Category Archives: theology

Hilary of Poitiers, 367

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Hilary was bishop of Poitiers and an important defender of Nicene trinitarianism. Conflict with Emperor Constantius led to his exile in Phrygia. He authored hymns, one of which appears in The Hymnal 1982. His most important theological was probably On the Trinity. Theologically, this was overshadowed by Augustine’s On the Trinity of the early fifth century.

But it is interesting in itself. He begins with himself, with his spiritual autobiography, but also with theological anthropology, just as Augustine would later do in his own trinitarian reflections.

7. Therefore, although my soul drew joy from the apprehension of this august and unfathomable Mind, because it could worship as its own Father and Creator so limitless an Infinity, yet with a still more eager desire it sought to know the true aspect of its infinite and eternal Lord, that it might be able to believe that that immeasurable Deity was apparelled in splendour befitting the beauty of His wisdom. Then, while the devout soul was baffled and astray through its own feebleness, it caught from the prophet’s voice this scale of comparison for God, admirably expressed, By the greatness of His works and the beauty of the things that He has made the Creator of worlds is rightly discerned. Wisdom 13:5 The Creator of great things is supreme in greatness, of beautiful things in beauty. Since the work transcends our thoughts, all thought must be transcended by theMaker. Thus heaven and air and earth and seas are fair: fair also the whole universe, as the Greeks agree, who from its beautiful ordering call it κόσμος, that is, order. But if our thought can estimate this beauty of the universe by a natural instinct— an instinct such as we see in certain birds and beasts whose voice, though it fall below the level of our understanding, yet has a sense clear to them though they cannot utter it, and in which, since all speech is the expression of some thought, therelies a meaning patent to themselves— must not the Lord of this universal beauty be recognised as Himself most beautiful amid all the beauty that surrounds Him? For though the splendour of His eternal glory overtax our mind’s best powers, it cannot fail to see that He is beautiful. We must in truth confess that God is most beautiful, and that with a beauty which, though it transcend our comprehension, forces itself upon our perception.

8. Thus my mind, full of these results which by its own reflection and the teaching of Scripture it had attained, rested with assurance, as on some peaceful watchtower, upon that glorious conclusion, recognising that its true nature made it capable of one homage to its Creator, and of none other, whether greater or less; the homage namely of conviction that His is a greatness too vast for our comprehension but not for our faith. For a reasonable faith is akin to reason and accepts its aid, even though that same reason cannot cope with the vastness of eternal Omnipotence.

9. Beneath all these thoughts lay an instinctive hope, which strengthened my assertion of the faith, in some perfect blessedness hereafter to be earned by devout thoughts concerning God and upright life; the reward, as it were, that awaits the triumphant warrior. For true faith in God would pass unrewarded, if the soul be destroyed by death, and quenched in the extinction of bodily life. Even unaided reason pleaded that it was unworthy of God to usher man into an existence which has some share of His thought and wisdom, only to await the sentence of life withdrawn and of eternal death; to create him out of nothing to take his place in the World, only that when he has taken it he may perish. For, on the only rational theory of creation, its purpose was that things non-existent should come into being, not that things existing should cease to be. (from New Advent)

What fascinates me is how he speaks of his “soul” and “mind” as independent things, certainly independent of the “I” speaking, and also of his body, as weighing down the soul’s efforts to attain to the mind of God. Perhaps I’ll read more, if I have time.


The Death of Mary Daly

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We learned yesterday of the death of Mary Daly, perhaps the most important feminist theologian in the twentieth century. She taught for more than thirty years at Boston College. I never met her but she had an enormous impact on Harvard Divinity School. When I arrived there in the early ’80s, feminist theology was beginning to make significant inroads there and her books were widely read.

Women still told war stories from the seventies when the concern over gendered language first surfaced. By the mid-eighties, that concern had morphed occasionally into silliness. I’ll never forget the time a female student castigated a male classmate who referrred to “the thrust” of an author’s argument. She said, “we don’t use that term anymore.”

Daly’s Beyond God the Father was an important work in my theological development, and I can remember laughing uproariously while reading Gyn/Ecology. Daly had a wicked sense of humor that she used effectively to show the patriarchal roots of language, symbolism, and religion.

There’s more about her death, and the reaction to her death, available here.

Surprised by Scripture

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I suppose that by now I should be used to it and even expect it–reading a passage of scripture and being completely surprised by language, concepts, or themes that I hadn’t noticed before.

It happened today while I was reading the text appointed for the Eucharist for the Wednesday in the third week of Advent. The reading came from Isaiah 45, which is a passage I assigned when I taught Intro to Bible. I used it in that context to point out the exilic context of Second Isaiah. It is clearly set during the Babylonian exile; the author is expecting the defeat of Babylon by the Persian Empire led by Cyrus. The chapter begins:

Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, …
I will give you the treasures of darkness
and riches hidden in secret places,
so that you may know that it is I, the Lord,
the God of Israel, who call you by your name.
4For the sake of my servant Jacob,
and Israel my chosen,
I call you by your name,
I surname you, though you do not know me.
5I am the Lord, and there is no other;
besides me there is no god.
I arm you, though you do not know me,
6so that they may know, from the rising of the sun
and from the west, that there is no one besides me;
I am the Lord, and there is no other.
7I form light and create darkness,
I make weal and create woe;
I the Lord do all these things.

There are two very important ideas here; the first that Cyrus is called the anointed, language used of Davidic kings and prophets, but never of non-Israelites; and second, that God is responsible for everything “I make weal and create woe.” This is a clear sign of the development of monotheism.

But what surprised and fascinated me in the text was something else:

18For thus says the Lord,
who created the heavens
(he is God!),
who formed the earth and made it
(he established it;
he did not create it a chaos,
he formed it to be inhabited!):
I am the Lord, and there is no other.
19I did not speak in secret,
in a land of darkness;
I did not say to the offspring of Jacob,
‘Seek me in chaos.’
I the Lord speak the truth,
I declare what is right.

This is obviously a polemic directed against Babylonian notions of divinity and creation. It’s even rather woodenly so, at least in the NRSV’s translation, with the use of parentheses. It draws a sharp distinction between the orderly way in which Yahweh creates and what must have been the author’s understanding of Babylonian creation myths.

Of course the priestly account of creation (Gen 1) shows God creating out of chaos. Creation in Genesis 1 is all about order, dividing light from darkness, day from night, dry land from sea, and this idea reverberates in this passage from Genesis.

The tension between order and chaos is a very human one and we tend to oscillate between two extremes. I remember a roommate whose mantra was regularly, “I’ve got to get my life in order.” It was something he said in the midst of the chaos of unkempt hair and clothes, a room that was littered with papers, books, and dirty clothes.

Obama’s Nobel speech

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There was considerable controversy over the selection of President Obama as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Many saw irony, or perhaps a desire on the part of the selection committee to influence events, in the confluence of the award ceremony with the decision to increase US troop presence in Afghanistan. Obama took his critics head on in the speech.

He did more. He addressed the just war theory in the opening paragraphs. Later in the speech, he argued that no war waged as Holy War could be just: “For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint – no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or even a person of one’s own faith.” Alluding then to the “Golden Rule” that has its parallels in most of the world’s religions, Obama continued,

Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature. We are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

He strikes a rather Niebuhrian tone is these paragraphs, recognizing both the fallibility of human nature, and the importance of striving for a goal that lies beyond the natural and obvious.

I am deeply troubled by a number of Obama’s choices in foreign policy and in combating terrorism–among them the reluctance to come clean on torture and especially to prosecute those who tortured, and advocated the use of torture, the defense of the Bush Administration’s justice department, and the reluctance to come clean on what happened overall during the Bush administration.

I don’t know what the answer is in Afghanistan. I doubt whether this expansion of US military presence there will be successful. It seems to me that there are only difficult choices there, and overall in dealing with terrorism in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. But I suspect Obama’s hands were tied by many factors, including the generals and the hawks on Capitol Hill. It will be interesting to see if he can extricate the troops from that place in 2011.

Having invoked just war theory at the beginning of his speech, the question of whether Afghanistan conforms to just war theory is valid. I think that question would make for a lively debate, even on the limited definition Obama provided. This is what he said. A war is just “if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the forced used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.” I’d be curious to hear his arguments defending Afghanistan’s conforming to those criteria.

Ecclesiological Reflections on recent developments

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I mentioned in my last post that I view the papacy as the product of a historical development, not the mark of the true church. It may be helpful to make some more comments on this matter.

The history of the church in Rome in the first and early second century is shrouded in obscurity. While it is clear that there was by the late first century an emerging sense of a coherent and cohesive body of Christians in Rome (the letter of I Clement testifies to that), it is not at all clear that there was a “bishop” of Rome, let alone that the bishop exercised authority outside of the city of Rome.

In the second and third centuries, other churches were equally powerful–Carthage in the West, and certainly the bishoprics of Alexandria and Antioch. Rome became most important in the west, because it alone of all the western churches, could claim apostolic foundation. As early as c. 200, Tertullian, writing in Carthage, recognized that Carthage’s claim to apostolicity rested, not in having been founded by an Apostle (as Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, could claim) but in its teaching being consistent with that of the Apostles.

But a half-century after Tertullian, Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, could challenge papal teaching and authority. For Cyprian, bishops working together in a synod were more important than a bishop who could claim direct apostolic succession. It is pretty clear that Rome’s supremacy in the church is a product of two things: 1) its unique status in the west as an apostolic foundation, and 2) the importance of Rome as the Imperial capital (the latter explains why Constantinople eventually overtook Antioch, Alexandria, and all other apostolic foundations to become the most important patriarchate in the East).

In the Protestant Reformation, the true church was defined as that community where “the word of God was truly proclaimed and the sacraments rightly administered.” Again, it was largely for historical reasons that the Church of England insisted on the apostolic succession of the episcopacy as one of the marks of the true church. It was a powerful weapon in the conflict with Calvinist polity, but it conceded a great deal in the conflict with the papacy.

It seems to me that one of the key issues for Anglicanism is to articulate a clear ecclesiology that doesn’t merely distinguish it from the Roman Catholic church, but provides a positive rationale for its existence. I’m wondering whether the heart of our current problem isn’t a definciency in ecclesiological reflection.

Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)

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Today is the commemoration of Teresa of Avila who is a rather odd inclusion on the Episcopal calendar. She’s one of the most remarkable and most important figures in the Catholic Reformation. She led an intense reform of the Carmelite order (both female and male), but she is better known for her mysticism and her spiritual writing. The Interior Castle and The Autobiography.

Teresa is interesting to me because of my double experience of her. As a historian of Early Modern Christianity, and as someone who taught The Reformations of the 16th century numerous times, I have read her as an example of a remarkable woman  with deep spiritual experience and important for the developing institutional church. To read her autobiography is to encounter someone who is caught in the midst of history. A descendant of converted Jews, a woman who sought to create for herself an authentic religious life, and sought to force other women into that life, who submitted to and challenged authority, Teresa’s autobiography is a wonderful lens through which to examine the 16th century.

But she is more than that. Reading and rereading her autobiography and The Interior Castle I am reminded at each reading by the depth and breadth of her spiritual experience, and surprised by her psychological insight, into herself, her fellow nuns, and the nature of religious experience. I used her work once in a course on Theological Anthropology in the Christian Tradition, and reading her in light of earlier authors from Pseudo-Dionysus and Athanasius to Luther and Descartes was quite illuminating.

Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626)

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Lancelot Andrewes ended his career as Bishop of Winchester, after holding two other sees earlier. A famous preacher and biblical scholar, he was a member of the committee that produced the translation that came to be known as the King James Version, and thus his language came to have an immeasurable impact on the English language, on Anglo-Saxon culture and on spirituality. He was a scholar of Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and so proficient in all three that the private devotions he wrote for himself were written in those Biblical languages, not in his mother tongue. The Private Devotions were published after his death, and translated into English. Here is one of his prayers:

PRAISE

Up with our hearts;
we lift them to the Lord.
O how very meet, and right, and fitting,
and due,
in all, and for all,
at all times, places, manners,
in every season, every spot,
everywhere, always, altogether,
to remember Thee, to worship Thee,
to confess to Thee, to praise Thee,
to bless Thee, to hymn Thee,
to give thanks to Thee,
Maker, nourisher, guardian, governor,
preserver, worker, perfecter of all,
Lord and Father,
King and God,
fountain of life and immortality,
treasure of everlasting goods.
Whom the heavens hymn,
and the heaven of heavens,
the Angels and all the heavenly powers,
one to other crying continually,—
50and we the while, weak and unworthy,
under their feet,—
Holy, Holy, Holy
Lord the God of Hosts;
full is the whole heaven,
and the whole earth,
of the majesty of Thy glory.
Blessed be the glory of the Lord
out of His place,
For His Godhead, His mysteriousness,
His height, His sovereignty,
His almightiness,
His eternity, His providence.
The Lord is my strength, my stony rock,
and my defence,
my deliverer, my succour, my buckler,
the horn also of my salvation
and my refuge.

(from http://www.ccel.org)

Curiosity and Wisdom

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Given the topic of my sermon this morning, I came across this discussion by Stanley Fish of curiosity. Taking off from a recent speech by James Leach, the Director of the National Humanities Administration, Fish asks whether curiosity has positive religious connotations, whether it is a virtue or a vice.

Oddly, he begins with Adam instead of Eve. Genesis 3 states quite clearly that Adam wasn’t involved: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate” (Genesis 3:6, NRSV).

“The tree was desired to be desired to make one wise.” There is of course in the biblical (and the Christian) tradition that denigrates the quest for wisdom, but there is also, as I said in my sermon, a strand that views wisdom as a way of approaching God

Update on Developments in Anglicanism

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I hesitate to comment on recent events in the Anglican world, but things seem to have heated up since General Convention. If you want to keep abreast of developments, check out the blogs I’ve listed. They aren’t particularly representative of the complete spectrum of positions, but their authors are thoughtful, and the comments often insightful.

Soon after General Convention, the Archbishop of Canterbury, musing on the passed resolutions and their implications for the Anglican Communion, posited the development of a “two-track” approach in which the Episcopal Church might be left out in the cold if it refused to sign on to a covenant, while individual dioceses could sign on. In August, the ABC met with seven “communion partner” bishops, who apparently stressed their commitment to Covenant and Communion.

After the ABC’s pronouncement, rumblings from the Church of England were heard, as the liberal wing of that Church began to voice its support for the Episcopal Church and began seeking ways of strengthening ties with it.

Most recently, the Diocese of South Carolina has issued statements about its future in the Episcopal Church. It seems headed for everything but outright separation. It also seems to want to emerge as yet another umbrella organization.

In other words, plus ca change…

I have stated in the past, and I continue to think that the notion of a covenant is a non-starter, for all sorts of reasons. The genius of Anglicanism, and its appeal, has traditionally been its messiness–or to use another word–its ambiguity. I have never accepted the theological, historical, or ecclesiological arguments for papal supremacy and I am not about to accept an Anglophone version of it.

The problem with the Anglican Communion for me is not the idea of it. Rather, what I question is the way it is made concrete. Of the “Instruments of Communion” only one, the Anglican Consultative Council, draws its members from outside the Episcopacy. That’s dangerous and anti-democratic and hardly consistent with the vision of the Church presented in the New Testament.

The Feast of St. Augustine

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August 28 is the commemoration of Augustine of Hippo. I meant to write something about him yesterday, but didn’t get around to it (Fridays are my day off). He looms over Western culture and over Western Christianity, with influence both benign and malignant. Some of the latter is due to mis-interpretation, particularly of his attitude toward sexuality.

A Bishop, theologian, and preacher, contemporary readers may find his biblical interpretation fascinating. He was no biblical fundamentalist. In fact, he thought that any interpretation of a text that was linguistically possible, was potentially useful to the reader. His underlying principle of exegesis was the two-fold commandment: Any interpretation had to contribute to the love of God and neighbor. That is not to say that his exegesis was not rigid at times. It often was, especially when he was in the throes of debate with opponents like the Donatists or Pelagians.

His feast is celebrated on August 28, because he died on that day in 431.

In the coming weeks, I’m hoping to read an important new book on him, Paula Frederikson’s Augustine and the Jews.