Metanoia

Figs, Bread, and Manure

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A sermon on Luke 13:1-9 preached by the Reverend Craig David Uffman at St. Anne's Church in Warsaw, Indiana on the third Sunday in Lent, 2010.

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What Fools Say in Their Hearts

In our secular age, it's common to encounter ideologies that masquerade as enlightenment. What's fascinating is that the enlightened of every age announce to the world their elect status in the same way.  They have been given the gnostic secret that it's all a sham: there is no God.  It's time for all to escape the sham in which we live by trusting the newfound wisdom of the new elect.

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One wonders what they would do if they discovered as well that the psalmist took the measure of such enlightened folk three millenia ago: “Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God” (Ps 14:1/53:1). Evidently the new discovery that there is no God is not so new after all.  Indeed, the agnosticism of today is but a pale imitation of that which Paul encountered at the Areopagus in Athens.  Fortunately, he helped the intelligentsia of his day name the god they did not know:

Freedom

A sermon on 2 Corinthians 3:18 and Luke 9:28-36

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Thinking Christianly About War

There continues to be concern about the administration's political will and acumen with respect to the Afghan War. Much of the rhetoric seems to presuppose that the question of handling the war is simply one of pragmatism. Some on the left object to our making war in Afghanistan simply because they believe we ought to devote our resources to domestic projects.  Others on the right criticize the president because they believe the administration is not prosecuting the war with sufficient seriousness to protect essential American geopolitical interests.  But whenever good and patriotic American Christians reflexively embrace pragmatism as our moral framework for thinking about war, we forget the moral compass entrusted to us by virtue of our baptism and run the risk of steering our nation into shoal waters. 

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Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #5

In the first post of this series, we saw that the epistemic role of the Spirit is at the heart of Christian ethical behavior. But that assertion does not explain how the Spirit forms Christians ethically. In the previous post, we explored the New Testament foundations of our trinitarian doctrine. In this final post, we'll reflect on the theological implications of our claims about how the Spirit forms us.

Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #4

In the last post of this series, we reviewed the Old Testament foundation of our claims about how the Spirit forms us. In this post, we continue remembering the Scriptural foundations of claims about the Spirit by turning to the witness of the New Testament.

The Holy Spirit in the New Testament

Paul and the Evangelists presuppose the portrait of the Spirit we find in the Old Testament.  The subsequent development in pneumatological doctrine that we have inherited results from the early Church’s development of christological, corporate, and eschatological doctrine. In particular, the New Testament emphasizes both the conception of the Spirit as one who equips individuals for special tasks and the more communal conception of the Spirit as one who makes obedience and holiness possible for all members of the family of Abraham by leading them to truth. Especially evident in Luke and Paul is the eschatological dimension. Luke emphasizes the role of the Spirit in bringing about God’s purposes in the world, while Paul emphasizes that the Spirit empowers disciples to anticipate the future fulfillment of God’s purposes in the present and thereby be transformed into members of the resurrection community. John extends this portrait with a conception of a the Spirit who is both immanent and transcendent, the one who causes disciples to recognize and embody truth in their common life as they seek to follow the Way of Christ.

Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #3

The Holy Spirit in the Old Testament

In the first post of this series, we saw that the epistemic role of the Spirit is at the heart of Christian ethical behavior. But that assertion does not explain how the Spirit forms Christians ethically. In the last post, we explored the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, with special attention to the explanation given by Gregory of Nyssa that helped pave the way for the Nicene Creed we recite during the Eucharist. In this post, we'll recall the Old Testament foundation of our claims about how the Spirit forms us.

At first glance, it would seem that the Hebrews of ancient times knew nothing of the doctrine of the triune God we rehearse when we recite the Nicene Creed. However, one finds the roots of Gregory’s trinitarian teaching already in the Old Testament distinctions of “Spirit of God” and “Spirit of the Lord.”  These distinctions were embedded literarily by the Hebrews in terms of “wind” or “breath” using the Hebrew word, ruah (breath, wind, spirit, mind, heart). When the scriptures were translated into Greek to produce the Septuagint, the distinctions found the fertile soil in the Greek word family, pneuma (“breath,” “wind,” and “Spirit”, “prophesy”) that Gregory later used creatively . Mining these metaphors, Israel developed a rich portrait of the Spirit that formed Early Church inherited and extended as it developed the christology that is our inheritance.

Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #2

In the first post in this series, we introduced the idea that the Spirit schools the Body of Christ so that we know the story of God we are called to enflesh.  We also saw that this epistemic role of the Spirit is at the heart of Christian ethical behavior.  In this post, we'll turn to Gregory of Nyssa for a helpful way of thinking about the Trinity generally and the role of the Spirit in particular. We'll also recall some of the classic Old Testament texts that provided the basis of Christian trinitarian doctrine.  This background will be important as we move deeper into our exploration of how the Spirit schools the Body of Christ so that it knows and embodies the truth about God that is the proper foundation of Christian ethical reasoning.

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Pneumatology Revisited: Performing the truth that the world does not know

The Spirit guides the world to grasp the truth about the triune God and itself by creating communities whose words and practices communicate the meanings necessary to reveal that truth. “The Spirit teaches us how, by word and deed, to mean what we ought to believe.”(Marshall, Bruce D. Trinity and Truth (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine). Cambridge University Press, 1999., p. 202-3.) The habits of our common life are therefore an essential part of the Spirit’s epistemic role: the practices of the Church are the crucial means by which the Spirit reveals to the world the truth it does not know. If we want to know the truth about God, we turn to our worship, where the Spirit guides our discernment-in-communion so that, in our liturgical practice, we utter the truth about God. If we want to learn about the greatest good, the greatest truth, and the greatest beauty - if we want to inquire about how God meets our needs so that we might live in friendship with God and our neighbors - we turn in confidence to our sacramental practice because Jesus has promised us he will meet us there. 

Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #1

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This series is ultimately about justice. Or rather, this series aims to remember certain fundamental Christian claims about how we recognize the just. In publishing this series, I am laying essential groundwork for future explorations of topics in Christian ethics. 

Questions about justice raise the question of how we know what is true, for to claim that we are able to recognize justice and injustice is to claim that we know truth. Yet often at the center of our brokenness are mutually exclusive claims about what is true. 

Wendell Berry: On Abundant Life

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It seems to me that all the religions I know anything about emerge from an instinct to push against any merely human constraints on reality.  In the Bible, such constraints are conventionally attributed to 'the world' in the perjorative sense of that term, which we may define as the world of the creation reduced by any of the purposes of selfishness.  The contrary purpose, the purpose of freedom, is stated by Jesus in the fourth gospel: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."  This astonishing statement can be thought about and understood endlessly, for it is endlessly meaningful, but I don't think it calls for much in the way of interpretation.  It does call for a very strict and careful reading of the word 'life.' -- Wendell Berry in Blessed are the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings about Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness