Who Am I?

On the Incarnation of the Word 36 – Who Reigned Before He Could Call For Father Or Mother?

Posted: October 5th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Incarnation of the Word | Tags: , , | Comments Off on On the Incarnation of the Word 36 – Who Reigned Before He Could Call For Father Or Mother?

This brief section of Athanasius’ treatise references another prophecy with which I was not familiar.

But what king that ever was, before he had strength to call father or mother, reigned and gained triumphs over his enemies?

In the Orthodox Church, the passage of Isaiah which includes the above (Isaiah 8:4) is read at Vespers of the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord. We tend to call that “Christmas” I believe. And it’s appropriate.

Who, then, it is on whom the nations are to set their hope, it is worth while to see. For there must be such an one, as it is impossible for the prophet to have spoken falsely. But which of the holy prophets or of the early patriarchs has died on the Cross for the salvation of all? Or who was wounded and destroyed for the healing of all? Or which of the righteous men, or kings, went down to Egypt, so that at his coming the idols of Egypt fell?

We do see the magi representing the nations giving Jesus tribute not too many months after his birth. We see Jesus eluding Herod’s judgment, thus in an ancient sense demonstrating that he was not subject to Herod. And we see all this when he was still an infant.

It’s interesting. When I was reading, but not writing about them, I think I tended to skim over some of these sections without paying close attention. Writing as I go forces me to read more closely.


How Spiritual Are We?

Posted: October 4th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Faith, Personal | Comments Off on How Spiritual Are We?

The Parade in today’s newspaper has an intriguing cover story, How Spiritual Are We? Their survey looks below the overarching numbers that are often quoted from other surveys and studies. The results don’t surprise me at all. But they might surprise some of the people I know who are deeply embedded in the evangelical subculture of the South. Or maybe not. It’s hard to tell about such things.

The article begins with the overarching statistic that many report, which is that 69% of Americans believe in God. However, that percentage breaks down in some pretty interesting ways. For instance, 30% of respondents said they attended religious services once a week or more. The article notes, though, that every time academic researchers have studied survey responses on that question compared with the actual attendance at religious institutions, they’ve found that at best half of those who say they attend once a week or more actually did. So realistically, across all faiths, no more than 15% of Americans attend religious services once a week or more. Regular attendance at a religious institution is no longer an American norm.

As I consider my own family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, I see the same dynamic at work. It’s the exception today, rather than the rule, to regularly attend any sort of religious service. Of course, 50% of the respondents to the survey outright said they rarely or never attend religious services. So it also appears to be a topic on which people are less inclined to prevaricate these days.

24% of respondents called themselves spiritual but not religious. That’s a tough category to unpack. I used that label for the syncretism (taking bits and pieces from different religions) that I once practiced. I also know atheists who use that label. And the article points out that some members of traditional religions use it to signal that they aren’t legalistic or rigid in their perspective. However, only 5% of respondents didn’t believe in any sort of concept of God and only an additional 7% weren’t sure if there was some sort of God or not. If I had to guess, I would expect considerable overlap between those two groups and the 12% who did not believe in any sort of an afterlife.

I will note that only 15% thought religion should be a key factor in political decisions while 58% said religion and politics should not mix at all. That doesn’t bode well for the so-called religious right in America. Maybe that movement will finally begin to drop out of the limelight it has enjoyed in recent decades, one which has been entirely out of proportion with its actual numbers. It’s probably too much to expect the movement to vanish altogether, but I’ll gladly settle for less attention given it.

Only 12% of respondents said their religion was the One True Faith ™ while a corresponding 12% said no religion has validity. The majority (59%) said all religions are valid. That’s actually a somewhat tricky question to answer. Valid can be taken in more than one way. As an American, I certainly believe that all religions (within reason — let’s exclude obvious things like human sacrifice) should be considered valid under the law and none should be given legal preference. But as a Christian, I also believe the fullness of truth and reality are revealed in Jesus of Nazareth and every other path contains, at best, a shadow of that fullness. Still, I would also not pronounce judgment on one who faithfully follows another path. God alone judges. And I expect that many Christians I know will be shocked (though hopefully not disappointed) at the multitudes God has managed to “save”.

In something that is a radical change from even our past, 82% of respondents said they would marry someone of a different faith. Curiously, 78% would not convert to another religion. Taken together, that has to mean that most Americans today don’t believe it’s important for a household to adhere to a single faith. There are many different ways to work that out in practice, but I found it an intriguing little tidbit. It probably correlates to the importance placed on religion. 44% of respondents (split half and half) said that religion was either not a factor in their lives at all, or was present, but not particularly important. 33% said religion was important, but not the most important thing. Only 24% said religion was the most important thing in their lives. I would wager that almost all of the 18% who said they would not marry someone from a different faith were a part of the 24% who said religion was the most important thing in their lives. That’s just a guess, but it seems like a safe one.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds from this point on. Though it’s a distorted myth of the first order to say that we were once a Christian nation, it seems pretty clear that we are less Christian now on a broad, general level than we have typically been in the past. That’s hardly a surprise to me. On one level, it does seem that we’ve finally reached a generation willing to take the “low church” proclamation at its word and to its logical conclusion.


For the Life of the World 1

Posted: October 4th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: For the Life of the World | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For the Life of the World 1

I’ve heard about For the Life of the World by Father Alexander Schmemann off and on for several years now. However, the convergence of several events have now led me to buy it and begin reading it myself. First, Deacon Michael Hyatt is teaching through it with his class each Sunday this fall, which is then distributed through his podcast, At the Intersection of East and West, a podcast I’ve followed since he started it. Second, I received a $10 Amazon gift certificate for participating in some survey. Third, I had to place an order for Catching Fire (the sequel to Hunger Games) for my daughter and, well, who can buy just one book at a time? 😉

So, this series will be interspersed within whatever other series I am doing more or less weekly as I intend to read through the book at the same pace as Deacon Hyatt’s class. I’ll write my posts on each chapter after reading the chapter and listening to the podcast. Today’s post is on the first chapter of the book, which describes its philosophical goals. The podcasts for this chapter spanned two weeks and I do recommend listening to them both. You’ll probably get more from Deacon Hyatt than you will from me anyway.

Fr. Schmemann opens his book by quoting the German materialist, Feuerbach, “Man is what he eats.” And he affirms that as a true statement, though not at all in the way that Feuerbach intended. Man is what he eats, but that does not reduce reality to the merely material. Rather, it points to the seamless unity of the physical and the spiritual.

In the biblical story of creation man is presented, first of all, as a hungry being, and the whole world as his food.

Today many, especially in Western Christianity, have attempted to separate reality in the world of the religious life and the world of the profane, the ordinary, or the secular life. The problem is that such a dualism is neither Christian nor even particularly human. I must confess that I don’t understand this tendency among my fellow Protestants. I have always sought a path toward a unified reality. Now, that does not necessarily mean the fully embodied spirituality of Christianity. I was not uncomfortable with the fundamental Hindu perspective of the material reality as maya or illusion. The Christian fights or should fight to unify the totality of life, to have the fullness of life, but Fr. Schmemann asks an intriguing question:

What is the life of life itself?

Unless we answer that question properly, we will never move beyond the dichotomy that seems to haunt American Christianity. Whether trying to spiritualize our life or secularize our religion we are still approaching them as two different and separate things. They are not.

God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God.

Fr. Schmemann coins a descriptive for man. Whatever else we may be called ( e.g. homo sapiens, homo faber), we are first and foremost homo adorans.

The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God — and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him.

It is only as we understand that reality that story of the Fall can even begin to make sense. The story, of course, revolves around food. That is no accident. But more than that, it is not about choosing to obey or disobey some arbitrary rule. It cuts right to the heart of who and what we were created to be.

Not given, not blessed by God, it (the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) was food whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God. It is the image of the world loved for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end in itself. To love is not easy, and mankind has chosen not to return God’s love.

It is the ultimate expression of materialistic love, the love of the material in and for itself and for what it can provide me. We have done it so long and so consistently that it has come to seem normal. We don’t give thanks. We don’t bless the material creation for God. “It seems natural not to be eucharistic.” Indeed.

When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the “sacrament” of God’s presence. … For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. … For “the wages of sin is death.” The life man chose was only the appearance of life. … He ceased to be the priest of the world and became its slave.

That is, of course, the great irony. Our life is hid in Christ with God. Our life was to bless God and lift up his creation to him in thanksgiving. We have no life apart from God, so when we embrace that which is not God, we ultimately embrace death. In trying to control our world (and even ourselves) we become slaves to the world in and through our passions. I actually have a greater appreciation for Buddhism since I became Christian than I did before I was Christian. There is much truth to their teaching that our passions enslave us. There are worse things than to strive to become dispassionate, though the Christian approach is, ultimately, much different than the Buddhist path.

In our perspective, however, the “original” sin is not primarily that man has “disobeyed” God; the sin is that he ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. … The only real fall of man is his non-eucharistic life in a non-eucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into “life in God,” filled with meaning and spirit.

The above is an extremely dense idea, but if you can begin to see it, you’ll begin to perceive the richness of creation and the depth of our distortion of it. This dualism, this dichotomy between the spiritual and the material, is in and of itself the very substance of our fall. Every time we view the world through this lens, every time we act on these assumption, we participate in the fall and destruction of creation, even if what we actually do appears on the surface to be “good“. When we live and act within this dualism, we are deepening the shadow over our world. It’s into this darkness that God acted decisively: He sent light.

It is within the context of these thoughts that Fr. Schmemann makes a statement about Christianity not being a religion in the traditional sense of the word in a way that actually made sense to me. (I’ve heard similar statements in the past in a Protestant context, but I could never get them to add up.) I’ll draw a number of his phrases together here, but to really grasp what he’s saying, you probably need to read the entirety of the chapter.

Christianity, however, is in a profound sense the end of all religion. … Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. … He (Christ) has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion. It was this freedom of the early church from “religion” in the usual, traditional sense of this word that led the pagans to accuse Christians of atheism. … And in Him (Christ) was the end of “religion,” because He himself was the Answer to all religion, to all human hunger for God, because in Him the life that was lost by man — and which could only be symbolized, signified, asked for in religion — was restored to man.

Within that context he discusses the story of the Samaritan woman at the well and the discussion about temple that she had with Jesus. Jesus affirmed that the Jews at that time knew the truth and worshiped in the right location. But he told her that time was coming to an end. Christians and Christianity have never been tied to a particular place, to a particular time, to a particular building in our worship. We sacramentalize all of creation.

Now, that is not to say that there is anything wrong with building places, even beautiful places, with ornate liturgy, or with any of the rest of a fully embodied spirituality. There is not and never has been. Contrary to the beliefs of many of my fellow Baptists, Christianity has no history of congregational, non-liturgical worship until they created it from their own imaginations in the wake of what is called the Great Reformation. Their imagined first century church never existed historically in the manner many of them envision.

But as Christians, we are not tied to any one place, any one nation, any one ethnicity, or any one language in our worship. All creation is our temple as we offer it back to God in thanksgiving.


On the Incarnation of the Word 35 – Prophecies Satisfied in Christ Alone

Posted: October 3rd, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Incarnation of the Word | Tags: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on On the Incarnation of the Word 35 – Prophecies Satisfied in Christ Alone

In this section, Athanasius continues to expound the prophecies in Scripture of Christ and how they were fulfilled in him alone.

But all Scripture teems with refutations of the disbelief of the Jews. For which of the righteous men and holy prophets, and patriarchs, recorded in the divine Scriptures, ever had his corporal birth of a virgin only? Or what woman has sufficed without man for the conception of human kind? Was not Abel born of Adam, Enoch of Jared, Noe of Lamech, and Abraham of Tharra, Isaac of Abraham, Jacob of Isaac? Was not Judas born of Jacob, and Moses and Aaron of Ameram? Was not Samuel born of Elkana, was not David of Jesse, was not Solomon of David, was not Ezechias of Achaz, was not Josias of Amos, was not Esaias of Amos, was not Jeremy of Chelchias, was not Ezechiel of Buzi? Had not each a father as author of his existence? Who then is he that is born of a virgin only? For the prophet made exceeding much of this sign. Or whose birth did a star in the skies forerun, to announce to the world him that was born? For when Moses was born, he was hid by his parents: David was not heard of, even by those of his neighbourhood, inasmuch as even the great Samuel knew him not, but asked, had Jesse yet another son? Abraham again became known to his neighbours as a great man only subsequently to his birth. But of Christ’s birth the witness was not man, but a star in that heaven whence He was descending.

However, I was actually intrigued by a note from those who translated the version of On The Incarnation available on CCEL discussing the mistranslation of the LXX and all Latin translations. Given that the Greek LXX in one form or another was pretty much the undisputed Old Testament scripture of the whole church (either in Greek or in translation) until the time of the Protestant Reformation I’m intrigued when specific differences are pointed out. This note is on Athanasius quote from Jeremiah 11. Of course, I take the statement that the LXX mistranslates the Hebrew with a grain of salt since we don’t actually have the text from which the LXX was translated. And, if I recall correctly, Jeremiah is one of the texts we know had several variations in existence in and around the time the LXX was translated (roughly 200 BCE off the top of my head). And I also keep in mind the surviving complaints of, for instance, Justin Martyr that as the rabbis were putting together what we now call the Masoretic text, they were making changes designed to weaken the effectiveness of the Christian proclamation among the Jewish people.

So I looked at the verse in numerous translations. The only English translation of the LXX I own is the one in the OSB. One of the first things I noticed is that this is not merely a matter of the translation of one word or phrase. Jeremiah 11 in the LXX, while similar to the Masoretic text, is different enough that this verse is actually verse 18, not 19. Here is Jeremiah 11:18 from the OSB.

For I did not know I was like an innocent lamb led to be sacrificed. They plotted an evil device against me, saying, “Come, let us put wood in his bread, and destroy him root and branch from the land of the living, so his name might not be remembered any longer.”

The OSB also notes that Jeremiah 11:17-12:5, 9-11, 14, 15 is read in Church on both Holy Thursday and Holy Friday every year. Clearly it’s considered an important passage, yet it’s one I can’t recall ever hearing in the context of a Protestant Church. Following are several different translations of Jeremiah 11:19 as rendered (I imagine) from the Masoretic text.

But I was like a docile lamb brought to the slaughter; and I did not know that they had devised schemes against me, saying, “Let us destroy the tree with its fruit, and let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be remembered no more.” (NKJV)

I was like a lamb being led to the slaughter. I had no idea that they were planning to kill me! “Let’s destroy this man and all his words,” they said. “Let’s cut him down, so his name will be forgotten forever.” (NLT)

But I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter;
And I did not know that they had devised plots against me, saying,
“Let us destroy the tree with its fruit,
And let us cut him off from the land of the living,
That his name be remembered no more.” (NASB)

I had been like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter; I did not realize that they had plotted against me, saying,
“Let us destroy the tree and its fruit;
let us cut him off from the land of the living,
that his name be remembered no more.” (NIV)

Before this, I was like a gentle lamb waiting to be butchered. I did not know they had made plans against me, saying:
“Let us destroy the tree and its fruit.
Let’s kill him so people will forget him.” (NCV)

I don’t have any great insights, but I don’t believe this can be reduced to a mistranslation. Even ignoring the earlier differences in this one chapter, the structure of the LXX translation feels markedly different from the rest. I think it’s more likely that the LXX translators were working from a different Hebrew text of Jeremiah than the one used in the Masoretic Jewish canon. There’s definitely more going on than a simple mistranslation.


On the Incarnation of the Word 34 – Prophecies of His Passion and Death

Posted: October 2nd, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Incarnation of the Word | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off on On the Incarnation of the Word 34 – Prophecies of His Passion and Death

Athanasius continues today with the prophecies from Scripture of Christ’s passion and death.

Nor is even His death passed over in silence: on the contrary, it is referred to in the divine Scriptures, even exceeding clearly. For to the end that none should err for want of instruction in the actual events, they feared not to mention even the cause of His death,—that He suffers it not for His own sake, but for the immortality and salvation of all, and the counsels of the Jews against Him and the indignities offered Him at their hands.

Once again, even if you’re familiar with the prophecies and the way Christians see them fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, take a few minutes to read and reflect on that entire section of the treatise.


On the Incarnation of the Word 33 – Incarnation Foretold in Jewish Scriptures

Posted: October 1st, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Incarnation of the Word | Tags: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on On the Incarnation of the Word 33 – Incarnation Foretold in Jewish Scriptures

Athanasius next addresses the unbelief of the Jews and the scoffing of the Greeks. If you hear echoes of St. Paul, that’s hardly surprising. The Incarnation and the Resurrection were always unbelievable proclamations. They aren’t things that our more credulous and “primitive” ancestors believed which we, in our more “rational” and enlightened state, have somehow grown beyond. I like the blunt way Bishop N.T. Wright put it when criticizing the Jesus Seminar on this point. He said that everyone in the ancient world, from Plato to a field slave, knew that dead people stayed dead. That’s not a truth we’ve only recently learned through the illumination of modern science.

These things being so, and the Resurrection of His body and the victory gained over death by the Saviour being clearly proved, come now let us put to rebuke both the disbelief of the Jews and the scoffing of the Gentiles. 2. For these, perhaps, are the points where Jews express incredulity, while Gentiles laugh, finding fault with the unseemliness of the Cross, and of the Word of God becoming man. But our argument shall not delay to grapple with both especially as the proofs at our command against them are clear as day.

In this section, Athanasius goes on to list some of the specific prophecies from the Jewish Scripture, which came to be called the Old Testament among Christians. Most Christians, especially if they’ve read or listened to the Acts of the Apostles, are probably familiar with these, but they are still worth reading. Take a moment to read the whole section.