Lesslie Newbigin on the cry of dereliction

At the very beginning of this book I referred to the cry of God in the garden of Eden: “Adam, where are you?” The agonized father seeking for the son who has been lost. Now the beloved son of the father has shared the fate of the lost children, and with them, for them, on their behalf, as one of them, he cries out to the father: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He goes down into the very depths of dereliction so that there could be no depths of despair into which we could ever fall in which the son of God would not be there beside us.

—Lesslie Newbigin, A Walk Through the Bible (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 1999), 64-65.

Laughter unites, but jokes divide

Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like sex and eating, it is an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same time something that is highly culturally and chronologically specific. Every human society in the world laughs, and whatever their race or language, people make almost exactly the same sound in doing so. Not only that, but they represent the sound of laughter in almost exactly the same alphabetic or phonetic form. Whereas Albanian dogs apparently go "ham ham" rather than "woof woof," and Hungarian pigs go "rof rof rof," not "oink oink," there are few language communities in the world that do not represent the sound of laughter with some variant on "ha ha" or "hee hee."

It even extends to primates. Charles Darwin was one of the first to recognize that Aristotle had been wrong to claim that human beings were the only animals to laugh. And since then many scholarly hours have been profitably spent tickling the underarms of chimps, and watching them at play, to confirm that they do indeed laugh exactly like Homo sapiens. Or very nearly so. The sound of human laughter is made only as we exhale. Chimp laughter occurs also as they inhale. The difference may (or, of course, may not) be crucially significant.

Yet things look very different when we go beyond such physical stimuli to reflect on jokes, cartoons, pictures, and performances that provoke laughter. Never mind what we may share with the primates; it is often hard for the English to share a joke with their neighbors across the Channel, or to respond to cartoons penned a century ago. It is all very well for comedians to claim that "the old ones are the best," but anyone who has picked up a nineteenth-century copy of a comic magazine such as Punch is almost bound to have been disappointed. Even when they are not referring to the minutiae of some now forgotten political crisis, the vast majority of the cartoons simply don't make you laugh. It is sometimes easy enough, on a few moments' reflection, to get the joke and to see why it might once have seemed funny; but that is a very long way from feeling the remotest temptation to laugh oneself. In that sense laughter does not travel across space, time, or even necessarily—as any encounter with a group of under-fifteens will tell us—between different age groups in a single community.

—Mary Beard in the New York Review of Books, reviewing Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, and John R. Clarke, Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250.

Oliver O’Donovan: good news for gay Christians

“How does the homosexually inclined person show Christ to the world?” [Rowan] Williams asks. Again, it is an obvious first step to ask why there would be a different answer for a homosexually-inclined person than for any other person. At the deepest level there can be no difference. It is one and the same Gospel witnessed to by gay and non-gay, a gospel of redemption from the enslavement of sin and of the purification of desire. Yet gifts are given differentially to members of the body of Christ; vocations are distributed variously to serve the common mission. Some are given in the form of special skills and abilities, some in the form of special opportunities, especially opportunities of special experience and suffering. From the place of special sensibility in which the homosexual Christian may find him- or herself we may hear a testimony to the way the world confronts our mission in our time, to its fragmented identities, its disjunctions of feeling, its cruelties, its dislocations and the peculiar possibilities of redemption that God has put at its heart. The rest of us cannot do without this torchlight shone through the fog of the late modern world in which we, too, must grope our way.

What if the challenge the gays present the church with is not emancipatory but hermeneutic? Suppose that at the heart of the problem there is the magna quaestio, the question about the gay experience, its sources and its character, that gays must answer for themselves: how this form of sensibility and feeling is shaped by its social context, how it can be clothed in an appropriate pattern of life for the service of God and discipleship of Christ? But suppose, too, that there is another question corresponding to it, which non-gay Christians need to answer: how and to what extent this form of sensibility and feeling has emerged in specific historical conditions, and how the conditions may require, as an aspect of the pastoral accommodation that changing historical conditions require, a form of public presence and acknowledgment not hitherto known? These two questions come together as a single question: how are we to understand together the particularity of the age in which we are given to attest God’s works? And then the Gospel has good news for us all: there is a friendship in which the most difficult questions about the self and the world in the era of time that is given to us can be explored and enquired into, a community in mission that can engage in the most difficult hermeneutic tasks. The good news preached by the church to the gay Christian coincides here with the good news preached by the gay Christian to the church. The content of that good news, perhaps, can be summed up simply by saying that the word “church” can achieve its proper content. The church is our neighbourhood in the confession of Christ and obedience to his law, a neighbourhood suffused with his love, a communion of mutual service and recognition.

—Oliver O’Donovan, Fulcrum

The Spirit of the Lord, §11.1: The Eucharist and the Holy Spirit

The eucharist is a pentecostal event—that is to say, the eucharist is made possible by the agency of the Holy Spirit. This is neither a new insight nor is it unique to the eucharist. It is not new because, as Eastern Orthodoxy has most consistently affirmed, the eucharistic liturgy takes place in the power of the Spirit on the basis of the church’s invocation of the Spirit (epiclesis). It is not unique because the church confesses that the very being and life of the church is itself a reality enabled and empowered by the Spirit. The church is effectively born on Pentecost and its mission takes place under the guidance of the Spirit.

So what then remains to be said about the relation between Spirit and eucharist? In this subsection, I wish to explore the relation between the Spirit’s agency in the life of Jesus and the Spirit’s agency in the sacramental life of the ecclesial community. That is to say, just as the Holy Spirit is the empowering agent in the mission of Jesus Christ, so too the Holy Spirit is the empowering agent in the eucharistic dimension of the church’s mission of Word and Spirit. While the church has never (to my knowledge) denied the role of the Spirit in the life of Christ, Christians have not spent enough time exploring the relationship between christology and sacramentology in the light of pneumatology.

The christological model with which I am working understands Jesus Christ as a single acting subject in divine-human unity. The unity is not one in which the Logos acts through the human nature as we find in classical christologies of the patristic era—most clearly in Cyril of Alexandria. Such a conception seeks to protect divine impassibility, and it does so by instrumentalizing the human nature. Moreover, both divinity and humanity are, according to this model, predefined substances prior to the Christ event. The classical theologians presupposed the natures of deity and humanity, leaving them with the problem of how to bring together two metaphysically opposed essences. Contrary to this, and following Karl Barth, I locate the union of divinity and humanity not in some moment of assumption prior to Christ’s life, but rather in Jesus’ life history. The unio hypostatica is not the union of two substances but an actualization of divinity and humanity in the history of Jesus. In his being-in-act, the being of God and the being of humanity are actualized. In other words, God is what Jesus does. The Logos is not some acting agent apart from the humanity of Jesus, but the Logos is instead the humanity of Jesus in act. To use the language of Eberhard Jüngel, God “identifies” with the man Jesus, and that act of identification is constitutive of what it means to be God. The point is that the human acts of Jesus are God’s acts. All of this is grounded in the eternal divine decision to be God for us and with us in Jesus, such that Jesus is in the beginning with God. The fact that Jesus Christ, in divine-human unity, is the subject and object of election means that the temporal history of Jesus is already a reality in the eternal being of God before the history of the world.

How then does the Holy Spirit relate to Jesus Christ? Against the Cyrilline model, which has no need of the Spirit’s activity in the life of Jesus, we must state up front that the Logos is not a complete agent in eternity apart from the assumed humanity who then acts in and through this humanity. Rather, the Logos is identified with the humanity of Jesus; the Logos is actualized in this concrete history. As a result, the acting subject is the human Jesus under the power of the Holy Spirit whom God bestows upon Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan River. Jesus is a truly human person whose actions are constitutive of God’s actions, but they are definitive of God only because they are sanctified and empowered by the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus Christ who proceeds as a gift of the Father. As the Synoptic Gospels testify, all of Jesus’ actions are done in the Spirit. And as Paul then testifies, the Spirit is the one who confirms and seals the work of Jesus for the life of the church. The Spirit is what unites the life of Jesus with the life of God, and the Spirit is also what unites the life of Jesus with the life of the church. Christology and ecclesiology are both pneumatically driven.

In the eucharist, this unity of Christ and the church is actualized in the power of the Holy Spirit. There is nothing intrinsic to the elements of bread and wine, nor to the words of institution or the office of the priest, which would make the eucharist an event of the presence of Jesus Christ. Instead, these disparate earthly elements are annexed and sanctified by God in the power of the Spirit to serve as the concrete witness to Christ’s death and resurrection “for us and our salvation.” In the same way that the Spirit is the sanctifying agent in the life and ministry of Jesus, so too the Spirit is the sanctifying agent in the eucharistic celebration. The Holy Spirit descends to Jesus, not to effect any substantial change in his ontic identity, but rather to actualize his being-in-act as the bearer of God’s eschatological reign. Similarly, the Spirit descends to the bread and wine, not to effect any substantial change, but rather to actualize the eucharist’s witness to Christ’s eternal activity of reconciliation and intercession. The Spirit gathers together the disparate moments of Christ’s life to serve as the redemptive mediation between God and humanity; likewise, the Spirit gathers together the disparate parts of the church into a sanctified community under the reign of Christ, the totus Christus, which feasts in communion with God and each other for the sake of their mission as the apostolic people of God.

The analogy between the Spirit’s work in the life of Christ and the Spirit’s work in the eucharistic existence of the church is disrupted (or rather extended) by the fact that Jesus is not only the incarnate Lord; but now he is also the risen and ascended Lord, who reigns at the right hand of God the Father, the Almighty. Whereas the incarnation was a divine descent of the Logos, a divine self-humiliation of the Word, in the power of the Spirit, the eucharist involves both descent and ascent. The Spirit both descends to the earthly elements and lifts the elements into the heavenly sanctuary where Christ eternally intercedes on behalf of creation. The eucharist is thus shaped by the fact that Jesus is now at the right hand of the Father. The eucharist is an ecclesial event determined by Christ’s resurrection and ascension.

At the same time, the Spirit’s eucharistic activity establishes a second analogy with Jesus Christ: the Holy Spirit’s descent and ascent in the eucharist corresponds to the Word’s descent and ascent in the Christ event. The “two natures” of the eucharist, consisting of the Spirit’s descent to the earthly elements and the ascent of the elements into the glorious presence of God, corresponds to the “two natures” of Jesus Christ, consisting of his divine mission into the far country as the humble Lord and his creaturely exaltation into participation in the life of God as the royal human being. The eucharist thus conforms analogically to the pattern of Christ’s own twofold existence as narrated by Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics IV, with the important caveat that the action in the eucharist is by no means an “incarnation” of the Spirit. Nor is the Spirit’s action in the eucharist qualitatively unique, as the Word’s action is in the incarnation, since the Spirit descends and ascends in this way elsewhere within the divine economy of grace. The intention here is only to highlight the way the Spirit’s activity in the eucharist finds a parallel in the event of Jesus Christ, which, like the eucharist, takes place wholly within the empowering presence of the Spirit of God. Through this activity of descending and ascending, the Holy Spirit actualizes the eucharist’s nature as the pentecostal event of Christ’s presence pro nobis.

Academic anti-historicism: an American problem

Yesterday, I quoted from a recent article on the absence of Freud, Marx, and Hegel from the disciplines in which they were so influential (psychology, economics, and philosophy). These figures are now discussed in other departments, all but forgotten in their original contexts—Hegel less so than Freud or Marx. The article does not seek to find a “single proposition” which explains this phenomenon, but it does present one problem as the likely culprit or at least the most probable basis for our present situation: “the ruthlessly anti- or nonhistorical orientation that informs contemporary academe.” In the article, Russell Jacoby offers the following analysis which I quote at length:

Psychology without Freud, economics without Marx, philosophy without Hegel: For disciplinary cheerleaders, this confirms intellectual progress. The cloudy old thinkers have made way for new scientific researchers. But at what cost? The past innovators shared a fealty to history. "We are what we are through history," stated Hegel; and Freud, for all his biological determinism, believed that one must master the past to master the present. Yet today we lack the patience to dig too far, or perhaps we lack the patience to unravel the implications of discoveries into the past. We want to find the exact pill or the exact gene that provides an instant solution. Psychology transmutes into biology. To the degree that a chemical imbalance results in depression, or a gene gives rise to obesity, the effort to restore health by drugs or surgery cannot be faulted. Yet an individual's own history may play a decisive role in those disharmonies. We triumphantly treat the effect as the cause. As a practical measure, that approach can be justified, but it avoids a deeper search.

The flight from history marks economics and philosophy as well. Economics looks more and more like mathematics, in which the past vanishes. Sometimes it even looks like biopsychology. . . . But can we really figure out today's economic problems without considering whence they came? Philosophy nods toward its past, but its devotion to language analysis and logic-chopping pushes aside as murky its great 19th-century thinkers. Polishing philosophical eyeglasses proves futile if they are rarely used to see.

No doubt there has been progress in those fields, but is it possible to advance without any idea of where one has been? Without a guide to the past, the scholar, like the traveler, might move in circles. Moreover, should the giants of the past be dispatched so coolly and mechanically? Culture is not like an automobile that should be junked when old and decrepit. I don't see how we can be educated — or consider ourselves educators — if we consign to the dustbin, say, Freud's exchange with Einstein on war, Marx's description of "the cheap price of commodities" that batters down national boundaries, or Hegel's notion of the master/slave relationship. Those ideas should be addressed, not parried; taught, not dismissed.

Jacoby, a professor of history at UCLA, is entirely right, even prophetic. The problem he identifies is not unique to these three disciplines but has thoroughly infected the academy. As a theologian, I can say quite confidently that theology has suffered greatly from our current ahistoricism. No discipline has a greater stake in history than theology, not only because it begins from a historical starting-point, viz. Jesus of Nazareth, but also because the discipline of theology itself stands in continuity with an historical community, viz. the church. Theology takes place in the company of those who have gone before us. Those Christians who see themselves as “confessional” are likewise demonstrating their dependency upon history, in that they submit themselves to the guidance of past believers who were fellow witnesses to the same gospel of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

In our current ahistorical environment, theology is clearly suffering. Not only are students of theology ignorant of the ancient church fathers and mothers whose wisdom and witness are indispensable for the church, but they are ignorant of more recent historical events and figures. Protestants, in particular, are unfamiliar with the issues, events, and people of the Reformation. People have heard of Luther, Calvin, and the 95 Theses, but know little to nothing about their significance. Names like Zwingli, Melanchthon, Bucer, Beza, Ursinus, Bullinger and others are virtually unknown to most Christians, and some of them even to many theology students. The consequence is that most Protestants have no idea why they belong to one denomination rather than another. Modern ecumenism, I suspect, often has less to do with genuine agreement over doctrinal issues than with simple forgetfulness regarding the original disputes. Many Baptists don’t know why they aren’t Reformed, and many Reformed don’t know why they aren’t Lutheran, and many Lutherans don’t know why there aren’t Catholic. This is a real problem. We cannot have serious theological dialogue unless we understand the history of the church and the history of theology. The future of the church depends upon the church’s knowledge of the past.

While I do not wish to place all the blame on American education, I do think this is a uniquely American problem. That is not because the United States has a poor education system, though that is certainly true and may very well be a factor. The issue is actually more basic to American culture as a whole. Paul Tillich first articulated this insight in his 1952 address entitled, “The Conquest of Theological Provincialism: Europe and America.” In this essay, Tillich discusses the cultural differences between America and Europe. He talks at first of the benefits of being in the United States, because it breaks a European from his or her intellectual provincialism. America’s freedom from tradition prevents the formation of an American provincialism to rival what one finds throughout Europe. Unlike Continental theology, Tillich says (in a statement that echoes Bonhoeffer), “American theological thinking is centered around social ethical problems.” Whereas the church in Europe is “the institution for the salvation of souls,” the church in America is “a social agent.” That is, the American church is primarily concerned with the pragmatic issues of the present moment, whereas the European church is primarily an historical institution continuing a particular tradition. Americans are more interested in practical theology than systematic theology, he says. Likewise, American theology is concerned with congregational life, not with church dogma. The so-called “Emerging Church” is a perfect example of American Christianity gone wild: radically ahistorical, non-confessional, and pragmatic.

Near the end of his essay, Tillich summarizes the problem with American Christianity:

Historical consciousness generally was something we brought from historically minded Europe to unhistorically minded America. It is not a matter of historical knowledge, but a matter of a feeling which every European instinctively has, namely, that ideas are in their very nature historical. The development of an idea is an essential element in the idea itself. This is the background of what was called Geistesgeschichte (inadequately translated “intellectual history” or “history of thought”). The true meaning of Geistesgeschichte is not a factual history of former thoughts, but is the attempt to make visible the implications and consequences of an idea in the light of its history. In this sense Geistesgeschichte is a part of systematic philosophy and theology. The assertion is rather unfamiliar to most American students, and it was one of our most important tasks to balance the American emphasis on new beginning with the European emphasis on tradition. And it was equally important to balance the American emphasis on facts with the European emphasis on interpretation. (175-76; emphasis added)

Tillich’s observation is acute. Americans emphasize “new beginnings,” whereas Europeans emphasize tradition; Americans emphasize facts, whereas Europeans emphasize interpretation. That is, Americans emphasize “historical knowledge,” whereas Europeans emphasize the “history of thought.” The American obsession with trivia game shows summarizes our situation: a love of pure factual information sans historical interpretation along with the possibility of starting a new beginning with one’s prize winnings. (How interesting that in Magnolia, two of the main characters are game show contestents and one of the central themes is our relationship with history, summarized in the thrice-repeated line: “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”)

In any case, Tillich identifies what is most important and also most concerning: America is “unhistorically minded.” Why is this the case? There are probably any number of reasons, but I seem to recall hearing that Tillich once said that this lack of historical consciousness is a consequence of the fact that the United States came into being in the Enlightenment and never went through its own period of Romanticism, the way Europe did. This seems to be a plausible and interesting thesis. Regardless of how we got to this point, what we do know is this: Americans are all about the here and now, the present moment. American Christians are thus interested in the present tense rather than the past tense, in orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy, in ethics rather than theology. Few events in history are more American than the Great Awakenings of the 19th century, and few actions in the church are more American than the altar call, in which the individual, in the heat of the moment, throws off the sinful past and embraces a “new beginning” in Christ.

All of this is simply to say, theology in America is in a perilous predicament, and has been for some time. Not only is the American academe growing more anti-historical with each passing year it seems, but the American culture itself is an ahistorical one. This is particularly distressing for the discipline of theology. If Jacoby and Tillich are right, then it makes perfect sense why American students are quite able to regurgitate factual information about historical figures yet often entirely unable to explain the historical significance of these same figures. In evangelical churches, like the one in which I grew up, one learns how to memorize Scripture and ace Bible drills, but not how to interpret those verses. Theology students may know who Athanasius, Origen, Thomas, Melanchthon, and Zwingli are, but not why they are significant for the church today. Christians may know the Nicene Creed, but not why it matters. Is it any wonder, then, that so many Christians today have no idea why Jesus has any significance for us beyond providing some moral example, comparable to Ghandi or King? Is it any wonder that Christ’s death and resurrection are viewed, if not as antiquated ideas of the past, as irrelevant facts which have no bearing on our lives here and now (see Peter Kline’s sermon for some thoughts about this)? Lessing’s “great ugly ditch” yawns wider for Americans, it seems, than for anyone else.

Can we stop the bleeding? Can we reverse the American anti-historicism? I sure hope so. Rather than offer any of my own answers, let me open the floor for discussion:

• Have you noticed the problem of non- or anti-historicism? If so, what are some examples from your own experience?
• How has ahistoricism affected the church?
  
• What do you think might be some of the reasons for this problem?
• What should the response of the church be to the lack of historical consciousness?
• What are some possible ways of combating our culture’s emphasis on the present tense over the past tense?
  

Freud, Marx, and Hegel: where have they gone?

How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past.

A completely unscientific survey of three randomly chosen universities confirms the exodus. A search through the philosophy-course descriptions at the University of Kansas yields a single 19th-century-survey lecture that mentions Hegel. Marx receives a passing citation in an economics class on income inequality. Freud scores zero in psychology. At the University of Arizona, Hegel again pops up in a survey course on 19th-century philosophy; Marx is shut out of economics; and, as usual, Freud has disappeared. And at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Hegel does not appear in philosophy courses, Marx does not turn up in economics, and Freud is bypassed in psychology.

The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be more pointed. If educated individuals were asked to name leading historical thinkers in psychology, philosophy, and economics, surely Freud, Hegel, and Marx would figure high on the list. Yet they have vanished from their home disciplines. How can this be?

—Russell Jacoby, The Chronicle Review

Freeganism: opting out of capitalism

For those who wish to “opt out” of capitalism, there is an option that is growing in popularity: freeganism, or becoming a “freegan” (combination of “free” and “vegan”). The name “freegan” seems to be relatively new, but the practice certainly isn’t: it’s just “dumpster diving” for the middle class. I was sent an article about this new movement from a family member of mine. I suspect this isn’t a lifestyle that he or most anyone else is going to rush out and adopt. But I certainly admire it.

For lunch in her modest apartment, Madeline Nelson tossed a salad made with shaved carrots and lettuce she dug out of a Whole Foods dumpster. She flavored the dressing with miso powder she found in a trash bag on a curb in Chinatown. She baked bread made with yeast plucked from the garbage of a Middle Eastern grocery store.

Nelson is a former corporate executive who can afford to dine at four-star restaurants. But she prefers turning garbage into gourmet meals without spending a cent.

On this afternoon, she thawed a slab of pate that she found three days before its expiration date in a dumpster outside a health food store. She made buttery chicken soup from another health food store's hot buffet leftovers, which she salvaged before they were tossed into the garbage.

Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a "freegan" -- the word combining "vegan" and "free" -- a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices.

"We're doing something that is really socially unacceptable," Nelson said. "Not everyone is going to do it, but we hope it leads people to push their own limits and quit spending."