This is from a more or less revisionist author but even a blind pig gets an acorn every once in a while.
“We very much need what Freud called the procrastinating function of thought, an achievement of consciousness. “
Ann Ulanov
Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, first stanza
Introduction
Yeats’ verses, written at the end of WW I, portray the poet’s sense of a disintegrating world, a world whose center no longer holds. This poem appropriately begins this essay because the whole poem not only reports the disintegration of a cultural center but also looks forward to a new social organization. Yeats ended his poem with these words:
;but know I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats’ message of one epoch disintegrating and another taking form speaks to the Postmodern perception that a major cultural shift is underway. In this essay we address the them of disintegration of identity directly. For the Postmodern writer we engage in this essay holds that no abiding natures, subjects or essences exist—either for persons or for societies. In this writer’s view, death and nihilism make Premodern and Modern assumptions of a human nature, a human subject or human essence irrelevant and false.
In its place, Postmodern writers propose conceptions of a plural or fragmented self, or a self defined in an unending process of interpretations of things and people. This essay engages one important Postmodern view of human identity from a Christian perspective. The Postmodern perspective is that of contemporary Italian writer and teacher, Gianni Vattimo, recognized by some as Italy’s most important contemporary philosopher.
The premise for this essay is that that western Christians, and eventually all Christians worldwide, will and should engage Postmodernity’s views of human being or human nature. Postmodernism is a label for contemporary thinking in many fields —in the arts, in philosophy, in social and cultural analysis—that break with, or at least challenge and stand in tension with, Premodern and Modern ideas.
Christians should engage Postmodern thinkers, because their themes of are of central concern to Christian concerns. In general, Postmodern writers are decisively secular and critical of, if not outright hostile, to Christianity and the Christian tradition. But Postmodern writers address the meaning of history, human nature, the characteristics of modern society and changing patterns of human relationships. Christian theology, at all levels, wants to engage these themes. Therefore, Christian thinking today should engage Postmodern writers.
This essay is the Fourth in a series on Christianity and Postmodernism. This fourth essay has a certain logical continuity with the two parts of the preceding Essay Three. In Essay Three, Part A, we explored Postmodern sociologist/philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s thesis that images (mainly electronically generated, digital images) are redefining contemporary people’s relationships to “things in the world.” Increasingly oriented to images of things, rather than to their originals, contemporary people are less immediately related to “the world of objects.” Baudrillard emphasizes that the difference between images and originals is disappearing in contemporary awareness; that we relate to images as we did to “real objects,” and that relations with “real objects” is becoming less important than our relations to copies and images of these objects.1
What is the Esse of Episcopacy?
By
Leander S. Harding
There is a standard form of the argument about the significance of episcopacy for the order of the church. Is episcopacy of the esse, bene esse, or plene esse of the church? That is, is episcopacy of the essence of the order of the church, so that without bishops in apostolic succession there is no church, or is episcopacy essential for the good order of the church but not absolutely necessary, or is episcopacy for the fullness of the order of the church, meaning that a church can be a valid church without bishops but that to be the fullness of the apostolic church demands the fullness of the apostolic order. The center of Anglican witness has been in the last two positions with a minority Anglo-Catholic report holding out for the first position. The great book about all of this is Michael Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Ramsey’s argument fits perhaps best into the category of plene esse. Churches without bishops are certainly valid members of the body of Christ, but there is something about the fullness of the apostolic witness and unity that is lacking and toward which the churches should press with full vigor for the sake of a fuller and more adequate witness to the crucified and risen Lord. Ramsey’s book convinced the Reformed pastor and missionary in India, Lesslie Newbigin, of the significance of the catholic order of the church for the sake of Gospel mission, and made it possible for Newbigin to embrace a call to be one of the first bishops of the Church of South India. Ramsey’s book remains a classic and breaks open stale arguments by arguing for the evangelical and missionary significance of the catholic order of the church. It is a travesty that the book is out of print. If you ever see a used copy, buy it.
The moment of foment and crisis that we are enduring in the Anglican world brings to the fore the significance of the office of bishop. All the old questions about how or whether bishops are of the esse of the church are bound to arise anew. But at the same time let us pause to ask what is of the esse of this order? What is essential to the office and ministry of the bishop? Ramsey argued that the bishop had an evangelical significance, for the bishop like the apostles from which the office derived was a living witness to the dependence of the whole body upon its one head and therefore upon the actual historical events of the crucifixion and resurrection of the Lord. The bishop was to hand on the tradition of the Apostles which was a witness to the life, death and resurrection of the Lord.
A full answer to the question of what is of the esse of the episcopacy would take many pages. But a quick answer can be given here. Two things at least, that are completely interrelated and interdependent, are essential to the office of the bishop. One is the stewardship of apostolic doctrine. John Spong has written somewhere of the bishop as an “apostolic pioneer.” Such a phrase is an oxymoron. Paul is quintessentially apostolic and laying out the essence of the apostolic order which the episcopacy must maintain if it is indeed to be an apostolic succession, when he says to the Corinthians, “ I pass on to you that which I received, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread. . .” To be a successor to the apostles is to hand on a witness which is primarily a report of things which God has done. To be a bishop is to be a sacred historian and the teller of a true witness and a true story. My word for this is to say that the bishop must be a faithful steward of apostolic doctrine. It is this witness which creates the one body utterly dependent on its one head and on the actual death and resurrection of the Lord.
Related to the stewardship of apostolic doctrine is the ministry of guarding the unity of the church. This is a unity in faith which is a response to the one witness, now mediated by the succession of teachers, to the one saviour. The bishop is a visible link with the college of apostolic witnesses. The original twelve have a common witness, and witness to each other and the church and the waiting world that their witness is authentic and true just because it is a common witness. The apostles and their successors in the apostolic ministry of bishops are to build up the one church in unity for the sake of its mission of bringing all the nations to the worship of the one true and living God within the body of Christ. It is of the essence of the episcopal office that the bishop cultivates and guards the unity of the church. This places a heavy responsibility on those in episcopal office to keep faith with the apostolic teachers that have preceded them and to be servants of ecumenical solidarity. Thus the bishops are to be living sacraments of the unity of the body of Christ.
The exclusive diocesan jurisdiction of the bishop is meaningful as the servant of the essential roles of steward of apostolic doctrine and instrument of unity. When the role of jurisdiction becomes separated from that which jurisdiction is to serve — namely, fidelity in apostolic teaching and fidelity to historical and contemporary unity in faith and witness — then something which is secondary is being elevated over something that is primary. This represents a kind of institutionalism against which the Reformers protested and from which the Roman Catholic church has been steadily distancing itself since Vatican II. Complaints by bishops of The Episcopal Church that the Primates and bishops of the Global South are acting in ways that are “curial” and “papal” are ironic in the extreme for it is precisely those bishops in North America’s TEC who have come to define their office institutionally and parochially (in terms of “our special polity” and “our unique American and democratic character”), and thus have lost their grip on the essentials of doctrinal stewardship and ecumenical solidarity, who are most liable to the Reformation charge of prelacy.
The meeting of the common cause bishops is a very encouraging sign, for it hints at the recovery of the essential ecumenical charism of the bishop’s office, that the bishop is a servant of the unity of the church and ought to be seeking it with all vigor and all humility. Let us pray that this vision extends beyond the very necessary work of uniting to the greatest degree possible orthodox Anglicans and extends to renewing solidarity in apostolic faith and practice with other Christian bodies wherever possible. Let us pray all around both in TEC and the continuing churches for a recovery and renewal by those who hold the office of bishop of a deep conviction of and consecration to that which is essential, the stewardship of apostolic doctrine and vigorous effort on behalf of the building of the one body of Christ in love and for the sake of Christ’s mission which is by virtue of his passion to return all things to the Father in the power of the Spirit.
This is the text of my article in the May 6, 2007 edition of the Living Church
Mission and the Unity of the Church
By
The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.
“Mission” is often proposed as a source of unity for our divided church. I put “mission” in quotation marks because it is a word that is used as though everyone knows what it means. In the vernacular of The Episcopal Church, mission, with very rare exceptions, means something the church does in the community to address problems of human need. A soup kitchen is mission. A homeless shelter is mission. Advocacy on behalf of migrant workers is mission. The millennium development goals adopted by the United Nations are put forward as banners of mission around which the church can unite both in the United States and across the Anglican Communion.
There is a tremendous amount of theology that is being finessed here and the use of the term “mission” by leaders in The Episcopal Church in this way is equivocal at best and its use with traditional Christians who are likely to understand mission in terms of bringing people to saving faith in Jesus Christ appears at times willfully misleading. It is quite correct that the church is called to serve the world and especially the needs of the poor, the sick and the oppressed. A church which never backed up its proclamation with practical acts of love would be a contradiction and a countersign to the Gospel. (“Gospel” is another word that is used with great finesse and equivocation as though everyone knows what it means.) But our good works, no matter how noble and how helpful, can never be the center of unity in the church and they can never be the center of unity for a badly divided human race. New divisions are bound to come about the right objectives and the right means, about who distributes the goods and who is entitled to receive them, about which missions are the most important ones, about who is shouldering their fair share in the work of mission and who is riding on the shoulders of others. For the entirety of my twentyfive-year ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church “mission” in this sense of good works, and with the subtext of “deeds not creeds,” has been the central organizing principle and it has ushered in a period of deep division and a diminishing ability to come together to address a needy world. This center has not held, and will not hold.
The human race is rent with division. As we enter the 21st century the divisions of race and clan and tribe are more murderous and threatening than ever before. These divisions are entirely capable of defeating any effort at development that the concerted effort of the nations of the world might make not to mention the efforts of a mainline American church which has been in a decades-long decline.
The human race is divided because of sin, an enthrallment to evil, a fundamental break with God made from the human side which cannot be repaired from the human side. Unity and reconciliation are not something that can be produced by any human program of development. Unity and reconciliation are created by the costly and sacrificial work of God. The break between God and the human race must be solved from God’s side and this is what he has done in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Proclaiming and witnessing the new life with God and the new life with each other that is possible in Jesus Christ is the mission of the church. Of course it includes acts of love but it is not a program of development. It is an invitation to come to the one place of possible unity for both the church and the world, the level ground at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ where faith grasps the costly mercy of God and the new light of the resurrection begins to dawn and true charity begins to flow. To try to speak of “mission” and “reconciliation” apart from God’s saving deed in the cross of Christ is to sever the consequences from the cause and to vainly fabricate a source of unity apart from the one God has actually provided. So much popular preaching and teaching in the Episcopal Church now emphasizes the ministry of Galilee at the expense of the teaching of the cross and the resurrection. You cannot have the inclusive table fellowship of Galilee without embracing the sacrifice on Calvary. A church that cannot confidently call its own, no less the unbelieving world, to rally to the One who is the way, the truth and the life, is doomed to fruitless divisions and has no hope, no new reality to offer a world that is perishing from division.
To proclaim Jesus Christ as “the way, the truth and the life,” does not mean that there is no truth or beauty in the world’s great religions and philosophies. It does not mean that we can confidently assign all believers in other creeds to certain damnation, though we can offer them no assurance of salvation apart from the One to whom we have been elected witnesses. It does mean that the church proclaims to the world, in word and deed, and by a life in which men and women of different tribes and races are actually reconciled with each other because they are reconciled with God by the sacrifice of the saviour, that there is an actual dependable point of reconciliation, with God and each other, made not by our hands but by the outstretched hands of the saviour upon the cross. The unity and future of the church and the human race, here and hereafter is vouchsafed in this one saving deed of God.
“Non-Anxious Presence? Self-Differentiated?”
I teach Family Systems Theory in a course on Pastoral Leadership. This theory about how emotional systems work has come into the churches through the work of the late Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman and his book Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. I have been involved with this theory which is based on the work of Dr. Murray Bowen since 1979. I find this body of material very helpful for anyone who wants to work on their family relationships and their capacity for leading with integrity, if it is taken on board in the right way. It is possible to hear it in a superficial way as a series of techniques that are at best savvy conflict management and at worst a clever way of outflanking your opposition.
The great benefit of Family Systems Theory is its challenge to actually work at reconciliation within your own family by developing as many one on one mutually respectful relationships as possible. It provides some practical tools for actually behaving like a Christian with your own people. I recently saw an interview with Dr. Murray Bowen at the end of his life where he with great weariness at the way in which his theory had been abused said, “It is not about therapy. It is about becoming a respected and respectful member of your family. It is about growing up.” If you really get some more reconciliation in the family tree you come from, you will be less anxious and more able to give thoughtful leadership in other settings. It is superficial in the extreme to try to apply this body of material to leadership without focusing on the hard work to be done in one’s own family. People who are doing this family of origin work don’t usually talk a lot about being “well defined leaders.”
Ed Friedman’s book has been taught for years at the “baby bishops school” and the jargon of Family Systems Theory appears frequently in the comments of the bishops of TEC. Words such as “non-anxious presence” and “self-differentiation,” are commonplace in church parlance. Recently in response to the Tanzania communiqué several of the bishops have made direct reference to Family Systems Theory, one even quoting extensively from one of Ed Friedman’s books. The gist of the comments is that the commentator is speaking from a knowing point of view and can survey the emotionally immature behavior of the opposition and that the response of this particular bishop or of the HOB in general is proceeding according to savvy, skillful and well known and well accepted standards of what makes for emotionally mature leadership.
There is a particular model of change at work in these comments about which I have written elsewhere. http://leanderharding.classicalanglican.net/?p=258 I call it the “Chuck Yeager heresy.” This model of change is based on what Ed Freidman would call a “too serious” hearing of one of his metaphors for the way in which efforts at leadership in families and other emotional systems are met with resistance. When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier the plane shook violently as it approached mach 1 but when the barrier was broken it was smooth on the other side. Many bishops and other leaders in TEC think that this is the pattern of all change in all emotional systems all the time. It is of course not as simple as that. When they hit resistance they think the thing to do is to press full steam ahead and it will be smooth on the other side. I had a student in one class who had been a flight instructor with the Air Force. She listened to the analogy and offered that you have to know your airplane. It could be the Yeager scenario or the vibration could mean for your airplane that the wings are coming off.
Much of the intransigence of the response of TEC leadership to resistance both in TEC and from the Anglican Communion is driven by this superficial reading of change and conflict. I predict that the net result of this leadership will be a more anxious and fractious HOB even after the troublesome Network bishops have been expelled. The reports of the last HOB being the best ever strike me as similar to the reports of pseudo-togetherness from a family that has fixed its anxiety temporarily by focusing on an identified patient (Duncan or Akinola). Expect a storm after this calm and especially if the offending party runs away or is expelled. Inevitably new problem children will have to be identified.
Now if you are quoting Ed Friedman and the principles of Family Systems Theory in the midst of an argument you are exactly not according to this theory “a non-anxious presence.” What you are doing is handling your anxiety with someone with whom you disagree by bringing in an authority on your side. You are saying in effect, “Ed Friedman and the absolutely best leadership theory that exists is telling me that I (we) are handling this crisis in just the right way and that your resistance is predictable and will soon diminish and that therefore I don’t have to take it seriously. All the experts agree with me that I am the mature one in this dispute and you are the immature one.” Family Systems Theory predicts that this kind of move in a relationship system make things more anxious and escalates the conflict in a destructive way.
One of the key concepts of Family Systems Theory is “defining a self.” This is the ability to take a stand upon well integrated beliefs and values which have been built up over a long time and to do so without being overly defensive or overly aggressive with those that disagree with you. Being rigid, inflexible and doctrinaire is not the same thing as defining a self. Taking a no compromise position is not the same thing as defining a self. Ed Friedman says that it is the easiest thing in the world to take a stand and the easiest thing in the world to stay connected. It is the hardest thing in the world to take a stand while staying connected. My observation is that the House of Bishops and the General Convention of TEC is a head disconnected from its body. There is a massive disconnect between the leadership and the people in the pews. This is not evidence for non-anxious leadership but for very anxious leadership which is being carried along by the herding behavior which is typical of organizations in crisis.
Another characteristic of anxious systems is scape-goating and scape-gracing. One of the features of the letters of many of the bishops who attended the recent Camp Allen meeting is very high praise for the leadership of Katherine Jefferts-Schori and condemnation of the evil plots and plans of Bob Duncan and the Network bishops. Now it is just possible that +KJS is an omni-competent paragon of virtue and that +RD is the personification of evil and the single cause of all TEC troubles. It is more likely that the over-praise of one bishop and the over-condemnation of another is evidence of a system that has delegated one of its number to be the identified patient or the scapegoat and another to be the designated saviour. People who live in alcoholic families know that both of these positions are injurious to the health of the person occupying that position. By the way, the valence of the projection on the designated saviour can change at anytime. The new presiding bishop can go from being incapable of any wrong to incapable of any right in a very brief period of time. Consult the previous presiding bishop about that phenomenon.
My assessment is that the leadership of TEC is leading it in an anxious way toward a cut-off (another key concept and thought to be the source of much emotional and physical illness) with the Anglican Communion and many of its own clergy and people. I predict that the tendency to deal with conflict by uncompromising intransigence and cut-off will lead to further schism in TEC in the future, probably on the left this time.
Indeed TEC is heading for divorce and the parties have already ceased to live in the same house. The danger now will be that a tendency toward disconnect and cut-off will be carried by each side into their new “families.” If further schisms are to be avoided it will be necessary for both sides to stay engaged with each other in a mutually respectful and non-reactive way “post-divorce.” The alternative is the angry and over-involved ex-couple who spend more time thinking about each other in divorce than they did in marriage. It will also be important that leaders cultivate the maturity that comes from quite literally doing the homework in one’s family of origin. Or to paraphrase the Bible, “If you are called to leadership in the church and remember that you have ought against your brother (mother, father, sister, grandmother, grandfather, cousins and especially some despised black sheep) go and be reconciled to your brother and then take up your assignment.”
Leander S. Harding April 12, 2007
Charles Henry Brent
March 27 is the day devoted to Bishop Charles Henry Brent in the calendar of the Episcopal Church. I wasn’t able to comment on his day at the time but I don’t want his anniversary to come and go without recommending that you keep a sharp eye out for his book, Things That Matter, in used book bins and forgotten church library shelves.
According to the biography that prefaces the book, Bishop Brent was born in 1862 and died in 1929. His father was a country parson in Ontario and the son never remembers wanting to be anything but a clergyman. After being ordained and teaching for a few years at his prep school he took up a post at St. John’s Church in Buffalo, New York and then went to be on the staff of St. Paul’s Cathedral in same city. There he was in charge of a small mission and incurred the wrath of Bishop Coxe for placing candles on the altar. The young priest found a more comfortable home for his churchmanship with the Cowley Fathers in Boston and labored for ten years in the Cowley mission of St. Stephen’s in the south end.
He so impressed low churchman and high churchman alike with his preaching, learning and piety that in 1901 he was elected by the House of Bishops to be the missionary bishop to the Philippines. The United States Army was beginning an occupation of the Islands in the aftermath of the Spanish American war and Brent has a significant ministry among both the occupiers and some of the poorest of the indigenous tribes. Among other things he brought into the church General “Blackjack” Pershing later to be head of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. As a result of this friendship Bishop Brent became Senior Headquarters Chaplain and had a hand in establishing the structure of the Army chaplain corps. He was known as the “Khaki” bishop and emerged from World War I as an international figure.
Almost as soon as Brent got to the Philippines he was elected in a number of other dioceses including Washington D.C. which he turned down. When he was elected a second time in Western New York he accepted and it was Western New York that loaned him to the chaplain corps.
It is hard to describe Bishop Brent in terms of our contemporary churchly identities. Evangelicals would recognize the intensely personal piety. On the other hand he was definitely what used to be called a churchman. Not especially interested in ceremony but deeply devoted to the church, its ministry and sacraments. He was also what Richard Niebuhr might call a “Christ and Culture” figure. He wanted to be forward looking and engaged with the best thought of his age. He was not in any way defensive in the face of the new currents of thought. At the beginning of the 21st Century we read this figure writing at the beginning of the 20th Century and detect an optimism for the integration of traditional theology and modern thought that now sounds naïve and more than a tad syncretistic. He of course took for granted things that now have to be fought for and could perhaps chance a look over the side of the ship knowing the ballast would keep it upright.
His influence was huge. He was famous as a teacher of prayer and as an ecumenical leader. Like another Bishop, Lesslie Newbigin he found intolerable that the message of a new and universal family in Jesus Christ should be mounted from a torn and divided church. Bishop Brent is regarded as the father of the modern ecumenical movement and organized and presided over the first world conference on faith and order in Lusanne. He was on his way to another Lusanne Conference when he died and he is buried in the Swiss town that saw so much of his effort to bind up the wounds of the divided church of Christ.
All of Brent’s writings have a kind of authenticity because they come out of a hard and practical ministry and out much personal illness and pain. Things That Matter is a collection of things that he wrote in the last year of his life when he knew that he was dying. Below are just a few quotations from this most worthy little book. They are among other things a testimony to a very fruitful ministry by someone who represented the broad center of the church in his day. I find some things to critique in Charles Henry Brent but more to admire and of which to mourn the loss.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
“I remember how, shortly after my College days, the Professor of Classics lay dying. He was a man of extraordinary gifts, a graduate of Oxford, who imparted to me that love of the classics which has formed the basis of such education that I have. A mutual friend was visiting him and discussing the new commentaries on the Bible. After listening with interest Professor Boys said: ‘ Mr. C—The best commentary of the Bible is the edge of the grave.’ I now know what he meant. At the moment I may have thought it a morbid thought. My experience of the last twelve months has shown me that the Valley of the Shadow of Death is a highly illumined valley and is more akin to a mountain top which reveals long views and endless vistas, than it is to a place of gloom. . .
Standing supreme above all else is God, and what comes from God, which constitute the only Reality. This being so man’s chief vocation is to penetrate the things of sight and sense, and to establish and consummate relationship of a personal character with God. There is nothing that can take the place of this and without it life loses such effectiveness as it might otherwise have.”
Prayer
“Prayer is the committal of our way unto the Lord, just as a deed of trust is the committal of our possessions to those who can handle them better than we. By living one day with God, preparation is made for living all days with God.”
“Prayer is love melted into worship.”
Suffering and Trouble
“Our chief danger is that we should try to escape suffering and trouble. It is bound to come, and if we have been using religion as an insurance against tribulation, when tribulation comes, the shock will be terrible. On the other hand, if we quietly accept the worst as being possible in our case, when it comes we deploy our spiritual forces so as to make the trouble, whatever it may be, an actual asset. This is being a supervictor. When evil strikes we are never taken by surprise. We are not crushed, however we may suffer, and faith rises glorious in the night of gloom. Reckoning with life as a tragedy in which we must take our full share is the beginning of that human greatness that obscures all else that lays claim to greatness. It is this that makes men free and sunny and adventurers; they having nothing to fear in the worst because through the Cross and the present co-operation of the Victor (who is also the victim) of the Cross, the worst is an opportunity, clay wherewith to mold greatness, a whetstone on which to grind off our angles, a polishing wheel for our wit, our gladness, our buoyancy, a foil against which to display our immortality.”
The Unity of the Church
“The unity of Christendom is not a luxury but a necessity. The world will go limping until Christ’s prayer that all may be one is answered. We must have unity, not at all costs, but at all risks. A unified Church is the only offering we dare present to the coming Christ, for in it alone will He find room to dwell.
Do not be deceived; without unity the conversion of great nations is well-nigh hopeless. The success of missions is inextricably bound up with unity. It would seem that missionary progress in the future will depend mainly upon the Church’s unity, and that national conversions can be brought about by no other influence.
God has used, beyond anything we had a right to expect, our divided Christendom. But now we know the sin and disaster of sectarianism, we cannot hope that He will use it much longer. Sectarianism, in spirit and in form, is par excellence the cult of the incomplete. It is a refusal to consider the truth and life in terms of the whole, not merely the whole of now but the whole of yesterday. It pins its trust to the dicta of a group or the findings of a fixed period. It is content to worship and to defend a conception of God instead of God. It lacks the shape of the Cross which rises vertically as high as God, and stretches right and left to the outermost bounds of humanity. In its extremist form it not only refuses to recognize as acceptable to Christ any group-culture save its own, but is also questions others’ right to continue to be. It is precisely this spirit, not in one special Church but in many, which has disrupted Christendom.
It may be that up to the present a divided Church has been used by God for the extension of His kingdom among men, but we have no guarantee that He will continue to do so. Indeed there are indications that the divided Church has passed the zenith of such power as it has had, and is declining toward desolation. Divided Christendom had had fair trial—it is a failure. . .
It is not the practical which first of all moves us to unity. The call comes not from beneath but from above. A split Church can present only a split Christ.
. . .We do not seek for unity in order to come to Christ, but in coming to Christ we are thereby committed to unity according to His mind, and if we fail to find unity we have missed the way.”
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY AND
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME
A SERMON PREACHED ON EASTER SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 2005
IN ST. JOHN’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH, STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT
BY THE TENTH RECTOR
THE REV. DR. LEANDER S. HARDING
Christ is Risen! This is the Christian Gospel. He lives and because He lives, we shall live; this is the good news which is the life of the church and which the church has to share with the world. That God raised Jesus from the dead and that there is new life in His name, a life which begins now and which the grave cannot hold is the precious message which the Apostles have entrusted to us and which is our joy and privilege to pass on to you. The church exists for no other reason than to communicate this message, the Christ, the Saviour, is risen. But we proclaim not only that God in Christ has triumphed over sin, evil and death but, the church says, this triumph is for you, this life is for you. Come and stretch out your hands and receive this life. Come and take this cup and drink deeply of this life. This life of love and sacrifice, of holiness and righteousness, this life poured out toward God and poured out toward brothers and sisters, this life which conquers all the enemies of our human nature, sin, evil and death, this life, the life of the Lord, the life of the Saviour, this life is for you that you may live in Him and He may live in you.
The proclamation of the church is that this Risen Lord comes to us as we gather together and that the life that is in Him, He breathes into us as we hear His words in the scriptures, share in the sacraments, serve each other and the world in His name. For He has said,”Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst.” And He has said, “Lo I am with you always even to the end of the ages.” The great theme of the Gospel according to St. John is Life, abundant life,”For this reason I have come that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” St. John teaches us about the eternal life that was in the Saviour and which has come into the world. This life that was in Him is most certainly and surely a promise of life eternal with the Father but it is also a new kind of life, which begins now, a new relationship with God and with each other. St. John speaks of this life as light. Humankind is living in darkness. We know much about darkness. A world in which we are forced to choose between war and passivity in the face of evil is a dark world. St. John says, “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness overcomes it not.” On the cross of Calvary love meets hate, righteousness meets sin, holiness meets evil. Light meets darkness and the darkness does not overcome Light. The light of the resurrection breaks forth from the grave. The purpose of the church is to carry and convey this life and this light. All about us this light shines with rays of the Resurrection. The vestments, the flowers, the music, the light coming through the stained glass, the best offering of art and architecture, our prayers, praises and adoration are all testimony to the Resurrection, all a way of saying with Mary Magdalene,”I have seen the Lord.” All of these things are visible witnesses to this invisible life at the heart of the church, which is the secret life at the heart of the world. Here the life of this world is beginning to shine with the life of the world to come. Here the creation and our human nature, which have become darkened by evil and sin, are being transfigured by the light of Christ. Therefore, St. Paul says, “Let us put away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not only a past event; it is also a present reality and a future hope. We believe in the Resurrection because of the trustworthy testimony of the original witnesses but also because when they speak we know what they are speaking of. We live by, with and through that love and that life. We have died with Him to sin that we might live with Him unto God. Therefore, St. Paul says,”You have died and your life is hid with God in Christ.” From the first Easter day until the Ascension the Lord revealed to his disciples the nature of the risen life, which He continues to give to the world. Here in this Gospel this morning a very important aspect of the nature of this life is brought out to us. That is that the Resurrection is a resurrection of the body for the tomb is empty.
In the Apostle’s Creed we say that we believe in the Resurrection of the Body and the life of the world to come. We believe that the Lord was raised bodily. The Resurrection does not proclaim that some part of Jesus, his spirit or soul, survived death but that God raised Him up. What was raised was not a part of Him but all of Him. When God raises us up it is not a part of us that God shall raise but all of us. “Behold,” St. Paul says, “I tell you a mystery. We shall not all die but we shall all be changed.” St. John says, “It does not yet appear what we shall be but when He appears we shall be like Him.” And what is He like? He is completely changed and yet completely the same. There is an awesome strangeness about the Risen Lord. But He calls His sheep by name and they hear Him and know Him and there is nothing lacking, nothing left behind, all is transfigured. When He raises luminous hands in blessing they bear the marks of the nails. Everything He bore in His body has been raised, even the suffering. The wounds are not erased, forgotten but raised, changed, transfigured, glorified. The prints of the nails are the tokens of his victory.
The Resurrection of the Body, that when He appears we shall be like Him, is our hope for the life of the world to come. The Resurrection of the Body also speaks to us of the kind of life the Risen Lord offers to us now in this life. When He was raised, everything pertaining to our humanity was raised with Him and that Risen Life is being offered to us now, communicated to us now. St. Paul says that we are being given an arabon which means a preview, a down payment, a first installment of the life of the world to come. We are members of the body of the Risen Lord and the life of His Risen Body flows into us through the Word and sacraments.
We must think for a moment what the body is. Our body is intimately connected to our personality, to our individuality. We know the footsteps of our loved ones. That the body is raised means that everything which makes you, you will be raised. Your uniqueness as an individual is of eternal significance. We will recognize those we love and they will recognize us. God intends you to grow from glory to glory in the life of the resurrection and become more and more yourself as you grow in the love of God and in the fellowship of all the saints. But you do not have to wait to begin to become truly yourself. God now wants to give you the glorified humanity of His Son. God wants you to grow now in his love and service and in fellowship with all the saints. You were never meant to be scarred by sin, your own sins or the sins of others. If we turn to God with repentance, if we turn to God for healing, God will give us the new humanity of His Son which will be embodied in us in a way which is eternally unique and you will already begin to become more you than you have ever been. You will certainly begin to change on the inside and you may even look different on the outside.
The body is the means through which we process information and through which we come to knowledge. Even the knowledge we have of spiritual things comes to us through the body. When we begin to understand something we say that we have “come to our senses.” In heaven we shall truly come to our senses and we shall know even as we are known. But we do not have to wait begin to know the truth that will set us free. We do not need to wait to open our eyes and see and open our ears and hear and be believing and not doubting. We are invited even now to handle and touch holy things.
The body is the instrument through which we receive and express feeling and emotion. When we are embarrassed we blush. We burn with shame or with anger, we are sick with love or grief. It is not for nothing that we speak of “gut feeling.” The Resurrection life will be a life full of feeling, full of joy and peace. This joy and peace will not be a forgetfulness of this life but our sadness and grief transposed to a new key. The depth of suffering will by the transfiguring mystery of Christ’s suffering be the depth of joy. But we do not have to wait to begin to feel the life of the Resurrection. When we confess our sins and receive God’s forgiveness, our suffering turns to joy. When the hurts that others have done us are brought to Christ’s cross and seen in the light of how we have hurt Him, anger and hate begin now to turn to forgiveness and compassion. His love for the Father and His love for brothers and sisters is offered to us now, and here and now we begin to feel the life of heaven.
Our bodies are the means by which we worship and by which we serve. We bow our heads and bend our knees, or we stiffen our necks and turn away. We stretch out our hands in worship to God and in service to each other, or we use our hands to steal from God and from each other. In the life of the Resurrection we shall be able to perfectly express worship to God and perfectly love and serve each other. But God does not want us to wait to begin to taste of that life. Even now He wants to give us the hands of His Son, hands of sacrificial service and loving adoration.
Our bodies were given to us that we might know and love God and love and serve each other. Our bodies were given to us that we might know love, peace, joy and the abundance of God’s blessing and God’s creation. Our bodies were created fair and pure. Our bodies were created for righteousness and holiness. Our bodies, our memories and emotions have become marked and scarred by sin and evil. We are scarred by what we have done to others and what they have done to us. Our poor frail bodies are impotent in the face of death. He has died our death and offers us His life. He has clothed Himself with our body of sin that He might clothe us with His body of righteousness; now in this life imperfectly but really and truly, and in the life of the world to come completely and perfectly. If we come to Him now and to His church now, hungry for this life that He brings up out of the grave and which He is breathing into us now, we shall find a confidence in saying, we believe in the Resurrection of the Body. For we shall know however through a glass darkly the sort of thing of which the creed speaks. We will know because we will have already received new eyes and new ears, new heart and new hands, a new character and a new expression, a fuller communion with God and a richer fellowship with each other. We shall be fitted for a new life in the new heaven and new earth that Risen Lord will bring to pass when He returns to bring all things to their perfection. And when at last we come to die, then shall this saying have come to pass,”O grave where is thy victory, O death where is thy sting.” ‘Then shall this corruption put on incorruption and this mortal put on immortality.” Let it be so. Amen.
Extreme Makeover
A Sermon Preached In St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut,
On Easter Sunday, April 10, 2004
By Tenth The Rector, The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding
Christian Faith is faith in the Crucified and Risen Lord. The preaching of the Apostles is without exception Resurrection preaching. In the reading that we have from the Acts of the Apostles today, St. Peter tells us what it is to be an Apostle and he tells us the message the Apostles bring, that Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the saviour king, promised by the Jewish prophets, has come. God has anointed Him not with oil like the Kings of old but with the Holy Spirit and power. In Him, as St. John tells us, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. He was rejected by His own people. He was condemned and crucified. God has raised Him from the dead and He is Lord of all, the king of everything. Early Greek-speaking Christians called Him the Pantokrator, the ruler of the cosmos. If the witness of the Apostles is true, if Christ is really Risen and Lord of all, the Resurrection is the single most important event in human history. It is, as the church has always taught, the beginning of a new history, a new creation in which there is a new way of being human in a new community formed by the New Testament, that is the New Covenant in Christ which is marked by the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit.
There are two sources of belief in the Resurrection. There are the reports of the original witnesses in the Gospels, the Book of Acts and the Letters of the Apostles, and there is the church’s experience throughout two millennia of the continuing presence and activity of the Risen Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, in her preaching, her sacraments, her fellowship and her service to the world both in the lives of the great saints and the most ordinary Christians.
These two witnesses are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. The historical evidence alone is very compelling to anyone who will approach the texts without prejudice. The first witnesses are the women. Not the way you would write it given the status of women in the ancient world, unless it was the way it happened. The Apostles tell us through the Gospels that when the chips were down they all fled and that after the crucifixion they were all hiding because they were afraid. How unlike any other religious text I know is this honest self-portrait of a frail humanity. You instinctively trust the honesty of a reporter who reports honestly about himself. C.S. Lewis, the agnostic Oxford don and professor of English literature, who was converted to Christianity at mid-life and who went on to become one of the greatest Christian writers in the Twentieth Century, said this upon encountering the Gospels in a serious way as an adult, “I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that none of them is like this.”
The skeptical, secular historian has an insurmountable problem in explaining the origins of Christianity apart from an objective and supernatural resurrection. How to explain the conversion of this frightened and defeated band into those men of whom their opponents complain in the Book of Acts 17:6, “ these who have turned the world upside down are come hither also.”
Michael Ramsey, the late Twentieth Century Archbishop of Canterbury, said in his justly famous book on the Resurrection, “The present writer would ask sympathy for two very modest presuppositions. The one is that the biblical belief in the living God, creator, redeemer, transcendent, is true. The other is that the events must be such as account for the Gospel which the Apostles preached and by which the first Christians lived.” Skeptical presuppositions aside, the events as recorded by the original witnesses account for the origins of the faith and the church far more adequately than any of the speculations of doubters.
The reports of the original witnesses are twofold. They report that the Tomb was empty and that they saw the Risen Lord. Both of these things together are important, so important that the meaning of their union has been immortalized in the Apostles Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The proclamation of the Apostles is that Jesus has been raised bodily and that in Him we shall likewise be raised. The point is that the resurrection faith is not about the survival of some aspect or part of us beyond death. The proclamation of the resurrection is not a proclamation of survival, that the soul or spirit survives death but a proclamation that everything relating to the humanity of Jesus, that our entire human nature, body and soul, our psychosomatic unity has been recreated in Him through His sacrifice of love. It was not some part of Him that survived but all of Him was raised from the grave, the first example of a new humanity in a new creation, destined to be the elder brother of many siblings in a new race. Because He shared our lives of sin and death, He has the power to give us the gift of sharing in His new and Risen Life which is a life in which everything pertaining to our human existence is transfigured and made new. Even now, through the power of the Holy Spirit He begins to recreate those who come to Him in faith. This is the meaning of the church’s teaching that in Holy Baptism we are regenerated, born again, made new.
This desire to be made new, to be made over is very deep in the human heart. There is a current reality TV show that plays upon this profound human longing to be a new person. The show is called, “Extreme Makeover.” It is a show about plastic surgery and people are chosen for a free extreme makeover. The plastic surgeons do their best from head to foot. The promise of the show is not only that the people will look better but that they will also feel better, have better lives in every way and especially in their relationships with other people. The promise is that those getting the extreme makeover will feel better about themselves and that other people will change their opinion of them as well. In other words, change the outside and the insides will change, there will be a complete and positive change in identity and in reality. Like so many of the shows on television just now, this is a show about salvation.
There is some truth in the premise. Someone has bad teeth and they don’t smile, fix the teeth and the smile and it does change things. There is also truth in the intuition that ultimately, if you are really going to be a new person, you must have a new body and that there is a connection between the body and our relationship with others. What the surgeons can deliver of course is only a temporary fix.
There is only one physician who can deliver on the promise of extreme makeover. He works not from the outside in but from the inside out. He works with sacrificial love and He transfuses us with His life and with His recreated humanity and we really become different in every dimension of our lives. We really do have a different relationship with God, with each other, forgiven and forgiving. We have a different relationship to our own faults and failings. We know we are not alone but have access to a power greater than ourselves, the Holy Spirit that the Risen Lord breathes into His people. We have new friends and we find fellowship and a new solidarity with others in praising and serving God. We have a new relationship to God’s good creation which we believe also will mysteriously in Christ be raised. We have a new relationship with the suffering world as the place from which the Crucified and Risen one calls to us to serve Him in His distressing disguise. He changes everything about us and there is no aspect of our humanity, including our bodies, that is not touched by His recreating work until He has made over into His image which includes giving us a body like His.
The Resurrection of Christ is something that is all ready but not yet. He is Risen and He is raising us and His Resurrection in us is something that is all ready and not yet. The Resurrection is something which we know about from the witness of the scripture and something which we experience as we immerse ourselves in the life of the church. Even this thing of the recreating work of the resurrection on our bodies is something which can be seen to be all ready and not yet.
Recently there was a celebration in Rome for the beatification of Mother Teresa. It is one of the steps in the Roman Church on the way to sainthood. At the end of the impressive ceremony there was unveiled a portrait of a very old, very frail, very wrinkled, very used up little woman. It was the portrait of a very beautiful face, a face changed, made over from the inside out. It was a portrait of something invisible breaking through to the visible. So St. Paul says in the 15th chapter of the First Letter To The Corinthians, “this mortal must put on immortality” and “it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Here St. Paul says we get a down payment of the life of the world to come. In the face of the saint perhaps we catch a glimpse of the beauty of the body that the grave cannot hold.
It is one of the great privileges that I have as a parish priest to see people change as they grow in the life of faith and they don’t just change their thinking, they change their being and their look and I tell you I can see people become more beautiful in the Lord. It is often an extreme makeover and not a temporary one but a token of even more radical and complete changes to come.
I trust the original witnesses and I trust the reported experience of the church through the ages. I trust my own Christian experience. I believe in the Resurrection of the body.
As you come to make your Easter communion, bring this deep desire of the human heart for an extreme makeover, this longing to be made new, to be beautiful, inside and out. Ask God for the grace to open your heart and life so that you might receive the new human life the Risen Lord brings us at the price of the cross and in the power of the Spirit, that life which begins now and which the grave cannot hold, that life which makes it possible for us to say with confidence, “ I believe in the Resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.” Amen.
I Thirst
A Meditation on the Third Word from the Cross
Given During the Three Hours Preaching, April 9, 1993
In St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut
By The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding
“I thirst,” is the shortest of the words that Jesus speaks from the cross. In Greek it is just one word, dipso. We know that part of the agony of the wounds that Jesus suffered in his scourging and upon the cross is thirst. When the body loses a great deal of blood, a tremendous all consuming thirst is produced. In every war the terrible cries of those abandoned on the field of battle is, “water, water.” At this point in his passion, Jesus flesh, like all human flesh, would be desperate with a burning thirst. Crucifixion was designed to be slow torture for criminals. The victim, though horribly traumatized by being nailed to the cross, actually died from slow loss of blood and slow strangulation. It is want of water and a want of air that does the killing. Now here on the cross in the mystery of the incarnation God gets inside human suffering. All of us are afraid of death in one way or another. In our day there is a special fear of slow death, especially the kind of slow death that it is only possible to die in a modern hospital. Here God in Jesus tastes of that suffering. Now there is truly no place where we might have to go where He has not gone before.
There are other kinds of slow death and some of the exaggerated fear of what might happen in a hospital might be a kind of cipher for types of slow death with which we are more familiar. There are other thirsts caused by a different kind of bleeding. The soul, the identity, the center of energy, the very most inmost self of a person can die slowly for want of life-giving water and life-giving breath. In both Hebrew and Greek the word for air, wind, breath and spirit are the same word. You can imagine what it might be like to be spiritually and emotionally dried up. You can imagine what it might be like to live a life day after day that is bleeding you to dry. You can imagine what it is to have a life in which each passing day leaves you with less vitality than the day before. You can imagine what it is to have a burning, all-consuming thirst, to say from the depth of your soul, “I thirst.” You can imagine what it is to have a kind of life which causes you to say in agony, “I am suffocating, I can’t breathe.” Each of us had had times like that in our lives. You may be having a time like that right now. There is a way in which humanity as a whole, the human race, bleeds from wounds like Rwanda and Iraq, from city slums and country shacks and from an empty life, of empty production and empty consumption, and says, “I thirst, I can’t breathe, I am dying.” We should have no problem joining with Jesus on the cross as he gives voice to a humanity that croaks from thirst and gasps for breath.
It is to satisfy our thirst, to breathe new life into us that Jesus has come. He wants to take from us the old life, the thirsty life, the life without breath and wind and give us a new life. He said to the Samaritan woman by the well, “I will give you water which will be in you a fountain gushing up to eternal life.” When he appears to his disciples at the resurrection he will breathe on them who are spiritless, who are winded. God thirsts to give us drink. To give us who are suffocating breath, the saviour breathes his last on the cross.
When someone is dying of thirst he or she cannot help but drink if the opportunity presents itself. When someone is strangling, suffocating, he or she cannot help but breathe if the chance comes. With spiritual bleeding and spiritual suffocation, it is different. The spiritually dying person can refuse to drink and bathe in God’s Spirit, refuse to inhale God’s life-giving breath. This obstinate panic that refuses God’s answer to our prayer when we cry, “I thirst,” is what pushes Jesus to the cross. This is what nails him there. There in the agony of Jesus, God makes his appeal to us. There God says, “I thirst also. I am crucified also. I am like you. I know your pain and your struggle. I know also a deeper struggle, a deeper passion. I know the passion of having your dying lover reject your life-giving gift. Here on the cross beloved, I follow you into death and when you are bled white and have breathed your last, I am there with the shed blood of Jesus to give you drink, I am there with the Spirit to give you breath.”
On the cross God is showing us our own suffering, showing us that God knows from the inside our suffering. On the cross God is showing us our thirst and our refusal to drink. On the cross is showing us what it costs God to endure our rejection of his love, our refusal to drink and to draw breath. On the cross God meets our suffering with the suffering of Jesus in such a way that with Jesus we cry out and by Jesus our thirst is met and we have our spirits revived. In your baptism you were promised that God’s lie would come into you when you ere bleeding and thirsty. You were promised that God’s breath would be in you when you were out of wind. In your baptism you were asked to die with Jesus, so that you could live with him. You were asked to cry out with him, “I thirst,” so that he could give you drink. Where the thirst of the human heart and the thirst of God to give life come together, Jesus prayer from the cross, his work upon the cross is finished. Amen.
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“My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?”
A Meditation On The Fourth Word of Jesus From The Cross
The Sunday Of The Passion, March 20, 2005
The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding, Rector
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut
Jesus had always had what other people wanted but did not have. Jesus had an intimate, constant, growing, life-giving relationship with God. All of those things that separate people from God were not to be found in Jesus. There was no lying, stealing or cheating. He had faced the temptations that beset us all. He knew them. He was like us in every way but did not sin. He had overcome the temptation to base the meaning and purpose of his life on success or power. He had overcome the temptation to have a comfortable life instead of the hard life of mission that the Father had given him. The life that the Father had given Jesus contained great loneliness and isolation and a tremendous temptation to bitterness, cynicism, and despair. Over and over the crowds misunderstood him. Even his own disciples misunderstood him. One of them betrayed him. They all fled and left him alone in his hour of need. He faced the temptation to give into his natural human fear of pain. He prayed to his Father that he might be spared. “Nevertheless not my will but thine be done.” He had steeled himself for the trial and mockery. He hung now in the valley of the shadow of death. Through it all Jesus had been sustained by his relationship with the one he taught his disciples to address as “Abba,” daddy. Jesus lived the one true human life. Jesus lived our life as God meant for us to live it. God made us to live lives of constant communication with our Abba. God made us to live lives constantly being renewed by his love and life and constantly expressing his love and life in the world.
Our lives are separated from God. Our out of proportion love of other things stands in the way. Our sense of our own unworthiness stands in the way. This sense of unworthiness can be disproportionate or proportionate, both are real barriers. Our bitterness at the betrayal of others stands in the way. Our despair and cynicism over human stupidity and cupidity stands in the way. Our weariness that comes when we become physically, emotionally and spiritually depleted, stands in the way. There is a gap between us and God which we cannot close ourselves. In the Bible the name for this gap, this separation is sin. The Bible says that sin is the same thing as death. Being cut off from God leaves us in a state of spiritual death. This Godforsakeness is the real horror of sin. Now we come to one of the deepest mysteries of the Bible. As St. Paul says,” He made Him to be sin who knew not sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God.”(2 Cor. 5:21) or as the New English Bible puts it,”God made Him one with the sinfulness of men,so that in him we might be made one with the goodness of God Himself.” God let His Son drink the dregs of human sin. Though Jesus did not sin, on the cross he entered into the depths of the separation from God that is the essence of the suffering that sin produces in our lives. Suddenly the constant communication with Abba is interrupted. Now the prayer of Jesus becomes like our prayer, a reaching out to close a void which however we try we cannot close ourselves. “Father, Why hast thou forsaken me?”
There are two places where Jesus shows how to pray. One place is where his disciples ask him how to pray and he says,”Pray like this, Abba, which art in heaven, hollowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. . .” The other place is here. He prays in the absence of a reassuring sense of the presence of God. He prays honestly. He expresses his emotion. His sense of abandonment. His confusion and perplexity. But He also prays with faith. He prays the opening lines of a Psalm, Psalm 22. In this Psalm a king of Israel, anointed by God, prays in the midst of suffering a prayer of abandonment, perplexity and faith. “Nevertheless in the midst of the great congregation will I praise you.” This is the last temptation of Christ. The temptation to doubt the goodness and mercy of God, the temptation to doubt God’s continuing care for us when we are so cut off from God. Now and only now can the writer of Hebrews say,” For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with us, for he was tempted in every way as we are and yet, did not sin.”
If you ever feel distant from God, cut off from God. Pray this prayer with the savior. Pray it with Him and in Him and through Him. Pray that the Father will give us a share in the Faith of the saviour, of His trust in His Father and the Father’s goodness, love and providential care and that we can trust in Him for the future both here and hereafter. Amen.
Abstract: Digital-based virtual reality increasingly defines our Postmodern religious environment. This Postmodern digital environment challenges Modern and Pre -modern understandings of church, of preaching and the sacraments in many ways. In this essay we discuss three specific challenges. Cyber-networking challenges traditional categories of church, denomination and sect. Communication as bare information without context and purpose redefines preaching’s rhetorical setting. Postmodern use of global rites and symbols attacks the link between sacramental rites and their narrative meaning.
“You can see the game better on TV than at the stadium.” On the big screen at a rock concert, the rock star is literally and figuratively ‘bigger than life.” In the corporate investor’s meeting, at the political rally, at the hockey game, attention is fixed not always on the stage or podium but often on the images shown on the monitor. The virtual reality, the image, is bigger, more vibrant, therefore more imposing and impressive than the reality, a tiny figure on a stage or behind a podium far away. A teenager spends hours at a time playing a computer game; “you have the impression that he really thinks there is a room behind the computer screen,” says a social worker. Social workers in Germany report that teen sexual relationships, in some urban milieus, is changing: the new patterns mimic pornographic sex scenarios available on the Internet, video rentals and DVDs.1 What is more “real” in the senses of imposing, influential on behavior and consciousness today: real objects and events in the world or “virtual reality?” This is the issue at the heart of this Third Essay on Postmodernism and Christianity.
This essay has two parts. This Part A focuses on electronic imagery as a central tool and symbol of virtual reality. Part B, scheduled for next month, addresses implications of the digital age for Christian teaching, church management, pastoral care, worship and prayer.
Special Convention?
The House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church has been asked to respond to the Primates Communiqué and give assurances that as bishops in the church they will not give consents to an election of a non-celibate homosexual and will not authorize same-sex blessings apart from the emergence of a new consensus in the Anglican Communion. They are also being asked to authorize a process for establishing alternate Episcopal and Primatial Oversight that includes close consultation between the Episcopal Church and the Primates Meeting.
Some of the bishops in TEC are arguing that a proper response to the communiqué requires the calling of a special General Convention because the unique polity of the American church does not give bishops the authority to act unilaterally. There is truth in this claim but the polity of TEC is built on a “checks and balances” model. It is clear, I think, from the constitution that the bicameral system we have in the General Convention gives the bishops a unique teaching authority, a unique responsibility for liturgy, and a veto as a house for approval of consecrations to the episcopate. It is straightforwardly in the competence of the house of bishops to be able to respond to the requests for assurance