Bonhoeffer asked us, How do we be the church in the modern times? This question has been bothering me for a while. Perhaps it has been haunting me, a spectre in the back of my mind that I have been trying to get a grasp of. I think that this question that Bonhoeffer confronts us with is one of, if not, the most important question that has been posed to us.
I am not going to pretend that I have an answer to such a question. However, I think I have an insight that is worth sharing. Yet, before I get to that, I feel that I need to do some background work.
You see, I have recently decided to try to get into a Doctoral position at a local seminary. As I was talking to one of the professors, it was recommended that I read James C. Livingston's Modern Christian Thought (2 vols.). This work is a primer on how Christian thought has developed since the Enlightenment, which will help me understand how the philosophical insights have shaped the Church. In short, it will answer the practical part of Bonhoeffer's question. That is, it will tell us how the Christian church has come to be in the modern era. However, we cannot say that how the church is is how the church should be.
So, I invite you on another little quest. As I read Livingston's book, I will be posting what I glean from the text in light of Bonhoeffer's question.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Trying Something Different
After the Lenten season, I abandoned this process, I abandoned the daily writing to try to figure the rest of this crazy thing called life. Even though I have not found the answer to the meaning of life, besides the obvious 42, I thought I might give this another shot to add some structure and discipline to my life.
I recently got a paper proposal accepted for a somewhat prestigious philosophical conference that is held at the University of Notre Dame (of Two Lakes) and thought about using this blog to show my thought process in writing the paper and was wondering if anyone was interested. The conference is on the challenge of Secularization, and here is my abstract:
I recently got a paper proposal accepted for a somewhat prestigious philosophical conference that is held at the University of Notre Dame (of Two Lakes) and thought about using this blog to show my thought process in writing the paper and was wondering if anyone was interested. The conference is on the challenge of Secularization, and here is my abstract:
We now live in a Post-Christian secularized world. That has been well-documented in the literature, including the great history of how this happened by Charles Taylor. Yet, I propose that this is not the major problem of our age. Even though Taylor has done a wonderful job showing the development of secularization through out the ages, I feel that he has missed something that figures larger than he is willing to admit. I would like to propose that the problem of our age is that we live in a world without vulnerability yet full of inquietude. Even though love is not the solution to man's historical problems1, I will argue that the only way out of this inquietude is through love of self, God, and the Other.
As Taylor argues in his work, it is not just the unbeliever in the Christian narrative that is under the spell of secularization but also the believer. We have been conditioned through our philosophy and theology to distrust an outside authority in our lives. But I will show that the root of this problem is that we no longer have trust in ourselves. Josef Pieper in his work on love, states that “there is hardly another concept that has become so demonstrably “at home” in the consciousness of the average Christian as that of acedia.”2 In Pieper's exposition of acedia, following St. Thomas Aquinas, we see that we are in a “despair of weakness, despairingly not wanting to be oneself.”3 Yet, Taylor dismisses acedia as a factor in our consciousness4. I find this to be a grievous error. For acedia is a “basic characteristic of the spiritual countenance (and ontological nature) of precisely this age which we live in”5 according to Pieper. Thus, contra Taylor, I am arguing that the root of secularization is not an Enlightenment philosophy or a gnostic outlook on life, but in a deep inquietude of the human heart6.
This inquietude comes from an “anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the height to which God has raised him.”7 Pieper continues by saying that “one who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is. He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness.”8 This leads to what Aquinas calls a “detestatio boni divini”9 which then leads man to wish that “God had not ennobled him, but had “left him in peace”.” 10 Or to quote Kierkegaard on a similar point, the individual “is unwilling, in his despair, to be himself.”11
Thus it is not that we live in a secular age, but in an age of acedia, or to put it different, in an age where the only serious philosophical question is suicide, to paraphrase Camus.12 In this age, it is impossible to say “It is good that you exist”13 for we do not wish to exist. We are tired of the obligation of existence, the duty of living, and thus are becoming disinterested and disembodied (This disinterestedness Taylor puts into the category of the buffered self, which is “essentially the self which is aware of the possiblity of disengagement”14). This is not an age of secularization but an age of philosophical suicide or as Aquinas and Pieper would term it, an age of acedia.
3Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture, St. Ignatius Press, pg. 28.
4Taylor states that acedia is a predecessor to the malaise of our present age, but says that it does not speak to the ontic condition, only the spiritual condition. (Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age, pg. 303) I would argue that a proper Thomistic view of acedia is spiritual, psychological and ontological, following Pieper.
5Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love. pg. 119
6Jurgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope defines hope as an inquietness of the heart which is both a blessing and a curse. I am borrowing this phrase from him, which he in turn borrows from Uber Hoffung by Pieper.
7Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love. pg. 119
8Ibid
9Aquinas, Thomas. Mal. 8,I
10Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love. pg. 120. Pieper is quoting Aquinas from Mal. II, II, 35,3.
11Kierkegaard, Soren. Sickness Unto Death. Quoted in Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, pg. 120. We also see this in Heidegger's understanding of “everyday existence” which is characterized by being's flight from itself, loquaciousness, curiosity, importunity, distraction and instability.
12Camus, Albert. The Myth Of Sisyphus, pg. 1, Taylor speaks of our fascination with death in our age and how it shows that we are disconnected to reality, thus showing that “there is a sense of void...and of deep embarrassment” (Taylor, 723) in the fact that we cannot understand it, but all long for it, as we are, to borrow Heidegger's terminology, being-toward-death. (Taylor, 722)
13Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love, pg. 164ff.
14Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age, Belknap Press of Harvard University, pg. 42
Monday, April 11, 2011
The Problem of Brunner II
By now you have noticed, I would at least like to think that you have noticed, I have taken a little bit of a hiatus from posting on this blog about my reading of Brunner. There are two reasons for this, and I think the second reason is the most important. My life has been changing for the better rapidly since I started dating a wonderful woman and this has thrown off my desire to delve deeper into Brunner's thought a little. But this is not the main reason. The main reason is Brunner's work.
There is a problem of getting burned-out trying to read approximatively fifteen hundred pages by the same author in the span of a little over a month. I have grown tired of Brunner and his thought. Brunner's thought, as I hinted at in an early post, does not stand the test of time. His project is important, and we can learn from it. Yet, like all work, it is historically situated and some of the problems that he is addressing has been addressed by others in better ways. Plus, we have lost the desire to be Existentialists, and have stopped listening to them. Their concerns are no longer our concerns.
Also, I find Brunner's theology problematic. He is trying to return to a state of "pure Christianity" through the writings of Paul and the first revelations about Jesus Christ. However, this purity has never existed. There never has been a pure, unified vision of Christianity. When we read the Scriptures we see this. Different authors focus on different topics, and offer different doctrine than the others. (For the best example, see the differences between Paul's writings and James' writings.) Brunner wants a return to the Ekklesia as expressed in Saint Paul's writings, but this Ekklesia has never existed, it is a revisionist abstraction. This revisionist abstraction leads Brunner to participate in Speculative Theology, which he is against while still being unaware of his assent.
Equally untenable, Brunner is trying to get rid of the traditional understandings of how the church operates. Brunner reduces the Holy Spirit to faith, the Eucharist to a personal encounter with Christ, and Baptism to a personal commitment. Strikingly, Brunner does not have an understanding of entering into a Covenantal relationship with God and the rest of humanity. For Brunner, Christianity is reduced down to a purely individual practice, something that is solely internal in us. It is for this reason, I must abandon Brunner and his thought. There are interesting points, but to hold to his thought, we must reject Faith and only participate in our inner subjectivity.
I am going to continue to blog about what I am reading even after Lent ends. This project has been enriching, and I thank you for thinking with me. The next book I am going to read and start talking through with you is Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday
by Alan E. Lewis. I wish that you continue learning and talking with me.
There is a problem of getting burned-out trying to read approximatively fifteen hundred pages by the same author in the span of a little over a month. I have grown tired of Brunner and his thought. Brunner's thought, as I hinted at in an early post, does not stand the test of time. His project is important, and we can learn from it. Yet, like all work, it is historically situated and some of the problems that he is addressing has been addressed by others in better ways. Plus, we have lost the desire to be Existentialists, and have stopped listening to them. Their concerns are no longer our concerns.
Also, I find Brunner's theology problematic. He is trying to return to a state of "pure Christianity" through the writings of Paul and the first revelations about Jesus Christ. However, this purity has never existed. There never has been a pure, unified vision of Christianity. When we read the Scriptures we see this. Different authors focus on different topics, and offer different doctrine than the others. (For the best example, see the differences between Paul's writings and James' writings.) Brunner wants a return to the Ekklesia as expressed in Saint Paul's writings, but this Ekklesia has never existed, it is a revisionist abstraction. This revisionist abstraction leads Brunner to participate in Speculative Theology, which he is against while still being unaware of his assent.
Equally untenable, Brunner is trying to get rid of the traditional understandings of how the church operates. Brunner reduces the Holy Spirit to faith, the Eucharist to a personal encounter with Christ, and Baptism to a personal commitment. Strikingly, Brunner does not have an understanding of entering into a Covenantal relationship with God and the rest of humanity. For Brunner, Christianity is reduced down to a purely individual practice, something that is solely internal in us. It is for this reason, I must abandon Brunner and his thought. There are interesting points, but to hold to his thought, we must reject Faith and only participate in our inner subjectivity.
I am going to continue to blog about what I am reading even after Lent ends. This project has been enriching, and I thank you for thinking with me. The next book I am going to read and start talking through with you is Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday
by Alan E. Lewis. I wish that you continue learning and talking with me.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
The Problem of Brunner
After recently finishing the second volume of Brunner's three volume work, I thought I would share just a small bit of what I have found to be troubling in Brunner's work. This isn't a detailed critique but just something that has just been bothering me.
Now, my specialty in academia is Existentialism. I studied it in college and graduate school, and wrote some major papers on existential themes, including my Master's thesis. Yet, Brunner is perhaps too existential for me. At least, he is too existential to be taken seriously anymore in the realm of scholarship. The problem is that Brunner reduces the whole Christian life down to the personal encounter between an individual and God. In doing so, he has, at least so far, left out the possibility for community. I have not yet gotten to his volume on the church, but it seems to me that the church is just there to show you that you need to have such a personal relationship. I find this highly problematic. The Bible calls us not to be individuals, but to be a body, one body made up of many parts. Brunner's theology does not seem to address this, and I look forward to hearing how he incorporates the Church into faith.
My other problem is that Brunner seems to reduce the Christian faith down into only a work of Jesus. He seems to be saying that God the Father is the Holy Hidden God where God the Son is the Loving Revealed God. It is then only the Loving Revealed God that we can have relationship with. This seems to me to be short-changing the Trinity. The only real mention of the Holy Spirit in his works so far is that the Holy Spirit somehow points to the Son. I feel like Brunner has a very under-developed Pneumatology and cuts us off from relationship with God the Father.
I am looking forward to reading the last book of this trilogy and sharing my thoughts with you, and thought I'd take a brief break and share my gratitude to your support and comments and hope that they continue.
-Dan
Now, my specialty in academia is Existentialism. I studied it in college and graduate school, and wrote some major papers on existential themes, including my Master's thesis. Yet, Brunner is perhaps too existential for me. At least, he is too existential to be taken seriously anymore in the realm of scholarship. The problem is that Brunner reduces the whole Christian life down to the personal encounter between an individual and God. In doing so, he has, at least so far, left out the possibility for community. I have not yet gotten to his volume on the church, but it seems to me that the church is just there to show you that you need to have such a personal relationship. I find this highly problematic. The Bible calls us not to be individuals, but to be a body, one body made up of many parts. Brunner's theology does not seem to address this, and I look forward to hearing how he incorporates the Church into faith.
My other problem is that Brunner seems to reduce the Christian faith down into only a work of Jesus. He seems to be saying that God the Father is the Holy Hidden God where God the Son is the Loving Revealed God. It is then only the Loving Revealed God that we can have relationship with. This seems to me to be short-changing the Trinity. The only real mention of the Holy Spirit in his works so far is that the Holy Spirit somehow points to the Son. I feel like Brunner has a very under-developed Pneumatology and cuts us off from relationship with God the Father.
I am looking forward to reading the last book of this trilogy and sharing my thoughts with you, and thought I'd take a brief break and share my gratitude to your support and comments and hope that they continue.
-Dan
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
The Problem of Death
Death, in our culture today, is taboo yet spoken about and seen everywhere. We are surrounded by it, but refuse to speak about it. We show each other images of it in the media that we enjoy, in the nightly news that we watch, in the prime-time tv that we watch, and in the movies that we partake of. Yet, it is still something that we do not speak directly of. We listen to music that circle around it, we read novels that pass over it, poetry that symbolizes it, yet we do not understand it.
Death is a shock, an awakening to who we are and how we view life. We are defined by it. Death is who we are. Morito, ergo sum, so to speak. We refuse to hold to this, we want to say that our lives are not interrupted by death, yet it is not true.
The true problem of Death arises when we read the narrative of Christ's death in Scripture. We do not know how to handle it. The Apostles, "needed these appearances (of the Resurrected Christ) in order to restore their faith in Him, the Christ, which had been shattered by the catastrophe of Good Friday." (pg. 371) Yet, we do not share in the scandal that the Apostles had. We've read the narrative and we know that God died for us, in Christ, and that He arose on the third day. We have turned the scandal into a celebration, and need to bring the scandal back.
"Jesus did not merely take upon Himself, and drink to the dregs, the biter cup of human suffering" (pg. 365) in His death. If it was only that, we still should be shocked, but it would not bear\bare the full weight\brunt of what happened on Good Friday. On Good Friday and Holy Saturday, "He also endured a measure of spiritual suffering, in the sense of feeling utterly forsaken by God, which no other person has ever suffered, and which we can only imagine as a foretaste of Hell - not as the "realm of the dead" but as the horror of being seperated from God." (pg. 365)
We need to at this point abandon Brunner. He continues "the article of the descensus ad inferos in the Apostles' Creed, is above all that it calls our attention to the fact that the point of the deepest humiliation of Christ is at the same time the beginning of His exaltation, of the Resurrection." (pg. 365) Brunner here makes an error that I feel most Christians make, and I made growing up. We gloss over the deep humiliation of Christ, and change it into a victory for ourselves. We too quickly pass over the Christ died part of "Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
We need to dwell on the absurdity of Death, and we do not. We gloss over it, we make it routine, we do not acknowledge it's power. And we run into a grievous theological error when we forget the torment and agony of our Saviour. That is what Lent is, taking serious the Death of God. If we do not do this, we fail to understand our faith.
Death is a shock, an awakening to who we are and how we view life. We are defined by it. Death is who we are. Morito, ergo sum, so to speak. We refuse to hold to this, we want to say that our lives are not interrupted by death, yet it is not true.
The true problem of Death arises when we read the narrative of Christ's death in Scripture. We do not know how to handle it. The Apostles, "needed these appearances (of the Resurrected Christ) in order to restore their faith in Him, the Christ, which had been shattered by the catastrophe of Good Friday." (pg. 371) Yet, we do not share in the scandal that the Apostles had. We've read the narrative and we know that God died for us, in Christ, and that He arose on the third day. We have turned the scandal into a celebration, and need to bring the scandal back.
"Jesus did not merely take upon Himself, and drink to the dregs, the biter cup of human suffering" (pg. 365) in His death. If it was only that, we still should be shocked, but it would not bear\bare the full weight\brunt of what happened on Good Friday. On Good Friday and Holy Saturday, "He also endured a measure of spiritual suffering, in the sense of feeling utterly forsaken by God, which no other person has ever suffered, and which we can only imagine as a foretaste of Hell - not as the "realm of the dead" but as the horror of being seperated from God." (pg. 365)
We need to at this point abandon Brunner. He continues "the article of the descensus ad inferos in the Apostles' Creed, is above all that it calls our attention to the fact that the point of the deepest humiliation of Christ is at the same time the beginning of His exaltation, of the Resurrection." (pg. 365) Brunner here makes an error that I feel most Christians make, and I made growing up. We gloss over the deep humiliation of Christ, and change it into a victory for ourselves. We too quickly pass over the Christ died part of "Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
We need to dwell on the absurdity of Death, and we do not. We gloss over it, we make it routine, we do not acknowledge it's power. And we run into a grievous theological error when we forget the torment and agony of our Saviour. That is what Lent is, taking serious the Death of God. If we do not do this, we fail to understand our faith.
Monday, April 4, 2011
The Problem of Scripture Reading Part II
"We believe in Jesus the Eternal Son of God because the Bible testifies that this is who He is." (pg. 341) This is the answer a lot of contemporary Christians will give when asked why they believe in Jesus. They believe because they are told to believe. (We have all probably sung the children's song, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.") If Scripture tells us to believe in Jesus, then we will believe in Jesus. This is because "We believe in Jesus because we first of all believe in the Bible." (pg. 341) The Lutheran scholar Johann Gerhard, in his Loci theologici,states that faith in the Bible is an "axiomatic presupposition of all the articles of faith." (pg. 341) That is, to believe in anything, one must start with the Bible.
Yet, this is highly problematic for Brunner. For when we make the Bible our starting point, "The authority of the Bible precedes the authority of Jesus." (pg. 341) Instead of deriving our faith from the Revelation we derive it from what is revealed. When looking at "faith n the New Testament sense as "meeting (or encounter) it rules out this...conception of faith. According to the Biblical conception of faith we believe in Jesus as the Christ not because it is taught to us by the Church or in the Bible, but because He, Jesus, the Christ, meets us as the true Word of God in the witness of the Scriptures." (pg. 342) When we believe in Christ because we are commanded to by the Bible, we are believing in an idol, according to Brunner, as we can only believe in Christ because we have encountered Him.
The text of Scripture is dead but the Word of God is alive when believe in Christ-through-encounter. This does not mean that we do not need Scripture, but that we need to put Scripture in it's proper place. "The Bible is not the authority on the basis of which we believe in Christ, but the Bible is the means, which shows and gives us the Christ." (pg. 342) Brunner continues that "The disciples of Jesus did not believe in Him on accord of any doctrine that Jesus was the Christ. Because God, through His Spirit, opened their eyes, they "discovered" Jesus as the Christ." (pg. 342)
"That disturbing mystery of the Person of Jesus which even unbelievers feel, becomes evident to faith as the mystery of the unity of the divine and the human Subject in the action and speech, in the suffering and in the death of Jesus." (pg. 342-343) When we read the Scriptures in a modern, academic or disinterested way, we never encounter the disturbing mystery of God. We only encounter some wise sayings, some moral standards, and e have to dis-regard the rest. But when we meet Christ, He disturbs our slumber, and reveals Himself not to be a speaker of words, but as The Word. When we fail to read The Word, we fail to read Scripture. That is the problem of Scripture Reading.
Yet, this is highly problematic for Brunner. For when we make the Bible our starting point, "The authority of the Bible precedes the authority of Jesus." (pg. 341) Instead of deriving our faith from the Revelation we derive it from what is revealed. When looking at "faith n the New Testament sense as "meeting (or encounter) it rules out this...conception of faith. According to the Biblical conception of faith we believe in Jesus as the Christ not because it is taught to us by the Church or in the Bible, but because He, Jesus, the Christ, meets us as the true Word of God in the witness of the Scriptures." (pg. 342) When we believe in Christ because we are commanded to by the Bible, we are believing in an idol, according to Brunner, as we can only believe in Christ because we have encountered Him.
The text of Scripture is dead but the Word of God is alive when believe in Christ-through-encounter. This does not mean that we do not need Scripture, but that we need to put Scripture in it's proper place. "The Bible is not the authority on the basis of which we believe in Christ, but the Bible is the means, which shows and gives us the Christ." (pg. 342) Brunner continues that "The disciples of Jesus did not believe in Him on accord of any doctrine that Jesus was the Christ. Because God, through His Spirit, opened their eyes, they "discovered" Jesus as the Christ." (pg. 342)
"That disturbing mystery of the Person of Jesus which even unbelievers feel, becomes evident to faith as the mystery of the unity of the divine and the human Subject in the action and speech, in the suffering and in the death of Jesus." (pg. 342-343) When we read the Scriptures in a modern, academic or disinterested way, we never encounter the disturbing mystery of God. We only encounter some wise sayings, some moral standards, and e have to dis-regard the rest. But when we meet Christ, He disturbs our slumber, and reveals Himself not to be a speaker of words, but as The Word. When we fail to read The Word, we fail to read Scripture. That is the problem of Scripture Reading.
Friday, April 1, 2011
The Problem of Reading Scripture
"In the beginning was the Word...And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:1, 1:14, NASB) In our day, the Word is no longer allowed to be flesh, to be incarnated. We have taken the life-giving spirit out of it, turning it into dead words. We enter into a mis-understanding when we have a "rationalist view of the "teaching" of Jesus as something which can be understood apart from the Person (of Christ) altogether." (pg. 276) We reduce the words of Jesus into mere words by rationalizing them and saying that he was "one of the many religious teachers who proclaim eternal religious truths." (pg. 276) or that Jesus "was "the first" to perceive and to teach or "the first" to do so "in power and purity"." (pg. 276)
Even though in the Evangelical Church today we do not want to admit that Jesus was just the first to say such things, we want to run His sayings through a rationalistic rubric and figure out if they hold any validity in the world today. We do this also by transferring His words into a "doctrinaire kind of theology." (pg. 278) We become "concerned with an "ethic of Jesus", a system of requirements, which exist in themselves in timeless validity." (pg. 278) In short, we make the Christian Faith about Morality and Law, what we have to do to fulfill a Divine Categorical Imperative, so that we can have a "better righteousness" (pg. 278) or more piety.
However, when we read the Scriptures, we should not try to extract a truth, an ethic or a system of morality. We should read the Scriptures as a personal communication of a Person. "No saying is based -as in the case of "eternal truths" - in itself, but every statement is related to Him, the Speaker." (pg. 277) And not only did the words of Jesus "not only proclaim this coming Kingdom of God, at the same time He inaugurated this new age and represented it in His own Person." (pg. 298-299)
When we try to extract "eternal truths" or wisdom from the Scriptures, we are extracting God from the Scriptures. It is no longer the Word of God that we are reading, but the word of man.
Even though in the Evangelical Church today we do not want to admit that Jesus was just the first to say such things, we want to run His sayings through a rationalistic rubric and figure out if they hold any validity in the world today. We do this also by transferring His words into a "doctrinaire kind of theology." (pg. 278) We become "concerned with an "ethic of Jesus", a system of requirements, which exist in themselves in timeless validity." (pg. 278) In short, we make the Christian Faith about Morality and Law, what we have to do to fulfill a Divine Categorical Imperative, so that we can have a "better righteousness" (pg. 278) or more piety.
However, when we read the Scriptures, we should not try to extract a truth, an ethic or a system of morality. We should read the Scriptures as a personal communication of a Person. "No saying is based -as in the case of "eternal truths" - in itself, but every statement is related to Him, the Speaker." (pg. 277) And not only did the words of Jesus "not only proclaim this coming Kingdom of God, at the same time He inaugurated this new age and represented it in His own Person." (pg. 298-299)
When we try to extract "eternal truths" or wisdom from the Scriptures, we are extracting God from the Scriptures. It is no longer the Word of God that we are reading, but the word of man.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)