Very Convicting

"Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo."

Karl Barth

Tradition(ed) Faith

"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living"

- Jaroslav Pelikan

Some Definitions (vol. 1; pages 1-10)

Evangelical Christianity is often allergic to tradition.Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and anyone else doing that liturgy thing, we often believe, are merely trading the Bible for the traditions of men. In some instances this may be the case. But it doesn't always have to be.

Some Christians are very proud of the fact that they stick to the Bible and "the Bible alone!". They don't let philosophy, theology, church history or any other tradition get in the way of God's pure Word. Don't get me wrong. I'm evangelical. I understand why most people think this way. We're trying to protect the uniqueness of the Bible.

However, I think Christians are mistaken if they believe they can arrive at a mature and developed doctrine of the Trinity (for example) by merely opening the pages of their New Testament and never consulting the tradition of the church. This is not to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is not in the New Testament. This is to say that many apologists and theologians have fought long and hard, across the centuries, to communicate how God can be fundamentally one yet also three. Whether Christians know it or not, the minute they use the word "Trinity" and talk about God in terms of being and essence they are walking into the halls of tradition, borrowing extra-biblical terminology to describe a profoundly biblical truth.

Not all tradition is the enemy of biblical truth. In fact, I would go as far to say that on one level, you can never separate the two. We never experience biblical truth apart from the communicative channel of tradition.

Reflections on the Christian Tradition

I finally received all five volumes of Jaroslav Pelikan's Christian Tradition. I've already started to read the first volume.

What I plan to do is utilize this blog space to share some of Jaroslav's thoughts on the development of doctrine throughout the history of the church. Each chapter in the book is divided into smaller sub-sections. I hope to give some brief commentary on each sub-section.

Maasai Creed

The Maasai Creed The Maasai Creed is a creed composed in about 1960 by Western Christian missionaries for the Maasai, an indigenous African tribe of semi-nomadic people located primarily in Kenya and northern Tanzania. The creed attempts to express the essentials of the Christian faith within the Maasai culture.

We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth. We have known this High God in the darkness, and now we know him in the light. God promised in the book of his word, the Bible, that he would save the world and all nations and tribes.

We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from that grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.
We believe that all our sins are forgiven through him. All who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love, and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.

Jaroslav Pelikan?

Jaroslav Pelikan. I hadn't really heard of him until a few days ago. Pelikan has been considered the greatest church historian of our century. He learned to read and type when he was two years old. He graduated from seminary and completed his PhD from the University of Chicago before he was 22! He taught over 40 years at Yale. He was raised Lutheran and converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in his very late years before he passed away.

I have recently ordered his magnum opus: a 5 volume set chronicling the doctrine of the Christian church from A.D. 100 to the present. It should be fascinating. I'll try to post my thoughts frequently.

If the Resurrection is true, nothing else matters. If the Resurrection is not true, nothing else matters.

- Jaroslav Pelikan

The World is Not Flat: Challenging Globalization with a Eucharistic Imagination

I have been a corporate communications major for the past two years. One of the most popular "buzz" words in my field of study has been globalization. The concept globalization, like religion, is very difficult to define. Scholars have a hard time articulating exactly what globalization is.

Globalization (in its broadest sense) is the process whereby people and societies around the world are unified into a single "global village"; functioning together economically, politically and socially. Globalization seems to embody a certain degree of secular catholicity. For many corporate communication majors, globalization is the best thing since sliced bread. Organizations are able to host digital conference meetings in three different continents all at the same time. Many companies have pursued the economic advantages of globalization by "outsourcing" labor to various Eastern countries where the wage standards are minuscule. Popular American companies like McDonalds and Coca-Cola have planted colonies and promoted their products across the globe. Unlike any other moment in history, it appears that globalization is bringing the most cultures together and creating the greatest number of economic opportunities. Not to mention the fact that globalization has facilitated the movement from mass communication to massive communication (the capacity to effectively communicate with and influence very large populations around the world).

For the past four years, I have been a Christian theology major and a religious studies minor. You have no idea how excited I get when I come across an interdisciplinary academic study that addresses corporate communications issues with religious studies resources (or vice versa). The other day I came a across Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh's article The World in a Wafer: A Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization. I know, what a mouthful! William T. Cavanaugh teaches systematic theology at St. Thomas University in St. Paul Minnesota and has authored Torture and Eucharist and The Theopolitical Imagination (a book I hope to buy and read very soon). My thoughts below are heavily influenced by Cavanaugh's stimulating article (found here: http://www.jesusradicals.com/library/cavanaugh/wafer.pdf)

Globalization, in the end, embodies a counterfeit catholicity. True catholicity is not just the "universal" overshadowing the "particular"- flattening out the uniqueness and locality of the particular, but the universal mysteriously present in the particular. Many people believe that globalization is such a great thing because it brings so many different people together. However, what many don't realize is that while globalization has a mighty reach, it is quite uncharitable. While globalization breaks through various cultures across the world, it ends up squashing the "uniqueness" and "otherness" of those cultures. Unity that leads to a forced, tasteless homogeneity is an ugly thing. Instead of bringing a variety of different cultures together, globalization is really creating an alternate mass-culture that slowly disintegrates the smaller cultures it comes in contact with.

Cavanaugh contrasts the false secular catholicity of globalization with the true catholicity the Eucharist. The church's practice of the Eucharist is truly catholic because it is a communal event that both cherishes particularity/locality (a particular loaf of bread and a very localized church comprised of very different members) and universality (Christ by his Hoy Spirit is cosmically present around the globe among his various churches and his saints are mysteriously united with one another).

"By the same liturgical action , not part but the whole Body of Christ is present in each local Eucharistic assembly. In Romans 16:23 Paul refers to the local community as hole he ekklesia, the whole Church. Indeed, in the first three centuries the term "catholic Church" is most commonly used to identify the local Church gathered around the Eucharist. Each particular church is not an administrative division of a larger whole, but is in itself a "concentration" of the whole. The whole Catholic Church is qualiatatively present in the local assembly, becuase the whole Body of Christ is present there. Catholic space, therefore, is not a simple, universal space uniting individuals directly to a whole; theEucharist refracts space in such a way that one becomes more united to the whole the more tied one becomes to the local. The true gloal village is not simply a village writ large, but rather "where two or three are gathered in my name" (Mt. 18:20)"

Globalization promises a unity without diversity-a homogenous vision without any subtstanital concrete plurality. The true catholic ekklesia, made up of males and females, rich and poor, white and black, is the only community that offers a rich unity without the obliteration of diversity.

Neither the Eucharist or globalization are neutral. They both demand our attention and vye to shape our imagination. Will you be shaped by the massive culture of globalization that forces you to downplay localized particulairty for a homogeneous universality or will you be interrupted by the Eucharist where you are fed the cosmic Christ who "appears in the homless person asking for a cup of coffee...who appears in the person of the weakest, those hungry or thirsty, strangers or naked, sick or imprisoned (Mt.25-46)" ?

How to Avoid Not Speaking about God

The existence of evil has been a problem for Christians since the early church. Many scientists have rejected the Christian view of creation and divine providence because of the supposed evidence for evolutionary naturalism. Philosophers have often abandoned an orthodox understanding of God (or have radically redefined the concept "God") due to alleged inner-contradictions within the traditional understanding of God (e.g., how can God be an eternal being and yet be simultaneously involved in a time-bound world?).

In the last 50 (or so years) a new weapon has been aimed at God and theological discourse in particular. Various philosophers (usually operating within the framework of hard postmodernism) have posed the following dilemma:

(i) God is infinite

(ii) Human language is necessarily finite

(iii)Therefore, any "God-talk" will either obliterate God's otherness or be de facto unintelligible

How can nouns, verbs, and adjectives (etc) possibly describe a being that is infinite? The moment one"captures" God within the net of a theological statement- he ceases to be God. Stripped of his transcendence, he becomes another finite "idea" or "thought" that can be described and analyzed.

If these allegations are true, they pose a major threat for Christian theology. How as Christians do we avoid nor speaking about God?

Paradoxically,we avoid not speaking about God by looking at the heart of our theology: the incarnation. In the incarnation we discover a particular logic at work. In the person of Jesus, the eternal, infinite God is pleased to dwell and embody himself in human form. Jesus is not half God and half man, he is fully God and fully human. The logic embodied in the incarnation is that infinity can take on the finite (and vice versa) without collapsing into meaninglessness.

The application to theological discourse should be obvious. Although God can never be "captured" by theological concepts, within the logic of the incarnation, finite words are able to communicate meaningful and true things about God. Finite language, while never escaping its finiteness- just like Jesus' humanity never escaped its humanness- can never the less be an adequate vehicle to describe an infinite God.

Philosopher James K.A. Smith writes:

"It is in this way that language functions like the Incarnation of the God-man: when the "Word became flesh" (John 1:14), the transcendent God descended into the realm of immanence (finitude), but without thereby denying or giving up his transcendence... God's transcendence is inaccessible to us, but the way in which this is remedied is precisely by God's humiliation and descent to the order of the (fallen) creature. It is God who moves toward finitude, rather than lifting up ...the finite.

(Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of the Incarnation, page 25).

It was God's powerful initiative love that led him to humble himself and take the form of a servant. As Christians (although always being careful of not being overly dogmatic) this should encourage us that God has not only made it possible for us to communicate about him and his gospel- he desires that we do so.