Confessing Evangelical

John H June 29th, 2010

This hymn caught my eye earlier today. It’s a baptismal hymn, but I think it applies almost equally well as a prayer for any infant – particularly those who are vulnerable; particularly the unborn:

Lord Jesu Christ, our Lord most dear,
As thou wast once an infant here,
So give this child of thine, we pray,
Thy grace and blessing day by day.
O holy Jesu, Lord Divine,
we pray thee guard this child of thine.

As in thy heavenly kingdom, Lord,
All things obey thy sacred word,
Do thou thy mighty succour give,
And shield this child by morn and eve.
O holy Jesu, Lord Divine,
we pray thee guard this child of thine.

Their watch let angels round him keep
Where’er he be, awake, asleep;
Thy holy Cross now let him bear,
That he thy crown with saints may wear.
O holy Jesu, Lord Divine,
we pray thee guard this child of thine.

The words are by Heinrich von Laufenburg, 1459, translated (like so many great German hymns) by Catherine Winkworth.

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John H June 27th, 2010

In my previous post on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together, we saw how Bonhoeffer places the praying of the psalms at the heart of our prayer together as Christians. In this post I’ll look in more detail at his observations on the psalms.

“The Psalter occupies a unique place in the Holy Scriptures”, Bonhoeffer writes, by being both God’s Word and the prayer of human beings. However, when we come to pray the psalms for ourselves, we will quickly find passages that we feel unable to make our own: “the psalms of innocence, the bitter, the imprecatory psalms, and also in part the psalms of the Passion”.

The answer is not to skip the “difficult” psalms, but to recognise that “this difficulty indicates the point at which we get our first glimpse of the secret of the Psalter”: namely, that “here Someone else is praying, not we”:

that the One who is here protesting his innocence, who is invoking God’s judgment, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. It is he who is praying here, and not only here but in the whole Psalter.

So when we sing or pray the psalms, we are united with the prayer of Christ himself. The Church, as the Body of Christ on earth, “continues to pray his prayer to the end of time”:

Even if a verse or a psalm is not one’s own prayer, it is nevertheless the prayer of another member of the fellowship; so it is quite certainly the prayer of the true Man Jesus Christ and his Body on the earth.

And as such, the Psalter teaches us how to pray:

In the Psalter we learn to pray on the basis of Christ’s prayer. The Psalter is the great school of prayer.

It teaches us “what prayer means”, namely “praying according to the Word of God, on the basis of promises”. It teaches us “what we should pray”, namely “the whole prayer of Christ, the prayer of him who was true Man and who alone possesses the full range of experiences expressed in this prayer”. And it teaches us to pray “as a fellowship”, acknowledging that our own individual prayer “is only a minute fragment of the whole prayer of the Church”.

(Incidentally, I wonder if that last point is a way to understand texts such as Mark 11:24: “whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours”. Should this perhaps be seen as a promise to the church as a whole rather than to us as individuals? Perhaps some roving exegete could comment on this: for example, is the “you” in that verse plural?)

The psalms encompass the full breadth of prayer, just as the Lord’s Prayer does:

Oetinger, in his exposition of the Psalms, brought out a profound truth when he arranged the whole Psalter according to the Lord’s Prayer. What he had discerned was that the whole sweep of the Book of Psalms was concerned with nothing more nor less than the brief petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

Only the prayer of Jesus Christ “has the promise of fulfilment and frees us from the vain repetitions of the heathen”:

The more deeply we grow into the psalms and the more often we pray them as our own, the more simple and rich will our prayer become.

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John H June 26th, 2010

Just as a quick aside, I’ve written a post about the series finale of Doctor Who. It is one massive succession of spoilers from beginning to end, so rather than post it here I’ve put it on a WordPress.com blog set up specially for the occasion.

Note that I am not, repeat not, setting up a Doctor Who blog. That way madness lies.

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John H June 26th, 2010

In the second chapter of Life Together (see previous post), Dietrich Bonhoeffer looks at “the day with others”. Most of the chapter is concerned with praying with our fellow Christians: as Bonhoeffer writes, “common life under the Word begins with common worship at the beginning of the day”.

The nature of this common worship will vary depending on the type of fellowship (e.g. families with children, fellowships of ministers), but the basic ingredients should always be the same: “the word of Scripture, the hymns of the Church, and the prayer of fellowship”:

1. Scripture (1): the psalms

Bonhoeffer urges the singing and praying of psalms as part of our life together. In the psalms the church joins its prayers to those of Christ himself, whose prayer the Psalter is. (More of this in my next post.)

2. Scripture (2): reading the Scriptures

Bonhoeffer advises that the reading of Scriptures in the fellowship should consist of extended, consecutive readings rather than isolated texts. It is as a whole that the Scriptures are “God’s revealing Word”:

Only in the infiniteness of its inner relationships, in the connection of Old and New Testaments, of promise and fulfilment, sacrifice and law, law and gospel, cross and resurrection, faith and obedience, having and hoping, will the full witness of Jesus Christ the Lord be perceived.

Hence Bonhoeffer recommends that a family fellowship “should surely be able to read and listen to a chapter of the Old Testament and at least half a chapter of the New Testament every morning and evening”.

3. Singing the new song

The psalms and the scripture readings should be followed by “the singing together of a hymn, this being the voice of the Church, praising, thanking and praying”. Why do Christians sing together?

The reason is quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because they can unite in the Word.

Music is “completely the servant of the Word”, which leads Bonhoeffer to argue that “the singing of the congregation … is essentially singing in unison”. “Destroyers of unison singing” must be “rigorously eliminated”: whether that’s those calling attention to their musical abilities by improvising harmonies, or those “who because of some mood will not join in the singing and thus disturb the fellowship”.

4. Saying our prayers together

Having “heard God’s Word” and “been permitted to join in the hymn of the Church”, now “we are to pray to God as a fellowship”. This “must really be our word, our prayer for this day, for our work, for our fellowship, for the particular needs and sins that oppress us in common, for the persons who are committed to our care”.

Bonhoeffer’s advice is that this prayer should be “said always by the same person”, but in their own words rather than using set forms:

The use of formal prayers can, under certain circumstances, be a help even for a small family group. But often a ritual becomes only an evasion of real prayer. The wealth of churchly forms and thought may easily lead us away from our own prayer; the prayers then become beautiful and profound, but not genuine.

The “situation in public worship is different from that of daily family worship”; within the family or small community, “the poorest mumbling utterance can be better than the best-formulated prayer.”

Conclusions

I found this chapter challenging. It made me acutely conscious of how weak/non-existent our own collective family devotional life is, and also of how weak my own personal prayers have become. Use of the daily office has been a great help in the first three stages described by Bonhoeffer – praying the psalms, reading the Scriptures, singing the hymn of the church – but has led me to underplay the fourth aspect, that of praying in my own words. Not completely, by any means, but enough for this chapter to make me rethink how I go about my personal prayers.

Similarly, I hope Bonhoeffer’s challenge will also inspire me to new attempts to foster more shared devotional time with E as a couple and with the boys as a family – though my work patterns (among other things) make this difficult to implement to the extent described by Bonhoeffer.

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John H June 25th, 2010

I’ve recently been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together, in which Bonhoeffer reflects on the nature of Christian community based in particular on his experiences running the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde between 1935 and 1937.

The starting point for Bonhoeffer’s reflections is Psalm 133:1: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” As he observes:

It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. … It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s Word and sacrament. Not all Christians receive this blessing. The imprisoned, the sick, the scattered lonely, the proclaimers of the Gospel in heathen lands stand alone. They know that visible fellowship is a blessing. (pp.7,8)

Christian community means “community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ”. This means that, first of all, it is a community that is formed by “the Word of God in Jesus Christ”. And what Bonhoeffer has in mind here is not the written Word of Scripture, but the Word that is spoken by one Christian to another:

God has willed that we should seek him and find his living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore a Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. … The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure. (pp.11f.)

Because Christian community has been established by Christ purely on the basis of faith in his Word, it is a mistake to look for “some extraordinary social experience” or “some wishful idea of religious fellowship”:

By sheer grace God will not permit us to live even for a brief moment in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. (p.15)

Hence true Christian community is realistic:

Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. (p.15)

By contrast, anyone “who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter”. Similarly, the survival of a Christian community depends on “whether it achieves sober wisdom” regarding this distinction “between a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and human community”:

In other words, life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy, catholic, Christian church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and and struggles and promise of the whole Church. [...]

There is a particular risk when we start exercising a right of selection over who enters our community, or separating ourselves from other Christians, other than where this is “necessitated quite objectively” (e.g. by “common work” or “local conditions”):

When the way of intellectual or spiritual selection is taken the human element always insinuates itself and robs the fellowship of its spiritual power and effectiveness for the Church, drives it into sectarianism. The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door. We must, therefore, be very careful at this point. (p.24)

That’s not to say that Christian community should be a dour, hairshirted experience without joy. As Bonhoeffer points out:

There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his life. But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. … We are bound together by faith, not by experience. (pp.25f.)

“How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity”: and Bonhoeffer concludes that:

…now we can rightly interpret the words “in unity” and say, “for brethren to dwell together through Christ“. For Jesus Christ alone is our unity. “He is our peace”. Through him alone do we have access to one another, joy in one another, and fellowship with one another. (p.26)

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John H June 17th, 2010

I’ve posted quite a lot in recent months on René Girard and James Alison and the concept of “mimetic desire”, but if the core of what Girard and Alison are saying on this subject can be condensed to a sentence, it is this:

We desire according to the desire of the other.

That is, humans are desiring beings. Where other animals have instinct, we have desire – and that desire arises in imitation of those around us, including the complex social and cultural patterns of behaviour and belief into which we are each born.

The question is then, which “other” are our desires going to imitate? The “social other” that surrounds us, the other of mimetic rivalry and violence? Or “Another Other”, one who is entirely outside those human patterns of mimesis, who has no rivalry or violence towards us – who, on the contrary, becomes the wholly-innocent victim of our rivalry and violence?

This then brings us to the subject of prayer. Prayer is about desire: about being honest with God about what our desires are, but in doing so coming to be shaped increasingly by his desires. To illustrate this, I want to develop some thoughts sketched out by James Alison in the closing section of his essay Prayer: a case study in mimetic anthropology, on the subject of the Lord’s Prayer.

As Fr Alison observes, the Lord’s Prayer “is all about desire”. It starts with God’s desire, then moves on to the expression and reorientation of our own desire. I’ve summarised this in the following diagram:

This shows the first half of the prayer as being concerned with God’s desire: for the hallowing of his name, the coming of his kingdom, the doing of his will. In the second, we move on to our own desires – starting with our most basic and immediate desire, the desire for “our daily bread”.

However, we then move on to two final petitions that I have shown in columns, to highlight the parallels between them. These petitions have much the same focus: embracing our “new self”, the self that is formed by the regard of “Another Other” in forgiveness and freedom from fear; and letting go of our “old self”, the self that is formed by our regard for the “social other”, of hanging on grimly to the “debts” owed by others and being bound by Satan’s patterns of mimetic rivalry. This is shown in more detail in the following diagram:

So the Lord’s Prayer itself is an expression of “mimetic anthropology” expounded by Girard but clearly understood by many before him, supremely by Jesus. To pray it is to have our desires, and thus ourselves, reshaped by “our Father in heaven”.

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John H June 6th, 2010

I came across this quote in an old notebook, from a 2008 interview in the Spectator with Dom Hugh Gilbert (the abbot of Pluscarden Abbey who was at that time being talked of as a possible successor to Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor):

I like the idea that beauty and holiness are the apologia for Christianity. The beauty of Christianity needs to shine out more; this is where the celebration of the liturgy becomes central. And the goodness of Christianity, i.e. the holiness of self-giving love (the witness of charity) and of prayer, needs to be sustained and developed. And this too, certainly: that the one thing Christianity has to offer is Easter. Simply: Christ is risen!

The beauty of the liturgy, the holiness of self-giving love and of prayer, and the announcement that Christ is risen. I’m even more convinced that Abbot Hugh is correct than I was when I first read it.

In my 2008 note I asked myself, perhaps a little sourly, “is beauty a misleading apology?”. I was perhaps mistaking beauty for splendour. Splendour has its place, but I wonder if what Gilbert meant is something closer to what C.S. Lewis described as “solempne“:

This means something different, but not quite different, from modern English solemn. Like solemn it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike solemn it does not suggest gloom, oppression or austerity. … The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp. …

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.

The beauty of the liturgy can be expressed partly through fine clothes and well-performed music, but at its heart it is about a certain forgetfulness: those involved, both celebrant and congregation, forget themselves as they perform the liturgy. This forgetfulness-in-performance can occur in both splendid and plain settings; equally, both splendour and plainness can be, in different ways, a distraction.

To put it another way, what is needed in the liturgy is a certain complacency, in the sense in which James Alison describes it in his essay “Confessions of a former marginaholic”:

The first point about complacency is that, contrary to its bad name, is in fact rather a good thing, because it means dwelling with liking in something. The Father says of the Son, “This is my son in whom I am complacent”. If you want to know that I am not making this up, here’s St Jerome’s translation: “Tu es Filius meus dilectus in te complacui”.

So that’s the essence of beauty in the liturgy: “dwelling with liking in” it. Not feeling apologetic for liturgy and ceremony; resisting the constant tug back towards the informal and spontaneous. In a word, liking the liturgy.

Then we have the life of holiness (in self-giving love and prayer) and the confident proclamation that Christ is risen – and hence death is defeated and our sins are forgiven. This is it, isn’t it? This is Christianity. I’m just conscious of how far my own life, and much of the life of the church, is from this.

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John H June 5th, 2010

We saw in my previous post how James Alison contrasts the “Temple” as a source of sacred fascination (whether we are attracted to it or react against it) with the “shepherding” of God’s people.

This then affects how we relate to religious authorities or “the institutional church”, particularly when we find ourselves at odds with them. Alison addresses this in a passage so good I’ve made it available in full here (PDF). He writes:

If we have a model of Jesus who is not indifferent to the Temple, but who is in rivalry with it, then we will also see the Pope and the Vatican, if we are Catholic, or whatever the equivalent is in our denomination, as occupying the place of Annas, Caiaphas and so on, and we will attribute to them a power and an authority and a coerciveness which we can resent, and our imaginations can work full-time in thinking about how awful they are and how heroic we are in standing up against them.

What this will mean, however, is that we “not have left the Temple at all”, and that we are still “utterly locked in to the centre of mimetic fascination, with its draw and its repulsion”.

Alison continues with “a point which is easy to make as a Catholic”, but which he hopes his readers “will find ways of translating it into your own denominational understanding” (see below for my attempt to do so):

The point of the Pope and the Vatican is not that it is the Temple, but that it is Peter. And the whole point of Peter is that he is not something splendid and heroic and imposing, but something weak and unheroic and vacillating. That is to say, just the sort of person with whom we cannot maintain real communion unless we learn to like him without paying too much attention to whatever bits of braggadocio he and his groupies have come up with.

And we learn to like him not because he’s nice or good, but because God has chosen to make God’s strength and salvation available to those who are able not to mind being in the company of the unheroic, the vacillating, the weak.

In other words, “if we read Peter as the Temple” – that is, if we see our religious authorities as something with which we are in a “sacred rivalry” – then we “will always be self-indulgent children needing a love/hate-figure”. Instead we should:

…learn to see the Pope as Peter, a fumbling figure trying to work out what to do as the Temple keeps on collapsing around him, rather as we ourselves are trying to do, and not let our over-charged imagination of him “get to us”.

This will then enable us to “develop a shepherding in the midst of the collapse of the Temple”: in short, to obey Jesus’ command to “Feed my sheep”:

Which means it will always be lived by us within the process of learning a certain sort of indifference to “Church-as-Temple” and of learning a growing sense of affection for what I would call “Shepherding with Peter”, whoever your Peter is.

How to apply this to the Lutheran church, particularly within “confessional” Lutheranism? Well, one might say that instead of “Peter” lurking over our shoulders we have “Paul” – in that we probably see the role of our leaders as being to perpetuate the teaching of Apostle Paul rather than the ministry of “Pope” Peter.

For some of us, though, the equivalent of “Peter” may be the “synodical bureaucrats” whom we see as promoting their institutional interests over the work of the gospel, or replacing Lutheran traditions with trendy by-products of modern evangelicalism. Or it might be those we perceive as self-appointed “guardians of confessional orthodoxy”, always on the alert to slap down any thinking that appears to go off the well-trodden paths of the Lutheran confessions – confessions which can themselves take on the status of “Temple” rather than guidebook for the Shepherds.

Whoever Peter is for us, today, the call is the same: not to get drawn into the fascination of attraction or repulsion to the Temple which Peter may claim to represent, but to forgive his “braggadocio” and recognise him as our fellow shepherd (a role which belongs to all of us in the priesthood of believers, but most especially to those in the holy ministry), feeding God’s sheep as the Temple of sacred fascination collapses around us.

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John H June 5th, 2010

In chapter 8 of On Being Liked, “The importance of being indifferent”, James Alison looks at the contrast between “Temple” and “Shepherd” found in both OT and NT.

In the OT this is seen most clearly in the prophecy of Ezekiel. Ezekiel had been a priest in Jerusalem, and in exile he had at first retained his love for the Temple and his sadness and anger at those who had desecrated it. However, after his vision of “God … detaching himself from the Temple and becoming flexible and mobile”, Ezekiel starts with his prophecy against the shepherds of Israel (Ezekiel 34), and speaks of God as the one who will himself seek and shepherd his people.

In other words:

the notion of “Shepherd” is always to be understood not just as a nice image among other nice images, but as one that only makes sense in critical juxtaposition to the notion of “Temple”. (p.120)

So Ezekiel was “working through a fascination until he was able to achieve a certain sort of indifference”. By “indifference” Alison doesn’t mean being dismissive, but “the sense in which something ceases to push any of your buttons either positively or negatively”. One’s heart is pointing somewhere else; one’s centre of gravity lies elsewhere.

Alison continues:

I put it to you that one of the most remarkable, and least remarked upon, features of Jesus’ acting out, teaching and ministry … is his quite extraordinary indifference towards the Temple.

The Temple was hugely important to first century Judaism, in particular as “the centre of mimetic fascination”, drawing people together and giving them “a sense of belonging which fused together learning, divinity, national identity, career, reputation, and so on”.

Jesus “quite specifically taught his disciples to regard the Temple with sublime indifference, to be deeply unconcerned about whether it stood or fell”. He “regarded his programme as one of creating a new Temple in his body”, as stated in Mark’s account of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple. In doing so he saw himself as fulfilling Ezekiel’s prophecy:

He is the “I myself will search out my sheep” and he is Shepherd not merely by teaching disregard for the Temple, but by himself becoming the Temple, by himself being the sacrifice which brings to an end the cult of the Temple as centre of mimetic fascination.

This includes both the mimetic fascination of falling in with the cult of the Temple, and its mirror image of reaction against the Temple, of protest gesture and “‘dissing’ the Temple establishment and the Temple”, in which the Temple remains a focus for fascination.

Instead, Jesus calls us to inhabit the same dynamic he inaugurated:

…of living in sight of the collapsing Temple while acting with deep indifference to it as he went about the shepherding of his sheep whom the false shepherds and hirelings had abandoned.

This contrast – between being fascinated by the Temple (whether in attraction or repulsion) and shepherding God’s people – in turn affects how we engage in ministry today and how we relate to our own religious establishments, especially when we find ourselves in disagreement with them. We’ll look at that in my next post, for which this has been largely preparatory.

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John H June 3rd, 2010

James Alison continues with his theme of God liking us in chapter 7 of On Being Liked (available online here). While the title indicates that Alison’s principal concern is with “unbinding the gay conscience”, much of what he says is applicable far more widely (and regardless whether you agree with his main thesis). And it’s that wider application – of “the relational nature of conscience and the importance of being set free from double binds” – that I want to look at in this post.

This question of unbinding the conscience is where the word “like” can become more useful than the word “love”:

[T]he word “like” is rather more difficult to twist into a lie than the word “love”, because we know when someone likes us. We can tell because they enjoy being with us, alongside us, want to share our time and company.

Well, what I would like to suggest is that if our understanding of love does not include liking, or at least being prepared to learn to like, then there’s a good chance that we’re talking about the sort of love that can slip a double-bind over us, that is really saying to us, “My love for you means that I will like you if you become someone else”.

Alison uses the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30 as a demonstration of how our answer to the question “does God like me?” affects our conscience and hence our actions:

The first two servants clearly imagined their master being away as an opportunity to do something delightful. Because they trusted that their master was the sort of daring fellow who would do rash and crazy things for which there was no script, would dare, would experiment, would risk losing things and so would end up multiplying things greatly.

In other words, they perceived their master’s regard for them as one of liking them enough to be daring them and encouraging them to be adventurous, and so, imagining and trusting that abundance would multiply, they indeed multiplied abundance.

By contrast, the third servant is paralysed by his imagination of his master to be “a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not winnow”:

His perception of the other was of one who did not like him and thus had put an impossible burden on him, and so all he had done was simply sulk. He had been bound, the living dead, moving neither forward nor backward.

It is no wonder that in Luke’s version, the master says, “Out of your own mouth I will condemn you, you wicked servant”, because it is in fact the servant’s own perception that has bound him.

Alison reaches a very Lutheran-sounding conclusion from this:

Someone of unbound conscience can dare to get it wrong, because they don’t have to get it right. If you have to get it right, that means that you don’t dare to get it wrong, which means that you are afraid of what will happen to you if you do get it wrong.

But the Catholic and Christian understanding of conscience is that because we know that we are liked we can get it wrong, and it doesn’t matter, because we are not frightened of punishment, but able to learn from our mistakes.

So a good conscience is “not a feeling of self-satisfaction at having got it right”. Rather it is:

…the excitement of being a son or daughter who is on an adventure, not the contractual precision of a slave who has to get something right because he has no sense of being on the inside of the project of whoever is in charge, and merely senses the other as arbitrary and capricious, as someone who will glower at what is not perfect.

As Alison continues, “consciences are unbound for a doing and a becoming”. It is not “what must we do?”, but “what do we want to dare to do?” Or to put it another way:

What would it be fun to present our master with on his return?

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