So, essentially, those in the Archdiocese who are making this decision are saying that, contrary to what we might have believed, agape is not unconditional, but dependent on the Archdiocese’s imprimatur of City Council policy.

Tell me, where does Christ append an anti-secularity clause to his “do it to the least of these, you do it to me”? What kind of Church is this that demands compatibility with bureaucrats before it will do the work of Christ?

Read the whole story here.

PS. Vox Nova has picked up on the discussion here.

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“Self, self, self”–says Dicken’s Chuzzlewit. But oh what slipperiness there is in such a reiterated self! Ethically we come to know belatedly that others have been participant in our selving all along. We thought we were at home with ourselves, just through ourselves, but dwelling with this, we are surprised by the other–a second time. We remember others already enabling us to be so, and we see through this odd illusion of being through oneself alone. Odd, since it is one granted by the gift of the other, one that the generous other seems willing to let be. We become more mature as ourselves, and we realize that this being for self is an immaturity. There are debts deeper than ever one could say or pay. And then an other giving may be known and loved differently, an other giving that enables one’s release to be oneself.

Systematically, we might seem to ascend towards the light; but like Plato’s philosophers, existentially, we must descend again into the cave, down again into the chiaroscuro of the equivocal ethos. And if indeed the specter of nihilism still haunts us, this is even more urgent. Can we speak of the milieu of being as the elemental field of value? Is there given a primal sense of “It is good to be”? What is the “yes” that is here needed? Is there this field of the overdetermined good of the “to be” that cannot be identified with this good or that? Is there a primitive “It is good” in excess of all of our determinations of it? Do we already live in the elemental field of value in this wise: our very being lives the ontological affirmation “to be is good”? We are in the middle, but does not this inchoate rapport with the good of being define our own being? Is this rapport our inarticulate community with the good as overdetermined? A rapport that also is a love?

William Desmond, Ethics and the Between, 5-6

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The best I could gather is that even as (indeed because of his being) a historical figure, Christ bears no relationship to the WWJD Christian. His historicity places him in a group that has been sealed in a tomb of metaphysical irrelevance. Reality is dichotomized between the historical and the now, the two forever reft of the other. In fact, the only way Christ becomes relevant to us is in his moral example, which (strangely enough) is a kind of historical existence. But in terms of human nature, or salvific action, or the significance of resurrection (he does defeat death after all), many of my students could find no way to integrate Christ into their thinking about politics, ethics, the quality of life, the nature of life and death, the list goes on; they couldn’t bridge the historical gap. I wondered aloud why his humanity wasn’t a connection, or rather why the connection of human nature to Christ was limited to a moral significance. Why does Christ’s triumph over death for humankind rank below a mere moral imitation in Christian decision making? Why the lack of intimacy with Christ’s human nature and the resurrection consequences thereof?

In Why Study the Past, Rowan Williams suggests the answer to these questions might come from our intentions toward history. If studying Church History leads one to a dichotomized identity between the historic church and the present church, then of course, then we’re left primarily with making judgments, the criteria of which will come from the standards of research we have today, and not the standards by which previous Christians might have had. “Eusebius and John Foxe,” Williams states, “were not trying to write good twenty-first century history” (26). And if our standard of truthfulness, aka good history, leads us “to suppose that biblical chroniclers had no recognizable sense of truthful narrative” then, Williams argues, we’ve failed to realize that “there is a somewhat different kind of enterprise being attempted in which canons of history-writing alone will not tell us everything” (26).

For Christians, our role in reading the history of the church, our “enterprise”, is not merely to chronicle the history in our terms, but more so to engage in a community, an identity which stretches behind and beyond us. “In theological shorthand, the modern believer sees herself or himself as a member of the Body of Christ…. Who I am as a Christian is something which, in theological terms, I could only answer fully on the impossible supposition that I could see and grasp how all other Christian lives had shaped mine and, more specifically, shaped it towards the likeness of Christ” (27). On the next page Williams says, “For the historian who has theological convictions, that challenge [of understanding the church's life] is at last something of what is truly known of Christ in the agents of the past” (28).

This concept of the body of Christ, and our participation in it, seems to me to be the fruitful way forward in jettisoning the overly simplistic aspects of “what would Jesus do” moral reasoning. Following Williams, I think the harmful aspects of WWJD thinking is in the way that it misses the ecclesiological and metaphysical ways in which we’re not connected to Christ through a flat, modern notion of imitation, but rather through the Spirit’s intimately drawing us together into one body through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Thus, it’s not a matter of only looking to Christ for an example, but living as Christ, indeed being Christ in the world.

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It seems that this is an important issue with which the church should be eager to grapple. I am reminded of Richard Kearney’s small text, On Stories, in which he demonstrates how stories of immigrants, often no more than political propaganda and satirical etchings, throughout history have influenced catastrophic and dispicable behaviour by otherwise decent people. The effects of such actions are still felt within and without the Jewish community still today. Indeed, Kearney and Salmon devote whole chapters to theory after the Holocaust.

So, I propose that we read this book over the next couple months, and discuss no more than one chapter every 2-3 weeks. It’s a small volume, and written in an easy style. Although an accomplished exegete and theologian, she intends the book for parish clergy and laity, so the bulk of our energy and time can be reserved for the discussion. If you like this idea, comment below or email me (link on the about page). In order to give sufficient time to order the book and read chapter 1, we’ll begin on 24 September.

Cheers.

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So much has happened this week in several blogs that we all frequent, not to mention outside or prodigious circle. Moreover, several noteworthies from the summer escaped my mention one way or another. Take this posting as my unofficial and abridged “I Don’t Know What You Did This Summer, But Here’s What You Should Have Been Reading.” I reserve the right to add to this list, to expect you all to follow up on the items herein, and to mock the many, dare I say most, of you who don’t. We’ll start with this week and work backward.

August 8. Fr. Edward T. Oakes published a charming and timely piece on the First Things blog on Wednesday called “On Canons”. If you’ve been keeping up with Janet and the most recent discussion over at Deep Grace of Theory, or you’ve been following the discussion on the nature of Christian philosophy or the comments under the Balthasar podcast, or you haven’t had your head buried in the sand, you might find his article illuminating. You’ll at least be tickled by such lines as: “No one disputes Hegel’s status as a canonical philosopher; but anyone who has tried to work through his rebarbative prose quickly comes to see how little literary merit counts when it comes to admittance in the ranks of canonical philosophers.” Ok, that’s hilarious to me. And I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t know what “Rebarbative” means. Hell, my spell checker doesn’t even recognize it. So, for all you playas out there -

Rebarbative: adjective; from French rébarbatif, from Middle French, from rebarber to be repellent; REPELLENT, IRRITATING

Here’s the really salient bit, especially for Janet. “To add to the problem [of defining what's canonical in philosophy and what's not], there is the fact of Western intellectual history that no one fails to notice: Science makes progress, philosophy doesn’t. The repetition of both errors and truths embarrasses the history of philosophy when compared to history of science, where – according to the standard modern (as opposed to postmodern) narrative – error is corrected by truth and does not recur.” Contentious enough for you, yet? Well, how does Oakes propose we deal with this problem of how to determine our philosophical canon. It’s not quite as easy as picking and choosing our favs and our despised: “I think Etienne Gilson gets close to my point when he drolly says in his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience: ‘There is more that one excuse for being Descartes, but there is no excuse whatsoever for be Cartesian.’ Nearly all philosophers of whatever stripe are united in contemning Cartesianism; yet there Descartes sits, like the Cheshire cat perched on his branch in the canonical tree, smiling at all the derision he gets from behaviorists, Thomists, Aristotelians, animal psychologists, neurologists – undislodgeable!” The answer – Scott will love this – is Thomism.. well, not quite, but in another bad nutshell, the problem with philosophy today is that, while having all the earmarks of Christian tradition, it is constantly trying to get away from reacting to, and making ample use of Christianity. In the words of Mortimer Adler, “Christianity has made problems for [philosophers] which they can not solve without faith, but which they will not refrain from discussing in rational terms.” But are Thomists dealing with the current problems of philosophy? Oakes: “The temptation for the Thomist here is to made Thomism a filly coherent, internally cohesive, locked-in while, a sealed-off bathysphere or an impregnable siege engine, impermeable to the lessons, both good and bad, that modern philosophy teachers … Good luck trying to overcome that prejudice. Because of the influence of seminary Thomism before Vatican II, the impression often arose that Thomism is a fully formed system… Are Thomists being trained in the history of modern philosophy to take up where, for example, James Collins left off in his magisterial God in Modern Philosophy?” Please read his entire article.

Next, the August 6th New Yorker rings the alarm we rang on May 30th (thanks to Salon.com.) Apparently, the honey bee decline is getting so bad that California is eventually going to have to rent the entire honey bee population currently in North America just to pollinate its almond crop. Where that leaves the needs of the rest of us is anyone’s guess.

Now, for the summer:

Archbishop Rowan Williams was interviewed and had his mug featured on the cover of Time magazine. You can read the interview here, and you can listen to the podcast here. Williams expresses his view that both sides must come together in compromise for the sake of the church. The article does a nice job of couching the issue not only in terms of the sexual ethics but, but also in terms of stability for the countries involved.

On the flip side, First Things published the Ugandan Archibishop Henry Luke Orombi. Orombi argues that the decisive element of Anglicanism, pace Williams, is not liturgical practices and mutual respect in dialogue. Rather, it’s martyrdom and evangelization, all aimed at advancing “The Word of God.” All tools of communion must be oriented toward “holding each other accountable to Scripture”. He then describes how the call to the Scripture in Ugandan society has transformed cultural practices there. In his eyes, backing down from the demands made on TEC would be comprimising on sexual ethics, thereby denying the transformative power of Scritpure and its effects in his own society. Yet, reading the article, one wonders at his seemingly black and white understanding of cultural issues and how he argues through examination of cultural norms and transformation in Uganda for what he expects to be the common Anglican element. The Church of England certainly didn’t get its start with conservative sexual ethics, and I doubt that stances such as Orombi’s will change many minds. Moreover, when we look at what has really been common to the Anglican church, and then read Orombi’s article, something is suspiciously amiss- what happened to The Book of Common Prayer. Hmmm. The real common anchor of Anglican life has been a liturgical one all along. Go figure!

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