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The passages for this coming Sunday are a curious mix. Yet they lay out the underlying structure of much of the biblical narrative very clearly. To follow this narrative, to find our place within it, to have the Spirit assimilate us into the text in unity with Christ, is a goal of our repentance. As throughout the Scriptures, God’s grace drives the narrative forward, with humans responding appropriately in faith, or loyalty, or trust and obedience to God.

To understand how these Scriptures lay out an underlying structure, we’ll treat them in order of their appearance in the Scriptures: Genesis first, Luke second, and Philippians third.

Genesis 15:1-12,17-18

The Genesis passage follows the unmerited promise made in Genesis 12 to Abram. Yet not much has progressed to this section in the narrative. This lack of “progress” seemingly looms in the background of the initial dialogue. Who re-initiates this dialogue in the passage? What is the content of the promise? What is Abram’s concern? Which comes first, God’s promise or Abram’s belief? The passage is an important passage to speak concerning the nature of “belief.” We live in a culture that teaches us that “belief” is either a type of cognitive assent, or, in contrast, a completely irrational conviction. Discuss what “belief” is here. The passage has an “object” to “believe” – i.e., it is belief in the Lord. Is this “object of faith” important in what follows? Why? Why would the Lord reckon such faith to Abram as righteousness (justice)? Does righteousness (justice) arise independent of faith in the Lord, prior to faith in the Lord, or is it subsequent to faith? What is it about “believing in the Lord” that gives rise to justice? How does Abram manifest his “faith” at the end of the passage? How does God grant Abram assurance that his “faith” is not in vain?

Luke 13:22-35

It is interesting to move straight from the Genesis passage to the Lukan passage for here we meet Jesus, “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt 1:1), the One in whom God has shown ultimately God’s faithfulness to Abram/Abraham. It is interesting that the initial question is offered to Jesus, not by a hostile source like a Pharisee or scribe, but by a villager, a Jewish peasant. What is the nature of the question? How does Jesus both accept and refocus the question? In the context of the Abram passage, what is Jesus called? How does this make a difference in interpreting the “narrow door”? If one equates this “narrow door” with Jesus, what would “entering” it entail?

Why would people want to enter the kingdom without entering through the door? What is the door significant to the kingdom? What is it about the nature of the door that some will miss it who care deeply to participate in the kingdom, but some will participate it from throughout the world, itself a sign of the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham?

The Pharisees appear following this statement. Notice that they do not question Jesus but give him orders. How does this exemplify the story just told? Why would Herod want to kill Jesus? Why would Jesus be so seemingly unconcerned about Herod’s intent? When does Jesus “finish” his work? When is it that the Jerusalem will “see” Jesus? To which upcoming passage in the Gospel does this allude – when is it said, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”?

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Promise; fulfillment in Christ; Paul know speaks here to those who have “entered the narrow gate,” who live as those gathered from throughout the world as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Paul’s exhortation to imitation comes as he himself is imprisoned by the Romans, possibly facing execution. Why would this serve as a basis of Paul’s call to imitation? How does this relate to the cross of Christ and, previously, the “narrow door”?

What is wrong with those who “live as enemies of the cross of Christ”? What is the contrast that Paul is trying to highlight? What are the real underlying dynamics that Paul sees the congregation of the saints at Philippi (and with them, us) dwelling within? What is Paul’s hope? Why does this hope generate Paul’s love for fellow-believers and the exhortation to “stand firm”? What is necessary, a presupposed requirement, for the recipients to do this?

We live amidst a culture in which ironically, many have replaced the language of “faith” with the language of “relationship” both within Christianity and outside, where it quickly becomes language of “spirituality” that has no object outside the human beings “needs”. This has great implications for the life within a congregation. Pastorally, I obviously want to sustain the biblical language of faith, particularly faith in God through Christ by the power of the Spirit, a faith that necessarily works through love (and is reckoned by God as righteousness, justice) as the proper human response to God's promise, God's loving mercy and grace. Maybe we need to examine our commitments as part of our Lenten exercise. If I may try to push us to some self-examination on the basis of our readings.

We've rightfully rejected the gross individualism of much of our evangelical background. Yet, possibly, it seems to me, we've only gone part of the way to the Scriptural language and narrative in substituting a "community" over a "congregation that lives by faith in God's promise in Christ". Perhaps by so doing, we miss the "narrow door" in our attempts to live in the kingdom. I struggle with so-called “relational theologies” at many, many levels, not lease practically on how it shifts language of the biblical language “church” and “congregation” or “Israel, heirs of the promise to Abraham” to the more culturally appropriate, more abstract, therapeutic non-biblical language of “community”. Maybe it might be interesting to talk about how these passages call forth the life of “Israel” or “the church” or “a congregation” and how this might be different from connotations of “community” in the society in which we live. This might be difficult work, but very important to find ourselves within the biblical text as persons who embrace the cross, rather than live as enemies of it.

Have a wonderful Lenten gathering.

Posted by johnwright at 8:10 AM | Comments (0)

Since it is Ash Wednesday, I thought that for this weeks Bible Study, I'd quote the Scriptures for Ash Wednesday and quotes from Augustine's On Christian Doctrine. To read the Scriptures under the direction of St. Augustine is a humbling and good thing to do.

Isaiah 58:1-12
Thus says the high and lofty one
who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
Shout out, do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments,
they delight to draw near to God.
"Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?"
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The LORD will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.


2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says,
"At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
and on a day of salvation I have helped you."
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see-- we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Jesus said, "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
"So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for your selves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

From Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I:

Therefore, since the truth is to be enjoyed which lives immutably, and since God the Trinity, the Author and Founder of the universe, cares for His creatures through that truth, the mind should be cleansed so that it is able to see that light and to cling to it once it is seen. Let us consider this cleansing to be as a journey or voyage home. But we do not come to Him who is everywhere present by moving from place to place, but by good endeavor and good habits. I.10

We would not be able to do this except that Wisdom Himself was fit to make Himself congruous with such infirmity as ours and to set an example of living for us, not otherwise than as a man, since we ourselves are men. . . . . Although He is our native country, He made Himself the Way to that country. I.11

Just as a cure is the way to health, so also this Cure received sinners to heal and strengthen them. And just as physicians when they bind up wounds do not do so haphazardly but neatly so that a certain beauty accompanies the utility of the bandages, so the medicine of Wisdom by taking on humanity is accommodated to our wounds, healing some by contraries and some by similar things. I.13

For the Church “is His body,” as apostolic teaching asserts, and it is also called His bride. Therefore He binds His body, which has many members performing diverse offices, in a bond of unity and charity which is, as it were, its health. He exercises it in this world and cleanses it with certain medicinal adversities, so that when it is delivered from the world He may join Himself in eternity with His bride, the Church, ‘not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing.’ I.15

The sum of all we have said since we began to speak of things thus comes to this: it is to be understood that the plenitude and the end of the Law and of all the sacred Scriptures is the love of a Being which is to be enjoyed and of a being that can share that enjoyment with us, since there is no need for a precept that anyone should love himself. Tht we might know this and have the means to implement it, the whole temporal dispensation was made by divine Providence for our salvation. We should use it, not with an abiding but with a transitory love and delight like that in a road or in vehicles or in other instruments, or, if it may be expressed more accurately, so that we love those things by which we are carred along for the sake of that toward which we are carried. I.39

Posted by johnwright at 4:56 PM | Comments (0)

We just finished a four week Epiphany series on the mission of the church -- both our congregation in Mid-City and the mission of all congregations amidst the church catholic. While each congregation participates in a very concrete, local context, this context does not define the mission of the congregation -- all congregations, in so far as that they are the body of Christ, live from the Gospel, the mystery of our faith: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. In the church locality and catholicity are not opposed, but coincide much like individuality and community [you (pl) are the body of Christ and individually members of it] and freedom and authority.

In light of the Transfiguration, a sign of the importance of history now in light of the age that is to come, the age of the resurrection, I couldn't help noticing the difference the catholic Christian convictions proclaim concerning the significance of human life, indeed of all creation, from the deepest convictions of the Western culture in which I live. Yesterday it was announced in Great Britain that "women who go through the medical procedure to harvest the eggs from their ovaries, which doctors describe as 'invasive' and possibly dangerous, will be paid £250 plus travel expenses" [source]. The commodification of human life proceeds apace, with nothing outside the realm of values that determines worth. What is Good, True, and Beautiful has dissipated into what is valued, ie., transformed into a commodity by human will that could be traded in a stock exchange -- neo-liberal economics that reduces all things to the competitive dynamics of the marketplace. All things become nothing except as assigned "value" by the "general" or "individual" will of humans. Transcendence is lost; all competes in a singular realm of pure immanence. Nihilism reigns, both on the neo-liberal right and the post-Marxist, post-colonial left.

The insidious nature of nihilism, a nihilism that always claims a humanistic ultimate concern, reaches into the very pores of our lives. The trail to today's nihilism runs deeply through the history of Western culture, politics, and thought. I finished today a book by Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, which shows that modern nihilism orginates in an understanding of the absolute priority of will. Gillespie concludes, "It was this idea of an absolute will that gave birth to the idea of nihilism, for if the I is everything, then . . . God is nothing. Nihilism, as it was originally understood, was thus not the result of the degeneration of man and his concomitant inability to sustain a God. It was rather the consequence of the assertions of an absolute human will that renders God superfluous and thus for all intents and purposes dead" (p. 256). Nihilism emerges as an inverse of the nominalist God, "terrifying, transrational, transnatural God of will, an omnipotent God whose absolute power reduced nature to a chaos of radically individual and unconnected beings" (p. 255). Contemporary nihilism therefore arises out of "the breakdown of the scholastic synthesis of reason and revelation" (p. 255).

Of course, it was also out of this same breakdown that the church fragmented in Western culture during the sixteenth century (and even before in the papal schism). No genuinely catholic ecclesial institutional witness remained whose witness arose out of a common participation in the Way, the Truth, and the Life that could suggest that the Logos was God, that “faith presupposes natural knowledge in just the way that grace presupposes nature, and in the way that a perfection presupposes what is perfects” (Summa Theologiae q. 2. a. 2 ad 1; thanks to Kevin Timpe for the reference!). In part we must attribute the rhetorical persuasiveness of contemporary nihilism to the fragmentation of the common life of the church.

As I've reflected upon this diagnosis, if it is correct, we must undertake simultaneously two tracks of retrieval. One without the other only plays into the primacy of a nihilistic will to power within the contemporary world. First, we must undertake the hard, careful, historical, social, intellectual, philosophical, and theological work to deconstruct the primacy of nothing in contemporary culture from its expressions in the western academic production of knowledge, to its journalistic manifestations, to its embeddedness in popular culture. It is encouraging to find a new series such as "Interventions" coming to bear. My friend, congregant, and fellow blogger Eric Lee (cf. ericisrad.com) has had opportunity to work on this and another related series that is coming out from Eerdmans Press, overseen by his friend Conor Cunningham. Last week Eric sent me the description of the series, posted at www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/Interventions/:

I N T E R V E N T I O N S

It’s not a question of whether one believes in God or not. Rather, it’s a question of if, in the absence of God, we can have belief, any belief..............

“If you live today”, wrote Flannery O’Connor, “you breathe in nihilism.” Whether “religious” or “secular”, it is “the very gas you breathe.” Both within and without the academy, there is an air common to both deconstruction and scientism, which both might be described as species of reductionism. The dominance of these modes of knowledge in popular and professional discourse is quite incontestable, perhaps no more so where questions of theological import are often subjugated to the margins of intellectual respectability. Yet it is often the case that it is precisely the proponents and defenders of religious belief in an age of nihilism are among those most—unwittingly or no—complicit in this very reduction. In these latter cases, one frequently spies an accommodationist impulse, whereby our concepts must be first submitted to a prior philosophical court of appeal in order for them to render any intellectual value. . . . . It is sadly the case that, despite the best intentions of such “intellectual ecumenism”, the distinctive voice of theology is the first one to succumb to aphony—either from impetuous overuse or from a deliberate silencing.

The books in this unique new series propose no such simple accommodation. They rather seek and perform tactical interventions in such debates in a manner that problematizes the accepted terms of such debates. They propose something altogether more demanding: through a kind of refusal of the disciplinary isolation now standard in modern universities, a genuinely interdisciplinary series of mediations of crucial concepts and key figures in contemporary thought. These volumes will attempt to discuss these topics as they are articulated within their own field, including their historical emergence, and cultural significance, which will provide a way into seemingly abstract discussions. At the same time, they aim to analyze what consequences such thinking may have for theology, both positive and negative, and, in light of these new perspectives, to develop an effective response—one that will better situate students of theology and professional theologians alike within the most vital debates informing Western Society, and so increase their understanding of, participation in, and contribution to these.

To a generation brought up on a diet of deconstruction, on the one hand, and scientism, on the other, Interventions offers an alternative that is otherwise than nihilistic—doing so by approaching well-worn questions and topics, as well as historical and contemporary figures from an original and interdisciplinary angle, and so avoid having to steer a course between the aforementioned ‘Scylla’ and ‘Charybdis’.

This series will also seek to navigate not just through these twin dangers, but also through the dangerous “and” which joins them. . . . Above all, they will hopefully contribute to a renewed atmosphere shared by theologians and philosophers (not to mention those in other disciplines)—an air that is not nothing…"

Even such textual performances at various levels is not sufficient, because the nihilism of contemporary discourse can easily absorb textual artifacts into the dialectical conflict in the marketplace of ideas that remains within the immanent. If nihilism has its roots in late medieval nominalism, we must also re-discover, or better, allow ourselves to be pulled into a common life of the church catholic by the Spirit to provide an institutional/political witness to a unity that differs anchored in the Triune Creator, rather than an arbitrary, omnipotent divine will and its human inverse. The most profound way to out-narrate the nihilism of the contemporary culture is to re-discover the visible catholicity of the church.

Ephraim Radner in Hope among the Fragments: The Broken Church and its Engagement of Scripture (Brazos, 2004) has an astute analysis of our current situation. Radner writes:

"We can point . . . to two different realms of peace that the Christian Church now finds itself lying between. The first is the old peace, the peace of the first Church of old, the Church of the pagan empire, which grew up in contrast to the competing claims of the religious marketplace of Hellenism. In the face of the spiritually depleting struggle for allegiance that competing pagan religions and philosophies demanded, the Christian Church both pointed to and embodied a space of encompassing truth, whose very uniformity provided a stable place in which the individual might move with a surprising freedom of inquiry and discovery. . . . The Church itself, in its breadth, historical density, and embrace, was this landscape of the truth, and that very identity provided the peace in which a significant or fruitful flourishing was possible.
The second realm of peace is that which was pried loose from established Christianity, bit by bit, following the Church’s western fragmentation in the sixteenth century. This is the new peace of multiplicity, of churches in their thousands, as Adam Smith says, vying for adherents among each other and thereby neutralizing the dangers unleased by the fanaticism of internecine Christian battle. This modern realm of peace, which we call Christian pluralism, seeks to control religious passions by individualizing them and limiting them to the small choices that single men and women make, over and over again, regarding their Christian social location. Instead of being a large landscape of peace, filled with the Church’s varied objects, the new peace of pluralism is defined by a welter of objects without a land, objects that individuals themselves collect as they choose and then buy and sell to others or simply discard. And thus, although the peace is kept in this new pluralistic realm, the character of Christianity, at least as compared to its origins, has been profoundly transformed back into the spiritual uncertainties of the very market that the gospel originally overcame" (pp. 39-40).

The peace of pluralism is nothing but a disciplined, regulated enforcement of the logic of nihilism, a false peace that posits conflict as more natural than harmony, a tool for the continuing power of the contemporary nation-state, rather than God, as the primary guarantor of the significance of human life and all creation.

Posted by johnwright at 3:19 PM | Comments (1)

Sunday is the last Sunday of Epiphany, its culmination in the reading from Luke of the transfiguration. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us of the importance of the Transfiguration: “the Transfiguration "is the sacrament of the second regeneration": our own Resurrection. From now on we share in the Lord's Resurrection through the Spirit who acts in the sacraments of the Body of Christ. The Transfiguration gives us a foretaste of Christ's glorious coming, when he "will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body." But it also recalls that "it is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God".”

The Gospel reading from Luke is profoundly shaped by stories from the OT, with many layers of meaning. Maybe the best way to enter the texts is to begin with the Epistle reading and then move to the Exodus passage and then to the Gospel.

1 Corinthians 12:27-13:13

This is the second time we have read this passage in Epiphany, highlighting the importance of the passage. Notice that the passage rightfully begins at 12:27, rather than the usual way of beginning the passage at 13:1. What is the difference in the passage whether one begins as 12:27 or 13:1?

In light of the gospel passage to follow, it seems that we should focus on the final “paragraph” of the passage, vv. 8-13. How does what come before prepare for this final passage? Why would it be that “love never ends” in contrast to the other items mentioned. What is seen here as the end, the goal, of human life? How do we participate in this end? Why is it that we now see in a mirror dimly? When will we see face to face?

Exodus 34:29-35

By ending with the emphasis on the phrase “face to face” we see an important link between the Corinthians passage and the OT passage from Exodus. Note the imagery that comes throughout the scene of Moses at Sinai. Read Exod 19:9, 18-20; 20:21; 24:15-18; 33:7-23. Why is it that Moses’ face shines after entering the “darkness” or “cloud”? Why must the text use such imagery to speak of God? For whom does Moses veil his face? Why would the Israelites fear approaching Moses with his face unveiled? Why would Moses unveil his face to speak enter the Tabernacle?

Luke 9:28-36
How does the story of Moses help you understand the imagery of the Luke 9:28-31? Why would Moses and Elijah appear after the transfiguration of Jesus? What is the subject of the conversation between Moses, Elijah, and Jesus? What is the end to which the passage points?
Why would it be that the three disciplines were “weighed down with sleep” during the transfiguration? When does Peter respond? What is wrong with his response? What is the function of the imagery of the cloud? Who enters it? Why does the voice accompany the crowd? Why would the three keep quiet?

What is glimpsed in the story of the Transfiguration about God and ourselves in relationship to God? What is the end of human life? What is the relationship between this end and the person and words of Jesus? Why is it that now we “see in a glass darkly”? What will it be to see “face to face”? Why is it important to keep this end in mind now? Does this take us out a concern for creation?

Posted by johnwright at 10:32 AM | Comments (2)

Since getting back from Kansas City, I've been working on a paper for the Wesleyan Philosophical Society and revising a book proposal out of the conversations with Professors Lindbeck, Burrell, and Hauerwas. We also had the honor of having Jim VanderKam, with whom I worked a year at Notre Dame, here on campus to give our Wiley Lectures. He lectured on the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and earliest Christianity. He was delightful and gracious as always.

I'm posting the conclusion to my paper. It brings out the implications for the reading of Wesley and renewing the church catholic that looks to Wesley as possessing a special charism for the renewal of the church.

Wesley within the Augustinian Thomist Tradition

Michael Lodahl’s analysis of the Wesleys’ grace before meal grace before meal rightfully highlights the relationship between creation and sanctification in Wesley’s thought. Lodahl recognizes that an extrinsic understanding of grace to creation fundamentally distorts Wesley’s teaching. Yet Lodahl seems to place the Wesleyan text into a univocal system of signs in which, like Plotinus, “earth and all its creatures, while remaining what they truly are as particular, unique, material creatures, become at the same time ladders and pointers toward the Creator and Goal of all” (p. 164). Lodahl reads Wesley as speaking to “wondrous picture of creation’s possibilities . . . at the heart of a Wesleyan reading of the world” (p. 165). Nature becomes that which is given, that which God, the One at the head of the univocal ontological system, uses to interact with humanity to take us to God through a mutual “in-fluence for what it is: the presence of a fellow creature, gifted to us by God for us to love, through whom God draws near to us and through whom we may draw near to God” (p. 165). Ironically, Lodahl therefore provides an inversion of the ontological system that he rightfully criticizes. Nature still operates as “an autonomous sphere which does not need to turn to theology for its self-understanding, and yet it is already a grace imbued sphere, and therefore it is upon pre-theological [science] . . . that theology must be founded.” Lodahl reads Wesley to embrace the givenness of creation that God then utilizes through the hierarchical flow amongst creation to bring humanity to God on the “’road’ of trafficking between Creator and creation” (p. 164).

Wesley’s commitment to the classically Augustinian ontology, presupposed by his use of the concepts of “use” and “enjoy” embraces creation, but never as autonomous in any fashion (which as Wesley recognizes, serves as a “practical atheism”). Ironically, the Augustinian ontology that Wesley presupposes is much more radically “relational” than the relational theologians within the Wesleyan tradition. Only God’s Being is necessary; creation is always radically contingent for Wesley. There is no “road” to God; one may “use” creation, but only by accepting it as gift, never given, in order to “enjoy” God because of all creations presence “in” God. God’s relationality with creation is established in the eternal, unchangeable God, not in the mutable creation; God’s unchangeable, constant relation of Love to creation as Creator, the distinction without a difference, allows humans to use the creation to enjoy the Creator. Given the reality of human fallenness, creation demands the moral therapy grounded in the condescension of God in the fully divine, fully human hypostatic union that is Jesus Christ so that humans might learn its proper role in witnessing to the glories of God.

To argue that Wesley has a fundamental Augustinian framework is not to remove him from the tradition of moral theology represented in Thomas Aquinas as argued by D. Steven Long. Wesley wrote long before Tillich argued that Augustine and Thomas represent two fundamentally different “philosophies of religion.” Once the influence of modernist categories had been extracted from the neo-Thomist readings of Thomas, scholars such as Henri de Lubac and Alasdair MacIntrye have more adequately read Thomas within, rather than against, the Augustine tradition. Wesley also wrote before Eastern Orthodox thinkers sought to define themselves distinct from the West by reading Thomas against, rather than in profoundly impacted by the Eastern tradition as a result of Leo X’s recommendation of Thomas in Vatican I. Yet Thomas “read widely and sympathetically in the Greek Fathers (albeit in Latin translations), and drew on them extensively in the Summa theologiae and other synthetic works (where Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus get the most attention), and also in his biblical commentaries (where John Chrysostom assumes particular importance).”

Ironically, the place where the confluence of the Augustinian and Eastern impact on Thomas comes precisely in his soteriology as deification, i.e., the necessary healing of humanity so that humanity might learn to use creation in order to enjoy God in the human being return to God. In language that mediates between Wesley and Augustine, Aquinas writes:

For we must bear in mind that everlasting life consists in the enjoyment of God. Now the human mind's movement to the fruition [enjoyment] of the Divine good is the proper act of charity, whereby all the acts of the other virtues are ordained to this end, since all the other virtues are commanded by charity. Hence the merit of life everlasting pertains first to charity, and secondly, to the other virtues, inasmuch as their acts are commanded by charity. So, likewise, is it manifest that what we do out of love we do most willingly. Hence, even inasmuch as merit depends on voluntariness, merit is chiefly attributed to charity (I-II Q. 114 a.4c.; www.newadvent.org/summa/2114.htm).

Aquinas’ discussion of the final end of humanity presupposes the Augustinian framework of use and enjoy conjoined to an Aristotelian virtue ethics (cf. Summan Theologica I-II). Wesley stands deeply within such a tradition of theological reasoning, an Augustinian Thomist moral theologian as the head of a “new religious movement” within the church catholic. It is thus not an accident that if Methodism and its heir are “’an ecclesial renewal movement in search of a Church’ . . . One could perhaps equally refer to the Roman Catholic Church as a church searching for ecclesial renewal movements.”

If the above argument holds, to be true to Wesley we must move the Wesley text out of the modernist, univocal relational ontology that seeks to mediate the Christian faith to the contemporary world, an apologetic move to make a “John Wesley for today.” Wesley emerges as a not particularly sophisticated early exemplar of important retrievals of the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox faith found in 20th century Roman Catholicism in the Nouvelle Theologie, developed and continued in post-Vatican II “Augustinian Thomism.” In more academic, less ecclesial circles, Wesley’s Augustinian Thomism brings the Wesleyan tradition into conversation with aspects of so-called “Radical Orthodoxy,” and analytic Thomism as represented in both theological and philosophical manifestations. Even Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVIth bears important affinities to the fundamental theological structures and concerns within the Wesley text. To place the Wesley text into these fundamentally catholic texts would require a fundamental shift in the textual networks in which and by which Wesleyan theologians understand themselves today. In the end, however, it may result in readings of Wesley that are much truer to Wesley’s text, allow more coherent and truthful overcoming of problems, intellectual, ecclesial, and practical, within the Wesleyan tradition, and provide a resource to help the church catholic work towards a visible unity. All the while, such a re-positioning of the Wesleyan tradition would put its intellectuals and academic institutions into some of the most important, profound, significant intellectual conversations in the Western world today – given, of course, the marginalization of theological discourse within the Western academy per se.

Most importantly, however, reading Wesley amidst these textual networks returns the Wesley text to its origin intent – a renewal of the church catholic through exhorting human beings to a “faith that works by love” in order to experience “holiness and happiness,” i.e., the enjoyment of God in this age and forever in life everlasting. The Augustinian Thomist Wesley places him accurately exactly where he was – one to renew the church catholic from the center of the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox tradition. Wesley never saw himself as a founder of a distinct tradition within the church catholic, especially one that eventually see him as the founder of an ecclesial brand name to support various franchises of ecclesial institutions. Wesley as an Augustinian Thomist opens the Wesleyan tradition to old/new vistas that intellectuals that consciously work within it have only begun to realize.

Posted by johnwright at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)

This Sunday’s Scriptures are an important opportunity to reflect on the details of our lives in light of the biggest picture possible. We live in a world that has taught us to think and live “pragmatically” – what’s practical. I read yesterday a good definition of pragmatism as “’A doctrine according to which truth is a relation, entirely immanent to human experience, whereby knowledge is subordinated to activity, and the truth of a proposition consists in its utility and satisfactoriness. . . . In relations with God, act as you do in your relations with people.” There is no norm of convictions, or loyalties, or truthfulness.
The problem with this is that nothing is “naturally” practical or pragmatic, because all our lives and activities have goals or purposes or ends already embedded within them. What looks “practical” or “pragmatic” with one goal or end in mind, could be horribly “impractical” given another purpose, goal, or end. Of course, Christians must commit themselves to a norm of convictions, loyalties, and truthfulness as Christians must ultimately confess their end in God. Our Scripture passages this week help us to think of our practical activities in light of our end in God.

Jeremiah 17:5-10
The Jeremiah passage has strong language. Why is trust in “mere mortals” bad? How does “pragmatism” lead to such a trust? Why is it blessed to trust in the Lord? What is this renewing?
Given these two directions, or ends, in life, why does the passage seemingly turn motifs to talk about the heart’s deviousness versus the Lord’s testing?

1 Cor. 15:12-20

How does Christ's resurrection change our perception about the end, purpose, goal of our lives? How does this passage relate to the Jeremiah passage? Why would it be that "if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied"? Obviously the resurrection requires faith; it is not contrary to reason, but reason cannot "prove" the resurrection -- we can only say why the conviction that Christ is raised from the dead is "reasonable" and the importance of its implications. Why would Christians deny the resurrection to focus solely upon life in this world? What happens to the church when we become focused stricly on "this life only"? Is the only option to focus solely on "the life that is to come"? How do we order the relationships between "this life" and "the life that is to come"?

Luke 6: 17-26

This passage begins with Jesus healing persons of their illnesses. How does this set the stage for the teachings to follow?

What is required for the blessings and curses to make sense to us, not merely abstractly, but for our life in this age? How does this passage relate to the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 and Jeremiah's sayings? Of what must we be convinced to see participation in a group described by Luke 6 as a "pragmatic" way to live our lives? How would a strictly pragmatic response relate to Luke 6?

Maybe it might be a good conversation to talk about the relationship between the three passages. What does this say about our life as a congregation, the body of Christ, and you, individually members of it?

Have a wonderful evening!

Posted by johnwright at 12:36 PM | Comments (2)