The past is not dead; it is not even past: a sermon on Augustine and the Donatists

Have you read True History of the Kelly Gang, the Booker Prize-winning novel by Peter Carey? It’s about the eponymous Ned Kelly, a sort of Robin Hood figure in the turn of the 19th century Australian outback. It’s a dazzling read. Not only because of perennial themes wonderfully, comically, tragically woven into a riveting narrative – social exclusion and desperation, personal loyalty and honour, judicial cruelty and corruption – the stuff of legend; but especially due to the voice that Carey gives Kelly – it speaks to us passionately and personally, fusing the horizons of yesteryear and today. The epigraph on the title page is so apt, from William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

Reflecting on the parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13 is what brought Faulkner’s statement to mind. It also triggered a memory that confirms it. I recalled one of those defining moments in church history, defining not only in the sense of setting the course that the church would take, but also in the sense of encapsulating a controversy that would re-emerge again and again along the way. No, indeed, “The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

Come with me to North Africa in the early 4th century during and after what will come to be called “The Great Persecution”. The emperor Diocletian has issued an edict declaring that all churches are to be destroyed, all worship forbidden, all sacred vessels confiscated, and all Bibles and sacred texts surrendered to the Roman authorities. Some of the church’s leaders give in to the demands, others resist and suffer for their faithfulness. Not surprisingly, the rigorists in the church consider those who buckled under imperial pressure to be traitors and apostates. Things come to a head with the disputed election of one Donatus as bishop of Carthage, an able, eloquent, and charismatic personality who, despite sustained opposition from church and state, will remain at the helm for the next 40 years.
What was at stake? According to Donatus and his followers, the church itself. The presence in it of those clergy who had bowed to pagan demands, they argued, compromised the integrity, tainted the purity, disrespected the martyrs of the church. Indeed they contaminated their congregations with their unforgivable crimes and must be removed from office.

Things got very nasty. The issue of the nature and constitution of the church aroused such passions. Subtract the violence and you could almost cry “Amen!” for such theological seriousness. The basic question was this: What is the connection between the unity of the church and the holiness of the church? The Donatists were adamant that the unity of the church is based on its holiness, and that the holiness of the church is constituted by the holiness of its members, particularly its ministers. The church, that is, is a community of saints, not a school for sinners. So the Donatists circled the wagons around the vineyards they planted, to protect the “true” church from the pollution of the world, and drastically to prune its own vines.

Opposing the Donatists was Augustine, bishop of Hippo (200 miles west of Carthage). Augustine and his followers were confident that the church could interface with a hostile world without fear of losing its identity. They insisted that the church is not a bolthole from the world, rather the church exists for the sake of the world, a world in pain and need. The church should not fear defilement either from pagan corruption or from Christian sinfulness, because its purity does not depend on its members and ministers but solely on its God. The church is not a community of the perfect, it is the community of the broken, those who live by God’s grace alone. It is therefore, inevitably, a “mixed” community, comprising quite bad people as well as pretty good people. Above all, said Augustine, the church is a fellowship of love – it is the love of Christ that constitutes its unity – a love that is patient and does not rush to judgement. And Augustine’s text? As the famous harvest hymn based on our parable has it: “Wheat and tares together sown, / unto joy or sorrow grown”.

I wish that this were a story of good guys and bad guys: Donatus – “Hiss! Boo!”; Augustine – “Hooray! Look out, he’s behind you!” – but it’s not as simple as a Christmas pantomime. Both sides in the conflict, in fact, did terrible, shameful things. A militant wing of the Donatists, the Circumcellions, plundered the homes of peasant farmers, robbed their granaries, kidnapped opponents, blinded them, murdered them. Augustine, in turn, if reluctantly, endorsed counter-measures including, eventually, state coercion and violence. When it comes to deeds, there were no winners in this schism. But in terms of ideas and principles? “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Donatus and Augustine continue to argue and battle for the soul of the church. Where should our sympathies lie?

Absolutely with Augustine, for one profound if rather obvious reason: if Donatus were right, we wouldn’t be here to discuss the issue, because if Donatus were consistent, there would be no church, just a sect. For where will you ever find a community of morally blameless people? Augustine himself was quite up front on this issue, even lurid. One who enters a church, he said, “is bound to see drunkards, misers, tricksters, gamblers, adulterers, fornicators ... The same crowds that press into the churches on Christian festivals also fill the theatres on pagan holidays.” And yet some Christians today would get their knickers in a twist about, well, me saying “get their knickers in a twist”. How we love a good moral panic! We’re a long way here from Augustine, or – better – Martin Luther, Augustine’s heir, who once advised his earnest young lieutenant Philip Melanchton to “Sin boldly – but believe even more boldly!” Augustine and Luther, you see, recognised that the gospel actually redefines the very meaning of “holiness”, translating it from the realm of moral purity to the sphere of grace and mercy.

Nor does one have to be a moral relativist to recognise how fluid and changeable is our understanding of what is right, seemly, proper. Calvin saw dancing as “a preamble to fornication”, while the English Puritan Richard Baxter considered it “a sinful sport”. In the time of my own ministry, what used to be called “living in sin” has become for most people – I dare say most Christian people – an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, prelude to marriage, or even a tolerable arrangement in itself. And if – heaven forbid! – I were a betting man, I’d wager that in a generation the vast majority of Christians will look back on gay partnerships as we look back on inter-racial marriage. In any case, the essential point that Augustine made is this: that “in the final analysis the difference between Christians and others lies in one thing only: the former are members of the church, the latter not” (David Bosch). What binds us together is not an agreed code of ethics or practices but the love of Christ working through the mutual acceptance and forbearance of his members, members who are called to welcome diversity, exercise tolerance, and practice what has been called “interpretive charity” (Stephen Fowl) in our judgement of others.

And this goes not only for personal behaviour – the issue at stake between Donatus and Augustine – but also, I would suggest, for personal belief. Or are we to weed the tares on the basis of TC – “theological correctness” – and shun the “unsound”? All I can say is God help me if I am ultimately judged by my theological convictions and consistency. The rule of “interpretive charity” should govern not only our behaviour but also our beliefs. The crucial thing in theological disputes is to recognise the intention of faith of those with whom we disagree, keep the conversation going, never be the first to walk away from the Table. Against contemporary Donatists, we must resist, says Rowan Williams, “the temptation to seek the purity … of a community speaking with only one voice and embrace the reality of living in a communion that is fallible and divided.”

Augustine, with penetrating spiritual insight, saw that nothing is harder to avoid than self-deception, particularly when, assuming that the church needs protection, we don the mantle of “defenders of the faith”. Augustine also saw that defining yourself by what you are against is the symptom of an obsessive personality that clings to legalism and dogmatism. And he saw too the ultimate tragedy of this “absolutist attitude” (Reinhold Bernhardt): that in desiring to legislate and exclude, and in rushing to premature closure, we become angry, bitter, loveless. As we learn from the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, we are simply not capable of carrying out judicious separations; they must be left to the Judge in the fullness of time. “Till then, all false zeal must be checked, the field must be left to ripen in patience, the net must be cast widely, and everything else left to God in faith” (Joachim Jeremias).

“The past is not dead. It is not even past.” And the future belongs to God.

Leaving the church?

A sermon by Kim Fabricius (his fourth-last sermon before retirement)

On my retirement in early October, my church, Bethel United Reformed Church, Swansea (UK), is going to be joining the worshipping community at the local Methodist Church. Our two congregations have been growing more closely together for several years, and my hope is that, in due course, we may become a united church, a Local Ecumenical Partnership (LEP). Bethel’s Church Meeting voted overwhelming for this venture of faith. But saying Yes is one thing, doing Yes quite another. And some are anxious – and others grumble. Hence this sermon, preached on September 15th.

Gregory Boyd is the Senior Pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. The church has an evangelical ethos, and before the 2004 presidential election Boyd was under a lot of pressure to “shepherd his flock” towards “the right candidate”, that is, the Republican candidate. As a conscientious pastor, Boyd tried to address the “big issues” of the day. So, he writes, “In April of 2004, … I felt it necessary to preach a series of sermons that would provide a biblical explanation for why our church should not join the rising chorus of right-wing political activity.” In them, Boyd argued that “a significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic idolatry.” Hey, this is the USA! What was Boyd thinking?!

Actually, “Some people literally wept with gratitude, saying that they had always felt like outsiders in the evangelical community for not ‘toeing the conservative party line’.” Others, however, howled with rage. “I felt as though I’d stuck a stick into a hornet’s nest,” said Boyd. And sure enough, the hornets massed, buzzed, stung – and then flew the nest. 20% of the congregation left in disgust. In round numbers, that’s a thousand people.

During the eighties, I myself preached on the embedded heresies of Thatcherism, and at least five miffed members left Bethel, maybe 15% of the congregation; thus in a small way I know how Gregory Boyd must have felt. So what’s the moral of his large and my little story? Don’t address controversial issues lest it divide the church? But then what kind of church is that? And what kind of Jesus? Do they actually match the church and the Jesus in the New Testament? And the answer is they do not. No way. I doubt you could find two successive chapters in the gospels where Jesus isn’t getting into trouble, conflict after conflict, with the religious leaders in Galilee or Jerusalem. Disputes continue in the early church, recorded in the book of Acts, though its author, Luke, does his best to airbrush out their ferocity; but it appears, gloves off, in the letters of the pugnacious Paul. Even the “God is love” letters of John were written to refute opponents, while the scathing letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation make “could do better” look like a gold star. So the question is not whether there were hostile reactions provoked by the life and teaching of Jesus, and acrimonious disagreements in the apostolic church, the only questions are what they were about and how they were negotiated.

One thing they were not about: personal offence. This has to be said because I’m afraid that personal offence is, alas, often the reason why people leave the church today: someone has done something to offend them. Here is material for the wry smile of a Barbara Pym novel, but none for serious consideration.

No, we’re talking substantive issues here, theological issues – including politics, money, and sex (and if you think these aren’t theological issues, you haven’t been paying attention) – they’re the ones that vexed the early church, and have vexed any serious-minded church in Christian history. The disputes Jesus had with the scribes and Pharisees had to do, in general, with the way he interpreted the scriptures; in particular, with the way he was rather laid back about keeping the Sabbath and observing the rules of ritual purity. “For the gospels do not leave us in the slightest doubt that Jesus, judged by the standards of his religious environment, was in fact ‘liberal’” – “Soft on sin,” said his opponents – “and that it was … that very fact that sent him to the cross” (Ernst Käsemann). 

What was the reason for our Lord’s “loose” behaviour? People. Everything Jesus said and did was directed to human well-being, whether it was healing an illness, eating with an outcast, or embracing the poor. He taught and acted in this way because, intimate as he was with his Father, he believed it to be the will of God. All your piety and prayer and professions of faith don’t amount to a hill of beans if you don’t love neighbour, stranger, indeed enemy. And if anything in the letter of the Bible got in the way of human flourishing, Jesus reinterpreted it. He knew from experience that the devil himself could play proof-text.

This radical understanding of the way human beings should relate to each other continued to exercise the first Christians as they wrestled with the revolutionary implications of the life and teachings of Christ. For Jesus himself, radical welcome meant crossing religious and social boundaries and including previously excluded fellow-Jews in the community of Israel. The motley company of twelve disciples – symbolising the twelve tribes of Israel – reflected just how radical this inclusion would be, with the despised quisling tax collector Matthew at one extreme and the nationalist freedom-fighter Simon the Zealot at the other, the variety expanding as Jesus attracted all sorts of people including the sad, the mad, and the bad. The inclusion of non-Jews – Gentiles – was not really on the agenda, though contact with, and even praise for, a few heretical Samaritans and occupying Romans suggested that the circle of the accepted would become larger still.

Cue St. Paul. The entire mission of the apostle is based on the premise that, in Christ, there is no longer Jew nor Gentile, that this ultimate dividing wall has been dynamited by the resurrection of Jesus, the first of a new kind of human being called “Christian”, whose Spirit will plant “churches”, where people will relate to each other in new ways, with indiscriminate kindness, infinite patience, and limitless forgiveness.

Paul had his hands full, that’s for sure. If you know your Old Testament, the scriptures of the early church, you know that it is adamant about maintaining the distinction between Jew and Gentile. So Paul’s use of the scriptures to prove his case was “creative” to say the least! But Paul pushed the envelope because now that Christ is Lord, the scriptures must bend to Jesus, not the other way around. The mother church in Jerusalem, led by Jesus’ brother James, looked on askance. Travelling evangelists visited the churches Paul had founded to combat his new-fangled teaching that Gentiles do not have to become Jews in order to be Christians. Congregations became battlegrounds. Splits occurred, cliques were formed, in-fighting raged. But for Paul the very gospel was at stake – the gospel of grace and freedom.

So there he stood. He could do no other. His teaching of God’s unconditional loving-kindness attracted some and repelled others. But leave the church? When attacked and isolated, Paul would not be forced out – though, as we heard, at the end of his most bitter letter, to the Galatians, he did plead “let no one give me any more trouble” (6:17) (or as we might translate, “Give me a break!”). Conversely, when church members felt cornered and bullied, whether they were liberal or conservative – it made no difference to Paul – he pleaded with them to stay.

So that thousand that left Woodland Hills Church in a huff because they didn’t agree with their pastor’s preaching, I’m quite sure Gregory Boyd thought, not “Good riddance!” – that would be an understandable but finally quite pagan response – but rather “What a terrible pity! These beloved do not seem to know the ABCs of being Christian, being church.” Because while you can choose your friends, you can’t choose your family – I mean the one into which you were born again by faith, compared to which, according to Paul, your nuclear family is but a biological imitation.

There is a lesson here for us all. There is certainly a lesson here for me. For I confess that there was a time when I seriously thought that I might have to leave the URC itself, with nowhere else to go: when we were all discussing same-sex relationships back in the nineties, and I had to consider what I would do if General Assembly took a hardline stance against them. Because I would have deemed such a position to be a grave moral and theological error. Could I remain in such an un-Jesus-like church? I decided I must, that I would have to stay and continue to argue the case. As it turned out, the URC decided no-decision, matters grave and gay referred back to local churches. As Bethel knows. As Church Meeting decided in May 2012 against the blessing of civil partnerships. I was gutted. I still am. But I’m still here. By the grace of God I’m still here.

And here we are. By the grace of God, here we are – together. And together – come hell or high water – come a new home – together, by the grace of God, let us remain.

A letter to Pope Benedict XVI

Your Holiness,

I hope you will forgive me the impertinence of writing to you – I who am not only young and a layperson but also one of those "separated brethren" of the protestant churches. The only claim I can make on your attention is that I have prayed for you sometimes, and so have come to feel that curious bond of affection that grows up between lives otherwise so widely separated but joined, as if under one roof, in prayer.

So you are stepping down, handing the job over to a younger man. You explain that you are tired and old, that you want to retire to the cloister and eke out your last days in lonely prayer. When your predecessor, Blessed John Paul II, noticed that he was no longer young, he turned even his age and illness, even his dying, into a visible sign of God's presence in frail flesh. But you've taken another road. The silence of the cloister, and beyond that the silence of the grave and the deeper silence of the living Word, have been calling to you, and you have answered that call. 

And who could blame you? You haven't exactly presided over the brightest hour of the church's history, have you? But none of us gets to choose our time. We are here, now, and we have to make the best of it, even if at times we seem to spend our lives paying off the debts of former generations, or suffering for their mistakes. Leading the church must feel sometimes like trying to keep a ship on course when someone else has been there before you putting holes in the hull. And then you get to the end of it all and wonder whether you did a decent job or whether you just created more holes for the next person to deal with.

But forgive me, Holy Father, I am forgetting myself. It is, after all, the church we're talking about (I will even use the Catholic capital for once: the Church), not just some troublesome institution. And the church has no leaders, only servants. Or rather it has one leader, always the same, he who loved us and washed us from our sins by his own blood. How easy to forget that the church today – with all its troubles, its sins, its sadness, its calamitous attempts to manage its PR – is the very same church that was planted in the testimony of apostles, watered by the blood of martyrs, nourished by the prayers of holy saints. How easy to forget that the church is not ours but God's, and that God leads and sustains the church by secret means of which no tongue can tell. You never forgot this, Holy Father, that is why you had the freedom to take this step, to lay aside your office and creep unburdened into the mystery of prayer.

I don't know what your legacy will be, Holy Father, and none of us can guess where the church's future lies. Except to say that the church's life today is hidden in the same place it was always hidden, in Christ who is in God.

Today, Holy Father, when the ash of last year's burned palm branches is smeared across my face, I will pray for you. I will pray for your successor – brave fellow, whoever he is! – and for all those poor courageous souls who hand their lives over into the service of God's church, living by trust when they cannot see the way, living by hope when their hearts are heavy, living by love because love is at the bottom of it all – for God is love.

Yours respectfully in Christ, &c.

Nate Kerr on the radio

While Nate Kerr was in Sydney a few weeks ago, he was interviewed for an ABC radio programme on the future of the church. It's an excellent, theologically substantive interview – you can listen to it here.

When I played the interview at home, my little two-year-old boy said gleefully, "It's Nate!" And then he added, with a frown of frustration: "But I want to touch Nate." I'm sure you'll feel the same way.

A theology of scholarship

I've started working on a paper titled "Discerning Christ in Contemporary Thought: The Christological Basis of Christian Scholarship", for a conference in Melbourne next month. I'm trying to develop a christological understanding of the nature of Christian scholarship, followed by a brief discussion of contemporary philosophical readings of St Paul as an example of this approach to scholarship. Here's an excerpt from my first draft of the paper:

Contact with contemporary thought has nothing to do with generic sentiments about difference, tolerance and open-mindedness. It is rather – to put it as starkly as possible – a matter of obedience. The risen Christ is not internal to the church’s life; he is not ‘in’ the church, but is always on his way into the world. He judges, addresses and leads the church from without. For this reason, the church cannot rest content with its own traditions and internal resources, as though the church already possessed Christ. Rather the church must remain alert and attentive, looking into the world for traces of Christ’s life and activity.

It is here that scholarship proves indispensable to the church’s mission. The vocation of Christian scholarship is to cultivate a continuing alertness to the voice of Christ, knowing full well that Christ – because he is risen – is ‘not a dead friend but a living stranger’ (Rowan Williams). He speaks to the church in ‘strange ways’ from strange places; scholars have no privileged access to Christ’s voice, but their job is to help the church to discern this voice so that the whole church can respond in obedient faith. The church will at times discover ‘its own nature and mission’ only as it listens carefully to the voice of Christ in contemporary thought or in wider social discourses and practices.

Christian scholars must labour with the complexities of contemporary thought, not in pursuit of mere novelty or a colourless open-mindedness, but out of a disciplined attentiveness to Christ’s own voice. It is the risen Christ who draws the church out of itself and into a history of promise; because Christ is not ‘in’ the church, there is no way of anticipating in advance where he will be found, or the places from which he will speak. As Karl Barth famously remarked: "God may speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog…. God may speak to us through a pagan or an atheist, and thus give us to understand that the boundary between the church and the secular world can take at any time a different course from that which we think we discern."

Just as the church’s vocation is to remain poised and attentive to Christ, so the vocation of Christian scholarship is to cultivate the asceticism of discernment, to steel the church for future opportunities – strange and unpredictable – to respond faithfully to the voice of Christ.[...]

This account might go some way towards dissolving the old debate about whether theology is primarily oriented towards the church or the university. Christian scholarship will naturally be practised within these (and other) diverse institutional environments. Fundamentally though, the vocation of Christian scholarship is neither ecclesial nor academic, but christological. Its most basic orientation is neither to the academy nor the church, but to the risen Christ.

Indigenous Australians and the church's confession

OK, here's a final excerpt from my paper on the Uniting Church's proposed preamble. This is from the paper's conclusion, where I try to illustrate what it might look like to make a confession about what it means to be the church in Australia.

I am deeply sympathetic with the theological intentions of the new preamble to the Constitution, and I am convinced that the church in Australia needs to find creative ways to rethink and redefine its own identity in relation to the country’s indigenous peoples, those traditional custodians of the very land on which the church gathers. Chris Budden's question is in my view fundamental for the Australian church: ‘Can the church be the church in Australia if it does not properly honour the place of the Indigenous people in its life?’ And more than that, are we not denying the gospel itself—the message of Christ’s universal lordship—if we give the impression ‘that God was brought to Australia by the churches’?

[...] Nevertheless, the whole voice of the document would need to be different, spoken from a different standpoint, if the preamble was to become an exercise of Christian confession and Christian discernment.

The following points then are intended as an illustration of how the language of a preamble could form part of the church’s confession. Here, the church speaks not from a position of privileged insight into God’s ways, but from a vulnerable position of pilgrimage within history. The church does not occupy an elevated ‘view from nowhere’, so that it could survey the whole arc of human history at a single glance. Standing within history, the church sees another world to which it humbly bears witness. Listening to the voices of indigenous believers, the church hears Christ’s own voice calling, and so is compelled to confess:

• Guided by Jesus Christ, the church’s Second Peoples listen attentively to the voices of our indigenous brothers and sisters, knowing that we cannot be the church without them, and that we cannot have Christ except together with them;

• we rejoice in their witness to the Creator God who was already at work in this land, through Christ and the Spirit, long before the arrival of the colonisers;

• in this witness, the church hears and recognises the word of Christ—a word that judges us for our cultural imperialism, our spiritual paternalism, and our hardness of heart; and that graciously liberates us to become together the people of God;

• together with the First Peoples of this land, our brothers and sisters in Christ, we confess that there is one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Together we entrust ourselves to this God, pledging to journey together as Christ’s disciples: to speak the truth in love, to bear one another’s burdens, and to seek and find Christ in one another along the way.

Jesus was already in this land: discerning Christ in indigenous cultures

Here's another excerpt from my paper on the Uniting Church's proposed preamble. This is from a section entitled “‘Jesus was already in this land’: The Logic of Discernment”. I'll post another brief excerpt tomorrow, from the paper's final section where I offer an alternative formulation to the new preamble.

I have been arguing that a confessing church should look for signs of Christ’s work in the world, while at the same time resisting the temptation to assimilate these signs of God’s free activity into a universally applicable doctrinal schema. [...]

Where indigenous Christians in Australia look back on their own cultural traditions and perceive clear lines of continuity—‘Jesus was already walking around in this land’, as one indigenous Christian put it to me in conversation—that is a proper exercise of Christian discernment. It is not part of a larger theory about God’s self-revealing activity among all indigenous peoples, nor is it a doctrinal insight into the structural relationship between the God of the gospel and indigenous law, custom and ceremony.

The theological discussions of the Rainbow Spirit Elders reflect this logic of discernment. The elders affirm that the Creator Spirit has been present from beginning within Aboriginal culture. This is a treasure that lay hidden, but is now disclosed to the eyes of faith; only now, in light of the gospel, can such treasures be uncovered. The elders thus look attentively to their own cultural heritage in an attempt to discern continuities of Christ’s work in this land: ‘As we search our culture in the light of the Gospel …, we must ascertain those things which are alien, as well as those things which are true to the Gospel.’ It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that ‘gives us our Christian Aboriginal theological bearings’, uncovering the hidden treasures of the past and revealing surprising lines of continuity between indigenous traditions and Christ’s work in the gospel. It is because indigenous Christians have already come to know God in Christ that they are led subsequently to perceive that God was already ‘leading us to know that Christ is ... an Aboriginal person camping among us, giving life to our people and our stories’.

As Vincent Donovan has argued in reference to African traditions, it is in this way that the gospel creates its own surprising ‘recapitulation’ of all the riches of a culture. This recapitulation in turn generates a thoroughgoing reassessment of a people’s cultural heritage. For some Aboriginal elders, the Rainbow Spirit is now perceived ‘as a life-giving God of love, and not as an awesome power that frightens us’. This is not a neutral historical assessment of the relation between the Rainbow Spirit and the God of Jesus Christ. It is not something that could be read off the face of indigenous traditions. It is an act of Christian discernment in which the riches of the culture are ‘sublated’—both preserved and transfigured—into the world of the gospel.

If we understand this logic of discernment, we can avoid perpetrating the subtle theological imperialism which colonises indigenous traditions, swallowing them up without remainder into a romanticised anonymous Christianity. The proposed text of the preamble contains more than a hint of such imperialism: God’s Spirit was already at work revealing God through law, custom and ceremony; ‘the same love and grace’ that was fully revealed in Christ was also sustaining the first peoples and giving them knowledge of God. Such statements fail to distinguish between a quasi-historical account of indigenous heritage, and the recapitulation of that heritage as seen through the eyes of faith in the moment of Christian discernment.

God and indigenous Australians: recognising or confessing?

I've been writing a paper on the Uniting Church's proposed new preamble to its constitution. I'm actually very sympathetic to the intentions of this preamble (and I'll post a more sympathetic excerpt tomorrow, on the importance of discerning God's work among indigenous peoples "outside the church"). But my main criticism is that the document speaks from a non-confessional standpoint – here's an excerpt:

This is not so much a confession of the church’s faith in Christ as an authoritative pronouncement about the specific mode of God’s self-revelation. God was at work among (presumably all) indigenous peoples ‘through law, custom and ceremony’.

The crucial question to put to this document is that of the church’s fundamental posture or position. Where does the church stand? Where is the church positioned in order to formulate such a fixed definition of the divine action in human history? Can a confessing church make such authoritative pronouncements? Or does the church first need to relinquish its confessing stance, its posture of vulnerable openness before Jesus Christ, in order to define God’s activity in this way? Can such doctrinal pronouncements really remain open to the free and surprising work of Christ in the world? Or has the eschatological untidiness of the Basis of Union been relinquished in favour of a highly determinate decision about the precise nature of divine action in history? In short, can a confessing church adopt a position of privileged insight into the mysteries of the divine will – a theological bird’s-eye view?

The language of the preamble betrays the fact that this document is indeed an authoritative, objective pronouncement rather than a confession of the church. It is spoken not from the position of obedient confession, but from a superior viewpoint. God’s activity in the world is not so much confessed as grasped and assimilated within an all-encompassing doctrinal schema.

Thus the preamble’s ten statements are said to be ‘recognised’ by the church. What does it mean for the church to ‘recognise’ the fact that God’s self-revelation in Australia has taken place through law, custom and ceremony? Surely it indicates that the church occupies a privileged position. Specific information about God’s activity – information not available in scripture – is somehow at the church’s disposal. Although the church knows God only in Christ, it now also commands knowledge of God’s action extra Christum. Instead of confessing, instead of remaining open and expectant to God’s surprising work in the world, the church is said to ‘recognise’ these facts. Not content to bear witness, the church speaks (in all ten paragraphs) with the voice of an anonymous historian, informing the world about the precise location of God – and of the Uniting Church! – in Australia’s history. Instead of standing ‘between the times’ and confessing from a position of weakness and vulnerability, the church has mastered history. It occupies a theological ‘view from nowhere’, an objective position from which even God is viewed as though from high above.

Doing theology on Aboriginal land

Here in Australia, the Uniting Church is proposing a new preamble to its Constitution. The preamble attempts to define the church's identity in relation to Australia's indigenous peoples; but the document raises all sorts of theological questions. Here's an excerpt:

When the churches that formed the Uniting Church arrived in Australia as part of the process of colonisation they entered a land that had been created and sustained by the Triune God they knew in Jesus Christ.... The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in the land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.

The next issue of Uniting Church Studies is exploring the theology of this document. I'm writing an article entitled “‘In his own strange way’: Confessing Jesus Christ in the Preamble”, focusing on the question, What does it mean for the church to confess? I'll be presenting a draft later this week at a systematic theology seminar in Sydney, and I'll post some excerpts here as well. In the mean time, here's a list of some of the things I've been reading for this paper:

• The Uniting Church's Basis of Union – a remarkable confessional statement on the nature of the church
  
• Rob Bos and Geoff Thompson, ed., Theology for Pilgrims: Selected Theological Documents of the Uniting Church in Australia (Uniting Church Press 2008) – includes the theological texts that underpin the Basis of Union
  
• Pope John Paul II's address to Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Alice Springs, 1986
• The Rainbow Spirit Elders, Rainbow Spirit Theology: Toward an Australian Aboriginal Theology (ATF 2008) – probably Australia's most sustained and insightful experiment in indigenous Christian theology
• Chris Budden, Following Jesus in Invaded Space: Doing Theology on Aboriginal Land (Pickwick 2009) – a problematic but important study of the colonial context of Australian theology; the book's central claim is that "the primary defining context for those who live in Australia is invasion" (p. 17)
  
• Rowan Williams' essay on Trinity and pluralism in On Christian Theology (Blackwell 2000)
• Rowan Williams' address earlier this month on "The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World"
• Frank Macchia and Paul S. Chung, ed., Theology between East and West: A Radical Heritage (Cascade 2002) – a predominantly Barthian collection, including several essays relating to other (mainly Asian) religious traditions

The lowest common denomination: a lament

by Scott Stephens (Scott is a pastor and theological educator in the Uniting Church in Australia, one of the country’s largest mainline denominations. In this piece, Scott discusses the Church’s founding confessional document, the Basis of Union. A shorter version of this piece was published in the denominational magazine, Journey.)

Over thirty years ago, the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) embarked on what could have been a remarkable journey, but it deviated from its original course with devastating consequences. It is now a shell of its former self, like so much Liberal Protestantism throughout the West, having gone whoring after the strange gods of impotent theology, liturgical gimmickry, inert bureaucracy and social respectability.

The past decade in particular has seen the UCA relinquish any prophetic vocation it might once have had — along with a considerable portion of its ecclesial and evangelistic vitality — and instead assume the inoffensive role of the religious division of a non-government provider of community and health services.

And so, in an extraordinary apostasy from its original calling, the UCA has decided to represent the ‘middle way’, the path of least resistance, a facile alternative to fundamentalism, evangelicalism and pentecostalism. In short, it has become the lowest common denomination. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine that, if God sees fit to grant it another thirty years, all that will be left of the Uniting Church itself is the logo on hospitals and Blue Care letterhead — and that for purely historical reasons.

But perhaps most troubling is that the fledgling church was warned against this very apostasy by Davis McCaughey, inaugural President of the Uniting Church. In his incendiary address to the 1979 Assembly of the UCA, McCaughey expressed his fear that the Church would be hijacked by bureaucrats and pedants, and that its clergy would be reduced to careerists and panderers:

“We no longer seem to expect our ministers to spend hours (literally hours) every week, thinking, reading, praying: so that when the hungry sheep look up they may be fed.... And I am not wholly convinced that our Constitution, Regulations and Procedures are sufficiently and rigorously controlled by [our eschatological hope]. I am not persuaded that they are not in danger ... of becoming ends in themselves.”

He warned just as passionately against the tendency he perceived to adopt a form of incestuous Church patriotism, which would obscure and ultimately destroy the Church’s vocation to carry on the mission of Christ:

“At all events the cry for a sense of identity in the Uniting Church cannot be answered by the offer of a new kind of Church patriotism. In an important sense, we in the Uniting Church in Australia have no identity, no distinctive marks — other than belonging with the people of God brought into being by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on their way to the consummation of all things in him.… We have embarked on a course in which we ask men and women to forget who they are, and chiefly to remember whose they are.”

Throughout his address, McCaughey pleaded for a return to the Basis of Union as a source of correction and renewal of the already deteriorating Church — a renewal, he emphasized, that must begin with the congregations themselves. Hence, for McCaughey, any suggestion that the Basis is merely an aspirational document or some transitional text that brought the uniting churches together (a ‘vanishing mediator’, as Max Weber would have put it) must be rejected out of hand.

The Basis is a liturgical document, shaped by the logic of Christian worship (“the rhythm of the gospel,” as McCaughey called it ); as such, it lends itself fully as much to communal prayer as it does to confession. Just notice the prominence and deliberate usage of prayer-language and doxology in the Basis.

In the opening paragraph, the uniting churches “pray that this act [of union] may be to the glory of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Having thus placed their past divisions under the sign of the strong name of the Trinity, they engage in a kind of corporate repentance for the disobedience of times past by pledging their “sole loyalty to Christ the living Head of the Church” and vowing “to remain open to constant reform under his Word.”

Following the proclamation of the gospel (paragraphs 2-8) and affirmation of the Faith of the Church (paragraph 9), the Basis “prays that she may be ready when occasion demands to confess her Lord in fresh words and deeds” (paragraph 11).

In paragraph 15, after describing the ordering of the church so shaped by the gospel, those already existing agencies within the uniting churches are invited to place themselves under the gracious judgment of God’s Word, and thereby “consider afresh their common commitment to the Church’s mission and demonstration of her unity.” The paragraph concludes with the prayer “that God will enable them to order their lives for these purposes.”

Finally, paragraph 18 gathers everything together into a concluding supplication: “She prays God that, through the gift of the Spirit, he will constantly correct that which is erroneous in her life, will bring her into deeper unity with other Churches, and will use her worship, witness and service to his eternal glory through Jesus Christ the Lord. Amen.”

This liturgical approach highlights those defining prayers which have been given to the Church, but which have been scorned and neglected to its peril: the prayer for continual repentance (that God “will constantly correct that which is erroneous in her life”) and for strident witness (that the Church would be ready “to confess her Lord in fresh words and deeds”).

At present, having traded its sacred birthright for a slop of quasi-pagan sentimentality and soft-left political correctness, the Uniting Church in Australia seems to have made up its mind to follow the rest of the Liberal Protestant herd in its head-long rush into oblivion. And yet, as I write this, I can’t help up think that there is another explanation for the UCA’s almost assured disappearance. What if God is killing the Uniting Church? Here is what Stanley Hauerwas told the congregation of Broadway United Methodist Church in South Bend, Indiana, in 1993:

“The plain truth is that Broadway survives as part of a larger church that is dying. Mainstream Protestantism in America is dying. Actually I prefer to put the matter in more positive terms: God is killing Protestantism and perhaps Christianity in America and we deserve it.”

Is God is killing the Uniting Church? Perhaps. Either way, its only alternatives are to continue indulging in the gratuitous “Church patriotism” that has blinded it to its plight thus far, and go on erecting stop-gap measures to stave off the inevitable; or it can embrace the fact that the Basis of Union has already placed the Church under the judgment of the Word of God with joyful repentance.

For is this not the hope that the prophets extended to those ‘pilgrim people’ in exile: repent, and return, for who knows what God may yet do?

St. Nowhere

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

In the 1980s there was an influential American medical drama / black comedy set in a Boston hospital, which served patients turned away from more prestigious institutions. The show had a cutting social edge that gestured towards what a proper health service might look like. It was called St. Elsewhere. This sermon is not about a medical hospital. It is, however, a picture of a hospital of sorts, the kind for sin-sick souls called the church, and this particular church has a similar name – St. Nowhere – and it too gestures towards what a proper church might look like.

Where is St. Nowhere? Well, … nowhere – or at least in Nowhere Land, a land known for its hills and sheep, its poetry and song, its cockles and cawl, a land often overlooked by its larger, more prestigious neighbour. So St. Nowhere was a good and fitting name for this church. It wasn’t called The Here-It-Is Church, or The Where-It’s-At Church, just, modestly, St. Nowhere. It’s a funny name, no doubt, but that’s because the folk at St. Nowhere would rather their church had no name at all: “a church with no name,” they said, “rather like God, who refused to give his name to Moses, because labels are libels.”

What kind of church was St. Nowhere? It was, er, just a church. “The church is here so that there can be Christians,” the people said, “Christians aren’t here so that there can be a church. We don’t market ourselves. We are not vendors of spiritual goods, nor providers of a religious service, nor masseurs of the so-called ‘inner’ life. We are here to witness, by the way we live the whole of our lives, to God’s peaceable realm among the nations, to the good news of God drawing near in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. We are here as the door of the kingdom, as a sign of welcome, inviting people into faith and friendship with Jesus himself. We are not into ‘success’, or even ‘growth’ as such, we are simply into calling people together to be apprentices of the Master, who teaches us how to be human. The main coursework – Humanity 101-102 – is the Sermon on the Mount.”

What denomination was St. Nowhere? I’ll give you a hint. Just off the sanctuary there was a chapel, the “Chapel of Saints” it was called, because around its circular interior there were portraits, icons if you like, of the “saints”, that is to say disciples down the ages who took the practice of faith seriously. From the New Testament church there were Stephen and Silas, Bartimaeus and Cornelius, as well as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Priscilla. Irenaeus, Basil, and Augustine were there from the early continental, eastern, and African churches. There too were the hermit Anthony and the monastic Benedict. From the Middle Ages, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas, and also Julian of Norwich and Hildegarde of Bingen. From the Reformation, Luther and Calvin and the Anabaptist Menno Simons. From the eighteenth century, John Wesley was there, and so too were Howell Harries and Daniel Rowlands. And from the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, and Mother Teresa. There were many others too. And in the last frame – odd, I admit, and make of it what you will – there was a mirror, where one would pause for “reflection” (if you catch my drift).

Another interesting feature of St. Nowhere was this: it had no walls. How they managed in the winter I don’t know, but no one was ever heard to complain of the cold. But fancy that – a church without walls! All and sundry could – and did – just walk in off the street, and then – sometimes sooner, sometimes later – walk out onto the streets again. “When the worship ends,” they said, “the service begins.” To save souls? “That’s one way of putting it,” they said, “but we prefer the expression of Jesus: to bring life, life in all its fullness.” The mad and the bad, the disabled and the deviant, the grey and the gay – they were particularly drawn to St. Nowhere. “A church with strict boundaries,” they said, “is like a house with a burglar alarm: anyone unscrupulous enough will probably find a way to break in, but people who have mislaid the key are defeated” (Helen Oppenheimer). Of course life was not easy at St. Nowhere, indeed it was often quite conflicted. But the folk there believed that the church is “the place where the people you least want to live with live there too” (Henri Nouwen).

Many Christians in the area shook their heads at St. Nowhere. They said that it wasn’t “Bible-based”, that it was too “political”, that it didn’t “meet people’s felt needs”, that it lacked an “identity”. These reproaches made the people at St. Nowhere smile. They replied, “In the Bible God is up to his ears in politics, and the church engages the state as one public engaging another public, not as some private sector facing the domain of government. Nor is ‘self-fulfilment’ a biblical theme, rather the human issue is always ‘self-denial’. For churches, like people, those that try keeping their identity will lose it, while those who risk losing their identity, for the sake of the gospel, will find it. We may not know who we are, but we know that we are God’s. We may not know what we will be, but we know that we will be like Jesus.”

As for St. Nowhere’s worship… It began at 10:30, though not really, because, the people at St. Nowhere would tell you, worship never begins, worship has always already begun – we enter the unceasing praise of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven – and so, in a very real sense, we are always late for worship. But in the 10:30 slot, what was worship at St. Nowhere like? It was formal and informal, serious and amusing, celebratory and contemplative, comforting and challenging. Someone always presided, but she acted neither as manager, nor a cheerleader, but rather as a catalyst in an ongoing experiment. “Worship is a ‘laboratory of the Spirit’ (R. S. Thomas),” the people said – and they added, “Explosions are to be expected.”

If you asked them why they worship God, they would answer, “What a silly question! We worship God because God is to be worshipped.” If asked what they get out of worship, they would answer, “That’s not the point: the question is ‘What do you bring to worship?’ Worship is not a utility but an offering, an economy of grace that interrupts the cycles of production and consumption by which the world lives. Which is why the collection is not just fund-raising but a critique of wealth and a judgement on greed. Not ‘materialism’, mind,” they hastened to add. “We are, in fact, a very materialistic church, and we like to eat and drink: we regularly consume the body of Christ, but while others drink to forget, we drink to remember.” Finally, if asked if God is pleased with their worship, they would say, “That all depends – depends on whether, with the prophet Amos, it leads to justice rolling down like Niagara Falls, and peace spilling over like the Mississippi in flood.”

And St. Nowhere’s theology? “You can’t pin us down,” the people would insist. “Or rather you can pin us down in the one place our Lord himself got pinned down: on the cross. It is only at this place of greatest danger that we are, paradoxically, theologically safe, where we are both broken and renewed. We have our convictions, but we walk by faith, not by sight. When we have doubts, God forgive us; when we don’t have doubts – God forgive us even more! After all, a deity who is bound to confirm our own opinions would be the god of a ventriloquist, but the God of the cross is free. God has a human face, but God is also cosmic mystery. And God is a playful God – and his favourite game is hide-and-seek – now here, now there, leaving traces, dropping clues, casting shadows, then hurrying on just as we catch up and calling back, ‘Follow me!’” But fancy that – the people at St. Nowhere actually enjoyed thinking, thinking about God together, and no issue was beyond discussion, ecclesiastical silence and denial yet another frontier that was, yes, “crossed”.

What more can I say about St. Nowhere and its people? Touched by grace, they lived with gratitude. Richly blessed, they rejoiced with gusto. Put under pressure, they acted with patience. Inundated with lies, they spoke the truth. Confronted with hatred, they responded with love. Tempted by violence and vengeance, they practiced peace and exercised mercy. They laughed a lot – “It’s our ‘way of crossing ourselves’” (Karl-Josef Kushel); they cried a lot too – “It’s our way of sharing people’s pain and powerlessness.” They would weep a lot over a tragedy like Haiti.

So there is a thumbnail sketch of St. Nowhere. Utopian – or what! If I have a prayer for this Week of Prayer, it is simply that St. Nowhere might be St. Somewhere, that the church-in-waiting that all churches are may be conformed to the church that we are destined, by grace, to become.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in New York

Over the past few days I had a delightful time reading Volume 10 of the new edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's works, Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931 (Fortress 2008), 764 pp. – a remarkable collection of letters, sermons, essays and lectures from his time as a vicar in Spain, a postdoctoral student in Berlin, and a visiting fellow at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

After working as a pastor in Barcelona (where he even acquired what may have been an original Picasso!), Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to complete his postdoctoral dissertation, Act and Being, which presented a kind of Barthian-Kantian approach to theological anthropology, grounded in the empirical reality of the church. The ensuing American period is especially fascinating: 1930-31 was a hell of a time to be in New York City!

The young Bonhoeffer was taking courses with Reinhold Niebuhr and John Baillie, going to hear sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick, studying pragmatism and American literature (he "read almost the entire philosophical works of William James, which really captivated me, then Dewey, Perry, Russell, and finally also J. B. Watson and the behaviorist literature"), worshipping in black churches, and corresponding with former teachers like Harnack and Seeberg.

His impressions of liberal American church life are generally quite scathing: "In New York, they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ.... So what stands in place of the Christian message? An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that – who knows how? – claims the right to call itself 'Christian'. And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation. Anyone who has seen the weekly program of one of the large New York churches, with their daily, indeed almost hourly events, teas, lectures, concerts, charity events, opportunities for sports, games, bowling, dancing for every age group, anyone who has become acquainted with the embarrassing nervousness with which the pastor lobbies for membership – that person can well assess the character of such a church.... In order to balance out the feeling of inner emptiness that arises now and then (and partly also to refill the church's treasury), some congregations will if possible engage an evangelist for a 'revival' once a year" (pp. 313-14).

In this ecclesial ethos, "the church is really no longer the place where the congregation hears and preaches God's word, but rather the place where one acquires secondary significance as a social entity for this or that purpose" (p. 317).

Bonhoeffer was similarly dismayed by the students at Union Theological Seminary. The students "are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.... In contrast to our own [German] liberalism, which in its better representatives doubtless was a genuinely vigorous phenomenon, here all that has been frightfully sentimentalised, and with an almost naive know-it-all attitude" (pp. 265-66). Again, referring to Union Seminary: "A seminary in which numerous students openly laugh during a public lecture because they find it amusing when a passage on sin and forgiveness from Luther's de servo arbitrio is cited has obviously, despite its many advantages, forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for" (pp. 309-10).

Bonhoeffer also encountered the fundamentalist theology of J. Gresham Machen and his followers, especially in the Southern Baptist Church. This kind of theology, he remarked, revealed "a different side of the American character", namely, "an unrelenting harshness in holding on to one's possessions, possessions either of this or of the other world. I acquired this possession with trust in God, God made my success happen, so whoever infringes upon this possession is infringing upon God" (p. 317).

It was of course the black churches that won his warmest praise and admiration: "In contrast to the often lecturelike character of the 'white' sermon, the 'black Christ' is preached with captivating passion and vividness. Anyone who has heard and understood the Negro spirituals knows about [this] strange mixture of reserved melancholy and eruptive joy" (p. 315). Bonhoeffer would later introduce some of the Negro spirituals to the worship services at the illegal seminary in Finkenwalde (possibly one of the first places in Europe to introduce such songs).

The volume also contains the remarkable student papers that Bonhoeffer wrote for classes and seminars in New York – papers on William James, ethics, determinism, dogmatics. His paper on "the Christian idea of God" draws a sharp distinction between "history" and "decision": "Within the world of ideas there is no such thing as decision because I always bear already within myself the possibilities of understanding these ideas. They fit into my system but they do not challenge my whole existence" (p. 458).

A similar Kantian point is elaborated in his paper (written for Baillie) on Barth's use of neo-Kantian philosophy. Here, he argues that "the deepest antinomy" is "the antinomy between pure act and reflection"; God does not enter the realm of reflection, but "tears man out of this reflection into an actus directus toward God" (p. 474).

In sum, this is a wonderful, invigorating book, documenting an exciting and formative period of Bonhoeffer's life. We find him learning new languages, encountering new traditions and ideas, adapting to radically different ways of life – and returning again and again, with remarkable consistency, to the deep wellspring of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. As Bonhoeffer remarks in one of his letters to Seeberg: "there can be no doubt that only through active contact with other ways of thought is one led to the formation and comprehension of that which is unique to oneself" (p. 119). In the same way, even in some of his most negative assessments of American church life, one catches a glimpse of Bonhoeffer's own profound and developing ecclesiological and ethical commitments.

Discipleship and christology

Today I drove to Canberra to give a talk at the School of Discipleship, an annual theological conference/retreat for Australian university students. While I was there, I heard a gripping and compelling lecture on Jonah and Second Isaiah by one of the plenary speakers, the Quaker scholar Daniel Smith-Christopher. My own talk was a more or less impromptu reflection on practices of discipleship as the context within which christology emerges in the New Testament: the Christian life is itself the basic christological text. (I was helped here by a recent reading of Terrence Tilley’s excellent new book, The Disciples’ Jesus: Christology As Reconciling Practice.)

I find theology to be especially enjoyable in a setting like this: an impromptu discussion leaves room for movement and discovery; it’s more playful and impressionistic than a formal lecture, more inventive and exploratory than a scholarly paper.

Anyhow, it did my heart good to see such an impressive gathering of theologians and university students. The event seems to offer a vibrant and theologically robust alternative to both the colourless conservatism and limp liberalism that one so often encounters in Australian church life. Best of all, each year the School of Discipleship creates its own themed range of beers: this year they had the Barmen Collection, including the Hans Asmussen Golden and the Karl Barth Porter (pictured).

And speaking of Barmen and discipleship, I’ve decided to set one of Bonhoeffer’s books for my undergraduate course on ecclesiology this semester. (After the lecture each week, a selection from the book will be the focus of a one-hour discussion, so that we’ve pretty much explored the whole book by the end of semester.) But I still haven’t decided between Discipleship (a richer, deeper work) and Life Together (shorter, more practical and accessible). Anyone able to persuade me one way or another?

What to read? Literature and ecclesiology

Nate Kerr will be well known to most of you, both for his regular interactions here at F&T and for his stunning recent book, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Cascade 2009). Well, Nate is currently in the throes of writing his next book, a series of essays on the nature and task of the church. And he has asked, learned readers, for your assistance.

Nate likes to read novels and literature while he’s engaged in intensive writing. So he’s wondering what y’all (as they say in Nashville) think are the best works of literature relating to “ecclesiology” – novels, short stories, poems, or whatever. In Nate’s own words: “I wonder if you would be kind enough to do a post entreating readers to help me in writing my next book, by suggesting the best [fictional/literary] works on the church for me to read as I’m currently writing.”

So what do you think? Come and have your say – that way, if Nate’s next book turns out to be an ecclesiological masterpiece, you’ll be able to claim full credit…

Ecclesiology: what to read?

I was extremely grateful for all your help with my recent request for readings on pneumatology. So I thought I’d ask for your help, learned friends, once again: what are the best things to read in a course on ecclesiology? It’s a first-year subject, so I’m aiming for a fairly broad range of topics (e.g. mission, liturgy, ecclesial ethics). And I’m aiming for a selection of texts from various times and traditions (I’m thinking of using Augustine’s City of God as the point of departure). Again, I’ll be selecting about 20 or 30 short readings – so any suggestions would be very welcome!

Incidentally, I was talking with a Catholic friend yesterday about course revisions. He told me that he was once appointed to teach a particular theology course – but after reading through the course outline and textbook, he decided: “I’m going to go to hell if I teach this.” I found this remark to be very instructive and very edifying.

Living gently in a violent world: Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier on the witness of L'Arche

Speaking of L’Arche, IVP recently launched a new series, Resources for Reconciliation. The first volume discusses justice and reconciliation. The second volume in the series is a dialogue between Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness (IVP 2008). Their dialogue explores the prophetic witness of L’Arche to the church and to society. “In a world determined to cure those who cannot be cured, Christians should refuse to do anything other than be with those Jesus taught us to be loved by – that is, those we ‘help’ by simply being present” (p. 56).

Vanier writes: “Today in France they are saying that within a few years there will be no more children with Down syndrome because they will all have been aborted…. The heart of L’Arche is to say to people, ‘I am glad you exist.’ And the proof that we are glad that they exist is that we stay with them for a long time. We are together, we can have fun together. ‘I am glad you exist’ is translated into physical presence” (p. 69).

And Hauerwas writes: “Long story short: we don’t get to make our lives up. We get to receive our lives as gifts. The story that says we should have no story except the story we chose … is a lie. To be human is to learn that we don’t get to make up our lives because we’re creatures…. Christian discipleship is about learning to receive our lives as gifts without regret” (p. 93).

And in a concluding reflection, John Swinton observes: “L’Arche reminds us that time is not simply a commodity to be wasted, spent, saved or used but is rather a gift given…. The people living in L’Arche have recognized that time is a gift…. L’Arche lays down a marker in the fabric of time, a marker reminding us that in Jesus, time has been redeemed for the practices of peace” (pp. 104-5).

'Can't you see my Church is in ruins?' The witness of L'Arche and the Barnabas Community

A post by Scott Stephens

The most venerated of all the saints of the holy Catholic Church is Francis from the Italian village of Assisi. The sheer force of his Christ-like devotion has inspired millions of Christians to ‘go and do likewise’. Equally, his transparent humility has rattled Church structures at their very foundations. Francis, more than any other single figure in the history of the Church, is a saint for all times, and a challenge for each generation.

But there is conundrum that goes to the heart of Francis’ identity. At what point did Francesco Bernadone, the lecherous and lazy son of a wealthy cloth merchant, turn his back on that life and become ‘Saint Francis’? What was his ‘Damascus Road’? Was it when the young Francis, still despairing after his dreams of chivalry evaporated, knelt before a crucifix amid the ruins of the Church of St. Damian, and a voice said to him, ‘Francesco, do you not see that my house is in ruins? Go and rebuild it for me!’ Francis obviously took these words seriously—he went and sold most of his father’s stock of fine fabrics and used the proceeds to rebuild the aging shrine.

Or was it when Francis abandoned the familiarity of human society and made his home in a leper commune? According to Francis himself, this event was decisive. He reflects in his Testament, written shortly before his death: ‘for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me even to look upon the leprous. But the Lord himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards, I delayed a little and then left the world.’

We tend to forget the place lepers occupied in the early Middle Ages. In the 12th century, those with ‘leprosy’—a designation that covered a range of deformities and communicable diseases—were restricted to decrepit communes outside city walls. By decree of the Church, they had to cover themselves entirely to prevent contact with others; they had to use clappers to warn whenever people came near; they were banned from speaking to children; they were even consigned to their own churches, their own sacraments, their own cemeteries.

Doesn’t this cast the command that Francis heard in St. Damian’s in a whole new light? The Church which had fallen into ruins was not the dilapidated, crumbling shrine, as Francis believed, but rather the very Church that had forsaken its Lord by segregating and abandoning the leprous. Thus Francis’ act of rebuilding the Church wasn’t his repair of St. Damian’s, but rather his establishment of a community with the lepers themselves.

So who today are ‘the lepers’, into whose company the Church should follow its Lord? As Michel Foucault chronicled in History of Madness, the sad story of the Church’s treatment of the leprous took a truly horrific turn in the 15th century. The Church liquidated the leper communes, and used those now vacant hovels to house the mentally disabled—out of sight and away from human society.

There are communities today who, like Francis, have set about rebuilding the Church. Such communities are nothing less than sacraments, testimonies of grace, which bear witness to a Church that similarly finds itself in ruins. The Barnabas Community in Durack, Queensland, was founded in 1995 as an act of obedience to Jesus, and in solidarity with L’Arche, the network of communal homes established by Jean Vanier in 1964.

Barnabas House is a suburban home in which residents with a disability are enveloped by a loving community of people who live and eat with them, who share life with them, who celebrate the beauty of God in them. As Vanier has often said, it is the presence of such communities in which the able and those with a disability live side-by-side, eating together and celebrating the holiness of one another, that comprises our best picture of what the Kingdom of God looks like.

The infectious joy and warmth of the Barnabas Community is not just in stark contrast to the sterility and institutionalized ennui to which people with a mental disability are subjected in Australian society. This community is also a living protest against the suppressed resentment that our society feels concerning the very existence of the mentally disabled. Stanley Hauerwas is surely correct when he claims that the mentally disabled embody the ethical limitation of our liberal humanism. ‘Our humanism entails we care for them once they are among us, once we are stuck with them; but the same humanism cannot help but think that, all things considered, it would be better if they did not exist.’

In our time, not only is the Barnabas Community an unforgettable protest against the institutionalized death and decrepitude of federally funded disability services; it is a powerful witness to a Church that has abandoned its Lord by placing its confidence in its buildings and in the idols of investment and in the immoral practice of usury—all the while outsourcing its care of the mentally disabled.

And so our Lord addresses us with the same summons that haunted St. Francis: ‘Do you not see that my house is in ruins? Go and rebuild it for me!’

If you would like to find out more about the Barnabas Community, or how you and your church can support its communal life, you can contact Glenda Hall or Scott Stephens.

The church is our mother: a homily for mothering Sunday

A guest-post by Andrew Brower Latz

Text: Jn 19.25-27

In John’s highly symbolic gospel, the short scene we’ve just heard is layered with meanings. Notice first the presence of Mary. She has not been a major character in the story so far but she does appear twice near the beginning, in chapter 2. The first time is when she hints that Jesus should do something about the wine at the wedding. In this instance Jesus says to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” It is as if Jesus resists any attempt to control his work as Messiah, even when it comes in a context that normally carries obligation, such as the mother-son relationship. But then Jesus actually does something about his mother’s request, and so he begins his public ministry, reveals his glory, and evokes belief in his disciples.

After this story in the first 11 verses of chapter 2, we have the strange verse 12, in which Jesus goes to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and disciples, and they abide there for a few days. The verse seems strange because it appears to be there merely to connect two powerful stories in the narrative – the changing of water into wine and the cleansing of the Temple – but it’s not a very good connection. The key, though, is the theme of abiding. In John’s gospel, abiding with Jesus is what qualifies you to be a disciple; just being with Jesus over time is all you have to do. You might make serious mistakes but if you just stay with him, live with him through and beyond any mistakes or wrongdoing, you still get to be his disciple. So in verse 12, John announces a key theme of his gospel and includes Jesus’ mother as one of his disciples.

As we skip forward to chapter 19, which is Mary’s next appearance in the gospel, John lets us know that she is a model disciple, because she is still with Jesus through his terrible death. Now there is a difference from the wedding. Then it was not Jesus’ “hour”, and there was little room for Mary’s involvement, but now Jesus’ hour has come and he moves Mary into a central place. Mary not only has the honoured role of giving birth to the Messiah through her obedience to God, not only kick-starting Jesus’ work as the Messiah, but now he makes her the mother of the beloved disciple. As we might expect, there is more going on here than a new relationship for just two characters – but to explain it we need a quick detour into Revelation.

Why does Jesus call his mother “woman”? It seems a bit odd at the level of plot and character. It’s because the word “woman” is doing its main work at the level of symbolism. If we accept that John wrote Revelation, and that there is a common symbolism between the two books, we can read in Revelation 12 that the “woman” is a symbol of the mother of the Messiah as well as the mother of other “children” who “keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus”. In Revelation, the “woman” is clearly a symbol of Mary, with the implication that Mary, by birthing the Messiah, is the mother of the church too. So Mary stands for the church and is a model disciple; she and the church are central figures in God’s work to bring redemption to the earth. By calling Mary “woman”, Jesus is acknowledging her centrality in God’s saving work. As the Fathers of the Church liked to say, if Jesus is the second Adam, Mary is the second Eve; if God is our Father, the Church is our mother.

Jesus’ hour – the time in which he glorifies God by his death – is in a very profound way something he endures alone, but it is also transformed by the faithful abiding of Mary and the beloved disciple, by their discipleship. Jesus makes possible our salvation, but he does so with the participation of Mary and the Church. That is why, in the verse just after the end of our reading, when he has brought Mary and the beloved disciple into this central role, Jesus can then say that all his work is finished. What results from all this is a new family based on faithfulness to Jesus rather than genes or marriage, a family based on the grace of gift rather than the given of biology, symbolised by the new relationship of Mary and the beloved disciple. The newness of gift is a characteristic of God’s way with the world, of God’s “economy” (to use some theological jargon). God’s way is sometimes surprising, sometime miraculous, as Jesus’ own birth and the birth of Samuel remind us. Both of these men, born in unusual circumstances, would lead God’s people to greater faithfulness, would be part of God’s answer to some serious problems in Israel’s life; and in both cases, Hannah and Mary are vital to the work of God.

We are reminded by the stories of Samuel’s birth and Jesus’ death that to be “given to the LORD” can involve suffering as well as joy. It also involves, as Paul reminds us, the need to develop a number of virtues that are characteristic of the family of people who follow Christ: forgiveness, compassion, love, humility, kindness, meekness, patience, peace. In short, to work together to make a community of peace, love and forgiveness, to take up our responsibility for our community.

As we saw, Jesus made the Church central in God’s saving economy and Paul’s letter explains how that is so. The Church embodies in a community the way that Jesus lived in the world, and by doing so it opens up access to God. Just as Jesus made God available to all, to sinners and to the righteous, so does (or should) the Church. Just as Jesus forgave people on behalf of God, and so brought real, material salvation from sin, so does (or should) the Church. Paul tells us we should forgive as we have been forgiven by Christ. At the end of John’s Gospel, the risen Christ appears to his disciples and tells them that if they forgive the sins of any they are forgiven by God. In other words, we are given authority to forgive sins on God’s behalf as Jesus did; or to put it another way (stealing the words of Rowan Williams), it is our task to take responsibility for God.

This is why the Church is our mother. Jesus won our salvation for us not by persuading an otherwise disinclined God that he really should forgive us, but by putting us in contact with the non-competitive God who is already loving and forgiving us, who already accepts us no matter what our moral state – the God who doesn’t need to be protected from our wrongdoing. But Jesus is, in a very real way, gone, absent, ascended into heaven. But he, and the presence of God he opened up, is mediated to us by the church. Without the Church we do not have access to the redemption that Jesus began. That is why the great Catholic scholar Henri de Lubac liked to say that the Church is the sacrament.

That all sounds very good, but it’s not true; well, it is, but it’s not the whole truth. The other side of the coin is that God is also to be found outside the church, and that we as the church often fail to embody God’s presence to one another and to the rest of the world. It is our task during Lent to discern if and how we have done so, and to turn away from that.

But we are not left alone. Remember from the liturgy that before we eat and drink, we call on the Holy Spirit to make Christ present with us through the bread and wine. And remember that before Jesus gave his disciples the authority to forgive sins and to take responsibility for God, he “breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’.”

Church and eucharist

“The point of saying that the Eucharist makes the church is that the body of Christ is not a perduring institution which moves linearly through time, but must be constantly received anew in the Eucharistic action…. Because the church lives from the future, it is a thing that is not. The church inhabits a space and time which is never guaranteed by coercion or institutional weight, but must be constantly asked for, as gift of the Holy Spirit. The Eucharist is the imagination of the church, but it is not our imagination in the sense that Christians build the church. The Eucharist is God’s imagination of the church; we participate in that imagination insofar as we imagined by God, incorporated into the body of Christ through grace….

“Eschatology is always in tension with history. This is the church’s story. It is not reactive in the sense that the church is defined and located by the state, or by other narratives external to its own. Opposition to the powers and principalities of the world is written into the very narrative of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which is commemorated in the Eucharist.”

—William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Blackwell, 1998), pp. 269-73. And on a related note, check out this failed gospel tract.