The resurrection renews the world. It opens it and keeps it open and it makes it new so that it is a new world. The resurrection has transformed the world in which we live. Of course it is not until we are baptised that we begin to learn this, and through years of discipleship begin to grasp the dimensions of this transformation. The pagans – that is, anyone untouched by the gospel – live in a closed world, in which every man must fear that a gain for his neighbour is a loss for himself. They are locked in and set one against another in unending conflict. This was the world of our ancestors, until the gospel arrived. The gospel told them that God has broken through into this world, has made himself at home in it, and comes and goes in and out of our sight, beyond our control and beyond our ability to summons him or deny him. He is Lord of time and space. Every barrier and confinement we meet opens before him to let him enter. Though solid to us all, creation is porous to him. The master comes goes as he please. The elements of the world divide to his right and left and bow before him as he passes. No time or place confines or contains him. All places and times are the places that he creates and opens to us, so that we may meet and encounter one another and live together there. All places are his hospitality to us. As this realisation sunk into our pagan forebears they learned a much more benign and tolerant attitude to one another, the mighty to the weak, and they ceased to fear one another, learned to trust those with whom they had no ties of blood, and so learned to live together in much greater units. They gave up living in tribes that were committed to aggrandisement through war, and became a nation, a community of people under one law.
Pope Benedict on Jesus and sacrifice
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI is a pastor. He preaches and teaches around the Church year, his homily at every feast telling us something about Christ and something about us. Through his Easter and Corpus Christi homilies in particular he teaches us how to relate the passion, crucifixion, resurrection, the eucharist and body of Christ.
His very impressive little book on Jesus of Nazareth takes us through the ministry up to the transfiguration. We come to it in the knowledge that there is second book dealing with the passion and resurrection to follow. But a work of Christian teaching theology would not put incarnation and ministry in one book, which would then look very like a work of biblical studies, and the resurrection in another, and the Church and eucharist in a third. That would attempt to divide the indivisible, Jesus in one book, Christ in a second, and so divide Christ from his people, take away his anointing, until ‘Christ’ becomes the corpse over which the dogs of biblical studies have fought these many years. So it is a joy to find that the passion, resurrection and worship and eucharist are everywhere in this volume.
The Son and the Spirit in the Providence of God – John Zizioulas on time and communion
Every Christian doctrine is an exemplification of the Christian doctrine of God. The Christian confession of God and that God is for us, requires an account of the generous provision of God, which is what providence is, and it requires all the other doctrines that make our talk about providence meaningful. The Christian doctrine of God tells us that we are not God, and so we are discharged from the exhausting though self-imposed duty to make ourselves divine, that is to take ourselves to be everything, and also to be able to stand outside this everything and decide whether or not to affirm it. One corollary is that we can really know other people, but we cannot know them and master them utterly, because they belong not in the first place to us, but to God, who has high ambitions for them. We are not ourselves by being ‘just-human’, without God. Thus the doctrine of God gives us the truth of man, but the truth of man cannot be extracted from this doctrine and cashed out into a theory about man. Because God mystery, by which we mean he is knowable only to extent he makes himself known, and man is the creature of God, man is a mystery too. The assessment of God is that we along with rest of the world are worth waiting for, and the Church is the demonstration that this is still the good judgment – of God. The secret of being human, is hidden with God, and only in communion with him, can we be human, together, with other humans.
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.
The Holy Spirit and the other spirits – at a glance
The Holy Spirit is the God of Israel who has distinguished himself from us by raising Jesus from the dead, and now distinguishes us from one another, securing our diversity and uniqueness
1) The Holy Spirit is the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead. The world is the hospitality of God. There are other spirits. Spirits may be understood as natural forces, some moral authorities (nations, their institutions and ways of life).
2) The Holy Spirit is all in all, indivisible and unknowable. He can preserve himself and the Son from being grasped or known. But he makes himself known first as the communion of saints, then as the whole company of heaven.
3) Knowledge of God is God’s own knowledge of himself. It is pure and undivided. It also protects us from itself, by preventing us from attempting to grasp it. The glory of God protects us from God. It does this so that we are not shattered by the impact of his arrival, or disintegrate under the pressure of his stronger gravity.
4) The West has made Christian teaching about the holiness of God abstract and absolute, so this holiness is no longer for us.
5) The West has taught that God is too distant to enter the circle of the universe, that the universe is not God’s space for us, nor time for us but empty and neutral space and time.
6) The holiness of God is a series of force fields, within each of which God extends to us a greater and more hospitable space.
7) As a result of our rebellion this hospitable world has become a remedial and custodial version of itself.
8) Holiness burns. Yet the holiness of the things God gives is too pure to be picked up by our own perception. Regular light exposure to this holiness will toughen us, and make us holy.
9) Holiness is ‘otherness’, the otherness of God from man, and for man. It regulates and make compatible all it touches. It never becomes tangible to us
as such, is not visible to us, because it is the condition of there being objects to us.
10) Modern Western theology distinguishes the spiritual from the physical and the literal. To avoid this dualising, and show that this world is the hospitable act of God to us, we must re-state the action of God in this world for us. Our pneumatological account must be in terms of
physical things made available for us by God.
11) The Holy Spirit is the creator of plurality. He makes the host and crowd of supporters and ministers. Because the Son has these
superior numbers, he will face down his opponents.
12) The work of the Son is the effort of the Spirit. The company of the Spirit chooses the Son and raises him. The chorus fills him and
lifts him up, and lifts him from us, making him the Son, not us.
13) We can give all the credit of the Son to the Spirit. The tradition (and ‘Filioque’) do not illegitimately subordinate
the Spirit to the Son, but reflect the functionalist subordination that the Spirit takes on himself.
14) Both Son and Spirit abase and subordinate themselves and each is raised by the Father. The action (existence) that goes out from Son and Spirit is subordinate. The Son and Spirit come to the Father as his subordinates and are received by him as his equals.
15) The Spirit creates and animates the whole company of heaven. He makes this company an actor, and even makes their liturgy an actor,
and make Jesus a subordinate actor.
16) The whole company exalt Jesus. They throw themselves down before him. He exalts them. He makes them get up, not thereby saying that
their worship of him is inappropriate, but rather that it is appropriate and he has acknowledged it.
17) The Spirit will be us, but we will never be the Spirit. We are not the definition of the Spirit – Christ is that. The Son can distinguish the Spirit from us. When Christ is all in all, we will have no other definition than as his Spirit.
18) Christ is the body and the head. When he is head and body, we may also become part of this body. The body is all head, it is headed (led, perfected) but we are never that head. He is always more than we are, always what we are not.
19) We can use a secular pneumatology as an account who make us, a many too many to name, and thus an indefinable flow of influences and forces. We are the result of the efforts of scores of workers (unknown to us) who have made the material which sustains – and constitutes – our own bodies.
God and the gods: Christian theology and the modern constitution of knowledge
The argument of this essay is that we must speak about God in the face of the many gods. The Western tradition does not do this. It assumes that is that one God may or may not exist. The Christian account claims that the world is full of forces, influences and imperatives, and where these are destructive of human life, it calls them gods. Theological talk of God requires a conceptual henotheism, which concedes that these of gods are identified and defeated by the God of Jesus Christ. Christian theology does not ask if God exists, but which god is God?
God is the Holy Spirit. He is the God of Israel who has demonstrated he is holy for us by raising Jesus from the dead. There are other spirits. Some of these may be understood as natural forces, others as such moral authorities as nations, their institutions and legal systems, their figureheads and ambitions, amongst all the gods of nations other than Israel. Where these authorities are not themselves under authority, but step beyond the bounds set for them, we may call them idolatrous, sometimes even demonic. These spirits are not insubstantial and ethereal. Their impact on us is real. Only the God of Jesus Christ can give them their proper role, or rid us of them.
Continue reading “God and the gods: Christian theology and the modern constitution of knowledge”
The Descent of the Son
God comes to us. The Son has set out to fetch us. We need two accounts of this coming. We need an account of the coming of the Son to us. And we need an account of the coming into being of the Son. The coming into being of the Son is the growing up of mankind. This is the account Irenaeus gives us. Then we need a subsidiary account of the resistance man puts up, an account of his idleness and reluctance, and thus of sin and fall. Augustine provide this account. We need our main plot from Irenaeus, in which the Son comes to us and we grow up to be members of the Son. And we need our sub-plot from Augustine to show the actual event of his taking on and dealing with our lost and vicious condition. Then we have to relate these two accounts. The first is the account of Adam who starts out as a child, but did not grow up with, or cling to his head and master. He is led and misled. He became a people without a leader, a body without a head, a group without definition or determination. He fell into torpor and delusion, and was for a long time lost. He failed properly to name and locate all creatures over which he was to exercise dominion. Instead he began to dislocate them, creating for himself all sorts of frightening, imaginary powers to whom he was increasingly in hock. The second account is of another version of Adam, the obedient son, who receives his discipline and as a result does grow up. This new Adam is that humanity headed and led by Christ, that receives its whole definition from Christ. This is the journey of the obedient Son, made the criterion of man, and constitutive of our humanity.
The Holy Spirit and the other spirits
God is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead. There are other spirits. Spirits may be understood as natural forces, some moral authorities. Some of these authorities are institutions, so nations, their legal systems and governments, empires, their rulers and their figureheads. Where these authorities are not themselves under authority, we can refer to them as gods, the gods of nations other than Israel. When these step beyond the bounds set for them, we may also call them idolatrous, and even demonic. These spirits are not insubstantial and ethereal. Their impact on us is real. Only the gospel of Christ can either give them their proper role, or rid us of them.
The Holy Spirit makes a world for us. This world is composed of things which together represent the hospitality of God, and his invitation to pass that hospitality on, and exercise it for one another. So God, the Holy Spirit, makes things physical for us. The Spirit makes the body, and indeed many bodies, and he makes the letter, and he makes the law, the Scripture, and the many words of God, some invitations, some commands. As long as these are sourced from the Spirit, and return to him to be refreshed by him, they are good. When they are withheld from him, they decay and cease to be what he made them. The Holy Spirit supplies us also with order and instruction, guides and guidelines, rules and institutions, forms of public order and worship. The Spirit is not against the letter, or the institution, or tradition or ritual. He creates, sustains and renews them. He is not responsible only for the spontaneity, but also for the continuity and reliability of all that is. We can talk about the Spirit only by talking about the continuum of this world with heaven as the act, and the economy of the acts, of the hospitality of God. We talk about the Spirit by talking about the world as the act of his hospitality.
Continue reading “The Holy Spirit and the other spirits”
The Confession of the Son – at a glance
The Son makes the good confession of the Father in the face of all rival masters. Other masters are
also allowed a limited responsibility; when they attempt to set up rival
jurisdictions, they are brought down. The Son speaks for those who cannot speak
for themselves. He makes us vocal. He puts his words into our mouths,
until we sustain one another with his words.
1) The liturgy is the speaking of God. God is speaking every word uttered in the service. The Son gives praise
to the Father; the Spirit serves this act of the Son.
2) The Holy Spirit makes a company of heaven. The Father sends them to accompany the Son, and the Son
returns with them to the Father.
3) The Father and the Son speak humanity; humanity is brought into being by their speaking; it is one mode in
which they speak divinity to each other.
4) We live on the words, speech and breath of the Son: his breath animates us and gives us what being we have.
5) We are given being, and become real, as we are brought together and ordered around the Son as his
assembly.
6) The Son calls together and perfects all the scattered elements of the cosmos. The Church is the visible phenomenon of the actual unity of the whole well-ordered creation, already present in Christ.
7) Jesus Christ is embodied to us by the Spirit. The Spirit always dresses, escorts and presents the Son to us in one person and through that one, in many.
8) The Son makes the good confession of the Father in the face of all rival masters. Other masters are also allowed a limited responsibility; when they attempt to set up rival jurisdictions, they are brought down.
9) The Son speaks us, and keeps us present, to the Father. The Son speaks for those who cannot speak for
themselves.
10) He makes us vocal. He puts his words into our mouths, until we are in ourselves faithful amplifications of
his words, and sustain one another with them.
11) The whole company of heaven fortifies and encourages those presently confronting the disobedient powers. It does this visibly in the person of the saints, who encourage rulers to protect and promote their people and not to ignore their requests, and warn them not to
exceed the power given to them.
12) The Spirit is commissioned by the Son to give us a work. We are co-assigned to the work of presenting people and keeping them present in this company.
13) The Spirit raises the cosmos and assembly around the Son. The Spirit animates every member and part with the speech of God so it is articulate with thankfulness.
14) The Spirit shares out to us the qualities and labours of the Son. The Spirit prompts Christ to give glory to, and differentiate himself from, the Father. The Spirit differentiates Christ from us, and us from one another. The Son tenders to us the otherness he receives from the Spirit and returns to the Father.
15) This assembly and cosmos is not merely an entity, but a living and holy being, a life in common. It will be a single shared effort in the crediting and acknowledging of the otherness (holiness) of every member. In this living exchange every member gives glory to every other, so differentiating and distinguishing everyone from himself, and fully attributing to each the holy otherness that he receives from God.
The confession of the Son
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.
Continue reading “The confession of the Son”