Pastor John Wright

Among other things, my summer school teaching schedule came out next week. I am going to teach a The490 seminar on "The Theology of Henri de Lubac" -- an interesting foray for me. I have to order my books. At this point, I am planning to begin with the secondary source on him by Balthasar, and then read three works: The Drama of Atheistic Humanism; The Mystery of the Supernatural; and Catholicism. After those, I believe we will read Milbank's new book. Any comments about such a program would be helpful. Among other things, it is to start work on a project on Vatican II and the Wesleyan.

Tonight, however, while trying to come back to life, I scanned over George Weigel's 1994 First Things interview with George Lindbeck (http://www.eppc.org/programs/catholicstudies/publications/pubID.200,programID.16/pub_detail.asp). It is an amazing interview. In it Lindbeck shows his watching of Cardinal Ratzinger's, now Benedict XVI's, interpretation of Vatican II. But what caught my eye tonight was a brief statement about Balthasar and ressourcement, the Christian return to the sources. Here is what Prof. Lindbeck said:

"Ressourcement, it seems, leads to the margins-or to martyrdom. The miracle of the Council is that the conjunction of forces was such that an authentic return to the sources could, for a moment, capture the center."

What is interesting is how this runs so true today still. Ressourcement, the return to the sources of the faith in the Scriptures and the Fathers to hear them as formative for the church, still struggles to find a place amidst a politicization of the church by forces of the left and right. An "identity politics" reigns, a concern not unrelated to form a niche within the market to expand the church's influence in the society through contact and relevance.

Yet God still surprises. A few weeks ago a member of my congregation talked to me about the congregation of his parents -- and Episcopalian Church in Oceanside (a wealthy coastal town close to Camp Pendleton in Southern California). Because of the American Episcopal's Church entering into schism with the Anglican Communion worldwide, their particular congregation submitted to a bishop in Bolivia. How wonderful! Here is a North American congregation willingly submitting its governance and finances to a bishop in South America! The church thus represents an inversion of the typical economic flow of extraction of wealth from the southern hemisphere for the benefit of the north.

It just reminds me again that we will not build God's kingdom through our works, even in returning to the sources. We only receive the kingdom as a gift that God gives us, if we will have eyes to see and ears to hear. Perhaps we can only see this from the center of the faith, a center in Jesus Christ, that often looks like the margins when seen through the eyes of the world.