The Idea of Feast Days
December 10, 2010
According to the Episcopal Church’s Holy Women, Holy Men, today is a day available to celebrate the great Karl Barth. Here is the collect:
“Almighty God, source of justice beyond human knowledge: We thank you for inspiring Karl Barth to resist tyranny and exalt your saving grace, without which we cannot apprehend your will. Teach us, like him, to live by faith, and even in chaotic and perilous times to perceive the light of your eternal glory, Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, throughout all ages. Amen.”
I noted this on my Facebook wall with a link and an interesting conversation ensued. This began by something the always engaging Benjamin Guyer said, namely that Barth, a man who publicly berated his friends and who carried on a 20 year affair with Charlotte von Kirschbaum, could be said to be a major Christian intellectual but his moral conduct was far from being worthy of celebration on any calendar.
Responses tended to question whether this is a fair way to gauge the calendric worth of a saint. After all, it was said by one, “Luther hated Jews, Augustine killed heretics, St. Paul killed Christians”…it seems that being a saint is not dependent on a wholly virtuous life.
Ben stood by his guns though and said that “Barth lived in various ways that are fundamentally incompatible with what a calendar of saints is intended to do - namely hold up for emulation particular men and women.”
This brought up a question in my mind: Are calendars in fact intended to hold up lives for emulation? It seems that it will at least do this, but I think there is a deeper way to look at this that I think might make room for the possibility of “flawed” saints being joyfully celebrated.
Not that long ago, Derek Olsen put a piece up on the Episcopal Cafe’ asking some much needed questions about the criteria used to compile Holy Women, Holy Men. Do go read that piece. Though he does not there lay out a full argument, I believe he points us in the right direction. Ultimately, there needs to be a sense in which a calendar is christological and not reduceable to contemporary party idealogies.
I would like to suggest that the calendar of feasts should be less about pointing to exemplary lives for the sake of emulation, though this will be a very strong feature of many such celebrations, but more about recognizing that these lives represent particularly strong points of intensity in the life of the Church that witness to the saving grace of God – His salvation is here being worked out amongst us. We recognize in them that God’s life and work became undeniably clear and the feast is not to celebrate the virtue in a life as such, but to respond in praise to the God who has made Godself known. It is a mark of God’s continuing faithfulness to bring his work to completion.
To elaborate even further, I’d like to suggest that the saints point to a Life that makes our lives coherent. The trustworthiness of these lives points to the trustworthiness of the God for whom they lived. In pointing beyond themselves, there is room to ‘allow’ that even the saints will not always come off so saintly. +Rowan Williams expresses what I’m trying to say like this:
“Often all we can do is go on telling the stories of those who keep us going; I may not look very credible, but I can at least point to someone who does. And as long as there are those who effectively and bravely take responsibility for God, the doors remain open and the possibility is there for others, perhaps very slowly, to find their way to a point where they can say…’I want to live int he same world as them; I want to know what they know and drink from the same wells.” – Tokens of Trust, 28
I’m aware that +Williams was not talking about the same thing I am talking about per se, but I think this holds true for what the celebration of saints is supposed to accomplish. By doing this there will be some who will inspire us to deeper levels of discipleship by emulation, but there are others who are significant for reasons that are not explicitly ethical, for instance someone like St. Ignatius of Loyola. Just as there are many gifts, so there are many ways in which to build up the life of the Church.
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.
Graham Ward: A Minor Annotated Bibliography IV
July 31, 2010
Be it the gripping Torture and Eucharist, the insightful Mystical Theology or the symphonic On Christian Theology, books in the Blackwell series “Challenges in Contemporary Theology” have yet to not drastically shift my worldview after reading, and Graham Ward’s Christ and Culture is no exception (I can’t wait to read the rest in the series).
Despite the fact that this is a collection of previously released and delivered essays, there is a certain deep similarity in theme, style and content between them. These pick up on all the collective themes of Christology; “incarnation, atonement, the economics of the Trinity what it is to be human [and] the Church” (23) but do so in a manner steeped in discourses very distant to the sort of christology of predication that I’m used to reading such as hermeneutics, metaphysics and cultural theory. Topics like embodiment and the operation of desire also play a large role. (23)
Yet all revolve around very close readings of Scripture. Ward pays particular attention to St. Mark’s Gospel but Scripture is used thoroughly and uniquely all throughout this book. Even if one were to disagree with all of Ward’s conclusions, many of which are controversial, this book is hugely important as I see it for its christological and exegetical method(s).
Ward builds off Aquinas where in the Summa he says, “God is not known to us in His nature, but is made known to us in His operations. (Summa Theologiae, I.Q13.8). Therefore Ward asks not “who is the Christ or what is the Christ [but] where is the Christ” (1) … and I might add, “what is Christ doing?”
The introduction alone is worth the price which not only concisely lays out his own vision but offers a substantive and wide ranging critique of Karl Barth, especially his christological dialectics which as Ward sees it, makes of Christ “either the absolute subject or the absolute object.” (12) (This seems not too unlike to some of Rowan Williams’ critique of Barth, cf. – “Barth on the Triune God,” Wrestling With Angels, pp.106-149) Briefly summing it up, Ward lays it out like this:
“Barth’s dogmatic approach to Christology (a) all too thinly defines the economies of salvation in which the gracious love of Christ finds a responding desire; (b) this finds expression in the thinness of his account of mediations (c) such that his mediating christology remains tied to specific cultural assumptions about the subject and nature; (d) this binds christology to the logic of dualism, itself a product of a certain cultural heritage in modernity; (e) this logic and these assumptions, on the basis of which we develops his dialectical method, render him unable to reflect upon his own cultural production of christology. The world is so lost, so secularized, so ignorant of God that both Christ and subsequently a theology of Christ operate above and beyond such a world, in contradistinction to it.” (14-15)
Of the Ward books I’ve read, this and his Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice were the ones that really captured my imagination. It is important in its own right (or seems like it to me at least) but also in that it renders such criticisms as “RO doesn’t deal with Christ or the Bible or discipleship seriously enough” in need of more evidence. And it also disrupts the all too common saying I hear, that Ward is some sort of exception to RO, “Ward I can take, Milbank I can’t.” Nevertheless, Ward would not want to be holed up on a “side” in contemporary theology.
I can’t wait to reread this one…hopefully I’ll make more strides toward comprehending the details.
Graham Ward: A Minor Annotated Bibliography II
June 16, 2010
See part I here. Also, I hope to make all of these into a PDF at the end so you should be able to download it.
I hope I did not seem to be too sure of myself when I said that Ward ‘saw weaknesses’ in Cities of God, as if somehow I am a fit enough mind to make such a judgement. This conclusion becomes clear in the second book in Ward’s Cities Trilogy, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice.
Whereas I found Cities to be unsystematic and somewhat obscure, this book was a beacon of rigorous and focused thinking. This must be in part because he asks three questions in this book and focuses exclusively on them:
“From What Place Does Theology Speak?”
“How Do Cultures Change?” and
“What Is The Relationship Between Religious Practices and Cultural Transformation?”
To examine the first question, Ward (who is no novice with respect to the theology of Barth) examines the relationship between Barth’s theology and his biographical context. How do various and specific pressures on Barth work themselves out in his theology? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that Barth’s work was profoundly shaped by the various situations and motivations that worked on him and directed his mind. This is might be a controversial thing to say for those Barthinians who really think Barth explicated a “pure dogmatics of the Word,” but there is simply no “pure” anything so they’ll just have to get over it.
In examining how cultures change, Ward draws often on the work of Paul Ricoeur, as he does in his third section, to yield some sweet fruit. This second chapter pays particular attention to the cultural structures and poetics that affect our praxis. Within this he draws out how to understand the thinking “subject,” argues for “standpoint epistemology” and much besides. He corrects the passive and impotent subject of Foucault and shows how intentionality and imagination enable people not to be content with being merely acted upon yet also how we don’t come up with ideas ex nihilo but draw and pro-ject from available resources.
The third chapter more clearly examines cultural change with reference to the practices of small groups with particular attention to Christian practice. In order to do this Ward explains Benedict Anderson’s understanding of relationships as “imaginary” and moves on to talk about “authority” and “rhetoric” and even how the public sphere is created.
This book was concise, tightly and well argued, and made for exciting possibilities in how to think about many topics from doctrinal change to the situatedness of all discourses. I would recommend it to any Barthinian and to anyone doing or thinking about theology or any academic practice for that matter; not only because it complexifies the “assured results of modern scholarship” and also of any “pure dogmatics” but also, it’s just a tintilating read.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
