First, theology is an endeavour of metaphysics dealing with the absolute as absolute and it is a critical examination of the practice of religion. Theology is always claudicate if it attempts to be one without the other.
Second, religion is theology in act, in practice. It applies a vision of life, a valuation of life, and a systematic format for the presentation and enforcement of that vision and valuation, the system of masks and rituals, dogmas and liturgics. Continue reading
I am familiar with the idea that theology is God coming to an understanding of self. I found this ditty of German Idealism egregious when I was an under-graduate and I think it still carries that cachet. But I find it a bentrovato axiom of idealism on two counts. Continue reading
I recently spent a day riding around the city. As I assessed the architecture I quietly started keeping count of a certain type of signage, the type that usually includes the word church. I espied the Church of the Disciples, the Church of the Apostles, Church of God, Church of Jesus, The People’s Church, Full Gospel Church, Bible Church, Garden Church, Salvation Church, and there were all the Assemblies bearing variations on the above. There were the Roman and Orthodox establishments with their monopoly on the names of saints. The Anglicans were there with their propensity to tell you where they stand, at least geographically—on the hill, in the field, in the park. The Lutherans seem to likewise like some geographical definition, usually their country of origin. There were the macedoine Methodists, who win the prize for most variations on a denominational name. I was given to question if attendance is really declining or are we merely establishing a church for every dozen or so souls? Continue reading
I once saw a film, the title of which escapes me; in fact, everything about it escapes me with the exception of one scene. The scene is a most excellent commentary on cultural expectations. Somewhere in nineteenth century British imperial Africa a young woman in much distress and in skirts the size of a village hut comes running down the hill from the great plantation house to the fields below where the helots of the estate plod through their labours. She runs from one to another crying for help, but they, having been made obsequious clods, plod on. Finally she cries out “What is wrong with you people! We have been here twenty years and you still don’t speak the language”.
The woman is the church, the workers the world. Continue reading
There are some who will place the analysis of history by Oswald Spengler in opposition to the analysis provided by Arnold Toynbee, Professor Toynbee being chief among them. I would judge both men right given the vantage point from which they each view the subject, the Newtonian Spengler contemplating the surface, the Heisenbergean Toynbee mining the interior. My ability to make such a judgment is, admittedly, an anility. Nevertheless, my confession made, I shall proceed to address the issue given according to Toynbee.
With some consideration it may be generalized that great civilizations reach their last incarnation as a universal state enabling the rise of a universal religion which in turn allows the civilization to pass away and simultaneously to pass on at least something of itself to its successor. In this sense the great religions have provided a future oriented thrust for society at a time when the enduring and seemingly all encompassing civilization is reaching its end. Conversely, when the civilization to which the great religion has given parental nurture begins to enter a time of crisis that same religion tends to act more as a brake than a forward thrust. Thus, some of us become bewildered as to how so great a force of life can become so great a deterrent, and while the historian may calculate the role of Christianity in the transition from Greco-Roman civilization to Western civilization, we with the poet Yeats must ask what beast moves itself through the desert to Bethlehem to be born.
As with any generalization, exceptions must be noted. The ecclesial entity is not a homogenous set, nor is its actions, nor its passions.
There remains in the ecclesial entity its founding forward thrust. In our times we have witnessed liberation theology, the varied strivings of “death of god” theologies, the explosion of knowledge in the understanding of the historical and cultural milieu of scriptures and dogma, all part of a continuing flow of growth from the ancient attempts to de-Judaize the Christ event, to the attempts to Hellenize it, philosophize it, scholastize it, and most lately to socialize it within the understandings of the movements of the enlightenment.
There is, however, the other side of the coin to consider, and with every passing crisis, it is a side that grows in power and influence. The forward thrust is countered with a fervid atavistic fascination. This is the failing hope that if only we could bring back the good old days (although they never really ever existed) we can save the day. In the phrase “we can save” the problem is revealed.
Papal domination was the atavistic deformity resultant of a thwarted conciliar movement of a dying feudal society. Biblical fundamentalism and literalism are the deformities resultant of the thwarted growth instincts of the enlightenment. The liturgical movements of the nineteenth century are the wistful fancies of an age shadowing itself in a never-was Gothic to escape the blinding light of growing democratic and materialistic energies.
Today the church faces those same atavic powers made more potent with each passing success. Their claim is to stop the secularization of religion, to uphold the foundations of faith from corruption. And their defenders are adamantine in their arguments and warfare. But, they, not the adherents of the forward thrust, are the cancer within the body ecclesial, and for three reasons. First, religion exists to consecrate the secular, and Christianity has created Western Christian and post-Christian society. With its propensity toward scientific study, humanistic values, material growth and development it is and remains an incarnation of Christian faith. There is no case of the church against the world here, for the world of the west is the church and vice versa. Dogmas and rituals aside, the two are merely two aspects of one faith, even if that faith needs be clarified on both sides from time to time, as is the case with any entity not in possession of perfection. Second, dogmatic formulations are precisely that, formulae, and not being mathematical, are subject to the linguistic and cultural mutations of time and place. Peter and John comprehended the experience of the divine power potent in their teacher in terms of their religious expectations and their templic ritualizations. Paul began the process of de-Judaizing those formulations, and placing them in the language of the gentiles to whom he preached. The sacrificed lamb became the god-man, and philosophers and theologians ransacked the ideas of the Platonic schools to find terminologies to describe the existence of the god-head and Jesus’ relation to and within it. When in the thirteenth century some began to add Aristotelian terms to the equation, their efforts were met, as had been their predecessors’, with furor and flurry. And so it was with the enlightenment, with romanticism, pietism, quietism, materialism, socialism. And as with the need for dogma to speak in the words of the times and places, so it is with morals. Third, any conscious and purposeful attempt to go back in time to a mythic ideal is fantasy become psychosis.
Growth is not and never has been about holding onto the past. Growth is the outcome of facing the challenge of the present, comprehending it, and finding a successful response that allows the adaptation and the integration of the entity into the time and circumstances of its present as a moment pregnant with its future.
It is my befuddlement with this juncture of the situation that sometimes leads me as much to prayer as to sarcasm. The day-dreaming recalcitrant conservatives proclaim and hold their position with all the force that hell-fire and damnation can secure. Those who would step into the future tread so lightly that they are scarcely to be heard, and fail, for whatever reason, to scale the heights and cry out that “He is not there”! I do not know why the archaic dogmatic and ethical pronouncements encoded in their fossilized Hellenic philosophical terms hold such power over so many strong minds. I do know that the way forward is never the past. The cross is the central moral symbol of the Christian faith. It is the definitive statement that no matter the shame or the loss, humanity is not without hope. All life and property, all reputation and hope hang on that gallows, and on it all is and must be given up, lost, save that “whose power working in us” can and does transform death into life, and the corpse does vanish into its transcendent, “a life giving spirit”.
The body ecclesial claiming the heritage of Jesus Christ cannot lift up its hands and condemn its own society, its own child, its own world as an entity bent on no more than material growth and political correctness, it cannot throw up its hands and surrender to those who would forever rehearse the past, it must stand, tall and firm, and shout out from the heights: the mission is not to the past, but to the world, the program is not a book, but a living and life-giving Spirit. Until we come to that land of promise, God ever goes BEFORE us for-us.
We can talk and discuss until the end of time. But to what end, the endurance of institutions? Christ Jesus died. Dare his ministers do the same? Dare his church the same? Dare we risk all for the sake not of ourselves and our comfort but of our vocation? Peter left Rome during the Neronian tirade to keep himself for the continuance of his mission. On the road he encountered Jesus making his way to Rome with a cross in tow. Peter understood. He could save himself and his mission only at the price of Jesus Christ. Whether or not Jesus asked “quo vadis”, it was understood, and Peter went back to die.
On a recent Easter Eve a Christian church in southwest Pennsylvania presented an Easter pageant. Reportedly many adults were upset, and many children horrified. The pageant featured the whipping of the Easter Bunny and the smashing of the chocolate eggs. It was argued by the Youth Minister of this church that this was a religious necessity to combat the pagan symbols of bunnies and eggs.
I would like to make four observations regarding this event.
First, “Easter” is a pagan name in origin. It is merely an updated spelling of Eostre, that frolickingly happy Brit goddess of spring. Had the minister had some wherewithal, she would have named it a Paschal pageant, Pasch being the Greek for Passover and the term used by Christians outside the English-speaking world. But Pasch and Passover are themselves about a lamb, communally slaughtered and eaten, about signing houses in blood, about escape from death, about inexplicable rescue. There is also no shortage of such themes in paganism as well, and scholars a few generations ago were tripping over themselves to comment on that.
Second, as a student of Biblical studies, allow me to make five non-textual speculations regarding the Bunny.
1. We all know that bunnies live in hollows and holes and sometimes–even caves. While the tomb into which Jesus was laid may well have been never used as a tomb, nowhere are we told it had no other use. I put to you it was in fact a home, the home of the bunny.
2. When on that fateful morn the bunny awoke, he was surely not amused to find that someone had rolled a great rock in front of his door, so he moved it.
3. To say the least, the bunny was surprised to find a body in his house. It was the bunny who helped him up and out. To those of gentler hearts who find this suggestion a sacrilege, keep in mind that Incarnation epitomizes the belief that God works in and through created things.
4. The bunny started to tidy up but did not, after moving both rock and Jesus (figuratively Earth and Heaven) have the energy to go on. Hence linens were left unfolded.
5. While sitting in the glow of the morning sun and trying to recover from such a hectic start of day, the bunny was startled by some women looking for Jesus. They, of course, already shaken by a removed stone, peeped in, and seeing the bunny with his long ears back and flowing confusedly thought him to be an angel and ran away.
They who find this all a little too fanciful are directed to get themselves to a library and seriously read some very serious commentaries on scripture. Some scholars’ musings make the above look patently tame. They who find this heretical are directed to read the Gospel according to Peter and further consider how a culture that employs the idiom of animal helpers as opposed to celestial helpers might relate the event.
Third, I do not know where chocolate eggs come from. I do not care. I grew up in a household where the meaningfulness of confections was understood to subsist in their enjoyment and not in the analysis of their origins. Yes, some mysteries ought not to be questioned, just celebrated. Nevertheless, the symbolism of egg for resurrection has Christian roots, it having been among the many pagan symbols co-opted, baptized, and given a new dimension of meaning. The shell is the tomb enclosing a life summoned forth to a newness of life. They that find eggs and chicks unacceptable symbols ought recall the psalmist tells us God wishes to cover us with his wings (Ps 91), and that Jesus echoes that passage when he desiderates that he would gather and protect us under his wings as does a hen her chicks (Mt 23, Lk 13). Chocolate has had, in some times and some places, a connection with the divine, but far be it from me to toss another bit of paganism at them that believe knowing a word means comprehending its meaning and so go about misunderstanding their own sacred writings, those of all others, and the nature and function of religion in general.
Fourth, I would like to consider the conservative side of the American Protestant heritage. Do you recall the childhood quiz: if April showers bring May flowers, what do Mayflowers bring? Answer: Pilgrims. Remember them? They outlawed Christmas and popularized basic black. So, what did the Pilgrims bring? Calvinistic capitalism, Biblical fundamentalism, and a strong inclination to Theocracy. Their excessive effort to out-weigh the burden of a belief in predestination garnished an orientation to external busy-ness, scriptural literalism and the need to have an answer from On High for every situation. If you were numbered among the saved, your industrious, profitable, and obedient life was the proof of it, until, of course, you arrived in heaven. God had spoken and the Bible was his singular and only word. The world represented what was not of God.
It is a sorry thing that the symbols of an empty cross and empty tomb are lost on those who would minister them. It is a sad thing that those powers that sustain and transport us from season to season are not grasped with joy. It is a sad thing that symbols that have held the attention of Western civilization for hundreds of years are losing their force. But life goes on, and it finds its way. So, if the brightness of spring, the innocence of bunnies and chicks, the fragrance of lilies, the delights of confections and the “hunt” for them as they lay hidden about on an awakening Earth speak to the world of the good news of life and living, then, let it be. Let the church consecrate them to God’s use.
Blessed is the Creator of all things. May we all delight in his works, and may all our crosses and all our tombs be empty this day and evermore.
I must confess that of all I have said, I thought the use of the terms “bow down” and “submit” would be the least questionable.
I believe man must always bow down or submit to something beyond or within him that he can freely acknowledge as a guiding principle, be that an idea of creativity, an ethical ideal, or a divine creator.
With the dawn of the Renaissance comes an increasingly more articulated thrust to apotheosize the individual. In Nietzsche that thrust flowers with the declaration that “God is dead”. Man could no longer tolerate living under someone or something. Man “stands out” (ex-ists) in the universe, man does not humble himself to the universe or to some big bang of the divine fiat “Let there be…”. Existentialism, or more precisely, atheistic existentialism was born. Man had to be the maker of his own values, his own rules. Man had to be master of his own destiny even in the face of fate and fatality. There is much truth here, but it comes from a very wrong place in man, from anger and dissolution fostered by the failure of spiritual direction and support. A medieval god could not speak to modern man, and so, modern man (Nietzsche, Sartre, and the cohorts of their co-anti-religionists) obliterated from the world the incoherent noise of an antique relic. But where an attitude comes from is as important to consider as the attitude.
All values, rules, laws, principles, visions come from man. They always have. One may claim they arise from the heart of man inspired by God or dictated to by God, but the fundament remains: they come from man. We have no stone tablets, no monoliths, no rainbow on which are written up for all times and places the what and how man must do. Even were that the case, man would need to accent to them, to enfold them within, to “write them on his heart” were they to have any practical value or hold. Man–whether inspired by a god or enlightened by his own experience and reflection– concocts his visions and understandings of himself and his world, and establishes codes of practical behaviour for maneuvering the same. Those codes have traditionally been, to one degree or another, en-culturized, established into a schema of cult and culture, a system of societal cohesion. The cult is always the subliminal expression of the culture. Social rules, expectations, and aspirations are given a coded existence, ritualized, and iconicized in some form, be it the tribal totem, the revered ancestors, or some deities of lesser or greater extension and/or power. But cults tend to fossilize in the course of institutionalization, and thereby begin to slowly and incessantly drag behind the evolution of the society. The cult becomes the antique, the relic of times past, a curiosity, but no longer the heart and hearth of social cohesion.
The churches of the renaissance, of the modern age, could not escape this cultic sclerosis. They could not find the code, the words, the vision to transmit gospel in a comprehensible language to a new world. And so the world ignored them, castigated them and their emblems for their irrelevance, and went on to establish a new cult, the cult of man.
If you read the great atheistic existentialists, you will find they are not without some idea of a divine, an all inspiring or defining principle. They are culturally conditioned and delimited from ever being free to refer to such as something divine or a mask of the divine. They are too abandoned by the cult of the past to ever want a cult of any type. But we are not capable of being without a cult any more than without a culture. Today we worship at the altar of financial success and gain, and around that cult our culture teeters. We walk alone, we bow down before our Blackberries and iPods, we allow ourselves to wallow in a ceaseless now. We preen ourselves, we encastle ourselves, we absorb ourselves. And all the while, the immensity above and beyond and within is ignored, and the most precious visions and vistas we can and could rise to are lost to a seemingly endless tinkering with things and fidgeting with ourselves.
To bow down and submit before the fearsome and wondrous power of being is merely to stop and acknowledge that I have roots, I have profundity, I have some meaning beyond this moment. It is to stop the constant flow of chatter and listen to the creativity of silence, to feel the rapture of stillness and her wings, to be re-created in the sheer and awesome wonder that I am, that we are. Somewhere in time a man looked out in wonder and asked who are you, and Wonder spoke back “I am”.
I have enunciated before the simple psychological reality: we are that which we worship. Bow we down and submit to our balance sheets, our latest and most minimalized machine of communication, our sculpted flesh, our aggrandized homes or to something more?
God is not dead. We have, many of us, simply lost his address, and yet yearn, in some secret speck of us, to find his threshold whereon to kneel and be embraced.
