Review of Donald Norwood, Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II

Donald W. Norwood, Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II (Eerdmans, 2015)

This is a timely book. Indeed as Donald Norward had been hatching it long before Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013, it is a prophetic book. Unitatis Redintegratio, the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism, states: “In its pilgrimage on earth Christ summons the church to continual reformation, of which it is always in need, in so far as it is an institution of human beings here on earth.” Yet after nearly fifty years this promising declaration seemed, to many an ecumenical Simeon, to have become a forlorn hope. Then, suddenly, habemus papam whose agenda actually includes – “reforming Rome.” (Well, at least the Roman Curia!)

At 232 pages of text Reforming Rome is not a long book, but its 25-page bibliography is suggestive of its compact comprehensiveness. It is hugely instructive and illuminating about Vatican II, not only in terms of input and output, but also as an event. That is, it not only provides a description and analysis of the Council’s work, it also gives a vivid sense of the Council as a kind of huge ecclesial gala for gift-exchange, as much about relationships as ideas. How delightfully Norwood weaves into his narrative snippets of the personal interactions of members and guests, before and after the Council as well as during it. Thus Vatican II becomes a model for the way to do our ecumenism today: unity-through-friendship. Which doesn’t mean that we must always be nice to each other, let alone agree with each other, but it does mean that we will always have each other’s backs.

Enter the ever polemical Karl Barth. From the first volume of his Church Dogmatics when he (in?)famously declared that the analogia entis, the ontological foundation for doing natural theology, is “the invention of Antichrist,” Barth was always up for a theological punch-up with Rome. Until the (school) bell, that is, when many of his Catholic interlocutors became beloved companions (particularly the two Hanses, Urs von Balthasar and Küng). Indeed for all his tenacious cross-examination of the Council’s documents – he lamented the failure of Nostra Aetate “to set forth an explicit confession of guilt” for the Church’s historic anti-Semitism; dubbed Dignitatis Humanae a “monstrosity”; and remained underwhelmed by even the moderated Mariology of Lumen Gentium – Barth was a dedicated evangelist for Vatican II, convinced in his dotage that there were now no “irreconcilable differences” to block the eschatological not-yet of unity from becoming ever more realised.

Other areas of contemporary as well as historical interest covered by Norwood – “The past is not dead; it is not even past,” wrote William Faulkner – include the excellent section devoted to the question of women (Barth told Rome that it still has work to do; women told Barth that he still has work to do too!); an update on why the doctrine of justification by faith should no longer be considered a church-dividing issue (though in my view the 1999 Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on Justification by Faith might be even more of an ecumenical game-changer had insights from the “New Perspectives on Paul” on the ecclesiological import of the doctrine informed the biblical studies done by its working party); and the parts that touch on polity, hierarchy, and the purple elephant that won’t leave the building, i.e., episcopacy (Barth, I sense, would support the ecumenical consensus about the threefold ministry, as long as there are laocratic checks and balances to the exercise of episcopal authority).

Reforming Rome is a must-read for anyone interested in Vatican II, in Karl Barth, and for all engaged in current ecumenical discussions, not least for the contagiousness of the author’s unquenchable enthusiasm for visible unity. In the book’s acknowledgements, Donald Norwood writes that “without the support of my lovely wife Margaret, I could not write another word.” To which uxorial praise I would only add: Margaret, stay healthy!

First published in the Society for Ecumenical Studies Journal

A sketch of Origen's theology: 20 principles

Well my postgraduate seminar on Origen's theology ended today. We read and discussed Exhortation to Martyrdom, On Prayer, First Principles book IV, the whole of Balthasar's anthology (Origen: Spirit and Fire), and the first half of the Commentary on John. At the end of the course I had a go at sketching out 20 principles of Origen's theology. These are not meant to be comprehensive but only an attempt to gather up some of the themes that we explored throughout the semester.

1.    Christian theology is a vision of spiritual pilgrimage: the pilgrimage through time of a holy community, and the pilgrimage of the soul towards eternity.

2.    These are not two pilgrimages, but one.

3.    This pilgrimage is motivated by desire. Human beings have an innate yearning for the beauty of God. Through that yearning we reach out beyond ourselves, beyond all time and space, towards our hidden source and destiny in eternal Love.

4.    All human beings are on a continuum of love and lovelessness. We are always either inching towards God in love or drifting away as our love grows cold. Nobody can love so much as to have already arrived; nobody can love so little as to be finally and irreparably lost.

5.    (At this point Origen’s theology could be integrated with a more pessimistic Augustinian theology of disordered desire: our innate yearning for God is both our best feature and the source of all our woe. We cannot move towards God through an effort of will, since will itself is subject to the vagaries of fallen desire. It is a mark of grace and healing whenever the will finds itself bending, however slightly and uncertainly, towards the Love of God.)

6.    There is no dualistic split within the human community, whether at the beginning (through the creation or predestination of two classes of people), or at the end (through the salvation of some and the damnation of others). All derive from a common unity, and all will finally share in the common fire and delight of Love.

7.    Evil is not part of creation. It is not a positive quality within creatures. Nor is it an eternal spiritual entity that opposes God. It is a privation, a shadow, a distortion of goodness, in which the creature bends itself away from Love and attaches itself to lesser goods.

8.    Fate, determinism, and anything that annihilates personal freedom must be rejected. Without a doctrine of personal freedom, the privation theory of evil would be impossible. The goodness of creatures (or of the creator, or both) would thus be compromised and the Christian metaphysical system would collapse.

9.    Body and soul are not absolutely divided but exist on a spiritual continuum. The soul can become “fleshly” as its love grows cold and it drifts away from God. The body can become “spiritual” as attachment to God increases. The goal of our pilgrimage is the divinisation of the soul and the spiritualisation of the body. This is not to deny that the future life will be embodied, but only to deny that our present experience is a reliable guide to what it means to be fully embodied and to enjoy wholeness of life. In the coming age we will be more physical, not less, than we are now.

10.    All creatures have an innate kinship with God, since God’s eternal Wisdom and Word, the Logos, contains within itself an outline of all creatures. The Logos adapts and accommodates himself to every creature, patiently and lovingly revealing to each one the truth of its source and destiny in the Love of God.

11.    Salvation is primarily a matter of revelation. By an infinitely patient divine pedagogy, the Son of God leads each soul through a lifelong (and longer-than-life) curriculum in Love.

12.    (Again, there is room for integration with Augustinianism at this point: why would our education in Love take so long unless our capacity for love were radically disordered and in need of the most extensive healing, correction, and practical training?)

13.    The Christian community is just as much a school, a community of learning, as it is a cultic or sacramental community.

14.    There is a distinction, but not a division, between beginners and the spiritually advanced. Both are on the same continuum of spiritual progress. The beginners are exhorted to become the advanced, and the advanced are warned against regressing. All who are, today, making progress in growth towards Love may be described as the spiritually “perfect,” since they are walking in the way of perfection.

15.    The main spiritual business of the Christian life is the reading and study of scripture. Scriptural exegesis is the instrument by which the Logos heals the soul, unmasks its fantasies, and trains it in the practice of the love of God.

16.    In this life, a deeper grasp of the meaning of scripture is not only the cause of spiritual progress, but also its main reward.

17.    The spiritual meaning of any passage of scripture lies in its relationship to the overall message of scripture: the good news of Jesus, God’s Son and our Saviour, the Wisdom and Word of God made flesh. It is only in relation to Jesus that all scripture finds its unity, coherence, and truthfulness.

18.    Platonism: the history of Israel is a typological revelation of eternal things.

19.    Christianised Platonism: the fact that history can reveal eternal things shows the value and dignity of history. The fact that material things can reveal spiritual things shows the value and dignity of matter.

20.    The divinisation of the self does not entail a destruction of the ego through a merging of the self with the divine nature. Rather it involves the continual exercise of personal freedom. It is the free and loving union of the creature with the creator, without abolishing the distinction between them. Because it is a union between the finite and the infinite, there can be no end point to divinisation. It is not perfection so much as perfecting. It is unceasing progress in growth and transformation. There is no limit to how much of God the soul can contain. Every advance in Love is an advance towards the infinite. The pilgrim soul travels deeper into Love, for endless ages, without ever reaching a final destination or without ever being able to say: “Enough.”

Duck soup doodlings

Dark matter makes up 80% of the universe, but where is it? American scientists now think they’ve found the answer: 11250 Waples Mill Road, Fairfax, Virginia.

“Hope is the thing with feathers” (Emily Dickinson). Despair is the asshole behind the duck blind with a 20-gauge double barrel shotgun.

There is nothing like a presidential election – this one in particular – to rescue from desuetude the imprecations of the Psalms.

So Neil Young, Elton John, and Adele are pissed off that their music has been hijacked by the Trump campaign. Imagine, then, the velocity of the spinning corpses of Charles Albert Tindley, Louise Shropshire, and Pete Seeger when the GOP starts singing “We Shall Overcome” at the Republican National Convention in July.

General Relativity for Reformed theologians: Calvin tells Barth how to move, Barth tells Calvin how to curve.

Einstein, of course, was right: God doesn’t play dice. He plays cards: Solitaire with Unitarians, Go Fish with Evangelicals, I Doubt It with Liberals, Old Maid with Roman Catholics, Spite and Malice with Hyper-Calvinists, Follow the Queen with Anglicans, Hearts with Universalists, Bridge with Ecumenists, Gin with lapsed Methodists, and Stud Poker with Promise Keepers.

The doctrine of predestination is no more a doctrine than the ontological argument is an argument. They are brilliant theological gags. If you get them, you smile, blissfully; if you don’t, you turn to tortured – or torturing – explanations.

Marilynne Robinson is such a thoroughgoing Barthian humanist – her childlike delight in creation, her suspicion of a logos asarkos, and her affirmation of a costly universalism – that one might call her writings a poetics of Bruce McCormack.

Time moves slowly in Hell, but the 14th-century sign at the entrance – “Abandon All Hope, You Who Enter Here” – has finally been replaced. The new sign, above an arrow composed of flashing coloured lights, reads “Follow the Money”.

Many evangelicals who declare that “America is a Christian nation” remind me of George Lindbeck’s crusader who cries “Christus est Dominus!” The only difference is their weapon of choice.

Where there’s a will, there’s a prey.

Writing for the Church Times (15 April), Andrew Brown observes that xenophobia and nationalism in Sweden have “taken a religious expression in paganism, not Christianity.” So just like the US and the UK then.

I hear that Liberty University is offering a new module in Russian literature. It features Chekov’s Uncle Samuíl, Tolstoy’s War and Piece, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Kalashnikov, and Turgenev’s Fathers, Sons, and Womenfolk.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Ever since 9/11, the US and the UK have repeatedly backed tinpot allies in the Middle East who they claim can form a government yet who are hated by the local population, while the Saudis, “our friends” (i.e., our business partners in arms and oil), remain the (wild) elephant in the region. Sisters and brothers, can I get a Yemen?

I think of the pulpit as home plate and therefore suggest that preachers should dress like umpires. If they preach the gospel, eventually they’ll need protection.

Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, one or two will piss off and start their own church” (Matthew 18:20, Original Autograph).

Jesus said, “Where two or three thousand gather together in my name, please accept my apologies for absence” (Matthew 18:20, Another Original Autograph).

I walk into a coffee shop. At the counter is a kid wearing a name badge. Zack asks, “Can I help you?” “A cappuccino, please.” “Awesome,” Zack replies. “With an extra shot.” “Awesome,” Zack adds. “And a chocolate top.” “Awesome,” Zack repeats. A hat trick of semantic vacuity. You know the worship ditty, “Our God is an awesome God”? Take it from the top, all you Zacks out there.

“No problem” is another word-wreck of a reply you often get from a waiter/ waitress/ waitperson/ waitbeing. As if in taking an order of burgers and fries he/she might suddenly find him/herself addressing an incident on Apollo 13.

The good news is that the truth will set you free. The bad news is that the truth will set you free.

What is salvation? The past catching up with you – and the Future snatching you from its grasp.

Jesus went to the territory near the town of Caesarea Philippi, where he asked his disciples, “Who so people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “David Berkowitz, of course.” “‘Man’!” Jesus shouted. “‘Son of Man’, you idiots!” (Matthew 16:13-14, Original Autograph).

“Just be yourself” goes the psychomantra. Really? And which “self” would that be? And even assuming you manage to locate and isolate one, why would you want to be him/her/whomever? Are you work-shy or just unimaginative? Have you never prayed?

The bewitchment of language begins with the hocus of “I” and the pocus of “me”.

I’m 67. Do I miss the old days? Not really. I’ve taken the good stuff with me. (And contrary to boomers who were no less senescent then than they are now, there was a heap of good stuff.) What I miss is the young days.

God’s Selfie: a sermon on Rublev’s icon of the Trinity

Icons. Nowadays “icons” are mega-celebrities of one sort or another: pop idols, movie stars, royalty: Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana – they are modern icons par excellence. In his brilliant reflection on contemporary culture, Lost Icons, Rowan Williams situates this “iconography” “in the complex realm of public presentation … [and] the marketing of personalities.” It is a travesty, he observes, of the “traditional icon of the Eastern [Orthodox] Christian world,” which “is never meant to be a reproduction of the world you see around you.” Rather, “the point of the icon is to give us a window into an alien frame of reference that is at the same time the structure that will make definitive sense of the world we inhabit.” And many Western Christians have also discovered that, prayerfully contemplated, these exquisite, evocative paintings of holy figures may awaken our spiritual senses and grace us with glimpses of God.

Here is one of the most famous of all icons. It was painted in the late 14th century by Andrei Rublev, a monk at the monastery of Zagorsk, near Moscow. It’s called “The Hospitality of Abraham”, narratively based as it is on the story in Genesis 18 about the three mysterious figures entertained by Abraham and Sarah who announce to them the birth of Isaac. But what do you suppose this icon is really all about? Here is a hint: its more common name is – “The Trinity.” But I reckon you could call it “God’s Selfie.”

But let’s take a step back and first ask how on earth – how on earth – can you picture the Trinity? Well, you can have a go at the Son – at least he becomes incarnate in the man Jesus. But what about the Father and the Holy Spirit? Perhaps an old man with a beard for the Father, and a dove for the Spirit? That’s been the tradition in Western art, the best of it quite sublime. But a dove lacks the “personhood” of the Holy Spirit, and while such imagery might tell us something about God’s work in creation and redemption – God as God reveals Godself to us (what theologians call the “economic” Trinity) – it tells us virtually nothing about God as God is in Godself (what theologian call the “imminent” or “eternal” Trinity).

Any other possibilities? Well, there is the venerable tradition of biblical interpretation known as typology, which re-reads the story of Israel in the light of the story of Jesus, hearing echoes of the former in the latter. It sees connections and explores correspondences between persons, events, and themes in the Old Testament and persons, events, and themes in the New Testament: sees the Old Testament prefiguring the New Testament and the New Testament reconfiguring the Old Testament. For example: in Romans 5 Paul writes of Adam as “a figure of the one who is to come”, namely Christ, the Second Adam; and in 1 Peter 3 the author sees the floodwaters in Noah’s day as anticipating Christian baptism in his own day.

Now: back to this strange tale in Genesis 18 about Abraham, Sarah, and the three mysterious visitors. Rublev is by no means the first Christian to have taken this story as a foreshadowing of the Trinity. It is certainly a strange story, full of suggestive ambiguity. Are there really three visitors, or only one? The text jumps between both possibilities. And who are these travellers? Are they human, angelic, divine? Certainly they bring the promise of the miraculous birth of a child. You can see how the story resonates with trinitarian themes. Perhaps, then, you can understand why it became the basis of attempts by Eastern Orthodox Christians to create a compelling visual aid to help us understand and worship God as Trinity.

So Rublev focuses our attention on these three persons imaged as angels – you can tell they are angels because they’ve got wings! (Abraham and Sarah don’t appear in the picture, although the tree rising over the left wing of the central angel reminds us of the oak of Mamre, where they entertained their visitors.) The angels are linked together by their common blue garments – blue, the colour of the sky, the heavens, and therefore symbolic of eternity. (The building above the angel on the left probably represents the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem.) And the whole scene is suffused with regal gold.

The angel on the right, introducing us to the Godhead, represents the Holy Spirit. His blue robe is covered by a green cloak – green, the colour of life, because the Holy Spirit (in the words of the Nicene Creed) is “the Lord, the Giver of Life”, including the earthly life of the Son through the Virgin Birth. The angel in the middle represents the Son. His blue cloak overlays a dark red robe – red, the colour of earth, the colour of blood, symbolising, respectively, the incarnation and the crucifixion. And the angel on the left represents the Father, his blue robe covered with a translucent cloak, symbolising the eternal divine glory.

What else? Observe that a circle can be traced around the angels, emphasising their divine unity and perfection. Note that each angel has a halo, symbolising their co-equality, and that each has a staff, representing their co-authority. And observe that they are sitting around a table, not round but rectangular, representing the world of time and space. But more, the table is clearly a Communion table – there is a chalice on it. And the angel of the Son is pointing to it with two fingers on his right hand, reflecting his two natures, human and divine, and yet, at the same time – such is Rublev’s artistry – also pointing beyond the table to the Spirit on his left, the Spirit sent by the Father through the Son. And in the chalice, though it is almost impossible to make out, there is a lamb: Behold the Lamb of God! – slain on the cross, but also slain before the foundations of the world.

Now look closely again at the three figures. They are certainly three distinct figures. But look at the way they are sitting, angled towards each other. And look at the way they are gazing – the Spirit on the right at the Father across the table, the Son in the middle at the Father to his right, the Father on the left at the Spirit across the Table – or is it at the Son to his left? The ambiguity is no doubt intended. But look too at the family resemblance – they could almost be triplets – no old man, young man, and a bird! – which suggests not only their equality but also their indivisibility. They seem to be giving themselves to each other, absorbed in each other, living in and for each other – one-in-three, three-in-one, the perfect expression of love. And the Son is central – why? Because he is the key that opens the door to the reality of God as Trinity, as it was by reflecting on his person and work that the early church came to understand and express that God is Trinity.

It has been observed that “this image of God does not always square with our understanding of personal relationships, whether with God or with each other. Often we do not link together the person on the one hand and the relationship on the other, because in modern western societies when we say ‘personal’ we usually mean ‘individual’ without any necessary sense of mutuality, interdependency, and inseparability. The Holy Trinity is not personal in our western sense at all. The personal nature of God, God’s very being, is relatedness, is Father, Son, and Spirit in the unity of communion. And so, in turn, for us to have a personal relationship with God is not a matter of two separate individuals, creature and creator, becoming ‘pals’. It is much deeper than that. It is a matter of being caught up into the very life of God, which is always personal but never individualistic. The Trinity reminds us that Christianity is not about having a one-to-one relationship with an isolated God, nor is it about having a private relationship with God to the exclusion of others. No, from start to finish Christianity is about participating in the trinitarian life of God, and it’s about participating in the community of the church, its human reflection” (from James White, The Forgotten Trinity, much adapted).

One last look at Rublev’s astonishing icon. I’ve left something out. I’ve missed what’s missing. Can you see how the scene, reversing the perspective we’re used to in Western art, seems to beckon towards us? Observe the empty space at the front of the table: the perfect circle is also an open circle. Could it be that Rublev is inviting us, the observers, to stop being observers and step into the frame, to approach the table, to share in the holy communion of Father, Son, and Spirit? For is that not the meaning and purpose of worship, of being church, of being Christian – to be drawn into, to indwell, the very life and being of God, as we lift up our hearts to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit? Yes, it is so. It is certainly so.

Finally this. Observe – none of the figures is speaking, they sit in silent, prayerful contemplation. So let us, like them, be quiet for a moment – in silent, prayerful contemplation …

Review of Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels

A guest-review by Jeff Aernie

Richard Hays’ 1989 publication Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul was—without exaggeration—a watershed moment in New Testament studies. Hays’ careful theological and exegetical analysis of the way the Scriptures of Israel reverberated through the corridors of the Pauline epistles sparked a hermeneutical conversation across the theological landscape. Teachers and students were required to read Paul again—to hear afresh the way the apostle called forth Israel’s narrative within early Christianity.

Nearly thirty years later, Hays has provided another masterful foray into the hermeneutical question of how the New Testament authors read Scripture: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Baylor University Press, 2016). In this volume Hays turns his attention away from Paul and toward the authors of the fourfold Gospel. His primary aim, in his own words, is to offer “an account of the narrative representation of Israel, Jesus, and the church in the canonical Gospels, with particular attention to the ways in which the four Evangelists reread Israel’s Scripture” (7). Hays describes the key for this interpretive task as reading backwards or figurally—by which he means that the Evangelists’ engagement with the text is primarily retrospective. Again, to quote Hays: “the Evangelists were convinced that the events of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection were in fact revelatory: they held the key to understanding all that had gone before” (358). The re-interpretation or re-narration of Israel’s story for the life of the church is necessarily mediated through Jesus.

Hays pursues this interpretive agenda by providing a separate chapter on each of the Gospels which provides extensive exegetical analysis on each of the key aspects of his wider thesis: how each evokes Israel’s Scripture to re-narrate Israel’s story, to portray Jesus’ identity and significance, and to describe the church’s role in the world. I am tempted to fill the rest of this brief post with quotations from these chapters, since Hays’ analysis of each of the Gospels reflects the type of exegetical care that should be a standard for the discipline. But I will confine myself to one extended quotation. In his conclusion to the chapter on the Gospel of Luke, Hays highlights a point which, I think, should influence our reading of each of the Gospels:

Luke’s Christology of divine identity requires a fundamental rethinking of our notion of “God.” Jesus is the Kyrios; the Kyrios is Jesus. God is therefore not a concept subject to general philosophical elucidation but a “person,” an agent known through the complex unfolding of his narrative identity—and only so. And precisely for that reason, the “low/high” christological categories collapse completely. God discloses himself to us precisely in lowliness (280).

The key emphasis here is Hays’ rejection of the artificial construction that certain Gospel authors develop distinctly “low” or “high” Christologies. He argues convincingly that the Gospel authors are re-narrating Israel’s Scripture in their own context precisely to engage with the mystery of how Jesus can simultaneously embody both Yahweh and humanity. For Hays, it is in recognizing the Evangelists’ figural reading of Israel’s Scripture that we are enabled to understand the complexity and depth of their narratives. “For the Evangelists, Israel’s Scripture told the true story of the world. Scripture was not merely a repository of ancient writings …; rather, it traced out a coherent story line that stretched from creation, through the election of Israel, to the telos of God’s redemption of the world” (360).

Importantly, Hays’ delineation of this Scriptural storyline is a reminder that the interpretive task never ends with narration. The Evangelists’ reading of Scripture does not culminate in mere exegetical assent. Rather, their portrayal of Jesus is also a call for the church to participate in that narrative. It is a commission to Christian discipleship. This, it seems to me, is what we have in Hays’ volume: an act of Christian discipleship that seeks “to carry forward the story of Jesus with new freedom and faithfulness” (366).

Holy Spirit, breath of life: a hymn for Pentecost

(Tune: Gwalchmai) - from Paddling by the Shore: Hymns of Kim Fabricius

Holy Spirit, breath of life,
     breathe upon me;
comforter in times of strife,
     make my fears flee.
You alone can save my soul
     from life’s wild sea;
you alone can fill the hole
     deep within me.

Come, then, Spirit from above,
     fall upon me;
bond of Son and Father’s love,
     set my soul free.
To the cell in which I’m bound
     you’re the sole key;
through the years you’ve sought and found
     self-enclosed me.

God of warmth who goes between
     others and me;
God of light who can’t be seen,
     help us to see:
only as we live in you
     can we then be;
living then for others too,
     I become me.