Karl Barth on God's Faithfulness to the People Israel

"Is Israel's mission thereby superseded? No, on the contrary, through everything the Old Testament again and again insists that God's election holds and will hold to all eternity. This man who is thus set forth as he is in Israel, is and remains the man elect by God and the man in consequence entrusted with this mission. Where man fails, God's faithfulness triumphs. And this Israel, which is a great demonstration of man's unworthiness, at the same time becomes a demonstration of God's free grace, which asks no questions about man's attitude, but sovereignly pronounces upon man a 'nevertheless,' by which he is upheld. Man is nothing but the object of the divine compassion, and where he wants to be more, he must necessarily rebel against this Israel-existence. Israel is simply thrown upon God and simply directed to Him. Read the Psalms: 'Thou only....' Man appears simply as a hearer of God's Word, and is set, and remains, under God's lordship, even if he attempts time and again to withdraw from it. And in the fulfillment of his mission, in the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, here most of all it becomes visible once more what Israel means. What else is the Jesus hanging on the gallows but this Israel once more in its sin and godlessness? Yes, this blasphemer is Israel. And this Israel's name is now Jesus of Nazareth. And if we glance again at Jewish history and see the strangeness and absurdity of the Jew, his obnoxiousness which repeatedly made him odious among the nations -- and now you may give the anti-Semitic register full play -- what else does that mean but the confirmation of this rejected Israel, which by God was made visible at the Cross, but also of the Israel with whom God keeps faith right through all stages of his wandering?"

--Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), 79

Walter Brueggemann on the Revelatory New Social Reality of Prophetic Israel

"The ministry of Moses ... represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharaoh's Egypt. The newness and radical innovativeness of Moses and Israel in this period can hardly by overstated. Most of us are probably so used to these narrative that we have become insensitive to the radical and revolutionary social reality that emerged because of Moses. It is clear that the emergence of Israel by the hand of Moses cannot be extrapolated from any earlier reality. Obviously nothing like the Kenite hypothesis of the monotheism of the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt will help us at all. While there are some hints that the God of Israel is known to be the God of the fathers, that evidence is at best obscure. In any case, the overriding experience of Exodus is decisive and not some memory now only hinted at in the tradition. However those antecedents are finally understood, the appearance of a new social reality is unprecedented. Israel in the thirteenth century is indeed ex nihilo. And that new social reality drives us to the category of revelation. Israel can only be understood in terms of the new call of God and his assertion of an alternative social reality. Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political relaity is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause. Theological cause without social political reality is only of interest to professional religionists, and social political reality without theological cause need not concern us here. But it is being driven by the one to the other that requires us to speak of and wonder about the call to the prophetic."

--Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 15-16

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: Robert Davis (Advent #3)

Especially as performed by Sufjan Stevens, this is one of my favorite Christmas songs. Enjoy!

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The Friendly Beasts

By Robert Davis (English translation)

Jesus our brother kind and good
Was humbly born in a stable of wood
And the friendly beasts around him stood
Jesus our brother kind and good

"I" said the donkey shaggy and brown
I carried his mother up hill and down
I carried him safely to Bethlehem town
"I" said the donkey shaggy and brown

And "I" said the cow all white and red
I gave him my manger for a bed
I gave him my hay for to pillow his head
"I" said the cow all white and red

"I" said the sheep with a curly horn
I have him my wool for his blanket warm
And he wore my coat on that Christmas morn
"I" said the sheep with a curly horn

"I" said the dove from the rafters high
Cooed him to sleep that he should not cry
We cooed him to sleep my love and I
"I" said the dove from the rafters high

And "I" said the camel all yellow and black
Over the desert upon my back
I brought him a gift in the wise men's pack
"I" said the camel all yellow and black

Thus every beast remembering it well
In the stable dark was so proud to tell
Of the gifts that they gave Emmanuel
The gifts that they gave Emmanuel

Christmas Remembering

I've re-posted below my Christmas reflections from last year; may they be a blessing to you this day.

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So much has been and is being written about Christmas, one pauses before presuming to add anything of meaning or value. Second in the Christian calendar only to Easter, the birth of Jesus announces the shifting of the very axis upon which time and space, past and present, God and creation turn in their relation to one another. Incarnation names the center point of history, because nothing before or since approaches its import, depth, gift, or power. (This is the mystery at the heart of G.K. Chesterton's magnum opus The Everlasting Man.) Quite literally, from Christmas on, everything is changed.

So: herein I step lightly; we are on holy ground.

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One helpful way to come to the stories of Scripture is as memory. The memory of God's presence and character and actions in the ongoing life, through time, of God's people and creation. So much of Scripture is filled with a prophet, an apostle, or God himself calling Israel/church to remember. Here forgetfulness quite nearly equates to sin, because spiritual amnesia is one and the same with spiritual atrophy. When memory fails, identity follows; and there is no faithfulness out of false identity.

So in reflecting on Christmas, I want to do a little remembering.

The first thing we ought to remember is that the infant named Joshua (for, of course, "Jesus" is the Greek approximation of "Yeshua," the Hebrew name meaning "Yahweh saves") was not an everyman, not a universal non-ethnicity; he was Jewish. The baby son of Miriam (for, of course, Mary's Hebrew name was that of Moses's sister) shared with his mother Jewish flesh: the same flesh as Ezra and Nehemiah the reformers; as Jeremiah and Isaiah the prophets; as Josiah and David the kings; as Deborah and Samuel the judges; as Joshua his namesake and Moses the lawgiver; and as Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, the fathers of Israel, God's people. This little baby boy is a son of Father Abraham.

Why remember such a seemingly obvious detail? Because the church has chronic memory loss about this "minor" fact, and -- true to Scripture's equation between forgetfulness and unfaithfulness -- the result is centuries of vitriolic anti-Semitism. (Many think this has been cured in the way modern American Christians interact with their Jewish neighbors. I have my own thoughts about that.) Therefore we cannot emphasize enough in our tellings and retellings of this grounding story that the baby Jesus was, in fact, a Jew.

Next we step back and look at the surroundings. A pregnant teenage girl, traveling with her fiance, looking for a hotel. Nine months along, no less. Though we might not repeat them in church, we have names to whisper behind such people's backs.

Illegitimate. Slut. Bastard.

Let us have no doubt that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph heard these things (and worse) along the way and throughout their life together. Not exactly what we would expect for the earthly arrival of the sovereign God of the cosmos -- and undoubtedly bewildering to a young engaged Jewish couple whose child, they were told, was the promised deliverer of Israel.

Building off of this disreputable situation, we see in the very beginning of Matthew's gospel the genealogy of Jesus (the "genesis" of the Messiah, as well as of the New Testament): the coming king as "son of David, son of Abraham," rightly so, for we expect the anointed one's lineage to be both royal and unquestionable. Yet ... oddly, there are four women mentioned, not a usual feature of these kinds of lists. Not only that, but -- as Richard Beck wonderfully draws out -- these women, each one, were involved in sex scandals: Tamar the trickster, Rahab the prostitute, Ruth the foreigner, Uriah the adulterer.

Of course, even our labels view them from a place of masculine power; they could equally be called the wise, the cunning, the faithful, the victim. But that is the point for Matthew's gospel, because it is precisely the (male-dominated) cultural expectations he is subverting with the inclusion of these women, crescendoing with the young virgin, pledged to be married yet already pregnant, the ultimate sex scandal herself.

This is the way the Son of God comes to us: a pregnant, unwed teenage girl.

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What else to remember?

The place: not a sweet or well-kept "nativity scene," but a dank, dark, tomb of a stable. An inlet cave smelling of urine, manure, and sweaty animals. When God comes to us as unexpected stranger, he is welcomed not by the warmth of a bed or the knowing hands of a midwife, but rather by the cold darkness of braying and crying, straw and seed. Into this swirling chaos of creatures, the promise of new creation is born.

And the time! Occupied Israel is threatened again with genocide, and this holy family must leave in temporary exile from God's given land, for this threat -- unlike the days of Moses -- means safety is in Egypt, rather than out of it.

That is one kind of time; another is what the New Testament writers call "fulfilled." The days are complete, and now is the time when Yahweh, the God of Israel, will bring his plan to completion to deliver, once and for all, his people and his creation. The apex of history is nothing other than the birth of this powerless infant. He is the anointed one, the Messiah, the coming king, the Lord of all in human flesh.

And this is a new thing.

Looking back, we can see the signs; but in fact God has done the utterly unexpected, exactly because he is that kind of God. Even at his birth he is seen only as threat, and that will not change. This new thing God is doing will not forsake its humble beginnings: it will be faithful to the end. All the powers of the world -- religious, political, social, whatever -- will have their way with him, and he will die a cruel, shameful death as an executed enemy of the state. Just as we would have never expected the beginning, the chosen entrance, of the incarnate God into the world -- a birth canal -- so we are shocked at the end, the exit, he takes. The cross is the faithful end of a God who would come into the world through a scandal like Mary's.

So we remember the fine details, and retell the story even when we think we know it backwards and forwards. Because this story alone -- faithfully remembered in all its gossipy, uncommercial, expectations-dashing untidiness -- is capable of reminding us, truly, who it is that lies in Bethlehem's manger. This new thing that God is speaking, teasing, breathing into life -- it is indeed the hope and light of the world. Peace on earth! This tiny, helpless, vulnerable child is good news for all the people.

Who would've guessed?




Merry Christmas.

Lesslie Newbigin on Salvation With and Through the Neighbor

"From its very beginning the Bible sees human life in terms of relationships. There is no attempt to strip away the accidents of history in order to find the real essence of what it is to be human. Human life is seen in terms of mutual relationships: first, the most fundamental relation, between man and woman, then between parents and children, then between families and clans and nations. The Bible does not speak about "humanity" but about "all the families of the earth" or "all the nations." It follows that this mutual relatedness, this dependence of one on another, is not merely part of the journey toward the goal of salvation, but is intrinsic to the goal itself. For knowing God, for being in communion with him, we are dependent on the one whom he gives us to be the bearer of this relation, not just as a teacher and guide on the way but as the partner in the end. There is, there can be, no private salvation, no salvation which does not involve us with one another. Therefore, if I may venture to use a metaphor which I have used elsewhere, God's saving revelation of himself does not come to us straight down from above -- through the skylight, as we might say. In order to receive God's saving revelation we have to open the door to the neighbor whom he sends as his appointed messenger, and -- moreover -- to receive that messenger not as a temporary teacher or guide whom we can dispense with when we ourselves have learned what is needed, but as one who will permanently share our home. There is no salvation except one in which we are saved together through the one whom God sends to be the bearer of his salvation."

--Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 82-83

Millard Lind on the Theopolitics of Israel's Warrior God

"The thesis of the following chapters is that the issue of Israel's history did not lie in the tension between 'myth' and 'history' but in the question of how 'myth' related to 'history.' In Israel's foundational event, the exodus, Yahweh the divine warrior overcame Egypt, not by means of human warfare, but by means of a prophetic personality who heralded a message brought to pass by miracle. There was, indeed, human activity, but it was the action of a prophet, not a warrior.

"Nor did the tension lie between two ancient institutions of Israel, the Sinai covenant and warfare; rather it was caused by an event that had happened within warfare itself, the escape from Egypt by prophetic agitation and miracle. This event, occurring within the institution of warfare, provided the basis for the new structure of the Sinai covenant, the rule of Yahweh founded upon Torah and prophetic word. The central issue of Israel's self-understanding therefore was Yahweh's relation to history through Torah and prophetic word, as brought into tension with Near Eastern myth where the gods were related to history through the coercive structures of kingship law and military power. This tension between the 'prophetic structure' of Israel and the 'kingship structures' of her neighbors is not only intrinsically evident in much of Israel's literature, but is specifically stated by that literature, as we shall see."

--Millard Lind, Yahweh is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1980), 32-33

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: Theodore Baker (Advent #2)

Starting today, little to no activity on the blog except pre-set poems and quotes. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope your season of Advent is a blessing and not merely one more thing.

Praise God for the birth of Jesus! That is all we can do.

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Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming

By Theodore Baker (English translation)

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

Isaiah ’twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind;
With Mary we behold it, the virgin mother kind.
To show God’s love aright, she bore to men a Savior,
When half spent was the night.

The shepherds heard the story proclaimed by angels bright,
How Christ, the Lord of glory was born on earth this night.
To Bethlehem they sped and in the manger found Him,
As angel heralds said.

This Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere;
True Man, yet very God, from sin and death He saves us,
And lightens every load.

O Savior, Child of Mary, who felt our human woe,
O Savior, King of glory, who dost our weakness know;
Bring us at length we pray, to the bright courts of Heaven,
And to the endless day!

William Cavanaugh on "Public" Religion and Translated "Values"

"A major problem with the attempt to make religion public is that it is still 'religion.' Asad shows how the attempt to identify a distinctive essence of religion, and thus protect it from charges that it is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of 'politics' or 'economics,' is in fact linked with the modern removal of religion from the spheres of reason and power. Religion is a universal essence detachable from particular ecclesial practices, and as such can provide the motivation necessary for all citizens of what creed to regard the nation-state as their primary community, and thus produce peaceful consensus. As we have seen, religion as a trans-historical phenomenon separate from 'politics' is a creation of Western modernity designed to tame the Church. Religion may take different cultural and symbolic expressions, but it remains a universal essence generically distinct from political power which then must be translated into publicly acceptable 'values' in order to become public currency. Religion is detached from its specific locus in disciplined ecclesial practices so that it may be compatible with the modern Christian's subjection to the discipline of the state. Echoes of Bodin resound in the public theologians' attempt to make religion the glue that holds the commonwealth together. Religion, that is, and not the Church, for the Church must be separated entirely from the domain of power.

"The great irony, then, is that in trying to arrange for the Church to influence 'the public,' rather than simply be public, the public has reduced the Church to its own terms. Citizenship has displaced discipleship as the Church's public key. In banishing theology from the public sphere, the Church has found it difficult to speak with theological integrity even within the Church. The flows of power from Church to public are reversed, threatening to flood the Church itself."

--William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 82-83, presciently identifying one public pastor in particular.

Sunday Sabbath Poetry: Mary Karr (Advent #1)

With the onset of Advent, I had intended to do a number of posts with Christmas poems or song lyrics, but with the end of the semester and traveling for the holidays, I haven't been able to keep up with the plan. So consider this your late first installment.

I've already shared one poem from Mary Karr in this forum before, but at the time I was running out of town and unable to say much about it. I'm currently working my way through her marvelous collection Sinners Welcome, and cannot say enough about her. Karr is an accomplished and noted poet who converted to Catholicism as an adult; she has a wicked sense of humor, a metaphysical eye, and seems constitutionally unable to use language uninterestingly. Her poem below is part of her "Descending Theology" series, and speaks powerfully to the tangible creatureliness of the child born in Bethlehem.

My own poem afterward is a brief reflection on a line toward the end of her poem. I hope both are a blessing to you in this season of Advent.

[Update: I have taken down poems I am in the process of submitting for publication. I apologize for the confusion and/or inconvenience!]

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Descending Theology: The Nativity

By Mary Karr

She bore no more than other women bore,
but in her belly's globe that desert night the earth's
full burden swayed.
Maybe she held it in her clasped hands as expecting women often do
or monks in prayer. Maybe at the womb's first clutch
     she briefly felt that star shine

as a blade point, but uttered no curses.
Then in the stable she writhed and heard
beasts stomp in their stalls,
their tails sweeping side to side
and between contractions, her skin flinched
with the thousand animal itches that plague
     a standing beast's sleep.

But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid,
the child knew nothing
of its own fire. (No one ever does, though our names
are said to be writ down before
we come to be.) He came out a sticky grub, flailing
     the load of his own limbs

and was bound in cloth, his cheek brushed
with fingertip touch
so his lolling head lurched, and the sloppy mouth
found that first fullness -- her milk
spilled along his throat, while his pure being
     flooded her. (Each

feeds the other.) Then he was
left in the grain bin. Some animal muzzle
against his swaddling perhaps breathed him warm
till sleep came pouring that first draught
of death, the one he'd wake from
     (as we all do) screaming.

11 Theses On What Can and Cannot Be Said About Scripture

1. The Bible does not know the existence of the Bible; that is, no part of the book in our hands, Old and New Testaments, knows the book in our hands, Old and New Testaments. Therefore, any and all claims about Scripture are suprabiblical, even if subordinately substantiated by biblical texts.

2. The biblical canon is not given by the canonical books themselves, and therefore what Scripture calls "the scriptures" is not self-evident and may include extra-canonical works.

3. Canonical authority cannot rest on personal authorship, for the claims of Mosaic authorship of Torah, Davidic authorship of the Psalms, and Pauline authorship of the Pastorals are rightly contested in modern scholarship.

4. The canon was formed over centuries of development, argument, discussion, and (dis)agreement, and its formation was in the hands of a developing ecclesial context that is often denigrated today. Yet there is no possibility of dismissing the latter (out of hand) without dismissing the former (out of hand) as well.

5. That the bound collection of writings called "the Bible" by modern Christians might be synonymously referred to (absolutely, unequivocally, self-evidently) as the "Word of God" by those same Christians would undoubtedly be a surprise to the original authors, editors, compilers, and audiences of the biblical writings. The logos of God is, according to John 1, that one who is and is with God from all eternity, but in time became flesh as Jesus of Nazareth; and the dabar yhwh of the Old Testament is a particular event of God's happening upon a person in time. Neither is (a/this) collection of written works.

6. If, then, the canon of Scripture found its final form through human ecclesial decision, the Bible is itself a product of Christian tradition.

7. That the writing, editing, collecting, preserving, and unifying of the biblical canon are grounded in the providential acting of the triune God is a theological dictum -- that is, an aspect of Christian faith -- and not a given, much less given in the texts themselves.

8. That the formation and authority of the canon are neither given foundations from which all else may be derived nor established by the texts themselves is not a negative or unhelpful observation: in fact, it is both faithful to the character of the gospel and appropriate to the context of the time after Christendom. Never should we have taken for granted that or what the Bible is.

9. The very human, very messy, very public forming and finalizing of the biblical canon is energizing in its faithfulness to the gospel for two reasons. The first is its absolute solidarity with the biblical God's resolute relentlessness in using imperfect means for divine purposes. Just like calling a polygamous patriarch, anointing a murderous shepherd, sending forth a zealous Pharisee, gathering together an idolatrous people, and assuming corruptible human flesh, the God revealed through weakness reveals also through non-self-validating texts not untainted by human hands.

10. The other reason for celebration of Scripture's messiness is God's promise to lead his people by the guiding of the Holy Spirit. Christians have rightly grounded the authority of Scripture in the inspiration of the Spirit, but the reverse is no less true: in the context of the believing community we must trust that God's Spirit also led the church to gather together the right texts in the right way, for all times and all places, as the inaugurating standard for God's people embodied in whatever context, as those stories and letters and laws through which the same Spirit will breathe life anew into each generation of the people of God.

11. Thus, to repeat: Christian Scripture is a matter of trust in the faithfulness and self-revealing love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Any claims to the contrary, either to ground it more foundationally or to establish it more "biblically," move beyond faith and lose credibility in the logic of the gospel.

Loving From Being Loved, Knowing From Being Known: Finding and Praising the True God in Book X of Augustine's Confessions

Introduction: After Narrative, After Conversion

The conclusion to Book IX of Saint Augustine’s Confessions would seem entirely appropriate as the conclusion to the work as a whole: Monica’s beloved son, so promising yet so rebellious, has finally converted to the Catholic faith, and after some brief time shared between them as fellow believers, the Lord who so faithfully answered Monica’s prayers takes her to be with him, and Augustine commends her witness to his readers as the extraordinary example she was. The climax of the narrative came in all its spiritual and rhetorical force, and Augustine narrates the gentle fade out with expectedly reserved finesse. End scene.

To the reader’s great surprise, Augustine has more. In fact, though “only” four books remain, the Confessions are not yet three-fifths complete. Augustine has a great deal more to say. But what more is there to say or do? The narrative is complete, and to be sure, Augustine wisely does not attempt merely to continue the story as he was telling it. Instead, he makes a critical decision, grounded in a simple truth that must not be lost to his readers: to have been converted is not the end of the story, but the beginning. If Augustine had left the story there, it would have communicated implicitly that conversion was the “point” of it all, and not the life with God created at conversion, as well as explicitly that Augustine was at the same place spiritually as a bishop ten years removed from his conversion, rather than on the same journey of transformation as all Christian believers. Book X is the spiritual bridge between the Psalms-infused, interpretive re-narration of God’s sovereign pursuit, calling, and claiming of Augustine in Books I-IX, and the conceptual theologizing of Books XI-XIII. On the one hand, Augustine continues to confess various sins in Book X, and seeks openly to present where he is in the faith a decade after his conversion, while on the other hand, he moves into sophisticated reflection on the nature of memory, the reason for confession, and other matters. The book is an amalgam of issues and topics, a rhetorical tour de force, a densely packed exploration of questions the reader may not have anticipated but Augustine clearly finds important.

The structure of Book X is both simple and complex: simple in its broad themes spread out with relative clarity, complex in the interweaving of those themes with detours, reroutes, and quick tangents, all discovered to be related to the task at hand. Augustine begins with an extended exploration of the character, purpose, and practice of confession in 1.1-5.7, which leads into a short foray (though with great resonance with what came before and what comes next) into the love of God in 6.8-7.11. A sizeable portion of Book X, and that for which it is well known, is Augustine’s sustained reflection in 8.12-24.35 on the nature and peculiar gift of memory: the intangibility of mental images, the process of learning, its relationship to the affections, the perplexing existence of (remembered) forgetfulness, the way memory leads to God yet also must be transcended, and finally the universal pursuit of happiness. In 25.36-29.40, a brief interlude emerges concerning God’s presence, love for God in return, and Augustine’s soon-to-be-infamous refrain, “Grant what you command, and command what you will.” This interlude segues seamlessly from confession and memory to active confession, in 30.41-39.64, of Augustine’s current temptations in the life of faith, walking honestly through the five senses touched on only briefly before, along with other potential sins. Finally, Augustine reaches his rhetorical and theological climax in 40.65-43.70, where he finds no other recourse for truth or salvation except in God’s mercy, poured out in the true mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ, whose cross offers true and lasting healing for all who are called and cleansed by him. Book X ends in an extraordinary flurry of New Testament quotations hailing Christ as the singular answer for the mass of sins remembered and named in all the previous pages.

Due to the wealth of content available, below we will limit ourselves to exploring three particular themes in Book X: making confession, love from and for God, and finding and praising the true mediator. Both structurally and thematically, these mark the beginning, middle, and end of Book X, and in a way are the poles around which the rest of what is discussed—however greater in volume!—finds its meaning and coherence.

On Making Confession

Having spent so much time in the act of verbal-literary confession, to God and before others, Augustine takes up the topic of confession itself in the beginning of Book X. The first words of the section outline broadly what Augustine’s personal telos is in this act: “May I know you, who know me” (1.1). From this overarching aim comes the meaning of making confession—with both vertical and horizontal dimensions—though there is no one clear reason or definition. On the one hand, Augustine speaks out of the hope that, in knowing God through being known by God, he might be found “without spot or blemish” (Eph 5:27); and, on the other hand, in confessing to God through the heart and to others by the pen, he desires to love the truth and thus “come to the light” (John 3:21).

However, to confess one’s sins (or better, one’s whole self) is neither to tell God something he doesn’t already know, nor to share with others something not first initiated and revealed by God to the speaker (2.2). Yet to withhold confession would similarly not keep something about oneself hidden from God, but rather it “would be hiding you from myself, not myself from you.” The act of confessing, therefore, is the self-giving of oneself over to the One who, in delight and love, first gives one the gift of knowing oneself. For Augustine the only pleasure and the only joy reside here, in finding oneself in and through God; and thus does confession spring forth both audibly and silently—the soul cries out to God in displeasure or thanksgiving, in love the lips give voice to the heart.

“Why then should I be concerned for human readers to hear my confessions? And when they hear me talking about myself, how can they know if I am telling the truth” (3.3)? There is no simple solution to the problem of trust in public confession: “I cannot prove that my confession is true” to those who doubt. It is Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:7 that prove decisive: “Love believes all things.” Therefore, “those whose ears are opened by love believe me.” And yet, though “those love has bonded to itself and made one” will be willing and able to believe Augustine’s confessions, for what benefit? In point of fact, Augustine has many benefits in mind. By God’s grace, in “hear[ing] the confessions of my past wickednesses, which you have forgiven and covered up to grant me happiness in yourself,” the heart of the listener will be “aroused in the love of your mercy” (3.4). To know the mercy of God in another’s life is to believe, if only for a moment, that all is not lost in one’s own. Moreover, to hear of persons whose past sins were grave but have now been conquered in Christ is a delight and a pleasure. For on account of God’s actions in the past of one such as Augustine, many will give thanks to God for God’s faithfulness and might, which “is no small gift” (4.5). Furthermore, in hearing both of past sins and of present struggles, faithful brothers and sisters, whether approving or disapproving, will pray for Augustine and insofar as they righteously discern the good and the bad in him, they are loving him. “To such people I will reveal myself.”

Yet what comes from moving from the past to the present, from “what I once was” to “who I now am” (3.4)? Apparently “many wish to know” who Augustine is now, even “demand[ing] to hear from me what I am” (3.3). Here he must tread carefully, for the “wish to learn about my inner self, where they cannot penetrate with eye or ear or mind” (3.4) may easily become voyeurism, gossip, or slander. Only God knows human beings fully, and no one is privy to that knowledge except as God reveals it, or as it is shared freely. Augustine is careful, then, to articulate that he confesses before others for the sake of those he has been given to serve, his “masters” (4.6). Not feigning to sit in judgment on himself (1 Cor 4:3), it is “in this spirit that I ask to be listened to,” “reveal[ing] not who I was, but what I have now come to be and what I continue to be.”

In what follows Augustine entreats the Lord to be present to him in what he confesses, both of what he knows of himself, and of what he does not know of himself (5.7). We might call this section, having begun in 1.1, Augustine’s confessional prolegomena to the rest of Book X, as well as his hermeneutical hindsight concerning Books I-IX. After finishing his life narrative up until conversion, the reader now hears from the speaker what he is doing in confessing; and before wading through the still festering sins and trials of the Great Rhetor, Priest and Bishop of Hippo, Augustine prepares the reader properly to receive this sacramental participation in his life, and the life of the merciful God. What comes next, what makes up a sizeable portion of Book X, is Augustine’s measured and thoughtful act of confessing today’s sins. Even as he takes the time to reflect philosophically on how it is God has made him capable of such reflection, Augustine never loses sight—as we will see in the way he concludes—that the rightful subject of confessional speech is God, and that his self-presentation will have significant impact on the lives of those he loves and is called to serve.

Love From God, Love For God

Having finished his thorough reflections on the gift, nature, function, puzzle, and role of memory, Augustine concludes he has “not found [God] outside it,” for everything he knows of God and has learned of God is available to him in his memory (24.35). Yet where does God actually dwell? Per Augustine’s experience and recollection, God is pleased to honor the memory by dwelling in it (25.36). Yet God remains immutably separate than the mind—he is “the Lord God of the mind,” “not the mind itself.” Yet once again, though God has “deigned to dwell” in Augustine’s memory, to speak of “places” with respect to the mind, much less concerning God’s presence, is ludicrous: “O truth, everywhere you preside over all who ask counsel of you” (26.37). And it is at this moment, that Augustine transitions, seamlessly, from conceptual reflection to uninhibited exultation—and to the beating heart of Book X.

Extolling the God unbounded by memory or learning, who is utterly present to all in careful attentiveness to their prayers, Augustine defines God’s “best servant” as “the person who does not attend so much to hearing what he himself wants as to willing what he has heard from you.” The remark cannot be taken as anything less than the fruit of Augustine’s hard road to submitting to God in conversion and self-renunciation. The time and pain of that journey comes forth in the beautiful opening words to the next section— “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you” (27.38)—the whole of which is renowned for its rhetorical brilliance in Latin and for the heartfelt depth of feeling Augustine speaks before God. Before his conversion, God was with Augustine, though Augustine was not with God, and delight in created things kept Augustine from delighting in God—and yet, “You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.” The incorporeal God, the immutable God, the God who is everywhere and therefore never limited to a single “place”—the very same God comes precisely to a man bent on “hearing what he himself wants” and overwhelms him with sound, with sight, with smell, with taste, with touch. This is the love of God: the all-consuming beauty of the divine mercy that crashes over every boundary and defense, every shield and rejection. And it is nothing less than the revelation that the greatest creaturely delight is in the Creator of heaven and earth, who gives freely and offers peace to great sinners, who satisfies every desire, who miraculously is able to be loved by his servants. This is none other than the living God discovered, narrated, and praised in the confessions of Augustine.

If “human life on earth [is] a trial in which there is no respite” (28.39), the Christian’s (and thus Augustine’s) “entire hope is exclusively in your very great mercy” (29.40). The God to whom Augustine makes confession—from whom he receives love, and to whom he returns love—is the God who lifts up, who heals, who has mercy on the lowly, the sick, and the pitiful (which, by extension, includes all humanity). In such a state of need, and in light of so merciful a God, Augustine entreats the Almighty infamously, but earnestly: “Grand what you command, and command what you will.” God here is not Sheer Power, much less Absolute Decision or some other philosophical suggestion; God is the merciful one, the origin of love, the gracious giver of peace and joy. Not only is God these things—that is, not only does God have these “attributes”—God has acted this way, toward humanity in general, but toward Augustine in particular! This God is no human projection, no stale idol: he is the living God who, in judgment on all human sin and ungodliness, speaks grace and unconditional love over them, pronouncing them free from all their burdens. Augustine knows this because God has done it to him. In context, therefore, his plea is not part of an abstract debate about free will—it is a prayer to the merciful God to act concretely on his behalf! “O love, you ever burn and are never extinguished. O charity, my God, set me on fire. You command continence; grand what you command, and command what you will.”

Augustine loves God because God first loved Augustine. Accordingly, Augustine lives continently because God first commanded continence and granted it to Augustine. The story of command, will, sin, and obedience is, for Augustine, nothing short of the story of the gospel, of God’s primal, originating, needless love for sinful human beings. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son... We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:10, 19).

Finding and Praising the True Mediator

In 40.65 Augustine begins to wind down his work in Book X. He even reviews the material he has traversed, such as the external world, the body and its five senses, and “the recesses of my memory,” noting that without God he “could discern none of these things, and...found that none of these things was you.” In a sense, his explorations and confessions have been an attempt to find God, to know him with the physical senses, to locate him in the mind, to call on him for forgiveness. “But in all these investigations which I pursue while consulting you, I can find no safe place for my soul except in you.” Yes, Augustine finds himself once again where all his journeys lead him: God’s holy rest.

Yet in his prior yieldings to lust, castigated with “the sicknesses of my sins,” Augustine was greedy, “unwilling to lose” the God who had come to him yet also unwilling to give up the lie of his living (41.66). “This is why I lost you: you do not condescend to be possessed together with falsehood.” “Condescension” is the key word for this concluding section, for it points backward to Augustine’s attempt to “find” God, and points forward, finally, to its definitive answer.

Having lost God, where to turn? How to be reconciled? Was it to angels, or to prayer, or to sacred rites that he should have turned (43.67)? Many have taken such routes, among other more mystical and experiential possibilities, yet they have been ensnared, no doubt often without their knowledge, to the evil one. “They sought a mediator to purify them, and it was not the true one.” Little has been said of Christ up to this point in Book X, but it is here that Augustine finally discovers the material, bodily “place” of the true God. In mercy, love, and grace the immortal and sinless God condescends to human flesh for the sake of salvation, and is the true mediator between God and humanity insofar as he is both God and man. God “sent him so that from his example [humanity] should learn humility,” and he “appeared among mortal sinners as the immortal righteous one, mortal like humanity, righteous like God” (43.68). In a single paragraph, Augustine lays out a concise but robust Christology: Christ the true mediator, sent to teach humility, voided death by virtue of sharing in it as one “united with God by his righteousness,” thus making salvation known both to past and future saints, being both truly human and the eternal Word equal and one with the one true God.

The Incarnation, however, is, like all matters of the Catholic faith for Augustine, not simply about doctrinal purity or theological sophistication. Rather, the Incarnation of God is cause for worship and exaltation: “How you have loved us, good Father: you did not spare your only Son but delivered him up for us sinners. How you have loved us” (43.69; cf. Rom 8:32). Christ was victorious in life and death before God precisely because he was victim; and because he was both priest and sacrifice, his offering cleanses sinners of their “many and great...diseases,” for his “medicine is still more potent.” Echoing his encounter with the Books of the Platonists and the first chapter of John (VII.9.13), Augustine asks who could have thought the Logos of God was lovingly near to humanity “unless he had become flesh and dwelt among us?”

Bringing that past moment of indecision into the present, he recalls nearly “taking flight to live in solitude” (43.70). But completing the circle, and formally culminating the narrative connections of Books I-X, Augustine recalls God forbidding him to flee, and comforting him with the fact that Christ’s death provides for living not for oneself, but for Christ (2 Cor 5:15). The climactic finish entails a furious succession of biblical quotations, some from Paul, but primarily (and fittingly) from the Psalms (6:3; 21:27; 54:23; 61:5; 68:6; 118:18, 22; 142:10). He makes closing, implicit reference to the Eucharist, from which “in my poverty I desire to be satisfied...together with those who” share it with him. Book X’s final words: “And they shall praise the Lord who seek him.”

Conclusion

We have seen how complex and interconnected the themes and subjects of Book X of the Confessions are, but perhaps nothing illuminates their coherence more than, having just discussed the middle and closing sections, restating Augustine’s opening words: “May I know you, who know me” (1.1). Like his later expositor Calvin, Augustine must take up the task to find and to know God as the God who knows Augustine—no knowledge of God without knowledge of self—and thus must make confession, must explore within himself, where (and how) it is that God has been and continues to be. Ultimately, however, what Augustine finds—as he knew he would—is the God of all mercy, neither empirically locatable nor identifiable through the senses, but revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that true mediator between God and humanity, whose gracious healing is sufficient for even such a sinner as Augustine of Hippo.

Confessing Bewilderment as a Theologian: On Tradition, Experience, and the Ethics of Same-Sex Relationships

The following is a short paper I wrote for a class this week concerning whether the church's tradition or human experience ought to be more decisive for determining the ethics of same-sex relationships. Upon reflection, I decided I could not ethically answer the question by choosing one side over another, not as a faux "both/and" third way, but precisely because my only honest answer was bewilderment. Furthermore, because my calling as theologian places me differently than a pastor, I find myself in a different position than most of my classmates. To that extent I hoped that I might model a small portion of the patience required to deal truthfully and wholeheartedly with issues such as this one, rather than answer simply for the sake of answering; and I hope whatever success I may have had in doing that might be of use to others in this forum.

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In considering the question of whether historic tradition or present experience ought to be considered more important for Christian discernment of the ethics of same-sex relationships, I find myself with Stanley Hauerwas when he confesses his “own bewilderment about what can or should be said” in response.¹ If graduate school is a place that trains students to address difficult questions with sharp arguments and penetrating logic, seminary must be where we learn that sometimes the temptation to answer impossible questions with easy answers—or to offer halfhearted replies to problems whose solutions we have yet to discover—must be refused, and unequivocally so, in order to cultivate the time and space required to live prayerfully and patiently in the tension of not knowing. I hope to model that intentional stance in what follows, insofar as any clear answer on my part to this formidable and family/society/church-dividing question would be thoroughly dishonest and intractably impertinent.

I have the rhetorical and argumentative capacity to argue the best case for both sides of this question. As much as I have read, and as much as I have shared in conversations and dialogues on the matter, I do not feel there is any new “information” I could receive that would sway me to either side. Essentially, it seems as if one’s view of the character of God, of creation, and of redemption, the nature of Scripture, and the revelatory value of experience simply decides the matter one way or the other. But then, of course, if one seeks to move past one’s own opinion and experiences, there are two equally competing camps (if not three): those committed to the long (and more or less unanimous) history of the church’s tradition, and those gay and lesbian persons whose experiences (and suffering at the hands of the bigoted and hateful) seem self-validating. Of course, the third group are those gay and lesbian persons who have chosen to discipline their sexual desires for others of the same sex, either by mere passive non-participation in genital sexuality (and thus celibacy) or by active intentional seeking of the transformation of their sexual desires toward heterosexual expression (and thus, potentially, marriage). I know good men and women, and good Christians, both gay and heterosexual, in all three camps; and it is beyond me to deny to any of them the claim that God’s Spirit is present and working in their lives.

That, of course, does not solve the problem. Further complications arrive by way of how to define the proper telos and function of a theological account of marriage, and similarly in the vexed history of Scripture and its application by Christians toward predominantly powerless groups of persons like women, slaves, and the “uncivilized.” With regard to the former, though I appreciate the coherence and long history of the Catholic articulation of the goods and ends of marriage, in my own life, in Scripture, and in general society I simply cannot find it ultimately satisfactory, primarily with regard to its relentless insistence on genital complementarity and the necessity of two adults of separate genders for the rearing of children. Though these aspects seem ideal for a number of reasons, there are excellent arguments against this ideal, both theological (the hospitable welcoming of adopted children by two persons of the same sex) and practical (the awful numbers of orphans and single-parent homes in the world), and its proponents seem almost willfully blinded to the realities of the most vulnerable and suffering today.

With regard to Scripture’s history of human application, I am of an equally torn mind. On the one hand, for (literally) thousands of years women were held to be second-rate status human beings who ought to submit in all things to men (whether husband or father), as were slaves (though they may be of equal “status” in theory if not in practice), and all substantiated by recourse to the Bible. On the other hand, I believe that the arguments used to justify these injustices were decidedly unbiblical and should never have held sway in the first place. Thus, with Richard Hays,² rather than a hermeneutic of suspicion, I want the church to come to the New Testament, and to Scripture as a whole, with a hermeneutic of trust. The reign of God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and poured out in the Holy Spirit in the creation of the church, inevitably calls forth the sorts of peaceable practices and other-welcoming habits of worship and life that ought to have properly ordered the life and faith of the church down through the centuries. To be sure, this vision broke through time and time again in the lives of ordinary men and women in spite of the institutional structures of patriarchy and violence—yet I am honest enough to admit the fact that it is difficult to look at the full history of the church as one of (substantial, systemic, and sustained) liberation, equality, peace, justice, and empowerment for those traditionally held at the bottom of society.

Now, to switch perspectives entirely, as I understand it the theological argument against acting on same-sex desires is fairly straightforward and not, in my opinion, contrary to the character of the triune God narrated in Scripture. (And, to reiterate, this and other arguments have to do with an ecclesial response to this issue—that is, within the sphere of the church’s faith and practice—and not necessarily with legal or societal structures). As the argument goes, God created, intended, and commands human beings for and toward heterosexual love as bounded and enlivened by the marital covenant between husband and wife; we live in a fallen world, and our desires are disordered; therefore those who experience sexual desire for other persons of the same sex ought, in the community of God’s people and by the power of the Holy Spirit, to refuse the fulfillment or expression of those desires, and are called either to the gift of celibacy or to the reordering of their desires toward persons of the opposite sex. But in the active fulfillment of sexual desire with a person of the same sex, sin is committed.

Not only do I understand this argument, I believe it is simple, coherent, and biblical, and it names the experience of Christian friends who experience same-sex attraction. If I were pushed to make a decision on the matter with no room to struggle, I would find myself landing here. So why not claim it as my position? Primarily, the combination of the severe ambiguity of Scripture³ with the powerful, deeply emotional testimonies from gay Christians who affirm and model the mutual love and respect possible in covenanted same-sex relationships.⁴ Furthermore, given the example of the Spirit’s free and creative activity—paradigmatically in leading the early Jewish church away from every known possibility given to them by Scripture and tradition regarding the practices of circumcision and ritual purity—who can say where the wind blows?

As it stands, because I am not and do not plan to be a pastor, but rather claim the calling of a theologian, I believe that the only faithful option available to me for the time being is to continue to live in the tension of not knowing, of not having an answer (even for class assignments). More than anything, my prayer is for the church: that we find ways to love one another and not to demonize, to welcome and not to barricade, to worship and not to exclude. If God gives even that much grace, it will be enough.

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[1] Stanley Hauerwas, A Better Hope (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000), 51.
[2] Hays, incidentally, provides the most compelling argument of which I am aware for the binding moral authority of the New Testament account of same-sex sexual practice. See Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 379-406.
[3] Of course, I do not mean the ambiguity of the texts themselves, which are about as clear as possible. Rather, I mean the extremely limited presence of homosexuality at all in the biblical texts, combined with the radical subordination of marriage and family to the call of the gospel, as well as the alternative understanding of the nature of same-sex relationships in the first century context.
[4] See Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” The Gay and Lesbian Christian Movement.

Against Optimism: On the Task Before Us

So long as we continue to live in a world where the poor are forgotten, the homeless are ignored, women are raped, children are abused, billions hunger, the rich hoard, farmers are dispossessed, the land is neglected, infants die, the sick are untreated, sex slaves are sold, the religious exploit the vulnerable, the powerful fleece the powerless, the nations make war, disease is omnipresent, families are torn apart, wells are poisoned by corporations, nuclear arsenals grow, thieves take what they want, women are disenfranchised, human beings are tortured, prostitutes have clients, deceit is praised, pregnancy is a threat, peoples are wiped out, the air is toxic, violence is glorified, divorce is the norm, and narcissism is a virtue, there will never exist such a great thinker or big idea or impressive PowerPoint or UN Committee or activist group or progressive agenda or global citizen or charismatic politician or revolutionary policy or perfect solution or technological agenda or millennium plan or world leader or think tank bigwig or Ivy League professor or snake oil chief executive entrepreneurial philanthropist faith healer extraordinaire that will be able to convince me to be an optimist.

No; instead, let the words of Rabbi Irving Greenberg haunt every Optimism, every Big Solution, every arrogance that We Have Finally Solved The Future:

"No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children."

Now, then, in place of lofty claims we could neither know nor implement, let us return to the hard, undoubtedly small, inevitably particular, sometimes unnoticeable, certainly unspectacular work of loving our neighbors, raising our children, tending our lands, and serving the needy. And may the God of hope -- not of optimism -- give strength to our hands for the task.