In our previous lecture we saw how the Christian Church through her main theological representatives in the early centuries viewed the world as God’s creation. Against Gnosticism she stressed the view that God the Father himself, through his own two hands, the Son and the Spirit, as St Irenaeus put it, created the material universe freely and out of love. Against the Platonists and pagan Greek thought in general she emphasizes that the world was created out of ‘nothing’, in the absolute sense of the word, thus ruling out any natural affinity between God and Creation and at the same time any view of the world as eternal, co-existing with the only eternal and immortal being which is God. This is another way of saying that the world is contingent, that it might not have existed at all, and that its existence is a free gift, not a necessity.
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Preserving God’s Creation 2
In our previous lecture we emphasized the seriousness of the situation with which humanity, indeed our planet as a whole, are faced because of the ecological problem, and tried to look briefly at history in order to see to what extent (a) Christian theology could be regarded as responsible for this ecological crisis, and (b) Christian tradition could be of help in our attempt to deal with this crisis. Our brief and inevitably generalised historical survey led us to the conclusion that Christian Church and its theology have indeed been to a large extent responsible for the emergence of the present ecological problem, but that, in spite of this, they possess resources that can be of help to humanity in this crisis. The ecological problem therefore, although being a problem of science and therefore to a large degree of ethics, education and state legislation, is also a theological problem. As it is evident that certain theological ideas have played an important role in the creation of the problem, so it must be the case too that theological ideas can influence the course of events in the reverse direction.
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5 Office in the Church
What is the purpose of hierarchy? What is the purpose of ordination?
1. The labour of the people
2. Priesthood
3. Ordination
4. Handing on the tradition
5. The rights of the labourer
6. The lack of rights of the labourer
1. The labour of the people
God intends to make a competent and responsive people. The Church is to take on some of the servant character of God and some of the offices of God. It is not that God ceases to exercise his offices. No statement of this sort is possible if we attempt to consider the Church in isolation from Christ its head, or to limit ourselves to statements that merely contrast two natures, identifying a work of God (activity) and a work of man (passivity) in the act of Jesus Christ, or identify after the ascension an action of man presided over by an inaction of God. This people is the work of God who presently labours by his Spirit to bring us into action. God has made man passive in order to give him a new action and life. He gives us his Spirit, and he makes the Church confess this Spirit, and theology must set out a Christological pneumatology.
The whole Christian body is elect to the work of God. This work is to be a demonstration of the victory of the unity of God over all divisive powers. The Body is to participate in its Lord’s work of releasing the world from all the alien authorities that presently hold the world captive. All Christians are members of this new assembly which speaks the truth, which teaches and enables truthful public speech, practises justice and praises God for his justice. The Church is a proleptic parliamentary and juridical assembly. All its members are citizens in a commonwealth: they will all grow up to the fullness of Christ. ‘There are different kinds of gifts but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men’ (1 Corinthians 12.4-11, 28). The service all Christians are engaged is to point away from the premature closure insisted on by all worldly statement, and to witness to the heavenly assembly that works with a more ambitious definition of humanity.
4 The Office of the Church to the world
The Christian commonwealth and the rule of the people of God
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord…
Calling the Twelve to him he sent them out two by two and gave them authority over evil spirits… ‘Take nothing for the journey except a staff…’ (Mark 6.7) He said to his disciples ‘The Harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest therefore to send out workers into his harvest field.’ (Matthew 9.37)
1. The Church is the gift of God to the world.
2. The head and the body.
3. Intercession.
4. Paideia.
5. Public political leadership
6. One loaf – the modelling of the new life
7. Truth-telling and competing rationalities and communities
1. The Church is the act of God
The Church is the speech and voice of God to the world. God speaks first, and continues speaking, and alone can say what constitutes a proper conclusion. The breath, the voice and the speaking of God constitute the single action of one indivisible Spirit. The Word, and Spirit, and (spiritual) Body constitute one sacrament. All things are the generosity of God in speech and in provision, for ‘He sustains all things by his powerful word’ (Hebrews 1.3). The Church is that first sign of the coming new creation that the Son shows the Father. The beginning of the Christian (gentile) community represents the unlocking and opening of the one community of God to the whole world and all peoples. It is the commencement of that harvest. The Son united with his body reconstitutes the world as new world and new creation. The world is the burden and charge God puts on the Church, and the Church (united to its head) represents the world to God.
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3 Eucharist
For the baptised, purified community the things of the world announce their maker to us. So for the Christian community, water and bread and wine are God’s opening gambit. By them we learn that these are first instalments. By them we discover that the world is not thing, but course of lessons by which the action and hospitality of God becomes steadily more obvious. These emblems and servants induct us into ever-increasing levels of the full reality of the being of God. They represent the work of this Reality himself – the Word – poured himself out to us, lending us the fullness of his being, but only as fast as that fullness of being himself prepares us to receive it. He does this by supplying us with a succession of subordinate things, each an emblem of the being it is supplied from above, and leads us up to the next and clearer emblem, through a chain of ever improving approximations of perfect reality.
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2 Worship
We worship God. He is God: we are not. We confess that the God of Jesus Christ is the only God.
We concede that there are rival gods, alternative authorities and divinities, but declare that none of them are what they claim to be.
1. Returning praise
2. The trinitarian order of worship.
3. Communion and participation in the life of heaven.
4. Liturgical action as
learning.
5. Worship as sacrifice
6. Truth
7. Creeds and plurality
1 Gathering
The doctrine of the Church starts from the doctrine of God. Who God is will decide what the Church is. Whatever we say about the Church must be controlled by the Church’s own teaching about God. We will not follow the custom of some contemporary ecclesiology to start with sociological pronouncements about the Church. In their place we will assume the competence of God to make whatever he will of his people.
1. The gospel
2. Election
3. Baptism
4. Reconciliation and unity
5. Responsibility of theological statement
Preserving God’s Creation 1
The subject of these lectures has to do with one of the most pressing and critical issues of our time. It is becoming increasingly evident that what has been named ‘the ecological crisis’ is perhaps the most serious problem facing the world-wide human community. Unlike other problems this one is global, concerning all humans beings regardless the part of the world or social class to which they belong. It is a problem that is not simply to do with well-being but with the very being of humanity and perhaps of creation as a whole. It is difficult to find any aspect of what we call ‘evil’ or ‘sin’ that would bear such all-embracing and devastating power as ecological evil. This way of describing the ecological problem may sound to some ears as a gross exaggeration, yet there are hardly any responsible scientists or politicians who would not agree with it. If we follow the present course of events the prediction of the apocalyptic end of life on our planet at least is not a matter for prophecy but of sheer inevitability.
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Baptism and Christian worship
1. Christian worship is public
2. Christian worship is the service of God to us
3. The Son makes the good confession
4. Rival liturgies
5. The Church names the gods
6. Being made persons in time
What can I do for a Practical theology seminar? Perhaps the best thing is to give you a straight account of the Christian calling and life. This is life together, this is most obvious when Christians are gathered together in worship. So I am going to talk about Christian worship as the demonstration of what Christian life is. I want to persuade you that Christian worship is an act of God, and that God involves us in this act of his, so we are the act in which God makes himself known here in the world. This means a number of things – that the Church is the big fact with which God confronts the world, and that the distinctiveness of the Church that is the single contribution to the world that the Church can make. Just by being different from the world, the Church demonstrates that the world is not yet everything it claims to be. This must also mean that God is also competent to make the Church mean what God says is means, so the shortcomings of the Church don’t ultimately get in God’s, or the world’s, way. Then two other things. One is that Christian worship is a public and political act. The other is that the Church service is making its participants holy. Or to say the same thing with a more ontological twist, the Church service is bringing its participants into existence. We exist only because we, or someone else on our behalf, worships God on earth.
1. Christian worship is public
I have turned ethnographer. I been to explore one of the many different communities in the London borough of Hackney. Though the community I have chosen to present to you seemed to be made of several different groups, it curiously insists that all its members make up one single community, most clearly seen on Sundays. The particular manifestation of this community that I have been examining refer to itself as ‘St Mary’s, Stoke Newington’. On Sunday in the morning the community appears. Its leading members are dressed in white. The first holds above him a large cross, the second and third carry large candles, a fourth carries a large book and is followed by one or two hundred people. At intervals the book is opened and read from, and when this happens the whole assembly bursts into acclamations and song. What do these people themselves think they are doing? How does this event make them the particular community they are?
To get to grips with this community I had to take some decisions. My first was to accept that this community understands itself to be meeting in public. It believes that the entire surrounding community is present, watching and listening to them. The walls of their building are transparent, as it were, so the whole event is visible to the outside world, which makes it like a large demo in a busy concourse or city square.
Secondly I decided that the community thinks what it hears and what it says. The readings, and the songs that respond to them, really tell us what these people understand about themselves. Since the community is only fully visible for an hour and a half, being sociologists of this community is like being sport commentators at a match. We have to provide a running commentary as the Church service takes place before our eyes. This means that we have to listen attend to the actual words and actions of the Christians assembled in worship, and from them set out the narrative of the service. They refer themselves to the words of the book – Scripture – which they listen and repeat in song. This means that the narrative of the Church service is the narrative of Jesus Christ that spells itself out through these readings. In short, Christ is what is going on in the Church service, and these people who hear and sing Scripture are our key to Christ. The unity of Christ and these people is what is being established here. In its worship this community declares that God intends to make us participants in some of his action for the world. So the Church service is the service of God, and remains his service, and yet it also becomes ours. Our action is through and through God’s action, and yet it will become really ours, our action with God. As the Christians see it, their worship is the speech of God that creates their community and their life. This worship creates plurality, it sets all things in motion, and distinguishes every thing from every other thing. God gives his speech to the world in the form of the Church: the Church is the action of God in the world. It witnesses to God who makes good what we start but cannot finish, and undoes what we have done falsely. The worship is God’s own compassionate diagnosis of the world, and the Church tells the world what it does Church interprets the world to itself and. In worshipping God, the Church deconstructs what the world does. The Church service is mocking what the pagans do. Finally, the event of the Church service reverberate in the activities of Christian through the week, so that every Christian is a little Church service continuing wherever each Christian is. These are some of the assumptions I am working on in what follows. As we go along you will be able to identify others. Our job is to provide a commentary on what this assembly is doing. Here are some particular moments of the Church service I want to look at:
Entry – greeting – prayer of humble access – Gloria – reading – psalm – reading – sermon – intercessions – confession – forgiveness & peace.
The Confession of the Son
The Confession of the Son, by Douglas Knight, published in Stephen Holmes & Murray Rae eds. The Person of Christ, London: T&T Clark, 2004
For a summary of this paper, see The Confession of the Son – at a glance
We are preceded by a conversation, the conversation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Like any other piece of theology this essay attempts to set out some of the logic of that conversation. It is going to give a narrative theology that set out an account of the gospel in passages of narrative, and in axioms that I state but don’t argue for. The narrative and the axioms serve one another and require one another. But as well as narrative this essay is also an attempt to demonstrate the advantages of a theology of the Word, which means broadly that God speaks and himself makes himself known to us. It does so by trying to show that a theology of the Word is also a theological logic of that word and that narrative. The logic – that is ‘philosophy’ – does not precede the Word – that is, the gospel – but it corresponds to it: word and logic are constituted together, so the theology and justification for this account of it must be kept together. This will allow me to say that the word is really word not when it is spoken, but when it is finally heard and an event is created by its hearing.