by his daughter; he fell to the ground, to the dust and the ashes, and cried out “Ah! My daughter, you have brought me very low. I have vowed to the Lord and I cannot go back. I vowed that I would sacrifice to my God out of thanks for my victory, for I have many things that I could give him. But he has chosen the one thing which I love before all others and said ‘give me this.’” And his daughter said, “If you have vowed, you must do it; I am ready to give up my life to the Lord. But allow me two months, for me to go into the wilderness with my companions to mourn for my youth and my purity.” And Jephthah wept and granted her those months, just more than forty days to mourn.

Tonight we are compelled as her companions to put on ashes and mourn; we go into the wilderness with the daughter of Jephthah. We mourn for ourselves, for we are of the house of Jephthah and we feel his sins upon us, the sin always lurking in our hearts that demands and asks of God and yet is fearful to give him what he asks of us; for he is asking for our lives, he is asking that what we desire most be his, and we are brought very low when he asks for it, to dust and ashes. But more than all of that we mourn for the daughter of Jephthah, for the purity of her heart and her spotless obedience, an obedience unto death. For her we mourn, that she will be led to the knife and the fire, so innocent and undeserving of death. We put on ashes to be like her in her death, her death which should by any right be ours, her death to which she freely goes, a lamb of God, a sacrifice of thanksgiving, a child of sinners giving up for them the blood of their sin. Fix your eyes upon this lamb as you mourn; as you fast and as you deny yourself this Lent, take care that in all of it the eyes of your heart are fixed upon this lamb. For it is for the lamb that we go mourning into the wilderness these months of Lent, for the lamb that we dress our faces with the ash of death, for the lamb that we keep these traditions; for there arose a custom in Israel, that every year they would remember and mourn the daughter of Jephthah. Amen.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Quotes on Textual Criticism

As something of a companion to my post last week I present here four quotes from men of acknowledged acuity on the subject of textual criticism. The first quote, from St. Jerome's commentary on Isaiah may appear a bit opaque (and I apologize for any shortcomings in my rather hurried translation), but what I find interesting about it is the highly theological methodology he applies to a problem of textual criticism. The second quote, from John Calvin, addresses directly the problem of the story of the woman caught in adultery, and consequently other passages of scripture whose provenance we may be inclined to believe is unauthentic. The last two quotes, from medievalist Frederick Klaeber and novelist James Joyce, consider, each in their own way, what the psychology must be of those who delight in cutting ancient texts up into various strata of authorship and redaction.

1. St. Jerome (commenting on Isaiah 2:22)

Rest therefore from the man whose breath is in his nostrils: for he has been considered exalted. This the Septuagint has left out and in the Greek exemplars there has been added from Origen (in Aquila's edition) with asterixes what we read in the Hebrew...Where we have said "he has been considered exalted," Aquila has translated it "in which he has been considered." The Hebrew word Bama, is either ὒψωμα, that is, "exalted," which we read both in the book of Kings and Ezekiel, or perhaps "in which," which is written with the same letters Beth (B), Mem (M), and He (H). As to the nature of their arrangement, if we wanted to read "in which," we write Bamma; if rather "exalted" or "exaltedness," we read Bama. Therefore the Jews, because they do understand it to be a prophecy of Christ, have taken the worse reading, so that it appears not to praise Christ, but to have no real force. For what is the purpose of the words, and what logic or sense is there, if we say, when these circumstances were so, and the day of the Lord was to come, in which the whose state of Judea is to be overturned, and all things ground underfoot, "I warn and instruct you, that you rest from the man, who breathes and lives just as we humans do, because he is to be reckoned as nothing"? Who would praise any person in such a way, and say "Beware lest you offend him, who is altogether nothing."? Therefore it must be understood in the opposite way: "When these things are all to come upon you and are proclaimed by the spirit of prophecy, I warn and instruct you to rest from him who, although he is a manaccording to the flesh, and has a soul, and breathes and draws breath from his nostrils as we humans breathe and live, yet according to his divine majesty is also exalted and considered so and believed to be so. I rack my mind and I cannot find a reason why the Septuagint did not wish to translate so clear a prophecy of Christ into Greek. Now the others who translated it but drew the ambiguous phrase into an impious sense, it is no wonder why they interpreted badly, and did not want to say anything about the glory of Christ, in whom they do not believe, I mean the Jews and Semi-Jews, that is, the Ebionites. Yet because Christ is "highly exalted" or "the Most High," who is in another phrase called Elyon among the Hebrews, we read in the 86th [87th] Psalm "Shall not Zion say 'one man and another were born in her, and the Most High himself founded her.'" And in the Gospel "And you, O child, will be called prophet of the Most High." And, so that I don't draw too much line (for in the exposition of Holy Scripture we ought to follow truth and not controversy) Bama in this place is not read as "exalted" among the Hebrews, but "exaltedness," that is, "heighth" or "loftiness," as if we were to say of someone that he is not "divine," but "divinity," not the "creek," but the "spring," not a "human" but "humanity." Origen interpreted the passage in the following way: Because it speaks in the singular about one man, it can be referred also to our Lord the Savior. Thus the Prophet orders that they should rest from him who has been considered in some great matter, although he appears for the present to be a human being and to have breath in his nostrils, just as other human beings breathe.

2. John Calvin (commenting on John 8)

It is plain enough that this passage was unknown anciently to the Greek Churches; and some conjecture that it has been brought from some other place and inserted here. But as it has always been received by the Latin Churches, and is found in many old Greek manuscripts, and contains nothing unworthy of an Apostolic Spirit, there is no reason why we should refuse to apply it to our advantage.

3. Frederick Klaeber (Introduction to his edition of Beowulf)

It has been the fate of Beowulf to be subjected to the theory of multiple authorship, the number of its conjectural 'makers' ranging up to six or more. At the outset, in this line of investigation, the wish was no doubt father to the thought.

4. James Joyce (Chapter 4 of Finnegan's Wake)

Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Ineunte Anno Aetatis XXIV

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol'n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-master's eye.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Thoughts on Textual Variants in Scripture

Talking over lunch with a friend the other day, the topic came up of textual criticism in the Bible, as it of course often does in seminaries and nowhere else. She commented to me that it had taken her aback when she first found out that some things, like the story in John of the woman caught in adultery, "weren't supposed to be in the Bible." My tongue was slow and my politeness ready so I didn't jump on this statement the way I might have in a more argumentative mood. It has given me food for reflection, however. What do we mean when we say such things about those parts of the Biblical canon which are not represented in the oldest and best manuscripts? What does it mean to say that they aren't supposed to be in the Bible? There seem to me to be two main presuppositions behind such a statement and I think both of them are wrong. The first is a historical-literary idea, that the "original" form of a text is the only valuable form of it. The second is a theological offshoot of the same sentiment, that the Bible was inspired by God only at the moment it was written down.

Both these propositions are concerned with essence or nature of the Bible and like all ideologies concerned with essence, they are very insistent that the essence be unique. If I tell them that the Bible may or may not contain the episode of the woman caught in adultery and still be the Bible, they will say that that is impossible, since a Bible with the passage and a Bible without the passage are two different things and the Bible is one thing. They have trouble understanding that both are the Bible even though they are not each other.

Let us take an example. The Bible has been translated into many languages. The one I read most often contains the word "God" quite a lot. If I were to pick up a Latin Bible, however, I would read that word not once. Both of these things are the Bible but they are not each other. Or would you say that anyone reading a translation is not reading the Bible? You might say something like "they're not really reading the Bible," but what you would mean by that would be that they weren't really getting the full sense of it and might be developing mistaken ideas about what certain words or phrases mean. But a poor student of Greek or Hebrew might very well read the Bible in the original language and make just those same sorts of mistakes. If people aren't really reading the Bible because they're reading a translation, then many people who do know Greek and Hebrew aren't really reading the Bible for the same reasons. But we say of all these situations that it is someone reading the Bible, and rightly so. The things read are different but they are all the Bible.

Another example perhaps more pertinent to the idea of privileging the "original text." If St. Paul were asked what books were contained in the Bible, he would respond with a list much shorter than the one we would give. We might even ask him, as he sat down to write a letter to those troubled Christians in Corinth whether what he was writing was the Bible. He would most certainly say "No. I'm writing just writing a letter to the Corinthians. You don't write the Bible, your read it." Would Paul merely be mistaken? Did he just not know that what he was writing was the Bible? Or would it be better to say that what he wrote to the Corinthians was a letter but to us the Bible? You might say that Paul did not intend it to be the Bible and thus we shouldn't read it as the Bible. But what books were written to be the Bible? If the author had to intend for his work to be the Bible for it to really be the Bible, then it seems the Bible doesn't actually exist. But I've got it here on my desk; people refer to it all the time and have for centuries. And if the intent of the author doesn't make something the Bible, it shouldn't trouble us when something like the story of the woman caught in adultery is in the Bible even if it wasn't in John's final manuscript of his gospel.

Another way of expressing this attitude towards scripture would be to say that we can only trust the Bible if it is without change, if it has always been the same down to the letter, the way Muslims claim the Qu'ran has remained the same since it was uttered by Mohammad. In other words there is something about the sort of thing the Bible is which gives it authority and truth. Let us indulge our Thomistic streak a little and work this premise out.

1. The Bible is true and authoritative because of the sort of thing it is.
2. Created things can be true and authoritative, but are not always and necessarily so; by their nature they are not always and necessarily anything, but always changeable. They can therefore be true and authoritative potentially but not essentially; they are not true and authoritative because of the sort of thing that they are.
3. God is the only thing which is uncreated.
4. Therefore, because a created thing cannot be true and authoritative because of the sort of thing it is, anything which is essentially true and authoritative must be uncreated.
5. Therefore the Bible is God (the Bible is Divine).

I am no specialist, but again, similar moves are made, to my knowledge, regarding the Qu'ran in Islam and also the Torah in mystical Judaism. For Christians, however, the Bible does not occupy such a position. For Christians, the Bible is for us, not forever. It is for our edification and inspiration, that is to say, it is true and authoritative for us, not absolutely and essentially true and authoritative; God alone is that. But if that God dwells in us, we will see how surely and singularly the Bible points towards him, and we will return to it again and again and joyfully obey it and submit ourselves to its truth and authority.

Scripture is a thing ordained by God to be a guide and comfort to his people on their way to him. Any explanation, therefore, of its authority ought to begin not with the nature of scripture in se, but the nature of God's action in scripture. Hence the presupposition I spoke about earlier, which asserts that God inspired scripture only at the moment it was written, is properly theological. It begins with the action of God as a way of establishing authority and truth for scripture, as though he infused those qualities into certain texts and then left them alone to operate in the world with their special qualities. This view demands that the texts remain exactly the same, because it was in their original shape that God graced them with authority and truth.

It is easy to see how this theology moves in the direction of asserting those things which we have refuted above, and it is for this reason that I have called it an offshoot of the secular proposition: it shares the same basic assumptions about what scripture must be in terms of uniqueness and immutability. Any book which is not precisely the same as the texts which God inspired is not scripture, or at the least is corrupted scripture, and therefore not really authoritative. Yet the experience of the church resists these ideas about the essential authority and truth of scripture. Many Christians throughout the centuries have heard the Word of God in different, often differing words of scripture. Many secular scholars today have an impressive mastery of the Bible's original language and contexts, but for all that they have far more trouble hearing God's words there than the simplest pious Christian using his dinosaur of a King James and some prayer. As Jesus said to some Jews who were disputing with him, you cannot understand how the scriptures are true if the truth of God is not in you (John 5:37-39).

Is is thus necessary on the witness of the church to say that, although the scriptures were certainly inspired as they were written, they were not inspired only then. For if the truth they impart to us were tied to a particular form they once took, we would not be able to receive that truth if we encountered them in another form. The inspiration of the scriptures is not the infusion of grace into certain texts but rather God's promise to speak to us in those texts, a promise he makes good on to his faithful every hour. If we understand the inspiration of the scriptures in this way, that, like the creation of the world, it is not a one-time act, but, rather, like all God's faithfulness, is 'new every morning,' these textual problems which can deeply trouble a certain conception of scripture have no hold over us. If God be for us, who can be against us? Certainly not textual variants.

Friday, October 2, 2009

A Confession

God does not give the Spirit to the Son, nor does he measure it, for God is not measured by God.
-Gregory

O Father, you sent forth your Word and your Spirit moved upon the face of the waters; by your power, O Spirit, was the Son made one of us, and we saw the Father; on our supper is the Father’s Spirit poured out and yet we taste your flesh, O Son. What is there on earth or in heaven that does not depend on you? What is there that exists that is not one? What is there that is one that does not draw from Oneness? And yet what is there that exists that does not exist in your Threeness, O One in whom we live and move and have our being?

Where was the Spirit when the Father said to his Son “I have begotten thee?” Where was the Son when the Father gave forth his Spirit? Where is the time when these things were not so? It is no time, it cannot be found; the mind of God cannot search it out, nor can the imagination of the world’s Creator envision it. Where is the place where we shall meet our God? In a tabernacle of darkness where my Lord has made his dwelling place.

O Father how was it to your Son that you said “I have begotten thee,” when that very Speech is the Son of your begetting? Almighty Word, what is your own, when even your breath is the Breath of another? O Giver of Life, how long life have you received to proceed from two infinities?

But you, O Lord, do not measure your Spirit, nor does God measure God, for what do we measure, but what we do not know? Does a man know his stature till he has measured it? Does a man know he is 'tall' till he has lain the word along himself and found it fitting? So we measure by what is not ourselves that which we do not know of ourselves. Yet what is of yourself unless all knowledge? And with what shall you measure yourself? For what is like yourself, as a chart has height like a child, which is not yourself? Or what is God that is not You, what is divine that you are not? Or shall we sunder God from God to measure God?

But Lord, I say to my hand, you have five fingers, I have measured you out, proportioned you and counted your members; shall you not say to your Son “I have begotten thee” and measure him by your Word? Yet what measurement is it to say I am as tall as I am? So it is for the Word to speak of himself. Was not God in Jesus Christ, reconciling the world to himself? Let us measure him. And what, shall we tell God that we have measured him? But God of all men knows the stature and the going out and the coming in and of the man he was not least.

Ourselves we cannot see without a mirror, but your ways are not our ways, O Lord. By our thoughts alone we can conceive of who we are, but your thoughts are not our thoughts, O Lord. You that are One and do not divide in being Three, shall you divide to know yourself? Shall you set apart the Son to measure the Spirit, shall you reckon without your Reason and breathe without your Breath? Or can what is from the beginning be no more? Shall you dissect the One that has no parts, shall the knife of your Reason measure out the portion of the Father, and the law of your decree specify the property of the Son? Shall the Spirit be poured into jars until the God gives out? And shall we then count the jars, that have contained what contains all? How shall we make these jars, when the Maker of the world shall be their contents? Where shall we put these jars, when the resting place of eternity will rest in them? From whom shall we buy these jars, which are the words of truth, the measure of God? To whom shall we go, O Lord? You alone have the words of truth.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Theses on Church and State in Protestantism

1. In rejecting the sacrament of order and preaching a priesthood of all believers, the Reformation rejects the division of labor within a community; with this, the Reformation rejects the the essential principle of modern society.

2. The modern insists that religion is a private affair; his world has therefore two authorities. The word of the Reformation is solus: it has but one God.

3. In the medieval and modern divisions of public and private, church and state, Christ's body is arrayed against itself and the individual believer is compelled to serve two masters. In the church of the Reformation, the body of Christ is one and the individual renders nothing unto Caesar.

4. In this way the Reformation is fundamentally opposed to the separation of Church and State. For Protestants, the paradigmatic moment on this issue is Constantine convening the Council of Nicaea, in which the Christian prince uses his political power for the good of the Church in the same way any other Christian would make use of his skills and position. For Romanists, it is Ambrose refusing communion to Theodosius, where the Christian prince, as a layman, submits to ecclesial authority. The Modern prefers the Roman picture, so long as Ambrose and Theodosius never speak.

5. Thus we may say that for the Reformation the Christian State is in the Church; for Rome, that State is under the Church.

6. For the Reformation, the church is thus totalitarian; this is a monastic impulse.

7. This totalitarian church of the Reformation is the martyrs' church of the first centuries. Tertullian argued for tolerance from the pagans and rigorism among the Christians; Augustine approved of the persecution of heretics and preached grace for all sinners in the church. Their mind was one and the same.

8. That this totalitarian church appears as a state church in a Christian society is a tautology; that it appears as counterculture in a godless society is inevitable.

9. We have need of a martyrs' church amongst the wreckage of the Reformation state, but we insist on thinking like Romanists and Moderns. We live in such wreckage because the Reformers 'gave, expecting nothing in return.'

Friday, September 11, 2009

A Sermon

Whether that can be rightly called a sermon which was neither given in the context of worship nor delivered to any real congregation may be honestly debated. Though the circumstances of this performance were those of the classroom, its genre, I hope, is undoubtedly homiletic.

The Scripture: Psalm 4

1Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress; have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.

2O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? how long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? Selah.

3But know that the LORD hath set apart him that is godly for himself: the LORD will hear when I call unto him.

4Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.

5Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the LORD.

6There be many that say, Who will shew us any good? LORD, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us.

7Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that their corn and their wine increased.

8I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.

The Sermon:

Success is an object of our desire. Not because we feel success will bring to us the pleasures of health or wealth, make our lives easier, or augment our happiness. O we often think that, but if we dig down deeper we will see that we human beings desire success because in success we find a certain empowering satisfaction. “A job well-done is its own reward;” this we know, just like we know the pleasure we feel when we admire ourselves in the mirror. To have done something is to feel alive. It is this self-esteem that keeps people dusting their cabinets and mowing their lawns. Because we’ve all stood on that summit, we’ve all looked out across the land beneath us with a victor’s eye. And O how we would like it if the delight of that victorious exertion never left us, O we can imagine what a bliss we would live out from that perpetual achievement. So hunger for this satisfaction drives us on, we seek and aspire to new accomplishments and new success. We would be conquerors forever.

But the world does not allow such things, now does it? In the boldness of my youth it may yet seem that life can only ascend, that on every triumph of mine another will be built and grander than the first. But there are others in this room who would restrain my eager heart, who would take down volumes from the study of their experience and show me: “Here, another passed me by. Here, my joys began to pale. Here, I could go no farther.” And even I, if I am honest with the memories of my heart and not its aspirations only, even I will know from the few but sunny pages of my youth that I have often, often cried “O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? How long will ye love vanity and seek after lies?”

This shout from the Psalmist is not the cry of the abject and the downtrodden. This is not the cry of the man who cannot feed his family, of the mother who has lost daughters or the father who has lost sons. It is those who have had glory who can cry out when it is turned to shame. It is those who have friends who can cry out when their friendships fail them. It is a cry that people like us tend to make. This is the cry of a promotion which has inspired jealousy among the people who were merely once your co-workers. It is the cry of a long-awaited opportunity which our family had hoped we would never get. It is the cry of a romance that has severed the closeness of old acquaintance. “How long will ye turn my glory into shame?” we cry to those who trouble us. How long will you season my happiness with hatred? How long will you answer my success with your failure? How long will your sarcasm return my earnest joy? Can’t you let me take pleasure in what I have achieved, what I have earned for myself?

And when these words have done nothing—if we even spoke them at all—we take the complaint to God. I’m sure that everyone in here would have brought their joy to the Lord as well, but those people out there, well, they’re going to come to God with anger and it’ll have been a long time since they spoke. But us, the ones who pray, we who know we have boldness to approach the throne of our Lord Jesus through his blood, we who know that “the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself,” we who know that “the Lord will hear when I call unto him,” we have a right to expect some justice when we bring our indignations to the Lord. So we say “God, why can’t I just be happy? Why must I suffer sorrow with my joy? Life, I know, will have its pains, but Lord, why can’t they come in their own time? Why can’t I just love and be happy and successful right now for a while and after that let sadness wait its turn?”

And how does the Lord answer us, how does the God of Love, how does the one whom we call Father answer us? Does he cradle us indulgently? Do his words console the weeping child by affirming what they cry for?

“Stand in awe, and sin not;
Commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still.
Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the Lord.”

“Stand in awe of me,” says the Lord, “and you will not sin.” Kneel, and you shall not fall. For I know, says the Lord, that your desires are the children of your fears. But it is not by raising yourself to the heights that you will never sink to the depths, it is by acknowledging the depths of God that he will raise you to the heights of his blessedness. Look deep into yourself, look deep into yourself and you will find no cause to doubt the Lord’s direction of your life. Drop down an anchor into the waters of your soul, and you will nevermore be troubled by the tempests, for at the bottom of that sea is the strength of your God. For when you have communed, as the Psalmist says, with your heart upon your bed, when you have filed past all the agitations of the day, when you have laid down all the troubles that you found within your heart at the feet of Jesus Christ, then, then, and only then you will be still and you will know that he is God and you will look for nothing further. When you have said to the demons that drive you all your hours, demons like pride and desire, demons like jealousy and fear, demons we call friendship, demons called duty, demons called success…when you have said to them all “Be gone!” and you have wept and you have sobbed at the pain of their leaving, when you have weathered all the whirlwinds and the earthquakes and the scorching flames of fire, then with a still, small voice, if you are still enough to hear him like Elijah, he will whisper to you softly “I am God. Put your trust in me, just trust me, and all with you shall be righteous and right. But put your heart in mine and never bitterness shall bite upon the sweet, for I shall be yours and I am the fullness of joy.”

There are many who say “who will show us any good?” They have looked at the pain that hounds all the achievements of this world and they say there is no pleasure on the earth. But for them we say “Lord lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us, for in thy light shall we see light! Lord, thou hast put gladness in my heart more than in the time that their corn and their wine increased. I will both lay me down in peace and sleep in security, for thou O Lord only makest me dwell in safety.” We say to them you can only see pain in this world because you have only seen this world, you can only see sorrow because you do not look for Joy, you cannot love life because you have not attended to the life that was lived in Love. You have yearned for sweet nectars from a rock, when the orchards of the Gardener stood ripening all around you.

O Lord, lift up the light of your countenance upon us! Let us see your face! For there indeed do we know we shall have gladness without measure and joy without end, a pleasure without interruption. Then our joy will surpass the happiness of prosperity and the contentment of health, the thrills of achievement and the glory of success. For in the light of your face they slip thoughtlessly from our clutches and we look for them no more. And when we have this gladness in our heart, when we have the faith of Jesus Christ, the love of our heavenly Father, and the comfort of his Holy Spirit, then we will lie down on that bed, that bed of tears where we communed with our own hearts and found the stillness of the Lord, and we will stretch out there our bodies in his peace and sleep with the contentment of a child, for we shall know and we shall know it in our heart, and we shall know it in our bones, that the Lord alone is our success, that the Lord alone makes us to dwell in safety. Amen.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

9-5 Theses

1. We ought to treasure everything we hear about Jesus in our innermost hearts, as Mary did. This is why God forbids us to use his name in vain.

2. Robin Goodfellow in Milton's "L'Allegro" and Frere Jacques in Mahler's 'Titan' model the same process whereby the common may be made acceptable matter for art.

3. Ideas of known authorship can never be profound without idolatry. When the author is known, we know the idea is a fiction, a thing made. But when the author is unknown, there is the sense of something unmade and eternal.

4. The modern state is a monarch. As such it can only remain in power by exciting antagonisms between the rich and the poor, and restricting the freedom of the rich to exercise their own power.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Of the Making of Many Books...

As some of you may know, I have just recently gotten settled in Durham, North Carolina to begin attending Duke Divinity School. In the course of moving I had to take stock of my books, which are numerous. Nothing, I think, gives so much satisfaction to the true humanist than admiring his own library, for it is no less than a concrete expression of his character, the quality of which he surely supposes to be very high. In such a spirit of self approval, I present to you, dear reader, some statistics on my library.

Most Represented Book: The Bible
9 copies on shelf, 2 in everyday use: 2 Greek Testaments, 1 Hebrew Bible, 2 Modern Study Bibles, 4 Older Translations (1 King James Bible, 1 King James Psalms/Proverbs/New Testament, 1 1560 Geneva Bible facsimile, 1 Tyndale New Testament), 2 Modern Translations (1 New Revised Standard Version, 1 Robert Alter Genesis).

Most Represented Language in Reference: Greek
6 Lexica (1 Full Liddell-Scott, 1 Intermediate Liddell-Scott, 1 Classical Greek Basic Vocabulary, 1 Bauer-Danker New Testament Lexicon, 2 Short New Testament Lexica), 3 Grammar References (1 Introductory Grammar/Textbook, 1 Greek Grammar by Smyth, 1 Reference on Greek Verbs)

Most Represented Authors

1. Martin Luther
7 Books: 5 Volumes of Biblical Commentary, 1 Volume of Treatises, 1 Freedom of a Christian.

2. Virgil
6 Books: 2 Latin Editions of the Eclogues, 1 of the Eclogues and Georgics, a 2-volume Latin Edition of the Aeneid, 1 Dryden Aeneid.

2. Cicero
6 Books: 1 De Re Publica/De Legibus, 1 De Officiis, 2 Volumes of Speeches (in Latin), 1 Volume of Speeches (in English), 1 Student text of the Pro Caelio.

4. Herodotus
4 Books: 2 English Translations, 1 Student text of Book III, 1 Greek Edition of Book VIII.

Number of Non-Western Books: 2 (1 Book of Alaska Native Folklore, 1 Tale of Genji)

Obscure Books:
Guido of Pisa's Commentary on the Inferno (in pretty decent medieval Latin).
Giles of Rome's De Ecclesiastica Potestate (in offensively inelegant medieval Latin).
A French School text of Oedipus Rex (or Oedipe Roi) from 1889.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Three Remedies for Modernity, Part 1

...veluti pueris apsinthia taetra medentes
Cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum
Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore…
-Lucretius

Modernity is a condition of mind into which all of us are born and bred. It is a cage, say some, from which we cannot hope to escape. I prefer rather to think of it as a disease congenital with our era, a birth defect exacerbated by unfortunate but unavoidable habits of environment, upbringing, and education. For such diseases the treatment is simplest and most effective in the early stages of development, painful and dangerous in later life.

Although the essential causes and principal characteristics of modernity may be much debated, the remedies I offer here are directed mainly at the belief in progress, the idea that advances in knowledge and technology so fundamentally improve the human condition that any other solution to our peculiar situation appears primitive and barbaric. An absolute faith in the salvation we shall gain through our increasing mastery of the universe is a prime tenet of the modern creed, and it instills in its adherents as zealous a disregard for the beliefs of others as any fanatical sect. It appears convincing to many not only because it benefits from a grand consensus of the cultural and political powers, but because it is a fact beyond dispute that the progressing technologies and techniques of the modern world have greatly varied and increased the sensual pleasures and material comforts enjoyed by humankind. Against those of us who are wont to long aloud for the condition of some civilization past these benefits are often objected, and the modern assures himself that a long life lived with running water and instantaneous communication is preferable by far to a shorter one endured with simplicity and purpose. It is an important step in the treatment of this condition to expose the vanity of such an attitude.

The three remedies I offer here are all literary, although they differ very greatly from one another beyond that simple category. The first is science fiction, a short story (almost a novella) written in the 1930s. The second is a work of history from the early 1960s. The last is part of an epic poem written in the 1590s. They all address themselves in different ways to some of these important symptoms of modernity.


First Remedy:
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”

Most of H.P. Lovecraft’s best work is at least in part a critique of modern assumptions, usually our typically inflated view of humanity’s place in the cosmos. The general drift of his attitude towards the expansion of human knowledge may be intuited from the justly famous sentence which opens “The Call of Cthulhu:” “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” For Lovecraft, as for the modern, knowledge is the decisive factor in human existence. Yet in spite of all his atheism, in stories like “The Call of Cthulhu” he shares something in his attitude towards complete knowledge with the author of Genesis: knowledge here is ruinous and destructive, not life-giving and liberating.

“The Shadow Out of Time,” one of his last stories, is a profound and multi-layered exploration of the ultimate emptiness inherent in the promise of scientific advancement and indeed all hopes of transcendence through knowledge. The plot centers on a university professor—most of Lovecraft’s heroes are intellectuals of one sort or another—who suffers from amnesia of several years of his life during which he acted somewhat bizarrely and conducted strange researches. As he begins to look into what happened to him, he pieces together clues from his own actions with a series of vivid and recurring dreams to discover that he had in fact exchanged minds with a being of the distant past. This researcher of the so-called “Great Race” had used the professor to acquire certain information available in his own day, and the professor in turn, while he inhabited the other’s body, had written a history of his own times for the archives of the Great Race. The ability of the Great Race to transfer their consciousnesses through time means that, in a way, their civilization never dies: by the time in which the professor encounters them, Earth’s distant past, they had already lived out the lives of many previous species, moving their consciousnesses each time into a new host civilization in the future. However, the Great Race also knew that the horrible creatures called Elder Things, which they had subdued when they first transported themselves to Earth, would eventually awake and overthrow them, forcing them to migrate their consciousnesses into the future once more, to a time when the Elder Things will no longer threaten them.

Having pieced this story together, but still fearing himself to be mad or deluded, the professor convinces some colleagues to join him in an archaeological expedition in the Australian Outback to discover the city of the Great Race. Wandering alone at night in the desert, the professor finds the city and the archives from his dreams and memories, but also awakens the Elder Things, which chase him from the ruins utterly terrified. The next day, he tries to rediscover the site, but the desert has swallowed it.

Lovecraft attacks the possibility of transcendence through knowledge from three principal angles in “The Shadow Out of Time.” First, he tauntingly suggests the impotence of the contemporary sciences in the form of the doctors and psychologists who try to convince the professor he has merely had a mental breakdown. This strand, however, does not critique the principle behind the belief in scientific progress, for one might easily respond that our knowledge, although it is insufficient now, will eventually be perfected. The principle of all-powerful knowledge is the object of Lovecraft’s second critique, which operates from the example of the Great Race itself, a civilization so advanced that they had conquered those two forces which seem to make us mortal and therefore form the substance of our problems, time and matter. But it becomes all too clear in the tragic story of the Great Race that this mastery does little to actually change the limitations of creaturely, bounded existence: they are merely capable of fleeing from one set of material and temporal problems to another. Finally, Lovecraft rejects even the idea of attaining some level of transcendence through self-knowledge in the character of the professor, whose quest to find out about himself results only in greater despair when he finds the truth: “If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time.” In this moment of cosmic despair, the professor’s only comfort is that he has no hard proof of the reality of it all: the best knowledge is faulty knowledge.

Whether the “shadow out of time” is a shadow that emerges from time and is cast by time, or is a shadow cast from outside of time, it lies over all that is bound by time, and it cannot be escaped except by truly transcending that limit—and for the efforts of creatures defined by that limit such transcendence is impossible. Against this metaphysical wall every presumption and ambition of enlightened science will be dashed.

In the story, this metaphysical shadow is personified by the sinister Elder Things, whose presence preceded the Great Race and continues to inhabit their ruins, whose eventual triumph proved inevitable. The Great Race is described as living always with the fear of these Elder Things in the back of their minds, for they knew they could not defeat them. As an object of knowledge, the Elder Things may be recognized, but not mastered.

For atheists such as Lovecraft and his protagonist the situation must indeed look very bleak. With the universe so laid bare, the innate human desire to transcend our mortal limits certainly appears to be mocked by the very principles of existence, and the Great Race, for all its achievements, proves merely to be a stronger creature chained in the same mortal limits. For a Christian, however, things look much different, for God, who becomes man in Jesus Christ, is a light out of time which shines in the darkness: this God throws no shadow over the world of man, as if to smother it, but casts light onto it, as if to reveal its place in the presence of something better. And this light does not merely uncover the tantalizing prospect of something unattainable, for over The Man Who is God death and all the attendant forces of the universe have no power, and in his true mastery over these forces he opens a way to true transcendence for all those who have their being in him. In the Bible (e.g. Hebrews 4) and in Church Fathers such as Augustine and Maximus the Confessor this transcendence is described as rest from the labor and motion of our existence, a characterization we may well apply to the Great Race and its tragic, eternal migrations, doomed, like all things set in motion, never to cease but by the power of another.

Friday, July 31, 2009

A Returning Reflection

I hope soon to take up posting with some regularity. The strains and commitments of my senior year and Divinity school applications proved unfortunately too great to allow me the kind of reflective time necessary to write.

As I contemplate the church and world which God is preparing me to serve, the challenge seems often too much and I wonder if I might do better in withdrawal and study. I confess I come too slowly to my own chastisement in these moments and content myself too readily with the feeble faith they evidence. Yet it is for these weaknesses that God has given us the church, and to the church such ministers as turn us out from ourselves, whether we are there satisfied or discontented, to the better destiny God has appointed for each one of us. My grandfather is one such minister, and I had this past Sunday the blessing of hearing him preach a simple undiluted word to the mostly oblivious tenants of an Illinois nursing home; this indeed is 'folly to the Jews and a stumblingblock to Gentiles.' I can thank God that my resident cynicism was crushed for that short space beneath the foolishness of the Gospel, and I pray him constantly that it may be so every hour.

Bishop William Willimon is another such minister, whom I encountered first in his books coauthored with Stanley Hauerwas. I leave you with a recent talk of his on the theology of John Wesley. It ought to be an admonishing and inspiring voice to every Christian, and especially to those of us who are readily enticed to merely think about the faith, not live it.