Archive for the 'Dogmatics' Category

Henri de Lubac “On Christian Philosophy”, part 3

Published
by
DWM
on September 3, 2007
in Grace, Incarnation, Nature, Scripture, Supernatural, Systematic Theology, Theology and other and Vatican II
. 5 Comments

In this last post on Henri de Lubac’s article “On Christian Philosophy,” we will examine Lubac’s conclusion that for such a thing as Christian philosophy to exist, it must necessarily renounce its hitherto held dogma of closed rationalism, broaden the scope of reason by accepting desire, and open itself finally to the mystery of the incarnation as its ontological impetus and telos. First, let’s recap the argument thus far explored in the previous two posts (which can be found here and here).

The problem is how to conceive of the relationship between the Christian faith and philosophy. Lubac early on dismissed grounding the language of faith in Philosophy. He was also uncomfortable with the idea that philosophy can retain autonomy, yet all the while receiving contributions from the Faith. Rather, it is in the very essence of thought and reason to be open, not closed, constantly drawn forward and refreshed by faith. Philosophy can not help but be indelibly altered by its interaction with faith. Indeed, as Lubac affirms at the end of the article, within the deep structure of reason is the tectonic movement of the supernatural. But, Christian philosophy as it was then conceived was so constituted by an image of a reason hermetically sealed that there was no place for the mystery of the supernatural. The mystery could not be allowed to “fertilize” the soil of reason. Philosophers maintained the sphere of pure nature as the ground of philosophy.

Continue reading ‘Henri de Lubac “On Christian Philosophy”, part 3′

Inadvertent Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology? A Reading Group Proposal

Published
by
DWM
on August 30, 2007
in Church History, Culture, Ethics, Polity, Scripture, Suffering and Theological Education
. 0 Comments

Salmon Preaching Without ContemptThat’s the claim made by Preaching Without Contempt: Overcoming Unintended Anti-Juadaism (2006), a short volume by Marilyn J. Salmon, NT prof at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Salmon stakes the claim, following recent Pauline scholarship, that the Gospels are inherently Jewish texts, that Jesus’ Judaism is at the core of his mission, and that a good deal of Christian hermeneutics, theologizing, and subsequent preaching has notoriously failed to recognize such.

Continue reading ‘Inadvertent Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology? A Reading Group Proposal’

Theosis among some Anglicans, part 1

Published
by
DWM
on August 12, 2007
in Anglicanism, Dogmatics, Supernatural, Systematic Theology and Theology and other
. 3 Comments

August 13th is the day that Anglicans, especially Irish Anglicans, remember Jeremy Taylor (d. Aug 13, 1667) whose various clerical posts included serving as chaplain to Charles I and, later in life, as Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland. I first learned of Taylor last year in an article by Edmund Newey titled “The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Wichcote, Ralph Cudworth, and Jeremy Taylor”.1 Newey’s central thesis relates to the concept of theosis, also called deification, in four Anglicans and the Cambridge Platonists movement in Anglican theology (Wichcote and Cudworth often being considered the first of the Cambridge Platonists). Tonight, I’ll look at Newey’s introduction and exegesis of Hooker. Continue reading ‘Theosis among some Anglicans, part 1′

  1. Edmund Newey, “The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Wichcote, Ralph Cudworth, and Jeremy Taylor,” Modern Theology 18:1 (2002): 1-26; at Ingenta↩

Response to Love Alone

Published
by
Jefe
on August 2, 2007
in Balthasar, Culture, Incarnation, Inner City, Suffering and Theology and other
. 7 Comments

The following is a response by Jefe G, a fellow resident of the DC area, to the series of posts on Balthasar’s Love Alone and Fathers Day. Jefferson agreed to let us share it here as a guest post - hopefully not his last! Thanks, Jefe. - DWM

I didn’t have the best experience with the first Balthasar book I read, so [the recent series of posts on The Land of Unlikeness] convinced me to give him another chance.
I was surprised that when I was about half halfway through Balthasar’s Love Alone is Credible, I started to feel something like a heaviness of suffering in the text. I was flipping to the title page to see the publication date for its proximity to WWII, when I noticed the description of the Auschwitz Sacred Heartcover photograph. The cover of my edition has a picture of an etching from a wall at a cell in Auschwitz of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I was almost relieved that I wasn’t the only one who saw in Balthasar’s slim book something absolutely ludicrous. Because just as scratching Jesus into a Nazi death camp cell wall is ludicrous, so is maintaining a belief that we remain ordered toward love, and that we are welcomed into that love, despite being absolutely aware of the enormity of human suffering today. Continue reading ‘Response to Love Alone’

Father’s Day

Published
by
DWM
on June 17, 2007
in Creation
. 2 Comments

Happy Father’s Day to all of you fathers and father/parent figures. God bless you and may your children recognize what a wonderful gift they have in you. May you experience God’s peace and happiness through your children.

Throughout the week, I haphazardly meditated on the idea of parenthood quite a bit. Aside from my direct connection to Father’s Day as a parent, I was privy to some really powerful experiences of parenting. Moreover, having recently read Balthasar’s meditation on a mother’s love and glance toward her child being the child’s awakening to the world, to the very idea of a “thou”, I had a helpful framework upon which to interpret my experiences. Continue reading ‘Father’s Day’

Assault on Hunny Bees

Published
by
DWM
on May 30, 2007
in Creation and Ecology
. 3 Comments

My last post today… I promise.
Salon has a really complex but helpful interview with four bee and polination experts discussing the recent drop in bee population and the relating factors. Apparently, there are a number of factors, all of which have been proven to affect the health of the population, but none of which can account for the scale of the problem.

I think we are facing a series of problems like this, problems that are environmental in nature, and this has been a real eye-opener for me as to how poorly prepared this country and countries around the world are in taking note of how climate change or global change will impact our ecosystems. Humanity is affecting our ecosystems, and it’s very complex to determine whether this is due to environmental change or some disease. You can see now that it is very difficult to pull these things apart.

The fact that Christians aren’t leading the charge in issues like the catastrophic decline of the honeybee and other polinator population is crazy. For me, it all boils down to the really poor to non-existent doctrine of creation and ensuing experience of the world many of us have. The experts are right; if the bee population can’t sustain the polination demand, it’s not like we’re going to get our produce somewhere else. We’re screwed. Hopefully someone will write a sequel to Assault on Reason and call it Assault on Hunny in my Tummy.

Hall 4 - Natural Law and Reason & Faith

Published
by
DWM
on May 23, 2007
in Anglicanism, Grace, Nature and Systematic Theology
. 8 Comments

The fourth and fifth sections of the Outlines, chapter 1, continues Hall’s attempt to delineate the natural and supernatural. In my reading, Hall suffers primarily here by delineating science and theology enough that, in so doing, creates an emancipated, secular science that is able to carry on entirely in the absence of theology, regardless of how much he wants it to want the input of faith and the church.

Hall begins by elucidating the “natural order” or the phenomenal world, in which certain observable “laws” or regulating forces maintain a uniformity of experience. However, this uniformity must not mislead one to believe that this is an eternal or everlasting cosmos, as neither science can prove nor revelation attests to such. Rather, revelation states that “this order will, in due time, give place to a new one.” Moreover, the phenomenal world has seen the breaking in of miracles and the supernatural, as testified to by the ancients’ preoccupation with the uniformity of the supernatural long before interest in natural laws grew. “Theological science is more ancient than physical science—in fact, the mother of it.” As such, Hall posits the following division of disciplines:

So long as natural science confines itself to the investigation of nature as such, and theological science to the theistic and spiritual interpretation of facts undeniably established, there can be no conflict. But when natural scientists undertake to advance theological interpretations of their results, a collision is apt to occur between their crude speculations and more mature Theology. And when theologians continue to rely upon exploded views of nature, basing theological speculations upon them, a conflict occurs between out-of-date and up-to-date natural science. As Dr. Pusey says, unscience, not science, is adverse to Faith.

Reason and faith, then, are both important in the theological project. Reason according to Hall is “an intellectual process making for the acquisition of truth… invariably conditioned in its exercise by the will and affections.” Faith, while having several different modes, is here “a department of reason, although dependant upon supernatural grace… the spiritual faculty by which we discern spiritual things.” Thus, being an exercise of reason, “the laws of human reason hold good.” Grace becomes important to Hall here, in that grace is vital to one’s very ability to grasp supernatural knowledge. Consequently, he grants a special place to the sacraments inasmuch as they expose one to grace. Access to grace through faith is most evident in the common statements of faith embraced by the “Greek, Latin, and Anglican (churches)… with but slight verbal variations and with the same meaning… significant, in view of the diversity of races and usages which exists, and the age-long mutual hostility which has prevailed. Such consent is not to be found elsewhere.” Rationalism, then, is not some pure form of access to reason, but is a crippled endeavor simply by virtue of its prima facie rejection of ecclesial authority.

While it seems that Hall’s definition of natural and supernatural probably got a lot of mileage, particularly among more technologically or scientifically minded Christians (Janet comments on this is a previous posting’s comment section), and maybe I’m even detecting a hint of CS Lewis’ Miracles, his language is ultimately uncompelling and rather flat to me. I’m especially uneasy about his division of territory between science and theology. This is possibly due to Hall attempting to hedge the claims of science, and my nostalgia for cosmologies like Maximus’, in which a theological understanding of the world not only precedes but informs a natural one, in which there is no comprehensive understanding of the natural world that does not flow from an initial engagement with that world’s creator. Furthermore, while he tries to ward off the notion of an universal scientific reason, his separation of powers between science and theology seem to grant that there is a space apart from theology in which a kind of positivist and exhaustive scientific knowledge is possible. Of course, it now is commonplace to reject such notions almost entirely on their naivete toward the place of interpretation in all things, scientific or theological. Similarly, one could ask exactly what Hall means by a natural order, and whether investigation of such includes ontology. He certainly isn’t clear as to how broad or narrow he expects the study of the natural order to be, but philosophers might make a convincing case for their autonomy under Hall’s system. Conversely, if anthropology and ontology are theological topics, or at least not wholly secular disciplines, then Hall’s secular science will be surely lacking in its exercise. My thomist friends can probably spell out for me how Thomas answers many of these questions, and I probably should point you all to this book as it helped me flesh a little bit of this out for myself as I was typing this post.

Yves Congar discusses Tradition

Published
by
DWM
on May 16, 2007
in Art, Polity, Scripture, Theological Education and Vanhoozer
. 5 Comments

There’s been two recent posts this week that quote at length from Yves Congar’s The Meaning of Tradition. Some of Congar’s ideas in the Intro relate to the recent discussion here re: Milinerd’s and Reno’s comments on Theological Education and Art Discourse, so I thought I would quote a small bit.

Paul Claudel compared tradition with a man walking. In order to move forward he must push off from the ground, with one foot raised and the other on the ground; if he kept both feet on the ground or lifted both in the air, he would be unable to advance. If tradition is a continuity that goes beyond conservatism, it is also a movement and a progress that goes beyond mere continuity, but only on condition that, going beyond conservation for its own sake, it includes and preserves the positive values gained, to allow a progress that is not simply a repetition of the past. Tradition is memory, and memory enriches experience. If we remembered nothing it would be impossible to advance; the same would be true if we were bound to a slavish imitation of the past. True tradition is not servility but fidelity.

This is clear enough in the field of art. Tradition conceived as the handing down of set formulas and the enforced and servile imitation of models learned in the classroom would lead to sterility; even if there were an abundant output of works of art, they would be stillborn. Tradition always implies learning from others, but the academic type of docility and imitation is not the only one possible: there is also the will to learn from the experience of those who have studied and created before us; the aim of this lesson is to receive the vitality of their inspiration and to continue their creative work in its original spirit, which thus, in a new generation, is born again with the freedom, the youthfulness and the promise that it originally possessed.

At last year’s AAR, Hans Boersma gave a paper in response to Vanhoozer’s Drama of Doctrine in which he suggested that Vanhoozer could benefit from appropriating Congar into his overall picture of how doctrine is developed and implemented. I confess that I don’t remember much of his paper and can’t find it in article form online. But I think the salient point is that inherent even to a proposal as generous as Vanhoozer’s is the tension between the Protestant and Catholic relationship to scripture, the (sometimes) radical individualism of sola scriptura and the perceived crustiness and equally rigid rules of tradition. In Congar’s words:

[S]ince the Reformation there is controversy between Christians on “Scripture versus tradition”, a controversy on the rule of faith.

And the dualism goes on…

Three Views of the Eucharist? (Eventual) ruminations on the place of the Eucharist in Anglican theology

Published
by
DWM
on May 13, 2007
in Anglicanism, Dogmatics, Hooker, Polity, Rowan Williams and Systematic Theology
. 1 Comment

Per Caritatem has an interesting 3 part series on a Reformed View of the Eucharist by Mike Vendsel that just ended last thursday. Vendsel reviews Douglas Farrow’s article, “Between the Rock and a Hard Place: In Support of (something like) a Reformed View of the Eucharist”. I must confess, I didn’t know there was such a thing. Just goes to show the state of catechesis when I was growing up. Farrow’s article basically posits two views: 1.is the “traditional” reformed view that attempts to safeguard a notion of Christ’s ontological body, existing in space and time, quite distinct from the sacramental elements. This perspective reminds me of something a youth leader said to me back in high school: “We don’t have sacraments; we have ordinances.” At the time, I took him to be mincing words, but since then I have come to wonder if it really wasn’t just an excuse to not deal with the tensions of being in a rather new tradition that has failed to articulate a metaphysic. Anyway, the problem with this for Farrow is how it radically seperates our materiality from Christ’s, and the Gnostic connotation of the worshipper engaged in some mental/spiritual connection to Christ.

The 2nd view is is the RC perspective, best articulated by Thomas, summarized by Farrow:

“by virtue of His divine omnipresence and omnipotence as the Logos, Jesus is able to provide on earth a eucharistic form of His humanity under the accidents of bread and wine, making present (albeit non-spatially) the actual substance of His exalted body and blood” (p. 171)

Calvin provides the foil to this view. For Calvin, the power of the Eucharist is not in dilluting Christ’s humanity, but rather in transporting us to heaven in union with Christ - a kind of beatific experience, it seems.

I won’t summarize the rest of the posts from Per Caritatem here, but rather direct your attention to the links to each post: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The series followed a post on an article on the Eucharist by Catherine Pickstock, “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist.” The post highlights Pickstock’s work with “Desire” and the allegory of the Grail. Here’s an interesting quote from Pickstock that seems to encapsulate most of the summary from Per Caritatem:

“Thus we can see that what the Eucharist is is desire. Although we know via desire, or wanting to know, and this circumstance alone resolves the aporia of learning, beyond this we discover that what there is to know is desire. But not desire as absence, lack and perpetual postponement; rather, desire as the free flow of actualization, perpetually renewed and never foreclosed” (pp. 178-179).

These posts got me thinking about how one might capture the distinctiveness of an Anglican view of the Eucharist. Rowan Williams talks about Hooker’s doctrine of Christology and Sacraments in his book, Anglican Identities. A major theme Williams brings out is Hooker’s emphasis of the incarnation as the redemption (or “restoration”) of humanity via the work of the Holy Spirit, not simply a relationship of solidarity by virtue of his being human: “it is a relation with a humanity itself already transfigured (not annihilated)by the outpouring of a divine gift.” The Holy Spirit can act upon and through us in multiple ways, including by not limited to the Eucharist - however one may theorize the relationship of Christ to the elements.

“Papist error about the Eucharist is less in the doctrine of transubstantiation as such than in the insistence on this as the only legitimate account of how Christ acts… Hooker can say, boldly, ‘there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us (67.2, p. 358); [similarly] Herbert argues that Christ died for humanity, not for bread, so it is the former that needs changing…”

While Hooker doesn’t seem to want to spend a lot of time fleshing out the metaphysics of the Sacraments, the point is clear: Christ acts on us through his gifts. “Receive the gift of divine action and the effects of divine action follow - in Christ’s humanity, in the bread and the wine, in the holy person.”

Question 2: The Supernatural

Published
by
A.D.
on May 4, 2007
in Anglicanism, Dogmatics, Grace, Nature, Supernatural and Systematic Theology
. 10 Comments

Thanks Dan for starting off our conversation of Francis Hall’s Theological Outlines. Lets have a go at question 2, on the supernatural. While I thought he opened clearly with his definition of theology, some confusion immediately comes in when he starts in on the supernatural , or at least some terms go by without being well explained. Of course, “the supernatural” is a huge topic, especially when we also look at philosophical concerns (which he apparently wants to do). I would like to quote this bit at the end though, and then make a brief comment: “Certain writers err in supposing that the distinction between lower and higher natures and between the forces resident in them (for this is what the distinction between natural and supernatural really means) has the effect of banishing God from nature and of reducing nature’s Divine significance. It is God that worketh whether He employs the forces resident in lower or higher natures, or dispenses with the use of means.” In other words, grace founds nature, as Balthasar and de Lubac stressed. And if we look at Hall’s definition of supernatural, which is anything the causation of which cannot be assigned to visible or human means, then obviously men and women are fundamentally graced, and all of the natural causes which they assign and effect come from grace. Balthasar makes the same point at the end of “Love Alone” and it really grounds his understanding of universal salvation. More on that later.