Metanoia

Jean Vanier: To accept the risk of personal consciousness

 

To accept the risk of personal consciousness and growth to inner freedom can be painful; it is never easy to follow the light of oneself when others do not seem to agree.  Communities can tend to close in upon themselves.  But belonging should always be a means to personal becoming.  It is accepting the risk of dying to aggressiveness and rivalry in order to discover a new freedom and a new fecundity - a new way of giving life to others, to be in "one body" with them.

--Jean Vanier in From Brokenness to Community

Oliver O'Donovan: On 'Authority'

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The term, ‘authority’ warns us that when redemption is present to us it does not encounter a vacuum. It exercises an authority over an existing reality. It encounters an apparent structure of order which is presented within the world, criticizing it and transforming it. It brings true reality to bear upon the appearances of reality which our world (that segment of the whole which shares our moment in history with us) presents to us. The effect of this is twofold: our world is judged, and it is recreated. The unreality of its existing coherence and continuity is exposed; and there is introduced a new series of events which present a truer coherence and continuity.

--Oliver O'Donovan in Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics

William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas: Being a Christian is not natural....

 
Being a Christian is not natural, not a by-product of being an American.  To be Christian is to be adopted by a new nation, the kingdom of God.  For the first time in our lives, those old labels and divisions that cause such grief - male/female, slave/free, rich/poor, New Jersey/Texas - are washed away, overcome, not by saying that such divisions don't mean anything, but rather by showing how they have been relativized, subordinated, and washed by our new citizenship.  Now, the only division that makes much difference to us is church/world.

--William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in Lord, Teach Us: The Lord's Prayer & the Christian Life

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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Jean Vanier: There is a myth about community

 

There is a myth about community, just as there is a myth about marriage.  The myth of marriage is "they lived happily ever after."  The reality of marriage is that it is a place where a man and a woman are called to sacrifice their egos on the altar of their desire to create one body.  Community also means death to ego, in order that people might grow to become one body, truly belonging to each other, not in a closed way but in a mysterious way where each one is growing in inner freedom. 

--Jean Vanier in From Brokenness to Community

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.