Charismatic Apologetics in St. Athanasius
August 19, 2010
A passage to which I imagine I will return for more reflection struck me as interesting on a few levels.
“What we have said is, indeed, no small proof of the destruction of death and of the fact that the cross of the Lord is the monument to His victory. But the resurrection of the body to immortality, which results henceforward from the work of Christ, the common Savior and true Life of all, is more effectively proved by facts than by words to those whose mental vision is sound. For, if, as we have shown, death was destroyed and everybody tramples on it because of Christ, how much more did He Himself first trample and destroy it in His own body! Death having been slain by Him, then, what other issue could there be than the resurrection of His body and its open demonstration as the monument of His victory? How could the destruction of death have been manifested at all, had not the Lord’s body been raised? But if anyone finds even this insufficient, let him find proof of what has been said in present facts.
Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energize others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Savior is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men, so that they throw all the traditions of their fathers to the winds and bow down before the teaching of Christ?
If He is no longer active in the world, as He must needs be if He is dead, how is it that He makes the living to cease from their activities, the adulterer from his adultery, the murderer from murdering, the unjust from avarice, while the profane and godless man becomes religious? If He did not rise, but is still dead, how is it that He routs and persecutes and overthrows the false gods, whom unbelievers think to be alive, and the evil spirits whom they worship? For where Christ is named, idolatry is destroyed and the fraud of evil spirits is exposed; indeed, no such spirit can endure that Name, but takes to flight on sound of it. This is the work of One Who lives, not of one dead; and, more than that, it is the work of God. It would be absurd to say that the evil spirits whom He drives out and the idols which He destroys are alive, but that He Who drives out and destroys, and Whom they themselves acknowledge to be Son of God, is dead.”
There’s a lot to unpack here and I don’t have time to do it but I want to draw attention to how St. Athanasius sees “proof” of Christ’s resurrection in his charismatic work; converting people from paganism; converting their habits and lives; casting out demons, et. al.
“My Father is still working, and I am working” indeed!
Anglican Identities: Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey
August 14, 2010
After his retirement, ++Ramsey spent much of his time at Nashotah House Seminary. At the time there was a nearby home for the mentally handicapped. One day a resident of that home ‘escaped’ and police were looking for him. Also on that day, Michael Ramsey was taking a walk in his full purple cassock. Seeing a very hairy man in a long purple ‘dress’ the police stopped him on his walk and asked who he was. ++Ramsey replied, “Why I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury!”
I just wanted to throw that story in there. It doesn’t really serve a larger purpose in this post.
It has often been noted that most who have taken the name Cantaur have been less than the greatest minds of the Anglican Church, but somehow the last century has produced three ABCs about whom has been said, “He is the most theologically astute ABC since St. Anselm himself.” I cannot judge such sayings, but at the very least, Michael Ramsey stands alongside William Temple and Rowan Williams as a creative and original theologian in his own right.
At this point I’ve not read as much Ramsey as I should like to. But even what I have is enough to excite me to read more. His classic theological work is The Gospel and the Catholic Church; a book written very early in his academic career and one that has apparently had a mixed reception. Ramsey was writing this in an Anglican school system very much dedicated to the liberalism of its time yet also when Barth was starting to be read and the “Biblical Theology” movement was coming into its own. It is remarkable the sheer amount of theology that is crammed into this thing. From the first chapter Ramsey is quick to remove any sense of worldly ‘purpose’ from his ecclesiology; the Church is made and has its life only in the life death and resurrection of Christ. It doesn’t play chaplain to the State, neither is it there to spread progressive values.
But this is also a mysterious participatory life. Here Ramsey is well ahead of his time for a Protestant. It may have been his deep appreciation of the Eastern Orthodox and/or his refusal to ‘rationalize’ how the New Testament talks about Gods life in the Church, whatever influenced Ramsey, he envisioned the Church as in the process of theosis.
But this forms only the beginning to this work. From there Ramsey attempts to explicate church order and unity, the episcopacy and apostolic succession in light of this Passion as opposed to locating it in the predetermined discussions as they have been developed. For him ‘Christian authority consists not in propositions about God [or, presumably the Church], but in God’s own redemptive action.” This is a section I should like to work on in the future: teasing out how the structure of the Church ought to be reflective of its life given by God in Christ. This section of the work is among the most novel and creative.
The next part of the book consists in a series of three essays of historical theology exploring the “Church of the Fathers,” including both the Greek and Latin fathers; “Developments in Catholicism,” in which he critiques the Roman Catholic Church for what he sees as certain discontinuities; and “The Reformers and the Church.” Ramsey was very much a sensitive reader of the Reformers and though himself often (and correctly) identified by others as “Anglo-catholic,” he was passionate that the Gospel and it alone stood at the heart of the Church.
In the next to last chapter Ramsey talks about the “Ecclesia Anglicana” and (typically) locates it both in the Reformation but also, on account of it’s historic order, within the intents of the Catholic Church. He here has a great little section on F.D. Maurice.
In a concluding note Ramsey returns again as he did throughout to the topic of Christian reunion, which for him cannot occur except as the Gospel is more and more ingested into the Church.
This work easily sums up the reason I feel so at home in Anglicanism. As with any church, in practice we are mixed, but at its best Anglican theological reflection usually follows this exact order: You must begin in the Scriptures; however authoritative and valuable the developments of history, Scripture (as it testifies to Christ) forms the heart of how we think of ourselves; then you move to the Church Fathers who still (providentially?) form a paradigm for integrating spirituality and philosophy into an holistic theology; but both the medieval church and the Reformation church have a rightful place even if both must be integrated with a tad bit more attentiveness; and it is only after this that we ought to begin to talk about the ‘Anglican Church’ and identity. The mixing of the universal and the particular are perhaps one of the reasons that Anglicans have not historically excelled in systematics but rather in devotional theology.
But that’s mere speculation. Whatever the case, by this book as well as his Anglican Spirit and An Era in Anglican Theology From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology from ‘Lux Mundi’ and the Second World War 1889-1939, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury has taught me how to feel at home in the Episcopal Church even when sometimes I still feel like a baby Anglican.
Other important works of his include: (please leave comments with others)
The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ
A great starting point with secondary literature is Glory Descending: Michael Ramsey and His Writings and Glory!. Owen Chadwick also composed this biography.
One could consider this a contribution to our mini-series on Anglican identity as well as for ‘Big Tent Christianity.’ Among the many contributions do be sure to check out our friend David Henson’s here.
It might seem odd to some who know me that I would write a post about ‘Big Tent Christianity’ because I don’t really much care for it. To be more specific, I don’t think that a ‘Big Tent’ is something that we should celebrate and rejoice in for its own sake. The ‘diversity’ in the Church does not extend to Christian division nor the incoherence of Christian speech across groups. More often than not, a ‘Big Tent’ approach downplays the fact that the plethora of Christian groups and denominations are more the fruit of impatience with each other and the refusal to love (that is, ‘heresy’) than fruit of the Spirit. We should be more apt to repent for our division and work for stronger unity in both doctrine and practice than act as if there is no division; because how is there real division under a large covering?
This sounds doubly frightening I imagine coming from an Anglican. Surely we like to sell ourselves as a broad church? ’We are the ‘Via Media’ of which Hooker spoke, able to leap evangelical and catholic doctrine in a single bound.’ It is to Hooker that I wish to dedicate this reflection. Specifically a famous sermon of his wherein he affirms what was incredibly controversial at the time: That Roman Catholics ‘could be saved.’ Ironically, as Rowan Williams points out in his little book, Anglican Identities (Cambridge, Cowley 2003), ‘he believe this, … for what are in fact sound Protestant [doctrinal] reasons.’ (24)
By doing this I hope to open an idea for reflection:
- It is often assumed that doctrine must be somewhat downplayed for ‘Big Tent Christianity’ to work. This strangely cuts off many from the Tent for whom doctrine is non-negotiable. I’d like to suggest that this tent can be filled up even with these ‘conservatives’ – which is what we want right? – by appeal to Protestant doctrinal distinctives as explicated by Richard Hooker, the inclusive Anglican par excellence, in his famous sermon ‘A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works, and how the Foundation of Faith is Overthrown.‘
For Hooker, ‘ Many are the partakers of the error which are not of the heresy of the church of Rome.’ (London, Oxford/Clarendon, M.DCCC.LXV., vol. II, 613) As Hooker sees it, most Christians neither understand nor actively believe the sophisticated explanations of Christian faith and even such things as they do believe they do not realize how some of those might in fact be erroneous. He thinks this because we are born into situations over which we do not have control. ’people follow the conduct of their guides, and observe as they did, exactly that which was prescribed them.’ (613) But the ‘foundation’ of faith is Christ alone and faith in him, not the whole of all we do or do not assent to, and this faith will be enough to sustain the Christian through judgment.
‘They be not all faithless that are either weak in assenting to the truth or stiff in maintaining things any way opposite to the truth of Christian doctrine. But as many as hold the foundation which is precious, though they hold it but weakly, and as it were by a slender thread, although they frame many base and unsuitable things upon it, things that cannot abide the trial of the fire; yet shall they pass the fiery trial and be saved, which indeed have builded themselves upon the rock, which is the foundation of the Church.’ - pp. 614-615
This is not at all novel, it is what we all learned as ‘Justification by Faith.’ But it is key for my point that Hooker draws the boundaries of the Church wide on account of sustained reflection on ‘doctrine,’ on the consequences of Scripture, rather than on the idea of Elizabethan comprehensiveness or an Anglian Via Media. Hooker is no help for those seeking to make of Anglicanism a wide church who are not also willing to flesh out the reasons why Hooker believed as he did.
Here, then, in Hooker, we find possible resources for ‘Big Tent Christianity’ which counter-intuitively came by way of doctrine. In fact I am a ‘Big Tent’ Christian. I am because I am confident that I myself do not have the capacity to be free from believing terribly ‘wrong’ things about God. My capacity for self-deception is vast and my openness to God’s grace is limited. I am because I am nobody’s judge. I am because we as a Church are dependent on the prior acts of a faithful God rather than our own attempts to maintain coherence.
Anglican Identities
August 10, 2010
So often in much contemporary Anglican disagreement, one hears that one or another position or action is “not Anglican;” as if there is a predetermined and widely understood notion of what is Anglican and what is not. More often than not these Anglican ‘identities’ are warmed over secondary reflection on how Anglicanism is ‘inclusive – “We don’t have a confession” – or ‘Protestant’ – “remember the Articles of Religion?” or whatever. Rarely have I found such cheap appeals convincing, and drawing from historical wells for invective has always produced less-than-complete pictures of our Christian past.
In his helpful little book, The Anglican Spirit, Michael Ramsey explains that there has seemed to be a general inability for Anglicanism to maintain anything like a coherent identity since WWII. He points to several different reasons, among them the rise of optimistic ecumenism and the ‘Biblical Theology’ movement. We see that this has carried on and accelerated up to the present debates surrounding authority, autonomy and theological revision.
On the one hand, it can become quite (for lack of a better word) ‘idolatrous’ to put an abstract ‘Anglican’ identity before the Gospel, yet so long as an appropriate perspective is kept, just as it makes perfect sense to talk about ‘Ignation spirituality’ within the Catholic Church as a distinctive vein, it makes sense to speak of Anglicanism as a worthy part of the larger Tradition and as something valuable enough to retain.
But ‘identity’ is always something being constructed from memory, reflection and imagination. It arises organically from going over the sources that feed us. To figure out what such an identity might look like, it is better to go back and read the Tractarians, Hooker, Herbert rather than latch on to something like ‘comprehensiveness’ and try to fill it with meaning.
‘Identity making’ is in the end worthless since as the Church we receive our identity always from God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and not from the efforts of our own devising. Nevertheless God has so made it that our lives are mediated by the stuff of this world, and so distinctive ‘cultures’ are not perversions of a transcendent universal standing over and above our existence, as if transfiguration had nothing to do with the ‘stuff’ of the world, but parts of a whole.
So we are going to offer a meager addition to this reflection. Each of us is going to compose a short post about an Anglican thinker who has affected us significantly in hopes of renewing interest in our primary sources. And soon we are going to add a new page, open to constant expansion, where we hope to list contemporary Anglican thinkers; where they teach and maybe some of what they’ve written; all in hopes that in attention to the particular we might understand more of the universal, and might get a better feel for how God is working among us today.
Around the Interwebs
August 6, 2010
- David CL Driedger has two posts up introducing a recent collection, The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation. Sounds glorious by the way he de-scribes it.
- Pastor Carol Howard Merritt writes about an encounter she had a party recently:
“I was at a party, holding my plastic cup of beer and talking to a stranger in a crowded house. She was in thirties, like I was. “So, what do you do?” she asked. “Where to do you work?”
I smiled because this part of the conversation can become really interesting. I’m a five-foot tall woman, who’s part of a generation that considers itself “spiritual but not religious,” so people don’t usually expect my answer: “I’m a pastor.”
“Oh my God,” she responded. “I never knew why anyone would go to church. But last year, my mom got sick. She’s divorced, and I’m living hundreds of miles away from her, so I didn’t know what we were going to do. And her church totally took care of her. They brought her meals. They drove her to the doctor. They called me when anything out of the ordinary happened.”
“Yeah. That’s what the good churches do.”
“Really?” She looked completely confused as she continued, “I had no idea. You should really advertise that.”
I don’t care much for the whole re-naming-liberal-protestantism-”progressive Christianity”-and-see-if-no one-notices thing, but I really like most people who self-identify as such and among them, Pastor Merritt, who advocates strongly for rejuvinating the Mainline and putting trust in the younger creative pastors.
- The Other Journal has a bit up about the “Righteous Rich in the OT” by Christopher J.H. Wright and I thought it very suggestive for political theology despite the fact that “list exegesis” is from the devil himself.
- Apparently there’s a site where you can download a ton of low-fi arrangements of classic tunes by some spectacular indie artists…for FREE!
- Ben Meyers tells things from multiple perspectives.
- David Congdon reviews an Arcade Fire concert in which Spoon opened. He captures why Arcade Fire is among the greatest bands of the ’00′s
The following is an excerpt from an article I posted complete with footnotes (read said article here) about Christian Apologetic efforts and Islam, characterizing the demonizing tone that some Evangelicals take against Islam.
Problematically, some Christian polemicists have abandoned addressing these fundamental claims, and they have resorted to unhelpful tactics. By way of example, Richard Cimino argues that Evangelical Christians, in particular, have pushed rhetoric about Islam to a polemically fevered pitch as a kind of nationalistic, fear mongering response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This ought to be received as a stinging criticism that is indicative of a willingness to focus on what are seen as devious practices within Islamic culture by Christians instead of making lucid arguments against their foundational claims.[14] According to Cimino, this is problematic because much of the positive, global-apologetic toward Muslims argued by polemicists like Ergun Caner centers on a characterization of Islam as dangerous, militant, and cultic.[15] However, this should all be tempered by Thomas Kidd’s research, which demonstrates plainly that such anti-Islamic polemics as Cimino describes were being leveled against Muslims by “Anglo-Americans” as early as 1697.[16]
So, while there is definitely an attempt to demonize the Islamic weltanschauung on the basis of mischaracterization, while there have been periods of interfaith dialogue initiated by Christians and spoiled by terrorists, and while there are clear examples of current Evangelical scholars focusing their apologetic efforts on ancillary issues within Islam, such behavior in no way belongs exclusively to the modern Evangelical movement. That particular characterization by Cimino is unwarranted. Nonetheless, Christian apologists should avoid being trapped by polemics preoccupied by what amount to “straw men” parading around as reductio ad absurdum arguments. There is sufficient dispute to be had with the foundational presuppositions of Islam to diminish the expediency of such distractions.
Richard Cimino, “‘No God in Common:’ American Evangelical Discourse on Islam after 9/11,” Review of Religious Research 47, no. 2 (December 2005): 162-74. Perhaps more immediately troublesome for students of Liberty Theological Seminary is the fact that Cimino singles out Ergun Caner’s Unveiling Islam as a polemic set out not only to demonize Islam, but also to “dispel the position of Geisler and Saleeb that Allah is the same God (Jehovah) that Christians and Jews worship.” See Cimino, “‘No God in Common,’” 166. Interestingly, Caner has included Geisler as a contributor in his Popular Encyclopedia of Apologetics. While Caner must certainly be given the berth to respectfully disagree with even those he includes in his edited works, all of the articles concerning Islam in the Popular Encyclopedia are authored by Caner. It may all prove coincidental, but such a situation only helps to strengthen Cimino’s critique.
Thomas S. Kidd, “‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History 72, no. 4 (December 2003): 773.
Now, here is an excerpt from a Washington Post article (read the full article here), explaining that Liberty University has removed Ergun Caner from his position as Dean of the Seminary following an internal investigation, because he has lied about his history with and expertise on Islam.
The biography of Caner, 43, has become shrouded in doubt after apparent exaggerations were brought to light by an unusual alliance of Muslim and Christian bloggers. They have pored through his sermons, books, speeches and court documents, finding contradictions in his narrative. His expertise on Islam and his claim to having been raised as a radical Sunni Muslim in Turkey have been questioned.
Wednesday is Caner’s last day as dean; Liberty announced he was being removed because of “factual statements that are self-contradictory.” Although he will no longer be dean, Caner will continue as a professor. Critics say the school’s explanation falls short.
“They haven’t come clean and explained what exactly they investigated and found,” said James White, director of Alpha and Omega Ministries in Phoenix, who dug into Caner’s past. “One can only offer forgiveness if there’s repentance, and they’ve basically said nothing with their statement.”
Frankly, Caner is lucky they aren’t firing him. How many stories about people who were fired for unscrupulous statements made on resumes are out there? What is rule numero uno about filling out applications in this job market? How many Evangelical universities are currently being taken to task over their questionable practices and faculty choices? Oh well, I guess the adage rings true once again, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”
I would also like (humbly, of course) to point out that in spite of my burning desire to rake Caner over the coals, yours truly remained “above board” as my status as a Liberty student prevented me from doing so. I made it part of my identity to dole out vigilante style justice on Caner’s brand of BS in the classroom a la the Boondock Saints during my other two degree programs. Take a look at my CV and see which of my degrees I finished “with honors.” :0) So, time teaches wisdom – but, I would still love to have a slew of posts to which I could direct your attention, exposing Caner for all of this. In the end, I guess I can just harumph around knowing that it is still a bigger deal to most people out there that 1) our Primate “is a chick” and 2) that God will condemn us for marrying and ordaining fags than it is that many prominent Evangelical leaders are falling off their pedestals in the most painfully ironic ways possible.
Harumph!
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
